OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE

A review requested by Liz, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The body of work created by the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (credited equally as writers, directors, and producers, though it's generally understood that Powell was more the director, while Pressburger was more the writer and producer) is arguably the high water mark of all British cinema, and their 1943 collaboration The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is maybe the most essentially, urgently British of the 21 films they made together. It is probably the most epic and ambitious in scale and intention: it's a World War II propaganda film with a real message on its mind other than the usual "We can do it if we stick together!" cheerleading typical of its generic bedfellows, that bases its analysis of what the people of the British isles could and should do to stave off the Nazi threat in a long-form study of military history spanning nearly half of a century. It does this in the body of one immaculately conservative soldier named Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey, flawlessly playing a brash youth and a puffed-up old man so distinctly that it's almost difficult to believe that they were both a 37-year-old actor), inspired in his personality and appearance by Colonel Blimp, the star of a satirical comic strip by David Low, but infinitely more expansive in personality; and it does this in the form of what must absolutely be the most excitingly shot British production I can personally name up to that point in history, the moment that Powell's directorial style snapped into focus and provided a visual means of expression that's neither exactly Hollywood nor exactly European. It would not, for my taste, remain the best production released under the banner of the Archers (Powell & Pressburger's independent company, through which they'd make all of their films until 1957), with their post-war efforts A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes eclipsing it in stylistic and structural complexity, and overall excellence, respectively. But it's more radical than they are, inventing out of thin air what they (and the rest of the Archers' output) would thereupon refine and build from.

The movie begins and ends in 1942, where Wynne-Candy is an old and slightly ridiculous ex-Army figure, spending his retirement advising and training the Home Guard. He's introduced as the butt of something halfway between a prank and a political demonstration: the evening afternoon before a war game is meant to start at midnight, brash young lieutenant "Spud" Wilson (James McKechnie) breaks into the Turkish bath where Wynne-Candy and many other old Army outcasts spend their hours, capturing the old man and winning the war game before it begins. This triggers a spirited argument between the two warriors, Wilson insisting that old, traditional conservative men like Wynne-Candy aren't merely out of touch, but acutely dangerous in this new sort of warfare. Chastened and annoyed, the old man finds himself drifting into an extended flashback that rewinds to that same Turkish bath, 41 years prior, when he was just Lieutenant Clive Candy, on leave from the Second Boer War - the flawlessly-executed trick by which a youthful body double substitutes for Livesey in his old age makeup while the camera manages to get slightly too far ahead of the character is the first of many coups du cinéma in the film, seamlessly blurring past and present into one discontinuous chronology that doubles as the first leg in the filmmakers' argument about the way that the past informs the present.

The remainder of the film is largely concerned with three movements, one during the Boer War, one in the days immediately following the First World War, and one in the early years of the Second World War, bringing us finally back to the morning of the day on which we met Candy. In each of these segments, we also see Candy's developing relationship with Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), a German officer with whom Candy duels in 1901, while he's in Berlin on an unofficial mission to defuse an anti-British propaganda effort. And we see as well his encounters with three young women who all look exactly alike, for the good reason that they're all played by Deborah Kerr: Edith Hunter, an idealist who obviously loves Candy but ends up marrying Kretschmar-Schldorff; Barbara Wynne, a pragmatic nurse who marries Candy despite his being much older; and Angela "Johnny" Cannon, who serves as his sharp-tongued assistant and driver as he works with the Home Guard, and ends up helping to bridge the gulf between the honorably conservative Brit and the honorably conservative German while their countries prepare to go to war.

While each sequence is hung on a single driving narrative spine, the overall impression is of a movie that meanders its way through history over the course of two hours and 43 minutes (the film was cut twice before being restored to its full length in 1983; a more thorough clean-up job restoring the vivid colors was completed in 2011), and yet never feels like there's a single sagging moment or unnecessary layover. The script is thoughtful and decisive, crisply marking down character beats for the actors to later flesh in, and presenting symbolic conflicts which feel so personal in their execution that the degree to which this is all a metaphorical satire of British military etiquette hardly gets in the way of what a perfect study of individual lives it is as well. And I will give it this above even A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes and all the rest: it is very possible that this is the best-written of the Archers' film, structurally, psychologically, and thematically. As it cycles back into 1942 and presents its message that men of Candy's era, for all their dignity and experience and intelligence, aren't equipped to fight a war against the systemic evil represented by Nazi Germany, the film generates a fierce passion about its topic mixed with affection, deep and rich and abiding affection, for the characters it's consigning to history. For something with such a serious subject, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp moves forward with enormous generosity and a great deal of fresh, bubbly humor - indeed, it is as much a comedy as otherwise, growing gradually darker towards the end.

The beautiful writing goes hand in hand with exemplary filmmaking technique that draws it out and works it into the visual bones of the movie. It is supremely well made, and not always because it draws attention to itself: one of the most perfect sequences in the movie consists of a camera staring at Walbrook's face as he quietly delivers a deep, probing monologue, pushing into a close-up, and then backing away again. It's so simple as to be virtually anti-cinematic, but it's exactly what the movie needs, both for the integrity of the monologue, and the place it occupies near the very beginning of the 1939 sequence; it promises the seriousness and mournful intimacy that the rest of the film will largely concern itself with, in opposition to the more bright material of the first two-thirds.

Frequently, though, the style is so great precisely because it makes itself felt. There is the comic audacity of the first transition from the Boer War to the First World War, a montage of mounted animal heads representing Candy's somewhat bloodthirsty approach to leisure time until he can get back to business (ending with the nihilistic joke of a Germany army helmet with the descriptive plaque "Hun - Flanders, 1918"); there is the bleak poetry of the second transition from the First World War to the Second, with the Wynne-Candy family album skipping through blank page after blank page following the newspaper clipping of Barbara's death. And there is the richness and moral complexity of the individual images, shot in glowing Technicolor to accentuate the vibrancy of military uniforms and upper class splendor in sharp contrast to default setting of drab earth tones, suggesting throughout (but especially in the Boer War sequence) that the pageantry of the British military and the pride of men like Candy, however handsome and captivating, is also chintzy and surface-level, all glamor without soul. Or consider the way that Powell presents the duel that takes up a huge portion of the first act: the opening preparations are contained within a hollow wide shot of a gymnasium, like a dead cathedral of Continental honor; the actual duel starts during a high-angle crane shot that backs away as Allan Gray's jaunty score kicks in, suggesting a perverse ballet, all part of the theatricality of the lives it presents, before dissolving into a snowstorm.

The visuals are, throughout, sardonic and witty, detached with just enough ghostliness that they feel appropriately out of time and yet anchored by the superbly expressive faces of Livesey and Walbrook that the immediate feeling of the characters' lives is always front and center. The images are satiric while the script is utterly sincere, and the structure is moody and weary while the energy of each scene and each performance is fiery and urgent, communicating with an intensity that could only driven by enthusiastic and greatly concerned patriots in a time of war. Of course the film hasn't aged well: this is carbon-stamped to 1943 as firmly as a movie could possibly be. And yet its insights into how history moves and what role people occupy in it are utterly timeless. As a time capsule and as pure cinema, this is as as essential, enjoyable, and challenging as the movies can get.

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IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU'RE...

The Costnerssaince just isn't going well, is it?

For the latest from our boy Kevin Costner, we turn to Black or White, a drama about race relations in America whose suffocating earnestness is almost enough of a liability to distract one from the film's clear-eyed assessment of the tenuous state of racial harmony in a world that is not our own, populated by individuals who very well may not be human. The film's lack of commitment to a reality that overlaps with ours in more than the most incidental details is clear long before it even raises the under-articulated questions promised with its title: right about the time that it introduces us to the bedroom of a person that it claims to be a seven-year-old girlchild, despite the set decorators' obstinate insistence that she is actually a pod person raised on Pier 1 Imports catalogs. It has been a long time since I saw a set in a nominally realistic drama that was so blatantly, offensively a set and not a room that somebody might have chosen to design that way because it reflects their personality. Unless the seven-year-olds these days like to kit out their bedrooms with the kind of blankly inspirational wall-mounted plaques that vacantly demand us to "BELIEVE" in a classy gold font on black.

But I digress. Black or White's inauthentic spaces housing inauthentic people are hilarious, but the real crime of the film is its utter impossibility as a parable of racism. It's a film whose central narrative hook - the white maternal grandfather, Elliot (Costner), and African-American paternal grandmother, Rowena (Octavia Spencer), of mixed-race first grader Eloise (Jillian Estell) duel over custody after the sudden death of Elliot's wife Carol (Jennifer Ehle, wasted on a wordless part stretched across few than ten individual shots) - could kickstart Lord knows how many different variations, but writer-director Mike Binder is too certain of the very specific points he wants to arrive at, and he stops at no melodramatic contrivance in order to make certain that the narrative arcs within millimeters of where he has preordained it to go. The result is an increasingly tattered lacework of unnecessary developments and complications that reek of little notecards pinned to a cork board in the writer's office. Elliot has to be an alcoholic, of course, because the film needs to avoid stacking the deck too hard against Rowena's son Reggie (André Holland), Eloise's dad, whom it has already decreed must be a (semi-)recovering crack addict. And he has to be a crack addict, because how else would the film be able to maintain ambiguity about whether Elliot is truly concerned for Eloise's well-being, or if he's just a bigot?

Many, many ways, of course, but some of them would require Black or White to be more thoughtful and reflective and less declamatory and clearly flagged at every level for who is being Reasonable, who is being Stubborn, and who is being Awful, Just Awful. We are told that the best kind of dramatic storytelling sets the characters in motion, and then follows them wherever they will go, building a narrative out of their psychology and behavior. This is surely not what happens in Black or White, which has already decided what kind of decisions all of its characters are going to make, and then constructs them to fit that space. At its best - which isn't much - this approach allows Spencer to give the film's only three-dimensional performance as a woman of stiletto-like insight and dogged self-assurance and willpower, but one who'll tie herself in knots to justify the actions of her absent, dissolute son. At its worst, it leaves us with a vacant hole in the place where Eloise should be, a plot device and lazy symbol from the beginning to the grotesque freeze-frame that the movie elects to end on.

The writing shows itself so openly, and the filmmaking and acting so limply facilitate it (it is overlit and prone to cutting to close-ups as a means of depressingly literal punctuation), and the whole thing is so patently artificial as a result (but not in the good way), that it hardly seems sporting to attack the film's idea of race. Honestly, it hardly seems possible to do so, since even by the rules of its universe-that-is-not-ours, it's hard to say what Black and White actually thinks about racism in 21st Century America. The climax, which finds Elliot given an angry, raspy speech in a courtroom - of course this is one of those "third act courtroom scene" movies, it would just have to be - muddies any of the points the film had previously been making to the point of irrelevance. Black people and white people are different? Aren't? It's all actually about poverty? I don't know what the hell we're meant to take away from any of it, and given how painstakingly the film has been jerry-rigged to make sure that it arrives at exactly that point, it's especially frustrating for the whole thing to collapse into urgent but vague statements along the lines of "Racism! Man, fuck it! And you know what fuck else? Fuck alcoholism, while you're at it". All I can tell is that shaming black drug addicts for being drug addicts but not for being black is, apparently, the film's secret weapon for creating the beatific state where we can all find some kind of way to admit to our own faults and get along.

So the whole thing is confused, shoddily-built, blandly assembled, and acted with a surface-deep emphasis on shouting, snarling, and flaring one's nostrils for effect. Worse films on delicate subjects have been, and will continue to be made, but right now, this is the one we get to deal with. Tuneless and messy, Black and White is not the film America deserves, and it is also not the film America needs. But we got it anyway.

4/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1990: In which we dance... the forbidden dance

My Hollywood Century project has, I confess, been subjected to some mission drift over the last twenty-odd entries. I described it, at the start, as:

Sometimes it will be a well-loved consensus classic, and sometimes a lost masterpiece. Sometimes an ill-made but important signpost in the course of mainstream cinema history, sometimes a forgotten piece of commercial junk food. Directors from the greatest auteurs to the most ignoble hacks...

There have been a lot of auteurs and signposts ever since the New Hollywood Cinema revved up back in 1967, and not enough hacks making junk food. But now we are at the dawn of the 1990s, a decade in which the American film industry lost its mind a little bit: with pressures from a world cinema that was as commercially aggressive towards North America as it had been since the 1960s, a newly-jazzed up independent scene that had never been so commercially aggressive, and, by the decade's end, the mainstream arrival of the internet and DVD, two technologies that enormously altered the cinema marketplace, there is perhaps no other decade in American film about which it's so hard to get a bead on its personality. It was a decade of the Baby Boomers being uncomfortable with growing old and Generation X finding itself ill-equipped to deal with responsibility, and the pop culture of the age reflects both groups' desperate attempts to retrench and figure out an identity. The decade began with a five-year hangover from the 1980s, and ended with an apparent attempt to regurgitate some weird hybrid of the 1960s and 1970s.

So what better way to commemorate the start of this most utterly confused decade without a soul of its own (there are many, many better ways) than with a feverish explosion of desperate filmmaking where the flop-sweat drops from the screen, and the desire to find any kind of anchor in culture far outweighs things like sanity: with nothing less than the most absolutely fucked-up double feature ever foisted upon cinemas. I would take your hand and guide you back to 16 March, 1990, the day a miracle happened, when two competing films were released, both centering on the short-lived dance craze from Brazil, the lambada. Talk about being hungover from the 1980s.

Better yet, and even more hungover, the films represent a singular moment in the history of the most colorful film producers of the newly-completed decade, Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, whose work as the leaders of the Cannon Group had defined so much of the action cinema of that era, before the legendary B-picture empire dropped into free-fall thanks to the massive failure of some costly ventures in 1987 and '88. Globus stayed with the shattered remains of Cannon, and it was there that he snapped up the rights to name a film Lambada, after a 1989 Portuguese-language track by French pop act Kaoma that had been seen great success in Los Angeles dance clubs. But Golan was faster on the draw at securing the rights to Kaoma's song for his film, The Forbidden Dance. Thus we have one film which could contain "Lambada" but, under the law, make only muted reference to that word in its advertising; the other could be titled after the song but not feature it. It is a fucking glorious candyland world in which we live.

Alphabetically, we begin with Golan's film, the one that made by his 21st Century Film Corporation under the insufficiently watchful eyes of distributor Columbia Pictures, and the film widely regarded as the worse of the two. Which is probably true, but The Forbidden Dance is such a giddy marvel of wrong-headedness that I would never think to call it worse than anything. It's much too fun for that.

The bitterly estranged Go-Go boys, both old hands at the whole "quickie cash-in movie about a dance fad" game - in happier times, they had given the world the most important of all breakdancing double features, Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo - engaged in a kind of strange-ass arms race to get their films out as soon as possible. The Forbidden Dance, its story written in L.A. traffic, was prepped in December, 1989, shot in January, and released in March, a feverish turnaround production that rivals the rapid-fire speed of factory filmmaking back in the silent era. And oh my God, does it ever show. The Forbidden Dance has a script - by Roy Langsdon and John Platt, though I feel sorry about accusing them in public - doesn’t rely on clichés, as much as it is an elaborate lacework made of nothing else but clichés, given a personalising touch only in that the character names are original. And this is not, I don’t think, laziness, but raw animalistic desperation: there was no time for thinking about the screenplay, it just had be cranked out at lightning speed, and clichés were all that there was time for. The whole feels unabashedly like a first draft: I can’t imagine that some of the tattered holes in the construction of the story would have survived a good night’s sleep, let alone a thorough re-reading. Even at the level of gaudy message-mongering (and The Forbidden Dance is nothing if not a gaudy message movie), the film loses track of its own content for a huge chunk of the middle, trading in one batch of stereotypes for another, different batch.

The film announces itself, or what it thinks it is, or God knows what, with an aerial shot of what passes, reasonably, as South American jungle, as the peculiarly-punctuated opening title card announces that we are in:

Brazil-
The Amazon:
Mankind is destroying
the rain forest…

Not all mankind, mind you; just white mankind. Brown mankind is busily engaging in a tribal fertility dance of some kind that serves two purposes: 1) to establish that our heroine, a native princess, has an intuitive ability to dance the writhing, sexually evocative moves of the lambada; 2) that director Greydon Clark had only one problem with the depiction of indigenous peoples in cinema as it existed in the ‘20s or so, which is that it wasn’t nearly Othering enough. It’s kind of miraculous, is The Forbidden Dance: a film obsessed to the point of literal dysfunction with attacking the racism of well-off middle-class U.S. whites against Latino Americans that is itself perfectly sanguine about depicting those same Latin Americans with marginally less dignity and respect than was afforded to the Skull Islanders in the original King Kong. The film isn’t even minutes old before it treats us to Sid Haig as a boogedy-boo tribal magician whose only fully audible vocalisations are excited chants on the “ai-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi!” model. And then it turns around and makes its villain an absurdly caricatured bitchy, dried-up middle-aged white lady whose damn near every line includes the phrase “those people”, delivered with the sort of subzero acidity that makes it sound dirtier than all the curse words in English strung in a row.

Anyway, the white people destroying the rain forest are in the employ of Petramco, a multinational oil company. This so offends that native princess, Nisa (Laura Herring), that she receives permission from her father (Ruben Moreno) to travel to Los Angeles under the protection of tribal shaman Joa (Haig), to speak with the chairman of Petramco in person. With unexpected speed, she arrives in the States, raises a ruckus in the Petramco lobby, and is dumped on the street without her identification papers, making it look to all the world like she’s just one more jobless Mexican. And no, The Forbidden Dance doesn’t seem aware that Mexicans are not the same as urban Brazilians are not the same as the isolated tribespeople living deep in the jungle, ethnically, culturally, or linguistically (though since all of the nonwhite characters speak in the same brand of José Jiménez Eenglish, this last one doesn’t matter too much).

Nisa manages to get herself hired by a shrill, unlikable, racist lady (Shannon Farnon), whose unenlightened attitudes about immigrants are so overstated and awful that it’s hard to read it as anything other than comedy. This position doesn’t last very long - one doubts that many of this woman’s maids make it for more than a week or two - but it does serve to introduce Nisa to to the racist lady’s son Jason (Jeff James), who first spies on the lost princess as she expresses herself spiritually in her off-hours, which basically means that she’s fucking the curtains in the servants’ quarters. This convinces Jason that she’s the perfect replacement for his shrill, unlikable, racist girlfriend Ashley (Barbara Brighton) at the local dance contest where all the local kids - or local unemployed college graduates, to judge from the apparent ages of Jason and all his shrill, unlikable, racist friends - are vying to win a contest and appear on the live dance show hosted by Kid Creole and the Coconuts. And oh my God, you guys, Kid Creole and the Coconuts appear IN THE MOVIE! It’s so cool. That Menahem Golan, always willing to shell out to get a real superstar in his movie.

For Nisa, a chance to show up on the television means getting to spread her message about stopping the exploitation of the rain forest to a national audience, but it’s going to take some doing to get there. For one thing, Jason will have to convince the shrill, unlikable, racist people who exclusively populate his world that Nisa has any detectable merits as a human being. For another, Nisa is now working at a whorehouse.

The whorehouse angle keys us in to one of the most distinctive of all traits of The Forbidden Dance: it is fucking filthy. The movie always suggests a sleazy, borderline-pornographic exploitation of the dance trend that was famously (and apocryphally) so sexual that it was banned in Brazil, that was hastily turned into something PG-13 (barely) in the editing room. Hence the constant hovering threat of sexual exploitation and rape, hence the way that the Pure and Innocent and Uncorrupted By Civilisation Nisa proves to be a whiz at the dirtiest dancing ever put to film. I don’t know much about the real lambada, and maybe this is an accurate depiction of it, but I doubt it: while, as they say, all dance is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire, the stuff we see in The Forbidden Dance is mostly just dry-humping to music.

Compounding the overwhelmingly sleazy tone of the writing and Clark’s listless direction which adds to the detached, bored pornographer feel to the movie, it’s just horribly put together, at every level. As will happen when you give yourself five minutes to rehearse, shoot, and edit a movie. The acting is vile: Herring, who ultimately would end up at the farthest possible opposite end of the cinematic spectrum 11 years later, when she was the co-lead of Mulholland Dr., plasters on a bright smile and sometimes a little girlish pout to show that she’s angry, and expresses the innocence of a non-industrial savage by chomping down on all her syllables and using an odd, placeless accent. This results in things like her rendering of the word "chairman" as "chare mon", and since she uses the word around two-dozen times in a one-minute speech, we get a lot of time to reflect on the subtleties of her basic inability to deliver lines. This by no means puts her at or near the bottom of pile of a cast in which nobody is able to handle the clumsy, exposition-drunk dialogue that Langsdon and Platt thought they could pass off as a replica of speech, or the awkward, omnipresent, and wholly inauthentic expressions of cartoon racism. There is basically nothing human in The Forbidden Dance: only cardboard boxes which say things like "only my money-induced laziness prevents me from setting fire to all these wetback beaners", carboard boxes which say things like "rain forests are totally important, and I have a pretty smile", and cardboard boxes rubbing their cardboard junk up against other cardboard boxes as Kaoma funks out on the soundtrack. It's a deadly combination of inept political cartooning and fatigued, dirt-poor filmmaking anti-skills, in which only Haig's mesmerisingly awful Looney Tunes witch doctor has any kind of liveliness out of all the blank stares and flubbed line readings throughout the cast. It has my most passionate, enthusiastic recommendation.

* * * * *

The Forbidden Dance made less than half of what the Warner-released Cannon production Lambada made their shared opening weekend; but we are speaking in terms of the purest relativism. Lambada still opened in eighth place and made less than one-fifth of that weekend's #1 film, The Hunt for Red October. It also enjoyed marginally less pained reviews, though I can't understand this impulse: if we have to choose between two absolutely, unforgivably godawful lambada movies, surely the one that's a batshit insane eco-parable that only reluctantly pulls back from being out-and-out smut is preferable for all audiences at all times to a lazy Stand and Deliver rip-off that occasionally remembers its title, and accordingly plugs in a brief lambada scene notable mostly for how much it doesn't feel like the first half of an explicit sex scene. The film's refusal to commit to being a proper dance movie is so complete that it doesn't even end with the de rigueur dance competition climax - it ends with a high-stakes geometry bee. Having seen The Forbidden Dance multiple times in my life, but only finally catching up with Lambada for this review, I find myself feeling hideously ill-used: both films are terrible in almost every way - Lambada, for example, casts bone-white Virginia native J. Eddie Peck in the Edward James Olmos "inspirational teacher from the barrio" role, and leaves the character ethnically Latino - but Lambada is far less deranged in its concept of how to structure a narrative, and so lacks the sense of impossible confusion that helps to make The Forbidden Dance such a deliciously bad experience.

That being said, it's only better in a relative sense: this is still shockingly bad. The quick version of the story: Kevin Laird, born Carlos Gutierrez, is the bright young star of the math department at an exclusive Beverly Hills high school. Thanks to sexual infidelity elsewhere in the faculty, he's about to be put in charge of the whole department by the prissy, unpleasant Principal Singleton (Keene Curtis), but Kevin has a secret: at night, he's "Blade", the smokiest, sexiest dancer at an East L.A. club called No Man's Land (the "Man's" keeps blinking out, like we're meant to understand "No Land" as a metaphor, though a metaphor for what, I cannot say), and after the club slows down, he takes all the teenage club goers into the back room for even smokier, sexier instruction in high school math. Thus will he help them get their GEDs, though if Blade ever teaches them things like reading, history, or the physical sciences, we are not made privy to it.

This situation has apparently held for some time, and would hold for longer still, except that one of Kevin's students by day, Sandy Thomas (Melora Hardin), has grown sexually obsessed with him, and follows him to No Man's Land, where she gains the knowledge to blackmail him into teaching her the lambada, which even in Lambada's sanitised form is still naughty enough to pretty easily get him fired and put on all the watchlists that the state of California can dream up.

Everything in Lambada that pertains to the lambada is reduced to a second-act complication, there solely to compromise Kevin's dream of raising the poor East L.A. kids to the educational standards of his vile, enthusiastically bigoted slackoff white students. This qualifies as, at least, a bait-and-switch; especially since director Joel Silberg - the helmer of no less than Breakin' itself, along with its apostrophied spiritual sister Rappin' - is good at nothing else besides filming the handful of dance scenes. The cheap script he co-wrote with Sheldon Renan certainly offers no room for interesting character exploration or social expression; Sandy is nothing but a devouring sexual id for two-thirds of the movie, and none of the other students emerge from the fog of "white skin = generically shitty, bronze skin = sassy but noble". Kevin, meanwhile, is a slurry of all the boring inspirational teacher tropes that the writers could scrounge up, played by Peck with glistening, knightly sincerity and no personality whatsoever; though I did enjoy the visceral disgust he expresses during the dance with Sandy. The character is amazingly sexless - check out the non-chemistry with his wife - and that, more than anything, is what blands out Lambada, a film that name-drops the whole "banned in Brazil!" controversy, but indicates nothing of why that might have been the case. Too many lawsuits against teachers, I guess.

It's too actively poor for me to accuse it of being "boring" - it's more angering, if anything, with its ginned-up conflict between Kevin and Singleton, culminating in the most excruciating possible competitive math quiz, where the tension is all drained away first from Singleton's transparently unfair questions, an arbitrary way to keep the scores close, and then from school superintendent Leland's (Basil Hoffman) imperious "oh well, human spirit, so they win" judgment, an arbitrary way to give the film a happy ending. But it certainly lacks the unflagging bad movie energy of The Forbidden Dance. Lambada's relatively sincere approach to its subject isn't nearly as much dazzling as the wall-to-wall sleaziness of The Forbidden Dance; and its poor acting is far more blandly mediocre than jaw-droppingly incompetent. It's tacky and crude enough to successfully continue the defiantly shitty spirit of Cannon-That-Was, but a quarter of a century on, if you want to watch a clapped-out refugee of '80s filmmaking that jumps on a short-lived dance craze in the dopiest, most terribly mercenary way... I mean, it's just not even really a choice, is all I'm saying.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1990
-Edward Scissorhands starts a love affair between Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and florid Gothic production design that lasts till the current day
-Patrick Swayze just wants to up and fuck some pottery, in Ghost
-Kevin Costner attempts to correct centuries of history and decades of cinema with the nobly pandering Dances with Wolves

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1990
-Finnish quirk-monger Aki Kaurismäki completes his Proletariat Trilogy with The Match Factory Girl
-Zhang Yimou and Yang Fengliang's Ju Dou is one of the earliest international successes of Fifth Generation Chinese filmmaking
-Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's most internationally renowned filmmaker, releases Close-Up, arguably his most important film

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THIS IS THE WAY THE END OF THE WORLD ENDS

I have wonderful news: Left Behind: World at War isn't nearly such an angrifying slog as its predecessor, Tribulation Force, and we'll have none of the bitterness that got in between me and my snark when I wrote about it. Compared to that film, and compared also to 2000's original Left Behind, the 2005 trilogy-capper is actually quite a different experience altogether, one that feels much more like a secular bad movie that has these regular, strange interruptions from Kirk Cameron smugly evangelising. And the difference between those movies and this one is obvious enough: World at War somehow managed to finagle the financial backing of Sony, and thus suddenly looks enormously more professional and competent. Which is not to say that it's actually professional or competent, in the absolute sense: its sets look like set, full of random computers and monitors and shiny surfaces, and they are lit hard and flat, and the handful of showcase effects are very much at the level of a film with a title like Bearacuda or Piranhaconda vs. Boa Sharkstrictor, both in the quality of their rendering and the grace with which they have been composited in. But it no longer looks like the whole thing was shot in a convention center lobby. It's even in widescreen!

The biggest difference the budget made, though, was that it enabled World at War to afford a real actor. The first two Left Behinds had to make do with Brad Johnson as their representative good-or-decent actor, an oasis of some kind of solid professionalism that threw into relief how tawdry most of the film was around him, and I will always be grateful to the stolidity he brought to those movies. But he's got nothing on the actor paid what I'm certain was not nearly enough money to validate the dime store spy picture shenanigans of World at War, that being Academy Award-winner Louis Gossett, Jr. It is not possible to communicate just how much his presence alters the landscape of the movie. Most importantly, the filmmakers had the good damn sense to realise that they had somebody with genuine onscreen authority and presence, and the good luck for that person to have concluded that even if he'd ended up in a direct-to-video-churches Christian thriller in which the President of the United States Gerald Fitzhugh (Gossett just looks like a Fitzhugh, doesn't he?) does his Nancy Drew act against Dracula playing David Bowie playing the Antichrist, well dammit, he was still a paid professional and he'd still treat the part like an actual part in a real movie. God bless him (and for begin in this movie, I imagine that's exactly what happens), Gossett is actually trying. Faced with the impossible dialogue and speeches that Paul Lalonde, Peter Lalonde, and André van Heerden's screenplay screenplay leaves him to recite, Gossett dives right in and tries to figure out what his character might be thinking and feeling in those moments, and while he cannot translate the words of the screenplay into the sounds of human speech, he delivers them with enough gravity and feeling that they still feel like reflections of his character's emotions.

Better yet, between Gossett's wildly disproportionate skill level and the amount of money the producers had to invest to get access to him, he got promoted to the level of lead, which means that Cameron has been knocked down a peg. And that is a development which is all alone enough to make World at War the classiest Left Behind movie with the most human interest. And that's even with its plot revolving around a paranoiac fantasy about the UN lacing Bibles with toxic gas, something I'd expect to see in a parody of hard-right Christian filmmaking rather than a legitimate example of it.

Poisoned Bibles, in all their melodramatic excess, are to be found nowhere in the book series upon which this was based (it's mostly taken from the last two chapters of Tribulation Force, the second novel, with some grace notes from the third, Nicolae), and that's not the only overt way in which the film mostly discards the source material in order to invent a plot in which things actually happen and there is some kind of momentum to be had. It's thanks to this development, which does very much make World at War the least boring Left Behind movie (leaving it plenty of room to be immensely boring, mind you, especially in the first, more character-driven half), that the series came to a halt after only three movies adapting only the first two of a 16-volume series. For novelists Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins, but probably mostly LaHaye, were upset at how much the films had drifted from the mission state of the books, which was to present made-up eschatological esoterica through the matrix of lifeless prose and empty characters inching their way through a story in which virtually nothing happened. They were able to cut the series off at the knees before it diluted their brand any further, and immediately set to re-starting the series with more of the intemperate religion that was the whole notion of the series in the first place.

It is true that as an End Times field guide, World at War is serious lacking. Antichrist and world dictator Nicholae Carpathia (Gordon Currie) is, functionally, no different than any other mustache-twirling Bondian supervillain, except for the part where he's immortal, and the plot by which President Fitzhugh and his survivalist militia team resist Carpathia's wicked schemes doesn't meaningfully differ from any random action thriller about a rag-tag rebel group. Even our very own Tribulation Force, the team of True Believers forming a more godly resistance to Carpathia, feels denuded of explicit religious zeal in a lot of the movie, and that's not even acknowledging how very little most of them are involved: Rayford Steele (Johnson) mostly just shows up because it would be weird if he didn't (though he does get married off in the early scenes to a woman we've never met and don't get to know), and his daughter Chloe (Janaya Stephens), herself having married the dashing TV reporter Buck Williams (Cameron), is largely on hand to be The Woman for Buck's plot. Which, given Cameron's skittishness about being a filthy un-Christian actor and doing things like touching the actress playing his new wife, isn't much of a good deal for her, given that the husband she's ostensibly supporting is visibly uncomfortable being around her. And as for Our Buck, he's laden with some random bullshit that takes up a lot of time, as a star of Kirk Cameron's white-hot celebrity would clearly deserve. His main job is to preach at Fitzhugh until he converts the president to the withholding and joyless fringe Christianity that, in LaHaye's worldview, is the only kind that keeps God and Jesus from hating you and your sinful ass.

By cutting down the rage-drenched theology down mostly just to the scenes that involve Cameron, World at War proves to be a whole lot more pleasant to watch than the bullying, accusatory pair of films that precede it. Though I cannot say if that's because the film isn't so wedded to its gross reduction of Christian thought to its angriest elements, or simply because Kirk Cameron comes off as so supercilious and boastful that it listening to him talk about any subject would be intolerable, and he's happily reduced to a supporting role. Whatever is causing it, World at War ends up feeling more like a movie than the other two, in all possible ways, and between Gossett pretending that there's some actual emotional weight and importance to the President's actions, and Currie's continued refinement of Carpathia into an ever more pure articulation of campy flair and self-satisfied wickedness, the film even enjoys something of a compelling relationship between its hero and villain.

Is this enough to make the film good? Oh, hell no, in no uncertain terms. It's quite terrible: Craig R. Baxley has, unquestionably, the strongest overall career of any of the Left Behind directors, and it shows in his significantly higher investment in making the action scenes vaguely exciting and the thriller scenes tense, but budget and the moral limitations placed on him by the production put a firm cap on how ambitious World at War can possibly be. It's glossy and mainstream and exciting for a fundamentalist Christian movie, but I really can't express what an enormous qualifying statement that is: being the most action-packed Christian movie in history only puts it at about the level of a no-budget underground Filipino thriller from the '70s.

And for all that I'm grateful that Cameron isn't the focus this time around, he still has the second-largest role in the movie; Buck Williams and his preening awful face and Cameron's inability to do that fussy thing "acting", when he can just recite his punishing, theologically inane dogma and sit back beaming with the flush of his evangelical zeal, they are all still very much with us (so is Cameron's wife Chelsea Noble, never worse in the series than in the scene where she confronts Rayford for leading her on; a gifted actress might have found the irony in playing a scorned woman who never actually had an affair with the man she's screaming at, but since Noble has decided that her character is a vindictive slutwhore, that's what we see, even though it's virtually impossible to justify that approach based on the script). World at War is a breath of fresh air compared the high school drama club production values of the first two, and the madman on the street with a sandwich board quality to the messaging, but compared to virtually any other action thriller about fighting a crazed supernatural Romanian dictator and stopping him from poisoning all the Christians with toxic Bibles, it's still unmistakably poor, hobbled by its philosophy and tremendously shy of actually being a genre film. It's the difference between getting your hand slammed in a door versus actually having your entire arm ripped off; there's still nothing pleasant about it, but the pain doesn't hang on for nearly as long.

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I GOT IT RIGHT HERE IN MY BRAND NEW RAPTURE BAG

At the risk of seeming indelicate or bigoted: fundamentalist evangelical Christian genre movies are weird. As I am not remotely the first to point out, they represent a miserable kind of paradox about them: they palpably want to be exciting cinema like wot the heathens all get to watch with their guns and their scantily clad ladies and their car chases. Except that it's incumbent upon the terrified, moralistic worldview that these films are so anxious to espouse to specifically lack guns and bikinis and all. The result are films that ape the style of big-budget Hollywood productions, but not the elements that style was designed to showcase; and, of course, not on anything that the most innocent among us could genuinely believe to be a big budget. The result is that these films have a peculiar and at times indefinable whiff of the ersatz: watching them just feels wrong at a semiotic level, like even though everything about them is definitionally cinematic - images pass by at 24 frames-per-second (or 29.97 frames-per-second, when the budgets were really low), giving the illusion of movement, and there is sound synchronised to that movement - it still just has to be some completely different medium all together.

Of all the fundie Christian films that ever were or, perhaps, ever will be, none is more famous and celebrated in all its ersatz-ness than Left Behind, the 2000 direct-to-churches-then-to-video adaptation of the first book in the wildly popular series of novels by Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins. The Left Behind book series purports to be the blow-by-blow account of what happens when God decides that history was fun and all, but it's really time to pack up this whole "Earth" experiment and end time with the return of Jesus Christ to save some people and condemn a whole lot more people over the course of seven grueling years that are going to start like, for serious, any time now, man. At least, they present the version of the Apocalypse as it is predicted to happen by LaHaye's particular brand of pre-tribulational pre-millenial dispensationalism, and if I only needed one reason to regret the decision I made a week ago to become a Left Behind expert for the sake of this review, it would be that not only did i just type out the Jabberwocky-like chain of nonsense syllables, "pre-tribulational pre-millenial dispensationalism", I also have something like an idea of what the fuck it means.

So anyway, Left Behind. A movie whose existence makes perfect sense, actually - books as popular as that get made into movies, among the godly just as among those damn Jews in Hollywood - but whose existence is also immensely pitiable and sad. Left Behind is a stupid, stupid movie. And I mean stupid, not in reference to its plot, for in fact screenwriters Alan McElroy, Paul Lalonde, and Joe Goodman (the latter two are also producers) the best work I could imagine in training LaHaye & Jenkins's absurdly tedious, aimlessly digressive collection of phone conversations and exposition clarifying things we already knew into something that functions as a relatively concise and straightforward narrative of jut over 90 minutes in length (and I did, yes, read Left Behind as part of my week of becoming an expert. Congratulations to New Moon of the Twilight series, on no longer being my least favorite novel of all time). And I men stupid, not in reference to the toxic theology of the piece, which is anyway toned down a great deal in its rhetorical urgency from the book, though it remains fixedly anti-human, and frankly anti-Christian, as far as this atheist understands the most important elements of Christian thought. Hint: not the elements that involve running Revelations through a kaleidoscope to prove why only the people you like are going to Heaven during the Second Coming.

No, I mean stupid as in just plain nuclear-strength stupid at the level of filmmaking craft. This a movie whose basic competence can be illustrated by pointing out that there are scenes cross-cutting between events happening simultaneously, at three visually distinct times of day. Or which implies in its very opening shot that the sun sets in the East over Jerusalem. Which would be a miracle, sure, but not the one that the plot has in mind for that sequence. And it is stupid because of how badly it fumbles every single character arc, which is the literal worst thing that could happen, given that the only thing this narrative has to structure itself is the religious conversion of its three main characters, one of which appears to take place completely offscreen. And it is stupid because the villain is a charismatic Romanian politician played by Gordon Currie who talks like Count Chocula and has been given the singular name of Nicolae Carpathia, presumably because LaHaye & Jenkins's editor insisted that their first choice of "Dracula T. Antichrist" was insufficiently euphonious.

But really, it's mostly stupid because of Mr. & Mrs. Kirk Cameron. The savagely fundamentalist evangelical Right's favorite E-list celebrity who can be trotted out for state functions and not-so-low-as-the-others-budget movies as proof that people who are kind of famous belief in their punishing sectarian variant of Christianity. Though I am quite sure that Cameron is at this point more famous for the unyielding severity of his religion, and his career's function strictly as a vessel for promoting that religion, than he would be if he was just the kid from Growing Pains all growed up with a career in DTV garbage. Anyway, Cameron's presence means that his wife, Chelsea Noble, is also present, and that's a shame, because whatever Noble is up to in Left Behind, which for convenience's sake we shall call "acting", is the most magnificently unbelievable bullshit I have seen in a really goddamn long time. It's exactly like the acting you get from actresses cast solely because they will agree to spend most or all of the film topless, except, y'know, the polar opposite of that. Noble plays, sort of, a young woman of Unwell Morals, and there comes a point where extreme distaste for her character is the only thing happening anywhere near her performance, which is still a step in the right direction from the earlier parts where she's shouting lines and staring vacantly with enormous eyes in what is doubtlessly intended to be a facsimile of the hu-man emotion called "friendliness".

Noble isn't in that much of the movie, though, and she's hilarious to watch. Mr. Noble is the far, far worse problem, because his performance is only a tiny bit better, much less amusing, and he's the film's protagonist: crusading TV journalist Cameron "Buck" Williams, though he more or less stops doing any journalisming by the film's midway point. Cameron's problem is far more terrible than anything in his wife's robotic copying of people feelings: his problem is that he's enormously smug, well aware that he's the big-time star in this incredibly little pond, well aware that he's savin' souls and changin' lives with his hollow proselytising of unpleasant religious dogma, and it oozes out of everything he does onscreen. He's a smirky, insincere jackass, looking more like he's about to start giving the hard sell on some piece of shit car than anything else; the only moment in his performance that's even a tiny bit convincing is when he has a breakdown in a men's restroom and promises to let Jesus into his life. It's not just bad because it leaves us with a terrible protagonist, it takes down another actor's performance as collateral damage: Janaya Stephens, playing the much-too-young love interest for Buck, has to suffer with a scene partner who openly confesses (fuck, openly brags) that he thinks playing romantic plotlines with women not his wife is functionally the same as adultery.

I had better, at some point, shift over to the actual plot of the thing, what there is of it. Basically, the world is full of signs and portents of something important about to happen, though it is ignored by all but the most committed religious believers. After about thirty minutes of meandering character set-up introducing us to Buck, and manly airline pilot Rayford Steele (Brad Johnson), because LaHaye & Jenkins presumably figured out on their own that "Dick Hardcock" wouldn't fly with their target audience, and Steele's daughter Chloe, the aforementioned love interest. All three of these individuals share one characteristic; they're awful, vile Christ-haters, and so when the Rapture comes and magics all the True Believers into heaven, they are among the millions upon millions of people who are… wait for it… left behind. Which happens while Rayford is flying a plane on which Buck is a passenger

(Incidentally, something that's always confused me about the whole notion of these books: when the Rapture happens, all the disappeared Christians leave the highways lousy with empty cars. But my impression of the sort of people who subscribe to LaHaye-style apocalyptic thought also view themselves as a persecuted minority; surely they wouldn't actually expect that there are nearly enough Rapture-ready believers as Left Behind, in either medium, implies).

So Buck, and Rayford, and Chloe, all have to learn about the ins and outs of post-Rapture life, eagerly devouring knowledge from Bruce Barnes (Clarence Gilyard, the beneficiary of a gratifying bit of colorblind casting - the character is heavily implied to be a generic thirtysomething white guy in the book) the junior pastor at a megachurch where virtually the entire congregation was zapped into heaven. And as they learn, one by one, what's going on, they also learn that Carpathia, a philanthropist and peacemaker who has just been made UN Secretary-General from total obscurity, is almost certainly the Antichrist, because in the disgusting worldview that LaHaye espouses, desiring world peace is literally, actually against the will of Jesus. And the newly born-again heroes agree to form a force to stop Carpathia, who has just solidified his rule by killing some gangsters in the Howard Johnson conference room that's temporarily serving as the UN General Assembly. With a homemade banner that, if you see the TV out of the corner of your eye while you're running across the room, might look like the UN seal. But they don't do it in this movie. See you in the sequel, everybody!

The almost total absence of anything that actually looks like a narrative is one of Left Behind's issues, but it's not, honestly, one of the biggest. The unmitigated ticky-tacky cheapness of it is; the feeling that director Vic Sarin and crew were trying their absolute best to make a movie like the real kind, but without any sort of modicum of discipline or creativity. So not only are all the locations slugged with cards identifying the place and time (but not the date, oddly), those cards are also in a painfully generic font, and we hear that teletype tikatikatika noise as the words spell themselves out. Plot details are stated then shown then reiterated. The number of close-ups of actors who didn't have enough makeup put on to counteract the glare of set lets borders on the criminal.

It's not all a wash - Johnson is actually good at playing a man who silently hates himself and still gets caught by surprise to find out that God hates him too, while Gilyard's incredibly corny and lazy "screaming at God" scene, though hardly a triumph of the screenwriter's art, gets a boost from the actor's sweat-streaked commitment to the scene's physicality. And Currie has the basic decency to know that he can stand out and make people at least ironically happy by devoting himself to pure, visceral camp. So that's three good bits of acting. And it's manna from heaven for bad movie fans: if not the stiff, unspeakable dialogue, it's the openly desperate production design, trying to make a whole lot of locations out of some pretty anonymous, church-basementy spaces, and if it's not that, it's Smug-Ass Cameron and Soulless Android Noble, strangling the movie a little bit every time they talk or move.

The bad news, of course, is that all this bad movie fun is yoked to a movie with a deeply irritating tendency to quietly clear its throat and ask if you'd maybe like to talk about eschatology and religion, or whatever. It's not remotely as obnoxious as the book; by the standards of Cameron's filmography, it's positively muted. But even in tiny doses, the paranoid, anti-charity, anti-love, anti-everything cant of Left Behind's ideology is absolutely no fun at all, and in fact becomes quite depressing when you think about the number of people that fervently believe in it. Some things are just too grim to mock.

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THE GALT OF THE EARTH

If I were going to give the full benefit of the doubt to Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt? - and I shall give it that benefit, for am I not a generous man? - I would immediately suggest that, compared to the two prior Atlas Shruggeds of 2011 and 2012, this one comes a lot closer to resembling a functional movie. It has location shooting that resembles an actual location, even if it's the wrong one: the extremely distinctive redwood forests of California can't convincingly play anything other than themselves (or forest moons populated by warlike teddy bears), and despite the film's game attempt to insist that its first half takes place in the Colorado Rockies, it doesn't work even a wee tiny bit. But at least it looks like a forest of any sort at all, and this puts it miles ahead of the "it's not a convention center lobby, it's an executive office!" vibe of Atlas Shrugged: Part I, which remains the most goofily enjoyable of this now-complete adaptation of Ayn Rand's infamous novel, and which we can now with authority and confidence decree to be among the most ill-conceived, hapless attempts to translate a work of literature into cinema since the Lumière brothers were in short pants.

Correctly assuming that absolutely not one goddamn soul will bother watching this film if they didn't bravely soldier on through the first two, Who Is John Galt? opens right in the thick of things, with Dagny Taggart, fearlessly selfish train magnate, having crashed her plane in "Colorado". Actually, there's something that functions like a recap of the previous movies (short version: the U.S. government hates, hates, hates, hates rich people, and passes law after law serving no function other than to tax them into a pauper's grave; one fearlessly selfish engineering wizard named John Galt has been sneaking billionaire entrepreneurs into his mysterious grotto where free enterprise reigns supreme and nobody has to care about the well-being of others), but it's presented so swiftly and with such a crazed melange of words and concepts that it resembles traditional exposition about as much as Schizopolis does. What we find is that poor Gander Rotgut has died in the crash, but also that she is a Time Lord, and is thus able to regenerate her body, and is now played by Laura Regan (Samantha Mathis and Taylor Schilling, who played Danged's two previous regenerations, aren't even permitted a The Five Doctors-style cameo).

She's recovered by a handsome but stubbornly bland and emotionless Land's End catalog model, played by Kristoffer Polaha, who takes her back to a place that looks for all the world like a run-of-the-mill hippie commune, except that all of the people who live there hate the thought of letting somebody have something for free the way that you or I might hate the thought of watching our loved ones being slowly crushed to death under the treads of a tank. And also, the production design budget didn't quite extend far enough to cover props, so the town is filled with things like Solo coffee cups and off-the rack clothing, and we have to really stop and consider what the hell kind of off-the-grid commune of arch-libertarians this could possibly be, if they're important Solo cups and hosting farmer's markets? I have no idea if the book presents a different idea or not, but the way that the screenplay - adapted by series producer John Aglialoro, three-time Atlas Shrugged writer Harmon Kaslow, and newcomer James Manera - frames this nameless town that even I know is supposed to be called "Galt's Gulch" makes it unambiguously clear that it cannot function in any meaningful way: it lacks a laboring class to get the food, build the buildings, maintain the infrastructure. We see a few people working in a copper mine, but surely John Galt -the Land's End model, by the way - wouldn't have spirited away dozens of hundreds or workers on top of the captains of industry that we know he's seduced?

But, of course, Atlas Shrugged is an obvious fantasy, not a real blueprint for anything that could be carried off in the real world, and Who Is John Galt? merely serves to draw our attention to this fact. Across the three movies, it is by far the worst-performed, and the human-shaped characters inhabiting it don't even feel like the obvious rhetorical devices of the first movies; they feel like an alien's attempt to vaguely replicate Earthlings without bothering about copying our behavior. Nobody in the film is credible, and nothing they say or do is convincing: I expect that it would be likelier to turn someone away from Rand's philosophies than the other way around, with Galt's legendary 70-page monologue-rant about throwing off the shackles of repressive government transformed into a confusing 5-minute scene where director James Manera and cinematographer Gale Tattersall frame the deeply ineffective Polaha with menacing shadows that make him look like a Sith Lord or a terrorist as he strings together a bunch of earnest one-liners that don't form any kind of cohesive argument at all, let alone one that it's possible to agree with or not.

The plot, mercilessly cut down from Rand's doorstop of a novel, is equally incoherent: the bad guys in government keep doing bad things because they're bad, but what is going on, and what effect it has, is wholly unclear. Meanwhile, Gnatty Ratter patiently listens to a succession of libertarian businessman-hippies explain Galt's philosophy to her, only for her to insist that she cares too much about her trains to commit to how little she cares about other people. Along the way, she and Galt have one of the most gloriously bad sex scenes in living memory: a PG-13 rated cornucopia of close-ups of lips and hands rubbing bra straps and a "guide the train forward" punchline applied with a total lack of embarrassment or, apparently, self-awareness.

With virtually nothing that happens onscreen resembling human behavior or emotion to any real extend, Who Is John Galt? can't even function as propaganda: it's more like aimless, illogical claims about freedom lacquered on top of scenes of people looking serenely constipated or cackling with evil, depending on if they're good or bad, though as Danger Garter's venal brother James, Greg Germann manages to find a third way by acting like Will Arnett's sweaty stunt double. So detached from reality is the film that it's impossible to connect its events to real-world concerns even by the standards of a trilogy that has steadily insisted that private industry investing heavily in trains is the way to beat encroaching fascism. It's almost tempting to assume that Manera and his cast and crew were actively trying to subvert Rand's ideology; that Who Is John Galt? is a deliberately sabotaged piece of non-cinema is frankly a lot easier to believe than the notion that at any point during its creation, anybody looked at the pieces they were assembling and thought that the final product would be plausible as a work of human communication.

2/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1975: In which the quickly-changing world is subjected to enthusiastic, if wildly clumsy satire

1975's The Stepford Wives has long since become one of those movies for which the twist ending of its central mystery has become the single thing that most people know about it. This is never a fair place for a work of narrative art to find itself, but it's especially unfortunate for this film, which is good in almost all ways until the twist ending, which makes a complete hash of the social commentary that is one of the film's two main reasons for existing. I shall return to that point; even though the twist ending is the only that most people know about the film, it's still the ending, and I'd like to hold off on spoiling a 39-year-old movie as long as possible.

The film, based on a 1972 novel by Ira Levin (whose Rosemary's Baby traffics in similar "the life of a paranoid housewife" themes, and was also turned into a rather more effortlessly successful movie seven years prior), dives right into the ramifications of Woman's Liberation, the major social progressive activity of the 1970s as the Civil Rights Movement was in the 1960s, though one which perhaps resulted in fewer clear-cut victories. Still, it was successful enough to make The Stepford Wives feel like a thematic visitor from another civilisation, with far different expectations about the importance of rigidly-policed gender roles. For one thing, even the most outspoken feminists in the film don't actually go so far as to think that women should be employed outside the home; the story's battlegrounds are set entirely around what they do with the time that they spend not having paying jobs.

Our outspoken feminist for the evening is Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross), who has recently moved with her husband, Walter (Peter Masterson), and their two daughters, Kim (Mary Stuart Masterson, Peter's daughter), and Amy (Ronny Sullivan), from the lively and dangerous world of New York to the soothing bedroom community of Stepford, Connecticut. We ken long before Joanna admits as much that this was Walter's choice, believing as he does that life in the suburbs is far more rewarding than the hectic, filthy life of an urbanite - "I just saw a man carrying a naked lady", says one of the daughters as they leave, speaking of a garden-variety pervert with a blow-up sex doll, to which Walter pleasantly notes, "That's why we're moving to Stepford", telling us from the first minutes that Stepford is the place without naked ladies, and that will be important.

As it turns out, Stepford is more sterile and unforgivingly blank than Joanna's worst nightmares. All of the men in town belong to a thing called the Stepford Men's Association, which seems to exist largely so there's a place that women absolutely can not go; and virtually all of the wives of those men are freakishly docile, not just by '70s standards, but by the most alarmist caricature of the Eisenhower '50s. Obsessed with cooking, housecleaning, and nothing else, the Stepford wives are like soulless, sexless objects, and only another recent transplant, Bobbie Markowe (Paula Prentiss), matches Joanna's attitudes, or shares her belief that something is seriously amiss with this town and the incomprehensibly retrograde gender attitudes it fosters.Eventually, Joanna and Bobbie stop just noticing this weirdness and begin to investigate it; and eventually, Joanna figures out what's going on, for all the good it does her.

That gives us enough to go on; the best and most lasting parts of The Stepford Wives have very little to do with what is discovered about the rotten underbelly of Stepford, and everything to do with the woman discovering it. The film in its present state came about as the result of not always friendly wrangling between director Bryan Forbes and screenwriter William Goldman, the latter of whom had some very accurate complaints about what Forbes's decisions did to the story's internal logic, particularly the decision where he cast his talented but somewhat dowdy wife Nanette Newman as head Stepford wife Carol Van Sant. But we'll get to the film's rickety narrativity in due course; there's so much of it that actually works, quite splendidly, that I'm reluctant to give into Goldman and confess that yes, this actually is kind of half-baked and illogical when all is said and done.

Forbes, whose career highlights aren't remotely as well-known as they should be, was first and above all a terrific director of actresses: in The L-Shaped Room, from 1962, he pulled the first truly great performance out of Leslie Caron; and in The Whisperers, from 1967, he helped the legendary Dame Edith Evans along to what is likely the very best screen performance of her estimable career. He was also, specifically, great at positioning his wonderful leading ladies in the context of thrillers about warped domestic spaces: The Whisperers, again, with Evans going slightly, slowly insane in her run-down flat, and 1964's Seance on a Wet Afternoon, with a sterling Kim Stanley as a demented psychic who perpetrates a kidnapping to prove her skills. The Stepford Wives fills both roles wonderfully: in it, Ross gives an absolutely superb performance that's miles beyond anything she does in her best-known roles, as the milksop girl in The Graduate and the charmingly bland woman spoiling the homoeroticism between the leads of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And she does it in part because the film so obligingly presents her as the very Rosemary-ish woman who finds herself trapped in a town that seems obviously, oppressively "off" to her, even though virtually nobody around her seems to reealise it.

Forbes doesn't play things subtly: he and the great cinematographer Owen Roizman soak the film in jagged shadowy interiors harshly contrasting with eye-bleachingly bright, saturated exteriors, both of them suggesting something very artificial and threatening; and the film also boasts a remarkably dated but even more remarkably successful score by Michael Small that uses some of the most banal, '70s TV-movie cues to establish the soporific ordinariness of Stepford, and then its increasingly vile secrets, as the score begins to have minor-key counter-melodies and electronic orchestrations creeping around the edges to inform us, sonically, that All Is Not Well.

It's a fine, if somewhat overworked paranoia thriller from the era that genre was at its best; Ross's increasingly frantic but reliably strong-willed performance makes her an ideal subject for the mechanics of the film, which is where it works best. And in every detail of the production design, the music, and the costuming, it uses the visual language of the kind of soppy films pandering to women in an ironic, biting way, clearly underlining its angry, satiric goals: this life, this kind of filmmaking, is the sort of box that a certain kind of men want to keep women locked away in, docile and unchallenging and in no way politically dangerous.

And back we thus come to the satire, which is clearly the main takeaway from the movie, even though it's a much, much better thriller than social commentary. As you know - as I know, long before I watched the movie - as the post basically up and tells us - the Stepford wives are robots, made by the mysterious Dale Coba (Patrick O'Neal), who used to build audio-animatronics for Disney. And this is the point Goldman made, and every hetero* male critic has made since, and we're all of us completely right: if you give the kind of conservative, woman-threatened man the movie portrays the ability to replace his wife with a completely docile robot clone who will uncomplainingly do every thing he wants, it's not going to be wearing hilariously demure dresses that go right up to the neck. It will be wearing skin-tight miniskirts that barely contain it's enormous, imbalancing breasts. And it won't have time to take care of the house, the kids, and the cooking, because of the sheer quantity of blowjobs it performs in the course of a normal day. For Goldman, this meant that all of the Stepford wives should also be caricatured, gorgeous trophy wives; casting Newman scotched that, and the movie had to become suddenly very contrived and inapt in its central satiric message as a result (though the fake Joanna does have curvier hips and larger breasts than Ross naturally possesses). Even if we conceive that the chauvinist's dream in the '70s was for a parodic version of the '50s to come back, it certainly wouldn't have come at the expense of the Sexual Revolution, which benefited men every inch as much as it benefited women.

Regardless of the specifics, it doesn't make sense except strictly in the realm of symbolism and metaphor, a flaw that didn't affect Rosemary's Baby, which was metaphorical and internally coherent within the universe the film was creating. Forbes's atmosphere and theatricality do an excellent job of putting the reveal over with enough intensity that the logical holes are hard to spot: the confrontation between Joanna and her new replacement is tremendously captivating horror filmmaking.

And besides, whatever intellectual cheats it has to take to get there, the important part is less "what's going on?" than "what does it it mean for our characters?" Joanna and Bobbie are extraordinary movie heroes, sharply-written and brilliantly performed. As long as the film remains in a horror/thriller mood, presenting their discovery of the sheer scale of the entrenched anti-woman worldview they're facing as a sort of Kafka-esque nightmare, it works beautifully. Intellectually, it could be a lot sounder, but its rhetorical skills are of secondary concern to the way it all feels, and it feels bone-chilling. Not the tightest paranoia thriller, not the most persuasively horrifying in its implication, but far better than the generally soft reputation it has suffered from ever since the '70s, and a fine work of craftsmanship from a director whose thrillers are some of the best that you've almost certainly never seen.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1975
-Hotshot kid director Steven Spielberg almost fails to make the first movie to ever break $100 million at the box office, Jaws
-After years in the making, Robert Altman brings to the big screen the long-awaited Nashville, with 24, count 'em, 24 of your favorite stars
-Edgy animator Ralph Bakshi makes Coonskin and immediately embroils himself in racial controversy

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1975
-Belgium's Chantal Akerman creates a new feminist visual vocabulary with which to showcase three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
-The simmering Australian New Wave bursts out in its full form with Picnic at Hanging Rock, a cryptic anti-mystery by Peter Weir
-Sholay becomes among the highest-grossing films in the history of Indian cinema, past, present, or future

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1974: In which all the artistic revolutions in the world don't stop popular things from being popular

It is not uncommon, when people swan about cooing with praise for the New Hollywood Cinema and the exciting American cinema of the 1970s, to act as if the whole of the film industry was engaged in thrilling experiments that met with broad favor from audiences, who for once in history were interested in being challenged and enlightened by extraordinarily bold cinematic voices, till those poopypants George Lucas and Steven Spielberg ruined everything. This is untrue. This, indeed, fucking untrue: while it's the case that movies like The Godfather and even The Exorcist would surely never be such Zeitgeist-defining megahits in the 2010s (or the 2000s, or the 1990s...), and this is a sorry reflection on later generations of filmgoers, it's also the case that The Poseidon Adventure plausibly could be. And it was right up there on the top of the pile in 1972, right alongside The Godfather. The simple fact is that the movies we now heap money upon, as a culture (effects-driven action films with simple, cookie-cutter storytelling impulses and deliberately shallow one-trait characters), are also the movies that our parents and grandparents did. Only the effects have changed, while the traits enjoyed by the characters, largely, have not. When brainy, adult-themed dramas do well, it's always an exception, not a trend, and pretending that every Joe and Jane Moviegoer in the '70s was three-quarters Film Comment critic does nobody any good. It's not like the $307 million worth of Star Wars viewers in its initial release were being marched into theaters at gunpoint.

So back we go to The Poseidon Adventure, a movie that saved 20th Century Fox from extinction, and made veteran spectacle producer Irwin Allen all sorts of fun new ideas for how he could extend that film's salient characteristics and extraordinary success into film after film after film. It's certainly not that Allen invented the disaster film; Universal's Airport, in 1970, is what really kicked off that decade's iconic vogue for the genre, and there's never been a truly protracted stretch of time without a single major disaster picture of some extraction (for it is a genre that can cover many kinds of stories) in America since the 1930s.

But Allen machined the disaster film into a smooth, easily-reproduced formula; Allen perfected the "all-star ensemble cast" variant of the disaster film; Allen drove the disaster film to its greatest heights for a brief but intense span when many people and studios tried to compete with Allen. Nobody could out-Allen Allen; his films were the biggest of the big until suddenly and shockingly, they weren't. And Irwin Allen was never bigger than in 1974, when he produced The Towering Inferno, the second-highest-grossing movie of the year when the disaster movie was at its pinnacle (Earthquake and Airport 1975 also landed in the domestic box office top 10). Allen and the two studios collaborating to make the film (Hollywood's very first joint production between two majors), 20th Century Fox & Warner Bros., even managed to haul the film up to a Best Picture Oscar nomination. One which probably would have otherwise gone to Best Director nominee John Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence, because the Oscars were also the Oscars in the '70s, even though they sometimes pretended not to be.

The Towering Inferno is pretty broadly regarded as the best of Allen's disaster movie cycle; I absolutely do not find this to be the case. Not with The Poseidon Adventure sitting right there: for The Poseidon Adventure has a cast generally given towards campier, more excessive performances. And The Poseidon Adventure has a more outwardly fantastic premise, which makes it both harder to nitpick logical holes and factual inaccuracies, and easier to watch its life-destroying menace with a spirit of jolly escapism. The Poseidon Adventure, most importantly, is 117 minutes long, and The Towering Inferno is two hours and forty-four minutes and some. It requires maybe around half of that, and the rest is all the most vicious kind of padding. The film only needs that insufferable running time to give subplots to the huge number of more or less famous people in the cast, and while it wouldn't be an Irwin Allen joint without a mixture of hot commodities, new starlets whose career never quite turned out, and well-known Old Hollywood stars who could be gotten for cheap, it's damn hard to mount any argument that their presence serves any narrative or emotional function. Presumably, they exist for us to have a host of potential victims to root for and fear for; in practice, it's just that many more trite stock characters to keep track of amongst the state-of-the-art destruction porn cumshots.

Really, it's not entirely fair to the characters, nor to Stirling Silliphant for taking on the impossible task of writing them (he adapted not one, but two books on virtually identical themes: Richard Martin Stern's The Tower, and Thomas N. Scortia & Frank M. Robinson's The Glass Inferno, each of them optioned by one of the collaborating studios). It's just a bloated movie that goes on and on about everything for far too long. Re-watching it,* I was both amazed and discouraged to find that its very best thriller setpiece, involving a man, a woman, and two children agonisingly clambering across a chasm of twisted metal and rebar that used to be a stairwell, takes place before the halfway point; the remainder of the action often as takes place in draggy, overly pacey setpieces that don't demonstrate the filmmakers having any knack for drawing out a sequence to drive the tension up to unendurable levels (Allen directed the action himself, leaving the human material to poor hack John Guillermin, who for his sins was made to direct the epochally terrible Dino De Laurentiis King Kong remake as his very next movie), but instead that they have a sorry tendency to strain those sequences till they pop like an overinflated balloon.

The film takes place in the newly-built (in fact, not quite finished) tallest building in the world, which has naturally been built in San Francisco, one of the most earthquake-prone cities in the New World. But it's not an earthquake that the 135-story Glass Tower needs to be afraid of, but the petty corruption of untrammeled capitalism: to shave a few percentages off the budget, wealthy magnate Jim Duncan (William Holden) has encouraged his contractors to keep to the city's building code, and not to the amped-up demands made by the tower's architect, Doug Roberts (Paul Newman), who wanted to double-down on everything to make absolutely certain that this most outlandish, unprecedented of buildings would be safe from every eventuality. One of those contractors is Duncan's son-in-law Roger Simmons (Richard Chamberlain), who went cheap on the wiring, and wouldn't you just know that the stress of providing power to such an enormous structure needs more than the minimum. Mere hours before the gala near the top of the party at which the building is to be officially opened in front of the leading lights of Frisco, a fire starts in an 81st floor storage closet. And as a dozen or so people who I'm not going to bother recapping, because absolutely none of them matter as anything but fire fodder, go about their business, the fire spreads and spreads, until the fire department is called in, under the leadership of Battalion Chief Mike O'Halloran (Steve McQueen), to fight the most desperate blaze they'll ever know, under the most disastrous circumstances. For as the film passionately informs us, fires in buildings that are more that seven stories high are virtually impossible to fight effectively. It is important - so important! - to not build indulgent buildings that are deranged firetraps. This message has been brought to you by Irwin Allen, getting all bizarrely preachy in the last scene.

Okay, so I'll mention one cast member: legendary dancer and generally suave motherfucker Fred Astaire, playing a charmingly broke conman and winning the sole competitive Oscar nomination of his career for, apparently, not being dead yet.

So I am torn: as pure spectacle, The Towering Inferno is the tops. Glorious modelwork, beautifully-shot fire effects, elaborate sets, some beautiful matte that look just fake enough so that you can really appreciate the craftsmanship, the whole nine yards. It's certainly the most handsome and accomplished of the year's disaster pictures (as far as "handsome" goes, it takes overlooking the horribly dated style of the Glass Tower itself, which looks like an insanely complicated liquor cabinet), and we cannot think for a moment that Allen wasn't committed to showing every penny onscreen. It is top quality eye-candy; and so much of it! I won't go over it again, having already said it once, for I would not want to be like The Towering Inferno. But fucka-lucka-ding-dong, it just goes on and on.

Despite the best efforts of most of those involved, the film never takes off as more than just a remarkable collection of glossy violence: the cast is decent, and McQueen in particular does the best job I could imagine of portraying a man reacting to the worsening situation around him with clarity, strength, and a weary thread of humor, but I have to wonder how fair it is to call this all "acting". By the end of the film's first third, character has fallen by the wayside, and all that's left is meat puppetry, with some talented and some not-as-talented faces occupying space in front of the camera and screaming in terror as needed, but not giving much of an inner life to the proceedings. This doesn't keep some of the more grueling, inventive deaths from feeling simple meanspirited - I am particularly distressed by the way that the ultimately very minor role of a middle-aged adulteress played by Susan Flannery is dumped from the movie (like a lot of disaster films, The Towering Inferno loves its moralising: especially in the respective fates of the repentant Duncan and the craven Simmons). Do we really need to see this rendered in such loving detail? I contend that we do not, for the film doesn't have the strength of character to follow through and present itself as a meditation on arbitrary, horrible, unpredictable death. The Poseidon Adventure, a cartoon adventure, does not suffer from this. The hilariously awful killer bee movie The Swarm, Allen's next picture, is so feverishly inept and divorced from anything resembling the lived experience of genuine humans, that it doesn't suffer from it either. The Towering Inferno is just realistic enough, just plausible enough, that it opens up some dark doors that it has no interest in peering into, and it leaves a sour note over much of the film.

But I concede that it's exhilarating. There's no elegance in the jerry-rigged screenplay, hybridising two books and forced deal with petty dick-measuring by McQueen and Newman that leaves the back half of the film wildly imbalanced (it also forced The Towering Inferno to introduce the technique of "diagonal billing": on the poster and in the credits, McQueen's name comes first read from the left, but Newaman's comes first read from the top). And there's even less interest in the characters it presents, and there's none at all in the visual compositions, so generic that I can't even come up with anything to say about them. But the fire feels horrifyingly real and present; the sight of it destroying actual sets is every bit as impressive, if less poetically shot, as the "burning of Atlanta" sequence from Gone with the Wind; the sound design, though occasionally a touch metallic and hollow, roars and explodes in a way that movies just did not roar and explode in '74 (I frankly prefer it to the more technologically accomplished Earthquake, though of course I have never heard it in the original, rare Sensurround mix); the score by a young John Williams has early feints towards the lush Romanticism of his most iconic scores from the late '70s and early '80s, and gives the film a soaring, passionate feel that it would otherwise totally lack. It has the goods, even if it doesn't really know what to do with them. But that's beside the point. In 1974, this was eye-popping, revolutionary stuff, and the sheer massiveness of the project and its devotion to showing never-before-seen wonders was obviously more than enough for audiences to get a kick out of it, wonky pacing and flat story and all. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1974
-Paramount releases Roman Polanski's acidic thriller of corruption and wickedness, Chinatown
-Martin Scorsese makes his sole "woman's picture", the ode to old Hollywood and new feminism Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
-The fabled BBS Productions releases its final movie, the outraged Vietnam documentary Hearts & Minds

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1974
-The New German Cinema welcomes an important new voice with Wim Wenders's Alice in the Cities
-Lina Wertmüller directs the Marxist parable Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August in Italy
-With an almost limitless freedom to do whatever he wants, John Boorman chooses to put Sean Connery in a red speedo and has a giant flying stone head disparage the penis in the British sci-fi misfire Zardoz

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DRIVING THAT TRAIN

Snowpiercer is the absolute best thing.

Okay, so Snowpiercer isn't literally the absolute best, obviously, but it's the kind of film which exists on a plain of such energy and madness that it inspires such an all-in response even if it's stupid. Incidentally, the last movie I saw that made me feel the same "that's the absolute best thing" impulse, for mostly the same reasons, even though I knew that it of course wasn't the best, or even close to the best, was Cloud Atlas. So my take on the film should probably be taken with a hefty ol' grain of salt.

Basically, Snowpiercer is a great, giddy mess of a film, one that picks up as many ideas as it can manage to hold and runs with them as far and fast as it can until it completely blows out. It's the most blunt, anti-nuanced allegory that cinema has produced in years (allegories not being terribly much in fashion at the moment), and its commitment that allegory is so complete that for whatever failures of logic and storytelling structure the movie evinces - and there are failures on both fronts - it's really hard to argue that it ever wanted to succeed as a conventional piece of storytelling anyway. Which has nothing to do with anything, but when one bumps around on the internet and encounters the people raising issues about how the tracks were built, or whatever, one starts to get intensely crabby, in the "were you even slightly interested in actually watching the movie?" sense.

So anyway, Snowpiercer, which I don't think is actually the given name of the train which features so prominently in the plot, but we can still pretty clearly refer to the train as being the titular character, even so. The film sets out its backstory with such intense economy of language and image that I think it would be hard to blame somebody for not catching it: in 2014, an experiment to counteract global warming goes terribly wrong, and the entire surface of Earth is plunged into unlivable, demonic cold. All the remains of humanity is gathered on that train, going around the entire world in an endless loop, and the history of why this is so is doled out piecemeal throughout the film. The passengers are segmented in a rigid caste system: the closer to the back, the more of a nobody you are, and of course the train's engineer Wilford, in the very first car with the engine itself, is the biggest somebody of all, more a god than a human from the way people talking about it. In 2031, there comes a point at which 34-year-old Curtis Everette (Chris Evans) has gotten too sick of the miserable life of people in the far back, and so, encouraged by the cryptic messages received by the wily old Gilliam (John Hurt), Curtis and several of the other strongest members of their car begin a full-scale rebellion, pushing their way along the train, car by car, hunting for Wilford and the children that he stole away from them for God knows what reason.

I doubt very much that it's even possible to have such a lack of imagination that you can't see what this is all about: it's a parable of the 99% against the 1%, with several characters filling in as symbols for particular aspects of that conflict. More overtly and consistently Marxist movies have existed, but you have to go all the way back to Europe in the 1970s to find them. The huge difference between Snowpiercer and e.g. The Working Class Goes to Heaven is that Snowpiercer eschews anything that resembles even the most distorted version of realism. It is first and always a heightened genre film - and more specifically, a South Korean genre film, albeit one which is at least 90% in English and stars Captain America in the lead role. But Korean it is, and you don't need to have seen too many Korean films to understand what that implies in terms of the movie's kinetic energy, whiplash tonal shifts, and commitment to its own weird internal logic no matter how much that logic might start to feel like a liability in the immensely peculiar last act (which, after much reflection, I have decided to like).

So basically, we have here yet another Bong Joon-ho picture; the director's fifth feature and first project since 2009's Mother (which I think is still his best movie, which might really just mean that it's his most consistent), his first in English, and his first with American and British movie stars: Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, Allison Pill (in a fucking magnificent one-scene performance) and Tilda Swinton are also in the cast. Though Song Kang-ho and Ko Ah-sung are on-hand to play father and daughter (as they did in the director's 2006 Western breakthrough, The Host), a drugged-out lock-picker and drugged-out psychic, respectively, and it would be a lie to say that the film doesn't seem at least a little bit more comfortable when it's focused on them than when it's focused on anybody else.

But anyway, as I was saying: Bong Joon-ho. There's a certain "let's fucking go for it" energy to every one of his projects that I have seen, and none have ever been so ludicrous ebullient as this. Though it's the director's first adapted project - based on a French graphic novel by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette - it fits smoothly into the rest of his career, or at least as smoothly as anything could fit into a stream of films defined mostly by their oblique angles and refusal to fit into clear, pre-ordained shapes. The film is equal parts left-wing agitprop, live-action cartoon (Swinton's high-wire performance as a cross between Margaret Thatcher and Margaret Dumont, done up as a secular religious extremist, is one of the most transfixing things I have ever seen that most transfixing of actresses do; not necessarily because it is as-such "good acting", but because it holds absolutely nothing back, and serves to foreshadow the tonal developments of the second half in a way I fully approve of), balletic action film, and grand tour of Ondřej Nekvasil's outstanding production design, which feels like a Felliniesque romp through individually magical shadowboxes that all come from a completely different place, mixed the smooth lines of futurism, and always so linear and cramped that we never, ever forget that this all takes place on a train.

Not all of these things work all the time, and not all of them are as good as others: for all the obvious love and care that went into the film's big night-vision goggles fight showcase, there's no denying that the film suffers for coming out (in the States, anyway), the same year as the exhaustively inventive martial arts epic The Raid 2: Berendal. And while I do not agree with the criticism, I can't really argue against the complaint that the film goes from not making sense with brio and momentum, to not making sense in a kind of jerry-rigged, emotionally unsatisfying fashion (though I do think that Evans - a revelation here, even after the increasing soulfulness and complexity of his big-ass Marvel movie performances - helps to keep things hanging together through his responses to what happens, and as long as we stick with his perspective instead of trying to adopt some kind of third-person objectivity, I think the climactic revelations all flow reasonably well).

But the thing is, even if its failure were far more manifest and undeniable, Snowpiercer has a level of ambition that is simple not present in the vast majority of films, certainly not the vast majority of films that occupy the same generic territory. It has a level of visual creativity and thematic ambition and performative eccentricity that are much, much too rare, and even when it's not working in the worst way, it still felt more alive and vital than the bulk of movies are even in their best moments. Every moment of genius and every half-formed lump alike make this one of the completely essential films of the year.

9/10

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