HE'S MAKING A LIST, AND CHECKING IT TWICE

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

High Fidelity is a movie that sounds on paper like it should be an obnoxious slog in the company of obnoxious men whose sense of sexual entitlement is treated with the utmost admiration and gravity, and I will confess that, having not seen it almost since it was brand new in 2000, my memory is that it was just that. But it's in fact closer to exactly the opposite. This is perhaps the genius of novelist Nick Hornby, whose book served as the film's basis (with a trans-Atlantic transplant to Chicago), and whose special gift lies in describing the behavior of undermatured men, allowing them full range to speak their mind, and thereby show off what shallow assholes they're capable of being. If I end up slightly preferring 2002's About a Boy, another Hornby adaptation that maybe wouldn't have existed without this one, that's mostly because there's something about his arch irony that feels a bit more organic when it comes with a British accent attached. Though High Fidelity isn't without its British bona fides: it was directed by Stephen Frears, a rather terrific chronicler of everyday urban life in England, though he's spent most of the years since High Fidelity trying to scuttle his reputation. At any rate, Frears brings to the project a certain brusqueness that serves it immodestly well, while capturing the lovingly over-detailed Chicago locations with the clear-headed non-romanticism of an outsider with a flair for depicting the feel of a place.

That place ends up being a non-incidental component of what makes High Fidelity work: the star, co-producer, and co-writer, John Cusack, native of the Chicago suburbs, obviously sank a lot of energy into making sure the film was a love letter to the city as much as it was anything else. Or rather, while it's only specifically about Chicago because of the immodest glut of locations called out by name, it's still very particularly about the physical environment that its main male characters wrap around themselves: the streets, the storefronts, the decor. High Fidelity is a very set-intensive movie, though aggressively naturalistic about it: the film is, at heart, about the kind of person who lets his identity by an outgrowth of his collection of Stuff, and it follows that closely observing the way he arranges and lives within his Stuff is one of the most important aspects of the film. Rob Gordon's (Cusack) Stuff is vinyl records, which carries with it a lot of very specific cultural baggage; but as a single man of about the same age with my own very exhaustive wall of Stuff in the form of DVDs and Blu-rays, I will enthusiastically attest to the accuracy with which the design team captured the way that such a person foregrounds his collection at home and, far more importantly to the film's narrative, the music store he owns.

Rob, early in the film, has just ended the latest in a long string of flared-out relationships, with Laura (Iben Hjejle), and has decided to go about the task of soul-searching in the only way that a pop culture obsessive knows how: he makes a list of his most traumatising break-ups and re-lives them, including revisiting the women in question, anatomising himself like an article in a magazine. That's about half of the film. The other half involves us simply watching as he and his employees/sole apparent social circle, Barry (Jack Black) and Dick (Todd Louiso) fuck around in their privileged little world of self-consciously arcane musical tastes and commodity fetishisation. Both halves feed into each other to contribute to the character sketch that the movie cares about infinitely more than it wants to chase down drama: this is a portrait of who Rob is and why that makes him such an impeccable turn-off to women and, more to the point, why he's so effortlessly good at rejecting the women who make it inside his blast radius.

I think the biggest reason that I didn't care for the film when I saw it in 2000 was that I hadn't, at that point, clocked what made Cusack an interesting actor: it's not the sweet guy charisma of his breakthrough in Say Anything... or his later straight romantic comedies, it's his amazing ability, when he sets his mind to it, to bend that charisma into a nasty prickliness. In Cusack's hands, Rob isn't a terribly likable figure: he's a peremptory, arrogant brat, given to loudly declaiming his intentions of rigorous self-analysis but always finding a way to let himself off after having begged for pity, and reliably willing to put even us, his confidants - the film's most overt stylistic gesture is to let Rob narrate his thoughts directly to the camera - in the role of the idiots that he lords his superiority over. He is, in fact, a thorough jackass, and this makes High Fidelity not a film about a fella finally getting lucky in love, but a film about a fella figuring out that he needs to stop being a raging dick and maybe he'll actually be worthy of the women who keep entering his orbit.

The film is at its best when it depicts the kind of hothouse environment in which this kind of egotism grows: the alienating, obsessive world that happens when a bunch of guys with the same interests all start to compete with each other to prove who is the most deeply entrenched in that world - Cusack's itchy, borderline angry performance is great, and so is Black's loud, snotty enthusiasm for being the most cynical and savvy in the room. Its depiction of pop culture obsessives, always quick with a reference, a game, a list-making exercise, is flawless, punched up with comedy that keeps it from being too bleak as it identifies with laser focus why these guys are stalled in one place. Where it stumbles is in its attempts to sell its romantic plot thread: partially because it does such a great job of convincing us that Rob has issues and is hard to be around that it's weird that Laura keeps not avoiding him, old habit or no. And it's also hampered by Hjejle's rather addled performance, which partially answers my other complaint: the reason she keeps letting him back into her life is because she's a flake. At any rate, a film that offers cameos to Lili Taylor and Catherine Zeta-Jones as some of Rob's most prominent exes needed to hunt a little harder for a romantic lead who could hold down the women's side of this film that's so dominated by the insular behavior of man-children.

That lack of a strong counterbalance hardly scuttles the movie - honestly, the romantic half of the film is present more to flesh out its depiction of Rob's bad behavior and desire to change than it's there to do anything in its own right. But it does leave the film a bit more hollow in patches than it could be. There is a sturdier High Fidelity out there. There is not, however, apt to be a funnier one, and probably not one that does a better job of capturing the ways that a certain brand of masculinity finds ways to turn its most glaring weaknesses into supposed strengths. It's not perfect, but boy, is it ever accurate and insightful.

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WHO CAN TAKE A SUNRISE, AND SPRINKLE IT WITH BLOOD?

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

Let's not dick around here: Candyman is the finest American horror film of the 1990s. Now, admittedly, those who've been hanging around this blog for all that long are aware that for me to make this claim of superiority is about on par with declaring something "the finest swift kick to the nutsack". But I promise that my enthusiasm has much more do with the quantity of things that Candyman gets right than with the general poverty of its competition.

Adapted by writer-director Bernard Rose from Clive Barker's short story "The Forbidden", Candyman centers upon a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), researching urban legends for her thesis. One of these legends involves a ghostly killer with a hook for a hand, who appears when you say his name, "Candyman", in front of a mirror five times. A cleaning woman happens to overhear Helen transcribing her notes, and talks about the story in a much more matter-of-fact way than the giggling undergrads swapping campfire tales, mentioning among other particularly concrete details that the Candyman is known to haunt the Cabrini-Green housing project on the city's north side. And so Helen and her research partner Bernadette Walsh (Kasi Lemmons) head up to the dangerous gang hub to poke around and find what they can find.

That's barely even the set-up for the movie, but it's already enough to clue us in to exactly what makes Candyman such an unusual achievement. In changing the setting from Barker's native England to Chicago and Cabrini-Green, Rose fundamentally re-shapes the territory that the story can occupy. The no-longer-extant Cabrini-Green, my younger readers may not know and my non-American readers would have no reason to be aware, was arguably the most notoriously dangerous and mismanaged housing project in the United States, a shorthand for urban blight, the inability of civic governments to do right by their communities, and the abysmal failure of white America to care about the fate of black America, and to generally assume that African-Americans were, when left to their own devices, prone towards violent thuggery. Setting a story in Cabrini-Green, in 1992 (three years before the beginning of the 16 year demolition project that has sought to reclaim the area for upper-middle class yuppies*), could not help but force that story to refocus itself as a statement on race in America. I would go so far as to say that's the primary reason why somebody would choose that location.

And lo! quite a parable about the U.S. race problem Candyman proves to be, though it has the luxury, being a horror film, of never having to come right out and say what's going on. But subtle it ain't. There is, for one thing, the backstory of the Candyman himself (played by Tony Todd when we eventually see him, around halfway through the movie): the son of a slave, tortured and burned to death for the crime of having a consensual sexual relation with a white woman in the 1890s. He is the angry patron spirit of every African-American male who was unjustly punished for the crime, essentially, of not being white. And what happens over the course of the plot? A white chick bumbles around in a place where she doesn't fit in, does what seems to be the right thing (she ends up uncovering the identity of a local gangleader who has been using the Candyman legend as a fear tactic, all Scooby-Doo like), but her actions - born in the pretty explicit conception of Cabrini-Green as a whole breeding ground of Others that she can use as intellectual fodder without having to deal too much with the actual material of their lives - serve only to make things worse, since her actions are what end up rousing the Candyman. As he tells her, point blank, if she wasn't so hellbent on taking away the power of his legend by running it through academia, he wouldn't have to put in such extreme measures to keep that legend fresh and ever more terrifying.

It is, in microcosm, the great American tale of over-educated white people with no fucking clue messing around with the lives of minorities like a kid with a lab kit, to disastrous results. It is, in fact, pretty obvious once you start looking for it. But the film takes the privilege of genre and never bothers to state its themes in the way of an actual message movie (which is perhaps why it gets to have such a cynical message that so signally refuses to lets its white characters off the hook. Although, the film is rather notable for how few important white characters there are: just Madsen herself, and Xander Berkeley as her husband. Her shady husband, but of course we already knew that from "Xander Berkeley"). And if the only thing you wanted Candyman to be was a horror movie, there's still plenty of fantastic work being done purely at the level of genre. The roots in Barker are clear even without the film's portrayal of the Candyman, with its distinct debt to Pinhead from Hellraiser: it's a film about the terrifying power of ideas, as much as the terrifying power of being split in two by a ghost with a hook for a hand. As one of the first films to pivot around the phrase "urban legend", then at its very trendiest, it's little surprise that Candyman should turn out to be about the dangerous power of storytelling, and the woe that befalls those who don't sufficiently respect that power. We can broaden that a bit: it's a film about failing to appreciate the role of culture, history, and knowledge: Helen ends up on the Candyman's bad side because she treats him as a lark, as opposed to the Cabrini-Green locals, who have a grave respect mingled with their hatred for him.

It's also, to be fair, a horror film that works at a gut level as much as an intellectual one, which is after all where horror needs to succeed. Much of that can be credited to Todd, a great character actor with an outstanding ability to seem menacing while being still and richly erudite. Much of it can be credited to the sound mix, which puts Todd's booming voice on a different level than the rest of the sound in the film, feeling like it's entering your head through something other than your ears. A whole shitload of it can be credited to Philip Glass, whose score is one of the best a horror film has enjoyed since the dawn of the 1980s: the droning repetition for which he's famous works perfectly in context, coming off as a dolorous chant as it throbs and throbs its way down into your bones. Glass is such a natural for horror that I have no clue why there are so few horror movies in his career; it worked magnificently in this case.

Arguably, the single element of Candyman that works best, though, is its sense of place. The location photography here is abnormally good: in the 23 years since, I can't name a half-dozen films to have taken advantage of Chicago anywhere near as well, and perhaps only one - The Dark Knight - to have topped it. The film opens with a series of aerial shots, with Glass's music brooding beneath, that start off by rendering Chicago as a flat, indecipherable map of lines and squares that only resemble buildings if you deeply want them to, putting us at into a disconcerting mood right from the beginning (is this an American city? An alien planet? Why not both!). The footage shot in Cabrini-Green, meanwhile, takes superb advantage of the run-down bleakness of that place, portraying it as a victim of human mismanagement that has been turned into something totally inhumane, an unnervingly authentic hellhole where it feels entirely plausible that such forgotten, hidden legends as the one the film builds itself on could survive and thrive.

Given such an extraordinarily suggestive central location, the film gets to do a lot with mood and implication, letting story elements bubble up without having to spell them out. I am particularly fond of the production design in the Candyman shrine - which I presume to have been shot on a studio set back in California - where the full range of Candyman lore is indicated through the paintings on the wall and the plates of chocolates with razor blades in them, but never explained. It suggests a deep background to this story, one that we and Helen never begin to tap or understand, and that lack of understanding is the driving force of everything bad that happens. Candyman is, essentially, a horror film about the danger of confident ignorance, whether that comes in the form of blithely accepting your husband's obvious lies about the undergrad he's fucking, or in the form of trying to reason with a vengeful ghost, or in the form of thinking you can know more about a lifestyle than the people who live it every day. It's brainy, it's atmospheric, and it's spooky as hell, and for all these reasons and more, Candyman is one of the essential works of modern English-language horror.

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BY JOVE

To begin with, Jupiter Ascending is pulp sci-fi of a very ancient stripe, and it is utterly proud of that fact. It tells the story of a secret space princess, set against the machinations of evil space corporations who hire burly lizardmen with bat wings as their guards; characters have names like "Titus Abrasax" and "Stinger Apini" and the protagonist gets the suitably alliterative handle "Jupiter Jones". From the look of it, one can quickly assume that directors Andy and Lana Wachowski, costume designer Kym Barrett, and production designer Hugh Bateup all spend months poring over magazine and paperback covers from the '40s and '50s before one sketch was drawn or one line of dialogue was written. And then the Wachowskis perhaps used those covers for their storyboards.

It's derivative as all hell, and yet it's like absolutely nothing that has come around in years: an extravagantly costly effects-driven adventure tailor-made for the narrowest slice of middle-aged genre fanboys. The only recent films to operate in anything like the same mode both tried mightily to distance themselves from all the goofy, juvenile trappings of the genre in different ways: the infamous 2012 flop John Carter by treating everything with crushing solemnity and leaden ponderousness, the 2014 smash hit Guardians of the Galaxy by coating everything in a protective layer of self-mocking irony. No such distance is afforded Jupiter Ascending, which openly loves the corny bullshit it's referencing and wants to bring it to breathtakingly gorgeous life with all of the money the Wachowskis could spirit away from a surprisingly spend-happy Warner Bros. (I have to assume it's this difference - total irony vs. total sincerity - that accounts for GotG receiving critical praise and becoming an enormous financial success, while JA has found only critical scolding and audience indifference, since they're otherwise virtually indistinguishable as exceptionally effective Star Wars knock-offs). It is a film that combines a passionate desire to remain forever 12 years old with the giddy engagement with Big Ideas that is the primary unifying characteristic of the Wachowskis' filmography; it's less the follow-up to their maddeningly under-appreciated Cloud Atlas (a collaboration with Tom Tykwer, which maybe explains the difference) than to their candy-colored pixie stix orgasm Speed Racer with more immediate gratification and a slightly more adolescent than pre-teen worldview.

The story is at once galaxy-spanning and blunt enough that you could write it on a cocktail napkin. The short version: Cinderella in space. Our hero is the aforementioned Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), born in the middle of the ocean while her single mother took her from Russia to the United States after the death of her English father, and now she actually does work as a maid. She's one of the cogs in the family business cleaning rich people's condos in Chicago (indulgent aside: the film makes spectacular use of Chicago's particular architecture and layout - nothing since The Dark Knight itself has been half so good in this respect), mostly stuck with the toilets for added indignation. But she is a Chosen One; the siblings of the unfathomably wealthy Abrasax family, a powerful dynasty of space industrialists, want her for their own reasons. Sister Kalique (Tuppence Middleton) and younger brother Titus (Douglas Booth) both seem to be at least kind of decent about it, but elder brother Balem (Eddie Redmayne), most powerful of the three, is extremely Bad News, with his all-black wardrobe, and his way of menacingly whispering theatrically.

He's the one who throws some terrifying skeletal beasts at her to kill her, from which she's saved by Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a bounty hunter with canid features just pronounced enough to not make Tatum look ugly. At which point we still know nothing, until Cain's earthbound alien friend Stinger (Sean Bean) discovers that she is, improbably, space royalty. Which is still rather more the start of things than the end of them: while it's a complete canard that Jupiter Ascending has a significantly complicated plot (everything important gets repeated, at least once), it does have an awfully overstuffed one, and it can hardly set up Jupiter as the resurrection of the Abrasax materfamilas fast enough to get to its galactic soap opera and dynastic wrangling.

It's neither elegant nor sophisticated, but the rush I, for one, got from following around all the story turns hits exactly the right beats: at its best, it's like a slightly dumber iteration of Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe, at its worst, it's still got the manic "we just escape from something that wants to kill us, but there's something else that wants to kill us even more!" pacing of a trashy adventure, mixed with fairy tale melodrama: one of the two climaxes hinges on a thrilling cross-cut race to interrupt a wedding with a scheming Victorian-style villain. Throughout, the Wachowski's script, and their direction of the actors wielding sometimes unmentionable lines, strikes a tasty mixture of taking itself deadly seriously when it has to for the sake of world-building, but openly and even arrogantly owning up to how very, very silly it can all be. So when the film needs us to believe in its batshit religion of genetics - or at least believe that the characters believe it - it presents reams of crazed technobabble (only Kunis, of the main cast, gets away without having to manage any walls of impenetrable text) with unblinking seriousness and gaping fascination. But when it wants to be a gorgeously over-designed piece of nonsensical eye candy, it can happily pull back and breezily let the movie be loopy fun, and so we get things like the wonderfully choreographed aerial fight over downtown Chicago that ends the film's... first act? Second? It's got a weird number of acts. It's fast paced and zippily edited, but slows down and backs off enough that there's never a point where it's confusing, and it all takes place from dusk to twilight, beautifully captured by cinematographer John Toll.

There are some absolutely unnecessary missteps, including a brutal shift from the first finale into the second, a weird reboot that has the feel of combining a planned sequel into the first film as insurance against not getting to make another one (which turns out to have been wise), and the actors are all over the map, from Redmayne's straight-up '30s matinee serial hamming to Tatum's quiet bafflement (only Bean, out of the whole cast, gives a clear-cut, classically "good" performance). And it's not apologetic for being a gee-whiz bit of fast-paced fluff, which makes it incredibly hard to suggest that it has any business being watched by sensible people who care about depth, weight, and emotions (Exhibit B: the awkward fumbling of everything that has anything to do with the love story between Jupiter and Cain). So I get why somebody would find it intolerably trashy. But set that against the sheer enormousness of its spectacle, its passionate respect for the highest and lowest achievements of its genre, its dazzlingly overwrought visuals, its vigorous post-John Williams score by Michael Giacchino, and I just cannot convince myself that I didn't have an enormous amount of fun.

8/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: FIGHTING FIRES

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: we've hit the point where something as dire as Planes: Fire & Rescue legitimately qualifies as one of the week's biggest releases. So anyway, fire and rescue. Pretty much one place you can take that. Anyway, I let the Christian firefighters have their go-round, time for the godless Hollywood heathens to have some fun.

A family drama about firefighter brothers crosscut with a technically audacious action-mystery about firefighter brothers might sound like a weird candidate to become a Zeitgeist hit, but the 1990s produced some really weird big popcorn movies, in retrospect. So here we are with Backdraft, anyway, one of the big "showing off our effects work" movies from the summer of 1991, as directed by Ron Howard channeling Robert Zemeckis copying Steven Spielberg.

The film tells of two brothers, Stephen (Kurt Russell) and Brian (William Baldwin) McCaffrey, sons of a Chicago firefighter whose death was witnessed by Brian in childhood, an event depicted with slow motion and hollowed-out sound effects and aching, mournful music, because at least Backdraft tells no lies about what it is. 20 years later, Stephen is one of the toughest sonsabitches in the Chicago Fire Department, a reckless genius who plays by his own rulebook and gets results even if he takes risks that make his colleague and father figure John Adcox (Scott Glenn) freak out. Because it's only a soul-sapping cliché if it takes place in a police station, y'see. Brian, meanwhile - having made the cover of Life magazine back in '71 for the picture of himself standing dazed while holding his dead father's helmet outside the burned-out building where the elder McCaffrey met his fate - has drifted aimlessly through young adulthood and now has come to realise that his goal has always been to follow in Dad and Stephen's footsteps and prove himself a man in the fires of... well, fires. Stephen greatly fears his little brother doesn't have what it takes to hack it, and so he treats the "probie" (firefighter slang for new recruits learning the ropes) with a particular barking roughness that masks his tender concern under dictatorial cruelty, and the relationship between the McCaffreys begins to deteriorate. Will the brothers come to a new understanding of each other and find a respect for the relationship they share, to be tested in the heart of a burning building? Will they ever!

Snarking is easy, but honestly, Backdraft would be a hell of a lot stronger if that's at far as its ambitions had gone, but writer Gregory Widen instead buttressed the tired old tale of dueling brothers with a subplot in which Stephen tries to win back his estranged wife Helen (Rebecca De Mornay) and be a more present father to his son Sean (Beep Iams). Meanwhile, Brian has just reconnected with an old flame, Jennifer Vaitkus (Jennifer Jason Leigh), now working in the office of Alderman Marty Swayzak (J.T. Walsh). She convinces Brian to use her connections to get himself a safer job than the madness of rushing into burning buildings, getting himself involved in the investigatory wing of the CFD, where old vet Donald Rimgale (Robert De Niro) teaches him the fine art of investigating possible arson cases. Will the brothers make hard decisions about the men they want to be, and weigh the merits of being safe and secure family men with the terrifying rush of serving the greater good at risk of life and limb? Will they ever!

Having already pressed two movies into one, Widen apparently figured "what the hell", and added a third: Brian and Rimgale's investigation reveals that a series of recent fires are indeed arson, but arson perpetrated by a real genius with fire. Consulting the unmistakably Hannibal Lectery convicted arsonist Ronald Bartel (Donald Sutherland), the investigators start to piece together a puzzle in which they find out how some genius firebug has been staging incredibly complex traps to trigger a very unusual type of explosion called a backdraft, in which the act of introducing oxygen into a room very quickly - by opening a door, for example - causes it to burst into flame quickly and decisively, yet the same cycle of air that creates the explosion also puts it out almost instantly, leaving just enough fire to kill whatever bastard triggered it. So this isn't mere pyromania, but specific, targeted assassinations, designed to leave no damage other than to a single victim. Will the investigators find out how this mystery is tied to the shady, hopelessly corrupt world of Chicago politics and land development? Will they ever!

In Backdraft, we see a flawless representation of a problem that had plagued summer movies before it was made and continues to plague them over two decades later: it has absolutely fantastic setpieces strung along an absolutely dimwitted script. Not just because it's cliché-ridden, though that doesn't help in the slightest: Backdraft is structurally broken at a truly remarkable degree even by the standards of Ron Howard films, given that director's insistent problem with keeping stories moving along steadily, tending to instead treat things with plodding episodic ebbs and flows; his best films (e.g. Apollo 13, Rush) don't get that way because they avoid that tendency, but because it works well in the context of the narrative. Backdraft compounds the problem: not only does it lack flow, it doesn't ever actually decide what its plot is - what the one-sentence "who is chasing what stakes and what's stopping him" logline is that describes the movie. And Christ knows, I don't want all movies to utilise the barbaric structure of Hollywood storytelling, but Backdraft is every inch a Hollywood movie and Howard a quintessentially Hollywood director; it is the very kind of project that the limiting rules were designed for. And having watched it more than once, I still can't tell you if it's "about" the brothers' patching things up, or if it's "about" Brian investigating the arson case. Because, the thing is, it's about both: basically, it takes place in two chunks, before and after Brian joins up with Rimgale, and there is no communication between those chunks. And even if there was, neither story that the film is telling in its clodhopping way justifies the film's solemn closing title card, "There are over 1,200,700 active firefighters in the U.S. today", which suggests a story about the travails of a firefighter which Backdraft has at no point since the opening scene come close to becoming.

At times, the movie on the edges is interesting: the film captures the way that ethnic stratification works in Chicago better than a lot of other movies, even if it still leans a little hard on the "Chicago Irish" stereotypes. The casual way that life in the firehouse is depicted suggests a far more nuanced and lived-in film about characters who aren't the ones we've been granted as our main subjects. These little strengths serve more to sharpen how devoid of insight most of the movie is, rather than provide a welcome respite from it.

But, the thing is, the fire scenes are great - not just, like, "this is is perfect serviceable disaster porn", but quite probably the best depiction of fiery destruction ever filmed, or that ever might be filmed for all the king's horses and all the king's CGI. Howard - or at least his second unit - film the action scenes with remarkable visual poetry: flame, as more than one character notes, is a beautiful thing like an animal, something to be loved as much as feared. And Backdraft captures that sensation beautifully, while also depicting a kind of creeping tension about what happens from moment to moment that is unlike anything else in Howard's career, and suggests that the man has a decent pseudo-Hitchcock thriller living inside him somewhere. It's mesmerising, brilliant thriller craftsmanship, and it makes for an incomprehensible viewing experience that it swaps places with the tedious human drama at such irregular intervals.

And boy, are Backdraft's humans tedious. Given nothing remotely like interesting character arcs to play, none of the actors leave a huge impression: De Niro and Leigh, usually reliable to provide a certain live-wire energy, are both sleepwalking through nothing roles, and Russell only gets one moment where he does anything besides play a gruff-talking man's man (it's when he screams, frenzied, at Brian for not staying put, and the actor allows us to understand that it's fear and love, not authoritarian bullying, doing the talking). That Baldwin is flat and uninteresting is hardly surprising, and the film elects to make him the de facto protagonist as Stephen sits out most of the last hour. Only De Mornay and Sutherland feel like they did any homework at all in building their characters, and they're both in, like, three scenes apiece.

Aesthetically, it's all over the place. Howard favors some unfortunately over-emphatic slow-motion throughout the film, and tries for an iconic feel that his skill hadn't worked up to yet by that point in his career - Russell is introduced coming out of the smokey building backlit like an alien in a Spielberg film, and it's almost comically over-serious. Hans Zimmer's score, one of the most wildly over-used in the history of film music (you couldn't watch a random sampling of 10 film trailers from the 1990s without encountering it at least a couple of times), gets points for the sheer fist-pumping flag-waving grandeur it evokes, though its a little blunt in its emotional manipulation (but hell, something needs to engender emotions, somewhere in the movie.

The highs are so, so high, and the lows so suffocating in their mediocrity, it's really impossible to make any kind of qualitative judgment about the movie as a whole: in some ways, it's essential '90s action cinema because of how great it is, and in some ways, it's essential because of how perfectly it typifies all of the boilerplate idiocy of that decade's popcorn formulas. Either way it's essential, I guess, but I can't think of another so-called essential movie that, having now watched it twice, I have so little desire to ever revisit.

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MARKY MARK AND THE ROBOT BUNCH

There comes a time when you start to think, "Am I really going to start ranking the Transformers films?", and the answer turns out to be "apparently". Because there's a lot of chatter out there about how Transformers: Age of Extinction is so godalmighty awful, and it's really not, actually. Now, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, that's the franchise's second film, from 2009 - that's a godalmighty awful motion picture that, five years after I saw it, still makes me reel from the aesthetic savagery of it, the complete refusal to function in the most basic terms as a work of cinema or piece of narrative. Age of Extinction isn't very good, for it is still a Transformers picture, but it comes at least kind of close; I'd put in on par with/above the original Transformers from 2007, and a hair below 2011's Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The latter of which remains, after 613 minutes worth of franchise, the only one of the movies that was able to put together an entire action sequence that's actually worth a damn.

In part, it comes down to the human element. A sentence that I'm pleased to have typed out, since I was half-convinced that my keyboard would erupt in flames before I finished it. Not the human element of the protagonists, since they're awful - in fact, screenwriter Ehren Kruger has somehow managed to write leads for the new wave of Transformers movies even worse than the scrawny geek fantasy Shia LaBeouf played in the last trilogy. And the casting director found an actress bad enough to make the model from Dark of the Moon seem modestly talented, and to make Megan Fox seem like an important young actress of exceptional talent and psychological insight. Besides which, any hint of decent characterisation is quite wiped out by a story that proceeds through some insanely convoluted bends for a franchise that requires no more narrative complexity than "Make these robot toys shoot at those robot toys. No, you're doing it wrong! Mooooooom!", and manages to leave damn near every single one of its plot threads, from the biggest to the smallest, dangling without much more than the illusion of resolution at the end. And the most unresolved threads are the ones having to do with the emotional relationships of the main characters, despite the first hour of a movie that ends up stretching to a comically unjustified 165 minutes indulging itself with lots of highly specific and methodical exposition and action setting up those emotional relationships. So when the "overprotective dad & scoundrel-ish boyfriend" conflict seems to have largely taken care of itself offscreen, it's easy to be even pissier at the film than normal.

But I was starting off like I wanted to compliment the movie... so, anyway, the human element. By which I exclusively refer to Joshua Joyce, the film's requisite Bad Capitalist who shifts over the course of the movie from being the secret chief villain to being the foppish secondary villain to being the comic anti-hero sidekick, none of which would augur well for him if he weren't being played by Stanley Tucci, and thus turning into, no two ways about it, the best human-sized thing in any of the movies of the series to date. He brings the same camp/diva hamminess that John Malkovich had in Dark of the Moon, but in a vastly larger role, and while his snitty, prissy bossiness isn't exactly great Acting-with-a-capital-A, and is plainly no challenge for Tucci of all actors, it's absolutely perfect for a popcorn movie, with its big notes and broad strokes and flawlessly-honed sense of fun.

Nobody, mind you, goes into a movie like this expecting to give much if any of a damn about the characters, so Tucci's effectiveness is more of a bonus than anything, but it's still nice to have it. Particularly given that nothing else in Age of Extinction is even slightly better than it has to be, and is often less. For all that the series' defenders like to accuse people like myself of hating movies where you just go and have a good time at the theater, I have to confess that it's not remotely clear what about this is supposed to be a good time. The visual effects are as costly and perfect as ever, and the titular robots just keep getting easier and easier to actually look at as distinct figures and not vaguely anthropoid clusters of sharp, chrome-covered points; the sound mix flawlessly combines several layers of chaotic noise and booming music in a hugely convincing and even coherent flurry of activity and energy. So on a purely experiential level, Age of Extinction works: but what experience is it creating, anyway? Like its three predecessors, it's only really great at pummeling the viewer into oblivion, and if that's really enough to qualify as "fun" these days, I'd prefer to be constantly bored.

Technical polish or not, this still isn't effective action: it's not as dizzying in its incoherence as Revenge of the Fallen - what could be? - but it feels more like an assembly edit than a final cut, with so many tiny continuity errors that you couldn't even make a drinking game out of them. But the bigger problem it that so many scenes and shots simply don't flow: we see a character in the Arctic and then a few seconds later he's in Chicago, or a character is on one side of the road and then manages to be walking down the road on the other quickly enough that it just feels wrong, in some itchy but not quite definable way. I have, I think, discovered something about the cinema of Michael Bay, in this his eleventh feature film as director: he's great at constructing images of violent balletic poetry, of making the most picturesque explosions and iconic moments from what feel like the world's biggest beer commercial (which phrase comes across rather literally in view of the combustive amounts of product placement in Age of Extinction, for both American and Chinese products - a most peculiar psychological disorientation results from watching what are obviously product shots for products you don't recognise), and in this case, he is aided considerably by cinematographer Amir Mokri, bringing some of the cod-Malick tenderness he developed in shooting Man of Steel to the film's Norman Rockwelly scenes of rural Texas. Parts of Age of Extinction, almost solely in the first hour, are actively gorgeous, and there are perfectly-framed shots of chaos and action throughout. But if he is a great maker of images, what Bay can't do at all is to combine those images in a row: every cut feels like it introduces a brand new physical reality. And there are, in fairness, fewer of them: Age of Extinction slows down quite a lot from its predecessors. I was timing it, in fact, and it takes more than two minutes for the first shot with a duration of less than three seconds - that's downright Tarr-esque, by Transformers standards. Even so, the editing is so bad at establishing any relationship between moments that the most stately, long-take Bayhem still refuses to build up any momentum.

Or it could just be form following content: the story of Age of Extinction is, itself, such a clusterfuck of disconnected ideas that don't build on each other, the editing is, in a sense, merely doing its job. There's a shitload going on involving the death of the dinosaurs, an alien metal given the delightfully tacky name of Transformium, the CIA joining forces with a shady defense contractor, a rogue Transformer bounty hunter, and the rural inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg, completely lost at sea) - the most transcendentally fake movie name of this or many recent years; I would expect a particularly low-rent Chuck Norris vehicle to come up with that - who discovers the dusty remains of Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen), leader of the good Transformers, in hiding these years since the war between Autobots and Decepticons nearly destroyed Chicago. Cade has a hot daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz); Tessa has a hot illicit older racing boyfriend, Shane Dyson (Jack Reynor), and if you suppose that Shane's skill for tricky driving would come in handy in a movie about robots who transform into cars, you'd be unbelievably wrong. Tessa and Shane exist pretty much for no reason other than to provide attractive people for the adolescent audience to ogle; Kruger provides a nifty very long scene indicating how exactly a 20-year-old can fuck a 17-year-old in Texas and have it not be statutory rape, a narrative dead-end that communicates mostly that the writer has done an amount of research into the fine details of age of consent laws that I am not, personally, very comfortable with. Shane is from Ireland, as Cade points out in mocking his accent, a scene that apparently only exists to make the audience uncomfortably aware that the man mocking the kid for being from "Dublin, Texas" is himself pretty unmistakably from Boston, Texas, and should really shut his trap.

These people find themselves squaring off against the impeccably beardy black ops mastermind Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer, everyone's favorite movie thug), and it ends up involving robot dinosaurs and an exploding terraforming device that turns animals into tranformium, and the late evil robot Megatron endeavors to resurrect himself in the body of the human-build prototype Galvatron, and he now, very excitingly, is voiced by the legendary Frank Welker, whose characters would otherwise be all dead. What Age of Extinction never does, nor even apparently considers doing, is explaining why the hell we care: the basic stakes and conflict of the movie are so murky, shift so frequently, and virtually never have anything to do with the protagonists beyond the fact that they keep being dragged along. Now, not every action movie needs to be conceptually sound, or conceptually coherent, even; not if it has solid, well-crafted action sequences to make up for it. And in the abstract, Age of Extinction has that, but though all the ingredients are readily visible, they haven't been made into an actual, functioning cinematic object. It's the difference between putting flour, butter, and sugar on somebody's plate, or giving them a slice of cake. And Michael Bay has made a pretty damn lousy cake.

4/10

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WHEN A GIRL'S DIVERGENT, PROBABLY IT'S URGENT YOU DEFER TO HER GENTILITY

An open question for which I would honestly and none-snarkily beg for an answer: could anybody who likes up-and-coming actress Shailene Woodley - and a quick peek at the internet promises me that there are many of you - please explain why? Is it a The Spectacular Now thing? Because I still haven't seen that. But I have seen Divergent, Woodley's shiny new Jennifer Lawrence-esque coming out party as the anchor of a can't-miss YA adaption series, and while the problems keeping it from being anywhere remotely near even the distinctly modest pleasures of The Hunger Games go deeper than the lead actress, I still find her to be a weirdly anxious-making bundle of non-charisma who looks actively nervous to be in front of a camera, and whose presence severely limits my ability to buy into the movie whatsoever.

Based on the first book in a massively popular book trilogy by Veronica Roth, Divergent takes place in a future where Chicago is, apparently, the only outpost of human civilisation left, and to protect itself, a wall has been erected around the remains of the city at a distance of some miles. For reasons that make absolutely not a whisper of goddamn sense at this juncture, society has been divided into five factions, each based on one overriding trait practiced uniformly by all those who belong to it: Abnegation, the selfless folks who are trusted to run government; Dauntless, the fearless soldiers who act as Chicago's security force; Amity, the peaceable love-everyone types responsible for growing and distributing food; and Candor and Erudite, truth-tellers and intellectuals whose function in society is not really even a little bit clear. It's not really in the book, either, but it comes a lot closer; Divergent, bless its heart, represents something of a case study in how to make the very worst decisions in translating a novel to a screenplay.

Anyway, everyone is born into one faction, and at age 16 is given a test that determines whether they are optimally suited for that faction; after this, they are able to choose where they want to live the rest of their lives in a grand ceremony that almost exactly splits the difference between the Reaping in The Hunger Games, and the Sorting Hat of the Harry Potter films. It is thus that Beatrice Prior (Woodley) leaves her parents in Abnegation to join Dauntless - incidentally, the grammar scold in my heart never stopped being annoyed that the faction names include three nouns and two adjectives - for she has admired the athletic, el-track climbing of Dauntless for her whole life, and she learns during her test that she is "Divergent", at odds with the perfectly one-note nature of her compatriots, and thus able to choose her own destiny. Obviously, choosing her own destiny turns out to be a lot more complicated than joining the faction of her choice, when it turns out that Erudite, in the form of the obviously-evil Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet), is trying to do evil throughout Chicago, destroying Abnegation for reasons that are also really not even a little bit clear.

As a narrative, the film version of Divergent suffers from two massive problems, one of them easily-avoided, and one not avoidable at all. Going in reverse order, the inevitable problem was that the story, at least in this leg of the trilogy (I haven't read the other two books), is largely backgrounded to conceptual development and ideas, two things that almost, but not quite, add up to world-building. It is a thought-driven narrative, in other words; this is fine in a text-based medium which can be experienced at the reader's own pace, and not fine at all in an image-based medium that goes at a specific pace. And that brings us to the easily-avoided problem, which is that Divergent, the movie, crawls like a dying snail on ice. Something like the first five hours of the 139-minute film are dedicated to Beatrice's - renaming herself Tris - initiation into the Dauntless society and training to be kept in the Dauntless ranks after they slough off the new recruits who couldn't hack it as soldiers. It's symptomatic of the biggest problem with Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor's screenplay, which fiercely mangles the book in translation, favoring the most momentum-deadening and anti-cinematic moments while leaving the characters uniformly indistinguishable on any grounds but their physical appearance, besides Tris and her hunky trainer Four (Theo James), whose leap from authority figure to boyfriend is as inevitable as it is unconvincing and abrupt. To say nothing about making any attempts to clarify anything, leaving a patchwork dystopia whose internal logic is stalled at the "because the writer said so" level of cohesion and sociological insight.

It's a pity the story is such a tangle of under-expressed concepts, stock characters and stock ideas, and pacing misfires, because on the level of basic craftsmanship, Divergent isn't half-bad. It's not a massively-budgeted affair; you can see that in the slick, often unconvincingly-applied CGI meant to apply a layer of ratty future tech and post-apocalyptic wear to the real-life Chicago settings (this movie is unabashed, unapologetic Chicago location porn, for which I will concede a reservoir of affection that would remain even if the whole project was a lot worse in every respect). The action setpiece of the first two hours, a zipline flight from the John Hancock Center (and holy shit, talk about location porn), is delightfully kinetic, but never feels remotely real, for example.

But director Neil Burger, an unexceptional but competent workaday sort of filmmaker, has a good sense of how to keep things punchy and active, as he and cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler weave and whip their camera around without too much recourse to the dreaded handheld shakycam (and when shakycam arrives, it actually works, sort of, at its express purpose of making things seem chaotic but not visually illegible). The visuals are, on the whole, a bit drab - the film's color palette is flat and dominated by too much yellowed-out footage - but there are busy, active compositions and sets that successfully communicate a lived-in and living world that looks vaguely like our own but bent through a funhouse mirror. It succeeds at one of the most important tasks of all post-apocalypse dystopia films, creating a physical reality that seems like it actually could exist in the form we see it. Now, giving a good, clear reason for that physical reality to exist is another thing, and using that reality as the backdrop for a story of any kind of urgency and emotional connection is quite another thing yet. But they have a couple more movies to get it right, and I enthusiastically doubt that they will.

5/10

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