MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR

Having been shot in color and on media that doesn't look like a 30-year-old VHS camcorder, telling something that resembles a story pretty much no matter how you look at it, and gliding in at a whimsical four hours and ten minutes, Norte, the End of History certainly earns its reputation as director Lav Diaz's easiest movie.* This means it's also probably in the top 300 easiest films released commercially in the United States in 2014. It's downright scrutable in fact, it's basically just a Filipino riff on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and who doesn't like a good literary adaptation?

The Dostoevsky angle is useful primarily in that it lets a viewer get a handle on a project that's other so broad and ambitious that it would be hard to know where the hell to start with it. But it's also reductive in the extreme to try and use that as a shortcut to "solve" a movie that's as minutely obsessed with class distinctions in the Philippines in the 21st Century, the political history of that country's radical intelligentsia, the impact of modern communications technology, and the representational capacity of cinema, as it is with the moral questions that could have consumed a 19th Century Russian novelist. Although those questions matter, too. The fact of the matter is, Norte is a film of wild ambitions, considering as many topics with as much complexity as it dares to. And with that much running time to play with, it gets to dare a lot.

The content seems simple enough: Fabian (Sid Lucero) is a law student, celebrated by his social circle as the most sophisticated thinker among them, and when we meet him, he's holding court on moral and legal theory. Something he apparently does quite a lot of, getting himself good and worked up about the depravity littered throughout the history of the Philippines, declaring that those who deserve to be punished have not been and that social justice shall never be achieved, and the sort of passionate fiery declarations typical of smart students. It so happens that he's borrowed money from the local loan shark, Magda (Mae Paner), and she's starting to get antsy about him paying her back. Also starting to feel Magda's angry pinch is the extremely poor Joaquin (Archie Alemania), trying to get a business off the ground to provide for his wife Eliza (Angeli Bayani) and their children. The desperate Joaquin is a bit more mercurial in his frustrations with Magda, leading to an angry, loud, public shouting match. But he simmers down. The outwardly calm Fabian, however, ends up exploding with rage and murdering Magda. And with perfect dramatic inevitability, Joaquin is sent to prison for the crime. And thus does the bulk of the movie follow the three strands thus set up: Eliza's exhausting attempts to survive by any possible means, Joaquin's eye-opening experiences in the Filipino prison system, and Fabian's descent into madness as he finds himself a prime symptom of the very arbitrary amorality and failure of accountability that he has spent his academic career decrying.

Befitting an (uncredited) adaptation of 19th Century social issues literature, Norte is greatly serious about explicating its themes under the assumption that the audience is smart and willing to think about the state of society, and its refusal to make good on its promises (the second half of the title is a fairly obvious, and entirely sardonic, reference to the "end of history" musings in the West when Russian Communism finally collapsed, and which the 21st Century has thoroughly shown to be pie-eyed optimism of the hollowest sort). But Diaz and his superb team don't rest on the script (which the director co-wrote with Rody Vera) to do all the intellectual heavy lifting; and given the enormous length of the film, that's certainly for the best. An unrelentingly idea-driven Norte would be an enormous slog, and even granting the more generous standards offered to this kind of long-take, wide-shot cinema, the film proves to be impressively full of energy and kineticism. It's brilliantly shot: cinematographer Larry Manda and Diaz manipulate their images on two axes, wide and deep, to explore the characters and the places containing them. It's impressive enough that the anamorphic widescreen is used so smartly, combining groups of people, and isolating individuals; but where Norte shines is in its exceptional use of deep focus - or, as needed, the absence of it. The ingenuity of moments like the murder of Magda, boldly combining off-screen space with careful management of where characters and shapes reside relative to the camera, is one of the best individual sequence of the year, but impressive shadowbox-like staging is very much the norm, rather than the exception.

The film's color palette is quite fantastic, as well; given Diaz's success with black-and white films, it's a little surprising, maybe, that the contrasts of blue water, pale sky, brown and green land, and the sickly wash of the prison interiors, would be so confidently employed in directing the viewer's emotions and engagement within scenes. And, too, for a director so accustomed to static shots - and Norte is made up largely of static shots - the handful of punctuation marks of camera movement are brilliant as well (between the deep staging and the cunning about what camera movement means when it's only sparingly employed, Norte feels something like an heir to Ozu Yasujiro, though for different ends).

The formalism in the film is very strictly used as a function of the storytelling and philosophy, mind you. This is very much a movie about Grand Ideas, and the images primarily serve to situate us relative to the characters, their words, and their actions, such that we either feel involved or distant in individual moments of thought or revelation (the way that the imprisoned Joaquin is framed, and Alemania's performance, suggest at times a modernist update of a medieval martyr painting into cinematic form). It's a complex and elaborate and extremely precise piece of filmmaking, that is to say, but one that's intuitively watchable and philosophically accessible far more than its on-paper content would suggest. I'm not a damn fool, and I won't go so far as to suggest that Norte is "fun", but four hours of academic moralising could be a hell of a lot more opaque than this crafty, organic film presents them as being, and the result is one of the year's best films, but better still, one of its smartest.

9/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: IN WHICH WE SERVE

Stories set in economic downturns aren't all that rare, but ones made with the subtle insight of Ilo Ilo are as precious and unique as it gets. And that's saying nothing about the film's perceptive, harsh study of human interactions, but since I've started on this road, let me follow it for a bit.

The film, the feature debut for writer-director Anthony Chen, takes place in Singapore in 1997, during the financial crisis that radiated throughout Southeast Asia in that year, a setting that it stresses not whatsoever, but which informs every last frame. It centers on the relationship between Terry (Angeli Bayani), an immigrant from the Philippines hoping to find work, and the family that takes her in as maid and de facto nanny. Father Teck (Chen Tianwen) is in sales, pregnant mother Hwee Leng (Yeo Yann Yann) is a secretary, and ten-year-old Jiale (Koh Jialer) is a coddled little shit who has no interest in considering other people as people. All three of them regard Terry as more of an ambulatory object than a fellow being, at least from the start, which doesn't end up playing out even slightly the way you would suppose. For while Terry is trying to assert her personhood in the face of bigotry that happily view here as just a random Filipina workhorse, Teck is busy trying to hide the fact that he's lost his his job, while Hwee Leng, busily handing out termination notices to her co-workers, is petrified that she's on the chopping block herself.

So what we have is not merely a parable about leaving one failing economy to a somewhat sturdier one (Singapore was less gutted by the financial downturn than the Philippines) and being resented by the people one finds there. It is that, but in the context of a story that recognises that tough times are tough all up and down the ladder, and that mean bosses have mean bosses of their own, and that living in a time of financial uncertainty tends to make everybody desperate and nastier. It's marvelously aware of how the pinch of money poisons everything in daily life, sympathetic towards the pain it causes even while it looks grimly upon those in the middle who direct their cruelty against those at the bottom. And all without even time-stamping itself to 1997, or allowing the social context of the story to function as anything but a quiet, steady background hum.

The plot up at the forefront, in the meanwhile, finds Terry doggedly doing her work as best she can manage, up to and especially including treating Jiale firmly for what might well be the first time in his life, and eventually, after the resentment has boiled away, winning the boy over. For it is also, apparently, the first time that a grown-up in his life has actually cared about him in any kind of active fashion. This pushes Hwee Leng into a jealous snit fit, lashing out at Terry for petty reasons but keeping her around anyway. Possibly specifically so that she has someone to lash out at.

Aesthetically, Chen and his crew heads - cinematographer Benoit Soler, editors Chen Hoping and Joanne Cheong, art director Michael Wee - opted here to go for a largely invisible realistic style, probably inevitably given the international standard for tales of economic woe among naturalistically-rendered human beings (calling it Dardenne-style filmmaking would be reductive and not necessarily accurate, but within the spirit of the thing). It's easy to get ahead of the film's look, then, and one couldn't honestly say that much if anything in Ilo Ilo is surprising on any level: certainly not visual, and mostly not in terms of storytelling, once you get past the relative paucity of films set in the throes of the 1997 Asian financial collapse.

What it banks on, as a result, is the precision of its emotional depictions, and the depth of its characters, and the skill with which they are presented for our benefit. Which proves to be an entirely sturdy basis for the movie to rest on. The quartet of central characters is pretty miraculous in their specificity and the nuances with which they are fleshed out; what looks to be a stock scenario, something like a Singaporean Nanny Diaries in a middle class setting, is complicated and enriched by how much Teck and especially Hwee Leng prove to be far more human than the obnoxious caricatures they're set up to be from the start. The terrific performances do a lot of this work, of course, with Yeo particularly layering a great deal of hurt and fear in between her rage, jealousy, and sniping (she won the award for Best Supporting Actress at the 2013 Golden Horse awards in Taiwan, alongside three other wins for the picture including Best Film).

But it also benefits from a crackerjack screenplay, written by Chen with a great deal of human detail and a conscious lack of overly dramatic contrivance. Things happen in small ways: there are angry confrontations, but they are all bound by domestic settings (this is a film which takes place predominately in tightly bound rooms; exteriors are always sudden, expansive spaces that trigger grand events), and always over tiny things - a sneaked cigarette, a bit of name calling. The film doesn't need bigger triggers than that to do all of its work of presenting these characters and their stressed-out lives.

So it is, all things told, a modest little slice of a movie; one in which small things are presently deftly but without showiness. Movies like this come out... not "all the time", but often enough that they're not really events. But movies like this are also not usually this perceptive and tightly built and anchored by such fully human characters, and this is enough to make Ilo Ilo a special movie, despite its lack of outward affect.

8/10

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IT NEVER RAIDS, BUT IT POURS

The production backstory of The Raid 2: Berandal (the subtitle, which translates as "tough guy", "thug", or something like that, is present only in ad material and not onscreen, at least not in the U.S. release) is surprisingly useful in hacking through what the thing is, and why it feels a little... but we'll get there.

See, Gareth Evans, Indonesia's favorite Welsh-born filmmaker, had an idea for a mighty crime epic, Berandal, that he was shopping around some years ago. It was such a sprawling film, with such complicated and daunting action scenes built around the skills of martial artist Iko Uwais, that he couldn't get anyone to bite on financing it, and in order to prove his ability to make an action movie that could draw a crowd and showcase the monumentally busy fights that he and Uwais had dreamed up, he made a much simpler, more contained movie that he could get financed. This was The Raid, released in Indonesia in 2011, and boy, did it ever prove Evans's talent: it is a masterpiece of genre cinema, the best action movie in years - probably the 21st Century, maybe since John Woo first left Hong Kong.

And that cleared the path for Berandal, with a twist: now the thing was to be retrofitted into serving as a sequel to The Raid, which itself raises certain expectations, and so two films that were not meant to be related are, and that makes it awfully tempting to compare the two of them, which isn't much good for anybody. The Raid and The Raid 2 are different movies that intend to do different things; both of them do the things they intend to do extraordinarily well. I will flatly state that the things The Raid does appeal to more than its ad hoc sequel. There is a profound simplicity to The Raid; it is a film of virtually no plot nor characters that exists solely to watch human bodies in motion, under astonishing control by their owners, enacting movements that are virtually impossible to imagine, let alone perform. It's ballet, basically; violent, blood-splattered ballet, but the appeal is mostly the same in either case.

The Raid 2 is surely not ballet, and were we going to spend the whole time poking at the things it does which The Raid does not do, and which the sequel suffers for, the first thing we'd arrive at is the sheer volume of plot: The Raid 2 does spend an awful lot of time exploring things that are not Uwais flying around and punching, stabbing, and shooting bad guys. And either in comparison with its predecessor or solely in reference to itself, this material is not terribly compelling cinema, given that Uwais, though he is fabulous when it comes to punching, stabbing, and shooting, really isn't the best at reciting dialogue, having facial expressions, or implying his character's range of emotions. And given, too, that the big sprawling epic crime drama that underlies the whole film feels pretty paint-by-numbers: there are two gangs that have been in static peace for years! But the son of one of the head gangsters is itchy to prove himself by beating the other gang! And our favorite supercop Rama (Uwais) is undercover to witness it all! Truly, some of the story beats are communicated with a certain heightened energy, and the performances by Tio Pakusodewo and Arfin Putra as the father and son leading the native Indonesian gang (the other gang is Japanese) give a kind of tragic dimension to the family drama hiding just inside the material. But for the most part, there are the scenes in The Raid 2 that are telling the story through words and characters, and scenes that tell the story through fighting and death, and the latter scenes seem to get just about everyone involved excited far more.

For oh! how very impressive the fight scenes are. The breakdown goes like this: martial arts choreography by Uwais, Yayan Ruhian (who played Mad Dog in the last film, and the totally unrelated retired killer Prakoso in this film), and Larnell Stovall; car chase choreography by Bruce Law; action choreography by Evans (who also edited the whole shebang). That's a lot of choreographers, but The Raid 2 earns that kind of specialisation: there is complexity in every action setpiece that boggles the mind, with the interplay between cinematography, editing, and human movement readily equaling all the but the very best moments in The Raid, moments where the camera movement alone is so fluid and swift that it barely seems possible that the thing exists (there is one shot in the car chase - the best car chase in ages, by the way - that I could not even come close to solving, until reading online that a camera operator was dressed as the passenger-side seat).

And not just the way the action is designed and framed, but the style surrounding it: there's a scene involving red reflective glass where the action consists of an assassin armed with a bat (Very Try Yulisman) running down the hall, with silver flashes running up and down the wall as his bat is reflected in which the abstract combination of color and line is so beautiful that it would nearly be worth framing. It's not the only scene where Evans and his crew use red in the most inspired ways; the film has a limited color palette but it uses those colors to churn up emotion and energy, keeping even the more sedate and pokey talking scenes clipping along just because of the brightness of the mise en scène.

All of this excellent craftsmanship, beauty, and ingenious choreography is in service, as you may have heard, to one hell of a brutal film. Like all the best martial arts films, The Raid 2 knows better than to be hypocritical and launch into some kind of hand-wringing about how violence this or that, but I will say this for it: the film doesn't go for the "cool" deaths. It is a movie where each and ever blown-apart head, wrenched limb, or splash of blood is there to make you feel it. One does not go through the movie whooping and applauding (or at least, I didn't; the fellows two rows back and a bit to the left would disagree), but gasping and cringing. If Evans and company are best at showing us what the well-trained human body is capable of, they're almost as good at showcasing the fragility of even these apparent supermen - the strongest fighters take a lot of damage, and the choreography shifts throughout the film to reflect that. That, and not the overheated city-spanning drama, is the real emotional core of these movies: a tribute to human strength and mortality alike. The Raid 2 is exciting and rationally nonsensical, but it also has a fleshiness to it in common with the very best action cinema, and that's enough to make it more than just so much well-mounted flash and dazzle.

8/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: TAPED OVER

V/H/S/2 begins with a scene of a seedy private eye (Lawrence Michael Levine) recording two people about to have sex in a hotel room. This event does not inform anything in the rest of the movie; it doesn't even introduce us to the character of the P.I., who'll be more formally set-up in the very next scene. But it does permit us to have a shot of tits being fondled within the first 30 seconds of the movie, and anyone who cherished the first V/H/S can tell you, tawdry high-school jock levels of respect for women are the beating heart of this horror omnibus series.

Or not, actually. The overwhelming theme of the first movie - all women are castrating she-demons - puts in not the whisper of an appearance in this sequel, and besides that first shot in the framing narrative, there's only one other snippet of (hugely gratuitous and objectifying) nudity in any of the four short films making up this anthology picture. Which is already enough to put V/H/S/2 at least half a step up from its forebear, an impression cemented when the third segment proves to be of such astronomically higher quality than anything else in either of the film that it manages completely by itself to hoist the movie over the line separating "probably nobody needs to ever see this" from "horror fans should probably see this, but maybe not anybody else". At this rate, I expect V/H/S/3 to nail the elusive "if you can't come up with any better way to spend your time, it's okay" threshold, and then we'll have ourselves a movie.

Anyway, the film takes the general form of its predecessor, a mysterious old building with a staticky TV surrounded by many VHS tapes. Or perhaps we should call them V/H/S tapes, a subtly different format for which it makes sense that visibly modern digital footage should have ended up on clunky slabs of black plastic. P.I. Larry and his assistant-girlfriend Ayesha (Kelsy Abbott) have been hired to find a missing college student, and have gone to his last place of residence to find him. Nobody seems to be there - emphasis on seems, as the human figure appearing and disappearing in the background of shots makes clear - and as Larry snoops around looking for clews, Ayesha starts digging through the tapes to find out if they contain any information. Thus does she find footage of their missing student (L.C. Holt), prattling on about the order that the tapes must be watched in, and how it does something to your head. Intrigued, Ayesha starts to watch the tapes, all of which contain documents of unexplained phenomena out in the world.

There's no real consistent quality to the four segments - five, if we count that wrap-around "Tape 49" (which theoretically means that this film takes place earlier than the last; the frame narrative there was "Tape 56"), written and directed by series mastermind Simon Barrett, one of the leading lights in modern indie horror (he also wrote the, in my opinion, wretchedly overrated You're Next). This is to be expected of anthologies, of course. The aggregate quality is still higher than V/H/S, though the gap between high and low is wider. The first segment, at any rate, is promising-ish: "Phase I Clinical Trials", written by Barrett and directed by Adam Wingard (of... You're Next), starring Wingard as a man with a terrible eye injury that makes him the perfect candidate for a new artificial eye. Which oh-so-conveniently has a recording chip in it. Anyone who's seen the Hong Kong horror film The Eye, its dreadful American remake, or just about anything, really, can see where this is headed: our hero can now sometimes see ghosts, and they are not at all friendly. Eventually, he crosses paths with a woman with artificial hearing (Hannah Hughes), who knows quite a lot more than he does, including the fact that you can make the ghosts scatter by having sex in front of them, an excuse for a boob shot so hilariously contrived that I'm actually willing to concede it might be satire.

The longer it gets, and the more it tries to explain shit, the more that "Phase I Clinical Trials" starts to get weird instead of scary, but in the early going, it's actually pretty decent, creepy mixed with jump scares in a way that actually kind of works. No such muted praise applies to "A Ride in the Park", written by Jamie Nash, directed by Gregg Hale and Eduardo Sánchez (the latter of whom got this whole game started when he co-directed the grandpappy of all "lost camcorder footage" horror pictures, The Blair Witch Project), which is an absolute dog of a short. In the woods, a cyclist (Jay Saunders) stops to help a bleeding, screaming woman (Bette Cassatt), who turns out to be a zombie. So he becomes a zombie. And so do the people who try to help him. There is nothing in this sequence that even threatens to be interesting; the brief flickers that indicate this is meant to be a comedy can be used only to justify how deeply unfrightening it is. The whole thing is filmed from a camera atop the cyclist's helmet, which gives it a feeble "YOU are the zombie!" kick, but that dies off by the first time that nothing happens for thirty seconds of static "verisimilitude". If there's any merit, it's that from a technical point of view, it's impressive how the filmmakers use sleight of hand to get their gore effects over in apparently uncut takes, but this one starts boring and gets worse, until its random birthday party massacre climax.

Things skyrocket with "Safe Haven", an Indonesian effort contributed by writer-directors Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Huw Evans, the latter responsible for the brilliant The Raid: Redemption. It's the most pacy and plotty of the segments: a news crew manages to snag an interview with the secretive "Father" (Epy Kusnandar) of a millenarian cult. To their dismay, they find that the ticking clock happens to end at the exact time they're in the compound, and the literally apocalyptic crumbling going on around them has rather unpleasant personal ramifications. Forgive me for being vague, but it wouldn't do to spoil the surprises, which are many, and almost all wonderful (though the punchline at the very end is pretty much useless). This is by far the most imaginative of the shorts, with the most ingenious effects and, it has to be said, the flimsiest grasp of the found footage gimmick that animates the entire concept of the anthology. There are scenes which abandon it altogether, turning into a normally-edited film with barely a fig-leaf of "there's a camera here" to stitch things together. No accident that it makes the film more watchable and kinetic. It doesn't, ultimately, re-write any rules, but it offers quite a lot of energy and gory fun for those who like those things, without feeling as hamstrung as its bedfellows.

Some of that high spirit continues to the beginning of the cryptically-titled "Slumber Party Alien Abduction", which opens with a bunch of boys making a home movie about dog-eating robots, and in a flash offers the best justification for a found-footage movie in years: it's kids dicking around with a camera. The one group of people who actually would keep shooting even after some of their own start to die off, finally put front and center. And the opening few minutes, documenting pre-teen and barely-teen boys being assholes to each other, has an exquisite ring of truth; but once the slumber party tails off and the alien abduction kicks in, it becomes so noise and chaotically hand-held that it's almost impossible to follow, and from the brief snatches of aliens we see, it's just as well that we can't. Things end nastily, and because of the age of the cast, it's quite a bit more sour than in other found footage movies where things end nastily (all of them), but it caps off five minutes of such pure cinematic misery that it honestly comes as a relief when the last of the children is dead.

So that's it: one hit, one acceptable miss, one miss, and one dead-on-arrival mistake. Still a better percentage than the first movie, or most found-footage horror as a whole. It's still a hollow concept that feels more and more tired with each passing year, but at least V/H/S/2 doesn't compound its hollowness by being rancid on top of it.

6/10

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