EVERYONE POOPS

It is easy to first focus on how Goodbye to Language is yet another film in Jean-Luc Godard's late career collection of essay films describing morality, culture, the state of modern Europe, how cinematic images produce and limit meaning, because that's what it is. It's not at all unlike a remake of his last feature, Film socialisme, in fact, only with a different form of moviemaking technology being turned inside and broken (prosumer cameras there, prosumer cameras and 3-D here), and less of a focus on audience-punishing impenetrability. And even that's not saying much, given that Film socialisme is about as impenetrable as anything Godard has made since the beginning of the 1980s.

The danger of over-emphasising that, though, is that it pulls attention for how disorientingly fun and funny Goodbye to Language can be, though I concede that one has to meet the film much more than halfway for that to be true, and even then it's a kind of fun that's certainly only for a very self-selecting audience. Although it has fart jokes, and not even, like, heavily abstract, theoretical fart jokes. Jokes wherein the punchline is, if a person is saying something very serious and philosophically impenetrable, it is funny to show them talking while gaudily foleyed-in wet farts play on the soundtrack.

While I think that the film has a plot - in fact, I think it even has a twist ending - trying to go back over it is grounds for nothing but a headache. Like most of Godard's "narrative" films in the last couple of decades (as opposed to his pure essay films), it's made up a series of vaguely united vignettes, during which complicated, self-referential conversations about theory play out between people who may or may not be capable of acting in other contexts, but really only serve as props here. The academics in the audience might be horrified by what I'm about to say, but I think the trick with most late Godard is to let the dialogue happen and catch what one can, but not really worry about working it all out. Not, at least, the first time, and while I look forward to spending many long years with Goodbye to Language, I've only seen it but the once, at this point. So if this is a bit of a thinnish review - well it will be, there's little doubt of that. But hopefully enthusiasm will count for the lack of depth.

The chief charm of Goodbye to Language is its interrogation of how cinema works in the age of digital media production, movies shot on phones and screened in tiny windows over the internet, and of course, 3-D. This overlaps a bit with Film socialisme, but where that was an angry work, trying to break the new medium, Goodbye to Language is a good deal more playful, trying to push the new technologies into extreme corners to find out what happens there. Even the politically and morally laden dialogues have a certain self-aware winking quality that makes this, at any rate, much more watchable than much of the director's recent work. It's still fairly pessimistic - that title didn't just come along out of nowhere, and it has exactly the implication of "goodbye to language, because pop culture has murdered you and the possibility of meaning along with you" that it seems to - but Godard's pessimism has been married to exhilarating cinematic experimentation at least as far back as Week End.

Not everyone would sign of on the word "exhilarating", I am sure - it's an inherently divisive movie - but for myself, I was delighted by Goodbye to Language fare more often than not, certainly more than I expected to be. Aye, delighted; with the giddy amazement of a baby looking at a Christmas tree. There are too many different things happening in the construction of the film's images for it to be pinned down to "the main idea", but one of the strongest ideas is to challenge digital 3-D as a medium and meaning-creating element, finding out what happens in its extremes. The most celebrated moment involves a long shot during which the two cameras capturing the image are split off the rig holding them in the correct relationship to capture a realistic 3-D image, each going one direction to record entirely different actions before being reunited. It's a spectacular moment, as viscerally dumbfounding as anything in the glossiest effects extravaganza, with different goals, of course - it's a basic Godardian gesture in reminding the viewer that movies are made because of cameras, that cinematic images are inherently fictitious constructions which are reconstructed in our minds as movement - and it's an experiment whose time had long since come. It's hardly pleasant, trying to reconcile the fact that your two eyes are seeing completely incompatible images, but it is pleasurable in its way, and makes stronger claims to seriously investigating how movies work than anything else in the year, or the decade, or probably the century.

But just because it's the film's most famous moment, doesn't mean it's the only great gesture in that direction. Later on - I wonder if this even deserves a spoiler warning, since I was surely excited to see it unawares - two static shots of still lifes are overlaid in much the same way, with each eye receiving totally different information, and a few moments later, the same two shots are combined using normal editing techniques, so both eyes receive the same flat double exposure. Comparing and contrasting the way that the two experiences work in the eye and in the brain is at least as telling as that first amazing break when the 3-D image splits.

Mostly, the film's struggle with imagery is of a much simpler sort: exaggerated moments of objects poking way the hell into the audience's space, making it impossible to look at the screen without your eyes watering slightly; nude bodies positioned in space to be as distracting as possible; hoary gags about objects interrupting three-dimensional space to interrupt what we want to be looking at, which are frequently nude bodies. Without being so angry about it as to turn into a provocation, the film invites us to consider how meaning can be swallowed by visuals, how words can be turned into buzzing noise that doesn't connect to image - goodbye to language, and goodbye to film language, in effect. With its nods towards YouTube culture in the preponderance of cute animal footage and low-res images breaking into digital blocks, and its implicit demonstration of how easily we can be distracted by a barrage of disconnected stimuli, it's an indictment of the shortened attention span of the 21st Century that also panders to that attention span, and not, apparently, in an ironic way.

It is a self-contained contradiction: it wants us to have constant fun while demanding at every step that we think about how terribly shallow it is to want to have fun constantly; it's a critique of dehumanising politics and culture that openly finds the dog to be the most interesting character. It's capital-A Art made by an angry old man, driven by a constant bro-ish fascination with "wouldn't it be cool if...?" moments. Most importantly, it's the single film I have seen from 2014 that most actively tries to find a new language for filmmakers to inhabit, and honestly, it might be the most consistently captivating one as well.

10/10

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COMING TO GET YOU

History remembers 1953's House of Wax as the first big studio film shot in 3-D during that gimmick's earliest incarnation. History remembers this so well, in fact, that history tends to overlook that House of Wax has perhaps even more significant a claim to fame: it was more or less the movie that first linked Vincent Price to the horror genre. I can't make that claim entirely divorced of hedging: it would be another half-decade until he appeared in The Fly, the first film in the almost uninterrupted run of horror movies he'd appear in throughout the second half of his career (we could maybe stretch a point and call the starting point of this run his 1957 appearance as a non-threatening Satan in the horror-free The Story of Mankind), and he'd already appeared in three horror-ish films in 1939 and '40, Tower of London, The Invisible Man Returns, and The House of the Seven Gables. But there were a lot of years and movie separating those films from House of Wax, and even if it took a while for him to stumble into a follow up, it was this film that created, perfectly formed in its first appearance, the archetypal Vincent Price Bad Guy. To wit, an erudite, well-educated genius who is turned by tragedy into a crazed madman willing to commit any number of murders to satiate his muse. And he's disfigured, to boot, an unnecessary but helpful addition to the form.

The film itself was a fairly loose remake of 1933's Mystery of the Wax Museum (which is, ironically, most significant for being a last: it was the final major studio feature shot in 2-color Technicolor), which means basically that the opening sequence, climax, and narrative hook are all the same, but the mix of characters is completely different. Mostly because Mystery of the Wax Museum was every inch an early-'30s movie, and things like fast-talking girl reporters and Depression hucksters weren't part of the cinematic landscape anymore in 1953. It's the same basic nugget, though: Henry Jarrod (Price) is the genius creator of the finest wax museum in New York around the turn of the century, but he lacks the mercenary edge to exploit his talents for profit. This aggravates his business partner Matthew Burke (Roy Roberts), who elects to set the museum on fire to collect the insurance money. Jarrod will have none of this, and tries to fight Burke, but he's overpowered and left for dead as the fires rage.

Some years later, Burke is enjoying the fruits of his arson, swanning around New York with his flighty girlfriend Cathy Gray (Carolyn Jones), but this all comes to a crashing halt one night when he's attacked in his apartment by a man all in black, of whose features we can see only that they appear to be grotesquely scarred. This killer stages Burke's death to look like a suicide by hanging, and in hardly any time, he chases after Cathy, as well; but just as he's strangled the life out of her, he's interrupted by her roommate Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk), who flees in terror and finds refuge in the home of her mother's friend, Mrs. Andrews (Angela Clarke), and more to the point, her friend's hunky son Scott (Paul Picerni). Scott is a sculptor, terribly excited to study at the new wax museum that's about to open, and guess who's running it: the not-so-burned-to-death Henry Jarrod, whose hands have been uselessly crippled and who uses a wheelchair to get around, but is otherwise in fine shape after his ordeal, and anxious to finish rebuilding his great collection with the help of two shifty assistants, Leon (Nedrick Young) and the burly, mute Igor (Charles Bronson back in the wee early days of his career, still using his birth name of Charles Buchinsky).

Scott is amazed by the detail and lifelike quality of Jarrod's work, but not half as amazed as Sue, who finds in the sculptor's new Joan of Arc statue the very spitting image of the dead Cathy, whose body was stolen from the morgue. At this point, even the most naïve of 1950s audiences is pretty much up to speed with the movie, which acts like it's a mystery, though the only thing that's even slightly questionable by the time the film hits the intermission at its halfway point (the technological limitations of early 3-D meant that only around 45 minutes could be played straight through) is whether the hideous facial scars are Jarrod's disguise, or if his apparently hale and hearty face is the mask covering his wounds. And even this isn't much of a surprise, though even the film seems guiltily aware that, in fact, a wax mask would be brittle and unyielding and not really likely to convince anybody that it's a real face.

At the basic level of communicating its story, House of Wax really isn't as strong as Mystery of the Wax Museum, simply because it's so astonishingly predictable, and with the benefit of hindsight pertaining to Price's career, it's easy to get out in front of it almost from before it even starts. In every other way, though, I far prefer the remake, which is one of the most absolutely fun of all horror studio pictures in the 1950s. It would be frivolous to avoid admitting right off that a big part of this is that same 3-D gimmick: despite being infamously directed by one-eyed André De Toth, who thus had no idea what the hell he was doing or what it looked like in the end, House of Wax has some of the most engaging dimensional effects ever, both in terms of creating a deeper, richer world, and in terms of sheer idiot spectacle. The second half is introduced with a lengthy sequence in which a barker (Reggie Rymal) entices people to come to the House of Wax by showing off all kinds of tricks with a paddle ball on the longest elastic string you could imagine - absolute gaudy bullshit that makes no sense whatsoever on a story level, and even the other characters know it. It might well be the most overt "you're watching a 3-D movie, so let's throw shit in your face" scene I have ever seen outside of a theme park attraction. And I am not ashamed to confess that I love it.

But in other places, the 3-D adds wonderfully to the inherently spooky atmosphere of the wax museum: it's slightly exaggerated, stretched for effect, and it place the wax statues in a position where they feel hyper-present, in way, all their limbs and poses distended in an aggressive way. And when that fire starts! It's one of the absolute best moments of 3-D as immersion into a dramatic, distressing situation ever filmed. Now, that leaves us with a good 65 minutes out of 88 where the 3-D pretty much just sits there doing nothing at all: no Pina is this, where every frame is aware of the depth and shape it offers. It's not even Creature from the Black Lagoon. Beyond question, though, the film gains a lot of impact and effect from its use of the technology: I have seen and enjoyed in 2-D in the past, but it absolutely belongs on the list of films that are just plain better when they have that added dimension.

On the other hand, ol' Flat Vision De Toth, as I doubt very much that he was called at the time, turned out to be great for the film in one respect: because he wasn't thinking of it in terms of dimensional gags, he was driven to make it work on its own terms as a piece of visual storytelling, and while being in full color means that House of Wax isn't nearly the moodiest or most vividly atmospheric of '50s horror pictures, it's pretty damn impressive just how much mood it gets, whether from the creepy artifice of the wax museum itself, or from Jarrod's torture chamber-esque molding room in the basement. It's not only because of its star that the film looks forward to the Roger Corman cycle of Edgar Allan Poe movies from dawn of the '60s: there's a similar use of great sets lit with a certain mustiness and gloom to create a hugely persuasive world for the gaudy, silly action to take place.

And about that star: we can talk about 3-D or sets or even the rest of the solid cast (Carolyn Jones rises to pretty fantastic in her twittery, weird performance, the rest stay stalled at "good enough to get the job done), but the reason House of Wax works is Vincent Price. It really is that simple. That man had screen presence like nobody's business, and a flawless, unmatched ability to play melodrama in a relaxed, naturalistic way. As good as that was in his early roles as a shady lover or criminal, and as enjoyably as he undoubtedly is when he's playing the hero of his horror movies, he was always at his very best playing theatrically expansive villains, and with Jarrod, we even get to see how that robust hamminess evolves out of the tamped-down enthusiasm he shows in the earliest scenes, when he's merely an eccentric artist. The transformation from that to the declamatory monster of the final scenes is as evocative as anything in the script at dramatising Jarrod's descent into madness, and the way that Price plays through his thick make-up rather than using it as a cheat (a trick he'd refine into mastery by the time of The Abominable Dr. Phibes, where he'd give a rich, elaborate performance despite being unable to move his face at all) gives a fullness and even pathetic scope to Jarrod's monstrosity that makes him one of the most engaging of all '50s horror madmen.

The scenario is clunky enough, and there are just enough flat-out dumb moments - the film's very final beat, a lame 3-D gag, is among the worst - that I can't in good faith call this one of the decade's standout horror pictures, but it's awfully damn entertaining, and it's essential viewing for Price alone. A horror film about the high cost of giving into mindless spectacle, it's awfully satisfying mindless spectacle itself, and in any number of dimensions, it's a delightfully garish exercise in low-grade creeps.

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SIN YOU WENT AWAY

As far as nine-years-later sequels go, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For... well, actually it's pretty fucking awful, since the only other nine-years-later sequels I can think of right off star Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy instead of Mickey Rourke and Jessica Alba, and take as their explicit theme the evolution of culture and individual personality against the background of nostalgia. Whereas A Dame to Kill For is powerfully eager to act like not a minute has gone by since Sin City opened, exactly copying the original film's distinctive aesthetic and using extensive make-up to erase the passage of nearly a decade from every returning star's face.

What I started off to say is that, as far as nine-years-later sequels go, A Dame to Kill For could have been infinitely worse. Because, when all is said and done, exactly copying the original film's distinctive aesthetic - that is to say, the aesthetic the original film exactly copied from the Sin City comics of writer/artist Frank Miller, whose visual concepts were translated so precisely that director Robert Rodriguez extended him a directing credit, exactly the situation that attains in the sequel - isn't such a terrible thing as all that, when even after most of a decade, you can still count on one hand all the films that have recalled into Sin City's extremely unique style of harsh monochrome and all-CGI sets designed with the thinness of angry line drawings. And you can count on no hands the number of good films to have done so. Unhappily, A Dame to Kill For doesn't buck that trend; we'll get there in a moment. First I want to finish saying nice things about the way the movie looks, because it's just about the last nice thing I'll have to say. The one big change the new film makes is that, coming in 2014 instead of 2005, it gets to take advantage of 3-D: and for all that I'd have predicted that a 3-D rendering of such a vigorously 2-D art style would look be hideous on a pre-verbal level, actually, A Dame to Kill For turns that to its advantage, pitching itself somewhere between a shadowbox of paper cut-outs and an exploration of the possibilities of pure visual geometry, shapes and dots suddenly gaining some kind of unexpected texture from their planar relationships. It is surely the first and so-far only essential work of 3-D I've seen in 2014; or maybe it would be better to say that it's the only film for which it is distinctly better in three dimensions than in two. I mean, we're lifetimes away from Gravity here.

That nicety aside, the film is not very good, occasionally drifting into outright putrescence. And this was predictable as far back as 2006, when a Sin City sequel first started to form in Rodriguez's hopelessly optimistic eyes. Of the six books and one short story collection that make up the published entirety of Sin City, there's really only one great story and two pretty solid ones, by my reckoning, and the two best were already used in the first movie. Now, A Dame to Kill For is the other pretty solid one. So that's a leg up. And the filmmakers have the basic good sense to avoid the other full-length stories, Family Values (which is impenetrably awful) and Hell and Back (which is better on the merits, but only just, and it's dismally fucking long). Instead, the film rounds out its content with two new stories: "The Long Bad Night" (which, if I understand it correctly, is fleshed out from an unfinished story Miller has had around for a while), and "Nancy's Last Dance" (entirely new), and one of the better pre-existing short stories, "Just Another Saturday Night".

The last of these opens the movie as a prologue, and it's easily the peak of the film: a nice way to warm back up to the style, the moral corrosion, the dementedly hard-boiled dialogue, and the warped physicality of the characters in the form of Rourke's probably schizophrenic thug Marv. The other two are, I want to reiterate, new Frank Miller. "The Long Bad Night" much less so, but "Nancy's Last Dance" is a kind of no-holds-barred tour of all the incomprehensibly dark things that have happened inside Miller's head in the 21st Century, with its rageholic violence and disregard for any kind of logic or linearity (it is, I think, completely impossible to square with the existing Sin City chronology) and even the most modest coverlet ripped off of Miller's deeply unpleasant thoughts about women. Which seems even worse here since it seems evident from the focus on tragic stripper Nancy (Alba) and the voiceover she speaks - I believe, the first ever written for a Sin City woman - that this is trying to redress the baked-in sexism.

And A Dame to Kill For has the intense misfortune to end with "Nancy's Last Dance", which means that for the last 20-odd minutes of the 102-minute feature (more than 20 minutes shorter than Sin City), we are pummeled over and over with a nonsensical, needless story that can't put a single foot right (career-worst acting from Alba! Bruce Willis as a sad ghost!) and is almost too ugly for words, so whatever kindly feelings one can generate towards the film are bashed into pieces by the structure that insists on leaving us wanting so much less.

Not that kindly feelings are in strong supply. It's not a long movie, really, but the pacing is all whacked to hell, making it feel positively endless for stretches, and the insertion of "A Dame to Kill For" right in the middle of "The Long Bad Night" does neither any favors - particularly since "A Dame to Kill For" lacks the tendons connecting the two new stories, so instead of feeling like a collection of vignettes, like the first movie, A Dame to Kill For feels almost like one story that has a completely irreconcilable other story twisting around in its middle. "The Long Bad Night" is, itself, a pretty drowsy affair: Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a shockingly lucky gambler who picks up the sweet-natured bar waitress Marcie (Julia Garner) to watch him humiliate the most powerful man in the hopelessly corrupt Basin City - Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) - at poker. He has his own reasons, embarrassingly easy to predict, for wanting to needle Roark, and this perhaps overshadows his judgement about not fucking with psychopaths who have the police and the gangs at their disposal. Meanwhile, in "A Dame to Kill For", gloomy private eye Dwight (Josh Brolin) is approached by his former flame Ava (Eva Green) to help free him from her abusive husband (Marton Csokas) and his thuggish chauffeur Manute (Dennis Haysbert, replacing the late Michael Clarke Duncan, whom he resembles only in that he is an African-American man). But this is noir, and Ava is much too fatale a femme to possibly mean good news. Which Dwight knows and goes in after her anyway, because when somebody is played by Eva Green in full-on "I will play my flawless naked body like a Stradivarius" mode, it's easy to buy her as the kind of sexual enchantress that no male with even the ghost of heterosexuality inside of him could possibly resist. And there are, of course, only heterosexual males in Sin City. And pedophiles, but not in this movie.

The entirely subjective problem with this isn't that any of it is "bad" bad, but that virtually all of it is dull: as written, "A Dame to Kill For" is light-years better than the almost plotless "The Long Bad Night", but both coalesce into a sort of indistinguishable mushiness in Rodriguez and Miller's flabby directorial hands. The titular story is simply not paced well at all, lurching to life in fits and starts, but never maintaining itself - scenes drag on and dither and collapse.Worse yet, especially compared to the original movie, the acting is at an almost uniformly low ebb: Rourke is basically as good as he was last time, but with less interesting material to play, which is enough to make him the stand-out. Brolin and Gordon-Levitt give almost the exact same bad performance of a cold-blooded hard-ass, with Brolin courting goofy excess a bit more freely (especially in the final act of his sequence, when he really should have been replaced by the unavailable Clive Owen). Horrifyingly, even Green can't do all that much: she plays an almost mythically cruel woman well enough, I suppose, and it's easy to take for granted any performer who can be that at ease with her nude body and draw it up into her performance. But she already did both of these things earlier in 2014 in 300: Rise of an Empire, where she managed to, if certainly not "redeem" the character's grossly sexist clichés, at least play them up with a lifesaving amount of broad wit and tactically deployed campiness that recalls Vincent Price, if Vincent Price was an unbelievably hot woman prone to nude scenes. In that film, Green ripped herself out of the movie, off the screen, and into some totally other universe where she could just be jaw-droppingly magnetic. Here, she successfully embodies a straightforward, long-established stock character that, if she hadn't already existed on the page since 1993, could have easily been introduced in a pitch meeting as "we need to put an Eva Green type in this movie". Which is nowhere near as impressive, nor as film-rescuing.

Green's limitation is the film's as well: it's just not interesting in any way. It looks nice: shiny and stylised and glittering with its hard whites and jet blacks moving along the Z-axis. But it doesn't look any nicer than the 21-year-old comic book that it's re-staging, and sucking all of the life from in the process.

4/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1954: In which one of the greatest visual storytellers in the medium's history tries his hand at its hoariest gimmick

The first wave of 3-D did not last very long. The first film to showcase the new Natural Vision technology, Bwana Devil, was released in November, 1952; in 1955, only one movie, Revenge of the Creature, was released in the United States in 3-D. In between those two points was a flurry of activity that saw literally dozens of 3-D films fling themselves out at the audience like a paddle ball aimed right at the camera lens.

Compared to our current, undying wave of 3-D, the '50s fad went from gimmick to cheap exploitation film trick to yesterday's new so fast that almost no A-list filmmakers had a chance to try it out. There's one major exception: no less a master filmmaker and cinephilic icon than Alfred Hitchcock was able to make a 3-D movie in the vanishingly brief window when it might have been possible for him to do so. Though that window closed fast enough that his film, Dial M for Murder, was released after the unreliable process had lost enough of its appeal that it wasn't even put into general release in that format. Not until revival screenings starting in the 1980s did most audience members have a chance to see it in all of its dimensions. Even closer to home, it became the very first movie from the '50s to be released on a 3-D Blu-ray, for those of us in the fraction of a percent of people who've actually invested the money into home 3-D to enjoy whenever we want, secure in our knowledge that even if we're spendthrift geeks whom no-one will ever love, at least the ghost of ol' Hitch is nodding approvingly.

Coming in the middle of a run of absolutely stunning masterpieces, Dial M for Murder honestly is hard to describe as a major film in the context of the director's career; it came out the same year as Rear Window, with which it shared a leading lady, and that comparison alone is sufficient to prove that the earlier film doesn't find the filmmaker at his best (and it proves the same for the leading lady, when it comes down to it). But minor Hitchcock, especially minor '50s Hitchcock, is hardly disposable in the same way that, say, "minor Renny Harlin" would be, and the 3-D version of Dial M for Murder is especially a worthwhile and I might even go so far as to say important piece of work. It's arguably the leanest Hitchcock film since Rope, six years prior (which is his other major gimmick-driven film, for that matter), with only one major set and five (arguably even just four) significant characters to keep track of; its plot consists of really just one thing, which is presented in a narrative structure that resembles an essay. First the concept is explained, then we see the concept put into execution, then we see the concept re-explained, then the concept is deconstructed. It's about a murder plot: it is, I want to repeat and stress, about a murder plot. And really nothing else.

There's a pleasing purity in this, and a certain reduction to an essential Hitchcockian core: the whole movie becomes the explication of a man, who has been unmistakably slighted but in no particularly egregious or unusual way, reacting in the most cold-blooded, psychopathic and sociopathic way against the woman in his life. Or viewed from the other direction, it's about having the most theoretically sanctified and precious place in the world - the home that one's own money has bought and paid for - turned into a chamber of horrors designed to kill oneself. Specifically, the script which Frederick Knott adapted from his own play centers on Tony Wendice (Ray Milland), a retired tennis star living in London with his wife Margot (Grace Kelly), and largely on her money. Margot, we learn first, is all excited to resume a year-old affair with American mystery writer Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings); we learn second that neither of the Wendices were all that happy with the marriage almost immediately after it started, though Margot seems at least slightly more interested in making it happy; we learn third that Tony knew about the affair almost immediately, and has been biding his time all these months carefully setting up all the pieces for a flawless murder. This involves coercing a vague acquaintance from university, C.A. Swann (Anthony Dawson), through blackmail and money, to act as the human cog in a perfectly-timed series of events that Tony describes to his patsy and the audience with monstrously detached pride.

One teeny fuck-up gets in the way, though: a busted wristwatch puts Tony's timing off by a few minutes, which is enough to put Swann off his rhythm, and an errant pair of scissors that happens to be in exactly the right place allows Margot to kill her killer first. That brings us right about to the film's halfway point, with Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams) investigating the crime scene on the obvious assumption that Margot committed murder; but Hubbard is obviously a clever sort, and the improvisation Tony was forced to engage in has quite a few holes in it.

Thanks to the exact order in which details are presented, Hitchcock and Knott lay before the viewer a rather spectacular series of whirring gears to behold: we know everything that any character might possibly be aware of from the get-go so the thrill of watching the film has nothing to do with the question of what happened, and everything to do with the question of what Tony will do to deal with what happened. It's beautifully tense, and Milland is absolutely suberb, playing his anti-hero as being just clever enough that his mental acrobatics are legitimately admirable and exciting to behold, without ever giving the character even an ounce of charisma or warmth. He's just pleasant enough to Margot that, give or take a certain brittle Britishness, it's not impossible to wonder that she'd trust him and want to have some way of either salvaging the marriage or letting it die peacefully; but that's the same tone he takes when idly discussing how he's been stalking and manipulating Swann, and it's the same tone he takes in the story's final moments, when it's his own freedom in the balance. He is perhaps the most perfect sociopath in Hitchcock: he has absolutely no interest in morals or the wellness of humans, up to and including himself.

That being said, the film's superlative moment is one where Milland is barely even a presence: Swann's skulking through the apartment, his attack on Margot, and her frenzied struggle to escape. It's a terrific scene for a thriller, and in 3-D it becomes one of the all-time great sequences in Hitchcock, particularly during a jarring moment when Kelly thrusts her hand straight at the camera in a gesture of helplessness and terror. This is the one and only "something pops out of the screen" gag in the whole movie, which makes it stand out more; it's also a shocking moment of implicating the audience and our space during a particularly intense fight scene. Dial M for Murder is a film almost exclusively about the space of the home, with only one scene and a handful of cutaways taking place outside of the Wendice apartment; this becomes even more pronounced in 3-D, when the space becomes tangible and we can begin to notice just how much the blocking and the position of objects in the frame (to take advantage of the added dimension, the filmmakers loaded up the foreground with furniture and knickknacks), and especially how much the physical space seems to diminish and contain Margot. It's a threatening place for her even before the attack, but that's when it becomes the stuff of nightmares: harshly lit by cinematographer Robert Burks with a single key light designed to look like it's in a different room, the parlor becomes a chaos of angles and shapes, less a home than a pit of traps and blockades.

This excellent scene notwithstanding, Dial M for Murder doesn't do much with Margot, which feels like a wasted opportunity: we know from her other Hitchcock collaborations that Kelly and the director had a terrific rapport that he very rarely reached with his actresses, and while in her limited way she's able to make Margot seem real and plausible, Kelly simply doesn't have the material to make her interesting. She's the MacGuffin in the story of how Tony bloodlessly plots a perfect murder and then dances around trying to fix it when its perfection turns out to be not quite all there. And that's certainly fine, though it makes the film a little bit cooler and more remote than most of Hitch's thrillers, where the protagonist is also sympathetic. There's nobody to root for here: Tony is too obviously and persistently amoral, Margot is barely present, and Mark only slightly more than she. And as for Hubbard - well, we never root for the police in a Hitchcock film, do we?

All of which leaves Dial M for Murder feeling just a touch too much like an exercise to rank alongside the unflagging likes of Strangers on a Train or Rear Window or North by Northwest. Though as those titles imply, it's an exercise made by an enormously talented constructor of thrillers in the most fertile period of his career, and while it has a handful of damaging flaws, among them a rather bland Dimitri Timokin score, and a final scene that depends on one character acting in ways that seem a little too beholden to the writer's contrivance for comfort, this would still be at or near the top of many solid director's filmographies. It's stretched as tight as it can possibly be, and merciless in the execution of its perfect machine of a story, and it incorporates a gaudy gimmick that deepens both the human interest and the intensity of the thriller, and it's undeniably a work of genius, even if it's not that genius's finest hour.

Lastly, you know how some (all) Hitchcock films with rear projection make it look kind of hackish and bad? Oh my God, you don't know how bad Hitchcock rear projection can be until you've seen what it looks like in a 3-D movie, where it is literally just a flat pane behind three-dimensional people.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1954
-Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones, starring Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte, is a watershed moment for African-Americans appearing in mainstream cinema
-Disney's live-action work reaches its first peak with the lavish adventure 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
-Nicholas Ray turns the Western on its ear with the strange and magnificent Johnny Guitar

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1954
-In Japan, Honda Ishiro sees Americans our giant monsters and raises us, with the iconic Godzilla
-The very first British animated feature is released, an adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm
-Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders take a Journey to Italy under the guiding hand of Roberto Rossellini

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ASH AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE

The opening image of Pompeii is an extreme close-up of a body covered in the ancient ash that exactly preserved its shape, against a black background, the sinewy camera movements letting us see every angle and the 3-D camera accentuating and exaggerating all the crags and shapes in glorious detail, using the best and brightest new technology to reach unprecedented new heights in the art of ogling dead bodies. Says it all, really.

The other thing that says it all: before the opening credits have finished running - and this is a movie without a pre-title sequence, mind - we've already been treated to two entirely different top-down shots of a pile of dead bodies all tangled up with each other.

Not that Pompeii is death porn, or anything else that might be outrageous enough to make infamous instead of merely a pleasantly crappy CGI epic. I'm more amused by the perpetual re-occurrence of the peculiar sin of dramatic works set in Ancient Roman times, which is that on the one hand, the storytellers seem downright puritanical in their zeal to condemn the Romans as unforgivable hedonists whose taste for tasteless, extravagant entertainment extended so far as to make the violent death of fellow humans ready fodder for a pleasant day at the theater. And then, of course, the work of drama we're watching (it's a trend that's older than cinema) goes out of its way to make all of the licentiousness of Rome look really exciting and lush, and frequently - certainly in the case of Pompeii - gets much of its entertainment value out of making a spectacle of people die. Hypocritical? Obviously, but not in a way that's particularly rankling. You can't go around expecting truly dumb art to have a unified, coherent ideological thrust, and there's not much whose obvious dumbness comes as pre-sold to us as a movie directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, the only filmmaker alive for whom his video game adaptations generally qualify as his aesthetic peaks.

But there's no reason to be snarky, when it comes right down to it. Anderson's films might be bad, including Pompeii, but they have a certain awareness of their own badness and refusal to live down to it, as it were. Compare it to fellow Class of '14 sword-and-sandal film The Legend of Hercules, if you want to see a genuinely awful movie with nothing to recommend it. Whatever failing he has a storyteller and chronicle of human emotions, Anderson at least knows from garish, indulgent CGI action; at the very minimum, he gives good 3-D spectacle, playing up everything that is splashy, kitschy and tacky in all the most glorious ways. We do not go the films like this for Gravity-style immersion; but there is much to be said for the direct, simple appeal of having somebody throw shit right the hell at your face, and there's not a lot of things that throw more shit with more gusto than an exploding volcano, after all.

Now, the caveat is that the actual eruption of Vesuvius and the subsequent destruction of the titular city that is pretty much the sole thing that anyone attending a film titled Pompeii is going to be interested in seeing, while pleasantly overbaked and noisy (in fact, I have to concede that the film has a pretty great if not necessarily surprising and imaginative soundscape), is buried at the tail end of a movie that is mind-blowingly dull, except for the director's zeal in staging scenes so that things are always very prominently in front of other things. The movie's nominal plot plays like a Telephone Game corruption of Gladiator: in the Roman-held portion of the distant Britannia, a venal general kills the living fuck out of a rebellious tribe of Celts; a young boy among them plays dead long enough to strike back, and is made a slave for his troubles. Years later, the boy, grown up to be a gladiator named Milo (Kit Harrington) but known only as the Celt, is the best pit fighter in Londinium, and it it in this capacity that he comes to the attention of Pompeiian gladiator promoter Graecus (Joe Pingue), away from the heart of the empire and hating it intensely. In no time at all, Milo is on his way to Pompeii, along the way catching the eye of young noblewoman Cassia (Emily Brown), daughter of civic leader Severus (Jared Harris). At this time, Severus is trying to make a deal with an important Roman senator, Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland), who only has an interest in making leering, carnivorous faces at Cassia whenever she enters the room, and it just so happens that he was also the general responsible for killing Milo's family. In the span of just a day and a night, Milo meets, antagonises, and befriends master gladiator Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), meets Cassia a second time and falls deeply in love, and comes to the attention of Corvus, who will not even let a sea of ash and burning pumice stand between him and his desire to murder Milo in the most violent way possible and clear the way to rape Cassia.

All I can say is, thank God for Kiefer Sutherland. Which I'm pretty sure is a phrase I've never even thought of saying before. His unhinged, lip-smacking venality in the role of the melodramatic over-the-top bad guy is by an incredibly vast margin the best part of the human side of Pompeii, keeping the film situated securely in the tradition of gaudy theatrical extravagance where all the best Roman-era genre pictures tend to live. Certainly, the deck is stacked much in his favor, with Harrington (looking like a dollar store Eric Bana) and Browning (looking like somebody's out-of-control attempt to make a brunette Princess Zelda on deviantART) proving the most watery and unconvincing romantic leads since... well, I've already gone and reminded myself that The Legend of Hercules exists, so I have to cool it with the hyperbole. But they absolutely suck, and it's bitterly hard to deal with the movie in the long passages where we're expected to care more about them looking blankly at each other in what the keening score promises is lust than the surprisingly adequate staging of Pompetii, with its not-unconvincing costumes and surprisingly invisible CGI. To say nothing about the emphatic destruction of same, a sequence which Anderson and his team of writers insistently keep interrupting with dramatic interludes involving Corvus's surprisingly dogged pursuit of the lovers even as buildings are literally falling down on top of him. Not since Billy Zane ran through a sinking Titanic while brandishing a pistol has a disaster movie villain been so hellbent on being the one to kill his rival in the midst of an act of God.

All that being said, though, the film is mostly just silly and dim, with just enough awareness of where to hit us with a miniature earthquake to keep things from sagging too much. And while Anderson makes terrible films, he's much more adept than e.g. your Roland Emmerich at telegraphing his own awareness that the whole thing is kind of cheesy and idiotic, and keeping the tone light that way. Pompeii is not any good, please don't get me wrong, but it understands that it order to pay for not being any good, it has to scrounge up some good moments of kineticism and just enough visual pizzazz to catch your eye as you're looking for something on TV to put off doing real work on a Saturday afternoon. Meeting the most unbelievably minimal threshold to justify its own existence doesn't sound like much, and it isn't much, but when so many films in this mold can't even manage to do that...

5/10

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MASTERS OF ITALIAN HORROR: DARIO ARGENTO SUCKS IN EVERY DIRECTION

October's such a busy month: here I am, looking to pack away the Chicago International Film Festival and get to work on Kevin Olson's Italian Horror Blogathon, and wouldn't you know it, but I was given an absolutely perfect, gift-wrapped transition from one to the other in the form of Dracula 3D, the latest film from the most famous of all Italian horror directors, Dario Argento. This fits in even better, given that my intended them for this year's blogathon has been to tour the work of the leading lights of Italian horror, and put off scrounging for something obscure till next year as I picked one highly representative film for each of the genre's Big 3, and a couple of other key figures who aren't necessarily named in the same breath as Argento, Bava, and Fulci.

I do feel a little bad that my Argento pick turns out to be something as wholly awful as Dracula 3D, though not nearly as bad as I do that Argento has been cranking out wholly awful movies for so long that I can look at the terrible acting, stupid camera angles, dubious CGI, and deeply uncomfortable nude shots of Asia Argento, and without raising an eyebrow or blinking, say to myself, "yep, that is absolutely representative of fully half of the directorial output of the creator of Deep Red and Suspiria". It is possible, I suspect, that Dracula 3D is even his worst film; I haven't seen every last one of his late-period failures of both critical acclaim and fanboy enthusiasm, but I can't imagine that any of them have a moment as ill-conceived and shamefully executed as the one where Count Dracula (Thomas Kretschmann) turns into a man-sized praying mantis with fangs to kill a villager in his home. Though at least the uniformly poor CGI in the film doesn't seem as out-of-place in the case of the mantis, which already feels like a cannon-fodder monster in a late-'90s survival horror video game.

So, besides jaw-dropping CGI insects, whatever does Dracula 3D add to the decades-long corpus of Dracula adaptations? Argento himself would say that 3-D is itself the only answer that question needs, though for myself, I only noticed two scenes in which the technology was used to do anything remotely interesting, and one of those was the credits sequence (the camera veering through the narrow streets of a 19th Century Eastern European village - it's actually pretty great, certainly the most visually involving part of the movie). The other was a gore-heavy scene that manages to suggest, in the loosest way, what graphic, picturesque horror translated into multiple dimensions could consist of, though even as a purveyor of messy gore, Argento isn't up to his old self, and while the big bloodletting sequence (the only one in the film to speak of) is certainly an exuberantly nasty mess, but it's not a particularly imaginative one (eye-gouging on loan from Fulci, quick editing to make everything seem more shocking), nor even gross enough to cheat its way into being over-the-top disturbing.

Otherwise, it's just another damn Dracula, largely abandoning Bram Stoker's novel (though it includes the moment when the count skitters up the exterior wall of his castle at night, a scene that doesn't make it into nearly enough adaptations), and significantly re-working character identities. The short version: Jonathan Harker (Unax Ugalde) and his new wife Mina (Marta Gastini) are returning the village of her birth, where Jonathan has recently snagged a job as librarian to the eccentric count. He arrives several days before here, gets the customary hushed resistance from the locals, receives a jovial account of the local superstition from Mayor Kisslinger (Augusto Zucchi), and his daughter Lucy (Asia Argento), Mina's best friend, and heads off the castle where he receives a most awkward dinner. In short order, the count and his newest bride (Miriam Giovanelli) have reduced Jonathan to a near-catatonic state, Mina has arrived to wonder where her husband is, and Lucy has begun acting very strangely, sporting a distinctive pair of holes on the back of her knee (a nice touch, the vampire knowing that people are onto his usual tricks).

Not that Lucy acting strangely is all that easy to suss out, what with Argento fille giving one of her all-time worst performances in a dazed, head-lolling stupor that distinguishes between "pre-vampiric" and "hemi-vampiric" primarily in her willingness to, yet again, perform nude scenes in a movie directed by her father, one of those things that I am undoubtedly supposed to be accustomed to by now, but likely never shall be. Argento is the easy worst in show, and that's impressive considering the uniformly ineffective acting on display: Gastini has the hardest time handling the English language, and it takes up virtually all of her available energy; Ugalde is so visually anachronistic and disinterested in anything he has to do at any point that he very nearly makes Keanu Reeves look respectable. Lording over them all, Kretschmann's Dracula is a titanic and complete failure, not sexy enough to be dangerously alluring, not animalistic enough to be a legitimate threat, not suave enough to reek with Old World charms. He is the baked white potato, hold the butter, of screen vampires. There is a physical object there - the 3-D confirms it - but no personality, no soul, not even a vivid soullessness. The only thing that redeems the human element at all is Rutger Hauer's perfectly-pitched Van Helsing (a psychiatrist and paranormal specialist in this iteration), projecting just the right amount of "what the fuck did I get myself into?" bemusement and hammy without going full-bore Edward Van Sloan or Anthony Hopkins and turning the movie into a flood of overwrought theatrics. It is a terrible version of the character, but the right one for this film, introduced just at the exact point where it helps turn the tide from "this is so awful" to "this is so awful, but at least it's kind of funny".

So much for the human element. The arch visual stylist who gave the world all those masterpieces is nowhere in evidence, but there's at least an overriding sensibility to Dracula 3D that gives it the feeling of discipline, even if it's not very interesting. Basically, it wants to be a full-color, high-tech, blood-fueled version of a Universal film, as far as I can tell: Luciano Tovoli's cinematography and Claudio Cosentino's sets both tap into a vividly old-school ethos of making things good and atmospheric, even if they end up looking unabashedly stagebound along the way, and for all that the staging of scenes is usually dreadful - the most interesting blocking happens in the opening, during one of the most physically unconvincing sex scenes in many days - if you can take the time to look behind the clumsily-posed actors, the cheery artifice of the locations tends to give the film at least some kind of sense of fun. Certainly, the score by Goblin keyboardist Claudio Simonetti (Argento's long-time composer), probably the only thing about the movie that actively works, contributes immeasurably to the sense that we're watching something proud to be old-fashioned, with all the bangs and creaks of a child's Halloween fantasies.

Still, "it feels like an 80-year-old movie with blood and Asia Argento's boobs" is, at a minimum, not what we want from the great maestro, and the whole thing is a deadly combination of laziness, incompetence, and disinterest. It manages, barely, to be stupid enough at enough points to be fun to watch beyond the retro-chic aesthetic, but even then the line separating a CGI mantis that is funny from a CGI mantis that I forgot about because I immediately started guzzling alcohol to block out the pain is a thin line, and porous. Really, the fact that I'm having a debate with myself in print as to whether Dracula 3D is dopey enough to be fun says it all. We are a long way from visual ingenuity and a real sense of macabre possibility here, and the spectacle promised by the phrase "Dario Argento in 3-D!" is as impossible to find here as decent acting or an original narrative beat.

3/10

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IRRESISTIBLE FORCE

The long-in-development, long-delayed seventh film by director Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity, already had a massive amount of hype to live up to even before it opened to just silly good reviews out of the Venice film festival, and of course it doesn't live up to it. It comes, however, about as close to living up to it as a movie possibly could: not nearly as succulent and all-encompassing in its awesomeness as the director's last film, the dystopian religious allegory Children of Men, because how could anyone possibly have expected something like that? It has less to "say", and though it says it very well, there's just not the same sense of having been unscrewed and filled with all kind of complicated, burning feelings about humanity. It's a magnificent, magnificent thriller, though, and one of the most dumbfoundingly impressive technological feats in the 20 years since Jurassic Park put the world on notice about CGI: comparatively, Avatar resembles James Cameron scribbling speech balloons on a prog-rock album cover, and Life of Pi is a crude doodle with a big orange cat no more impressive than your average Garfield strip.

Before I say a word about anything else, though, the sound mix: the very first thing that happens in the movie is a medium close-up of Earth, with an infinitely tiny speck of the space shuttle in the distance, and the very first thing we hear is someone talking, indistinctly, in the far back right. Then it slowly crawls around to the left and then center, getting consistently louder. We are being gradually dropped into the setting as the space shuttle moves closer, being pulled into the only audio possible in a rigorously silent space movie. It's the first time in years that a sound mix was so boldly foregrounded and conceptually perfect that I wanted to start crying and cheering at the same time. From the sound mix. Which continues to be absolute perfection throughout, but nobody wants to read the review that focuses on sound mixing, so I'll shut up about it.

The film takes place in an unspecified year that cannot exist: the U.S. space shuttle program, ended in 2011, is still up and running, while the first Chinese space station, launched later that year and still not permanently manned as of 2013, is in full swing. Here we find mission STS-157 (the actual shuttle program ended at STS-135), led by Commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), adding a new program to the Hubble telescope; this installation is headed by the civilian Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a biomedical engineer. An accident involving a Russian satellite has triggered a cloud of metallic debris directly on the same orbital path as the Space Explorer (fictional), and before Kowalski, Stone, or the rest of the unseen crew have a chance to react, their rig and vessel have been torn apart, and Stone is flung into the vastness of space, spinning around madly.

That all happens in the opening shot, by the way. For all that Children of Men boasts some of the most stupefying long takes in the history of the artform, it's banal and unsophisticated compared to Gravity, which includes several different sequences in which a single take proceeds for minutes at a time, and never in simple, clean set-ups, but always with flying, balletic abandon, gliding in towards characters and back away, around objects, through tiny spaces. If I persist in finding Children of Men to have the more impressive and important cinematography, it's because that film had to do everything practically, minus some digital stitching; Gravity's most amazing shots are almost entirely CGI, absent the faces of the actors, and we're basically watching an incredibly realistic, thoughtfully-constructed cartoon for a great deal of the time (though not as much as I'd expected beforehand (in fact, fully half of the movie has a completely physical Bullock on what I imagine are largely physical sets). You can simply do more that way; it's not as ballsy and live-wire as having to do things constrained by real-life physics.

That being said, Gravity doesn't use "you can do anything in CGI" as a crutch, but as a challenge and a dare, and when Cuarón and director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki set themselves to doing anything, they end up doing everything: their virtual camera is employed in unbelievably complex movements that shift through varying perspectives in subtle but profoundly effective ways. They mimic traditional effects of editing through the abruptness with which the camera that was moving that way is now moving this way, and in so doing say more with that shift than an edit (which we would expect, and therefore be anesthetised to) could. They evoke with indescribable success the sense of being in the zero-G environment being depicted, all the more so when the film is filling your field of vision on the biggest screen possible in the most vivid 3-D of any mainstream movie since the contemporary 3-D boom began in 2007 (the only movie I can think of that uses the technology to better effect is the German dance documentary Pina), and the sensory overload is complete - I should mention, I didn't have the film filling my field of vision, and it wasn't the biggest screen possible, and I still got totally sucked in by Gravity, ho ho, a pun.

Nothing I've said probably indicates why this isn't all so much film nerd candy - achingly long takes being the kind of thing that normals don't even notice until they are pointed out (and I have firsthand evidence of a normal not realising that the opening shot of Gravity is 17 minutes long), and when they are noticed, being the kind of thing that is held to be "cool" more than anything - but much as it was in Y tu mamá también, the unedited moving camera serves as a way of taking us into the characters (or character, really, this is pretty much entirely the Sandra Bullock Show), situating them in their physical environment, tightening our identification to them and the world as they experience it (this is not as much the case in Children of Men, where the tracking shots tend to serve a narrative rather than a character function). Literally: at a certain point, the camera moves right inside Stone's helmet, and we see things literally from her very eyes, nor is this the only time that the image is occupying something only millimeters away from her exact point of view. We could also argue that creating a completely plausible reality is key for the film's later effectiveness, and that uninterrupted stream of visual information is a way of establishing that reality and playing sleight of hand with the glut of CGI: "no, see, it has to be real, look at how we just shot it from 83 different angles!"

All of these things - the deepened reality of the film plane, the attachment we form to Stone (helped out by Bullock's innate likability, though I don't quite understand why she's being touted as having given such a phenomenal performance - a lovely movie star turn, absolutely, and impressively difficult technically, but I doubt she gave the best performance possible even among the names approached for the part. I am, however, very happy that Blake Lively said no), the tangibility of non-real sets and locations - go a long way to explaining why Gravity works so fucking well as a thriller, so infinitely better than its most obvious forerunners in the "isolated person in an extreme survival situation" genre like Open Water and Frozen. Actually, the mere fact of not having characters so awful that I was rooting for wolves to eat them by the five-minute mark would be enough to make Gravity better than Frozen, but it's much, much deeper than that. It is a visceral movie: the genuine feeling of weightlessness in the visuals makes sure of that, as does the way that our disorientation and Stone's are so nimbly tied together, so that we really feel her situation even if we haven't yet made up our minds if she's sympathetic or not. And the 3-D helps a great deal: when that 17-minute opening shot ends with her being flung into a star-speckled void, she is the lone point of dimension against an impossibly distant backdrop of space and the invisible but tangible plane of the screen, and it feels unbelievable isolated and suffocating; it is almost certainly the single best use of 3-D I have seen in a movie.

Where the film does go a little bit awry is in its attempts to be a rich, tearjerking character drama on top of a survival thriller about being stuck in the unfathomably inhospitable void of space, done mostly through the artless application of a backstory involving a tragically dead daughter, injected just at the right moment to feel tacky (the screenplay, which Cuarón wrote with his son Jonás, is the weakest part of the project - not the story and scenario, mind you, just the screenplay). That being said, a scene were Stone cries and her tears immediately ball up and float off her face - one "hits" the camera lens, in a wonderfully nice touch - is genuinely moving. And Steven Price's generally quite good score, which runs the gamut for horror movie stings to a goopy, soaring anthem to human durability, does a fine job of giving you an emotional workout, making the end in particular seem much more awesome and grave than Lubezki's incredibly dramatic camera already did. Still, the thing it does best is to create an immediate series of strong feelings, not to explore more airy concepts of spirituality and fear of death, which feel a little phoned-in, honestly. The visceral impact is already more than enough to make Gravity a thoroughly involving piece of experiential cinema, and that provides all the human interest necessary. The only places the film bogs down at all are in its most nakedly "watch Sandra feel sad" moments, though something with these kinetic visuals can never be said to "bog down" at all, really.

In short (the time for which was 800 words ago): this is the most engrossing film I've seen in ages. It's more about being intense than about being deep, but that is the privilege of a great thriller, and Gravity is more than a great thriller; it is the greatest thriller made in years and years, a movie using all the finest tools of modern filmmaking at their best advantage to tap into the most primal kind of cinematic emotion-making. It's gorgeously complex and deliciously simple in one and the same breath.

9/10

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DANCE, DANCE, OTHERWISE WE ARE LOST

They say that good things come to those who wait, and I am happy to report that after months of patient waiting, 2013 has finally produced a movie that's so bad it's good, in the form of 3-D sports/dance hybrid Battle of the Year, something of a b-boying themed remake of the 1989 taekwondo tournament movie Best of the Best, which I'm 100% sure is a cultural touchstone all of you immediately recognise. Short version: a team training hard as possible, quickly as possible, to win the "Olympics of b-boying", Battle of the Year in France. Long version: that, plus a degree of fist-pumping jingoism not seen so widely, in such an uncut form, since Cannon Films fell out of the habit of siccing Chuck Norris on an army of expendable Russians back in the '80s.

We are introduced, in the funniest scene I have watched in a movie theater this calendar year, to hip-hop impresario Dante (Laz Alonso) addressing the board of directors of his multi-media empire with a most grievous concern. The children do not like breaking! And if that most ancient dance, one of the cornerstones of hip-hop culture since its inception, shall fall out of favor in the United States, than surely it's only a matter of time before hip-hop dies out as a major force in the marketplace. "I overheard some kids saying that b-boying is no longer cool" frets Dante with deep gravity, and the whole tenor of the scene suggests that not just his company but the entire American economy rests on finding a way to make the dance popular again, now. Plainly, Americans need to regain our dominance in the art form that we invented before those foreigners took it away from us, goddammit. Success at the international level, giving all American kids something to root for against the French and Germans and those asshole Koreans, will be exactly what it takes to make b-boying wonderfully popular! B-boying, apparently, is soccer.

Dante's first idea is to find his old friend from the early days of the scene, Blake or "WB" (Josh Holloway), a former basketball coach and current alcoholic. Giving Blake a blank check to do whatever he wants is the first step of many on the road to forming an unstoppable crew, the "Dream Team" of American b-boying, and Blake's task is to take the egos, rivalries, and meanness that have for so long condemned the Americans to failing in international competitions of an originally American style, and strip them away, to make a team that is about the betterment of all and not just the showboating of some. If, by this point in the synopsis, you're eagerly wondering whether Blake's newfound sense of purpose and affection for the ragtag crew he's training get him off the hooch, or whether the prickly personalities and distrust among the b-boys, especially talented hot-heads Do Knock (Jon Cruz, who actually dances under the name... Do Knock) and Rooster (noted domestic abuser Chris Brown), will prevent them from gelling as a team and learning to respect each other, then Battle of the Year desperately wants you to go see it right this second, because you are going to eat that shit up with a spoon.

For everyone else, the appeal of Battle of the Year lies almost exclusively in the complete lack of success with which it freshens up the unbelievably musty scenario, or in the helpless, tasteless ways that director Benson Lee inserts references to his own 2007 documentary Planet B-Boy, beatified as the very Gone with the Wind of breaking movies, particularly in the scene where a giddy b-boy fan named Franklyn (Josh Peck) - "Franklyn with a 'Y'", he calls himself, so many times that I was legitimately outraged that he didn't show up under that name in the end credits - forces Blake to stream it from Netflix that very second, to teach the ignorant old man about the current state of the art. Awesomely, at the time of Battle of the Year's long-delayed release (it was pushed a full eight months from January, where it would have at least seemed a little less incongruous), Planet B-Boy was not, in fact, available to stream from Netflix, which makes this incomparably ballsy product placement totally ineffective, in addition to hilariously crass and tacky. But not as tacky as the way that Franklyn with a "Y" first accesses Netflix on his new Sony tablet, do you see how shiny and technically advanced it is? And not nearly as hilarious as the scene where Dante gives all the b-boys a goodie back of presents that elicits the breathless response, "I got a PS Vita!", a sentence never said by any human being ever in such an orgasmic tone of voice.

The goofy melodrama is interspersed, at intervals, by some of the worst dance choreography I have seen in my entire experience of the urban dance subgenre, completely wasting the fact that outside of noted domestic abuser Chris Brown, all of the b-boys are played by actual b-boys (most of them, incidentally, are better actors than noted domestic abuser Chris Brown, though none get such a dramatic Oscarbait scene as his snot-filled weepy farewell); and 3-D helps these dance numbers out not at all, serving only to make them murkier and not to make them in any way visually kinetic. Along the way, a token female (Caity Lotz) is introduced, and even the movie doesn't try to pretend she needs to be there after the initial "I will never ever have sex with any of you" jokes, and the actual Battle of the Year is presented with a level of microscopic arcana that suggests Lee and his screenwriters, Brin Hill and Chris Parker, were unaware that there might be anywhere in the world someone who is not infinitely familiar with the process of scoring professional breakdancing battles.

Through all of this, Holloway - a much better actor than the material, though that's true of almost any actor sober enough to stand on two legs for more than ten seconds at a stretch - attempts to anchor the material with grave, pained looks and barked out lines that are meant to evoke the hundreds of no-nonsense teacher and coach movies over the decades, but married to the fizzy idiocy of the script and the anemic characterisations in which people are given one trait (the gay kid, the young father, the... actually, I think that's all of them), the junky filmmaking, and the uniformly bad acting of every other person onscreen, Holloway's furrowed-brow attempts at gravitas end up playing as campy overreach more than anything, the one Very Serious Actor who doesn't realise he's in a shitty-looking clown show. It's wasted effort on the actor's part, but it's the perfect mordant center for a whirlwind of daft occurrences and strained dialogue and constantly mis-conceived dramatic beats; such earnest bad filmmaking that it becomes one of the most refreshingly silly things I've seen in weeks.

2/10

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