PERSONAL CANON: THE HUNGER GAMES

Even among those who love it, there's no real consensus as to why the 1999 horror film Ravenous is great. Because it is a punchy black comedy? Because it is an intelligent attack on social constructs of bravery and masculinity? Because it's a satire of American expansion in the West? Because it's one of the few movies to treat on the wendigo, a malevolent spirit out of Algonquian folklore? Because it's just a damn impressive gory horror movie that jumps with both feet into cannibalism, a subject most relatively big-budget American movies are far to squeamish to openly consider?

Any and all of the above can apply in more or less different combinations, based on the reviewer, and I do not doubt that I missed some of the possibilities. The point being, Ravenous is sufficiently broad to include some borderline-exclusive readings, which might arguably be just a way of saying that it's too vague to actually mean anything besides "shock value! stage blood!" But I will certainly not be the person to go there.

That said, at least this much is as objectively true as it gets, the punchy black comedy is terrific, and we're introduced to it long before the movie has set itself up as a horror film at all, or even clarified that its setting puts it denotatively, if not emotionally, in the wheelhouse of the Western. The very first thing that happens, in fact, is a title card with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche (misspelled "Nietzche", a fact I point out because even for movies that I love, I do not pretend that they are perfect), stating-

He that fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster

-which has less to do with the content of the film than the script thinks, but it gets us close in, anyway. Playing underneath is a military march that feels so solemn, especially with the appeal to Nietzschean authority, that the whole thing feels ripe for a piss-take, and this is confirmed when another quote pops up on the same card, credited to Anonymous-

Eat me.

-which would be quite obviously enough a sarcastic "fuck you" even without the cartoon sound effects that accompany its appearance.

My point in all this, anyway, is that opening gestures matter, Ravenous uses its opening gesture to tell us that it is a comedy, or at least that juvenile undercutting of very serious-sounding things will be a major part of its game. Now, this mood doesn't hold - in fact, beginning with its most goofy moment and end with its most subdued, Ravenous spends its entire running time growing progressively more serious, which is one of the things I like best about it, and best about Antonia Bird's gorgeously controlled directing. Incidentally, I could bring this bit up anywhere, but I shall get it out of the way now: in a just world, Bird would have been given all sorts of high-profile opportunities on the strength of what she accomplished here. Instead, Ravenous was the last theatrical feature to date out of just a handful for her, following which she returned to the world of British television, where she started. Maybe that's how she wanted it, I have no idea; certainly, it is a known fact that Ravenous had a contentious shoot in which producer Laura Ziskin got all up in everybody's business, and Bird was in fact the third director attached during production. But Ravenous is as good a calling card as you could hope for; however good it is in many ways, it is consistently and specifically great in its directing, which navigates quite a minefield of shifting tonalities and does it so smoothly that you have to actively remind yourself that this was a bloody, warped comedy before it got to be so savage and nasty.

But I believe I left things at the opening title card. From here, we are carried to a military state dinner honoring Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) for acts of heroism conducted in the Mexican-American War, and as predicted, the film is awfully eager to suck the pomposity out of the Army's stately self-regard, between the over-the-top juxtaposition of a super-earnest (but under-orchestrated) march with very prim compositions, and the even more over-the-top depiction of the Army brass devouring their fine steak dinners with disgustingly moist sound design and gross-out close-ups of food being messily chewed. For one of the other things that Ravenous can be said to do thematically is to link meat-eating with savagery that thinks itself civilised, which is not at all what I'd personally claim. But you can't pretend that it's not there, and even as an unapologetic carnivore, I salute the film for committing to its message that way.

Boyd, we'll find out in the course of some chronologically-shuffled flashbacks, is both a hero and a deserter; he survived a bloody onslaught that took out the rest of his regiment only by pretending to be dead the instant that the Mexican soldiers arrived, and after being carted back to their base camp in a pile of corpses, single-handedly killed every last one. It's not clear that this is significant yet, but this only happened after he inadvertently swallowed the blood of his commanding officer, who was positioned directly over him in the corpse wagon, and dripped over him the whole way.

Gen. Slauson (John Spencer) has no idea what to do with a case like Boyd's, so he packs him off to the Island of Misfit Toys: an outpost way the hell out in California, Fort Spencer. He arrives in the dead of a cold winter, to meet the rest of the people the Army couldn't slot someplace nicer: Col. Hart (Jeffrey Jones), a meek, poetic soul; Maj. Knox (Stephen Spinella), a hopeless drunk; Pvt. Reich (Neal McDonough), a gung-ho and possibly psychotic soldier; Pvt. Toffler (Jeremy Davies), a religious to the point of distraction; and Pvt. Cleaves (David Arquette), a stoner. That there is a stoner puts us on the path to teasing out what Ravenous has in mind, for one thing that comes through strongly in its first act is a flippant, '90s sense of humor (certainly, Jones's performance is as mired in the late '90s as a Fiona Apple album), constantly puncturing anything that resembles serious place-building, and making it clear if nothing else could that Ravenous is not actually about cannibalism in the 1840s, however much it's about cannibalism in the 1840s.

One of the things that chiefly serves to drift the film away from its sardonic opening is the arrival, soon after Boyd, of a desperate, starving Reverend F.W. Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle). He spins a Donner-esque story of a wagon train gone awry above the snowline, and the mad Colonel Ives, who got such a rush from eating the dead members of the party that he started getting a little murder-happy when the corpses weren't coming fast enough. To George (Joseph Running Fox) and Martha (Sheila Tousey), the native siblings who serve as general staff for the fort, this suggests the legend of the wendigo (which is, theoretically, from the wrong side of the American continent), the demon that attaches itself to a man who eats another man, giving him power but also an insatiable desire to kill again and again to keep himself strong. It shades a little bit into European notions of vampirism as it plays out in the movie, but on the whole this first-ever wide-release wendigo picture does a fair job of exploring the concept.

For aye, there really is a wendigo, as the bulk of the soldiers find out when they go up into the mountains to stop Ives and save the last of his victims, but it turns out to be Colqhoun himself, who brought them up there to catch them unawares and stock his larder with hardier meat than the starving settlers that he's been eating on all winter. Long story short, it's soon down to Colqhoun versus the coward Boyd, who once again tastes human blood when he timidly picks at the dead Reich in order to stay alive over the course of a bitterly cold night. And once again, he has a sudden flush of courage and strength, and this is enough to get him back to Fort Spencer and to the very sudden shift into the last act of the film, that I will not spoil, though oh, how I shall have to work to talk around it.

It's primarily in the end that Ravenous crystallises as more than just a gory horror film in period dress, though it bears saying over and over again that even as a simple Western-horror hybrid, this is pretty great; the single biggest problem with the first hour is in a chase scene between Colqhoun and Pvt. Toffler, with a strenously wacky banjo score playing underneath (probably by Michael Nyman; he and Damon Albarn are the credited composers, but they did not work together, each contributing around half of the music. I find that Albarn's electronically-created, ironic riffs on period style to be the far more effective at creating the weird mood the film likes to inhabit, especially his repeated theme "Boyd's Journey"), the kind of miscalculation so vast that it has left people with the idea that the whole film is scored like a bluegrass hoedown. Still, the first part of Ravenous, gooey fun that it is, and as giddy as Carlyle's monstrous performance becomes, it's not remotely as interesting as it becomes in the end, when the whole thing turns into a referendum on how men demonstrate strength and virility, while dismissing as low cowardice the desire not to die and the desire not to kill others. Bird and screenrwriter Ted Griffin (the first completed project of a scattershot career that nevertheless includes Ocean's Eleven) don't belabor the point, and Ravenous came out a couple of years too early to be a full-throated attack on American militarism (still, a scene explicitly linking the cannibals' philosophy to Manifest Destiny is a little too much on-the-nose), but you can't fail to notice that it's there, and what began as a snotty bit of fun had against military men turns into a much more brutal (as the film itself grows increasingly brutal) indictment of the culture of masculinity not just within militaries, but anywhere that men goad each other into foolish attempts to prove who is stronger.

That, on top of some gorgeous location photography that makes the Czech Republic a pretty fantastic surrogate for the Sierra Nevadas, excellent performances by all involved but Pearce and Carlyle especially, and some wonderfully horrifying imagery (the interior of the cannibal den is perfect), and whate we end up with is a terrific horror movie all around, one of the absolute best of the 1990s. And being one of the best horror films of the '90s is an easy thing to achieve, but still, Ravenous is too damn good in too many ways to languish in any kind of obscurity.

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UNIVERSAL HORROR: THE MUMMY REBORN

With the benefit of hindsight and the tendency of time periods to compress as we get further from them, it's not uncommon to think of Universal Studios initial wave of monster movies as comprising a boom that stretched from 1931 to 1945, but it was nothing of the sort. There was an initial flurry of horror films in the wake of Dracula that only lasted from '31 to '33, then there was a period of confusion and needlessly stretched-out, costly attempts to develop sequels, following which the studio underwent a crisis of management that found Carl Laemmle Sr. and Jr. forced out of their company, taking with them Junior's affection for the horror films he stewarded. It was was only after the success of 1939's Son of Frankenstein, created to cash in on a hugely profitable double-feature re-release of Dracula and Frankenstein, that something like an actual "boom" finally kicked in, lasting for just five years and not 14.

I bring this up mostly to explain what seems inexplicable, if we follow the conventional wisdom that Universal was cranking out horror films like mad: that it took eight years following The Mummy in 1932 for the studio to make another film starring their bandaged horror. Contextually, particularly considering the box-office under-performance of The Mummy, it would have been almost stranger if there wasn't such a gap (we should not fail to notice that The Invisible Man of 1933 also had to wait until 1940 for its first sequel).

Anyway, when a second mummy film finally emerged, in the form of The Mummy's Hand, it wasn't connected to the first film in any way: not as a sequel, and despite the presence of a few conspicuously repeated plot elements, not as a remake, either. This shouldn't really be of any real concern, for among other things, it spares us the spectacle of trying to undo the distinct finality of that movie, and eliminated the need for inter-film continuity, both characteristics of the Frankenstein series done consistently poorly. What is a real concern is that as a result of the upheavals at Universal in the latter half of the '30s, the state of horror in the new decade was one of almost complete rejection of any kind of ambition or artistry: the 1940 crop of horror pictures marks the point at which Universal's horror output became predominately relegated to B-pictures, anything that could be made quickly and cheaply, designed as quick-moving amusements that would amuse and perhaps briefly spook the audience, but mostly pass through the system quickly as a minor distraction could manage.

Some of the films made in this mode were more effective than others, and it can at least be said that The Mummy's Hand is significantly better than the default setting for Universal's B-movies. Still, if you watch it in any kind of proximity to The Mummy, the immediate and overriding thing that you notice first and most heavily is that it looks cheap. Desperately so, in its opening scenes, where the emptiness outside of Cairo could not possible look any more like a hillside in Southern California. Pathetically so, when the film's prologue repurposes The Mummy's historical flashbacks, and the immensity of the gulf separating the two budgets is made manifest.

The cheap needs not inherently be the enemy of the entertaining, though, and The Mummy's Hand is charming and easygoing enough in its matinee-movie way, though there are enough unforced errors throughout that it's really hard to think of this as one of Universal's most shining moments. Things start off with too much of an exposition dump, to start with, as the high priest of Karnak (Eduardo Ciannelli) - and it would appear that the screenwriters, Griffin Jay & Maxwell Shane, have it in their heads that Karnak is a cult or a god, not a physical place - instructs his foremost disciple, Andoheb (George Zucco), in the history of the Princess Ananka and her lover Kharis (Tom Tyler), who committed blasphemy in an attempt to raise her from the dead. For punishment, he was buried alive with a supply of tana leaves, which allegedly have the power to preserve life. Ever since that day, 3000 years ago, members of this sect have religiously prepared a tana leaf brew to pour on Kharis's body, keeping him in a state of perpetual half-death, ready to be revived and avenge any crime committed against Ananka's tomb. This is all presented a bit artlessly, but when a movie is as hell-bent on getting to the end as the 67-minute The Mummy's Hand is (one huge benefit of '40s B-pictures - they did not dick around), you need to get the rules spelled out fast and efficiently, and the cost is elegance, fuck it.

Somewhat later, in Cairo, rag-tag archaeologists Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and Babe Jenson (Wallace Ford) are looking for financing; Banning is convinced that he has a shard of pottery from Ananka's tomb, and he wants to go digging. Unluckily for him, his attempts to get money from the Cairo Museum are thwarted by one of that institution's Egyptology experts, who declares the shard an excellent forgery. Since that expert is the very same Andoheb who has just become the high priest of Karnak, we can readily assume that he's hiding something important. Undaunted, Steve and Babe go hunting for a rich patron, and they think they've found one in the form of American magician Solvani (Cecil Kellaway), who happily agrees to fund their expedition; what they don't know is that he's on his last legs, and this is a get-rich-quick scheme for him that thoroughly angers his daughter Marta (Peggy Moran), warned against the archaeologists by Andoheb. She thus insists on traveling into the desert with the three men to make sure that her dad doesn't end up murdered, along with the great Egyptologist Dr. Petrie (Charles Trowbridge) and that's how we end up with a whole merry passel of travelers camped right outside the tomb where Kharis rests, ready to be revived and sent on a killing spree.

Every negative or mixed review of The Mummy's Hand starts out the same way, so let me please not break with tradition: seriously, fuck Babe Jenson. If you have ever found yourself struggling to get through any kind of genre film in the '30s or '40s that was just about done in by its comic relief, then you know the type, but Ford's wacky sidekick is of an entirely different order. He's an overt Lou Costello clone, only far more laconic and soft-spoken, which is somehow infinitely worse than a faux-Costello* who goes too far being shrieking and manic; I think it's because Ford is so bland about the shenanigans he's called upon to execute that it seems like he doesn't really care about them, which makes us not care about them, which makes them seem exceptionally pointless, and watching someone trying to play Costello-style freak-outs reasonably straight is just excruciating on the face of it. It's both sullen and shrill at once, and for a film that already dodges a comic relief bullet with Kellaway's sweet and amusing Solvani, to see this kind of agonising bumbling given such prominence threatens at times to make the film unwatchable altogether.

There's nothing else explicitly wrong with the film, though plenty of things I would have traded in: Foran is an acceptable matinee lead, though not by any means an inspiring one, but Moran is real pill, aiming for a Maureen O'Hara level of tart self-assurance and ending up nowhere remotely near that; every one of her line readings is curiously flat and sarcastic, an interesting approach for a horror film's damsel in distress, but not this one. Tyler was cast largely because it was felt that he was the right build to be intercut with footage of Karloff from the first movie, and his limited amount of time as the stalker creeping up on people in the night - this is basically a slasher movie, structurally - doesn't suggest that we want to see very much more of his unexceptional presence and carriage than we get. the best thing about his mummy Kharis, in fact, is the optical effect used to black out his eyes and mouth, a legitimately off-kilter and creepy touch.

Outside of the mummy itself - which, unlike the earlier film, never takes the form of a living human, just a withered, bandaged, angry cadaver - there's nothing much in The Mummy's Hand that even thinks to be taken seriously as horror; director Christy Cabanne was a magpie, making films in every style you can name across one of the most prolific careers in the history of cinema, but his training was especially in comedy and adventure, and those are very much the things that come to the fore here. It's an awfully lighthearted, fun movie, even for a B-horror, where it never seems more than vaguely likely that anybody we like will be harmed or even seriously inconvenienced by the mummy, and both Kharis and Andoheb are dispatched so easily and arbitrarily that even if either of them had been seriously threatening before, it would be hard not to retrospectively consider them to be awfully weak sauce, as villains go. This is a movie aiming not to trigger an "Ooh, a mummy! Spooky!" response, but "Ooh, a mummy! Cool!". Or whatever word they used for "cool" in 1940. The point is, it's a high-spirited lark with just enough creepy details that it doesn't completely defang the monster of its title, and while its genial comic thrills aren't at all what one is looking for out of even the second and third tier of Universal monster movies, that's not to say that it doesn't work on its own terms, as the thing it set out to be. That "disposable" was among the things it set out to be is neither here nor there.

Reviews in this series
The Mummy (Freund, 1932)
The Mummy's Hand (Cabanne, 1940)
The Mummy's Tomb (Young, 1942)
The Mummy's Ghost (Le Borg, 1944)
The Mummy's Curse (Goodwins, 1944)
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (Lamont, 1955)

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UNIVERSAL MONSTERS: ALL WRAPPED UP WITH NO PLACE TO GO

October means classic horror marathons here at Antagony & Ecstasy, and after a few years of alternating between the old-school Universal Studios monsters and the black-hearted Gothic versions of the same made by Hammer Films, I thought to myself, "why not compare them back to back?"

And thus I am happy to announce that on weekends in October (with allowances for the Chicago International Film Festival), we'll be taking a look at Universal and Hammer's respective films about the bandaged undead - it's time for some mummy movies!

The rise of horror as a real thing in American cinema was not an uncontroversial process; concerns over propriety and morality kept the genre from ever taking hold in the States during the silent era the way it so vitally did in Germany. When the dam finally broke in the early sound days, with Universal's one-two punch of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, it was still using the fig leaf that these were actually literary adaptations, not scuzzy little monster shows (even though both of those films bent the literary source into such unrecognisable shapes that it barely counts). This had, in fact, been true of nearly all the meager horror offerings of the '20s, as well: they were based on important, high-toned books and stories, and they just happened to be freakish and scary, and that's how the 1923 period drama based on Victor Hugo's sober social critique The Hunchback of Notre Dame is sometimes held to be the starting point of Universal's horror cycle.

Once horror found its toehold in '31, though, all bets were off, and the explosion of original horror stories the following year created a perpetual motion genre machine that, except for a few rough patches here and there (primarily in the '40s, with smaller die-offs in the '60s and '90s), remains with us even today, 80 years later. Universal itself broke into the world of "original" horror in December, 1932, with The Mummy, the very first monster movie made about a more or less original monster: mummies exist, sure, and the very idea of a carefully preserved corpse is creepy enough that the horror connection isn't a particular leap, but the particular way that this film presents its undead killer isn't derived from folklore like vampires, werewolves, or golems are.

Though you'll note, I did put "original" in scare quotes up there, because John L. Balderston's screenplay is hardly a model of creativity and invention. It's frequently little more than a redressed version of Universal's Dracula, based closely on Balderston's own play; this married to a story treatment by Nina Wilcox Putnam & Richard Schayer for a horror-romance based on the life of Cagliostro, from which comes The Mummy's only real innovation on the Dracula model, the idea of a reincarnated love from across the centuries (with cheerful redundancy, this idea would re-enter many future vampire pictures, most prominently in Bram Stoker's Dracula from 1992).

The important bit in all of this fun but somewhat inconsequential trivia is that The Mummy isn't just a Dracula rip-off, it's a Dracula rip-off that is, in fact, considerably better than Dracula in almost every regard, despite failing to possess anything like the same cachet. I assume this is what being first does for your reputation; that or the fact that vampires have always been popular, while the last time that mummies were brought into the public eye was in the form of Universal's own extremely loose 1999 remake, The Mummy as an action-adventure romp with a dime-store Indiana Jones.

No matter what, the film is still a damn impressive exemplar of 1932 horror filmmaking, one of the few films of that vintage that remains legitimately creepy whatsoever. A huge amount of credit for that falls on Karl Freund, the legendary cinematographer making his American directorial debut (after, perhaps, having kept Dracula propped up throughout Tod Browning's incapacitating drunkenness, depending on which rumor you listen to), and proving just as cunning in charge of the whole visual scheme of a movie as when he was just in charge of lighting it (and while The Mummy's camerawork is officially credited to Charles Stumar, it looks so much like Freund's work in every regard that it seems ridiculous not to speculate that the German master wasn't really dictating all the elements of the image). In Freund's eminently capable hands, The Mummy is the most gloomy, Expressionist of all the Universal films of the '30s, more foreboding and atmospheric than Frankenstein, and easily the equal to the Freund-lensed opening sequence of Dracula, in all its decaying splendor, without having anything resembling Dracula's subsequent lapse into starchy white interiors, overlit with a painfully static camera. It's the difference of a year of technological development and solving the problems of sound filmmaking, that The Mummy has such a more fluid camera than Dracula could dream about, and as Freund has the camera gently sneaking through his sets and moving up tight to the characters in their moments of fear and distress, it all hits much harder than a film of this vintage "ought" to.

Certainly, the film's opening scene benefits enormously from the new freedom available to the filmmakers, and this by itself is possibly the best sequence in American sound horror through the end of 1932. It is the year 1921, and an archaeological dig sponsored by the British Museum has uncovered a particularly wonderful tomb in Egypt, where the disgraced priest Imhotep was buried; it's like nothing that crack archaeologist Sir Joseph Whemple (Arthur Bryon) or Egyptologist Dr. Muller (Edward Van Sloan, playing very nearly the same part he had in Dracula) have ever seen. Imhotep was buried alive, it seems, for some unspeakable sacrilegious crime, and one of the treasures in his tomb is a gold casket marked with stern injunctions against opening it for threat of releasing some curse related to the dead priest's infamy. Muller takes this all very seriously, but Sir Joseph and his assistant Ralph Norton (Bramwell Fletcher) do not, and while Sir Joseph has the superstitious doctor outside, haughtily talking Science this and Intellectual Responsibility that, Ralph is busy cracking open the casket and reading from the seal inside.

Everything up to this point has been terrific: dusty old Egyptian tombs are fine places, all the more with the production having been designed by Hungarian fairy tale illustrator Willy Pogany, who gives it a suitable sense of mythic dread. It is an especially velvety kind of blackness that Freund achieves in suggesting the unseen corners of the tomb, and it's a lovely scene overall, and then in one magnificent whip pan from Imhotep propped up in his coffin to Ralph busily studying the Scroll of Thoth, everyone involve ups their game all the way as high as it will go. For it's here that, slowly, almost painfully, the corpse of Imhotep begins to open its eyes, unseen by Ralph, and now we get to talk about the other two people chiefly responsible for The Mummy being so much better than most '30s horror films: Boris Karloff, a superstar after Frankenstein, as the reincarnated Imhotep, and Jack P. Pierce, the makeup designer whose work done to give Karloff the illusion of desiccated flesh is even better, in my opinion, than his deservedly iconic work designing Frankenstein's monster. The mummy version of Imhotep barely gets any screentime - I haven't timed it, but 90 seconds sounds plausible - but oh my Christ, the impact it makes. When Ralph turns around and starts screaming and then laughing madly at the sight, it seems weirdly plausible that he'd actually be driven insane on the spot, so persuasive is the make-up and the haunted house setting where we see it.

At this point, the movie skips ahead 11 years, and ceases to be quite as good, though still much better than it could have been, all things considered. Briefly, there is a new expedition being headed by Sir Joseph's son Frank (David Manners, playing exactly the same character he played in Dracula, the wet noodle romantic lead), and as it is on the verge of finding absolutely nothing useful, a vaguely menacing Egyptian man with unpleasantly dry, flaky skin named Ardath Bey (Karloff) comes to camp to suggest where the English team can find a terrific find, the tomb of the princess Ankh-es-en-Amon. This dig turns out to be quite a big deal, and it receives a splashy display in the Cairo Museum, where Ardath Bey comes one night after hours. He has with him the same Scroll of Thoth, and he's just about to enact a ritual in front of the mummy of Ankh-es-en-Amon herself, when he's interrupted by a guard. Whatever he did was enough to trigger something in an English-Egyptian resident of Cairo, Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann), who begins to act in odd ways suggesting a certain confusion about who she is or where. As Frank notes upon meeting her at the museum, where she's arrived in a trance, she looks exactly like Ankh-es-en-Amon would have in life, and whatever a viewer in '32 might have thought, a viewer from any year since then immediately grasps that we're dealing with the modern incarnation of the princess's sole, and that Ardath Bey - who is, of course, the same Imhotep, given somewhat more robust flesh - will stop at nothing to capture her, while Frank, aided by his father and Dr. Muller, looks for some way to break the mummy's spell on the woman he fell in love with, by his own admission, because she resembled a preserved corpse.

Not only is this like Dracula in the abstract, several individual scenes recreate, more or less, individual scenes from the earlier movie, and the biggest problem with both films is the same: the relationship between the bland male lead and his romantic interest is not remotely interesting enough to sustain a scene, let alone a feature. And this is enough to keep The Mummy stuck in "oh, it's great! if you like '30s movies" mode, while something like Frankenstein is great, full-stop. Still, it's a huge step up for Universal's horror films: superior to Dracula not just because of Freund's infinitely more successful visuals (even the chatty exposition scenes in the middle have a softer, more withdrawn lighting style than the bright rooms in Dracula), but to the general improvement of the cast as well. Van Sloan, never a great actor, is still a lot less broad and shrill here (that, and there is less of him), and Johann is a terrific leading lady, with a face that doesn't like half-Egyptian, half-anything (she was Romanian), but still looks amazingly different from the usual leading lady. It's rounder, more inquisitive, more attentive, like Claudette Colbert but with angry eyes. She hated movies and got back to theater as soon as possible (at the time of The Mummy, she was married to future legendary Broadway impresario John Houseman, in fact), and she and Freund quarreled endlessly, but none of that shows in her performance, which is otherworldly in just the right degree to really make an impression, unlike the parade of bland female horror movie stars of that and every other generation. She even gets to save herself from peril at the end! Which is a script detail, not an acting one, but it helps to make Helen a more pronounced and interesting character than women in '30s horror usually tended to be.

The clear stand-out - and, my love for Freund notwithstanding, the reason that The Mummy still works so beautifully - is Karloff, whose bandaged-up mummy is a memorable image, but whose stiff, menacing Ardath Bey is a magnificent performance of a tremendously compelling villain. There's none of the plummy charm that he frequently brought to his subsequent villains; Bey is not without wit (which he uses to cutting effect against the blithely imperialistic British characters), but he is without humor, and Karloff's performance is an unimpeachable triumph of presence and restraint. He moves slowly, and methodically, every bit the incompletely-reanimated corpse, but also like a snake, for whom every movement is weighted with great consideration for the final killing strike. It's easily the most menacing performance that I have ever seen the actor give, and one of the great pieces of villainy of the '30s, and for all that lovers of the grotesque might bemoan the short shrift given to the iconic mummy, I think that Karloff's Bey (with some great subtle makeup by Pierce to make his skin look sandy) is such a profoundly effective character that I wouldn't want to trade a frame of it.

There are, of course, ways in which the film shows its age, mostly due to representational matters. There's no way that any 21st Century viewer can comfortably observe the blithe racism of the film's treatment of native Egyptians or the casual assumption that we'll like the white English heroes by default, because they are white and English and busy taking the cultural treasures of North Africa to the civilised countries that can really appreciate them. On a slightly less profound note, the way that archaeology worked in 1921 and 1932 is so different from the way it works today as to be comical; the way that Sir Joseph chats unconcernedly about a millennia-old wooden box falling into pieces in his very hands would be cringe-inducing if it wasn't so darn absurd. Or maybe I have those the wrong way 'round.

So yeah, it's dated. But many films are this dated without this many compensating factors, and for a movie made so early into America's dalliance with horror, The Mummy is a ridiculously confident, sophisticated piece of filmmaking.

Reviews in this series
The Mummy (Freund, 1932)
The Mummy's Hand (Cabanne, 1940)
The Mummy's Tomb (Young, 1942)
The Mummy's Ghost (Le Borg, 1944)
The Mummy's Curse (Goodwins, 1944)
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (Lamont, 1955)

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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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THE INTERNET IS FOR PORN

I think that I tend to root for Joseph Gordon-Levitt in most things, being as he is a largely talented (though at times unadventurous) actor with an apparent desire to do off-kilter things on the grounds that art is better off when things are interesting. I also tend to find actors-turned-directors to have a really problematic and limited sense of what movies are beyond flat panels where actors say lines, so the knowledge that Gordon-Levitt was making his feature debut as director and screenwriter with Don Jon has, in general, left me with a big steaming plate of trepidation.

The good news first: Don Jon is pretty okay. Maybe even better than that, though it suffers from JGL-the-director being so concerned with how he was putting together his film that he let JGL-the-actor get a little bit out of control, while also putting his name to a film that has so, so many ideas, and it makes sure that you see the work that went into fleshing out each and every single one of them. Let us say, for starters, the Gordon-Levitt obviously has an affection for the filmmakers of the French New Wave, and has hungrily copied much of their playbook with perhaps more energy than discipline. Percussively-edited repetition of lines, images, and moments have their place in this story, which is presented from the opening narration as the story of a man who thrives on uninterrupted patterns and routine (the film comes to us as a comedy about porn addiction, but the secret hiding in plain sight is that the main character is probably suffering from some kind of undiagnosed compulsive disorder), but instead of drawing attention to the main character's psychological state, the style tends for the most part to draw attention first to itself. The result is a film with tense, ironic energy in the way that scenes flow and shots collide, but in a way that feels a bit overfamiliar and safe, like this is the way you're "meant" to tell this kind of story.

That story, by the way, doesn't make Gordon-Levitt's job any easier, since as screenwriter, he's trying to cover an awful lot of ground that (not that he's looking to me for career advice, but as I stop to ponder this all, I really do wish that he'd started off with a screenplay for someone else to direct, before diving headlong into two new and daunting tasks at once). Don Jon is, depending on the scene and even the specific lines within the scene, a story of an entitled jackass being confronted with himself and obliged to become more of a decent human being; an arch, hip romantic comedy about the way that sex and relationships work today (though it strikes me that the film reveals a certain mid-'00s level of technological savvy that betrays the author of the mid-to-late-20s characters as being, himself, five years older than they are; a critical five years it is, too); a dramedy about how people can be crippled by addiction into lives of shallow routine and comfort; a lazy parody of New Jersey (or perhaps a brilliantly subversive parody of how New Jersey is portrayed in the media, but I think that's pushing it - sometimes, you need a douchey bro in your picture, and the easiest way to put that over is "New Jersey guido"); and a satire of the way that women are depicted in American popular culture as readily available sex objects. Perhaps its my ideological bias showing if I confess that I thought that the last of these was the most effective element, and I wish it made up more of the whole after a terrific opening montage that finds no culturally meaningful distinction between pornography and the virtually nonexistent outfits worn by women in advertising and entertainment; though perhaps it's because this thread is explored so briefly that it works so consistently.

That's a lot of different thematic concerns to drive after over the course of just 90 minutes, even for a seasoned veteran, and if nothing else, Gordon-Levitt's ambition is faultless. The execution is almost inevitably wobbly, starting with the director's own performance, and especially his performance of the omnipresent voiceover narration, which sounds like a completely different accent than the one the actor uses for his onscreen appearances, and is even more cartoonish and aggravating. That's quite an achievement, given that Gordon-Levitt's take on New Jersey masculinity as the titular Jon is so broad and loud, going beyond "this man is, himself, a shallow cartoon version of a human being" into "I have completely forgotten how to modulate". The performance underneath that accent is largely fine, with the character's voluminous privilege and self-regard feeling settled and lived-in, and his unexpected bolt of high romanticism giving him actual pleasure as an emotional novelty, above and beyond the pleasure of romance itself. But when the surfaces are as much a liability as they are in this case, subtle undercurrents aren't worth as much.

Thankfully, almost everyone else in the cast is better, with Tony Danza's own brand of "Ayyyyyy, waddafuck, Im from Noo Joyrsee here" bombast as Jon's dad, while suggesting a genetic component to being an alarming exaggeration of Jersey Shore stereotypes, being the chief element contained within that "almost". In fact, what occurs to me only now, and makes me wonder if there's something deliberate to it, is that the great performance in Don Jon are all given by women: Glenne Headley as Jon's ebullient mother, full of love and tacky condescension is the good version of Danza's performance; Brie Larson, as his silent, phone-addicted sister, has a part that telegraphs itself too neatly (she so conspicuously doesn't speak that it would have been a fatal shock if she didn't get to utter a single line of film-clarifying wisdom in the last third), but the actress salvages it with priceless reaction shots and body language - she's the funniest thing about a movie that keeps wondering exactly how funny it wants to commit to being.

The real treasures here, though are Julianne Moore and Scarlett Johansson; the former as a classmate of Jon's at night school who provides the movie with its one incarnation of warm, messy humanism, the first time that this movie of lust and passion actually shows us a person with authentic, emotional desires; it's an awkward, sweet character that Moore carries off perfectly, and if the weird final act works at all, it is almost solely because Moore has such immense warmth about her in this part, even at her weirdest and most confounding, that we can totally believe the choices made by multiple characters that seem entirely contrary to how real people behave. Still, she can't begin to wrest away Best in Show honors from Johansson, whose work is, simply, one of the best acts of character creation of 2013. She plays, to begin with, a flawless embodiment of the shrill, gaudy New Jersey princess as imagined by all Americans in their darkest moments of Jersey-hating: a gum-smacking, nasal, mouth-breathing sort of figure almost too terrible for words. And then, having done this, she finds every gesture, every little smile and smirk, every unexpectedly ingenious line reading that the part affords, to takes this cartoon and make her seem alive, affectionate, likable, and bright. That is, to play a caricature and also a totally believable and attractive person at the same time. And then she navigates a script that presents her character as a function of Jon's perspective, so that her expressed personality and mood in any given moment is more about his psychology than hers. It's a magnificent achievement in all ways. Don Jon is fun and witty throughout, but it only completely comes to life in sharp, dazzling ways every time Johansson comes onscreen, and when was the last time we could say that about this actor?

The rest of the film absolutely does not, and probably can not live up to that performance. It's frequently smart and too-frequently slick; it challenges male self-regard in ways that are funny and not haranguing, without being so subtle as the Gordon-Levitt vehicle (500) Days of Summer that it can be easily misread; it lapses into stock jokes and over reliance on the word "fuck" to snatch a nervous titter out of the audience more than it should. It is, in a nutshell, a "promising debut", the kind that you like without finding any way to love, and with just enough undisciplined style that you long to see the same thing with a bit more merciless self-editing involved. Still, though, movies that skewer the male gaze with a sense of humor precisely pitched to make the males its skewering the most enthusiastic fan of the results aren't exactly ten to a penny, and Don Jon sociology is unique enough to wash away at least some of its sins of execution.

7/10

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THE FUTURE IS NOT NOW

It's been two months since I previewed the new Antagony & Ecstasy site that I've been tinkering with, and I've gotten a lot of good feedback since then. Thanks to everyone who shared thoughts, concerns, compliments, and suggestions, and I think it's come a long way toward being the best experience for all concerned (though it has a way to go).

That being said, it was never meant to be a live replacement in its current state; in fact, I had all along meant to close it down at the start of September. But now the time has come to say "good-bye, new site", and the next time you all see it, it's going to be the fully complete, totally functional version of my sweetest dreaming.

(I mostly don't want to have to figure out how to incorporate my Chicago Film Fest reviews into the new format yet, so I'm shutting the lights off before that becomes an active issue).

I do not have the slightest idea when this will happen, but at the rate I've been going so far, I think 2016 is a good solid target.

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)

An earlier version of this review can be found here.

A couple of years ago, I encountered the argument somewhere on the internet - I cannot find it again, alack, for it is a difficult thing to search for and not encounter porn - that long tracking shots are an inherently masculine act of cinematography. Essentially, that the complexity involved, and the invariably showy results, are nothing so much as dick-measuring by male directors and male cinematographers who want to prove how tough and awesome they are to other males. And certainly, if you look at the many epic-length shots in the career of that great chronicler of American maledom, Martin Scorsese, or the works of such male-centered directors as Brian De Palma and Paul Thomas Anderson, there's something to it..

If this theory holds any water at all - and I think it does, though not in the necessarily reductive form in which I've just presented it - then Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 message thriller Children of Men is the thickest, veiniest, most throbbing erect cock in the history of cinema. Its greatest takes are not merely long, they are marathons; they do not merely track, but go in and out and around structures and vehicles like they were made of rice paper. I have at multiple times, and in complete earnestness, described it as a movie primarily about camera movement, production design, and the relationship between the two. Which has not been very helpful to the people asking me what the film's plot contained, but that's just how I see it: any ol' movie can be a "what if?" investigation into an especially original post-apocalyptic scenario, but only Children of Men is about the physical world where that scenario plays out, as depicted by the single best act of cinematography of the 21st Century. And not just because of the long takes, though one in particular is potentially the most technically sophisticated shot of the decade. As is is wont, Emmanuel Lubezki does good things with the lighting and color palette creating an overall tone of "decaying yellow" that suits the film just fine.

Adapted by Cuarón and a small army of screenwriters from P.D. James's novel, the film takes place in 2027, in London, 18 years after the last human was born. With human fertility having mysteriously blinked out of existence, the species has been plunged into a world-wide depression that served to intensify all the worst tendencies of life at the time the Bad Thing happened, which primarily means for our purposes that Great Britain has turned into an all-out police state, and on the lifeless November day that it opens, the government's plan to remove all foreign-born refugees is in its last stages. This has met with some pushback from the handful of people with enough optimism left to give a shit about maintaining human dignity and freedom, with the biggest anti-government group in the country going under the name of "Fish", and perpetrating - so the government claims - a series of terrorist bombings. One of these occurs in the movie's opening scene, minutes after the announcement comes along that the 18-year-old youngest human being alive was stabbed to death, and seconds after a particularly given-up sad-sack named Theo Faron (Clive Owen) exited the coffee shop where the bomb exploded.

I'm disinclined to go any deeper than that, because if you've seen it, it would be redundant, and if you haven't, A) fucking go do it, and B) there are fun surprises in store. Also, I will be littering this review with spoilers. Let us be content to suggest that the film is about the restoration of hope and faith in a world where those things are in short supply, and in the particular figure of a man who especially doesn't have either of those things. In 2006, it was an outright commentary on the encroaching authoritarianism being felt in America and Britain in the middle of that decade, but as time has gone by, far enough that the movie's biggest single prediction has obviously failed to come true, a lot of what comes out most strongly is the film's impossibly rich emotional landscape; as a friend of mine recently suggested (and this is a PARTICULARLY HEFTY SPOILER, BUT WHY HAVEN'T YOU SEEN THIS MOVIE YET? GAWD), it's the happiest ending any film could have in which you can see the protagonist's corpse in the final shot.

Incredibly, I find that familiarity and some time away (this was, in fact, the first time I'd watched the movie since its 2009 deadline passed) have convinced me that Children of Men is even deeper and more complex and vividly humanistic than I'd given it credit for when it was new, and that was a hell of a lot of credit. The reveal of the pregnant Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), executed with a long hold on Theo's dumbfounded face as non-diegetic symphonic music flows up and down the soundtrack, is an overt heartstring-puller, but it works, dear Christ, it works so well. And of course the ending, with its sad and hopeful gestures pulsing in tandem, and that wonderful little snippet of children laughing over black; it leaves me a wreck. It has always left me a wreck.

Also it reminds me that this most profoundly visual of movies both opens and closes with audio over a black screen, and this is particularly cunning in the beginning, as the film unrolls its cavalcade of the very best world-building in the last 15 years of cinema. Children of Men takes place in an incredibly specific reality, and one that could trigger a lot of bullshit alarms, what Cuarón and company do to usher us past the suspension of disbelief traps is to show us the world working, and pitching information at as from the side, frequently not commenting on some very important details and trusting that because those details are in frame or on the soundtrack, we will become aware of them. Even the central idea of infertility is played off this way: first we learn that Baby Diego was the world's youngest person. Then we learn that he was 18 years old. The script lets us put two and two together, not explicitly stating "people can't have babies" until a crackpot old hippie played by Michael Caine says it in the context of a joke. It does this visually, too: the incredibly precise production design is full of rich details that are right there for the picking, piles of dead cattle, worn-out technology, a lack of new artwork, and signs of barely visible police surveillance all around.

And so we come back to the camera movement, and to my notion that Children of Men is chiefly about marrying that movement to production design; and saying it that way makes it sound shallow and spectacular, like a downer Avatar, and that's not so at all. For one thing, the physical space, the story, and the themes are all inseparable: in order to make a film about the triumph of hope, it is necessary to establish hopelessness, and this is something that Cuarón, Lubezki, and designers Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland do incredibly well. Any given set in Children of Men, worn-out, jerry-rigged, and crumbling, instantly communicates the idea that the people living in it have completely given up hope.

To fully communicate what they want to, the filmmakers have to immerse us deep into their film, and that's what makes this such a tremenous achievement: the way that the constantly moving camera, crossing through doors and gazing out car windows, creates a sense of total spatial unity, emphasising how all of the elements of the mise en scène exist in a connected, organic way (oddly, it's the exact opposite of what the car window shots did in the director's previous Y tu mamá también, where the point was to stress the characters' isolation from the world around them). This is the main purpose of the first of the film's three most showy tracking shots, the one that opens the film and goes inside, around, from close-up to wide, and all in a way that tells us so much about the tenor of this society just by the way it's laid out. There's also plenty of clever storytelling done with the camera movement: a woman in a black hood is carried off screen left by the tracking movement, which proceeds to cross over several dead bodies laid neatly in a line, a sickening but hugely successful visual punchline.

I mentioned three great showy tracking shots; the other two are a bit more well-known and frequently-discussed, but let's just touch on them. To end with, there's the legendary 6-minute "shot" (stitched together digitally; you can tell when because drops of stage blood on the lens disappear), which carries us into the depths of a collapsing slum during a firefight, in which the constant movement and our awareness of it plays into the sense of chaos and danger, making for one of the most breathlessly exciting action sequences of the last ten years (so it's not all brainy shit). The middle one, and my favorite, starts inside a car and ends up outside of it, with quite a lot of ridiculously specific choreography dribbled in, and what I love about this is that unlike the other camera movements in the film, this isn't about unity of space, but unity of time; we're seeing, without the cushion of editing, how a situation can turn from neutral to warm to panicked to tragic in just a handful of seconds, and it is, if anything, even more tense and heightened than the six-minute tracking shot through a gun battle.

The brilliance of Children of Men isn't its technical accomplishment, though. Nor is it the way that the scenario tells a richly involving emotional story, nor the cutting political commentary and demand that the audience seriously considers what kind of world we want to live in. It is the way that it cannot be anything of these things without being the others as well, and how the piercing emotional highs of the film could only be created by this cut to that beat of acting, which is captured by this close in on that part of the scene. It's a perfect movie. There. Done.

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