MARCH 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

This has been an odd winter so far: enormous hits that weren't supposed to be, movies that looked like they were going to be terrible turning out pretty decent (e.g. Kingsman, which I finally saw and will be reviewing sometime today). So it's probably smart to admit that you never can tell, and even though there's not a single wide-release film that I'm looking forward to in March, I'll bet at least one of them turns out to surprise me.


6.3.2015

I'll also bet that it's not Chappie, which finds Neil Blomkamp (whose career, ever since the last third of District 9, has been an experiment in the art of diminishing returns) cross-cutting Short Circuit with a dour post-Nolan action movie. I lack the imaginative capacity to envision this turning out well, though it's never the wrong choice to put Sigourney Weaver in your genre film. So that's at least one thing to look forward to.

Even so, it's at least the most ambitious-looking film of a rough lot, that also finds Vince Vaughn, Dave Franco, and for some inscrutable reason Tom Wilkinson drugging and cursing and sexing their way across Europe in Unfinished Business. I am not much of a Vaughn fan in the best circumstances, and this is plainly not. Also, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is here to remind us that grandmas like to see movies too, and I need to finally stop dragging my heels on catching up with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Perhaps I will do them as a blog double feature. Because if I suffer, I will make damn sure you suffer with me.


13.3.2015

The first time Disney made a live-action version of one of their animated classics, they had Glenn Close play iconic villain Cruella De Vil. The second time, they had Angelina Jolie play iconic villain Maleficent. And now, they're having Cate Blanchett play rather less iconic villain Lady Tremaine in their new Cinderella, which is where the logic totally loses me. It's like, literally, just a re-skinning of Disney's 1950 animated feature in live-action, without songs with one of our greatest actors playing the wicked stepmother. And, I am sure, doing a kickass job of it; but why bother? Money, obviously, but why really bother? But then, Cinderella is my least favorite of all Disney's princess films, so I clearly don't fit into the target audience.

I am, though, in the target audience for a film in which Badass Liam Neeson and Badass Ed Harris square off, and yet Run All Night looks intensely boring and formulaic in every aspect that isn't those two men being in the same action movie. Especially with Joel Kinnaman in there, all mediocring the place up.

Lastly, I don't usually mention limited releases in these previews, but if you're going to be in a place to see It Follows, you should do so.


20.3.2015

Franchises that feel obligated to messily include their series name in the official title have given us the plainness of The Hunger Games: Whatever and the relative elegance of The Twilight Saga: Whatever Else. But there's something especially charming about the crass functionality of The Divergent Series: Insurgent. Given how fucking useless Divergent was, I expect it to be the solitary element of the film that I shall ever describe as "charming". Fingers crossed for more decent Chicago location porn.

Doggedly attempting to serve as counter-programming, we find this kind of action message movie thing called The Gunman, with Sean Penn as a military contractor. I don't even know. The trailer already practically put me to sleep. Also Do You Believe? is, tragically, not a biopic of late-period Cher, but one of those bleak movies that panders to Evangelical Christian audiences, rubbing their noses in how they're not allowed to enjoy actual movies with actual production value.


27.3.2015

I find myself in the peculiar position of hoping that Home, a ghastly-looking animated sci-fi comedy, manages to become a big hit, because it's sort of the case that the entire future of DreamWorks Animation rests on it turning a profit. And while DreamWorks and I have had our differences - we have, in fact, had virtually nothing but, save for the movies with the words "Dragon" or "Panda" in their title - the landscape of Hollywood studio animation is more vital with DWA alive and kicking than with them dead.

Oh, and Get Hard, your title is an erection joke. Good for you.

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BEST SHOT: THE SOUND OF MUSIC

It's that time again: that marvelous, wonderful time of year when Nathaniel R, guiding light of the Film Experience, invites all the internet to play along with Hit Me with Your Best Shot. The rules are simple: he picks a movie, you pick a single shot you want to talk about, and the result is a cavalcade of different opinions about an individual and we all learn many things. Seriously, even if you don't have a blog or tumblr or anything, it's worth starting one just to play along here. It is the most fun thing I do with this website of mine.

Anyway, season six kicks off with The Sound of Music, a monster behemoth of box office dominance that has only been matched a scant handful of times in the history of cinema, celebrating its 50th anniversary this week. I reviewed it not so very long ago - just two days shy of seven months ago, and my word, but that Hollywood Century thing made 2014 feel like a weird blur to me, now that I'm reflecting on it. But the point is, my thoughts on it are fresh enough that the second Nathaniel announced the title, I had a pretty clear sense of where I wanted to go with it.

It's easy to ding the film for its unrestrained sweetness and sentimentality, but there's a bit more nuance to it than that. This is easily the most sinewy and challenging and successful adaptation of a Rodgers & Hammerstein show to film, fixing narrative holes all over and generally stressing the grave historical context for its story more than the stage version ever did. Even though The Sound of Music has historical illiteracy built into its skeleton to a degree where no fully historical version could ever truly exist.

My point being: no matter how treacly and upbeat and Favorite Thingsy the movie gets, it still ends up reverting to the mean of Nazism. And that's what always seemed to salvage it from its alleged syrupy tackiness, to me: it presents little lessons of being able to find some way to keep going on in the face of nothing all that bad (thunderstorms), and then in the face of things that are actually, yes, kind of rough (dad is a joyless martinet), all as a way of getting to the big test case: is it possible to remain positive about life and humans staring right in the face of the most effectively anti-human organisation in the 20th Century, if not the entirety of Western history? The Sound of Music, perhaps too innocently, perhaps too easily, believes that it is.

And that's how we get to my shot.

Captain Georg von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) has just performed the Austrian patriotic anthem "Edelweiss" (that is to say, the film has previously established it as a patriotic anthem; it is, of course, a fully American invention), an act that we understand to be politically dangerous but not quite illegal yet; the Anschluß isn't quite done yet. But von Trapp has still gone out in the face of a whole mess of Nazis and Nazi-sympathising Austrians, and said, "fuck your toxic beliefs" in song. He does this in the bright glare of a solitary spotlight, surrounded by black, and as he's done, his beatific wife Maria (Julie Andrews), and his seven children come out to join him for the applause. And then we get this wide shot, of the Family von Trapp, banded together, encased in a tiny bubble of light surrounded by all that darkness, all those people who can't be distinguished, friend from foe, patriot from collaborator.

There are not all that many places where director Robert Wise (who did not care for his material in making this film) was able to sneak in a subdued grace note amidst all the ebullience and opulence and surface charm, but he damn sure did it here. Throughout, the film proudly declares itself to be a tribute to family banding together in love, but it doesn't always quite have a sense of what the stakes of banding together might entail; in this one shot, chilly and lonely but also visually anchored by stability and familial warmth, it absolutely nails it. I do not dispute that The Sound of Music is sentimental; images like this one are how it justifies that sentiment.

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BITTERSWEET SYMPHONY

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

Throughout his career, director Kim Jee-woon has been an unapologetic generic magpie, unified only in that whether he's making a psycho-thriller like A Tale of Two Sisters, an absurdist Western like The Good, the Bad, the Weird, or even an American-made action film that fumblingly tries to serve as a comeback vehicle for a retired star, like The Last Stand, he's always primarily making character dramas. The generic elements inform the way that psychological arcs develop, but they are never more important than the basic, driving question: who are these characters, and why do they make the decisions they do?

And on those grounds, it might even be the case that A Bittersweet Life, Kim's 2005 follow-up to his big breakthrough A Tale of Two Sisters, is the director's masterpiece. It's mostly a standard-issue revenge thriller set in the world of Korean gangsters, which is hardly a slight: for something so tawdry on paper, the Korean revenge thriller genre has produced a remarkable number of genuinely great films. But that also means it's easy to think you know what's going on with it, and that's not the case. Sure, the basic story about mob enforcer Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun) ending up on the wrong side of both opposing factions in a gangster war when he decides to commit an act of mercy in the name of love, proceeds much as it ought to, and even its plot twists seem "right" for it, without any dumbfounding shocks. But it is also far more about what's happening inside Sun-woo's head as this brutally efficient criminal finds himself nudged away from his own life long enough to see it from outside, and finds that it is not making him a terribly happy person. It is, you might even say, making him bittersweet, though you probably shouldn't and neither should I, since the actual Korean title translates more simply as "The Sweet Life". And is thus ironic instead of moody.

There'll be time enough to dig into that, so let me first clarify that A Bittersweet Life is still, chiefly, an action thriller in its design, and for entire scenes that's the mode that dominates. So it's a good thing that it's also an extremely good action thriller, with some absolutely tremendous sequences littered here and there, and the best saved for last. The director and his cinematographer, Kim Ji-yong, employ a very fluid, loose, lithe style of camera movement that tends to glide along with the action and accentuate the movement and impact of it, without turning into John Woo-esque ballets of violence. In fact, the film maintains one steady foothold in a realistic aesthetic that's grounded far beyond the ordinary standards of most action films - or most Korean genre cinema that I know of, frankly. It is, somehow, both shiny and grainy at the same time, full of strong lighting and fully saturated colors that have unnerving presence and authenticity. The texture of the film's innards is profoundly real and tangible, which gives its burly attention to its violent outbursts an added weight. It's not necessarily the case that the action itself is more exciting as a result; but it certainly ends up feeling more tightly knitted to the film's psychological intentions. Sun-woo, living in a more realistic world, is affected more realistically by the brutal actions he witnesses and perpetrates.

Which really is what it always comes down to. It would be giving the film too much credit to compare it to the best of Jean-Pierre Melville, but that's very much the territory that Kim is mining: a man is sick of himself and his world, and the film has a kind of hyper-present presentation of that world. For Melville, this tended towards glossy ennui; for A Bittersweet Life, it's more like a series of increasingly enervating adrenaline rushes, leaving the movie feeling a bit more worn and tattered every time. And, of course, leaving Sun-woo feeling worn. There's much that's great about the movie, but it's hard to imagine it having quite the same impact without Lee in the lead role; there are layers and layers that keep shifting their orders in his performance, sometimes an angry, hard killer; sometimes a sad romantic, sometimes a noble soul trying his best to be brave and moral and even, in the most unexpected places, optimistic. It's immaculately rounded and not at all stuck in the basic track of honor and tension that animates even the best gangster movie performances, though those things are present. Given the film's hoary inciting incident, the old "a beautiful woman melt's the thug's heart" sequence that absolutely wins no points for imagination or subtlety, I might even go so far as to say that the film's ability to feel human and not dimwitted and corny relies solely on Lee's ability to sell Sun-woo as a closet romantic, and make it clear just what an impact, down to his very core, this one woman has on him, and do those things without making a play for us to sympathise with him as a romantic lead. Basically, he has to underplay everything while expressing some very subtle, non-verbal cues as to how his character is re-evaluating himself because he fell in love - I'm honestly not even sure how that works, and yet Lee does it like it's no big deal at all.

Compared to the best of its genre from around the same time - these were the years of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, and Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder, which between them set the bar inordinately high for Korean crime thrillers in the mid-'00s - it would be difficult to argue that A Bittersweet Life is necessarily one of the best out there, either stylistically (it is handsome, but in a somewhat conventional way), nor narratively (it focuses on unusual and enlightening aspects of broadly generic story elements). But it might very well be the case that Sun-woo is the most interesting character, and Lee's the most complex performance, to be found in any even superficially similar film of that generation. It's enough to give the film a clear personality and totally unique perspective that help it to stand out even in an crowded field of largely impressive thrillers. The worst things about it are still awfully solid, and the best things are deep and probing far beyond what you'd ever naturally expect from a film of this model, and it's quite a special treat because of it.

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THE BACK OF BEYOND

This review is dedicated to Father Chris J., whose dogged persistence in wanting me to review this movie has been incredible - and entirely justified, as I have finally learned.

Beyond the Black Rainbow is the sort of film that makes one badly want to start listing out all its apparent influences and the other movies it's copying from. Not as a way of proving that writer-director Panos Cosmatos's solitary feature to date is derivative, but the exact opposite - as a way of finding some way to get one's hands fully around the unrelentingly strange and inexplicable thing, making some first effort to crack open the Oh my God, what was this?-ness of it. You know, be able to happily declare that this bit here is reminiscent of Michael Mann's The Keep (a conscious influence Cosmatos acknowledges), that bit there of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (which he does not). Unluckily, one of the most clear-cut influences, or at least one of the best comparisons, is the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky, which is less a clarification of what, exactly, the film is going on about, and more a good way to generally indicate the specific flavor of dazzling inscrutability it favors.

Duly recapping the plot isn't much good either, since it suggests a level of concrete stability that's not really at play, but let's go for it anyway: as we see in an opening film reel, Dr. Mercurio Arboria (Scott Hylands) founded an institute in the 1960s which he named after himself, dedicated to bridging the caps between psychology and spirituality. By 1983, Arboria is now run by Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers), a tetchy and dark figure in all the ways that Dr. Arboria was idealistic and warm. Nyle's chief interest is a young woman named Elena (Eva Allan), whom he keeps in a foggy state in near-isolation in a softly-lit white room. Here, he interrogates her on a routine basis, not for an apparent interest in learning anything beyond how to push her buttons, and possibly how to trigger and exploit her psychic capabilities.

That being said, the appeal of Beyond the Black Rainbow lives entirely within the ways that its scenario is reflected and explored through its visuals and Jeremy Schmidt's droning music, and not really how that scenario develops as a narrative (which is for the record, largely trite when it's not befuddling). Like Jodorowsky, or Andrei Tarkovsky in his explicit genre films, Cosmatos is playing a game here of making emotional states and philosophical concepts concrete by means of visuals. Insofar as it is a film about the mental condition of being drugged into a state of confusion and inability to express oneself - and having slept on it, I think that's the best I've got - it depicts that through a series of heavily stylised and impenetrable shots that use color and focus to convey abstract feeling. And thus, like Jodorowsky, the film sits on a line between the categories of "narrative" and "experimental" film that's hard to parse. It's not always totally successful in splitting the difference - its late lunge towards psycho killer horror is odd, to say the least - but invariably fascinating and stunningly visual. I do not say "beautiful", since part of the film's conceit is to lather everything in a grainy, broken-down look that suggests a piece of '70s psychedelia that unnervingly accurately predicted the fashion of the 1980s, and hasn't been seen since the solitary, ratty print was passed around in underground film circles.

But oh, how very striking it is in every way. The film uses enormous solid swatches of colored lighting, reds and blues mostly, which create intense and discomfiting feelings of artifice and wrongness, especially when combined with the massively interesting faces of Rogers and Allan - the former, in particular, has a wan appearance that suggests Christian Bale playing a dessicated tortoise, and it's a very appropriate fit for his inhuman excitement about turning his dull-eyed prisoner into a lab experiment. At other times, the film blasts out white and the palest of blues, which in combination with cinematographer Norm Li's fearlessly soft, shallow focus, offers the sense that the film is attempting to dissolve itself. The bold colors tend to center on Nyle, the whites on Elena, giving the whole film something of a codebook for reading itself: the one figure is otherworldly, Expressionistic terror, the other is diffuse and barely able to cling to a sense of distinct self. The contrast between these visual modes drives what I think to be the film's theme, though I concede that I'm guessing a little bit: attempting to define and explore the limitless potential and indestructibility of the human psyche by means of confining and destroying it leads only to cruelty and madness for all involved.

Not everything that Beyond the Black Rainbow does well is limited to camerawork and lighting: it has some wonderfully peculiar mise en scène, on top of it, a clear nod to the geometry of '70s sci-fi in things like the triangular prism Nyle uses to control Elena's mind. And there's a little bit of body horror in things like the reveal of certain characters' true appearances - one scene of a body disassembling itself predicting the three-years-younger Under the Skin so closely that I'm convinced that there has to be some degree of influence there (in fact, Under the Skin echoes Beyond the Black Rainbow more than a couple of times, and it's difficult for me to imagine a fan of the more popular 2013 film not responding to this one in somewhat similar terms) - or just plain normal horror in some of the dreamiest slasher-style killings I've seen in a 21st Century movie. And then there are things I can't even define, like the flashback to 1966 and a psychic breakdown - in all senses of "psychic" - that takes the form of an explosive short film of pure horror imagery cut together with balletic editing and camera, something like a tour of Hell's art gallery.

I'm tremendously excited by everything happening in this film, which is, as such things go, a success; though it's honestly hard for me to imagine how something so deliberately abstruse and driven by making short-term emotional impact over and over again for almost two hours could be a "failure" on its own terms, short of being boring. And that is certainly not the case. Still, it could not be any less idiosyncratic and willfully off-putting, and nothing this visually conceptual would ever manage to be generally well-liked outside of a tiny population of self-selecting viewers. It's anchored too deeply in genre to feel like a pure art film, but absolutely not enough of a conventional narrative to work as a genre film; it is a film for people who might call Stalker their favorite movie of all time if only it were more opaque. So, you know, a little audience, but a passionate one.

And of course, it's from Canada. Goddammit, Canada, always making the most fascinating and complicated horror and thriller movies all the time.

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WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

On paper, everything about The DUFF seems calculated to make it seem like the most dire of slogs, beginning with its capitalisationally overdetermined, visually ugly title. And it only gets worse upon learning that said title is a slang term (which feels like it probably doesn’t actually exist in the wild) meaning Designated Ugly Fat Friend, and that it is in reference to a character played by Mae Whitman, who could only conceivably be accused of being ugly or fat accordingly to the dysfunctionally narrow range of acceptable female body types allowed by Hollywood.

Surprisingly, if not out-and-out miraculously, The DUFF is not at all the ungainly miscarriage it seems like it not merely could have been, but that, in fact, it absolutely had to be. It is, in fact, a rather intelligent high school comedy, not entirely flawless, and clearly the work of grown-up filmmakers trying to fake it like they know more than they actually do about how The Kids These Days use the Twitter and the Snapchat and the iPad (and then, to cheat even more, they build a totally helpless and out-of-touch school principal into the plot, played by the always-excellent but under-used Romany Malco). But it’s got strong bones and snappy dialogue, and it feels more aware of how people behave (if not specifically teenagers, necessarily) than most of its genre. It’s the best such film I’ve personally seen since Easy A, a film it copies in several particulars: it’s neither squeamish nor prurient in its acknowledgement that teenagers have sex, it relies on well-positioned adult character actors - Malco, Allison Janney, even the usually insufferable Ken Jeong in an unexpectedly grounded career peak - to help build a frame around its game but green young cast, and it’s ultimately built on the bedrock of a magnificent, perfectly-timed comic performance by a woman who almost entirely by herself makes the entire film more sophisticated than it xis, if you follow me. And if The DUFF can do for Whitman’s career what Easy A did for Emma Stone’s then it is a valuable motion picture, indeed.

The basic concept at the heart of the film is that Bianca Piper (Whitman) is disgusted by the thought, presented by her asshole jock neighbor Wesley Rush (Robbie Amell) that she is the “DUFF” of her trio - not, herself, ugly nor fat, but far less attractive than her BFFs Casey (Bianca A. Santos) and Jess (Skyler Samuels), and thus the one who acts as gatekeeper to all the boys who really want to ask one of them out. And this disgust turns into a passionate desire to reinvent herself, and in so doing gin up the confidence to finally approach her crush, Toby (Nick Eversman). Thus she makes a deal with Wes: if he helps her to be less of a doormat, she’ll help him to not flunk out of chemistry. And so they become constant companions and friends, earning Bianca the wrath of Wes’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Madison (Bella Thorne), the most popular but also the cruelest girl in school.

It doesn’t take too long to figure out the overall shape of the thing if not every specific detail it takes to get there, but originality is not generally the goal of romcoms. And whatever lack of suspense enters the proceedings the instant we realise that Wes is transparently crushing on Bianca, the film survives it without too much strain, partially because the actors have the right kind of chemistry in the right directions, and because screenwriter Josh A. Cagan, adapting Kody Keplinger’s novel, wisely takes the more Hitchcockian tack of making the tension within the plot about the characters figuring out what we already know, instead of trying to pretend that we haven’t already heard this one and have no idea what’s going on.

The result is a likable, unchallenging, but largely satisfying number about people who work well together figuring that fact out, while also making the important (if resoundingly clichéd) discovery that being yourself matter more than wedding yourself into a role that society has decreed. The path by which this is navigated has perils, and film struggles through some of them: the whole third act keeps tripping over gooey, film-killing pauses to re-word the final speech from The Breakfast Club around the basic idea that everyone is somebody else’s DUFF. And we know that the film is aware of The Breakfast Club, which was referenced and re-worked to much better effect in the opening sequence, which attempts to ironically grapple with the way that 2010s teenagers filter their identity through the pithy, sound-bitey culture of social media (which, again, feels like adults are responsible for it, not anyone who actually knows a teen; though there’s an extended riff on the word “amassable” that’s pretty delightful). So the film begins and middles far better than it ends: the comedy is spritelier, the visuals and use of graphic elements far more inventive, and the pace breezier. Director Ari Sandel is good at comedy and snark, and not so good at heart. But if we were to throw out every movie that had a rocky ending, we’d hardly have any left.

And for the most part, The DUFF is a top-notch midwinter treat: visually creative in the way it literalises social network technology, given a comfortable assortment of good lines, just twisty enough in its predetermined romcom march that it doesn't feel lazy. And Whitman is a treasure: able to make wretched self-pity seem funny, and self-confident enough in her carriage and expressions - not a trace of Ann Veal to be seen - that she manages to put an ironic spin on being thought ugly or fat, and thus saves the movie from any feeling of toxicity on that front. She's absolutely terrific, giving a wry, knowing attitude to her character and the film, and turning The DUFF from a modestly amusing comedy to a genuine success. It's not perfect, but it's goddamn close for February.

7/10

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DANES OF DEATH

If the 2014 taught us all just one lesson, I'd like it to be that Eva Green is an international treasure. It's one thing to be, allegedly, the one spot of pure bright light in the TV show Penny Dreadful (of which I have not seen a single episode), but quite another to survive two different Frank Miller-related comic adaptations with her dignity as a human and woman intact, particularly when both of those films demanded extensive, inconsequential nudity. Survive and, indeed, provide such vitality to the barren rocks of the script and the filmmaking and the whole rest of the cast that she manages to make 300: Rise of an Empire into a movie that I actually feel okay about recommending to people.

By no means is it as impressive to save a Danish art Western as to make 302 into something with any merits whatsoever; but here in The Salvation, what do you know, Green is once again the best thing about a movie that, frankly, doesn't have any right to be as much of a boondoggle as has turned out to be the case. And this while playing a character whose tongue was cut out, and so she is only able to use her flaming eyes and tensed-up shoulders to do all her work.

Certainly, the rest of the film isn't as dire as all that - if nothing else, Mads Mikkelsen is strong, though not unusually so, as the grim-faced hero - but if anything, the individually strong elements of the movie all feel like they should add up to something much more than the whole. The film is your basic tragic revenge job: one day in the 1870s Century, a Danish immigrant who has settled in the American West, Jon (Mikkelsen), along with his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt) eagerly await the arrival, after seven years, of Jon's wife Marie (Nanna Øland Fabricius) and young son Kresten (Toke Lars Bjarke), left behind when the brothers fled Denmark after serving on the losing side of the Second Schleswig War. And all seems like it should be happy struggle to carve out a home in the New World, except that the family's stagecoach also boasts a pair of obviously bad ruffians, who spend a little time insinuating and making veiled threats, and finally pushing Jon out of the coach. He follows for miles, eventually stumbling upon his son's body, and thence to the camp where the goons have raped Marie to death. And so he kills them, mercilessly and angrily.

The wacky, almost farce-like twist, is that one of the men was the beloved brother of infamous gang leader Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and he's out for revenge himself. The deal he makes with the only nearby town, in the person of its craven mayor/undertaker, Keane (Jonathan Pryce) is that the townsfolk will find the killer, or Delarue's men will leave a wave of blood and despair behind where the town once stood. And you can pretty much put things together from there. Oh, and Green plays Delarue's mute lover, Madelaine, though it's clear from the dissembling looks and barely sublimated anger that flashes across her face that the only thing she really loves is her own sense of security.

Adherence to broadly familiar plots is no sin for a Western, one of the genres historically best suited to stories of conscious self-mythology; and while I think that The Salvation in its gutturally violent way, would like to think of itself as a contrast to the moral simplicity of the classic Hollywood Western, it's really only substituting one kind of myth for another. And not, let's be honest, a terribly new myth: the film's tone suggests that it thinks of itself as being in some way shocking or subversive, but the hyper-violent nihilistic Western has been with us long enough to serve as a cliché in its own right. The Salvation, which is clearly taking its marching orders from Sergio Leone's filmography in everything from the way the violence is staged to the slightly yellowed color timing, comes to us a full fifty years after A Fistful of Dollars exploded itself over the world, and it doesn't really see fit to add much of anything to that model.

Within this entirely classical framework, parts of The Salvation work amazingly well: director Kristian Levring (one of the Dogme 95 filmmakers from back in the day, though nothing about this resembles the Dogme aesthetic even superficially) and cinematographer Jens Schlosser build some awfully fine gloriously iconic images for us to gawk at, not romanticising the landscape (which is played here by South Africa, incidentally), but treating it as both grand and dauntingly empty and cruel. And there are, throughout, moments of incredible potency: Jon cradling his son's dead body by the hard silver light of the moon, the use of accusatory close-ups and dusty lighting during the town's first encounter with Delarue. The film's colors are harshly digital and almost metallic, and his gives every single frame of The Salvation a kind of vividness that's not realistic, and not exactly "beautiful", though it's surely very piercing and memorable, giving a sharp, unforgiving tinge to the images that feels exactly right.

And yet the thing doesn't cohere. Partially because it is, at the end of the day, just one more damn film where a husband turns into a zoned-out killing machine because his family dies, and partially because Levring and his co-writer, Anders Thomas Jensen, are really eager to keep ladling on the depravities, the wide range of characters who are no damn good, the overall sense of hopelessness and agony and violence as a way of life. You need to temper that somewhat if it's not going to feel just egregious, and that hasn't been done here at all. But even that's not as distressing as the lack of insight or discovery: the film is dolorously pleased to inform us that some people are just awful, awful, and they can turn good people awful in their wake, and let's run through the 2500th variation of Walking Tall and Death Wish to demonstrate that fact. It's a nice, fleet 89 minutes, so at least its overfamiliarity doesn't leave it boring, but if I'm going to watch this much suffering for this long, I still want to have some sense that I learned something after all that. All I learned from The Salvation is that the Danes are about 40 years behind the revisionist Western curve.

6/10

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EVE OF DESTRUCTION

Joseph L. Mankiewicz is not a bad director. But he's not a truly great one, either; he's not worthy, anyway, of being the second of only two men to have won a pair of back-to-back Best Director Oscars (John Ford was the first). He didn't, in general, do anything unexpected with his camera; he rarely pushed actors to do work beyond their comfort zone, preferring instead to facilitate them being the very best version of their usual selves. His best directorial instinct, in fact, was to provide the cleanest and most unobtrusive possible frame for Joseph L. Mankiewicz, screenwriter; and that Mankiewicz is the absolute best of the best.

Moreover, that Mankiewicz was never, ever better than when he adapted Mary Orr's 1946 story "The Wisdom of Eve" into 1950's All About Eve, a film in which the art of screen invective finds its absolute all-time pinnacle. Is it a disreputable pleasure, to bask in the bitchy vitriol as talented actors hurl elaborate, poetic insults at each other? Maybe, but the important point is that it's pleasure, and the caustic dialogue in All About Eve is some of the best ever committed to celluloid in Hollywood:

"Bill's thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he'll look it twenty years from now. I hate men."

"Don't cry. Just score it as an incomplete forward pass."

"To those of you who do not read, attend the theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself."

"The cynicism you refer to, I acquired the day I discovered I was different from little boys!"

"Does Miss Channing know she ordered domestic gin by mistake?"
"The only thing I ordered by mistake is the guests. They're domestic too, and they don't care what they drink, as long as it burns."

"Everybody has a heart. Except some people."

There's a great deal more to All About Eve than zingers, but I don't think it's unfair to suggest that the dialogue is what makes it truly, deeply special. Lots of movies have great acting. Lots movies have pulpy melodramatic hearts beating vigorously under a veneer of studio shine. Very, very few movies have the facility with language of All About Eve. And it's not just simple pleasure that makes me single out the dialogue, either; for all its florid excess, the dialogue is always insistently functional. This movie is about a cluster of people jockeying for dominance amongst each other; it is a drama of how people assert power, and ultimately - crucially - how they elect not to assert power. The way they speak is intimately linked with all that power struggle, so even if it's utterly beguiling to hear a top-shelf cast spit acidic aphorisms, it's also a sneaky way of constantly pounding on the story's themes.

Having entered the cultural lexicon as a kind of shorthand for greedy protégés targeting aging mentors, I do hope that the basic shape of the thing is familiar: Margo Channing (Bette Davis), 40-year-old goddess of the Broadway stage, has attracted a passionate admirer in the form of 24-year-old Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter). Everybody takes to Eve, from the moment Margo's best friend Karen Richards (Celeste Holm) ushers her into the star's dressing room: Margo's favorite director and boyfriend, Bill Simpson (Gary Merrill), Margo's favorite writer and Karen's husband, Lloyd (Hugh Marlowe), Margo's blustery producer Max Fabian (Gregory Ratoff). Only Margo's longtime maid Birdie (Thelma Ritter) takes an instinctive dislike of Eve and her perfectly-formed tale of woe ("What a story. Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end", she grouses in that immaculately grumpy Ritter way); only after taking Eve on as a personal assistant does Margo start to spot the clues that the guileless young woman is, in fact, rather craftier than she seemed, her eagerness to please slowly adopting a sharklike quality.

The film traces two character arcs more or less in tandem: Margo's confrontation with her feelings of self-loathing over getting older, and her eventual realisation that she needs to re-adjust her priorities and be nicer to the people who put up with her; and Eve's insinuation into the world of prestigious theater, aided and guided by the murderously sarcastic newspaper columnist Addison DeWitt (George Sanders). It's reasonably straightforward, as backstage melodramas go; from the moment the film elects to open near its end, with a ceremony giving Eve a tremendously important award while Margo, Karen, Bill, and Lloyd all conspicuously fail to clap for her in a collection of medium shots that perfectly frame the disgust each of those characters feel for her, it's less a matter of wondering what will happen, more wondering how it will happen, and all in the tightly-compressed nine-month frame the film establishes for itself (the only significant misstep in the whole of the writing - it's simply not plausible that Eve could reach the level of national acclaim we're told she enjoys on the strength of only one solitary play that, if we follow the rest of the in film logic, premiered only two or three months earlier).

And here is where I have perhaps been too mean to Mankiewicz the director, who executes the development of that story with a crispness and sophistication that leaves what amounts to a sudsy story of catfighting feeling like the most brainy of psychological dramas. I'm not quite as fond of his directing here as in the previous year's A Letter to Three Wives (for which he won the first of his two consecutive Oscars; Eve, of course, netted him the other - and both resulted in writing Oscars, for good measure), but the casualness and elegance with which he stages scenes and the energy he draws from his unbelievably good cast certainly help the film to be its very best self. Aided with a terrifically airy Alfred Newman Score and some smart, cunningly character-defining costumes by Edith Head and Charles LeMaire, among other talented contributors (there's not anybody involved in the film's creation who isn't doing top-level work), the film is as glamorous as its characters like to think that they are, making the ugliness and snitty sniping and pathos of those characters feel all the more sharp and tense. That mixture between the surface gloss and the psychological brutishness drives the film like a wild horse, and even though, at 138 minutes, it's maddeningly indulgent for a melodrama with so few clearly-defined plot points, my reaction to All About Eve is always surprise when I realise that it's getting ready to wrap up, even though I just started watching it.

The point I was making, anyway, is that there's beautiful clarity to the filmmaking, even if it's not as complex or surgically precise as Sunset Blvd., the film with which it competed for most of its Oscars (and how marvelous and odd is it to think upon one of the most insoluble Oscar battles ever waged - from Best Actress to Art Direction to Picture itself, most of their head-to-head competitions are incredibly difficult to pick a winner - would center on two melodramatic stories about women?). Mankiewicz's style is to first attend to the characters, and let the rest follow, which leads to some phenomenal pieces of subtle filmmaking. There's an early sequence, for example, that finds Eve meeting the rest of the cast; by staging Davis, Holm, and Marlowe in a three-shot that intercuts with Baxter alone in the frame, and shortly thereafter stages the four of them so that Baxter alone is facing the camera, offering a quiet bit of foreshadowing that Eve is somehow, importantly, different than the others; mere minutes later, she expresses her whole sob story in a curiously flat shot as Newman's score cranks itself up into a relentlessly swoony bit of romanticism that feels gaudy compared to everything else in the score, completing the first impression of this young woman as being distinctly, if indefinably, "off".

The focus on characters also means that the film gives a lot of room to its actors, who pay it back fully. That Davis gives one of the great performances of a generation is simply one of those facts everybody knows, and it's hardly worth going into all the little things she does that make it so (but I am especially fond of how matter-of-fact and unapologetic she plays her big "I've realised I was wrong" speech in the back of a car; even at her humblest, Margo is still proud and tough, and Davis isn't about to deny that reality). The quality of her work has tended to overshadow her co-stars, especially Baxter (a co-nominee in Best Actress, but clearly not in the same race to win as Daivs, Gloria Swanson, and eventual victor Judy Holliday). Which is spectacularly unfair; given a more nuanced role, Baxter is very nearly at the same level as her more famous colleague, especially in the opening scenes when the first-time viewer still hasn't quite discovered what's to dislike in the innocent enthusiast. It's nothing short of a miracle that Baxter can play the role to be totally spotless and pure the first time, while also leaving just enough brittle theatricality that you can pick up on it while re-watching; it's such potent stuff that I'm always a little sorry when the film starts to tip its hand that Eve is a nasty little beast, and Baxter starts to retreat into a much simpler - though no less persuasive, portrayal of a deeply self-satisfied cobra, staring with her hard eyes and setting her face like a marble mask. She's a great villain; one of the best of the 1950s.

But really, the best thing about All About Eve is that it doesn't rely on the kind of straightforward morality where "a great villain" even applies. It presents a ruthless, horrible world, where everybody who survives needs to be at least partially a predator (the small, early performance by Marilyn Monroe nails this perfectly; almost nowhere else in her career do we see the calculating menace behind adopting "I'm a busty dumb blonde!" as a strategic weapon. It is some of the best work she ever did, even if it's entirely limited to two scenes). Eve is a symptom, not a cause; and while Margo and friends clearly hate her at the end, they don't actually seem to blame her for being better at playing the game. That's a hell of a lot of cynicism, especially for a 1950s film; thank God, then, for the endless wit that helps the nastiness to go down, and the robust performances that ground it in something human. Because take them all together, and they mean that All About Eve is one of the greatest films of post-WWII Hollywood.

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