THE WORLD IS A FINE PLACE, AND WORTH FIGHTING FOR

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

I shall start with a personal anecdote, since who doesn't love personal anecdotes from nominally objective arts critics? But "a man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." And when the man now writing was a good deal younger - a boy, really, though I mightn't have thought it at the time, all of 18 and new to college - he saw for the first and until very recently the only time, David Fincher's 1995 breakthrough Se7en, the film with which that music video director proved that, absent the clusterfuck of studio intervention that made Alien³ such an unimpressive feature debut, he had the stylistic chops and tight control of tone required to be a Real Auteur. And upon this first viewing of Se7en, Wee Young Timmy Brayton was absolutely flattened - just so damn thoroughly unnerved and wrecked by it that, for 14 years and change, it was the one and only title on my list of movies So Good I Can Only Bear to Watch It Once. Now, obviously, the film's not that extreme, and in the intervening decade, I've watched many films that are far more punishing in every way, and for some years now, I've supposed that in this case, memory was exaggerating the titanic dreadfulness of how cruel and unabating the film was, and of course that turns out to be the case. Still, the point remains: it takes a hell of a movie to trigger that kind of response. And yes, Se7en is absolutely a hell of a movie - and a movie of Hell, I might idly throw out there, if I wanted to engage in feeble wordplay.

The film's impact has been seismic; along with The Silence of the Lambs, four years earlier, and maybe we could argue TV's The X-Files, which premiered in 1993, it's one of the creative works in what we might, for want of a clear term, call the Horror Cop genre: police procedurals which appropriate all they can from the gore and terror-driven horror genre (a genre that was, I suspect not coincidentally, in abeyance in the first half of the 1990s), to the point that they start to blur definitional lines. Silence, I think, is a horror film; Se7en, ultimately, probably isn't, but it's right there. And though these two films are, by themselves, almost the entire history of this experimental subgenre, their influence has been felt absolutely everywhere in the two decades since the latter film's premiere - Holy Mother of all things sacred, Se7en is 20 years old, when the fuck did that happen? - in less pure form. Take some of the horror back out, and you have the glut of TV procedurals in which grim-faced cops sorrowfully poke at the most hellaciously violent and often sexualised crimes, depicted with all the brio that standards and practices will permit. Go the other way, and lump in enough horror that it's impossible to deny that's what's going on, and you basically have Saw (a film whose aesthetic does not at all hide its theft from Se7en) and all its little torture porn offspring.

That's a pretty shoddy legacy, but let's not permit it to devalue Fincher's great achievement in anyway, which after 20 years - 20 fucking years - and countless copycats, hasn't lost any of its unnerving, devastating nihilistic power. It is a cruel, bitter movie, undoubtedly the film that most plainly expresses the theme common to all of Fincher's work, that humans are basically prone to cruelty and stupidity, and all decent people can do is try to not give into that impulse. And one may or may not respond to the bleakness and nihilism of that message - and if any English-language film can be confidentally described as "nihilistic", it's Se7en - but it's impossible to deny the potency and artistry with which Fincher and company execute it here. I do not hide my frequent lack of affection for the director's work, but this is a great piece of cinema, the kind that works on such a visceral, primal level to communicate its thoughts and feelings that quibbling with it like pissing in the wind. It is a powerful, brutalising thing, and maybe the most totally successful thing Fincher has directed; alongside Zodiac (which I'd call his best movie; it's also probably his most clinically intellectual), it suggests that whatever he does, Fincher should probably always make movies about serial killers.

The plot of the film, inspired by screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker's miserable stretch of time living in New York (it's a bit remarkable how not at all impressive Walker's subsequent career has been, when he's every bit as important for the film's impact as the director), is straightforward enough: in an unnamed city where it almost always seems to be raining, and which ends up even filthy after the rain than before it, Detective Lieutenant Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is in the last week of his employ with the police department, and is to spend the next seven days (the title has a double meaning!) showing the ropes to new transfer Detective Mills (Brad Pitt), who is more or less going to end up his replacement. On day #1, they find an appalling murder scene, where a man was tortured to death by being forced at gunpoint to eat till he burst; this turns out to be the first in a series of killings inspired by the seven deadly sins - gluttony, lust, wrath, sloth, pride, envy, and greed. As the two men investigate, the gulf between their respective worldviews begins to inform everything about how they respond to the ugliness and savagery of these crimes: Mills's conviction that right will out, and that the universe favors justice drives him towards passionate anger, while Somerset's work-honed certitude that there is more wickedness than the good people of the world can ever hope to combat leaves him doggedly pursuing clues with a detachment that's like depression, if only depression could somehow be even sadder.

The actual meat of the film is pretty easily gotten through; the content, for the most part, is a more or less literal tour of Hell. Not for nothing does the film heavily emphasise Dante's Inferno: like that poem, Se7en functions as a story of one wise old man guiding a younger, more optimistic soul through several tableaux vividly demonstrating the consequences of worldly sin. The difference being that, in Dante, the sins are against God, while in Se7en, they are punished only by one deeply broken human, played by - is a 20-year-old movie still covered by spoiler alerts? Because it's a huge spoiler - Kevin Spacey in the best work of his career, granite-faced as he spits out his bile in brittle, inhuman tones. There is definitely no God in the universe of Se7en; only psychopaths. And instead of the message "these are the punishments you might face if you misbehave", the lesson is the infinitely bleaker "these are the punishments you might face for having the misfortune to have been born".

Walker's script is insistently symbolic without being overbearing about it, and it's surprisingly willing to stop the narrative development entirely to favor scenes of the two leads talking about morality and philosophy, but the thing never drags. A lot of credit for both of these things must go to Freeman and Pitt, who might fall into the ordinary "sagacious black cop/fiery white cop" dynamic, but build such extreme personality into the parts that everything they say and do feels far more an extension of character than the requirement of the screenplay (it might be my favorite Freeman performance; it is, anyway, the one where he engages with his then-nascent "wise old black man calmly intoning advice" persona in the most interestingly off-kilter ways). And certainly, the quality of the filmmaking is at an extraordinary level: beyond Fincher's direction, there is the matter of Howard Shore's erratic, scraping score, Darius Khondji's cinematography, with its overtones of infection and dessication, and Richard Francis-Bruce's tightly controlled editing, all slow build-up to explosions.

It's an absolutely top-shelf thriller first and foremost; a movie that uses its nervy central gimmick as a great spine to pose the question, "so what happens next?" before plunging us through one of the most raw-nerve mysteries of its decade. The film is propulsive in the exactly the same gestures that it's nauseating and distressing. Hell, that's basically the thesis statement presented in the film's enormously influential opening credits, which combine punchy cutting and a thick visual sense of moral rot and so set the entire film off on the footing it will pursue forever after. Exciting on the one hand; immensely unpleasant on the other. It is a desperately involving and watchable film for something so absolutely starved of joy; it makes the expression of total nihilism vividly cinematic in a way that no other American film I can immediately call to mind has ever even attempted. It is not the kind of film I can honestly say that I could love, let alone do love; but I don't suppose I could possibly admire it any more than I do, for its absolute commitment to tone and the excellence of its construction in every scene and every frame.

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THE LAZARUS PITS

There's little more frustrating, in terms of filmed entertainment, than watching a movie waste the talents of a gifted actor, and The Lazarus Effect burns through no fewer than three people who absolutely shouldn't have gotten themselves stuck in such a ropey low-budget horror film: Olivia Wilde, Mark Duplass, and Donald Glover. And we might as well throw Ray Wise onto that list, since even though he's in dodgy little crap-pile movies like this all the time, most of them at least give him more than one scene with a grand total of zero meaningful lines of dialogue to occupy his time. And even as this is a grave irritation, it would barely even enter the conversation about just what it is that's most vexing and wrong-headed about the first truly awful horror film of 2015.

The film is about a scientist tampering in God's domain, and his name is Frank (Duplass), so at least the script, by Luke Dawson and Jeremy Slater, knows itself. Specifically, materialist Frank and his Catholic fiancée Zoe (Wilde), who is a Catholic, and that causes struggles with Frank, who is atheistic, and so he can't understand her belief in the soul and the afterlife, which is due to her Catholicism - do you understand that yet? Because the movie is willing to make it clearer if need be. Three years ago, Frank and Zoe put their wedding on hold to focus all their attention on the serum they've been developing: a serum whose initial use was to sustain the brain activity of coma patients, but has turned out to have the rather unexpected side effect of bringing the recently deceased back to life. Their work on pigs and dogs has been unpromising so far, but a breakthrough is right around the corner when they, and their assistants Niko (Glover) and Clay (Evan Peters), welcome an undergraduate from the university where they do their work, Eva (Sarah Bolger), to film their experiments (and no, this doesn't mean that the film is one of those first-person jobs, saints be praised)

Unsurprisingly, Eva's first trip to the lab results in a shocking success when the team brings a dog back to life. Over the next few days, Frank and Zoe keep an eye on him - Rocky, in honor of that movie where Sylvester Stallone played a boxer who was killed and brought back to life - and the results are weird as hell: apparently, Rocky is getting better way too fast, way too much. All this thinking jams to a halt when the university tries to shut them down, and a biochem corporation swoops in to steal their research, and all looks grim, until the rogue scientists decide to break into the lab one night and re-create all their work to have a document that this miracle really was their work. What, exactly, they hope to do with this, given that the biochem company owns their work, that they did, fair and square and legally, is not clear. Just for the bragging rights, presumably. Anyway, they start working awfully hastily, to stay ahead of the guard and the mysterious hacker who has been spying on them, and they work so fast that they forget to take every last safety precaution. And that's how Zoe ends up electrocuting herself to death. I just bet you can imagine where it goes from there.

So, what do we have here, with this The Lazarus Effect? Equal parts Frankenstein, the Friday the 13ths where Jason was a zombie, and, I was surprised to find, Lucy (the dialogue smugly points out that we use all 100% of our brain, just 10% at a time - but RevivedZoe uses all of her brain all at once. And much the same happens to her as happened to Scarlett Johansson, only done as an '80s horror film instead of a '90s action film). And a whole lot of unbearably shitty writing married to trite directing and cinematography and a lot of cheap jump scares. Bland, generic horror I can handle, and director David Gelb is good at providing it: the lab is spookily underlit, it has lots of things that clang, and there are oh-so-many close-ups to facilitate people sneaking up when we're not looking. What torpedoes The Lazarus Effect is she sheer mindlessness of a screenplay that keeps starting plot threads which it has absolutely no intentions whatsoever of pursuing to completion: the dog basically evaporates out of the movie around the three-quarter mark, right after dialogue that's more or less literally stating "hold on, the dog is important! We have to remember that there was a dog in this movie!" The film keeps trying to build a sense of external stakes - the university wants to kick us out; wait, somebody here must be a spy; wait, this big multinational firm is being all sinister and wants our serum; wait, someone has hacked into our encrypted files - and just as doggedly keeps forgetting all of them the instant that the scene introducing them ends. None of the characters are consistent or make any kind of sense, though the central relationship between Frank and Zoe is clearly the worst part: they've been craftily written to seem totally unsuitable for each other and barely even able to tolerate each other's presence, except when they're a warm, stable, romantic pairing.

The ghastliest part is certainly that central religion/science debate, as conceived by people who apparently hate both faith and reason. So much energy is put into creating ambiguity about whether Zoe went to Hell, or if she just had a hallucination driven by her Deep Dark Traumatic past and kicked into overdrive by the moment of dying; such playful teasing goes on as to whether she's been possessed by a demon or is just having her brain overheat from too much magical science juice. And yet, in the clinch, the film gleefully announces that it doesn't give a shit about any of that; it just wants to have a corny twist ending and a rampaging Frankenstein monster who behaves with unnecessary personal cruelty while she terrorises the lab.

I want to admire The Lazarus Effect. Its economy and efficiency are both laudable (basically just five people on one set for 83 minutes), as is its desire to remix old-fashioned tropes with a certain rough-hewn DIY indie mentality. But the result is so lazy, and at times openly incoherent at the level of storytelling, while being shot like a series of beginner's lessons from the Every Horror Cliché Ever playbook, that I can't credit the film for its conceptual strengths. Only one aspect of the film is good on any level: Olivia Wilde is absolutely splendid, creating a woman who believably shifts between evil and confused terror, after having done all of the heavy lifting of the more character-driven first half entirely by herself. There's humanity and terrifyingly plausible inhumanity alike in her performance, and she makes the whole film seem a little more effective and stable just by virtue of standing there, insisting on what we should think and feel no matter what bullshit is going on the script. But she is one person, and it is a goddamn tidal wave of bullshit.

2/10

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TO CHAV AND CHAV NOT

There's a level on which Kingsman: The Secret Service is the movie director Matthew Vaughn has always been destined to make. In fact, that is perhaps true of all of its levels, both the good ones and the bad. On the good side of the ledger, Kingsman is one of the most smartly-crafted action films of recent years, even as it fully subscribes to the heightened aesthetic that has done so much to make action films of recent years noisy, visually incoherent messes. On the bad side, it has some grim, grim thoughts about human beings and society, and it doesn't even seem to be aware of them. And this is intensified by how consciously the film raises political and moral questions that it proceeds to explore with absolutely no depth whatsoever.

But we'll get back to all of that. Adapted by Vaughn and his longtime writing partner Jane Goldman from a 2012 comic miniseries written by Mark Millar (very loosely, I gather; but I do not make a habit of reading Millar's work), Kingsman is the story of a secret intelligence agency operating out of London but without the oversight of any world government, run by the best and brightest of White Male England's upper classes. When one of them dies while attempting to rescue a kidnapped climate scientist, the organisation starts a hunt for his replacement, and its most forward-thinking member, "Galahad", the code name for one Harry Hart (Colin Firth), looks outside of the usual suspects from Oxbridge to nominate a young tough kid, Gary "Eggsy" Unwin (Taron Egerton) from the grubbier places in the city. This is a bad habit of Harry's, we find; his last nominee when this happened 17 years ago was, in fact, Eggsy's dad, who died in the Middle East when Harry himself made a small but deadly blunder. Anyway, the quest to cull the nominees down to just one true Kingsman recruit is carried off with some intense urgency, for as this is all happening, American telecom genius Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) is executing an unclear but obviously devious plot to use free cellphone SIM cards against the entire population of the world.

There is a generous and an ungenerous way of looking at this. The generous one, the one that the film literally plops into the mouths of its characters, is that this is all a parody of the James Bond franchise, turning the posh world of British spies with tony accents and impressive educations upside down by throwing a class-shaped wrench into all of it, and holding up the sexism and violence porn of standard-issue spy cinema up for ridicule. In practice, I frankly don't think any of that works, in no small part because Matthew Vaughn doesn't have a good sense of humor. He's able to do jokes, sure: there is an almost non-stop litany of quips and snarky asides and absurdities scattered throughout Kingsman, and some of them are even funny. But it's not sustained enough for this count as parody, and it's damn sure not smart enough for it to count as satire. So really, it's just a particularly self-aware and sarcastic version of the exact thing it set out to comment upon.

Besides which, it's pretty clear that whatever surface-level interest the film has in exploring class (it has infinitely less interest in exploring race or gender, which is probably why the only two people of color in the film to open their mouths are also its villains), that interest doesn't ever last for more than a scene or two. Its central conceit is more based on letting poor urban thugs earn their way into the upper class than it is about providing any kind of dignity to those who aren't upper class, and its politics throughout are absolutely inconsistent, waddling around and cherry-picking what it wants from conservatism (Reagan's Star Wars program is approved of), libertarianism (the heroes are outside the government, the villains are part of it - including, for the briefest of cameos, President Barack Obama), labor (a joke about how awful Margaret Thatcher was), and a particularly unsavory form of American progressivism (the film kills off a bunch of civilians and expects us to laugh through it because they were "just" Westboro Church-style religious bigots). One might go so far as to say that, in fact, the film has no kind of coherent political outlook whatsoever, that its nods towards class-consciousness and the patriarchal mustiness of Bondian superspies are just a pose, and that it's really just a pretext for doing the actioney stuff Vaughn actually cares about. And I would say that one would be totally correct in saying that.

Considering how insistently and repetitively Kingsman articulates its themes, it doesn't actually have any: it's a big action spectacle that tries to pretend like it has any kind of depth at all without doing the things that would give it depth. But the spectacle! -oh the spectacle! I hate to admit it, because it's all so intellectually dishonest, but Kingsman has some unbelievably terrific action, and viewed strictly at a mechanical level, the film is just about flawless. It builds its scenes with clear, one-at-a-time purposes, introducing the characters and the world through punchy, humorous scenes that crank out exposition with just enough flair and wit that it's more entertaining than painful - and it is impossible to undervalue how much Firth is the keystone to all of this, with his effortless line deliveries and self-effacing sense of stuffy English propriety, and his impeccable impatience with everything. When the film eventually commits to making Egerton its solitary lead, as it clearly plans to do from very early on, it loses a great deal of personality and deftness of touch that keep it striding through even the most muddle-headed representational problems.

And having made that structurally wonderful screenplay, the film then lards it up with several absolutely perfect action scenes, that find Vaughn perfecting the style of action preferred by himself and Zack Snyder, as well as their copycats. It's manic, full of quick changes in the film speed, full of zooms and swooshes; and it is beautifully coherent. I am nearly tempted to call it the Rosetta Stone for an entire generation of action cinema: the chaotic, hyper editing that usually results in visual slurries where nothing can be followed suddenly works instead to accentuate the narrative clarity of the fights; the fetishisation of slow-motion, instead of pornishly drawing our attention to pain and blood, serves to punctuate and redirect the action choreography, and call our attention to the shifts in the rhythm of the fighting that drive that redirection. The film's best action setpiece is also its morally ugliest, which doesn't feel like a coincidence at all; it would, in fact, hardly be so ugly if the way it was shot wasn't so tremendously exciting and involving that it makes it impossible to care about all the bodies it's leaving in its wake. Far less problematic is the climax, where unambiguous bad guys are executed in a giddy, openly comic fashion, while the action cross-cuts across three totally different registers of tension (fight the computer, time a perfect shot, evade the armies with guns), serving each of them equally. It's cross-cutting that recalls the climax of Return of the Jedi, and I am not inclined to make that comparison idly.

So the question stands: does Kingsman's excellence as a work of craftsmanship outweigh its illiteracy and amorality as a drama of humans living in the world? Reader, I do not know the answer. I walked into it expecting to hate it, and I walked out having had a good time over a surprisingly fleet 129 minutes. That's enough to swing a positive recommendation, but I can't bring myself to be too enthusiastic about it.

6/10

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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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