BEST SHOT: PARIS IS BURNING

My favorite episodes of Hit Me with Your Best Shot are invariably those where Nathaniel throws the widest curveball, and this week's subject is certainly that. For the first time in six seasons, he's assigned a documentary: the critically acclaimed, groundbreaking Paris Is Burning, a 1990 film about the drag ball culture in New York in the late 1980s. It's been on my must-watch list for ages, and it deserves every inch of its reputation. The subculture it depicts hasn't really become any better-known in the intervening quarter of a century, even though elements of it have become damn near mainstream, so the documentary's mission of exploring the very unique behavior and vocabulary of its chosen subject, in considerably detail and with zealous ethnographic objectivity, remains fresh and interesting; meanwhile, the film has also taken on the quality of a time capsule, bringing life back into a long-dead portion of New York. It has aged as well as a documentary possibly can, all the more so since its trenchant depiction of the pressure points in America along racial, economic, and gender-identity lines applies every bit as well to life in 2015 as in 1990, sadly.

All that being said, this is not "Hit Me with Your Best Short-Form Review". And selecting a documentary for this game makes for an unusual challenge. Watching a documentary with an eye towards picking a single image from it proved to be a revelatory experience: it reveals how much this particular documentary, anyway, thrives less on the narrative within the frame than the narrative that comes in the pairing of image and words - director Jennie Livingston's approach to constructing the film rather conventionally combines a wide range of narrators, over images of the things they're describing, mostly. Or sometimes the connection between speech and visual is more abstract, which is when it's at its most potent. Either way, the film works beautifully. But many of the best and most penetrating moments are too reliant on the words being spoken under the image to make their full impact.

Paris Is Burning, among a surprisingly large number of thematic strands for such a short little film (the agreed-upon running time is 71 minutes; confusingly, the version streaming on Netflix is five minutes longer), spends a great deal of time discussing appropriation as an extension of fantasy: that the drag balls provide a space for the participants to perform an identity that they don't possess, in a place where there is no judgment or danger about doing so. This includes performances of straightness, wealth, and white-collar employment in addition to performances of femininity, and my fascination with the film's class-based argument almost sent me to select a shot about how the poverty-wracked black, gay artists in the film mimic white businessmen, except that Conrado at Coco Hits New York already picked basically the exact shot I'd have used, for almost exactly the same reason.

So on to my runner-up:

There's enough of a touch of irony here that I'm pretty sure the moment was staged to a degree that most of the highly observational film isn't but then, we know from Herzog that truth is more important than scrupulous fact in the making of documentary. We have here Octavia Saint Laurent, bright shining star of the House of Saint Laurent, one of the most competitive families in the ball scene; and she is staring through the store windows at a dress by that other Saint Laurent. With one fluid pan, Livingston shows both Octavia's view of that dress, and then separates her from it through a pane of glass, a clear cage that silently reminds her and us that in the nice high class rich white people world of Yves Saint Laurent, people like Octavia and her family don't count, and indeed don't exist.

And thus, appropriation; thus the alternate reality of the balls, where the people marginalised for a kaleidoscopic array of reasons could insist on their right to be, and to live out the identity that the power structure of society at large blandly denied to them. The film discusses empowerment openly and repeatedly, but mostly only alludes to the kind of repression that the balls seek to redress; it's in a handful of individual shots and montages that mainstream culture and its normalising straightness is depicted with explicit force. And none of those moments are so persuasive and effect as this, where the simple elegance of the visuals and the look of hopeful longing on Octavia's face make it clear how much she wants what's just out of her grasp. All of Paris Is Burning argues strongly for how the balls matter; this moment is the most direct argument why they matter, and for that reason it gets my vote for the best shot of a film that's made up of almost nothing but memorable moments.

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WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD?

It's clear long before Maps to the Stars reaches its conclusion that whatever it finds there is going to be unfulfilling. The film thrives far too much on a shaggy, wandering tone of mystified bitterness that flares up regularly into hilarious, but pitch black comedy; it finds interesting and unexpected echoes and overlaps between scenes, some of them adjacent, some of them separated by half the movie, but its most distinctive strengths are exactly those which come about because of its momentum-free shuffling of tones, perspectives, and plot elements, and which exist in the particular absence of a clear narrative drive. It is the sort of movie which plainly announces, by the midway point, that it's going to roll to a stop somewhere, rather than build to a pointed conclusion.

So if that's the sort of thing that sounds horrible to you, it's absolutely the case that Maps to the Stars will feel like an endless slog. It certainly does not do much to avoid triggering that reaction. But on the other hand, if one can approach the film without needing it to build and build towards a fiery conclusion, there's a whole hell of a lot going on here that's absolutely terrific. The film offers its own possible framework in the form of Paul Éluard's 1942 poem Liberté, which appears here in a new translation, and is broken up and recited in chunks, repeated in no clear order, throughout the film's running time. So let us think of it thus: as a poem. It is structured not as a story, but as series of refrains and rhymes, a collection of anecdote-like scenes that are all constructed like perfect little stanzas - all with unusually clear beginnings, middles, and ends -and which draw upon a shared pool of images, concepts, and language. Themes are woven throughout, subdued and barely noticeable in some passages, foregrounded in others with the implicit invitation to compare and contrast the way those themes are developed and how they change based on context. So maybe like a symphony, in addition to a poem.

Whatever the case, it's one of the most unusual films in director David Cronenberg's highly unusual career. It feels very much like the proper follow-up to his last film, 2012's Cosmopolis, though I couldn't honestly speak to a single element of aesthetic, performance, or story where the two films actually seem to meet. Maybe it's that both of them feel like they're using literary technique bent to the very different needs of cinema. Maps to the Stars perhaps fits more snugly into the general notion of what a Cronenberg film is: it has rampant psychotic behavior, incest both accidental and deliberate, and a fixation on the way people's bodies announce who they are to the world, without necessarily doing so with any accuracy. But little flickers of Cronenbergian madness certainly feel strangely out of place in a character-driven satiric comedy soaked through with snarky inside jokes about the state of modern Hollywood - Bruce Wagner's strange and somewhat terrific screenplay (that would be the Bruce Wagner whose erratic career includes A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors, the best horror sequel of the 1980s) has the smug insider vocabulary of a particularly insipid Oscar telecast, only strung along a spine of disconcerting anti-realism that makes idle comments about Anne Hathaway, Garry Marshall, and "Harvey" feel like a bad acid trip that followed a day spent devouring back issues of Entertainment Weekly.

That combination of gossipy name-dropping, parodic broadsides about how those Hollywood fuckers live, and the steady drone of Lovecraftian madness that never quite lets the film go end up making Maps to the Stars one of the indisputably oddest pop culture satires in living memory, and to my mind, a staggeringly effective one. No film has better depicted Hollywood as a fever swamp of insecurity driving people to be their worst selves, all within a slippery structure of irrationality and subjective editing, since at least Full Frontal, and I realise that invoking that film as a comparison - and particularly a positive one - says more about me than about either movie. But they're working in similar territory, trying to explode the idea of stardom with the righteous rage of outsiders attempting to break cinematic language as a way of demonstrating the vapidity of the people who construct cinema.

I've gone a long way without even hinting at the plot, though that's at least in part because Maps to the Stars resists a plot synopsis. But here goes anyway: the film presents interrelated stories of Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), an aging movie star trying to land the part her dead, (maybe) sexually abusive mother played in a movie that's going to be remade; her massage therapist and TV self-help guru Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), husband to Christina (Olivia Williams), the surly manager of their 13-year-old son Benjie (Evan Bird), a foul-mouthed narcissist who's just leaving rehab. Slashing across these lives is Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a recent transplant to Los Angeles, covered in burn scars, who lands a job as Havana's new personal assistant, and has connections to the Weisses that the film smartly doesn't try to pretend should be a shocking revelation, but simply runs with as soon as enough evidence has piled up that we can start to put things together.

The film touches on themes about how acting can serve to knock one's sense of self out of order, and not just the acting that's done by professionals in front of cameras; but the more rewarding elements are those related to the insistence of the past in interfering with the present, with people having a difficult time grasping the reality of death, with how movies and the movie industry serve as a giant machine for trying to enable people to pretend that death doesn't exist, that stars are ageless, and so on and so forth. The best way it builds its ideas is through that poetic repetition; the way that things like burning, visitations from ghosts, specific lines of dialogue and images, all keep repeating in different places. It's complex without being terribly confusing, though the effect is more impressionistic than movies tend to be.

None of which should be meant to imply that Maps to the Stars is up its own ass, though I guess it probably is. On top of everything, it's frequently hilarious - there are multiple lines of dialogue so crude, absurd, or frequently both, that they're likely to hold on as some of the funniest things said in American theaters in 2015 - and brilliantly acted: Moore, who won the Best Actress award at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, is the clear stand-out, plunging fearlessly into a desperately pathetic shell of a person, raging and awful but also so helpless that even at her most hateful, we feel sorry for her. Wasikowska is miraculously enigmatic without feeling inhuman, and Cusack mixes smarmy hucksterism, outbursts of violence, and sweaty terror in perfect balance, to achieve one of the best performances of his career. But the whole cast is great, with Bird being perhaps understandably swamped by his powerhouse co-stars.

It's not a film for everybody, though I suspect it's for more people than are likely to encounter it. Cronenberg and Wagner are up to some very peculiar things here, but the film offers plenty of entry points (its comedy, its relatively obvious and straightforward symbolism, the almighty Moore in her most commending and grabby performance since... Christ, a long time, The Hours at least) that make it rather surprisingly entertaining for something so rabidly artsy and anti-commercial. At any rate, you're not going to bump into anything else this year that resembles it much at all, and for that, I can only offer praise.

9/10

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THE LOVE OF GOD

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

To begin with, it's a biopic - and does any genre so reliably connote "this is a well-polished and achingly handsome lump of Serious Art that's not terribly artistic and even less entertaining" than the biopic? And not just any biopic - it's part of maybe the most diabolically prestigious and inert subgenre, the biopic of an important classical musician, which has produced such ever-forgettable lead weights as The Great Waltz (Johann Strauss) and A Song to Remember (Frédéric Chopin), and has stretched all the way into the 21st Century with the likes of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. Besides, it's a powerfully murky biopic: the incredibly famous title character isn't actually the subject or the protagonist, but in deference to his fame, the movie keeps ceding huge chunks of attention to him that leave it damned confusing what the actual story is that the filmmakers aimed to tell.

And yet, Amadeus is one of the best American films of the 1980s. So it just goes to show, never prejudge.

The 1984 film is based on the 1979 play by Peter Shaffer, who did a rather thorough job of re-imagining the material for its journey into cinemas, but either way, the core is the same: the relationship of composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) and Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), between Mozart's 1781 arrival in Vienna, where Salieri served as artistic director for the Italian operas of the Hapsburg court, and the former's death in that city in 1791, at the age of 35. It is an enormously fictionalised version of that story, though it should be pointed out that the single biggest lie that Amadeus has popularised - that a jealous Salieri murdered Mozart with poison - is one that the film very specifically and as a key element of its plot doesn't depict (it also doesn't, technically, indicate that Salieri was a mediocre hack, only that he perceived himself as such relative to Mozart. And so these two unfair characterisations of Salieri - the talentless murderer - are the film's great popular legacies through no fault of its own).

So disinterested is Shaffer in actual sober history, in fact, that to call Amadeus a biography, in either medium, is something of an inaccuracy. It's more of a psychological fable told using real historical figures to give it an imposing weight; that, and to celebrate in front of the widest available audience the peerless sophistication and beauty of Mozart's music, lengthy passages of which are played all throughout the rather long movie as Shaffer hands enormous blocks of dialogue to Abraham to elucidate using only somewhat dumbed-down musicology exactly what it is about Mozart that should cause all of us to regard him as one of the half-dozen greatest composers of music in the history of European culture.

And that's a great and worthy goal, one that Amadeus only slightly muffs by handing off all of its music cues to the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, as conducted by Sir Neville Marriner, who generally leans on an annoying tendency to rush through the music like he's terrified of losing his dinner reservation. But ultimately, "provide a showcase for Mozart's Greatest Hits" isn't remotely the reason that Amadeus is great drama and great cinema (many a tepid workaday biopic has also been a splendid Greatest Hits showcase).

For that, we turn instead to the excellent performances and cutting characterisations in the script, as well as the vivid and fleshy production overseen by director Miloš Forman, in what I will happily identify as his best work in English. The film is not the first nor the last, but among the most successful of all attempts to revivify a culture dead for 200 years using sharp contemporary style; the vast majority of costume dramas have a marked tendency to look poised, stuffed, and mounted, but in the hands of Forman, who came of age in the raw, direct naturalism of the Czech New Wave, 18th Century Vienna is full of sarcasm and ass-kissing and bitterness and flustered movement just like the contemporary world. It's a period film that was shot as though it took place in modern-day Los Angeles; Forman and cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček (who'd worked with the director, on and off, from the beginning of both their careers) don't both with painterly lighting or compositions, in some desperate attempt to ape Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (which perfected that style and has never been remotely equaled); they dive right in and capture the color, line, and texture of the dressed-up Prague locations, and of Theodor Pištěk's costumes (rather more fanciful than accurate) with the same intention to find the blunt reality of things that served them as young Czechs attempting to tear holes in the fabric of Communism.

This unsentimental way of film interiors and exteriors alike with a kind of blank-faced present-ness is perfectly matched by the two most important performances, Abraham's and Hulce's - the cast as a whole is wildly inconsistent, ranging from Jeffrey Jones's marvelously and perfectly unfocused Emperor Joseph II, to Elizabeth Berridge's whingey, breathy take on Mozart's wife, but it's essentially a two-hander with a lot of people standing on the sidelines cheering. It's not always subtle acting that's going on: theater actor Hulce's only meaningfully visible film role to that point was in the low-brow comedy Animal House, and he brings a lot of that exact energy to his manic, filthy Mozart, with an unavoidably irritating laugh. Abraham is a bit more nuanced, mostly because the character he's playing is a facile liar, who does his level best to seem pleasant when he is scheming and wrathful. What matters about both of them, mostly, is their resolute modernism: the very conscious layering of psychology and the small physical gestures (Abraham's performance as an old man recounting the story to an increasingly horrified priest is full of some absurdly wonderful facial expressions and gestures - his inward-looking smugness on "Everybody liked me. I liked myself" is my favorite beat in the entire film) that speak to fussy stage-trained acting, and that fills this very old-fashioned mise en scène with very hard contemporary attitude that goes beyond such things as the evocation of punk rockers in Hulce's wigs. It is a study of 20th Century attitudes towards jealousy and faith that places 20th Century men, incongruously but effectively, into 1780s Vienna and does not comment on it.

But in that very lack of commentary, Amadeus comes alive. It's not the kind costume drama that brings a long-dead place back to life; while the film's Vienna is persuasive, and Twyla Tharp's staging of several Mozart operas winningly looks back the poshest stagecraft of a long-dead era, and the film-long obsession with food of the Viennese upper classes (which serves more as a character detail for Salieri than a piece of world-building) is lavish, if not always totally appetizing, it would be difficult to argue for Amadeus the merit of scrupulous historical accuracy. The dialogue doesn't support that; the general indifference to verifiable facts in the matter of its subjects' lives certainly doesn't support that. The film triumphs above all things as a character study, played by two remarkably fine actors in peak form, providing a chance for its very modern audience to reflect on very recognisable feelings of envy towards people we know damn good and well to be more capable than ourselves, "fairness" be damned; the period trappings are, as much as they are anything, a way of heightening those feelings by making them seem weird and fresh.

Or even more simply: the thing Amadeus primarily depicts, biopically-speaking, is the writing of operas - a dramatic form in which strong emotions are presented in a heavily artificial matrix of absurd plot and florid singing. And because of that artifice, the emotions are more immediately accessible. And that's basically the exact same thing Amadeus is doing: the mechanism of the artifice is different, but the intensity, lack of subtlety, and thus the accessibility, they're all the same. It's a prose opera. Form and content meet and seamlessly blend. Terrific stuff.

N.B. I: To prove that I can be at least a little bit critical, take a gander at that tagline. "The man... The music... The madness... The murder... The motion picture". Is that not literally the worst copy in the history of film advertising?

N.B. II: There exists a director's cut; it is far easier to see the film in that format now than its original theatrical version. I prefer the older, shorter cut; the extended version overexplains things that were perfectly clear without being laboriously spelled out, and it badly affects the flow of a 160-minute film that starts to feel puffy at three hours. One might say, of the theatrical cut, "Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall".

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LOVE IN THE TIME OF CON

Having thought about it for a couple of days now, I still haven't decided if Focus is particularly enjoyable and solidly-crafted for a bad movie, or if it's extremely inconsistent and frustrating for a good movie. I think I ultimately tend towards the latter, if only because no project that depends so successfully on movie star charisma to drive its everything can be truthfully called bad, not in these benighted days when our movie stars are abandoning us. And it is fair to point out that only one-half of the leads of Focus can rightfully be called a "movie star" - Will Smith, making his first movie for adults in seven years - Margot Robbie absolutely throws off the kind of casual, gorgeous, screen-grabbing performance that would immediately confirm her as a movie star if that's still the way things worked.

Smith plays Nicky Spurgeon, a legend in the world of con artists; Robbie plays Jess Barrett, a rank amateur who tries to play him one night in New York, with a sex-based con that she and her partner rush through, and which Nicky has figured out almost the second it starts. This lights enough of a fire under Jess that she chases Nicky to New Orleans, where he's leading a veritable army of grifters and conmen on a spree of pickpocketing and other minor tricks for extracting money from the clueless and ignorant. He takes her under his wing, teaches her the tricks of the trade, all while starting to fall in love with her, and she with him. Ah, but alas! this too is a con, and he's actually only been faking the whole thing so she'll better play her part in the mother of all cons, paying out beautifully for all concerned. And while Jess gets her fair share, the heartbreak isn't worth it. Three years later, their paths cross again in Buenos Aires, as Nicky finds himself selling his skills to a racing team owner, Rafael Garriga (Rodrigo Santoro), who wants to fix a race he's already likely to win. And this is a task the sullen, dead-eyed Nicky is fine to grind through, until he learns that Garriga happens to be Jess's new lover - and it turns out that he wasn't faking things with her after all, since having her thrust back into his life proves to throw him wildly off his game.

It's nice when things are simple, and the problem with Focus is such a thing: the first half of the film, in New Orleans, is delightful. The second half, in Buenos Aires, isn't. Not that the first half is flawless, any more than the second half is a wall-to-wall disaster, but the fact remains that Focus is basically two entirely self-contained movies wedged together, and rebooting into the second causes no end of problems for the filmmakers Glenn Ficarra & John Requa (who both write and direct). For one thing, the first half is told basically through Jess's perspective, while the second is through Nicky's; that's the kind of structural fancy-dancing that could easily result in a compelling mash-up of perspectives, but it's not what Focus is interested in, and the result is a confusion of focal points and anchors for the audience that leaves the film struggling to pick back up. It's easy to see what the film is aiming for, especially as it heads into its final twist, and the parallels between the halves start to strengthen themselves; it just doesn't get to where it wants to go.

The other big problem is almost as simple, though not quite as explicable. The best parts of the film, almost indisputably, I'm tempted to say, are those which center on the art of the con; when it is more concerned with the relationship between Nicky and Jess, it deflates badly (this is another reason why the second half is so much weaker than the first; the con involved with the race car trickery is not, to begin with, anywhere near as delightful in its complexity as the final reveals, or as the first half's litany of well-executed grifts). It's honestly kind of bizarre that this should be the case, since the film so persuasively argues that executing cons is how these two characters flirt, and the relaxed sexual chemistry between Robbie and Smith is certainly the strongest individual element in the film. But it only works when it's sublimated underneath sleek style and smooth patter; every time the film turns to focus on the flirting, sexiness, and attraction without filtering it, everything goes to hell. Part of this maybe can be blamed on Smith, who lets things get too serious (Robbie does a good job of keeping even the bleakest moments she has to play fizzy and tossed-off). Mostly, I suspect it's just that the film's lithe style works better when it stays at the level of shallow fun, and that Ficarra & Requa have a hard time recalibrating for actual emotions.

That all being true, when Focus works, it's absolutely splendid, a sugary sweet cocktail of glossy cinematography and editing that make all of the mechanics of conning hum and whir with expert cleanliness, while showing off the stars to absolute best effect. The pleasures of a movie that's willing to bask in having pretty people thrown up onto a huge screen should not be denied, and when those pretty people are so able to tap into the exact tonal register the film needs - in this case, peppy and confident dialogue mixed with a constant unspoken "I know more than you do and I am not going to rest till I prove it" tension that adds some quiet antagonism to the flirting - it can be an outright boon. The razzle-dazzle elements of Focus are terrific, and they exude a breezy refusal to be too serious that makes it easy to enjoy the small spectacle of watching professionals execute reasonably simple tasks flawlessly. A description that applies to the filmmakers and cast as much as to it does to the characters. The film bogs down, certainly, and it bogs down in some very damaging places. But it soars just enough to be, on balance, an enjoyable bit of fluff.

6/10

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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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