BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THIS MISSION WILL SELF-DESTRUCT

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation continues the unexpected late flowering of a TV-derived spy franchise into its best self. And now, may I present its worst self.

There's nothing new in the observation that anybody with in any interest in the matter already made between 1993's Hard Target and 2003's Paycheck: for an unqualified genius of an action movie director, with two different candidates for Best Action Film Ever Made in his career in the form of The Killer and Hard Boiled, John Woo surely could not put a single foot right during his layover in Hollywood. Out of his six American features, the absolute best is surely 1997's Face/Off, and even that film is closer to "good enough" than "all-time genre classic". We can't just blame the language barrier: even the most culturally non-specific elements of action filmmaking are deeply compromised.

I bring this up in connection to Mission: Impossible II, from the summer of 2000, both because it is possibly my least favorite of Woo's American films (though that is a competitive race), and because it so beautifully typifies how badly he was fumbling the basic skills that he had so recently used better than just about anyone else living. M:i:II (I had forgotten how beastly the abbreviations of the titles for this and Mission: Impossible III looked) was a movie literally conceived around its action setpieces; this was not merely something the filmmakers weren't ashamed of, they broadcast it, like it was a proof of how focused they were on a great action experience. Now that it's standard operating procedure for the Mission: Impossibles to construct their narratives exactly this way, it's easy to lose track of how thoroughly dangerous a strategy this is, because there is a very strong possibility that you end up with a story exactly like the one M:i:II suffers from, but my present concern isn't the film's storytelling woes. The thing is, if you make a point of coming up with action sequences along which to strong a narrative, rather than the other way around, it stands to reason that the action will be pretty fucking terrific, right? And M:i:II can't even get that right.

It has one gunfight scene that is, so far as you can make it out through the choppy editing, solid middle-tier Woo, and the climax involves one very impressive knife fight stunt and some fantastical wire work that, is, so far as you can make it out through the outright incoherent editing, daunting and impressive and poetic. But that's pretty much it, unless you count the early rock climbing scene that's more of an amuse bouche than an action sequence proper. There's a ghastly car chase sort of sequence that doubles as the two main characters flirting, and it is utterly dumb and plagued with slow motion (the film as a whole is plagued with slow motion, like Woo decided it was his "thing" and never stopped to wonder if it belonged in this shot or that shot particularly), and there's a scene that tries much too hard to remind us of the exquisite "suspended in the computer room" scene from the 1996 Mission: Impossible, undone by familiarity and the worst visual effects of the whole movie. And when all is said and done, none of these things represent nearly a large enough percentage of the 123-minute running time - itself cut down savagely from Woo's mythological intended cut of some three and a half hours - which is largely devoted to inching through a bare bones plot. Even that's being polite: the first 33 minutes of the film aren't "inching". They're just fucking stopped there, staring earnestly as the characters repeat the exact same beat for 20 minutes.

The plot this time: Russian scientist Dr. Vladimir Nekhorvich (Rade Serbedzija) has a cutesy-named bioweapon "Chimera", and its even more cutesy cure, "Bellerophon", and he's taking them to the United States and the Impossible Missions Force, owing to his trust and friendship with IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Unfortunately, ex-IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), wearing an Ethan Mask and a little electronic patch that allows him to speak in Ethan's voice, confronts Nekhorvich on a plane and steals the chemicals, before forcing the plane to crash. Naturally enough, Ethan himself is assigned by IMF executive Swanbeck (Anthony Hopkins, somnambulant) to track down Ambrose, with one curious point of insistence: Ethan can pick whatever two IMF agents he wants, but he absolutely must also recruit the civilian con artist and thief Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandie Newton).

And here the film walks out of the room, right in the middle of a sentence, leaving us all baffled as to whether we should, like, follow it? Or just wait there for it to come back? Anyway, it is pure cinematic death as we watch in what feels like real time for the days that it takes Ethan to persuade Nyah - whose special skill, it turns out, is not thievery, but being Ambrose's ex-girlfriend, which easily makes this the most condescending of all the female roles in this enormously sausage-festy franchise - to join his team. At a certain point, that highly elaborate car flirtation happens, to augment the implausibly fast and thorough physical flirtation they've already launched into, and it is hard to completely hate it, because of how elaborately and well-executed it is, but it's also hard to love it, because it is the silliest goddamn thing.

Eventually, the movie starts to move again, though not with any particular urgency. What happens in the remaining three-quarters of the film is frankly a bit unfocused: we know all along that Ethan wants to stop Ambrose from using an apocalyptic bioweapon, but not always how this or that particular scene is going to aid him in that goal. On paper, this is all marvelous: Woo and screenwriter Robert Towne, working from a story originally by Ronald D. Moore & Brannon Braga, are more interested with lingering on moments and characters, and allowing production designer Tom Sanders and cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball to stage beautiful collages of color and light and kinetic movement. It's a massive tentpole action movie that wants to attend to small poetic moments in the background, and allow the characters to inhabit moments, and what's not interesting about that? In practice, everything. Part of it, surely, is that the film was cut down so dramatically, suggesting that what's left is connective tissue more than narrative movie. But part of it is just plain ol' rocky, confused filmmaking.

Certainly, the film's editing (by Steven Kemper and Christian Wagner) is as conspicuously lousy as it could possibly manage to be. From the moment during Ethan's re-introduction on Utah mountaintops that the scene cuts between four different angles of his hands slipping in less than a second, the movie throws its lot in with hectic, clarity-demolishing over-editing, sometimes so giddy that it's almost fun in a bad way (the explosive cut to the Utah scene, a dancer spinning across the screen to create the gaudiest wipe I have ever seen in a professional motion picture). Hans Zimmer's score, I suspect at Woo's urging, also trips near to "so bad it's good" territory, with its soaring use of a wordless female voice doing more than all the slow motion and all the doves in the world ever could to render Woo's aesthetic as a self-parody. The performances are all over the map: Cruise plays his cocky charming shtick with an unusual layer of uncertainty and inauthenticity, and Newton is astonishingly, uncharacteristically leaden, though with a role like that, how could she be otherwise? Scott is the most blank villain in a franchise that has had a fairly consistent villain problem, and the best thing about his presence here is that it prevented him from playing Wolverine in X-Men. And those are basically the only actors that the film cares about in the slightest.

As for what it does care about? I cannot say. Woo's best films are all about movement of people relative to the camera and the violence happening around him, but M:i:II is almost exactly the opposite of that: it is inert, subdivided into tiny little static moments cut together fast enough to synthesise kineticism. Visually, the film is soothing, not exciting: exactly the wrong thing for an action movie of any sort to be, or a sequel to a film noted for its intense thriller sequences, or a movie whose character beats are so generic that we just need to be distracted from them. Oh, it's pretty in it's gauzy way: the polish is there, but it's all in service to nonsense.

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COOL, CLEAR WATER

A review requested by Tim Van Autreve, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Director Claude Berri's Manon of the Spring from 1986 is maybe the best kind of sequel. It is greatly deepened in its emotional impact if you've seen Jean de Florette, its predecessor from earlier in 1986 (they were released in France about three months apart), and can fully appreciate the weight of history leaning down on the characters. But it works tremendously well as a standalone narrative (in fact, it does so better than Jean de Florette, which ends on something of a cliffhanger): the backstory is woven into character-building moments so fluidly that it doesn't register that we're having and entirely different film recapped, and having seen the original film, it doesn't register that we're having stuff we already know spit back at us.

This isn't actually all that much of an accident: Manon of the Spring began life as a 1952 film of the same name written and directed by the multi-talented Marcel Pagnol, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, director, and memoirist. As I understand it, the film was carved down so severely from Pagnol's original vision that he decided to turn it into a novel. And since he was already turning it into a novel, he went ahead and turned into a massive two-volume novel, so he could flesh out the film's backstory in its own full narrative. The hefty The Water of the Hills, or L'eau des collines, since everything is sexier in French (though I admit, I prefer the way Manon of the Spring feels in my mouth compared to Manon des sources) was published in 1963, and it was cyclically re-adapted by Berri and Gérard Brach, and so the overall point is, anyway, that if Manon of the Spring feels like it was worked out to stand on its own two feet, while Jean de Florette has an absence of resolution that gives it a kind of tacked-on feel, that's because that is precisely what happened.

I prefer Jean de Florette even so, but it's not worth being a dick about it: both movies are sort of terrific, much better than it seems like they should be on paper. They are relentlessly commercial 1980s French films - so 1980s French, right from the font used in the opening credits - designed for maximum international appeal in the period setting (the late '20s, approximately) and the casting, and shot by Bruno Nuytten (his last work as a cinematographer, before he shifted to directing) to shamelessly make Provence look as beautiful and tourist-friendly in its endlessly golden, sun-kissed fields and hills as any corner of God's earth ever has. The first time I watched the dyad, I approached with an undiluted suspicion verging on hostility, but it's simply too intelligently written and assembled not to overcome that. This is kind of the Gallic version of peak Merchant Ivory: it really seems like the thing that it is can't help but be awful, and instead it's really great.

Back to Manon itself, since that's the theoretical focus here. Some years ago, César Soubeyran (Yves Montand) contrived to block a spring that fed the neighboring property, to force Jean Cadoret, the owner, to sell; his conspiracy ended up getting out of hand and Jean died. Now César and his idiot manchild nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) own the property and use it to grow carnations, with the water from that very same spring. Jean's daughter, Manon (Emmanuelle Béart), who witnessed the Soubeyrans' treachery, now lives in the countryside as a goatherd, having come to accept her lot in life, though not forgetting the wrong done to her. This situation explodes because of three events: first, Ugolin watches Manon dancing nude in the hills to dry herself off after bathing, and grows obsessed with her. Later, on a trip to town, she overhears a pair of villagers talking about the wrong done to Jean all those years ago, and realises to her horror that the whole community knew about César's villainy, and did nothing to stop him, since he was such a prominent citizen. She'd be without any recourse, except that quite by accident one day, she discovered the small cave housing the spring that provides the village with all its water. Quicker than you can say "karma sucks, bitches", Manon blocks off the spring, forcing the villagers to come to reckoning with the past sins; they presume the dried-up water must be a sign of divine wrath. While this plays out, César grows increasingly obsessed with the idea that his inept, childless nephew is the last member of the line, and he feeds Ugolin's motivation for starting a family, which turns into an increasingly morbid obsession with Manon that, in turn, intensifies her desire to extract vengeance.

The title positions Manon as the protagonist, but in the actual film it's nothing of the sort: this is much more César's story and therefore a study in how past sins nag at the present, whether those are the sins of Jean de Florette's plot, or the history behind even that history. In the scene that most directly sets up the themes and stakes of his arc, he explains to Ugolin that the Soubeyran fortunes were done in by the family's greed and wretchedness in trying to wall out the rest of the world. "Interbreeding! It's bad for rabbits, and it's bad for people" he grouses to nephew, clearly a victim of that interbreeding.

In this context, Manon is an agent of fate more than a character in her own right, and Berri encourages us to think of that by keeping her dialogue and even her action to a minimum for the early parts of the movie. Casting Béart went a great deal of the way towards making that work: her incongruous beauty is absolutely never convincing as a rural shepherd girl, but it helps to make her seem like a nymph more than a person, something that the way she's filmed reinforces: our first glimpse of her is as a quick burst of motion that we can just make out as a human figure before it darts up a tree. When she's finally brought into the film as a proper character, we learn that she's articulate and inordinately intelligent for that place (a legacy from her intellectual father), and her behavior, coupled with Béart's deeply thoughtful expressions - it's not a very speech-dependent role - allows us to appreciate Manon as a fully-formed individual in her own right, and not just a prop for César's downfall and reckoning; but those early scenes cast a long shadow, and there's always a lingering feeling that she's an embodiment of nature's own revenge, and that the villagers' assumption that the blocked-up spring is a spiritual punishment is exactly right.

It is, in all ways, a film about the relationship of the land and the people who live on it, something accomplished especially well in wide shots that present human beings and their habitations as elements in the landscape, and not even the most important among those elements, sometimes. Even the postcard-appropriate photography contributes to this, focusing our attention on the scenery, which is given so much emphasis and liveliness that it becomes a character, if I may run headlong into a cliché. But clichés wouldn't be clichés if they didn't have some truth to them, and the sheer presence of the beautiful earth with its lush foliage and imposing rocky hills has much to do with how Manon of the Spring works at presenting its characters' place in the world.

In fairness, I don't know that anything that happens here could be honestly described as surprising; the film's themes are not new, and while its execution of them is especially handsome and well-tethered to its characters, it's not in any way challenging. If the film were American, I could describe it as "really good Oscarbait", I think you'd know exactly what I had in mind, and how hard that "really good" had to work. But the point is, that work happened: distinctly bourgeois art film sensibilities and all, Manon is smart and persuasive and very, very lovely to look at. It's not daring, but that's true of much of French cinema in the 1980s, and this film and its sibling are clearly among the strongest highlights in that country and decade.

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AUGUST 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

The annual trickling away at the end of summer is upon us (no Guardians of the Galaxy in the wings to explode at the last minute, I fear), which is just as well for me: it's going to be a crazy month with much less time for theater-going than I'm used to. So for me, this monthly preview is an unusual chance to actually work out my priorities, since "see everything unless I decide against it later" isn't going to be a strategy this time around. And before we leave July behind, I know I still need to catch up with Trainwreck; soon, I promise.


7.8.2015

A big weekend of smallish releases: Fox's second attempt at Fantastic Four isn't shaping up to be the world-beater we might have hoped for. I liked the early suggestions of where the tone was headed, but the too-visible woes in the film's production history have left that moot, along with the bland-ass trailers. And it's been fun watching people tie themselves in knots about Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm, and I personally think he's a great pick for the role, but the rest of the cast is whiffy as it gets.

Going down the line, we come to Ricki and the Flash, which unites Jonathan Demme, Meryl Streep, and Diablo Cody, and while Streep/Cody seems like a brilliant match made in Heaven, Demme/Cody is a very "things fall apart, the center cannot hold" proposition, don't you think? Is there any overlap in their respective filmographies. And also more bland-ass trailers that pretty thoroughly reveal all the important emotional beats. Next up is The Gift, the Joel Edgerton directorial debut we didn't know we apparently needed, with Jason Bateman making the weirdest bid for artistic stretching ever, turning his everyman shtick to the service of a sleazy hero in a psychological thriller.

Surely set to be last in the box office race, but first in my heart, is Shaun the Sheep Movie, whose grammatically ghoulish title cannot hide the fact that it is a new Aardman film, and Aardman films are a holiness above all else.

In limited release, and given GKIDS general release strategies, I'd bet I'll have to wait until the end of the year to even think about catching up with it, we find Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, a Salma Hayek passion project that unites a killer list of indie animation directors in a narrative/anthology hybrid. One of my most anticipated films of 2015.


14.8.2015

I confess that I was more interested in Straight Outta Compton when we didn't know that it was going to be two and a half hours long. I mean, political importance and cultural flashpoint and all, it's still a biopic, and that's a fuckton of time for a biopic. But what else is going to be worth seeing that weekend? Guy Ritchie's attempt to salvage a film that Steven Soderbergh couldn't get off the ground in the feature-length update of the old Cold War spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., with its playfulness replaced by Ritchieisms? Underdogs, a monstrously clumsy-looking Argentine animated feature with visibly awful dubbing into English? No, and no.


21.8.2015

Man, we're really starting to get into the Augusts now: they remade the 2007 video game adaptation Hitman, now calling it Hitman: Agent 47. And they're releasing it.

At least the other two wide releases for the week sound like actual movies: Sinister 2 is clearly a bad idea, given that 2012's Sinister unraveled so hard in its second half, but horror sequels are a thing that exist in their own world and always have been. And while a stoner comedy about Jesse Eisenberg as a spy who is also a pothead feels like something that should have come out in, like 2009... No, I take it back, Sinister 2 is the only film that sounds like an actual movie. But American Ultra is coming out anyway, and it has the odd fortune to be the first Kristen Stewart film of her critical renaissance.


26.8.2015

Did you know that revolutions in Southeast Asia can sometimes inconvenience expatriated Americans? If not, No Escape has you covered. I feel like I thought this was going to come out months ago.


28.8.2015

We Are Your Friends is a movie about EDM starring Zac Efron, which is great, because it means I can avoid two things I dislike at one time.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: YOUR MISSION, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation continues the unexpected late flowering of a TV-derived spy franchise into its best self. Is it not right, then, to take a look back to that franchise's beginnings?

There's an elephant in the room that two decades haven't gotten rid of: the 1996 feature film Mission: Impossible commits to a twist at the three-quarter mark that serves almost no purpose other than to thoroughly and pointlessly piss off anybody committed to the 1966-'73 American TV series Mission: Impossible to enough of a degree that the movie's title would function as a draw. There's damn little about the movie that capitalises on that connection: the plot, attitude, and even the genre are all completely different from the show, although obviously any movie that gets to include Lalo Schifrin's glorious theme music will benefit from doing so. So why do it? The character involved is enough of a non-entity within the film in and of itself that any subversive bite goes awry. The commentary on post-Cold War aimlessness in the intelligence community is identical if you change that character's name and thus avoid the whole bloody affair. All it really does is telegraph a lazy contempt for the property and its fanbase, and even if Mission: Impossible had no other flaws - and it certainly has other flaws - this would be enough to keep me from ever particularly cottoning to it, for I am indeed quite a fan of the show. And also, for some reason, I've spent all my energy so far trying like mad not to spoil a movie that came out two full generations of movie audiences ago, but it's a good habit to keep.

Despite its thorough and conscious rejection of the show it was based on, this was ground zero for the trend of strip-mining classic TV for new action tentpoles (most of the previous TV-to-film adaptations during the 1990s had been sitcoms turned into the movie version of sitcoms), and I will concede that the film's enormous financial success is easy to comprehend: the parts of this film that work, work really damn well, most especially but not only its instantly-iconic thriller sequence that finds Tom Cruise suspended from the ceiling of an austere white room while trying to silently hack a computer. The film kicked off one of the 21st Century's most interesting (even in its worst entries) action franchises, but Mission: Impossible is not itself all that much of an action movie: it's much more interested in plumbing the paranoia that attends to the life of a super-ultra double-top-secret spy, which it does through some elaborately staged moments of high tension that are frequently communicated through mundane speech and character beats.

"Just like Hitchcock!" one might want to say, upon recognising that M:I was directed by Brian De Palma, history's most famed Hitchock impersonator, but by 1996, he'd largely worked that out of his system, and the film is working in a different vein than that. This is still a big-budget studio movie, Paramount's big play for the summer, if not indeed the whole year (it ended up being the third-highest grosser of '96, behind the VFX tag-team of Independence Day and Twister), and it carries with a certain shallow gloss as a result of that. The incongruity of faces like Kristin Scott Thomas and Emmanuelle Béart (in, I believe, her only English-language film prior to 2014) cropping up in such an obvious Hollywood commercial play is one thing that might make us want to credit M:I with a little more artistic gravitas, as does the presence of De Palma, for that matter, clearly more interested personally in pulling at the wires inside a gigantic studio production than actually sitting down to make one like a good boy. These things are all to the credit of producer Cruise (his first project with Paula Wagner under their Cruise/Wagner banner), already at this point looking to start his fascinating project of tweaking, self-analysing, and inverting his superstar persona - Jerry Maguire came out later the same year, and his dates with Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson were next in line. But these things ultimately do not make Mission: Impossible any less of a '90s popcorn movie.

Nor, frankly, is it one of the better examples of such things. The blunt fact is that the story - credited to David Koepp and Steve Zaillian, with the finished script handled by Koepp and Robert Towne - is a bit of a shambling mess, bearing the unmistakable mark of a movie that was assembled from pieces of movies that were not made, with a couple of tremendously obvious loose ends (the most conspicuous being a Bible that serves as the clue to unlock the film's twist, but it makes absolutely no sense how it manages to do so), and a final act that takes the delicacy of the preceding 100 minutes and says "fuck it, just throw an exploding helicopter at it". De Palma's directing doesn't do much at all in the way of obviating these flaws, and it usually feels that he was more invested in pursuing ideas for the sake of it, than pursuing ideas for the sake of this exact movie. That pays off: Mission: Impossible is always at least interesting as an exercise in De Palma stylistics. The problem is that it is, frequently, only interesting as such an exercise.

But anyway, I should get around to the plot before I hit the 1000-word mark, even though in ignoring it I'm doing no worse than the movie. The Impossible Missions Force, a top-secret US government agency that solves the problems that can only be cracked with creativity, cunning, and extra-legal means, has lost a list of its agents' true identities, and top agent Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) and a team he's hand-picked have traveled to Prague to retrieve it. The team, including Ethan Hunt (Cruise), Sarah Davies (Scott Thomas), Jack Harmon (Emilio Estevez, uncredited), and Phelps's wife Claire (Béart), successfully infiltrate the American embassy in Prague, but the mission otherwise goes spectacularly wrong: starting with a sudden and shockingly gruesome death for Jack, the entire team except for Ethan ends up dead, a mere 26 minutes into the film. IMF director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) informs Ethan (rather stupidly, when it comes down to it) that this suggests to all involved that Ethan must therefore be the mole that the IMF was trying to smoke out with this mission, and so the agent now finds himself on the run to clear his name and find the real traitor, even if he has to enter the grey world of disavowed IMF agents and shady arms dealers to do it.

The scenario and tone split the difference neatly between the sour espionage realpolitik of John le Carré and the florid fantasies of James Bond, and that's by far the nicest thing I have it in me to say about Mission: Impossible as a story. The whole thing is so damnably confusing: not in the rewarding way where we're navigating a puzzle that snaps into place at the end as long as we've been paying full attention, but in the frustrating way where we only have to pay such close attention because the filmmakers made a huge mess of things. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the TV series's focus on group efforts to solve problems as a team of specialised experts; really, it's nothing but a spy-themed variant on the infinitely more satisfying The Fugitive from three years prior, subbing Cruise during an uncertain transitional phase for Harrison Ford at his peak powers. Like many an action film before or since - including all four of its own sequels to the date of this writing - it's primarily a scaffolding for setpieces, and it has the grave misfortune to end with by far the worst of its big three: a helicopter vs. train chase through a tunnel that suffers from all the idiotic bigness of popcorn cinema and lacks any grace in the filmmaking, on top of having primitive CGI that has aged unexpectedly poorly.

The other two are pretty great, though. The hacking scene I've touched on, but it's worth reiterating how well it uses deathly silence and uncomfortably intimate close-ups on Cruise's sweaty face to ramp up the suspense to exquisitely painful levels. The opening scene at the embassy, the only part that feels anything like the old Mission: Impossible, is a nifty marriage of quick cutting between elements of the team's plan, inspired spy movie balderdash (the series' beloved mask machines put in their first, most dramatically "Look at me! I'm cool!" appearance), and beautiful style: an overhead shot of the embassy stairs is an exercise in pure geometrical composition that speaks especially highly of De Palma's visual sensibility. The sequence uses unexpected but totally successful first-person shots to work us into the action; editor Paul Hirsch plows through scenes and lines with terrific momentum-building speed.

De Palma is good enough at suspense that he can even get some really taut tension from scenes where nothing seems to be happening at all: the conversation between Ethan and Kittridge is shot from an inconsistent array of sickening angles, far nastier than any basic two-shot situation has the guts to be, and it's great. It only goes so far, though. Ultimately, the film has a hard time defining its stakes (the MacGuffin is particularly MacGuffiny, primarily because of the number of different times it turns out not to be real), and its characters range from distinct but under-used (Scott Thomas gives Sarah attitude that's not in the script, but she dies before the conflict even begins) to dull functional objects in the script's gears (everybody else, though Béart is the most flaccid, I assume for reasons of language discomfort). After the later sequels left Cruise totally at ease with the role of Ethan Hunt, charming and hard and visibly thoughtful, I'd quite forgotten how stiff he was here; by '96, he'd already given some very good performances, but the real loosening-up that came from working with Cameron Crowe in Jerry Maguire and Anderson in Magnolia was needed before he could make Ethan anything but a generic action movie superhero, here unfortunately stuck in a wannabe-brainy spy thriller.

Credit where credit is due: the film tries to push against its genre, and the auteurist flourishes are unmistakable, which is much more than can be said for the vast majority of films at this level of commercial ambition in this era of Hollywood filmmaking. Mission: Impossible isn't always successful, but it's certainly never lazy. Its earnest desire to be a Bond picture with more thoughtfulness and challenging aesthetics are to be lauded, though I think it's telling that 15 years later, when Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol finally carved a top-notch movie out of this material, it was by going in a different direction than the original film in almost every way other than the mechanical ingenuity of its setpieces.

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PLEASE SHARE MY UMBRELLA

A review requested by Fedor Illitchev, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. My thanks as well for the historical background he was able to provide for this film, about which virtually no information is readily available in English.

During the most censorious periods in the history of Soviet cinema - which is to say, everything from the start of the Second World War until the early 1980s, with the exception of the Krushchev Thaw between roughly 1956 and 1965 - there were, broadly speaking, two reasons that a film might trigger the official objection of the government. One, obviously, was because it contained subversive narrative elements that could be interpreted as critical of Soviet policy, or Communism generally. The other reason is a little stranger: basically, a movie could be stamped down on account of being too stylish. The charge was "formalism", meaning that the film was driven more by aesthetics and filmmaking technique than presenting a clear story with a plain message, and was perhaps so confusing and obscure in its challenging application of those aesthetics that the people in charge couldn't even tell if it was subversive or not.

It was wicked formalism, rather that touchy political content, that mostly explains the aborted career of Mikhäil Kobakhidzé a filmmaker from what's now Georgia. At the dawn of the '60s, in his early 20s, Kobakhidzé attended the state-run Gerasimov film school, until his graduation in '65. Between 1961 and 1969, he completed five short films, three at school and two subsequently; the last, Musicians, finally pushed the censors too hard, and his next completed project wouldn't come until years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when he was invited to make En chemin in 2003 as part of a French series of short films.

If Musicians killed off his career, it was his fourth film, 1967's Umbrella, that first triggered the warning signs. To your eyes or mine the wordless 18-minute film - available in its entirety on YouTube - is naught but a poetic fable about human connections starting to blur and pull apart, carried on the back of an uninterpreted image of an umbrella floating along the Georgian countryside of its own accord. But we lack the finely-honed paranoia of a Soviet official. There's one way into which it's at least possible to read troubling politics into the film: the umbrella is associated with distinctively French-sounding music cues that I can't place 100% (though one motif is instantly recognisable from Gershwin's An American in Paris), while the clean-cut youths the umbrella entrances and confuses are linked, in the umbrella's absence, to a passage from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. The potential for a politicised meaning to this Western vs. Russian war on the soundtrack was dangerous enough to bring unwanted attention Kobakhidzé's way, if not, itself, enough to shut him down.

As for the film itself, it's probably easiest if we start out by just working through the plot. A young man (Gia Avalishvili) works in some not-entirely clear capacity by an isolated stretch of railroad tracks, and in his downtime entertains his girlfriend (Jana Petraitite) by putting on cute little shows, with a curtain and everything, in which he plays Tchaikovsky on a recorder. A white umbrella floats by, and they're compelled to give chase through the countryside and into town, and it taunts them, staying just out of reach. They give up for a bit and dance inside the man's house, while the umbrella lingers outside the window. It follows them and they're finally able to grab it, and all seems happy and free till another man (Ramaz Giorgobiani) comes by, and the umbrella flies over to him. The woman follows him and they start to walk off; she slows and changes her mind handing the umbrella over to the second man and walking back, though the framing of this final shot - nothing but her quiet, ambiguous smile - make it deliberately impossible to be sure what's on her mind in that moment.

If there's a political reading that seems to me to fit the evidence, it's one that would actually tend to support the Soviet Union: the allure of Western culture, embodied by the umbrella, drags the young couple away from their work and their lives, embarrasses them in front of their neighbors, and generally bothers and distracts them. In the end, they both abjure the umbrella, she by deliberate choice and he by learning that its charms are all just a big come-on, in the end - this true regardless of what the umbrella represents, or if it represents anything at all. So it is, if I have any idea what the hell I'm talking about, a fable about the triumph of Soviet youths (calling them good Georgian youths would be one of those subversive narrative elements I mentioned) over the siren call of Western art.

But then, what Umbrella is actually about is rather more abstract and emotive than breaking down its plot beats into editorial cartoon symbols. The bulk of the film is about pure experience, the young man and the young woman and the umbrella moving in stark black and white against the mottled grey dirt of the Georgian hills. They run and skip in a highly exaggerated series of angular movements of, transformed by the camera and the music (which dominates the minimalist, plastered-on sound design) into playful dancing. Just about the only thing it's possible to confidently declare about Kobakhidzé's critical reputation in the West is that people like to compare him to Jacques Tati, and that's absolutely fair: the fascination with how bodies and limbs can move in graceful sweeps and sharp jabbing gestures, and how the angle the filmmaker takes on those bodies changes our perception of what they're doing, readily evokes that French genius that Kobakhidzé had never seen. But the movie that Kobakhidzé had never seen that I kept thinking of was Richard Lester and Peter Seller's masterful exercise in manic slapstick, The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film from 1959, which similarly finds itself deeply fascinated with the geometry of the human form.

What both of those comparisons miss - for both of them attend only to Umbrella's broadly comic aspects - is the gauziness of the movie, the sensibility that positions it within a widely-defined Eastern European artistic tradition instead of the widely-defined Western European/American tradition. As much as the film is charming, it's even more hushed and haunting, with the umbrella's fluid gliding through the landscape and the camera's graceful pursuit of it adding an ethereal feeling. Kobakhidzé and cinematographer Nikoloz Sukhishvili's images can have a very hazy and ghostly quality, owing in no small part to the stark whiteness of the umbrella serving to so thoroughly strip any and all naturalism from the film. But also owing to the way that the images all seem to be made of curves and irregular shapes, in everything from the rolling hills to the floppiness of laundry in the wind - the man's little square house is a striking bulwark against this, a concrete manifestation of stability that emphasises the weirdness around it (the shots of an out-of-focus umbrella through the house's windows are absolutely striking, as instantly unforgettable as anything I've seen).

The film's brevity and its frankly opaque "meaning" more or less require that it function more as a mood piece and an expression of emotions. It's not quite an experimental film in the way I like to use that term - it tells a definite story and that story has resonances - but it's fair to call it experimental in the way that it generates those moods and emotions purely through movement, editing, and gradations of greyscale. It's deeply mesmerising and yes, it's absolutely formalist - that the Soviets would get a little nervous watching it makes perfect sense even if the film itself has little that anyone could object to within it. It's joyful cinema, cut with just the right amount of bittersweet, and the way that it builds that joy within its craftsmanship is far more affecting than a blunter treatment could have been; it's a sorry accident of history that it's for exactly that reason that the film was shunted to the memory hole that makes it so deeply obscure now.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: 21st CENTURY HORROR - THE DAMMED

If I were to tell you that a movie called Zombeavers is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable experiences I've had with a 2015 movie (it's been kicking around since the first half of 2014, but its commercial release was slow in coming), and you were to call me a piece of shit, no good fucking liar, could I be offended? Of course not. What sort of outright psychopath would expect a movie called Zombeavers - and for exactly the reason you suppose it is called Zombeavers, which is that it has beaver zombies in it - to be even slightly close to tolerable? Let alone the funniest horror-comedy since at the very least The Cabin in the Woods, and I'd be privately inclined to set the line farther back than that.

The friend with whom I first saw it - both of us falling head-over-heels in love after expecting not a damn thing from it* - came up with a perfectly pithy one-sentence review, and there's nothing he can do to keep my from stealing it: it's the version of ThanksKilling that's terrific instead of bone-scrapingly awful. It's mostly the same ingredients: uniformly reprehensible characters who speak entirely in filthy jokes that are forcefully dirty more than clever in any meaningful way, deaths presented in a fully comic register, and killer animals that do not pretend for even one instant to be anything but hand-crafted puppets. It simply works better this time, possibly because this film is ultimately sweeter-natured; it's more upbeat, the insults more bubbly and less caustic. And it's considerably less vile in its attitude towards women, who are still objectified to a fair degree (there's an entire scene whose narrative is "girl takes off her bikini top and makes other girls feel awkward by parading about showily"), but who are presented as the authors of their own sexuality beyond what cheap-as-hell horror movies typically traffic in.

Mostly, I am tempted to say, it has better puppets: I badly want the filmmakers to authorise the production of zombeaver plushies, because I would buy one right now. They are the cutest little ugly fuckers. But in fairness, I was already on the film's side before we saw them for the first time, at the 27 minute mark of a relentlessly paced 77-minute feature.

The film's set-up could not be more generic: three college students are driving to a cabin in the woods. These are sorority sisters Jenn (Lexi Atkins), who has just been cheated on; Mary (Rachel Melvin), who has decided that this means it's time for some supportive girl time; and Zoe (Cortney Palm), who isn't trying to contain her irritation that Mary has issued a blanket "no boys and no phones" rule for the weekend. They banter in a raucous, scatological way, etching out a strong, clear-cut dynamic, even if it's also frankly a little bit like what three male screenwriters - Al Kaplan, Jon Kaplan, and Jordan Rubin, the last of whom is also the film's director - would come up with if they knew that they wanted to subvert stereotypes but also had never been around women talking. Still, it takes only a few minutes to get a crisp, strong understanding of each of these characters, and respond to them as individual personalities, which is not at all something you just get every time a genre movie crosses your path. And while their line are crude, there's some actual humor to them as well, particularly because they're tied to character: Zoe makes jokes that Mary would not, and within five minutes of meeting the trio, we understand why that is.

And the other part of the set-up is, if anything, even more generic: a pair of truck drivers hit a deer, and in the process manage to lose a barrel of toxic sludge that ends up getting in the water supply. Cue the zombies. The twist being that the truckers (played by comedian Bill Burr and snoozy rocker John Mayer) are having a filthy conversation of their own, but one that occurs in a zen-like state of stoner's consideration, profoundly anti-funny in its abiding fascination with homoeroticism and the way that both men deliver every line to sound like a non-sequitur, even when it actually follows. And then they plow into a deer, killing it in an inordinately violent way. It's a bold first scene, at any rate, so deep into irony that one can see nothing else. I love it a little bit; it's aggressively absurdist and pointedly alien.

The film, obviously, concerns of holding the zombeavers back just long enough to shake the bottle with the young women in it until it gets good and fizzy - this includes Zoe sneakily arranging for her boyfriend, Buck (Peter Gilroy) to show up, along with Mary's boyfriend Tommy (Jake Weary), and Jenn's notorious ex, Sam (Hutch Dano), and our learning what everybody but Jenn already knew, which is that seemingly kind and pure Mary was the faceless brunette seen making out with Sam in the photo that broke Jenn's heart. And then it goes straight to the usual Night of the Living Dead territory: everybody reacts to the first zombeaver in ways that would be sensible if only they weren't in a horror movie, and then tries too late to secure the cabin their in, by which point it all comes down to waiting to see what errors they'll make to let the monsters get them. Along the way, the leering, puritanical local hunter Smyth (Rex Linn) arrives to provide some false hope, as do the nice old neighbors down the way, with some pretty crude mouths of their own, the Gregorsons (Phyllis Katz and Brent Briscoe).

We're miles away from a movie that's going to work based on the density of its plot, but then you knew that the moment I said Zombeavers. The movie goes all-in on one thing and one thing only, which is a vigorously warped sense of humor. A very precise kind of humor, too: it's not exactly a Sharknado-style exercise in "can you guys believe how willfully bad and stupid and silly this is? Isn't it fun?", a mode that I find enormously enervating. But I'd be hard-pressed to explain exactly what thing Zombeavers does that keeps it out of those particular weeds. Certainly, it is stupid; certainly, it is inordinately proud of the fact that it does all of the reprehensible and trite and illogical things that make lousy monster movies lousy. It just... feels different. The difference between a movie that is funny (or supposedly funny) because it is bad at being horror, and a movie that is funny because it's good at being comedy. It never winks at us, or tries to get away with doing stupid shit by saying "look at the stupid shit!", but treats the zombeavers, within the world of the film, with perfect gravity, even as outside of the world of the film they're pure farce. Comedy is best when the characters don't realise they're in a comedy, after all.

It's a one-note comedy, fair; maybe two, with note one being "zombeavers are too ridiculous to take seriously" and note two being "these characters are deeply committed to being profoundly awful and whipping up some zesty dialogue to prove it". 77 minutes is already a generous running time for something with so few tonal registers - smutty dialogue, manic running about and yelling in a way that Rubin doesn't even slightly care about making scary, random absurdity - and at an absolute minimum, the film could do without the outtakes that are not part of the ending credits. Those are instead set to a jazzy Sinatra-style number recapping the plot of the film we just saw, which is infinitely more fun in comparison. And better still is the post-credits stinger that's a terrible visual pun of the first order, and thus a work of art that needs to be appreciated by every person with a heart.

The repetitive nature of the humor is probably the single thing that most keeps Zombeavers from realising its full potential as a bawdy comedy masquerading as a repulsively gory horror film. Not that everybody would be in the market for the absolute best possible version of that movie, though I know that I am not alone in finding even the imperfect Zombeavers to be exactly the right thing for a specific kind of moment. It's a movie that holds nothing back and pushes itself with such energy that even someone as resistant to this brand of crude comedy as myself can't help but roll over for it.

Body Count: 9, plus a very messy deer, one dog (seen), one dog (implied), and one bear.

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A DECADE OF ANTAGONY

Today, beloved readers, is a very special day: Antagony & Ecstasy celebrates its 10th anniversary! And that, coupled with the rapidly-approaching fact of my entry in grad school, means that it's time for a celebration. I herewith declare that August shall be a month of jubilee at this blog, which means that all of the posts I've been kicking down the road for years now are going to finally start showing up. Those who have been asking me for two years when I shall finally get around to Wreck-It Ralph, for five years about A Bug's Life, and for the whole decade of this blog's existence about that Terry Pratchett tribute I teased during my second week writing will be happy with some of the festivities on the table.

It also means that starting on the 15th, there are going to be some enormous changes around these parts. But we're going to talk about that on the 15th. Until that grey day arrives, I want to thank all of my readers, those who comment and those who do not, for having supported me for the last decade and made it feel like all these words about the highest and lowest of film art have been worth it. Without you, this would have ended a long time ago, and I'd have never invested so much of myself into writing about movies to pursue it all the way to a terminal degree. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for coming here to share my often irritable, frequently overbaked, and hopefully, sometimes, enlightening and interesting observations. Here's to another ten years, no matter what other changes the future will bring.

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