Captain America: Civil War (2016)

Posted on September 13, 2016 by Ross Birks

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I had a lot of problems with Civil War the first time I saw it; too scattershot, too cluttered. Honestly, I found it a bit of a chore to enjoy it as much as so many others apparently were. Upon re-watch, however, I found it to be a much more satisfying experience.

A lot of the stuff that I didn’t really get into the first time went down with more ease (you can read my initial thoughts here). This time around I dug the splash page royal rumble and found more concrete in the jumbled structure. Black Panther and Spider-Man didn’t feel as shoehorned in either and I actually got into all the extended digressions and subplots. I’ve been reading a lot of comics lately as well, so maybe I’m just more tuned in to this sort of soap-opera-in-spandex storytelling than I was a few months back.

It still doesn’t quite work as a Captain America story. I don’t understand why they couldn’t just call it Civil War and avoid any disappointment of confusion all together. Yes, the Bucky/Cap thread from Winter Soldier is continued but so are many others from previous movies. I mean, a sequence involving Tony Stark recruiting Peter Parker has no place in a movie with the words “Captain America” in the title. The film works more effectively if you look at it as an ensemble. Perhaps that’s where my initial disappointment came from. I was expecting something far more Cap centric, so naturally everything that wasn’t that, came across like a distraction. Going in for round two, however, I knew what I was in for and actually got on board. Expectations, man. They fuck you up.

I also wish the Russo’s would slow things down here and there and have faith in their shot choices. There are so many strong compositions of stuff in motion that would be elevated to true greatness if only they were held for longer. The sequence where Bucky and Cap beat Iron Man down, for instance, features an extended shot of them double-teaming him (naughty) but just as it’s about to reach devastating heights, they cut back into more frenetic coverage and the effect is immediately extinguished. You go from actually believing Tony might die to knowing full well he will escape with a few cuts and bruises.

Marvel movies just don’t work as stand alone stories anymore. Those days are gone. I revisited Civil War after re-watching both The First Avenger and The Winter Soldier and when viewed as a continuing chapter, with the other characters and threads still fresh in the mind and not with a few years worth of distance, and notas a self-contained instalment, the film held up far better. It’s a mid-franchise stage setter and a loose-end exterminator. And while conventional serial storytelling teaches us you need to make your individual chapters satisfying, we need to accept that we live in an era now where you can leave things unresolved as the promise of a follow-up is guaranteed. It’s a slippery slope, sure, but Civil Warwas far more satisfying when I just went along with it. Beyond initial instalments (the first Iron Man, Ant-Man etc.), to go into a Marvel movie expecting a complete story is kind of hopeless at this point. The story doesn’t end in Civil War but there is an emotional arc that feels pleasingly developed and somewhat concluded. A few months back I found this to be one of the most disappointing moviegoing experiences of the year but now it has become one of my favourite MCU flicks. Who woulda thunk it?

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After Last Season (2009)

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Ross Birks

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Like some kind of weird transmission from another planet, After Last Season found its way in front of my eyes with little warning. I had no understanding of what it was, where it came from or what it was trying to say but by the end I knew it was a voice I liked the sound of.

A quick google search helps to put some of this in context but not much. Initially stirring up a viral storm as a mysterious trailer that landed on iTunes one quiet day in 2009, online theorists speculated that it was a meant as a joke or, even more bizarrely, part of the marketing campaign for Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are. As it turned out, After Last Season was none of those things. But it is a film. And it’s a unique one.

Written and directed by Mark Region, this foreign transmission is hard to summarise or even describe, which in itself can be a sign of great cinema. As Morpheous once told Neo: “You need to see it for yourself”. Visually and conceptually the film sits somewhere between Michel Gondry and Shane Carruth. Gondry for the look, Carruth for the brains.

Much has been said of the spare and puzzling production design, some of which appears to be made out of cardboard or other materials from the filmmaker’s local arts and crafts store. Like Carruth’s Primer, Region injects a lot of scientific and heady concepts into the proceedings. There are endless scenes of people talking over tabletops and you probably won’t have a clue what the hell they’re talking about. There’s a murderer on the loose, some technology that allows people to visualise another’s thoughts and extended animated CAD sequences. It’s tricky to follow and easy to be put off by but genuinely, there’s something going on. What is it? I don’t know yet.

The construction is crude yet there’s a spectre of a steady hand. The odd editing rhythms and cutaways would be easy to write off as nonsensical and amateur but there’s definitely an intent behind them. Many viewers I think, have confused their failure to understand the film with the filmmakers lack of skill. While, yes, I do think there’s a lot to be desired in terms of the film’s aesthetic and performances, I suspect the filmmaker is a hell of a lot smarter than me when it comes to the nitty gritty of what the film is actually about and is assembled exactly as it should be. It will definitely take a few watches and lots of mulling over to piece this puzzle together but unlike genuinely “bad” movies, the prospect of that actually excites me. If this were merely a piece of shit, I wouldn’t be thinking about it anywhere near as much as I have done. The fact Region hasn’t made anything since just makes his voice more difficult to decipher. This is definitely one that could gain half a star with every rewatch if the pieces slot into place.

Watch this space.

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The Doors (1991)

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Ross Birks

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With The Doors, Oliver Stone was able to bring the mysticism brewing under the surface in many of his films completely to the fore. It’s none more apparent than in the film’s most memorable and endlessly parodied scene in which Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer) and his bandmates drop acid under the scorching sun in the psychedelic vistas Death Valley. It is one of the most iconic scenes in Stone’s back catalogue and frankly, the main reason I’ve always wanted to see this film. Blazingly obvious in its druggy visualisation and transitions but pretty spot-on in capturing the minds-eye of Morrison’s self-made psyche, it’s as if Koynaasqatsi drunk a gallon of Red Bull and went streaking in the desert. Despite having previously seen it through the prism of various parodies, I’m happy to report that that sequence still delivers as a piece of total nutjob cinema. So Oliver Stone. So 1991.

This isn’t one of Stone’s best films but it is one of his most visually adventurous and accomplished. His long standing collaboration with the great cinematographer Robert Richardson was beginning to hit its peak with Richardson’s manipulation of hot top lighting and severe colour with deep black contrast reaching spectacular heights. It feels like a primarily stylistic exercise for Stone. Without this film he wouldn’t get to JFK and certainly not Natural Born Killers. You can see him flexing new muscles and become more experimental with form and structure. The script, as is typical with Stone’s films whether he writes them or not, feels like a sledgehammer constantly banging away but Val Kilmer’s central performance is so staggering that the film remains engaging and occasionally thrilling.

There were times here when I legit had to remind myself that I was watching Val Kilmer and not Jim Morrison. Morrison is known for his contradictions and complications and Kilmer hits all the right notes, even going as far as singing many iconic Doors tracks himself. There are times where you won’t be able to tell the difference between Kilmer’s takes and the original songs. The merging of Kilmer and Morrison is absolute. This isn’t merely a sappy celebration of Morrison either. The character, as presented by Stone and his co-writer J. Randal Johnson, is often a dick or pretentious poser. The film doesn’t seem to sugarcoat him though it can be accused of sidelining much of the band in favour of putting Morrison in the spotlight. The title is quite inaccurate in that regard.

As with so many Oliver Stone movies, the majority of stuff here can be quite superfluous. He’s known as a filmmaker who throws every idea at the wall in an attempt to see what sticks. Sometimes that works in his favour, sometimes it doesn’t. Much of The Doors will begin to recede from memory as quick as it entered but there’s just enough sharp edge to stop if from dissipating entirely. The music, obviously, is great. The visuals are striking and the film has a real pulse. At times it feels scorching hot and frenzied. The riotous concert sequences are as good as you’d hope. At other times it just feels like it’s going through the motions of a slightly unconventional biopic. Luckily, Kilmer’s towering performance presides above it all – a five star Morrison Hotel in a three star town. It kinda makes me want to see what Kilmer and Stone got upto in Alexander. But yeah, if you enjoyed Wayne’s World 2 check out The Doors.

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Born on the Fourth of July (1988)

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Ross Birks

BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY

Something came over me and I had the urge to make my way through the Oliver Stone movies I’ve never seen. Born on the Fourth of July is the biggie. It was nominated for a ton of Oscars and won a few (Stone bagged his second for Best Director) and unlike many of Stone’s other acclaimed 80s films (Wall Street ahem) it still seems to be held in certain high regard.

I’m not usually one for heavy handed war movies but admittedly this one sucked me in. The story of Ron Kovic’s hellish transformation from young American go-getter to a crippled, disillusioned and abandoned ‘Nam veteran is clearly one close to Stone’s heart and he instills it with as much passion and stylistic vigour as he can. Yes, it’s very on the nose and aimed at the heart strings, Stone has never been the most subtle filmmaker and is prone to bang the obvious point or approach as hard as he can but that is also part of what makes him Oliver Stone. It feels like a film made in the 80s in way that slightly dates it but also in a way that makes it sensical. I’m not surprised this film resonated with so many in 1989 and became a blockbuster. Like Platoon and Wall Street before it, the film taps into unsettled attitudes and unspoken truths that were at their height in 1989 with total transparency. It’s a message movie, but one that was utterly essential at the time of release.

There are many sequences here which showcase Stone swinging the bat at full strength that really work. The battle sequences, shot with long lenses at sunset, are striking in their stylisation and the nightmarish hospital where Kovic is sentenced to months of squalor and recovery is unforgettable. Cruise’s performance too is pretty titan. Characteristically it looks like your standard “Give me an Oscar” attempt but there’s an earnestness and sincerity there that outweighs that vibe and convinced me this was Cruise’s all or nothing bid to be seen as the greatest actor of his generation. Like Stone, he gives it his all. It is a performance as physical as it is emotional and the gamut of torment he has to play must be an actor’s dream (albeit a draining one). I don’t throw this word around lightly, but his work here was transformative.

Oliver Stone was once regarded as one of the most successful and important filmmakers of his generation but shifting times and opinions on his films seems to have regressed him into a filmmaker regarded as overrated so commonly that he has actually become underrated. His filmography might be unwieldy and his aesthetic and politics too much for some to take, but I always respond to the full-blooded drive behind his films. He is wildly experimental but pitches his projects, like Spielberg, to the wildest possible audience making some of his films viscerally original and others laughably overwrought. Born on the Fourth of July captures his habits in perfect moderation with the material. It’s a quintessential Oliver Stone film. It’s not an immediate favourite, but I enjoyed it as a reminder that now and again, I am actually a fan of this filmmaker. And 80s Cruise at his most serious is great.

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Charley Varrick (1973)

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Ross Birks

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Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick has become a bit of an obscure picture, but it is as quintessentially 70s in its ideals and execution as any other second-tier genre classic of the era. It might not be up there with Dirty Harry but it’s certainly on the same level as something like The Warriors or the original Mad Max.

When first choice Clint Eastwood turned Siegel down, he approached Walter Matthau for the title role and while, like Eastwood, Matthau found nothing immediately appealing in the role took it on anyway. Matthau is an actor who might not have the same chiselled looks as an Eastwood or McQueen but has the same shaggy-dog, world-worn exterior that made Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe make sense in the same decade. Matthau’s performance is half of what makes the film so great. You see the cogs turning behind his eyes. He’s always ahead. We might not know his full motivations until the very end, but just watching him execute his plans rather than understand them is enough to be totally engaging. Siegel regular John Vernon is there for good measure and Joe Don Baker, another actor who seemed to make more sense than ever in the 70s, plays a mafia hitman/cowboy hot on Varrick’s tail. When the three finally share a scene in the final moments you realise the biggest pleasure of Siegel’s movie is just watching these character actors work with this material, as well as finding who, if anyone will walk away unscathed.

Siegel directs the film with brute force. Always an uncomplicated and economical director, he makes every cut count. The opening bank heist and fall out is staged with ticking clock precision. The splashes of violence are appropriately blunt and harsh too. One particular scene featuring Baker interrogating and torturing Andrew Robinson (none other than Dirty Harry‘s Scorpio) is especially tough but not unnecessarily. This is a film about violent men who don’t blink and those who do are chewed out by dogs with bigger teeth. It is a film about professionalism too. Like Siegel, Varrick thinks out every beat. Even his business card proudly boasts “Charley Varrick – the last of the independents”. It’s no mistake that Matthau always looks best when wearing a suit.

As a side note, it’s hard to watch Charley Varrick and not see a lot of Breaking Bad in it. Like Vince Gilligan’s show it is a small crime saga unfolding in Albuquerque, New Mexico where corrupt sunlight acts as substitute for sneaky shadows, where dirty money can be stashed in barrels, small businesses operate as fronts and all you need to forge a new identity is a camera and some fingertip skills. Varrick repeatedly wears the same cream jacket with cream pants combo that Walter White was so fond of too. I’m not sure how intentional the parrellels are but it adds to the film a cool dimension when watching today.

Charley Varrick is as entertaining as you want it to be and as tough and cynical as you’d hope from 70s genre filmmaking. If nothing else it completely lives up to the promise of its first intertitle – “A Siegel Picture”.

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The Unbelievable Truth (1989)

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Ross Birks

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My first Hal Hartley movie! A pretty glorious dip into a purposefully off-key world punctuated with a thrilling, mischievous wit. It’s a film that throws down a gauntlet of intent. Like many great stylists, Hartley seems to arrive fully formed. Yes, I don’t have any of his other films to compare it to where I’m sure his voice becomes more assured, but watching The Unbelievable Truth is to immediately grasp a voice and sensibility. With one 90 minute swoop, I now understand completely what people mean when they say the words “Hal Hartley-esque”. You know when you hear Mamet dialogue for the first time, or Aaron Sorkin, or Tarantino or Spike Lee and the same applies here. The language just sizzles and pops to its own tempo. Very intelligent and very funny.

The film is also full of faces I now vaguely recognise from later work but never have I seen them so front and centre. People like Robert Burke and Edie Falco (okay, yes, I’ve seen her front and centre plenty) were mostly unknowns when this film came out and they feel born from this universe. The real stand-out, ofcourse is Adrienne Shelly. She has a face made for cinema and a tongue capable of verbal somersaults and wicked poetry to match. Watching her in every scene reminded me of the first time I saw Anna Karina in a Godard movie or Marilyn Monroe in Hollywood black and white. She is a stunning and individual actress whom I immediately fell in love with. Finding out Shelly died a few years ago made the experience more tragic but I now look forward to seeing her other films with more care and savour.

Well, as far as one film goes, I can safely say I’m a fan of Hal Hartley. His style is wonderfully assured with just the right amount of experimental. At one point Burke and Falco share a scene in a cafe and they repeat their lines of dialogue multiple times through, faster and faster as if Hartley ran three takes in quick succession without calling “cut” and merely dubbed out his cries of “again!” in post. As a script the film occasionally feels too clever for its own good, it is so neatly and perfectly plotted and laid out that the smugness of its construction can’t be helped but it too feels intentional and right. I quite loved this. I can’t wait to dive into this universe again and again.

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The Fits (2016)

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Ross Birks

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The Fits showcases a young black cast, predominantly female, in the world of American dance troupes. It is a flaunt of diversity and artistic expression but by no means does it exist sorely for that purpose. Almost an urban US companion piece to 2014’s The Falling in the way it portrays a grounded community being hit by a bizarre pandemic. While the 60s British girls in The Falling experienced murderous fainting spells, the young dancers here are suddenly struck by an outbreak of strange seizures.

We see the world through the eyes of 11-year old Toni (Royalty Hightower, arriving on the young actors scene with aplomb), a tomboy who joins the dance troupe early in the film and struggles to fit in with the older girls, especially as the “fits” of the title bring the victims closer together leaving the unaffected Toni looking in from the outside. The metaphor is not hard to miss and the scene-by-scene content – stubbornly and stunningly spare – sometimes feels like a short film stretched to only-just feature length. Writer/director Anna Rose Holmer brings a specific vision to her material though and her choices – culled from an unmistakably female sensibility – occasionally inspire “oh wow” levels of aesthetic pleasure. One of the fits is viewed exclusively through iPhone screens and it is at once disturbing and timely. The film’s glorious climax is a total sensation too and makes The Fits maybe the first movie to be exclusively born and realised in, and fully representative of The Beyoncé Age.

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De Palma (2016)

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Ross Birks

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“Holy Mackerel!” – Brian De Palma every two minutes in De Palma.

Stylistically, this documentary is not as interesting or daring as its subject deserves (De Palma just sits in a room talking to a static camera?) but as a personal voyage through the filmography of one of cinema’s greatest visionaries it sure hits the spot.

As a De Palma obsessive since my teens, a lot of this information I’ve heard before on DVD special features or books of collected interviews but for people new to his work or those looking to dig a bit deeper into his back catalogue beyond the touchstones it’s the ideal starting point. The barrage of clips only emphasises how visually inventive and dynamic De Palma’s work is and to see so many awesome sequences in quick succession can be overwhelming. It reminds you that, really, there’s nobody making films like this right now.

I haven’t seen a movie released in the past twelve months that comes anywhere near De Palma’s audacity as a stylist. While watching him talk, you will mourn at the current state of the American filmmaker. Films like Phantom of the Paradise, Carrie, Blow Out, Dressed to Kill and even sequences from lesser works Body Double, Raising Cain, and Snake Eyes still feel vital. De Palma’s marriage of trash and art remains delicious and singular.

The documentary covers everything in his career, both professional and personal and De Palma, as always, is totally open and forthcoming. He seems at ease with his legacy and his place in the world having the distance to consider his failures objectively and his successes with hindsight. There’s a moment right at the very end, however, where De Palma talks about the physical state of the “old man director”. It is intercut, for the first time, with newly filmed shots of De Palma walking down the street. He looks to be struggling and not in the best physical shape putting any prospect of future movies in doubt. It’s an odd note to end on and is so brief and last minute that I wonder why Baumbach and Paltrow chose to hint at this tangent without exploring it.

I’m not sure De Palma amounts to anything more than a glamourised retrospective interview that might be more suited as a supplement on a Criterion bonus disc (Baumbach has interviewed De Palma previously for many of their releases of his films) but any excuse to see these sequences on as big a screen as possible can’t really be disputed. De Palma is a captivating speaker and with subject matter so entertaining and visually arresting the running time just vanishes. Plus, it’s good to have a kind of definitive statement on the man’s career that acts as a good point of reference for die hard fans and newcomers alike. Brian De Palma is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time and also one of the most divisive. If nothing else, De Palma will inspire others to get involved with the conversation.

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Green Lantern (2011)

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Ross Birks

Green Lantern

Really not as bad as its reputation would have you believe, Green Lantern‘s biggest offense is that it’s just plain old average. Seeing it for the first time in a post-Batman v. Superman world, it comes across as refreshingly upbeat, colourful and – praise the heavens – adept. Unlike recent DC/WB movies, it isn’t afraid to be poppy and fun. Whereas Snyder completely desaturated all the colour from Superman’s technicolor existence, Martin Campbell goes all out and creates a ridiculously vivid cosmic universe that is totally in keeping with Green Lantern’s comic book origins. The cartoony effects and silliness gained a lot of critical flack upon release but I found all of those elements to be both fun and entertaining.

Yes, the script is nothing to write home about but considering how much complex mythology and history they needed to establish in only a few acts, I can forgive them for playing it as safe as far as the plot goes. The real tragedy is they never got the chance to stretch their legs with a sequel as I believe the core team Warner put in place for this movie was almost perfect. With the origin story out of the way and so many great stories to mine from, who knows what they could have come up with?

All of the actors are well cast. Ryan Reynolds is charming as hell (I’ve never read a Green Lantern comic so I can’t judge if his portrayal of Hal Jordan is an honourable one) and his chemistry with Blake Lively is great (I’m not surprised they have since got married and had kids). Even Peter Sarsgaard as the second-tier villain is enjoyable. He spends the last chunk of the film covered in ridiculous rubbery make-up but, again, I sort of loved it for how silly and heightened it is.

I remember this film getting out and out slammed, but I feel like this is exactly the kind of movie DC need to make right now. When Green Lantern was released, Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies were the be all end all and dark, gritty grounded superhero stories seemed like the only way to go. It’s funny how in only a few years the tides have turned into the opposite direction. I think this is a case of being the right movie at the wrong time. I suspect Green Lantern‘s failure is what inspired DC to completely eschew the zippy, pop superhero blockbuster and double down on the Nolan approach. Now they’re slowly trying to inject the fun back into their projects, sometimes mid-production. Maybe they should just re-release this? It holds up and is a great palette cleanser for Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad.

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Microwave Massacre (1983)

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Ross Birks

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Okay. So read the title Microwave Massacre to yourself. You’re immediately picturing a movie in your head right? Well, Microwave Massacre is absolutely not that movie. Totally devoid of electronic kitchen appliance-based massacres, my first instinct was to call up whoever thought of that title and demand my money back. But life’s too short. What you get instead is a weird American sitcom from hell.

It’s about a Joe Nobody (played by guy who voiced Frosty the Snowman) who beats his wife to death with a salt shaker after being driven mad by her terrible cooking. He chops the body up and stores it in the freezer with the rest of the meat but after accidentally eating a slice he gets a taste for human flesh so turns to dicing up hookers to feed his new found appetite. There is a big-ass microwave in there but, quite hilariously, its sole purpose in the movie is to heat food up. The whole thing is played for laughs. Cheap ones at that. And the filmmaking is amateur at best. It’s one of those films that feels like a bunch of businessmen saw the booming horror market on VHS and tried to cook up (geddit?) a movie that would sell in a plastic case wrapped in some lurid cover art. They just didn’t bother putting a proper movie inside.

At 76 minutes, it’s a slim watch but even then the plot is stretched to ridiculous lengths. There’s lots of cheery T&A in there but it’s all quite awkward. All the lines are delivered terribly and when every line is a half-assed one-liner you know you’re dead in the water. The best way to watch the film is as a spoof of American soap operas. I’m almost convinced the filmmakers meant to add a laughing track to the whole thing but forgot at the last minute. They also forgot to add the microwave massacre. A terrible film but entertainingly bad.

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