365 Days, 100 Films #27 - The Proposition (2005)

The Proposition, 2005.



Directed by John Hillcoat.

Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, John Hurt, Danny Huston and David Wenham.





SYNOPSIS:



Australia is still an untamed country and the British colonies there are still in their infancy. Captain Stanley is the sheriff of one of them, and he is determined to have the violent criminal and gang leader Arthur Burns killed.





Captain Stanley (a magnificent Ray Winstone) opens The Proposition as a man of wealth and taste. To his new prisoners, after laying siege to the brothel in which they hid, he makes a proposition: Charlie (Guy Pierce) and the simple-minded Mikey (Richard Wilson), will be allowed to walk free if they kill their older brother, head of their notorious family gang, Arthur Burns (Danny Huston). That name is a statement in itself - Arthur burns. Arthur murders and Arthur rapes. Captain Stanley is determined to civilize Australia’s wild land, and he will start by being rid of its most fearsome outlaw. He has to become the devil himself to achieve his aims, offering his two captives such an unholy deal.

Captain Stanley:I wish to present you with a proposition. I know where Arthur Burns is. It is a God-forsaken place. The blacks won't go there, not the trackers; not even wild men. I suppose, in time, the bounty hunters will get him. But I have other plans, I aim to bring him down - I aim to show that he's a man like any other. I aim to hurt him. And what will most hurt him? Well I thought long and hard about that, and I've realized, Mr. Burns, that I must become more inventive in my methods. Now suppose I told there was a way to save your little brother Mikey from the noose. Suppose I gave you a horse, and a gun. Suppose, Mr. Burns, I was to give you and your young brother Mikey here a pardon. Suppose I said that I could give you a chance to expunge the guilt, beneath which you so clearly labour. Suppose I gave you 'til Christmas. Now, suppose you tell me what it is I want from you.



Charlie Burns: You want me to kill me brother.



Captain Stanley: I want you to kill your brother.

The dialogue constantly makes reference to Hell. The sparse Australian outback and visible heat could easily be mistaken for that punishing afterlife. Sweat smudges every face and dampens every garment. The hot, wavering air distorts the sun. Maybe this is what a Western set in Hell looks like.



The Proposition has the Western genre’s fundamental element – its characters are completely dwarfed and at odds with their landscape, insignificant in its vastness. “There is the sense that spaces there are too empty to admit human content. There are times in The Proposition when you think the characters might abandon their human concerns and simply flee from the land itself” (Roger Ebert). But the scenery itself is crumbling, bathed in a hellish red by the setting sun. Flies are everywhere – on faces and on food – hovering around anything living or dead. Perhaps everything in this outback is dead. The flies’ presence is as good as the stink lines drawn in cartoons.



Hidden in this land are the surviving Burns gang, their leader hunted by one brother to save another. They stress the importance of family, but they’d kill each other for fun if they had a good enough excuse. Charlie could be partly redeemed for his sins if he saves Mikey, but instead he wonders around in a half-dream. Meanwhile, the town grow restless and demand more action from Captain Stanley. There is a thin Victorian veil covering their blood thirst for revenge. They stage a lynching of their Burns prisoner, but only show they are no better than the savages that they hunt.



The final scene is set at Christmas, a cruel joke on Captain Stanley and his wife, trying their best to adjust themselves to the non-British climate. They attempt a pathetic excuse for a Christmas. The tree is grand, and the table covered in delicious foods, but there’s no hiding from the piercing Sun outside. Nor from the Burns gang, with a murderous glint in their eye.



Rating: *****

Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #26 - Cedar Rapids (2011)

Cedar Rapids, 2011.



Directed by Miguel Arteta.

Starring Ed Helms, John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Kurtwood Smith, Stephen Root, Mike O'Malley, Sigourney Weaver and Alia Shawkat.





SYNOPSIS:



An innocent, small-town insurance salesman is introduced to the harder, partying ways of life at a conference in Cedar Rapids.





John C. Reilly used to be a respectable guy. He was the solid character actor of Boogie Nights, The Thin Red Line and Magnolia. Actors like that often plod away with these thankless roles, getting stuck in their own revolving doors. But then came Will Ferrell. He showed Reilly a sneaky way out.



If this were school, Reilly’s drama teacher would have been disappointed. “Such high hopes for that boy,” she’d bemoan in the staff room, “but now he’s fallen in with that bunch of comedians.” It was Talladega Nights what did it, playing Ferrell’s best friend, Cal. They seem to have been joined at the hip ever since. Accomplished actors usually make for quite good comedic ones, but Reilly goes straight for the clown, sometimes even surpassing Ferrell for absurdity. Maybe it’s his puffy face.



That’s why any film with him in is worth your time - he’s the Philip Seymour Hoffman of comedy films. Cedar Rapids casts him as a hard-drinking and partying insurance salesman, Dean Ziegler. He’s the one that our lead insurance salesman, Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), is instructed to avoid at all costs. You see, Cedar Rapids is an annual convention for Christian insurance companies. Each conference sees the representative with the most Christian commitment to serving their customers honoured with the prestigious Two Diamonds award. Lippe’s company have won the award for the past three years, all thanks to his predecessor’s charisma and charm (and maybe something else). But following his suspicious death (auto-erotic asphyxiation is implied), it’s now up to Lippe to take home the Two Diamonds trophy.



The problem is that Lippe is overwhelmingly mild-mannered and naïve. He’s never been on a plane before and has a sexual relationship with his old school teacher (Sigourney Weaver, in a creepy, mothering way). As Cedar Rapids is a new experience for Lippe, his boss provides him with the aforementioned list of people to seek out and people to avoid. Only one name adorns the ‘Avoid’ side: Ziegler.



As events often do in these situations, Ziegler ends up in the same room as Lippe. His original roommate, Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock Jr., or Senator “Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeit” Davis from The Wire), volunteered them to put up an extra bed because of an overbooked hotel. Initially Lippe wants nothing to do with Ziegler. He’s under strict orders not to. But Ziegler wears him down, first getting him to drink, then to sing (Helms, by the way, has a tremendous voice) and, ultimately, to “dance with the tiger”. Lippe never seems to get any less naïve, but his innocence is sorely tested.



Along the way there’s your standard sub-plots of romance and corruption. Not much to see there; move along. There’s also a far bawdier third act, which seems to have seeped in from some Judd Apatow film being shot in a studio nearby. There’s prostitutes, hard drugs and Rob Corddry. This part has some of the film’s funniest moments, and it’s cool to see the characters far removed from their insurance conference safety zone, but it jars with the observed nature of all before it.



There is a very good film somewhere in Cedar Rapids, but it’s impossible to say where. Maybe if they ran more with the Lippe as a 40-Year Old Virgin character, but it’s hard to say if that would have worked. It would have been great to focus more on the three guys, Reilly, Helms and Whitlock, as their banter was very fluid – but the romantic sub-plot isn’t actually that bad. More Reilly overall would have been appreciated, but you’d run the risk of making him a caricature.



Near the end of the film in particular, Cedar Rapids highlights how important conferences are to these characters. Joan Ostrowski-Fox (Anne Heche) sees it as an escape from her family in a what-happens-in-Cedar-Rapids-stays-in-Cedar-Rapids kinda way. Yet she remains very likeable so you share her moral ambiguity. Ziegler’s recent divorce is also gently hinted at, and you get the sense Cedar Rapids lets him forget that void at home. There’s a sweet melancholy for the prostitute, Bree (Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat) that stands outside Cedar Rapids’ entrance too. The place must be a good source of business; with a hotel full of people who don’t know each other and are far away from the people they do. It’s like a Freshers Week for grown-ups.



Maybe that’s it, then. If Cedar Rapids played for the darker, Pathos laughs in this world of three-night stand conferences, it wouldn’t be so forgettable. It isn’t bad, but in no way is it anything above ‘average’. Even then, that’s largely due to the quality of the cast.

Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #25 - True Grit (2010)

True Grit, 2010.



Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen.

Starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Hailee Steinfeld, Barry Pepper and Domhnall Gleeson.





SYNOPSIS:



A tough U.S. Marshal and a Texas Ranger help a stubborn young woman track down her father's murderer.





If you’re really good at making films, the audience forgets they’re watching them. Reality dissolves into a dream-like state, only with more clarity and a musical score. You come to just as the credits start to roll. “That was pretty good,” slowly dawns on you as you wake.



Afterwards, you start to appreciate those bits that were so finely crafted that they made you forget the film wasn’t real. There are many of these in True Grit, but by far the most impressive, and poetic, is the script. It’s as bold as Hemmingway and flows just as good. The characters speak in some lost American dialect from the turn of the last century. In another’s hands it would come across forced and clunky. The Coens make it effortlessly naturalistic. An example;



LaBoeuf: You give out very little sugar with your pronouncements. While I sat there watchin' I gave some thought to stealin' a kiss... though you are very young, and sick... and unattractive to boot. But now I have a mind to give you five or six good licks with my belt.



Mattie Ross: One would be just as unpleasant as the other.



It’s as though the script were written out in modern tongue, only for every other word to be replaced by its much grander synonym.



True Grit is about Mattie Ross, a girl no older than fourteen, who seeks revenge on the man who murdered her father. To do so she employs Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), an old, U.S. marshal. They cross paths with a Texas Ranger by the name of LeBoeuf (Matt Damon) who seeks the same man. Cogburn is a drunk and a murderer. LeBoeuf is dull-witted. But in helping Ross they get to show they are both men of ‘true grit’. Not that fake stuff that’s flooded the market.



True Grit is a long way from the black and white morals of most classical Westerns, but it evokes the same misty-eyed steel that they projected - when people were good and decent and weren’t prone to self-indulged soul-searching like the protagonists of the present day. Though it takes the course of the film to show it, all three characters are built upon their principles. Stubbornly so.



It is Ross who eases out Cogburn and LeBoeuf’s true grit. She’s a remarkable gal. Her superego seems too large for her age, separating everything into either ‘good’/‘bad’, ‘lawful’/‘unlawful’ and ‘godly’/‘godless’. She goes about revenge in the language of bureaucracy and supports her sass with knowledge (often to the embarrassment of the adults with whom she talks). It’s what makes her pairing with Cogburn so parental, like she’s some chip off the ol’ block. There’s always the sense that she’s imitating the talk and actions of those much older than her. It’s kinda cute, if a little brash.



The film’s great strength, alongside and because of the script, is this sincerity. The score doesn’t have an ironic note in it. Being post-modern is the easy way out these days. The Coens don’t allow their characters to sit and agonise over personal pain – they internalise it and proceed with the tasks at hand. Psychoanalysis had yet to take off on those shores. Consequently, True Grit conducts itself in heroic charges against terrible odds. It’s easily the film of the year thus far.

Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #24 - My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

My Neighbor Totoro, 1988.

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
Featuring the voice talents of Dakota Fanning, Elle Fanning, Tim Daly, Lea Salonga, Frank Welker, Pat Carroll and Paul Butcher.


SYNOPSIS:

In post-war Japan two young sisters move to the countryside and discover a forest inhabited by magical spirits known as Totoros.


Remember when you were a kid and everything was massive? Cynicism barely existed back then. You could genuinely believe that a ‘People’s Elbow’ was the most devastating move in all of sports entertainment when really it was just The Rock doing an elbow drop. You could sit for hours in your bedroom plotting out mass, universe-wide battles pitting a Boba Fett action figure against an evil army of Lego drones. Some stories would span across many planets from under the stairs to the back of the garden. Christmas was great not just for the presents, but also because there was a rare military base that appeared only once a year in that assembled tree.

Suspending disbelief is easy when you’re young. There’s no doubting or second-guessing the realities you create with friends or toys. I’ve never seen a film that commits this unquestioning belief to film more than My Neighbour Totoro. It’s about two sisters who move to a new house with their father. Their mother is in hospital, but with nothing serious. It isn’t that sort of film.

Nothing much happens besides three brief scenes. The two sisters, Satsuki and Mei, about ten and four years old respectively, play in the garden and explore their new surroundings for most of the film. Satsuki eventually starts attending school, leaving Mei at home with her father. Mei’s the sort who could entertain herself for hours with only a toy bucket. On one of these play sessions, about half an hour into the film, she sees a tiny, faint blob hopping across the ground in her garden. Its ears are two small triangles on the top of its head. Mei startles the creature and chases it through the bushes at the garden’s edge. She comes to the base of an enormous tree, one that stands about twice the size of the rest of the forest. The faint blob jumps down into a gap between the roots. Mei jumps in after it.

Here she discovers two more of these blob-like creatures, only one is a little bigger and furry, and the other is much bigger and furrier. They are ‘Totoro’, which is Japanese for ‘forest spirits’. Satsuki compares them later on in the film to some drawings in Mei’s picture book. A lesser film might have used this to reveal the Totoro as figments of Mei’s imagination. That’s the easy interpretation – the sisters have created a fantasy to deal with their mother’s extended stay in hospital. If you wish to reduce the film with such redundant psychoanalysis, you’re missing its point. My Neighbour Totoro isn’t about the power of a child’s imagination. It’s about an entire realm of fantasy of which only children are conscious.

My Neighbour Totoro wisely never addresses this explanation, rather opting for a world where such fantasy is real for the children but only warmly humoured by their parents. It suggests that these Totoro are real, but because we’re a little older now, we just can’t see them.

Toy Story does this more obviously. After first watching that film, who didn’t believe that their toys would jump to life as soon as they saw you close the door? See it when you’re a little older though. You’ll appreciate the technique and some of the humour more, but you’ll loose that sense of wonder – that Toy Story was actually revealing something a lot bigger, a grand conspiracy where toys are actually sentient beings. My Neighbour Totoro addresses how a child’s imagination experiences the world more subtly. In doing so, it merges together this fantasy with reality. It makes you want to not only believe like a kid again, but for that lost perspective when you could see where the Totoro existed.

That the Totoro are used so sparingly is another of the film’s great strengths. You’re left wanting far more than you’re given and you start to dream yourself about what they might be up to when they aren’t on screen. Are they nocturnal? Are they the last of their kind? Do they take trips into space on the Cat Bus? Oh, right, the Cat Bus…

The Cat Bus is arguably the greatest animal form of transport ever conceived. It has five legs on either side and two mice on its roof for illumination. Its face owes a great debt to Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat and its eyes beam out strong headlights.

Its first appearance comes in the rain, whilst Satsuki and Mei are waiting for their father at the bus stop. He forgot his umbrella and they’ve brought one to give to him when he arrives. That’s how nice they both are, and how superbly simple this film is. King Totoro (the biggest of the three) has joined them, but he’s has only a leaf to cover his head from the rain. Satsuki offers him her father’s umbrella. He doesn’t know what to do with such a contraption, so he plays with it in Chaplin-esque naivety. He’s delighted when it opens above him. This is the first time Satsuki has encountered a Totoro, yet she batters not a single eyelid.

After standing in the rain for a while, King Totoro lets out an enormous roar to summon the Cat Bus, who gallops down the road and takes him away. You’re as unfazed as Satsuki because you share her child’s perspective, accepting the bizarre with a merry shrug. It’s only when the camera cuts to a witness frog across the street, mouth agape, that you realise the how absurd it all is – two girls and King Totoro underneath an umbrella that’s hardly half his width. Oh, right, and the Cat Bus. Taken out of context, it’s as trippy as balls.

So many movies are hard going. Lead characters often have some form of parent trouble or bereavement; others require parts of intense conflict for the conclusion to mean anything. Some, however, like My Neighbour Totoro, are just charming. It’s easy to read “a child’s perspective” as condescending, like it’s inferior to our wiser, aged view. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience addresses the differences between the two outlooks. He also spoke of a higher innocence, an enlightened stage that follows experience. My Neighbour Totoro helps you get there.

Oli Davis

365 Days, 100 Films

Movie Review Archive

Hayao Miyazaki: Drawn to Anime

365 Days, 100 Films #23 - Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Grave of the Fireflies, 1988.

Directed by Isao Takahata.
Featuring the voice talents of J. Robert Spencer, Rhoda Chrosite, Amy Jones and Veronica Taylor.


SYNOPSIS:

A boy and his younger sister struggle to survive in war-torn Japan during World War II.


"Yes, it's a cartoon, and the kids have eyes like saucers, but it belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made." -Roger Ebert

Seita is a pre-teenager in Japan who has just lived through World War Two. The film opens on him as he slowly passes away, homeless and starving in a train station. His war is over as he utters “Setsuko” with his last breath. He whispers it in the same way Kane spoke ‘Rosebud’. The camera tracks back as two janitors start to tidy him away. The shot’s increased scope reveals many more like him, supported by the station’s numerous pillars. Commuters consider them a nuisance.

Seita takes a ghostly red form and begins to wonder through his life during the war. Grave of the Fireflies is animated, so these moments aren’t ruined by warped special effects. Those at Studio Ghibli imbue more humanity in their subjects than most live action films can muster with their claims to truth. Seita boards a train that will proceed to call at events in his past. It’s so he can understand what has happened and how he ended the way he did. Only then can he finally be free of his guilt.

These flashbacks start at Seita’s home with his mother and young sister. The latter is his ‘rosebud’ – five-year-old Setsuko. The comforts of home and family are in stark contrast to the previous opening scene of Seita’s death. American planes are dropping napalm canisters over their city. Most of the homes are built from wood. They never stood a chance.

Seita and Setsuko become separated from their mother during the air raid. They take cover away from the city and are unharmed, but their mother sat like a duck in the local shelter. They reunite at a makeshift hospital in a levelled city that doesn’t have enough medicine or staff. Seita’s mother is so badly injured, it wouldn’t make a difference if they did. She looks as though her eyes have been seared clean off. Her lips are two swollen sausages and her skin is replaced with blood-soaked bandages. Seita doesn’t let Setsuko see. He tells her that mother’s quite ill so they’re off to stay with their aunt. Seita has decided to shoulder the pain exclusively, and he continues this way until his death. His protectiveness appears noble now, but will become selfish and harmful soon. As they leave we see mother’s body being lifted upon a bonfire. Maggots and flies already feast away.

Their aunt holds a grudge against the orphans. Seita and Setsuko come from a military family, living with more generous rations than their relatives. That Seita and Setsuko do nothing but play like children all day also frustrates the aunt. Her husband and daughter work constantly to support the war effort. But what can the brother and sister do? Their mother has just died and are without a home. Their father is a Navy man from who they haven’t heard in so long. Go to school, their aunt insensitively suggests. It burnt down, replies Setsuko.

By default, Seita is now the head of the family. A very small family, but at least he still has that. Exhausted by the pestering aunt, he pawns his mother’s clothes and withdraws the family savings so he can support Setsuko alone. They find an abandoned air raid shelter near a lake and, like children playing ‘house’, plan the rooms of their new home.

Money, however, quickly becomes worthless as the Japanese currency falters. It’s all about trading needed item for needed item now. As they live outside the system, in their cave by a river, Seita and Setsuko aren’t entitled to food rations. Setsuko begins to show signs of illness. She scratches a lot and has sores on her back. Sometimes she faints. Dependent child characters often become tiresome or annoying. Not Setsuko. It’s the way she’s drawn clutching her doll and wearing her hat. She’s so endearing and helpless you want to rescue her yourself. It’s why Seita’s relationship with her is so heartbreaking.

She becomes delirious from hunger, chewing marbles and making rice cakes out of mud. Seita does all he can to save her. He takes food from people’s empty houses during air raids and steals fruit from farmer’s fields. But he never considers going back to his aunt, even when their situation becomes increasingly desperate. She’s a horrible woman, but she could have saved them.

It’s almost as though it’s because of a hidden selfishness. Seita has invested all his loss, of his home, mother and father, into caring for Setsuko. If he lets someone else take over, or even merely share, he would have failed her and his deceased family. His love is smothering, but he does everything for that girl. He’s only a kid – how’s he supposed to know any better?

The film itself is based on a semi-autobiographical novel. The author lost his sister to malnutrition at the end of the war too, but unlike Seita, he survived. He blamed himself for his sister’s death and wrote the book to make amends.

This is the one Studio Ghibli film for which Disney does not hold the distribution rights. The book’s publishers do. It’s fitting, in a way. Grave of the Fireflies should to be separate from the rest of Ghibli’s canon.

There’s no overt anti-war agenda because the story is such a human one. These aren’t soldiers or politicians, they’re civilians. But in focusing on and attempting to deal with such a personal tragedy, Grave of the Fireflies becomes as powerful a statement against war as Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth or Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero.

Oli Davis

365 Days, 100 Films

Movie Review Archive

Hayao Miyazaki: Drawn to Anime

365 Days, 100 Films #22 - Young Bruce Lee (2010)

Young Bruce Lee (a.k.a. Bruce Lee, My Brother), 2010.

Directed by Manfred Wong and Wai Man Yip.
Starring Aarif Rahman, Tony Leung Ka Fai, Christy Chung and Jin Auyeung.


SYNOPSIS:

A biopic exploring the early years of martial arts legend Bruce Lee.


There’s a great story about how Davey Boy Smith (aka The British Bulldog) got his name. Smith’s mother, still weary from giving birth, accidentally wrote her newborn son’s gender, “Boy”, as the middle name on his birth certificate. Young Bruce Lee opens with a similar mix-up. Bruce Lee has just been born, and his mother, tired and slightly delirious, murmurs the word “push” over and over, echoing her long gone doctor’s words of encouragement. When asked for the child’s name, the American nurse mishears “Push” as “Bruce”. His family and friends knew him as “Phoenix”, but he kept “Bruce” as a stage name. There’s a lot in a name. The Americanised “Bruce” sits snugly alongside the Eastern “Lee”. That juxtaposition was arguably what made him such an international star.

Young Bruce Lee is the story of Bruce Lee before this happened, opening with his birth and ending as he leaves for his first trip to America. Two of his surviving siblings introduce the film in a brief prologue, claiming theirs as the untold Bruce Lee story. One of them is Robert Lee, and it is his book, ‘Bruce Lee, My Brother’, on which the film is based.

There are three stages: baby Bruce (1941), youngster Bruce (1947) and teenager Bruce (1957). You need gaps about that size in biographical films. It lets you change the actors without too much fuss. Throughout he lives with his huge family in Hong Kong and maintains a group of close friends. It’s their exploits that the film follows, including a love triangle between Lee, his friend Kong and Kong’s girlfriend. He can get away with a lot, because he’s been a local film star since an early age, but he values his friendships more than anything else.

It’s remarkable how Americanised their lives were. They listen to Elvis, dance the ‘Cha-Cha’, watch Rebel Without a Cause and dress accordingly. It’s American Graffiti with a Chinese cast. Hong Kong was a portal to the West in these times, but their domestic film product had not yet broken through to the international market. This is what Lee wishes to achieve.

You wouldn’t really know it, though. People wonder through the narrative with no definitive goals, and thus few obstacles that could create dramatic tension. There are flashes in the love triangle, and in Lee’s feud with an American boxing champion, but they phase in and out with little or no build. Apart from the ending scenes, there isn’t anything particularly special about the film’s story. If Lee weren’t its subject, Young Bruce Lee could be accused of being about very ordinary affairs.

Thankfully, there’s a lot of joy to be had with Lee. It shows what an enduring pop culture figure he is. The yelps! I could listen to them all day. The film occasionally treats you to one with a zoom-in close-up. Shit’s old school. It has a lot of heart, too. There’s a big emphasis on Lee’s family, and their warmth to each other comes across very well.

It does have an odd, recurring stylistic device though, where there will be slow motion close-ups of quite mundane actions (a foot stepping forward, a hand being placed on a chair). It’s not like they’re contextually meaningless actions, just that slow motion should be used sparingly. It makes it all a bit melodramatic. The film could have probably shaved off about 10 minutes if they played them at normal speed.

For a film that introduces itself as the “untold Bruce Lee story”, by his brother and sister, you wouldn’t expect it to be so stylised. There’s the aforementioned flogging of the slow-mo close-up, a barely believable ‘Cha-Cha’ competition and quite a few stagey fight scenes. It makes you want to take the film like a Tequila slammer (with a pinch of salt and lots of alcohol). But then, just before the end credits, a series of actual photographs are shown alongside stills from the film. There’s Bruce Lee dressed in a dapper black suit and tie, triumphant with his younger brother after winning a ‘Cha-Cha’ competition. It’s a bit of a slap in the face, but it isn’t your fault for harbouring such cynicism – it’s the film’s. Why should it feel the need for melodrama and exaggeration when its source text is so rich? All it needs is a bit of toning down.

Rating: **

Oli Davis

365 Days, 100 Films

Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #21 - Laputa - Castle in the Sky (1986)

Laputa - Castle in the Sky, 1986.

Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
Featuring the voice talents of Anna Paquin, James Van Der Beek, Mark Hamill, Cloris Leachman and Jim Cummings.


SYNOPSIS:

A young boy and girl race against pirates and foreign agents in the search for a legendary floating castle.


People call Studio Ghibli the Eastern Walt Disney. I couldn’t say which people exactly, but that seems to be Wikipedia’s general consensus. That they make animated children’s films is the most obvious reason for comparison, but there’s something more intangible about the similarity. They both share a sense of ‘magic’. Cringe away.

Laputa – Castle in the Sky was the first film the studio released in 1986, which places it within the last classic age of Disney from Fox and the Hound (1980) to The Lion King (1994). To further show the two studios’ affinity, Disney currently holds the Studio Ghibli’s distribution rights in the west.

It follows the sprawling adventure of Sheeta and Pazu in the seas of the sky. Everyone is after Sheeta because she possesses something they all want – a strange stone held in a necklace, inherited it from her mother just before she died. The film opens with Sheeta under military protection, or rather, ‘imprisonment’. But the people in Laputa don’t travel by roads; they voyage on vast airships that surf the clouds as though they’re waves. They’re shaped like giant boats tweaked with wings and propellers to keep them in the air, with a gloss of steampunk seasoning.

The main delight is in the film’s mythology. It places you, along with Sheeta and Pazu, in the middle of a much grander story of which Laputa is merely a chapter. None of us know why the stone floats Sheeta gently down to the mine where Pazu works when she falls overboard from one of the ships, nor why it is so sought after. As their adventure develops, and they encounter other, more knowledgeable characters, the legacy of Laputa is slowly disclosed. Many centuries ago there were races of people who lived in floating cities of their own invention, the grandest of which being the castle of Laputa. In time, these sky people moved to the earth and their history was consigned to legend. Pazu’s father, a pilot, once saw Laputa half obscured by a torrent of windy clouds, but everyone thought him crazy when he spoke of it. Sheeta’s ties to the castle are a little stronger. Such an epic story, spanning thousands of years, invests you in an entirely different world full of its unique history and myth.

The secondary delight is the film’s quirk. It possesses a surreal sense of humour, and you should expect nothing less from a film so imaginative. Pay attention to the background because everyone has something to do. Henchmen struggle with the simplest of tasks whilst others bicker. Most trip or fall.

Perhaps a little too long overall, but Laputa has such a rich tapestry of story and background detail that it’s hard to complain.

Oli Davis

365 Days, 100 Films

Movie Review Archive

Hayao Miyazaki: Drawn to Anime

365 Days, 100 Films #20 - Fertile Ground (2010)

Fertile Ground, 2010.

Directed by Adam Gierasch.
Starring Gale Harold, Leisha Hailey and Chelcie Ross.


SYNOPSIS:

A couple that has recently experienced a miscarriage move into an isolated house with a dark history.


‘Fertile Ground’ sounds like it should be a romantic comedy, probably starring Jennifer Aniston as a clumsy, single gardener. From there you can go two ways: the Adam Sandler route where they join forces to win the local ‘hedge trimming championship’; or cast Channing Tatum as an expert, but unhappily engaged, gardener who teaches Aniston the wonders of nature. The film writes itself.

Or it could go in the ‘haunted house’ direction. Emily (Leisha Hailey) and Nate Weaver (Gale Harold) are a loving couple who experience a (very bloody) miscarriage in the film’s opening scene. It comes from nowhere, during a dinner party celebrating the pregnancy, and is effectively shocking. Afterwards, they both decide to move out of the city and into Nate’s “great-great-great-great…he was old” uncle’s house to help Emily recover. That’s the haunted one, by the way.

[Rant begin]

It’s a good, creepy house. The exterior is a cold white and the barren road stretches off emptily into both horizons. The rooms inside are large, the windows are rickety and it has a basement. But then why is the house itself never scary? Why must the film rely on ghostly apparitions jumping into shot for its frights? It isn’t the house’s fault.

Over-exposure. Horror is most effective when it is unseen or unknowable, but here, at night, everything is visible in the moon’s cool blue half-light. Not only does it destroy the mystique, but it also draws unwanted attention to the background. The lighting’s focus should be on Emily’s terrified face, yet distracting objects litter the view behind her.

You have to be brave to embrace the darkness. It’s more expressionistic, and therefore not as safe. Unfortunately, Fertile Ground’s makers are adverse to such risks, and thus the film’s appearance looks more suited for daytime television.

The generic music and dissolve transitions between scenes only accentuate this impression. The film is also inexplicably, and uselessly, separated into sections by title-cards in the most annoying “scribbled-on-a-blackboard” font: “Starting Over”, “Moving In”, “New Life”, “Old Secrets”, “Strange Happening”, “The Gathering”, “Revelations” - at best these are insufferably cheesy, at worst they are patronising to the viewer.

[Back to the plot]

The two start to uncover dark “Old Secrets” about the house. They find a 150-year-old skull in the front garden (it was interfering with the plumbing) and a trip to the local historian reveals that many a (female) murder have occurred within their walls. It’s probably ok though, consoles the historian, the last death was in the 60s.

This starts to send Emily a bit barmy, tapping into her already fragile, post-miscarriage psyche. Nate, too, becomes angrier and obsessive. Their relationship deteriorates as Emily begins to see more and more strange occurrences; the door is oddly ajar, a bloodstained woman passes through the corridor, her nightmares intensify. All the usual things you’d expect of a haunted house film, and just as formulaic as the most boring within the sub-genre.

Oli Davis

365 Days, 100 Films

Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #19 - 13 Assassins (2010)

13 Assassins (Jûsan-nin no shikaku), 2010.



Directed by Takashi Miike.

Starring Koji Yakusho, Takayuki Yamada and Yuseke Iseya.





SYNOPSIS:



Feudal Japan is in a time of peace, but the sadistic Lord Naritsugu is next in line for the Shogun’s rule. 12 samurai, and one scavenger, are under orders to assassinate Naritsugu to avoid such a political catastrophe.





You know what’s missing from cinema these days? Really good villains. I don’t mean, like, a ‘good’ villain as in a bad-guy who sees the errors of his ways (confusing word order: noted); I mean some detestable sonofabitch that you can’t wait to get their comeuppance. Films that are blessed with such antagonists can build their whole plot around their eventual, humiliating (hopefully bloody) demise. 13 Assassins does so masterfully.



There’s a cheap trick in storytelling called ‘kicking the puppy’. It’s where you have your bad guy commit a bad deed that is separate from his relationship with the hero. These acts should be indefensible and, because they do not concern the ‘good guy’ in any way, will show the villain as an objectively evil person. He isn’t just driven by an accidental wrong the protagonist committed (see: Iron Man 2), but is wicked to the core. So you show a guy kicking a puppy onscreen, or something in a similarly provocative range, and it’s established in your viewer’s mind that he is a villain. It whets the appetite for retribution.



13 Assassins, being a Takeshi Miike film, takes its sweet, graphic time over this. Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki) is the Shogun’s sadistic half-brother, and next in line to the de facto throne of 18th century Feudal Japan. He kicks a whole lotta puppies. In the film’s opening 20 minutes, Naritsugu has already been shown raping a clan leader’s daughter-in-law, then beheading (after three failed attempts, like some demented lumberjack) her husband, and using a tied-up peasant family (who seems to be comprised entirely of women and children, the most sympathetic of puppies) as bow-and-arrow target practice in his garden. Most horrifically, though, is the aftermath of one of his hideous pastimes. A young lady sits weeping in a cloak; her eyes appear black and the tears they leak are a dark crimson. She had been found dumped by a road near Naritsugu’s palace, apparently after he’d grown bored of her. To demonstrate the need for action, one of the Shogun’s advisers, Sir Doi (Mikijiro Hira), is showing an old samurai, Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho), this example of Lord Naritsugu wickedness. He asks someone to take off the girl’s cloak. It reveals a writhing, limbless torso. “What happened to her family?”, Shinzaemon asks, appalled, but the girl can only speak in cries because Naritsugu had taken her tongue as well. She writes her answer instead on a scroll laid out on the floor. Her red tears stain parts of the paper. An aide holds up the Japanese characters to Sir Dou and Shinzaemon. The white subtitles below read: “Total Massacre”.



The whole sequence is like punting a puppy across a football pitch, and its augmented by those onscreen sharing in the disgust. This is a time of peace in Japan. The Shogun has managed the various clans’ relationships well, and the days of the Samurai are nearing an end. Sir Doi secretly recruits Shinzaemon (“The Shinzaemon?”, everybody seems to ask when he introduces himself, hinting at a glorious past) to assassinate Naritsugu. Shinzaemon’s sword hasn’t been in battle for years. Times of peace aren’t that great for samurai. He dreams of an honourable death, as do the 12 other samurai he recruits for the task. This may be their last opportunity for one.



When you meet a few of the other samurai, you can tell they’re just there for the stuffing, like the red-shirts on a Star Trek away team. You have your loyal one, your joker one, one doing it for the money - it’s all very cute, but they’re never given any time to develop, not like in Seven Samurai. But it’s never really about the 13 assassins. It’s all about Naritsugu getting what he deserves.



Like in Seven Samurai, the 13 men fortify a town. It’s on Naritsugu’s route home, and it is where they will strike. This is what 13 Assassins builds up to. The opening 30 minutes details Naritsugu and the politics of trying to be rid of him. The following 50 minutes show the 13 men being brought together and fortifying the town. It’s paced calmly and with restraint. There’s only a brief flash of swords in the first hour and 20 minutes. Then Naritsugu’s troop arrive at the town. Shinzaemon had prepared to face 70 men. Naritsugu has brought 200. The odds get longer and the body count higher.



What follows is an epic and exhausting 40-minute battle sequence. The cinema frequently gasped at the set pieces, and the chap next to me even punched his fist and said “Yeah!” under his breath at one point. It’s exciting, but because of its immense length, it becomes something of an endurance test. As the assassins tire, so do you. You’ve battled hard with them, and it shows how desensitising and wearing battles really are. And then comes the final showdown. Naritsugu vs Shinzaemon. You’d be hard pressed to find a pay-off sweeter.



Rating: ****

Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #18 - Hanna (2011)

Hanna, 2011.



Directed by Joe Wright.

Starring Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, Jason Flemyng and Cate Blanchett.





SYNOPSIS:



Hanna is an abnormally strong and gifted, 14 year-old killing machine, and there are a few people out there who want her for themselves.





Joe Wright can sure pull off a decent long take. He had that extended, mind-boggling shot in Atonement, gliding over and across a beach of celebrating World War II Allied soldiers. The longer it went on, the more excited and tense you became, your unbelief compounding at every extra event in shot, scared that someone might break character or miss their cue and they’d have to go again from the beginning. Joe Wright’s latest, Hanna, possesses similar shots, but their impact is lessened somewhat by their number and the occasional betrayal of a CGI pixel (those odd, jerky movements in fight scenes). You can tell where they’ve stitched two takes together too, usually when the sun’s flare burns out the screen entire. They’re still very impressive though - if not for Atonement’s effort and mastery, then for sheer imagination and zest.



In all other respects, however, Hanna is quite different from Atonement. They share an actor in Saoirse Ronan (Hanna in Hanna, Briony in Atonement), but that and the long takes are about it. Hanna is a very special girl. She has extraordinary strength and reflexes, and has been groomed by her father, Erik (Eric Bana), into a survival machine from a very early age. They live in isolation in a wintry forest, heated by fire and hunting deer for food. She’s still very sweet, though. Her face is softly mouse-like, and a book of Grimm’s fairytales lies underneath her pillow alongside a photo of her murdered mother. But who murdered her mother? Why do they live like hermits? How is Hanna so strong?



These questions are slowly answered as the film progresses, but the enemy is established right from the start. Erik looks his daughter in the eye just before this wintry prelude is over and explains that a woman, Marissa (a red-haired Cate Blanchett), will not rest, or tire, until Hanna is dead.



The film is rich with quirky characters. They need their quirks otherwise they’d drown in the cast-list. There’s the manically camp German hitman, Isaacs (Tom Hollander). He whistles sinisterly and wears a full-body matching tracksuit. Constantly beside him are his two Dr. Marten’s-wearing, Ben-Sherman-shirt adorning skinhead henchman. Marissa, who employs the help of Isaacs, shows her obsessive character not in dialogue or intense stares to camera, but by the immaculately stored selection of high-heeled shoes in her room, and the way she brushes her teeth until her gums bleed. One character, Hanna’s grandmother, we only meet very briefly, yet her personality is stored within a few minute actions. As she sits opposite Marissa in her apartment room, knowing that death shortly awaits, she carefully sweeps a few crumbs on the table into her cupped hand to place them neatly on a plate. This woman’s last thoughts are to tidy up breakfast. You show, you don’t tell. It’s a good rule for Directors to go by.



The film’s visual metaphors are heavy, but they work in a post-modern comic book way. One scene shows Erik walking through an airport. It’s one of those extended, single take shots, and the longer it goes on, the more people we realise are tracking him. As Erik becomes aware of his shadows, he passes a few sunglasses billboards on the walls behind him that show five-foot high eyes. It’s giddily self-conscious. There’s probably a lot more of those tucked away in the film. Second viewings should be recommended somewhere on your receipts.



The Chemical Brothers provide the film’s dub-steppy musical score, which works well with the underground comic book mood. The sound design overall, in fact, is sublime. The crackling heat of a waffle iron, and the muffled voices in a room next door could set up a scene with your eyes closed.



You can compare Hanna with Kill Bill and Leon, but really you’re only making a list of female assassin films. In tone and stylistics, Hanna is far more similar to Run, Lola, Run. They share a fondness for the same neon coloured hair and ridiculous editing pace, only that 90s, VHS fuzz is replaced with a much crisper lens. Perhaps the film could have done with more of a climax, and its release of information could have been handled better, but everything is far too fun and absurd for anyone to seriously complain.

Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #17 - Black Swan (2010)

Black Swan, 2010.



Directed by Darren Aronofsky.

Starring Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Winona Ryder and Barbara Hershey.





SYNOPSIS:



A ballerina is pushed to the very edges of her sanity in a gruelling production of Swan Lake.

There weren’t any other pictures. I swear.

Darren Aronofsky once said that all his films, when you took away their visual and narrative flair, were about a character’s search for God. They’re certainly all about a search for something. Pi has Max seeking the ultimate number; Requiem for a Dream searches for its next high; The Fountain needed to find a cure; and The Wrestler had lost the American Dream. If you take ‘God’ as an abstract concept for ‘perfection’, Aronofsky’s mission statement makes a bit more sense. Especially so in Black Swan, where Nina’s (Natalie Portman) drive for absolute perfection in her performance of ‘Swan Lake’ makes for her own demise.



But how to achieve perfection? Having an extended lesbian scene between Portman and Mila Kunis is one way. Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), the ballet company’s director/pretentious visionary, outlines his different method from the film’s start: ‘Swan Lake’ has been performed many times, so they must strip it down to its bare bones and foundations, to then build it back up again. Only then can they make it fresh, and go some way to achieving this elusive and mystical God. They used to do that in experimental psychology labs in the 60s. The theory was that their patients would effectively re-wire their own broken minds when re-establishing mental connections. Results weren’t that great.



Leroy proceeds to do this not only to the play, but also to Nina and us - the viewers. But in a way, because the film is told so subjectively from Nina’s point of view, her and we are almost the same. It follows that any punishment Leroy (read: Aronofsky) exerts on Nina, the viewer also experiences. The feelings you get from watching these gruelling scenes can be quite acute. Aronofsky shows Nina peeling the skin off from around her nail, and you wince as though you’re doing it yourself; Nina’s toes are shot pirouetting in close-up, and yours start to curl. It all falls under the ‘haptic’ theory of film – where the eye is seen as a sensory organ of touch, as though you can feel the things you perceive onscreen. It sounds over-academic, but there’s a lot of truth in it. People spazing out at Saw isn’t because what they see is too much, it’s because they’re imagining those acts upon themselves.



These haptic encounters are pretty raw, but when coupled with Nina’s schizophrenic perspective, the experience is increasingly intense. As the film is told entirely through Nina, we are also privy to her hallucinations and nightmares. Sometimes she sees feathers sprout from the prickles in her skin, others she envisions lesbian encounters. It compromises the film’s reality, twisting it into something gruesome and deformed, and you’re trapped within it.



I like to think I’ve a strong stomach for these kinda films, but I struggled with the opening hour (until the lesbian scene). It’s Aronofsky’s intention. You’re being stripped away, tested to your limits of endurance – just like ‘Swan Lake’, just like Nina.



I was so, so close to walking. It was terror that kept me there, the paralysing sort like when you think you hear someone downstairs at night. In the film’s final reel, after an hour and a half of punishment, Leroy/Aronofsky makes good of their promise: they rebuild you. Something clicks (or rather, snaps) in Nina. She finally understands how she can be the delicate, innocent White Swan, whilst also channelling its seductive, Black counterpart. Her elation in this attained perfection is infectious. You become delirious with her performance and the applause it garners. She’s found her God, but at what cost?

Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #16 - Source Code (2011)

Source Code, 2011.



Directed by Duncan Jones .

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright and Russell Peters.





SYNOPSIS:



A solider must relive a train bombing over and over to uncover the man responsible for the crime.





Sisyphus was a very deceitful Greek king who let his ego grow fat and self-important. He wasn’t a nice chap and the Gods ended up assigning him one of those horrible afterlife chores. For eternity he was to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to tumble down just before he reached the top. It ain’t no ‘guts-pecked-out-by-vultures’, but such repetition would grate pretty bad. Infinity is aaaaages.



In other news, hardly anyone likes commutes. They’re early and crammed.



Source Code is a sort of Sisyphusian commute and Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is thrown into its deep end. He awakes on a train with his head supported by its window. He has no idea how he got there and recognises none of the carriage’s passengers. The last thing he remembers was flying a helicopter in Afghanistan. “I’m Captain Colter Stevens,” he pleads with the woman sitting opposite him, who was talking to him like they were friends. “No you’re not. You’re Sean Fentress.” WTF, indeed.



Panicked, he stumbles around the train asking others where he is. You see this from both perspectives. You understand Stevens because you don’t know what’s going on either, but you also sympathise with his fellow commuters’ frustration - who hasn’t experienced a crazy guy on their way into work? He retreats to a toilet and notices the mirror. That isn’t his face. Checking the photo ID in his wallet, that’s Sean Fentress.



Understandably flustered, Stevens staggers out the toilet like a confused drunk. The woman who sat opposite him earlier is waiting for him. She’s Christina (Michelle Monaghan). “It’s all going to be ok,” she assures him. Then the train explodes. Stevens awakes in a dark capsule with frayed cables and wires snaking from its walls. They’re loose ends. A woman, ‘Goodwin’ (Vera Farmiga), appears on a monitor. It has a late-90s, Dystopian metallic grey finish. This screen is Stevens’ only connection with the real, outside world.



Earlier that morning, the train Stevens was on had exploded on its way to Chicago. It was a terrorist attack, and more are threatened to come. Stevens’ mission is to relive the last 8 minutes on that train as Sean Fentress so he can find the bomber and prevent any more explosions. But how, you might ask. It isn’t through time travel, it’s through parallel realities and quantum theory and stuff. Sean Fentress died on that train, but Stevens is able to experience his last 8 minutes by tapping into the dying man’s final brain signature. Just imagine it’s like a really intense Groundhog Day. With alternate realities.



Contrived? Maybe, but so was Inception. In ways it’s better, favouring ‘Sci-Fi’ over ‘Action Film’. There’s a 70s political conspiracy edge to it all too, like a more tripped out Parallax View. The score throws in the odd brass section, much like The Incredibles’ take on the same era’s film music, for good measure.



You would think that Source Code has enough plot already, but each 8 minute commute reveals some new, compounded twist. The film untwines in two time lines – Stevens trying to identify the train’s bomber and Stevens trying to find out where he is in that capsule. When did he ever sign up for this timey travelly programme anyways? Last thing he remembers before the train was Afghanistan.



Source Code shares themes with Duncan Jones’ previous film, Moon. Both Sci-Fi, of course, but they also ask questions over the protagonist’s identity, increasingly confusing reality and existence. More interestingly, both Stevens and Moon’s Sam Bell are isolated, one in some unknown capsule, the other on a remote lunar base. Their only communication with characters other than themselves is mediated through screens. Their interaction with reality is second hand, and thus its reliability is cast it in doubt.



SPOILER: If you’ve seen Source Code, revisit Metallica’s video for ‘One’. It’s edited with clips of Johnny Got His Gun, a film about a soldier who was hit by an artillery shell on the last day of the Great War. He lost all four limbs and his eyes, ears, mouth and nose in the impact, but is kept alive by in a military hospital. A prisoner in his own body. Captain Colter Stevens channels this soldier and gives him the release Johnny Got His Gun denied.



And another thing, by the film’s own logic, a parallel reality splintered off from each trip into the source code. Stevens harassed a lot of people in their final 8 minutes in that reality. That’s a lot of crappy commutes.

Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #15 - Attack the Block (2011)

Attack the Block, 2011.



Written and Directed by Joe Cornish.

Starring Nick Frost, Jodie Whittaker, Luke Treadaway, John Boyega, Alex Esmail and Simon Howard.





SYNOPSIS:



When aliens invade a South London council estate, it's left to a teenage street gang to try and save the day.





“He’s much taller in real life”, I thought, “and that’s when a little hunched too”. Joe Cornish ambled across the cinema screen to stand before us. He thanked Channel 4 for his breaks in life; a first job in production; giving him and his friend Adam Buxton their first show; partly funding his debut film that we were about to watch. If it weren’t for them, he imagined in a desperate alternate reality, he’d be holed up somewhere taking crack with his prossie girlfriend right now. “Shouldn’t have said ‘prossie’,” he quickly self-flagellated under his breath. As a listener of the Adam and Joe podcasts, watching him speak felt disorientating. My mind dismembered voice from mouth as though it were a very good piece of dubbing. It’s like the first time you ever saw John Motson. But to the film…



Attack the Block pits the inhabitants of a Brixton council estate, which they defensively refer to as “the Block”, against a very localised alien invasion (note: not ‘global’). The film opens on Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a nurse returning home to the Block, when a gang of hooded teenagers block her way. Their faces are obscured by shadow and the night takes care of the rest. Two of them flank Sam on their bikes to surround her. Their leader, Moses (John Boyega), demands her wallet and the ring around her finger. Shaking, she struggles to remove it quick enough, so Moses pushes her to the tarmac.



You’d expect Sam to be the protagonist here. Well, she’s kinda a co-protagonist later on, but it’s the gang who are the film’s heroes. Yeah, the ones who just mugged a defenceless lady – a white lady at that. When a piece of the sky crushes a nearby car, harbouring inside it a lean, sharp-toothed alien, your appetite begins to whet for the gang’s bloody demise. After all, it’s an established sci-fi/horror convention – the bad guys get ate. But instead it is they who kill the monster, impaling it on a stick with the same aggressiveness they exerted on Sam. You see, they aren’t the real bad guys. They could be, in time, but they’re still kids here.



It’s easy to forget that they’re only young because they’re so intimidating at first. But Cornish admirably reveals the gang’s age by humanising them with perceptive details (“I wanna go home and play Fifa”) and shows them as the youths demonised and ignored by society (unless for a knife-crime statistic). It makes it harder to blame them for bullying the street corners. They mooch back to the Block on their mobile phones, each moaning to their elders about staying out a little longer. You get little snippets from their conversations. They’re talking to grandmothers or uncles, not mothers and fathers. It’s safe to assume the homes to which they return are ‘broken’.



As they walk to the Block, the depth of the film’s cast is realised; Moses, and the other four who comprise his gang, are significantly developed; Probs and Mayhem, two pre-teens who want to join Moses’ gang are introduced; Brewis, a posh University graduate from Fulham, is sorely out of place and looking to buy weed; and Ron (Nick Frost), who gets stoned and watches the Discovery channel all day. That’s why he’s the best person to take the alien’s corpse to – he might be able to tell them what it is, and more importantly, if it’s worth any money. They seem quite preoccupied with this, like most kids who go through a spell of hyper-capitalist entrepreneurialism. I once set up a shop underneath my stairs when I was about eight, convinced I’d earn my fortune. At least I had stairs. They only have the stairwells that connect the Block’s floors.



When the alien ships start to crash to earth around the Block, camouflaged by the firework displays that litter the night’s sky, these brief introductions of supporting characters allows the film to effortlessly cut between them and their different sub-plots later on. But what of the monsters! Their jaws light up with a neon blue, but the rest of their furry bodies are so black they merge with the dark. That’s pretty handy when you consider the cost of puppetry and CGI. It’s called making your budget work for you. You never see enough of the monsters to make out their flaws, and it is this secrecy that makes them relentlessly terrifying. That’s called positive feedback. Germain Lussier at SlashFilm, who called the film a “genre-bending, cult classic in the making”, pointed out how Attack the Block imposes its geeky passion upon the viewer. It “elicits the kind of nostalgia that’ll make fans want to own and display tiny replicas of its protagonists and antagonists.” It’s an odd compliment, but an acute one. Journey into a Forbidden Planet and you’ll see the hordes of McFarlane miniatures of Spawn and Halo exhibited in glass cases. Look a little further on and you’ll see ones from The Warriors and Shaun of the Dead. Hopefully soon they’ll be accompanied by a range of Attack the Block’s monster plushies.



So the monsters proceed to attack the gang, and sometimes the gang attack the monsters, but the teenagers are loosing and get pushed higher and higher up the Block. The film isn’t sloppy though - all this action is fully supported by plot. Why, for example, do the aliens seem to be exclusively targeting them? We must also not forget Attack the Block’s wicked sense of humour and its occasional treats of inspired gore.



Cornish said before the film began that he was influenced by the monster films he watched growing up as a 80s child like Predator, Gremlins and Critters (it does sometimes feel as though he’s channelling Joe Dante). And just like those films, Attack the Block makes you want to have children just so you can scare the shit out of them from an early age.



Walking home at just gone 10pm, after seeing Attack the Block, you realise just how well it was photographed. Every frame captures the urban night. Illumination comes from car headlights, streetlights and mobile phones. It’s all unnaturally piercing, yet at the same time, for those who live in the built up areas similar to the Block, there’s a familiarity to be found in their electric glow. You really appreciate your estate’s orange bath after that, and then maybe you’ll start to understand the youths that share…shhh! Did you see that? Over there, in the corner, just out of the lamppost’s peripherals…

Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive