World War Z

Go back six months and the omens for Marc Foster and Brad Pitt’s zombie project (he stars and co-produces) were pretty appalling: production and editing had been riddled with writing fallouts and cost issues (the budget ballooned to around $200m, though there were hyperbolic reports of the ridiculous sum of $400m) to the hilarity of all outside that poisonous bubble – Foster and Pitt reportedly didn’t speak to each other at its troubled end. Fast forward to its release and there were accusations from Israeli quarters that the movie had undertones of anti-Zionism. With all the problems that WWZ has been plagued by, the end result could have been a lot worse.

The first script was penned by J. Michael Straczynski (Changeling) before Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom) was parachuted in to compose a complete re-write. Then, after the shoot finally completed last year, Pitt and his team decided (with the help of Lost and Star Trek Into Darkness’s Damon Lindelof) that the entire forty minute third act would need to be reshot and replaced. There severe problems with logistics and an inexperienced production team… to be honest WWZ’s travails are best described in this article here. Everyone expected a flop of Titanic proportions. And then, on the first weekend, it took £77.3m ($118.8m) from the box office. It had more than recouped its outlay and there is even, absurdly, concrete talk of a sequel.

Pitt plays the former UN official Gerry who has retired in order to spend more time with his stereotypically idyllic family. But one day they, and all the inhabitants of a Philadelphia traffic jam, are accosted by a horde of hyper athletic zombies (that is, Danny Boyle zombies rather George Romero zombies. With the help of his friend at the UN (Fana Mokoena) Gerry and his fam just escape from Newark by helicopter and are taken to a Navy ship somewhere in the Atlantic off the Eastern seaboard. From there he is persuaded to help a young virologist discover the source of the zombie disease and find a cure. Gerry finds himself travelling to South Korea and Israel and Wales in that quest.

As one would expect the plot does lose itself and there are a series of false starts and pointless characters but nothing too laughable. The third act is tangibly different to the rest but it isn’t noticeably worse – in fact the discovery at the end is surprisingly adroit and an appearance by Peter Capaldi is always welcome. To be fair though, considering the writing issues, there must have been a late night where everyone just said ‘oh fuck it, that’ll do’. It is a bit funny how serious it takes itself though – ‘the fate of humanity is at stake!’ etc etc.

Older zombie movies were typically issued with savage contemporaneous social commentaries, trying to act as intellectual stimulus rather than the simple blood’n’gore fests that latter days renditions have become. The modern genre is rarely anything more than shallow grisly escapism; celebrating man’s ability to create vulgar fiction rather than forcing the audience to question the world. The concept of the zombie apocalypse is a utopian construct, fashioned by writers as a kind of reset button for society – to wilfully neglect or ignorantly overlook that makes a mockery of the whole thing. WWZ can be accused of that. It possesses nothing of the intricacies and complexities that the book possesses. Of course it would pertinent to point out that the original script (Straczynski) had serious geopolitical intentions but it was rejected, ostensibly for being too clever. Not unlike the rebuff of Soderbergh’s Behind The Candelabra the production companies again prove to be overly fearful of commissioning anything that doesn’t use a requisite amount of CGI. But, to be fair to them, they’re only following demand. And the current demand is for pot-bellied superhero with unquenchable appetites for computer effects.

Hollywood once again smothers any spark of intelligent thought with the pillow of ‘action-thriller’ and VFX. World War Z is a blueprint of how bountiful CGI and a first class A-lister like Pitt can draw hordes of convulsing people and make tons of money despite artistic deficiencies, and how it will be able to achieve that feat over and over. It’s mind-numbing entertainment but I guess its entertainment nonetheless. And we all have those late nights when all we want to do is watch something guileless and anaesthetising. This is it.

Lotus Eaters

Lotus Eaters is a critical ode to the youthful decadence of affluent London socialites, built on a rampaging surfeit of photographic swagger. And it's the visual affectation of this film that renders it so interesting: there's no doubt that director Alexandra McGuinness and her cinematographer Gareth Munden are heavily influenced by the paragons of cinema history. It uses Kubrick’s tracking shots, Godard’s cut-up editing and the shaky action camera work that Visconti and Cuaron, among many others, have displayed a flair for. And all those techniques shot in black and white. This film is pretentious, but is there anything wrong with that? There’s no doubt that monochrome photography does look cool.

However that focus on a polished aesthetic seems to have been at the expense of anything much tangible. McGuinness said in an interview that she wanted Lotus Eaters to be character-driven not plot-driven and that is a stylistic choice evident, painfully so at times. The story concerns itself with Alice (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) and the minor existential crisis she experiences within general life and her relationship status. She is a model but looking to enter the acting profession whilst trying to save her drug addled boyfriend Charlie (Johnny Flynn), but lost in the thoughtless decadence of her reckless friends. Nothing really happens – it’s just a succession of parties and social gatherings at which the characters are fleshed out. But like The Room there are some ‘indifferent’ acting performances and iffy writing: the manipulative she-devil Orna is a case in point. Orna is the Cruella de Vil figure – predatory, black and platinum hair, fashion background – who acts as a kind of guardian angel to Felix. Her scenes though err on the cringeworthy – largely because of jarring dialogue and the incongruous sex appeal she exudes in waves. The writing also fails to capture the lustre of some pretty robust themes – anorexia, drug abuse overdose, rape allegations of rape. They’re all mentioned briefly suggested but never dealt with: instead they simmer away ineffectively in the background. Alice is clearly suffering from anorexia but, beyond a couple of momentary allusions to it, it affects nothing.

This isn’t to say there aren’t good bits. McGuinness’ writing conforms quite explicitly at the end to Greek tragedy – it is juxtaposed with the high-brow symbolism of a dying horse, the meaning of which I am not privy to. There’s a great line about trying to conceive a child out of sheer boredom which comes right out of the Austen draw of affluent folly. Music also plays an important role in summoning up the atmosphere of trendy: scenes of tension are punctuated by montaged party scenes of hip music – the London goth/post-punk band O Children make a surprise appearance in the festival scenes. In fact it was the copyrights to the soundtrack that prevented Lotus Eaters’ release in American cinemas until this year despite its first showing a couple of years ago.

Undoubtedly Lotus Eaters is at its strongest when dealing with the opulence – the scene where the group fill a bath with vodka is particularly memorable. Bella (Gina Bramhill) perfectly encapsulates the pervading spirit of rampant excess and fleeting juvenility in a dramatic soliloquy near the end. She strips and enunciates to her whacked out friends the glories of these days they’re living through, wishing the night would last forever in that kind of 19^th century Parisian ultra-idealistic way. Its observation is clear: in our retro-obsessed modern world the true belle époque is here and now. It’s a movie made from tumblr, like McGuinness stitched a load of black and white Instagram photographs together. A succession of beautiful people dealing with the pitfalls of the first world: drugs, relationships and fashion. Yes it’s a dreamlike vision, deliberately distorted to exaggerate a small cross-section of wealthy twenty-somethings, but nonetheless a curious watch. The essence of the movie is rooted in Greek literature. The title of course is named after the lotus eaters of Greek mythology who spent their decadent lives on an island of pleasure and paradise. This proves to be an apt title for McGuinness’ film.

Gozu

Gozu is a movie that bores into your soul: it looks deep within you and drags out the hidden phantasmagoric fantasies that we all harbour. It's also the kind of unsettling nightmare that urban-dwellers imagine provincial towns to be, full of brazenly quaint characters with freakish habits. Yet there are plenty of comedic moments amongst the ocean of surreal. Takashi Miike is the master of successfully juxtaposing the horrifically bizarre with humour, of establishing remarkable tones of heightened shock. Gozu is part of British TV channel FilmFour's 'FrightFest' season, a fortnight of classic and obscure horror films. It's August date is designed to coincide with the annual film festival of the same name, that takes place in Leicester Square and it throws numerous gems that I was previously ignorant to. This be one.

I knew Miike from a couple of his other horror works – 1999's Audition and his ‘Box’ segment in the film collaboration Three… Extremes – and enjoyed them both. He is somehow consistently able to exceed the confining boundary of tastefulness without shedding any of the emotional integrity. The central character in Gozu is Minami (Hideki Sone), a nervous young man ascending the Yakuza ladder. He is in thrall to his mentor Brother Ozaki (Show Aikawa) whose mental capacity has seemingly dissipated in the Tokyo smog; Minami is instructed by Boss to assassinate Ozaki in the town of Nagoya away from the capital. But Ozaki’s corpse manages to escape outside a café in the town and Minami is forced to hole up at a local inn and tracks his movements with the aid of Nose, a local Yakuza with a prominent skin deformity.

Sone plays Minami well: not as a sniveling wretch who finds himself in the Yakuza out of broader social weakness, but as an anxious young man of inexperience thrust into a realm of confusion and misunderstanding. He is virginal and fretful around women, so fretful in fact that his sanity deserts him when confronted by an attractive young woman who presents herself as Ozaki (Kimika Yoshino) in female form – don’t ask, that plot development doesn’t make much sense when you’re watching it, never mind out of context – and he believes her. It's how his mind deals with sexual contact – by substituting the woman for a man he knew very well. And thus one of Gozu's central tenets concerns his 'awakening' to the physical.

It’s difficult to discuss Gozu without mentioning the famous scenes, though they will be spoilers. In my opinion it’s very difficult to properly discuss a film – particularly one as abstract as this – without referring to what happens at the conclusion. In the reviews that I’ve been writing in the past couple of months I have, generally, refrained from giving away the endings. But really, it is kind of necessary. And so I will tell you, dear reader, what happens at the culmination of Gozu. THIS WILL BE A SPOILER. The female Ozaki coaxes Minami into intercourse. During their interaction a hand grabs his penis from within her vagina. She proceeds to gives birth to a full grown man: the male Ozaki. Then they all walk cheerfully down the road together. End. Pretty staggering stuff and one’s mouth is very much agape as the credits roll. That wild surrealism surpasses even the other egregiously stark images: a person with a cow’s head appears to Minami in a dream sequence carrying a message and later he catches the innkeeper and her brother in the midst of their side business of bottled breast milk production. But it would be disingenuous to reduce this sometimes opaque work to nothing more than its most memorable and shocking bits. The cow’s head represents the scariest thing in Japanese folklore (even the retelling of the story supposedly reduces its listeners to a catatonic sludge) and to see it reduced to nothing more than a hallucinatory postman is, if nothing specifically tangible, symbolic of Miike’s iconoclastic tendencies. I must confess I don’t really ‘get’ the meaning of the elderly lady squeezing milk out of her breasts. Renewal? Rebirth? Prolonged youth? There’s no doubt however that she (Keiko Tomita) suffers from loneliness. It’s a theme that is prevalent: Minami is repeatedly propositioned by various characters, all suffering from that crippling symptom of advancing age. For him at least that loneliness – which manifests itself largely through sexual frustration – is resolved at the end. Snapshot glimpses of the lives of the innkeeper and Nose are emblematic of the broader stagnation of their lives: they desperately seek some excitement before the natural path of mortality takes its withering course. This endemic sense of waste is exacerbated by the provincial town they reside in, seemingly characterised by decades of inertia and older methods of progress – Minami is desperate to make haste in the location of Ozaki’s body, but Nose and his Yakuza superior prefer to take their leisurely time.

The final word though must go to the Koji Endo, the guy behind Gozu’s music – it’s superbly executed, both in thematic appropriation and emotional effectiveness. To invoke unease, especially in the scenes of rampant surrealism, he masterfully constructs pieces of jarring atonal noise with strings and synthesisers. His use of cello for when female Ozaki delivers male Ozaki is in the modernist vein of avant-garde composers like Iannis Xenakis, and works so well. This curious picture is another tile in Miike’s patchwork career of dramas, action thrillers and horror movies. I haven’t seen too many of his films but in the pantheon of bizarro horror the bat-shit weird Gozu stands pretty high.

Oblivion

Just a quick appraisal of Tom Cruise' sci-fi vehicle Oblivion from earlier this year, recently released on DVD. And it's actually not that bad. Oblivion isn't extraordinary but it remains entertaining with satisfyingly executed themes of alien deception, lost love and social pariah. Cruise plays Jack Harper, a soldier-cum-technician who keeps a watchful eye over the drones that protect vast tidal power stations, along with his 'teammate' and lover Victoria (Andrea Riseborough). They inhabit a post-apocalyptic Earth which humans are soon to depart from.

The plot presents a decent twist, the visual effects are smooth and ephemeral and there's a dream-sequence/love interest for Harper in the shape of Olga Kurylenko - all the ingredients for a good science fiction movie. When we remember how many shit films have eminated from that genre and how easy they are to mess up, this is still a fine achievement for writer/producer/director Joseph Kosinski (who also did Tron: Legacy, although that got a bad rep I don't think it was so bad - well the Daft Punk bits were good). Architectural and vehicular design is suitably futuristic (NB: not futurist) and pretty cool, all minimalist transparency and rounded clean lines; and the music, scored by Anthony Gonzalez or a.k.a.'d as M83, keeps to the tasteful side of uplifting and electronic.

Although it's a standard Earth-and-humanity-is-great and love-overcomes-all flick this is entertaining enough not to have been a complete waste of time and money. Not to mention the appearances of Jaime Lannister (for whom Nikolaj Coster-Waldau will surely be forever known as) and Morgan Freeman in Mad Max stylee apparel. And if those drones aren't a canny allusion to the illegal drone strikes carried out by the US military on Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and many others then I don't know what would be.

Spring Breakers

‘Spring break, spring break forever’ is the paradox whispered throughout the second half of Spring Breakers. Although Harmony Korine’s delicious new film came out several months ago it's worth, I think, a slight reappraisal. Or at least another look. Actually the whole concept of re-examining stuff a few months after the critical hype is interesting – a feature lost in the internet age in which blogs race to get their opinions out before their rivals. Thus we see knee-jerk opinions and overly dramatic attention baiting reviews. It's a little sad maybe but understandable as we all (myself included) strive for as many clicks and pageviews as possible.

And on the subject of overly dramatic and attention baiting things we return to this film. Although initial critical reaction was largely positive, those that didn't like it really didn't like it. Glitteringly stylised photography and seemingly misogynistic, one could understand some of the misgivings. It seemed to bristle with a haughty arrogance, stubbornly sure of its thematic footing yet sniggering at the higher-than-thou irony of putting some Disney stars (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens) in scenes of drug-use and rapacious sexuality. That core of self-amusement is stamped the whole way through Spring Breakers – calling the religious girl Faith (Gomez) is just a further example. It’s deliberately bizarre, full of absurd images and scenes like James Franco’s cornrows and being tried in a court clad in nothing but bikinis. Franco is actually superb playing the leeringly creepy Alien, a local small fry gangster with visions of misguided self-aggrandisement. His richly gangster-ised accent and materialistic obsession is utterly convincing, and yet another peculiar role choice in what is becoming an exceptionally versatile career.

What actually happens? Some girls rob a store in their college town then go down to Florida for spring break. They traipse around drinking and snorting cocaine, then accidently become involved with Alien. That’s about it. To be honest describing the premise feels like it misses the point. It’s a film of purposeful excess, highlighting the hideously ostentatious culture surrounding youthful party breaks and isn’t designed to be much more. People who like films (or rather, like to know a lot about films so that they can impress other people) are used to spending time trying to decipher the singular universal meaning behind a Terrence Malick conclusion or David Lynch ending. Korine turns this obsession with 'knowing' what something means on its head by constructing a movie that draws its tendrils from many themes - youth, drugs, sex - but without imposing any kind of commentary on it. Writers always try to apply some profound meaning to the work of someone with a cult-like reputation like Korine, a tendency that he seems to be making fun of; when in actual fact it’s just the shallow bravado it appears to be. It's nothing more than a face value film, made for the fuck of it, to irritate and draw outrage and it does so brilliantly. Spring Breakers pokes fun at the very idea of inferring meaning from art.

(By the way, I do recognise the irony of me inferring a meaning from a film designed to mock the process of inferring a meaning).

Before Sunrise and Before Sunset

Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) are the first two parts in Richard Linklater’s romantic trilogy – with the third Before Midnight in cinemas right now, though I have yet to see it. They are set in the evocatively baroque alleyways of Vienna and Paris and follow the same two characters at nine year intervals, showing how they met then lost contact and reconvened. Both are moving stories and utterly convincing, largely due to the quality of the writing, far removed the damp schmaltz of most romance flicks.

The three stories concern the idiosyncratic conversations between an American man, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), and a French woman, Céline (Julie Delpy) – both in their early twenties – and their spontaneous descent into rapturous love. In the first, Before Sunrise, they are strangers on a train to Paris who simply strike up a conversation then, despite knowing very little about each other, impulsively get off together at the Austrian capital and wander through its aesthetic majesty all night, utterly beguiled by one another. They establish a quixotic agreement to spend only the single night together, forgoing all the disappointments that would inevitably arise from a haphazard long-distance relationship (he in America, she in France). It’s a saturatingly romantic decision made in the full optimistic bloom of youth, and sort of mirrors the concept set down by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in his play ‘Axel’: two beautiful people enjoy only one blissful night in each other’s arms, before collectively drinking poison so as to preserve their perfection forever more. Before Sunrise shifts away from the Symbolist idealism of ‘Axel’ though because Linklater and Kim Krizan (the other writer) want to ground Jesse and Céline in the compromising realism of human susceptibility – they agree to waive their lovelorn pact and meet on the same platform in the Vienna train station in precisely six months. The film ends without a true resolution, without the audience knowing whether they meet again or not. It ends with the elusive hope that heralds all potential love affairs, and it’s stunning.

Before Sunrise resonates deeply as a piece of escapist cinema. The idea of spontaneity is quite an alien concept in the conservative modern world of ours, where fastidiousness is championed and organisation sought for. The notion of jumping off a train with an unknown entity without definite plans is so refreshingly dashing, an enthralling example of carpe diem, of unpredictability and excitement – something that we all crave, but are usually too anxious to seize – and the type of brashness that only the young are audacious enough to attempt.

 Nine years pass between the first film and its sequel Before Sunset, both in real and fictional time. Hawke and Delpy reprise the two central characters but with a more mature outlook on life’s mundanity. Without wishing to give too much away, Jesse and Parisienne Céline meet in ‘La Ville-Lumière’ after their failure to convene in Vienna nine years previously and smoothly reconnect with the same unerring chemistry. The structure of the sequel is altered slightly from Before Sunrise: the dialogue is one long conversation and operates in real time, with a multitude of long extended takes that follow the duo around the pretty streets and waterways of Paris. Yet the script retains the emotional depth and jarring authenticity of the first and continues to explore the psyche of both characters in such an organic and tender way that is captivating to an audience already poignantly invested in Jesse and Céline after the first instalment (and it is necessary to see the films chronologically).

Hawke and Delpy are also credited as co-writers along with Linklater and Krizan for Before Sunset. Evidently they care a great deal about their own characters and in what direction their personalities have matured; the personal attachment that the actors themselves have for Jesse and Céline lends an extra layer of plausibility and emotional weight. This rather sums up the two films: beautiful works with wads of convincing sentimentality.