This Is The End (2013)

This Is The End is silly and stupid. But then that's obviously the point. Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, James Franco among many others (including cameos from Emma Watson and Rihanna and Jason Segel) play themselves during the apocalypse. Self-referential and self-deprecating humour is occasionally used in a funny way  - particularly the coke-addled Michael Cera scenes - but the entire religious/Satanic aspect is ridiculous to the point of suicidal tedium. Obviously these are just a few lines. To be honest I don't think its worth more than that. And I'm usually a sucker for post-modern approaches to cinema.

Seriously though those Michael Cera bits are brilliant; they're just all in the first 25 minutes. Just watch the first 25 minutes.

Armadillo

Yes it's another Afghanistan related post but this one is quite considerably different to Taxi To The Dark Side. It is another documentary but only in the loosest possible sense; truly this is the most cinematic documentary I have ever seen.

Danish filmmaker Janus Metz follows a squad's 6 month tour of Afghanistan. By focussing on a couple of characters, particularly the slightly aloof and thoughtful (though painfully reticent) Mads, Metz condenses that long period into an hour and forty minutes. This might sound reductive (in literal terms I suppose it is) but the raw emotion and boredom feel remarkably immediate and genuine. Metz captures the full spectrum of the Middle Eastern war experience: from the copious amounts of waiting, focussing on their down-time pursuits - pornography and baking - and the camaraderie that naturally ensues in such a hostile environment; to the high adrenaline buzz-saw dramatics of conflict against hidden Taliban adversaries. 

These experiences are all sublimely smeared in melodramatic visual photography and thoughtful use of sound. Often the natural score is replaced by one written by Uno Helmersson's score, which weaves in and out at tense moments. It's a superior score, sonically unnerving and adept at sustaining dramatic poise. Of course the high-quality production element is the chief criticism put forward by Armadillo's detractors: just how authentic is it? Was chronology affected in the editing process? If so, to what extent - were events deliberately manipulated to provide a gripping action sequence? These are all pertinent questions, but perhaps miss the underlying point the film is attempting to convey. The war there is futile. When faced with fighting an enemy that can disappear into the local community there is no way of winning. Metz captures this frustration amongst the men several times over. One is reminded of the excellent documentary on Vice with the English journalist Ben Anderson (both part one and part two, and look up Anderson's This Is What Winning Looks Like, another documentary that is breathtakingly incisive and relevant).

Naturally this film received a lot of attention in Metz's native Denmark. Anger was roused by the scene that depicted some dead and bloodied Taliban bodies in a ditch and the soldiers dancing round all smiles and languour. It was always going to be a controversial sticking point for the trigger-happy perpetually unhappy bourgeois crowd, who immediately filed complaint and outrage in the Danish media both against Metz and the soldiers themselves. But all that Metz was seemed to be doing though was to portray the harsh realities of a war. More nuanced than that even. The men in Afghanistan are trying desperately to fight an impossible conflict against a guerrilla enemy - whom, Anderson shows in one of the videos above, the soldiers rarely even catch a glimpse of - and to have killed five straight off the bat in a really intimate combat situation... I can completely empathise with their glee at survival, not only that but a confirmed kill in what must surely be an incredibly exhilarating experience. To paraphrase the soldiers at the end - 'you weren't there'. How could we, a faraway public, condemn the actions of those involved in a fatal firefight, especially in such a brief situation. There is no way of retrospectively moralising such a sequence of events when not in the immediate geographical vicinity. In that sense I am an apologist. And anyway a charge of - to paraphrase Apocalypse Now - war crime in the context of a bloody conflict is insane.

As a final note, I've no idea how Metz and his camera were allowed to get so close to the action. Brave man. Also 'Armadillo' is the Forward Operating Base from which the regiment are based. If nothing else the DVD cover (above) is way cool: a grenade transposed into a heart.

Taxi To The Dark Side

Taxi To The Dark Side is an Alex Gibney documentary film released in 2007 about the culture of torture in the US military, with the death of a young, innocent Afghan taxi driver - Dilawar - in a prison in Bagram as the launching pad. It critically examines the grassroots interpretation of that wildly ambiguous term, the 'War on Terror'. Actually Taxi To The Dark Side is considerably more nuanced than that inadequate description gives credence to. It doesn't just name and shame the minor players in various torture scandals but follows the rabbit hole all the way up to the highest echelons, continually questioning the humanity and morality of an administration and military that risibly looked to ignore or quash any suggestion of torture in American Afghani imprisonment camps. It examines Bagram then Abu Ghraib and then to Guanatanamo Bay, highlighting the vacuum of accountability.

In short, this is a very effective documentary. It's cleverly composed, using the Dilawar case as a rudder with which to steer every line of argument and includes refreshingly frank interviews with a multitude of different characters up and down the spectrum of responsibility. That includes the Military Police and Intelligence Officers who carried out the physical torture. Gibney alters the perception that an audience would have of them; he manages to convincingly portray them as victims of the system that allowed, encouraged even, the implementation of debilitating physical interrogation methods. It's difficult to feel genuine compassion for them (they were all convicted by military tribunals) but it suspends knee-jerk condemnation and contextualises their plight in a wider political atmosphere - an atmosphere that demanded intelligence about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda at all costs. These were nice people who were morally isolated from the outside world, working in a culture that passively encouraged the dehumanising of its Muslim inmates in a manner not unlike the Nazi officers of Jewish concentration camps or the Einsatzgruppen. 

Of course the most controversial bits involve Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and General's McNeil and Miller and their apathetic attitudes towards the endemic contraventions of the Geneva Convention that occurred under their authority. Even more sickening though are the brutal 'interrogation' techniques and the documents signed by those movers and shakers that acquiesced to those methods. Stress positions, sexual humiliation, sleep and sensory deprivation are all described in vivid detail. Interspersed throughout are excerpts from G.W. Bush speeches - there's no doubt that it's a deliberate mechanism designed to shock, to evoke disgust and it bloody works.

Gibney's Taxi To The Dark Side is unpleasantly effective in its shocking portrayal of goes on in the supposedly civilised twenty-first century. It doesn't even end on a positive note - Guantanamo Bay is a continuation of the treatment prevalent in Abu Ghraib because it falls between the judicial cracks of Cuba and America, it's not at the behest of any national law. They can get away with anything they want. Depressing stuff. Not least because Taxi To The Dark Side received high exposure - it won a Best Documentary Oscar - and Gitmo continues to thrive despite vast worldwide outrage. Evidently there's no way of forcing closure through legal channels (Obama has twice promised and twice failed to ensure its termination).

Blue Jasmine

Here's a link to a review I wrote elsewhere for the new Woody Allen film Blue Jasmine, starring Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins and Alec Baldwin. Enjoy.

Elysium

Ok, it's actually been a few weeks since I actually saw Elysium in the cinema and I have been lazy and not written about it until now. But here we are with Neill Blomkamp, Matt Damon and Sharlto Copley. We have an action packed science fiction that concurrently plays on the prescient themes of economic inequality and hero-saves-the-world daring-do. Those are, as I shall discuss, fundamentally contradictory and symbolic of the muddled message at the very heart of the script. There will be spoilers, but then how else can I discuss the meat of the film.

Roughly speaking Damon is a former convict looking to set his life in order working in a factory that builds androids. But he is then the victim of an accident, leaving him with only a few days to live. He must get to Elysium and cure himself with the magic machines they have up there on this distant satellite. Meanwhile Jodie Foster is desperate to preserve her beautiful privileged home from the dirty vermin smouldering on Earth. The wildcard Agent Kruger (Copley) is the baddy who tried to kill everyone.

It's a moderately pleasing picture with brilliantly realised VFX (as one would expect for a big budget) and photographically engrossing combat scenes. Matt Damon is Mr.Consistency once more as the ailing central character Max Da Costa desperately in need of medical salvation from a near-fatal nuclear exposure, who bumps his childhood sweetheart Frey Santiago (Alice Braga) and her sickly daughter; Copley is sufficiently creepy to play the villain Kruger and that irrepressible South African accent is superb the whole way through; and Foster is as sternly matriarchal and ruthless as she needed to be for her role as Delacourt, the Secretary of Defence charged with defending the privileged satellite world of Elysium. 

As for the politics - and one could hardly argue this is not a political film considering the flagrant subject matter of wealth disparity - things are less convincing. I'm not sure how deep and serious Blomkamp's socio-political convictions were for Elysium but the general message has been tragically garbled in favour of superficial plot twists. The concept of a literal partition (i.e. space) between rich and poor is potentially thought-provoking. It is an exaggerated and partisan view of a future society, completely eliminating the bourgeoisie (something Marx would have taken issue with), but nonetheless interesting. Exaggeration is absolutely fine if it is deliberately employed to make a greater, overarching observation about the imbalance of monetary distribution in the modern world. But it wasn't. It was just a cool way of making Da Costa have to fight the evil guys with cool futuristic weapons in a standard quest storyline.

To question Elysium further we would have to examine the motives behind each of the main characters and understand why it is they want to reach Elysium. Max Da Costa wants to heal himself on one of Elysium's wizard medical capsules; Frey Santiago wants to heal her daughter from leukaemia; Kruger wants to supplant the Elysium government and rule as an autonomous figure in luxury. In short, all central characters have no concept of a greater liberation of mankind from the suppression of the rich, but strive forwards with selfish goals in mind. That there is an eventual emancipation of the underprivileged is tacked on at the end as a way of justifying the selfish ambitions that had driven Da Costa and Santiago thus far. When we remember that the wealthy citizens of Elysium don't even turn out to be the bad guys the message becomes ever more confused. Delacourt and the other misguided few are rendered just as victimised as their social underlings by Kruger's callous opportunism. Blomkamp really missed a chance to make some seriously relevant social statements pertaining to the prevalent economic inequality of our world. Elysium's political message is frighteningly flippant - a once pure message has been strangled by the desire to make a good story. 

Should I forget political morality and just take the movie at face value? Possibly... but no. Cinema is the perfect platform for debates about the global problems of our modern society. It's strange that a deficiency in care and thought was allowed to pass considering the liberal centre left leanings of those who work in cinema and the arts (obviously, I'm talking about the creative types not the corporate suits). Alas, the fundamentals of Elysium will forever remain unresolved. Visually it's great though, and the world on Elysium is gorgeously idyllic.

Europa Report

2013 seems to be awash with thought provoking science-fiction films. Not just sanitised superhero flicks but movies that contain sturdy, worthwhile themes. Europa Report can be counted as one of those. Directed by Ecuadorian Sebastian Cordero (Cronicas) this’n slipped under the net somewhat, unknown and unseen by almost every casual cineaste. It is easy to see why. Without a big name director or a star actor’s coattails (highest profile guy is Sharlto Copley of District 9 and Elysium fame) for the PR men to grab onto there seems to have been very little promotion for Europa Report (it relied mostly on viral and blogging publicity campaigns). It’s also very character-driven with no time wasted on superfluous action scenes – and without ‘action’, films rarely sell well.

Right, a synopsis: a crew made up of Americans, Europeans and Russians head to Europa (a moon of Jupiter) the one seemingly inhabitable body in our solar system. They are on a quest to discover whether there is any sentient life thriving in the vast frozen oceans there, but disaster strikes and Europa turns out to be a bit wilder than predicted. I say ‘wilder’ – it’s not like Avatar with rampaging predators – but instinctive life, creatively and interestingly presented by the filmmaker. Without any distracting monster VFX, suspense is sustained at a captivatingly high level right to the end – a feat based on the idea that fear of the nameless or unspecified is more mesmerising and enthralling than a visual threat. That age-old film-writing technique of keeping the unknown unknown is as powerful as it was in the 1940s when Jacques Tourneur made Cat People.

Cordero’s cinematographic approach to his space odyssey-ing sci-fi comes from an unusual angle. The unnerving concept behind found-footage is usually applied to low-budget horror (not that that technique is low budget anymore – just look at the Paranormal Activity franchise)  to instil an immediacy, and cleverly unhook the significance of the ending, i.e. the audience knows whether the characters survive or not because that’s the nature of anonymous ‘found-footage’. Interspersed with the private videos and footage are faux interviews with the ‘experts’ that worked on Mission Control and knew the astronauts who were lost on the exploration, taking on a documentarial role.

With a mixed chronology Europa Report can be considered a challenging watch, and it’s absolutely necessary to stick with the characters, and spend time mentally piecing together the events as they emerge. It sounds like a recipe for madness, for utter cinematic and narrative chaos but a focussed audience is rewarded with an extremely satisfying final third, in which everything unravels from a fragile bud into a sturdy, charismatic flower. Worth a go.

New stuff coming, honest

I haven't posted a review on here for 11 days, for which I apologise - life stuff etc. I will add something new in the next 3 or 4 days. Probably a double sci-fi review of Elysium and Europa Reports.