SFF 2012: Killer Joe

William Friedkin is a maniac.

It's a sad fact that as they get older, many great directors seem to lose the fire that once made their more youthful works so incendiary. Well, if Killer Joe is any indication of Friedkin's current psyche, it's proof positive that once vital directors can not only rediscover that flame, but reignite it into an explosive bonfire.

At 77 years young, Friedkin has made a film that many of today's Young Turks would do well to take heed of. Where 2006's Bug showed great promise, and an obvious desire to continue to grow as an artist, Killer Joe is, without reservation, a resounding success.

It shares an obvious kinship with other southern redneck thrillers like the Coen's Blood Simple (there's some Wild At Heart/Blue Velvet era Lynch at play here too), yet not once does it feel recycled or predictable. Killer Joe is wholly it's own beast... and what a depraved, blood-thirsty beast it is. This is black humour so utterly dark, that the only way I can describe it is Nihilist Comedy.

Speaking of which, it is without a doubt the funniest movie I've seen in a long time. When I wasn't picking my jaw up off the ground, during one of it's many completely insane what-the-fuck moments, I was just laughing my ass off (as was the rest of the packed audience... the entire theatre was roaring with approval). Thomas Haden Church in particular is hysterically funny. I was in stitches at almost every line he delivered.


Matthew McConaughey is pretty amazing in this. "Creepy" doesn't begin to describe his performance, and he joins Willem Dafoe's Bobby Peru as one of the most vile, menacing redneck villains of all time. Gina Gershon blew my socks off too. People always talk about "gutsy" performances, but hers here is the real deal. There's a lengthy scene in this that I can only imagine was very unpleasant for her to perform. You'll know it when you see it.

Then there's the violence. And the sex. And the shocking, horribly uncomfortable, sexualised violence. And Gina Gershon's bush. Killer Joe pulls no punches, and it's not hard to see why the MPAA gave it an NC-17 rating for "graphic aberrant content involving violence and sexuality, and a scene of brutality." Suffice it to say, you'll never look at KFC the same again (not that you should look at KFC anyway, it's gross).

The US distributor of this film should be applauded for refusing to bend over for the MPAA, choosing instead to support Friedkin's violent, nihilistic vision... no doubt at the expense of a larger take at the box office. Because of this, I encourage everyone to get out and support this one if it happens to come to your town. You won't regret it.

We just don't see many American movies like this one any more.

PROMETHEUS

A week after setting down on LV-223 for the first time, my feelings towards Ridley Scott's grand return to SF/horror are overwhelmingly ambivalent. Seldom have I seen a film where the gulf between its strong points and its faults is so vast. I'm not exaggerating when I say that Prometheus ranges from the truly sublime to the utterly vapid.

The frustrating thing about the film is that when it works, it works so damned well.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

The first act of the film is close to perfection. The opening sequence involving the "Sacrifice Engineer" and the seeding of life on Earth is nothing short of magnificent, as are the subsequent shots of the USCSS Prometheus against the cold beauty of deep space. So too, the images of the ringed gas giant (which may or may not be in the Zeta II Reticuli system*), and its two moons LV-223 and LV-426 (upon which the events of Alien and Aliens will take place some 30 and 90 years later respectively). The entire prologue is simply breathtaking.

Also wonderful are the opening shots aboard the Prometheus, before the crew of 16** have been awakened from their hypersleep dreams. These scenes of Michael Fassbender's David-8 tending to the sleeping crew's needs, maintaining the ship, worshipping Peter O'Toole and diligently expanding his Artificial Intellect (& physical prowess) are a great introduction to the character who will ultimately prove to be more fleshed out and satisfying than any of his human counterparts. These scenes also serve as a nifty introduction to the cool-as-hell interior design of the starship, as the camera stalks through its corridors, messdeck and corporate staterooms. The pacing throughout this portion of the film is spot on, nicely echoing the slow-burn first half of Alien.


It's after the crew is awakened from hypersleep that some aspects of the film start to creep inexorably southward. During the first few exchanges amongst the Prometheus' crew, we get our first inkling that Jon Spaihts' and Damon Lindelof's screenplay is simply not going to deliver the iconic character ensembles of Alien and Aliens. Amongst a couple of other clunkers from some of the crew & mission specialists, Fifield's assertion that he's "just there for the money" feels painfully like an attempt to ape Parker's character from Alien. As with last year's dismal The Thing prequel (for all its faults Prometheus is an infinitely superior film to that turd), this is the first of many "nods" to Alien that feels just a little too on the nose. We are subjected to more of these Alien "homages" later on, such as when David is decapitated, obviously mirroring the decapitation of Ash.

Unfortunately, as the film progresses, the shallow, undeveloped nature of the majority of the characters only becomes more pronounced.

However, character development is only one of the script's issues. I'm usually very forgiving of illogical character motivations and actions in films (I'm a horror fan after all, and horror movies are notoriously full of them). However, some of the things that occur in this film are just bafflingly stupid, and almost all of them revolve around the actions of the mission scientists.


Consider this: Weyland Industries is the sole financier of the Prometheus mission at a cost of one trillion dollars. As this mission has the potential to be the single most important voyage of discovery in the history of humankind, one would assume that the company would hand pick the absolute cream of the scientific community in every field, and that they would have little trouble doing so, being the most powerful economic entity in the solar system. Right? Apparently not.

First we have Logan Marshall-Green's Dr. Charlie Holloway (Dr. Shaw's archaeologist partner) removing his helmet in a potentially lethal alien environment. Regardless of the fact that they've detected a breathable atmosphere in the Engineer's pyramid, it just seems like a profoundly idiotic thing to do. Sure there's oxygen to breath, but what about airborne pathogens? Personally I'd rather leave my helmet on than risk space-Ebola. And I'm not even a scientist! What's worse is that all of his fellow teammates immediately follow suit. I get that Ridley may have chosen to do this to make the character's identities less ambiguous, but it's just silly.

It's hammer time!

Then things get sillier. Geologist Fifield (Sean Harris) and biologist Milburn (Rafe Spall) totally freak out when they find the remains of a dead Engineer. I found it very difficult here to suspend my disbelief that any serious scientists would react in this way. After they become separated from the rest of the team, their behaviour takes a turn for the worse. I was actually reminded of Laurel and Hardy whilst watching them bumble around like fools. Simply put, this should have been one of the scariest parts of the movie, and it was a very ill-conceived idea to inject comic relief into proceedings at this particular point. After running around, acting like terrified children, Milburn decides it would be a good idea to pet an obviously hostile, rearing Hammerpede, and... oh dear.

Many more "scientific" absurdities follow: Whilst conducting the most important (and again, potentially dangerous) post-mortem examination in history, neither Ford nor Shaw bother to actually don their flimsy surgical masks. Meanwhile, Dr. Holloway throws a tantrum because they didn't find any living Engineers on their first completely cursory investigation of LV-223's surface, and like a petulant child, gets completely wasted on champagne. He's a fucking archaeologist right? You'd think he might be pretty excited about discovering the perfectly preserved remains of an ancient alien civilisation, not to mention the exquisitely preserved remains of one of it's denizens, but... nope. I guess Vickers is supplying some pretty classy champagne, and he doesn't want to miss out. Or maybe he's just a raging alcoholic. Whatever.

Then there are characters who are just sort of... there. Pilots Chance (Emun Elliott) and Ravel (Benedict Wong) are just window dressing, and Kate Dickie's Ford just sort of stands around looking constipated. These people are talented actors, and they are criminally underused here.

My final gripe about Prometheus is with the editing. After the leisurely pace of the opening sequences, the second and final acts of the film feel way too tightly edited. There's just no room left for the film to breath, and everything feels rushed and a little muddled. I'm assuming this was because of pressure from Fox's Tom Rothman to get the film down to a more commercially viable two hours. Scott actually announced just the other day that the home video release may reinstate some 20 minutes of excised material back into the film, and hopefully this will help to alleviate some of these pacing issues. Maybe even provide some much needed character development? We'll see.


Okay. By this point you probably think me an uptight, anally-retentive Xeno-nerd, with his space-panties all in a bunch. Fair enough, but I've dreamt of Scott's return to SF for 30 years, so please... cut me some slack. My expectations for this were HUGE. And the thing is, I actually really like the film. It blows Fincher's abortion and Jeunet's misfire completely out of the water, and as a result I can finally consider Alien a trilogy of sorts.

It's a heavily flawed film, but there's more than enough there to make me almost adore it.

Fassbender, Theron, Elba and Rapace are all great as David, Vickers, Janek and Shaw respectively. Particularly Fassbender of course, who completely steals the show. His David is every bit as memorable as Ash or Bishop.

The design of the film is virtually flawless: the ship, retro spacesuits (nicely reminiscent of Mario Bava's Planet Of The Vampires), planet surface, pyramid (exterior and interiors), Juggernaut, the Engineers themselves - all fantastic. Beyond the design itself, the film is just insanely cool to look at. Simply put, it is stunningly beautiful SF. The gore is disturbing, the effects mind-blowing and most of the various creatures very well realised.

I also love that H.R. Giger has finally been given his due (to a certain extent anyway) in Prometheus, providing two distinctive murals and receiving a prominent credit at the end of the film. I'm chuffed that Scott has re-appropriated Giger's unused Harkonnen castle design from Jodorowsky's failed Dune project. So too some of Ron Cobb's more ambitious designs for the Nostromo (particularly the bridge).

I don't even mind that the screenplay doesn't seriously address any of the philosophical questions that it raises (a huge problem for many other fans apparently).

Prometheus is grand science fiction with a pulp heart, and that's OK with me...

... but to return, finally, to the film's flaws - I was granted a remarkable insight into Prometheus (and SF cinema in general) mere hours after seeing it. Upon arriving home from the theatre and flopping on my couch, I was pleasantly surprised to find that ABC1 was airing Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running (for the second time in a year no less).

Made four years after VFX master Trumbull changed the game forever with his peerless work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running was always going to be slightly hamstrung by the simple fact that it's budget was one tenth that of Kubrick's epic (according to IMDb: $10,500,000 vs. $1,100,000). As a result it looks pretty dated. The sets are a low-rent affair, with hospital EKG machines standing in for computer monitors etc. The effects are shaky too. Having just witnessed the cutting-edge spectacle of Prometheus, it was akin to watching an old episode of Doctor Who.

Yet, despite having already seen Silent Running maybe half a dozen times in my life, I found myself once again completely enthralled by it. Spellbound, not by its design and effects, but rather it's rich screenplay by Michael Cimino et al, and that wonderfully unhinged central performance from Bruce Dern as Freeman Lowell.

By the time Joan Baez' voice was singing over the end credits, with Drone 01 tending to Earth's last forest, I could barely see for the tears in my eyes...

... and for all its extravagant spectacle, Prometheus could inspire no such emotion in me.



* In Alien, Lambert (the Nostromo's navigator) says in reference to the ship's position: "I found it. Just short of Zeta II Reticuli. We haven't reached the Outer Rim yet." which I always took to mean that they have not yet reached the frontier of settled space, and Zeta II Reticuli is the closest known star system. Now Ridley seems to be saying that the events of Alien, Aliens and Prometheus all take place in the Zeta system. It's all a bit ambiguous.

** Or is it 17 in hypersleep? Is David included in the crew manifest, or considered a mere component of the ship's hardware?

SFF 2012: Rampart

In Oren Moverman's Rampart, Woody Harrelson gives the performance of his career as Dave Brown, a late '90s L.A. cop whose modus operandi on the street is brutality and corruption, without the slightest twinge of conscience or remorse. This pig is so morally bankrupt that the Bad Lieutenant would probably rat him out to internal affairs.

If you thought Harrelson was menacing in Natural Born Killers, wait 'til you see him in this. The menace here is more internalised, but it never lets up for a second of his screen time, boiling away just below the surface, ratcheting up the tension to uncomfortable levels. It's a cliche, but Harrelson's officer Brown really is a walking time bomb. A spring loaded trap of barely controlled rage, imminent violence and universal hatred. In his own words:

"I am not a racist. Fact is, I hate all people equally."

Homophobe, misogynist, racist... this cop proudly wears his poisonous beliefs like a badge of honour. The trouble is, everyone around him is finally reaching the extent of their tolerance for his behaviour... and officer Dave Brown isn't heeding the warnings.

Rampart is an outstanding example of classic L.A. noire, solidly anchored by a sharp, caustic screenplay by James Ellroy - almost certainly his best to date (remember, he wrote the source novel for L.A. Confidential, not the screenplay). Harrelson deserves awards for this, but he isn't the only one to shine: Sigourney Weaver is also at the top of her game here in a relatively small part, and it's obvious that she's going to remain a force to reckon with as she moves into her senior years. The other star of this movie is the cinematography by Bobby Bukowski, which is just impossibly beautiful. Through his lens, the City of Angels has never looked better.

Rampart is powerful stuff. Highly recommended.

SFF 2012: Despite The Gods

Penny Vozniak's documentary Despite The Gods sits comfortably beside its brethren Lost in La Mancha and Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse as a fascinating and poignant portrait of a passionate filmmaker struggling against the odds to achieve their dream. Except sometimes that struggle ends in something like Apocalypse Now, and sometimes it ends in... Hisss.

The film follows Jennifer Lynch's first foray into filmmaking since 2008's Surveillance (which was awarded Best Picture at Sitges), an Indian/American co-production called Hisss (with a working title of Nagin: The Snake Woman), which was shot entirely on location in India. Lynch is out of her element in an unfamiliar culture, and an even less familiar film industry, and it quickly becomes evident that she is struggling to cope with the pressures and stresses of this new environment. The production seems to be foundering from the very outset, and things only go from bad to worse as Lynch continues to slog through a grueling shoot that lasts many months.

Despite The Gods is often laugh-out-loud funny, providing a welcome counterbalance to the constant feeling that everything you're seeing on screen is about to implode in a very ugly way. I found Lynch to be very likable, in a good-humoured, self-deprecating sort of way. At the beginning of the film she speaks candidly of the cruelty she suffered at the hands of the press in the wake of Boxing Helena, and the tough years that followed, when amongst other things she cleaned houses for a living. Perhaps most poignantly, she also discusses her obviously painful memories of the time following her father's greatest failure, Dune (coincidentally his third feature too), when "he didn't speak for a year". Her fear of failure whilst recounting this is palpable and moving, and again, greatly endeared her to me.

As a consumer, it's easy to take the whole process of filmmaking for granted, so it's good to be reminded by documentaries like this that your two hours of enjoyment are often the end result of thousands of hours of painful, difficult and thankless toil for the cast and crew. Succeed or fail: hats off to them all.

Sydney Film Festival 2012

The SFF has kicked off for another year, and this time around I'll be posting a few quick capsule reviews of some of the films I see.

Unfortunately the fest got off to a lousy start for me when the screening of Maury and Bustillo's Livide turned out to be a complete fiasco. A word to the French distributors who provided the print: next time you send a film to a festival in a non-French speaking country, you might want to consider sending a print WITH FUCKING SUBTITLES. It was a theatre-full of righteously pissed off patrons who exited the screening five minutes into the film... but none more so than me. I've been dying to see this film for two years now, so needless to say I was LIVID with rage. Sorry.

Back tomorrow with reviews of Despite The Gods and Rampart!