Showing posts with label The Matrix. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Matrix. Show all posts

Monday, 11 September 2017

Is The Villainess (2017) - despite resemblance to the Kill Bill volumes (2003 / 2004) - closer to Looper (2012) ?

Responses to a Teaser screening of The Villainess (Ak-Nyeo) (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

11 September

Some first-night responses to a Teaser screening, by London Korean Film Festival (in conjunction with Cambridge Film Festival), of The Villainess (Ak-Nyeo) (2017), screened at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Monday 11 September at 9.00 p.m.




In The Villainess (2017), who is the title-character ?
Is it Seo-hyeong Kim ?



Amidst all the sequences where so much happens so quickly (the whirl that is typically in The Matrix (1999), or of the Kill Bill films (2003, 2004)), the opposite pole of The Villainess - aside from the possible elements of melodrama* of which Mark Morris spoke - is that type of moment when one thing reminds of another (which is there, with Motoko, in Ghost in the Shell (1995)) :

Sook-hee (played by Ok-bin Kim) is no longer in the present, because her instant has become the time to which (drawn by remembrance) she has disassociated - and so she is then visibly not 'present' to someone near her. But this is not mere daydream, but traumatic revisiting of episodes (or eras) of abuse [As in As if I am Not There (2010)].

As Motoko arguably is intuitively seeking – without knowing whom, or what, she seeks (but having the capacity ‘to dive into’ the being of others) – so is Sook-hee. Accordingly, we see her, finding in parts of her memory to which she does not have direct access things that events throw up, but unable to give her complete history (and so the film does not show it, not even 'out of order'). To this extent, The Villainess will not fully explain who Sook-hee is, or why, but just alludes to the tortuousness of her life - as its painful and wounded nature becomes clear to us.



In literary terms, one is reminded not only of G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (and Conrad's The Secret Agent), but also the weirdness of Iain Banks in The Wasp Factory, A Song of Stone, and - of course - The Business !


Film-references :

 * Akira (1988)

* As if I am Not There (2010)

* Ghost in the Shell (1995)

 * Jupiter Ascending (2015)

 * Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) / Vol. 2 (2004)

 * Looper (2012) [Surprise Film at Cambridge Film Festival]

 * Salt (2010)

 * The Matrix (1999)



These tattered corridors, do they remind us of where Neo seems to have been gunned down for good... ?






End-notes :

 * There are certainly romantic tropes, but how much are they undercut by everything else that we know... ? (Even so it is very important for Sook-hee to know whether she was ever loved, whatever happens Now.)




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 1 February 2017

Cracking open : Ghost in the Shell (1995) (work in progress)

Cracking open : Ghost in the Shell (1995) (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

1 February

Cracking open : Ghost in the Shell (1995) (work in progress)

For those who want / need it, there is a link here to a synopsis [on IMDb (@IMDb)] : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113568/synopsis

 There are around three parts of Ghost in the Shell (1995) that are, in terms of setting up a scenario or telling a story, very heavy on text – which signifies more, when one is reading sub-titles, and trying to work out how long one has to read each (and, therefore, whether one can go back and re-read something that one did not immediately follow – which can cause anxiety can set in…), but is still hardly ideal, if one were trying to catch all the words / what they signify.

 Unless – which simply is not the case here – someone is genuinely being told something, and he or she needs to be told a large amount of information at one time (independently of our knowing it per se), a film in which sections seem overburdened with quickly-delivered text has not been carefully thought through (even in translation from manga, where there is all the time in the world to read, to celluloid, where the reader may, as described, feel justifiably pressured*) :

We cannot even realistically suggest that a native speaker (unfamiliar with the original text) would have been expecting the first of these passages, because they do go against the pattern of the film thitherto of short, sharp exchanges, not all of the content of which seems vital – as is the way in any film with an element of action – and which, if they need to make sense, will or can do so later. Be that as it may, because one passage references Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, and others some concepts in Western philosophy (especially philosophy of mind), some of which are familiar from The Matrix* (1999), there are shortcuts, and these are not strongly held reservations about the film.

 As to whether Ghost titillates, and does so gratuitously, one hears [from @xa329] that the full manga text is explicitly sexual in places, which both confirms and denies the perception : the film could clearly show more (as later films apparently do), but none of this takes away from the fact that a female body is depicted naked, as if this is necessary for the ambient camouflage that is being deployed, when clearly that is not true for others (males) who are likewise camouflaged. (It could have been thought to be necessary by those, on the side of the government department (Section 9) with which we are interested, but that is a feeble excuse, not even used, to show Motoko naked, which is what the film-makers wish to do – and have faux-nakedness, since this is animé, not actual flesh, but as if showing such an image cannot be for sexual gratification : no one watching this film will believe that Motoko needed to be shown in that way, or that watching the motions of her breasts, nipples, etc., as they pass through the air or water are unintended to stimulate.

 Strip away these doubts about the film, and how and why it has been made in this way, and there is still plenty to say – in a way that one doubts that one can say for Jane Fonda’s choice of appearing in Barbarella (1968). The important questions are, almost necessarily, about #AI (since Motoko is not human), and partly about the body that she ends up in, and surveys the city with and from, after declining the offer to stay in Batou’s hide-away : she is grateful to him for being preserved, but does not wish to be secreted away by someone who also has fantasized about her sexually : even that is not much of a position taken from principle, but just of not wanting to be the closet creature of anyone, i.e. the idea of free-spiritedness that has pervaded her role.

 Here, as The Wachowskis did, we will find the rogue piece of code that is Neo (as well as the nature of his activities outside his legitimately paid hours of work), the sentinels, and concepts of seeking physical destruction of something that inherently is not physical, and thus also of being able to merge completely with it, and what that might mean. In Matrix Revolutions (2003), particularly (but also in the whole Matrix trilogy – and it is a complete and necessary trilogy (albeit supplemented by The Animatrix (2003), for those who will have some of the detail alluded to fleshed out…) – that merging is often passing through, and experiencing another’s lack of substance, and here, in Ghost, there is much talk of ‘barriers’ and ‘diving into’ another being, and other key-words that delineate what separates, but could yet allow ingress…
To be continued / polished / edited



 End-notes :

 * One is told, and can see, that The Wachowskis were influenced by Ghost (as considered below).

 ** One is less impressed by an argument that suggests that dumping information on us is mimetic of what M., and her fellow agents, experience as they try to process an understanding of the cyber-enemy that they face (and whether some of them are more artifice, or have been constructed as artefact, such as The Puppet-Master)…






When someone appears to suggest that such image / still is from the film's live-action re-make... :






 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 18 March 2016

Hiding in plain sight

This is a review of High-Rise (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

18 March

This is a review of High-Rise (2015)



 High-Rise is not a short film, but it seems to handle with unnecessarily great brevity – either because one has been overly tempted that one will find out (Curiosity killed the cat, after all), or because Amy Jump’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard least wants to tell (if not maybe Ballard himself ?) – what, after the very opening¹, the inter-title ‘Three months earlier’ has one most expecting, i.e. something like 'a story', or, here, an explanation :

 We may well end up feeling that there is an allegory in train that is essentially contentless, because it descends to typifications of character and social impulses from which one may easily disinvest, although it is concerned, as if tasked to be so, to proceed linearly back to the opening - for us to understand anew (or maybe feel that we were misdirected into construing awry ?). In contrast, a film such as Metropolis (1927) (to which we will return below : Ballard must surely be responding to Fritz Lang) is expressly, unmistakably a parable, whereas this film seems to have pretensions to be something else, but progressively withdraws (from) them : whether that is adaptation or original, we may feel that we are re-visiting the territory of a film such as O Lucky Man ! (1973), but arguably less interestingly (despite a little energetic reference to Pierrot le fou (1965) thrown in for good measure).


The result is remarkably emotionless – sex on the glass dining-table, and even with Charlotte Melville (Sienna Miller) hanging over the balcony of the twenty-sixth floor, all of which one knows should feel daring, but is actually as exciting as the lack of affect with which why Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) asks, and is answered, why the sex is not continuing, after it has banally been interrupted. Dr R. Laing (we must be reminded of R. D. Laing), from the Department of Physiology, is described by other characters as Hiding in plain sight, and, in a semi-naturalistic way, his look, physique, make-up, demeanour are all used to make him seem a creature apart, later subverted by that Godardian gesture of absurdity. (And, somewhere in all this, do we find hints of Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim, and that Jesse Eisenberg in The Double (2013) deserves greater respect than the film seemed to merit when it was released… ?)

Maybe the fact is that Ballard’s novel does not exactly have a narrative, which is what this review appears to suggest (and Will Self confirms - please see the Post-script) : Ballard moves us randomly up and down the (initially) tripartite building with chaotic aplomb; his narrative is controlled by the dysfunctional elevators, blocked by the broken chairs, cupboards, desks that jam the stairwells.. If so, this is surveying the building, from top to bottom and around, as an environment for, and one that has given rise to, one excess after another – almost as if Plato had got it all wrong, with The Republic, and authored chaos. But is High-Rise any better than, say, choosing Samuel Beckettt’s short story Le Dépeupler (The Lost Ones), if his literary executors would even allow one, as the basis for one’s screenplay - what, one would have to ask, would making a film add to what that text describes (there are some quotations below) ?


In fact Carmin Karasic's The Lost Ones seems to exist, as an immersive installation and VRML work based on Beckettt's text

By analogy with the focus of this film (or indeed this question whether it was best left as a novel, without the burden of visual representation ?), it is as if, in The Matrix Reloaded (2003), Andy and Lana Wachowski had taken a brief, but important, moment, and instead had it dominate the whole film : one thinks of when Neo penetrates to their own character called The Architect². What film, one has to ask, would it have been if that scene, when Neo realizes that what he had thought beforehand (i.e. that getting there was the be all and end all - which, to have him make the attempt, it was expedient that he believe), had been handled that way : not as Neo's impetus to what, in the light of his accepting the reality that he did not achieve what he expected and acting on it to provoke what next happens, but as an occasion for a massively extended philosophical and existential enquiry between The Architect and him [there appears to be a complete transcript of that scene, which is worth those who are unfamiliar reading, at http://www.scottmanning.com/archives/000513.php] ?


In being drawn to microcosm, though with a narrower focus, Ben Wheatley’s (@mr_wheatley’s) A Field in England (2013) is most like High-Rise, but Sightseers³ (2012) and it both have a concern for story-telling (even the former, for all its psychedelic elements), which is largely abandoned here, except in appearance. For although High-Rise, in its own terms (let alone that of its predecessors), often does not seem very cinematically motivated, it does enjoy employing visual spectacle, and gives us moments or set-pieces that it luxuriates in, such as when ABBA is being played by a string quartet, or with Laing patchily applying the contents of a small tin (for which he has absolutely fought tooth and nail), but somehow perfectly painting the whole of flat 2505 – and skating over what might hold any of this together...


In the event, maybe the film just asserts that there is no story, that that is just how things are when the lives of individuals, in a melting-point, battle it out. (This is part of the reason, despite its very different tone and purpose, for mentioning Le Dépeupler (The Lost Ones) above, and seeking dominance is certainly highly relevant in A Field in England, of course.) In the concluding minutes of High-Rise, Wheatley employs a laconic voice-over, which formally assumes the role of being informative, but now seems oddly inessential, given a scenario where it is patent, because at such length, that people in this place have abandoned everything to pursuing their self-interest, at any cost.

 When the device of voice-over is used, one seeks after the utility in doing so : here, it seems to be to underline what has already been imparted, which is a sense of inevitability about the upheaval, of resigned fixity in the face of societal disintegration and chaos. Concluding a number of meetings that the screenplay choreographs, the architect Royal (Jeremy Irons) and Laing casually chat about these things, over a dinner of sorts (and that, as mentioned above, is specifically where one is put in mind of The Matrix Reloaded, when Neo encounters The Wachowskis’ Architect, and learns that he effectively exists and operates at the level of a computer program, albeit an anomalous one).


Charlotte Melville, after all, told Helen Wilder that Robert Laing is definitely the best amenity in the building (a building that, we should note, Royal's right-hand man Simmons claims, when Royal wants to sack him, to consider to be his employer, not Royal). On one level, as that terminal voice-over wants to suggest, High-Rise is about Laing, and the very familiar theme of the mercenary instincts of someone who becomes attracted to power, scheming, etc. (e.g. obviously O Lucky Man !, but also Bel Ami (2012), though it scarcely bears mentioning alongside Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) [It is better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody]).

On a parallel level within the film, and in common with Metropolis, which gives the youth of rich parents (such as Joh Fredersen’s son Freder) a sky-top place of pleasure in which to while away their hours (unlike the toil of working life underground, and the hours of respite on lower levels up from the workplace), High-Rise has an almost absurdly and floatingly unreal roof-space garden⁴. It adjoins The Architect’s penthouse, and, in imitation of Marie Antoinette at Versailles (cake is even suggested as a food at one point…), represents the life of the elite. (* NB Spoiler * Even if it is an elite that ludicrously believes that it can regain power by the implausible step of lobotomizing one individual, who is the perceived source of trouble.)


A still from Metropolis (1927)

God forbid, though, that Ben Wheatley, in filming this text, should leave us feeling cheated, as at the conclusion of Metropolis : no one need fear on account of appearing to be naively expected to embrace a resolution that, except on some symbolic level, hardly addresses the cause of all the disturbance and violence, by presenting a gesture and a form of words. (This highly unconvincing rapprochement that Fritz Lang gives us, as if it changes what we have seen, is mediated by Freder, between Joh Fredersen and Grot, the leader of the workers (and the foreman of The Heart Machine), who links their hands : we are told that There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.)


Ballard must have explicitly wanted to reject that sense of papering over from Lang, but High-Rise arguably gives us not something else, but just the opposite extreme, where passionate urges do not get controlled reasonably. His novel, and its impact as a piece of writing, may be one thing. This film gives us, without the coherence or explanation that some might want (unless one simply subscribes to the view that an account of incoherent actions, intentions and the resulting processes and patterns has an innate right to be incoherent in its own right), a picture of where the brutal and horrific have become commonplace.


So what seemed grim and desperate when first seen is then how things have developed to be, with the connivance of all, and are as they are. But maybe Beckettt (translating himself from the original French of 1971), and not Ballard (from 1975), deserves the last word – who says, of those occupying the ‘flattened cylinder fifty metres round and [eighteen] high’ in The Lost Ones⁵ :

 Obliged for want of space to huddle together over long periods they appear to the observer a mere jumble of mingled flesh. Woe the rash searcher who carried away by his passion dare lay a finger on the least among them. Like a single body the whole queue falls on the offender. Of all the scenes of violence the cylinder has to offer none approaches this.


Post-script

 In The New Statesman (@NewStatesman), Will Self (@wself), who knew Ballard personally, and was even consulted by Amy Jump for that reason, concludes his piece about film adaptations of Ballard’s work (‘What would J G Ballard have made of the new High-Rise film ?’) by saying (about High-Rise) that ‘It may not be everyone’s idea of a laugh-out-loud film but, frankly, who cares what everyone thinks ? I don’t – and nor, quite obviously, did Ballard.’ Earlier, talking about when he met Jump, Self says (NB Contains spoilers) :

All I can recall saying is that she and [Ben] Wheatley had their work cut out, given that the novel has no proper plot to speak of, being, in essence, a series of flashbacks from a scene neatly encapsulated by the book’s opening line: ‘Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.’


End-notes

¹ Playing the sprightly theme from the Allegro of Bach’s so-called Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 (in G Major, BWV 1049) [the link is to a performance of the Concerto, by Das Freiburger Barockorchester, on YouTube] deliberately sets up an incongruity at the outset with the grotesque manner of domesticity that we are shown. (Elsewhere, Wheatley uses material from one or two more of these Concertos as a method of effecting a dislocation between the pleasant civility of the music and what he shows us.)

² Planning the city in Metropolis, Joh Fredersen is another architect, and, of course, all of these take their lead from freemasonry’s tenets. (Both have a regal bearing, but Ballard’s architect (Jeremy Irons) is even called Royal.)


³ On whose screenplay Amy Jump also worked, with the film's stars, Steve Oram and Alice Lowe.

⁴ However, unless visual distortion (or some strange geometry) is at work, the extent of the walled garden is not matched to the footprint of the building (which, although it shifts across at the top of the tower, does not change).

 ⁵ The Lost Ones, pp. 7, 59-60. Calder & Boyars Limited, London, 1972.




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 23 January 2016

Why would one want to wait for a film's end-credits ? (work in progress)

Reasons to stay until the film's end-credits have rolled

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 January
Reasons for even those who are not intending / supposed to review a film to stay until the end-credits have rolled

As a guest at BAFTA last year, one was told by the inviting member of BAFTA (@BAFTA) that it is forbidden to do anything else – of which prohibition there indeed appeared to be highly persuasive evidence, even in a packed evening screening of The Martian (2015).

Despite the disruption, usual elsewhere, of almost everyone else trying to leave, and not infrequently doing so noisily and clumsily (as if their lives depended on not staying for two or three minutes longer¹ - which then means that one must often shuffle into the aisle to let them out and so that one can best see what is visible on the screen around people's heads), there is a rationale behind staying until the credits are through. [Effectively, this is a companion-piece to some comments, made about what people often enough do during a film, when also writing about The Tree (Drevo) (2014).]


The elements of that rationale are given here, in no particular order, and to justify, Milton like², this approach to those who - since they are in the majority - clearly do not appreciate them (or who may even, if one has not watched a film with them before, think that they have grounds for teasing about such ‘a quaint practice’) :


1. Seeing archive material that amplifies what the film showed (whether or not its story, or just its setting, was factually based), e.g. as shown within the credits for The Railway Man (2013), or what is best called The Harbour Bar (El Cafè de la Marina) (2014)

2. To hear reprised principal elements of the score, which acts as a summation of what one heard en route, and so of what one saw at each point, and is rarely unrewarding (despite people milling past) - particularly worthwhile, say, with that of films such as The Matrix (1999)

3. Occasionally, there is extra footage of another kind (whether right at the end of the credits, or inserted in the sequence), and which often gives some new dimension (depending on the film) : maybe just a final laugh [not recalling with certainty, but one suspects so – and of an insightful nature – for Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip (2010) and / or The Trip to Italy (2014)], or even a different take on the film and what it meant, of which The Great Beauty (2013) (La grande bellezza / #LaGrandeBellezza) is an excellent example, with both a long sequence along The River Tiber embedded in the credits³, and a reprise of the score (please see point 2, above)

4. An important closing track, not used in the film, but just played over part of the credits, and (if one were there to hear it…) actually the aural equivalent of footage in the credits (please see point 3, above) in making part of the feel of the film as a whole : probably so with Hope Springs (2012), and almost always true of Woody Allen’s films, e.g. Stardust Memories (1980)

5. Of course, not everyone will be bothered about the pieces of music that are used (as against the original score⁴), but, if one is, it may be one’s only chance to find out easily what that song / piece was called, and / or who wrote / performed it, unless one buys the soundtrack or DVD, etc., because even IMDb (@IMDb) is, as noted previously, certainly not without its faults, and largely does not extend to giving complete music-credits (here is what it lists for Youth (2015), and here, despite the credits that one saw roll, it gives none for the person who translated the screenplay) - so one’s easiest way to confirm, say, the singer or the name of some song has gone, when one leaves the cinema-screen too early to read the answer

6. Or one might want to know where that building was, and whether the interior was from the same one as shown as its exterior : the first clue [assuming, again, that one does not try to set about the task after leaving the cinema (and, even with the DVD and a large t.v. screen, the credits can end up minuscule] is to see the members of different units, e.g. Italy Unit or France Unit. It does depend much on the choices made by the film itself what information it then gives about locations, and also where it is to be found, so one’s eyes need to be nimble, because the credits will not always state Filmed on location at xyz, but there may just be mention of the premises in a list of thanks (or special thanks)
[...]


End-notes

¹ Maybe people did not have respect for Macbeth (2015), and it must necessarily be taken for granted that they have little for those who choose to watch the credits (who also, willy-nilly, had to hear their curt pronouncements) : however, despite the very thoughtful atmosphere at the conclusion of the film, their desire to be out was just as strong as it must have been to be there, in the first place, in one of the first screenings in Screen 1 at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse).

² I.e. stated, early in Book I of Paradise Lost, Milton's aim to justifie the ways of God to men (on the question whether he did so, a writer in The Guardian (@guardian) dilated in 2011...).

³ In The Great Beauty (probably better thought of as Immense Beauty), the whole titles ran over the beauty and calm of Rome in the closing sequence, whereas, with writer / director Paolo Sorrentino’s new release, Youth (2015), it is just the main name-credits (through to and Jane Fonda, though we have flitted, for a while, to another venue by the time that her name appears). Then over the remaining end-credits, conventionally presented, an affecting reprise of David Lang’s ‘just (after song of songs)’ (which we do not hear in full (it runs to fifteen minutes), but Lang has, after his impressive contribution to the previous film, scored the film.

⁴ Whereas with, say, The Danish Girl (2015), one can very easily find out afterwards (if that theme is stil haunting) that Alexandre Desplat wrote the score and / or what other films he composed for : for one, it is there in the IMDb (@IMDb) listing for the film, and thence from Desplat’s entry.




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 9 February 2015

Un séjour avec soju ?

This is a review of A Girl at my Door (Dohee-ya) (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 February

This is a review of A Girl at my Door (Dohee-ya) (2014), watched at a special screening at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse), on Thursday 5 February 2015


Introductory - other important Doona Bae roles :


As the Tweet (inevitably pithily) tries to say, there are some significant roles for Doona Bae (or, at any rate, those whose existence is easily known in the West) that appear to be linked (whether that reflects the nature of roles offered to, as well as accepted by, Doona Bae).

When Nozomi, the doll that Hideo (Itsuji Atao) buys in Air Doll (2009), comes to life (as played by Doona Bae), the doll itself / herself is a substitute for a failed affair, and Nozomi is rarely quite one with the world into which she emerges (and from which she ultimately departs) except to the extent that she makes a life for herself and finds others who understand her and her experience.

The idea of a doll come to life is, at heart, just as much a metaphor* – it is up to the viewer with what the metaphorical connection itself is being made – as it is in the case of the so-called fabricants in Cloud Atlas (2012), with Sonmi-451** proving the tenets of AI, in that these created life-forms do become wholly sentient, although only intended to be unemotional, robotic drones.

That said, setting apart The Animatrix (2003) (and its engaging depiction of The Rise of The Machines, desiring equality with mankind – as foreshadowed by Samuel Butler in Erewhon), it is one that the Wachowskis, elsewhere, largely wish to resist in the Matrix world (starting with The Matrix (1999)). For Neo appears to assert a primacy of humanness / humanity – although, in the eyes of The Architect (and on some other scale), Neo may just as much be [reducible to] a piece of code as, in Jupiter Ascending (2015), Jupiter Jones is considered to be genetically identical to the mother of Lord Titus.

However, in this film, Doona Bae (Inspector Young-Nam Lee) is not playing a doll who lived, or a replicant who discovered feelings (including sexual arousal), and became a rallying cry for generations to come, but is a woman, taking care of the girl of the title(not least in the original title, where she is named). Albeit at Lee’s door is not where we first see her, for she is being bullied, and there are some tensions built into that premise…***

In any case, the girl (Dohee) is a mirror to Lee, and she is played with such great plasticity by Kim Sae Ron that one could not believe that one or two other girls had not been sharing the part – an effect not accounted for just by make-up and hair. Lee’s identification with Dohee, and her concomitant compassion and malleability / indulgence, is obvious from the start, though not the depths of – or the reasons for – it.


Whereon hangs the film, were it not that :

* Whether or not one’s constraints are budgetary ones (according to Wikipedia®, the film’s budget was just US $300,000), what the film presents as a small coastal settlement is even more obviously unpopulated than it would be compared, say, to shooting in Seoul – at least, what we see must be a small quarter of Yeosu (which research suggests is actually a city, not a town)

* Even if the script wants to explain that situation away, by saying that Koreans no longer want to live / work there, and that only the person keeping the workers there are in hand is local : in that case, what need a police station, with not a few officers, at which Lee is the ‘station chief’, if the only significant activity is aquatic in nature ?****

* In fact, the cast is so thin on the ground that, apart from the denizens of a hair salon cum village hub, and the group of people who are momentarily present when Lee moves into supposedly temporary accommodation, we have already met everyone else. (Although Lee apologizes to her landlady for the inconvenience of her unexpected arrival, conveniently there is no sign that she is ever going to be housed anywhere else.)

* The world of this film, then, revolves unconvincingly around only the workers, Dohee’s father (who is in charge of the workers, and is the somewhat erratically written and drawn father of Dohee*****), Lee’s fellow officers, and a cashier of a supermarket in an unspecified location (but, in the locality, a police officer does not even recognize Lee whilst she is busy with her bottles of water).




Doona Bae and Kim Sae Ron are both excellent in their roles. Sadly, theirs are the only ones with any substance, for not only is Dohee’s father a cipher (of parental drunkenness), but so is her grandmother – who seems strangely reminiscent of [a more aggressive version of] the one who is initially unsympathetic in Kim Mordaunt’s The Rocket(2013) (which is set in Laos)…

NB Possible spoilers in this paragraph
As to Doona Bae’s character, it depends intimately, and even intensely, on that played by Kim Sae Ron, to the extent that it is questionable whether they are, apart from on the level of the attribution of dialogue, actually separable. That notion, if one were seriously encouraged to entertain it from the start to finish in the film, could have been its saving from its immersion in banality, as well as the need to believe that, although Lee is a police inspector, she is not only very naive in her personal dealings, but also lacking in being even plausibly streetwise.

By choice of film to appear in, Doona Bae seems in danger of not usefully claiming for herself the territory of the saintly fool, too good for this world, but forced to be in and of it [as in The Idiot (Idioot) (2011)] : it may suit her aesthetic to take such roles, but they do not ultimately flatter or, more importantly, use her talents. Yes, of course it is a delight to see her infectious smile break through, after sombre scenes where she is forced to be the celebrated guest at some grim event for her induction, but showing wearing ‘a mask’ can only be done so many times (even to the extent that spring water is turned into some sort of saké – or vice versa), however well Doona Bae carries it off, before it become stale.


This film, almost inevitably, reminded of Humbert Humbert (James mason) in Lolita (1962) and of the eye of the beholder, but also of many another scenario where one properly suspects that manipulation (masked by apparent innocence) is at work. For, no doubt for reasons relating to her own past, Lee trusts Dohee (for example, there is an un-ironic scene with tears, harp in the score, and Lee’s tender reaction), rather as Sean Connery does Tippi Hedren in Marnie (1964). However, viewers of, say, Catalan cinema may be reminded more by Dohee of Nico (David Solans) in Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013), and doubt the wisdom of Lee’s faith (however much, as heavily implied, Dohee may be the imprint of a young Lee).

The reason being that this is one of those films that opens with a car, clearly being driven a distance, with what we know – from looking towards the front of the car and through the windscreen – is literal baggage in the back. And that, perhaps, is the downfall of any sense of (surprise at) the unfolding of the story, on which it seems to have depended, whereas it all seems – without suggesting dramatic irony – so patent, right from seeing the arrival in a place with a small-town mentality. In Peter Gabriel’s words (from ‘Big Time’, on his album So) :

The place where I come from is a small town
They think so small, they use small words
But not me, I'm smarter than that,
I worked it out


End-notes

* This has been a topos since, at least, Adam was fashioned from clay (Genesis 2:7), proceeding through the Greek mythology of Talos and of Hesiod’s Pandora, the Metamorphoses of Ovid, and Pygmalion’s statue there, Paulina’s in The Winter’s Tale, Bernard Shaw’s reimagining of Ovid in Pygmalion (and its own reimagining in My Fair Lady (1964)), etc., etc.

** Doona Bae is also credited, by IMDb (@IMDb), as playing Sonmi-351 :




*** The (apparent) failure to envisage any consequences of the isolated example of intimidation by peers is one that the plot seeks to gloss over by, much later, having Lee stated to be such a feared force (this fear seems little evident at the), and by locating the main time-period of the film outside term, so that nothing comes of it.

Maybe, but it did seem, at one point, as though the serious incident that we witness, where Lee’s mere show of authority is not taken seriously until it becomes referable to their middle school (and whether she follows it up seems doubtful – the plot just seems to have her forget about the issue) : Lee does not, at any rate (which seems to indicate a late shoe-in) raise the question with Dohee until it is unconscionably late, if something had been continuing…

**** It is hardly to be referred to on account of being a better film, but My Sweet Pepper Land (2013) at least avoids one feeling that Baran (Korkmaz Arslan), its police officer, is on anything other than a perilous, corrupt frontier (happily joined there by Govend (Golshifteh Farahani)). The world of A Girl is actually such a world, but with an implausible veneer of law enforcement, and of seeming to be a home to generally law-abiding folk…

***** Regrettably, both note-taking and IMDb let one down on crediting the actor and his role ! However, we are saved NB Link is to a summary of the plot by Wikipedia®, which tells us that he is Park Yong-ha (played by Song Sae-byeok).



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 5 February 2015

Elixirs of youth, utilitarianism, and Sonmi-451

This is a partly completed review of Jupiter Ascending (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

This is a partly completed review – it will certainly spill over into another posting – of Jupiter Ascending (2015)




5 February

Someone (whose Tweet cannot now be located) was replying to an invitation from BBC’s Film 2015 (@BBCFilm2015) for comment, and described Jupiter Ascending (2015) as ‘baffling’ and / or ‘confusing’ (in such a way that made clear that this / these description(s) was / were not commendations) :

Well, if one watches a film such as Father and Son (2003), and expects it all to be explained and tied up by the end, then that ‘just ain’t life’, so Screen 3 at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) this afternoon at 4.30 would have been the wrong place to be (if one thinks that this film (or, say, Caché (Hidden) (2005)) should not baffle or confuse, even though life can and does)…

Before Jupiter Ascending (#JupiterAscending), Cloud Atlas (2012) was a long, hard look at repeating patterns, and the related potential for our kindnesses and cruelties to reverberate beyond our own time. (Although that is also, in The Matrix Revolutions (2003), the explicit message at the end of the trilogy – even if some resent even the existence of the two companion films to The Matrix (1999).)

Almost necessarily, Jupiter Ascending (2015) does not seek to cover that ground again, but trust, deceit and betrayal, and the nature of reality, have been integral parts of The Wachowskis’ screen-worlds since The Matrix, and they are here, too. We may tend to call what used to be ‘personnel’ by the name HR. If so, we overlook what these film-makers keep returning to, the behaviour (and morals) of those who see their fellow human-beings as ‘resources’ (thus, the earlier film has Jim Broadbent (as Timothy Cavendish) exploited by his family, and David Gyasi (Autua, a free man in slavery))…

Yes, The Wachowskis have 'delivered an action film', but what and where is the action, and what levels of reality (mirrored by different grading of CGI versus live action) are we meant to perceive ? :



That said, the amount of undiluted action is far greater, and it as though the proportion of threat, pursuit, and rescue in the time-period of Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae) and Chang (Jim Sturgess) had expanded proportionally to fill out the rest of Cloud Atlas. One will have to come to the action (and the nature of what action depicts / denotes on a cinema screen) at a later date, but it is not as if Lana and Andy Wachowski, always wearing their cine-literacy easily, have deprived those less keen on it of plenty of other insights.

Some key references (not exclusively to this one film of theirs) are :

* Metropolis (1927)

* Carry on Cleo (1964)

* Brazil (1985)*

* Akira (1988)

* Looper (2012) (mixed with that scene from North by Northwest (1959))

* Platonic Ideals / ‘The Theory of Forms’ / οὐσία (or ‘ousia’)

* Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) / The Makropulos Case (Leoš Janáček (based on Karel Čapek’s play)) / Bernard Williams’ essay of that name**

* Free will v. determinism / the craze for 'genetic screening'

* Etc., etc. – and one should not doubt, when The Matrix (1999) alluded to Lewis Carroll and The Wizard of Oz (1939), amongst others – that these references are any more than coincidental !


So what, also, about these possibilities (arising from that Film 2015 questioning / Tweeting) ? :






As to the film more than twenty-four hours later, it is still a fertile ground for reflection, because its makers’ knowingness should never be taken for granted.






Then again, one does not please everyone... :





More to come, but, for those who like spoilers, here are some Tweets in the meantime…








End-notes

* With even a little cameo from its own Terry Gilliam, an influence to which The Double (2013) also nods*, with what it has become fashionable to call its steam-punk feel. [Also in Paddington (2014), though perhaps distilled through Gringotts Bank in the Harry Potter films (numbers 1 and 7 ?).]

** Williams, Provost of King's College, Cambridge, was also rather fond of opera...




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday, 28 December 2014

Revisiting City of Angels (1998) after The Matrix (1999) (and Drive (2011))

This is a review / exploration of City of Angels (1998)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 December

This is a review / exploration of City of Angels (1998) (re-watched on DVD)




Appearing just before The Matrix (1999), City of Angels (1998) somehow inhabits a benign version of its city of also black-costumed guardians : there, Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo enter it from their reality, based in a submarine-like craft*, beyond The Matrix itself** – and are effectively (in the sense of an immune system) infections that Agents Smith, Brown and others (the guardians of that system) seek to locate and destroy. In City of Angels, Seth, unseen with his fellows, is a guardian of the angel variety (hence Los Angeles).

However, the idea of being watched over might not yet be counter to the spirit of enjoyment that is willing to entertain the framing-story of Capra’s now-classic It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), with Clarence (Henry Travers) ‘getting his wings’ (against a divine backdrop) through the saving of George Bailey and family (James Stewart, Donna Reed (Mary Bailey) and Thomas Mitchell (Uncle Billy)). It’s A Wonderful Life supposedly was a failure on its release, but is part of Christmas for many***. After the opening sequence, the God perspective, which is present throughout Meg Ryan’s (Dr Rice’s) involvement with Seth (Nicolas Cage), is downplayed in, and into, some moments of comedy (or fun).

Even so, when we have George, surveying the world that there would have been without him – a befuddled, slow-to-comprehend George**** (partly under the influence of cheap booze) – the mood, of course, is dismal, stark, chilling. And, for some, seeing how George has been put upon, disappointed, and ended up making sacrifices is too much to be balanced by how the film eventually closes : cruel vignette after vignette that show the optimism and hope of youth turned to 'service' and 'duty'*****.


Which brings us back to the angels, and whether contemplating them is a help to us : Messenger (Dennis Franz) and Cassiel (Andre Braugher) are the ones whom we come to know (alongside, and in relation to, Seth). Some of us, in a God-empty universe, might revolt at the notion that, in a lapse of attention, an air-traffic controller could, by the unfelt touch of an invisible angel, be brought back down to ground (pun not intended, but still included) – from thoughts of domestic matters to a flight on his screen that he has overlooked.

For some have to rejoice instead in asserting a post-Nietzschean world – preferring that to what are viewed as the empty comforts of religion (and ignoring the force of logic in Pascal’s Wager ?). In this film, Maggie Rice is seen, seeking to be rationalistic about the world and mortality (and even talking to herself, trying to get herself to believe it), but hurting with the fact of ‘losing’ her patient (Mr Balford) on the operating-table – whom Seth was, in parallel, tasked with taking to eternal realms.

Only a little licence that Maggie should take it so personally, because cardiac surgeons may well be bound, at times, both to examine themselves for what they may have done wrong, and to feel solely responsible for battling against death. Seth says that he has been struck by how hard Maggie fights, and believes that she could see him, ready to take Mr Balford away. From there on, and with Messenger’s help, their appreciation of the realities of their positions occupies the bulk of the film, with Seth (as does Neo) needing to test his powers to find out who he is.

It is a film infused by the theology and iconography of Milton in Paradise Lost, and, if considered in the context of the Matrix trilogy as a whole, it also ends with reconciliation, telling a story of loss and love : Seth, who had not even been heeding his own needs, ends up affirming the positive that there is in life by plunging into the sea, as Messenger earlier showed him how…

The New Testament’s First Letter of Peter seems to speak of the curiosity of the angels in desiring to know what will happen to mankind, and there is the same sense of the angels Seth and Cassiel, existing on the outside of their own experience – sitting together, as buddies, high above the city (on a sign or a statue), and marvelling at the nature and order of things :

Wonder not then, what God for you saw good
If I refuse not, but convert, as you,
To proper substance; time may come when men
With Angels may participate, and find
No inconvenient Diet, nor too light Fare:
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps
Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit
Improv'd by tract of time, and wingd ascend
Ethereal, as wee, or may at choice
Here or in Heav'nly Paradises dwell;
If ye be found obedient, and retain
Unalterably firm his love entire
Whose progenie you are. Mean while enjoy
Your fill what happiness this happie state
Can comprehend, incapable of more.


(John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book V)



End-notes

* Thankfully, the Nebuchadnezzar is not a yellow craft.

** Unlike The Wachowskis’ machine-city, where the only outside (at least in the first part of the trilogy) is that of the rebels’ quasi-submarine, the final section of City of Angels takes us beyond LA (and even Drive (2011), with its similarly impressive noctilucent cityscapes, has a brief interlude of respite).

*** Though there are interesting, lesser-known alternatives such as The Bishop’s Wife (1947) (Cary Grant, Loretta Young, David Niven), or even Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) (Judy Garland).

**** One is almost reminded of Macduff, feelingly denying the acceptance that all my pretty chickens and their dam have been lost.

***** Pot o’ Gold (1941) (later known as The Golden Hour) has Stewart as a character (Jimmy Haskel) who seems to move in the opposite direction from the battles with Potter (Lionel Barrymore) that embroil George Bailey :

Jimmy gives up the happy, but parlous, mayhem of the music shop that he runs to go to work for his music-hating uncle, Charley Haskel (a CJ decades before that of David Nobbs’ Perrin). Music then becomes the symbol around which the warm-hearted unite, and which the bigoted CJ despises (largely to comic effect, as when he is obliged to try to sing by Jimmy’s former cell-mates, and ends up – thanks to Charles Winninger’s skill – amusingly hoarse).






In a plot that makes no / few pretensions to hang together (except through music, and centred for no very obvious reason on Ma McCorkle’s orderly yet anarchic boarding-house), Pot o’ Gold still revolves entertainingly around chucking a rotten tomato, gratuitous off-screen violence, proud lovers, and just as stubborn neighbours…



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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