OH, ALSO THERE’S MINOR SPOILERS

I ain’t gonna lie, readers; it took me a while to write this one.  I got home from seeing Pacific Rim, irritated and betrayed (for reasons I’ll explain), and got on The Internet, ready to share my frustrations with the film with a giant swathe of the population that I assumed would doubtless have the same irritations I did.

I found no such people.  In fact, I found a great number of people whose feminism and opinions I respected claiming it this great inclusive/representational victory and lauding the characterisation of the, um, one woman.  My crest fell.  I suddenly felt ashamed and cowed.  Maybe they’re right, I thought.  Maybe Pacific Rim is this Big Thing after all and I’m just this picky little boy who should swallow my face and look grateful.

Or maybe it’s like Avengers Assemble all over again, where everyone and their dog made Joss Whedon into a Maypole and danced around him, singing the praises of his Black Widow and how boss she was, and all I could think was “yeah but she still strangles men with her thighs in a black leather catsuit though doesn’t she”.  It’s a step forward, but even further steps could have been so easy, yet weren’t taken.

Let’s look at Pacific Rim’s director, Guillermo del Toro.  Now, Guillermo is my homeboy.  We go way back.  He’s made some of my favourite films in the world ever, and written some of the best women in filmland, and then put them in main roles (example: Pan’s Labyrinth).

Mako (Rinko Kikuchi) is good in Pacific Rim, sure, but despite what others say about her getting the protagonist’s development arc, she isn’t the protagonist, Boring Raleigh (Charlie Hannam) is, and that’s where the film focuses.  It needn’t have done, as Mako does indeed get a nice narrative arc of her very own – but it really does focus on Raleigh instead.  Why, Guillermo?  Why?

Why focus on the boring guy?  The boring inexplicable guy who is not only tedious, but a TERRIBLE choice for “massive robot pilot saviour of mankind” because he consistently makes awful decisions?  Decisions so awful, in fact, that I thought that maybe his progress through the film would punish him for his reckless endangering of human lives – but then he was eventually lauded for them!  I just. No. (There was a lot wrong with Raleigh, like why doesn’t his hideously traumatic co-death with his brother have more of an effect on him – but I honestly don’t have the wordcount to get into it!)

There were no end of cool background people that would have made the film a) more interesting and b) less inevitably-focussed-on-the-white-American-dudebro.  Loads of internet has spaffed cheerful over the Soviet team (Heather Doerksen and  Robert Maillet) – and they’re right to do so; they’re bossly and cute as hell (and let’s not forget that BLOODY SEXY Brutalist Jaeger design!!) but they get three lines, all of which are techy floundering and then they die.  That’s… that’s not great, guys!  Three lines!  I had more lines when I was an extra at the local Methodist church panto when I was 14!

Mako wasn’t terrible.  There was a standout bit for me where she pilots a Jaeger for the first time and loses it completely as Her Traumatic Past flings nightmare fuel into her face until she endangers the life of everyone else in the Jaeger playhouse – and yet her co-pilot Boring Raleigh somehow manages to swallow down and stamp on the MASSIVE PTSD that presumably he’d have (along with brain damage, surely??) from sharing a brain with his beloved brother as he died an extremely brutal death.  I just.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’d have been less bothered by her shortcomings if she hadn’t been forced to carry the flag as literally the only woman in the film with lines.

“But they didn’t kiss at the end!” people have said, delightedly.  And in a world where films appear to be literally impossible to put on celluloid without The Day Being Saved By Heterosexuality, that’s great.  I’m all for non-sexual relationships.  But that’s not how the film was shot or put together.  If it was, it didn’t do enough to undermine the romantic overtures between Raleigh and Mako all the way through (Del Toro says that he did their fight scene “like a sex scene” even), so while no, they didn’t kiss – they honestly might as well have done, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had done.

Frustratingly, it’s not 100% crap.  I say “frustratingly” because I’d love to just shit all over this thing wholesale and be done with it, but I can’t.  The world of Pacific Rim is absolutely spectacular.  Del Toro has done his worldbuilding trick where he’s made everything in the setting fantasticly beautiful, cruel and bleak.  But then stitched the actual narrative and characterisation out of tropes.  Tropes aren’t a bad thing per se – but I honestly felt that I had seen this film before in a million different cinema-sittings.  When you can predict a character’s story before he (and it’s always a he) has even done it?  Not great.

But the good bits are really good.  The robots are heavy, work-worn and believable.  The Kaiju are so beautiful they made me do facewaters on numerous occasions.  You know when Newt (played by Charlie Day – but I’ll come back to him in a minute) braindives into their world to spy?  That black passing body over the giant red sun?  The fiery skies and the knowledge that Kaiju are their answers to mechs?  The hot, prickly balloon of delight inflated in my chest and I felt this sudden desperation for Del Toro to make the film he’s clearly always wanted to, carry on from Hellboy II‘s overtones of human punishment monster Apocalypse, and give it the “and then everyone died” happy ending that I’ve always wanted to see him do.

“We terraformed it for them,” Newt says breathlessly.  Humans have ruined the world, and now monsters want it to play in.  I wept.  “Yes!” I yelped in the cinema.  “Stamasfodfpohssadjfdk!” I elaborated, which I think in this context meant, “Please give me all the monster Apocalypse porn I need to make my heart complete, Guillermo.”  My boyfriend patted my knee sharply, which I think in this context meant, “Please stop making the sounds that will inevitably get us kicked out of the cinema”.

But it didn’t happen.  I felt personally betrayed.  Come on, Guillermo, I thought we were bros.

Speaking of bros, I did ship/love Newt and Herman (Burn Gorman, who is a hottie), the rivalrous, hilarious, day-saving, vitally-important-to-the-plot-and-yet-still-somehow-endearingly-rubbish scientists.  “You can’t ship them!” cried my lovely housemate.  “Did you see how they fumbled a *handshake*?  That is what the sex would be like.  Flapping, awkward and inaccurate.”  Yes, it would.  Just like regular sex.

Newt was great though.  We follow him through the underground Kaiju-part trade as he shambles off on his quest to find this one particular drug-baron.  Ron Perlman, of course, plays this…

s p e c i f i c   c r i m

and…

…no, I think we’re done here.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• The monster/mech effects are literally the best I’ve ever seen
• The world Del Toro has built is compelling, beautiful and engrossing.  The background detail makes it all feel really real and believable
• Idris Elba Is A Severe Hottie
• Do not underestimate how awe-inspiringly beautiful it is

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• You have seen it before, in a million different hats, over the past twenty years
• The monsters don’t win AGAIN
• It hints at doing something fun and different but doesn’t actually
• What sort of a name is “Stacker Pentecost” anyway¹

1. Ed’s Note: “MY NEW NAME FROM NOW ON”

Oh, readers. I’ve done that thing again. I’ve gone and seen Les Miserables without having seen the musical or read the book and now I’m writing about it without the massive burning swollen bladder of fandom that everyone else seems to have about it, and as such, will probably sound a bit naive. I had literally no idea what it was about. Well, apart from “France” and “revolution” and some presumably rather miserable people and – something that was used to successfully sell the whole thing to me – pretty young men draped attractively about the place in military uniform, covered in blood. Oh, and Hugh Jackman singing. He apparently does lots of musicals in Australia, and I was curious to know what that was like, since I know him primarily as the not-very-musical-ready Wolverine.

Maybe I should just hand in my human card at the desk.

Did I like it? Well… yes. I think? Sort of. There was a lot that I found either directly unappealing or straight-up baffling, but overall, there was sufficient stuff in there to make me want to see it onstage. And, well, I’m a sucker for musicals.

The main thing about this film is that it suffers from being a film. There are things that you can only do in the magical reality of the stage, and this particular production (directed by Tom Hooper) tries on the whole gritty reality thing (except with people singing all the time) and therefore can’t get away with similar tricks and tactics. This is most glaringly obvious in how they depict (or not) the passage of time. There were some bits that were completely confusing because I just couldn’t tell whether or not time was meant to have passed or not. For example, on stage, as my stage-show-fan friend tells me, Fantine (Anne Hathaway) can waft in and out of the set to show many days passing between her selling her hair and her teeth before eventually being forced by circumstance into becoming a sex worker. In the film, it looked like she’d lost her job, and then immediately sold everything in her face and became a sex worker.

I was like, wow that’s a terrible afternoon.

It happened again after Cosette’s (Amanda Seyfried) wedding. “I can never tell my adopted daughter that I’m an ex-con!,” Valjean howls, sheathing his Adamantium talons and fleeing for the hills, where he staggers into a convent and casually dies in the corner. I assumed he’d had an ill-publicised heart attack in the carriage on the way over.

The next problem I had with Les Mis was the way Valjean was so suffused with his role as apparently French Ex-Con Jesus that for me he ended up being completely impossible to identify with. I found his motives and decisions inexplicable to the point of being hilarious. I wanted to have the film retitled “Jean Valjean’s Baffling Sequence Of Life Choices” because in this rendition at least, he comes off as too saintly, too self-righteous and too… incongruously self-sacrificial for me to see him as a real person and empathise with him. Ever.

“Also I have to dive out of this window now lol bye” “YOU BAFFLING SCOUNDREL”

And what on earth was going on with the cinematography when anyone was having a solo? With a stage show, if someone has a solo, you’ve got them as a figure in context with the set, the extras, all embalmed in live music. So you can empathise with them properly because there’s this whole holistic musical experience going on. Not so with the film, where the director has decided that the best way to make you empathise with the solo singer is to have a VERY TIGHT CLOSE-UP of the singer’s face, slightly off-centre, while they cry and sing at the same time. This is not how you make your audience empathise with anyone or anything. I found myself wondering how they’d done Anne Hathaway’s makeup while the rest of the cinema sobbed around me.

Has now sported this look in about 32,412 films, but is working it

Right, time to talk about Javert. As my more long-term readers will know, I’m a villainsexual creep, and my darling friend who kindly dragged me from my Doom Fortress to see this flick accurately predicted that I’d have the hots for Javert. She was not wrong. I have never before fancied Russell Crowe in anything ever (in fact, quite the opposite) but I honestly found Javert the only character that I empathised with and found engaging and explicable. Plus, he’s got an attractive array of uniforms and shiny boots. In fact, that was a great way to tell – in the absence of any bloody thing else – the passage of time. It had to be later on: Javert had MOAR BRAID. I’m okay with that. Time-keeping through the medium of men in uniform? I’m deleting my phone’s clock app this afternoon.

I actually quite enjoyed the fatalistic pointlessness of barricade-building rich white boys¹ harping on about no longer being slaves and changing the world and then being run over with cannons. That was grand. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see a structures-of-oppression-ruining bloody revolution, but this is a film, and I’m a bloodthirsty little boy with the need for something hard and horrible to counteract Valjean’s large-overcoated saintliness, so I was overwhelmed with the beauty of their cataclysmic failure. So beautiful. So horrible. So… uh.

Deserves better than Marius, period. In fact, deserves own, better-orchestrated revolution not being led by Marius & co.

Now, Eponine (Samantha Barks). Eponine is meant to be an empathic, sadface-inducing character, and she’s sweet and earnest and I rather liked her. But Marius, the guy she’s in love with, is so boring. I just wanted her to get over it and find someone interesting who doesn’t apparently fall madly in love with people when he glimpses their hats from a distance through a crowd.

It’s always nice to see Helena Bonham-Carter reprising her timeless role of “Cackling Woman With Hair” (I don’t think they even give her a costume, do they? That’s all just her wardrobe), too. And I sincerely hope that after playing Signor Pirelli in Sweeney Todd, Sasha Baron-Cohen is typecast as Musical Skeevy Comic Relief for the rest of his life and never plays another vaguely-veiled bigoted stereotype ever again.

Overall, it really wasn’t as miserable as I was expecting. Valjean lives a long and successful life, Cosette and the boring Marius (the gorgeous Eddie Redmayne) get married, Fantine’s wishes are vindicated, all that stuff, and everyone dies happily ever after with a rousing song about sticking it to the man. All this talk about how much sobbing it elicits from people generally makes me wonder if someone’s snuck into my room at night and glued my tearducts shut. It struck me as generally rather uplifting and “Oh well! Songs and Christian Love!” rather than “DESPAIR AND CHIPS FOR EVERYONE”.

To summarise! YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• The music is genuinely brilliant. Believe the hype.
• Everyone plays really, really well. Flawless performances from Anne Hathaway (in particular), Wolverine, and even Russell “Are You Not Entertained?” Crowe, who has a spectacularly grizzly, stoic turn as Javert
• It really does look exceedingly good

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• I’m not sure how many of the characters feel like real people, honestly
• It suffers from its own medium in a few glaringly obvious and immersion-breaking ways
• It feels pretty obnoxiously long, but that might just have been me and my bladder having a disagreement
• People do sing pretty much all the time and you might be allergic to musicals, but if you’re allergic to musicals WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO SEE LES MISERABLES

1. Ed’s Tiny Note: are they meant to be an underclass? Despite Eddie Redmayne being a Rather Cut-Glass Etonian ;). Anyone read Hugo/able to verify how they’re meant to come across?!

***As is usual, dear readers, the BadRep pirate flag reading SPOILER WARNING – only mild to moderate this time, but still – is hereby hoisted here! ***

So, Britain’s most beloved animation house, Aardman Animations, the cheerful cohort behind treasured characters Wallace & Gromit and my personal comfort-watchers Chicken Run and Rex The Runt, really can’t go wrong with a film entitled The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists.  It’s adapted from Gideon Defoe’s series of childrens’ books of the same name and derivations thereof, one of which is called The Pirates! In An Adventure With Communists, and if that doesn’t make you deliriously excited, then I’m afraid we can’t be friends.  I haven’t read them yet, but I’ve made arrangements to get them into my eager paws as soon as possible because how can I not?  Pirates!  Everyone likes pirates.

It was the poster that drew my eye first.  Witness:

PIRATES! it says.  And there they are.  There’s a nice representation of different genders, ages, ethnicities and beards on the poster, and I was all excited for a nice diverse film – the sort I tend to dream about.

SHAME IT’S A LIE.

Well, no, I’m exaggerating – it’s not quite a bare-faced man-churned fictivated sin-speech, but it’s pretty fallacious.  The main character is that chap in the middle there, the Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant).  The pirate to the left of him, Cutlass Liz – voiced by the brilliant Salma Hayek – is an award-winning Pirate Of The Year, full of swash, buckle and plunder-power, and gets literally no screen-time in which she isn’t a sex object.  Seriously.  She turns up, wiggles, alludes to her piratical prowess and then… isn’t seen again!  She has, like, three scenes!  And one of them is in the dreams of the Pirate Captain where she’s all, “Ooh Pirate Captain, I am UNDONE”.

The pirate to the right of said Pirate Captain in the poster goes by the moniker Suspiciously Curvaceous Pirate (they’re all “[Adjective] Pirate”). Voiced by Ashley Jensen, she’s a dragged-up pirate with an amazing false beard and a sweet Scottish chirp – who also gets very little screen-time or lines, and whose characterisation appears to revolve around the fact that she likes sparkly jewels, pastel colours and fancies the captain a bit.  The humour of her character is almost exclusively that she’s a cross-dressing woman.  Now, I’m never okay with boys in drag being sent up purely for being boys in drag, so why would I be okay with it if the character’s female?

Not great, is it?

That said, it’s not all bad news for lady characters in this, but from a rather unexpected source: the villain, voiced by the legendary Imelda Staunton, Queen Victoria (“Look at my crest! What does it say?  I HATE PIRATES.”) is absolutely magnificent.  She’s perfect.  Stop making that face.  This is the badassest Queen Vic you have ever seen, and I don’t think it’s possible to not fancy her even a little bit after the credits roll.  She has a battle skirt that clanks aside to reveal a) jodphurs and b) TWO KATANAS.  Come on.  How many other films have had Queen Victoria fighting pirates with katanas before getting vanquished by GCSE-classroom science?  FUCKING ZERO.  THIS IS A UNIQUE CINEMATOGRAPHICAL EXPERIENCE.

OVERALL, the above issues aside, it’s a very funny film – the school of humour whereby if one joke doesn’t wash with you, never fear! there’ll be another one along in a tick – and it’s rich with classic Aardman background detail (the pirate ship has a fusebox, for example, and watch the faces of the taxidermy animals in Charles Darwin’s (David Tennant) house during the bathtub chase scene!).  Martin Freeman’s second-in-command pirate actually looks a bit like him, which is neatly appealing, and Brian Blessed’s megaphonic turn as the Pirate King is predictably godlike.  The dodo is gorgeously animated.  I wish there’d been more scientists doing science-y things, but then I was imagining something dreadful involving shiny gloves, tailored labcoats and experimentation, and there are reasons I haven’t been allowed to make films for children and that’s one of them.

But I did make a new poster, to give the neglected characters just a bit more attention. I made Cutlass Liz look a bit more badass, too, on account of her being badass and therefore deserving of a badass coat:

THERE.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

•  The best Queen Victoria you have literally ever seen
• It’s really painfully funny
• Who doesn’t want to see Brian Blessed being a pirate king, seriously
• There’s Flight Of The Concords on the soundtrack!
• Thank god for stop-motion claymation – surely the finest animation technique ever? THIS HOUSE BELIEVES: YES

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It promises a lot in the trailer and poster in terms of ethnic/gender representation and then doesn’t deliver
• I frankly wanted more science
• And more Brian Blessed
• More of everything that wasn’t the cis/white/male lead characters, actually, I mean they were great and all but I’m bored of cis/white/men being the… we’ve already had this discussion, internet, leave me be

Naturally, these skills are directly applicable to his role as Arthur Kipps, a harrowed, traumatised, suicidal young single father-of-one sent to catalogue the creepy shit in a haunted house on some salt marshes in The Woman In Black. Obviously a laugh a minute, there. I can only assume he took the role determined to prove himself a Serious Actor, You Guys – which we’ll talk about in a minute. First, let’s talk about the actual story.

**** Obligatory this-is-how-my-reviews-tend-to-roll SPOILER WARNING here!****

I’ve seen the stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel several times, because I love having the shit scared out of me. The scares in WiB come from Surprise. They’re things that jump out at you and say, “Boo”. Nothing more sophisticated than gribblies in the dark, which is a bit damning of me, but seriously – that’s all they are. They’re good at it, but I never find the horror in WiB particularly horrifying.

On stage, in the intimacy of seeing real life flesh-and-bone players getting menaced by things in the dark renders the jump-and-boo tactic of scare artistry very powerful, because you all empathise together in a big knot; you notice what the actors notice, when they notice them. Things can be hidden and sneak about, and then you, as an audience, find yourselves watching the scenery as much as the actors, and the hidden gribblies play out in real time and it’s all very nice and spooky.

SERIOUS FACE

You can’t do that in a film. You gotta work harder.  The film (directed by James Watkins) does its best to reproduce the “things lurking in the background” feel of the play by having Mr Radcliffe constantly off-centre in shots and filling the space behind him with shapes that might be an out-of-focus human face. It’s one way to create the atmosphere, and it does it well, but the main thing the film does differently from the stage show is that it recognises that cinema can’t get away with jump-scaring all the time without being boring. You have a lot more time with the camera up in your character’s face, and you gotta give them reasons for all them facial wranglings. Theatre is … all close up on your audience, and cinema is all up in your character’s grill. Distance is important. You can get away with less in film. You gotta have backstory and all that. The Woman In Black movie understands this, and Jane Goldman‘s screenplay valiantly fills the holes that the stage version simply doesn’t have the room to fill. We get suspicious villagers! Pale, zombified children drinking lye! Backstory and juice all about The Children and that, and that certainly goes some way to giving horror that’s more psychologically fulfilling than just working on pure adrenaline.

Problem is, in a way that it simply isn’t in the play (and I ain’t red t’book, so I can’t comment on that), it really is all about The Children (in the stage version, there’s a play-within-a-play motif that more-or-less prevents this focus wholesale). And, you know, while there’s nothing wrong with that per se, I just never feel particularly comfortable with anything that centralises female desire for children and biological motherhood. There’s a lot of that in the film, and I mean one hell of a lot – we’ve got the Woman In Black going literally insane over the loss of her child, first through adoption and then through death, and then we’ve got Mrs Daily (Janet McTeer), who isn’t so much of a medium as a large,¹ channelling her dead son’s spirit all over the place and keeping little dogs as child replacements, and then we’ve got Dan Radcliffe being traumatised over the death of his wife who died in childbirth and all that. So it’s a pretty central theme.

Hold up a sec, Society. I got a little request. It’s no biggie, just: CAN WE PLEASE, AS A CULTURE, STOP CENTRALISING PHYSICAL GENETIC PARENTHOOD AS THE ONLY VALID FORM OF PARENTHOOD. Please. Please. Because right here, right, we’ve got the demonisation of the Mr and Mrs Drablow – who have adopted Nathaniel, the eponymous black-clad Woman’s child – as literal child thieves. This is what drives the whole descent into madness which leads to the haunting, deaths and general destruction. That’s it. That’s the root cause. Adoption. And I know there are tales that do it worse, but seriously; The Woman In Black revolves around how terrible it is when biological parenthood is subverted, either through death, or worse, through adoption!

It drives me a bit up the wall. We know that parenthood isn’t inherently holy and pure; there’re neverending streams of news stories about the extreme situations where it all goes wrong, but what about chosen family? Is it really that terrible to form familial bonds with people to whom you are not genetically tethered?

Aside from that, this flick catalogues Dan Radcliffe’s fine ability to look serious while opening doors, see ghosts and drink heavily. That’s pretty much what he does. He does so with alarming dedication, actually, and while I know we’re meant to, as an audience, suspend disbelief and accept that he’s a man on the edge with nothing left to lose, he has a wanton lack of a survival instinct. I mean, I’d realise I was in a horror film way back at the beginning with the creepy staring children and the rural locals who are afraid of cars. You end up feeling that his determination to open all the doors and chase disturbing sounds around the OBVIOUSLY HAUNTED HOUSE is remarkable. The man’s a hero. But you do really rather want to shout, “STOP OPENING THE SODDING DOORS!” at him.² Still, his frowning skills have come on a long way from that other film thing he did when he was younger, whatever it was called.

They’ve also changed the ending from the play, which has it quite open-ended and desolate. (Skip this paragraph if you still want to watch the film without knowing the fine detail!) The film does something completely different, and it’s ridiculous. I imagine some people may find posthumous familial reunion on an otherworldly railway track quite comforting, but I found it ludicrous. It goes quite a long way to undermine the sincerity of the plot, and isn’t it funny that in horror/survival films, the pragmatic, rationally-minded one is always shown to be wrong or narrow-minded? Mr Daily (Ciarán Hinds), who is vocally sceptical of ghosts and contacting the dead… well, it’s a bloody ghost film, isn’t it? So he’s proved wrong all over the place, and the stupendously melodramatic ending pretty much consolidates his comprehensive wrongness, and I’m like, well, actually I sympathised with him a lot, so what do I take home from this?

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It does surprise!horror very well.
• It’s very well cast and located, and check out that house, I mean goddamn.
• Mrs Daily is the best thing in the film, what with her mediumage and her creepy little dogs and all.
• Oh fine, yes, Daniel Radcliffe is worth a watch as something other than that other role he played in That Other Film Series.

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It only really does the “boo!” horror very well; the rest is very, very cheesy.  That said, I found myself jumpy in the dark for a week afterwards, and I’m hard to scare.
• OH MY FUCKING GOD, ADOPTION REALLY ISN’T A SODDING CRIME, IT IS 2012 CAN WE REALISE THIS PLEASE
• The soundtrack is like Fisher Price Psychological Tension Music and I could have provided a more subtle and nuanced soundtrack on vox and kazoo.
• Some children die.  But I suppose you wouldn’t be even considering going to see this film, of all things, if that was likely to distress you.

1. DO YOU SEE WHAT I LITERALLY DID THERE
2. Which I did, several times, which is why I shouldn’t be allowed in cinemas.

I’ve turned over different ways to start this review in my head, and really the best way I can think of is with an apology. I’m sorry. I did a bad thing. I watched the American remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo before I saw the original Swedish. I haven’t even read the books, either. When my own revolution comes, I’ll be first against the wall. And then my revolution will end.

I am often ferociously anti-Americanised-remakes, as the remake trend can assume, on the part of their Western, English-speaking audience, a certain level of can’t-be-bothered-with-anything-not-in-their-own-language.¹ It also assumes that anything not English-language isn’t really worth seeing, and this is fully gross. That said, I avoided Stieg Larsson’s critically-acclaimed Millenium Trilogy until the remake came out, and let me tell you why. It’s quite simple, really.

Rape scenes. That’s why. There’s some notoriously graphic sexual assault in these films. So I avoided them. I avoided them very well until I heard Trent Reznor² was doing the soundtrack for the remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and then, three days ago, I found myself with a spare few hours and a fiver in my pocket, and went, “Hey, I’ll go and see a film that I know will trigger the fuck out of me on my own! What could go wrong with that?”

Nothing went wrong at all. I mean, yes, both rape scenes are absolutely atrocious and I actually felt sick and cried, and if you’re at all disturbed by the portrayal of sexual assault, stay the fuck clear of this film, BUT I saw it again the next day and bought all three of the original Swedish films (well, the extended versions that were two-parters for televised release), and watched the original TGWTDT that very evening. I was going to, in fact, write a comparison piece on the films and talk about how the remake does things differently in terms of the plot and all that, but something magic happened when I went to see the film the first time around and I found myself incapable of doing so.

Have you ever fallen in love with a fictional character? Everyone says it’s impossible to fall in love at first sight, and while that may be true of people you meet in the street, it’s totally possible to fall in love with a character the moment they appear in the story.

I have fallen in love with Lisbeth Salander. So, this review is going to compare the original Lisbeth (played by the divine Noomi Rapace) and the remake Lisbeth (an unrecognisable Rooney Mara), and how her character varies across the films, in part because of some very small design decisions. It’s also a good excuse for me to do some proper fanart of her. I fully accept that my opinion of Lisbeth was shaped by the version of her I saw first.

In Niels Arden Oplev’s original films, Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth is withdrawn and quite brusque, but perceptive and vengeful. She makes eye contact with people, she touches them, asks questions – she’s pretty easy to relate to, and in the however-many hours of sprawling investigative plot you get, she undergoes a lot of development, morphing beautifully from a quietly damaged, pained creature to this fully-fledged angel of justice. In the final scenes, where she hunts down killer Martin Vanger on her motorbike, she doesn’t ask for permission to do so; she just watches him burn to death, deaf to his pleas for mercy. It’s a beautiful scene. There’s steel in her eyes and mouth. It explicitly echoes her own setting alight of her father – a parallel only hinted at in the remake – and her associate Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) is amazed and disgusted with her when he learns of her actions, which allows Lisbeth to give her gorgeous “Don’t make him into a victim” speech.

Original Lisbeth is a human. Plenty of design decisions have lead to this: she has eyebrows, for a start, which do a lot to shape her face and give her expression. She has make-up that looks like a professional taught her how. She wears colours other than black. Her skin is unblemished, and her nails are short and neat. She carries herself with quiet pride, and her eyes are alive with Noomi Rapace’s trademark razor-sharp observational glare. Her hair lies flat a lot of the time.

She’s as brusque and vicious as you’d expect, but she shakes people’s hands. She makes eye contact and says things. And all this fleshes her out as a character in more explicit ways that a viewer can relate to – it’s easier to form an empathic bond with a character who has dialogue, obviously – but she’s a lot more human. And yes, I do actually count that as a bad thing.

Remake Lisbeth, in David Fincher’s film (co-starring Daniel Craig) is a tiny, vicious monster. She is easily the greatest thing about the film, with Rooney Mara effortlessly stealing every scene she so much as breathes on, but unlike Original Lisbeth, she starts out as being so viscerally damaged, so visibly broken and so fucking furious with the world around her, that it feels as though she remains quiet just to barely contain the thrashing, clawing monster that she constantly keeps under skin. Where Original Lisbeth becomes more overtly monstrous, the character development with Remake Lisbeth is that she becomes more human, almost – she seeks out Mikael because she has, as she says in a one-sided conversation with her former guardian, “made a friend”.

Everything Remake Lisbeth does and says is carefully tailored to make her as cold as possible – fitting perfectly into what is visually an ice fucking cold film, all in blue, black and white. “I have a high metabolism, I can’t put on weight,” she deadpans, as though she’s said it a thousand times before, when she’s asked when she last ate, even though that wasn’t the intention of the question. Her make-up is sloppily crayoned-on as if she simply couldn’t care less. She doesn’t care. She prowls through the film as though everyone she meets couldn’t affect her life if their own lives depended on it, and if they tried, she’d literally bite them to death. Her eyes are wild, fiery and bestial. In the last shot of her face, when she watches Mikael walk off with his lover, Erika (the painfully hot Robin Wright), she honestly looks like a wolf. Her eyes are almost red. It really does feel as though in everything she does – including sex – Lisbeth performs only the very basics of what she needs to be received at all in society, because that’s in her best interests. Everything else can burn.

And that, my friends, is why I liked the remake better than the original: because Lisbeth is a werewolf. Also because she gets better consensual sex scenes and her revenge upon her rapist isn’t filmed to be a precise echo of her own rape. Perhaps I’ll write a second Lisbeth Salander Please Can I Be Your Friend Why Are You Biting Please Stop Biting Me essay comparing all the sex she has.

But for now, here’s a potted summary of why you need to see the remake, honest.

YOU SHOULD SEE THE REMAKE BECAUSE:

• It’s bleak, disgusting, savage and beautiful all at once
• It’s very nicely paced
• The acting is superb, and it contains predominantly European/Swedish actors!
• It doesn’t feel very Americanised, product placement aside (why do I suddenly want an Epsom printer?)
• LISBETH LISBETH SHE’S AMAZING LISBETH I LOVE YOU LISBETH
• I literally do not have the words for how perfect Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s ethereal, terrifying soundtrack is

YOU SHOULD SEE THE ORIGINAL BECAUSE:

• It plumbs into the mechanics of the story with more depth
• Lisbeth has more dialogue, particularly showing her social politics
• The sex scenes (as opposed to the sexual assault scenes), particularly between Erika and Mikael, are more loving and personable
• You get more backstory to the characters in general
• It’s a lot less bleak and disgusting-feeling than the remake (although the endless shots of dead women’s faces at the end is horrendous)

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THESE FILMS BECAUSE:

• I am not joking when I say that, between them, both films contain two of the most personally painful rape scenes I have ever seen (Rape 1 is worse in the original, Rape 2 is worse in the remake, but that’s obviously completely subjective!)
• A cat is mangled in the remake (but not the original)
• Seriously, it’s actually quite horrible in its violence, both portrayed and alluded to, so steer clear if that ain’t your bag
1. Did you know they’re making a Hollywood remake of Troll Hunter? I know, I know, I set everyone around me on fire, too. It’s okay. It’s a natural reaction.
2. I would crawl through fire to get to this man’s trousers.
]]> /2012/01/18/at-the-movies-the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo-oh-god-i-am-so-sorry-i-watched-the-remake-first/feed/ 8 9252 /2011/12/23/at-the-movies-sherlock-holmes-a-game-of-making-them-as-married-as-possible/ /2011/12/23/at-the-movies-sherlock-holmes-a-game-of-making-them-as-married-as-possible/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:10:57 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=9163 Beware, gentle reader! For this fair review contains those demons known as SPOILERS!! While they are not major plot spoilers, there is mention of Stuff That Matters, so if this causes your brow to sweat, TREAD CAREFULLY! And you might want to skip the entire review and just look at the picture at the bottom.

Father Christmas begins his judgement of whether or not potential gift recipients have been Naughty or Nice well back in February. January is his holiday month, where no paperwork is done. It all starts in February, that judgement process. He’s got a lot of people to get through, and the judgement of Naughty or Nice is perilous. Some people write him letters. That makes it easier; except those bastards who write something extolling how such a polarised morality system is flawed, and the whole concept of “Naughtiness” is subjective. These people usually get a lump of coal, a black top hat and the GPS location of my bedroom.

As you can imagine, the more Father Christmas can mass-judge and dispense identical recompense or reward – known as “blanketing” – the easier his job is. So any opportunity he has to reward an entire section of humanity in one go, he takes it. Of course he does. Wouldn’t you?

Anyway, that’s why Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows exists. Father Christmas noticed that an awful lot of people who had exhibited exemplary behaviour this year were linked by their communal desire to see Robert Downey Jnr. touch Jude Law with as much of his naked body as possible, and pulled a few strings at Warner Brothers – he has fingers in many pies, you see – and here we are.

I got all this, incidentally, from a few of my double-agent elves stationed in his workhouse. I intend on repurposing his operation for my own, er, purposes.¹

So: Sherlock Holmes 2 (let’s call it that for short) follows in the grand tradition of making Holmes and Watson as blatantly married as possible without allowing them to actually kiss. From my perspective as an audience member, it looks almost like a game directors (in this case, Guy Ritchie) play: given that both Holmes and Watson have female love interests, how can they convey just how deeply involved with each other they are without resorting to boring, obvious techniques such as having them snog or surreptitiously shag in a train? Ritchie leaps the first hurdle – that of the lady interlopers – with little difficulty. He kills off Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) in a single scene with no ambiguity or remorse. Thought she was fun and interesting and looked forward to seeing more of her in this film? Tough! Down she goes in a fit of unceremonious bloody coughing under the impassive gaze of Dr Moriarty (the terrifying Jared Harris) from behind a teacup.

Watson’s wife, Mary (Kelly Reilly), though clearly a bit of an unflappable, gun-cocking badass herself, gets about ten lines in total, and is dressed up and polished as a dreadful gooseberry to Watson and Holmes’s gay domestic bliss. It’s a shame, and, you know, I’d hiss and spit about it more and about how it seems that people are resentful of any differently-gendered third party to a homoerotic pairing (canon or not) as if any hint of heterosexuality immediately ruins everything like bisexuality or polyamory don’t fucking exist BUT YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND, THERE WAS HALF-NAKED SPOONING AND LOTS OF HURT/COMFORT. I CAN’T STAY ANGRY AT IT.

I just penned a paragraph listing all of the things Holmes and Watson do or say to each other that could have been replaced wholesale with extended, visceral scenes of them fellating each other’s tongues, but then I ran out of recommended wordcount for the article and I don’t want to anger my editor. Suffice to say, it’s a lot, verging on ALL THINGS. You’re probably not very surprised. I did say the film was a reward for the RDJ/JL cabal and the Holmes/Watson contingent. That’s a lot of people who’ve been basically Mahatma Ghandi this year. Well done those people.

But it does bring me back to the point I always get up in my grill when I watch “bromances” such as this, and that is: it’s not enough. Don’t you dare call this a queer film because it isn’t. It mollifies, rather than actually addresses any visibility issues. It flirts, but is ultimately a bit of a cocktease. I know there’s the argument that emotionally intense (but not actually sexual) relationships between women get a lot of screen time in fictional media, and intimate inter-female friendships have a bigger presence in the collective conscience of Western culture (that group toilet trip thing, for instance) so it’s not fair that men can only slap each other tentatively on the back or – gasp! – they’ll be branded as “gay”, but what I’m most concerned with is the abandonment of all this bollocks heterocentrism. Let’s just stop erecting the acceptable-emotional-involvement barricade just shy of physical intimacy just in case we end up ruining Western civilisation with these thoughtless same-gender relationships. Go the whole bloody hog, would you? Or are you only flirting with the idea of homoeroticism because you think it’s ridiculous? Neither is good.

And I know a million people before me have complained about the lack of queer visibility in mainstream media, and how mixed-gender couples get an awful lot of privilege in terms of representation, but seeing something like Sherlock 2 – whereby the two heroes come so close to just coupling it up all over the screen but are clearly prevented by the fear that the merest hint of consummation will send the Straight Cis Male audience members fleeing like Bill Bailey from the Trollhunter – just makes me see red. The Rage Cage descends. (I have actually written this part of the review through the Rage Cage after all!)

…Which might explain why there’s very little actual review. I’m sorry. Let me fix that. The violence is up in this film: it’s very gritty and very hard-hitting compared with its predecessor, and there’s a lot of Ritchie’s favourite slo-mo impacts and explosions. A lot of the violence focuses on the militaristic, rather than the directly interpersonal as in the first film. There’s a scene wherein our heroes and the amazing Noomi Rapace (who was Lisbeth Salander in the original Girl With The Dragon Tattoo films) as a tousle-haired “Gypsy” knife-fighting fortune teller (oh my god I’d bloody love to see a Traveller character of any ethnic background who wasn’t at least one of those things) charge through a forest whilst being shelled by heavy artillery. They all survive, miraculously, but the actual filming of the ballistics in graphic, almost comic-book-style, all slow motion and muted sound, makes it so brutal that I found it quite difficult to watch. And I’m all over my violence, usually – as we know. It was probably the intended effect, anyway; so a winner is you, Mr Ritchie! You harrowed me out with artillery explosions, and this isn’t even a “war film”. Well done.

As this film also caters to those steampunk kids, there’s lots of machine porn: lots of mechanical extreme close-ups and sweeping racks of armaments. Everyone gets armed with new, shiny, extremely destructive firearms. Bullet-holes are examined, and Watson’s military past is brought up often. War pervades. Terrorism happens: “extreme political movements” and “anarchists” are framed for the detonation of bombs, carefully engineered to pit the European powerhouses against each other in bloody conflict.

With this backdrop of indiscriminate, impersonal violence, Watson and Holmes’s adoring, frequently tactile relationship sticks out like a sore, er, thumb. It’s amazing. Their emotional interplay – the most profound moment for me was when Watson fished Holmes out of a collapsed tower and stroked his hair – is like a warm, soft thing in amongst rubble and bullets. Ahhh. It’s ever so nice. Still not enough, though.

But I wish they’d had Rapace’s lovely lady in it more. She was resourceful and believably earnest; her performance refreshingly down-to-earth and human next to RDJ and Law’s saucy ping-pong. There’s several gorgeous scenes where Mycroft (played by the oozingly lovely Dame Stephen of Fry), Sherlock and Watson have a sort of banter-off, and Simza sits watchably increasingly perplexed, alternately following their conversation and letting it pass her by. She was very real. She even bled and reacted to pain in real, non-dramatic, human ways, which is unusual in films of this genre – and makes a particular contrast with the theatrical, fancy-hatted Irene. But she didn’t have nearly enough presence, losing out drastically to Sherlohn Watsolmes in terms of screen time – which, you know, fair enough: the film is about them, but she really was wonderful. I think she and Fry’s Mycroft should have their own spin-off where they ooze and stab their way around Europe in search of the perfect hat.



Actual photographs from the set.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It’s very funny
• It’s very beautiful to look at
• The action sequences are slick and well-designed
• Moriarty is well hot
• IT IS A SPECIAL PRESENT FOR THE HOLMES/WATSON FANDOM
• A SPECIAL PRESENT FROM PROBABLY GOD

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• Er.
• Well, it’s quite violent, I guess? If that’s not your thing, you should leave it aaht
• Moriarty hangs Sherlock on a meat hook and tortures him while singing Schubert’s Die Forelle no wait that’s a reason to see it
1. If you read to the end of this sentence, you will forget everything I have said in this article. No! Wait! Not all of it! Remember the review! Remember the rev- bugger.
]]> /2011/12/23/at-the-movies-sherlock-holmes-a-game-of-making-them-as-married-as-possible/feed/ 8 9163 /2011/10/24/at-the-movies-the-three-musketeers-or-markgraf-loses-it/ /2011/10/24/at-the-movies-the-three-musketeers-or-markgraf-loses-it/#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=7912 I am the worst person in the world to take to a cinema. Cinemas turn me, through no fault of my own, into a Grade A Douchebag. I just find the whole experience too engrossing. My ticket crumples in my eager hand as I enter the theatre, and magic happens. The low light, the seats and the excited quiet cause a strange mutation in my brain and suddenly, the whole world is just me and that cinema, and nothing else matters.

I laugh. I cry. I shriek like an excited child. I hurl insults, groan and grip the hand of the person sitting next to me, and I just can’t help it. The film, in that darkened, magical room full of equally hypnotised people and their rustling sweets, is my entire life for the hours that it runs.

Now, if a film is uniformly delightful, I’ll get used to the level of delight it’s producing in me and be relatively quiet. If it’s uniformly miserable, I’ll just cry quietly to myself for the duration. If it’s completely terrible, I’ll start out shouting and then my fury will dull into silence, while I glare at the screen with the cold, dead eyes of a shark. But if a film varies, and has parts that I love and parts that I hate, I’ll react anew to the different levels of content as they emerge.

Paul WS Anderson’s The Three Musketeers was, therefore, a big problem for everyone else in the cinema.

**** WARNING: spoilers from here on out!****

It’s a film with its pros and cons, as most films are, but the problem with this film for me was that the pros and cons were both very forthright in how pro-y or con-y they were, and they constantly vied for supremacy. The result was a sort of see-saw effect, whereby the quality of the film yo-yoed wildly from start to finish, and my face was sort of like this:





So at the end, I looked a bit like this:



Oh my god you guys, what was this film. It was obvious that they knew what they wanted to do with it, but really weren’t sure how. As you can tell from the title, it’s ostensibly based on Alexandre Dumas’ lovely book, but much in the same way that every time I take a trip to Tesco, the journey is based on Virgil’s Aeneid. I read The Three Musketeers when I was young – so young, in fact, that the memory is a mere rose-coloured blip on the horizon of my literary consumption – so have possibly unrealistic recollections of how ludicrous it was. But I’m pretty sure the bloody thing didn’t have zeppelins designed by Leonardo da Vinci.

The whole thing’s meant to be set in the year 17-whatsit, and the costume department and set designers have had a fucking ball with it. The clothes are divine, and the interiors are spot-on. It’s really lush to look at, the attention to detail – even in the weaponry – is sublime, which makes it all the more bloody baffling that they saw fit to sledgehammer shit like rotary platform mini-cannons and clockpunk crossbows on top. The final straw for me was the sudden, rage-cage-inducing appearance of modern stringed instruments at the end.

The way I see it is this: if you love 18th century France so much, don’t spend oodles of obvious love and affection recreating that amazing period of European history in all its gaudy, beautiful, corrupt and hilarious glory and then promptly drizzle congealed green-screened steampunk on top! And if you want it to be a full-on, anachronistic love-in with airship-mounted flamethrowers, stop pretending it’s in any way historically accurate! Go the whole hog! Have a mechanical Tyrannosaur! Stick Cardinal Richelieu in leather!

…Ooh.

And the dialogue. Oh, god. The dialogue. It was clearly written by a team who thought they were far more witty than they really were (Alex Litvak and Andrew Davis, I’m looking at you) and while the cast, bless them, did their best, no one – not even Christoph Waltz, doing a staggeringly attractive turn as Richelieu – could redeem the continual stream of steaming cat vomit.

This brings me on, neatly, to the casting, one of the film’s only saving graces. As I say, Waltz is charismatic and delicious as usual, but it isn’t just him carrying the show. The Musketeers themselves (Matthew Macfadyen, Luke Evans and Ray Stevenson) are fun to watch¹ with good interpersonal chemistry (OT3 FOREVER) and King Louis XIII, (played by Freddie Fox, characterised as basically me in a sparkly hat) is a gigantic hilarious fop. To balance out the prevalence of heroes, I was personally foaming with delight to see that we had not one, but three and a half whole villains to choose from! Milla Jovovitch, who is my future wife by the way, does a truly spectacular turn as demi-villain Milady de Winter (but more on that in a bit), an eyepatched Mads Mikkelsen (who you may remember as the blood-weeping, testicle-flogging villain in 2006’s Casino Royale) as the Cardinal’s captain of the guard, swanning about in red brocade being all leg and blades, and Orlando Bloom.

… Orlando Bloom. Now. I hate Orlando Bloom. I’ve found him phenomenally unremarkable in everything he’s been in to date, and in every case his universal expression is the perplexed discomfort of a dog that’s been instructed to sit on snowy ground. Here, he’s the villainous Buckingham – a tarted-up-to-the-nines fop with a pearl earring and a 24-carat smirk, and he’s fucking perfect.

I’m terrified that – after his Oscar-guzzling performance as Hans Landa in Quarantino’s most recent romp, Inglourious Basterds – Christoph Waltz will be forever cast by English-language cinema as villains, and Musketeers certainly doesn’t abate my fear. But please, please, gods of cinema, if there is any justice in the world, please let Orlando Bloom be typecast for life as a scenery-chewing villain off the back of this film alone. He’s having so much fun! He’s more camp than a goth Mardi Gras! The facial hair suits him and everything! I never want to see him doing the beleaguered hero act ever again.

So the casting’s great. Except, sadly, D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman), who’s irritating, boring, and frankly too young to carry the role off with any gravitas. But all of his shortcomings pale in comparison to the humanoid plankton² cast as his love-interest, Constance (Gabrielle Wilde). She has one facial expression:



This is her expression for all things. Delivering sarcastic put-downs, being dangled from the prow of an airship, stumbling along a boardwalk a million miles from the ground and being held at knifepoint. All that face, and a monotone to match. It’s awful. It’s not even as if she gets nothing to do. She gets herself captured on D’Artagnan’s behalf by dressing as him and acting as bait³ and that could be amazing! But she does it with the charisma and presence of a bowl of cold soup.

Readers will be surprised to learn that this film does actually get a technical Bechdel pass. There are actually quite a lot of women in the film, serving – on paper – very important roles. The Queen (Juno Temple) has an entire contingent of ladies-in-waiting, of which Constance is one, and the Bechdel pass comes when she asks for her jewels, only to find that they’ve been stolen. It’s only one line, though! She spends the entire film surrounded by women, having a fun time in the garden and calling Richelieu on his bullshit to his face, but she never gets more than a meagre handful of lines. Why? It feels as if the lines she does get – there are literally only about four – and the placement of them are lip service to having to write her a part. So, in an entire French fucking court of women that practically fills the screen, they only get six lines between them. WHY? Is there a LAW against women advancing the plot? The Queen has a vital fucking ROLE in the plot, as she’s one of the chief pawns that Richelieu fucks about with!

But yet, she’s completely out-parted by… Milla.

Oh, Milla. I love you so much. You’re the lizard-eyed, carved-bicepped, bullet-dodging action queen of my dreams. This role is a fucking gift for her. Milady is a double-agent, assassin and spy! She’s a fucking Swiss army knife of bad-assery. She’s got a lockpick haircomb, icy-cool emotional control to spare, and abseiling stays. She can dual-wield a pistol and a rapier, has no problems selling people out or killing them, and appears to be literally invincible. I can’t say enough brilliant things about her. It’s all going so well! And then her clothes fall off and she becomes a lingerie model on a clock, complete with lascivious camera pan. Because, obviously, men won’t understand or enjoy a woman being badass unless she’s got as few clothes on as possible (even in a culture where the collars were big and the dresses bigger). I cried. Sex assassin, ho!

Speaking of assassins, the opening action scene is in Venice. “VENICE, ITALY!!” we’re told (to differentiate, presumably, from Venice, Barnsley). A guard stands watch on a dark canal edge. Something bubbles in the water at his feet. Suddenly, a dart is fired straight from the water into his gullet. Athos emerges, wet and masked, armed with some kind of automatic crossbow.

Meanwhile, Aramis, hooded and billowy, synchs up a viewpoint before Leap-of-Faithing down onto a gondola.

Porthos manages to get a kill-streak of 15, fighting off soldiers in a basement, earning himself a new trophy!

They have basically made Assassin’s Creed II: THE MOVIE, and split Ezio into three people.

The rage-cage descended over my eyes. HOW DARE THEY, I announced, being restrained by the two people who foolishly accompanied me to the cinema. GET OFF MY ASSCREED, I declared. People had started to stare. PRESS X TO AVOID MY ACID VOMIT OF WRATH, I continued. I was out of control. It was of great relief to everyone when the scene changed and I could be pacified with Mads Mikkelsen’s gorgeous cheekbones and mile-long legs.

All in all, a mixed bag. Like reaching your hand into pick ‘n’ mix and being unsure as to whether you’ll get a fizzy cola bottle or an enraged musk rat.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It is so blisteringly camp and sparkly that I came out wearing glitter that I didn’t go in with
• The sets and costumes are lush beyond compare
• The casting’s brilliant, with few exceptions
• It’s one for the Eurofilm nerds, with excellent performances from Mikkelsen, Waltz and a motley crew of Brits – and an unexpected, hilarious cameo from Til Schweiger, who starred alongside Waltz in Inglourious Basterds
• VILLAIN PORN!!! VILLAIN!!! PORN!!! YES!!!

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It just doesn’t know what it’s doing, with anything, ever, especially the women
• “What? You mean… just having them on-screen isn’t good enough? :(“
• The dialogue’s an experience quite a lot like snorting crushed glass
• I’d rather deep-throat a live conga eel than watch the scenes with D’Artagnan in again
• Who the hell thought model battle-maps would make good scene transition material?
• Why is D’Artagnan glaringly American, when everyone else at least tries to be pseudo-British?
• MODERN FUCKING INSTRUMENTS HRRGHNH WHY GOD
1. Aramis is a priest. I will fight anyone going for Aramis. And I will win.
2. No offence to plankton.
3. with the laziest drag I have ever seen – SHE WEARS HIS HAT! That’s not drag, that’s what I do in the hat section of John Lewis for fun.
]]> /2011/10/24/at-the-movies-the-three-musketeers-or-markgraf-loses-it/feed/ 9 7912 /2011/09/26/at-the-movies-troll-hunter-or-whos-coming-to-norway-with-us/ /2011/09/26/at-the-movies-troll-hunter-or-whos-coming-to-norway-with-us/#comments Mon, 26 Sep 2011 08:00:28 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=7414 I went to a healthfood shop today and bought NATURE SNACKS. Now, I don’t normally go into healthfood shops because I can’t understand their pitch. What’s all this marketing to people’s paranoia and fears about their bodies? Why do I go in and get a copy of HEALTH magazine in my face, adorned with a willowy, glowing woman telling me to lose weight and eat seeds? What’s all that about? I think they market their wares wrong. Instead of telling us to EAT FRUIT OUT OF FEAR OF FATNESS OR SIN, they should be all, MOTHERFUCKING NATURE SNACKS!! LOOK, THEY’RE MADE OUT OF TREES AND SHIT!!! EAT THESE AND BECOME KING OF THE FUCKING ELVES!!!!

Troll Hunter, though, gets its pitch exactly right. “TROLL HUNTER!!!” shouts the poster, in yellow, with a gritty picture of Hans The Troll Hunter’s well-defended Land Rover driving towards the legs of a truly gigantic troll. That’s what we like to see. Gets straight to the point. This is a film about a man who hunts trolls, and the trolls aren’t fucking around. That’s what it is.



That tagline, guys.

Now, I’d read a few précis of André Øvredal‘s film before I went to see it, which is something I generally avoid doing because I like to go to a film all clean of bias, but it would have been hard to remove my firmly-lodged desire to see this film, because fuck I love monsters. All the opinions I’d read started with something like, “I didn’t expect this to be hand-held-camera Blair Witch mockumentary style!” so naturally, I expected that.

However, given that information, I expected it to be a horror film about some kids who make a film about trolls.

It’s not. It’s a film about trolls.

It is literally a film all about trolls. It’s not even a horror film about trolls. It’s just about trolls. You get to know about all the different sorts of troll, how long they live, what they eat, how long their gestation period is, and what they like to do with car tyres. It’s also a sensitive portrait of the hunter, Hans (Otto Jespersen), and his lifelong symbiotic relationship with them and their territorial warfare. He’s sort of like the stoic, outdoorsy, very smelly grandpa you always wanted. He’s not your typical big, ripply, macho action hero. He’s like a grumpy, landmine-collecting Sir David Attenborough. With a beard. And landmines. I found myself, as the credits rolled to In The Hall Of The Mountain King, wanting to go to Norway immediately and try and find him and look at trolls with him.

The whole film runs, as you can imagine from something that’s shot on a hand-held camera ostensibly by film students, completely devoid of soundtrack, but that somehow makes it more immediate, more intimate: it’s peppered with little details that make it feel very real, and all the people in it less like characters that have been written and cast, but more like ordinary people, with their own failings and idiosyncrasies.  To illustrate this I need to give a mild spoiler away, so skip the rest of this paragraph if you’re invested in being entirely spoiler free! In the first troll chase, the sound techie girl (Johanna Mørck) is lost, and we presume her dead, having possibly been eaten by a ten-foot-tall troll. But she emerges from the forest, wild-eyed and grinning, practically crying with delight that the fairy-tale monsters are really real.¹ She’s neither mangled, nor screaming, nor in need of comfort, rescue or first-aid – she’s absolutely thrilled, and still clutching her boom mike. For a film that’s all about monsters and the man that hunts them, this is a very human film.

It’s also hilarious, which was another thing I wasn’t expecting. I laughed like an audience-disturbing drain at some points (seriously, never go to see a film with me, I’m awful) and clapped like a delighted child at others (see? awful). The humour and humanity help it feel true, which in turn makes the danger feel really dangerous and the tension feel really tense. It’s deeply engrossing for it.

The only thing is, it’s so different from any other film currently on offer – and indeed different from similar shaky-cam freak-fests that preceded it (hello, Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, I’m looking at you) – that it might take some viewers a little while to get into. You have to adapt. You don’t really watch it the same way that you usually watch films. It helps by giving you a soundtrack-free plain text introduction to the film as being a collection of recordings anonymously dropped off at a studio, which certainly got me into the right mindset, but your mileage may vary.

Basically, this is what’d happen if I was told to make a horror film about werewolves. It’d just end up as a film about werewolves and what they do. This is a film, then, that is about trolls and what they do. It will make you want to go and look at trolls. (But don’t go if you’re a Christian because they can smell you.)



Not pictured: the Jainist cameraman.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It’s all about the monsters and how they fit into human life, and if you like monsters, folklore and learning about different cultures, you’ll love it
• It’s pretty much unique in its combination of how it’s shot and what it offers
• It’s really, unexpectedly funny
• The people feel real, solid and …people-y
• TROLLS!!!!!!!

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• I don’t know, you might take exception to the recurring theme of them being able to smell (and liking to eat) Christians
• Shaky-cam doesn’t agree with everyone (I found it challenging to watch in parts)
• I might be in the cinema, periodically shrieking and weeping and no-one needs that
1. This bit made me cry. WHO’S SURPRISED :D
]]> /2011/09/26/at-the-movies-troll-hunter-or-whos-coming-to-norway-with-us/feed/ 14 7414 /2011/09/01/at-the-movies-the-skin-i-live-in-or-markgrafs-continued-facial-incontinence/ /2011/09/01/at-the-movies-the-skin-i-live-in-or-markgrafs-continued-facial-incontinence/#comments Thu, 01 Sep 2011 08:00:03 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=7153 Before I get stuck into this review proper, I want you to know, readers, that I have found it impossible to review without spoilers.  THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW.  If you care about spoilers for this film, scroll on down past the review to the illustrations and the “you should/should not see this film because…” bullet points.

Other thing is, there’s talk of rape in this, too.

Now, I went to see The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito) on my own, which was possibly a mistake, the reason for which you’ll realise as you read on.  I have a little snippet of anxiety left over from school whereby if I go to do something alone, I’ll be afraid I’m in the wrong place.  I’ll get my ticket, read the ticket, go to the place it says on the ticket, but I’ll still be a bit scared that I’m somehow, magically, in the wrong place.

So there I sat in the Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge, nervously clutching my mug of tea (THEY LET YOU BRING FUCKING TEA INTO THE FUCKING CINEMA OH MY GOD HEAVEN IN AN AUDITORIUM!!!!), wondering if, when the film started, it’d be the right one or not.

Ten minutes of sumptuous interiors, high-angled shots, hyper-saturated film and an onslaught of seething, brooding madness in, I realised with great satisfaction that yep, I’m watching a goddamned Pedro Almodóvar film.  That man has his favourite toys, tropes and themes, doesn’t he?  This is another film that watches class through a fish-eye lens, focussing on the life of a very well-off, in-demand surgeon (Antonio Banderas), who is currently undertaking research into the growth of synthetic human skin for the treatment of burns sufferers.  He has “help” and a housekeeper and everything.

Also, he keeps a young woman (Elena Anaya) as a pet in a locked room and does experiments on her.

This is just the set-up.  This is all revealed in the first extravagant slice of immaculately tailored, dressed and designed film.  It goes further. Every single character in this film is broken in some fundamental way.  Or if they don’t start out that way, they become that way.

The only truly sympathetic character, I found, was that of the housekeeper, Marilia (Marisa Paredes).  She’s stalwart and practical, caring and protective, and I wish she survived ’til the end, but she doesn’t.  I was surprised, actually, that there were any purely sympathetic characters at all in this film – it’s Almodóvar, no-one is innocent ever!  And, indeed, she is the only fully likeable, empathic person in the film.  Everyone else is absolutely horrible in some ways, and deeply sympathetic in others, leaving you with absolutely no bloody idea what to make of them overall.

So far, so Almodóvar.

Now, while I was watching this, absorbing it like a sponge, my thoughts drifted – as they are wont to do – to the rest of the Almodóvar canon.  My favourite film of his by a long shot is Bad Education, and if you’ve not watched it, you really must – but he really does have this ongoing obsession (theme, exploration, whatever you want to call it) with transgender people, and the process of transforming gender presentation, and whether or not transformation redeems.  He’s also good at casting real trans* people as transgender characters, which is something that Hollywood has yet to realise is a thing that they should fucking do, too.  “Huh,” I thought, with this in mind, watching Antonio Banderas’s distressingly hot surgeon-gone-mad leaking deep-eyed insanity all over the cinema, “There’s no trans* folk in this!  Weird, for Almodóvar, to not at least have one of us.”

And then everyone was trans* and everything hurt.

No, I’m serious.  Holy shit.  Yes!  Indeed, ALL film literature on this is meticulously devoid of spoilers (and I’m ruining that now, hahar!) but the pretty young thing Scary Dr. Richard is keeping as a toy/pet/experiment/wife replacement/wall-to-wall security camera work of art (I’m not even joking) is the bloke that raped his daughter and has been surgically rebuilt to look like a cis woman as punishment.

Now, before I explore that comprehensive cinematographic clusterfuck in more detail, I’m going to make a quick aside here and say that this film also deals with consent and choice, and what happens to our minds when these basic human rights are removed from us.  There’s a lot of relatively graphic sex in it, and not all of it is 100% doubtlessly consensual, so please bear that in mind if you’re off to watch it.  There’s also non-consensual body modification and surgery, none of which is graphic, but the treatment of it is brutal and plays upon the mind’s ability to patch in worse realities than that to which it’s denied visual access.  And there’s also kidnapping, gagging, drugging, imprisonment and so on, all of which is beautifully and luxuriantly filmed for your horrified pleasure.  Nothing is sacred, no-one is innocent, and everything is broken.  It’s amazing.  It’s like, as the film goes on, it peels off layers of scabs to reveal more horrible things underneath.

Back to the sex reassignment thing, then.  This is the first time I have ever seen in a film the notion of sex reassignment as punishment.  I’ve seen castration as punishment (The Ladies Club), I’ve seen rape as punishment for being transgender (Boys Don’t Cry) but I’ve not seen this.  Now, my initial reaction was, “ASDLAKSJFLDKG HOW DARE MR. ALMODOVAR USE THE REALITY OF SEX REASSIGNMENT LIKE IT’S SOME KIND OF DREADFUL, FEARFUL THING THAT ANYONE WOULD HATE TO HAVE HAPPEN TO THEM” and then I realised that he’s actually written a pretty good precis of what it’s like to be a trans man.

Vicente, the rapist of Richard’s daughter, and let’s ignore the rape part for the moment, is taken away and forcibly reassigned “female”.  He’s given a vulva, new skin and breasts, and from the looks of it, a new bone structure and voice, too.  (And there’s also the bit where Antonio Banderas chains him up and shaves him with a straight razor, which gave me that’s-my-kink related problems…)

But he still identifies as Vicente – despite quite literally wearing Richard’s dead wife’s face (the reason, I presume, that the part of Vera is not played by a trans woman) – is tortured by how he now has all these different dressy, make-up-y and vaginal intercourse-y expectations of him, and finds solace in yoga and opium to help him forget the pain.

Dude, that’s me.  Except without the yoga and the opium and… a few other things, too, but the main theme is there.  This is the non-consensual assignment of a sex and attributed gender role that you just aren’t.  He plays along and acts the part, but only as long as he absolutely has to before he can escape.

So that was the first time I ever sympathised with a rapist in a film, the end.



Seriously. Watch his films and tell me if I'm wrong. I'm not.

Apparently, people walked out of the preview screening here in Cambridge, which surprises me.  There’s nothing graphic (other than sex) in this film, and really, then, you’re only left with the themes to run with, and I can’t really see how you could be disgusted to the point of walk-out over the themes in this film.  The cynical feminist in me wonders if the very idea of sex reassignment is really that disgusting to some people…

You should see this film because:
– It’s Almodóvar’s most comprehensible and accessible film that I’ve seen, and would make a nice introduction to how brilliant his work is
– It’s absolutely brutal, terrifying and bizarre, and those are all qualities that make good cinema
– It’s beautifully made, perfectly cast, and the soundtrack made me cry
– You won’t see another film like it, ever

You should not see this film because:
– HOLY NON-CON TRIGGERS, BATMAN
– Antonio Banderas is problematically hot and it’s difficult to watch him being such a terrifying pile of mess and insanity without fancying him a lot
– OR AT LEAST I THOUGHT SO, BUT THEN, I DO HAVE THE WORST TASTE IN MEN EVER



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]]> /2011/09/01/at-the-movies-the-skin-i-live-in-or-markgrafs-continued-facial-incontinence/feed/ 8 7153 /2011/08/18/at-the-movies-arrietty-or-markgraf-loves-studio-ghibli-forever-what-a-surprise/ /2011/08/18/at-the-movies-arrietty-or-markgraf-loves-studio-ghibli-forever-what-a-surprise/#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2011 08:00:43 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=6917 I’ve just been to see Arrietty, people. Like, literally just this minute got back in after the 2.3 mile (I checked on Google maps) schlep from my favourite cinema. I’m hot and I’m sweaty and I’m tired. Better make this review a bloody good one.

So, Arrietty is an adaptation of Mary Norton’s childhood-favourite series (and don’t forget the films!) The Borrowers, which is about an ecologically invalid subspecies of human beings that are inexplicably about five inches tall or less and basically subsist off stolen goods and services. This adaptation is by Studio Fucking Ghibli, who also did my favourites Howl’s Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke. Oh, and not forgetting the godlike Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro.

I literally couldn’t love Studio Ghibli films more if I tried. They are a tour de force in animation, steadfastly championing the 2D cel-shaded animation genre like the 24-carat geniuses they are. Pixar and Disneamworks can’t touch them. People are leaping frogs about Pixar producing its first female protagonist!! with the (and rightly so) hugely anticipated Brave – but Studio Ghibli have been writing fantastic, inspirational female protagonists since they first began with Sheeta in 1986’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky. I mean, come on. While we’re fannying about here in the West with bloody Sucker Punch apparently making history with having so many female protagonists, they’ve made things like Princess Mononoke, where not only is the title girl a complete badass, she’s also actually not by-the-book squeaky blameless sacrificial-lamb benevolent. She has power and flaws and rage and potency and – wait, this is a review of Arrietty.

Arrietty is the first film to be directed by the Studio’s newest induction to directing, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, and it’s absolutely magnificent. I am slightly ashamed to admit that, while I read the first Borrowers book when I was a kid, I can’t remember much about it, other than Arrietty being great fun and very empathic as a main character, and that I wanted to know exactly how they made their clothes. The film does an awful lot for scale fetishists like me (SMALL VERSIONS OF BIG THINGS THAT ARE JUST THE SAME!!!) and explores in quite some visual detail the things that will change at that level of minutiae – in particular, surface tension and the behaviour of liquids. How they pour tea! Is amazing! I squealed in the cinema!

The story is simple and quite static. It takes place in only a few days, and really, nothing huge happens in the vast scheme of things, but that’s just it: from your perspective as an audience, nothing much has changed at all. But from Arrietty’s tiny perspective, everything has! Her house that she’s lived in all her life has had to be abandoned, she’s met more of her own species, having believed that her family were the only ones left, and she’s made friends with a human boy, despite her parents, Pod and Homily, warning her of the inherent dangers therein. Everything’s changed. Her whole worldview has been rocked to the core – and yet Yonebayashi keeps us, the audience, at this cool, gentle, static distance with his long still shots of water dripping off the edges of plants and Cécile Corbel’s gentle music. It’s amazing. It’s like he does perspective with your perspective.

That was the most amazingly pretentious sentences I’ve ever written and I’m not even sorry. But yes. There’s a lot of focus on scale, naturally, in this. That’s where the magic is. From the moment you see Arrietty, fleeing expertly from a laugh-out-loud-amusingly-faced fat cat, you’re enchanted. She’s so small. And everything she has in her life, from bay leaves to fish hooks, feel so familiar and worn with use. You’re captivated between the alien nature of observing life lived at 1/8th scale, and being charmed by how familiar it is at the same time. It’s perfect. Dude, did I mention the tea?

The main difference between (what I remember of) the first book and the film is firstly that it’s vastly simplified, and the inclusion of Spiller (“Dreadful Spiller” in t’books) as a motion catalyst. He’s introduced having rescued Pod from a sprained ankle in the rain – and my god, the moment he came on screen? I fell in love. I am going to cosplay as that boy every day for the rest of my life. He’s completely amazing. He’s wild and awkward and ingenious and has a KETTLE FOR A BOAT. He’s a little bit of a shoehorned-in love interest of sorts for Arrietty, but the shows of affection are mostly from him to her – she’s far too busy escaping crows and playing catch with woodlice. And even then, there’s only arguably two of these awkward Spiller-y shows of admiration, so you needn’t worry – as I do – that an oafishly stapled-on heteronormative TWOO WUV will impinge upon your film-viewing.

Basically, I want Spiller to have a cameo appearence in everything. Which will happen, because I will dress as him and climb onto sets of productions and films and things and run around in the background.



Overall, this is a brilliant directing debut for Studio Ghibli’s brand spanking new physics-obsessed boy, and I’m very excited to see what else he’ll be doing in the future. I’d compare him to Miyazaki, but I can’t, because all I’ll do is shriek “HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE” seventeen times before passing out in a flood of my own tears.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• You should always see a Studio Ghibli film immediately and without reservation because if you don’t, I truly believe you become one of the soulless
• This is a charming adaptation that I think does Norton proud – if only for the fact that it engrossed me so completely that I now have to return to the novels!
• Niya the cat is side-splittingly hilarious
• THE TEA. LOOK AT HOW THEY POUR THE TEA.

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• I can only think of one reason that’d prevent you from seeing this film, and that is if all the cinemas in your area immediately burn to the ground tonight.
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