Hulk Smashed

Peter Bradshaw's film reviews for The Guardian are a joy to read, especially when he's writing about something he hates. His latest publication is a hilarious demolition job on The Incredible Hulk, written entirely in a monosyllabic Hulk-speak. Here's a sample:

"Same old story. Superhero movie give superhero mirror-image antagonist. Like in Spider-Man 3. Idea rubbish in Spider-Man 3. Idea rubbish here. Hulk versus humanity important thing. Cancelled out here. Basic problem ... critic not believe Hulk angry. Hulk just roar. It not look convincing. Not truly seem angry. Critic think about this. Critic decide why. It because Hulk not swear. Hulk just say: "Hulk. Smash" etc. If Hulk shout C-word ... different matter. Then Hulk look angry. Sound angry. Not here. Hulk genteel. Critic remember Ang Lee version. Ang Lee version slagged off. Yet rubbish new Hulk film make that look like Citizen Kane. Critic exit cinema miffed. Film take away two hours of critic's life. Critic not get time back. Ever. Rarrrrr."

It gave me minutes of fun. Almost as good as the time he took Lassie out to the old barn and shot her:

"Come here, girl, I'll have none of this nonsense, we're going home. I'm going to grab you by the scruff of your neck, and ... oh no! The preternaturally intelligent collie has got away from me again! Determined and lovable creature that she is, she's wriggled out of my grasp and got back outside the Odeon again! Barking fit to beat the band! Oh for goodness sake you daft canine, just say what you think about these films on offer! Narnia? King Kong? Hmmm ... wagging your tail. And what do you think about Lassie? ... Oh dear. Has anyone got a plastic bag and some rubber gloves?"

Actually, the one-star review of The Incredible Hulk is just one of four drubbings dished out today to Irina Palm ("awful in the way that somehow only British films can be"), The Happening ("fatuous anti-rational, anti-scientific piece of smuggery"), and Priceless ("gruesomely unfunny and tacky comedy-farce"). Is somebody feeling grumpy?

Carry On Philatelising

Let's be clear about this: I've never been a stamp collector. I have nothing against those who do, even if there is a popular suspicion of people who can spend a fortune and a lifetime acquiring and studying tiny bits of gummed paper; I just always had other things to be a geek about. But this week I might just change my mind and get my hands on the Royal Mail's latest issue of philatelic (OK, I might be making words up here...) things. With the slightly spurious excuse of marking the anniversary of 1958 (the release of both Dracula and Carry On Sargeant), they've released six commemorative stamps celebrating the output of Hammer Film Productions and the Carry On... franchise.

There can hardly be a more striking indicator of something's passage from cultural anathema to national treasure than its appearance on a stamp, those little paper markers that are safe enough to be seen by the postman or sent to Santa. These films were not always seen through such misty eyes, as Derek Hill's 1958 Sight and Sound review of The Curse of Frankenstein reminds us:

Instead of attempting mood, tension or shock, the new Frankenstein productions rely almost entirely on a percentage of shots of repugnant clinical detail. There is little to frighten … but plenty to disgust.

C.A. Lejeune reckoned that the same film was ‘without hesitation… among the half-dozen most repulsive films I have encountered’, and she wasn't alone in condemning the Hammer films as prurient, sensationalist grotesqueries. What is it that makes them seem so tame and comforting now? In his article "Hammer's Cosy Violence", from Sight and Sound's August 1996 edition, the novelist Jonathan Coe refers to "the sense of blanketing comfort which the very (over)familiarity of the regular Hammer ingredients now induces." If horror is based on the unknown and unfamiliar, perhaps it was only a matter of time before the endless replaying of horrific events in the homely grounds and corridors of Bray Studios in Buckinghamshire would become reassuringly heimlich. Or maybe its because nothing involving Peter Cushing could be as noxiously cynical as the kinds of teen-obsessed, gash-n'-slash McTorture movies that currently preoccupy the centre-ground of the horror genre (hand me my slippers - over there, next to my cardigan).

It's a bit more difficult to salvage Carry on Emanuelle from the bargain-bin purgatory in which it belongs, but Hammer's finest moments can still inspire with a wickedly creative bit of blood-letting. Having said that, who wouldn't want to adorn their next envelope with the image of Sid James dressed as the Sphinx? It's just a good job you don't have to lick their backs anymore. I must say, though, that the sight of the Queen's head looking on impassively in the midst of these scenes is mildly disconcerting...

Funeral Parade of Roses

"A feverish collision of avant-garde aesthetics and grindhouse shocks (not to mention a direct influence on Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange), Funeral Parade of Roses takes us on an electrifying journey into the nether-regions of the late-'60s Tokyo underworld.

Cross-dressing club-kid Eddie (played by real-life transvestite entertainer extraordinaire Peter, famed for his role as Kyoami the Fool in Akira Kurosawa's Ran) vies with a rival drag-queen (Osamu Ogasawara) for the favours of drug-dealing cabaret-manager Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya, himself a Kurosawa player who appeared in such films as Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and High and Low). Passions escalate and blood begins to flow - before all tensions are released in a jolting climax." (Plot Synopsis from Lovefilm.com)

It's tempting not to review this film, but just to show a bunch of stills and leave them to stand alone as a recommendation to view the whole thing. Almost any frame can be grabbed and held up as a beautifully composed image, but mostly it becomes fascinating for the barrage of eclectic formal experiments.








While these stills show the exciting variety of shot scales and compositional spectacles, they don't convey the ways in which the mash-up of documentary and fictional techniques drives the film forward. The film provides a mix of extreme narrative contrivance and naturalistic, Brechtian interview with ordinary people and cast members out of character. Peter's interview to camera even hints at the plot twist which has not yet been revealed. Matsumoto wanted to blend together his disparate cinematic influences; he hails from a documentary background, but was fascinated by Italian neo-realism and the avant-garde, and each of these modes complements, comments on or occasionally undermines the others. Moments of apparently naturalistic documentary footage give way to blatant fabrication and vice versa. At every step, the fiction is undermined by images of its construction. Scenes are linked with bursts of leader film or still images. A sex scene focusing on Eddie's ecstatic facial expressions is cut short by a shot of the scene being filmed, revealing that he is writhing alone on the bed. Is this scene telling us that Eddie is acting in adult films, or is it an entirely self-reflexive insert to puncture the fictional bubble? Even his final scene of self mutilation is interrupted by a contact shot of stills of the scene being shot, and a cheerful commentator who asks the viewer: "Frightening, isn't it?"

Whatever it did for progressing the prominence of gay people in Japan, this is less a piece of authentic queer cinema and more an example of captivated sub-cultural tourism. The transvestite body is treated as a fascinating object, shot in fragments during sex scenes, and its always a surprise to see the lead character out of make-up; the camera seems to revel in the illusion that Eddie's face creates. The pleasured look on his face, the gripped sheets, clutched necks, scraped backs and intertwined fingers would look like the average hetero sex scene if they weren't dressed up in the garb of queer cinema. Maybe that kind of passing is the whole point of the film, but rather than allowing the queens the indulgence of full immersion in their masquerade, the film thematises the wearing of masks as a universal human trait to hide our true selves. Many scenes draw comic effect from the incongruity of pretty girls who are also prey to the inconveniences of guy stuff:

In addition, Eddie's traumatic past comes worryingly close to claiming a correlation between incestuous child abuse and homosexuality, but these are minor reservations for an otherwise electrifying, exploratory film that keeps turning up one flourish of visual wit after another.

Read more:

Jasper Sharp, "Funeral Parade of Roses."
Review at Cinema Strikes Back.
Review at Lucid Screening.
Review by Kevin Wilson at Thirtyframesasecond.

Twentynine Palms

[This post contains major spoilers for those who haven't seen the film.]

What am I to make of Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms (2003)? It consists mostly of a couple (David and Katia) based in a motel but exploring the surrounding desert in their Hummer. They argue, buy an ice-cream, swim in the pool, have rough sex, fight in the street, kiss and make up, before being attacked in the desert. David is beaten and raped and, clearly more than a little unsettled by the experience, stabs Katia to death in the motel. The last shot is of David's corpse sprawled in the desert while a traffic cop radios for help, trying in vain to convince headquarters to give a damn.

Dumont claims that the film is an experiment in building tension through a lack of dramatic action, and that the film's sense of escalating menace is constructed in the spectator's mind in response to the films longeurs. This is an interesting proposition, implying that we are so conditioned to expect violence to be encountered in the barren landscapes of America(n cinema) that its absence arouses suspicion, but it is rather disingenuous. If the film aims to document the quotidian minutiae of a couple, with all of their bickering, musing and sexual grappling before smashing it all sideways with random acts of unforeseen violence, then that mission is undermined by a series of portents and correspondences that pepper the film. While it is not obviously signposted that David will end up stabbing Katia to death, in retrospect the structured build-up to this conclusion is certainly in evidence.

The spectral premonition of sexual abuse haunts Twentynine Palms in David's controlling subjugation of his partner in most of their couplings, most troublingly when he holds her underwater to go d(r)own on him. His gurning, groaning orgasms are echoed by those of his rapist. Are we supposed to read this as some kind of poetic justice for David's own barely-suppressed sexual aggression? Earlier in the film, he expressed little sympathy for a victim of abuse on the Jerry Springer show, which is either a cynical commentary on the distancing, dehumanising effects of trash TV, or a character note to inform us that something is not fully functioning in the empathy division of David's brain.

The violent conclusion might lead us to look for clues as to why it happened. Are the attackers a group of disgruntled dog owners? Are they marines from the nearby military base? The military motif, symbolised by the Humvee they drive (Darren Hughes has argued that it's all about the Hummer), crops up more than once. Before stabbing Katia, David has made a messy attempt at shaving his head, mirroring an earlier conversation in which Katia contradicted herself by saying that she found soldiers very handsome, but she would leave her lover if he cut his hair so short. This was obviously a moment that teased a jealous nerve in David, and its difficult now not to see it as yet another structuring device with its reference to an earlier sequence. A scene of each character locking themselves in the bathroom is also repeated:

Katia eventually charges out of the bathroom and leaves the motel room, at which point David grabs her arm to create the illusion that it is he who is throwing her out. When the scene is mirrored at the end of the film, David emerges with murderous purpose, issuing the scream that we have heard him give throughout the film - during sex, while being rammed from behind by an SUV, and finally while slaughtering his girlfriend.



The violent denouement is also foreshadowed by David's aggression towards Katia throughout the film. Wild, grunting sex is one thing, but we see him hit her several times, and a shot of him creeping up on Katia in the pool is clearly designed to suggest the claim he wants to stake on her body. So, I don't think I'm being a naive prude when I feel that this is not a picture of an everyday couple going about the typical couply routines, but a deliberate sequence of narrational cues building up a suggestive picture of a man waiting for an external influence to tip him over the edge into bloody madness.




I find his films engrossing and beautifully composed (yes, that's a cop-out piece of mitigation, thanks), but I find myself instinctively reacting against Dumont's sensationalism, and his suggestion that I need to see a violent movie in order to demythologise the artifice of the usual movie violence. But he shares with Michael Haneke an interest in everybody's voyeuristic fascination in depictions of graphic violence. Everybody's, that is, except for his own. His apparent nihilism is not ours, and his attempts to force spectators to construct their own terror and then torment themselves with it ignores his own role in engineering and administering it. Compare (OK, it maybe an unfair comparison, but indulge me here) this to Christian Mungiu's masterful generation of terrifying suspense out of bureaucratic procedures in 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days (2007), where the threat of discovery looms large but is never fully realised. Which deployment of spectatorial engagement is more productive and revealing: Mungiu's depiction of how a repressive environment causes people to internalise systems of surveillance and police themselves, or Dumont's cyclical exercise in sex-n'-death button-pushing (with the added implication that you devised and pushed those buttons yourself)?


Further Reading:

Manohla Dargis, "Twentynine Palms."

Marcy Dermansky, "Moan and Groan."

Errata, "Twentynine Palms."

Darren Hughes, "The New American Old West:Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms."

Michael Koresky, "Urge Overkill."
Nick Wrigley, "The Polarizing, MagnificentCinema of Bruno Dumont."

The Georges Méliès Blog

Just a quick note to draw your attention to the heroic under-taking by Michael Brooke to write an analytical review of every single film in Flicker Alley's 173-film Georges Méliès DVD boxset. After receiving my copy (pictured) in the post a few weeks ago, I was hoping to get time over the summer to do something similar, but Brooke's blog reminds me that it was probably way out of my range. I can't wait to spend some quality time with the films, and his work will provide plenty of illumination. Even if you don't have access to all the films, it's a fascinating read. And if blogging was an Olympic sport....

http://filmjournal.net/melies/

Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani

For the benefit of anyone who just can't get enough football over the next couple of weeks, or who is pining for another seafood-based sports drama, I draw your attention to Minoru Kawasaki's Kani-Goalkeeper [follow this link for the trailer]. Kawasaki's follow-up to his acclaimed The Calamari Wrestler is just another tale of a big crab who finds acceptance when his amazing goalkeeping abilities are revealed to the world. It's one of the many films with a fabulous title and concept, which I haven't seen, and which will no doubt disappoint when I do eventually see it. But for that intervening period, I'm glad that somebody took the time to make a movie about a giant decapod crustacean and his safe pairs of hands. According to its director, it's "like Forrest Gump, but with a crab." What's not to like?

Irony Man

I could start by fabricating the excuse that I was queueing for the Jia Zhangke screening and it was sold out, but whatever lie I come up with, I ended up foregoing more edifying entertainment in order to watch Iron Man. I'd been softened up by some warm reviews, and the assurance that its politics couldn't have been more right-on if Hans Blix himself had been transformed into a cyborgic weapons inspector and spent two hours of screentime failing to inspect any weapons.

How surprised was I to find out that Iron Man is not the liberal avenger and "ally of the United Nations" that he was purported to be in a Guardian Guide cover story? A bit surprised. This is the latest in a long line of films that deals obliquely with America’s post-9/11 situation, tentatively probing areas of moral ambiguity, but rarely with a whole-hearted commitment. Certainly, it seems to be about an arms dealer who makes a moral choice to withdraw from his position of complicity in the networks of retributive, territorial destruction that his trade fertilises, but it is actually less a fantasy about how a moral interventionism might work and more a vision of how the Bush administration seems to think it already acts.

The film dresses up tortuously complex geo-politics in a fantasy of precision-engineered bodies, a convenient replacement of diplomacy with kicks and punches. To most of us, a Middle Eastern warzone is a distant, scorching, no-go area of torn limbs, twisted wreckage and unreasonable locals. Iron Man can be there at a moment’s notice, picking off bad guys (with no stray “friendly fire”), thumping some sense into those toothless desert types. He can get in and out unscathed and withdraw to his default position of non-involvement, the ultimate in convert interventionism. Surely this is meant to be cathartic, a vision of weaponised body armour that does its job as surely and precisely as the algorithms used to make the CGI happen. Digital effects make it all seem effortless – there’s little in the way of tangible physicality, so there’s an over-compensation in the thudding sound effects and rock-solid violence, and since all the effects are plotted so carefully, there's little in the way of chaos to make it feel like real, rough-and-tumble combat with lives and limbs at stake. If nothing else, this kind of eye-defying, lightning fast action can only show up the elegance of the superheroic mayhem in Ang Lee's much maligned Hulk. In Lee's film, the customary "get me the president" sequence that announces the monster as a national threat finds the Leader of the Free World on a fishing trip, barely interested in news of the green giant that is currently trashing the fixtures and fittings of the military industrial complex. There's a grander political statement in that one moment than in all of Iron Man's hand-wringing.

As a character, Iron Man is not as interesting as Robocop, whose metal prostheses were permanently forced upon him, bringing on an existential crisis that makes Tony Stark's yearning for a cheeseburger seem like a state of luxury. (Neither character is as afflicted as the protagonist of Colossus of New York, which deserves more recognition than it gets, if only for having a mournful solo piano score at a time when the theremin was the 50s sf instrument of choice.) After Spider-Man, Hulk, Daredevil and Batman, it has become customary to see superheroes grappling with the internal crises created by their public status and physical difference, so it's a big surprise to find Robert Downey Jr's character embracing the diplomatic impunity and celebrity that goes along with his alter ego. It's just a bit of a boring surprise.

P.S. The pun in the title of this post no longer matches the way my argument turned out, but I liked the sound of it, so rather than teasing out some sense of irony from my reading of the film, I thought I'd just leave it there anyway. Who's going to notice?

P.P.S. I should also note that in Iron Man Gwyneth Paltrow ‘tackles’ the most thankless decorative role offered to an Oscar winner since Orson Welles advertised fish fingers. But I have nothing substantive to say about that fact. Unless a sigh of resignation counts as comment.

Extra: Since I published this post, AP at the Movies' review of Iron Man has drawn my attention to an intelligent and far more evenhanded discussion of the film than I could manage here, and it sounds like Dana Stevens has put a positive spin on exactly the kind of thing that energised my little rant about the film:

"[The] middle section, in which the newly energized Tony tinkers with his emerging superpowers like a kid in shop class, is the movie's finest and funnest hour. But when he starts to actually use those powers, zooming to random corners of Afghanistan to save cowering villagers from evil warlords, the movie's sharp intelligence gives way to a dopey wish-fulfillment fantasy. This is what we'd like our wars to be: a clearly defined moral crusade against a bald, glowering meanie who proclaims his Genghis Khan-like ambition to "dominate all of Asia." (With an eye on potential box-office buzz kill, the movie cannily stays away from the mere mention of the Taliban, the war in Iraq, or domestic terrorism.) Tony's invulnerable, omnipotent, impossibly expensive armor is an almost touching overcompensation for the moment of extreme vulnerability in which our country finds itself."

So, is Iron Man a soothing piece of geo-political wish-fulfilment, or a deluding bit of geo-political evasion? The choice is something akin to yours.