Doomsday

SCENE: It is the near-future, a darkened recording studio in Dean Street. Neil Marshall, Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins, Malcolm McDowell and the bloke that plays the punky Scottish bloke, are sitting in the semi-dark, looking at a big plasma TV screen, sipping frappuccinos from cardboard cups, waiting for Doomsday to flicker and whirl into action. Each fingers a sheaf of notes on which are written pointers and factoids and marks they must hit to give the upcoming DVD commentary a rounded and well thought-out feel. Eventually, the Universal logo, trumpeted with blaring pomposity, glides into view.

Neil Marshall: Good morning, everybody, I’m Neil Marshall, the director of Doomsday. To my right, we have, er…

Scottish bloke: I’m [rustling of paper] …Craig Conway.

Marshall: That’s right. And then, Malcom McDowell.

Malcolm McDowell: Hello.

Marshall: Bob Hoskins.

Bob Hoskins: Awright.

Marshall: And the lovely Rhona Mitra.

Rhona Mitra: Hi.

Marshall: And we’re here to provide the cast commentary for my film, Doomsday. Here we are, then, the start of the movie.

Conway: Yay!

Marshall: Thank you, and immediately we go in to the credit sequence which you overvoiced for us, Malcom.

[In the background, McDowell's character, Kane, is explaining the plot: "Like so many epidemics before, the loss of so many lives began with a single microscopic organism. It's human nature to seek even the smallest comfort in reason, or logic for events as catastrophic as these. But a virus doesn't choose a time or place. It doesn't hate or even care. It just happens."]

Hoskins: Jesus.

McDowell: Hmmm.

Marshall: Obviously heavy exposition isn’t always a good idea. And yes, as a student of film, I’d concur with the view that when the presentation of exposition becomes awkward or wordy, it is sometimes referred to by the perjorative expressions ‘plot dump’ and ‘info dump’. In written fiction, the term is additionally used to indicate giving information by exposition rather than revelation through action and dialogue; if such passages are well-written and intriguing, they may be described as “info-dumping” with no pejorative intent. This method has long been used in classic drama and modern productions where the plot is the consequence of preceding events that would either weigh down the production or would reveal too much, spoiling the mystery. Exposition is also necessary in some dramas since it can be from the point of view and perception of a character, and may or may not accurately reveal the facts. Examples of such well done exposition include Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the 1956 film Forbidden Planet.

Conway: Cool!

Hoskins: Are you reading that out?

Marshall: No.

McDowell: You are, that’s from Wikipedia.

Marshall: It’s not. It’s what I think.

Hoskins: Right.

Marshall: Oh, now, here we go. The ship shoot-out. Sets the tone, I think. Lots of steel and chrome shine, like Walter Hill, referenced later of course with tribal figures, as a timely homage to The Warriors. And this boat shoot-out is certainly a nod to the famous Usual Suspects set-piece.

[a head splatters on screen, a naked woman starts shooting a shotgun from her bath]

McDowell: Just like it, yes.

Marshall: Now, Bob, here’s your first scene, the world-weary cop explaining to Rhona what she has to do, leading her SWAT-style team into the forbidden zone. Bob. Bob?

Hoskins: …

Marshall: Bob?

Hoskins: I was in The Long Good Friday, you know.

Marshall: I know, but here we see y-

Hoskins: And Mona Lisa. Neil Jordan! Jesus.

Marshall: Sure, but here your charac-

Hoskins: Nixon, 24:7, Enemy at the Gates, Last Orders…

Conway: Outlaw?

Hoskins: Fuck off.

[silence]

Marshall: OK, OK. Ah, we’re at the bit where the team go into the ruins of Glasgow now, looking for the cure. Here the armoured cars are pulling up outside the hospital. This is my homage to-

Hoskins: Aliens.

Marshall: Well done, Bob.

Hoskins: Well done? It’s a direct steal. Even the dialogue is nicked.

Marshall: It’s an homage.

Hoskins: It’s nicked.

McDowell: Crikey, isn’t it, though? I mean, precisely.

Conway: Oooh! Look! Akakakakakakakak!

Marshall: And now the crew are captured, and it’s your scene, er [rustling of paper] …Craig.

Conway: It’s me! It’s me!

Marshall: As you can see, we’re going for that Mad Max, post apocalyptic, Warriors look, with the mohicans and all the motorbikes and cars covered in shields and plating and spikes and so on.

Conway: Spikes.

Marshall: Spikes, yes. The jets of flame in the cannibalism scene add a sense of urgency and I think that the Can-Can with the blokes in kilts dancing to Bad Manners adds a touch of the macarbrely humourous.

McDowell and Hoskins: Really?

Marshall: Really. Absolutely. And similarly, the use of Good Thing and Spellbound in this sequence is an ironic take on the soundtracks of 1980s action films. Like when we use Two Tribes later on during the car chase.

[silence]

Marshall: Honestly.

[silence]

Hoskins: Bloody hell.

Marshall: Bob, I-

Hoskins: You know what, Neil, I really quite liked The Descent. I thought it was a smart, attractive, well-paced horror movie, way way above any of the other sort of dreck you get these days. It starts off nice, with a good evocation of loss and recovery, then moves carefully and intelligently through the gears, never once treating us like idiots. And it looks good, too, some of the outdoors scenes and caving sections were absolutely gorgeous. When my agent called, I thought “this’ll be a good one Bob, do this one”.

McDowell: Me, too.

Hoskins: But fuck me, what’s this? This is shit! It goes at a million miles an hour and Rhona looks fabulous but, and no offence, love, she acts about as well as my last fart. Sorry, sweetheart, but you do. Me and Malcolm are doing our best here, you know. OK, my accent goes from East End Bob to Posh Bob a little too much, but we’re still the best things up there. Poor old Sean Pertwee’s not bad either, but you only give him a dozen lines before he gets offed. Jesus, man!

Conway: Ooer.

Hoskins: And what’s this lad’s role in all this? All that shouting and gurning and screaming bollocks? It’s a fucking pantomime. Fuck it, I’m out of here. Malc, beer? Groucho in two minutes? I just need to get some cash out.

McDowell: Good idea. Let’s go.

Marshall: Bob! Malcolm! I put that money in your pockets.

Hoskins: And we gave you what you wanted. You then twisted it up into a right kebab of a movie, all mixed up rubbish covered in chili sauce so you can’t taste anything but the blood and diesel.

Marshall: It’s fun.

McDowell: For thirteen year old boys. See you. Hold up, Bob!

Marshall: Bob! Bob! Malcom! Come back! O bollocks to ya! I’ve got Hugh Jackman on my next movie, you know? Yeah, Hugh Jackman, that’s right!

[a door slams. Silence falls again. On screen a Bentley is crashing spectacularly through a bus. Neil Marshall looks at Mitra and Conway]

Marshall: You two are quiet. Cat got your fucking tongues?

Conway: Oooh, I’m telling.

Mitra: What’s this again?

[Dull thudding as Marshall hits his head repeatedly on the desk]

Funny Games U.S.

It’s been ten years since Michael Haneke made Funny Games in his native Austria, and bludgeoned his way to a slew of prizes and nominations at the top festivals, with plenty of people praising that particular movie for its serious arty take on our obsession with violence. Since then he’s made a couple of very good films, including the hugely underrated Caché (Hidden), but now he decides to come back with a frame-for-frame word-for-word US remake of that original attention-grabbing work.

Why? Funny Games US, apart from the English language content and actors switch, is exactly the same as the first Funny Games. Maybe that’s the point; maybe in saying that the Arthouse crowd got it, now it’s time for a stab at the mainstream, pun intended. And the American mainstream at that…stick in Tim Roth and Naomi Watts and it’s time that Ohio and Iowa and Colorado got to see what violence is doing to us all.

Well, maybe. The fact is that it’s only the Americanisation of the voices within the film that have changed. Check out the respective trailers (1997) and (2008) to see just how painstakingly close they are to each other.

The story is very simple. A rich and faintly nauseating family are taken hostage by two preppy adolescents, tortured and then subjected to various humiliations. Throughout, the violence done to these people is all off-screen (more often than not the camera suddenly leaps to an outside shot, gazing at the house, or simply exits the room), and at various points the main protagonist, Paul, looks at the audience and challenges us directly to consider what it is we’re not only viewing, but taking a tacit part in.

And it is challenging. It’s very challenging. Although we don’t actually see the violence (except in one sequence, which is quite explicit, but tellingly doesn’t actually happen…a confusing thing to say, I’ll get back to this in a minute) we do see the results of it. Similarly, a forced humiliation of the Naomi Watts character, where she is forced to strip, only shows her crying from the shoulders up, but afterwards we see her tied up in her skimpies, which means we actually aren’t saved from any of the nastiness. I’m certain that the point of this is Haneke sneering, “you’ve come to see a gauche show of sex and violence, well we’re not going to do that, we’ll just show you how it affects people” and that’s all very good, but to show us a boy lying mostly out of camera shot, but a mess of blood and brains on the wall is just as bad, frankly. And just because you don’t see a woman’s tits, to concentrate then on her, half-naked and crying uncontrollably, covered in snot and spittle, and shivering in fear, is again a fucking awful sight. We’re not saved.

The so-called explicit scene involves Naomi grabbing a shotgun and blasting one of her tormentors in the stomach, his bloodied body flying through the air, to land crashing splattery against the wall and floor. “That wasn’t supposed to happen!” screams Paul, at which point he grabs the TV remote and winds back the action to the point where he can grab the gun first.

Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.

There are clever-clever tricks like this all the way through and rather than appear smart, they appear smartass. Paul’s to-camera sequences last in toto less than a minute; a wink, a sentence, another sentence, and really, that’s it. It depends on your take with regard to the fourth wall; do we break it down, or leave it to the viewer to decide, well, what he wants to decide? I loved Francis Urquhart’s soliloquies, but they were extensive character-led mises en scene that were an essential part of the story. Here, they’re a brief, oi-did-he-just-speak-to-us distraction, and in conjunction with the rest of the film they, the structure and the plot and the whole didactic mix of the thing, add up to a pretty patronising treatise on how rubbish we are as an audience for allowing this kind of thing to happen. How fucking dare we watch exploitatively violent or sexist films?

Well, hang on, that is a good point, of course. Our attitude to violence and sexual violence in particular does need to be challenged, of course it does, but in handing the teacher’s role to Paul (Michael Pitt) it’s a position that loses much of its impact. Not that Pitt isn’t a good actor, in fact he’s excellent, and is scary and menacing and fiercely intelligent in the part, but I would have much preferred that he was someone we could sympathise with. That really would have fucked with our heads. The main problem with all of the characters, even the young boy, is that nobody here is particularly sympathetic. Roth is vanilla and a bit weedy, Watts seems spoilt and whiney, and the two offenders are supremely irritating. In a stagey movie that cries out for a leftfield dynamic what we actually have is a group of annoying people shouting at each other. Instead of making the awful Jumper, how much more interesting would it have been to have seen Jamie Bell as Paul? Or - perhaps a little too old - Christian Bale?

And so, almost all of the impetus and impact is lost because although it’s horrible to see people suffer, it would have been much more interesting to see people we connect with going through the wringer. And without the snide asides. But then, let’s be honest here; it’s not an actor’s film, it’s Haneke’s, and he’s the one talking directly to us. Pitt and Watts and Roth are just his mouthpieces. And being talked down to like this gets tiresome fairly quickly. After half an hour, Roth says to Pitt “I get it, I get what you’re trying to do,” and so do we. If there’s anything more wearing than being talked at like a child, it’s working out the big idea before the smug reveal.

I wanted to like this because there are certain cinematic staples that are swept aside. Cute dogs and cute kids? Cavalry coming? Pretty people triumphing? All good references to screw up, but - and there’s no other word to use, I’m afraid - they’re wasted. So it’s not a shame on us Mr Haneke, trust me.

Happy-Go-Lucky

I’ve always been a big fan of Mike Leigh; ever since Keith nasally intoned to Candice-Marie that they should ‘ask Ray’, I’ve thought that the man really knew what he was doing in pointing the camera at the slightly mad and slightly sad.

As the years have gone by, of course, he’s gazed longer and harder at the madder and sadder, culminating in the devastatingly effective and completely wonderful Life Is Sweet and, within that film, what I have always considered to be the ultimate cinematic showdown, between Jane Horrocks as the bulimic Nicola and her Mom, Wendy, played by Alison Steadman; an almost too emotional to watch explosion of tough love. It makes me weep just to think of it. Since then, we’ve had the heartbreaking Secrets & Lies and the unutterably grim Vera Drake, plus too many others not to have to own up and consider that the man is a genuine maestro, a real Brit superstar of the big screen. Leigh’s CV might be interpreted as that of a miserabilist, but with Happy-Go-Lucky he gives his gloom merchant critics a cheery wave and invites them to the knees-up that is life with Poppy.

Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is a thirty something primary school teacher tootling her way around Camden market, giving everyone the time of day and just being essentially, a right little smile fest. When she has her bike nicked (”we never even got to say goodbye!”) she determines to begin driving lessons, and in doing so runs right up against Scott, a man with a diametrically opposed world view to her. Scott has, to quote Leigh, a “lot of rubbish floating around inside his head”. A misanthropic meritocrat with more than a hint of racism and social prejudice (he locks the car doors when he sees black pedestrians) he’s a little ball of fury that reminds you in many ways of Naked’s Johnny - there is the same obsession with Revelations and the grinding inhumanity of The System - but where Johnny was genuinely funny and had a filthy scally charm, Scott is just a sad fucking weirdo aching to be sectioned.

Poppy’s effervescently cheerful outlook is severely challenged, then, and it doesn’t take long for them to come to blows.

Outside of this, Poppy’s life looks relatively normal; she’s a good friend to her long-time flatmate Zoe, a loyal sister to hopeless Dawn, and a valued member of staff at her local school. She tries to do the odd evening class, including two hilarious flamenco sessions, have a good time, and just get by. She accepts her lot, but tries to lift others. “You can’t make everybody happy,” says Zoe, “there’s no harm in trying, though,” replies Poppy.

Scott the instructor, a tightly-wound performance by the great Eddie Marsan, sees it differently (of course), not only is he appalled to think that Poppy is a teacher, but he is seriously critical of her easy-come-easy-go lifestyle. When Poppy infuriates him with vague intimations that she loves Zoe and then refuses to expand on it, his mind creates a spiral of frustration and disapproval that threatens to pop the bulging veins in his temple.

It is this dynamic that drives the main part of the film, but there’s also a tentative new boyfriend angle to fit in, and also the possibility of a bullied child to test Poppy’s cheery outlook. At first, it seems that the bullying will trip her up, and Leigh allows us a few minutes to mull over the possibility that perhaps all there really is to this girl is a big smile and…that’s it. Or, maybe, there is a sinister, yet to be mined seam of darkness which will be uncovered as she’s tested more and more. But actually, no.

Poppy is genuinely happy-go-lucky, it’s her philosophy, and also her strength, and when she approaches the problem with her pupil head-on you realise that the glint in the eye is a twinkle with a bit of steel mixed in.

Unfortunately, ironically, this powerful sense of helpfulness that drives her character produces the one duff note in the whole movie, a scene that sticks out like a pimple on Poppy’s shiny face, right in the very middle of the story. With a bewildering sense of the inappropriate, Leigh suddenly - and it really is connected to nothing that goes before or after it - drops Poppy into a situation that no-one in their right mind would countenance, where she finds herself in a bleak, dark, run-down area, for some reason trying to befriend a mentally distressed drunken tramp. It’s five minutes of hand-wringing, frankly, and any editor worth his salt would surely have faced up to his director and insisted he let it go. Hawkins is faultless in the scene, but we work out that Poppy has backbone, that she’s not just a bit of fluff, and it almost ruins what is in essence a brilliant film. At the end, we see Poppy stand up for herself and face down the spike of much more realistic threat, and that’s all we needed.

Happy-Go-Lucky is a terrific movie by a terrific director, that will blind-side a lot of his critics (although they’ll sit up with glee at that dozy central scene), but it’s not Leigh’s film, it belongs completely to Sally Hawkins. I’ve been head over heels for her for years now, and to have her there in every scene, in every frame almost, is a true delight. It may be that you’ll find her irritating for the first half an hour (she’s not to everyone’s taste) but she will win you over with what is easily the most charming performance of the year.

Four days later, and I’m still smiling, and you can’t say fairer than that. Poppy, you can’t make everyone happy, but you managed it with me.

for the film, for Hawkins

Du levande (You, The Living)

Imagine that a man stands before us all and says that this movie is dedicated to “You, The Living”.

And then some odd things happen.

There are a few titters and some people trundle home with a faint smile.

The next day they think they have seen a work of genius.

You, The Living is about the human condition. It is about us. It is about me, you, and everyone we know. Life, and that. Sometimes it captures the absurdities of just that subject, but always it tries for the absurdities of just that subject. Ultimately it is the absurdity that sticks.

There are a couple of scenes that stick, too, scenes that made me smile…but genius? Don’t make me laugh.

Actually, no, do make me laugh. Please.

Roy Andersson, the creator of this multi-award winning, highly lauded piece of nonsense has grabbed an absurdity all his own; that boring jokes, stagey sets and a little blob of street cred will grab you a mess of awards.

Don’t believe the hype. Just because it’s dedicated to you, doesn’t mean it’s for you.

[and, in a new irregular feature of the show, an addendum]

I was feeling sore about the brevity of it, although if you see the movie you might see what I was trying to do. Daft move. Don’t try style again, understood.

OK, so I’ll add a little more.

You, The Living starts off with a man lying on a couch, fast asleep. Outside, an approaching train gets louder and louder and then goes by (unseen, his apartment is clearly quite a way up), waking him. He sits bolt upright and looks really startled. Then he addresses the audience and tells us he had a bad dream. Similar dreamers punctuate the film every 20 minutes or so, each of them then going on to describe their dream. Between these sections there are sketches, normally 90 seconds or so in length, each describing a facet of human emotion or interaction, the vast majority taking place in single static shot formality.

Once in a while, a character already seen will pop up in another’s sketch. An austere and overlit bar is used as a vague meeting place for some of the repeated characters, but there’s no attempt to layer the connectivity any deeper than that.

It’s baffling and confusing and - tellingly, for me - the most affecting sequences are the longest ones; one, where a man describes trying to do the pull-a-tablecloth-from-under-a-fully-set-table trick, and another where a girl has a fantasy wedding to her rock star idol. In both, the central characters break out of the one-shot routine and actually get to move around and do things. These two sequences are very good, and the tablecloth guy in particular is terrifically funny and, yes, he made me laugh out loud.

But then, I laughed at Little Britain once.

In the end, I looked at the poster on the way out and thought, “‘gales of laughter’? Are you having a laugh?” Now, I don’t want to come across a Philistine, but really, it’s just not very good at all.

[●REC]

I’ve always really liked perky. Perky goes a long way with me. And in Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) perky gets redefined as a bored and eager-for-any-story TV reporter, out for some thrilling on the spot reportage for a Spanish programme about people who work through the night, kicking her heels in a Barcelona fire station. With the crew sleeping and an empty station house to slope around in, she and her cameraman Pablo, long for the alarms to go off and a real-life call out to get their adrenalin pumping.

Be careful what you wish for. Soon, the call comes in and they’re racing through the night to an apartment block where an old woman is reportedly locked in her flat. Inevitably, there is more to the call than that, and it seems the woman is hysterical and very violent. Bewilderingly, after the old girl attacks a policeman, the fire crew, Angela and Pablo, and the other residents, find themselves locked in the building by the emergency services. And then they hear screams, and moments later, a body falls to the bottom of the stairwell.

[●REC] unravels pretty quickly from this basic premise and the young directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza waste absolutely no time in cranking up the tension with off-camera sounds, shaky glimpses of various atrocities and an almost endless soundtrack of screeching from Angela, who turns from perky to petrified very rapidly. It’s a movie made almost entirely of clichés (whispered to-camera fear, green creepy night vision, wobbling running shots, static but out-of-focus periods when brief exposition is needed) , but it’s told totally straight-faced and with a fierce conviction that genuinely makes you believe what’s put in front of you.

Sure, bodies on gurneys start to twitch; absolutely, there are people talking in front of glass screens when an arm shoots through and grabs them; and totally, the last ones alive are the reporter and her fella…but so what? [●REC] works within its limited frame (no pun, probably) because it just does it, delivers, and then gets out. At a smidge under 80 minutes, this is exhilarating stuff, and if something rubbish comes along - and there are a few wincingly bad moments - then a moment is all they are. The wedged-in back-story when - stupidly - an attempt is made to explain the situation, is unnecessary and ham-fisted, but it’s over swiftly and we’re back in the mix soon after.

One thing [●REC] isn’t is boring, and that’s a lesson Cloverfield palpably never managed to learn.

However, I think that the Horror POV genre should now be closed. Really. If we include the no-radar-blip Brit thriller The Zombie Diaries, of which I’ve only seen the trailer, then this has been a very heavily ploughed field for yer average fan…2008 has thrown some bad (Cloverfield, natch) and some good (Diary of the Dead) at us, but with [●REC] it’s clear that we probably have all the entries we need for now, thanks very much.

That isn’t to say that it is at all a bad film; indeed, I rate it pretty highly, but I think that in a fresher market it might have made a bigger and better impact. Plus, with other people being pulled quite justifiably across to see El Orfanato, it will almost certainly lose out to the high end, slick, Spanish thriller crowd, too. At the moment, it’s not going to get the audience it deserves, and that will be a shame.

½