Looking For Eric

Richard Thompson sang, “There’s a love you can’t survive / And it burns you up inside”. Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) has bought into this philosophy wholeheartedly, despite his heartache lasting 30 years, and now, weary and run ragged by life’s endless obstacles he seems a broken and dispirited man. Small wonder then that he steps fully formed and real into the latest Ken Loach film, the master of grimy social realism plucking another beaten-up loser from the gloomy milieu of modern life and giving him a good kicking to make a point.

Like Peter Mullen in My Name is Joe, or Bruce Jones in Raining Stones, Evets is painfully perfect, a wrecked and dented little soul beset on all sides by the iniquities of pretty much bloody everything that hoves into view. He has a crappy job as a postman, a tip of a house and two reckless and seemingly lost stepsons who treat him with contempt. But his deepest scar is for Lily, the girl he panicked over and left all those years ago, and whose memory he keeps in stasis buried in a trunk filled with too-painful-to-touch memorabilia.

What he manages to snaffle, unbelievably, but probably due to one too many sneaky tokes on his kids’ weed stash, is a little bit of advice from King Eric himself. Cantona. Ooh, and indeed, ahh. Yes, that Cantona. Appearing in his room as he contemplates darkly on where his life has taken him, little Eric is suddenly presented with his hero, King Eric. Cantona becomes Eric’s confidante, his guide, a trusted friend and teacher.

At first, Eric is bemused and worried (“I’m still getting over the sardines thing” he groans, referring to Cantona’s famously obtuse and baffling comment to the press in 1995 when asked for a quote following his kung fu kick on a racist fan), but gradually the idle idol wins him over with some genuinely touching aphorisms; when Eric contemplates suicide, he firmly but clearly states, “we always have more options than we think”. When asked if his first love might hate, or worse, feel ambiguous towards him, Cantona looks into his wine glass and answers in French. After much pleading, he tells Eric, “the noblest vengeance is to forgive”. Eric takes this to mean that Lily may have forgiven him, but we know that it also means he must forgive himself.

Cantona is brilliant in this sidekick role. He chivvies Eric along with flair and brio, never once losing his mystique as the unknowable thinker, but also managing, in one fantastic moment of pure comedy genius, to puncture the pomposity just enough to ground him for a moment. Talking about the pain of the nine month suspension after the kung fu incident, Eric thinks it’s about time he showed his hero a little sympathy: “sometimes we forget you’re just a man,” he says, with genuine concern. He is met with that impassive gallic slab of a face; “I am not a man. I am Cantona.” The timing before he cracks into a smile is the best you’ll see in the cinema all year.

I could have watched this odd little double act for hours, but, as with Mike Leigh’s conscience wobble in the middle of the otherwise sublime Happy-Go-Lucky, where he suddenly remembered he needed to ’say’ something and so veered off on a ten minute schtick about homelessness, Loach also wakes up and realises that fuzzy and funny comedy romance isn’t going to be enough. And so, off we go, but with less restraint than Leigh, into a long and ultimately quite grim treatise on gun crime in Manchester. This injection of plot is so jolting it manages to derail the film for almost a third of its length, and is, for a period, genuinely distressing. Obviously, it’s a subject that should and must be discussed, but it slams into the wonderful first part of the film so hard as to leave you seriously disoriented.

Ignoring a few almighty plot holes with a casual wave of his hand, Loach tacks on a feel good coda, but it doesn’t really restore the movie back to the simpler and more engaging story of Eric rediscovering his purpose. It’s odd that just as the audience think they might have found Eric, and enjoyed searching for him, the director seems so eager to punch them into submission with rather too much of his accustomed and probably predictable social commentary. And if that isn’t the ending you wanted or hoped for, well, don’t blame me.

Terminator Salvation

At a splodge under two hours, Terminator Salvation (you don’t really want a précis, do you?) is striving for the lean actioner tag. Lots of bang for your buck, speed, noise, the whole nine yards. I think we all know what we’re talking about.

What you actually get is Arthur Dent’s cup of tea from the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser; a movie that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a proper film.

It’s hard to deny that it has many things going for it: a proper, and let’s call him determinedly focussed, star (Christian Bale); a long-standing franchise to hang its shit from; a gazillion dollars’ worth of top-notch CGI; a loyal fanbase, and…the most bafflingly inept, bloodless, soulless and downright hopeless direction imaginable. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fucking mess.

McG (McG, fercryinoutloud) helms the thing like a child throwing toys around his backyard. He chucks items and people about with happy abandon, creating admittedly some eye-popping images (although, ILM and the many other visual effects organisations, really get that nugget of kudos, surely?), but what he manages to create isn’t an interesting, challenging or even fun take on the man vs machine story. No, it’s a bucket of pebbles with ideas written on them, shaken up and down to see what flies out and what makes a noise.

McG (I’m not going to be able to write that anymore now, sorry) is the man who managed to wibble away so uselessly on Charlie’s Angels, if you care to recall, so he really knows how to fuck things up. Given the keys to the kingdom and allowed free rein, he pisses the whole thing up the wall like an unloved ginger ASBO lacking his Retalin shot.

There is no structure, no helpful narrative, no style or finesse, no consistency. Brief, flat, uninflected reactions between so called characters move the story along a little, but it’s essentially one slam-bang action sequence after another. The interaction between actors is executed in the same way that children make their GI Joe or Barbie dolls talk to each other before segue-ing to the next mud fight; yada yada bang bang.

Throughout, I felt insulted. The audience I watched it with was similarly dislocated and hostile. People talked constantly. The laziest parade of uninterested punters ever trooped in, barely looking at the screen it seemed, some almost 40 minutes after it started. When the expected boxes were ticked (the sadly predictable litany of, “I’ll be back,” or “come with me if you want to live,” and “there is no fate but what we make,” trotted out as supercilious bullet-points) it raised a titter. But this is the cinema of ‘They Will Come’. It is a triumph of expectation and arrogance.

A smug and ignorant waste of time.

Drag Me To Hell

Where were we? Oh yes, Lesbian Vamp-…no, not that. That was awful; I mean, I could tell what they would have liked to do, and all, but it was just painful. Sorry, I know I’m unpicking an old thread here, but it’s important. LVK failed badly, to some extent because it was colon-cloggingly shit from titles to credits, but mostly because it didn’t understand the genre it was trying to parody (and that is such a high-minded term for what they ended up doing). If you don’t actually ‘get’ that which you want to go after, you’ll never manage it. There is a moment in the film where the fat one is sat there, covered in goo, trying to espouse this clunking po-mo drivel about the whole vampire mythos, and it’s supposed to be funny and erudite and cutting, and it fails utterly. It’s not even particularly ham-fisted. It’s just wrong. And if you get that wrong, then you have no right to be there.

Now, what the clueless idiots should have done, was save all their money and had a big night out watching Sam Raimi’s rollicking ride, Drag Me To Hell. Had this come out 9 months sooner, that first film would never have been attempted. Drag says more about horror, and with more passion and more…dammit…authority, than pretty much anyone (including your Rodriguezes and Yuznas and early Peter Jacksons) can manage. He grew up in the fucking briar patch, man.

Drag Me To Hell (what a determinedly B Movie title that is) opens in a storm, and more or less continues in that vibe until the very end. A cursed boy is, well, dragged to Hell, and then the title (in mahoooosive white on black ) thunders onto the screen behind the earth-moving soundtrack. Aaaarrgh and, indeed, Grrrrr! Bathos intervenes, and our next stop – of course – is a bank, where pretty loan manager Christine (Alison Lohman) is in the hunt for a promotion against her creepy co-worker Stu. Her boss says she has to toughen up, so she does, by refusing to grant a mortgage extension to hideous old hag, Mrs Ganush (Lorna Raver, spectacularly gross and over the top). In her despair and growing disgust at the young woman’s hardline, the crone curses Christine with an ancient spell, totemising a button from her coat, which will in three days lure a violent demon towards her, which will drag her, you guessed it, to Hell.

I know, I know, enough with the Hell dragging. We get it already.

So, obviously, you won’t need to be told that for the next three days Christine’s predicament gets worse and, with each attempt to extricate herself, she just hauls herself further and further into abyss.

And, yes, you’d be right. That is just what happens, but it’s the way that it’s done which so thoroughly entertains. Raimi hasn’t done this knockabout horror for ages, but he’s not lost an ounce of his verve and dynamism. The trick is that he knows his roots, he knows what works. He understands what his audience are expecting, and manages to give them it and so much more besides. I would think that the last time I winced and laughed all at the same time and in such doses, was the last time I watched Evil Dead II. Raimi is great at the horror, but he’s great at the gags, too, and when he’s really on a roll the horror is the gag. The gumming scene alone attests to that, but there are many more examples, my personal favourite being the perfect illustration of what not to do at an open casket wake.

His medium is always going to be the pitch perfect physical comedy. If there’s such a thing as slapstick horror, then this is it, but what lifts this to be something really special is the extraordinary way in which he can invest the most mundane objects (a handkerchief, a slice of cake) with nail-splintering tension. Alison Lohman helps hugely, of course, in fact all the crew here put in smart, knowing performances (Clay Dalton’s baffled rationalist boyfriend is so splendidly sensible) and play it straight almost up until the end. Joyously, there is just enough time for Christine to pull out an almighty Grand Guignol grave-robbing faux finale, rammed with thunder and Ash-like posing, backlit by the lightning. She doesn’t quite grunt, “groovy”, but she’s not far off.

Raimi is clearly a huge fan of legendary horror movie Night of the Demon, for it is referenced constantly, and the climax of the film is almost a steal. But, look, if you’re going to have the shit go down backed up by a booming great orchestral score, then there can be no finer homage to make than to Tourneur’s awesome 50s classic. It just puts into extra relief how the guys who made Lesbian Vampire Killers never had a bloody clue.

The posters say that Drag Me To Hell is a Masterpiece. It’s not, that accolade belongs to Night of the Demon, but it is a masterclass, and as a companion to that earlier film, it’s very nearly as worthy as it gets. And that’s saying something.

/