Herzog Double Bill

A pioneer of New German Cinema, Werner Herzog has enjoyed creative peaks and overcome commercial troughs to settle on a duel artistic life, operating a ‘one for them, one for me’ strategy that allows him to parlay his work on commercial fare like Rescue Dawn (2006) and Bad Lieutenant (2009) into a slew of personal projects delving into the deepest, darkest recesses of human compulsion. A common thread in Herzog’s work is the exploration of existential, geographical and physical extremes.

From Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) to Grizzly Man (2005), Herzog presents characters driven by inexplicable desires and consumed by implacable urges that place them outside the bounds of conventional behaviour, ignoring the portents to forge ahead to their doom, swathing their folly in divine purpose. His reputation in Hollywood’s portals of power as a feral merchant of ‘chaos, hostility and murder’ has been rehabilitated in the last few years by a series of remarkable films that guided the syntax of cinema into new and strange directions.

The Wild Blue Yonder (2005)

Billed as a ‘science fiction fantasy’, The Wild Blue Yonder is a difficult film to place within any accepted parameters, taking a fanciful subject and presenting it with such unerring immediacy and plausibility that it feels like a Von Daniken novel adapted by Errol Morris. Carried with admirable gusto by Brad Dourif’s central performance, Herzog delivers a requiem for a dying planet that is at turns playful and earnest.

Dourif is an unnamed alien, an intergalactic refugee from the ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ of Andromeda whose forebears settled on Earth in an attempt to lead the indigenous population in the right direction, occupying roles of influence in government and intelligence agencies. With the Earth now barely habitable, humanity seeks to escape the planet and colonize Andromeda. The Alien must watch in despair from Earth's desolate husk as his home world is ‘adapted’ to humanity’s rapacious demands, delivering an impassioned monologue on the background to such a development.

The Wild Blue Yonder is a remarkable example of taking footage without any apparent connection and from it assembling a narrative arc, expounding grand theories from the sparsest of starting points and utilizing a charismatic actor to unify the disparate elements. The film casually throws out ideas that could provide material for a number of films - from re-examining the Roswell Incident to positing that breeding pigs marked the beginning of the end for humanity.

Dourif delivers a tour de force as the forlorn ET, narrating the ten chapters into which the film is divided with a barely concealed anger and bitterness, railing against our hubris and lamenting the neglect of our most valuable resource. Herzog slyly plays with the nature of truth, presenting us with a number of phoney experts who present their ideas with a veneer of authenticity and conviction that would lead some to believe they were credible sources if viewed outside the context of the film. 

The Wild Blue Yonder is quite unlike anything that has preceded it. A particular highlight is Henry Kaiser’s footage from the base of the ocean, which is used to replicate the conditions of Andromeda. Kaiser captures the manifold life forms that reside there with stunning clarity, detailing an environment so eerie and otherworldly that it outstrips anything the human mind could create, a world where beauty and brutality have learned to co-exist. Herzog’s intentions are as unclear as ever; but whether consciously or otherwise, The Wild Blue Yonder presents an argument for environmental responsibility more persuasive than all the PowerPoint presentations in the world.

Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

Inspired by Henry Kaiser’s underwater footage in The Wild Blue Yonder, Herzog set off to Antarctica at the height of the Austral Summer; keen to understand the sort of person who would live in a place with five months of permanent daylight and determined not to make a mawkish anthropomorphic film about penguins. Herzog travels to the McMurdo research centre, where his romantic notions of Scott and Shackleton are shattered by the base’s prosaic environs, with its modern amenities and resemblance to a construction site. Stifled by the cosy modernity of McMurdo, Herzog sets off into the heart of the planet’s most inhospitable terrain, providing narration in his breathy, mellifluous timbre.

Along the way Herzog encounters all manner of striking scenes that repudiate the Disneyfication of nature and highlight the creeping homogeneity that is eroding our planet’s diversity - the Teutonic fatalist in Herzog comes to the fore as he details the cruel realities of a landscape that is brimming with life above and beneath the surface. The ultimate rebuke to those who seek to dull nature’s sharp edges and manipulate it for their own ideological purposes is the sight of a penguin breaking from its group, heading towards the mountains and certain death without any apparent motive.

‘Everyone who’s not tied down falls to the bottom of the planet,’ says William Jirsa, a linguist at McMurdo. Herzog meets a succession of ‘professional dreamers’, restless, obsessive souls who must keep moving, searching for something in the stillness and silence they failed to find elsewhere. There is the driver who was accused of kidnapping a child in Guatemala, the plumber whose fingers signify he belongs to the Mayan royal bloodline, the Iron Curtain refugee who is always packed to leave at a moment’s notice and the woman who travelled to Peru in a sewage pipe. That such stories are commonplace tells us much about those who are drawn to Antarctica.

Herzog laments the dilution of our adventurous spirit, how our innate curiosity and desire for personal glory has transmuted into fatuous pranks and ludicrous record attempts, using footage of Shackleton performing an unconvincing recreation of his quest on a soundstage to illustrate this adulteration. Encounters at the End of the World is a celebration of those hardy souls who remain on the fringes, enduring the hardship out of a desire to mitigate human damage and gain a deeper understanding of their surroundings.

‘It’s a horribly violent world,’ says Sam Bowser, a biologist studying life beneath the ice. We are treated to the full majesty and menace of the primordial environment that the Tetrapods clambered to the surface to escape. Equally primal is Mount Aribus, whose lava lake sends jets of magma shooting above the crater rim. A dedicated team studies the volcano, risking their health and sanity in an attempt to understand her awesome power and potential impact on humanity.

What is abundantly clear in Encounters at the End of the World is just how precarious our existence is, that if we wish to escape the fate of the dinosaurs or humanity in The Wild Blue Yonder, we must respect nature and fear its capacity to inflict catastrophic damage. Herzog’s ambivalence is unmistakable; he shrinks from the sunlight but marvels at the callous configuration of it all, but even this most lugubrious of voices sees that it isn’t all chaos, hostility and murder.  

The Molly Maguires (1970)

In the world of the movies, distinct cultural locales have historically been rendered with such staggering ineptitude by Hollywood that one has to wonder whether those responsible for recreating these milieus had ever set foot outside the confines of Burbank, California. With a few notable exceptions, they ended up coming across like a gaudy Vegas resort or theme park attraction, co-opting a few key cultural signifiers to present a cost-effective approximation of authenticity. Even with the advent of the runaway production, the blight that is CGI has served to restore this factitious veneer to everything from Ancient Rome to the depths of space. Though it was shot entirely on location, the makers of ‘The Molly Maguires’ kindly imbued their production with all the folksy charm one has come to expect from anything with a whiff of ‘Irishness’ about it, in case anyone were confused as to its provenance. But despite its lack of historical verisimilitude, ‘The Molly Maguires’ is a superior piece of entertainment that kicks against its limitations to address some serious issues.

It is 1876 and life is tough, to say the least, for the denizens of a Pennsylvania mining town. A society of militant coal miners known as the Order of Hibernians has begun committing acts of sabotage on collieries under the name the Molly Maguires, in an attempt to bring about better working conditions. Enter James McParlan, an ambitious police detective and fellow Irish immigrant who, under the auspices of the Pinkertons, must infiltrate the Molly Maguires and prevent the next attack. Working down the mines and seeing firsthand the gruelling conditions under which the miners work, McParlan begins to sympathise with the Hibernians’ cause and falls under the spell of its inspirational leader, Jack Kehoe (Sean Connery). McParlan must decide whether to hand over Kehoe and his associates to the Pinkertons and work his way up the career ladder, or follow his conscience and take up the cause of workers’ rights.

One of the standout moments of ‘The Molly Macquires’ is its bravura pre-title sequence - lasting fourteen minutes and completely without dialogue, it compares favourably to the way in which Sergio Leone used silence to establish tone in ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. Unlike Leone, however, Ritt refuses to exult in beautified gore. Ritt brings a degree of reality to the film’s action sequences, an approach which forces the viewer to confront the consequences of conflict, something the merchants of stylised violence would recoil from. A deft and underrated director with an impressive body of work, Ritt could always be relied upon to provide assiduously composed shots packed with detail and subtle psychological pointers. The pace is deliberately slow, lingering on shots in a way that would terrify a less assured director - the average shot length is ten seconds. James Wong Howe’s cinematography captures the stifling atmosphere of this blighted landscape, breathing life into the autumnal palette of Eckley, Pennsylvania. Sadly, his good work is undermined by a production design that has a tendency to stray into cloying parody and an incongruous score from Henry Mancini, which adds unneeded grandiloquence to such a downbeat work.

Ritt was a master at getting the best out of his cast - evidenced by the fact that he directed thirteen actors to Academy nominations. Though ‘The Molly Maquires’ don’t quite live up to this pedigree, the two leads turn in performances that stand up surprisingly well to contemporary standards, unlike the majority of their best remembered roles. To me, Sean Connery has always been one of the great overrated British actors, an inert, one-tone performer whose legacy is being continued by the likes of Sean Bean and Clive Owen. But Connery’s lack of emotional dynamism is a perfect fit for the aloof Jack Kehoe, despite his conspicuously well-tanned frame - fresh from a golf course on the Bahamas, no doubt. Richard Harris, on the other hand, was always a captivating figure; few actors were, or are, as comfortable before the camera. He brings much needed credibility to the role of James McParlan, inhabiting the role in a way that goes beyond the brutal technicality and affectation of the Method, his dolorous eyes and beleaguered mien constantly dramatizing the character’s dilemma. Frank Finlay as Pinkerton officer Davis and Samantha Eggar as Mary Raines embody the forces pulling McParlan in opposing directions, with Davis encouraging McParlan to act in the interests of personal advancement and Raines exhorting him to accede to the dictates of his heart.

Beneath its mawkish exterior, ‘The Molly Maguires’ has some interesting points to make about the holy trinity of church, state and commerce that rules America. A telling moment is when McParlan, on seeing a wealthy industrialist called Gowan after a football game, comments that Gowan didn’t mind who won as he owns both teams, the game itself providing a metaphor for the way the system is rigged in favour of wealthy elites, a de facto class system. It is small moments like this that makes Walter Bernstein’s screenplay so interesting. ‘The Molly Maguires’ explores the dark side of America’s ‘land of opportunity’ mythology, positing that a life away from thankless toil is beyond the reach of most of its citizens, that the country’s prosperity is built on the backs of countless millions of anonymous drones. McParlan comments that he is ‘tired of looking up and wants to look down’, and it is this mood of duplicity that ultimately prevails. The film confounds expectations by refusing to wallow in phony heroism, notions of guilt and absolution being usurped by the idea that greed makes cowards of us all.

The Chase (1966)

‘The Chase's’ journey to the screen was a turbulent one. This infamous misfire was supposed to be an integral part of producer Sam Spiegel’s legacy, a prestige picture to rank alongside his previous landmarks ‘The African Queen’, ‘On the Waterfront’, ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ and ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. But it ended up being a protracted battle of wits between Spiegel, its meticulous writer, highly strung director and capricious leading man; fatally compromised by the egos it strove to appease. ‘The Chase’ was a failure from which Speigel would fail to recover, his reputation for efficiently steering high-profile pictures to completion forever ruined. Hoping to rekindle Marlon Brando’s waning enthusiasm for acting, Spiegel tried to shoehorn as much material into the ever-changing screenplay that would appeal to his star’s social conscience, much to the chagrin of its screenwriter, the redoubtable Lillian Hellman.

In ‘The Chase’, a small Southern town is thrown into turmoil when one of its former inhabitants, Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford), escapes from prison. In the course of fleeing, Reeves accidentally kills a man whose car he is trying to hijack. Meanwhile, the town’s embattled Sheriff, Calder (Brando), tries to prevent tensions from boiling over between sections of the town’s denizens, all of whom agree that he is nothing more than a puppet for local oil magnate, Val Rogers (E.G. Marshall). Bubber becomes a mythical figure amongst the town’s youth, and his return threatens to blow the lid off an affair between Roger’s son, Jake (Edward Fox), and Reeves’ wife, Anna (Jane Fonda).

It’s difficult not to compare ‘The Chase’ to a film directed by Penn a year later. By going back to the ‘30s, Penn was able to make a much more radical statement about ‘60s ferment with ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ than he ever would have been permitted to under the aegis of the tyrannical Spiegel. There are signs of this bravura in some of the set-pieces, but ‘The Chase’ feels staid by comparison. One of the few areas in which the film does excel is its cinematography; Joseph LaShelle captures a sultry Southern summer with aplomb. Away from the chaos of the shoot, the second unit was given a degree of latitude and captured some striking scenes of Reeves’ escape, injecting some excitement into the largely laborious opening act. In hindsight, many of the film’s other problems could have been ameliorated before the project was set in motion, had all the forces guiding the film been pulling in the same direction.

Redford is wholly unconvincing as the rugged con on the lam. Although his legendary screen persona had yet to be formed, he is just too inherently clean cut and suave a figure to be plausible and elicit sympathy for Bubber; there is no suffering on his face or privation in his voice. Equally, English actor Edward Fox was a strange choice to play the disillusioned scion of an oil empire, a casting blunder that was never reconciled. His on-screen relationship with Fonda is fatally stilted; the pairing come across as two actors with incompatible approaches struggling to make sense of the muddled material given to them. Fonda - whose acting here is as embarrassingly earnest as that of Bree Daniels in ‘Klute’ - gamely strives to invest her character with an inner life, but she wasn’t a gifted enough actor at this stage to overcome the script’s limitations. Brando looks tired and pudgy, his accent alternating wildly - a portent of his unintentionally hilarious, scene-sabotaging turn ten years later in ‘The Missouri Breaks’. His trademark mumble slowly winds down into a barely audible groan, as if  resigned to the fact that he was participating in yet another dud. Angie Dickinson is required to do little more than look pretty and not fall over the scenery as Calder’s wife and Robert Duvall is as reliable as ever as Rogers’ henpecked VP, a man trapped between the strict conservatism and growing permissiveness of opposing generations.

‘The Chase’ is symptomatic of many films that emerged in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, articulating a deeply ingrained mistrust of the South and its culture - the South of ‘The Chase’ and countless other films through the ‘60s is a feral, retrograde place in danger of being overwhelmed by its own reactionary, inflammatory machinations. Reeves is a patsy who is playing for the town’s sins, with only Calder, a man of solid liberal principles, to protect him from the baying mob. ‘The Chase’ was a vehicle for Brando to promulgate his political beliefs - his decision to commit to the film was made on this understanding - but in setting out to encompass as many of Brando’s favoured causes as possible, the film ends up fudging its approach to each.

‘The Chase’ says nothing about race relations that wasn’t said with greater clarity in ‘The Defiant Ones’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, and would be dealt with to great acclaim a year later in ‘In The Heat of the Night’. What began as the crux of the narrative is only alluded to, used as a plot device to propel the love triangle that ends up taking precedence over the film’s noble intentions. Who knows, maybe the film would have been a more effective plea for racial tolerance if Bubber Reeves had been played by a black man?

Unthinkable (2010)

...Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Torture.

Hollywood’s attempts to address its nation’s quixotic ‘war on terror’ have met with lopsided results - for every ‘The Hurt Locker’ there is a rash of ‘Renditions ’, ‘Brothers’ or ‘Lions for Lambs’. In an industry that seems congenitally incapable of sincerity at times, its forays into a real world with real consequences have often been spectacularly crass. A good case in point is this straight-to-DVD offering, which fancies itself a ‘psychological thriller’ addressing ‘contemporary concerns’.

H (Samuel L. Jackson) is a black-ops interrogator indentured to the shadier elements of the intelligence community - possibly because he has committed war crimes. He gruesomely tortures a home-grown terror suspect (Michael Sheen) who claims to have planted nuclear bombs in three American cities. By-the-book FBI agent Brody (Carrie-Anne Moss) is appalled by what she sees and indulges in a protracted bout of hand-wringing over this flagrant breach of international law. Brody and H argue over the efficacy of using torture, with Brody maintaining that any information gained under such conditions is inherently unreliable and H insisting that it is a necessary evil to protect American citizens.

This ‘brave, uncompromising’ look at the murky world of national security is in reality a TV movie with pretensions, a plodding ‘race against time’ thriller dressed up in esoteric terminology and cutting-edge finery. Jackson’s character is a mixture of Jack Bauer and Axel Foley, a wise-cracking psychopath we’re encouraged to sympathize with and root for. The contrast with Moss’s character couldn’t be starker. While H is a family man, Brody is a childless, unmarried career woman with a chilly demeanour - although we’re told that, like every career woman, her biological imperatives will win out in the end. Brody is portrayed as an uptight obstruction for her insistence on invoking the Geneva Convention at every turn while the maverick H is taking care of business. This dynamic essentially plays like a mismatched pairing in a cop movie, which would be fine if it wasn’t being used in such a grave context. It seriously undermines the film’s already shaky credibility that the characters fall into this archetypal ‘good cop, bad cop’ double act. Sheen bleeds and screams his way through the film as the ‘all-American’ Jihadist, but no attempt is made to provide any dimension to his character, to explain his motivation beyond the usual ideological bluster. This would have been a more interesting film than the one presented, a character study to which the gifted Sheen would have been better suited.

A noteworthy feature of ‘Unthinkable’ is the relative absence of middle-eastern characters. It shies away from making the connection between Islamic fundamentalism and young, disenchanted Muslim men. If they really had been committed to dealing with the issue in a frank, realistic way, the filmmakers surely wouldn’t have baulked at the idea of featuring such a character. Their bravery obviously only extended so far. ‘Unthinkable’ may believe it is a dispassionate attempt to encourage debate and address the issues in an even-handed manner, but it is nothing of the sort; the narrative arc leaves little doubt as to where its sympathies lie. Brody is there to present the illusion of balance, but its opinions are so firmly fixed and the dialogue so perfunctory that it feels like a 1950s propaganda piece. I kept waiting for it to pull back and reveal some deeper insight, but no such revelation occurred.

‘Unthinkable’ is blind to the intricacies of its subject matter, peddling easy answers and presenting a worldview as hopelessly atavistic as the zealots it sets out to decry, plumbing new depths of apologia and chauvinism. Its ultimate message is that torture works, that the ends justify the means, long-term consequences be damned. H is depicted as a man of action hamstrung by politically correct Quislings, a true patriot desperate to save his countrymen by any means. This is a shameful glorification of American Exceptionalism; a concession to those who believe that global treaties are an obstacle to domestic security, that the checks and balances preventing the abuse of executive power can be overridden on a whim. It’s sad when issues as pressing and complex as this are reduced to fodder for formulaic, ham-fisted thrillers. I have no doubt that Donald Rumsfeld would heartily approve.   

Days of Wine and Roses (1962)

This adaptation of J.P. Miller’s teleplay is an intriguing anomaly in the career of Blake Edwards, a director renowned for helming lightweight fare like ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’, ‘The Pink Panther’ and ‘10’. Likewise, this marked something of a departure for its star, Jack Lemmon, who had carved out a niche playing lovable, befuddled everyman in the likes of ‘The Apartment’ and ‘Some Like It Hot’. ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ is an interesting film historically, marking something of a bridge between the production-line output of the old studio system and the daring, taboo-breaking new spirit that would emerge towards the end of the decade and reach its apotheosis with ‘Easy Rider’.

The film charts the courtship and marriage of Joe Clay (Lemmon) and Kirsten Arnesen (Lee Remick). Joe is a high-flying Public Relations man, which in reality involves little more than kowtowing to the egos of his upscale clients, whether it be procuring women or finagling flattering press coverage. Kirsten is the assistant to one of Joe’s top clients; a bookish young woman who prefers chocolate to Joe’s chosen vice. Joe eventually introduces Kirsten to the anaesthetizing joys of alcohol. Now with a child to care for, Kirsten and Joe descend into the hell of full-scale alcoholism, their hard-living lifestyles coming into conflict with their cosy domesticity.

‘Days of Wine and Roses’ is shot in downcast monochrome, Phil Lathrop’s photography noticeably darkens with the characters’ worsening circumstances, the expressionistic lighting patterns and slabs of shadow increasing as addiction’s grip tightens. Henry Mancini’s Oscar-winning score does much to articulate this slide into the depths of despair, with its doleful, jazzy tones. Edwards sticks to delicate pans and noncommittal medium shots for the most part, a decision that lends genuine significance to the few close-ups he uses - as when Kirsten’s father offers Joe a drink; his dilemma is etched all over Lemmon’s famously expressive face.

Lemmon is captivating as a world-weary cog in the machine; his impeccable comic and dramatic timing are equally in evidence here. He imbues an essentially unlovable character with much needed empathy and humanity, underscoring Joe’s misgivings about the ethical vacuum in which he operates. Kirsten’s decline is particularly heartrending, and Remick rises to the task of conveying this. She undergoes a startling physical transformation, beginning the film as a statuesque, insouciant beauty and ending it a haggard, crestfallen husk of a person. It comes as little surprise that both leads were nominated for Oscars. Though Lemmon and Remick provide the film’s core, ample support is provided by Charles Bickford as Kirsten’s redoubtable father, a man struggling to keep his daughter from following Joe down the path to self-destruction.

‘Days of Wine and Roses’ takes place at a time when America’s moral consensus was beginning to erode; when people began to question the values they’d been taught to believe in, when job security and the promise of advancement up the career ladder was no longer enough to pacify nagging doubts and frustrations. The film underlines this dysphoria. Kirsten is plagued by alarming reveries, using drink to blot out the grime she sees all around her - the world is dirty when she is sober. Jack despises the dark art of perception management, a world where integrity is an impediment to success, consumed by guilt for dragging Kirsten down with him. They are trapped in a mutually destructive union, bound by their need to seek solace in the bottle. The film’s final third occasionally falls prey to preachy moralizing in the form of Jack Klugman’s Alcoholics Anonymous leader, but any lapse into melodrama is offset by the strength of the performances.

‘Days of Wine and Roses’ is not a comic account of affable drunks or a mawkish cautionary tale - the most common approaches to the depiction of alcoholism – but an important progression in screen realism, comparing favourably to the yardstick, Billy Wilder’s ‘The Lost Weekend’. Jack Clay is up there with Harry Stoner in ‘Save the Tiger’ and Shelley Levine in ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ as a seminal role in Lemmon’s legendary career.

American: The Bill Hicks Story (2009)

When he died from pancreatic cancer in 1994, Bill Hicks entered the pantheon of pop culture martyrs. These ephemeral beings that shone so bright, these fallen idols sacrificing body and soul for their art, form the basis for a Cult of Death that has becomes a lucrative industry. We all know the names of these saintly, ill-fated figures whose gifts were as much a blessing as a curse. Their work and, perhaps more importantly, their image looms large in the collective imagination. They have become shorthand for those seeking authenticity or distinction.

We’ve all read the biographies and seen the sanitized Hollywood biopic and we think we know them; because so much of their lives reside in the public domain. They will never fall prey to the inducements that have halted many a promising artist; they will never grow stale, complacent or repetitive, they will never become grotesque parodies of their former selves.

Hicks’ brief life has been so thoroughly pored over that it seems inconceivable any new facts can emerge in ‘American’. Is it merely a hagiography, a public relations exercise endorsed by those who wish to brand him the Ultimate Outsider?

The most striking feature of ‘American’ is its visual style; various photographic techniques are used to create a unique backdrop, stylishly animating the content of the interviews. Still images are brought to life and localities recreated, given a depth of focus by raising the subject from the background, somewhat in the manner of a pop-up book. Consequently, ‘American’ has a vivid playfulness that sets it apart from the staid, humourless format of so many retrospectives, capturing the essence of Hicks’ sardonic worldview.

The most remarkable thing about Hicks’ upbringing is just how prosaic it was, he grew up in a comfortable suburban home with Southern Baptist parents. But Hicks was possessed of an inventive mind that saw how ripe for parody his home and school life was. He began to do stand-up at the age of fifteen; comedy was a means of escape, saving him from the drab respectability he dreaded. His lifelong love/hate relationship with Los Angeles began with a brief, frustrating move there, whereupon he succumbed to the loneliness and uncertainty that is the city’s default setting.

It was on his return to Houston that his work underwent a marked change, due in no small part to his entree into the world of heavy drinking and hallucinogenic drugs. His stage presence became more confrontational, his material darker, he started dressing in black and perfected the ‘Kinison scream’. As a consequence, some of his earlier fans deserted him and he was no longer asked to perform on TV. Ignored in his own country, Hicks was embraced by audiences in Canada and Britain, where his coruscating attacks on American foreign policy chimed with popular sentiment.

Of course, all of this is common knowledge to anyone who has read Cynthia True’s ‘American Scream’, or the panoply of other biographical works that have sprung up in the years since Hicks’ demise. ‘American’ presents no real new information, but it does offer a fascinating document of Hicks’ development as an artists and a person, charting his passage from a lovable teenage comic doing impressions of his dad to a prophet of doom kicking against the spiritual malaise of the hoi polloi, the hypocrisy of the religious establishment, the poltroonery of the political class and the cupidity of Corporate America. The home movie footage shows a different side to Hicks, outlining just how carefully cultivated his on-stage persona was, he is relaxed and personable, a world away from the ‘man in black’ he was renowned as.

Hicks’ credo was ‘love not fear’, something that is often forgotten by those who dismiss him as an ‘angry’ comic. There was always a motive behind his ire, something that set him apart from contemporaries like Sam Kinison. Fanciful as it may sound, Hicks’ ultimate ambition was to share what he’d learned from his drug experiences, which he believed had set something free and put him on the path to nirvana. The mystical bent of his later material is informed by his drug experiences, providing a perspective that is aeons ahead of the blandly observational shtick that prevailed on the circuit. This insight instilled in him a state of oneness with the universe, but put him at odds with audiences seeking more pedestrian fare.

He saw through the reactionary bluster of the Reagan/Bush years, with its adoration for the military-industrial complex and veneration of flag and fatherland. He wanted his audiences to be able to see that they were being misled, imploring them to evolve with him. But his call went unheeded; America rejected his vision; he was viewed as a renegade for speaking out against the first Gulf War.

Like Richard Pryor before him, Hicks refused to be browbeaten, to adapt to the demands of television executives and movie producers.  He explored subjects comedians usually shied away from or dealt with in a facile manner. He travelled to the darkest recesses of the subconscious, challenging preconceptions with purity and profundity. 

Was Bill Hicks ahead of his time? He’s still ahead of his time.

We need Bill Hicks more now than ever. Heaven only knows what he would have made of the madness that has ensued in his absence.

‘American’ is the definitive portrait of man whose impact on the development of comedy is incalculable.

Heartless (2009)

Youth and subculture are perennial lightning rods for the delicate sensibilities of polite society, with each transmutation serving to stir the fear and suspicion that first rumbled onto the silver screen with the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. The ‘Chav Horror’ motif that was used to grisly effect in ‘Eden Lake’ seems to be developing into a sub-genre of its own, with the tracksuited ‘yobs’ as our very own version of the demented rednecks in American ‘backwoods terror’ flicks. On the surface, ‘Heartless’ sounds like just this kind of ‘Daily-Mail-reader’s-wildest-imaginings-come-to-life’ endeavour, with its marauding gangs of ‘hoodies’ terrorizing communities, gang disputes spreading beyond their traditional boundaries and ominous tower blocks housing all manner of iniquity. But this is more than a crass exploitation film, channelling tabloid outrage for a quick buck.

Jamie Morgan (Jim Sturgess) is a timid photographer born with a heart-shaped birthmark on his face. When not dodging the taunts of scornful youths, Jamie documents the neglected margins beyond the gentrified centre, rummaging through the detritus for pictorial inspiration. On one such excursion he comes into contact with a gang that is vastly different from the ones he regularly encounters, fleeing before he can investigate further. His foreboding proves to be well-founded when the gang kills his mother before his very eyes. Jamie’s despair at the morally bankrupt world around him leads to a meeting with Papa B (Joseph Mawle), who offers him a life free from ridicule, in exchange for assisting him in the creation of his Kingdom of Horror.

‘Heartless’ presents a hyper-stylized urban dystopia that bears as much relation to modern London as ‘Blade Runner’ did to Los Angeles in 1982; positively Dickensian in its portrayal of squalor. But this is by no means a criticism; the expressionistic lighting and gothic mis-en-scene of its doom-laden inner-city backdrop is so visually arresting that it compensates for any lack of veracity. The world presented in ‘Heartless’ is a landscape of the mind, an abstract plain filled with apocalyptic dread, the product of a rudderless subconscious, a fevered imagination seeing monsters lurking around every corner. Music is a useful adjunct to this, with David Julyan’s stirring collection of original songs articulating Jamie’s mental state like a running commentary.

The film’s unremitting grimness is countervailed to some extent by a dose of good old-fashioned British whimsy from the likes of Ruth Sheen and Eddie Marsan, adding to the ‘Mike Leigh meets John Milton’ feel that prevails. Sturgess brings an intensity and poignancy to the role of a man who must indulge in the corruption of the world to be accepted by it; a loner hiding behind the comfort of the camera lens like Mark Lewis in ‘Peeping Tom’ and sitting in his room plotting vengeance like Travis Bickle in ‘Taxi Driver’. Jopseh Mawle strikes a sinister note as the infernal Papa B. Though he serves as little more than a plot device delivering expository dialogue, he takes to the role with considerable élan, not falling into the trap of rehashing the typical Faustian tack of portraying him as a sybaritic sophisticate. Noel Clarke - the designated voice of ‘the kidults’ - makes a brief appearance as Jamie’s neighbour and reformed gangster, AJ; adding ‘street’ credibility to proceedings but little else.

The friendship between AJ and Jamie is something that could have been developed further; they appear together in a couple of scenes before AJ disappears, as does much of the cast as the film progresses. Which is the strongest indication that none of what transpires in the film is occurring outside the confines of Jamie’s head. From the stagey streets to the gaps in logic, ‘Heartless’ has the gaudy unreality of a vivid nightmare; like a Lynchian portrait of suburbia transposed to the decaying metropolis, there are elements that appear off kilter.

‘Heartless’ is certainly a cut above what currently passes for horror; writer/director Phillip Ridley clearly understands that the best horror is cerebral, dabbling with social, moral and philosophical issues while evoking an eeriness that is more effective than all the gore in the world. The film’s ultimate message is that horror is all around us; that Hell is human construct, a repository for our worst impulses and appetites, that we create the monsters and set these elemental conflicts in motion. ‘Heartless’ is that rarest of creatures; a British horror film that isn’t in thrall to whatever high-concept brutality is in vogue Stateside

Compulsion (1959)

The Leopold and Loeb case has been fertile ground for film-makers; from Hitchcock’s experimental ‘Rope’, to Tom Kalin’s turgid ‘Swoon’, to Michael Haneke’s hectoring guilt-by-association-fest ‘Funny Games’ to Rafal Zielinski’s criminally overlooked female take on the ‘thrill kill’ phenomenon ‘Fun’.  But ‘Compulsion’ remains the most well-known, primarily because Nathan Leopold sued the film’s makers for defamation of character; which, ironically, only served to boost the profile of the film. ‘Compulsion’ is emblematic of Hollywood’s preoccupation with ‘message’ movies in the late ‘50s/early ‘60s, the undisputed king of which being Stanley Kramer.

‘Compulsion’ tells the tale of Judd Steiner (Dean Stockwell) and Arthur Strauss (Bradford Dillman); two wealthy college students who see themselves as Nietzschian supermen beyond good and evil. They undertake to explore all the possibilities of human existence, a quest which culminates in the murder of a teenage boy. Sid Brookes (Martin Milner), a fellow student working part-time as a journalist, finds a pair of glasses from the crime scene that links Steiner to the murder. Strauss and Steiner prepare an alibi, which quickly unravels under the scrutiny of District Attorney Harold Horn (E.G Marshall). They are charged and face the death penalty. Enter Jonathan Wilk (Orson Welles), a maverick defence attorney and vocal opponent of capital punishment who is employed by the students’ families to save them from the gallows.   

Journeyman director Richard Fleischer takes a conspicuously journalistic, Kramer-esque approach; the clinical, well-lit tone and unfussy shot selection provide a workmanlike platform for the performances, despite the lifeless soundstages and choreographed location shoots. Dillman plays the affable, brazen Strauss in a manner that seems hopelessly outdated and affected, when you consider that ‘On the Waterfront’ and its fine-de-siècle ilk had been in the ascendancy for much of the ‘50s. Strauss is intended to be the antagonist, the id to Steiner’s superego, but Dillman’s portrayal is so mannered that it renders the character little more than a snide caricature. Stockwell, on the other hand, pitches it perfect as the impressionable, bewildered Steiner, marking him out as an actor attuned to the changing timbre of his craft

Orson Welles’ had no such truck with this nascent naturalism and remained a steadfast adherent to the ’bombast’ approach to the last. His performance is that of an actor whose cinematic instincts have deserted him and is forced to fall back on showy theatrics, running roughshod over director and production - something Welles became infamous for when he deemed a project beneath his talents. Grandstanding appeals to the jury abound in the heavily codified world of courtroom dramatics, and Welles savours this opportunity to use the culmination of the trial as a shop window for his acting chops; lurching around the set and delivering a disjointed, ranting, meandering, sonorous monologue for the best part of twenty minutes.

But for all its melodrama, ‘Compulsion’ still has value when viewed in the context of the Cold War. Though set in the ‘20s, the film’s core themes resonate with the moral and philosophical sensibilities of ‘50s America - the conformist, proscriptive paranoid world of the slowly eroding moral majority. Much like Judd and Arthur’s homosexuality, the fear of communism is only ever alluded to; ‘rationalism’ and ‘secularism’ are invoked throughout as a handy euphemism for the godless faith. Judd and Arthur symbolize a world where certainty and order no longer hold sway, where nature’s innate cruelty has shaken people’s belief in a guiding force. America’s de facto class system is also addressed, albeit tentatively; the deference with which Judd and Arthur are treated when being questioned would not have been extended to suspects from less affluent backgrounds. Indeed, their interrogators refuse to believe at first that these privileged young men could be capable of such a heinous crime.

‘Compulsion’ goes as far as was permitted by the self-censorship of the industry and the squeamishness of society; but it still feels like a missed opportunity to deal with the case in an even-handed manner. Little attempt is made to explain what in fact compelled these two young men from well-to-do homes to act as they did, beyond blaming the big ideas their heads were filled with at their seat of learning. The apparent coldness of their home life is never addressed, as family life was sacrosanct in ‘50s America, an integral part of its self-perception as God’s Own Country.

The one kernel of a dangerous idea that the original case - and the film, however unintentionally - posits is that the criminal urge transcends wealth, education and breeding, a contention that strikes at the very heart of the idea that these things are tools for amelioration. Richard Murphy’s screenplay ultimately shies away from this in favour of ‘morality lessons’; pandering to the status quo and allowing the audience to go home reassured that their values have not been challenged.   

DiCillo Double Bill

Sundance darling and Jarmusch acolyte Tom DiCillo’s career trajectory has been riveting to behold. The director who set the indie world on fire in the early ‘90s with ‘Johnny Suede’ and ‘Living in Oblivion’ fell with equal rapidity after the humbling disaster that was 2001’s ‘Double Whammy’, which was hauled over the coals by the critics and failed to gain a theatrical release. His is an irksomely erratic and wilfully individual oeuvre. Both of these films find DiCillo following up these creative peaks and troughs.

Box of Moon Light (1996)

Arthouse veterans John Turturro, Catherine Keener and Sam Rockwell star in DiCillo’s third film. Al Fountain - Turturro - is an officious, detached electrical engineer from suburban Chicago who travels to a rural backwater for work. When his job is cancelled, he uses the opportunity to take some time away from his wife and child and visit the lake he briefly visited in his youth, which is the best memory he has of his unhappy childhood. Fountain begins to suffer from hallucinations where he sees things around him moving backwards. The trip brings him into contact with The Kid, - Sam Rockwell - a playful, scatterbrained, credulous young man striving for self-sufficiency who teaches him not to take life so seriously and enjoy himself.

‘Box of Moon Light’ was initially intended to be DiCillo’s follow-up to ‘Johnny Suede’, but when funding fell through he decided to make ‘Living in Oblivion’ instead. As is so often the case, the stopgap ended up being superior to the labour of love. But that’s not to say that ‘Box of Moon Light’ isn’t a stylishly presented piece of film-making, with its languorous pacing, slow pans and tracks and shimmering photography providing a perfect distillation of the sultry backdrop. The soundtrack is also effective in adding a folksy flavour to proceedings, with banjos, harmonica and tremulous guitars.

Turturro is in his element early on as the ill-at-ease boss struggling to engage with his employees and simmering with rage and frustration, but he fails to convince as the likeable, laid-back character Al is supposed to transform into. Turturro does conniving, creepy and intense with aplomb, but he’s no Jimmy Stewart. Rockwell is particularly grating as the slow-witted yokel who fancies himself as part survivalist, part shaman. At this point in his career, Rockwell was in danger of becoming an Owen Wilson-esque drawling slacker buffoon in a string of undistinguished supporting roles. Thankfully, he made some good choices and became one of the finest actors of his generation.

Turturro and Rockwell quickly ease into ‘fish out of water’ mode; the overburdened city slicker who overcomes his initial discomfort to throw off the trappings of his hermetic white collar existence and the noble savage who teaches him to appreciate the simple things. It’s a theme that has been endlessly recycled, from ‘A Good Year’ to ‘Doc Hollywood’. Catherine Keener and Lisa Blount are lumbered with stock ‘hillbilly simpleton’ roles as the bizarrely names Floatie and Purlene and appear merely to initiate the sort of contrived subplot that is the stock-in-trade of cloying romantic comedy.

There is a strange schizophrenia at play throughout ‘Box of Moon Light’, simultaneously mocking and romanticising the inhabitants of the town and the values they typify. The film presents an array of ‘local colour’ - inept local law enforcement, smutty waitresses, belligerent hicks, religious zealots - and urges us to laugh at their simplicity, yet it is also smothered in the usual supercilious ‘they’re stupid but happy’ platitudes.

In the end, of course, lessons have been learned, everyone is a better person with a new perspective, all is right with the world, balance is restored and demons are exorcized. All kinds of heavy-handed symbolism and soppy morals are conjured up to try and convince us that the film has said something important about the human condition; though it remains unclear exactly what, beyond the belief that adultery is good for the soul and any spiritual crisis can be remedied by getting naked, dancing and sleeping outdoors.

Delirious (2006)

It’s never a good sign when a film opens with a song as generic as the Dandy Warhol’s Rolling-Stones-karaoke hit ‘Bohemian Like You’. Five years after the ‘Double Whammy’ fiasco, Dicillo returned with his latest ‘offbeat drama’, which again struggled to find an audience.

Micheal Pitt - who was trying to erase the memory of his own career lowlight, the woeful ‘Last Days’- plays Toby, a homeless aspiring actor. In his daily wanderings, Toby happens upon a media scrum outside a nightclub, where a gaggle of paparazzo is waiting for the emergence of pop star K’Harma - Alison Lohman. One such paparazzi is Les, - Steve Buscemi - whom Toby latches onto and ends up working under in exchange for shelter in Les’s shabby apartment. Les and Toby manage to finagle their way into a succession of benefits and ceremonies, where Toby’s scruffy charm casts its spell on influential casting agent Dana - Gina Gershon - and, inevitably, K’Harma. Toby is thrown into the media spotlight, causing a rift in his relationship with Les.

The grainy, under-lit aesthetic and hand-held camerawork befits the down-at-heel scenarios in the film’s early scenes, but as its tone softens and it becomes little more than a romantic fantasy it soon becomes incongruous. Buscemi and Pitt are an effective pairing as the vainglorious, deluded bottom feeder and the callow, wistful bleary-eyed cherub; but one cannot shake the feeling that both are on autopilot here; replaying lesser version of roles they have performed countless times. Lohman is plausible as the put-upon pop commodity, bringing a vulnerability to the role that elevates it beyond the Britney parody it plainly is. Equally, Gershion does more with the slime-ball casting agent role than should have been possible. Elvis Costello makes an amusing cameo, sending himself up as a pompous, volatile prima donna; I’m not sure how much of a stretch that was for him.

‘Delirious’ picks easy targets to lampoon, but even these are handled with maddening ambiguity. DiCillo seems conflicted, or he simply didn’t have the moxie to bite the hand that feeds; on the one hand decrying the moral bankruptcy of the entertainment industry, while on the other revelling in its tawdry glamour. ‘Delirious’ descends into little more than a run-of-the-mill Cinderella story; dressed up with lightweight social commentary, Hollywood insider ‘dirt’, reflexivity and post-modern playfulness. The message seems to be that these radiant public constructs are what we little people should aspire to be; that fame’s warm embrace will heal all scars. More syrupy confection than savage expose, this is DiCillo’s last dramatic feature to date. Lessons have been learned, everyone is a better person with a new perspective, all is right with the world, balance is restored, demons are exorcized and so on and so forth.

The Caretaker (1963)

Donald Pleasence’s varied and daring career is now best remembered for its latter stages, which he spent much of engaged in all manner of folderol; from plotting world domination in the campest possible manner in ‘You Only Live Twice’ to being chased by a maniac in a rubber William Shatner mask in the increasingly preposterous ‘Halloween’ franchise. Ditto Robert Shaw, who shall forever be a grizzled Hemingwayesque mariner in the public’s eyes.

But if you’re keen to seek out examples of these most unique of British theatrical exports before they were snagged by Hollywood and its lucrative yet reductive charms, then ‘The Caretaker’ comes heartily recommended. Thanks to the patronage of numerous luminaries from the worlds of theatre and film - including Noel Coward, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter Sellers - Pinter was able to bring his much-lauded play to the screen under the aegis of the newly formed Caretaker Productions, filming on a shoestring in the cramped confines of a house in Hackney.

Aston - Shaw - is a taciturn young man who befriends Mac, - Pleasence - a garrulous derelict who has just been sacked from the latest in a long line of temporary menial jobs. Aston offers Mac a job as the caretaker of his dilapidated, cluttered house, which he shares with his glib brother, Mick - Alan Bates. Just relieved to have a roof over his head, Mac unwittingly steps into the middle of an unfolding battle of wits between the brothers, whose mercurial natures and terse exchanges only serve to befuddle and exasperate him. Mac becomes little more than a pawn in their twisted games, never fathoming their true intentions.

Granted, the role of Mac Davis is a classic Pleasence grotesque; a raving, wild-eyed, uncouth reprobate, lurching from combative to sycophantic with alarming regularity. The difference between Mac and the succession of over-the-top lunatics that lamentably became Pleasence’s métier is the power and pathos of the material and the finesse with which it is delivered. Shaw’s performance is mesmerizing in its economy, his strained body language and clipped delivery lending a deep foreboding to Aston’s aloof munificence, every gesture laden with insight. Bates exults in the subtle psychological cruelty he inflicts on the hapless Mac, bringing a creditable unpleasantness to the role without resorting to the overwrought trappings of the archetypal ‘bad guy’. Indeed, the willingness on the part of all three leads to take on such inherently unsympathetic roles exemplifies their standing as actors of serious intent.

The performance-driven dynamic of ‘The Caretaker’ obviously betrays its theatrical origins, but the complaint frequently leveled at stage-to-screen adaptations - that they are little more than filmed plays - is not applicable here. This is a deeply cinematic experience with a diverse filmic palette; thanks in large part to the decision to widen the scope of the play and the cinematography of auteur-in-waiting Nicolas Roeg.
Roeg provides evocative, noiresque photography, harnessing ominous blocks of shadow to create a rich chiaroscuro. Director Richard Donner puts the claustrophobia of the location to good use, fashioning arresting compositions and utilizing extreme angles to create a literal and figurative confinement that adds another layer of potency to the simmering tension at the heart of the interplay. The musical score is equally effective in ramping up the sense of incipient psychosis; consisting of a series of eerie bleeps and sustained chords that punctuates the sparseness of the diegetic soundtrack.

Thematically, ‘The Caretaker’ explores many of the concerns of the early ‘60s British Zeitgeist; the widely held concern over mass migration - Mac’s preoccupation with ‘the blacks’ as the root of all his problems - the burgeoning consumer culture and upward mobility of the age - Mick’s ambitious designs for the house, reeling off a list of furnishings in reverential tones, as though they are a panacea for everything that currently plagues the household - and Britain’s loss of standing in the post-colonial age - it could be argued that Mac himself represents the reduced circumstances of the erstwhile global superpower.

Of course, this being Pinter, none of this is ever explicitly addressed. Various theories have been promulgated; that the three characters represent the Holy Trinity or the workings of the subconscious mind, but the beauty of this and all of Pinter’s work is its ambiguity. The film is rife with symbolism - the crack in the ceiling dripping water into the overflowing bucket, Aston's cherished Buddha statue, the unconstructed shed, the frozen pond. It is possible to interpret these in numerous ways, but to me they are potent signifiers of the film’s conceptual and narrative arc: the accumulation of grievances, frustrations destined to overflow in a torrent of recrimination, defiance in the face of manipulation and tenuous equilibrium stretched to its limits. In the world of Pinter, the most innocuous gesture, banal act or commonplace item can take on the deepest significance; there is a compelling synecdoche at play throughout.

‘The Caretaker’ is a bold, multi-layered meditation on the nature of power that still crackles with tension to this day; featuring sterling direction, bravura cinematography and Pinter’s renowned ear for dialogue. It’s gratifying to see Pleasence and Shaw practicing their craft in a milieu where they weren’t hamstrung by Hollywood’s inimical demands.

The Expendables (2010)

Boasting a cast filled with names that would have come with a considerable pricetag in around 1987 but now come as part of a nostalgia package, ‘The Expendables’ finds ‘Sly’ once again at the helm. Considering that his directorial credits include clunkers like ‘Staying Alive’ and ‘Paradise Alley’, his continuing ability to be allowed behind the camera can only be put down to the puzzling popularity of the recent ‘Rocky’ and ‘Rambo’ retreads.

In keeping with Hollywood’s current fondness for all things ‘80s, ‘The Expendables’ takes us back to the days when ‘Sly’ could overthrow a South-East Asian regime with only a headband, a vest, a machete and a snarl. While ostensibly set in the present, the film is a paean to the heyday of gung-ho actioners, when Sly, Arnie and the like dispatched a raft of foreign baddies single-handedly, without a UN resolution in sight.

Our eponymous heroes are a band of hotshot mercenaries sent to a fictional Island in the Gulf of Mexico to depose a puppet regime controlled by a former CIA agent. There endeth the plot. ‘The Expendables’ is a testosterone-charged, loud, violent, ludicrous mid-life crisis of a movie, featuring a cast of Harley riding, tattooed, facially immobile men of advancing years desperately trying to convince us that they can still do everything they could do twenty years ago. Replete with car chases, decapitations, explosions, physics-flaunting stunts and fiercely heterosexual male bonding, one can only hope that those involved are aware of just how silly the whole thing is. It stretches credibility to breaking point that these men, most of whom probably need help getting out of the bath these days, are capable of performing the physical feats on display here.

Stylistically, we see the usual bag of tricks at play; slow-motion brutality, rapid-fire editing, giddy camerawork, a bombastic score and some very conspicuous stuntmen - this film must have been an overtime bonanza for its stuntmen, who no doubt had to fill in for any strenuous activity its cast were required to perform; climbing flights of stairs, bending over, chewing, etc.

Stallone slurs his way through the film like a punch-drunk Rocky as gang leader Barney Ross, delivering his barely decipherable lines with all the animation of a sedated bear. Bruce Willis and the Governor of California provide blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos as Mr. Church and Trench, smirking their way through a string of smug in-jokes and laboured badinage. Jason Statham treats us to his usual mangled mix of accents as the wonderfully named Lee Christmas, hovering between South London and Southern California throughout. Dolph Lundgren delivers most of the memorable lines as the maverick outcast Gunnar Jensen, including such gems as ‘life’s a joke, Shitbird!’ and ‘need a facelift, pretty boy?”. Martial arts legend Jet Li’s sole role is to be the butt of jokes about his size as the appallingly named Yin Yang and Oscar nominee Mickey Rourke is totally wasted in an inconsequential peripheral role; though both make the best of the paltry material they're given. But it’s Eric Roberts who steals the show as rogue agent James Monroe; evidently relishing this opportunity to get his teeth into such a hilariously over-the-top role and hamming it up accordingly.

Part of the problem is that there are too many people trying to do too much in too little time, with the consequence that every character is poorly developed. A perfunctory effort is made to give them some dimension - Christmas is in the midst of relationship strife, Yang has financial problems and Jensen is battling drug addiction - but it’s merely window dressing for the film’s real focus.

There is also some first-rate misogyny on display; the film features two women, both of whom are ‘damsels in distress’ relying on the big, strong men to protect them. At one point, Christmas says to his ex-girlfriend, “you should have waited for me, I was worth it,” after beating the tar out of her abusive new partner.

The final twenty minutes is a relentless cacophony of gunfire, explosions, burning flesh and jets of blood spouting from gaping flesh wounds; the film takes almost pornographic delight in the hundreds of corpses it racks up.

One has to wonder whether South and Central America is about to usurp the Middle East as the new home of the action movie villain; with a new generation of leaders antithetical to US objectives in the region. The General Garza character is firmly in the Chavez/Morales mould and, in the same way that Rambo’s right-wing fantasies chimed with Reagan’s worldview, ‘The Expendables’ seems to echo the feelings of the hawks in the State Department towards those regimes.

For all its bravado, ‘The Expendables’ is a depressing watch, akin to a veterans sporting event where men who were once at the top of their profession struggle to relive their glory days.

American Gangster (2007)

Ridley Scott has turned his hand to a multitude of genres: Sci-Fi, Sword and Scandal Epic, Jingoistic War Film, Factually Dubious Historical Action Spectacular, Feministic Road Movie and whatever ‘Legend’ was supposed to be. Scott is a director with an unerring gift for taking the lacklustre and the hackneyed and swathing it in a carapace of lush, pulchritudinous visuals and dense, arresting backdrops.

‘American Gangster’ is his first foray into the world of the crime drama since the ludicrous ‘80s gloss-fest ‘Black Rain’. Does ‘American Gangster’ rectify this glaring rebuttal to his reputation as the ultimate genre director? In a manner, it does, ‘American Gangster’ is a perfectly proficient piece of film-making, but it isn’t without its faults.

‘American Gangster’ charts the rise of Frank Lucas - Denzel Washington - from local flunky in 1970s Harlem to international druglord and organized crime kingpin. Following the death of his mentor, ‘Bumpy’ Johnson - Clarence Williams III - Lucas vies for control of Harlem with a plethora of rivals - most notably Idris Elba as the cocksure Tango. Lucas begins smuggling a cheap and potent new strain of heroin out of Vietnam, bringing his family from the Carolina sticks to back him up. Parallel to this is the turning point in the life and career of Richie Roberts - Russell Crowe - an ambitious detective and aspiring lawyer swimming in a cesspit of corruption. When he discovers a million dollars in cash in the trunk of a car, he is vilified for deciding to turn it in. After being outcast by his crooked brethren in the force and losing his partner to an overdose, Roberts is asked to head up his own unit, investigating the source of this new drug, named Blue Magic. The higher Lucas rises, the more he contravenes his own rule to remain inconspicuous, which brings him to the attention of the Special Narcotics Bureau, as well as some less upstanding sections of law enforcement.

Washington exudes his customary poise and charisma, solidifying his reputation as the most dependable leading man in Hollywood; it seems that there is no film he cannot elevate by his mere presence. Crowe turns in his best performance since ‘The Insider’, imbued with a focus and pathos missing from his more grandstanding, Oscar-coveting roles. Also of note are the performances of Josh Brolin as the unctuous Trupo - which bears favourable comparison to Nick Nolte’s hard-bitten turn in ‘Q&A’ - Chitewel Ejiofor as Frank’s guileless brother, Huey, Ruby Dee as the long-suffering Mama Lucas and fully paid-up member of the Wu Tang Clan, RZA, as Moses Jones.

But not even this profusion of talent can compensate for the feeling that ‘American Gangster’ has nothing at its centre. He may be a great technician, but Scott’s films are not renowned for their emotional depth. A Scorsese or a Lumet may have been able to endow the film with some heart, to unearth some truths in the midst of the chaos and carnage. Indeed, ‘American Gangster’ is at its best when it explores the socio-political factors behind the characters' actions.


Lucas pursues an idiosyncratic variant of the American Dream; the determination, hard work and entrepreneurialism at the heart of its mythology. He is a portent of the coming decade, of corporate hegemony; Reaganomics incarnate. Roberts, on the other hand, is the honest man whose good intentions go unrewarded, beset at every turn by entreaties to fall in line and look the other way. Sadly, this is not explored in any great detail, taking a backseat to the usual cat-and-mouse template.

‘American Gangster’ draws on all manner of influences, from blaxploitation classics like ‘Superfly’ and ‘Black Caesar’ to New Hollywood gems like ‘Serpico’ and ‘The French Connection’. The problem is that, by invoking these films, it simply serves to remind us how great they are and how ‘American Gangster’ lacks the vivid grittiness, urgency and brutality of its progenitors, feeling more like a compilation of classic clips than a coherent whole.

Like anything Ridley Scott is involved in, it looks amazing, but its resplendence is part of its weakness, with the trademark 'Scott sheen' having a distancing effect, wrapping the characters in a layer of honey. Another shortcoming is Steve Zaillian’s screenplay, which does little to rectify some of the clichés that have bedevilled the genre: the violent, ruthless ganglord who is a devoted family man at heart, the obsessed cop whose personal life is falling apart around him, etc. While it at least resists the temptation to glorify the ugly realities of Lucas’s milieu or present a black-and-white morality, it treads a familiar path and it’s disheartening to see so many archetypes being perpetuated yet again.

A little more ‘artistic license’ could have benefited the denouement; the scenes between Washington and Crowe fall below expectation after so much build up. Strict verisimilitude is not always the preferred course. The end result is a sprawling endeavor with epic pretensions and a misplaced sense of importance for what is essentially a stylized, big budget B movie.

Horror Double Bill

The Host (2006)

When a toxic chemical from an American military base is dumped in the Han River, it creates a mutated behemoth that wreaks havoc on the unsuspecting citizens of Seoul. Gang-du is an ineffectual waster who works and lives in a food stand with his demanding daughter, Hyun-seo, and long-suffering father, Hee-bong. That’s about the full extent of the set up; the monster makes its first appearance fifteen minutes in, marauding through the streets and capturing Hyun-seo. Joined by his athletic sister, Nam-joo, and astringent brother, Nam-il, Gang-du vows to escape the quarantine the family has been placed under and find Hyun-seo.

Bong Joon-ho’s monster film is something of an oddity, at turns disturbing and whimsical. It quickly becomes apparent that this is far from a formulaic creature feature. Whatever the intention of the film-makers, ‘The Host’ is, no pun intended, a peculiar creature that works on any level you choose to take it. Is it a satire on genre convention, an allegory for US imperialism, a broadside against globalization, a parable on the dangers of environmental degradation, an attack on nuclear brinkmanship? Like most effective horror and sci-fi, it is sufficiently ambiguous to project all manner of metaphor and symbolism onto.

A slightly redundant subplot aside, ‘The Host’ features an engaging set of performances, stylish cinematography and snappy pacing. My chief complaint is with the monster itself, which appears too early and often and is more ‘Men in Black’ than ‘Cloverfield’. For me, it is always preferable to see the damage cause by the creature before unveiling the beast in the final reel.

The Descent (2005)

A lesson in how to shoot monsters on a budget could have been learned from British director Neil Marshall, whose ‘Dog Soldiers’ is a master class in using technical ingenuity to overcome financial constraints. Marshall’s next entry into the ‘civilisation Vs barbarism’ canon is an equally effective genre piece. ‘The Descent’ takes the best elements of Craven, Raimi, Romero, Hooper et al. to produce a genuinely unsettling subterranean shocker, divesting itself of the flashy effects and ostentatious set pieces to put the viewer at the heart of the action.

The film begins with a jolt when lead character Sarah - Shauna McDonald - is involved in a car crash. On her recovery, Sarah joins a group of friends on a caving expedition. As the group descends into the uncharted bowels of the earth they disturb something primeval that they must do battle with to escape the caves alive.

The chaos and confusion that ensues is fantastically captured with kinetic camerawork and frenetic editing, the lack of visibility throughout is another effective tool in ramping up the tension. A cast comprising of smart, accomplished modern women is a concerted break from the usual retrograde portrayal of females in horror as imperilled scream queens there solely to boost the body count. It is also refreshing to see a film of this ilk where the group dynamic is sufficiently complex to make their fate actually mean something.

In the face of a slew of execrable remakes that have besmirched the name of horror, Neil Marshall brings a fresh perspective to a form that has become overly reliant on repetition and convention. ‘The Descent’ plays on elemental fears - the dark, confinement, nature itself - positing that manufactured adrenaline can never compete with genuine peril and terror. Much like its illustrious predecessors, it believes that, for all our modern trappings, we are essentially no different from the cave-dwelling creatures; we are a product of our environment, acting on instincts we are powerless to quell.

Four Lions (2010)

If you’d witnessed the media furor surrounding ‘Four Lions’ and were sufficiently credulous, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the film is an exercise in bad taste akin to Pasolini’s ‘120 Days of Sodom’. In reality, the opprobrium heaped on the film came from those sections of the media that have had it in for Morris since his infamous ‘Brass Eye Special’ and were going to condemn it as a matter of course. Ironically, they did significantly less fact checking than Morris chose to in preparation for the film before writing their histrionic headlines.

‘Four Lions’ tells the story of a group of Muslim men in a Northern English town whose disenchantment fuels violent dreams of Jihad, but whose romantic notions of Holy War are disabused in a series of hopelessly botched plots and misadventures. Omar - Riz Ahmed - and Waj - Kayvan Novak - travel to Pakistan to prepare for the imminent Clash of Civilizations, much to the consternation of Barry - Nigel Lindsay - who, left to his own devices, hatches his own schemes and recruits wannabe rapper Hassan - Arsher Ali - to their ‘cell’. Meanwhile, Fessel - Adheel Akhtar - stockpiles peroxide in the garage of the house he shares with his unhinged father. It transpires that it was all bought from the same shop, but Fessel used a variety of 'voices' and 'disguises' to protect his identity. Fessel refuses to blow himself up, as it would upset his father, but instead trains crows strapped with explosives to fly at selected targets.With their training excursion to Pakistan ending calamitously, Omar and Waj return to the UK to put their most ambitious plan into action; to attack the London marathon.

'Four Lions' features a host of credible, understated performances from an able ensemble cast. Nigel Lindsay is spectacular as the truculent recent convert whose belligerence belies his piety. Riz Ahmed is the heart of the film, embodying the forces pulling young Muslims in opposing directions, the dichotomy of a generation born into Western liberalism but confronted by a burgeoning militancy in their midst. Kayvan Novak and Adheel Akhtar provide much of levity; their characters are not required to be much more than dim-witted and deluded, but they invest their roles with enough tragedy to prevent them from slipping into caricature.

Aesthetically, the film has a downbeat, unvarnished quality to it, mirroring the grimness of the characters’ surroundings, but also serving to ground them in reality and not allow the viewer to take what they see too lightly by piling on the usual facile trappings of the film comedy.

Nobody can claim that ‘Four Lions’ isn’t meticulously researched; Morris spent three years travelling across Britain, interviewing Imams, experts and ordinary Muslims to fully understand the subject he was about to tackle. Morris’s commitment to neutrality and authenticity is evident throughout; neither setting out to portray the central characters as helpless victims or a monolithic bunch of shrieking fanatics.

This approach is typified by the portrayal of Omar’s brother, who considers himself a moderate and decries violence, yet follows many of the less progressive edicts of Islam pertaining to the treatment of women. This refusal to either lionize or condemn, to coldly observe what transpires; adds extra resonance to the humour and makes the final moments all the more potent. By giving the lead characters an inner life and a diversity of reasons for acting as they do, Morris turns something that could have been crass and exploitative - Carry on Caliphate, if you will - into a thoughtful, uproarious and strangely touching take on the absurdities of faith and friendship.

Morris has made a career of going where other comedians fear to tread, an agent provocateur incurring the wrath of our ‘moral guardians’ for holding a mirror up to their hubris and hypocrisy. His latest offering is so special because it takes a difficult subject and broadens our understanding of it without ever becoming didactic.

In the same way that Morris’s ‘Brass Eye’ special wasn’t ‘making fun of paedophilia’, but was in fact a clever dissection of media hysteria and political opportunism, ‘Four Lions’ is more about provincial malaise than suicide bombers. It succeeds where so many ‘serious’ films about terrorism have failed because it understands its subject and has a firm grasp of what it wants to say about them, getting under the skin of people who hold such abhorrent views to such an extent that it goes a long way to demystifying them.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Having spectacularly missed the mark with the sombre, ponderous, meandering ‘The Darjeeling Limited’, arthouse darling Wes Anderson tackles Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s classic. Alas, this is not the way to celebrate the source text. Anderson approaches ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ in a manner befitting his oeuvre but detrimental to the effectiveness of the material. He essentially turns ‘FMF’ into a stock Wes Anderson film - but with puppets.

For anyone unacquainted with what this involves, it can be summarized thus:
Snappy but vacuous dialogue that fancies itself as arch.
Frenetic editing that makes a virtue of drawing attention to itself.
Copious amounts of music - from twee folk to ‘Street Fighting Man’ in this case.

Anderson has excelled at making films about flawed intellectuals grappling with their inadequacies, but, on the evidence of ‘FMF’, it appears that this is the only thing he can do, regardless of its suitability to the project he's working on.

In Anderson’s 're-imagining', Mr. Fox - George Clooney - is a journalist with a gauche son, Ash - Jason Schwartzman - and a frosty wife - Meryl Streep. Against the advice of his attorney - Bill Murray - Mr. Fox moves his family into an upscale townhouse situated inside a tree. Despite assuring Mrs. Fox that he has moved on, Mr. Fox cannot fight his instincts and sets about raiding three nearby farms owned by the villainous, and inevitably British, Boggis, Bunce and Bean - with Michael Gambon essentially reprising his role in ‘The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover’ as Bean.There is also a sub-plot about Ash and his more outgoing cousin, Kristofferson - Eric Anderson - wherein Ash is intimidated by the more precocious Kristofferson.

Can you feel the magic yet?

The end result is a film uncertain of its identity, outlined by the fact that it is crammed with references to films like Rebel without a Cause, The Dollars Trilogy and West Side Story while nominally being a film for children. Where the equally lacklustre ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ could at least lay claim to being a film ‘about childhood’, ‘FMF’ appears to be a film about existential crisis and adolescent angst and is therefore unlikely to appeal to anyone beyond those with a fondness for Wes Anderson films.

It is, however, quite an achievement on Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach's part to have taken these inherently lovable characters and turned them into such neurotic, self-absorbed yuppies, blathering on about meditation, mobile signal and credit cards.

In the age of the CGI/3-D spectacle, animated films that use more traditional methods must possess enough warmth and charm to compensate for their lack of visual finesse; qualities which ‘FMF’ sorely lacks. The voice acting is stilted, the character models lifeless and in comparison to the yardstick for all things stop-motion - the films of Aardman - it is found wanting. ‘FMF’ ironically feels less human and organic than something like ‘Toy Story’.

It is hugely disingenuous to claim that this is a screen adaptation of a Roald Dahl novel. Beyond the title and the names of the characters, ‘FMF’ bears little relation to the original. Anderson falls back on the archetypes that litter his previous work when he should be delivering something truly populist, sabotaging a film that should have been joyous in the process.

For adaptations that retain some of the magic and mischief of Roald Dahl's work see:
The Witches (1990)
Matilda (1996)
James and the Giant Peach (1996)