Guess who came to dinner?

At Cannes 2010, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” won the Palmde d’Or. The director, who instructed critics to simply call him Joe, gained acclaim earlier in his career for, amongst other titles, “Tropical Malady”. I haven’t seen Joe’s earlier work, but if it’s anything like “Boonmee”, at least I’ll be prepared for the Meaningfulness of it all. “Boonmee” is at times beautiful to behold, at others frustratingly tedious; overall, the film is so intent on presenting fascinating images and odd characters that it completely exhausted me. Seldom did I have to work so hard at interpreting what I think I’m seeing. 

Uncle Boonmee is dying. As part of the process of letting go of the earthly, he retires to rural Thailand to live out his last days in peace and quiet. While there, he is visited by figures from his past who become very much part of the present – a deceased wife; a long lost son – and the film has moments where it seems to leave its main plot (as much as there is a plot) to arrive at differences moments in time and space that somehow (we aren’t guided as to how, exactly) link to Boonmee. By the time the woman by the waterfall discussed fate and life with the talking fish, I’d abandoned hope that somewhere, Joe will make it all make sense. 

Maybe I seem unfair to “Uncle Boonmee”. I understand and agree that cinema can and should challenge viewers to engage with narrative models and structures that are vastly different to the Hollywood model. Often, it’s these films that are labelled “visionary” and “transcendental”. Consider David Lynch’s highly stimulating films on psyche and fantasy. His films differ greatly from how we’ve been trained to read movies, yet they’re quite accessible while remaining open to various interpretations. Lynch has had his failures – “Wild at Heart” – much like another visionary, Terrence Malick, who made “The Thin Red Line” into one of the best films I have ever seen, and who took the story of Pocahontas in “The New World” and made it into a self-indulgent bore. 

If Lynch and Malick’s best work make the directors seem like professors of their craft who base their work on solid philosophical ideas and cultural currents, “Boonmee” makes Joe look like the interesting humanities student who has something to say but cannot get his audience (me; I don’t speak for those who fell head over heels for this film) to decode his message in anything other than broad thematic strokes. So, “Boonmee” is about Life and the Meaning of it all. The characters (and their character) mean little. 

I may be being a bit deliberate, as I’m framing the film as self-conscious Art, and it is, but it is certainly not without merit. As Arty as it is, it provides some food for thought. Admittedly, most of that thought came from me, not from the movie. “Uncle Boonmee” is quite a sensory experience, even immersive at times. There are stunning scenes, such as in the latter part of the film when the fading protagonist and his family venture into a cave that becomes a galaxy. And at the beginning, there’s a moving, entirely convincing dinner conversation between the living, the dead and the animalistic. Towards the end, the film even manages to insert itself powerfully into Thai politics. It’s the overlong in-between that weighs the film down. 

All in all, I’m growing weary of art as the Great Metaphysical Indecipherable. 

And the fish? He eventually does something far more interesting than talk, I can tell you that. Just don’t ask me what it Means.

An angel in the ashes

Image: www.slant.com

The BBC’s “Red Riding” project, based on the novels by David Peace, is a project of such scope that it resulted in three directors tackling the material in three different chapters. “The Red Riding Trilogy”, as it was then called, runs at a total of 298 minutes. The three entries (by Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker) span a decade and are called by their years: “1974”, “1980” and “1983”.  The first part deals with death and betrayal; the second with defeat and disintegration; the third, finally, attempts some sort of redemption (it may well be too late from some characters). It originally screened as a mini-series on the BBC in 2009 and had special theatrical screenings in the US the following year.

On its surface, “Red Riding” is a serial killer narrative and a police procedural; viewers should pay attention to all details in the three movies as seemingly minor characters and events obtain significance later. In “1974”, Andrew Garfield is a young journalist investigating the murder of a girl who had swan wings stitched onto her back. His investigation reveals a conspiracy which extends into the second film, “1980”, where Paddy Considine (so memorable in the family drama “In America”) stars as a top cop assigned to catch the Yorkshire Ripper.

Finally, everything comes to a full in “1983”, where a washed up lawyer (Mark Addy) and desperate policeman (David Morrissey) unknowingly collaborate to bring closure to certain events. Underlying the whole series is the idea of some major conspiracy that involves rampant police corruption and various forms of unethical conduct. As is the case with many successful trilogies, the full impact of the story only hits when the entries are seen as a whole, and it makes “Red Riding” one of the most impressive film projects of the past few years.

The different eras are convincingly recreated through design and grading, and the stories are sensitively told by some of Britain’s foremost directors. Their imagery is impressive, detailed and nuanced; seldom has a falling snowflake seemed so utterly desolate, or an interrogation room so much like a torture pit. Make sure you can afford to put aside either a whole day or two successive evenings to watch one of the finest thrillers to come from the UK.

South Africans can order “The Red Riding Trilogy” from www.amazon.co.uk for close to R120 for the 3-disc set. Note that it comes with almost no extras, no option for subtitles and inferior sound quality.

A Spanish ghost, one Korean badass and a 1950s psycho

I was properly dissatisfied to discover that during last week's outage, Blogger had lost three painstakingly prepared movie reviews. Since I cannot afford the time to rewrite all three reviews, I've decided on short 'capsules' on each: "The Orphanage", "A Bittersweet Life" and "The Killer Inside Me".

Nobody put baby in the corridor.

"The Orphanage" is a ghost story for those who claim that they don't make ghost stories like they used to. Married couple Laura (Belen Rueda) and Carlos (Fernando Cayo) purchase an old mansion to eventually make it into a place of care and attention for special needs children. The couple’s young son, Simon (Roger Princep), soon starts talking about friends that only he can see. Before long, tragedy strikes, and Laura realises that certain things are beyond what she knows and accepts as real. The past is never dead. “The Orphanage” is one of the most richly atmospheric scary films I’ve seen in a long time. Directed by JA Bayona and produced by genre aficionado Guillermo del Toro, this supernatural thriller is exquisitely shot, with a sense of foreboding so strong than when the horrific payoff comes, it’s a climax well earned. It’s the best film of its kind since “The Devil’s Backbone” (which is actually less scary than this film) and the claustrophobic “The Others” (made by another Spanish filmmaker, Alejandro Amenabar). Watch out for an incredibly well constructed séance scene featuring Geraldine Chaplin.

La Dolce Vita

Kim Sun-woo works for a hotel magnate. The boss orders him to look after his mistress while he's away on business, and adds that should something go wrong - as in, should she cheat on the hotel magnate - Kim should kill her. When push indeed comes to shove, Kim realises that he is not an emotionless killing machine (could've fooled me), fails to follow through on the order, and finds himself in deep trouble. Kim Ji-woon, he of the magnificent gunplay of "The Good, the Bad and the Weird", made waves at Cannes in 2005 with "A Bittersweet Life", which has since become quite the cult favourite. This film is a stylish mix of gangster tropes and a full-on vengeance narrative, where the issue is not so much "Why is a character doing this?" but "Really, how much does it take to kill someone?" The hero of the film, Kim Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun), is a simple man, and far from immortal; he takes a lot of damage throughout the course of the film. He is a man of simple pleasures: a fresh espresso, a bullet through the head. Both provide a particular thrill. In one of my favourite pieces of dialogue from any action movie, a driver asks Kim about the noises he heard coming from an apartment Kim had just come from, and the hero replies: it was "a hole ripping through a person". The film is brutal and violent, but cinematically so, as prescribed by the genre. This isn't anything like the unsettling imagery of "The Killer Inside Me".

The eyes of Lou Ford

Few directors can claim as diverse a resume as British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom, whose “Welcome to Sarajevo” helped inform my political consciousness in the mid 1990s, and whose hilarious “A Cock and Bull Story” is a favourite comedy from the 2000s. Now he goes semi-noir with the controversial “The Killer Inside Me”, a tale of a psychopathic deputy sheriff in the 1950s, Lou Ford (Casey Affleck). Ford is assigned to chase away a prostitute (Jessica Alba) who services clients at the edge of the town. One anticipates that the two of them will develop some sort of relationship, but one cannot foresee the violence that erupts from the situation. There are only two scenes of violence in the film, but they are the most unsettling of their kind I’ve seen in a long time, forcing the viewer to distinguish between violence and action. (Stephane Zacharek from Salon wrote a strong but not entirely convincing essay on the film and its “conscienceless camera”). Based on the novel by Jim Thompson, this glimpse into psychopathy is not for everyone.  

Fear comes in waves (tagline)

Image: www.rottentomatoes.com

Christopher Smith, known for writing and directing arterial spray-infused thrillers such as "Creep" (2004) and "Severance" (2006), moves into more psychologically murky waters with the ship-set "Triangle" (2010). It is difficult to discuss this film without going into spoilers, so here's the basic plot and my essential thoughts on the film.


"Triangle" opens with single mom Jess (Melissa George) in a hurry to get somewhere, having seemingly been delayed by her autistic son. After dropping him off at school, Jess joins potential lover Greg (Michael Dorman) on his yacht along with some of his friends and a young man he's taken under his wing, Victor (Liam Hemsworth). It's not long before the trouble begins: the wind drops, and then a storm capsizes the yacht. Happy to board a ship that passes their way, they believe they're saved, except for Jess who is clearly unsettled by the fact that there's no-one else on the ship. It's not long before people start dying. 


"Triangle" is clever but not as much as it would like to be. It is seldom tense or scary, but the film looks great and Smith makes good use of contrasting the blue and white openness of the sea with the dark, confined interiors of the ship. Although one can figure out what's going on without too much difficulty, the film is at least somewhat unpredictable in how it reveals the dynamics aboard the ship. The problem is that post-"Sixth Sense", many people, including myself, go into a thriller already anticipating a big twist of some sort, and spend the movie trying to figure out what's going on, looking to see how the puppet master pulls the strings. Few thrillers prove wholly satisfying, and in the end we have movies like "Triangle" that can be classified as almost not shooting itself in the foot. It doesn't help that even before the action is really afoot, the film over explains its thinking with too many overt mythological references. 


Now, to go into some soft spoiler territory.


Those mythological references I speak about above? They mostly concern Sisyphus, that unfortunate fellow who was damned to push a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again once he got near the top. What is a man to do? Start over. Repeat for infinity. This provides the film's narrative macro structure, which finds Jess in a position where she has to perform certain actions to get to an apparent end, only to fail and start over again. Structuring the film like this is a blessing and a curse: it makes for a different type of thriller that's more cerebral than most thrillers but the novelty wears off eventually. The film's plot does not hold up under scrutiny.


Still, as flawed as it is, "Triangle" is much better than most gore-obsessed horrors that come out these days, and it gives new meaning to genre term Final Girl - traditionally used to indicate the lone female survivor in a typical horror movie - by emphasizing how alone this lone figure truly is.  

Hammer time

The patriarch and his boys in "Thor"

Kenneth Branagh's "Thor" opens with the bombast of a Serious Kenneth Branagh movie. For a moment I was afraid that the British thesp is going to give us Norse mythology by way of "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein". After a while, the ornate bombast made way for Goofy Kenneth Branagh, he of the light touches, and somehow, "Thor" works. It's a return to fun comic book movie adaptations, as opposed to the darker superhero incarnations of "The Dark Knight" and, um, "Ghost Rider". It's not nearly as good as the former and much better than the latter. It's a good movie, just far from great (the closing line, it must be said, has unexpected resonance).

Arrogant king-to-be Thor (Chris Hemsworth), son of Odin (Anthony Hopkins), is banished from Asgard by his father and finds himself in New Mexico and in the company of some researchers, including the fetching Jane (Natalie Portman) and Erik (Stellan Skarsgard). Much trouble is afoot, as Thor's brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) may be responsible in orchestrating the blond warrior's exile, and may have even greater, and dangerous, plans for the whole of Asgard. (Anyone who knows anything of Norse mythology will have a good idea of where this Loki character is heading.) Meanwhile, scientists gather around a foreign, immovable object found close to Thor's own landing site: his mighty hammer, Mjollnir. It's only a matter of time before Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) starts lurking around. (Yes, this is a direct reference to the post-credits scene in "Iron Man 2".)

The film is set in equal parts Asgard and Earth, and there is a third setting, the realm of the Frost Giants, that is a place of stunning cold and misery. It's quite beautiful; the jagged landscapes are breathtaking, even in 3-D. Asgard, however, is a mixed bag; half the city looks coated with fool's gold, and it has a decidedly plastic look about it - Asgard as Happy Meal. This type of visual opulence may work in the comic world, but in film, it looks rather cheesy. Why have two or three turrets in your castle if you can have sixty gold-plated towers? The opening act's dialogue is cheesy as well, particularly a scene where a hammy Thor tells his friends what he's done for them. And Anthony Hopkins's Odin is an act we've seen before; weighty, solemn, forceful. (See: "Legends of the Fall").

At least Hemsworth looks like a superhero (and once he's in New Mexico, he has some great lines). His biceps nearly rips his T-shirt to shreds when he attempts to obtain Mjollnir. In a perfect world where this film is made at half its budget, WWE superstar Triple H could star as Thor. As the adversarial Loki, Tom Hiddleston does possibly the best job of all the actors involved. He also has the most emotional scene halfway through the film, which gives him an opportunity to prove his range.

I promised myself not to complain about the 3-D, but I will complain about the over-edited action scenes,  which are sometimes even more difficult to follow due to the 3-D. A hammer swings, there's a spear, someone screams; there's little that connects the dots - all of which made me grateful for what happens in the finale, where the spectacle is clear. The film has numerous nuggets for comic book fans that I won't spoil, and it's clear that the film, like the forthcoming "Captain America", is a stepping stone for the event that will be "The Avengers". Naturally Stan Lee makes an appearance, though less ostentatiously than in some other movies. Remember to stay right to the end for the obligatory post-credit scene.