Monday, 28 August 2023
Thursday, 24 August 2023
Tuesday, 22 August 2023
Ghost in the Shell
The most horrifying aspect of Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell is an almost incidental detail within the film itself: the idea that a human's soul, here referred to as their ghost, is a detectable and quantifiable variable when dealing with cyber crimes where people are hotwired as easily as cars. When examining these puppets, be they flesh and blood or artificial constructs, the pulsing green systems of this near-future spit out interlaced, three-dimensional maps that describe the circumference of sentient identity. Bootlegging these private wavelengths, and the natural decay that occurs during this duping process, is also casually discussed. Naturally, in this setting, these analog appraisals are no big deal. A fact of life both understood and internalised. Human augmentation is, after all, endemic in the urban sprawl of New Port City. Off-the-shelf (and idealised) bodies are everywhere and staring straight back at each other; even the middle-age spread of a windy bureaucrat is, we learn, threaded with black, coiled cabling.
That mechanical reproduction has sunken into this most sacred of spaces should, naturally, prompt some unusual behavioural patterns in those born out of these processes. Oshii's film doesn't just account for these strange, suicidal eccentricities, it's premised on them. Major Motoko Kusanagi, voiced by Atsuko Tanaka and Maaya Sakamoto, is a cyborg working for a particularly amoral internal security agency that specialises in murderous, interdepartmental in-fighting. The Major, and her colleagues, are so heavily customised that their bodies are no longer their own property. We are told, almost in passing, that these leased people are physically and psychologically dependent on their continued participation in government black ops. They have next to no agency. Resignation or retirement would mean that they would need to be dismantled. That their memories would have to be wiped. Who or what then would be left? In Oshii's film the deeper co-mingling of the flesh and digital realms is a lopsided relationship; one that demands that human beings give up ownership of not just their physical appearance, and any ego attached to that, but the very personal, individual essence that makes them who they are. This shock permeates Oshii's film, detectable in depressive, dehumanised interludes where dolls glimpse their doppelgangers and the resignation with which our heroes subject their gleaming outer shells to grievous mutilation.
Monday, 21 August 2023
Saturday, 19 August 2023
The Return of the Musketeers
Given the passing of Roy Kinnear during filming, following a heart attack after he fell from a horse, it's understandable that The Return of the Musketeers is very much a passionless slog. Richard Lester's film largely abandons the omniscient perspective taken in previous instalments, that saw overdressed figures battering their way across lavishly appointed sets complete with ADR grumbles, to hand over proceedings almost completely to Michael York's D'Artagnan. The now-ageing lieutenant is given a voiceover to accompany his misfiring adventures, a move that further diminishes the ironic framing that accentuated Lester's previous entries. We are no longer observing a rock star swordfighter who professes undying love for his kidnapped mistress while sleeping with any woman who'll have him. Now he's telling his own story, oblivious to his failings. Comedy and action are a difficult mix at the best of times, each having different tonal objectives that require a delicate, even masterful, touch to balance. Lester previously succeeded through a knowing incongruity: elements that veered into the absurd - be that the character's actions or the situations they found themselves in - were always contrasted with a palpable sense of real, physical danger. Here, nothing is presented as serious (and nothing can be taken seriously anyway) so the film becomes joyless noise. If Return has an ace up its sleeve though, it's a sozzled-looking Oliver Reed as Athos. Although rarely deployed, the actor is instantly able to confer weight and meaning to every little trifle he utters.
Friday, 18 August 2023
A Colt is My Passport
Joe Shishido stars as Kamimura, a contract killer caught in a web of criminal intrigue that - one unusually thorough assassination aside - has more in common with the creeping avarice of a corporate merger than it does street-level passions. Kamimura is a methodical criminal, a cold-blooded presence who, when he's left to his own devices, is better tuned to the detached rhythms of staking out his quarry and thinking through the mechanical processes of their termination. Director Takashi Nomura and screenwriters Shuichi Nagahara and Nobuo Yamada build their opening moments around a similar sort of incidental expertise as that exhibited by James Bond in the early Terence Young entries: having settled into a vacant nest overlooking his target's garden, Kamimura lights a cigarette; not to calm his nerves but so he can hold it out of a window to judge the wind directions that will soon be acting upon his gunfire. This predatory, reptilian intelligence, so suited to generating and extinguishing turmoil, is less useful in A Colt is My Passport's middle-section. There the heaving drama is turned over to Chitose Kobayashi's Mina, a forlorn truck stop worker who fixates on Kamimura, imagining some sort of emotional connection between herself and a murderer simply seeking safe passage out of the country. This interruption ends up working for Nomura's film, suggesting a conclusion far less exciting than the one we end up getting: Shishido running straight at the camera, firing every gun he can lay his hands on.
Wednesday, 16 August 2023
The Four Musketeers (The Revenge of Milady)
The second half of Richard Lester's Alexandre Dumas adaptation doesn't have the best start. The Four Musketeers (The Revenge of Milady) begins with a lengthy recap of the first part before plunging headfirst into a war between Catholic France and insurrectionist Protestants (backed by England) that has made allies out of former foes. This rough gear shift is matched by an assembly that makes enormous leaps in location; a structural restlessness that - if we're being generous - does echo the fidget energies that pour out of Michael York's D'Artagnan. To Lester's film credit, when it does settle down Four Musketeers finds itself more excited about charting the homicidal pettiness of Faye Dunaway's wonderful take on Milady than it does the adventures of a young swashbuckler. That this spy is capricious and vengeful is an understatement. She lives to be adored: Milady enjoying and luxuriating in the power imbalance that her beauty both implies and ensures. Perhaps there are deeper motives in play in The Four Musketeers when it comes to Milady's studied hatred of D'Artagnan and his mistress, Raquel Welch's Constance? If that is the case, we are not privy to them.
A greater familiarity with Dumas' text might reveal some crumb of logic powering the murderous machinations of the literary Milady but the through line here seems to be one of pure spite. Dunaway's performance reeks of jealousy. She flattered the socially inferior D'Artagnan with her physical affections and is appalled that he not only rejected her (moments after having slept with her) but did so out of his desire for another woman. There's a sense that because D'Artagnan thwarted Milady in her attempts to overwhelm and intoxicate, that a correction is now demanded. Does she believe that the murder of Constance changes something in her and D'Artagnan's relationship? Will he finally submit himself wholly to her insidious charms? We see elsewhere the intended effects of the sexuality that Milady wields so effectively. Captured by the British, her heaving bosom is enough to ensnare a pompous and puritanical jailor, setting him up to be the useful idiot in a political assassination plot. Matching Dunaway for unexpected (and therefore enjoyable) turbulence is Oliver Reed as Athos. The actor glowers, suggesting a three-dimensionality of character largely through a nagging sense of distraction. He talks to the other Musketeers but never truly looks at them. He's staring off into space; his attentions elsewhere and, obviously, churning.
As with the first instalment, The Three Musketeers, characters are dressed throughout in their finery, requiring that the actors puppeteering these enormous outfits exert incredible amounts of energy just to get the layered petticoats and embroidered tabards moving. Rather than shy away with rapid cutting, Lester embraces this awkwardness of motion, making it a key component in all of the film's lengthy and largely observed swordfights. Panting duellists must cope with the frustrations and exhaustions inherent to their ostentatious dress. Mishaps and accidents are equally allowed to exert themselves on the unfolding dramas, complicating and enhancing the film's exhilarating sense of drunken danger. That The Four Musketeers takes place during a war has constant purchase within Lester's mise en scene too, one that extends beyond the establishing shots of ruined chateaus or billowing cannon lines. The Three Musketeers featured a series of animated tableaus in which members of the thoughtless ruling class battered through the slogging efforts of a downtrodden (and mumbling) working class. Four Musketeers takes the same basic unexamined toil concept but tweaks the parameters, allowing for far more callous scenery. An absurd picnic, attended by Charlton Heston's Cardinal Richelieu and Geraldine Chaplin's Queen Anne, comes complete with a portable organ built into a horse carriage and, in the near distance, several Protestants dangling from a hanging tree. No reveller bats an eyelid. The beautiful people chat and snack on without interruption. It's a sight gag that wouldn't be out of place in Ken Russell's similarly excellent The Devils.
Monday, 14 August 2023
The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan
Martin Bourboulon's The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan, the first French language adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' novel since Bernard Borderie's two-part pass way back in 1961, is good at finding moments in this sprawling saga where attention can be focused around a single character as they stress their way through an overwhelming event. So, whilst being transported to the gallows for a crime he did not commit, the carriage transporting Vincent Cassel's Athos is attacked and its doors blown off. The cramped quarters of this sweat box, and the cracking pandemonium going on outside, contrast pleasantly: the audience feeling Athos' dithering desire to stay put (and therefore safe) in a location that, only moments earlier, they'd wished to see the musketeer flee from. As the title character, François Civil's D'Artagnan finds himself the subject in a couple of these sequences too: once when alone and under attack from an expert while camping out in the wilderness but also earlier, when cementing the bonds between this young upstart and the trio of Royal guards he will soon call brothers. Attacked by troops working for Cardinal Richelieu, on the pretext that the four men are duelling illegally, Bourboulon darts back-and-forth between each of the four swordfighters. The musketeers are brazen, stabbing at all-comers and firing their booming black powder pistols, while Civil's fresh recruit ducks and darts, less able to drown out the violent chaos erupting around him. It's a shame this empathetic framing isn't extended to Louis Garrel's King Louis XIII during an assassination attempt. Instead of sticking with this quivering monarch as he cringes under a condemned man's cloak, the film's perspective uncouples from this target to check in on the various skirmishes taking place around the room. Not unexciting then, but comparatively routine when held up against the stagings we have just seen.
Sunday, 13 August 2023
Sunday, 6 August 2023
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is delightful. The film an expert examination of a never-ending merchandise machine that manages to chart new, emotionally fertile, ground while reconfiguring plastic commodities so successful that, once upon a time, they had to be rationed. Considering the distinctly homicidal look that Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird originally gave their sinister, sewer-dwelling creations, the ninja turtles have proven to have be a particularly elastic concept. As it turns out, the basic appeal of repulsive-looking amphibians waving around martial arts weapons can survive even the most transformative of takes. Like many big screen adaptations before it, Kyler Spears and Jeff Rowe's film is a reappraisal, taking the four youngsters back to zero to explore their glowing origins. Rowe, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit's screenplay places their greatest emphasis on a previously untapped adolescent longing. One premised on being, essentially, a pack of home school children lumbered with a well-meaning but fanatically mistrustful rodent for a parent.
Jackie Chan's strung out Splinter isn't the former pet of a displaced ninja master in this continuity, he's a New York rat. Having survived all manner of attempts on his life - even before his run in with luminescent ooze - has rendered him terminally cagey. This well-founded paranoia is transmitted to his sons; the necessity for ninjutsu training coming from their position as despised outsiders who must constantly trespass into man's world for essentials, rather than the original telling's need for a violent act of revenge. While these children are happy to marathon Gordon Liu films in pursuit of bone-cracking enlightenment, their collective desire is an opportunity to be, briefly, apart. To have other friends and indulge interests beyond repetitive board-breaking. These guileless dreams of acceptance are complemented by stylistic choices that relentlessly reject the depiction of these characters in idealised or bluntly superheroic terms. Mutant Mayhem then taking a leaf out of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse's book in terms of prioritising a scribbled aesthetic over a more mundane or (God forbid) functional look. The three-dimensions of computer generated animation are used here to build darting, stop-motion action figures. Each one accented with the kind of scrawls and inky corrections native to schoolbook margins. The Turtles, and their Playmates cousins, are all wonderfully ugly. Their big screen portrayal (finally) delivering on the unrefined but imagination-firing artwork that crawled all over those treasured blister cards.
Saturday, 5 August 2023
The Toxic Avenger
Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman's The Toxic Avenger is determined to fill its frame with as much repulsive imagery as possible. This interest in the relentlessly off-putting goes beyond the special make up effects that depict the bubbling skin of a teenager who has fallen into a radioactive barrel or the caved-in heads of thrill-kill victims. The camera pushes in on cackling faces, not to inspect them but to leer, to probe from such close proximity that these pitted landscapes begin to twist and warp. If the character is particularly repellent they might even have food spilling out of their mouths as they motor through their lines - chewed-up grub utilised as a cheap way to achieve the viscerally grotesque. Male faces - particularly the one owned by Mark Torgl, the fearless actor who plays the weedy pre-dip incarnation of the eponymous hero - are screwed up into the kind of honking, cartoonish caricature you'd expect to see adorning the cover of Mad Magazine. Set in Tromaville, the chemical waste capitol of New Jersey, Toxic Avenger details a crimefighting spree that draws from television's The Incredible Hulk and the murder musculature seen in the many Friday the 13th sequels. When battling other men, this over-inflated putz growls like Lou Ferrigno as he tears limbs off would-be muggers. The violence visited on women though is much more intimate, adopting the stalking rhythms of a slasher film as this mutant initiates humiliating assaults on the slobbering gym rats who mocked his sexual inexperience. The crown jewel of the Troma video library, The Toxic Avenger is available in an extended cut that adds several blurry montage clips (apparently sourced from analogue tape) that either burn screentime with stock footage of trundling tanks or by recapping the sub-90 minute film that we're all already watching.
Friday, 4 August 2023
Wednesday, 2 August 2023
The Beguiled
Long before a lame drunk starts pointing a Flintlock pistol at startled school children, Don Siegel's The Beguiled is a siege film, one premised on hopeless, wartime longing and the incompatible desires experienced in unequal relationships. Clint Eastwood plays John McBurney, a grievously wounded Union soldier being nursed back to health by a half-dozen women in a Confederate sympathising seminary school. McB - so called by Pamelyn Ferdin's Amy, the (apparently) guileless adolescent who discovers his burnt-up, bleeding body - is Eastwood at his most louche, a bed-ridden stud pouring syrup into the ears of anyone who'll listen. He's arrogant and conceited, completely assured that his good looks and treacly manners will allow him to behave as he pleases. The women who fall under his spell, Geraldine Page's middle-aged headmistress; Elizabeth Hartman's virginal schoolteacher; and Jo Ann Harris' precocious teenager, each vie for this plucked rooster's attention. Variously, they extend offers of a salaried position, romantic love and, simply, sex as a way to secure their place in his affections.
Siegel's film, adapted from Thomas P. Cullinan's novel by screenwriters Albert Maltz and Irene Kamp, uses bursts of memory and whispered thoughts to reveal the ways in which these people appraise themselves and each other. McB and Page's Martha - the characters experienced enough to actually have a past - exert themselves on the film using the former. While McB talks up his affinity for these untamed Southern lands we catch a glimpse of him, pre-injury and beaming ear to ear, as he sets crops alight. Before he was blasted into repose, McB experienced war as an adventure, one curtailed by his near fatal injuries. Martha recalls the last time she had an opportunity to roll around with a handsome man, and the shame she attaches to that relationship. We hear the hurried thoughts of the other women as they catalogue the school's ever-evolving relationships. Each one capable of incisive and pitiless assessment. There's a breaking point in The Beguiled though, an amputation performed under dubious pretext, after which all decorum is dropped. McB, having regained some mobility, rants and crashes about the house; desperately trying to cower these women and children. The revenge that sees his lifeless body sewn into a burlap bag is engineered, almost entirely, by the twelve year old who discovered him though. Amy, an overlooked but no less jealous member of the household, repaying Eastwood's brute for his boozed-up thrashings.