The Cure - Warsong

Gladiator II

Gladiator II ties itself in knots to place its hero, Paul Mescal's Hanno, on the same path to the colosseum as his predecessor Maximus, as played by Russell Crowe. The latest from 86-year-old Ridley Scott is a belated sequel that he (somehow) found the energy to film in the year following Napoleon, another of the director's enormously detailed historical epics. In terms of pure storytelling, David Scarpa's screenplay twists and turns around a shallow dynastic intrigue that seems rather obvious given this sequel's photostat plotting. Although charming in a five-a-side sort of way, Mescal isn't quite able to channel Crowe's strange, tractor beam turbulences; those arresting eyeline tremors that physical communicate a mind seesawing back-and-forth between temperance and explosive violence. Similarly, Connie Nielsen's performance as Lucilla, the daughter of former emperor Marcus Aurelius, is a shadow of her preceding act. The actress now flat and robotic where previously her Lucilla had registered as guarded but still extremely cunning. 

This lack of gravitational pull from two of the most important characters, as well as the aggressively blunt storytelling employed to get a gladius in Hanno's hands, means Gladiator II is a subordinate experience in comparison to the 2000 film. But that's not to say that Scott isn't having or transmitting fun. Like his twin Alien prequels, Gladiator II represents an opportunity to reappraise concepts and sequences that never made it into the parent piece, often because of budgetary rather than qualitative concerns. So while Prometheus allowed the director to reclaim Giger's pyramid designs, this second Gladiator inherits costly colosseum battles built around massive African beasts and duelling, burning battleships encircled by sharks. An arena battle involving a rhinoceros doesn't just deliver on the broad strokes of Sylvain Despretz's twenty five year old storyboards (images of which were tucked away in the special features of two-disc DVD sets for the first Gladiator), it also reproduces the unusual little details that Scott himself etched into his Ridleygrams. This fascination with macabre match-ups also allows for Hanno to be subjected to hand-to-hand combat with hairless baboons, rendered here as muscular teeth and claw that wouldn't shame Scott's pitiless Alien: Covenant. 

Gladiator II's vision of Rome is denser and dirtier as well, journeying beyond repeatedly re-dressed bedrooms and flat, computer-generated vistas to really stick its nose into the filthy stalls or subterranean tombs that are threaded into this ancient city. This vivid, lively approach to antiquity is best expressed by Denzel Washington as Macrinus, Hanno's ambitious, arms-dealing slavemaster. Washington's role could very easily default to a rehash of Oliver Reed's curtailed Proximo: an entertaining, storied actor for the less experienced leading man to bounce off or commiserate with. Macrinus' role in proceedings does overlap somewhat with Proximo's but, again, this sequel goes in directions that the previous film could not. Reed's untimely death meant that Maximus' master could not become an antagonistic presence in the Spaniard's life. Not so here. Macrinus is an actor, able to present whichever image his audience expects. So, with pompous senators, Macrinus pretends to be a rich gadabout. When in the company of real power, his servility may ratchet up slightly but it is always tempered with a ruthless focus. In all things Macrinus strains to appear useful; instantly solving problems that he himself has cultivated. The closer he creeps to the throne, the more venal and bloodthirsty he becomes. At his peak he's endangering maidens and galloping away from pursuing heroes like a serial villain. Washington's is a wonderful performance, one that combines the actor's Shakespearean bona fides with a more modern-presenting flamboyance reminiscent of an entitled, record label mogul. 

Harry Gregson-Williams - Gladiator II Overture

Astrotrain by Kiron Fan

Arooj Aftab - Aey Nehin

Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard - Now We Are Free

Gladiator

Following sepia studio logos and an introductory text that swirls inside the mists of time, Gladiator gives its opening seconds over to a hand touching the tips of long, wheat stalks during golden hour. While unseen children laugh, off in the distance, we watch as bronzed fingers lightly grasp at this waving grass, enjoying the prickly sensation. This interlude does not represent the present for Russell Crowe's Roman general Maximus, they are either his memories or a fantasy of home that has wriggled into him then refused to budge. Crowe's soldier blinks himself out of this trance to discover that he is still trapped on enemy territory in the midst of winter, preparing for an imminent, apocalyptic battle. It is, in a way, a dichotomy that is just as pronounced as the one experienced by Rick Deckard in the various Director's Cuts of Blade Runner: a dream that is pointedly disconnected from each character's current reality. Whereas Deckard's drunken, future-shocked reveries depict a muscular unicorn crashing through a forest, Maximus' interior perspective is softer, suggestive of a private moment that this man may have actually physically encountered. 

These personal desires instantly propose Maximus as romantic but beleaguered, an instrument honed by decades of bloodshed that would, quite happily, pack up then leave this place if he enjoyed that level of authority. Maximus returns to these visions again and again as the film presses forward. They expand in scope to explicitly include his wife and son, the situations curdling into precognitive glimpses of their death at the hands of bloodthirsty Praetorians. Later they are fleeting comfort for Maximus, following his failure to show fealty to Joaquin Phoenix's murderous heir. The visions are now drained of colour and life, taking on the same stark, funereal quality as that present in Arnold Böcklin's painting Die Toteninsel, specifically the monochromatic third version, painted in 1883. Scott's film portrays the afterlife as a place of family and comfort, an escape from obligation otherwise thwarted by the machinations of madmen. Happiness then is something always just out of Maximus' living reach. Even before his diseased body is sold into slavery, the General is very specifically a pawn in larger schemes. The dying emperor Marcus Aurelius, played by Richard Harris, may trust and appreciate Maximus but the younger man is still just a tool, a way for this war-mongering monarch to realign a legacy that has emptied his kingdom's coffers and allowed for the rise of Phoenix's poisonous, self-obsessed Commodus. 

These strict states of being for Maximus have structural purchase as well. The General is always subordinated; always stuck answering for somebody else's life-or-death demands. After he is unceremoniously ejected from the Roman army he is bought by Oliver Reed's Proximo, an ex-gladiator turned slavemaster. Later, when he fights before crowds in the Colosseum, he acts on behalf of Connie Nielsen's Lucilla, functioning as a male proxy who can lower himself to violence and vanquish her creeping brother. It is in these later passages that Gladiator reveals itself as a sports movie masquerading as a historical epic. Ridley Scott's film, written for the screen by David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson, may begin with massed, strictly regimented armies blasting flaming rocks at treelines but once the principal characters have returned to Rome, Gladiator gives itself over to a mode of storytelling that has more in common with a pro-wrestling television show than pious, Technicolor biblical blockbusters. Above all there is a complete submission to a very specific format. Secondary characters may plot and plan in shadow but nothing in Gladiator can truly be accomplished unless it involves armed combat staged for sadistic spectators. Scott's film then pointedly elides any of the contextualisation typical to this genre: Maximus isn't saved by the Christian faith. Similarly, he doesn't allow himself to be martyred or transformed into a messianic symbol. His final act is to relay the message, the albatross-like burden, that Marcus placed around his neck at the beginning of the film. He does this job, admirably, after getting to enact a ferocious, truly triumphant beating on the new, nepotism hire. 

System96 - Terminal

Optimus Prime by AZOINAB

Ultramagnetic MC's - Give the Drummer Some

Bertrand Bonello - Fractal, pt. 2

The Beast

From the outset writer-director Bertrand Bonello's The Beast seems to be building a very specific kind of scaffolding, one that uses a science fiction premise and the fantastical technology available therein, to detail a would-be affair that occurs again and again, across multiple centuries and lifetimes. In an emptied-out, Covid-compliant future, Léa Seydoux's Gabrielle argues with machines of varying sophistication about her career prospects. Gabrielle's reluctance to sink herself into oil and have her past lives audited for emotional irregularities means that she is only able to perform the most menial of tasks. The artificial intelligence that presides over the Paris of the 2040s simply refusing to collaborate with persons who haven't subjected themselves to strange, somnambulist experiments that resolve certain, unseemly emotional responses. Despite a very obviously shrunken human population, the machine masters of The Beast have little use for anyone who isn't attempting to match their serene, robotic neutrality. 

The horror here then is that not only has an impartial kind of intelligence mapped out human suffering to such an exacting degree, arriving as well at an inhuman sort of solution, but that mistakes made lifetimes ago can still impact upon the now, damaging a person who hasn't even had a chance to influence those experiences. The ability to dip in and out of these scenarios and participate in this latent trauma doesn't seem to be particularly therapeutic either. More of a blunt force correction that fails to make any concession for the wants or desires of the fixed, human identity trespassing outside of their own era. When Gabrielle does take the plunge, subjecting herself to lengthy, fragmented dreams in which she relives key instances of stress that have stained her karmic soul, the sticking points always revolve around George MacKay's Louis. He first appears as a chaste, Victorian suitor who refuses to act upon the signals being beamed directly at him by Gabrielle's married equivalent. This sumptuous interlude, premised around an expected sort of propriety wrongfoots the audience about the kind of person that Louis is. 

When we meet Louis again a hundred or so years later, this inability to act upon his desires has curdled into something violent and reproachful. The hesitance of a high-society (supreme) gentleman now fully realised as a ranting incel who creeps around at night, following women in his car while trying to build up enough courage to do something awful. Loosely based on The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, Bonello's film disdains the dithering, male perspective on commitment to detail how terrible it is to be the subject in somebody else's problem. To be both incredibly vital and yet somehow still extraneous. In all of their meetings Gabrielle is quite capable of recognising the connection between herself and Louis. She pursues him, using the apparatus of her age to appear open and amenable. It is Louis who resists, unwilling or unable to be truly brave and take a chance. The Beast is a cumulative experience then, a forlorn piece that makes its point out of fragments that, very deliberately, fail to congeal into anything romantically satisfying. Léa Seydoux, as photographed by Josée Deshaies, is our only real constant. The actress very rarely anywhere but the centre of the frame. Often the camera will slowly close in on her face, eliminating all extraneous information to fill our screens with a pair of big blue eyes that permanently look like they are on the verge of weeping. 

Bertrand Bonello - Fractal, pt. 1

Okay Kaya - The Wannabe

A World's Finest by Paul Jon Milne

Junior Varsity - Cross the Street

Madara 1000 - Visions V1

Who Can Kill a Child?

Director Narcisco Ibáñez Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child? begins with seven minutes of punishing black and white documentary footage that details, again and again, the immense suffering that has befallen children throughout the twentieth century. These newsreels obscure nothing. We are asked to peer directly at the bloated bodies of innocents; the tiny, mutilated people who have either starved to death during a famine or been murdered by other genocidal apparatus. These episodes seep into the events of the film itself, recurring as a news report on a portable TV set that sits on a shop counter while an English tourist, Lewis Fiander's Tom, buys his wife, Prunella Ransome's heavily pregnant Evelyn, a few rolls of film so they can document their island-hopping adventure. Although the Spanish salesman who serves the couple is moved by the rolling misery on display, Tom and Evelyn are more interested in resuming their getaway. They are escaping reality, rather than embracing it. 

Filmed and released in the mid-1970s, Who Can Kill a Child? wasn't necessarily intended to be pored over with a mind to present-day paedological concerns but it is striking that this couple have, and it's stated a few times, deliberately left their children at home, denying them access to this sunny break. Similarly, the duo's nationality (within the context of a Spanish film) and Tom's self-appointed role of expert fails to arouse much sympathy for the duo either. They are very deliberately tourists, the kind of transplanted visitors who might deign to mumble a few words in the local language but are still comfortable enough to complain about regional customs and the crowds that they attract. Tom is fixated on a remote, nearby island that he holidayed on many years previously which has, in the meantime, become the flash point for a mass uprising of children. The specifics of this mutiny are left mysterious but the intent to kill any and all adults seems to be communicated psychically, child-to-child. It says something as well that the message is always so greedily received. Given the very real evidence offered upfront as explanation for this reprogramming, as well as the self-involved subjects navigating this turmoil, it's difficult to side against the revolting youth. 

The Flaming Lips - Evil Will Prevail

Quincy Jones - Killer Joe

Godzilla Got a Nintendo GameBoy for His 70th Birthday!! by Brett Marcus Cook

Quincy Jones - Ai No Corrida // Razzamatazz

Joker: Folie à Deux

A sequel that doesn't just refuse its place in the ever-expanding comic book movie pantheon, but actively works to sabotage and undermine such an enterprise altogether. In that sense Joker: Folie à Deux can sit proudly alongside other, hectoring second episodes like Exorcist II: The Heretic or Gremlins 2: The New Batch instead. All three films are, after all, the result of the entity formerly known as Warner Bros. demanding a second visit to well-trodden turf. Folie has (similarly) been received as disappointing, if not actually upsetting and outright frustrating, for its obstinate desire to not give the audience the Clown Prince of Crime they so desperately desire. The film very obviously having next-to-no interest in assuming the role of gritty predecessor for a series of period Gotham City spin-offs. Despite this incalcitrant outlook there are a few, brief allusions to DC's wider world of criminality, but they are all so abashed or plain out-of-focus that they might as well have been clipped away in the edit bay. It's as if the piece itself cannot bare the studio notes that have, presumably, been foisted upon it. 

A promise of the kind of gauche, multipurpose continuity that the various Marvel universes have staked their future on does intrude very late in these proceedings but it's all so blurred and indistinct, occurring way in the background while Lawrence Sher's camera stays locked in on Joaquin Phoenix's gasping, drowning performance as Arthur Fleck. That thing that audiences say they want is present then but the execution is deliberately aggravating and disappointing, framed as a wrinkle casually unfolding on the periphery. Wouldn't you rather focus in on the character that the filmmakers actually want to tell you about? Hasn't Phoenix's all-consuming act sated your need to see this heavily merchandised monster revert to trick flower type? With Folie, writer-director Todd Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver have delivered a follow-up that isn't just ambivalent about its billion dollar ancestor, it's angry about it. Put out that the incredible marketplace success that the previous film enjoyed demands another instalment; appalled that a substantial amount of the film's audience saw in Joker an insurrectionist façade that could be applied to social movements from the shallower end of the political waters. 

Phillips' solution then is to underline the foibles and flaws inherent to his interpretation of this character: Fleck is physically meek and easily dominated; his grasp on reality is slippery and prone to fantastical delusion; and perhaps most crucially, he lacks the healthy, psychological scaffolding required to make good on his dearest make-believe. All of which very deliberately works against the expected assumption of a cackling super-identity for this jailed psychiatric patient. The captive audience of an ongoing court trial, as well as the introduction of Lady Gaga as Lee, a shade of Harley Quinn, would seem to suggest an opportunity for mass, cathartic slaughter but the pieces, by design, never quite click into place. Lee isn't the elasticated sidekick we're otherwise used to, she's a troubled rich kid holidaying in her idea of somebody else's mania. She's a fan. In love with the branding rather than the person that is actually stood before her. When Lee's fantasies are not being served she eagerly pouts and recriminates, damning Arthur for his failure to measure up to the persona that she has herself concocted. For his part, the wrinkled and emaciated Fleck doesn't fantasise about orchestrating the kind of orgiastic violence his beloved would seem to prefer. Instead he dreams about himself and her as brightly coloured subjects in a gently mocking variety show. Happiness as a Saturday night television broadcast. Unlike his would-be partner, who at first seems to be a particularly vivid agent of Fleck's imagination, when left to his own devices Arthur is quite happy to sit there medicated, soaking in Technicolor musicals. 

Joaquin Phoenix - True Love Will Find You in the End

The Cure - Alone

Savage Street Vigilante by Simon Mallette St-Pierre

Prince - Trust