Gina Carano could kick your ass.  I don’t care who you are.  This girl makes the boys from 300 look like a chorus line.  She chokes Michael Fassbender with her thighs.  She leaves Ewan McGregor to die under a rock.  She even makes a Steven Soderbergh movie worth watching.  You don’t need to suspend your disbelief when she launches into action.  Unlike that string bean Angelina Jolie; Gina does all her own stunts.  She’s a Mixed Martial Arts champion, from Dallas County, Texas.  Her demeanour is soldierly, through and through.  In Haywire, her mission is to beat the crap out of male movie stars.  She does so with aplomb.  As the tagline says, “They left her no choice.”  This girl was born to get into fights.

Special Ops hottie Mallory Kane (Gina) is the sort of no-nonsense fist-thrower who always lands the last punch.  She’s a former Marine who now works for a clandestine “contractor”.  Her rat-fink boss (McGregor) is about as untrustworthy as it gets.  On a mission to Dublin, Mallory is sold out by her employer and framed for murder.  A rogue Irish assassin tries to rub her out in her hotel room.  But Mallory being Mallory, it’s the Irish fella who winds up dead.  After that, Mallory heads back to the States, with a plan to “debrief” her boss of his worthless life.  All that stands between her and satisfaction are cops, killers and assorted bad guys.  Our girl is only too happy to relieve these gentlemen of the air in their lungs. 

And real fights are the main reason to see this film.  There’s none of that fast-edit Three Card Monte in Haywire.  When Gina wrestles with someone, the camera stays on her.  She’s the Cyd Charisse of ass kicking.  You need long takes to appreciate her art.  Although real fights lack the fantastical stamina of fake combat, there is something to be said for authenticity.  No-one lasts more than one round against Gina.  As anyone who ever got clobbered in high school can attest: real fights happen fast.  That’s the only similarity they have with fights in video games.  There’s no slow motion camerawork in real life; no adrenalized soundtrack to gauge how well you’re doing.  A good melee is over before you can call it a fight.

It’s just a pity Gina can’t give her director a kick in the ass while she’s at it.  Of all the people working in Hollywood today, Steven Soderbergh is surely the guy most in need of a good slap.  There has probably never been a director so prolific – or so patchy – in his output.  You know it’s a Soderbergh film when all the good ideas go to waste.  Does it look like it was shot quickly, by a guy who doesn’t really give a crap how it looks?  Does it seem insincere – almost as a point of pride?  Is there a nagging sense the film could have been made better by just about anybody?  If you’re nodding wearily, it’s likely you’ve witnessed the Soderbergh effect.  He’s undoubtedly smart, but his instincts are terrible.  Haywire has a great premise, but it doesn’t set your pulse racing the way it should. 

You keep waiting to get excited by this movie, but gradually, your expectations slump.  It’s just another exercise in vain, meta-movie posturing, with nods to films you haven’t seen and a soundtrack that would work better in a cocktail lounge.  This would be fine, if casting Gina Carano had been a mistake.  But she’s magnificent.  You have to imagine Die Hard being D-grade to understand my frustration.  Imagine Bruce Willis being the consummate action hero, and Die Hard with no pace.  Haywire is more a series of vignettes than a proper story.   It’s made the way only Soderbergh could be happy with: like a riff on a theme he’s bored with, before he’s begun.  Genre stuff brings out the clever-clever side of this director.  The only thing more enervating than CGI, in a fight scene, is a failure to commit.

I’m not sure if a woman kicking ass is a feminist statement.  A comment from a message board: “Gina, kill me, please” seems to sum up the masochistic appeal for men.  To his credit, Soderbergh doesn’t go the Russ Meyer route and fetishize Gina’s brutality.  At no point does Haywire resemble Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!  This is more like the sort of movie David Mamet would make: a celebration of a warrior; not her chest.  We’ve come a long way from the 60s.  This isn’t the era of “foxy boxing” anymore.  Although Haywire might not be the rousing triumph it ought to be, with Gina playing a literal knock-out; the movie still respects women.  The problem is: the film is comatose.  It lays there, as if struck by lightning…or Gina’s fist.

 
As Steven Spielberg’s old pal George Lucas once said: “Emotionally involving the audience is easy.  Anybody can do it blindfolded.  Get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.”  By my count, someone threatens the life of the horse (in War Horse) roughly every half an hour.  That’s a lot of mortal jeopardy.  Cynics will argue that Spielberg endangers the animal for the sake of the box office.  But I don’t think cynics should be allowed to see this film.  For while it may well be corn-fed sentimental hokum, every bit as contrived as Lassie Come Home, there’s something undeniably moving about War Horse.  Spielberg is fascinated by our capacity for good.  He might be a sap, but my God he knows how to make a movie.

Early twentieth century England, as envisioned by Spielberg, is a land fit for Hobbits.  Emerald hills stretch to the horizon, tiny hamlets sit nestled among the fields.  A farmer’s son, who looks like an Abercrombie and Fitch model, gambols through pastures, blissfully unaware of the oncoming First World War.  This boy is in love with a horse.  Not in an unwholesome way, like the kid in Peter Shaffer’s play, Equus, but in a nice way, like Elliott and E.T. or Tintin and his loyal terrier, Snowy.  The boy is called Albert.  The horse is called Joey.  After a lengthy prologue where Joey saves the family farm, WWI begins and Joey is sold to the cavalry.  No more gymkhanas for this brave nag.  This war horse is headed for the Somme.

Man’s inhumanity to animals can never really match the horror of when, in my job as English teacher, I once saw a 15-year-old boy spell the word “horse”: w-h-o-r-u-s.   Obviously, no act of inter-species barbarism could hope to match the senseless cruelty of what that boy did to a word (Whore-us?  Really?!  Was that kid trying to drive me insane?!)  However, there is plenty that will set animal-lovers weeping in War Horse.  In three separate scenes, a different actor levels a gun at Joey.  That’s not to mention the bit where the horse gets tangled in barbed wire.  Anyone who found Marley and Me hard going will be experiencing Watership Down levels of anguish for much of this movie.  Be warned: fictional horses do suffer. 

This is not to say, mind you, that every human in War Horse is anti-equine.  It’s not as if this is a remake of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, where all humans are portrayed as weak-willed and petty.  The guy who made Always isn’t known for his cool appraisals moral failure.  So there are plenty of instances in the film where human decency is celebrated, and both German and British soldiers are seen being extra-nice to Joey.  Even if the horse does seem a bit of curse on his owners (you’re better off petting a vial of anthrax for all this horse does for your lifespan), people seem to be queuing up to save the poor beast.   In one scene, two soldiers climb out from opposite sides of the trenches to rescue the animal.  This scene is also the source of the movie’s most risible line of dialogue, when a British soldier calls Joey a “war horse”, just in case anyone had been left wondering about the obscure provenance of the title.

The cast is a who’s who of British thespians…that didn’t get cast as wizards in Harry Potter.  Despite his resemblance to a male model, newcomer Jeremy Irvine brings a plucky naivety to his role as Albert, the boy who can’t say no to a horse.  Weasel-faced David Thewliss is well-cast as a villainous landlord.  If Peter Mullan was any more salt-of-the-earth, as Albert’s dad, you could use him to flavour crisps.  Emily Watson is effortlessly lovely as Albert’s saintly mum.  The guy who played the baddie in Thor gets at least four scenes where he, too, loves Joey (before they’re parted by a German machine gun).  And Benedict Cumberbatch summons every ludicrous syllable of his name to bestride the role of an ill-fated cavalry officer.

The main question I had, after all the hooves had finished thundering, was: would anyone really look at a picture of a horse before they went into battle?  I know Albert loves Joey and all, but… a picture of a horse?  Really?  Such criticism may be overly harsh.  Lord knows, I took my E.T. pencil case everywhere when I was a boy.  But how much you’re able to swallow that detail (or not to register it) may well determine the extent to which you enjoy War Horse.  For Steven Spielberg, innocence is the bedrock of his career.  He looks at the world with the eyes of a child.  And maybe that’s what’s needed to properly appreciate this movie: a little less jaundiced realism.  Like it or not, sugar cubes make this horse run.

 
It’s hard to be dapper in the age of rappers.  The whole idea of wealthy chic went out with the top hat, and the art of deference.  Perhaps we had to see the rich like jewels – something rare and precious – in order for them to shine.  In Michel Hazanavicius’ movie, The Artist, we’re tastefully transported back to a time when film stars were treated like aristocrats.  The movie is an air kiss to silent cinema.  In execution, it’s as impeccable as a Cartier watch.  I’m not sure it’s about anything, other than giving pleasure, but I felt about a thousand times more suave for having seen it.  Perhaps it’s enough, to be like a movie-lover of the 1920s: to swoon over trompe l’oeil, and to feel the romance of life in lustrous black and white.

This is the story of a silent movie star called George Valentin.  He’s an icon of his day, an artist, universally adored.  Even his dog gets fan mail.  We meet George at the very peak of his career.  The year is 1927.  At the premiere for George’s latest film, he gets kissed on the cheek by an unknown young woman.  The next day, the only question in the newspapers is: Who’s That Girl?  Answer: She’s Peppy Miller, a wannabe, soon to be the biggest star in talking pictures.  George, alas, doesn’t speak (on screen).  So his career is finished.  In a few years, he won’t even be recognised by the fickle crowd.  Thankfully, his dog (and Peppy) won’t abandon him – or their love of silence.  Some old-fashioned things aren’t allowed to die.

The genteel wit of The Artist is evident from the first scene, where George is tortured for information (in his latest film), but defiantly tells his captors: “I won’t talk!”  A later dream sequence, where George is bullied by sound, continues this play-on-(the absence of)-words.  By the time George’s wife says they “need to talk”, you’re either tickled by the joke or scanning for the nearest exit.  The Artist is not a biting satire of show business.  It’s a bon-bon that’s been cooked up to make cineastes go gooey inside.  Even the movie studio George and Peppy work for is named after Edison’s first motion picture camera.  George’s dog might as well be named Rin Tin Tin.  The movie has a crush on early Hollywood: that kingdom of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, where everyone was glamorous and no-one worried about their “indiscretions” winding up on TMZ.

French actor, Jean Dujardin, is so goddamn handsome he could fluster George Clooney.  The only thing you can’t believe about him as a movie star is that he isn’t one already.  The man has charm the way a hunchback has posture issues.  If you looked up the word “debonair” in the dictionary, you’d find Jean Dujardin in place of Cary Grant.  He has a chin that could get him dinner reservations anywhere in the world.  He even makes a moustache look cool!  The fact that he spends the film looking the way he does, while being accompanied everywhere by a cute dog, is a bit of a charm blitzkrieg.  But the fact you don’t end up jealously hating Jean is surely testament to his skill as an actor, and the remarkable appeal of the film.

His co-star, Bérénice Bejo, has a way of winking at the camera which should be encouraged in her future work.  She plays the ingénue with just the right amount of sass, and she wears the clothes of the period in a way Coco Chanel would have approved of.  Her slender beauty feels right for a “flapper”, even if real flappers weren’t quite so slender in their day.  The main thing is she has a sense of fun about her which is infectious.  She brings a spark of mischief to The Artist.  You find it easy to believe she’d catch George Valentin’s eye.  Bejo is gamine in a way perhaps you have to be French in order to pull off correctly.  She could stab a puppy six times…and flutter those eyelids, and there isn’t a jury on Earth that would convict.

If you’re too jaded for The Artist, I’m afraid there’s no hope for you.  You probably sneer at the first bud of spring.  This movie is joyous, elegant and life-affirming.  A half hour in, like George, you’ll feel it’s vulgar to hear people speak.  What needs to be said, after all?  This movie is pure cinema, undiluted by words.  Through watching it, you come to understand why silent films cast such an alluring spell.  Our world of texts and blogs; Facebook and Twitter needs The Artist.  It has a palliative effect for viewers in an age where words are hurled at us wherever we go.  There’s an ease to black and white silent film; it exists, without the urge to convince you that it’s real.  Once you take away speech, film is closer to a dream.

 
Of all the ways to write about America at the dawn of the 21^st century, this is, undoubtedly, the most mediocre.  The phrase “swinging for the fences” is not apt to this book.  Like the dull lives of the middle-class characters it details, exhaustively, over 600 pages, there is very little to make the heart race in Freedom.  You don’t get the swagger of Tom Wolfe, or the indignation of Philip Roth.  What you get is Jonathan Franzen, the milquetoast to end all milquetoasts, painstakingly doling out all the pet peeves of America’s chattering classes.  It’s like reading a blog by the Normals, of Liberalton, where dissatisfaction is as endless as the stream of words.  For all the handwringing, it’s a miracle the author could type.

Oh, piss off, Franzen…you long to shout, as he embarks on yet another dissection of conjugal woe.  Freedom is the story of a marriage, told over the span of thirty-odd years, between unhappy amateur novelist Patty, and her husband, the ever-loyal environmentalist, Walter.  We also hear a lot about their son, the capitalist asswipe, Joey, and Walter’s best friend, the musician, Richard.  As befits a novel aiming for Literary status (even when its plot is reminiscent of Desperate Housewives), there are several chapters written by Patty herself, to tick the Unreliable Narrator box on Franzen’s “Get Me a Pulitzer” checklist, and a last chapter which may-or-may-not actually happen; thus ticking off Meta-Fiction.

What’s missing is anything resembling a pulse.  Say what you want about the often dubious motives behind some of Tom Wolfe’s fiction, but The Bonfire of the Vanities has everything that Freedom lacks: race, religion, and good jokes are all but absent from Franzen’s vanity project.  Everything is so well-mannered; it stifles the life out of the book.  It’s like reading a college application essay; whereas Tom Wolfe reads like the brazen poetry from a bathroom wall.  In Freedom, a major plotline revolves around endangered birds, for God’s sake.  Even an ornithologist would concede that’s not much of a “grabber” as a premise.  Franzen’s point is made: yes, the environment is boring, and that’s why we don’t worry about it enough.  But that doesn’t seem like a strong argument for having to wade through several thousand words on Cerulean Warblers.  At least in Moby Dick, Melville killed the whale after all that guff about whaling.       

What is there, literally, left to say, if all you’re going to write about are the sex lives of rich white folk?  I know John Updike made a career out of this.  But Updike was catty and vain and, frankly, a giant slut.  Franzen is a choirboy by comparison.  He only writes about sex so much because, well, what else do people do?  We learn more than enough about Walter’s stultifying job.  Patty doesn’t work.  Joey only works to illustrate military-industrial hubris in a plotline that isn’t developed sufficiently.  So sex seems a good alternative in a story that otherwise revolves around birds.  But it isn’t enough to sustain 600 pages.  There’s nothing profound to what Franzen has to say.  It reads like the limp misgivings of the inert.

Philip Roth is more my kind of writer.  If Freedom were written by Roth, ok, Walter would be fixated with sex, and Patty would be an emasculating monster.  But they kinda are like that already.  It’s just that Jonathan Franzen is too wussy and objective to say it.  Most of my favourite writers are tabloid at heart: subjective, irrational, thrill-seeking jerks, with talent to burn and no compunctions about fairness.  A leftie with a conscience, like Franzen, only sounds shrill when he gets worked up about corporate culture or the state of the environment.  Philip Roth is an asshole and a leftie, so his indignation takes pleasure in outrage (and outraging those he hates).  What Freedom lacks, more than God, is recklessness.

In June of this year there was a photograph, taken during the riots in Vancouver, of a couple lying down kissing in the middle of street, while police with batons charged around them.  It’s clear the couple couldn’t give a damn about anything but getting laid, rightthissecond.  But the image is heroic, nonetheless.  It says: we want each other, even as the world burns.  The insane, risk-it-all, throw-your-hat-(and your pants)-into-the-ring dynamic…is what Freedom should be all about, and yet, resolutely, isn’t.  Jonathan Franzen doesn’t have enough soul.  He’s too afraid of not being taken seriously.  There’s a “properness” to his writing that makes your heart wilt.  Be unabashed, you bastard!  What else is freedom good for?

 
This review is dedicated to Tom Wheeler.

Everyone in this movie is waiting for a sign.  The Future is uncertain; it’s like a form of semiotics.  How would a happy couple know each other if they forgot they were a couple?  How do people who want sex attract the likeminded?  How is it that a picture connects with a person?  And what do we want people to understand about us?  The signals are everywhere.  But if we’re too ready, we risk picking up the wrong signals.  If we’re unprepared, we risk sending no signal at all.  We can be forgotten far more easily than we can be understood.  In Miranda July’s sophomore effort as writer/director, everyone wants to communicate their innermost thoughts.  The question is: how do we interpret this sincerity?  As kitsch?

The movie is narrated by a talking cat.  That alone may give viewers pause.  What is Miranda July up to?  The cat seems sentimental, even mawkish.  But it’s also unmediated, like a lot of July’s work: naïve, unknowing, embarrassing… even taboo.  She uses the cat to test the limits of privacy.  What is too private to be shared?  All the people in her films test boundaries of what is deemed appropriate: in terms of sex, or intimacy, the public and private self.  In The Future, two people in their thirties raise the question: do our lives have meaning?  They don’t have careers, or a family.  So they don’t have any of the usual signifiers of a well-lived life.  Instead, they seem aimless.  They can’t even be motivated to adopt an omniscient cat.

These characters could be seen as straw men by those who hate Miranda July.  They seem to embody the kind of navel-gazers who shop at Etsy online.  The fact that the woman is played by the director herself doesn’t help.  Nor does it help that her co-star has a haircut that bellows: ‘flake’.  It’s entirely possible to hate this film on the grounds that it isn’t about real concerns.  But I’m convinced Miranda July isn’t a narcissist, and that her films do contain deep truths.  Critics of hers use words like ‘twee’ in order to dismiss her.  They take her films at surface value: as equal parts girlish naivety and art world pretence.  In this way, she inspires the same scorn as Tracey Emin.  Both women are underestimated by those who accuse them of acting gauche.  Neither woman adopts naivety as a pose. 

Maybe ‘raw’ is a better word than ‘naïve’.  But ‘raw’ has connotations of anger.  It’s a masculine way of playing it straight.  Raw emotions can’t be soft…or so we’re led to believe.  You’re not meant to mix whimsy with what matters most.  That’s why so many critics get angry when Hamish Linklater stops time and starts talking to the moon (in The Future).  It isn’t the fantastical part which irks critics; it’s the sense of flightiness, of ‘girlie-ness’, if you will.  The sense that a starry-eyed girl is telling us a story and that only a fool would listen to it.  As if a unicorn had wandered into a poem by Sylvia Plath.  I think Miranda July does this kind of thing instinctively, as opposed to deliberately; not as a means to piss off critics, but because she genuinely believes that fey people are more honest about themselves.

In The Future (I do like writing that phrase), a woman leaves her boyfriend.  She moves in with an older, sleazier guy, who wears a gold chain around his neck so he can attract a certain kind of woman.  He’s a creep, but she wants him – so what does that make her?  She came to him because he was a sign-maker by profession.  She wanted him to make a sign for her, but she couldn’t specify what it should be.  Maybe he’s a sign that she needs help.  The movie seems to invite us to find him creepy.  But then again, he’s also the man who drew a picture that the woman’s boyfriend connected with.  He’s as lonely as anyone else.  So why should he be judged for trying to find fulfilment?  Isn’t the omniscient cat as creepy as him?

This isn’t a movie that says what it wants to say.  It’s flawed in execution, and it’s a lesser film than Miranda July’s debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know.  That said – it still stays with you.  It’s hard to shake the image of Hamish Linklater summoning the tide, or the little girl who literally buries herself up to her neck in her own back garden.  Both these people, in the film, are putting out signals that no-one seems to hear.  But it’s Miranda July who reaches out to them.  She takes the little girl into her arms near the end, and she reminds her ex-boyfriend of the love he’s almost forgot.  These scenes aren’t intended to be cathartic.  They don’t offer us resolution.  They’re there as a sign: Miranda July wants to converse.

 
When I was a kid I was obsessed with two things: Sherlock Holmes and the dubbed English language version of the Japanese TV show, Monkey.  Seemingly, these two things have nothing in common; one is about an aloof, analytical, brilliant English detective – while the other is about an Asian guy in make-up doing bad karate.  However, it’s clear from Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows that director Guy Ritchie has made a connection between these two, and the resulting film is exactly the kind of escapist nonsense that defined British television back in the eighties.  Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is like magician David Blaine crossed with Chuck Norris, he’s a cross-dressing bohemian Kung Fu master who also dabbles as a sleuth.

Whether all this pleases Holmes aficionados is a dubious prospect.  In this sequel to the 2009 hit, everything is predictably engorged: the sets are more elaborate, the explosions are more gratuitous, the gay subtext is flagrant as opposed to demure.  The moment someone says “the Reichenbach Falls”, you can pretty much guess the climax.  All that’s left is for Holmes and Doctor Watson to do battle with Professor Moriarty.  This time, Holmes’ nemesis is plotting the onset of World War One, twenty years early.  He’s been nobbling arch dukes faster than venereal disease.  But the gloves come off when Moriarty poisons the lovely Rachel McAdams, reducing her from Holmes’ leading lady to a toxic cameo in the space of one scene.

What’s up with that?  Did Rachel punch Guy Ritchie in the balls?  She seemed perfectly adept as the “love interest” in the last movie.  In A Game of Shadows, her death doesn’t even rate a tear.  She seems to have been written out to make way for a feisty Gypsy, played by original Swedish Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, Noomi Rapace.  I for one was a bit thrown by this decision, as McAdams and Robert Downey Jr seemed to have real chemistry in the first Sherlock Holmes.  But such are the machinations of Hollywood, I guess, where one minute you’re second billing, and the next, you’re lying dead.  The rumour that Brad Pitt might take the role of Professor Moriarty is also proved misguided.  Instead, we get a competent turn from Mad Men’s Jared Harris.  He’s a less risky choice, obviously.  But there’s none of the frisson you would have got from watching Brad toy with Rob.

The movie is also one of the dingiest blockbusters of the year, with scarcely a scene that isn’t lit like they were using energy efficient light-bulbs.  I know London in the nineteenth century wasn’t exactly world-renowned for its air quality, or the brilliance of its illuminations, but you have a hard time seeing Holmes and Watson half the time, let alone discerning what they’re up to.  As director, Guy Ritchie appears to be asleep at the wheel.  This isn’t the same man who put a cattle prod to British cinema.  As sequels have a way of doing, somehow Part 2 has sapped everyone’s enthusiasm for the material.  There’s a journeyman feel to the story telling and execution, with very little that shows true passion for the tales of Sherlock Holmes.

I still can’t get over how they casually murdered Rachel McAdams.  Moriarty’s whole: “That’s gotta sting!” speech (where he confesses to the murder) doesn’t seem to ruffle Robert Downey Jr.  His reaction is more as if Moriarty had taken a whiz in his deerstalker, rather than offing the love of this man’s life.  Bunging-in a sexy Gypsy is no fit substitute.  She’s only there for the sake of the plot.  I wouldn’t mind, if she did more than pout.  But Noomi Rapace doesn’t seem to offer much beyond her unpronounceable name.  It’s symptomatic of the movie’s “that’ll do” attitude that they can’t even let Holmes grieve.  Knockabout fun and “bro-mance” are all well and good, but not at the expense of what’s best about Holmes.

Does anyone else remember Young Sherlock Holmes, from 1985?  It was Steven Spielberg’s attempt to kick-start a new franchise, with a teenage detective meeting a teenage Watson while they’re both at school.  I know it sounds crap.  I’ll admit parts of it were…not good (It was made during Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom phase, when he was going through a bad divorce and kinda being a bit racist).  But Young Sherlock Holmes got one thing right: when Holmes’ girlfriend dies, you know he’ll always be alone.  That made a big impression on me, aged seven.  The loneliness of the great detective… How tragic he is.  That’s the real Holmes; the Victorian gentleman who should have a Dragon Tattoo.

 
Aliens aren’t born; they’re made out of fear.  Sounds ominous, doesn’t it?  Well, don’t worry.  I don’t intend to write a serious review of The Thing.  Movie aliens aren’t projected out of existential dread.  Their origins are rarely so subtle, or enlightening.  Movie aliens are mostly crude manifestations of latent phobias…and blatant prejudice.  Think of the penis-shaped monsters in Alien, or the dreadlocks worn by the Predator.  Hate-filled extra-terrestrials are usually dreamed-up by hate-filled little men.  I’m half-way sure the new version of The Thing is surreptitiously homophobic (but more on that later).  It’s strange the way creatures from other worlds are always made out of the icky parts of things we find on Earth.

In the new version of the old story, a team of Norwegian scientists find an alien under the ice in Antarctica.  It’s 1982.  The alien appears to be made out of fangs, claws, suckers and sharp teeth.  Naturally, the scientists bring it home to defrost, and waste precious alien-killing time drinking and making toasts.  In a matter of hours, the alien wakes up, fires a tentacle through one guy’s chest, eats the guy, turns into another guy… And so on.  The scientists should’ve seen it coming.  John Carpenter made the exact same movie in the same location thirty years ago.  As you know, his version starred the great Kurt Russell.  And it was better in every possible way.  The only difference, this time, is that one of the tough guys is a girl. 

I love how, if you call it “fantasy violence”, you can do anything to people in films.  In the new version of The Thing, some beard-o gets his head ripped off roughly every ten minutes.   People are decapitated, eviscerated, immolated…and whatever they call it when a cadaver sprouts extra limbs.  The film is a splatter-fest.  It plays with viscera like a boy who doesn’t want to eat his spaghetti.  If you replaced every act of violence with a sex act, the movie would be banned.  That’s because film classification is nuts.  It’s ok to show a woman’s body tear itself apart, and for the bloody mess to start attacking people.  But it wouldn’t be ok to show the woman having sex; or for us to see a man’s penis… Unless it’s a psychotic, acid-spitting alien, with a head that looks like a man’s penis.

There are no scenes in the new version of The Thing to match the spooky paranoia of the original.  We don’t open with a huskie being chased across the Arctic tundra by a helicopter.  Instead, some Norwegian dude tells an incest joke.  Then a snowmobile falls into a crevasse.  We don’t get the laconic wit of the original script, where a man says – of a decapitated head on spider legs: “You gotta be fucking kidding.”  This new version comes with an abrupt, sort-of happy ending, followed by an awkward end-credits sequence which seeks to tie events up.  There’s none of the terse cynicism of Kurt Russell’s last line: “Why don’t we just wait here for a little while… see what happens…”  In the era of CGI, no-one bothers with the script.  It might risk distracting from the unspectacular.

Despite having a name like a suffragette, Mary Elizabeth Winstead is one of the better things about the new movie.  In keeping with the 1980s setting, she looks a bit like Phoebe Cates, the girl who broke hearts in Gremlins.  Knitwear doesn’t seem to dim her sex appeal, and she seems competent handling a flame-thrower.  She doesn’t get put off when her colleagues start gushing blood.  And she has a woman’s keen eye for men’s jewellery, which comes in handy when sorting out who’s human at the end.  It would have been nice if the script could have developed her character a bit more beyond “Sigourney Weaver clone”.  But at least she doesn’t have to strip for the finale.  You need a warm coat to fight evil in the South Pole.

Mary is important to the movie’s homophobic subtext, because she has to kill all the men who have become “infected” by the “virus” that means they “look like men” but are “secretly hiding something”.  Now, some people might say my theory is ridiculous.  But what was up with the original tagline for The Thing?  The one that said: “Man is the warmest place to hide.”  Didn’t that line have a kind of implied homophobia; the same way “Disco sucks” wasn’t only a criticism of the music?  The last man/alien to die in The Thing has a beard an ear-ring.  If he was wearing a Judy Garland t-shirt the symbolism would only be slightly more obvious.  I’m joking, of course.  But still.  Why does the Predator have dreadlocks?

 
This is a movie about fearing the end of the world.  It’s more about anxiety than the apocalypse.  Whatever metaphors are contained in the script, the sense of impending doom is palpable, and unsettling.  The whole film plays like a bad dream, where hidden meaning is secondary to throat-sucking dread.  All horror films are about the same thing, but they let you off when the nightmare takes shape.  In Take Shelter, fear is amorphous.  We don’t know if the worst is real, or inside a man’s head.  And that uncertainty is the conceit.  Worry drives you mad.  But worry warns you of danger too.  It paralyses you even as it prompts you to act.  That’s why the gift of prophesy is so alluring.  Once you’re certain, you don’t feel angst.

The husband and father in Take Shelter thinks Armageddon is imminent.  He sees the uncanny circling.  Menacing clouds make fists overhead.  In his dreams, he’s attacked by loved ones.  He wakes up, and the world seems unsafe.  There’s a history of mental illness in his family, but he isn’t afraid of madness.  He’s afraid that he may have glimpsed the future.  “A storm is coming,” he warns people, “unlike anything you’ve ever seen.”  The husband decides to build a haven for his family.  He buys a shipping container to use as an ark.  The news each day seems to warrant his suspicions.  He buys gas masks and tinned food, to weather the great catastrophe.  At last, when the sirens go off, he’s ready.  But is he right?

I couldn’t breathe for parts of this movie.  The nightmares depicted on screen are terrifying, and I felt powerless as I watched.  You don’t get a reprieve, the way you do in monster movies, when the suspense is over and it’s kill or be killed.  In Take Shelter, eeriness is pervasive, and indelible.  The same way David Lynch scares you, not because of what you’ve seen, but the sense you’re left with.  In a scene where the husband foresees his wife turn against him, director Jeff Nichols makes your stomach lurch just by showing you a knife.  There is something wrong with the world in this film.  Even the rain is the wrong colour in the husband’s dreams.  The lack of traditional genre signposts only makes things more horrible.  You’re watching a domestic drama sprout horns.  The very ordinariness of this man’s existence seems to make him vulnerable.  Reality warps with frightening ease.

I grant you, Michael Shannon has a face for madness.  He has demons, even when he plays the good guy.  It’s his eyes.  They look wild.  He never seems to open his mouth wide in this movie.  He seems scared of what he might say.  When he finally cracks, and screams his fears at his friends and neighbours, it isn’t a moment of catharsis.  It’s more like he’s possessed, for a moment, by the insanity he’s tried to rein in.  Fear threatens to rupture him in Take Shelter.  When he has bad dreams, you see his skin stretched taut.  As if a dream could rip him open.  He doesn’t invite your confidence or your trust.  He looks like a man who murders his family in their sleep.  No matter how scary the world around him, Michael Shannon is scary too.

That’s why I say Jessica Chastain does such a great job playing his wife.  She humanises her husband.  When he’s coughing up blood and going into contortions, she reacts as if he’s sick, or dying.  She responds out of love, proving he must be worth loving.  Theirs is a marriage you believe in largely because she believes in it.  She isn’t a fool, so you have faith in her choice of husband, and her decision not to run.  By the time the family are locked inside the shelter, with the storm outside, Chastain becomes the voice of strength.  She isn’t a part of the horror story until the end, and she valiantly resists the urge to panic.  It’s only in a dream that she appears equally susceptible to madness.  In that scene, it’s as if all hope was lost.

The end of the world is the sum of all fears.  Hypochondria and paranoia give us variations on the theme: we’ll all be wiped out by disease, or we’ll all be wiped out by terrorists.  But the nightmare always springs from a feeling of powerlessness.  There are things in this life that are beyond our control.  Death, among these, is foremost.  But then, we can’t control the economy either, or our country’s standing in the world.  That’s why Take Shelter can be viewed as a story of national malaise, or a parable for the global recession.  The great thing about the film, for me, is that it doesn’t have to be a metaphor at all.  It’s a tragedy.  The ending is perfect.  In the last scene, all our fears become real.

 
Yes, you get to see Michael Fassbender’s penis in this movie.  And yes, it’s big.  But full frontal male nudity can’t hide the religious aspect of this film.  I know the guys who made the Narnia movies have an idea of what “religious” means.  But they’re wrong.  Shame is a true religious movie.  And not because anyone in it espouses religion; not because anyone is (I shudder to even use the word) “saved”; but because this film is about being human, because it abides with shame.  Those who know Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire will be hard pressed not to picture an angel sat beside Michael Fassbender as he rides the subway.  Love might be totally absent from this man’s life, but that only makes his struggle more profound.

This is a movie about a sex addict.  I’m not sure I sympathize with sex addicts any more than I sympathize with the millionaire who shouts, “Help!  I’m so rich, my wallet is about to burst!”  But once I got past my initial cynicism about the premise, I found I was able to feel concern for the man at the centre of the story.  Brandon (as he’s called) is a handsome Irishman prowling the streets of New York.  He hunts for sex constantly: in bars, on-line, at work.  He doesn’t have any friends.  His boss likes hang out with him because they both like to chase women.  But Brandon doesn’t care for his boss.  Actually, he doesn’t much care for anyone, not even his sister.  Brandon is an addict.  Like every addict, he wants oblivion.

What a magnificent bastard Michael Fassbender is (in this movie).  Lean, wolfish, priapic.  There’s a scene where he stands at the bar as his boss tries to pick-up a woman.  All Fassbender has to do is give her a look.  Minutes later they’re consummating that look in an alley.  That’s how sexy he is.  He is not good husband material.  The one scene I didn’t credit is the one where he takes a work colleague on a date and she’s surprised he doesn’t believe in marriage.  It’s like being surprised a rabbi is Jewish.  Just look at him!  There isn’t a trace of monogamy in his eyes.  All you see is hunger.  That’s the attraction.  The film avoids accusations of misogyny because the women he chases are just like him.  The script doesn’t condemn promiscuity.  Shame isn’t a “moral” film in that sense.  It’s about a man who feels condemned because he lives without joy.

Watch closely in the scene where Carey Mulligan sings “New York, New York”.  It’s one of the few times you see Fassbender’s mask slip.  All the bombast that Frank Sinatra brought to the song is stripped away.  Instead, Mulligan sings with an aching vulnerability.  She’s the equally damaged sister of the lead character; the one who’s like a mirror for all the wreckage that’s inside him.  Whenever they’re on-screen together, there’s a powerful sense of sibling tug-o-war.  He hates that she’s so honest about her needs: for love, for attachment, for family.  But she won’t let go of him.  Her every moment is spent trying to get his attention.  His every moment is spent denying her.  By the end, one of them wins.  But it’s a pyrrhic victory.

This film has the opposite effect of pornography.  Sex brings you closer to the protagonist’s inner-life.  You’re not a mere voyeur.  Like director Steve McQueen’s previous film, Hunger, a man’s body is used to express the central theme.  But where Hunger was about the futility of violence, Shame isn’t about the futility of sex.  It’s about a man who has sex the way an alcoholic drinks; a man who uses sex to nurse his shame.  He feels worthless, so he sleeps around.  If he was a teenage girl, you’d recognise the cause of his behaviour right away.  But this explanation only describes the surface of things.  Shame isn’t about low self-esteem.  As in any true meditation on religious themes, there is no nice neat answer to suffering.

In Wings of Desire, there’s a scene where a man commits suicide, even though an angel sits beside him.  You could look on that man as doomed, or as someone who makes the wrong choice, but the film doesn’t ask you to judge his actions.  It isn’t pious.  It wants you to empathize.  In Shame, the point is not that Michael Fassbender is going to change; the point is that he’s in pain.  The likelihood is that he will stay that way.  For me, the religious aspect of this film lies in its sincerity.  There is no “issue” being explored here, no ulterior motive urging this man to be chaste.  There’s just the mess of his life – his humanity – for us to share.  Shame is religious because it grants a sex addict a measure of grace.

 
There is always an audience for hokum.  Whether it’s an inspirational teacher story where the teacher only has one class, or a fight for justice where the lawyer breaks down in tears, the fantasy version of reality is always a sure bet for good box office returns.  Nowhere is this more the case than in movies about the civil rights movement in America.  According to Hollywood, there was such a tiny minority of actual bigots in the South, it’s a wonder racial segregation got started in the first place.  As the new adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s novel, The Help makes clear: white folks were just itching to do right by African Americans in the 1960s.  The only mystery is why black people didn’t ask white folks for help earlier…

Unless it was because white folks were a bunch of institutionalised racists, who didn’t start to offer help until black folks demanded it for themselves.  In the revisionist history presented by The Help, the civil rights movement forms the backdrop for a nerdy white woman’s story.  Instead of Mrs Malcolm X, this is Cinderella: where the white girl dreams of being asked to New York…and the black servants are left to sweep up.  A white wannabe journalist decides to write a book exposing how shitty it is to be a black housemaid in Mississippi in the 1960s.  Two black servants agree to help her.  Despite the fact this book means certain death for any black contributor, the white girl’s (career) struggle is made to seem equally heroic.

This movie is a slice of baloney about as thick as a kudzu vine.  It’s a pantywaist version of oppression.  About the only real thing in it are the social coteries.  Apart from that, it’s the kind of movie where Emma Stone (with legs up to her eyeballs) plays a nerd; where Viola Davis’s maid might as well be Martin Luther King; and where, if Octavia Spencer was any sassier, she’d have her own sitcom.  Imagine Mississippi Burning with all the violence taken out; where instead of being killed, the lead racist gets a cold sore on her lip.  There’s literally no scene too cornball for The Help.  Nothing sad happens without lachrymose music.  When the housemaid who raised Emma Stone gets fired, the director makes sure we follow her home, to trace her finger, sadly, along the wall; where she marked Emma’s height (and the supermodel length of her legs) at different ages.

Bryce Dallas Howard plays the villain of the piece: a rich bitch southern Medusa who spits poison at everyone.  She’s more an evil sorority queen than a member of the KKK, but she’s as close as this movie wants to get to the reality of white racist attitudes.  Howard is not only a bigot; she’s also a bad mother and a rotten daughter.  If she wore a mask, she’d be a super-villain.  The movie takes special delight in the scene where Octavia Spencer tricks Howard into eating a pie laced with shit.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the critique of racism in that action, but it wouldn’t hurt for the movie to be a bit more subtle.  Like a lot of things about The Help, there’s a very predictable, self-congratulatory air about Bryce’s downfall.

This film wants you to feel good about yourself…especially if you’re white.  Its point of view is nostalgic, as much as enlightened; not nostalgic for “coloured” bathrooms, or segregation on public transport, but nostalgic about mint juleps, and fey newspaper editors who probably live with their mommas.  Author Kathryn Stockett is the latest in a long line of Harper Lee acolytes, and To Kill a Mockingbird still sets the standard for how to approach prejudice if you come from a Confederate state.  The key word here is: tiptoes.  Racism should be limited to a few bad apples (i.e. mean folks, who are racist as an extension of their meanness, as opposed to being racist because their society encourages them to hate black people).

Audiences love this kind of hogwash because it gets them off the hook.  It makes civil rights seem like a foregone conclusion.  So much so, you might be left wondering why Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King got shot; or what Malcolm X and the Black Panthers seemed so crabby about; or why everyone was so flagrantly racist on TV up until the 1980s.  Sadly, the truth is: nice genteel ladies, like Kathryn Stockett, and the sweet young thing played by Emma Stone, didn’t usher in civil rights for African Americans.  It’s all very well to have Emma write a book and embarrass her home town, but the real change was about visibility.  This movie should be about two black women.  It’s kinda racist to cast them in support.