USA

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

André Crous

Getting up close and personal with Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 film about drugs and other addictions, is both an immersive and a repulsive ordeal.

Requiem for a DreamUSA
5*

Director:
Darren Aronofsky
Screenwriter:
Darren Aronofsky
Director of Photography:
Matthew Libatique

Running time: 100 minutes

François Truffaut famously said that any anti-war film nearly always turns into a pro-war film. He was among those who had lived through the trauma of the Second World War and wanted to consign all of the war’s evils to the dustbin of history, not project them onto a giant screen. But many directors, anxious to prove themselves, have other ideas and often relish in showing us epic, gory spectacles that are entertaining, not nauseating.

The same tends to be true of films that deal with drug use: All too frequently, the feeling of immersion created by the sounds and the images is a warm cocoon rather than a frightening shroud.

Nearly two decades after its 2000 release, Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, the exception that proves the rule, remains a nightmarish vision of addiction – one that excels at bringing us so close to the drugs we can practically feel our gorge rising with revulsion. The film uses rapid-fire editing to signal its characters’ broken attention spans, fish-eye lenses to distort their already warped perspectives on life around them and a devastating score by Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet to bring the titular requiem vividly to life.

In the story, adapted from Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 novel of the same name, the 20-something Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) regularly pawns his mother Sara’s (Ellen Burstyn) television set for money to buy hard drugs. Sara, an elderly widow living in an apartment in Coney Island, is spending more and more of her time in front of the TV, watching game shows. Her favourite has a studio audience roaring with unbridled passion every time Tappy Tibbons, the charismatic host, energetically intones, “We-e-e-e-e got a winner!” But she is growing lonely from seeing her son so seldom. Out of the blue, she receives a phone call informing her she has been selected as a contestant on one of her favourite shows. She decides to go on a diet, but when the results are too slow in coming, she starts taking questionable diet pills that steadily drive her to the edge of psychosis.

Along the way, Harry’s girlfriend, Marion (Jennifer Connelly), dreams of opening her own clothing store, and his best friend, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), wants to make his mother proud by living up to his promise that one day he’d do everything he can to “make it”.

But Requiem for a Dream has no patience for the dreams of people whose focus is diluted by their weakness for drugs of various kinds. The three “chapters” in the story are titled as three seasons, but it is telling that it starts with summer and ends with winter: There is no spring, no blossoming of new life; there is only an agonising, seemingly ineluctable downward spiral. By the time the closing credits roll, everyone’s dreams have not only come crashing down but shattered into a million pieces, with the shards cutting the dreamers to the bone.

What makes this particular film rise above its innumerable counterparts that have been made about drugs and addiction? It is full of colour, yet grim as hell. The camera is free as a bird, even when it depicts characters who cannot escape their fates. And oddly enough, instead of pulling us closer, the close-ups end up alienating us from the objects of their focus. Aronofsky’s stroke of genius is to use the cinema’s tools of intimacy against us and redefine the potential of old conventions.

The close-ups are repulsive, and the alienation we experience is antithetical to the intimacy we usually expect from this visual approach, which yields a crippled euphoria – a synthesis that is far superior to its constituent parts.

Although best summarised by the simultaneous presence of light and darkness in the title, this dialectical triad is most prominently on display in the climactic sequence: As the music’s rhythm builds to a crescendo, the pace of the cuts quickens and shots from all four storylines (one of which includes an orgy) alternate faster and faster until breaking point, when various liquids are released and the screen suddenly fades to white. The insinuation is that the film itself is having an orgasm, but instead of lust and desire, the entire sequence is filled with despair and dismay.

What we see is repulsive, and yet, because we are so close to the action, we cannot disconnect from it, which sends us into a state of vertigo that also hints at the characters’ mental turmoil. Aronofsky’s kaleidoscope of visual approaches suits the material perfectly and even includes an implicit religious component. Many of the images, particularly those that show us someone curled up in the foetal position, are overhead shots, and at the bleakest of moments, the camera pulls back even farther. It’s not a stretch to interpret these images as God’s point of view. However, there is no intervention, and the implication is that divine indifference gradually turns to divine disregard. The emotional impact on the viewer, who is always open to empathising with the characters, is absolutely devastating.

It’s as if Sara, Harry, Marion and Tyrone are all screaming into a void, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” But no one answers, and they continue their plunge into the abyss. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, by the time he hits rock-bottom, Harry has a bloody hole in his arm. Every time he shoots up, we get the same extreme close-ups in almost identical sequences: among others, someone flicks a lighter, a syringe injects, a pupil dilates, and blood cells surge inside a vein. We hear a gasp of anticipation and then a sigh of ecstasy.

But the repetition, instead of providing comfort and security, is emblematic of a vicious circle from which the characters cannot escape. This sequence of hard drug use spills over into Sara’s life as well, as we see her popping pills in extreme close-ups, which ultimately leads to one of the most upsetting parts of the film: Sara’s hallucination of a rumbling refrigerator that seeks to tempt her into rejecting the purple, red, orange and green pills.

Sara, whose voice just about breaks with emotion every time she opens her mouth, is the central focus of the viewer’s empathy. The scene between her and Harry, in which she levels with her son about her obsession and her loneliness, is not just heartfelt but downright heart-breaking. She is vulnerable but determined to keep going, no matter what, and she keeps on smiling through the tears.

This interaction includes perhaps the best performance of Ellen Burstyn’s career. It becomes all the more poignant when we witness Harry realise that his mother’s situation is as sad and hopeless as his own. But despite his love for Sara, he is incapable of preventing her from going down the same path as him. It would take a miracle to escape from this desperation, but the world of this film is utterly devoid of miracles.

Requiem for a Dream is unrelentingly bleak, and none of the major characters manages to escape the calamities their addictions inflict on them. Artistically impeccable and deeply affecting, it is not only the most brutal of Aronofsky’s illustrious career but also easily one of the top movies of the past two decades and infinitely superior to the much more conventional Traffic, the other big drug production from 2000, which walked away with multiple Academy Awards that year.

This is an anti-drug film that never once runs the risk of showing the bright side of its sordid material. Many movies depict their action and spectacle on a scale that ends up stimulating the viewer on the level of the senses by rousing us instead of pulverising our emotions. But Requiem for a Dream starts with its heel already firmly planted on our skulls and keeps pressing down firmly until the very last moments, when our life just about flashes before our eyes.

And this is exactly as it should be.

“We-e-e-e-e got a winner!”

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)

André Crous

In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, his ninth feature film as director, Quentin Tarantino reminds us that even when movies are based on very real events, their stories are in the hands of the filmmaker.

Once Upon a Time in HollywoodUSA
4*

Director:
Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter:
Quentin Tarantino
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 160 minutes

At the end of his Second World War drama and perhaps his greatest film, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino did something shocking: He recast history to give us the successful assassination of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in a movie theatre in 1944. While the viewer often suspends disbelief to follow the story of fictional characters in a recognisable historical setting, there tends to be an assumption that the main events will remain, in large part, intact and unaltered. But Tarantino says (correctly) that the filmmaker is in control of his or her depiction of history: Since a representation is already separate from the original, why not go even further and rewrite history for the purpose of entertainment, especially when there is no risk that anyone would mistake the film for actual history?

In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, his ninth feature in the director’s chair, Tarantino is his revisionist self again: He tells a wholly fictional story within a recognisable context (Hollywood in 1969) with all the meticulous attention we would expect from David Fincher before reminding us that he can change the facts of history because the real world is only applicable to the extent he wants it to be. Many of the characters are very close to their real-life counterparts, but only up to a point. And in the tension between real life and representation lies the possibility to create great art.

Released exactly 50 years after the tumultuous year it depicts, Tarantino’s film is set in Tinseltown of the late 1960s, where we find the curious combination of a yearning for the innocence of yore, the hippy rebellion against the status quo and an invisible sword of Damocles hanging over it all because Hollywood in 1969 means only one name: Sharon Tate. Tate, an up-and-coming 20-something actress, had married Polish director Roman Polanski the previous year, a few months before the release of one of the highlights of his career, the classic Rosemary’s Baby. A little more than a year later, eight months into her pregnancy, she and three of her friends were slaughtered by followers of Charles Manson.

Sharon Tate is played by Margot Robbie in Tarantino’s film, but the real Sharon Tate does show up onscreen when Robbie’s Tate goes to watch The Wrecking Crew at the cinema, and we see Robbie as Tate watching the real Tate play an awkward Danish blonde named Freya Carlson. And yet, while many viewers might notice these are technically different people, the entire setup is clearly one of make-believe, so the suspension of disbelief holds. What has been more controversial, however, is the clear divergence from historical fact at the film’s climax, even though the entire film is, by definition, covered by a “This is fiction” disclaimer.

So, what is this fiction all about? Despite all this talk about Tate, the film is actually primarily interested in her next-door neighbour on Cielo Drive: a former cowboy television star named Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose friendship with his long-time stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), is by far the most intimate he ever allows himself to get with another human being. Missouri-born Rick’s career has gone downhill since his starring turn in Bounty Law in the 1950s, and he is scared of having to pack up his bags and say goodbye to Hollywood. But Cliff, who lives with his pit bull, Brandy, in a caravan next to a drive-in, is always available as his driver, a shoulder to cry on and a constant companion through thick and thin.

The plot, most of which unfolds over two days (one in February, the other in August), follows Rick and Cliff, together and separately, as well as Sharon, who spends most of her day at the cinema watching herself. Rick, who has all but given up on himself, meets a child actress (although she refers to herself as an “actor“) who will change his life. Meanwhile, Cliff gives a young hippie a lift to Spahn Ranch, where mistrust hangs thick in the air. At the ranch, peopled almost exclusively by young white girls, Cliff seeks out an old friend, the owner, George Spahn (Bruce Dern), who has gone blind since Cliff last filmed on the ranch and has shacked up with the most domineering girl in the group.

DiCaprio and Pitt both give some of their best performances ever here. DiCaprio, whose appearance is still strikingly boyish more than two decades after Titanic, conveys the sentiment of being an outsider very well simply by showing up. His character goes through multiple ups and downs, and we can always see the gears grinding behind his eyes during his silences. Pitt, by contrast, is the epitome of cool and easily outshines the character of Steve McQueen, who makes a brief appearance in a very unnecessary late-night party scene at the Playboy Mansion. Channelling the energy (and still sporting the looks) of a man half his age, he is kind to everyone but is not beyond striking a very hard blow, as we find out in a memorable interaction with Bruce Lee and a hilarious flashback with his former wife, whose demise he is very likely responsible for.

A major improvement on Tarantino’s previous film, The Hateful Eight, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood gives itself space to breathe but never meanders. Two of the longest scenes – the one at Spahn Ranch and the wholly immersive production of the television show Lancer, in which the dialogue and the actions run almost indefinitely, without cuts or camera changes – have very good reasons for being there, albeit in retrospect. Spahn Ranch upends our expectations and introduces us to some very important characters, while Lancer marks a major turning point in Rick’s perception of his own potential.

But ultimately, after more than two and a half hours of leisurely comedic drama, most people will only talk about the ending. Those who know the story of the Tate/Manson murders will have a sickening feeling towards the end of the film when we see the eight-month-pregnant Sharon Tate and it appears Tarantino is about to shift from the leisurely fifth gear out on the highway right into first gear. But then, the director intervenes like God to give us a rousing version of history instead. In fact, knowing what really happened to Tate makes the events of the film, by comparison, all the more exhilarating, just as Tarantino had done with Hitler in Inglourious Basterds. He doesn’t skimp on the violence but directs it elsewhere and even borrows a flamethrower from his Second World War masterpiece for added showmanship.

The final moments include one of the most acute examples of dramatic irony imaginable, as Jay Sebring, unaware that in a parallel universe (i.e. the real world) he has just been brutally shot and stabbed in a bloodbath, invites Rick over to Sharon’s house after the Manson trio has been taken away by the police. He has no idea what happened to his counterpart in the real world. But we know. And this discrepancy between the real and the fictional is particularly poignant because, in a sense, these characters are real to us, and the fictional murderers have gotten what was coming to them. When they are killed, we feel like they are punished not only for attacking Rick and Cliff but also for murdering the real Tate and her friends.

It is unfortunate, however, that the film does not make the connection with real life more concrete. While he appears on one occasion, Charles Manson’s name is all but left out altogether (his followers refer to him as “Charlie”, but he is never seen in their company). But perhaps Tarantino wanted his film to exist more in the world of make-believe than as a representation of history, which is why an infrequent and incongruous narration (by Kurt Russell, who plays a minor character here) pops up on the soundtrack.

To take the term used by André Bazin, a representation is always at best an “asymptote of reality” and never reality itself. So much focus has been on the closeness of those two lines as the film draws to a close, but few have extolled the artistic tension that results from that intimacy. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood would have been entertaining enough without the last 30 minutes, but what happens there reaffirms its director’s capacity to amaze us.

Finding Vivian Maier (2013)

André Crous

Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary about a photographer whose work was only recognised after her death, takes audience on a voyage of discovery.

Finding Vivian MaierUSA
4*

Directors:
John Maloof
Charlie Siskel
Screenwriters:
John Maloof
Charlie Siskel
Director of Photography:
John Maloof

Running time: 80 minutes

When he bought his first box of Vivian Maier negatives, John Maloof had no idea who the photographer was. At the time, in 2007, Maloof was just a 20-something guy who knew little about photography but sometimes frequented flea markets and auctions, a gift that had been passed down from his father, and to him by his father before him. He says he always had a talent for noticing something worth having, and when he started sorting through the negatives he had bought, he was struck by their consistent quality.

He knew these pictures were the work of a certain Vivian Maier, but searching online did not help him very much, as Maier had never achieved any kind of professional success. Two years later, after posting some of the pictures on the Internet and getting an unrestrained euphoric reaction from commenters, he tried again. This time, he found an obituary, posted only a few weeks earlier, that helped him embark on a journey of discovery into the life of this unknown but obviously talented individual.

There is no question that Maier is a subject worthy of an investigation that runs the length of a feature film, even though the opening sequence, clearly meant to be comical, shows us her acquaintances unable to come up with a word to describe her. They eventually more or less settle on “eccentric”. Although it becomes clear that people did not particularly dislike her, she was generally perceived to be somewhat odd.

There are multiple reasons for this, and whenever Finding Vivian Maier pursues another strand of her story, it always grabs our attention. The first act, however, is by far the most interesting, as Maloof takes us through his early realisation that he was onto someone remarkable. He also waits until just the right time to reveal to us what Maier looked like, and we get a real rush from the small discoveries along the way, from her name and her accent to her photographs and her occupation, and finally, her appearance.

For a long time, there is uncertainty as to whether Maier was French or American, and the interviewees have vastly contradictory statements. Along with Maloof, who has managed to get hold of some very curious individuals to interview for this film and thereby made them and the film especially memorable, we find out when she was born and what she did for most of her life. She started in a factory and eventually worked as a nanny, even though her approach to child-rearing is far from admirable, and late in the story we get to the darker side of her character, which unfortunately is examined rather superficially.

We watch the film, the photos and the person herself develop in front of our eyes from our perch inside the theatre – itself a darkroom of sorts – and ultimately the image we get is one from which we simply cannot turn away. Maier remains elusive to the end, and even though Maloof makes do with little information about her past, except for snippets revealed by a genealogist or those she worked for over the years.

Yet the magnetism of the story lies primarily with the photos, as would Van Gogh’s paintings, Mozart’s music or Kafka’s stories. In contrast with these artists, however, Maier created her pictures as a full-time hobby rather than her occupation, and she never tried to actively sell her work or get it seen by the public. She had taken more than 100,000 negatives over her lifetime, but almost none of them had been developed. Countless pictures are shown onscreen, accompanied by breathtakingly emotive music scored by Academy Award–winning composer Joshua Ralph, who has worked on some of the most widely acclaimed documentaries of the past few years, including Man on Wire and The Cove.

Maier shot hundreds of rolls of photographic film and film stock, but while we get to see an impressive variety of her films, we almost exclusively see her photos in black and white taken in the 1950s and 1970s, and the lack of colour photos, which goes unexplained in the film, is rather peculiar. What we see in these black-and-white pictures, however, takes our breath away, and there are many visual references to pictures by other renowned photographers of the era whom Maier was either consciously emulating or by whom she was influenced. Or perhaps she was doing all this without even knowing about someone like Diane Arbus or Helen Levitt.

It helps that Maloof himself is such a visual filmmaker, and his curious eyes draw us into the story he is telling, but we never get a satisfactory explanation for why he signs the backs of Maier’s prints that go on sale and are shown to great success at art galleries around the world. Another detail that was a bit hard to swallow involved him trying to track down a church steeple in a French town on some of Maier’s pictures: He says he used Google images by typing something like “French church steeples” and somehow found the picture. Perhaps because of a lack of information from the filmmaker, this bit seems mind-blowing at first and then suspicious in retrospect, especially because the village somewhere deep in the Alps only has only a few dozen inhabitants.

Whatever qualms there may be about the investigation itself, the quality of Maier’s images is unassailable, and while the character herself may fade into the background after we have seen the film, the striking compositions of her work will not.

Maloof and co-director Charlie Siskel expertly connect details from interviews with the life captured in Maier’s tens of thousands of photographs, and while we cannot retrace the subject’s life exactly or feel like we are following in her footsteps, we do get multiple glimpses of the moments she caught with her camera. She may have been eccentric or even mentally unstable, and she may very well have lacked social tact, but what remains today is her extensive body of work, and everybody who sees Finding Vivian Maier would agree that her pictures have earned her a place alongside some of the greatest photographers of people of the 20th century.

John Wick (2014)

André Crous

There is too much shooting and not enough character in (this first instalment of) John Wick, an action vehicle tailor-made for Keanu Reeves

John WickUSA
3.5*

Director:
Chad Stahelski
Screenwriter:
Derek Kolstad
Director of Photography:
Jonathan Sela

Running time: 100 minutes

Tarantino, by way of Star Trek, taught us that revenge is a dish best served cold. The ice-cold temperament of Keanu Reeves is therefore perfectly suited to a tale of revenge that produces an almost never-ending stream of corpses but is all the more chilling because of its main character’s utterly cool demeanour.

Jonathan “John” Wick (Keanu Reeves) used to be a bad man. Until five years ago, he did astonishingly successful work as a heavy – halfway through the film, someone reminds us, perhaps a tad euphemistically, that Wick used to be the guy you called to “beat people up” – and was an associate of one of the nastiest Russian mobsters in New York City, Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist).

A few days after the death of Wick’s wife, a group of young Russians notice his 1969 Boss Mustang at a gas station; that evening, they beat him to within an inch of his life and take the car. By some crazy coincidence, one of the men is Tarasov’s son, Iosef (Alfie Allen), who has no idea yet what he is about to unleash. And we know that some bad things are on the way because his father the strongman goes silent.

Chad Stahelski (David Leitch performed co-director duties, but because of DGA rules, only one person can receive credit as director) reveals very few details about Wick’s past life, either working in the business or living with his now-late wife, whom we only see in flashbacks and in a prominent video on his mobile phone. This lack of information hinders our understanding of the character but it also makes him an enigma whose strength lies demonstrably in the number of people he can kill without breaking a sweat, or a nail.

The first shots of Wick at home show us he is living very comfortably, but we don’t know how this is possible, whether his wife knew anything about the way he used to make his money or whether he has a day job. When a policeman stops by late one night during an altercation, the scene between them is deliberately comical but will baffle the viewer on second thought, because we don’t have enough insight into his life to understand why the cop plays dumb on purpose, albeit much to our enjoyment.

Thankfully, it is Reeves in the role of Wick, and even when he becomes emotional, be it out of sadness or out of anger, his expressions are muted, which in this case is a very good thing. What is not a good thing, however, is the casting of his nemesis. While Michael Nyqvist is a fine actor in his native Swedish (he starred as Mikael Blomkvist in the original TV series adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels), his English is terribly wooden, and he is done no favours by a screenplay that makes him recite dialogue that sounds like it is from more than a century ago. His Russian may very well be better than his English (I couldn’t tell), but the film would have been much better off with a different actor in the role.

The story of a man unwillingly drawn back into his former life in the underworld to avenge a more recent injustice may sound a bit like The History of Violence, but John Wick has nowhere near the same insight or sense of drama as Cronenberg’s stunning 2005 film. Instead, we just get a lot of gunshots, stab wounds and broken bones, often without even knowing anything about the victims.

If you like violence, you will love John Wick. There is little variety, as more than half of the living shuffle off their mortal coil with a shot to the head, and the story is terribly thin, but the film does remind us that Reeves has a place in the action film genre, and sometimes it needs him as much as he needs it.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

André Crous

David Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo breathes fire over the chilly Swedish countryside.

Girl with the Dragon TattooUSA
4*

Director:
David Fincher
Screenwriter:
Steven Zaillian
Director of Photography:
Jeff Cronenweth

Running time: 160 minutes

At their first meeting, the septuagenarian Henrik Vanger, head of the powerful Vanger Industries, warns an investigative journalist about “thieves, misers, bullies … the most detestable collection of people you will ever meet.” These people, we learn, are his relatives, and in the cold winter air of rural Sweden, the fog that permanently hangs over the quiet desolation is the uncertainty about the intentions of a handful of people on a tiny island: the Vanger family.

The journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, has come to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl, Harriet, which dates back to the summer of 1966. On that day, sumptuously recreated by director David Fincher and his cinematographer in shades of gold, Harriet seemed to be on edge, and by nightfall she had vanished like a dream.

Blomkvist seems to be the perfect man for the job: He is a keen detective and isn’t scared of naming and shaming the guilty parties, no matter how influential they are. He also happens to need some time alone, and the excursion to the remote town of Hedestad seems to be the perfect opportunity for him to regroup after a devastating legal defeat.

He soon realises that he is in over his head, however, with many corpses – all of them girls, which explains the (original) Swedish title of the book on which the film is based: Men Who Hate Women – rearing their heads from beyond the grave, and decides to bring in the goth cyber expert Lisbeth Salander to help him hack his way through the swampland of cold cases. Lisbeth is the girl with the titular tattoo, and has clearly had a very rough life, though presumably the details of her childhood will be dealt with in the sequel(s).

That is a shame, because the 2009 Swedish film, with which Fincher’s version will inevitably be compared, handles Lisbeth’s backstory very cunningly by using a momentary flashback to hint at an extremely violent streak. Furthermore, this American interpretation of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling three-part novel differs in one significant respect from the source and the other film version: While the setting, the characters’ names and all newspaper headlines are Swedish, the dialogue is in English, though Swedish interjections for “Hi” or “Thanks” do feature in speech.

Daniel Craig, who plays Blomkvist, overcomes this linguistic mishmash by playing his usual British self, and it works. Christopher Plummer, as Henrik Vanger, is an American who pronounces Swedish names with a Swedish accent. But Rooney Mara, who plays Lisbeth and has the right body gestures for the character, has a face that is too delicate for the role and her attempt at imitating a Swede speaking English fails miserably.

Fincher, who has had ample experience putting information-heavy storylines onscreen, skilfully guides us through the wealth of details from that fateful day in 1966 when Harriet disappeared. In one very effective sequence, while Blomkvist reads a timeline of the events with a yellow highlighter, we get brief glimpses of the day in the same yellow tones.

In contrast with the bright sunbathed images that constitute the past, the present is murky, perfectly anticipated by Fincher’s opening credits sequence – his best since Fight Club – in which a grey, metallic fluid seems to gush over a body that is half-animated, half-decomposing, while Trent Reznor’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” pulsates on the soundtrack.

Fincher allows himself one moment of the darkest brand of humour, pulling the kind of stunt Kubrick did when his main character in A Clockwork Orange committed a rape while crooning “Singin’ in the Rain”. Here, under slightly different but similar circumstances, some of Enya’s music is used to the same bloodcurdling effect.

Such effects are the director’s forte, and he uses image and sound both subtly and grippingly to affect the viewer on a subconscious level, often hinting at more ominous details that others have overlooked to their detriment. The film’s focus on Blomkvist and Salander is sharp, but the 2009 adaptation offered an impression of danger despite the family members’ proximity to each other. Then again, Fincher does provide greater detail about the investigation’s many twists and turns, and he does so in a firm and comprehensible way that has less violence than its Swedish counterpart yet is equally effectual.

The Night Before (1988)

André Crous

Bad acting be damned. The Night Before is more than a guilty pleasure. It is a classic.

The Night BeforeUSA
4*

Director:
Thom Eberhardt
Screenwriters:
Gregory Scherick
Thom Eberhardt
Director of Photography:
Ron Garcia

Running time: 85 minutes

There once was a time when Keanu Reeves was a bit of a dork. Not the actor, but his characters. Although in the minds of most viewers, the line has always been a bit blurred. He is as much Neo as he is John Wick as he is the second half of the unforgettable duo that is Bill & Ted. Keanu (because nobody refers to him as “Reeves”) has played some iconic roles over the years, but the main reason for this muddled boundary is that he is not much of an actor – at least, not one who produces speech in a natural way. As a result, his various performances have been remarkably similar in expression.

The Night Before was among his very first films and the one in which he made his début as a leading man. This mostly farcical production fits his adorkable line delivery and excessive hand movements to a T. But despite the laid-back nature of this pretty derisory undertaking, it should be regarded as a high point of Keanu’s career because it is so consistent in its wackiness.

His character, Winston, is a nerdy senior in high school whose biggest achievement is being vice-president of the Astronomy Club. Two of the coolest girls in school made a bet, and the one who loses is punished by having to go to the prom – and, worst of all, be seen in public – with Winston. That lucky girl is Tara Mitchell (Lori Loughlin), the daughter of a very protective single dad who is also an ominously cool-as-a-cucumber police captain. Naturally, the traditional “chat” between the date and the father involves a shotgun.

But The Night Before opens after the prom has already ended, and we never even get to the prom. One reason is the action itself: Winston gets off the highway too early and loses his way in an unseemly part of downtown Los Angeles. The other reason is structural: The film is a cleverly assembled mixture of quirky flashbacks triggered by a verbal or a visual cue in the present. But there is no way the prom was even a fraction as exciting as what Winston and Tara get to experience.

It all starts long after sunset, when Winston wakes up in a dark alley dressed in a white jacket and a pink carnation, just as a truck is about to (and then does) drive over him. He has no idea how he got there. This amnesia takes a while to shake off as he slowly pieces together the events that led up to him alone in the middle of the night without his wallet or his car keys, but $1,400 stuffed deep into his jacket.

While asking around, he quickly learns that he has to meet the local crime boss, “Tito”, at dawn, where they will have it out over… something. This impending doom imbues the entire film, comical as the events sometimes are, with a foreboding feeling of danger and dread, even as Winston (always awkwardly but, somehow, usually successfully) evades countless obstacles in his way. He also realises Tara has disappeared, and he doesn’t remember dropping her off at home, which means her father will have a bullet with his name on it.

A string of bad decisions – from Winston unwittingly helping a thief steal his car to him mistakenly selling Tara to a pimp – lead to the night unfolding as a horror show that the two teenagers take in their stride. They are either fearless or insane, and by the looks of things, these two options are not mutually exclusive. When a bartender overtly pockets Tara’s credit card before shuffling off, she blithely responds to no one in particular, “Well, there goes my credit rating…(!)” And when she is stuffed into the trunk, she is more worried about her silk dress getting ruined than the fact that she is about to be trafficked. Lori Loughlin plays this role of an airhead high school princess, who is indifferent to danger because she has always lived in a protective cocoon, exquisitely.

The night-time setting is remarkably seedy, and almost every character in both the present and the recent past (the flashbacks from earlier that night) either is a criminal, has criminal tendencies or gives off a vibe that has us grabbing our wallet to make sure it is still there. The Night Before particularly maligns its black characters: With a lone exception, every single one is some shade of a crook.

But it is the unexpected Proustian “madeleines” – those sensory triggers that evoke a particular memory – that stitch the plot’s two timelines together in a perfectly suited comical fashion and create a synthesis that is also an impetus constantly pushing the story forward. These bits of connecting tissue are very potent tools in a filmmaker’s toolbox, as Stephen Daldry proved in the opening credits of The Hours, which created visual links between three stories. Here, the moments are admittedly much less sophisticated but equally successful at establishing strong and memorable ties between the past and the present, thereby illuminating our (and Winston’s) understanding of his predicament.

The flashbacks are filled with such entertaining characters and events that we care little about the major plot hole: Locating the exact moment about halfway through the film where the flashbacks finally catch up with the film’s opening scene is not as easy as one would hope. But the reason this closure is lacking is that the film is always rushing full-speed ahead towards dawn, with the events around Winston quickly spiralling out of control as we reach the final act.

No one would have guessed Proust would make an appearance in a review of a Keanu Reeves film. Then again, many a Keanu film exists on a plane of existence that transcends that of its peers. The Night Before is serious yet ridiculous, clever yet superficial. And unlike many a comedy from the same period, the humour hasn’t aged a bit. (If you haven’t watched Wayne’s World in a while, try again and see whether you can call it anything other than cringeworthy.) Held together by performances that, if tweaked just a little bit, might have been unbearable, the film has a rhythm all its own and surpasses its respectable but staid counterparts, like those of John Hughes.

The Book Thief (2013)

André Crous

The Book Thief, which seems to shift the blame for the atrocities of Nazi Germany to an offscreen character named “Death”, is one of the worst World War II films that have ever seen the light of day.

Book ThiefUSA
1.5*

Director:
Brian Percival
Screenwriter:
Michael Petroni
Director of Photography:
Florian Ballhaus

Running time: 130 minutes

There is something sadistic about the industry inflicting movies on us on a near-annual basis that have to do with Jews hiding from the Nazis. From time to time, these films have undeniable strength and importance – for example, films that are documentaries, like Shoah or The Night and the Fog, or those that veer close to being documentaries, like Schindler’s List or Europa Europa – but just as often, there are movie producers who are interested in the subject more as a moneymaking device than as a historical tragedy.

This is where things usually fall apart. If the subject of fear is used not to teach us about the evil of the past, but merely as a backdrop to a story about a Christian girl who falls in love with a Jewish boy, and who reads him bedtime stories when he is bedridden, it can only be described as abominable. And that is exactly what The Book Thief is.

The Christian girl in question is an orphan named Liesel (Sophie Nélisse). Her brother died recently in the arms of her mother, who has had to flee because she is a communist, leaving Liesel in the care of a parentless couple. Her new “papa” is the kind-hearted, patient and loving Hans Hubermann, played with grace by Geoffrey Rush. Her second “mama,” of course, is the strict and offish Rosa (Emily Watson), who is sharp-tongued, always finds fault with everyone else, and whom we never grow to like.

At her brother’s funeral, Liesel had picked up a book, and with this book her world, which has suddenly shrunk to a small home on a short street in a tiny swastika-emblazoned town in the German countryside, opens up again, and her relationship with her new father blossoms. She falls in love with books, and after the predictable scene of a Nazi-organised book burning in the town square, she can’t help but take one of the books, even as it singes under her coat, making her clothes billow with smoke.

The Book Thief, which is based on a novel by Austrian author Markus Zusak, may have had the best intentions, but when the street on which the girl lives is called Himmelstrasse (Heaven Street), and we constantly have a narration supplied by no one other than Death himself (voiced here by Roger Allam), and everyone speaks as if they’re on the radio, it is truly embarrassing. And the embarrassment is infuriating because of the importance of the historical context.

For a large part of the film, a young Jewish man, Max, hides out in the Hubermanns’ cellar, and Liesel’s fascination with him, mixed with the secret she has to keep – even from her best friend, Rudy, the boy from next door who never leaves her alone and who, from the way he is acting, apparently had decided to fall in love with her even before they met – could have been the source of an interesting story. But because of the terrible acting by almost everyone in the cast and the very one-dimensional characters they all portray, it is difficult to take anything seriously, despite the terrible setting of Nazi Germany.

The only time when the film packs a punch is near the beginning, shortly before the start of the war, when director Brian Percival intercuts the violence of Kristallnacht with a choir of fair-haired German children singing their hearts out, dressed in their Hitlerjugend uniforms with enormous flags of the Nazi Party draped on either side of them. It is a deeply distressing scene for the viewer, which seems to belong to an infinitely more capable film. It is also a scene whose gravity is almost entirely undermined by one a few minutes later in which Liesel and Max make fun of Hitler’s mother.

But the worst is yet to come. Never mind Liesel effortlessly wading into frigid waters halfway through the film and Rudy diving into the ice-cold river to prove his love/friendship, and neither of them so much as get gooseflesh from the cold: The film ends with almost an exact copy of the final scene of Titanic, in which the memories of a lifetime are exhibited on cabinets for our perusal so that we can all have a nice, warm feeling upon leaving the cinema, knowing that Liesel’s post-Holocaust life was beautiful.

The Book Thief is one of the worst World War II films I have ever seen. It is one thing to try to balance humour with the grotesque events that no man or woman – and certainly no child – should ever have to face, but it is quite another to essentially make light of the events by having a director who doesn’t seem to mind his actors sounding like they are reading from a page just out of reach of the camera, and a story that is incompetently vying for our emotions. Having Death narrate the events is silly, if not appalling, beyond belief, and the whole experience leaves the viewer immensely disappointed, with a desire that someone should have set light to the screenplay.

Booksmart (2019)

André Crous

Told from a female perspective but playing like a cheap Netflix fusion of American Graffiti and Superbad, Booksmart hopes (in vain) that we can look past its lead’s impish behaviour because she’s more-studious-than-thou. 

BooksmartUSA
2.5*

Director:
Olivia Wilde
Screenwriters:
Emily Halpern
Sarah Haskins
Susanna Fogel
Katie Silberman
Director of Photography:
Jason McCormick

Running time: 90 minutes

There are few people as annoying as know-it-alls. Now imagine someone like this playing the lead in a feature film and failing to recognise her own deficiencies at any point in the story. It is near impossible to root for such an individual. And yet, this is the main character in Booksmart, a film that takes place over roughly a 24-hour period on the last day of school and seems to pitch itself as a female-driven American Graffiti or Superbad. Unfortunately, it has little more going for it than meagre production values, a forgettable soundtrack and a complete lack of visual creativity.

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) is student body president and will be valedictorian at her high school graduation the next day. Seemingly living a life of privilege (we never see her parents, and the implication is that she somehow lives on her own on the top floor of a big duplex apartment unit), she sees herself on a glide path to the Supreme Court bench within a few years. Clearly, there is no shortage of hubris, although it is not rooted in anything except grades.

She and her best friend, Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), have spent their entire school career seemingly insulated from any and all social contact, as we soon learn when Molly overhears her classmates maliciously gossiping about her. Confident in her own academic superiority, however, she confronts them by suggesting graduation is the end of the road for them, only to learn that the cool kids have way more layers than she thought: One is going to Harvard, another is headed to Stanford and the most popular guy in school has been accepted at Georgetown, while the resident stoner and long-term school student has been recruited as a programmer for Google. She not only misread the classroom: She has misread the classroom for years and never learnt anything except her school work. By the looks of it, social interaction and life, in general, have completely passed her by.

For Amy, life is somewhat more complicated. An out but introverted lesbian for the past two years, she has focused all her energy on work (and, presumably, the high-maintenance friendship with Molly) and has yet to find an outlet for her teenage hormones like her peers. She has super-religious parents who are fully supportive of their daughter, so getting laid is (as in so many other films) actually the most pressing challenge to her otherwise blissfully elite existence.

Having just realised that they have missed out on being teenagers, and given the symbolic importance of the last night of school, Molly devises a plan to attend the year’s biggest party and rack up some experiences before she graduates to residing inside the law library at Yale. Basically, her big plan is just to go to the party, where she will get to hook up with her uber-popular vice-president, Amy will finally make out with a girl, and they will somehow make up for a youth ensconced in a bubble of superiority. This “plan” is pathetic, but what is even worse is that the film somehow allows most of Molly’s dreams to come true, without her having to change a thing about herself.

The characters’ passivity is mirrored by the film itself, which has little in the way of either physical or audiovisual dynamism. Most scenes feel desperately empty, and shots with more than two characters involved in the action are few and far between. The screenplay’s central focus is on the Molly/Amy duo, and yet, by the end of the film, they are still two-dimensional, at best. The film isn’t interested in doing more than scratch the surface, and in the one big confrontation between the two girls, their dialogue fades out so that we can’t hear them, lest they appear to be more complex than a blank page.

By far the most interesting character is their cool English teacher, Miss Fine, played by the supremely talented Jessica Williams, who belongs in a much better film. The amount of personality, back story and feeling she brings to her character in just a handful of scenes is simply astounding. Jason Sudeikis is another comedian in the cast and turns up at school as the principal, although his talents are much better deployed later on when he pitches up as a Lyft driver. The topical issue of teacher pay is hinted at but probably too serious a subject to address in a film that is clearly more about lip service than thoughtful speech. (Props are given, however, when props are due: Uganda is dinged for its abysmal LGBT record.)

It might be unfair to expect any film about high school seniors to ever equal (never mind surpass) the brilliance of Will Gluck’s Easy A. But Booksmart‘s central characters are nowhere near as dynamic, independent and charismatic as Emma Stone, and the camera, by comparison, looks like it is fixed in place. In addition, while Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson in Easy A have rightly been called the best movie parents of all time, Molly’s mother and father are inexplicably absent. Meanwhile, Amy’s very Christian parents (played by Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte) only appear once and come across as overwrought caricatures every bit as childish as a baby on a sugar high.

Booksmart touts its feminism by pointing to other strong women (Molly’s room is adorned with pictures of Michelle Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) instead of infusing its own potentially thought-provoking central duo – a loud feminist and an out lesbian – with any kind of energy or insight beyond juvenile frolicking. They know everything, but they know nothing. Worst of all, it took them their entire young lives to figure out that being self-centred outsiders has its drawbacks.

It is incredible that it took four writers to come up with this shallow narrative headlined by a girl devoid of self-reflection and her omega-female sidekick. All the students change their minds about their peers within a single night and mostly without any serious drama. The scales fall off their eyes as if by magic, and by the end, there is absolute harmony and understanding. One half expects them to burst into a full-on musical number.

This film is often as nauseating as the excessive compliments Molly and Amy give each other and deserves a failing grade.

Us (2019)

André Crous

Jordan Peele’s second feature film, Us, is a serious horror production that surpasses his début, Get Out, in style if not in substance. 

Us (2019)USA
4*

Director:
Jordan Peele
Screenwriter:
Jordan Peele
Director of Photography:
Mike Gioulakis

Running time: 120 minutes

For the film critic, the problem with twist endings is that it is frowned upon to dwell on that final revelation, despite their importance to the experience. Even just mentioning that there is a last-minute information dump that causes us to rethink the entire film is often too much for the reader to handle. It’s a fine line to walk, but neither the critic nor the reader/potential viewer should be overly sensitive, particularly if it is made clear why such information is included.

Jordan Peele’s Us ends with a labyrinthine flashback that seems to tell us everything before turning our whole notion of the story’s past upside down and then, for good measure, twisting our collective nuts one last time before the credits roll. But while the film does contain traces of this shocking development throughout, most notably in the form of a tune that is whistled, the character concerned simply does not embody the skeleton she has in her closet. The traces seem planted, while the central performance is almost unaffected. The actions do not bespeak a closely held secret, and therefore, the film will not be much more interesting the second time around. And that’s worth a mention in a review such as this.

It all starts out very peculiarly and then gets weirder and weirder until the climax in a subterranean, rabbit-filled lair. In 1986, a young girl named Adelaide visits the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with her parents. At some point when they aren’t paying attention, she wanders off and into a mirror maze (in a dark twist of humour, it entices the customer to “find yourself”). She looks around for a way out but doesn’t find one. Someone appears behind her – a stranger who is as tall as she is, wears the same clothes and has the same hairstyle. But before we can see their face, the film cuts to the opening credits sequence, which involves a multitude of white lab rabbits.

Peele’s second film is a far cry from his first, Get Out, the global smash hit that somehow managed to induce in the viewer the anxiety of a psychological thriller while very clearly poking fun at supposedly liberal white Americans’ racial prejudices. In Us, whose title hints at a link with the United States (a link that is ultimately very weak if not altogether obscure), he is much more interested in making a genre film than in making a statement about contemporary society.

In the present day, an adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is just settling in for holiday with her family at a cabin. Husband Gabe (Winston Duke) is happy-go-lucky, seemingly without a care in the world, and is particularly excited about taking his children to the nearby beach in Santa Cruz. This news, a close-up reveals, hits Adelaide like a ton of bricks. But she puts on a brave face for her children, Zora and Jason.

The same night, after the visit to the beach, a mute family of four appear in their driveway. But it’s not just any family – it’s their doppelgängers: four individuals who have features very similar to theirs but are wearing crimson-coloured clothing. In addition, each of them is armed with a golden pair of scissors. Only one of them speaks, albeit with great difficulty and a voice that sounds like someone who is always being strangled: Adelaide’s alter ego, Red, who is quickly revealed to be the mastermind behind an uprising from the underworld.

This underworld consists of underground walkways alluded to in the film’s epigraph, which informs us of “thousands of miles” of tunnels beneath the continental United States. The characters down below mostly behave in a way that mirrors their above-ground counterparts (although, curiously, that is not always the case). This intimate relationship means they are “tethered” to each other. Plato’s cave, but with sentient shadows, would be an eerie but apt comparison.

Except for the epigraph, the first real foreshadowing we get of this tethering is a stunning image at the beach, where the camera hovers straight above the action to capture the family walking in a straight line, barely visible, while seemingly attached to their giant shadows that are lifelike but take on a life of their own as animate shadows. National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz is famous for a similarly striking composition he made with camels in 2005.

Following the initial home invasion, we quickly realise that the uprising is not just limited to the family of four but extends to the entire United States. Somehow, as is all too often the case with disaster movies, the rest of the world is unaffected. The family sticks together, trying to learn from each other how best to kill the impostors, until the final act, when Adelaide races (all alone, for reasons unexplained) into the underworld to find one of her children, who has been abducted.

This is where things take on a real mind-bending dimension as we have to put all the pieces together when the film climaxes in brightly lit hallways that could very well be tethered to the hotel room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Peele hits us with the climax, then knocks us off our feet with a bombshell surprise before delivering a second body blow. It’s the Sixth Sense of horror films, but the unexpected double twist vaults the film into a league all its own.

And yet, whereas M. Night Shyamalan’s famous blockbuster both made immediate sense and elicited admiration for blinding us to something that was in plain sight the entire time, Us conceals more and thereby reveals less, even on a repeat viewing. In his effort to shield the truth from us, Peele varnished over all the details that would have contributed to a richer fictional world, even at the risk of unveiling too much.

Even if it seems much more complex than it actually is, this is an original and stunningly crafted horror film.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

André Crous

In this sixth instalment of the famous franchise, Ethan Hunt (rather, let’s face it, Tom Cruise) is as ready as ever to do the hard work himself, but tying up decades-old loose ends can be a messy business.

Mission: Impossible - FalloutUSA
3*

Director:
Christopher McQuarrie
Screenwriter:
Christopher McQuarrie
Director of Photography:
Rob Hardy

Running time: 145 minutes

Imagine, for a moment, you’ve reached the climax of a high-energy, globetrotting action film. For most of the past two-and-a-half hours, the characters have been relatively solid, and the story has unspooled at a pretty good clip. On top of the Eiffel Tower, the good guy and the bad guy have been at each other’s throats for what feels like ages. For the umpteenth time, we suspend our disbelief and tell ourselves that the 15-minute countdown to the end of the world is still in effect. Finally, as we catch our breath right after disaster has been averted in the nick of time, the camera zooms out to reveal the Bellagio fountains in the background, and we realise this “Eiffel Tower” is, in fact, the one in Las Vegas. And yet, the film continues to insist that this is Paris, not the Las Vegas our eyes so very plainly see.

That’s basically the stupid stunt Mission: Impossible – Fallout pulls right at the end, when we are told the action takes places in the Himalayas, but down below the fjords are pretty, the hillsides are green, and this rocky outcrop is very clearly not the Roof of the World but rather the world-famous Preikestolen (Pulpit Rock) on Norway’s west coast. Unless we’re to believe that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) somehow helicoptered his way through a wormhole linking Kashmir to Scandinavia, this makes very little sense, particularly because so little effort has gone into hiding the truth. After all, a crucial interaction early on involves a Norwegian nuclear weapons specialist.

In this instalment (the sixth in total), Ethan Hunt again teams up with his long-time computer hacking partner, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), who’s been with him for the past two decades, and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg in a welcome low-key appearance), who’s done half the time. Given Hunt’s team’s track record, however, the new CIA director, played by Angela Bassett, insists that someone from the agency’s special division join the team. That individual is the seemingly by-the-book August Walker (Henry Cavill), who, attitude problem aside, appears to be professional enough.

Not unlike a James Bond plot, the film’s villain is bent on having a global reach and is ready to inflict significant pain to achieve his goals. Although his identity is a mystery at first (we can quickly figure it out for ourselves), his nom de guerre is John Lark. He heads up the terror network called The Apostles, whose goal is allegedly world peace, but the price to pay is immense suffering: Chillingly, three of the Abrahamic religions’ holy sites – the Vatican, Jerusalem and Mecca – are the initial targets of the nuclear devices.

In a film like this, however, our attention is not going to be on the generic details of the narrative but rather on how good or memorable the action scenes are. And while director Christopher McQuarrie’s plot is pretty standard for this kind of production, he does manage to stage one of the most exhilarating scenes of any of the (first) six films in the series: a chase scene on motorcycle through the streets of Paris that rivals anything that has come before and is the most high-octane piece of filmmaking in the City of Lights since Claude Lelouch’s C’était un rendez-vous.

The whole scene is sublime, from start to finish. Pursued by police, Ethan steers a truck into a narrow alleyway to force them to climb over the vehicle while he and August escape through the front window and speed off on waiting motorcycles. August speeds off, but for a tense few moments, Ethan can’t get his bike to start. When it does, damn the torpedoes, it’s full speed ahead. Not satisfied with merely weaving in and out of traffic, Ethan also heads straight up against the flow into one-way streets (and even clockwise around the Arc de Triomphe) and races through heavily congested crossroads, all shot with a camera that is as mobile as Ethan and follows him at full tilt as he swerves to evade the French police. In all of two minutes, McQuarrie reinvigorates the whole franchise.

And yet, the whole thing ends with a deus ex machina so preposterous the film takes on shades of that same impossibility-induced hilarity that the recent Fast & Furious films have mined for laughs. Whenever the screenplay writes itself into a corner, it simply paints an exit door through which to escape. Finding himself trapped, Ethan simply cuts some netting, falls through a grate and ends up inside an underwater canal where his buddies are calmly waiting to whisk him off in their speedboat. With these types of films, one will always suspend disbelief, but in light of the (albeit hyperreal) thrill ride of a chase scene, this kind of a twist is just a bridge too flimsy.

The film also relies too heavily on the viewer’s knowledge of, never mind emotional attachment to, characters from previous instalments: Ethan’s former wife, Julia, and former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust are two specific individuals whose presence here seems gratuitous. By contrast, a new character in the form of the mysterious White Widow (played by Vanessa Kirby with a mixture of sensuality and pure cheek) holds our attention in every one of her scenes. If she does make a comeback in the next episode, one hopes that hers would be a big role.

Clearly, this sixth instalment of the now more than 20-year-old big-screen Mission: Impossible franchise is not the best of the series. That distinction will (likely forever) belong to the very first one, directed by Brian De Palma and written by David Koepp and the legendary Robert Towne. That film’s set pieces, from the break-in at CIA Headquarters in Langley to the fast-paced climax on top of the Eurostar, might be small in scale compared with those of its successors, but – with the major exception of Fallout‘s chase scene in Paris – they still set our adrenaline pumping faster than anything else the series has offered us since.