Floating Weeds

A gorgeous film by Yasujirō Ozu, and fittingly given it’s a story about a theatre troupe, a showcase of fine acting talent. Ganjirō Nakamura plays a hammy actor paying a visit to an old flame and an illegitimate son who thinks he’s just an embarrassing uncle. It’s a very subtle performance, conveying the ironies of a man trying and failing to lead a business and a family, someone who expects authority but doesn’t earn it.

The title is entirely metaphorical, perhaps a way of evoking how exposed the itinerant actors are to the whims of fortune. But floating weeds tangle around each other and clump together, which is exactly what we see the characters do in the film. Nakamura has two families, the acting company and his former lover's household, and they intertwine in ways he doesn’t want but cannot prevent. His arrogance leads to him losing both, and having to set out again on his own.

Nakamura is backed up by a veritable who’s who of Japanese acting talent. Machiko Kyō (of Rashomon fame) gives a star turn as the jealous Sumiko, and Ayako Wakao (who will become Masumura’s favourite in the 60s) is stunning as the young actress who is a master of seduction. Ozu stalwarts Haruko Sugimura and Chishū Ryū also give fine performances in minor roles. And the three horny actors trying to chat up the town’s young ladies are great fun. This is one of Ozu’s most enjoyable films.

Avengers: Infinity War

Spoilers. I don't usually care about spoilers, but for some reason I wanted to go in clean for this one, and I'm glad I did. I didn't expect what was coming. Up until the very end I thought the film was playing by the rules and would pull off a defeat of the bad guy. To have Thanos win was a glorious send up of expectations.

Joel over at the London Graphic Novel Network has written a very good three part piece (even think-pieces now come in trilogies) on the film called 'the audacity of hopelessness', which is an excellent title, as this really is an audacious move by Marvel. In previous Avengers films Joss Whedon established the protocol of having a minor character die permanently in order to generate pathos and a certain amount of tension about who would make it. It never worked because you knew almost all of them will. The chat in the run-up to Infinity War would have been who would bite the bullet this time, a popular theory being that Iron Man would be retired. What a safe option that turned out to be! Instead the four founding Avengers (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Hulk) are spared, but Thanos wins and it's the new characters who turn to ash.

Joel loves the chutzpah of the ending, and takes issue with another good piece by Film Crit Hulk, who complains that the audacity is only skin deep. Like the Marvel comics before them, the cinematic universe will retcon the superhero cull and we'll return to our regular scheduled programming of two to three films a year. The safe option is simply deferred, and there won't be meaningful consequences. It's a justified fear, which is why I'm hoping Avengers 4 is a working title and the next film is just called Thanos. Perhaps it can even go in the direction Film Crit Hulk suggests, and explore Thanos's abused childhood and unfulfilled romance with a goddess of death. The only way the audacity of Infinity War can be earned is if Marvel continue to be audacious.

Film Crit Hulk is rather adorable in his fretting about what the Marvel films are teaching people:

I think about how many people can’t handle the basic dramatic stress of Infinity War and seeing our heroes in danger. I worry about how all the old lessons of Walt Disney’s original ethos, and the emphasis on understanding loss and consequence, could help prepare us to face the pain that we experience. For so many stories are designed to teach us the incredible healing and human power of sadness.

At my screening in the Peckamplex a lot of the kids were running around the aisles during the talking bits, so forgive me if I downgrade the importance of the Marvel Universe's underlying message. Those inured to the workings of retcons may well be annoyed at the probable lack of consequence to Infinity War's finale. But the mood in the screening was palpable – even the kids were silent in the last 10 minutes. Hulk is criticising the film to come, maybe justifiably. But the impact of Infinity War is real.

It's always about perspective. I would guess that most people still experience these things as individual films, rather than as threads in a wider tapestry. And the films are never less than enjoyable. The wider tapestry on the other hand is pretty threadbare, little more than a ploy to get you interested in the minor films (like the acclaimed Black Panther or the quirky Ant-Man) which would otherwise not have the audience they do.

And for all Film Crit Hulk's fretting about the film's disinterest in loss and consequence, even he recognises with a bit of squinting that Infinity War is trying to say something about sacrifice. In order to get the soul stone, Thanos must destroy something he loves, and he has the will to do it. He is a believer in the greater good, despite the bodies that have to pile up in the meantime. Meanwhile Gamora and Scarlet Witch fail the test, refusing to sacrifice their loved ones to stop Thanos (this gets slightly ridiculous in the latter case, as it would appear quite a few Wakandans give their lives in order to save Vision). In the end it doesn't matter, but at least Gamora and Vision both consent to their destruction. Heroes sacrifice themselves, the villain sacrifices others.

And there is some pathos to the deaths – Spidey and Stark obviously, but Don Cheadle wandering around looking for Falcon hit me quite hard. Hulk having to cope with Black Widow being gone would have been even more poignant, especially given their brief reunion, but the film spares her for some reason. The indiscriminate deaths are bewildering, quite difficult to process. But that's exactly as it should be. "Thanos will return" is a gesture worthy of Jonathan Hickman, and future films will not be able to take away the finality of that experience. I'm cautiously optimistic that Marvel will find a way to mourn the dead before righting the ship.

The Breakfast Club

Kinda like Moby Dick if the ship was detention and the whale was an asshole teacher. Or like a retelling of the origin of the United States – the castoffs from the old world rebelling against their elders and writing a new constitution. The twist being that their new fellowship will collapse at the start of the following week.

If the film is supposed to represent America in microcosm, it's not a particularly diverse one when it comes to ethnicity or sexuality. There are however some broad brushstroke explorations of class, where delinquency is peeled back to reveal an abusive or uncaring family environment. That shouldn’t excuse the behaviour, which Molly Ringwald has written about here. Bender gets the hero shot at the end of the film, and he doesn’t deserve it.

Where Hughes is on stronger ground is how he shows the male characters burdened with a very oppressive view of masculinity, involving frequent instances of threats, fights and homophobia. Andrew’s long confession lays bear the emotional scars patriarchy can leave on teenage boys – his ‘old man’ almost belongs in the Old Testament with Abraham, Lot and the other patriarchs.

The film was shot in sequence, which is surprising as it feels like a collection of disparate scenes that have no follow through. Characters scream at each other in one moment and are thick as thieves the next. The pairing up at the end makes zero sense to the modern viewer, particularly Ringwald's character hooking up with the guy who has relentlessly harassed her for the last 8 hours. It’s bizarre, and goes to show that the film, and Hughes's sensibilities, have aged very badly indeed.

"Movies get around our cleverness and our wariness; that's what used to draw us to the picture show. Movies – and they don't even have to be first-rate, much less great – can invade our sensibilities in the way that Dickens did when we were children, and later, perhaps, George Eliot and Dostoevski, and later still, perhaps, Dickens again. They can go down even deeper – to the primitive levels on which we experience fairy tales. And if people resist this invasion by going only to movies that they've been assured have nothing upsetting in them, they're not showing higher, more refined taste; they're just acting out of fear, masked as taste. If you're afraid of movies that excite your senses, you're afraid of movies."

...

"People feel that there's violence out there, and they want to shut it out. Movies, more than any other form of expression, are capable of bringing us to an acceptance of our terrors; that must be why people are afraid of movies" - Pauline Kael, 'Fear of Movies', from When the Lights Go Down

The Villainess

A preposterous Korean martial arts film, with a loopy plot and absurd fights. The first is probably the best, starting out like an arcade shooting game before switching to first-person knives, kicks and a grim bit of garrotting for the finale. The film is very enamoured of the long-take action sequence, in which the camera whips around the protagonist as she slaughters foes by the hundred. The cuts are disguised by CGI and rapid camera turns, and a lot of it does end up looking like a particularly intense video game. But it’s something new in cinema, if a bit headache-inducing.

It’s a rather weird title (I put the Korean through google translate and got wicked or evil woman). She’s not actually a bad person, she’s more a victim of dastardly fathers, gangsters and intelligence agencies. The end of the film seems to imply that the wretched influence of all the above create a monster, and that villainy is a product of a corrupt society. There is a slightly annoying gendered dimension to this though, in that the protagonist is set down this path by being a dutiful daughter, girlfriend, wife and mother. She does a very abrupt turnaround as soon as she learns she’s pregnant, from wanting to end it all to wanting to live and protect her child. It’s almost as if the maternal instinct switches on automatically to overcome all prior trauma or depression.

For all the awesome killing she does, the protagonist has very little agency – being directed by others (mostly men) for the duration of the film. Even her boyfriend for the romcom interlude in the middle is there to manipulate her. Perhaps that’s the point, and it’s only when all the people who have ‘made’ her (as the big bad boss claims) have been dispatched can she be free to set her own course in life. Perhaps The Villainess is an ironic title. It’s the bad guys that call her a bitch. They can’t see a woman trying to escape their influence as the heroine.

Warcraft: The Beginning

Not a well-reviewed film. I ended up watching it with some Warcraft fans and their enthusiasm rubbed off on me. Duncan Jones, who won fame with Moon and my respect with Source Code, sticks within the parameters established by Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. If anything, he is too faithful to the source material, packing in lots of lore which would confuse the uninitiated.

My experience of gaming makes me think the form is most effective at constructing brilliant alternative words. Warcraft III, the only game in the franchise I’ve played, has that in spades. But it also managed to string together an involving plot (that jumps four times in perspective) and some interesting character transitions. Indeed the effect of the game is to introduce you to different warring races and suggest that while not all ethically equal, each group has its own goals and justifications, which complicates a simple reading of good (human) against evil (orc).

The film copies all that across, producing a noble orc within a genocidal warband and a corrupt human within a peaceful kingdom. One of the issues is that the human’s turn to the dark side is never explained (it is in the games, one of the fans assured me). There are only hints of an interesting antihero before the demon takes over.

The rest is boilerplate Saturday morning adventure, and it’s about as effective as any of the Hobbit films, and certainly more enjoyable for having some of the murk replaced with shiny CGI plate-mail and barbarian muscle, and having proper wizards that cast proper fireballs. It didn’t make as much money as expected, but I for one would like to see Duncan Jones have a shot at making a sequel.

Annihilation

What does the alien want? Although it mirrors Natalie Portman’s actions and appears to commit suicide, the final scene reveals that actually, it doesn’t share Portman’s suicidal urges. In its own weird way, it saves her marriage.

The alien’s modus operandi is ‘refraction’ – the scrambling of reality to create new forms. It is creative whereas the humans in the film are (self)destructive. We may experience these effects as annihilation, but from the alien’s perspective it is exactly the opposite.

It’s hardly a comforting thought to assume the point of view of a cancer, which is why this film lacks the charge of Garland’s Ex Machina, where male power was overturned by a sympathetic ‘alien’ female. Here the alien may just represent Eros defeating humanity’s Thanatos – the (supposedly) impulsive way Portman’s sabotages her marriage being replaced with the will to save it. It doesn’t quite work because the marriage feels unreal to begin with, and ‘impulse’ is not a great explanation for Portman’s infidelity.

Garland has done better before. In its structure Annihilation is similar to the Garland-penned, Danny Boyle-directed Sunshine, where the characters spent less time explaining who they were, and their cabin fever environment made better sense of their descent into madness. There are some shudder-inducing moments in Annihilation, as well as a few beautiful sequences, but nothing that compares to the thrill-ride of Sunshine’s final 30 minutes. That it went straight to Netflix in Europe is somehow fitting – it’s not as good as Garland’s previous work would suggest it should be.

"In Britain at least, changes of government are precipitated not by a burning sense of right and wrong but by a vague feeling that things have gone too far in one direction and that some kind of correction is needed to bring them back into balance. After a while, voters bank the good things that a government has given them and look to the other party to deliver them from the bad things. They got the welfare state from the Attlee government, for instance, but after five years of sacrifice they were longing to do some shopping. They got something like full employment from a series of Labour and Conservative governments but they also got higher taxes and over-mighty trade unions and so turned to Margaret Thatcher. She and John Major sorted out those problems but kept health and education on such short rations that voters in the end elected New Labour, at least in part, to build them back up again. It did so, but did little or nothing to tackle the underlying vulnerabilities of a growing welfare state reliant on an economy built increasingly on debt and immigration, as well as an unwarranted confidence that the good times could ever end." - Tim Bale, The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron

Black Panther

There is a striking parallel between Wakanda and Themyscira – faraway hidden utopias which flip the privileges of our world. In Black Panther the attraction of that idea is brought out a bit more than last year's Wonder Woman. The little boy who grows up to be the villain sees the glow of a spaceship in the sky, the possibility of escape and the hope of a new world. Wakanda becomes a way to transform present day iniquities and right historic wrongs.

The best villains are those who have motives you can sympathise with. Andy Serkis is a cartoon in this film, but the revolutionary agenda of Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger is born out of a sense of righteous anger, which pickles into murderous resentment. Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa has to walk the line between his cousin’s urge to overthrow and institute new empires, and his father’s desire to remain detached from the concerns of other countries – isolationism par excellence. Weirdly, by making Wakanda into a superpower, the film imposes on it many of the foreign policy responsibilities the United States takes on as the world’s policeman.

T’Challa’s dilemma is overlaid with a personal responsibility to a cousin abandoned by his father, and by his fatherland. The absent father is a common experience in the black community, which the film broadens out into a failure to express solidarity generally. Wakanda’s problems are partly of its own making.

These ambiguities are what make the film such an intriguing watch. T’Challa manages to quash Wakanda’s imperialistic turn, but also opens up the country through humanitarian outreach – there are aid programs but no military bases. Difficult questions (on foreign intervention, reparations, the legacy of slavery or the return of cultural artefacts) are referenced but remain unresolved. Then again, there’s only so many digressions a superhero film can sustain without becoming ponderous. Black Panther takes on some heavy ideas, but wears them all lightly. It’s a finely balanced piece of work, and yet more proof that Marvel Studios know exact what they are doing.