Savages

For the first time in the history of Stranded Cinema, I have an exclusive. Despite it not being released until late September in the UK, I have already seen Savages. In fact, I saw it at a free preview screening several months ago. Although the agreement not to discuss the film at these screenings is hardly enforced, I have held back. However, as it's been released in the USA, I feel that I can now post my thoughts safely. It’s the latest project from Oliver Stone, developed from a novel by Don Winslow. The first thing to say is that this is a terrible film. Two marijuana growers in California, who share a girlfriend called ‘O’, get into trouble with a Mexican cartel who want to take over the market. Their girlfriend is eventually taken hostage and they must struggle to find a way to release her. The plot, as you can tell, sounds like a Tarantino film from the 90s, and that’s exactly what it feels like it is trying to be. The narrative starts, however, with little or no set up. Why do we care about these characters, who are little more than drug dealers with heart? What interest do we have in them? We’re given a narration by ‘O’, but rather than helping it is annoying. It continues far too long. ‘Show, don’t tell’ is the classic imperative of good cinema which Stone has ignored here. The audience isn’t stupid, unless you want them to be. The narration is drifting and vacant, over slow motion or blurred shots, portentous in its content, with pseudo-intellectual insights such as ‘I had orgasms, he had wargasms’.  Salma Hayek plays the Mexican cartel leader – a deeply flawed, unbelievable character, badly acted. Someone can’t be a heartless psychotic businesswoman, and a loving mother. There is an extent to which this can’t be stretched. Travolta is good enough as a slimy federal agent, but the best thing about this film (as in most films he’s in) is Benicio del Toro. He plays the right-hand man of Hayek’s character, and tours California with a gang of Mexican gardeners, turning up at people’s houses and torturing/killing them. He is so good it’s almost funny. Even his character, however, is stretched to breaking point towards the end. The one powerful moment of this film is the revelation of the rape, but what is the point? It means nothing and has no implications to the plotline. Lastly, the double-ending will annoy almost everyone who sees it, and is again pointless. The final conclusion of the film is deeply unsatisfactory. Nothing is resolved. It is escapism as its worst – they leave the country and all of their responsibilities to live happily ever after. It may be that the film was improved with further editing after the preview screenings, but there are fundamental flaws here which I don’t think can be ironed out. Any work of art that at some point resorts to the dictionary definition of its title for any sort of meaning, as this film does, has lost all hope.

The Hunt for Red October

This film has one of the most frequently misspelt titles of all time – there is no ‘the’ before ‘red’. Despite knowing who was in it and what it was generally about, I’d never seen it fully, and thus was unaware it formed part of the Jack Ryan story, the character from Tom Clancy’s novels who also features in Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games. It is the first in the series (although apparently contains many references to Patriot Games, suggesting it was written later). You don’t need to know this when watching the film, but it does help. Ryan’s character is far more interesting than your usual action hero. Here he discovers that the Russians have launched a new, silent submarine, capable of avoiding sonar and that it’s heading for America. What he soon learns, however, is that the officers are intending to defect. Connery does his best to restrain his strong Scottish accent, but it is not very convincing. There is a strange, very heavily signposted transition between the languages as the camera zooms in on a man speaking Russian and zooms out on him speaking English. I don’t think there is a better way to disturb your audience and disrupt the flow of a film. Connery’s character itself is somewhat unlikeable, and it is only with some extremely improbable plot-turns that Ryan (played by Alec Baldwin) gets to meet him face to face. It is a complex story, although there are some rather obvious devices to help it on its way: ‘I know how he’s going to get them off the submarine’ Ryan says at one point. He then doesn’t tell us, but keeps it a secret until the critical moment. It is ultimately a hollow film – teasing us with a deeper meaning, when there really is none. It is not especially tense, thrilling or dramatic, but good enough – which, most of the time, is all we want.

River of Grass

This film is the debut of writer-director Kelly Reichardt ,who has since gone on to direct Meek’s Cutoff. All of her films so far have created excitement in the film-world, but she has yet to intrude into mainstream consciousness (if that is even her intention). River of Grass is a small-scale, independent film about a bored housewife who gets involved with a younger man in a small town in Florida. Everything is told from the perspective of the woman, and we hear throughout her narration on events in a relaxed, monotone drawl. It feels at times like a homemade movie. The camera is shaky, the picture grainy, and dialogue mumbled (and could be one of the inspirations for mumblecore). Despite this, after watching I was surprised the film was as old as 1994. It feels fresh and modern (in comparison to other films from the same year, like Speed for example). The characters are casual, even after they think they’ve killed someone with a gun they find. We’re uncertain throughout how we’re supposed to judge their actions, and who we are supposed to support, or reprehend (she leaves her children at home alone to go out to a bar; he threatens his grandmother with a gun). The ending is sudden, but not exactly shocking. It’s only surprising perhaps that there is no sexuality involved in the story. They are two bored characters, beyond being desperate and lonely, lacking any purpose or meaning to their lives. There is a raw sound to the movie. It is intoxicating, sometimes painful to watch, and impresses indelibly on the memory. A strange, beguiling film that will alter you imperceptibly, but permanently.

Sorority Row

A film like this has to be judged by its own standards, or those of its genre. Any attempt to compare it to cinema more widely, or art and literature as a whole, would result in calamity. There’s no mistaking who this film was made for and why. Five final year students at a sorority house in an anonymous University in the US accidentally kill their friend. They decide to hide the body, but nine months later, when they are graduating, something starts picking them off, one by one. This may sound very, very familiar, and it is. I Know What You Did Last Summer did this twelve years earlier. However, as I found out after watching the film, Sorority Row is a ‘reimagining’ of an 80s original: The House on Sorority Row. So the claims of which came first are perhaps moot. Nonetheless, Sorority Row cannot be said to be original or innovative in anything that it does. To a certain extent teen horrors aren’t expected to do this, but the best, and most famous, always stretch the boundaries of what’s possible within their limits. As with Lesbian Vampire Killers, it may seem relatively easy to make a film like this. There are, as Randy from Scream might say, certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully make a horror movie. Sorority Row fails on several counts. Who, for instance, is the main character? We’re never really sure. This needs to be defined fairly early, unless you want to constantly tease the audience with who will or won’t survive – but this is a risky step itself. Is the killer frightening enough? Are they supernatural or human? Do they have a certain unique style, or way of killing? It seems some of this has been considered (the tyre iron), but not all of it. When we discover who the killer actually is, the reason for the killer to have acted the way they did becomes meaningless. This ‘reveal’, in fact, is one of the hardest things to pull off in these films. Here it is done poorly (someone spots something in someone’s conveniently open bag), although there is at least some surprise as to who it is. The murders themselves are so obviously flagged that they’re not at all frightening, gruesome, or even funny (as they sometimes are in the Scream franchise). It seems we’ve become so used to films like this, that we need them to be more and more extreme, leading to the torture porn in Hostel and Saw, which even I refuse to watch. The end of the film has multiple, anti-climactic conclusions and we leave it feeling we have experienced very little style, and virtually no substance. Even by the standards of the genre, this film is poor.

Total Recall

Total Recall has been remade and will be released next week. It is perhaps an obvious choice for a remake – contemporary CGI, modern taste for realism and irony, and better actors (Colin Farrell, Jessica Biel and Kate Beckinsale), have the potential to make it a huge, rollercoaster of a blockbuster. I wonder, however, how much of the sinister play with reality and memory the new version will retain. The strap-line on its posters says ‘What is Real?’, suggesting that this will be a major theme in the film. In the original, we remain uncertain until quite late in the movie as to whether anything we see is actually happening or not. There is a scene in which the people trying to capture Quaid/Hauser (played by Schwarzenegger) attempt to persuade him that he is dreaming, that he is not really a spy on Mars, but an ordinary construction worker on Earth. He sees through this lie and manages to escape, but the dilemma is crucial to the film and how it manipulates its audience. We are the real construction workers on Earth, fantasising that we might be spies on Mars. We are placing ourselves in the shoes of Quaid/Hauser, and this scene in which he is told he is dreaming is ultimately directed at us. It speaks directly to us, and the lie is actually the truth. The film as a whole rather than encouraging us to believe we can be more than construction workers, in fact reinforces our position as such. It gives us this fantasy, allows us to play with it for two hours, so that we might accept reality more happily. I’m also fascinated by the many questions that Quaid/Hauser’s identity raises for us. For Quaid, Hauser is a different person, someone he cannot be, and this is in fact how all of us treat our past and future selves. They are distinct from us, yet we recognise whilst repressing the inevitable links. There’s an metafictive play with the names, too: Quaid is Irish-American and Hauser is German-Dutch. The film was directed by Verhoeven (a Ducthman) with American money. Significant? I don’t know. I await with both excitement and concern this new version. It will have lost the quirks of Verhoeven’s direction – the fast changes of situation, the panning camera, zooming in from a distance on its target – but what will it have gained?

Shalako

Despite the successes of some Westerns in recent years, cinema audiences still seem ambivalent about the genre. In the late 80s and early 90s there was quite a resurgence with Young Guns, Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, Open Range, and Tombstone. More recently we’ve had There Will Be Blood, True Grit, Appaloosa, 3:10 to Yuma and Cowboys & Aliens. The genre has expanded to include revisionist, noir, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, futuristic, contemporary and comic book westerns. Despite this, you will still occasionally meet people who’ll say ‘I don’t like Westerns’. For a genre to be discounted entirely seems rather dramatic, and may stem from a European distance to these movies (despite the efforts of Sergio Leone). It is perhaps down to films like Shalako, made in 1968, that the reputation of Westerns still sometimes suffers. Starring Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot, it purports to be a more sympathetic Western – the Indians are not unreasonable savages, they just want their land. However, they are still men in wigs, their faces painted brown, screaming as they attack, simple-minded in their intentions. The film reminded me a lot of Zulu, made four years earlier, but with much more success. The title, Shalako, probably put a lot of people off. The entirely miscast Connery as the main character doesn’t help, nor does Bardot in a strange, uncharacteristic role (one of the few American films she’s in). It feels very much like, and probably was, a cast put together before a script. The film is in fact far smaller in scale than it purports to be. There are sweeping landscapes, but the plot follows only a few characters for little more than two days. They are attacked and surrounded by Indians and try to escape. Eventually they are caught again by the Indians and a final showdown is expected. What we receive at the end, however, is highly disappointing. There is no substantial conclusion or resolution. The real enemy, of course, as in all these movies, is the in-fighting between the white men. Shalako is as tremendously flawed as a film can be. We never have sympathy for any of the characters, despite Connery’s natural charisma, or Bardot’s beauty. It is in all a weird movie, probably better forgotten.

Lesbian Vampire Killers

I’m ashamed to say I saw this film, although in my defence it was on the television while I was waiting for someone. That person didn’t arrive and I ended up seeing the whole movie. The title is self-explanatory. There’s no subterfuge around what the creators were trying to do (when a vampire is killed, white gunk spurts out of them – I probably don’t need to spell out what it’s supposed to be). In fact, my one complaint would be not that they went too far, but that they didn’t go far enough. It could’ve been far scarier/sexier, if they’d been willing to be daring. Unfortunately what we have is a rather tame B-movie that only half-delivers on its promises. The set up is fairly abysmal – why does the vampire queen have to wait until the last in the family line? Why is the main character the last in the line? Likewise, towards the end, why do the vampires leave the two lovers alone for a few minutes – just so the script writers can fit a bit of dialogue in? These may seem like trivial details, but I believe it is exactly on details like these that B-movies need to be perfect. They need a compelling, believable set up and strong character motives – that, in fact, is almost all they need. See the films of John Carpenter for how to do this properly. The film also needs a good ending – here it is poor to the point of boredom and distraction. There are multiple climaxes with no point or impetus – people running backwards and forwards in the woods mindlessly. It’s obvious that this film owes a lot to Shaun of the Dead, but its creators can’t deliver half of the wit, irony, music, pacing and fast camera movement that Edgar Wright can. There is, however, one great line. It’s a line that you secretly wish every character in a horror film would say: ‘I know there’s some really strange stuff going on, but can’t we just pretend like it’s not happening?’.