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Luchshe, chem lyudi (2018)
Superior Russian sci-fi with a compelling killer nanny
A telling detail: as one character hands another a shirt, a nearby flat screen flashes up an ad for a similar shirt. With that sly algorithmic reference, Better Than Us establishes its credentials as superior sci-fi drama. This Russian production takes care of business.
A corrupt CEO acquires one Arisa, a highly advanced prototype fembot. Arisa has the appearance of a leggy, skinny supermodel and - though no one knows it yet - a relaxed attitude to Asimov's Three Laws. A corporate security guard who attempts to rape her is left dead and she escapes into the streets.
The wandering Arisa encounters a little girl and, through her, a dysfunctional family headed by the girl's father, a disgraced surgeon working well below his pay grade as a pathologist at a Moscow morgue. It happens that the body of the security guard killed by Arisa ends up on his slab. It is clear the guard died of spinal trauma, but the surgeon is told to write it off as cardiac arrest.
Assorted competing interests start to enter the scene. The CEO dispatches corporate thugs to re-acquire his missing fembot. A tattooed gang of young urban terrorists called the Liquidators want all bots destroyed. A cynical, socially inept cybercrime cop smells a cover-up. The surgeon's family unravels while Arisa bonds with his two children, displaying startling levels of human empathy and insight, a compelling killer nanny. The narrative becomes complex but never convoluted - the quality of the writing keeps the strands clear and easy to follow. Subplots abound but do not distract; they add ever-more intriguing layers to the story.
Better Than Us takes place in a plausible, not-quite-dystopian near future with drones in the air and coughing old cars in the streets. Empty six-lane highways go nowhere under leaden skies. Bots of the inelegant, backward-legs Boston Dynamics pattern do the grunt work while more decorative models man reception desks and serve Americanos.
Netflix has a season of 16 subtitled episodes with, it is rumoured on reddit, a further season in the pipeline. I'll be looking out for it. Better Than Us, while below the radar for the present, has all the makings of a cult blockbuster and deservedly so. Catch it now before everybody else does.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
Bad City of Angels
Only cinema can do this. Only cinema can depict a Persian vampire- woman in a chador skateboarding down a lamplit street and make it work, can make it surreal and stunning and totally germane to the plot. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is full of such moments, full of gratuitous genius, black humour and cinematic magic.
Filmed in monochrome, the minimalist dialogue in subtitled Farsi, the action takes place in 'Bad City', Bakersfield Ca. standing in for Iran. Our hero is Arash (Arash Marandi), a James Dean wannabe with a flash American car he explains took him 2,191 working days (exactly six years including one leap year) to buy. Arash dutifully cares for his ageing, heroin-addicted father, who owes money to a ferally abusive pimp and drug dealer played with evil gusto by Dominic Rains. The dealer takes Arash's treasured automobile in part payment of the father's drug debts.
In a vast, bleak night space of almost Soviet immensity, Rains's character treats one of his prostitutes with laconic cruelty, abusing her and ejecting her from Arash's car. She sobs on the ground. Watching from a distance is a silent sentinel, nun-like in her chador, the Girl Who Walks Home Alone At Night.
Named only as 'The Girl' in the credits, this is Sheila Vand's avenging dark angel. 'I have done bad things,' she tells Arash further down the story. 'I am bad.' She brings herself wordlessly to the pimp's attention, meeting his eyes with an impassive sadism reminiscent of Rooney Mara's character in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. In his cocaine-fuelled hubris he takes her home. It does not end well for him.
Arash, now travelling by bicycle, goes to his work as a gardener and handyman. 'Shaydah the Princess', the daughter of the house where he is working, is a flirtatious, spoiled little rich girl, chatting mindlessly on her cellphone and assessing the result of her rhinoplasty in the mirror. He spots her jewelled earrings on the dresser and gives way to temptation. He wants his car back. He takes the earrings to the pimp's house, arriving just as The Girl is leaving.
Inside, he discovers the pimp's mutilated, blood-drained body. On the coffee table is a briefcase stuffed with cash and drugs. He empties it, takes his car keys, and flees.
One more scene remains to round off the film's characterisations. The Girl confronts a skateboarding boy, repeatedly demanding -- her face twisted with passion and menace -- 'Are you a good boy? Are you?' She will be watching him, she threatens; she will rip out his eyes and feed them to the dogs if he transgresses. The terrified boy runs away, leaving his skateboard.
Arash, driving his reclaimed and beloved car, arrives at a costume party dressed as Count Dracula, his pockets stuffed with the pimp's drugs and cash. Shaydah is there with her friend the 'Skeleton Party Girl', actually a cameo role played by the film's writer and director Ana Lily Amirpour. Drugs are taken. Arash, rejected by Shaydah, finds himself in the street, tripping, lost in Bad City. He is staring at a street lamp, entranced by the light, when The Girl comes skateboarding past.
If all stories are ultimately about the search for love, here is the central dynamic of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. Under the street light is Arash, the holy innocent, dressed up for a party as the vampire Dracula. Into his life comes The Girl, a genuine vampire killer, on a skateboard. Light Angel and Dark Angel are brought together in a bizarre, comic coincidence. How will this play out?
No backstory is given for The Girl, no explanation of how she became who and what she is. We are left to assume that it is something primally dark. Yet something in the character of Arash touches her, something that softens her hard and murderous heart. And something in her draws Arash. Their instinctive, developing symbiosis is brilliantly symbolised by a scene in which he pierces her ears with a safety pin in order to present her with the diamond earrings he stole from Shaydah. She accepts the pain, she accepts the jewels, she accepts the proffered love. The vampire-woman is not tamed -- you can never see that happening -- but she is shown a new and different life beyond the blighted, heartless wasteland of Bad City.
Amirpour has created a masterpiece of atmosphere and vision, aided and underpinned by an eclectic soundtrack of mingled Western and Persian pop. The backdrop is nominally Iran, actually California, a setting which in itself produces an austere, strangely familiar Everyplace -- the landscape of the lost soul -- where cruelty, selfishness and existential absurdity besiege from all quarters the simple human longing for Love. There are recurring moments of crazy beauty. The editing could have been a little tighter, which is why I give A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night nine stars instead of a faultless 10. But that is a quibble; every character, every performance, burns into the memory. Amirpour's writing and directing creates a world where the outlandish becomes more real than the superficial 'reality' we inhabit in our daily lives. Once again, only cinema can do this. Breathtaking.
Ghost in the Shell (2017)
Ghost Runner
Reading earlier reviews, I am relieved I have never seen the original Manga version. It means I can come at Ghost in the Shell without preconception or expectation. I can see many cinematic influences, and accept that the greatest influence of all will have been the original, but it is not there in my memory to colour my impressions of the film I saw tonight.
Cinematographically we are in Blade Runner territory, the near-future dystopian cityscape created by Ridley Scott by way of William Gibson, a neon-lit eternal night of wet streets, flashing kanji logos, littered alleys and animated ads. There is even an ad for the long- defunct Pan-Am, a direct nod to Blade Runner. That said, Jess Hall has done a magnificent job in creating a brooding and entirely plausible world, CGI holograms producing a gritty, disconcerting surrealism, a trippy might-be of militarised urban evolution.
The story is told in linear sequence. In a culture where the cybernetic enhancement of humans is routine, we are taken through an opening lab scene that gives the technology its acme, 'Major', the cyborg played by Scarlett Johansson, a human brain implanted in an entirely robot body. And as sinister Hanka Robots boss Cutter (Peter Ferdinando) makes clear to Major's principal creatrix, Dr Oelet (Juliette Binoche), she is a weapon, no more. An investment that is expected to provide a return and victory in a war being fought in boardrooms, Yakuza bars and the bitter night streets of the Lawless Zone.
'Cyber-terrorists' are waging war on Hanka Robots. In a stunning early action scene that sets a high standard, hacked geisha-bots go rogue during a meeting between Hanka representatives and the visiting diplomats of an African nation, murdering the ambassador (Chris Obi). Major and her squad of 'Section 9' special forces intervene.
Major 'deep dives' into the central processing unit of one of the geisha-bots in an attempt to discover the hacker who turned it. She nearly comes to grief in the nightmarish, Jungian underworld of the AI's subconscious, a dark hell of shifting imagery and viral programs, but comes out with the necessary intel.
The pursuit is on. Major and the rest of Section 9, a kind of heavily-armed, cyber-savvy SWAT team who seem to communicate telepathically, go after the hacker-terrorists she has identified and located.
And so the story proceeds. The pace is relentless, the action explosive. I won't go into more detail for fear of spoilers. But as Major closes in on her quarry, she starts to question her origins and her identity. She sees visions of a girl being dragged from a burning hut by black-clad police. Her hazy, incomplete memory tells her she was a victim of terrorism before her transformation into a cyborg, her parents killed, but is it true?
In sci-fi terms we are on familiar ground, charted by Philip K Dick: if androids dream of electric sheep, do cyborgs dream of a humanity they have lost? Major finds herself in the philosophical grey area between her perceived reality and what might be a computer-implanted false memory designed to create and motivate a corporate killing machine. Does she -- her soul, her eponymous 'ghost' -- remain truly human, or human-cyborg, or something new and different that represents an evolutionary advance? Director Rupert Sanders does not shy away from these deep questions while continuing to serve up a dramatic, visually electrifying and attention-holding story. The special effects are entirely convincing. The music (from Lorne Balfe and Clint Mansell) drives like a train.
Johannson's performance holds centre stage by necessity and definition. This is not a glamorous role. She plays a hard and determined robot killer. Even the flesh-coloured, skin-tight latex body suit she wears for several scenes (squint and you can pretend she's naked) belongs in context, more functional than sexual. But she brings to the role a subtle, wondering vulnerability beneath the steely professionalism of the assassin, an emerging humanity that blossoms by the film's resolution. There were objections to a Caucasian playing a 'Japanese' character, but they don't make sense to me. Major is anethnic, a cyborg, her robot body manufactured in a lab. How could she be any race?
Now I will be off to investigate the original version of Ghost in the Shell. I will try not to judge the original by the standards of the remake. I am glad to have been able to judge the remake on its own merits, and they are considerable. I recommend you see this film.
Arrival (2016)
The cerebral has landed
I watched Arrival on its first showing tonight here in the UK. I had been attracted by the buzz around the movie -- and I was not disappointed. I found it a challenging and absorbing piece of work, an intelligent speculation on the time-honoured sci-fi theme of what happens when 'they' finally land.
Linguistics expert Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is recruited to establish communication with the aliens, joined by mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner). They are driven out to Montana (played here by Quebec) where a huge alien craft, one of 12 to have arrived at various locations around the globe, hangs massively above the ground. Every 18 hours a portal opens in the base of the craft, allowing access within.
Two giant, squid-like 'heptapods' -- irreverently nicknamed Abbot and Costello by Donnelly -- can be glimpsed behind a large, translucent barrier. In an effective visual trick, the barrier is the same size and aspect ratio as a cinema screen, so you find yourself looking beyond the screen into a kind of cinematic second world -- a screen beyond the screen, in fact, where here be monsters.
The aliens communicate by forming mysterious, smoky glyphs that obviously mean something -- but what? Dr Banks is under pressure from the military, represented by Col Weber (Forest Whitaker) to determine the visitors' intentions. Gradually she assembles a vocabulary and begins to comprehend their language. Meanwhile international tensions grow as the superpowers race to read the aliens' mysterious messages, jockeying to gain military or scientific advantage over their rivals.
There are tensions, too, in the internal dialogue of the movie's main character, Dr Banks, played by Adams with a kind of steely, intelligent vulnerability -- an award-deserving performance that is never anything less than completely convincing. Dr Banks is troubled by visions of a daughter who died young. It is natural to assume that the daughter scenes are flashbacks -- but beware of assumptions. The narrative plays with time. Renner's wise-cracking, caring, crumpled support strikes exactly the right note.
Bradford Young's cinematography is muted, the story played out under lowering grey skies and within the dark confines of the alien craft, while director Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Sicario) keeps the pace moderate but relentless. The film is a builder without a wasted shot. The dialogue is spare verging on staccato, wasting no words on excessive exposition, the writing credits going to Eric Heisserer (screenplay) and Ted Chiang, who wrote the original story. Johann Johannsson's score is consistently compelling and occasionally sublime.
Arrival demands close attention. This is no dizzying CGI-fest of space cadets saving the world. The mood is serious, the theme grown- up, the narrative cerebral. Humanity is held up against the mirror of an overwhelming -- and manifestly technologically superior -- alien presence. Villeneuve treats his genre and his audience with respect. His film deserves the same.
American Hustle (2013)
Pay Attention
A film that polarises opinions, I see. I watched it cold, as it were, not having read any reviews before walking into the theatre, so I was able to see it without expectations or preconceptions.
It is about manipulation, about players playing, about situations spinning away from characters with their own agendas. FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) browbeats small-time con artists and lovers Irving Rosenfield (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) into helping him set up a sting designed to entrap corrupt politicians. Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner) is the streetwise but sincere political wheeler-dealer at the centre of the operation and Irving's wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) is a wonderful wild card, an engaging loose cannon functioning as a kind of neurotic deus ex machina.
The direction (David O. Russell) chops up real-time and flashback action, post-modernist style. Much of the dialogue was apparently improvised, and it shows - in a good way. Jennifer Lawrence in particular comes out with several choice, laugh-out-loud lines, but you don't know which (if any) are hers and which come from the laptops of writers Russell and Eric Warren Singer. The interminable, episodic ice- fishing shaggy dog story of DiMaso's exasperated boss, Louis CK (Stoddard Thorsen) is almost certainly scripted and worthy of Lawrence Sterne.
The late-1970s setting is meticulously observed, from Bale's ludicrous oldest-swinger-in-town comb-over to the whalefin lapels to the many medallions nestling on hairy chests (Did we really dress like that in the 1970s? Er, yes). The starring chest of the film, while we're on the subject, is the one constantly over-exposed, from every angle, by Adams's navel-deep cleavage. (Insert your own golden globes joke here.) It actually got a bit distracting over the 138 minutes. But I survived somehow.
American Hustle is an ensemble piece with no clear-cut heroes or villains, no white-hat-black-hat dynamic, no good-girl-bad-girl dichotomy. The characters think they are being proactive but in fact they are reactive; they wobble on shaky ground, their tumultuous allegiances, expediencies and relationships swirling in confusion, emotions running high, sexual tensions at snapping point. Who's playing whom? Is anyone really pulling the strings? What's the real scam? There is no telling. Complication mounts on complication as Russell scatters expositional red herrings all over the screen, the big tease.
And therein lies the film's chaotic genius. Pay attention to it. American Hustle is a work that repays concentration. Hell, you've paid for your ticket, get your money's worth and engage. This is no glib, easy, sit-back-and-munch-your-popcorn caper movie; it is demanding and difficult. The actors' performances are utterly convincing, without exception, and the characterisation sufficiently excessive to be human - which is to say, the characters are realistically fallible, occasionally over the top, and often none too pretty. They mess up. They get things wrong when the situation runs away from them, and it is always running away from them. They're just like the rest of us.
I came away firmly on the pro- side of the polarity. I'll be buying the DVD so I can backtrack over the detail I missed. Recommended.
Out of Rosenheim (1987)
Magic Marianne
I discovered Bagdad Cafe by accident. The film I'd set out to see was sold out so, having schlepped into London, I reluctantly settled for something I'd never heard of showing on another screen. It was Bagdad Cafe. Subsequently I bought the VHS, lent it to someone - "You MUST see this movie!" - and never got it back. I bought the DVD, lent it to someone else, same result. I bought a second DVD and I am NEVER lending it out. Never ever.
This is a spellbinding film, and like many of the reviewers here I can't quite work out what the spell is. It's a simple story: a German tourist finds herself dumped in the Nevada desert by her obnoxious husband and makes her way to an isolated, rundown motel and service station - the eponymous Bagdad Cafe. She makes friends with the people there. That's it.
The isolation of the motel reflects the isolation of the motley collection of characters living there. Life seems to have passed them by just as the trucks on the highway pass them by. They are in the middle of nowhere, going nowhere, cast up on the edge of the flow like human flotsam. Each is lost in solitude and quiet desperation, stuck, trying to make the best of things.
Jasmin, Marianne Sagebrecht's character, is also stranded by the abrupt and brutal break-up of her marriage. In a black irony she has grabbed not her own suitcase but her husband's, which contains his clothes and, surreally, a teach-yourself-magic kit.
With a vulnerable, valiant and soul-wrenching dignity Jasmin sets about making the most of her bleak situation, a stranger in a very strange land. She rolls up her sleeves and cleans the place. She makes proper coffee, strong. Alone in her room, she starts teaching herself magic tricks from the kit as mile-long trains trundle by in the night.
One by one, the other characters begin to thaw around her. Jasmin is the catalyst that brings them together. Artist and former Hollywood set-painter Rudi Cox (Jack Palance, in lizard-skin cowboy boots as reptilian as his eyes) falls helplessly in lust, then love, with this voluptuous Teuton who has appeared out of the desert like a perspiring valkyrie. The café owner Brenda (CCH Pounder, a world of helpless pain in her face) slowly lets go of the rage that is tearing her apart. She learns to smile again. Brenda's grown-up children, the Bach-worshipping son and the wayward daughter, are won over. The once-deserted café starts to attract a clientèle. Why? "It's magic," as Jasmin says, blue eyes glinting, prestidigitating eggs, coins and ribbons from the ears of laughing customers.
Magic indeed. The film weaves an indefinable spell under skies cascading with colour, against a soundtrack that includes Bob Telson's Oscar-nominated 'Calling You'. Love, friendship and fellowship bloom in the desert. Hope blossoms in the sand. Director Percy Adlon (the screenplay was written by his wife Eleonore) has created a gentle, haunting, humanist jewel.
And no, you can't borrow my copy.