chris-3415 Reviews

Annihilation (I) (2018)

NOPE

[2/10 · 18 December 2022]

Alex garland channelling ridley scott's alien and john mctiernan's predator, by way of jurassic park and just about every other instance of the genre from the last 4 decades. With some software upgrades onboard of course and some gender reassignment. Tarkovsky? Nah. Annihilation: expect no surprises. Its the "and then there were none" arc. Spoiler: it opens with a phallus being struck by lightning and closes with some hot central core imagery. And love triumphs, sort of, until the next instalment, maybe.

It really looks like it was stitched together by a committee. One of the freedoms a genre offers is a set of expectations that can be set aside for dramatic effect, the freedom to not do what the genre suggests should be done. Kind of like narrative negative space. Given the weight of that history, it's always galling to me when everyone involved appears to be unwilling to shake it up a bit. Simply going through the motions because they figure if you throw enough dollars and tech at it it'll work; encumbered rather than liberated by the genre. I think garland encountered problems when he sipped from hollywood's golden chalice. Ex machina was a much better film. Tarantino said making jackie brown convinced him that it was better never to attach himself to studio properties, and i think it was the same with lynch and dune. I wouldn't write garland off yet. But annihilation . . . Whew.

But here is the opening pitch for the reboot! The two zombies may have escaped corporeal destruction, but they have internalised the shimmer, and they will produce unholy spawn! Or maybe, given the tenor of the times stateside, it'll be holy spawn! I'm sure garland won't be in on it though, he'll be breathing a sigh of relief that he's made it out of the zone with his irises uncolorised!

Moonage Daydream (2022)

does bowie a disservice

[2/10 · 18 December 2022]

Whilst "i dig repetition", there seems to be a lot of it in Moonage Daydream, and i'm afraid it simply looks like poor control of the material. This film is a great illustration of bowie's lyric "fame, puts you there where things are hollow". Its way too long, with lots of flashing lights and stuff but not much solid information. I found it very disappointing. It ended up making bowie look kind of vacuous, especially compared to the recently released spiders from mars documentary, which is just excellent concert footage and great sound from a single point in bowie's career. I guess you could call this one a fanboy's homage to his hero. I watched it to the end, ever hopeful, but i came away exhausted and underwhelmed.

Silent Running (1972)

textbook hippy nonsense

[3/10 · 16 August 2015]

this review contains spoilers! its 1972 and the summer of love has been followed by the winter of the machine. what can a poor boy do? realising he is powerless in the face of the new world order, he drops out (hard 1970s style, not soft 1960s style) kills the local supporters of the status quo, retreats to his bedroom in the shadow of saturn (astrological reference), neglects the washing up and lets the pot plants wither away. he's been on the job looking after the terrarium for 8 years but he still hasn't learned that plants need sunlight to photosynthesise, duh. he talks to machines that can't talk back and imagines a response. he goes crazy. in the end he lets his dreams go, and commits suicide, in the process taking out the people who have tried to rescue him. his problem is that he's locked into a machine system which has no avenue of escape. he tries to save the plants with artificial life, ends up using the on-board Abomb to do himself in. his whole existence is predicated on the machines and he just can't deal with it. he's a hippy ideologue. read in this way its an OK story, but really, considering kubrick's 2001 was made some years before it, silent running is pretty lame. it has much more in common with the moralistic scifi movies of the 1950s and 60s, despite its groovy environmental themes (also pretty old hat by this time; rachel Carson's silent spring was published in 1962). and joan baez's sentimental quavering on the soundtrack is frankly unbearable.

Line of Duty (2012–2021)

shaky, wooden, predictable

[4/10 · 26 December 2014]

make sure you take your airsickness tablets before settling down to this one because the camera never stops shaking around, an effect so relentless and overdone it looks like parody. i found the whole enterprise a bit boring and predictable, and no salvation from competent acting was forthcoming. everyone is trying really hard and acting their little hearts out but i couldn't really connect with the characterisation on any level. maybe enough has been done with the "conspiracy from top to bottom" genre for a while. the plots are always ridiculous of course, but if the actors are good to watch and the dialogue snappy i can put up with that. in the end, despite all the jumping around, i found it a pretty wooden affair really.. but i watched all 5 episodes of series 1, so i guess it isn't a complete turkey. . .

Out of the Blue (1980)

for hopper fans

[4/10 · 12 December 2013]

hopper's late work deserves the accolades, but out of the blue, from his out of control middle period, is a pretty rough artifact. his directing style borrows loosely from roger corman, john cassavetes, bob rafelson, but out of the blue comes across as shouty and self absorbed, without the critical distance necessary for a full bodied outcome. it feels like hopper was trying way too hard to be on a radical edge, but ended up making something conservative in structure, pacing, characterisation because his judgement was clouded or lacked maturity. it's all pretty flat, except for the naturalism of hopper's performance which is outstanding, perhaps because the other actors are so wooden. there are strange b-grade editing choices - why use the slow motion crash footage in which dummies are really obvious, for example? maybe hopper didn't really have directorial ideas, and needed to get over himself a bit before he was able to concentrate on becoming the great character actor of his later years.

Rage (I) (2009)

cinematic negative space

[10/10 · 5 January 2011]

in classical Chinese painting, what gets left out of the composition is of crucial importance. potter's "rage" omits quite a few of the compositional elements we take for granted as essential in modern cinema - a bold move in a world dominated by Hollywood tropes and CGI. "rage" isn't what i'd call an experimental film, it's a film produced with an acute awareness of cinema as a super-saturated medium, in which the audience already knows all there is to be known. there are no new stories to be told; no killings which haven't been shown, no motivation which remains unexplored, no new formulas. but this literate, knowledgeable and sophisticated modern audience produces a space which can be activated by leaving things out, rather than putting things in. potter knows that all she needs to do is map out a bare structure, with sumptuous color and first rate actors, and all the rest of the work can be played out of the expectations we all bring to bear on the cinema experience. "rage" is a who-done-it, with andy warhol's "screen test" film series operating in the background, dressed with a kind of glossy-magazine-photoshopped look in which everyone's irises are a suspiciously similar sci-fi hue, and with a nice little twist in the end which implicates us, the passive viewers. i thought one of the most surprising things about the movie was the palpable "rage" expressed in other reviews on this site. we react like addicts when the sugar-candy experience of having everything laid out for our adrenal stimulation is withheld. this isn't a movie about the fashion industry, its about the modern obsession with surface, with effects, and its background theme is intensely political. it's characters are ciphers for the main players in the infotainment infiltrated everyday world, the businessmen, the celebrities, the wannabes, the innocents, the jaded old-hands, the haves and the have-nots. for those who were disappointed by this work, who weren't fascinated by watching, up close, great actors working, i sincerely hope michael bay's next SFX blockbusta isn't too far away. . .

Rocketship X-M (1950)

new interpretation of an old classic

[8/10 · 17 November 2006]

i've thought about this film on and off over the years since i first saw it on TV as a kid. today i've been googling it and interestingly i realise that i understood the film in a totally different way. i guess it was the wrong way, but it seems to be a better way nevertheless!! my youthful interpretation was that the unexplained problems the ship encountered, the anomalous way it performed under acceleration, the crew's blackout, and the suggestion of a higher power taking over, were due to the ship entering a time/space warp. the crew thought they must've reached mars, but in fact they hadn't even left earth's orbit, they had traveled forward in time, and the planet they presumed was mars was actually a post-nuclear holocaust earth. why else were the martians so human in appearance? why else was the gravity the same as earths? etc. i guess i was a fairly sophisticated reader of sci-fi by the time i saw the movie, must have been in the early 60s sometime, and themes like time travel might have been more common then. the movie retained its appeal for me for a long time because of this perceived ambiguity.

Children of Men (2006)

gritty realism undercut by ponderous clichés and poor acting

[2/10 · 17 November 2006]

i saw "children of men" after reading a few positive reviews in journals i can usually trust, but i'm afraid i was very disappointed by this movie. the only redeemable feature is the mise en scene and the staging of the action sequences, which is pretty good, but not good enough to overcome the leaden dialogue, improbable plot devices, the sentimentality and astonishingly B grade acting. julianne moore dropped in one lunchtime to get her part nailed. clive owen is asleep on his feet, and i don't wonder with some of the lines he has to deliver, including "they got me", straight from a 1950s TV western and without a touch of irony. its really very bad, and the ending is pure kitsch. i'm surprised that a film which tries so hard to achieve gritty visual realism could allow itself to descend into such banal clichés. it's like they under estimated how much it would cost to create a believable street scape and get the explosions to look good so they had to cut some corners with the writing and acting.its rare for me to feel like i've wasted my money on a movie but this time i did.