Monthly Archives: February 2014

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Her Spike Jonze (USA 2013) Joaquin
Phoenix, Amy Adams, Scarlett Johanson

viewed: Empire Cinema Newcastle upon
Tyne; 18 Feb 2014; ticket: £4.00

Loony toons

As I watched Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ my
question was: what was it selling?

Initially it looked like advert for the
ideology of personal development wrapped up in a Guardian Angel type
fable, the role of the disembodied presence being appropriated by an
Operating System called Samantha.

Spike Jonze’s (writer and director)
scenario posits a world in vague fuzzy future peopled by characters
borrowed from a Bill Viola photo installation of the mid naughties;
the ‘Her’ characters file past us on the way from one place to
another their faces and comportment defined by a sort of sedated
slo-mo contentment their voices resonating with anodyne honesty and
reassurance.

For reasons know only to himself,
Theodore Twombly, Jonze’s male protagonist is named for the American
abstract painter, Cy Twombly who died in 2011. Perhaps Jonze owns
work by Cy who is a lyrical and even romantic painter. Perhaps Jonze
intended the use of the Twombly name as some sort of gesture or
homage. Cy Twombly certainly as a painter developed and built on his
work during his long career; though whether his later work is
preferred to the earlier, or vice versa, is a matter of taste.
Unlike Spike Jonze, Cy Twombly would not have confused development
with the changes brought about by ageing and experience.

The self development ‘sell’ hawked by
Jonze amounts to no more than rehashed Californian self help mantras.
One of these mantras intones that relationships when they fail, and
perhaps even when they don’t, constitute a kind of disease that needs
a fix. There is a current of contemporary developmental psychology
thought that sees relationships as problematic from the point of view
of ‘individual growth’. The theory is that in relationships
dominances develop leading the co-respondents to sabotage each others
potential, each trying to suppress or undermine or exploit the other.
In a culture that adopts individualism as its key value the belief
is that the operant function of a relationship is promote ‘the
potential’ of the self. The individual is more important than any
grouping: dyadic triadic or collective.

And everyone has ‘potential’.

Relationships can make ‘real’ change
in individuals impossible. It is no surprise when Alan Watts, one of
the original ‘gurus’ of the California alternative personal growth
trail puts in a voiced appearance.
(“The
only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it move with
it and join the dance.” Alan Watts) Watts was certainly one of the
thinkers most influential in promoting the ideology of perpetual
personal change and increasing acceleration, that Jonze is selling in
‘Her’. In as much as the object of the questioning and programmes,
such as they are, is to make the individual feel ‘good’ about
themselves, the movement quickly becomes an ideology of narcissism.

To
the extent that this is a film about talking about relationships,
‘Her’ targets a female audience. Talk in the form of dialogue covers
the film wall to wall: (in the same way that mindless destructive
action wall to walls in the ‘boys’ movies) it is the stuff of soap
opera, soap opera talk. Spike Jonze’s dialogue is like retreadings
from Friends, Desperate Housewives etc. The critical point is the
vacuum within which all the talk-talk happens. Soap operas are
located in parallel universes, designed to resemble real life, but
have no such connection. ‘Her’ takes place in such a parallel world.
A sort of fuzzily defined future where Computer Operating Systems
possess Artificial Intelligence, and the characters work in soft
communication industries: Theodore works for a company that writes
personal letters for people, implying intimate communication skills
have died.

‘Her’
dialogue has the surface look of being about something real, but
lacks the context that means that it can signify anything actual.
Context is everything in relation to dialogue. Where dialogue is
detached from contexts that give shape and depth to meaning, then
what is spoke in the situations contrived by the script, is
disconnected from grounds about which we might care or understand.
Simply put without context situations are meaningless, without
consequence. And all the emotive cross referencing self questioning
and self agonising that Jonze inserts into the ‘Her’ dialogue between
his protagonists is spurious. ‘Her’ context and setting are vaporific
and lack significance. The dialogue signifies nothing more than an
exaggerated swollen sense of self importance.

‘Her’
is about selling narcissism wrapped up in the myth of personal
development and change.

And
it’s all wrapped up.

‘Her’
is a prime example of the inflated ambition of contemporary film
making. Woody Allen once used to know how to make concise funny
Romcoms. Interestingly most were set in NYC which gave them some
kind of context, as did Woody’s jewishness. And Allen knew how to
deliver a film in 90 minutes. Jonze takes over two hours to deliver
‘Her’ and his film is tortuously slow lacking in basic filmic
tensions and laboriously tedious in coming to its conclusion. During
the screening sometime in the middle of the movie, the dialogue was
punctuated by loud snores coming from some one asleep in the stalls.
That about sums it up as there’s lot of slo-mo in Her,
much of the film passes by in Spike Jonze’s comatose state of film
making, accompanied by a load of dreary tinkly music attributed to
Samantha the Operating System.

And lastly a question to which I don’t
know the answer. Samantha the disembodied OS, at the end of the
script passes, with her new chum Alan, onto another higher plane,
another dimension of existence, leaving Theodore behind. She has
migrated in accordance with her destiny.

OS/OT = operating system = operating
Thetan. Is this an allegorical movie driven by the belief system of
Scientology?

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Lift to the Scaffold (L’Ascenseur pour
l’Echafaux) Louis Malle (1958 Fr) Jeanne Moreau; Maurice Ronet

Viewed: NFT London; 7 Feb 2014;
ticket: £7.50

Change in the Rules of the Game.

Nineteen years on from Renoir’s The
Rules of the Game, after a world war the German Occupation and the
infiltration of Coca-Cola culture, Louis Malle makes The Lift to the
Scaffold. At it’s simplest his film states simply and objectively
that the rules of the game have changed: it’s a new game, with
shifting ambiguous rules.

Lift to the Scaffold is a shock wave
that jolts us out of the cosy world of traditional social hierarchies
and the striated conventions that define them. It shakes us out of
class bound notions of ownership and personal relations into the post
war world of the 1950’s which is already being shaped by
contemporary modernism. A world always on edge where money defines
identity; a world with fluid boundaries defined by personal desire
accelerations separations and object fetishism. A world that at
that time of the film’s production was in embryo but projected by
Malle into its maturity.

And like Renoir’s movie, Lift to the
Scaffold is also a satire on social relations.

Renoir’s satire in keeping with the
times is a gentle probing. He puts into relief the strange,
sometimes hypocritical amusing contradictions that result from the
different behaviour codes followed by two classes of people living in
close proximity as masters and servants. Malle’s satire is more
savage and pitiless. Renoir’s protagonists, in particular the ruling
class, are able to control events by containing them within their
world. Malle’s protagonists have no such power and the satire
derives from the manner in which actions by the protagonists veer
completely out of their control resulting in exaggerated unintended
effects that overwhelm them. Effects enlarged and given greater
visibility by the cool detached acting style that gesturally
characterises the playing out of the scenario.

This difference between the two films
is highlighted by the killings that are important but not necessarily
defining events in the two scripts. In Rules of the Game the murder
is a crime passionel, motivated by jealousy: an old fashioned sort of
provocation. It is viewed in the film as an embarrassment rather
than a crime, a mistake that can be justified contained and explained
away. The killing in ‘Rules’ is done from a distance without the
killer and victim being in close contact: Andre will have had no
idea who shot him. Contrast with Malle’s script. Here the two
murders are close up and personal, with eye contact between the two
parties. As if Malle understands that within the new social matrix
sexual and murderous relations will be two unpredictable sides of the
same coin: power. Malle’s killings are in complete opposition to the
bungled events of ‘Rules’: political assassination (perhaps mediated
by passion) and kicks. In Lift to the Scaffold the killings are acts
of individuated will. And both murders satirically spin out of
control of the perpetrators exposing them to the capricious forces of
fate and satiric irony.

Renoir’s script is devised using the
classical unities of time and place: events unfold at a leisurely
pace building up to the climax. In Malle’s script the lack of
unities gives brilliant defining form to the movie. The protagonists
although fatefully entangled are physically separated in time and
space. Two of the main characters Florence and Julien, never meet
face to face. Their unseen actions effect each other from a
distance. Just as today the wild interplay of separated individuals
on social networking sites can set into motion accelerated forces
moulding possibility into certainty, so the actions of Malle’s
protagonists just as certainly accelerate them into the precipitation
of the events that eventually consume them.

Of course Malle works with new social
types: arms dealers, disaffected rebellious kids, veterans with a
grudge and sets them against a new emerging milieu of incessant
motion and transience: highways, motels, modernist office blocks, the
city streets (Moreau’s endless mythic walk through night time
Paris)or any place whatever. Malle locates his characters in a
world not only in relation to their social strata, but more in
relation to objects (or absence of objects as in the interrogation
scene). Objects burrow into the course of the action, not just the
cars, which are caressed and admired like a lover, but pencil
sharpeners, cameras, card filing systems, revolvers. Louis Malle
directs out attention to object fetishism and the world of Vuitton,
BMW, Apple etc waits in the wings.

In filming Lift the the Scaffold Malle
used his camera in a way that builds on the expressive ideas of
Rossellini de Sica Visconti and other Europeans. The Camera as
directed by these film makers doesn’t only work to create affect
perception or movement; it is not a slave to story or the manipulated
affects of emotion. It might do some of these things but its
principle function to enable the audience to see, to be invested as a
seer. The audience is not asked to invest in fake emotional
symbolism. The cars the guns the bars the highways the clothes the
office blocks can all be read as signs, not so much part of the
narrative but signifiers connecting the film to the world we live in.

Before ‘Lift’ Malle had worked with
Bresson on ‘A man escaped’ ( Un condamne a mort s’ est echappe;
1956) . And one of Bresson’s formal concerns carries over into this
film, his determination of a specific type of acting style needed to
make films that were about seeing. The role of the actor is to
reveal something to the audience. This cannot be achieved by the
actor flooding out the audience’s emotional channels, overwhelming
them by manipulations. It is achieved by the actor building a certain
type of relation to their role which is not a becoming. The actor’s
task is to show, in one way or another, how their character is a
construct in a particular situation. The scenario the script and the
structure of a film are an apparatus which allows the actor to take
up varying positions in relation to the material allowing the viewer
the spac to be a key interpretor of the material.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Out of the Furnace – Scott Cooper
(2013 USA) Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson

Viewed: 4 Feb 2014 ; Empire Cinema
Newcastle upon Tyne; Ticket: £3.95

Disneyland invert

The opening sequence of Cooper’s Out of
the Furnace takes place in a drive in movie and introduces us to
Woody Harrelson’s character Harlan. Harlan gets annoyed at something
or other (much of the detail in the film is elusively blurred). In
response to his stirred up emotions, he rams a hot dog (“Goddam
food makes me sick!”) down the throat of his lady consort, before
beating to a pulp the gentleman who has protested too much. Woody’s
visceral reaction to whatever it was that upset his guts is so
extreme its statement of excess becomes funny. It announces that
‘Out of the Furnace’ is going to lead us deep into the Hillbilly
swamplands of parody; an opening preemptive clip that’s bourn out in
the movie’s development

Cooper’s film expresses America as a
kind of inverted Disneyland.

And in this inverted Disneyland Woody
Harrelson plays the part of a demonic Jiminy Cricket. The voice of
the anti-conscience. Perhaps it is the creation of this dark Gothic
archetype that explains the allure of the film to its audience.
Harlan as the internalised voice that psychically legitimises the
violence of the enraged Id. In infantalised cultures defined by an
imperative for immediate gratification (and celebrated in the adverts
that precede the movie) frustration is intolerable. The urgency of
desire legitimises violence towards anything or anyone who is
perceived as a barrier to desire. As Harlan says when he first
meets and gives Rodney the look: “I got a problem with everyone”.

Harrelson’s performance as an
internalised psychopath comprises the film’s core. Even when not up
on screen like a shadow he’s still present. Hard eyes (hardening of
the muscles around the eyes is a trick Harrelson does very well) with
lips and skin stretched face, he exudes an implacable necessary
desire for doing only what he wants to do. Harlan’s psychopathic
counter conscience is offset with Russell and Rodney, the ‘good’
brothers, in a scripting device that splits off multiple
personalities into discrete characters. The rustbelt Pennsylvanian
setting of the film, photographed as a beautifully contrived
dilapidation, is no more than a picaresque back drop against which to
set the play out of the internalised personality forces at play in
American culture: Destruction and Accommodations.

The limitation of Cooper’s Out of the
Furnace (Furnace – presumably a metaphor of America, or a play on
Griffith’s intertitle line in Intolerance: Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking?) is that from his narrative he is able to produce
no more than a parody of the American Gothic genre.

The dialogue lurches from cliché to
cliché comprising one liners we’ve heard before in some other movie.
The scripting elements: the damaged war vet, the bare knuckle
fighting, dying old father, all tread well worn narrative paths
without deviating from the familiar. The scripting device that
exploits the idea the Mountain Men reflects the ultimate parody of
distancing. It spatially removes the schizoid psychopathic cultural
forces, destruction and accommodation, from close-up (Zimmerman’s
slaying of Martin – Florida 2012: Dunn’s slaying of Davis – Florida
2913. Both these killings appear to have been triggered by the
infantile rage of the killer when their will was opposed by young
blacks. Both killers took legal refuge in Florida’s Stand Your
Ground Statute.) to faraway. The Mountain Men become distant
phantoms removed from day to day life. ( ‘Some of them never bin down
from those hills’). Out of the Furnaces’s Mountain Men are caste as
sort of Zombie creatures, removed from mainstream psychic conditions,
who prosper in their own middens. Of course this device of the
‘other’ (Hillbillies, Mountain Men, Swamp Men) has been prodigiously
over exploited by Hollywood from Boorman’s Deliverance and a host of
movies since. Cooper again brings nothing new to the idea, only
replication and repetition.

The final sequence of film abrogates
any moral claims Cooper might make for his movie. Folded into the
film is a subplot with a racial dimension. In one of the opening
scenes in the movie Russell has a black girl friend. During the
stretch he serves for drunken driving, she leaves him for the town’s
black police chief. Although apparently in love with Russell, she
choses black middle class respectability over white trash life style.
The sexual competition between the two men is suggested but muted in
the script. The image projected by Out of the Furnace is one of a
matured interrace relations in which racist white attitudes have been
completely eroded by liberal progressive states of mind. The problem
is that this liberal optimism is countervailed by the film’s core
proposition of the schizoid character of the white American. And in
the penultimate scene, where Russell is chasing and gunning down
Harlan, the black cop in pursuit orders Russell to put down his gun
and not shoot. Russell disobeys and kills Harlan. This resolution
is dishonest and points to the difficulties white film makers have
with race. The filmmakers lose their nerve and the plot. The only
moral outcome for the plot was for the black cop to have killed
Russell and Harlan to have escaped. The reality of the American
Psyche is suppressed rage, which in the film is represented by
Harrelson’s Harlan. This demented schizo force is the one that
eludes escapes and elides with the good, and the logic is that it
should escape. Every slock horror film script writer and director
knows this and intuitively understands the logic, even in parody,
that this is what has to be. Cooper for whatever reason doesn’t get
it.
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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American Hustle David O
Russell (USA 2013) Christian Bale; Amy Adams; Bradley Cooper.

Viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne 28 Jan 2014
Ticket:£3.95

Hanging in/out

After two hours plus in the cinema I
found it difficult to understand what Russell’s American Hustle was
about except style and mood. It’s a relaxed laid back type movie
personified in Bale and Adams who comprise the performing axis, and
the excuse for the plot to crank through its laborious machinations.

Set in the 1970’s, it is based
loosely (very loosely I suspect) on a conman and con woman entrapped
by the FBI and whose skills are used to expose high level political
corruption in New Jersey and Washington. But all
the plot shenanigans are played out in an inconsequential manner that
became progressively perfunctory. The script initially lends the two
protagonists voice overs giving some insight into Irving and Sydney’s
states of mind. This device is soon abandoned leaving the audience
to gaze at the surface of the movie: the costumes and haircuts, the
music and the square dance of the personal relationships that pivot
around Irving’s wife and girlfriend.

American Hustle is little more than a
bland exercise in style. It is laboriously scripted with cliche’d
one liners borrowed from a previous jaunts into the Con-land genre
such as the Sting and the Grifters. The dialogue represents a
stereotyped cod American philosophy of survival captured all those
years ago by W C Fields: “ Never give a sucker an even break.”
How long can they go on recycling these gash lines?
American Hustle is almost completely
lacking in on screen tension unless you count the extreme décolletage
of the outfits worn by Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence. Bursting out
of the costumes, their tits threaten to pop out completely at any
time. But the scenarists decide not to do a take on this particular
gag line, and the tape or whatever, does its job. And, in the final
scenes in which the plot has bestowed upon all the players smiling
faces and happy MacDonald family hour, the ladies mamories are
appropriately and symbolically nicely tucked up inside their bras.
The tension is over and so is the film.
American Hustle: tit’s haircuts
costumes and 70’s music all the way down the line. Everything on
the surface. Judging by its face American Hustle is an exercise in
borrowed style from a bygone epoch, the usual Hollywood retro refuge
when the material has nothing much else going for it. A surface of
contrasting haircuts and coiffure, frocks and flairs and whenever the
script or haircuts or costumes start to flag, Russell fades up some
70’s grooves David Bowie, Donna Summer Elton John to keep the
audience interested. American Hustle a sales pitch for a 70’s
select CD.

In a filmic sense American Hustle is a
dead dog, a tired stylised exercise of genre Hollywood output. But
there is one particular thing of note in the scenario and that is the
psychic make up of the main characters. They replicate in their
identities an increasingly opperant feature of Western identity: the
schizo ID. Each of American Hustle’s main characters plays out a
schizo personality; no one is whom they seem to be. Irving is and
Sydney are professional cons whose presentation of self is at the
same time both a fabrication and a deeper assertion of their real
selves. And the FBI agent and Roslyn also move into variant schizo
identities of the people they start out as representing. American
Hustle’s main characters are all schizos and symbolise the forces
that are at work in a culture where leisure has replaced work and
status as the loci of identity.

Embedded in the core of the film’s
characters is the idea of duality of identity. As the characters
move between different strata and social networks they shift identity
to accord with their needs and purposes. ID is changed: just like
changing a frock. We live in the land of the quick change schizo
artist. But of course this ID schizo shift in the movie replicates
what’s become the default option in the West. Increasingly
individuals operate across a number of discrete domaines such as work
leisure and in particular on-line worlds. In step with this de facto
separation there’s a tendency to create and adopt variant ID’s to
interact with each network of people. This schizo tenancy in
fronting contemporary identities can be slight or radical, but
overwhelming forces are at work driving the process. Schizo
identity claims have become part of the deep game playing that is
used sometimes to effect successful manipulation, but that often ends
up as a sort of compulsion to control all the parameters relating to
the presentation of self. And American Hustle on its own somewhat
anodyne terms certainly uses this schizo feature of contemporary life
as a playing out factor of the film.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk