L.P. Ring's Blog, page 6

New Zealand International Film Festival – What to Watch in Wellington

With the news that festival star Three Identical Strangers has had two dates added, let’s take a look at some of the other – there are many – stand-outs over the coming two weeks of films.

You Were Never Really Here

Directed by Lynne Ramsey (Ratcatcher, We need to talk about Kevin), You Were Never Really Here promises to be one of the darkest yet most intriguing offerings at this year’s festival. Starring Joaquin Pheonix in full bad-ass mode, the film tells the tale of the lengths a war veteran will go to when tasked with recovering the abducted child of a United States Senator. Pheonix’s character is the man to call – the expert at extraction – when such things happen, but starts out as an unfortunately typical case for the killer-for-hire turns much darker once the girl is found. For him, troubles are only just beginning.

Jonny Greenwood is on score duties following his triumphant Phantom Thread work while Jonathan Ames’s bleak as all hell 2013 novel gets the full cinematic treatment. This movie was widely lauded at Cannes last year with the director picking up a Best Screenplay award while Pheonix got a nod for acting. One thing for certain is that for both subject matter and action, this film doesn’t promise to be one for the faint-hearted – think Nicolas Winding Refn’s fantastic Only God Forgives with Ryan Gosling if you want a comparatively extreme cinema experience. Tickets are going fast.

Mandy

Panos Cosmatos’s second feature film features Nicolas Cage on full-ranting form – which is the best Nic Cage style available – in a full-on tale of revenge set in the early 1980s. Nicolas Cage and girlfriend Andrea Riseborough  live a quiet, blissful existence in the remote American countryside when they are set upon by bad man Linus Roache and his band of feral cultists. The result leaves Cage on a ranting mission of vengeance against the murderous band of villains, with the action and gore ramped up to eleven. This isn’t a film for everyone but set for a many people’s guilty-pleasures list for years to come.

Wildlife

In a major switch from the previous two entries, Paul Dano’s debut feature stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan as a married couple on the verge of separation at the beginning of the 1960s in Montana. Based on Richard Ford’s novel, the director has worked tirelessly to recreate America at the start of that momentous decade, placing Mulligan in particular in the perfect place in which to explore her character’s frustrations and stymied development after her husband (Gyllenhaal) takes self-pity one step further than usual and goes absent without leave.  Told through the eyes of their son – the excellent Ed Oxenbould – the story places Mulligan right on the precipice of revolution yet leaves her with no certainty as to how she can fully embrace it. With a fantastic cast and source material, Dano (better known for acting roles such as in There will be Blood) has created a narrative that promises to be a fantastic view of an America on the verge of changing forever.

Piercing

Taking Japanese author Ryu Murakami’s (Audition) work to America was not going to be easy, but director Nicolas Pesce has created a devilishly wrought two-hander featuring potentially perfect husband and father Christopher Abbott (Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene) and call-girl Mia Wasikowska (Stoker, Crimson Peak). Abbott is a stressed out businessman on a business trip with an itch he needs to scratch. Safe to say if you are familiar with the source material or any of Murakami’s other work, you can already figure that this won’t go in any way typical.

Terrified

This Argentinian horror has been getting all the right kind of buzz among fans of the genre since its release last year. Director Demian Rugna has crafted a tale of suspense and terror as world-weary cop Maxi Ghione is called to investigate a case which goes well beyond his skill-set. Unable to work out what is going on, he enlists the help of a friend with ‘paranormal experience’.

First Reformed

Ethan Hawke may not be everyone’s idea of a priest but Paul Schrader (best known as the scriptwriter behind Taxi Driver) isn’t your typical director. Having taken a black eye from the critics for recent offerings Dog Eat Dog and The Canyons, the general consensus is that Schrader is back on proper form for this tale of a priest in the depths of spiritual despair.

Leave No Trace

Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone brought plaudits aplenty for both her direction and break-out star Jennifer Lawrence. This film – featuring Ben Foster (The Program) and Wellington-born Thomasin Harcourt Mckenzie – sees another father / daughter relationship in crisis as their seemingly idyllic existence is threatened by social services. What results is an extreme examination of family bonds under the very tensest of circumstances.

Photo courtesy of NZIFF.

The New Zealand International Film Festival runs at venues across Wellington from July 27 to August 14.

https://www.nziff.co.nz/2018/wellington/

Norman Mailer’s ‘An American Dream’

Mailer’s novel – initially a serialised set of chapters for Esquire Magazine – takes us into the world of academic Stephen Rojack. Rojack is a man who has failed at everything – in politics as a one-term congressman alongside Jack Kennedy, in marriage to a society girl, even in his final fall into the field of quack psychology and late-night television. Despite these failures, he still has the veneer of respectability to get invites to the best parties, some access to money and a roof over his head. It’s almost as if this most self-obsessed, neurotic of men cannot reach rock bottom.

But for the man who could have everything, all of this is threatened on a night of drinking which ends with a woman dead and Rojack accused of her murder. Even at the scene, surrounded by cops and witnesses, he’s able to strike up a potential affair with a gangster’s moll. Will she offer him something everything else in his life hasn’t?

The novel is very simply (but effectively) plotted with all the action taking place over a few days. Mailer nails the characterisations, often with a few short descriptions – the way a man chews, the way tone an ex-boxer uses when speaking. Theses short descriptions allow the reader to fill in the blanks, to create their own pictures. The full weight of Mailer’s descriptive powers are left to Rojack. The man himself is eminently believable as someone convinced of his own failures and doom. He’s also a man perfectly willing to aid in his own destruction – in some ways a more outgoing form of Albert Camus’ ‘The Outsider’. If only the world at large would listen and believe that the creature before them is not worth a place on the upper rungs of American society’s ladder.

The novel was condemned in its time for its treatment of women.  The portrayals are certainly not compatible with the #MeToo era but I never feel that Mailer is taking malicious glee here – it’s a tough, masculine (and white) world that Rojack populates where privilege trumps many other things. The portrayal of women was probably much of that time – published not long after a much philandering American president – the aforementioned Jack Kennedy. The women in this – very much characters to push or pull Rojack further – are presented in far greater detail than most of the men and offer significantly more to the plot. However, Mailer seems at pains to show how no matter what these women do, they are condemned to never reach any fulfilment in a man’s world. While they will never rise above their stations in life, Rojack will always struggle to reach lower than his.

Mailer was a true artist of the written form. The novel’s only fault – and many will probably disagree – is that sometimes he seems too in love with his brush strokes, too desperate to add a final flourish. His disappearance into heavy metaphor can sometimes jar, particularly in the sex scenes where I found myself rolling my eyes at some descriptions. Otherwise it’s perfect, and at only 250 pages is a perfect introduction to what the man achieved in some of his longer works. As a portrayal of a man trying to destroy himself even as everything around him contrives to do the opposite, it truly deserves to be read. And its comments on how white privilege protects against near everything are probably even more cogent now than in the past.

The Brilliance of Aguirre: Werner Herzog’s Heart of Darkness

Picture a ramshackle flotilla of soldiers being hit from all sides by enemy fire. Picture the bickering, infighting, panic as the soldiers consider the impossibility of their task; feverish, starving, condemned to death by orders beyond their control. Their leader stares ahead at a magnificence only he can see, ranting at the weakness and corruption of the world and demanding complete loyalty in return for untold and unimaginable riches.

There are many things to compare Werner Herzog’s third feature – Aguirre: Wrath of God – with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Both echo a form of political and religious imperialism whereby the native majority are condemned by convenience as savages by a minority from overseas. Both are tales of a war party caught far from home, discovering that their superior technology, culture and faith count for little in a hostile jungle terrain. Both are tales involving men battling to reach a goal they don’t really believe in. However, while Coppola’s boat’s crew is led by a man the audience can might relate to as a moral compass point in Captain Benjamin L. Willard, Aguirre’s crew is led by someone far more akin to Colonel Kurtz. The titular Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), although never officially the leader of the expedition, successfully undermines the designated leader and then places a puppet he thinks he can control in charge. Aguirre has no interest in following the orders he’s been given; he is intent on finding a way to the mythical Eldorado, and he will get there on the sweat and blood of his own men.

Both films represent picaresque journeys. Where the two films diverge the most – though whether or not the men see Eldorado as in anyway tangible – is in the lack of a true counter-point to stand up to Klaus Kinski’s tightly-wound villain. Mutterings abound among the disgruntled troop and yet no-one really stands against him – not when he manufactures a coup against designated leader Pedro De Ursua, not when a storm wrecks their boats and forces them to make new ones, not even when the men are starving yet most food is left for Aguirre’s anointed expedition head, the puppet Don Fernando De Guzman. Aguirre outlasts and destroys everything in his path, left ranting and furious, entreating all around him to follow him onto glory. At least Willard eventually reached a geographical end in his journey.

Set in the 16th Century, Werner Herzog’s unique, almost Guerrilla-style film is loosely based on a real life conquistador and quixotic-style expedition for the mythical Eldorado. Filmed on location in the Amazon jungle under conditions that for some of the crew must have felt like a military expedition, Herzog dragged his cast, props and crew through the Amazon jungle, shooting scenes in chronological order and even writing some of the extreme weather elements he faced into the story as they went. Much of the time he spent arguing with lead actor Klaus Kinski, pestering and cajoling him at different turns into producing the performance type he thought necessary for a megalomaniac mad-man. Off-screen the two men bickered constantly, while on-screen Kinski spends most of the movie like a coiled spring, staring fervently at a spot downstream that only seems to exist in his mind and switching between plot machinations typical of Othello’s Iago and leadership similar to Joseph Conrad’s (and by extension Coppola’s) Kurtz. By the end he will have willingly sacrificed everything and everyone in his lust for glory.

Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski had one of the most inventive and unique director / actor relationships in European cinema in the 1970s and 1980s. From Aguirre in 1973 until their final, Bruce Chatwin-inspired Cobra Verde in 1987, the two worked in at times horrendous conditions both physically and emotionally to complete their work, Herzog often sparring for days with Kinski in order to keep the eccentric actor from quarrelling with others. Impossible to separate fact from fiction, stories abound of Herzog threatening to shoot Kinski, of trying to set fire to him, and of Kinski regularly screaming obscenities at the director, refusing to listen to instructions, and creating a working atmosphere some found intolerable. Years after, Herzog would produce a documentary titled My Best Fiend about their friendship and working relationship, with plenty wondering which of them was the more insane – the raving, ranting Kinski or the quieter, more thoughtful Herzog. Certainly, Herzog seems to have been a fantastic foil for Kinski, and perhaps the older actor – who Herzog once referred to as a ‘great pestilence’ – brought out the best in the director. Their paired hysteria brought a number of towering masterpieces, but Aguirre – even more than the other Herzog / Kinski / South American  jungle offering  Fitzcarraldo – stands at the very summit.

 

Hereditary

Do you like scary movies? I love ’em. Classics like Don’t Look Now, The Exorcist and The Shining. Guilty pleasures like Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers and Jonathan King’s Black Sheep. So the arrival of A Quiet Place and Hereditary this year had me stoked for some proper scares at the Multiplex. Even after I found the first of these a bit underwhelming – particularly the ending which reminded me a little too much of Signs – I was still excited for the latter. I even read the UK Guardian’s top twenty-five horror films of all time (it being at 20 should perhaps have warned me not to get my hopes too high).

At the time of writing, director Ari Aster’s mid-budget horror hit Hereditary has a Rotten Tomatoes (RT) approval rating of 91% and an IMDB score of 8/10. It’s been compared favourably to horror classics such as Rosemary’s Baby, Don’t Look Now (both of which the director has name-checked in interviews as inspiration) and been called this generation’s The Exorcist. That last review – something that seemingly developed from one review into a tag-line for the film – has already drawn the ire of Exorcist devotee Mark Kermode who’s flogged about how annoyed he gets when movies are described as any generation’s Exorcist. Not to say that the Linda Blair / Max von Sydow 1973 classic isn’t sacrosanct. More a ‘why do we always have to do this?’ comment. While I couldn’t agree more on that, it isn’t the only problem I have with Heredity being hailed as a horror classic.

The set-up has so much potential, with a recently deceased relative, a dysfunctional family, and a slow-burn pace setting you up for what you imagine is going to be a fantastic second half. Toni Collette is excellent as always, Gabriel Byrne plays the near-defeated father with aplomb, and both child leads (Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro) are excellent – new-comer Shapiro in particular carries off her scenes brilliantly. The acting chops are all on show.

And there are enough early signs of horror – including some d-i-y with a dead bird and a grisly decapitation – to suggest that when Asher finally gets there we will be truly frightened. There’s a genuine sense of dread as we reach the hour mark and just beyond which is no mean feat for a horror film weighing in at 2 hours. The audience waits and waits, because the show is always a key part of horror; the longer you can keep an audience involved without showing your monster the better. You’ll struggle to keep them if that monster isn’t the real deal.

And then the point is reached where you expect the horror to take over. And it doesn’t. The audience begins to get restless. “We had that jump scare a few minutes ago, right? That was pretty effective – there’ll be more of that.” “There were the stills featuring someone on fire – that’ll be scary.” “Oh, right. There it is. That was okay, but maybe there’s more to come.”

Except there really isn’t. People begin to relax. A few people even giggle. There are a few whispers of discontent even – twists of the wrist to see what time it is. Then the naked satanists show up. Old naked people were funny when Stanley Kubrick made Eyes Wide Shut and that just doesn’t work in a horror movie. Then there’s some floating. And the non-twist (which is not a twist because it’s been signposted the whole way through the film). The credits come up. The lights come up. And a bunch of people turn to each other and ask if that is it. Or if anyone out there can still make a decent horror flick?

The movie comes hot-on-the-heels of John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place – itself with a 95% RT approval rating although again IMDB has been less kind with a 7.9 score. There is something in this – that the mother of all aggregator sites loves it while IMDB is more lukewarm. However, it’s in the RT audience score – 58% fresh – where you begin to wonder what exactly is going on. Because everybody in the media loves this film – American Psycho scribe Bret Easton Ellis called it the best film of the year on Twitter. Yet a quick look down the comments section of that Ellis tweet found a lot of people expressing disbelief at the writers opinion. It’s as if we’re in the middle of some media attempt at mass-hypnosis. We like the film so you will like the film. I’m reminded of a friend from college who swore John Woo’s Face-off was garbage even though everyone else was going nuts for it. There are a few reviewers who’ve expressed disappointment – John Byrne at RTE, Ryan Gilbey at The New Statesman – but they are in the steep minority. Meantime, more and more people are going to see it. I suppose at least it isn’t another Avenger’s film.

Hereditary is well-acted. It has some genuinely creepy moments and a solid set-up. However, the last 20 minutes may be the most risible I’ve seen from a horror film in a very long time and I recently re-watched Exorcist 3. To have the audience in the palm of your hand and to do nothing with that is the kind of thing I’d expect from Lars Von Trier – except he’d do it as a joke. Ari Aster has set the audience up for a scary night at the flicks, but has ended up fumbling the catch in the end-zone, leaving us with an ending more Scary Movie than actually scary. He’ll probably do better, but this was some waste. M. Night Shyamalan called – he wants his crown back. I mean-time must learn not to give into the hype so much.

The Journey Begins

A lot of time thinking about this but being in sleepy Wellington seems a great place to start. The goal is to have two novels on KDP by the end of 2018 with a third on the way. Will keep you all posted!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton