Friday 30 June 2023

Sirocco (Curtis Bernhardt, 1951)

1925. Syrians are fighting to rid their homeland of the French, who have been in control since the end of the Ottoman Empire.


As the conflict excelates, the French are increasingly brutal in their response.


American smuggler Harry Smith (Humphrey Bogart) has made a living off both factions, but finds his neutrality threatened when he becomes entangled with a young woman, Violetta (Märta Torén), who just so happens to be the mistress of the French officer (Lee J. Cobb) on his tail...



Auckland’s Academy Cinema is screening a festival of Humphrey Bogart’s films. I had not seen most of them and so added them to the Midnight Ramble’s schedule. 


Not a movie I was aware of, Sirocco is reasonably entertaining, although it feels a little softened.


My overall impression of the movie is that it is a more cynical retread of Casablanca - Bogart is a black market wheeler-dealer in the middle of a conflict in a foreign land. There is a beautiful woman (Märta Torén) who is trying to escape, and draws Bogart in. Her romantic partner (Lee J. Cobb) is involved with said conflict.

 

It is not cynical for trying to repeat a successful formula - it is cynical within the text e.g. Violetta is a kept woman; Col. Feroud may want to broker a truce with the Syrians, but he is also obsessed with keeping Violetta under his thumb - even beating her at one point; Bogart’s Harry Smith sells contraband to French and Syrian alike, including weapons.


The movie is bleak and compelling, but weirdly muted.


Bogart’s character is a little flat - the actor also seems to be checked out.


Because the characters are so crudely drawn, the attraction between Smith and Violetta seems purely opportunistic. And without a major shift in his character, his final sacrifice feels underwhelming. 


I found it hard to figure out the character’s change of heart - and then there is everyone else.


The characters are not so much contradictory as they are random.


The French commandant is introduced issuing a proclamation to execute civilians as reprisals for dead soldiers - later, when Smith is arrested and informs him of his scheme with Feroud, the Commandant is completely honorable and believes he should keep to his subordinate’s word.


While he has reneged on his initial proclamation, the fact that he is willing to countenance it seems to go against the idea that he would not use it as an excuse to escalate his campaign against the Syrians - maybe that is my own cynicism, but it seems like a weird softening.


That leads me to the portrayal of the warring parties.

 

While Cobb’s Feroud shows an empathy for the Syrian cause, the portrayal of the Syrian resistance is limited. 


There are no main characters to represent their point of view, and most of the supporting characters we do see are either out for themselves or weak-willed.


The Syrian resistance has an understandable lack of scruples - they are the underdogs in this fight.


But as with the Commandant mentioned earlier, the film gives the French occupiers an empathy and sense of honor that seems totally out of proportion.


There are times where the movie touches on the grim realities of a long siege - the bombing of Smith’s club is a prime example (after the bomb goes off, the scene lingers, as survivors scramble through rubble and smoke, and a woman howls).


But the movie never collasces - it feels like the sketch for something more profound. And its similarities to past Bogart vehicles only accentuates how shallow it feels.


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Tuesday 27 June 2023

Live Wire: An explosive Brosnan thirst trap!

In this season of The James Bond Cocktail Hour podcast, we are covering the six year gap between Licence to Kill and GoldenEye, covering everything James Bond-related, from books to comics to video games, to non-Bond properties which tried to fill the gap.

On the latest episode, we check out the explosive thriller Live Wire, starring future Bond Pierce Brosnan!

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Tuesday 20 June 2023

OUT NOW: Extraction 2 (Sam Hargrave)

After barely surviving his last job, Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) is retired and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life.


And then a stranger appears at his cabin with an offer he cannot refuse: 


His ex-wife’s sister is married to a Georgian mobster, Davit Radiani (Tornike Bziava), who has been imprisoned. As part of his sentence, his family has to share his sentence with him.


Rake enlists his friend Nik Khan (Golshifteh Farahani) to rescue this woman and her children.


This rescue puts Rake and his team in the sights of Davit’s brother Zurab (Tornike Gogrichiani), who unleashes the force of his criminal empire against the fugitives.




I do not remember liking Extraction that much. I also do not remember that much about it.


Thankfully, Extraction 2 catches you up by showing the ending of the last movie.


Despite that opening, there is something refreshingly no-nonsense about Extraction 2. It hits the ground running, and ends before it gets tiresome. 


Opening with Rake’s own extraction, the first act has no action. Instead we watch him going through physical rehab and trying to come to terms with his injuries.


Forcibly retired, he is stuck in a remote cabin in the woods.


During this relatively sedate sequence, the film makes sure to introduce the villain murdering a traitor - all while revealing the key elements of the plot to follow.


Rake's retirement ends quickly and we get a montage of our hero forcing himself back into action hero shape by performing various tasks outside in the woods. A callback to action movies past, it reminded me of Rocky IV's training montage, and Susan Jeffords' book Hard Bodies, in which she references a media portrayal of Ronald Reagan's belaying his age (and boosting his masculinity) by chopping wood. 


This is probably the closest to an obvious homage I could see, although it is impossible not to read Rake’s one-man assault as a feature-length update of Stallone and Schwarzenegger.


Let’s get to the action.


The mayhem starts with a terrific 20-odd minute one-take as Rake gets the family out of the prison. The camera creates a sense of anxiety as danger bursts out from every corner of the frame. It is anxiety-inducing, particularly when Rake and Ketevan (Tinatin Dalakishvili) are caught in the middle of a prison riot - which is a great way to mask every time a new bad guy attacks them.


While it is a (excellent) technical exercise, it generates a sense of immersion.


This sequence also shows off the film's great use of locations - the underground tunnels of the prison; that classic action movie staple, the factory - the filmmakers and choreographers make inventive and unique use of each of these environments, so it never feels repetitive.

 

The helicopter pursuit with Rake and co. on a train plays like video game levels, with the camera hugging the participants like a third-person shooter. The camera also shifts perspectives from Rake to Nik and even taking in Ketevan’s son Sandro’s (Andro Japaridze) reaction to the violence. 


That shift in perspective extends to narrative voice, especially in terms of the villains. 


One of the highlights of the first movie was the time spent humanising Rake’s opponent Saju Rav (Randeep Hooda). Extraction 2 does a similar thing with Zurab (Tornike Gogrichiani) - repeatedly showing flashbacks of the brothers growing up, going through hardship.


There is a running theme of characters dealing with familial trauma (Rake regrets missing his child’s death), and without feeling didactic, the film contends with questions around what defines family, and how is love expressed. 


The film is not a character piece - one could argue some of these themes are only vaguely touched on. But it does give these silent characters a sense of tension - and a need for redemption.


Since this is an action film, that need is expressed through shooting, stabbing and exploding people.


While the initial action sequences feel like technical exercises, the filmmakers are not anchored to a specific style of shooting.


The escape from the hotel is shot in a more classic, continuity style. There is an emphasis on tactical precision of Rake’s team try to get away and Zurab’s crew try to box them in.


Long sections of this sequence play without score - just the sound of bullets.


The variety and pacing of the action prevents it from getting boring - the hotel provides several distinct environments e.g. an underground garage, a parking lot, the gym and the roof (including the side of the building).


There are a few pinpricks of humour - the one henchman crushed by weights in the gym.


After all the action of the first two thirds of the film, it slows down for Rake, Nik and the family to lick their wounds and take off their (metaphoric) armour.


Thankfully, the movie does not forget what it is - Rake is soon taking the fight to the villains with a grenade launcher, blowing up planes, buildings and whoever has a death wish to become barbecue.


While the movie takes the time to show flashbacks of how the villains were moulded into the monsters they are now, the film is smart enough to not repeat that format with Rake - instead, his loss of a child is mapped onto his quest to save Sandro, the young boy who is torn between love for his family, and the allegiance he has for his father’s gang.


A similar sense of understatement and ellipses is used in the portrayal of Rake and Nik’s relationship.


What they say is less meaningful than what they do.


As with the previous movie, Rake ends the movie beaten to a pulp. 


This time he is the one to save Nik, bringing the film full circle.


Extraction 2 is not going to rewrite the action genre, despite its technical credentials.


 It is a familiar concept executed to a high level.


As far as the acting goes, it is of a good standard. Kudos to the filmmakers for casting outside the usual suspects - the Georgian cast are excellent, particularly Japaridze as Sandro. He conveys a lot without dialogue.


There are a few action regulars - Olga Kurylenko plays Rake’s ex-wife, and Daniel Bernhardt plays one of Zurab’s henchmen


Hemsworth, complete with Aussie accent, is terse and stoic. He has weight and authority, and handles the action. I found him a little blank in the original but here he seems more at home as the repressed killer.


Rake gets more definition in Extraction 2, and it probably has to do with the film being more of an ensemble piece. 


The real standout as an action star is Golshiften Farahani as Nik Khan, Rake’s partner (and potential romantic partner). She gets a couple of great action scenes, on the train and on the hotel roof.


The film ends with the tease of a sequel but it does not feel like the story is unfinished. This is an action film that feels like the kind of straight-ahead fare that sued to be made on a regular basis in decades past.


The film has a similarly dour tone as the original, but with an expanded canvas, we get a little more specificity in terms of characterisation. If the film is missing anything, it is more of a sense of humour - there is a slight knowningness on the fillm’s part that Rake is an unkillable man mountain, but it feels like unexplored territory.


Still, this is a minor quibble. 


If anyone is complaining that Hollywood does not make these kinds of movies anymore, point them toward Extraction 2.


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Sunday 18 June 2023

OUT NOW: The Flash (Andy Muschietti, 2023)

Something is broken.

Within the Hollywood system, within capitalism itself.


Even before we get to the zombified recreation of Christopher Reeve.


This movie is everything wrong with contemporary Hollywood.





As we contend with the implications of AI, this movie is symptomatic of the space that technology will quickly occupy.

As Hollywood becomes less an industry and more a branch of larger corporations, the room for innovation and creativity has been reduced dramatically.

Creativity has never been the centre of Hollywood, but the industry used to be run by people who wanted to make movies. They wanted to make movies that made money - and they would spread their resources across a variety of different genres, budgets and specific audiences.

We have gone from remakes and sequels to focusing on an increasingly smaller number of films based on previous works.

The money men want sure things - but now that means mining the same things over and over again.
In the past, filmmakers would try their own spin on popular hits, now we do not even get that.

The success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars has given other companies the wrong roadmaps for success.

The subsequent rise of the multiverse as a concept in popular films is not a creative notion but a way to monetise and rehabilitate past hits (or attempts at hits). Speaking of which, Spider-Man: No Way Home had a whiff of staleness about its inclusion of earlier Spider-Men and their respective villains. There was a vague sense that it was a con, a movie based on an over-reliance on nostalgia for emotional responses, rather than actual drama.

If that movie nudged at that door to that idea, The Flash kicks it wide open.

Ezra Miller is a human disaster area - a toxic confection that the studio is content to stand behind. If the movie around Miller was half as good as the movies it pays tribute to (and I am not that big a fan of Batman ‘89), it would be easier to dismiss the whole confection as a misfortune - a movie torpedoed by casting a POS.


Instead, one is forced to contend with a movie-as-trailer built around said POS as host to a series of characters and moments designed to appeal to fan memories.


There are not even slivers of moments where it feels like the film finds something human, something with texture and contradiction. I am usually able to pull nuggets out of movies like this but The Flash is so facile and incestuously enraptured with the company’s back catalogue that it was a fruitless search.  


This is a movie designed for a perverse kind of wish fulfilment - what if Michael Keaton came back as Batman?; what if Nicholas Cage’s Superman had existed?; what if Christopher Reeve were still alive (and not disabled)?


Whatever is workable about the title character’s story feels tertiary. Bits and pieces of an interesting drama have been wedged into disparate corners to facilitate the inclusion of Michael Keaton’s Batman.


Kiersey Clemons has about five minutes of screen time - she is barely involved at all, and I forgot about her until I reached this part of the ran… review.


Filled with jokes that make the movie more aggravating (and feel like attempts to soften the star after his offscreen controversies), Miller’s performance defined by extremes - his teen version is heightened to the level of cartoon, and reduced to being a stand-in for Batman fans to gauck at the guest star.


Sasha Calle looks cool but has little to do as Kara Zor-El.


And then there is Michael Keaton.


Keaton’s character exists to facilitate a refraction of nostalgia, blending meme-level references of 1989’s Batman (‘You wanna get nuts?’), and a desire to recraft his Batman in ways closer to more contemporary iterations. 


There is nothing to his character, or the decision to include him, that adds to a deeper understanding of Barry Allen’s story.


This movie feels closer to getting all your action figures and having Keaton-era Batman fight Michael Shannon’s Zod.


The film’s inherent cheapness is matched by its look.


As it progresses, the film looks like a perverse parody of criticisms levelled at Marvel.


There is a sense of intangibility as virtual cameras hurtle around vaguely defined, overly lit computer-generated environments.


The third act is a disaster to look at - characters are poorly rendered, with flattened faces and angular, hard lines around their edges.


Watching this movie felt like the end: not just of this run of comic book movies; or of Miller’s career; my hope is that 2023 and The Flash are the end of a way of making Hollywood movies.


Movies which are solely about stroking a specific viewer’s ego, movies which are only interested in regurgitating familiar characters, and movies made by people who take their workers (like the VFX artists who worked on The Flash) for granted.


Hopefully this is rock bottom. Hopefully.
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Thursday 15 June 2023

The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin, 1974)

Builder James Duncan (William Holden) is dedicating his latest creation, the 138 storey Glass Tower, the world’s tallest building.


On the night of the dedication, a fire starts on the 81st floor and starts to spread.


As the fire grows and starts rising toward the party on the top floor, it falls to Fire Chief Michael O'Halloran (Steve McQueen) and the building’s architect Doug Roberts (Paul Newman) to stop it.


Right from the beginning, The Towering Inferno presents itself as the biggest and most prestigious example of its genre: 


The unique double billing of Newman and McQueen, the multiple studios (the result of a rare case of synthesising separate skyscraper projects), the widescreen aerial photography of a helicopter crossing San Francisco’s iconic skyline  while John Williams’ triumphant main theme booms under it.


Producer Irwin Allen’s followup to The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno feels like a spiritual sequel - bigger in scale, more expensive and filled with stars.


This is big four quadrant entertainment, with an ensemble of stars. 


The story covers the situation from multiple angles.


The first time I watched The Towering Inferno, I enjoyed it but compared with The Poseidon Adventure, it seemed a little ponderous.


On this viewing, it flew by.The fire starts 12 minutes in and the action builds from there.


No one is particularly memorable, but no one is awful.


The seventies was a time of change: the oil crisis, the end of the postwar boom.


It makes sense that disaster movies - in which familiar vehicles, environments and movie stars are destroyed - became so popular.


They feel like reflections of societal unease.


They also put the lie to the idea that Jaws and Star Wars inaugurated the blockbuster.


The Towering Inferno and the other disaster movies of the time are also platforms for spectacle.


While it is long, the movie never drags. Directed by John Guillermin (who I have covered before), the film manages to maintain and escalate the tension as the film progresses.


The fire effects add to a genuine sense of danger - mostly because it is real stuntmen interacting with real fire - as do the miniature effects for the elevator and escape line subplots.


And while the movie is based around trying to deal with the fire, the film includes some solid antagonists - Richard Chamberlain’s contemptible electric engineer Roger Simmons, and his father in law, Duncan (William Holden). Duncan is positioned as somewhat sympathetic - he takes some responsibility for the disaster - but Simmons is completely irredeemable. 


Another movie might have found a way for either of the film’s heroes, O'Halloran (McQueen) or building architect Roberts (Newman) to deal with him - here, Simmons is undone by his own selfishness. The film even teases the audience with an early death, but he survives for a suitably dramatic fall (pun intended).


The film ends on a somewhat pat note - a promise for ethical building practices, and a humbling of boundless ambition. In its scope and scale, the film cannot help but refute that idea - but it makes for a more entertaining viewing experience!


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