( John Hancock / 1971 )
Hancock's JESSICA, a play on the age-old is-she-mad-or-are-there-ghosts? theme, appears to be content to saunter from one under-cooked cliche to the next for its entire running time, which makes its status as one of horror's unsung gems hard to fathom.
Friday, 13 January 2012
EVANGELION 2.0 : YOU CAN (NOT) ADVANCE (H Anno)
( Evangelion shin gekijôban: Ha / Hideaki Anno et al / 2009 )
The strange afterlife of NEON GENESIS EVANGELION, an epic combining teen existential angst, religious iconography and gigantic robot battles, continues with the second film in the new big(ger) budget four-part remake. Unlike the first film, YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE, ADVANCE deviates more from the source series. The characters are warmer, the Judeo-Christian mythology is even more pronounced, entire plot points are changed or new events introduced, and in general ADVANCE is much brighter and much louder. ADVANCE looks fantastic, especially the beautiful CGI Angels, without losing sight of the still aesthetic that characterised the series, part out of budgetary necessity, but part as providing a contemplative counterpoint to the climactic mecha fights. The potential problems of adapting a TV series into films raises its head in ADVANCE with, just like ALONE, the film's staccato rhythm. Where the series always neatly built to an Angel attack, playing perfectly to the confines of a TV episode, in ADVANCE Angels appear without any build up of tension as the film strains to fit in character development and behind the scenes conspiracies. The uneven pacing, in addition to an increased focus on the admittedly impressive battles and changes in characterisation, downplays the series' pessimistic melancholy, a very large part of what made it so unique.
ADVANCE is a decent film but whether this reboot will offer any real improvement on the original is still to be seen. The highly dramatic and visually specatcular climax - where almost all of the main characters are left for dead before pulling everything back for a bizarre, metaphysical 'happy' outcome only to then announce that "The world is ending" - is a vivid reminder of just how original EVANGELION can be and hopefully indicitive that the following films will not fall completely under the imposing shadow of the TV series.
The strange afterlife of NEON GENESIS EVANGELION, an epic combining teen existential angst, religious iconography and gigantic robot battles, continues with the second film in the new big(ger) budget four-part remake. Unlike the first film, YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE, ADVANCE deviates more from the source series. The characters are warmer, the Judeo-Christian mythology is even more pronounced, entire plot points are changed or new events introduced, and in general ADVANCE is much brighter and much louder. ADVANCE looks fantastic, especially the beautiful CGI Angels, without losing sight of the still aesthetic that characterised the series, part out of budgetary necessity, but part as providing a contemplative counterpoint to the climactic mecha fights. The potential problems of adapting a TV series into films raises its head in ADVANCE with, just like ALONE, the film's staccato rhythm. Where the series always neatly built to an Angel attack, playing perfectly to the confines of a TV episode, in ADVANCE Angels appear without any build up of tension as the film strains to fit in character development and behind the scenes conspiracies. The uneven pacing, in addition to an increased focus on the admittedly impressive battles and changes in characterisation, downplays the series' pessimistic melancholy, a very large part of what made it so unique.
ADVANCE is a decent film but whether this reboot will offer any real improvement on the original is still to be seen. The highly dramatic and visually specatcular climax - where almost all of the main characters are left for dead before pulling everything back for a bizarre, metaphysical 'happy' outcome only to then announce that "The world is ending" - is a vivid reminder of just how original EVANGELION can be and hopefully indicitive that the following films will not fall completely under the imposing shadow of the TV series.
Thursday, 5 January 2012
THE FALLS (P Greenaway)
( Peter Greenaway / 1980 )
Possibly the most reassuring apocalyptic movie ever made, Greenaway's THE FALLS has at its narrative core a typical disaster plot but is in actual fact a remarkable and obsessive avant-garde work. A mysterious catastrophe (termed the Violent Unknown Event [VUE]) affects the Earth, causing widespread deformities and mutations, and the film is set in its aftermath as people try to come to terms with what happened. So far, so normal, but this is not even close to being a genre picture.
Most victims of other cinematic apocalypses become at best, hideously deformed mutants but more likely, zombies which our heroes will need to heroically but tragically battle against. Zombies, however, are not what Greenaway is interested in. Greenaway is interested in ornithology so his victims develop deformities which resemble the physiognomy of birds and are then plagued with desires of flight. Rather than the Earth descending into a wasteland where daily survival often means a fight to the death, the world, in a highly British spirit of 'Keep calm and carry on', just keeps on revolving in much the same way as it did before. Albeit one where people keep on throwing themselves off of tower blocks, attempting to fly.
The form THE FALLS takes is possibly best described as a visual encyclopedia. It is a record of the 92 VUE victims whose surname begins with the letters Fall-, and proceeds alphabetically from one person to the next providing a short biography of each. Although encyclopedic in design, Greenaway takes great delight in emphasising the subjectivity of it all. Biographies will disagree with each other over how events happened, the VUE Commission will announce that certain biographies will not be released as they "not to be trusted", who even qualifies as a VUE "victim" is up for debate, and even where it happened. THE FALLS is an encyclopedia at peace with humanity's inability to come to a conclusive agreement about anything.
What appears to be the central contradiction of Greenaway is that on the one hand he is a fastidious cataloguer: the biographies are detailed with an eye for the minutiaie, ideas developed in one biography will be examined in another from a different perspective, contradicted or reinforced. Yet on the other hand he is a complete absurdist from the Monty Python school of comedy, only far far drier. His world is precise (although always aware of the subjectivity of 'facts') and clearly created with a great deal of thought and deliberation, and yet his world is also one where there is the distinct possibility that an apocalypse was caused by a conspiracy of birds who were fed up with not being treated quite right. It is a contradiction that will either drive you to distraction or delight you in a way that no other director can. Running at over 3 hours long it is not to be lightly recommended and his earlier shorts like H IS FOR HOUSE and DEAR PHONE possibly achieve more in considerably less time but for Greenaway's early, ritualised and highly compulsive work THE FALLS stands as a welcome, if unwieldy, climax.
Possibly the most reassuring apocalyptic movie ever made, Greenaway's THE FALLS has at its narrative core a typical disaster plot but is in actual fact a remarkable and obsessive avant-garde work. A mysterious catastrophe (termed the Violent Unknown Event [VUE]) affects the Earth, causing widespread deformities and mutations, and the film is set in its aftermath as people try to come to terms with what happened. So far, so normal, but this is not even close to being a genre picture.
Most victims of other cinematic apocalypses become at best, hideously deformed mutants but more likely, zombies which our heroes will need to heroically but tragically battle against. Zombies, however, are not what Greenaway is interested in. Greenaway is interested in ornithology so his victims develop deformities which resemble the physiognomy of birds and are then plagued with desires of flight. Rather than the Earth descending into a wasteland where daily survival often means a fight to the death, the world, in a highly British spirit of 'Keep calm and carry on', just keeps on revolving in much the same way as it did before. Albeit one where people keep on throwing themselves off of tower blocks, attempting to fly.
The form THE FALLS takes is possibly best described as a visual encyclopedia. It is a record of the 92 VUE victims whose surname begins with the letters Fall-, and proceeds alphabetically from one person to the next providing a short biography of each. Although encyclopedic in design, Greenaway takes great delight in emphasising the subjectivity of it all. Biographies will disagree with each other over how events happened, the VUE Commission will announce that certain biographies will not be released as they "not to be trusted", who even qualifies as a VUE "victim" is up for debate, and even where it happened. THE FALLS is an encyclopedia at peace with humanity's inability to come to a conclusive agreement about anything.
What appears to be the central contradiction of Greenaway is that on the one hand he is a fastidious cataloguer: the biographies are detailed with an eye for the minutiaie, ideas developed in one biography will be examined in another from a different perspective, contradicted or reinforced. Yet on the other hand he is a complete absurdist from the Monty Python school of comedy, only far far drier. His world is precise (although always aware of the subjectivity of 'facts') and clearly created with a great deal of thought and deliberation, and yet his world is also one where there is the distinct possibility that an apocalypse was caused by a conspiracy of birds who were fed up with not being treated quite right. It is a contradiction that will either drive you to distraction or delight you in a way that no other director can. Running at over 3 hours long it is not to be lightly recommended and his earlier shorts like H IS FOR HOUSE and DEAR PHONE possibly achieve more in considerably less time but for Greenaway's early, ritualised and highly compulsive work THE FALLS stands as a welcome, if unwieldy, climax.
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