Disappointing Cult Classic of the Week: 'Repo Man' (1984)

Urban dictionary's definition of a cult classic:

1) Something that's really hip with a select group of people.
2) A popular [...] movie, which has gained a large following.  (NB: Pretty much the opposite of definition 1, but that's not an uncommon occurrence when looking for definitions of 'cult classic'.)
3) A movie that is weird as f**k.

The urban dictionary has some fascinating interpretations for words and phrases - honestly you could lose an afternoon (and what little is left of your innocence and naivety) to the website - but its third definition for 'cult classic' is as good a fit as any for Alex Cox's disjointed, but unfortunately never disarming, Repo Man.

The story follows teenage punk rocker Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez showing his range by playing Emilio Estevez) who, after getting fired as a stock clerk, starts working for a car repossession agency after being tricked into helping a repo man steal a car. And that's pretty much it for Otto's story. There are several subplots going on around him - a mad scientist driving a Chevrolet Malibu full of dead aliens, a rival car repossession agency, some punk rocker thieves who turn up every so often to liven up a scene, an underground group trying to spread the word about aliens, and an FBI agent dressed as Michael Jackson circa 1979 - but they all feel aimless and displaced, as if they've been cut from a much larger whole. Whenever Otto happens across these other storylines he often doesn't even notice them, focused as he is on the thrill of taking other people's cars and getting paid for it.

The film's slapdash (and supposedly 'raw') quality is the main thing that's endeared it to people over the years; that and a punk soundtrack which for many was era defining. You can see how the film has become a cult classic (depending on the definition you're working to), praised as it was for its wry sense of humour and an irreverent approach to storytelling which ran counter to most everything else being made at the time; but it's possible you need to have come of age in the Reagan era to appreciate how unusual it was. Watching it almost three decades after its release what's supposed to be irreverent feels directionless and meandering. A section in which the 'hero' is tortured is introduced so abruptly, shot so oddly, then abandoned with almost as much immediacy that I was left wondering if I'd imagined it. In fact that's very close to how the film felt as a whole: abrupt. Sequences that should have been left on the cutting room floor, in which characters spout cod philosophy, go on and on and on; and yet other scenes, like Otto's torture at the hands of not-Michael Jackson, which actually have the opportunity to further story or character, are given only a cursory spot in the film's 92 minute running time.

That such an oddball film could make it through the studio system is considered wonderful, but baffling. That anyone would hope for more of the same I find just as baffling.

Overall: 2/10

New Release Review: 'Elysium'

Want to explore a real world issue by examining it in a new light? Then sci-fi may be the genre for you! In theory.

After Neill Blomkamp's spin on the racial divide in South Africa in District 9 we now get his take on the gap between LA's servant class and the wealthy to whom they tend. The set-up: the very rich have fled Earth to live on a space habitat (or 'ringworld' to those that know their sci-fi) which orbits our world, whilst the other many-many-billions-of-us gaze up at the sky and hope that one day we can buy a ticket there and get shot of the over populated, over polluted Earth. Matt Damon plays one such habitat gazer. After an accident leaves him with a significantly shortened life span he races to find a way onto the rather well defended habitat where the med-pods the wealthy use to keep themselves healthy will save him.

Despite going out of his way to introduce storylines about immigration, healthcare and the rich/poor divide, Blomkamp then studiously ignores them for the rest of the film's running time. Those knotty issues are just backdrop. Even Damon's storyline takes a backseat to Blomkamp's real interests: ponderously large futuristic weaponry and over choreographed action sequences. There's one beautiful shot in which he details the annihilation of a robot in slow motion - a shot we get twice, just so we can fully appreciate it - and it looks amazing, but it means nothing; perhaps the best summation of the film. If we could invest in someone then things might have been different, but characters are introduced hazily, and die arbitrarily. There's a voice-over that comes in several times, a memory from Damon's past, reminding him that he's destined for great things; which is twaddle. Nothing that happens in the film is destiny, it's just happenstance. The film isn't exploring fate versus choice, it's just throwing in a portentous flashback to give weight to a story that has none.

Elysium only comes alive when Sharlto Copley (who played the bumbling jobsworth on District 9) is onscreen. His mercenary is indifferently written but Copley has enough charisma to make him memorable. No one else gets out with their credibility intact - except perhaps Damon, but that has more to do with how forgettable his role is than anything else. Jodie Foster does a watered down (and strangely accented) version of her part in Inside Man, William Fichtner glowers a lot (and that's about it), and Wagner Moura seems to have been told to do his best Nic Cage impression: all nervous energy and awkwardly tilted head.

One thing Blomkamp has done a great job of is making the Earth look worn and weathered. The security robots and air transport are immaculately designed and rendered. It all looks credible, it just doesn't sound credible. The world doesn't quite make sense. That wouldn't be as critical to the film if it had a beating heart, instead it has a electro-pulse-cannon-thing in its place.

The overall effect is of having watched a friend play a video game for an hour and a half, not once pausing to ask if you'd like a go. An unforgivable act.

Overall: 3/10

MINOR SPOILERS:
(Highlight to read)
The mission that drives a large proportion of the plot is an attempt to turn the citizens of Earth into citizens of Elysium, via the never-very-cinematic art of hacking a computer, which would give everyone access to the med-pods they so desperately need. In an ideal world I'd have been rooting for Damon and the handful of others that join him on this mission. Instead I was worrying about the practicalities of the plan: It's not possible for everyone to go to Elysium; it's got a population of 10,000. Everyone can't just head up there, it wouldn't be sustainable! Mostly they're just after the med-pods, but how many uses can they get out of them? How many are there? They're obviously a finite resource. I don't imagine they'll work particularly well by the time person number ten billion gets their turn.

More importantly, the master plan has nothing to do with fixing Earth. What they're doing is little more than putting a band aid on a heat shot wound. Nothing's going to change, it's just a temporary fix.

TV/DVD Release Review: 'Broadchurch'

Broadchurch is classified as a crime drama. That's not really accurate. A crime kicks off the story - the death of a young boy - and we get to know the people (and suspects) of Broadchurch through a police investigation, but the real focus is on tracing how the loss ripples through the community. By casting the almost over qualified Olivia Colman and David Tennant as the detectives investigating the death the show manages, briefly, to look like it's aspiring to be a classy procedural in the vein of Prime Suspect and Cracker. Tennant's detective, who's new to the town, forces Colman to shift her perspective and view the people of Broadchurch, many of them friends of hers, as potential murderers. It's an interesting arc for Colman, it's just a shame no one noticed that Tennant wasn't given one. He does get a compelling, slowly teased out, backstory that is part of the reason for his dogged approach to the current case (although the trope of the detective that pushes himself to the limit, desperately trying to close the case at all costs, was well worn about a century back), but he gets nothing to do in the present beyond belittling Colman (always amusing) and scowling. Although he does the scowling thing rather well it hardly stands-in for character development.

A further frustration is that the pair aren't much good at the whole detecting lark. Practically every clue is handed to them, wrapped in a neat bow, and more often than not these tip-offs could have been given to them at any time during the eight episodes, but they're only deployed when the plot needs them. Structuring a murder mystery isn't easy, and sometimes you have to come up with the odd contrivance to keep a clue back, but there ought to be a rhyme and reason to it, rather than it being immediately apparent that it's just convenient for the writer. Instead of giving Tennant and Colman the opportunity to do some actual detecting most of the screen time is used up making it clear that anybody could be the culprit. (IF YOU WANT TO AVOID EVEN TINY SPOILERS THEN SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH) Which is fine as that's part of the point of the show and fits well with where Colman's character arc goes, but it works rather less well when there's just a handful of characters that are never considered for the crime, and one in particular who's so pointedly boring, beige and forgettable that you'll immediately clock that they're going to play a big part in the final reveal. Which wouldn't be an issue if the red herrings weren't so damned red herring-y (it's a word now, get over it). You shouldn't know that the suspect is innocent - and that you're being lead a merry dance - until, ideally, the very last episode. In Broadchurch you know it in scene one, episode one.

Fortunately Broadchurch isn't really a detective show. Instead the focus is on detailing the different stages of grief in a way few shows (or films) ever have. If the show were only about dealing with that pain, and how you'd look just about anywhere to find answers or a way to deal with it, then it'd be pretty close to perfect. Unfortunately Chris Chibnall, the creator and writer, spends a great deal of time pretending its classification is accurate. The best thing you can do is ignore that pretence. Broadchurch is a straight drama, and for the most part it's a damned good one.

Overall: 7/10

New Release Review: 'The Conjuring'

The progression of a horror lover: age 7, get hooked on theme park rides; age 9, watch Jaws, try to unlearn how to swim, fail, decide to stay the hell away from any and all bodies of water; age 13, start on serial killer movies; age 16, discover the J-horror films, learn to sleep with one eye open; age 21, finally get around to watching the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, wonder if they'll ever be quite so freaked out ever again.

If, during your youth, you went through any of the above, you'll know every move The Conjuring is going to make. There are four and half months left in the year but I'd say the odds are good that The Conjuring will be the best not-remotely-surprising horror film you'll see in 2013. The story, supposedly true, details the traumatic experience of the Perron family, who made the slight hiccup of moving into a haunted house. The only slight wrinkle to the overly familiar haunted house story is that half the screen time is spent with the husband and wife paranormal investigators (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson) who are talked into helping the family. The film reminded me of a well oiled TV comedy which follows the simple rhythm of 'line, line, gag, line, line, gag', only here it's 'build, build, scare, build, build, scare'. It knows how to tease out these moments, but none of them are in any way new. It's almost like James Wan, who previously directed Insidious and the mostly decent first Saw film, went through a checklist of horror tropes and wondered how well they'd work if they were all on the screen at the same time. If Wan had paired down the fairly large cast and fleshed out some of the characters a bit more then there would at least be an opportunity to invest in them. Instead, despite the film being 'Based on a True Story', no one feels real, they're just archetypes.

Part of me wonders if I'm being too harsh on the film. As a jaded horror fan, long LONG since desensitised, I can't appreciate The Conjuring for what it is because the tricks are so very familiar, but that doesn't mean the film didn't use them well. In fact I'm pretty sure it did, as the casting, atmosphere and pacing evoked the '70s setting - and the horror films from that period - perfectly. Maybe after each of us has watched three decades of horror films we should accept that what comes next isn't for us but for the next generation. I'm not sure that I really believe that's the case, but I do think there's a false nostalgia in the way we remember the horror films we grew up with. Our parents and grandparents probably have the same perspective, one generation having had Psycho, the next The Exorcist. Both sets could easily find themselves thinking that what came next pales in comparison. Maybe each of us just has a finite number of scares in us?

Overall:
For the jaded: 6/10
For the unjaded: 8/10

New Release Review: 'Only God Forgives'

Only God Forgives really shouldn't be playing in the big cinema chains. To get the most out of the film, and I'm not sure there's really all that much to be got, it ought to be seen at your local art house cinema; or better yet, it should be set up as an art installation. You could stroll past it, catching a glimpse of its moody, mannered aesthetic and its heavy handed approach to sex and death, oedipal desire, and justice, and then you could move on, having been briefly intrigued, but knowing full well that you really weren't missing much.

The story, in as far as there is one, mostly follows Julian (Ryan Gosling) as he's coaxed into avenging his brother's untimely death, which came about at the behest of Lieutenant Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), a police officer with a seriously Old Testament approach to punishment. Those expecting a continuation of the work Gosling and director Nicolas Winding Refn did on Drive should tweak their expectations somewhat. Only God Forgives has much more in common with Refn's earlier effort Valhalla Rising. Both films exist in a netherworld between our own and something like purgatory, or hell. In the heavily atmospheric Valhalla Rising that was a good fit: it being set a thousand years ago in a brutal wasteland where death is ever present. In Only God Forgives that same portentous tone becomes much more trying, even laughable; and coupled with a poised and distant aesthetic, and lighting as heavy handed as its themes, the film ends up being wilfully inaccessible.

It reminded me of nothing so much as the early student films I saw at film school. The script is a wisp of a thing; the cinematography is only notable because of lighting so stark that the colours red and blue have a greater screen presence than most of the cast; and as for the cast:

• Gosling isn't an actor that's been capable of suggesting his characters have a rich inner life, so when he's given barely a dozen lines and has to spend most of the film conveying his feelings through glances, it works... Not terribly well. 
• Kristin Scott Thomas, as Julian's foulmouthed mother, seems to be having fun, cast against type, but she's just one amongst a slew of people to not care about. 
• Pansringarm is at least captivating to watch, yet Refn seems to be going out of his way to undercut the man's natural charisma by having him sing karaoke. Twice. In full.

If Refn scrapped all the pseudo dream sequences and hallucinations the film would probably have come to less than 50 minutes. He should probably make a cut of just those segments and put it in an art gallery and see how it fares. It'd be a good fit. Or at least a better one; because as a piece of cinema it's seriously lacking.

Overall: 1.5/10 

DVD Review/Overlooked Gem: 'Stoker'

Stoker isn't the most original piece of cinema you'll see this year, but the odds are it'll be the most archly beautiful. The film is one shot after another of hauntingly disturbing imagery, all of it as immaculately presented as the family of the title. At the start of the film the Stoker's numbers have diminished by one as India's father is killed in a car accident. Stepping in to fill the void, to look after both India (Mia Wasikowska) and her mother (Nicole Kidman), is Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), a man they didn't even know existed. Anyone who's seen Shadow of a Doubt will find that set-up eerily familiar, right down to the name of the uncle, but the story quickly goes places even darker, if no less Hitchcockian.

It's strange, and rather refreshing, to watch a film in which the cards are all laid down in the first five minutes. Everything you need to know about each character is given to you before their first scene is over; there are plenty of little wrinkles to their story, slowly revealed, but they'll fit neatly in with what you've already learnt. This is because Stoker's more interested in power dynamics: the scenes with the family at dinner, feigning civility as they pressure and maneuver, are unbearably tense precisely because we know (for the most part) who everyone is and what they're after. That tension is, more often than not, broken by director Chan-Wook Park's dark sense of humour; and the moment the tension's been relieved he gets right on with building it back-up. It's highly effective, and it'd make Hitchcock proud.

Stoker often feels like a modern retelling of a forgotten Brothers Grimm tale. The story certainly has a simple timeless quality to it. In keeping with that - except for the occasional shot of a mobile phone, and a sheriff's car that must have been made in the last quarter of a century - there's little to tell you where we are between 1960 and 2013. I keep wanting to refer to it as a fable, but a fable needs to be about animals, mythical creatures, and the like. Perhaps it's a parable. Both are (comparatively) short, have a broad sweep to their story telling, and linger in the consciousness because the idea at their core is so simple and compelling.

Which is to say: I rather liked it.

Overall: 8/10