Well, this is a slightly awkward. I went to see the new writer/director Barry Jenkins flick, Moonight, yesterday. As a three-chaptered story of internal, social and sexual identity, it's pretty great. I just don't have that much to say about it.
And it's not that I don't know how to respond to the film, more that my response is a sort of quiet contemplation. Three segments follow the central character, Chiron, as a child, teenager and adult, through the gang and drug culture of Miami's urban sprawl. And among the domestic struggles we've seen so often over the years in these settings, Chiron thinks from an early age that he might be gay. The film is about how Chiron comes to terms with that, and Jenkins uses quiet introspection where others have used righteousness and rage. This is a calm film about turbulent times. That said, it wasn't as overtly impactful as I'd expected which caught me off guard, but at the same time it wasn't all melodramatic hand-wringing either. Issues are addressed but never resolved neatly, and the film's central subject-matter isn't its sole focus. Yet this borderline reluctance to fit neatly into a standard cinematic box saw me willing the story forward, while at the same time wishing each section was significantly longer and more involved. Maybe I'd have preferred it as three one-hour TV episodes?
Moonlight features solid turns all round under Jenkins' stoic direction, but the standout performances come from Ashton Sanders as the teenage Chiron, and Naomie Harris as his drug-addicted mother (in all three segments). Although at the same time, I want to take points off for the needlessly distracting hand-held cameras (and associated focusing issues), and also for a sound-mix that reduces every third line to an unintelligible mumble.
I enjoyed Moonlight more than this review probably suggests. It didn't blow me away by any means, but it's stayed with me. Which is better, naturally.
I actually don't know, that's how stumped the film has left me.
It's more of a Sunday DVD, to be fair.
Undoubtedly.
It's the first time I've seen many of the faces here, but the film should be at the top of everyone's CV, I'm sure.
Depends on why we're disagreeing.
There's not.
Level 2: Well, that Naomi Harris is in this, and she was in that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End along with Keira 'Sabé' Knightley.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
The A-word.
It's the bane of cinephiles, everywhere.
That book you love; the comic you remember; the show you used to watch; the game you lost an entire summer playing? Oh, someone's adapted it and it's getting made into a movie! Whether a cause for pre-emptive celebration or foreboding caution, it leads to only one thing: expectation. And expectation is the death of the 'clean' movie-viewing experience; no matter how closely the film sticks to its source material, or how much it tries to distance itself, it will be faced with the hurdle of comparison.
And while the movie industry loves the pre-built marketing buzz of 'now a major motion picture!', they loathe the comparative references which will be made from the first review onwards. Because many punters will expect to get exactly the same reaction from a completely different medium, to a story they already know. And therein lies the problem.
In this monthly series, we'll look back at some of the most respected and best-loved properties which have made the perilous journey to the big screen; often with some controversy, and almost always with far too much hype. This isn't so much a review of the films themselves, more an appraisal of their suitability as an adaptation.
And so we begin with Philip K. Dick's Minority Report, the 1956 short story of a man caught in a system of 'Precrime', whereby a monitored trio of precognitive mutants read the imminent future for cases of murder and treason. The details are then passed on to a dedicated police unit (with an identical set of results passed to the military as a set of 'check and balances'), who are dispatched to arrest the offender before they have a chance to commit the crime. Although in some cases, the offender isn't yet aware that they intend to murder their victim(s). Precrime are almost literally the thought-police.
That's right, I'm starting 2017 by reading about institutionally-sanctioned prejudice in a book from 61 years ago. But I digress…
Bearing in mind that my default approach to sci-fi and speculative fiction is cinematic (rather than literary), my first thought was that the initial setup of the story seems reminiscent of Robocop , with The Establishment focusing more on a pre-emptive deterrent, rather than in-situ engagement of criminals. Not withstanding the obvious flaw in the system (we'll get onto that), the fact remains that with a system of punishment in place that addresses the 'crime' while leaving the victim still alive, Precrime would indeed act as a first-stop deterrent. For murder, at least. The narrative seems to suggest that reports of theft and assault are automatically filtered out of the system, and are presumably picked up by the authorities in the regular manner.
Dick's philosophical time-cruncher is only a forty-two page short story, and - like all the best speculative fiction - isn't so much concerned with the advancement of technology, but more the non-advancing nature of the humans with access to it. At the core of the story, the machines which facilitate the scrying are only tools connected up to the people (albeit 'mutants') at the centre. But then, people are only biological machines, after all. Minority Report is more a brief study of the illusion of free-will, and the margin of error involved when anybody tries to second-guess someone's true motives. Again, cf 2017.
Most of all, I love that the thought-analysing machines in this future state are still printing off slips of card. Can we hold on to that, please?
The central figure one John Anderton, the developer of Precrime and a police commissioner about ten years or so from retirement (so not a young protagonist, something worth bearing in mind for a movie adaptation, I'm sure). In a system where the last recorded murder was over five years ago, its inventor has convinced everyone - including himself - that constant surveillance and preemptive intervention is for the public good. And it's all the more baffling since the one obvious flaw in punishing someone for a fixed crime in a fluid timeline is something which doesn't seem to have occurred to him until he ends up accused of murdering someone he hasn't yet met. Once this happens, the penny seems to come clanging down with ironically startling rapidity.
Even for a 'short' story, Minority Report takes its time in getting round to this caveat, although when it does, Dick's writing is reassuringly self-aware. The tale unfolds into corporate conspiracy, rather than personal vendetta, and the already unclear waters of right and wrong are muddied with the pollutant of 'for the right/wrong reasons'. And while it's nicely compact, this is a story just crying out for expansion.
The book (I'm going to call it that) is good fun and far more accessible than I've found Philip K Dick on previous attempts. I can't help but wonder how 'out of reach' this non-specific future would have seemed in 1956, because in the 2017 of consumer algorithm profiles and social media tracking, Minority Report feels closer than ever...
Oh, I see the Murder Cards™ have been replaced with carved, wooden lottery balls. Makes as much sense as anything, I suppose…
Given an entire plot makeover and with Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell, the budget for this adaptation is clearly larger than the starting concept. Thankfully, the film's always more than being A Tom Cruise Movie™, event though the translation's still more generic that it should be. And sure, it's more heavy-handed in its message than the written-version, but that's probably a combination of the larger narrative and the visual storytelling method. The film is less of a philosophical thriller, and more the arch action movie that the cast-list would suggest.
As a plot-device and overall concept, Precrime seemed more practical in the book version of this. Equally overblown and with the same moral stumbling-block of course, but less ostentatious. While the how of the story remains largely the same, screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen take significant liberties with the who and why. All for the good of the feature-length adaptation, of course.
On the plus side, this is exactly the kind of exploration than the story needs. Although if anything, the film's far longer than it needs to be at just under 2h20m. Minority Report hits the ground running with a show, don't tell methodology, but the extended narrative time means there's a lot of exposition in here, over and above what's really needed. And it's perhaps ironic that for a sci-fi movie, Anderton's newly-added 'broken cop' backstory could have been written by a computer. In what could be the film's signature sequence, it displays the morbid fascination with eyeballs that occurs in other adaptation of Dick's novels (more of those in future entries to this series), but which is absent from the source book (a bit I was looking forward to, if anything).
This film version is set (ie captioned) in 2054, which puts a specific future-date on things, this time round. Although bizarrely, if Cruise's hand-wave-operated computers with translucent holo-displays don't date the movie enough, the Nokia-logo product placement and COPS referencing certainly do.
Overall though, not a bad movie by any means, even if it's a slightly unremarkable one, in the long-run of cinematic history…
It is, although it's more like an idea in longhand; the first, bare-bones draft of a novella. It also feels in places like it was written in an afternoon.
It is. The creative team behind the film have fleshed out the initial idea (warts and all) in ways which allow it to be expanded more fully. Okay, this leads to the potential setbacks of the system being more glaringly obvious, but it's not like everything in the real world's been thoroughly foolproofed, either.
As much as I enjoyed the paper-version, you won't really get much more out of it than just watching the movie. Although, perhaps uniquely, it'll probably take less time to read the book.
I didn't hear one.
Although I wasn't listening out for it, truth be told..
Level 1: Well apart from those police-cruisers which look an awful lot like Jango Fett's Slave 1 ship from Attack of the Clones (2002), the city-scape and assembly-line chase sequences which bear more than a passing resemblance to Attack of the Clones (2002) and John Williams' score which bears more than a passing resemblance to his work on Attack of the Clones (2002)… Lor San Tekka's in this (from the Star Wars in 2015, admittedly).
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Oh, hi. As with last time, I've made you some Skittlez character-posters, in lieu of actual words. That said, I'm half-way through drafting another set of nitpicky observations, and it looks like my local may well have stopped showing Rogue One after this weekend. In which case, I'll just have to post them up under their own steam at some point. But until then, pictures!
[ Click for Big (opens in new window) ]
I've got more of these to come, too. So there'll definitely be some sort of mop-up post to wring the last out of Rogue One.
In the words of Baze Malbus, "You're welcome…".
All of The Star Wars.
Yep.
It does.
It's a strong showing.
Nope.
Yep.
Level 0: It is Star Wars.
Although if you really wanted to go the long way round with it…
Rogue One stars Alistair Petrie, who appeared in the first episode of the 2013 TV drama The Escape Artist, as did a certain David Tennant, who of course headlined Casanova, along with Rose Byrne, who rocked up in 2004's Troy alongside Julian Glover, an actor who was in the 'Arthur's Bane' episode of Merlin, which also boasted Lindsay Duncan, who had a role in An Ideal Husband, a film that featured Oliver Ford Davies, who also starred in the 1997's Mrs Dalloway, along with Alistair Petrie from Rogue One…
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
I have to be honest and say that the mawkish and patronising trailer for Mel Gibson's true-story wartime epic didn't put me in the most receptive frame of mind for the film*1, and nor indeed did the opening of that film itself, comprising a battlefield scene from the climactic sequence enacted in slow-motion with full orchestral accompaniment, and inserted apparently for the members of the audience who want All The Guns And Explosions Immediately Now. Was young Mel going to bring us a Spielberg film, after all? This is, after all, a film about a pacifist in a war-zone, so we should expect some level of preaching, right?
After the title sequence, the film drops a 'Fifteen years earlier' card and we see a pivotal moment in the young protagonist Desmond Doss's life. Skip forward from that, and we meet the adult Desmond (Andrew Garfield), properly for the first time. By now, we're in more familiar, character-building territory, with narrative support coming from his mother (Rachel Griffiths) and father (Hugo Weaving), as he meets his wife-to-be, Dorothy (Teresa Palmer). And the latter three are all great performers, but the thing which already makes the film shine at this early point is Andrew Garfield. He's great, isn't he? Like, from his first scene where he's in a church, playfully making fun of his mother's choir (even if he is soon seen breaking the Code of Conduct by talking in a cinema, of course*2). Garfield brings an optimistic sincerity to his role as a conscientious objector who signed up to serve in the Army medical corps, where many another actor would have gone for naive righteousness. And while the trailer suggests that everyone around him is a one-note cutout, there to dissuade and belittle Doss until some third-act revelation, I was delighted that that's not the case. Those scenes in the trailer do take place of course, but at a pace which is kinder to everyone involved.
So, Act 2 comes along and with it the first battle on the titular Ridge. Good god. The utter, utter carnage. As much as I'm a wooly liberal at heart, this first extended sequence is deeply satisfying, cinematically*3. I can only describe what we see as Walking Dead levels of gore and mutilation. More interestingly, there's no score during this first fight, just a symphony of ordnance, screaming and the coursing of adrenaline. And that's worth noting because the second-wave battle the next day, and Doss's subsequent rescue-mission do have the soundtrack running behind them, which naturally increases the emotion of what we see, but lessens the overall impact.
As the film progresses, the characters are filled in more intricately, as is the gravity of the situation. And sure, it gets a little bit pantomime on occasion, but the film's worst pouting excesses are still easily forgivable. At two hours twenty minutes, this isn't a short tale, but it's worth every minute. And true-story or not, you will find yourself holding your breath and wondering who's going to make it. As is so often the way with this type of film, the closing segment shows archive interview footage from surviving members of the platoon and Doss's family*4; as is less-frequent, the film earns this entirely.
Thoroughly pleased to have my cynicism thwarted, Hacksaw Ridge is an outstanding film. Mel Gibson has done the unfathomable and made a movie which is completely respectful of pacifism, whilst also being unrepentantly gleeful in its violence.
He's also done the unimaginable by making a movie where Vince Vaughn and Sam Worthington are an actual pleasure to watch*5…
…although am I alone in thinking the poster tagline is basically Mel Gibson telling Clint Eastwood to fuck right off?
At this rate, I suspect that Eastwood is going to jump on Gibson after school…
Saving Private Ryan, I imagine.
(Although I haven't seen that. No, you shut up.)
For the big and the loud? Oh, yes.
It certainly does.
It's up-there.
Probably not.
Of COURSE there bloody is!
Level 2: Andrew Garfield was in that Silence with Qui-Gon JinnandKylo Ren. I mean yeah, that's a recent one, but I think it's worth not-forgetting.
*1 To the point where I had tickets for Monday's preview-screening, but after a shitty day at work, decided I couldn't handle being condescended to for two hours, knowing that the film was on general release from Thursday anyway. [ BACK ]
*2 Where young Desmond is pestering his date through the newsreel at the start. Okay it's not during the movie itself, but it's more important than trailers or something, y'know? Actually, it occurred to me in this scene that it would have been cool for Gibson to have used the newsreel footage we see in the first Captain America film, to easter-egg this movie into MCU continuity. But then it occurred to me that Hugo Weaving plays the Red Skull in The First Avenger, and he plays Desmond's dad in Hacksaw Ridge. And if Des's compatriots are initially reticent about going into battle with a pacifist by their side, I shouldn't imagine they'd feel any better if they found out his old man was the head of the Hitler-disowned Nazi deep-science division, Hydra. This is why I'm not a screenwriter, by the way. [ BACK ]
*3 Although I now want to see a sequence of that intensity, but with Stormtroopers and Rebel Fleet Troopers, like a live-action R-rated Battlefront. And naturally, I know that's never going to happen. [ BACK ]
*4 Although I'm not going to lie, from the 2003 interview we see at the end of the film, the real, actual Desmond Dossdoes remind of of Henry Kane from Poltergeist II, and that does kind of take the glow off the film a bit. Imagine lying bleeding out on a battlefield when he comes over to grab you, saying everything's going to be just fine… [ BACK ]
*4 And yes, you're right - For the first time I've actually hyperlinked these footnotes so you can just flip up and down at a click/tap. It's a pain in the arse as I manually code all this, but I might just keep it up. That's how much I care about your scrolling-finger… [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
