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Carré blanc

Carre blanc

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 6 July 2012

Venues: Rio, London

Director: Jean-Baptiste Léonetti

Writer: Jean-Baptiste Léonetti

Cast: Sami Bouajila, Julie Gayet, Jean-Pierre Andréani

France 2011

77 mins

Those who cling to wealth and power by forcing conformity, stifling creativity and crushing the very essence of humanity are the faceless dominant evil that exploits the most vulnerable aspect of what it means to be human. It is ultimately our spirit which is, in fact, not as indomitable as we’d all like to believe. Through indoctrination and constant scrutiny we are reduced to lumps of clay. We are moulded in the image our true rulers want to see. They want us tied to the consumption they control. Call them what you like, but they are indeed The New World Order.

And they are winning.

And, worst of all, the loser is love.

And without love, we all become prey.

Harkening back to great 70s science fiction film classics like The Terminal Man, Colossus: The Forbin Project, A Boy and His Dog, Silent Running and THX 1138 - when the genre was thankfully bereft of light sabres, Wookies and Jabba the Hut, when it was actually ABOUT something - Jean-Baptiste Léonetti’s debut feature film Carré blanc is easily the finest dystopian vision of the future to be etched upon celluloid since that time.

The future it creates is not all that removed from our current existence.

Carré blanc screens on 6 July at the Rio Cinema, London, as part of the East End Film Festival (3 July – 8 July 2012). For more information please visit the East End Film Festival website.

Léonetti announces himself as a talent to be reckoned with. This low-budget science fiction film astounds us with its visual opulence. That, of course, is because it’s obvious that Léonetti has filmmaking hardwired into his DNA. NEVER does the film feel cheap or low-budget. Never do we feel like it has structured itself around all the usual budget-saving techniques that so many other first-time filmmakers unimaginatively opt for. Léonetti has wisely, painstakingly chosen a number of actual exterior and interior locations that fit his vision perfectly and work in tandem with the narrative. His compositions are rich and because his location selection has been so brilliantly judicious, he clearly had the time to properly light and dress the images.

The next time I hear some young filmmaker whining about the ‘challenges’ of their one-set low-budget production I will consider placing them on my list of those who shall feel the wrath of my Baikal semi-automatic Russian assault rifle when civilisation collapses and it becomes one giant free-for-all.

Though Carré blanc shares a specific approach with past work to a genre that can, perhaps more than any other, effect true analysis and possibly even change, there is nothing at all retro about the picture - no obvious post-modernist nods here. It is completely unto itself.

Carré blanc is fresh, hip, vibrant and vital.

Blessed also with a deliciously mordant wit, Léonetti delivers a dazzling entertainment for the mind and the senses.

The tale rendered is, on its surface and like many great movies, a simple one. Philippe (Sami Bouajila) and Marie (Julie Gayet) grew up together in a state orphanage and are now married. They live in a stark, often silent corporate world bereft of any vibrant colour and emotion. Muzak constantly lulls the masses and is only punctuated by announcements occasionally calling for limited procreation and, most curiously, promoting the game of croquet - the one and only state-sanctioned sport.

Philippe is a most valued lackey of the state - he is an interrogator-cum-indoctrinator - and he’s very good at his job. In fact, with each passing day, he is getting better and better at it. Marie, on the other hand, is withdrawing deeper and deeper into a cocoon as the love she once felt for Philippe is transforming into indifference. In this world, hatred is a luxury. It’s a tangible feeling that the rulers would never tolerate and would punish with death.

Indifference, it would seem, is the goal. It ensures complete subservience to the dominant forces. Love, however, is what can ultimately prove to be the force the New World Order is helpless to fight and the core of this story is just that - love. If Philippe and Marie can somehow rediscover that bond, there might yet be hope - for them, and the world. It is this aspect of the story that always keeps the movie floating above a mere exercise in style.

So many dystopian visions suffer from being overly dour. Happily, Léonetti always manages to break the oppressive force of the film and its world by serving up humour. Most of the laughs in Carré blanc occur within the context of tests delivered by the interrogating indoctrinators. In the world of the film, suicide is often the only way out for those who have a spirit that cannot be crushed. One early scene features Philippe as a young teen and another boy his age who have both attempted unsuccessfully to kill themselves (by hanging and wrist-slashing respectively).

Both boys are led into an empty room where smiling corporate lackeys speak to them in tones of compassion. They are both asked to engage in a test to cheer them up. Lying before them is a body bag. The test is thus: which one of them will be first to go inside the bag?

Let us just say that we laugh in horror at what follows. (I wasn’t the only one laughing in the packed house at the film’s premiere screening. A few sick puppies belched out appreciative guffaws.)

Narratively, this sequence reveals that Philippe is clearly an interrogator in the making. The test itself is a perfect way to not immediately ‘waste’ potential ‘talent’ by snuffing them out before seeing what they’re really made of. As the film continues to unspool, some of the biggest laughs and equally chilling moments come from the tests Philippe concocts and metes out to discover those who must be weeded out of society - permanently. Other laughs derive from the odd announcements and pronouncements over the endless loudspeakers.

To Monsieur Léonetti, I offer a tip of the hat for coming up with so many dollops of darkly humorous nastiness throughout the proceedings. They not only offer entertainment value, but are inextricably linked to the world he creates, a world so similar to the one we live in and one which feels just around the corner if humanity does not prevail over the force of a very few.

Love becomes the ultimate goal of Léonetti’s narrative and as such, he delivers an instant classic of science fiction. At the end of the day, the best work in this genre IS about individuality and the fight to maintain the indomitability of spirit.

It might, after all, be the only thing we have left.

This review was first published on Daily Film Dose.

Greg Klymkiw

Check it out, Cinema releases

Killer Joe

Killer Joe

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 29 June 2012

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Entertainment One

Director: William Friedkin

Writer: Tracy Letts

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple, Thomas Haden Church, Gina Gershon

USA 2011

103 mins

‘I don’t think I’ll have to kill her. Just slap that pretty face into hamburger meat.’
– Jim Thompson dialogue from Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing

At one point during William Friedkin’s Killer Joe, an unexpected roundhouse to the face turns its recipient’s visage into a pulpy, swollen, glistening, blood-caked skillet of corned beef hash. Said recipient is then forced at gunpoint to fellate a grease-drenched KFC drumstick and moan in ecstasy while family members have little choice but to witness this horrendous act of violence and humiliation.

William Friedkin, it seems, has his mojo back.

He’s found it in the muse of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts. The two collaborated in 2007 on the nerve-wracking film adaptation of Bug, a paranoia-laden thriller with Michael Shannon and Ashley Judd. Set mostly within the dank, smoky confines of a sleazy motel room, both dialogue and character were scrumptiously Gothic. The story was full of unexpected beats, driving the action forward with so much mystery that we could never see what was coming. Alas, Letts lost command of his narrative in the final third, veering into predictability. In spite of this, Bug was still one of the most compelling and original works of its year.

Killer Joe is a total whack job of a movie, and delightfully so.

Set against the backdrop of Texas white trash, the picture opens with a torrential downpour that turns the mud-lot of a trailer park into the country cousin of war-torn Beirut. Amidst tire tracks turning into small lakes, apocalyptic squalor and lightning flashes revealing a nasty barking mastiff, a scruffy Chris (Emile Hirsch), drenched from head to toe, bangs on the door of a trailer. When it creaks open, a muff-dive-view of the pubic thatch belonging to his ne’er do well dad’s girlfriend Sharla (Gina Gershon) leads Chris to the bleary-eyed Ansel (Thomas Haden Church).

Chris desperately needs to clear up a gambling debt and suggests they order a hit to knock off his mom, Ansel’s ex-wife. She has a whopping life insurance policy and its sole recipient is Dottie (Juno Temple), the nubile, mentally unstable sister and daughter of Chris and Ansel respectively. Once they collect, Chris proposes they split the dough.

To secure the services of the charming Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) they need to pay his fee upfront. Father and son propose Joe take a commission on the insurance money once it pays out. This is initially not an acceptable proposal until Joe catches sight of the comely Dottie. He agrees to take the job in exchange for a ‘retainer’ - sexual ownership of Dottie.

Father and brother of said sexy teen agree to these terms, though Chris betrays some apprehension as he appears to bear an incestuous interest in his dear sister.

From here, we’re handed plenty of lascivious sexuality, double crosses, triple crosses and eventually, violence so horrendous, so sickening that even those with strong stomachs might need to reach for the Pepto Bismol.

Basically, we’re in Jim Thompson territory here. It’s nasty, sleazy and insanely, darkly hilarious.

This celluloid bucket of glorious untreated sewage is directed with Friedkin’s indelible command of the medium and shot with a terrible beauty by ace cinematographer Caleb Deschanel.

Friedkin, the legendary director of The French Connection, The Exorcist and Cruising, dives face first into the slop with the exuberance of a starving hog at the trough and his cast delivers the goods with all the relish needed to guarantee a heapin’ helpin’ of Southern inbred Gothic.

This, my friends, is the kind of movie they don’t make anymore.

Trust William Friedkin to bring us back so profoundly and entertainingly to those halcyon days.

Oh, and if you’ve ever desired to see a drumstick adorned with Colonel Sanders’ batter, fellated with Linda Lovelace gusto, allow me to reiterate that you’ll see it here.

It is, I believe, a first.

This review was first published on Daily Film Dose.

Greg Klymkiw

Check it out, Cinema releases, Comic Strip Reviews, Home entertainment

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

To mark the 40th anniversary of the film’s original release, STUDIOCANAL and the ICO are releasing a re-mastered digital print of Luis Buñuel’s surreal comedy The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in cinemas on June 29, including an extended run at BFI Southbank as part of their Jean-Claude Carrière season. Carrière has written the screenplays for many classic films including Belle de Jour, The Milky Way, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Tin Drum, La Piscine, Sommersby and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is released on DVD, and for the first time on Blu-ray, on July 16.

Comic review by Grayham P. Puttock
Grayham P. Puttock is the creator of Love&Ammunition comic. To see more visit dontlooknowcomics or contact Love&Ammunition@facebook.
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The Apartment

The Apartment

Format: Cinema

Release dates: 15-28 June 2012

Venue: BFI Southbank, London

Distributor: Park Circus

Director: Billy Wilder

Writers: Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond

Cast: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray

USA 1960

125 mins

The Apartment is the story of a Manhattan apartment used for illicit sexual liaisons by company executives who in return give its owner, their lowly colleague C.C. Baxter, good efficiency ratings and fast track promotions. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) works in the ‘Ordinary Premium Accounting’ department at a large insurance company. His desk is one of many situated in rows of hundreds in an open plan office. Those ‘using’ the apartment are all his superiors with their own offices and keys to the executive washroom, and their liaisons are with their secretaries, the switchboard girls and the elfin elevator assistant Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), with whom Baxter falls in love. Such is the insular world of this office tower block whose employees outnumber the residents of Natchez, Mississippi.

The script (co-written with regular collaborator I.A.L. Diamond) is so brilliantly crafted you could just sit and marvel at its perfection. It even creates its own syntax, dialogue-wise. There are a smattering of topical 1960s jokes and a few in Yiddish that might need translating but much of the humour is universal and the film is as funny now as it surely was 50 years ago.

Wilder’s films in general are so well written it is easy to credit him as a screenwriter and overlook his talent as a director. For Wilder, the screenplay came first and the other elements worked to support it - his gravestone even reads, ‘I’m a writer but then nobody’s perfect’. But that doesn’t mean that mise en scène, cinematography, sound or even editing are without imagination, or that his work is any less cinematic. The editing may be classically smooth and unobtrusive but when the film cuts seamlessly from a suicide attempt to a drunken dance routine with the melodramatic death music morphing into the jukebox’s cha-cha-cha, we can see Wilder taking unobtrusiveness to another level.

The film has a great look - the cocktail bars thick with smoke and bustling with Christmas drinkers (even Santa Claus himself orders a whiskey); the open plan office with its geometric patterned ceilings. The art direction was by the great Alexander Trauner who used forced perspective to show the masses of office staff. The rows of desks were built smaller and smaller with those furthest away being peopled by children in business suits. The apartment itself is a wonderful creation, a quirky combination of thrift-store furnishings and technical innovations, including a very impressive remote control television.

In Jack Lemmon, Wilder seems to have found his perfect star. The Apartment was the second of seven films they were to make together. His C.C. Baxter is anxious, self-pitying, sickly, weak-willed but still the film’s hero. Like his Daphne in Some Like It Hot (1958), he is unable to say no to escalating requests. He is lacking in moral fibre and non-judgemental to a fault. Even Fred MacMurray’s charming philanderer Sheldrake has stronger, if skewed, sense of justice as he complains of how unfair it is for his mistresses to expect him to divorce his wife. The moral world of The Apartment is one of those who take and those who get taken, or of ‘finks’ and ‘schmucks’. Baxter is the latter.

The re-issue material seems to play up the Mad Men connection. The early 1960s inter-office politics (particularly the sexual politics) have a lot in common with Matthew Weiner’s TV show as does the drinking and smoking at work and the after-work cocktails (a Frozen Daiquiri, a Rum Collins or a dozen Martinis). Was every office worker in New York permanently sauced? However, the philanderers in The Apartment are much less classy than Don Draper - actually even less than Roger Sterling. As the switchboard girl complains, she hoped he would take her to ‘Twenty One’ but instead had to settle for ‘Hamburg Heaven and some schmuck’s apartment’. The gulf between the advertising world of Mad Men and the insurance industry of The Apartment is exemplified by Mr Dobisch can-can-ing in sock-suspenders at the Christmas party.

Perhaps more than any of his other films, The Apartment is full of Wilder’s irreverent sense of humour. Although aimed mostly at the corporate business world his scattershot approach hits a wide range of targets, from Wilder’s previous star Marilyn Monroe (a lookalike is picked up in a bar by the aforementioned Dobisch) to Fidel Castro (‘a no-good fink’), from credit card culture to television. Baxter’s enjoyment of one of cinema’s classiest moments - Grand Hotel (1932) - is destroyed by an advertiser’s question - ‘Do you have wobbly dentures?’

Male-female relationships have rarely been viewed with such relentless pessimism. The Apartment has to be the least romantic rom-com ever. However, the film’s darker comedic moments are deftly handled and Wilder side-steps the moral maze he has led us into with yet more well-timed gags. When assessing his own work Billy Wilder described The Apartment as being the film with the fewest mistakes. And he is right: it is as near to perfect as is possible.

Paul Huckerby

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The Naked Island

The Naked Island

Format: Cinema

Venue: BFI Southbank

Screening dates: 24 + 29 June 2012

Part of the Kaneto Shindô and Kozaburo Yoshimura restrospective

Director: Kaneto Shindô

Writer: Kaneto Shindô

Original title: Hadaka no shima

Alternative title: The Island

Cast: Nobuko Otowa, Taiji Tonoyama, Shinji Tanaka

Japan 1960

96 mins

Kaneto Shindô’s The Naked Island is arguably one of the masterpieces of the Japanese New Wave, yet the saga of its production is just as compelling as the events depicted on screen. Set on a small island in the Setonaikai archipelago, the body of water that separates the three main islands of Japan, this is a story of hardship that frames the struggles of a peasant family against an awe-inspiring yet unforgiving landscape. It was also a location that would test Shindô’s resilience throughout the two-month shoot, with the treacherous natural environment serving as an appropriate metaphor for the economic conditions under which the director was working. The Naked Island was financed through the independent company Kindaï Eiga Kyokai, which was founded by Shindô, fellow director Kôzaburô Yoshimura, and actor Taiji Tonoyama when the two filmmakers left Shôchiku Studios to develop personal projects without restriction. Yet audiences did not share their concerns. Politicised films such as Lucky Dragon Number 5 (1959), which criticised atomic bomb testing, failed commercially, and as his company was on the verge of bankruptcy Shindô embarked on The Naked Island with a budget that was one-tenth the national average. If a family member had been shooting behind-the-scenes footage, or if the film had been made during EPK (electronic press kit) era, then a documentary about the production of The Naked Island would rival Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) and Lost in La Mancha (2002) as an examination of an ambitious project on the brink of collapse.

The Naked Island will be released in the UK on Blu-ray by Eureka Entertainment on 17 June 2013.

However, such a record is perhaps unnecessary, as anyone with some knowledge of the production process of The Naked Island, or the geographic region in which it was shot, will be able to appreciate the difficulties that Shindô and his crew dealt with on a daily basis. Although the film is infused with a poetic quality that is enhanced through the almost total absence of dialogue, this is very much a realistic vision of island life: surroundings are not presented as a utopian paradise, but as tough terrain with limited hydrologic resources. The problems caused by the lack of water largely constitute the minimalist narrative as the family, who are the island’s only occupants, obtain water for their plants and themselves by rowing their boat to a neighbouring island. This task is undertaken alongside other physically draining chores, carried out while unprotected from the heat of the sun, resulting in a cyclical experience for both the protagonists and the audience. Drudgery eventually leads to disaster: while the parents are away from the island, their older son falls ill, and his father must race to find a doctor before his offspring’s symptoms prove to be fatal. Such drama would usually inject urgency into a study of the family unit, but Shindô maintains the detached approach of a documentarian. He positions the family as hard-working farmers trying to live off the land, but is unsentimental with regards to their predicament. Nature is in control of both their future and the rhythm of Shindô’s filmmaking.

The Naked Island evokes the necessary routine of life away from civilisation through the constant sound of waves and Hikaru Hayashi’s haunting score, which mostly repeats the same melody throughout the film. Kiyoshi Kuroda’s striking cinematography captures each area of the island with such clarity that the family’s constant struggle becomes deeply moving, despite Shindô’s restraint. Nagisa Ôshima famously criticised the film, suggesting that Shindô had conceded to the image that other countries had of Japan in order to achieve overseas success. Beyond its setting, however, The Naked Island is characteristic of Japanese cinema in that it emphasises steadfast determination in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity: the only ‘reward’ that the family receives for suffering the trials of the island is being able to carry on living until their shared willpower runs out. Shindô was more fortunate as The Naked Island was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1961 Moscow International Film Festival in a tie with Grigori Chukhrai’s Chistoye nebo (1961), with sales to international distributors rescuing his company in its hour of need. In addition, the firm relationships that were formed with Hayashi and Kuroda under considerable pressure led Shindô to adopt a collective mode of production that would result in such subsequent classics as Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). When he went out on location, the financially desperate Shindô thought that The Naked Island would be his last film, but it instead resulted in the kind of resurgence that can only come from the most trying of circumstances.

John Berra

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The Bad and the Beautiful

The Bad and the Beautiful

Format: Cinema

Venue: BFI Southbank

Director: Vincente Minelli

Writers: Charles Schnee, George Bradshaw

Cast: Lana Turner, Kirk Douglas, Walter Pidgeon

USA 1952

118 mins

Vincente Minnelli’s insider look at the golden age of Hollywood is sly and slickly entertaining, with Kirk Douglas as the unscrupulous producer Jonathan Shields adding a tough edge to the black and white melodrama. Told in three long flashbacks, it recounts the relationships of director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), writer James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell) and the luminous Lana Turner, who plays the actress Georgia Lorrison, to the ambitious Shields. Shields woos them, puts a magical gloss on their burgeoning talent, and then carelessly, casually ditches them when they’ve outlived their usefulness to him.

Charles Schnee’s whip-smart script, packed with sharp one-liners and passionate dialogue is a pitch-perfect accompaniment to the noir-ish look of Robert Surtees’s cinematography. There’s an extra layer of knowingness to the whole production too: shadows, odd staircases, extravagant stage sets and behind the scenes shots are nods to the mechanics of filmmaking, while in-jokes about directors and actors add an extra frisson to this gripping tale of Hollywood hubris.

Director Amiel is the first one to dish the dirt on Shields. A paid mourner at the funeral of Shields’s father, he insults the dead producer: ‘one of the mad men who almost wrecked it, a butcher who sold everything but the pig’s whistle’, unaware that he’s standing next to his son. He apologises and it’s the start of a beautiful friendship. The duo learn their craft on the B-movie production lot, their biggest success ‘The Doom of the Cat Men’, where the laughable, ill-fitting cat costumes are abandoned for the shadowy allure of silhouettes: ‘Because the dark has a life of its own. In the dark all sorts of things come alive.’ Soon after, darkness enters their relationship too, as Shields’s ruthless disloyalty becomes evident.

Lana Turner as Georgia Lorrison is next in line for the Shields treatment. Drunk, and crushed by the weight of the legacy of her actor father, she is rescued by the charismatic Shields from playing ‘the doomed daughter of the great man’. Shields coaches her, stops her drinking, makes her believe that he’s in love with her. Lana’s all aglow, like a damaged angel, tender and trembling and determined to do her best. Until fear overcomes her on the night before filming her first important role and she goes on a bender. Shields drops her in a swimming pool to sober her up, and sets her on the path to being a star. And then along comes the celebratory party where Georgia is feted and Jonathan is missing. Heading to his house wrapped in a white mink, and with her heart on her glittery sleeve, she’s determined to celebrate with him. But instead of a celebration, Georgia is faced with the heart-breaking realisation of Shields’s betrayal.

James Lee Bartlow seems the most likely candidate to resist the allure of the film world. A pipe-smoking Southern writer, with a delightful wife - Gloria Grahame, blonde and blithe and funny, with the catch phrase: ‘You’re a very naughty man, I’m happy to say’ - he nonetheless succumbs: ‘I’m flattered that you want me and bitter you got me.’ Jonathan and James go to work on the script, with constant interruptions from charming Rosemary Bartlow, until Shields, unbeknownst to James Lee, arranges a distraction with fatal consequences. It’s the end of another relationship, a definitive severing of all ties, like those with Amiel and Georgia.

But this is Hollywood, and in the final scene the three protagonists are clustered around a phone, listening to the scintillating, despicable Shields pitching them a new project. Until the very end we wonder if they will be sucked in again by his treacherous charm.

Part two of the Vincente Minelli retrospective runs until 26 June 2012 at BFI Southbank.

Eithne Farry

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The Raid

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The Raid

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 18 May 2012

Venues: Nationwide

Distributor: Momentum

Director: Gareth Evans

Writer: Gareth Evans

Original title: Serbuan maut

Cast: Iko Uwais, Ananda George, Ray Sahetapy

Indonesia/USA 2011

101 mins

Asian action cinema, and in particular Asian martial arts films, has been on something of a downward turn of late. Maybe it’s because the old stars are, well, getting older - Jackie Chan has just hit 58 this year, even Donnie Yen is nearing 50 - and the void has not really been satisfactorily filled. Tony Jaa was the great big hope, but we all know what happened to him - one only hopes that his reunion with Prachya Pinkaew (Ong-bak [2003], Warrior King [2005]) on Warrior King 2 will serve as his redemption. The scene, bar a few outstanding films such as Ip Man 1 (2008) and 2 (2010), has been somewhat lacklustre of late, with action roles falling to Asian pop stars seeking a film career rather than talented martial artists.

So thank heavens for writer-director Gareth Evans and new shining light Iko Uwais, who between them have created two beacons in an otherwise faltering genre. Their first collaboration, Merantau (aka Merantau Warrior, 2009), is a highly enjoyable action flick that introduced the world to the formidable talents of Uwais and his preferred martial art, Silat, an Indonesian form that had never really been showcased on film before. It’s a simple coming-of-age set-up: a young boy (Uwais) leaves his remote village to become a man and must face the hardships that come with growing up in an unrepentant and crime-ridden city (in many ways, it’s similar to Ong-bak). While not altogether ground-breaking, there’s enough raw energy, passion and style on show to suggest that a more accomplished film would come.

The Raid is the film that delivers on that promise. Having already stunned festival-goers around the world, The Raid is now set to take the UK by storm. And that’s exactly what it is, an unbridled storm, a thunderous lightning bolt of action cinema that will sweep you up and blow you away.

Once again, the set-up is simple. There’s a murderous crime boss, Tama (Sahetapy), living on the top floor of a tower block, a high-rise concrete maze that he’s populated with seemingly every hardcore villain and violent madman in Jakarta. A team of crack special forces cops is sent in to take him down, quietly and with no fuss. But, as in all good action films, there’s a dirty cop on Tama’s payroll and soon the spec ops team have been betrayed, and, cut off from the outside world, they are facing certain annihilation. Fortunately, one loyal cop, Rama (Uwais), has eaten his Shredded Wheat for breakfast and sets about cleaning shop in the most brutal way possible.

Watch a clip.

Like Merantau, The Raid starts with Uwais warming up, stretching his muscles and practising his martial arts skills - the quiet before the storm. But when the action hits, it’s relentless. Each breathtaking set piece is perfectly orchestrated, from Uwais’s intricate skill set through to Evans’s peerless and pacy direction. The fights are artfully done, played out like ballets of destruction, culminating in a final three-way fight that is stunning in its execution: I can’t recall any other action film finishing with a fight between hero and villain where the latter is the one who is outnumbered (two vs one) but is so talented in his art that the heroes are the clear underdogs.

Uwais is certainly the star of the film, mixing the charisma of Tony Jaa with the hand speed of Bruce Lee, but the performer who really captures the eye is Yayan Ruhian as one of Tama’s psychotic henchmen, the appropriately named Mad Dog, who delights in causing pain. Slight in build, Ruhian, who served as the film’s fight choreographer with Uwais (a role the pair also filled on Merantau), is a lithe, lightning-fast bundle of muscle and sinew whose performance as Mad Dog is set to make it one of the genre’s most memorable villains ever.

As a full-on martial arts action film, The Raid wears its influences on its sleeve, taking the very best traits from the cream of Hong Kong cinema, in particular John Woo’s classic heroic bloodshed movies of the 80s and 90s, such as Hard Boiled (1992) and A Better Tomorrow (1986). Even Oldboy (2003) gets a nod with what has become a de rigueur scene for Asian action cinema - a fight in a corridor. But with the director being Welsh (yes, we don’t really get how that happened either), it also has smatterings of Western cinema too, such as Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Die Hard (1988). Indeed, one scene, where Rama tries to hide an injured fellow officer in a wall crawlspace as one of the villains systematically stabs through the plasterwork with a machete, is so nerve-twitchingly intense it would be more at home in a horror film than an action flick.

Overall, The Raid is hard to fault. OK, it’s not breaking any new ground, more so reinvigorating it, and the action dominates character development (although there’s just enough to make you care what happens to Rama et al). Equally, some of the more visceral violence will put off a few, and even have hardcore fans wincing, but, as a whole, The Raid is such a refreshing take on the action film it makes you realise just what you have missed from the genre for the past few years. It’s been a long time since I’ve left a cinema so pumped with energy that I just wanted to watch the film again immediately, and I can’t wait to get it on DVD so I can watch in more detail the blistering fight action.

It’s early days yet, and there are still some excellent films to come, but already I think I’ve found my film of the year. Bring on Evans/Uwais collaboration number three.

Toby Weidmann

Check it out, Cinema releases, Comic Strip Reviews, Home entertainment

The Plague of the Zombies

Two years before Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Hammer Studios produced this socially conscious zombie thriller set in Cornwall and directed by John Gilling. The Plague of the Zombies (1966) is released on double play by Studiocanal on 7 May and screens in selected cities across the UK on 12 June 2012.

The screening is part of the Made in Britain season organised by Studiocanal and the ICO in celebration of classic British cinema between the Jubilee Bank Holiday weekend and the Olympics. The other films in the season are Passport to Pimlico (5 June), The Man Who Fell to Earth (19 June), Hobson’s Choice (26 June) and Quatermass and the Pit (3 July). For more information, please go to the ICO website.


Comic Strip Review by Chris Doherty
For more information on Chris Doherty, go to bittersweetfatkid.
Check it out, Cinema releases, Festivals

True Love

True Love

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 4 May 2012

Venue: BFI Southbank

Part of SCI-FI-LONDON

1-7 May 2012

Director: Enrico Clarico Nasino

Writers: Fabio Resinaro, Fabio Guaglione

Alternative title: Y/N: You Lie, You Die

Cast: Jay Harrington, Ellen Hollman, Clare Carey

USA/Italy 2012

100 mins

For low-budget filmmakers, having a tiny cast and only one or two locations is a huge bonus in keeping costs down. This has led to a number of films based on ‘locked room’ scenarios over the last decade and a half. Cube (1997) was an excellent, genre-defining example of this and in subsequent years, Maléfique (2002), Ryûhei Kitamura’s Alive (2002), Saw (2004), Fermat’s Room (2007) and Exam (2009) have explored horror and science fiction variations on the theme. Many of these have screened at SCI-FI-LONDON or FrightFest in the past so this is starting to become a well-worn theme for fans of the genre and regular genre festival attendees.

Enrico Clerico Nasino’s True Love, which screens at SCI-FI-LONDON this month, is another example, but unfortunately, it adds little that hasn’t been seen before. The central premise of a young married couple, kept in separate, futuristic cells and made to answer difficult questions about how much they trust each other under the threat of water, sleep or mobility being removed is strong enough. As a film made by Italians with an American cast and setting, this could have resulted in an interesting exploration of Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo Bay-style interrogation techniques on middle-class suburbanites who experienced the ‘war on terror’ as a mild diversion through their televisions, but disappointingly, this aspect is barely hinted at.

Instead, the writers and directors have reality dating shows and the Milgram experiment in their sights as the subjects they’re giving an SF twist to. Even then, the science-fictional aspect of the film is minimal, apart from a final scene that adds an eye-catching set piece of gravity working differently in opposite ends of the prison-like environment. [SPOILER WARNING] But this is undermined by a ‘was it all a dream?’ ending, and the nature of the lies they have told each other - adultery, financial trouble - is more suited to romantic melodrama than a death trap thriller. [END OF SPOILERS]

Neither the two main actors or the parts they’re playing are particularly engaging, meaning that the film’s main attraction lies in the more technical aspects of the production. True Love‘s direction, editing, cinematography and sound design are all solid, and for these qualities alone, those involved behind the scenes deserve to work on bigger and better things, but the film overall suffers of a lack of ambition and originality. While True Love isn’t by any means a particularly bad film, for audiences to get the most out of its narrative and visual twists and turns, they’ll need to be unfamiliar with similar narratives that have dealt with these tropes better and with more imagination.

SCI-FI-LONDON opens on May 1 and runs until May 7 at various venues across London.

Alex Fitch

Check it out, Cinema releases, Festivals

Extracted

Extracted

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 2 + 4 May 2012

Venue: Apollo, London

Part of SCI-FI-LONDON

1-7 May 2012

Director: Nir Paniry

Writers: Nir Paniry, Gabriel Cowan, John Suits

Cast: Sasha Roiz, Jenny Mollen, Dominic Bogart

USA 2012

90 mins

An excellent science-fiction thriller that, while reminiscent of a number of other films, including The Cell (2000), Identity (2003), Timecrimes (2007) and Inception (2010), improves on all its predecessors by having tight direction, characters the viewer can relate to and a brisk running time that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

US genre TV star Sasha Roiz, reminiscent of a laid-back young Jeff Goldblum, plays an inventor whose device allows a person to experience their own or other people’s memories as an interactive virtual reality environment. To get funding for this, he unwittingly does a deal with a law enforcement agency, who want to use it to investigate whether a supposed killer has committed a murder he claims no memory of. Roiz rushes to get the prototype finished for this initial demonstration. It works well enough in letting him enter the killer’s mind but malfunctions when he attempts to leave, putting his own body into a coma and trapping his consciousness in the killer’s mind for the next four years.

The script explores the morality of the device and the truths and fictions we tell ourselves. While tense and gripping when needs be, the film refreshingly doesn’t feel the audience has to be kept on the edge of their seats throughout, giving the human drama space to breathe. Since the budget doesn’t allow for the eye-boggling visuals of The Cell or Inception, it also avoids the over-familiarity of blockbuster set pieces that its predecessors got bogged down in. And despite the potentially labyrinthine possibilities of the scenario, it tells the tale in a straightforward manner that doesn’t require a scientist with a blackboard to explain the narrative to viewers without a Ph.D.

Indie actor Dominic Bogart portrays a sympathetic junkie and potential killer very well, experiencing his own incarceration in jail while he has another person trapped inside his head, and through the recreation and repetition of his memories, we learn how he has been betrayed and manipulated by the people he loves, throughout his life.

The story includes a twist that makes us doubt the central premise and leaves the plot open for a welcome sequel. This leads to some minor problems I have with the script, in particular: for a film that relies on a certain amount of real-life science, it seems strange that the filmmakers don’t acknowledge until the very end the well-established fact that each time a person remembers something, the memory changes slightly - a fact Roiz’s character seems incredulously unaware of.

Overall, though, a top-notch indie thriller and one that will hopefully find a distributor and a larger audience as soon as possible. Extracted is certainly the best film I’ve seen so far at this year’s SCI-FI-LONDON and its second screening on May 4 deserves to be sold out.

SCI-FI-LONDON runs from May 1 to 7 at various venues across London.

Alex Fitch