Tag Archives: science fiction

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

Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel

Corman's World poster

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 26 March 2012

Distributor: Anchor Bay Entertainment

Director: Alex Stapleton

USA 2011

95 mins

Some years ago, I was invited to write a piece on a cinematic cult hero. I chose Roger Corman without hesitation. This was doubly fortuitous as I had just been lucky enough to have interviewed the misnamed ‘King of the B’s’. He was gracious, savvy, witty, charming, informed and possessed amazing recall of many of the characters who had graduated from the so-called Corman School. This was all the more noteworthy as he was already 81 and still had seven or so film projects on the go. Corman proved to be a gentleman and an inspiration, and so it is only fair to paraphrase - in this season of Shakespeare - the following line: ‘I come to praise Corman, not to bury him’. That is my caveat to readers of this review of Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, a long-overdue documentary on this unique (now 86-year-old) maverick producer/director now released on DVD, as this is a film for savouring, leaving all critical baggage in the hallway.

This documentary’s tone is by turns witty and irreverent while keeping a proper historical and biographical eye on things. It is as controlled a piece of presentation as one could desire given the breadth - not always depth - of the Corman oeuvre. Director Alex Stapleton has come up with an exemplary documentary that respects and plays with conventions and tropes of Corman’s style - and cheesiness - in a fascinating piece of ‘other’ Hollywood history. And what a history! You want to give a first chance to young directors? How about the following list, whose sophomore efforts were overseen by Corman: Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Robert Altman, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Robert Towne, John Sayles, Monte Hellman, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Anderson, Paul Bartel and Richard Rush - to name a few. Young actors to play the parts? Pam Grier, William Shatner, Jack Nicholson (who breaks down and cries with his reflections), Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper, David Carradine, Barbara Hershey, Talia Shire, Sandra Bullock and Robert De Niro - not a bad list. Many of the above still hold Corman in great esteem and offer fine insights into the man during the course of the documentary.

As part of the legendary American International Pictures, Corman directed and/or produced the terrific Edgar Allan Poe cycle and dozens of low-budget drive-in ‘classics’ with titles like The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Caged Heat, A Bucket of Blood and The Little Shop of Horrors. When he struck out on his own with New World Pictures he not only continued to make delicious drive-in fodder but commenced distribution of foreign language films that no one else would touch. It was due to Corman’s work in this field that American audiences were introduced to, among other films, Fellini’s Amarcord, Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Corman seemed to move seamlessly from drive-in classic to art-house classic with an unerring sense of both. Who else can compare? Corman is a one-off, and although Hollywood ignored him - though studios were happy to poach his subject matter - they eventually saw the light and honoured him (thankfully not posthumously) with an Honorary Academy Award, which is the touching ‘money shot’ of the film.

Almost worth the price of admission alone though, are the end credits that have a high-octane, spirit-raising rendition of ‘Do You Wanna Dance’ by the Ramones from Rock and Roll High School while clips from various films and decades - he made hundreds: 10 films in 1957 alone - literally explode onto the screen. Clips which highlight the maestro’s instinctive understanding of the cultural zeitgeist and the genres he developed for a growing baby boom audience: monster movies, sci-fi, horror (especially his apogee with the Poe cycle), beach party frolics, bikers, rock n’ roll sagas, speeding car spectaculars, gritty blacksploitation flicks, counter-culture tales - you name your sub-culture and Roger Corman was there, well before Time magazine could do a cover story on it. And all on miniscule budgets and legendary production miserliness - as he himself observes: ‘You can make Lawrence of Arabia for half a million dollars - you just don’t leave the tent’.

Thankfully there has been no ‘Premature Burial’ of either Corman or his cinematic products - as his co-producer wife of many years states when commenting on Corman’s attitude to on-set or professional set-backs, ‘the dogs bark but the caravan moves on’. My only real disappointment with this DVD is that it only lasts for a mere 95 minutes (which rush by) and not for at least 180!

James B. Evans

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

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

Gantz

Gantz

Format: DVD

Screening date: 3 October 2011

Distributor: Manga Entertainment

Director: Shinsuke Satô

Writer: Yûsuke Watanabe

Based on the manga by: Hiroya Oku

Cast: Kazunari Ninomiya, Ken’ichi Matsuyama, Yuriko Yoshitaka

Japan 2010

130 mins

After the success of the Death Note series, an inevitable wave of similar films followed, most of them epic-scale, multi-part adaptations of acclaimed - and equally lengthy - manga or animé series. Many of these films centre on competition and gameplay, frequently involving two or more opposing groups, a series of complex rules and a great deal of strategy.

In Death Note the contest is between the intellects of suave psychopath Light and the misfit genius L, each restricted by the rules of the notebooks and relying upon increasingly brilliant strategies and moves to defeat the other. In Tôya Satô’s Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler (2009) 30-something gambling addict Tatsuya Fujiwara - the star of Battle Royale (2000) and Death Note - is pitted against several other no-hopers in a series of unpleasant challenges, observed by rich gamblers who make bets on their lives. Fujiwara returns in Hideo Nakata’s reality TV-influenced The Incite Mill (2010), in which 10 lucky contestants are locked in an underground complex for 10 days and told to kill each other while TV audiences watch. Less deadly but more popular is Liar Game (2007), a series that started on television and moved to the big screen with Hiroaki Matsuyama’s Liar Game: The Final Stage (2010), in which the players constantly try to outwit each other for large sums of cash. At the cheaper, nastier end of the spectrum we have Tokyo Gore School (2009) and the two Death Tube films, all of them directed by Chanbara Beauty director Yôhei Fukuda. As well as Death Note, this concept of individuals or teams pitted against each other for sport, punishment, personal gain or the entertainment of others is immediately reminiscent of Battle Royale - and, to a lesser extent, the Saw franchise - although few of them feature similar levels of brutality and violence.

Among the most interesting of the post-Death Note films are Shinsuke Satô’s Gantz (2010) and Gantz: Perfect Answer (2011), the two-part adaptation of Hiroya Oku’s hit manga and the subsequent animé series. In Gantz players are transported at the moment of their demise to an empty apartment, occupied by a large black globe. The globe - known somewhat mysteriously as ‘Gantz’ - provides the nonplussed players with futuristic weapons and equipment, and outlines their new ‘mission’: killing aliens. The aliens themselves are a strange bunch, some appearing to be entirely human, with others looking like enormous Buddhist statues or life-size toy robots. For each kill the players are awarded points, and accumulating more than 100 points allows the player to either come back from the dead and continue their life - with a convenient dose of amnesia, of course - or to resurrect another player and bring them back into the game. One-time school friends Kei (Kazunari Ninomiya) and Katô (Kenichi Matsuyama, who played L in the Death Note films) find themselves drafted when they are accidentally killed by a passing train. Their new weapons and equipment give them great strength and protect them from major injuries, but they’re not born fighters or violent by nature, and it isn’t until several of the other players have been killed or injured that Kei and Katô come to terms with what is expected of them.

Predictably enough, Gantz gives both its players and the audience precious little in the way of explanations and background information. If these creatures are aliens, where are they from and why are they here? Why do they need to be killed? Aside from accusing the players of murdering their friends, the aliens aren’t much help either. And what exactly is Gantz? An early scene in the first film shows us that the black globe contains what seems to be a comatose man on life-support machines, but no further information is provided. Trapped in their Kafka-esque nightmare, the players can only continue to fight, with no real sense of who they’re fighting for or why.

However, Gantz gives them little time to ponder their fate by pitting them against a quick succession of increasingly powerful enemies. It is these well-choreographed and bloody fight sequences that form the core of the first film, introducing the main characters and the central concepts. The sequel, Gantz: Perfect Answer, brings in several plot twists and devices that push the tension up a few notches, as well as providing the requisite number of jaw-dropping fights. Not content with simply recruiting from the recently dead, Gantz now seems to be employing an assistant to ensure that certain people are selected - by killing them. It’s not entirely clear why Gantz needs those individuals or what his long-term goals are, but things take a turn for the decidedly sinister when the name of one of Kei’s closest friends appears on their target list, even though she is obviously not an alien.

These fights are more than just visual treats, however, allowing the audience to fully understand the rules surrounding the ‘game’. They also underline the relationships and emotional connections between the various characters. Kei might spend a great deal of time trying to attract the attention of the pretty Kishimoto (played by actress-model Natsuna), but when he gets the chance to resurrect another player, he doesn’t choose her. Even though Kei pretended not to recognise his former schoolmate Katô when they saw each other at the station and later in the apartment, it’s immediately apparent that he’s going to bring him back. Eventually it’s another player - cult veteran Tomorowo Taguchi, star of the first two Tetsuo films - who resurrects Katô, but later on Kei still picks someone other than Kishimoto. Unlike many similar films, Gantz makes an effort to build and define its central characters, something that gives the physical combat an extra level of impact; they’re not just pins to be knocked down in their droves, and their deaths in the Gantz ‘arena’ have very real effects.

Although the Gantz movies have earned critical acclaim and performed well at the box office, they are less likely to be greeted favourably by fans of the original manga and the animé adaptation. For a start, the material has been toned down, with the nudity and sexual content removed. Certain characters have been altered too - most obviously Kei, who is considerably more arrogant and less friendly in his earlier incarnations. However, both films capture the adrenaline-fuelled thrills of the original manga, and they’re also two of the best sci-fi/action movies you’re likely to see in the near future, from anywhere.

Jim Harper

Solaris

Solaris

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 8 August 2016

Distributor: Curzon Artificial Eye

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Writers: Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Andrei Tarkovsky

Based on the novel by: Stanisław Lem

Original title: Solyaris

Cast: Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Jüri Järvet

USSR 1972

159 mins

Solaris is science fiction for people who don’t like science fiction.

This justly famous film is based on a Polish novel from 1961 by Stanisław Lem, which first appeared in English in 1970. Both are science fiction for people who don’t like science fiction. The film is easier to enjoy if you don’t know the book well. Tarkovsky’s work here is often brilliant, especially when there is not much happening, but he is erratic in his handling of the plot and clumsy with dialogue. The screenplay changes quite a lot of the mechanics and details of Lem’s story: sometimes it seems as though the writers have misunderstood the book, more often as though they are trying to correct it, and this usually has the effect of substituting crudeness for subtlety.

The worst bits are the talky passages, in particular a sub-Dostoevskian scene where the characters sound off bitterly and sarcastically at each other. And towards the end, the characters seem to be trying to explain the film to us by means of meandering philosophical ponderings. There are problems with the acting - plenty of hammy moments, and a general sense that the actors are not quite sure what they’re aiming for. A notable exception to these criticisms is the luminous Natalya Bondarchuk: the director himself observed that this 21-year-old fresh out of drama school outshone the rest of the cast.

The best bits are not just those with no actors on the screen, but also the mainly silent scenes, central to the story, between Kris the spaceman and Hari the woman from his past. A couple of dream/hallucination sequences are inspired additions to Lem, in terms of imaginative vision if not of content. The most striking invention is a weightless scene of great beauty and mystery. And with the exception of the dialogue scenes, the film is a visual tour de force. About two hours in (!) it really takes off, as the director seems to forget about getting the story straight and contents himself with making strange and beautiful variations on themes of doubt, unease and illusion.

For all its faults, this is an extraordinary film. But, especially if you admire the book, you might prefer the 2002 remake by Steven Soderbergh, starring George Clooney and Natascha McElhone. It concentrates on the crucial relationship between Kris and Hari, and it supplies what Lem and Tarkovsky both fail to come up with: a really excellent ending. If buried in you there are any feelings of regret or remorse about ended relationships, be ready to have them unearthed. The remake manages, like the book, to convey the sense that this work of science fiction is perhaps not really about strange happenings in an imaginary future, nor even about man and the unknowable universe, but about love and loss and memory in our own lives.

This review was first published for the release of Solaris as part of Artificial Eye’s Andrei Tarkovsky Collection box set in June 2011.

Peter Momtchiloff

You Are Here

You Are Here

Format: Sci-Fi London screening

Date: 1 May 2011

Venue: BFI Southbank

Director: Daniel Cockburn

Writer: Daniel Cockburn

Cast: Tracy Wright, R.D. Reid, Anand Rajaram, Nadia Litz

Canada 2010

78 mins

10th Sci-Fi London Festival

23 April – 2 May 2011

Various venues, London

Sci-Fi London website

The unquestionable stand-out of this year’s Sci-Fi London was Daniel Cockburn’s You Are Here, an original, inventive and engagingly cryptic film that is left wide open to interpretation. Billed as a ‘meta-detective story’, it is a non-narrative, abstract meditation on the processes of the mind that is intellectually stimulating, as well as charming and playful.

It starts with a lecture in which the speaker tells the audience ‘You are here’, before explaining that the self exists in time and in solitude. Next, a voice-over narration explains that the crowd of people we see on the screen is called ‘Alan’. ‘Alan’ picks up a red ball and almost gets hit by a taxi. Although ‘Alan’ avoids being killed, he feels that ‘something has already gone wrong’. ‘Alan’, represented by a multitude of characters of both genders and various ethnic backgrounds, goes through his day and performs his daily tasks, but cannot log into his computer at work because he’s forgotten his password. He sees a door high up on a building, which does not lead anywhere, and wonders what its purpose is.

Another sequence of the puzzle shows people in an office controlling agents out on the streets, charting their movements in a bizarrely pointless activity that they all take very seriously. Elsewhere, a man invents a prosthetic eye that allows blind people to see, but it turns out that he has a sinister agenda. In another strand, a woman has built an archive of documents - tapes, videos, photos, etc. - that she has found by accident. One of these is a videotape that shows a man in a room in some sort of institutional facility; we later learn that he is a scientist performing an experiment. Locked up in a room, he has to translate and respond to sheets of Chinese characters that appear under the door, without knowing a word of Chinese, and with only the help of a multi-volume reference book. We are told that the experiment is meant to represent the way the brain works.

In the end, the various situations set up during the film unravel: ‘Alan’ falls out of the door that opens on nothing; the woman’s archive starts re-ordering itself and she decides to give it up; two street agents find themselves in the same place, which is not supposed to happen. Neatly concluding the situations set up at the beginning, the film culminates in death and disorder.

As noted by Chris Chang in Film Comment, the reference to John Searle at the end of the film gives some indication of the ideas behind it. An American philosopher interested in the workings of language and the mind, Searle devised an experiment called the ‘Chinese room’. The point of the experiment was to show that a computer can use language without actually understanding it. Literally representing that experiment and placing it at the heart of the film, Cockburn investigates the way in which the human brain perceives, pictures and orders the world around it, including its own self. The various surreal and seemingly absurd activities performed by the characters may be representations of the way the brain works, including processing information, mapping out one’s surroundings, and remembering things and events. Alternatively, the characters could represent computer processes - albeit those of an archaic and inefficient machine. All the situations construct systems of information storage that gradually become overloaded, leading to their destruction, which may be a comment on our world made in an oblique and deliberately low-tech form (see the enormous mobile phones used by the street agents). There is certainly a subdued sense of disquiet running through the film, which comes from the collapse of the systems, but also from the creepiness and paranoid feel of some of the stories, including the street agents, the eye inventor and the brain experimenter.

The film has many layers and their relationships are complex, with characters from one strand appearing in other stories: the scientist in the Chinese room experiment appears in the archivist’s story; she herself appears in the street agents’ story; and while the lecturer who opens the film seems to have a framing role, he later returns ‘inside’ the film, with a trio of kids turning the camera on him while he films the very images of the ocean that we have seen him use in his initial lecture. As we watch the film, our own brain is perceptibly working to organise and understand what it is seeing, so that You Are Here also leads us to dive into our own consciousness and become aware of its processes. It is a tremendously rich experience, invigorating and joyous as well as unsettling and thought-provoking, and, when the consciousness we have seen at work throughout the film dies out at the end, a surprisingly moving one too.

For more information on You Are Here, please go to the film’s official website.

Virginie Sélavy

Source Code

Source Code

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 April 2011

Venues: nationwide

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Duncan Jones

Writer: Ben Ripley

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga

USA/France 2011

93 mins

In less than a year, three films have been released that have been profoundly influenced by the style and structure of (rather than adapted from) computer games. If anything, it is a cinematic trend that is overdue, in the wake of the likes of Tron and The Matrix in the 80s and 90s. Following last summer’s Inception and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which transferred the plotting and aesthetics of video games to the big screen, Source Code is reminiscent of the kind of game where you have to complete a mission; if you die, the level resets and you have to start all over again, trying to master the level based on your prior knowledge of the behaviour of the non-player characters. In the plot of this film, Jake Gyllenhaal’s character starts ‘the level’ believing that he is in a simulation where he has eight minutes to discover the identity of a bomber on a train. Between each attempt he wakes up in the cockpit of a crashed helicopter and tries to work out why he can’t escape this environment. As the film progresses, we discover the truth about the two worlds between which he moves and the nature of his interaction with military personnel, who are communicating with him via video screen.

In other hands, this could have been a dull ‘Channel 5’ action film, but with Gyllenhaal wringing the maximum amount of emotional potential out of his time-and-body-displaced hero, and with compelling direction by Duncan Jones, the team lift the material out of its familiar genre trappings into something more intriguing and moving than you might expect. Gyllenhaal has made a career of looking slightly perplexed in unusual situations - from playing the disturbed eschatological lead in Donnie Darko to a gay rancher in Brokeback Mountain - and his endearing performances help the audience to accept the outré scenarios he often finds himself cast in.

For Jones, this movie is the cinematic equivalent of ‘the difficult second album’. His debut Moon was an underrated cult hit with a nuanced performance from Sam Rockwell (a very watchable actor who can be his own worst enemy by playing unusual characters a little too broadly) in the role of a lonely astronaut with existential angst on the titular planetoid. Fans of this first film, and indeed the company that bankrolled Source Code, probably expect his new film to be similar to a certain extent, but with higher stakes and a bigger budget, and be slightly more accessible. Luckily, Source Code manages to achieve all these things with aplomb. The science fiction is both more accessible than in some of the film’s predecessors - many people have seen Quantum Leap and Groundhog Day, which are both referenced in the casting and dialogue respectively - and more obtuse, as I for one can’t quite get my head around the nature of the lead character’s time travel. Moon‘s theme of a character dealing with the nature of his own ‘less than human’ status and experience of his own death over and over again is repeated and successfully reimagined here, and the only faults I found with the film were the tacked-on romance, which is of the Sandra Bullock ‘relationships that start under intense circumstances’ style, and slightly annoying product placement.

Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, Gyllenhaal reacts to the time loop he’s trapped in with a similar range of responses: bewilderment, bemusement, hysteria, denial and eventually acquiescence, making the best out of a bad situation even if his final visit to the past might prove fatal. Both films ignore the immorality of the situation - Murray learning to ice-sculpt and play piano just to woo the woman he fancies and Gyllenhaal essentially stealing another man’s life - but they are both so enjoyable that you ignore the unspoken and concentrate on the excellent filmmaking.

Moon was helped in achieving cult status by an excellent ad campaign and word of mouth. Unfortunately, Source Code has had little of either - the disappointing posters being as generic as any dismal Philip K. Dick mis-adaptation - but this is the first great thriller and first great science fiction film of 2011, and it deserves to find as large an audience as possible.

Alex Fitch

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The Man Who Fell to Earth

The Man Who Fell to Earth

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 9 September 2016

Distributor: Park Circus

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Writer: Paul Mayersberg

Cast: David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark

Based on the novel by: Walter Tevis

UK 1976

139 mins

Bowie, rarely as effective again on screen, completely inhabits the role of the fallen angel, his otherworldly persona and physical frailty perfectly meshing with Newton’s own.

Following apprenticeships at various London film studios, Nicolas Roeg worked his way up to camera operator on, among others, Ken Hughes’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) and Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners (1960) before gaining writing credits on Cliff Owen’s A Prize of Arms (1961) and Lawrence Huntington’s Death Drums along the River (1962). It was as a cinematographer that Roeg established his reputation as a distinctive cinematic visionary. Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Franí§ois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1965) and Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) all in some way looked forward to Roeg’s own visually and thematically arresting work as director, where colour was used to symbolic effect to probe taboo subjects and linearity was eschewed in favour of complex time leaps and splintered narratives.

Beginning with Performance (1968, co-directed by Donald Cammell), a tale of identity crisis set amid London’s late 60s criminal underworld and taking in Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Roeg became the leading light of British film, establishing a run of films that remains unparalleled in contemporary cinema. Frequently focusing on characters cut adrift from their usual moral and physical surroundings, Roeg seemed unstoppable until first Bad Timing (1980) and then Eureka (1983) ran into problems with their uncomprehending distributors. The director found himself at odds with an industry increasingly resistant to his pioneering vision and tendency to shine a light on areas of the human psyche many would prefer left darkened.

Newly restored in 4K, The Man Who Fell to Earth will return to UK cinemas for a 40th anniversary reissue on 9 September 2016. For venue details check the Park Circus website.

In more recent years, The Man Who Fell to Earth has arguably emerged as perhaps the director’s most characteristic and richly rewarding work. Adapted from the Walter Tevis novel by Paul Mayersberg (who would also script Eureka), it’s a film that takes pleasure in resisting categorisation, retaining the science fiction origins of its source material while heavily accentuating Tevis’s less overt allusions to capitalism, corporate power (the film remains the closest Roeg has come to any kind of political statement) and the alienating effects of contemporary American society. The first non-children’s film that I can ever actually remember seeing, it is a work that seemingly contains all the infinite possibilities of cinema (often in a single frame), and I return to it periodically for inspiration and stimulation. It is not and never has been universally loved. It was cautiously received at the time by critics, as so many of Roeg’s films were: Nigel Andrews, writing in The Financial Times, accused it of having ‘enough ideas for six different films; and far too many, in my opinion, for one’.

Initially favouring Peter O’Toole for the central role of Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien who comes to a fertile earth in order to save the inhabitants of his own dying planet, only to become marooned as a potent cocktail of sex (courtesy of Candy Clark), gin and television slowly take control, Roeg instead dipped once more into a pop star pool that had proved so effective with Mick Jagger and Performance. Roeg became convinced that David Bowie, the recent subject of a BBC Alan Yentob documentary charting a tour of America of equally irresistible and infinite temptation, was in fact his Newton. The financiers (the film was among the first ever British-financed movies to be made in the United States) failed to share the conviction, expressing their scepticism as to whether the singer could actually act. Roeg remained undaunted, exclaiming, ‘what do you think he’s doing when he gets up in front of 60,000 people to perform?’ Bowie, rarely as effective again on screen, completely inhabits the role of the fallen angel, his otherworldly persona and physical frailty perfectly meshing with Newton’s own.

Beginning with stock NASA footage of a space rocket leaving earth before cutting to a vessel - assumingly jettisoned from the rocket - crash-landing back to earth in a New Mexico lake, Roeg and Mayersberg frequently undercut the genre elements of their material (in fact they don’t seem especially interested in the novel at all) in favour of thematic juxtapositions and kaleidoscopic cross-cultural allusion. In one of the more overt, a randy college professor later seconded into Newton’s expanding business empire (the alien arrives on earth with a small stock of gold rings that he swaps for cash and with a number of futuristic product patents that will allow him to amass a fortune), Bryce (Rip Torn), is seen lingering over an image of Brueghel’s Icarus. The Man Who Fell to Earth also incorporates W.H. Auden’s contemplation of the Greek myth (‘the expensive, delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on’), emphasising Roeg’s interest in the notion of watching and being watched.

When Newton takes his first tentative steps on earth he is observed by an unknown spectator, who will again later appear at the alien’s bedside once he has undergone a series of painful and incapacitating medical examinations. Newton himself turns voyeur. Initially using television to learn about his new planet and humankind through the medium’s multiple images and signals, he fashions a wall of television screens to which he ultimately becomes addicted. Television helps fuel Newton’s increasing paranoia, with Roeg and Mayersberg suggesting that the modern technological age of observation and endless consumerism is corrosive. There are elements of this also perhaps in the film’s incredibly prescient presentation of an increasingly global America nostalgic for its past (the music of Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw and the flashbacks to sequences involving early pioneers, glimpsed by a weary Newton from his limousine), yet enthralled to the point of obsession by the notion of its future. The Man Who Fell to Earth concludes with a shot of the crown of Newton’s head, an image similar to that of Turner in Performance just before Chas puts a bullet through it, revealing a man utterly broken and adrift, who has undergone the process of becoming human only to discover, to his cost and that of his homeland, what a wilfully destructive race we are.

This review was first published in April 2011 for the UK DVD release of the film by Optimum.

Jason Wood

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Monsters

Monsters

Format: Cinema

Date: 3 December 2010

Distributor: Vertigo Films

Venues: Curzon Soho, Screen on the Green, Vues Islington, West End (London) and nationwide

Director: Gareth Edwards

Writer: Gareth Edwardsr

Cast: Whitney Able, Scoot McNairy

UK/Mexico 2010

94 mins

Monsters is a new science-fiction film that straddles the divide between several genres: the Japanese kaij? eiga (giant monster) genre that started with Godzilla in 1954, preceded in the West by King Kong (1933); alien invasion movies that lead to the devastation of parts of the globe; travelogue films featuring photo-journalists; and it has a touch of romance to boot. The fact that Monsters weaves all these strands together in a comprehensive and complementary way is an achievement in itself. The fact that director Gareth Edwards accomplished that while location-scouting on the hoof in a country he was unfamiliar with, working with a cast of untrained actors, who improvised many of their lines, and designing terrific special effects, makes this one of the most assured and impressive feature debuts in recent years.

When asked about the movie, Edwards talks about creating a world where the advent of a creature like Godzilla is treated like a 9/11 event, one that has changed the world, initially in a shocking way, then has become background noise as the West gets on with its life, with occasional sound-bites on the news to remind middle-class viewers that the war against terror is still going on. Creating a monster movie with links to contemporary society isn’t a new idea: at a stretch King Kong can be seen as the start of Western guilt over imperialism, while Godzilla certainly reflects 1950s concerns about the advent of the nuclear age and so on. In recent years, monster/alien invasion movies have seen a renaissance, heralded by the camcorder cinéma vérité of Cloverfield (2008), which recalls the modernity of capturing terrorist events on camera phone and the reportage of the Gulf Wars on low-light adaptive TV cameras - the unreal/virtual quality of TV reporting leading Jean Baudrillard to describe it as the ‘Gulf War that did not take place’ - and mixed the giant lizards of Godzilla, Gorgo (1961), Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) et al. with the spectacle of modern disaster movies. District 9 (2009) took that attempt to make an alien invasion seem ‘real’ one stage further, by presenting half of the movie as a documentary about events that have already taken place, though it returned to traditional narrative filmmaking for its final act.

With a miniature budget, Edwards can’t compete with Cloverfield or District 9, and indeed both films cast a large shadow that draws inevitable comparisons. So rather than going for the spectacle and high drama of his predecessors, the director uses the backdrop of a quarantined Mexico, still partially infested with aliens, as the setting for a slightly old-fashioned drama that recalls the films of Frank Capra as a gentle romance unfolds between a mismatched and slightly antagonistic couple. It also draws on the familiar post-20th-century tale of an indentured photo-journalist reporting from a war zone and the improvised, semi-illegal filming of Michael Winterbottom’s In this World (2002), where refugees from a war zone play fictionalised versions of themselves, in footage that sneaks under the radar of the authorities. By asking real people who live in Mexico real questions about their lives (replacing the off-camera questions about real life with inserted fake questions about aliens) the director constructs a semi-truth that blurs fact and fiction on screen and would probably delight Baudrillard in its confident creation of a world that is both real, familiar and evocative of current concerns about the ‘war on terror’/immigration and also virtual and obviously fake.

Gareth Edwards started as a special effects designer and the effects in this movie range from the outré - 40-foot bio-luminescent squid floating above the streets of a Texan border town - to the completely invisible - the superimposition of posters warning about the quarantine and invasion on walls in real locations - the latter so realistic that it comes as a shock to find out they were computer-generated, as the viewer doesn’t even expect this aspect of the filmmaking to be CGI. The most impressive example of these kinds of effects previously came in The Truman Show (1998) where again some elements of the film are obviously CGI - a zoom onto the surface of ‘the moon’ to reveal a TV studio behind - and others are invisible and unexpected - in this case, the addition of extra storeys to the squat buildings of the town where the film was shot. Like Peter Weir, Edwards mixes satire, media commentary, excellent direction and sympathetic performances to create a science-fiction film that sums up the decade prior to its release in memorable microcosm.

Monsters isn’t a perfect film, the plot, like the characters, meanders a little and the final scene where the two protagonists are menaced up close by a giant alien squid in an abandoned gas station seems a little conventional and forced (although the final shot of that scene is transcendent) compared to what’s gone before. However, Monsters is the finest and most thought-provoking alien invasion movie since the excellent District 9, and it uses its small budget in absolutely exemplary fashion, easily outshining movies costing five times its amount, such as the similar but creatively bankrupt and risible Skyline, also released this year. With a circular plot that makes viewers want to watch the film again, not only for the possible conclusion to the narrative they might have missed the first time round, but also to absorb more of the excellent background details, this film shows the emergence of a major new British talent and its December release date lets it just slip into lists of 2010’s best films.

Alex Fitch