Author: BRWC

WARNING: SPOILERS AHOY!

“Private life is public knowledge”

New Years Eve, and a group of College friends get together for a party to send the year off. Outside, however, a mysterious pandemic grips the globe turning people crazed and violent. As a means of defence they barricade themselves inside, but as the night drags on and the virus claims more and more lives, how safe can they stay?

Seeing as it’s Cody Calahan’s feature film début as director, he knows how to put the thing together. It has real movement to it, he obviously understands how to keep pace and it’s visually solid, a stand out being  when the characters are introduced by their social networking profiles. There’s also some sparse yet really grand gore and shocks to be found here, which is key to a body horror like this. Besides this, it suffers from all the problems most low-budget horror films of its type do; fluctuating script quality, average acting, arbitrary tension. However, it’s Antisocial‘s main theme that puts meat on its bones; what if the internet was literally viral?

While there are comparisons to be made with films like The Crazies and 28 Days Later, the most obvious parallels to be drawn are between Antisocial and the films of David Cronenberg (and not just the whole Canadian thing). Like Videodrome or eXistenZ, Calahan takes an abstract idea and realises it in flesh, showing all its grotesque horror. However, unlike these films, it displays to us an argument without conclusion. Cronenberg’s films feel like they are a part of a dialogue, confronting and pondering the modern age with scepticism. Antisocial is more a cynical, didactic statement with a feeling of no real thought behind it. For me, it needs to be a scathing dissection of the way we interact with the internet, but it’s more like your friend getting annoyed at you for checking your emails on your phone.

Although I don’t necessarily agree with the films anti-Internet age message, I’m not sure that the film fully does either. It seems to be bashing our reliance on technology, but the characters use technology to better their situation, keeping up with the outside world and trying to make sense of the virus. Technology is both the damnation and the saviour. So if not all of the internet is bad, it’s just sites like facebook, which, for me, undermines any relevant point the film might be trying to make. Any problems that society may have with technology is larger than just social networking, and without strength behind its thematic focus, what we’re left with is a capable, if not run-of-the-mill, horror flick.

There are some really strong moments to be found amidst the exposition and clichés. While mildly thought provoking if you haven’t seen horror films like it before, it lacks the development of its core idea needed to be poignant. Antisocial is worth a watch for the set pieces, just don’t take its message as seriously as it seems to.

A year after An Unexpected Journey set out into cinemas, we’re back in Middle Earth as director Peter Jackson takes us further on our quest to the Lonely Mountain and to reclaim the ancestral home of the Dwarves.  This time there is no need for exposition and introduction; we know our characters and why they’re on this journey so the film can get straight into the story.

The Unexpected Journey left us with the company narrowly escaping from their orc pursuers after a helping hand from some airborne poultry with severe pituitary gland issues.  Desolation lands us right back in the chase as the enemy has caught up and the band must push on further to their goal.  They have to overcome a deadly forest swarming with McDonald’s Super-Size arachnids, evade capture from petulant Woodland Elves, sweet-talk a man with a mullet the 80s could only dream of and successfully navigate the prototype of Rubber Dingy Rapids before they can even lay eyes on the Mountain.  It’s quite a lot when you remember that the source material is only a few hundred pages long.

Part 2 of Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy keeps the same blend of light-hearted farce and medieval brutality that the first did so well, but it lacks in it’s pacing.  As the group diverges you have multiple arcs with many characters, many new challenges and obstacles to overcome and all whilst attempting to build tension and suspense in their own way.  Sadly, the frequent hopping between each branch of the film pulls you out of the narrative just as you’re getting into its groove; Jackson would have done better not to add the flash around the edges of the core story.

But it’s not all a stuttering rabbit-pulled-sleigh-ride to watch.  The films boasts some fantastically crafted and executed action sequences, epic world building, tributes to fans of the books and films as well as great performances from Freeman, McKellan and Armitage.  And Lee Pace leaves an immortal mark as the bitter Elven King, Thranduil; a total contrast to the majesty and decorum of Galadriel and Elrond in the Lord of the Rings that adds great depth and diversity to the mythology.  But, above all, the film is constantly building toward a climax under the Lonely Mountain – and you will not be disappointed when you get there.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is in cinemas 13th December 2013.

Now, as a writer on cinema, it has never been my practice to begin a piece this way—to set aside the overall film for a moment to indulge in effusively throwing praise onto a single aspect or performer in the thing—but in the case of Kerri Lendo in Don Swaynos’ Pictures Of Superheroes, I cannot seem to avoid it. Lendo (in the starring role of Marie) is absolutely wonderful, an unmitigated delight and the performance is perfect on levels it would take a separate piece to explicate properly. ‘Mesmeric,’ even ‘addictive,’ are words that seem appropriate to float out in describing her work—and her performance is no flash-bang, over-the-top thing; no, in all her subtle, muted down, quietly realized nuance in expression, in vocalization, in everything, she holds-fast the attention of this cinema lover. Perfect. I single her out, as I do here, because, frankly (as much as I dig the overall film, which I will get to in a moment) I could have simply watched her character, in isolation, on screen for twice the running time and not felt short-changed (…or still felt short-changed, whichever sounds like I’m giving the higher praise). Yes, if (a la Garfield Without Garfield) the film were to remove the presence and dialogue of all other parties and display, in the same context, only Lendo’s performance, the film would not suffer for it. One of those truly laudable and rare performances, complete, its own little whole.

That out of the way, let me move on the rest.

I struggled for awhile to find  a comparison—or even an appropriate description—of the film, but other than “absurdist…but not Beckett absurdist” or “deadpan…but not Anderson deadpan” I kind of just fumbled. Until it struck me, exactly (bear with the fatuousness of this) that the only way I could properly explain and praise the writing, performance, and overall verve of the thing is as follows: think as if someone took the almost surrealistic and frenetic comedic tilt of Monty Python sketches such as “The Cheese Shop”, “The Bookshop” or “The Travel Agency”, did not change a word of the scripts or an ounce of the atmosphere or pace, just delivered the lines straight-faced and subdued—imagine that and you would be imagining Pictures of Superheroes (or imagine the John Cleese film The Strange Case Of The End Of Civilization As We Know It, maybe, but without the Sherlock Holmes send-up aspect, just the tone of the comedy). Because certainly “absurdist” is a way to look at the writing: absurdist and committed to, almost insisting on, the reality of its own absurdity—its absurdity so needing to be seen as “status quo” that it is a risk in and of itself.

What do I mean by that?

Let’s do a quick case study: Jared Hess’ Napoleon Dynamite works in sustaining its conceit particularly because it does not set its “oddballs” against a backdrop of “normals”—there is no straight-man on hand, just bizarros, and so the nuance of that film’s world reaches a homeostasis that works. The same director’s Gentleman Broncos does not work, for the very fact that it sets its hero as an “ordinary, sensible person encountering a bunch of oddballs” thus undermining the humor, limiting the thing to a kind of wry “tour through the freak-show” and thus making any progression or reaction seemed forced, inserted, completely inorganic—it’s hard to find the humor in a thing when the humanity of the “funny characters” is overtly removed, made instant caricature/zany-for-the-sake-of-zany through making a fictive main-character so vanilla an observer as Benjamin is in that piece.

Swaynos’ film works as the former of Hess’ films works because it treats the “weird” as the baseline and, frankly, were anyone (even Marie…in a just deliriously, adoration inducing performance by Kerrie Lendo, in case you missed the opening paragraph of this piece) in the film to “find things peculiar without themselves being as peculiar” it would all fall flat.

Pictures Of Superheroes (here’s a decent comparison) is a film kin to Taika Waititi’s Eagle Versus Shark (even more than the films of Hess I just mentioned) in that for all of its oddness (and for its marvelous central female performance—Lendo in this, Loren Horsley in Eagle) it does not step from being an actual exploration of central personalities—it is not proposition comedy, it is not situation comedy, no, it is in-front character comedy, but it at the same time does not ignore proposition or situation, just finds a brilliance in keeping all these tracks running synchronic.  That is—can one imagine any of these characters existing outside of the very calibrated world-display they inhabit? No, I wouldn’t think so. But, is there ever a conscious feeling on the part of the viewer (at least this viewer) that a “hobby farm,” an “unreal world” is being presented—no, there’s not. A tough trick to maintain.

And—to single out another performance—nowhere is this trickiness more admirably navigated than by Shannon McCormick (in the role of Eric). Frankly, on first viewing, the introduction of this character made me a little bit uneasy—in the sense of “oh dear, is this film going to lose the good thing it had going?” McCormick’s performance combined with the kind left-field nature of the establishing narrative put me on guard that a “different kind of comedy” was being spliced in—a more “stage comedy” delivery that often does not mix well with “cinematic/bizzaro deadpan”.  My trepidation not only did not last, it inverted, completely. Because the quality of the McCormick performance—especially directly off of  Lendo’s—is not only necessary to the film, but the pairing of these leads is irresistible to watch.  McCormick’s Eric at all times runs the risk of both going over-the-top and suddenly toning-it-down too much, but the fella does not take a single misstep, just stays the line right in the fray of things (an actual–and pleasant–kind of suspense in its own right being created). Think the difference between the iconic portrayal of Gareth Keenan by Mackenzie Crook in Gervais’ UK The Office versus the more hammy, for the groundlings, portrayal of Dwight Schrute by Rainn Wilson in the US adaptation of the program. (Just to be clear, here: McCormick is Gareth, in that example: the performance stays vivid, human, challenging, and funnier each time it watched.)

In fact, everything in the film—down to the slightest, single scene supporting role—is so in its element that I put the whole thing in that category of films not meant to be watched, but films specifically built to be re-watched and re-watched and re-watched.  The glory of the balance-act, the pleasant squirm of “is this gonna go bad” is a delight, to be sure, on a single viewing, but in all honesty I do not think I even got to watch the film until I’d watched it once and started again (I’ve now watched it half dozen times).  Pictures of Superheroes is one of those films that only appreciates with time and viewings (and is ridiculously quotable, I might add—I avoided inserting dialogue bits throughout this review just because I would have never stopped) and one that shows the lashing, vibrant, aliveness of contemporary, independent American comedic cinema—the film is of a current expression of the filmic zeitgeist, to be sure, but is restlessly (that word is used purposefully) earnest, not for a moment derivative, not for a moment shying from the taking the risks that lead not only to laughter, but to a genuine delight at all that cinema can evoke.