Month / Feb 2019

by James Turrell

Alita: Battle Angel

Writers: Robert Rodriguez, Laeta Kalogridis & James Cameron 

Director: Robert Rodriguez 

The writer and director Richard Ayoade once said that ‘actors are the most important thing in a film and there are many examples of actors transcending poor material.’ I personally don’t agree with this and the script is ultimately the most important thing, as that’s the base from which whole film is constructed. Alita: Battle Angel does contain two performances that does offer proof that actors can engage an audience when the script fails to do so.  

Co-written by Avator’s James Cameron and directed Robert Rodriguez, Alita: Battle Angel is the story of an eponymous teenage cyborg struggling to find her identity in a post-apocalyptic Earth. Based on a manga series called Gunnm, the film is set in 2563 in Iron City, 300 years after a war with the United Republic of Mars (URM) ravaged the Earth. It’s all so very standard sci-fi, with flashes of Cameron’s own Terminator to RoboCop to the ever present Metropolis.  

Like all poorly written films, the script is both simple and convoluted. Christoph Waltz’s Dr Ido finds a half-dead cyborg girl in junkyard and rebuilds her, and when she awakes she cannot remember anything about her past life. The film follows Alita as she attempts to find out who she was and who she is, while falling in love with Dr Ido’s assistant Hugo (Keean Johnson). Earth’s main entertainment is a sport called ‘Motorball’ a kind of mix of basketball and Nascar, where people in super-fast robotic suits battle around a track to score baskets. Alita longs to be one of the players but the game is run by Mahershala Ali’s Vector, who is an evil business overlord and set on killing her. He intends to kill Alita because, inevitably, she is last of her kind. She is a long lost URM soldier, the deadliest killing machine Mars ever produced.  

Alita is a bizarre mixture of dystopian sc-fi and teen romance. There a fighting robots and authoritarian governments mixed with scenes in which Alita and Hugo kiss for the first time in the rain. Seriously. The film is that reductive. We are treated to almost beautifully bad dialogue; ‘it’s a harsh world. The strong prey on the weak down here.’ The film hits its plot beats so predictably it could have been written by an A.I. machine that had recently had a stroke. During the films concluding fight sequence, a cyborg bounty hunter called Zaper who has been hunting Alita, has his human face sliced off. He starts jumping around and shouting ‘my face! My face! My beautiful face!’ I can feel the bile in the bottom of my throat beginning to fizz again.  

However, the film is not without merit. Rosa Salazar as Alita does provide the film’s main character with a real humanity. She manages to get the audience to see past her exaggerated, anime eyes and you believe she is a real teenager trying to find her place in the world. Christoph Waltz is excellent as Alita’s essentially adopted father and cyborg surgeon Dr Ido. He brings a world-weariness to the role and the weight of living under conditions of tyranny shines through. The film’s battle and action sequences are pleasantly lucid; Robert Rodriguez’s direction is clear and concise, it is very easy to follow the scene even when there are 10 cyborgs having a scrap at high-speed.  

This a very poor film that contains a couple of good performances and some impressive action sequences that make you forgot some of its more snort-inducing aspects. The film is very much set up to be the first in a series, with Edward Norton popping up at the end as some kind of evil overlord. Whether we will get them or not remains to be seen. However, I’m not sure whether my (less than) beautiful face could take anymore.  

4/10

by James Turrell

Beautiful Boy

Writers: Felix van Groeningen & Luke Davies

Director: Felix van Groeningen

Since the release of Foxcatcher in 2014 and The Big Short in 2015, Steve Carell has become one of cinema’s most expressive and diverse dramatic actors. The line between comedic and dramatic acting has always been vastly overstated. As Better Call Saul showrunner Peter Gould said when referencing comedy legend Michael McKean’s dramatic turn; ‘if someone can be brilliant at being funny, it’s very easy for them to be brilliant at being dramatic. It’s not always so easy to go the other way.’ While Timothée Chalamet’s drug addicted Nick is Beautiful Boy’s narrative driver, Carell as his father David is the grief-torn, desperate protagonist.

Based on memoirs by journalist David Sheff and his son Nick, Beautiful Boy is centered upon Nick’s battle with addiction and the affect that has on the rest of his family. Nick’s addiction follows a familiar path, from rolled gateway innocence to the needle of no turning back. He recovers and relapses and recovers and relapses. Film’s that centre on something like addiction or a mental illness are defined by how realistic the representation is, and Beautiful Boy does well in that regard. Nick’s addiction is nuanced and based in reality, and the film avoids superficial Hollywood conclusions. Director Felix van Groeningen is not squeamish about showing the more brutal elements of Nick’s addiction, and we are shown multiple, unforgiving shots of Heroin injection. And the worst aspects of addiction are laid bare; stealing the savings of a 6 year old sibling a particularly black-hearted example.

However, this is very much Carell’s film and his anguish at his son’s behavior permeates every frame. Carell excels as a father torn apart by a desperation to understand why Nick uses. This failure to understand is a central theme of Groeningen and Davies’s script; the unknown defines the family members materially affected by drug addiction. You can never really know what causes an addict to destroy themselves unless you’ve caused your own forehead to bleed as well. David feels that a certain set of circumstances he can force Nick to go through will stop him using. But ultimately Nick will keep using until the day he finally stops, any abstinence before that is a very brief sojourn. Carell captures this pain wonderfully; his performance gives the film a heart-breaking rudder.

Chalamet’s performance is not quite as riveting. While Nick’s character has nuance, some of the expository scenes in which is addiction is formed are the film’s least engaging. We see clichéd close-frame shots of Nick’s bleary eyed high as the focus drains from the world around him while dissonant, ‘edgy’ music is overlaid. It’s a shot you’ve seen a million times from Trainspoting to 21 Grams and Beautiful Boy contains a few scenes in which narrative rigor and originality disappear. Whether it’s David finding Nick’s journal or pop songs referencing substance abuse playing over montage sequences of drug-use, there are occasions when the script and Groeningen’s direction become sloppy.

But overall Beautiful Boy is a very effective and moving piece of work. As someone with first-hand experience of living with a drug addict, the film has a commendable verisimilitude. Carell is excellent and Chalamet is very good, and the film also sports an excellent supporting turn from Maura Tierney as Nick’s step-mother Karen. There is a lovely sleight of hand in the third act, where Nick seems to have recovered fully and he gives a triumphant and moving speech to his support group. Only for him to fall far from the rails once more. The film could easily have ended there, leaving the audience draped in the glow of a happy but artificial sunlight. But it doesn’t. Nick relapses again and the film shows how with addiction there are no easy answers and Hallmark endings. Beautiful Boy is ultimately a moving film with some great performances that is overall an honest and heartfelt depiction of addiction, and the often tragic affect it has on those around them.

8/10

by James Turrell

The Favourite

Writer: Debora Davis & Tony McNamara

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

The Favourite has to be weirdest ‘hit’ in several years. Somehow, the re-telling of little-known Queen Anne’s life as a lesbian love-triangle, complete with experimental camera techniques sends people bounding like rabbits to the cinema. The film, by cinema’s new premier existentialist Yorgos Lanthimos, is a bizarre tale of power, both symbolic and real, and the way in which gender interacted within the hallowed halls of the pre-democracy Crown.

The story is ostensibly about the Privy Council members that advised Queen Anne Stewart (Olivia Coleman) during the war with France in the early 18th Century. Sarah Churchwell (Rachel Weisz) is Queen Anne’s closest advisor and secret lover, who holds enormous sway over the Queen and is in some sense, the defacto Queen of England. The arrival of Sarah’s cousin Abigail (Emma Stone) as her maid is the narrative driver, as the two do battle using political subterfuge and sexual fluidity to become the Queen’s titular anointed one. The historical realism should be taken with the biggest pinch of salt you can find.

Coleman’s Queen Anne is a kindly, frail character, whose infinite grief at the loss of 17 children casts her in a perpetual shadow. She is confined by a string of endless physical ailments, most notably gout, to her palace and these illnesses are what allow Sarah to dictate her policies. Coleman is exquisite as Anne, managing to find joyous warmth among the loss central to her character. She’s rightly on course for an Oscar, and will no doubt offer thanks to her mentor Super Hans as she grasps the gold. The Favourite is crammed with great acting; from the brilliant dueling of Weisz and Stone, to the just-the-right-side of panto Nicholas Hoult as opposition leader Harley. Hoult is given perhaps the best line of dialogue you’ll hear this year, describing another character’s romantic attachment as ‘cunt struck.’

Debora Davis and Tony McNamara’s episodic script is frothing, its dialogue propelled by Iannucci -style inventive language and swearing. The world they have created feels both real and alien; the period setting clashing furiously with the upended gender norms and sexual rigidity associated with the time period. This feeling is intensified by the circular framing created by Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan, our curved view of the world is just as bizarre as it feels. The film mostly takes place inside the same house, and this twisting visual style allows the same corridors and rooms to be re-invented with every scene.

The men of The Favourite hold much of the practical power; they command the Army and choose battle strategies, they fund the war itself. But they are reduced to desperate sideshows, trying and failing to genuinely affect the political maneuverings of the Sarah and Abigail. Queen Anne’s word may be final but the sentences are scripted by someone else, and those writing the sentences wield the largest axe. But they also have the furthest to fall, as Sarah grimly decrees; ‘there is always a price to pay and I am prepared to pay it.’

These shifting dynamics combine for an exhilarating film, one infused with a piercing subversion in both story and visual terms. Weisz and Stone’s characters never feel like forced creations or like the writers have created them to show how woman can occupy roles most commonly done so by men. They own their lives and the power that comes from them is a by-product.

This sense of anarchy does seem to slip in the last third of the film. As Queen Anne becomes sicker and loses much of her physical body to illness, and as one winner emerges from the political games of Abigail and Sarah, the film becomes more reserved and even mournful. The light drains from the screen and the camera reverts back to traditional framing, Queen Anne’s physical demise seems to straighten the world out. It makes for a weirdly jarring final twenty minutes, in which the more normal the film becomes, the stranger it feels.

The Favourite is a unique film and surreal story told boldly by Lanthimos. It features wonderful acting and fizzing dialogue, and captures the stakes that follow when personal lives and politics become enmeshed. The film’s final third is odd, and as the subversion dims so too does a certain spark. But the excitement that comes from watching such an oddly shaped but brilliantly realized world is rare.

9/10

by James Turrell

The Hate U Give

Writer: Audrey Wells

Director: George Tillman Jr.

Possibly the most important book written in the 21st century thus far is Ibram X. Kendi’s colossal Stamped from the Beginning, a history of racist ideas in America. Over 600 brutal and unrelenting pages, Kendi carefully demonstrates how the systemic racism of modern American society was formed. Kendi goes into detail about the phenomenon of black people literally making themselves whiter, by bleaching their skin or straightening their hair. This schizophrenic and tragic behaviour permeates throughout The Hate U Give and in particular the protagonist Starr, who finds herself split between worlds inhabited by either white people or black.

The Hate U Give is adapted from a 2017 novel by Angie Thomas and is directed by George Tillman Jr., who also helmed Biggie biopic, Notorious. The film follows a few weeks in the life of Starr Carter, played by Amandla Stenberg in a career-making performance, after she witnesses her best friend Khalil murdered by a police officer. The opening scene is devastating in its intimate brutality. It sees Starr’s father, the imperious Russell Hornsby as Maverick Carter, giving his three children the ‘talk.’ This is not the ‘birds and the bees’ talk you might expect, but rather he goes into detail about how to react when interacting with a police officer, in order minimize the risk of harm. His children are ten, nine and one. It’s a damning indictment of any society that a parent should feel this necessary. And this idea is a continuous theme of the film, that a black person’s interaction with the state is different than that of other races. An unexpected knock at the door is greeted with fear rather than curiosity.  

Starr and her older brother Seven attend a private, predominately white school, away from the family’s community in Garden Heights. Here Starr is forced to avoid acting too ‘black’ in order to escape unwanted attention, as she succinctly puts it; ‘when white kids use slang, it’s cool. When black kids do it, it’s ghetto.’ Following the shooting of friend, Starr becomes the key witness in a grand jury case and is faced with fallout from the exposure of TV interview, after bravely calling out the role of drug kingpin King Lord in Khalil’s death. Tillman Jr.’s direction is very muted, he allows Audrey Wells’ script to exist without any whiff of flourish, which allows the never-ending brutality in which the state treats Starr’s family to be viewed unvarnished.

It is not possible to overstate how extraordinary Stenberg’s performance is. The emotional honesty, the anger, the desire for justice; they all exist within the confines of her craft. The year may only be five weeks old, but we quite possibly have already seen the leading performance of the year.

The Hate U Give is about how a family responds to a tragedy, and how this response becomes enmeshed with that of the wider community. After the inevitable failing of the police shooter to be held accountable, the Garden Heights community erupts into an understandably rage-fuelled protest. Wells’ script outlines how depressingly predictable the response society has to such tragedy is. How protests and riots and speeches and biased news coverage never serve to make any discernible difference. Both sides are seemingly trapped in an endless conveyor belt, in which actions have already been decided long ago.

This is a powerful piece of work, one which induces rage and sadness in equal measure. The film is an unashamed, unequivocal call to arms. The story may centre around Starr and her family but the film’s ultimate aim is to energise people into action. And Tillman Jr. and Wells make clear what real engagement is, actively helping the black community in their struggle and not the consumerist protests held at Starr’s school. The film is not without fault, there is some hideously clunky expositional dialogue and an over-use of voiceover. But as a film that documents black experience in unceasing, often traumatic but ultimately hopeful fashion, it is an astounding achievement.

9/10