The Martian (2015)

Ever wondered why your mum would always tell you off for talking with your mouth full? The answer, believe it or not, is: because Matt Damon in The Martian.

The Martian is a 2015 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott, starring Matt Damon.

More specifically, it’s because listening to someone speak while chewing is ONE OF THE MOST ANNOYING THINGS ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH.

Matt Damon talks a lot in this film. That’s because for about 90 per cent of it, he’s alone, so the only ‘dialogue’ is him recording a video diary (speaking directly at a GoPro camera). This would be fine, except that he performs most of this dialogue while eating.

This is baffling for a number of reasons. First, let’s go with something that is important for all films, regardless of genre or content: internal logic. Early on, we the audience are practically beaten over the head with the message that this guy’s number one concern, being stranded on Mars with no contact with NASA back on Earth, is that he will eventually run out of food and starve to death. It seemed to me to be a puzzling choice to then show him CONSTANTLY EATING IN ALMOST EVERY SCENE. It kind of diffuses the whole ‘he may starve to death’ vibe they were going for.

The second reason, however, is far more obvious: it is unbelievably fucking irritating to listen to someone talk with their mouth full. You only have to try to carry on a conversation with someone chewing gum for about fifteen seconds before the urge to punch them in the face becomes almost irresistible. How on Earth (pun intended I guess) these scenes made it past the filming, editing, and post-production phases without someone mentioning that it is some of the most annoying acting ever committed to film is completely beyond me.

I usually watch a film two to three times before I post a review of it. If it has a commentary track, I’ll even watch it a fourth time. Mercifully, The Martian is commentary-free. So I only watched it three times in quick succession. Think you’re a patient person? Hold that thought. Go stick on The Martian and watch Matt Damon say the word ‘hexadecimals’ three times while breathily chewing a mouthful of hot potato.

I’ve also learned from commentary tracks that, generally speaking, actors hate scenes where they have to eat. So do editors and directors, mainly because it’s a pain in the ass to match scenes and ensure continuity – you have to constantly remain aware of how much food is on a plate or on a fork or in someone’s mouth, and actors often have to keep these disgusting ‘spit buckets’ just off camera to avoid having to swallow thirty five pounds of food if the scene where they are eating is filmed in dozens of takes over several days. So the question again comes to mind – how did this not come up during production? At some point you’d think Matt might have spoken up: ‘Hey, Ridley, enough with the potatoes already.’

He does remark towards the end that he’s sick of potatoes. If it was some weird device to try to remind the audience that this is basically his only food supply, it actually has the opposite effect. In the book, there’s a far more detailed explanation of his rationing (which only includes potatoes, it’s not limited to them) and you do actually get the sense that his food supply is indeed a) limited and b) steadily dwindling. There is a source of tension there. In the film, you never really get the sense that he’s in any kind of real peril. Yeah, there’s a Cast Away-type moment where the film skips seven months ahead in time and we see that he’s lost a lot of weight (courtesy of some damn fine CGI work) but this is well after it’s clearly established that NASA has a solid rescue plan underway, so all but the least jaded of film goers will know by this point that stranded astronaut Mark Watney is no longer in any danger of dying on Mars.

The whole film lacks any real dramatic tension, which a film like this sorely needs. Watney is portrayed as this kind of genius botanist/engineer, so as soon as a seemingly insurmountable problem presents itself, he solves it. No time is taken to establish any kind of peril. The palpable tension of a lone man trapped on an inhospitable world should have practically written itself, but it’s never explored beyond a trite kind of problem-plus-science-equals-solution equation that never once takes the time to establish any kind of credible tension. I never got any kind of visceral feeling that this guy was stuck on a desolate planet, hundreds of thousands of kilometres from any hope, or that his life was in any kind of immediate danger. It felt more like he was stranded at a beach resort with a dead cell phone. The book, at the very least, attempts to explain how difficult and complex it is to communicate between planets (hint: it’s so close to being impossible it’s a wonder we can do it at all, let alone in trying conditions like the ones portrayed here) but in this film, again, the minute it’s established as a problem, Watney and some NASA whiz-kid in Pasadena whip up a solution before the tension ever has a chance to take root.

Okay, my judgement is harsh, the film does strike some solid notes. The production design is, as is typical for a Ridley Scott film, absolutely sublime. I was completely immersed in the visuals, and the technical details (the Mars Rover, the Hab, etc) are all spot-on. All the stuff back on Earth, the political and media implications of NASA’s colossal screw up in leaving an astronaut stranded on Mars, are all really very interesting and the performances (particularly Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean and Chiwetel Ejiofor) are all solid. I found myself engaging far more with these characters then I ever did with the increasingly irritating Mark Watney character.

Basically the film, which stretches way past two hours’ length, is so eager to race to a snappy conclusion that everything feels rushed. It could have been an intelligent, psychological exploration of loneliness and isolation, but instead it settles for corny ‘triumph of the human spirit’ nonsense that is as forgettable as it is underwhelming. Ridley Scott used to explore complex themes and thought-provoking ideas with his science fiction. Take the quiet, contemplative moment in Bladerunner where Rick Deckard softly pads at the keys of a piano in the musty darkness of his apartment and compare it to the scene in The Martian where Matt Damon prances around in a bathrobe complaining that all he has to listen to is 80’s disco music. The mighty have indeed taken a tumble here.

Someone needs to remind Ridley Scott he’s better than this, and someone needs to slap Matt Damon upside the head and tell him to freakin' swallow before he opens his mouth!

The Book of Eli (2010)

Denzel Washington turns a cat into a chapstick, Mila Kunis goes from meek to mayhem in about 60 seconds flat, and Gary Oldman yells a lot. Welcome to the apocalypse, Hughes Brothers style!

The Book of Eli is a 2010 post-apocalyptic thriller directed by the Hughes Brothers and starring Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman and Mila Kunis.

Before I get into my favourite moments in The Book of Eli, let me just reiterate a point about this blog – the warning about spoilers on the home page ain’t no joke. My posts can only loosely be called ‘reviews’, they're basically just me harping on about films I love or films I hate, so discussing plot twists and endings is sort of the par for the course.

I mention this because I’m going to dish out a whopping great spoiler for this film in the first paragraph of the review, and it’s one of the best plot twists of all time. Yeah, that’s right, of…all…time. So I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who has not seen the film, because it’s best experienced cold. If you haven’t seen The Book of Eli, do so before reading on. You have been warned.

Okay, let’s get into it.

My favourite moment in this film is right at the start. It’s where Eli (Denzel Washington) takes refuge in a ruined house and settles in for the night. Before he goes to sleep he takes out his bible and opens it. As he does so, he closes his eyes and begins silently mouthing the words. He does this, because he’s blind. The bible is in braille, but regardless, he’s read it so many times he’s memorised it anyway.

The 'he was blind the whole time' twist is revealed much later, but, as in films like The Sixth Sense and Fight Club, it’s signposted numerous times throughout the film. And like The Sixth Sense and Fight Club, directors the Hughes Brothers deliberately filmed The Book of Eli in a way that makes Eli’s blindness ambiguous enough as to have you question it, even after the film is over, and demanding a second viewing just to figure it out and pick up on all the clues.

My favourite clue to his blindness is when he recognises the sound of a motorcycle he has heard before, and knows a band of thugs is in the same town as him. It's a beautifully subtle moment, all he does is kind of turn his head a little. It's easily missed the first time through, like a lot of the clues are. It’s brilliantly done.

We’ve seen him earlier, killing a cat for food. While in the house cooking the cat, he feeds a rat sharing the house with him. It’s the first indication of Eli’s character. Instead of killing the rat he shares some of his food with it. He doesn't just kill wantonly - the cat was emaciated and gaunt and probably close to death anyway. The reason he doesn’t kill the rat is he doesn’t prey on the weak. This is illustrated again shortly afterwards when he comes across a woman in the wasteland. He doesn’t steal her water, even though she offers it to him and he’s clearly running low on his own supply. He's just dispatched the band of lowlifes she was with, and could clearly just kill her as well, but he doesn't. He knows he’s a badass and holds the power of life and death over some of the people and creatures around him, but he chooses to use that power wisely.

The counterpoint to this is the villain of the piece, played of course by Gary Oldman. Seriously, what do casting directors do when auditioning films like this? I swear they keep Gary Oldman’s agent on speed dial. ‘So, who’s playing the lead?’ ‘Who cares, we got Gary!’ He plays the wannabe dictator of a makeshift settlement, and when we first meet him he’s reading a biography of Mussolini. While I love villains who genuinely believe they are doing the right thing, it’s also hilarious when a bad guy just knows he’s a bad guy. And there isn't an actor alive who can yell like Gary Oldman.

Oldman’s character wants a bible because he’s deluded enough to believe that standing on a pulpit and spouting ideology will help him control people and thus expand his little post-apocalyptic paradise (hence the Mussolini reference). So when he finds out the mysterious stranger recently arrived in his settlement is carrying a bible, it's game on.

Washington and Oldman represent two sides of the same coin. There are those who embrace organised religion because their intentions are truly altruistic, and then there are those who would seek to use it to further their own aims, and as a method of control. Eli is taking the bible across the country to a settlement the opposite of Oldman’s – a place seeking to preserve knowledge and start again. Oldman just wants to expand his empire.

The female lead is Solara (Mila Kunis), an illiterate girl in Oldman’s settlement. She’s fascinated with the message contained in the book – that of a world far different from what she knows. The fact that she can’t read is key. Oldman sends gangs out into the wastes to gather books in a relentless search for THE book, but they can’t read either. One of them even remarks that it would be far easier to find this one book if the guys looking for it could actually read. But instead of teaching them, he orders the books they find destroyed. Like any dictator, his power relies on mercilessly keeping people dependent on him.

The moments of humour in the film are also brilliantly done. My favourite is when Washington and Kunis take refuge in an isolated farmhouse with an old couple. The couple proudly display a working phonograph and put on a record, music they describe as relaxing and a respite from the savage world around them. You’re expecting some sweeping opera, and instead the needle hits the vinyl and Collette's Ring My Bell starts blaring out. It’s hilariously absurd.

The Hughes Brothers (Allen and Albert) have always made solid films. They started with the underrated gang flick Menace II Society, then did the equally underrated crime film Dead Presidents, before establishing themselves with the big-budget thriller From Hell (which is, weirdly, the film of theirs that cops the most criticism, despite in addition to being a superb horror film, also being the only film about Jack the Ripper worth watching).

Some reviewers pissed and moaned about this film being some sort of evangelical Christian propaganda, and I find this sort of stuff hilarious. Any film that features the bible is going to stir up the idiot pool, and the Hughes brothers knew this going in. The fact that one of them is actually an atheist makes that criticism of the film even more amusing. The book is a MacGuffin, plain and simple. In the hands of the good guys it’ll do good things, the bad guys, vice versa.

The Book of Eli is a neo-Western action film with some great underlying themes and subtext, all of it handled deftly by two directors who are true masters of their craft and consistently operate at the very top of their game. This is a very cool film.

Director Snapshot: M. Night Shyamalan

Shyamalan suffered more than any other director in recent memory from a sort of one-hit-wonder syndrome, where his first film did phenomenally well both financially and critically, and his subsequent films failed to live up to expectations. This is not entirely due to his next ventures being crappy movies, even though some of them absolutely are, but rather that The Sixth Sense (1999) was just so damn good.

Unfortunately for Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense is a great film due mostly to factors other than him. Even on repeat viewings, once you know the big twist, it still holds up as a good film mainly due to three things that would come to define why his films are what they are: solid actors in the main roles (in this case Bruce Willis and Toni Collette), the work of the astoundingly talented cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, and a fantastic score by composer James Newton Howard.

What I did there was a bit of sleight of hand. I said his ‘first’ film did well. But that’s not actually the case. It’s just that everyone thinks The Sixth Sense was his first film because it’s the one that established him as a household name. He actually made two films prior to The Sixth Sense, Praying with Anger (1992) and Wide Awake (1998). If anyone is curious about where the tendency for Shyamalan to cast himself in his films came from, it started with his debut effort. He plays the lead role in Praying with Anger. It’s a terrible film. It’s self-indulgent, manipulative and in parts mind-numbingly boring. I’ll admit I never made it to the end. After a scene where the young Shyamalan stands up to a riotous mob by spouting clichéd moral platitudes, I just couldn’t take any more. I haven’t seen Wide Awake and, because it stars Rosie O’Donnell and the cover looks like Sister Act, I don’t plan to.

Anyway, following The Sixth Sense came Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, After Earth and The Visit.

Unbreakable and Signs are not fantastic cinema but they are far from awful, fared passably at the box office and with critics, but were far from huge commercial successes.

Some say Unbreakable (2000) is Shyamalan’s best work. I disagree. I thought it was a nice take on a superhero movie and is an original and well-made thriller, but I didn’t enjoy it enough to see it multiple times and I don’t think it outdoes The Sixth Sense or Signs.

Signs (2002) is incredibly underrated. It was helped enormously in a box office sense because it starred a pre-looney tunes Mel Gibson, who at that time was still pulling in audiences. I actually really enjoy Signs, in fact it’s one of only two of his films that I watch regularly enough to own (the other being The Sixth Sense). Shyamalan is not shy about the fact he borrows heavily from directors he admires. With Signs, believe it or not, he modelled his directorial style on Alfred Hitchcock. The result is a pretty damn decent thriller. It has a few nice jump scares (the glimpse of the alien standing on the barn roof is my favourite), but the major set piece towards the end where the aliens surround the house is just brilliantly done. We never see the aliens, we only hear them surrounding the house and trying to get inside. It’s wonderfully claustrophobic. Call the ending a deus-ex-machina if you will (in fact even Shyamalan himself readily admits it is), I had no problems with it whatsoever.

With The Village (2004), Shyamalan tried to replicate the success of The Sixth Sense by following the same basic formula – cast decent actors, spin a mysterious story, and end with a shock reveal. It sort of worked – the film did far better than Unbreakable but failed to live up to the commercial success of Signs. Is it a better film than either of those? No. But it’s not as terrible as some people say it is.

Still, when The Village sort of revived Shyamalan’s credibility he was given carte blanche to write, produce and direct his next film, but I bet the studio regretted that decision. Lady in the Water (2006) is a pretty terrible film. When a director has to resort to turning a bedtime story he tells his kids into his latest cinematic foray you know he’s struggling to come up with ideas. True to form, Shyamalan managed to rope a decent actor into the main role. Paul Giamatti is fine in the film, it’s a shame the story and supporting characters are so miserable. It’s a film that is suffering a massive identity crisis – it doesn’t seem to know what it is. It’s supposed to be a bed time story brought to life, but has these odd digressions where it attempts to be some kind of satire on thriller movie conventions and the genre itself. It doesn’t succeed at any of it.

Next was The Happening in 2008. It is touted by some as a wonderfully clever comment on government fear-mongering and the political atmosphere in America and globally at the time. It’s not. It’s a god-awful film. It is so awful in fact that the mere thought of rewatching it literally gave me heart palpitations. I wish I was kidding. Defenders of The Happening claim that people who hated the film did so because they failed to ‘get it’, or ‘missed the point’. Uh, no. I got it. It just didn’t do ‘it’ very well.

By the time The Last Airbender came out in 2010 I was seeing Shyamalan films more out of morbid curiosity than any real desire to witness his latest creations. When it comes to films I am an unashamed glutton for punishment, but with this one my limits were truly tested. Shyamalan takes a sophisticated, imaginative cartoon and manages to reduce it to one of the most insultingly moronic films of all time. Flashy 3D visual shit doesn’t for a moment distract from a condescending script, banal characters and a lack of imagination that is almost beyond comprehension given the source material. The end result is like taking a 30-year-old scotch and mixing it with a stale lime slurpee from the 7-Eleven.

Next came After Earth (2013), and saw Shyamalan plumb new depths of insultingly moronic. The word that most came to mind while watching this was ‘seriously?’ It is so jam-packed with plot holes, failed internal logic and atrocious acting I honestly cannot believe it saw the light of day. Whatever star-struck Will Smith fan in the studio greenlit this one should hang his head in shame. It’s one of those films that runs for less than two hours but feels like a goddamn eternity.

When After Earth failed to even come close to breaking even domestically, Shyamalan’s studio backing finally evaporated. He didn’t work for two years, and his next venture was directing the television miniseries Wayward Pines (I haven’t seen it).

He returned to film with The Visit in 2015. This was touted as his ‘return to form’, but very tellingly released straight-to-video, showing studios’ complete lack of confidence in his work generating worthwhile returns. I wouldn’t call it a return to form because I was never convinced Shyamalan had much form to begin with, but it’s not an awful film. It’s the formula again – interesting characters, mysterious story, big reveal. It works . . . but only just.

I think the haphazard but occasionally solid success Shyamalan’s films have enjoyed is in spite of, not because of him. I honestly don’t think he’s the wonderfully gifted director some claim he is, what I think is he’s just managed to get away with aping directors who are far better than he is. He’s been helped enormously by casting great actors in the lead roles (with obvious exceptions), his brilliant cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, and James Newton Howard, whose musical scores for Shyamalan films are far better than the films themselves. He’s apparently got a couple of films in the pipeline, but I can’t say I’ll be rushing out to buy tickets.

In a nutshell –

Best Film: Signs
Worst Film: It’s a tough choice, but I’ll go with After Earth

The Lovely Bones (2009)

Peter Jackson returns to Heavenly Creatures territory with the visually spectacular but strangely empty The Lovely Bones.

The Lovely Bones is a 2009 film directed by Peter Jackson, starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Michael Imperioli, Susan Sarandon, Saoirse Ronan and Rose McIver.

Much like the novel it’s based on, the film The Lovely Bones has brief flashes of brilliance weighed down by heavy handed visualisation and schmaltzy emotion that rings so false it’s almost painful to watch.

There’s a flash of this brilliance early on where the detective investigating the disappearance of fourteen year old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) shows her parents a piece of evidence, the knitted woollen hat her mother made for her that she was wearing the day she went missing. There is a beautifully subtle piece of acting between the detective played by Michael Imperioli and Susie’s mother, played by Rachel Weisz. Her mother takes one look at the hat and knows her daughter is dead. Her father (Mark Wahberg) clings desperately to the hopeful notion that she is just missing. He feebly tries suggesting that finding a hat doesn’t mean the same thing as finding a body. I love the look the mother and the detective exchange. The two actors convey the extreme emotions without dialogue, and Rachel Weisz does it perfectly. She knows, and he knows that she knows. The dialogue that follows (he tells them they also found a ‘significant amount’ of blood) is for her father’s benefit – the detective knows he doesn’t need to say anything else to Susie’s mother.

The Lovely Bones is far from a terrible film. It's just not a very good one. It was produced by DreamWorks, Steven Spielberg’s company, and directed by Peter Jackson. Now, the novel swings pretty wide of being great literature, but I can’t help but feel that had Spielberg not got his corny paws on it, and in the hands of a more courageous director, the film would have been much better. Jackson just doesn’t give the subject matter (the brutal murder of a teenage girl and her family’s subsequent grief) the gravity or respect it deserves.

Firstly, Jackson shies away from depicting the more brutal aspects of Susie’s rape and murder as in the novel in favour of focusing more on her ascent into heaven and subsequent observations of her grieving family from there. The problem with this is he spends way too much time on fancy CGI visual crap rather than character development or story, so in the end the film ends up being strangely shallow and superficial. The novel is an examination of grief and loss, the film is way too much of the cool visual stuff from What Dreams May Come with very little of the emotional resonance that made that film great.

Astonishingly, as visually adept as Jackson is, in this film he seems to fail at the most rudimentary visual stuff. There’s a scene where the detective and the killer exchange a few glances through the tiny windows of a dollhouse the murderer has made. The scene is trying to be some kind of creepy, Hitchcock-esque cat and mouse thing between the cop and the killer, but the way it’s done, not to mention the looks the actors give each other, make it come across as almost comical.

Anyway, the character that suffers the most from Jackson’s inability to delve beyond the surface is Susie’s mother. In the novel she becomes distanced from her family because, as much as she loves them, they are also a daily reminder of the daughter she’s lost. She even has an affair with the investigating detective, not out of lust, but rather a desperate need to escape her sense of loss. Susie’s father is a reminder of her murdered eldest daughter. The detective represents a world beyond that pain. It’s a wonderfully moving and tender examination of just how immensely complicated grief can be. But in the film Jackson shows this is in the most inane way possible – he has her literally leave. Her departure halfway through the film dreadfully short-changes her character. It’s like Jackson and Co couldn’t figure out how to write her, so they just decided to have her run away instead. In presumably trying not to depict her as cold and unsympathetic by omitting the affair, they make her seem that way anyway. She goes off to find herself and come to terms to with things by picking grapes in a vineyard in California. As a plot device this is not awful, but the way she re-enters the film later does make it seem like all she needed to get over her little girl’s murder was a break and some sunshine.

I understand to a point the reasons Jackson and his writing team (wife Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) had for excluding the more difficult aspects of the novel. Showing Susie’s rape and murder in all its terrible detail would have come across as gratuitous. What makes the rape so horrifying in the novel is that her murderer stuffs her knitted hat into her mouth to shut her up. The hat has a jingle bell on it, so she is forced to lie there being viciously assaulted listening to the jingle bell going as he’s raping her. It’s truly abhorrent, but probably would have been very hard to film without glorifying the moment. And having her mother indulge in an affair with the detective would have made her seem callous and turned the audience against her. The thing is though, on both counts, I don’t think this works.

Take the scene depicting Susie’s murder. It’s well-filmed, generally, I mean the lead up to it is wonderfully done. We the audience know the situation is creepy as fuck (a middle-aged guy coaxes a 14 year old girl into his underground ‘clubhouse’), but it takes Susie a while to realise that something is not right, and by the time she does it’s far too late. But the climax of the scene is terrible, it’s PG-13 run of the mill thriller movie nonsense: Susie desperately leaps for the ladder to escape but, set to a sinister music cue, her murderer grabs her – cut to black. Don’t get me wrong, it’s suspenseful, but it’s not nearly as horrifying as it should be. We’re seeing an innocent little girl about to be raped and strangled, this is not Jason Voorhees waving a machete and chasing a scantily-clad blonde through the woods.

The characters are a really mixed bag but thankfully the performances are mostly really good. Saoirse Ronan is terrific as Susie. She shows a great deal of emotional restraint for an actor so young. Stanley Tucci as her murderer is also quite good though he’s depicted as a stereotypical creep so his performance never goes anywhere unexpected. We get dimly-lit shots of him creepily sitting in his car or playing with his dollhouses but again, it’s really nothing we haven’t seen before. Rachel Weisz and Michael Imperioli (a vastly underrated and underused actor) are both good in what are essentially bit parts. Unfortunately this is balanced by the woeful performances of Susan Sarandon and Mark Wahlberg.
   
Sarandon plays a drunk, one of those supposedly wise older ladies who swills bourbon while dishing out nuggets of sage advice. It’s painful to watch. When will filmmakers learn that the wise old drunkard is not funny? She’s supposed to be a bit of comic-relief, which would work better if the rest of the film was as dark as Jackson is pretending it is. Sarandon’s character (the grandmother) coming to stay is the biggest WTF moment for me in the whole film. As the pill-popping drunk who breezes in and supposedly stirs the family out their reverie, brings happiness into the dark household, yadda yadda, Sarandon is mostly just obnoxious. But again, this is all shit that has been done many times, it’s superficial and it’s lazy writing.
   
Mark Wahlberg is fine when playing thugs, and is actually quite talented when it comes to comedy. But when he plays a character any deeper than a wading pool he fails miserably, and this film is no exception. He’s about as emotive as a wall of sheetrock. In the mercifully infrequent scenes where he has to play opposite the talented Rachel Weisz you realise how one-dimensional he is.

I think I would be far less critical of the film had I not read the novel first and seen how vastly better it deals with the subjects and issues it presents. The book is waffling and pretentious, but it is a solid examination of a family’s grief and loss and certain parts are incredibly well-written and intensely moving. Jackson could have presented the difficult stuff with respect while still making a hard-hitting film that could have been just as moving. Instead he slapped on the CGI visuals with a paint roller rather than a fine brush and treated the emotions like he was too afraid to delve any deeper than the surface and the result is a film that is technically flawless yet distant and cold.

It may seem an odd comparison, but The Lovely Bones suffers from what I call Phantom Menace-syndrome – that is, an over-reliance on flashy CGI to tell a story rather than trusting your script and your actors to deliver a film that will have an impact regardless of its visuals. There’s a truly beautiful scene in The Lovely Bones where Susie’s father places a candle in the window of his study for her. One night, as he’s looking at it, the reflection of the candle in the glass doesn’t match the flame he sees before him, and he’s convinced that it is Susie communicating with him. This wonderfully subtle use of CGI to convey a powerful emotion is what makes the scene so incredible. It’s a crying shame the whole film wasn’t nearly as good.

The Fly (1986)

The Fly is a 1986 horror film directed by David Cronenberg starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis.

Fans of the horror genre will know that remakes rarely outdo originals. I’ll save multiple examples for another time, but one I’ll mention is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The 2003 remake of the Tobe Hooper original turned a terrifying, claustrophobic nightmare ‘what if’ scenario into a run of the mill, forgettable teen slasher flick.

In the capable hands of the bizarre genius who is David Cronenberg, 1986’s The Fly does no such thing. It’s a tight, lean horror film that does exactly what it sets out to do, namely, scare the shit of you and make you want to chuck. Cronenberg, you magnificent bastard.

The film stars Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, and both leads are great, though Davis isn’t asked to do much besides look horrified and cry a lot. She’s very good, but Goldblum gives one of his best performances. And hey, I have to respect an actor who can keep a straight face doing a scene where he screams angrily while wearing a pair of tighty-whities.

The original wasn’t a terrible film, but it was straightforward fifties scifi monster fare. Cronenberg’s version is far darker and more disturbing. The premise is the same: a scientist working on teleportation technology ends up accidentally splicing his DNA with that of a fly.

It’s there the similarities end. Cronenberg has a thing for deformity and sexuality, and both are on fine display here. Where the original made use of creature effects by having the protagonist literally spliced with a fly (he ends up with a fly’s head and front leg in place of his own), Cronenberg treats this incarnation more like a disease – Goldblum’s been spliced with a fly at a genetic level, and his body slowly begins to mutate into something that is neither human nor insect. His body doesn’t know what to do, so it begins to sort of break down on a molecular level.

And the sexuality is pure Cronenberg weirdness. A side effect of the gene splicing is that Goldblum has gained superhuman strength and endurance, so can suddenly fuck for days on end. When Geena Davis can’t keep up, he abandons her in pursuit of someone who can, leaving her with a bizarre rant about how the teleportation (he hasn’t realised, at this point, that he is half-insect) has somehow ‘cleansed’ his DNA, making him a perfect human being. He’s full of hyperactive energy and can’t see that he’s behaving abnormally. Goldblum plays the scene perfectly; he’s like a rabid junkie who hasn’t yet realised that taking massive amounts of methamphetamine has a downside.

What makes The Fly work so well is that in addition to being a great horror film and nicely done gorefest, it is at its core a tragic love story. Davis sells this aspect of the film really well – even as she sees Goldblum deteriorate before her eyes, she still cares for him, and he for her – I love the moment when he tells her to leave and never come back, because he’ll hurt her if she stays. He knows his mind is devolving into insect as much as his body and he can’t predict what he’ll eventually become. But he never becomes a straight out monster. He retains his humanity right to the end. Even when he kills someone toward the end, he does it not out of malice but because the guy gets in the way of his last-ditch, desperate attempt to splice himself back to humanity (he’s realised that his teleporter pods are capable of gene splicing, so in desperation thinks that if he splices himself with enough human DNA he can somehow make himself normal again).

Cronenberg amusingly refers to The Fly as his take on a romantic comedy. Whether you see it as a straight horror or a deeper tale, the film works because it puts a fully developed story and great characters first and the splatter second. It’s a great example of how to do a remake well.

The Nice Guys (2016)

The Nice Guys is a 2016 action comedy directed by Shane Black and starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling.

No one does action comedy like Shane Black. There’s a bit in The Nice Guys where one half of the ‘buddy cop’ duo, Holland March (Ryan Gosling) dreams that his partner Jack Healy (Russell Crowe) wears an ankle holster. Later, when confronted at gunpoint by one of the film’s villains, he frantically collapses at Crowe’s feet and begins pawing at his ankle looking for it. It’s a hilarious moment in a hilariously off-beat film and a typical example of the brilliance of writer/director Shane Black’s work – he’s fantastic at follow-through.

Another equally great example is a supposedly heart-wrenching moment where Crowe confides in Gosling about an incident that occurred in his past, but Gosling (a rabid drunk) falls asleep before Crowe can finish the story. Later when Crowe brings it up, expecting some understanding, he’s met with a blank-faced stare from Gosling who has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s a beautiful moment from both actors.

There are so many great moments throughout the film, but some of my favourites are where Shane Black, who has been in the action movie business for so long (he wrote Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout and wrote and directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) mercilessly pokes fun at the tropes of the genre. Like when head villain Kim Basinger shows up out of the blue and announces very seriously that she’s ‘head of the Justice Department’, Gosling just shrugs and says ‘well that explains basically nothing’. The film doesn’t take itself seriously for a second.

Crowe plays a tough guy who beats people up for money, and Gosling an alcoholic private detective. Their paths cross when Gosling is hired to find a missing girl and Crowe is hired by the missing girl to stop Gosling looking for her.

Gosling’s wife died leaving him with a daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice). March is hired to find an adult film star we see in the film's opening scene as a kid steals a porn mag from under his Dad’s bed and gazes lovingly at the centerfold, Misty Mountains. Just then, a car crashes through his house and the kid stumbles out to find Misty herself in the same pose she was in the centerfold, but she’s dead. I love that the kid takes his shirt off and covers her up. Black establishes early on that ‘nice guys’ do the best they can in a shitty world. It’s typical of Black’s wonderfully dark sense of humour that the kid covers the body he was leering at in a magazine minutes earlier.

Anyway, when Crowe and Gosling realise the plot is thicker than they originally thought and that something very strange is going on with the dead porn star and all the people involved with the production of her latest film, March and Healy team up ala Riggs and Murtaugh and the film jumps from one oddball situation to another, made all the workable by the great chemistry between the two leads and Black’s directorial competence. Having grown up watching earlier examples of his work, I found myself nodding in appreciation at his restraint here. There’s no flashy camera work, no over-the-top special effects. The action is coherent and easy to follow, which puts him a cut above most other directors working in the genre today. He's over the top where it works, and underplays it where it matters.

The Nice Guys takes place post-Kennedy - poverty and corruption are rampant, the Hollywood sign is decaying and LA is kept afloat by two things - porn and the auto industry. I love the parallels Black draws between the two. There are two party sequences bookending the main storyline – one set at a porno producer’s mansion and the other at an auto show. They are both virtually identical.

I also love some of the commentary on adults looking down on the ‘kids of today’. Set in 1977, there’s a sequence at the start where Crowe laments that things have gotten so bad that a 13 year-old girl would shack up with a sleazy guy because he provides her with pot. Huh, give it a few years buddy. There’s another hilarious example of this sentiment later when Gosling encounters a kid who can’t stop talking about porn and how he tried to get into a film because he’s got a big dick. I love the follow-through here as well – Gosling hilariously obsesses over the kid’s vulgarity because he thinks that’s the type of guy his daughter has to ‘look forward to’.

The humour in the film is spot-on, and the smaller stuff is just as well-executed as the bigger jokes. Early in the film Crowe breaks Gosling’s arm when he’s threatening him to stop looking for the girl. I love that throughout the film we see Gosling in several different outfits, and rather than change his wardrobe he just cuts the arms of his expensive suits to allow for his cast. It’s great physical comedy and another insight into the character – he’s rented a house right across the street from his one that burned down – this is a guy desperately clinging to the life he wants rather than living the life he has.

Lethal Weapon kicked off the sub-genre of the ‘buddy cop’ film: fast-paced movies that effortlessly combine action, slapstick humour and (often very dark) comedy.  From the fantastically choreographed final set piece to a character forgetting his brass knuckles the same way someone might forget their car keys, Shane Black was doing this stuff long before the phrase ‘Tarantino-esque’ made an appearance, and in my humble opinion, no one has ever done it better.

Misery (1990)

Misery is a 1990 thriller directed by Rob Reiner and starring James Caan and Kathy Bates.

My favourite moment in Misery is a very small one, and a great illustration of why I love this film so much – the performances, in particular, James Caan as famous hack writer Paul Sheldon. It’s the part where crazy Annie Wilkes’ pet pig comes barrelling into the room and sticks its snout into his face. He’s incapacitated and helpless while an animal snorts obnoxiously into his face.

I love the look he gives the pig – it is pure hatred and disgust. To make matters worse, and the scene all the more uncomfortably hilarious, is that she has named it after the lead character in his series of pulp romance novels.  In a single look and with absolutely no dialogue, Caan conveys everything you need to know about his entire predicament in the film. He’s a famous writer, rescued from a car wreck by a batshit crazy fan who then imprisons him in her house while she slowly descends into complete and utter madness. Stephen King’s imagination for creating utter horror in simple situations is unmatched by any thriller writer, and screenwriter William Goldman did a fantastic job of taking a great novel and turning it into an equally great horror film (an unfortunately rare thing when it comes to film adaptations of King’s work).

The performances of the two leads are what set Misery apart from other thrillers. Kathy Bates is truly frightening as the demented psychopath Annie Wilkes. She could have played it as an over-the-top villain, but she goes for something far more effective. The veneer is the caring, motherly type, a lonely woman who finds solace in romance novels, but as it begins to crack about half an hour into the film you start to see glimpses of what lurks beneath.

Bates, and director Rob Reiner, do a fantastic job of dishing out the crazy in small chunks, rather than all at once, and the film is immeasurably better for it. Everyone remembers the ‘hobbling’ scene, and while that is a great scene, I prefer the first hint at Annie’s true nature. It’s where she’s feeding him tomato soup, and telling him what she thinks of his new novel (he’s got a first draft of his first non-romance novel in a long time, his effort to become a ‘serious novelist’). Predictably, she hates it because it’s not what she wanted – it’s not her beloved Misery Chastain. As she’s giving him her thoughts on it and he begins to defend it, she loses it, and begins ranting at him angrily, spilling soup all over him. What I love about the scene is how effortlessly Kathy Bates switches Annie from a violent psycho back to her façade. She suddenly becomes apologetic and then ends the conversation with her eyes kind of glazing over as she says ‘I love you, Paul’. She is so fantastically insane. And again, I love James Caan at the end of the scene, after she’s left the room. Again, he does it with a simple look – he’s realised he’s in deep shit. You can see the clock begin to tick in his head.

I love the way Reiner draws out the tension in other ways too. Like with the Sheriff traipsing through the snow and coming within inches of finding Caan’s car buried under a drift. As we see the Sheriff, Buster, walking back to his car, the camera pulls back slightly and we see one wheel protruding from the snow. It’s these simple shots that Reiner does so well. It has you cursing the screen and snapping your fingers and saying ‘damn it, so close’. 

There’s also the tension as Paul Sheldon waits for the inevitable – Annie Wilkes has just purchased his latest Misery novel. He knows (as we do) that Annie’s beloved Misery Chastain dies at the end. Again, Reiner dishes out the tension beautifully. We have several scenes of Annie bouncing into the room, excitedly telling Paul where she’s up to, and that she's loving every minute of the book, not wanting it to end. Then we see the anxiety in Paul as he waits for her to finish and wonders what the hell he’s in for when she does.

And there’s another great moment after she’s finished and found out about Misery's death. First she tells him he needs to burn his ‘serious’ manuscript. Obviously he objects, and tries to talk his way out of it. So she walks around the bed absently squirting lighter fluid on him. Again, it’s the look on Caan’s face. He's both heartbroken and consumed with a helpless kind of rage.

And as great as the ‘hobbling’ scene is, I also prefer another smaller moment that is, for me, far more horrific. It’s where Annie is in a severely depressed state. She’s absently looking out the window into a downpour, and telling him how the rain makes her depressed and how scared she is of ‘losing him’. But then she pulls a gun from the pocket of her cardigan and as the fear flashes in Caan’s eyes yet again she almost casually remarks that she ‘might put bullets’ in it. I love that it’s not an overt act of violence, it’s the implied threat is so goddamn terrifying. And the fact she makes the threat after saying she doesn’t want to lose him again shows how fast and loose Annie is playing with her grip on reality. Her downward slide into murderous insanity is nearly at an end.

I also love the deeper stuff in Misery too. I’ve heard that the book is actually used in some Psychology courses; Annie Wilkes is such a great example of a delusional personality. It’s better illustrated in the book, but there’s a scene in the film where, after Annie has forced Paul to bring Misery back to life by writing a new book Misery’s Return, where he starts to explain to her the type of writing paper he likes, saying (in an effort to placate her madness) that he just wants her to be a part of the writing process. I love it that she dismisses this entirely. She doesn’t give a shit about the process, because to her, Misery Chastain is a real person. She doesn’t want to know about how the writer created the character or brought her to life, because that would ruin the delusional fantasy she’s created in her head.

As great as everything about this film is, it’s the two main actors that make it truly shine, and hold up so well after all these years. Bates and Caan give truly memorable performances, and I love the cathartic moment when Paul finally gets his revenge. It’s a brutal bit of violence, but I can’t help but laugh at it – under any normal circumstances the mere thought of smashing a lead doorstop over a woman’s head and then shoving the charred remains of Misery's Return down her throat would never even cross Paul Sheldon’s mind. But given what she’s put him through, it’s absolutely understandable.

Misery is a fantastic film and one I revisit whenever I’m writing, if only just to remind myself that there are worse things than a case of writer’s block.