Jim Taylor

A ponderer with delusions of grandeur...

The Fourth Dimension (EIFF 2012)

Jun 272012
 

The Fourth Dimension is a strange beast.  Although billed as a single feature, it is in fact a succession of three short films – one American, one Russian, one Polish – all of which present their own unique take on the impact that the fourth, temporal dimension has on people’s lives.  A series of quotes from Albert Einstein, Sergei Eisenstein and Doc Brown (from Back to the Future) are shown at the start of the film, giving the audience an idea of what scientists and theorists (both real and fictional) think about the dimension in question.  These preconceived notions about the nature of the fourth dimension are to be challenged, however, according to the list of instructions apparently given to each film-maker involved in the project.  As the graphics shown between each segment tell us, the purpose of the film is to make us think about the fourth dimension in ways we never have before.

Indie favourite Harmony Korine’s The Lotus Community Workshop opens proceedings, and deliberately blurs the line between fiction and reality by featuring Hollywood star Val Kilmer playing a (seemingly) fictional version of himself.  The film follows Kilmer as he embarks on his new, post-acting career as a motivational speaker who plays messiah to groups of enraptured, desperate fans.  In this segment, the fourth dimension is “heaven on earth”, a state of being which is attainable, claims the actor, with the help of the alien beings who gave him a new understanding of life.  Kilmer is magnetic in the role of starry-eyed, hippy man-child, although the extent to which it is a genuine performance, and not merely Kilmer playing himself, is a mystery.  The segment as a whole acts as a wryly humorous look at celebrity self-help culture, although its message about the all-important fourth dimension remains unclear.

The second short film is Alexey Fedorchenko’s Chronoeye, a very different sort of piece about a lone Russian scientist (Igor Sergeev) obsessed with building a machine which can see into the past.  Driven by personal tragedy, he seeks a way to recapture lost moments, but his narrow-minded pursuit of the past at the expense of his present is mirrored by his device’s frustrating inability to gain access to the bigger picture.  Here the fourth dimension is represented in a more traditional form, and Sergeev’s character repeatedly laments humanity’s inability to move as freely in time as we can in space.  For all its scientific and philosophical musing, Fedorchenko’s segment is deeply touching, and, unlike its two companion pieces, has enough raw story material that it arguably should have been extended into a feature film in its own right.

The final instalment is called Fawns, and comes from Polish director Jan Kwiecinski.  Four youths run amok in an abandoned country town, as a flood of apocalyptic proportions slowly bears down on them.  Initially concerned only with self-gratification and hedonistic indulgence, the group eventually rediscovers their humanity when one of their number goes missing.  Kwiecinski makes heavy use of symbolism here, and in this segment the fourth dimension is represented by the oncoming flood; time portrayed as a mighty deluge which bears down upon us as we pursue our little dreams.  The moment of natural beauty which closes the film seems to suggest that all we can do is appreciate the good things in life while we can.

In the end, The Fourth Dimension feels a little too disjointed to stand up as a coherent film.  The individual segments all make for compelling viewing, but the three directors’ interpretations of the project’s shared premise are too wildly different for any real sense of unity to emerge.  That said, if having Val Kilmer’s name on the poster secures a wider audience for the work of Fedorchenko and Kwiecinski then the collaboration will have been worth the effort, and each of the three works on display here is absolutely deserving of that wider audience.  So what is the fourth dimension?  Something the three stories all seem to agree on is that the answer to that question is rather inconsequential.  What matters is not how we understand time, but rather what we do with the small amount of it which is given to us.

Jim “Aristotle ate my brain” Taylor, geekzine correspondent, reporting from the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012

Grabbers (EIFF 2012)

Jun 262012
 

Last year, Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block demonstrated that, post-Shaun of the Dead, the UK was capable of producing impressive monster movies which could acknowledge a slew of Hollywood influences while still maintaining their own identity.  Jon Wright’s Grabbers has now, it seems, done the same for Ireland, albeit in slightly more parodic fashion.

The film begins (inevitably) with a mysterious object falling to Earth, and the grisly deaths of a crew of Irish fishermen who are foolhardy enough to investigate the crash site.  The following morning, dead sea-life begins to wash up on the shores of Erin Island, and the local Garda start to suspect that something strange might be happening in their little community.  It isn’t long before people start disappearing, slimy things are going bump in the night, and the mainland begins to seem a very long way away.  Standing alone against blood-sucking creatures from outer space, the locals of Erin Island – in the time-honoured tradition of classic creature features – pull together for an epic last stand.

Heading up the cast is Richard Coyle as washed-up, drunken police officer Ciaran O’Shea.  Coyle’s leading role in the TV adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal seems to have lifted him out of the career rut he experienced upon leaving Steven Moffat’s Coupling in 2002, and in Grabbers (one of two films he’s appearing in at this festival – the other being Luis Prieto’s Pusher) he once again displays his talent for combining dramatic and comedic styles to great effect.  Ruth Bradley is by turns funny and sympathetic as uptight and ambitious young officer Lisa Nolan, whose initial clashes with the cynical O’Shea form the beginnings of a will-they-won’t-they romance.  Russell Tovey (Being Human, Doctor Who) rounds out the cast in the obligatory boffin role, with fine comedic support coming from Lalor Roddy and David Pearse as bewildered locals turned amateur monster hunters.

Grabbers manages a fine balancing act of horror and comedy, helped immensely by the talented cast and surprisingly impressive CGI.  It’s scary when it needs to be, and its alien antagonists are (for the most part) conceptually novel as well as being brilliantly realised.  It’s also very funny, much of the humour coming from the ‘mismatched partner’ routine of O’Shea and Nolan, as well as the bumbling response of the island’s locals to the ever-growing threat.  The film wears its influences on its sleeve at all times, but crucially never slips into full-blown parody.  There are knowing references to The Thing, Jurassic Park, Predator, Aliens and Night of the Living Dead – and the appearance of a quarry in the final act will bring a wry smile to the face of any fan of classic British sci-fi – but Grabbers remains an exciting, scary and funny film in its own right.

In fact, the only place the film falls down is in its portrayal of Ireland and the Irish.  Lingering shots of the local countryside pepper the film, and, whilst beautiful, give the impression of having been shoehorned in merely to boost tourism.  Their appearance often jars with the otherwise swift pacing of the film, which only serves to highlight their redundancy in purely cinematic terms.  Furthermore, Grabbers‘ portrayal of the Irish people feels like something of a lazy cultural stereotype.  If writer Kevin Lehane and the Irish Film Board wish to celebrate and perhaps reclaim this stereotype then fair play to them, but there’s something about an Irish sci-fi film which features drunkenness as a major plot point that seems a little crude in storytelling terms.  These criticisms, however, shouldn’t be made too harshly; Grabbers is a triumph for Irish cinema, and for science-fiction cinema in general.

Jim Taylor, geekzine correspondent, reporting from the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012

Young Dudes (EIFF 2012)

Jun 232012
 

“Guy, did the world end?”

“I’m not sure.”

 

I don’t know who wrote the blurb for this film on the official Edinburgh Festival website, but it’s very misleading.  As far as I can see, there are no “space aliens” to be found in Young Dudes, the latest feature from acclaimed Taiwanese director DJ Chen.  There is certainly plenty of humour, emotion, trippy imagery and religious symbolism, but no space aliens.  That said, extraterrestrial intervention is one possible explanation for the weird and wonderful sequence of events which unfolds throughout the course of the movie.  In this reviewer’s opinion, however, Chen’s disarmingly beautiful vision of the 2012 apocalypse urges a more spiritual reading.

Adam and Guy (Bo-Chieh Wang and Tsuyoshi Abe) are two wannabe musicians who, convinced that the end of the world is nigh, take it upon themselves to save humanity from the coming deluge.  With the help of a beautiful Russian girl Adam meets on the internet (Larisa Bakurova), they create an online community called “Klaatu” (in a clear nod to The Day the Earth Stood Still), dedicated to universal love and the enjoyment of life’s simpler pleasures.  As people across the world come to believe that they really are living in the end times, Klaatu gains a massive overnight following which propels the three friends to global stardom, just as the long-predicted apocalypse seems to finally envelop them and stop time dead.  It is at this moment that the film transforms, and immediately begins to invite question after question from its audience.  Is everything as it appears to be?  Have the three friends really stepped outside of time or are they being manipulated by a sinister cult?  Are they mad, or have they really caught a glimpse of the afterlife?  Is what we’re seeing real, or merely a product of Adam’s fevered imagination?

If that plot summary makes Young Dudes sound a little crazy, that’s because it is.  Chen’s abandonment of a solid narrative leaves several key questions unanswered, but she gives the audience enough information to put the pieces together if they want to.  The latter part of the film becomes a emotional odyssey through a world at once alien and familiar; a staggered pilgrim’s progress towards the ultimate light at the end of the tunnel.  Symbolism is everywhere as the film approaches an almost overwhelming emotional crescendo, soundtracked by the David Bowie song which gives it its name.  Rarely has a film about the end of the world been this uplifting, and this eager to give itself over to the reckless abandon in which Chen’s writing so wantonly indulges.

Clearly inspired by the grimy fantasy of films like Jacob’s Ladder and Twelve Monkeys, as well as the trippier fiction of Philip K. Dick, Young Dudes is a film which keeps you guessing, but never leaves you in the dark.  It deserves far greater attention and analysis than it will probably receive – both at this festival and elsewhere – but if there’s any justice in the world, this film will be the subject of critical debate for many years to come.  The Film Festival literature describes it as a science-fiction film, and I suppose this is true, but it’s sci-fi of the most spiritual kind.  Friendship, love, the end of the world, and the search for God are grand themes indeed, but ones expressed here so eloquently and unpretentiously that it’s impossible not to be charmed by this little film’s approach to such big ideas.  In short, Young Dudes is a wonderful film, and one fully deserving of your attention.

Maybe it was just space aliens, but I don’t think so.

Jim “13th Warrior” Taylor, geekzine correspondent, reporting from the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012

Killer Joe (EIFF 2012)

Jun 212012
 

And so we come to the film chosen to officially open the 66th Edinburgh International Film Festival; William Friedkin’s Killer Joe.  It might seem as though Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) has been relatively quiet since his ’70s heyday, but nothing could be further from the truth.  Although the ’90s were something of a wilderness period for him, the director has made nine feature films in the last thirty years, the most recent of which, Bug, won the prestigious FIPRESCI award at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.  His latest offering, the (very) black comedy Killer Joe, further confirms that this celebrated auteur still has the power to shock and enthral.

Essentially the story of a contract killing gone wrong, the film tells the tale of Chris (Emile Hirsch) and Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), a father and son who decide to cash in on a lucrative life insurance policy belonging to Chris’ mother by hiring the eponymous hitman to kill her.  What they don’t anticipate is Joe’s decision to take Chris’ emotionally troubled sister Dottie (Juno Temple) as a retainer for his professional services.  As is so often the case with films of this stripe, an apparently simple plan begins to come apart at the seams, and the fallout from the killing plunges Chris and his family into a waking nightmare where everyone’s carefully-constructed facade begins to crack.

Matthew McConaughey is a revelation as Joe, a man who is both murderer and detective, and at times more an elemental force than a human being.  That he would have struggled to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor even five years ago in Hollywood makes McConaughey’s transformation into the pallid, dead-eyed hitman all the more startling.  His performance is undoubtedly the centrepiece of the film; charismatic and repulsive in equal measure, he inserts himself with disturbing ease into the family home, charming, threatening and cajoling his way into the hearts and minds of the people who have hired him.  His true nature remains hidden until the final act, which climaxes with a surreal and shocking scene involving a chicken drumstick, sure to take its place alongside the ‘milkshake’ scene from Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood as one of the most perplexing and bizarre sequences in modern American cinema.

Matching McConaughey all the way is British actress Juno Temple as Dottie, a young woman misunderstood by those around her and thus treated as little more than property, until she eventually takes her destiny into her own hands with lethal consequences.  The chemistry between the two actors is undeniable as their twisted romance unfolds, although their rapport does unfortunately serve to make the interactions between other characters (Hirsch and Church in particular) look stilted and staged in comparison, despite fine performances from all the actors involved.  Special mention should also go to Gina Gershon as Chris’ abrasive stepmother, who turns what could have been a rather two-dimensional and cliched character into a fully-realised human being.

Friedkin’s frequent use of close-up shots forces the viewer to focus on the minutiae of the character’s lives, emphasising the tiny building blocks which everyone uses to create a wall between themselves and the world.  Throughout the film these barriers are gradually eroded by fear, rage and tension until every character’s monstrous inner-self is unleashed in an explosion of violence which, while shockingly brutal, is also punctuated with black humour.  Though this transition initially seems jarring after the careful pacing of earlier scenes, writer Tracy Letts deserves credit for allowing Killer Joe‘s sustained tension to boil over and erupt into the madness which is its only logical conclusion.  For this reason most of all, the film will inevitably divide opinion, but it remains proof that William Friedkin can still create challenging and affecting cinema, nearly forty years after the release of The Exorcist.  Killer Joe is not a perfect film, but it is mesmerising.

Jim Taylor, geekzine correspondent, reporting from the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012

Him, Here After (EIFF 2012)

Jun 212012
 

Stories of returning soldiers readjusting to life after war have become so ubiquitous in cinema that they perhaps deserve their own sub-genre.  What is different about Him, Here After, though, is that the conflict which its nameless protagonist has survived is one rarely featured in film and is perhaps therefore unfamiliar to western audiences – despite having lasted for 26 years and ending only in 2009 – for the plot concerns the return of a defeated LTTE soldier to his home town following the end of the Sri Lankan civil war.

Writer and director Asoka Handagama effectively conveys the crippling sense of alienation experienced by the central character (Dharshan Dharmaraj), as a man who has only ever known war returning home to begin a new life as a civilian.  Unable to find a job, and receiving by turns silence and abuse from the people he thought he was fighting for, his sense of resignation, resentment and ultimately paranoia grows unabated.  Gainful employment and a reunion with his childhood sweetheart soon bring the promise of stability, but it isn’t long before recognition of his particular ‘talents’ results in his being drawn into the burgeoning criminal underworld of postwar Sri Lanka.  When the wife of the man whose job he has stolen begins to follow him like a shadow, his fragile contentment begins to unravel with alarming speed.

The subject matter is perhaps controversial for Handagama  (he is Sinhalese rather than Tamil) but he handles it expertly, and care and attention are evident in every lingering shot despite the obviously small budget.  The jumpy editing employed gives the film an almost dreamlike quality, but the socio-political message of Him, Here After is clear. Dharmaraj’s veteran represents all former Tamil Tigers trying to find their place in a new world, wondering why, despite their best efforts, the war has followed them home.  The old LTTE commanders he knew have found a new calling as gangsters and smugglers, still running – as he sees it – a similar racket; duping young men into joining their cause, though now that cause is even more morally questionable.  When your life has been shaped by violence for so long, asks Handagama, how can you find peace in peacetime?  As one former LTTE officer puts it towards the end of the film, “there are no new lives, only the opportunity to start our old ones anew.”

For the most part, Him, Here After is a riveting account of postwar tensions and personal alienation, and is undoubtedly a thematic triumph.  The wife of the protagonist’s predecessor, dogging his footsteps throughout the second half of the film, is at first a symbol of his personal ghosts, haunting him for his past crimes.  By the end of the film, though, she has become a symbol for Sri Lanka itself after the war; battered and bruised, but – crucially – still alive.  Viewed through this lens, the ending Handagama offers us has a measure of closure, but in narrative terms it remains infuriatingly ambiguous.  These characters may act as symbols, but they are also individuals, and by denying us a resolution to their personal journeys, Him, Here After leaves us with an uncomfortable sense of uncertainty.

Jim Taylor, geekzine correspondent, reporting from the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012

Amok (EIFF 2012)

Jun 192012
 

One theme of this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival is a celebration of the new wave of Philippine cinema, which is seemingly undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment.  If we take Lawrence Fajardo’s urban fable Amok to be an example of this new movement, then it looks to have a very bright future indeed.

Amok concerns the intersecting lives of myriad characters as they make their way through the city of Pasay on a hot and busy day.  The film opens with a group of children playing the role of Greek chorus by rapping about the hardships of life on the street, before seguing into a series of vignettes based around characters from wildly different walks of life.  We follow, amongst others, a father and son making their way to the airport, an argumentative brother and sister on a long drive, a fading film star in a spiral of self-destruction, and a number of street vendors, one of whom takes drastic measures in an attempt to pay the rent.  It is this latter act of desperation which links all these seemingly isolated groups of characters; a shocking act of violence borne of fear which draws all the threads together as we approach the film’s tense climax.

Amok is in fact all about fear, and the terrible things it can make human beings do.  The unforeseen consequences of the actions of two would-be criminals ripple outwards, touching the lives of everyone featured in the film, forcing them to put their own petty fears and prejudices in perspective.  Amidst the oppressive street traffic and ceaseless noise of the city, characters rediscover their humanity through painful experience, although the newscast soliloquies which close the film demonstrate that not everybody has learned their lesson.  Fajardo’s camera angle never stays the same for long, and the many roving viewpoints he utilises to tell the story reflect the many different perspectives of the film’s characters, seen from under tables, behind food counters and in the backseats of taxis.  The crisp clarity of digital film suits this unflinching vision of urban humanity, and the actors’ performances are uniformly excellent, particularly those of Gary Lim and Dido de la Paz as the afore-mentioned criminals.

If there’s one criticism to be made of the film, it’s that some characters plainly suffer from the vignette format.  We simply aren’t given enough of an opportunity to care about some of the people we meet, and as such their ultimate fate seems somewhat inconsequential.  Perhaps, though, this was Fajardo’s intention; to show every side of human life, even the banal.  This small gripe aside, Amok is a riveting film that, despite its languid pacing, unfolds in a hypnotic fashion which keeps you watching even when you might prefer to look away.

Jim Taylor, geekzine correspondent

– Stay tuned for all of Jim’s incoming articles from the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012 –

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