Home

Little House on the Shoulder

2008 // Switzerland - France - Belgium // Ursula Meier // May 19, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Home was featured in a limited engagement on May 14-19, 2010 at the Webster University Film Series.]

B+ - Suffused with both balmy affection and a mounting aura of calamity, Ursula Meier's Home presents an unnerving portrait of a family floundering on the shoals of modernity. The director has described her film as a "road movie in reverse," and that seems as apt a description as any. While the archetypal road movie entails a journey outward to discover something of value, Home concerns itself with a family that has already found everything it needs, only to have its idyllic state disturbed, fractured, and ultimately pulverized by the movements of others. The film's clan—never graced with a surname—dwells in a modest house in the countryside, where an old, unfinished highway runs right through their front yard and has been re-purposed as the family's personal parking lot and street hockey rink. One night, asphalt trucks rumble down the road, and steel barriers spring up along the shoulder and the median. The metaphor is stark: the highway's abrupt completion sends cracks through the family's contented existence, disrupting their physical environment, their well-worn routines, and their interpersonal dynamics. However, Meier steers clear of tussles with central planning bureaucrats, or other Kafkaesque ordeals. Instead, she vividly explores the results of the family's perhaps blinkered determination to stick it out and carry on with their lives. And therein she discovers compelling insights into the fragile nature of domestic happiness and the anxious, bewildering character of contemporary life.

The family of Home is a boisterous nuclear tribe, which middle-aged father Michel (Dardenne veteran Olivier Gourmet) and mother Marthe (Isabelle Huppert) wrangle daily into some semblance of order. They are loving and liberated in the casual manner that only French families seem capable of achieving. Older daughter Judith (Adélaïde Leroux) smokes while bathing in the same tub with her kid brother, Julien (Kacey Mottet Klein), and they splash each other while their parents tease them in the cramped bathroom. Everyone is relaxed, except perhaps for middle daughter Marion (Madeleine Budd), who even in the earliest scenes possesses a simmering anxiousness. Meier and a gaggle of writers leave much unrevealed about the circumstances of the family's move to the country, which occurred years ago. There are hints that it was a shift undertaken by Michel for the benefit of Marthe's mental health, and that this particular house next to the abandoned highway has some obscure quality that puts her at ease. That ease ends, of course, when the road is tarred, striped, and re-opened for the tens of thousands of vehicles that eventually roar past the family's kitchen day and night.

Meier relies upon a lean, disciplined approach to storytelling that favors observation over exposition, where scenes are rigorously explored and yet not drawn out beyond what is necessary to convey a particular character detail or depict a fresh indignity wrought by the highway. There are no significant characters in Home other than the five family members, and each is a victim. Meier relishes devoting time to each, conveying their habits, flaws, and differing responses to their familial crisis, but her creations never betray a self-conscious quirkiness. Judith sunbathes and listens to heavy metal as if nothing has changed; Marion begins obsessing about car counts and pollution-borne illnesses; and Julien turns the highway into his own personal source of amusement. Michel just wants his family to remain happy and safe, but his demeanor betrays doubt. It is Marthe's behavior that seems to shift the most drastically, and not for the better. The highway makes her uneasy and distracted, and the ceaseless noise of passing cars prevents her from sleeping at night. She hallucinates oncoming headlights in the distance, and gazes across the road with a fugue-like vacancy, Meier's camera seeming to anticipate with palpable dread an oblivious, suicidal stroll across four lanes of barreling traffic. Huppert commands our attention with her creased femininity and escalating fearfulness, much as she did in Private Property, another splendid fable of threatened localities and riven family bonds.

Home posits a contemporary world where adaptation is tricky at best, and the resolve and optimism so cherished as virtues by the middle class become proverbial albatrosses. Meier doesn't comment on the fundamental unfairness and cruelty of the family's situation, and the film never suggests that the highway can be defied. It has been channeled past the clan's front door by inscrutable powers, a disruption as uncaring and irresistible as a hailstorm or marching army, but limitless in its duration. Instead of the civic melodrama of a family's struggle against powerful forces, Home presents the mesmerizing collision of human tenacity with a fundamentally untenable situation. The film's central question eventually snaps into focus: How long can the family keep up the pretense that their home is still livable? It's at once enthralling and sickening, as fixed in its outcome as a game of chicken between a man and locomotive, but no less nerve-wracking while it unfolds.

Meier displays an unwavering regard for the urgently personal dimensions of her story as well as an absorption with the willful transformation of environments. This latter impulse risks an ill-fitting element of the grotesque in the film's final act. The contradiction between Marthe's misery and her unwillingness to leave her home forces Michel to take measures that are almost cartoonish in their severity. However, in its closing scenes, Home's somewhat silly gambit—which finds the family sweating inside a sealed habitat, awash in junk and rotting food—pays off cannily as Marthe at last takes her liberation in her own hands. Crucially, the film is not concerned with charting the correct path for those who find themselves trod upon by modern life, but with critiquing the hang-together obduracy that tends to seize families in crisis. Meier suggests that this simplistic ethos threatens to minimize the reservations of some individuals, while lending outsized power to the dysfunctions of others. Ultimately, Home asserts that the longer that mere pluck is substituted for hard-eyed assessment and adjustment, the more traumatic our ultimate dislocation will be.

Iron Man 2

Metal on Metal

2010 // USA // John Favreau // May 16, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

B- - If one regards it primarily as the second chapter in a presumable trilogy of films about billionaire industrialist Tony Stark's super-weapon persona, Iron Man 2 is a slick slice of cinematic entertainment. Director Jon Favreau and leading man Robert Downey, Jr. deliver heaping helpings of the essential vibrancy and wit that rendered the first entry in Marvel's technophilic franchise such a giddy revelation. However, while it functions well enough as a sequel, or as a mere episode in a broader saga, Iron Man 2 is bit soggy when approached on its own merits. Favreau and scripter Justin Theroux—the actor/writer who penned the deliciously acidic Tropic Thunder—are aiming for too many targets in some scenes, while in others they seem to be spinning their wheels in anticipation of the next action set-piece. Accordingly, the film has trouble conveying the sense of nitro-fueled urgency necessary for the Iron Man myth, which is at bottom a Popular Science wet dream with a dash of guilt and ambivalence. The sequel just doesn't hum along so effortlessly as its predecessor, which in retrospect, seems much leaner and more focused, as origin stories often are. Favreau gives us a middle chapter that is preoccupied with mortality, legacies, and thinly veiled allegories about geopolitical blowback and loose nukes. These elements are tackled with aplomb, but cobbled together in such a manner that Iron Man 2 feels a bit haphazard. Eh, no matter. We're all just here for Downey's quips, right?

The new film finds Tony Stark, now exposed as the man behind the crimson-and-gold suit, facing Congressional pressure to turn over his technology to the United States government. The response: "Thanks, but no thanks."  Despite his new-found commitment to world peace, Stark's craving for attention doesn't seem to have diminished one iota, and when he's not jetting off to compete in the Monaco Grand Prix, he's producing an enormous World's Fair-style Expo dedicated to cutting-edge technologies. Meanwhile, a nasty-looking Russian gorilla named Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) labors in secret on a device that suspiciously resembles Iron Man's arc-reactor. (When a heavily tattooed character dwells in a dank apartment with a wall of newspaper clippings about the protagonist, that character is by definition Up to No Good.) Stark has more pressings and visible concerns, however, such as the palladium in his suit's power source that is slowly poisoning him, or his smug ass of a rival, weapons manufacturer Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell).

In keeping with the first film, Downey is the real draw here, and as expected, he delivers the lighting wit and cocksure demeanor of Stark with swooning precision, even as the sequel grants him more scenes of private grimacing. The film's headiest sequence involves not a robot suit soaring at Mach 3, but a moment of scientific revelation (re-discovery, really), tinged with familial warmth and painted with a whirl of holograms. Downey captures the bliss effortlessly. The cast of characters that Downey played off of so well in Iron Man has returned: Pepper Potts (Gwenyth Paltrow), James Rhodes (Don Cheadle, crisper and cooler than Terrence Howard, but much more believable as an Air Force officer), and even Favreau himself in a more substantial role as chauffeur Happy Hogan. Distracted by his crime-fighting duties, Stark elects to name a flabbergasted Pepper as CEO of Stark Industries. He then brings in a ravishing notary from the legal department, Natalie Rushman (Scarlett Johansson), to act as his new Girl Friday. (Of course, most notaries don't have martial arts training...) Thankfully, Favreau doesn't permit the trite girl-on-girl rivalry angle to blossom into ugly flower, and before the second act both women are butting heads with Stark over his juvenile behavior.

Favreau's penchant for actor improvisation is on fine display here, perhaps even more so than in the previous film, with both Downey and Paltrow acquitting themselves marvelously with their effortless, rapid-fire banter. (Who knew Paltrow had it in her? Not me, certainly.) Rockwell is given free reign to create a thoroughly unlikeable villain, a whiny reflection of Stark who possesses all of his arrogance but none of his confidence. However, the character of Justin Hammer, while he might adhere to the principles of comic book villains, isn't especially menacing. Rockwell is fun to watch, but he merely reveals how genuinely threatening Jeff Bridges was as Obadiah Stane in the first film, even (or especially) when he just wore a business suit. Sadly, Rourke seems a bit wasted here, mumbling out the odd line in a thick Russian accent and seemingly cast for his physical presence more than anything. Johansson is, well, Johansson, gorgeous but ultimately colorless, lending nothing in particular to an underwritten part.

Consistent with the first Iron Man, Favreau here exhibits his remarkable facility for rendering action sequences with clarity and drama, while maintaining the aura of cartoonish thrills that the source material fundamentally demands. Here the "shiny new toy" exhilaration of Stark's outings is still present, but also complicated by the doses of selfish foolishness and strained friendship. There's little need for Dark Knight chills in Favreau's wily, jocular approach, which makes it all the stranger when the director and Theroux nod at graver thematic concerns. In one scene, an amused Vanko asserts that an attack on Iron Man doesn't have to succeed to work: it merely has to put the scent of blood in the water. It's an unsettling notion... until one recalls that Christopher Nolan conveyed far more with a single fearful line from Gary Oldman's Lieutenant Gordon in Batman Begins ("What about escalation?") Still, the result of this dire gesturing isn't so much clumsy as cluttered, as it prevents the sequel from achieving the kind of propulsion that powered the first film's neatly spun tale of a warmonger's redemption. Ultimately, Favreau seems to be demanding too much of his second chapter. He wants to convey the rising global threats that Iron Man's existence engender; conduct a corresponding critique of real-world arms races; warn of the hazards of turning to flawed Randian messiahs; and tackle the unresolved Daddy Issues that plague Stark as his own mortality creeps up on him. Meanwhile, the groundwork for the upcoming Avengers film keeps getting slathered on, which makes for some fun reveals, but diminishes the efficacy of Favreau's proximal story. In this manner, a stirring adventure is made to feel unaccountably like a holding pattern.

Kick-Ass

Just For One Day

2010 // USA - UK // Matthew Vaughn // May 11, 2010 // Theatrical Print (AMC Esquire)

C - The high concept that undergirds Kick-Ass, while hardly a model of sparkling originality, at least holds the potential for a witty character piece or an intriguing flexing of generic norms. Colorless, clueless high school student and comic aficionado Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) poses what he believes to be a fair question to his fellow geeks: Why has no one ever tried to be a real super hero? The answers seem obvious to Dave's pals. Super-powers don't actually, you know, exist, and even "regular guys" like Bruce Wayne are billionaires with access to science-fiction technology. Any real masked vigilante would end up in traction fairly quickly. Dave will not be deterred, however. Kick-Ass presents itself as a miserablist "What-If?" scenario about a scrawny kid donning a green wetsuit and attempting to fight crime. Unfortunately, the film lacks focus: at times it prefers the mode of a violent comic book played straight, or a limp high school farce, or a deadpan send-up of the superhero genre. Director Matthew Vaughn simply has no notion of where he wants to take this adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr.'s comic, and the film's sporadic moments of droll inventiveness don't redeem its awkward muddling of its pedestrian components.

Clearly not having thought his plan through, Dave assumes that all one needs in order to be a superhero is a colorful costume and the will to stand up to evildoers. (One might call this a repurposing of Matt Yglasias' Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics, which leads us to some kind of strange comic geekery / political blogging ouroboros.) There is a kind of guileless charm to Dave's naïvité, even if Johnson's performance is a clumsy blend of Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker, Cera/Eisenberg discomfiture, and the stammering nerd from a 1980s sex comedy. When Dave assumes his new superhero persona, Kick-Ass, Johnson's physical presence feels more vital, especially in the way his wide blue eyes and slack lips perfectly convey the dim adolescent dork behind the mask. His Travis Bickle mimicry in front of a mirror notwithstanding, Kick-Ass' cracked voice and self-conscious manner hint that Dave's wish-fulfillment will not end well. Indeed, the poor sap's first attempt to confront a pair of thugs lands him in the hospital, with deadened nerves and metal plates bolted to half his bones ("Just like Wolverine!" he enthuses.)

Meanwhile, the film introduces us to middle-aged widower Damon Macready (Nicolas Cage) and his eleven-year-old daughter, Mindy (Chloe Moretz). Like Dave, Damon and Mindy are in the masked vigilante game, but unlike Dave, they actually know what they're doing. Damon is a former hero cop framed by a New York City drug kingpin, now cutting a bloody swathe through the criminal underworld as Big Daddy, assisted by his lethal sidekick Hit Girl. Damon has trained Mindy relentlessly since the age of five to be a walking weapon of mass destruction, and while they are utterly devoted to one another, their father-daughter chats are on the relative merits of automatic pistols rather than the mean girls at school. It's heart-warming, in an utterly twisted and fucked-up kind of way, which I can only assume is one of the primary points of Millar and Romita's comic and, by extension, of Vaughn's film. Namely, that for all the paternal kindliness attributed to the hero-sidekick relationship, there's something more than a tad depraved about schooling a child to be a ruthless killer, especially when it's in the service of your own thirst for revenge.

By pure happenstance and a succession of misunderstandings, Kick-Ass eventually gets tangled up in Big Daddy and Hit Girl's scheme to topple drug lord Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong). Eventually, their efforts draw the attention of D'Amico's witless, slightly spoiled son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who has superhero fantasies of his own. It's not worth elaborating on the story any further, because it isn't especially compelling on the whole, or even that thrilling or amusing in its moment-to-moment particulars. There's a subplot about a ridiculously gorgeous girl at school (Lyndsy Fonseca) who befriends Dave but—get this!—mistakenly thinks that he's gay. (Hilarity does not, in fact, ensue.) Vaughn's approach to the film's action is just tired and oddly disengaged, as though it's something he can't wait to get through. And I can't blame him. There's a clinical kind of fascination to the gore-spraying mayhem of Hit Girl's vigilante berserker rages, but the character-centered exchanges between Cage and Moretz are nonetheless far more engaging than the admittedly uncanny sight of a preteen murdering drug dealers with abandon. (Side note: For all of Cage's excesses as an actor, the deliberately bizarre cadence he adopts as Big Daddy is an inspired, genuinely funny flourish and a clever dig at Christian Bale's Batman rasp.)

There's an admittedly cunning little fake-out at the heart of Kick-Ass, in that Vaughn tricks us into believing that his tale is primary about the titular character. Dave's simple character arc from oblivious optimism to disillusionment and back to seasoned optimism occupies much of the film's rather tight thematic space, but narratively speaking, Kick-Ass is actually about Hit Girl. Vaughn is plainly trying to be edgy by centering his plot on a foul-mouthed, bloodthirsty eleven-year-old girl, and the film's probings at comic book conventions aren't entirely off-the-mark. Yet the whole enterprise smacks of trying to have it both ways, of critiquing such conventions as grotesque while also reveling in their sheer awesomeness. Contradiction isn't necessarily a defeating quality for a film. Snyder's underrated Watchmen had its share of problems regarding the simultaneous celebration and revilement of superhero violence, and still managed to be a contemplative and gloriously messy fantasy. Tarantino's superlative Inglourious Basterds was an exquisite snarl of mixed messages, and it even pulled a similar trick, vis-à -vis the gender of its "real" protagonist. However, Vaughn isn't up to the task of juggling his scold and fanboy sides with anything approaching Tarantino's agility, or even achieving Snyder's giddy attention to detail. Kick-Ass simply isn't good enough to accommodate everything that the film-maker wants to achieve. Brutal, bloody violence (borderline torture, really) sits uncomfortably alongside fantastical, bullet-spraying action that bears no resemblance to reality. The casual dismissal of superhero stories as juvenile silliness bumps up against copious gadgetry techno-babble and flamboyant sets. Shoehorning these elements together doesn't make a film complex when it's done so gracelessly, or with so little regard for the coherent whole.

How to Train Your Dragon

The Wyrm and His Boy

2010 // USA // Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders // April 18, 2010 // 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies Cine)

B+ - For over a decade now, Dreamworks Animation has been churning out Shreks, Madagascars, and various other talking animal mediocrities (anyone remember Shark Tale?), jousting with Blue Sky Studios for a distant second-place slot behind American animation's reigning champion, Pixar. In 2008, Dreamworks managed its first genuinely good film, Kung-Fu Panda, a charming, marvelously designed bit of fluff in the underdog sports movie mold. Lacking contemporary kiddie animation's characteristic risible pop culture references and cheap scatological humor, Panda hinted at better things to come from the studio in terms of feature animation. And, lo and behold, here we are, two years later, and Dreamworks has delivered the exhilarating, dazzling How to Train Your Dragon, a film that should by all rights be nothing more than disposable entertainment, but attains something much finer. No doubt this is at least partly due to the men at the helm, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, who were the minds behind that oddball late Disney Renaissance marvel Lilo & Sitch. However, it's undeniable that Dragon feels like the progeny of a studio that has finally found its stride and resolved to aim high. The story is simple, the design breathtaking, the action rousing, and the humor mostly warm and sweet. While Dragon lacks the grace and thematic sophistication of a Pixar film, it is by any measure a damn splendid animated feature.

Based on the novel by Cressida Cowell and adapted by DeBlois, Sanders, and William Davies, Dragon is a teachable example of how superior children's films flow from simple, vivid stories, as opposed to high concepts or gaggles of wacky characters. At bottom, the film is a winning blend of two familiar fairy tale scenarios: 1) Loser Find His True Purpose, and 2) Two Groups Find Understanding. The setting is Berk, a fantastical Dark Age Nordic village as seen through a sumptuous, sardonic cartoon lens. (Picture Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert's take on Richard Fleischer's The Vikings and you won't be far off the mark.) The village is bedeviled by constant dragon attacks, and as a result life in the community is organized almost entirely around fighting the beasts. Our hero is a milquetoast blacksmith's apprentice named Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), who wants more than anything to slay a dragon and thereby prove himself, particularly to the aloof object of his crush, Astrid (America Ferrera), and to his perpetually disappointed father, Stoic (Gerard Butler), who is, naturally, both a mighty warrior and the village chieftain.

When an opportunity to kill a wounded dragon falls into Hiccup's lap, the young Viking nonetheless finds himself pitying the creature. Over the course of several days he returns to visit the hobbled dragon, which he dubs Toothless, bringing it food and gradually earning its trust. Hiccup's kindler, gentler approach proves to be a boon, as he quickly rises to the top of his dragon-slaying class with the aid of all the practical knowledge he's gleaning from his quality time with Toothless. Eventually, Hiccup fashions a prosthetic tail fin for his dragon pal, as well as a saddle and bridle, and before you can know it the pair are sailing through the wild blue yonder. This is just about the point when his secret comes out to Astrid, the most capable wannbe-dragon-slayer in the village before Hiccup's unlikely rise. Shortly thereafter, Hiccup's enraged father captures Toothless and uses him to discover the lhidden location of the legendary Dragon's Nest, setting the story up for a climactic confrontation.

Dragon treads over well-traveled fairy tale territory, but it's told with an admirable tidiness and emotional sincerity. There are no feeble, prolonged digressions for the sake of comic relief or unearned pathos. The scenes click together, one after the other, succinctly establishing the story's core emotional conflicts while also taking time to revel in the film's rich design. And what design! Boasting the most evocative art direction in a computer animated feature since 2007's Ratatouille, Dragon is bursting with marvelous sights, evincing a phenomenal attention to detail and a spirited affection for its historical-mythic Nordic setting. From the mighty longboats and icy fjords to the tiny runes scrawled in a dusty book, the film is wall-to-wall with visual pleasures. The design just feels positively enthusiastic, and while one might be tempted to dismiss its "Völsung-Cycle-for-Kidz" aesthetic as faintly ridiculous, the overall effect is so lusciously enveloping and so vividly realized that the look of the thing feels like an artistic achievement all on its own. Nowhere is this element more apparent than in the dragons themselves, for DeBlois and Sanders have envisioned them not as a slew of anonymous scaly terrors, but as a collection of distinctive species, each with its own appearance, movements, personality, and lethal breath weapon. Toothless, who from a certain angle resembles nothing so much as a proud, finicky black cat, is a particularly fine example of a memorable animated creature whose persona is derived almost wholly from facial expressions and motion.

Baruchel—who is apparently a movie star now, but who I still remember best as scrawny, dimwitted Danger from Million Dollar Baby—is a fine fit for the wry, self-effacing, slow-on-the-uptake Hiccup. Indeed, most of the voice-acting is suitably spry and broad without being distracting, with Craig Ferguson's garrulous blacksmith being a particular standout. One of the film's odd incongruities is that the adult Vikings speak in booming Scottish brogues, while the adolescents sound like Santa Clara high school students. (When it is dubbed into Danish or Norwegian, will the Vikings still have Scottish accents? The mind boggles.) The film's rare moments of unsuccessful, grating "humor" consistently involve the teenaged Vikings, who, more so than any of Dragon's other characters, seem to have wandered in from hyper-kinetic afternoon cartoon show. They're cranked up to eleven—as teens are wont to be, I suppose—and therefore seem a poor fit for the film's more conventional storybook pacing and tone.

While How To Train Your Dragon fits in seamlessly with a thousand other good-natured children's stories about understanding and cooperation, DeBlois and Sanders reveal, through their handsomely expressed Long Ago milieu, a more sophisticated dimension to their film, one absorbed with the relationship between man and animal. The dragons of this story possess fantastic physical qualities, but they are not genius arch-villains in the mold of Tolkein's Smaug. They are animals, who yearn for food, comfort, and companionship above all else. Dragon thus functions as a kind of Domestication Myth, condensing millennia of side-by-side adaptation between man and beast into a magical moment when the savage wolf changes into the loyal hound, or the stallion into the steed. It might be a far sight from the psychological, emotional, and generic complexity that Pixar has been able to weave into its ostensible children's stories, but this added dimension to Dragon deepens its appeal and adds a humane resonance to its timeworn outlines.

The Red Riding Trilogy

A World Stinking on the Bone and Pecked by Sparrows

2009 // UK // Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker // April 15, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

A- - Yorkshire. Is there a more evocative landscape in all of England? The word conjures visions of Wuthering Heights and its doomed lovers, of green dales and simple, working-class folk. Such visions, nurtured on robust helpings of classist romanticism, are nowhere to be found in the Yorkshire of Red Riding. Turn off the M-1, peer out the rain-spotted windows. What do you see? Sad, ragged flats and shops; cruel buildings of steel, concrete, and linoleum, seemingly designed to engender malaise; the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant, pumping God-knows-what into the air, water, and bowels; vacant lots inflamed with rubble, weeds, and grubby children, who aren't so much playing as they are biding their time. And out there, beyond the drone of Leeds, Sheffield, and Hull and the countless, wretched towns, are the moors. There are no trees, just the pitched and rolling Pennines (what passes for mountains in England), clad in heather and huddled under eternally gray skies. The sense of exposure and remoteness is suffocating. England's sun-kissed Isle of Wight might as well be in Monaco, or Timbuktu. The Red Riding film trilogy spends nine years in this miserable dream of Yorkshire, from 1974 to 1983, as the Left's dreams of a bright British future comes crashing down amid economic stagnation and ruin. The tale crosses paths with one of the most notorious serial killers in British history, but the film is not really about him. It's about the sort of place that could give birth to such a creature.

The potency of a film often flows from its story or characters. Red Riding possesses both story and characters in abundance, but its bedrock is a mood, one born of slate skies, lonely ridges, and relentlessly grim housing projects. Screenwriter Tony Grisoni adapted three of David Peace's "Red Riding" quartet of novels to create this trilogy, with directing duties split between film-makers Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, and Anand Tucker. Each has modest achievements to their name, but there is little in their filmographies that hints at the churning, despairing tone that Red Riding reveals. (Tucker has visited Yorkshire before in When Did You Last See Your Father?, but the setting of Riding is so foreign to that film that it could be on another planet.) Peace was raised in West Yorkshire in the years portrayed in the novels and the films, but by the 1990s he had fled to Japan. There is no romanticism in his vision of the cities and moors of his youth, none of the cock-eyed affection for a particular place that graces the works of so many authors. Red Riding reveals a soul wrestling with the loathsome seeds inside him: the smug malevolence of men who savor their petty authority; the casual contempt for foreigners and women; the everday brutality poorly hidden behind paper-thin walls; the cruelty that grows like cancer from idleness and hopelessness. Peace got out, but he can't get away. Grisoni and the directors, all British, have felt the discomfiting vibrations in the novelist's words, and shaped their own visions of his Yorkshire. Traditionally, there were three Ridings in the county: North, East, and West. The Red Riding of the title's trilogy is not a physical place, but a force of darkness, one that seeps through the ground into the greasy puddles left by yesterday's rains, into tacky basement pubs with last decade's decor, and into the hearts of pitiless men who have made the North into their personal feifdom.

The plot concerns a sprawling maze of corruption and murder that encompasses the West Yorkshire Constabulary, a construction magnate, journalists, lawyers, priests, pimps, and hustlers. It brushes up agains the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, a real-life serial killer who slew and mutilated thirteen women and is currently living the remainder of his days at Broadmoor Hospital. However, the mystery that squats at the nexus of the film is not the Ripper murders, but the disappearance of three little girls. One of them has been discovered on a construction site: tortured, raped, and murdered, with white swan wings stitched to her back. Who committed this horrific crime? Like detectives in a police procedural, we might pin photos of all the principals on a board and draw lines of connection, mark them with question marks and pin bits of evidence in tiny plastic bags to them. Perhaps, before the killer is revealed, we could deduce it on our own. It doesn't matter. The film-makers are less concerned with who is murdering these children than in transporting us to a place and time where such an atrocity could occur with such ease, where the man responsible—and, make no mistake, it is always a man—could go unpunished, even protected.

The scope of the plot is overwhelming; it is unnecessary to attempt to summarize it here, or to catalog the enormous cast of characters. Each chapter of the trilogy focuses on one or more protagonists. They are not so much heroes as they are men of abundant grit and a smear of conscience, who find themselves in situations where conscience can be compromising, or even fatal. Red Riding: 1974 follows Yorkshire Post reporter Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), who is digging into the disappearance and murder of the little girls. In 1980, we meet detective Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine), who the Home Office sends to West Yorkshire to assist the local police in the Ripper investigation, and also probe possible misconduct in the Constabulary. 1983 splits its time between West Yorkshire detective Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), whose long-repressed scruples are beginning to gnaw at him, and John Piggott (Mark Addy), a bargain-basement lawyer reluctantly drawn into the case of a mentally retarded boy scapegoated for the murder of the children. Many of the actors convey everything we need to know about their characters by their mere presence. We hear the name of nefarious Yorkshire millionaire John Dawson drop into conversation, and when he appears with the face of Sean Bean, the chilly menace we feel multiplies threefold. Eddie Marsan portrays a repugnant Post reporter who wheedles Dunford with the nickname "Scoop," lending the man a slathering of nihilism with just his gnomish sneer. Then there's Peter Mullan, whose twinkling eyes should put us at ease; however, his local priest has an oddly close relationship with seemingly every woman in the story. Other actors seem to have been cast for their countenances or voices alone: jowly Warren Clarke as a thunderous senior detective; Sean Harris as a malevolent weasel of a cop; John Henshaw as a portly Post editor; Julia Ford as a cowed widow. The nearly incomprehensible rumblings of the Yorkshire dialect serve as the soundtrack to the film, along with snatches of pop and soul from the era, drifting out of jukeboxes and phonographs.

The structure of Red Riding is akin to that of Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone: the mystery expands without resolution, collapses around a seemingly unrelated event, and then expands again. After Dunford's haunted search for the truth about the missing girls culminates in violence and further cover-up, the Yorkshire Ripper murders focus our gaze on the essence of the trilogy, the staggering corruption of every civil institution in the county. In the third chapter, another girl goes missing for the first time in nine years, and the film acquires a tint of the The Searchers, as detective Jobson and the lawyer Piggott each grope blindly towards her while the clock goes tick-tock. There is much of the story that is left unresolved, and those who need a complete explanation for all that they observe will be left disappointed. Significant plot points occur off-screen, and much is left to implication, insinuation, and imagination. No matter; there is a visceral quality to the trilogy's vision, one that transcends the specifics of its story to convey a devastating aura of despair which occludes a happy ending, or even a tomorrow that looks any different from today. The directors convey this sensibility with varying degrees of success. Remarkably, Jarrold, veteran of costume dramas such as Great Expectations and Brideshead Revisited, seems to understand Peace's world the most intuitively, and his stylistic choices are a piece with the tone of Red Riding. The grain of the 16 mm film he employs, the scenes that glide in and out of focus, the expressionistic quality to his lingering close-ups: they rhyme with this Yorkshire and its claustrobic flats and eerie parking garages. Tucker's warmer approach is the roughest fit, with its clean digital video and usually unnecessary stylistic flourishes. The third chapter seems intended to lift us, ever so gently, out of the preceding four hours of gloom. Not to a better Yorkshire, but far away to somewhere else, where sun shines once in a while and little girls are loved instead of butchered. Both 1983 and 1980, to a lesser degree, become unfortunately enamored with the more conventional aspects of the story, the love affairs and revelatory confessions and bloody standoffs. Still, Red Riding is a supreme example of the sum being greater than the parts. The experience of these films, taken together, is rich and devastating, a transportive noir epic squirming with the black beetles of a failed society.

Clash of the Titans

Things Fighting Bigger Things

2010 // USA - UK // Louis Leterrier // April 14, 2010 // Theatrical Print (AMC West Olive)

C - Let's be honest, here. Desmond Davis' 1981 swords-and-sandals-and-stop-motion fantasy epic Clash of the Titans is not a particularly good movie, and the affection that it engenders flows from nostalgia born of endless Saturday-afternoon telecasts on UHF stations in the decade after its release. To be sure, the original Clash introduced Gen-Xers (your truly included) to special effects master Ray Harryhausen's unreal creations, and served as a gateway drug for the discovery of his earlier works, such as Mighty Joe Young, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Today, stop-motion has essentially vanished from big-budget live-action films. (Although not from film altogether, thankfully, as it has recently given us wonderful features such as Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox.) Accordingly, French director Lois Leterrier's remake of Clash can be properly regarded as neither a tribute nor a slap to Harryhausen's creations, although it is rife with winking references to Davis' film. This Clash is strictly a diversionary actioner for the era of computer-generated beasties, one that owes as much to the original Greek myths and post-Lord of the Rings blockbuster norms as it does to the 1981 film. Of course, the force that really sired this update is the almighty dollar, and its target audience is composed of money-flush adolescent boys who can't be bothered to seek out the original Clash. So why bother? Well, because Leterrier, his reputation as a flashy hack notwithstanding, knows how to direct a thrilling action sequence. And because sometimes an old-school fantasy quest is just what the doctor ordered.

Clash presents a slick, simplified take on the myth of Perseus, the illegitimate son of the lightning god Zeus (Liam Neeson) and a mortal woman. Left for dead as an infant, Perseus (Sam Worthington in glower mode) was raised by a fisherman and his family, who have the misfortune of standing in the lethal path of Hades (Ralph Fiennes), god of the underworld. It seems the city of Argos has been behaving in a particularly blasphemous, god-defying manner lately, and the miffed, autocratic Zeus has given his younger brother Hades leave to terrorize the city into submission with his monsters. Things come to a head when Argos' queen injudiciously lauds her daughter Andromeda's (Alexa Davalos) beauty as superior to that of the gods. Hades offers a way for Argos to atone for its sacrilege: present Andromeda as a sacrifice in ten days for his sea monster, the Kraken, or the beast will destroy the city.

The means by which Perseus gets drawn into this crisis is a little sketchy, but before the first act is over, his divine heritage has been revealed and the city has shanghaied him into questing for a way to defeat Hades' leviathan before the deadline. The god-son is only in it to confront Hades and avenge his slain adopted family, but the king of Argos suspects that Perseus' blood gives them an edge against the Kraken. The city sends the newly forged hero off with a squad of Argos soldiers and a couple of eccentric monster-slayers, and the film settles into the "fantasy adventure" part. Like the original Clash, Leterrier's film hews closer to the classical Hero's Journey than recent fantastical epics, which tend to favor sweeping warfare over small-scale escapades. There are no epic battle sequences featuring tens of thousands of warriors here; just a band of heroes running from one CGI-monster-studded set piece to another as they race against time. It's often flimsy, but also enjoyable in its way, if only because few fantasy films pursue a pure Guys-on-a-Quest outline anymore.

For the most part, Clash doesn't have pretensions to be anything other than a tacky action flick featuring weird monsters and copious ass-kicking. (There's some egregiously anachronistic critiquing of royal privilege, but the film is palpably apathetic at the prospect of pursuing this line of thought.) Leterrier's film lacks the pornographic dazzle and gore-addled gratification of Zack Snyder's 300, but also that film's strident political gesticulations. Clash is just aiming for heroic thrills, and in that respect it's a modest success, although the awfulness of select elements routinely distracts. The performances range from the serviceable to the terrible, with Worthington's jaw-clenching turn front-and-center in the latter category. The script presents Perseus as a straightforward, clearly motivated warrior-hero, the type of lug whose lack of experience and general hotheadedness lead him to attempt daring (read: foolish) acts of courage. It's not a complex role, but the actor should at least have fun with it, and given that the film's villainy is spread around—both the gods and the humans are pompous assholes—the hero needs to be that much more appealing. Worthington, however, scowls and sneers his way through the role with all the enthusiasm of a Gucci model, and his buzzcut, baby blues, and chiseled profile seem more suited to a Space Marine than a mythic hero. Neeson and Fiennes are slumming; the former looks actively embarrassed in bafflingly medieval armor apparently lifted from Liberace's closet, while the latter phones in the menace with goggling glares and a wheezy rasp. Even the second string—normally compelling presences such as Mads Mikkelsen, Liam Cunningham, and Pete Postlewaite—feels wasted. The dialog is often ludicrous, but mostly it's just forgettable, lacking even the rare bite exhibited by the original Clash's Olympian scenes.

What Leterrier get right, as usual, is the action, which shares with that of his Transporter films and underrated The Incredible Hulk a clarity, urgency, and unambiguous connection to story that few directors achieve. While Clash doesn't realize Hulk's wonderfully tight link between action and drama, it at least moves in a straight line from one monster battle to the next, with the consequences of failure always looming. From a broad vantage point, the battle sequences aren't especially tense, as there's no doubt that Perseus will emerge victorious. (Of course, was there any doubt that Luke Skywalker or Willow Ufgood would win the day?) What Leterrier does admirably well is create a sense of chaos in his action, using terrain and space to fine effect, unafraid to let battles between man and monster veer this way and that. Other directors achieve this through needlessly frenetic editing, but Leterrier keeps things a touch more grounded. He wants us to actually see his effects wizards' creations—dodgy though they might be in some shots—and savor the capricious, uncontrolled character of battle. Perseus might dwell within the Protagonist Bubble of Protection, but his companions often perish quite suddenly and brutally, underlining the lethal nature of their foes, even if the film never lends these deaths much emotional heft.

Most of the memorable monsters from the 1981 film return here: giant scorpions, a coven of witches, Medusa the gorgon, Pegasus the winged horse, and the Kraken itself. Even the diabolical Calibos appears, although Leterrier's film recasts him as the hideous, exiled king who once consigned the newborn Perseus to the sea. (To my young eyes, the brooding, slightly erotic menace of Calibos was always the most frightening element of Davis' original.) Naysayers will likely decry the "sterility" of the new film's computer beasts compared to Harryhausen's creations, but this new Clash's threats are both stunningly designed and consistently frightening. Medusa retains a ghost of feminine beauty beneath her scales, which vanishes into serpentine grotesquery when her petrifying gaze flares to life. The Kraken owes as much to Japanese kaiju monsters (and by extension, Cloverfield) as it does to myth. Rising out of the Argos harbor with tentacles flailing and toothy maw clacking, it's so colossal that we never truly glimpse its entire form. Needless to say, the whole film is production designed within an inch of its life, and for the most part it presents a vivid fantasy world. (The tawdry, soft-filter, silver-and-alabaster Olympus is a prominent misfire, as is the stiffly unconvincing Stygian ferryman, Charon.) Consistent with most lavish fantasy films, it's the little details that stick, such as the smoke and orange embers that swirl in the air when Hades appears, or even the peeling skin on his pale forehead.

Clash might be a vulgar, hack-and-slash adventure, but it manages to avoid one of the perennial traps that bedevil the genre. Blessedly, there's no attempt to establish a romantic connection between Perseus and Andromeda. They only meet on two occasions over the course of the film, and her role is to permit Perseus' personal redemption for failing to save his family. The romantic sparks that do flare are between Perseus and Io (Gemma Arterton), a cursed, ageless woman who has been shadowing the god-son for years and volunteers to join his quest. (We'll just disregard the creep factor inherent in pining for your 600-year-old stalker...) The passion between the couple is a background element, and resolutely chaste, but it makes for a welcome change from the usual Hero and Princess template. Unfortunately, Leterrier tacks on a cheap romantic resolution in the film's final moments, rendering the wise, battle-hardened Io as little more than a prize. This is a shame, as it diminishes the film's modest flexing against blockbuster conventions. What's left is merely a glossy, silly escape-hatch to a time when heroes and monsters still rumbled.