Friday 15 March 2024

Red Rooms



A young woman sleeps rough in an inner-city alleyway (despite clearly possessing the means to not have to do so) with the intent to stir early then secure herself a gallery seat for the trial of a serial murderer not only accused of killing children but of then broadcasting these crimes to some subterranean, invite-only layer of the internet. She returns day after day, sits in the same seat, boring holes through both the impassive, emotionally deactivated defendant and the grieving families actually affected by these crimes. In terms of divining any sort of meaning or rationale for the behaviour of Juliette Gariépy's Kelly-Anne, the only real clue that writer-director Pascal Plante seems to offer are the online poker games this semi-employed model returns to throughout Red Rooms. It's not just the hard currency these simulated hands facilitate, it's the basic structure of the game, and how it then informs Kelly-Anne's frequently alarming decision making: you're dealt your cards, you then propose a stake based on how likely you believe you are to win, then hold or fold depending on how the game develops. In conversation with a much more forthcoming woman, Laurie Babin's fellow court squatter Clémentine, Kelly-Anne's describes her detached approach to these should-be exciting games of chance. How she will often discontinue matches early to protect her own investment or the ways in which her deliberately cold playstyle contrasts with those who find themselves emotionally entangled and therefore more likely to make mistakes. She lets something crucial slip during these conversations though, perhaps emboldened by her proximity to another person who seems to share her own strange fascinations. This statement the only real insight into a physically fine-tuned person who sips smoothies in her wind-whistled glass house while casually committing identity fraud or cataloguing paedophilic snuff clips. Kelly-Anne doesn't just like to win you see. What she really enjoys is witnessing somebody else lose. 

ADMB - White

Wednesday 13 March 2024

Beyoncé - Texas Hold 'Em

Lily-CAT



An unapologetically derivative anime from Studio Pierrot that cross-contaminates the winding, industrial corridors of the Nostromo with the precocious critters that stalked Outpost 31. The OVA's most original aspect then is the dress sense of the doomed passengers: instead of overalls spotted with personal effects, the crew of this deep-space cruiser are bright and preppy; voluminous sweaters are tied over the shoulders of corporate princesses and a pump-action Pinkerton noses about dressed in a Varsity jacket. Hisayuki Toriumi's Lily-CAT (viewed here lumbered with an English language dub courtesy of Carl Macek and Streamline Pictures) often seems to be presenting scenes either out of order or without the kind of connective tissue that, usually, knits a narrative together. So, cats die horribly then reappear as snooping cyborgs or bodies bulge, fit to bursting, clearly intended to be located inside an explosive decompression event before we're reassured that these figures are simply rattling around while an untethered escape vessel tumbles away from its mooring. Confrontations between the expendable, unlikable crew and the pulsing alien infection are blocked strangely too, often without any real sense that the static, gawping figures and the writhing tentacles that menace them are occupying the same space. It's as if Lily-CAT has been constructed by two different teams - one flicking through issues of Olive magazine; the other trying to top the slimy special effects of Rob Bottin - then rudely spliced together. 

Tuesday 12 March 2024

Madara 1000 - Clack Bat

The Detective by Hello Berlin

Endless Withdrawal - Losing Sleep

Double Echo - Spectre

Poor Things



Emma Stone and her enormous, bulging eyes play Bella Baxter, the guileless product of a deranged scientific experiment that intertwines the wreckage of a suicidal adult with an infant brain completely untouched by any previous experience. Naturally, the same childlike affect that sees Bella relentlessly hoovering up any and all information also attracts slathering, Victorian bachelors in their droves; each man petitioning to ensnare this innocent but unusually liberated woman. Bella sees and interprets all: a concept reflected in Robbie Ryan's cinematography, whose perspectives range from monochromatic and partially obscured to technicolour and glaring when Bella is at the height of her powers. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written for the screen by Tony McNamara (based on the book of the same name by Scottish author Alasdair Gray), Poor Things very obviously riffs on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, with Willem Dafoe's scarred vivisectionist standing in for the Swiss body snatcher. Instead of a sagging but sapient failure scorned by all though, Bella is raven-haired and luminous; courted again and again by a succession of weeping cads who all long to nail her down to their own living quarters. In this sense there's more than a little of Charles Dickens' Estella, the emotionally cool heartbreaker from Great Expectations, to Bella. Like Miss Havisham's icy ward, Bella expresses an avowedly independent form of femininity. Similarly, the emotional terror of being human is decoded with an exacting logic that does not waste a great deal of time consoling with the heartbroken men she leaves in her wake. Mark Ruffalo's Duncan Wedderburn soaks up the lion's share of the damage, slowly transforming from a Terry-Thomas-style scoundrel into a figure of shrieking farce. His boastful cocksmanship coming up short when faced with the insatiable appetite of a person locked into a relentless, data-gathering phase. 

Monday 19 February 2024

The Butterfly Murders



The Butterfly Murders, director Tsui Hark's dreamy feature debut, takes place in the aftermath of a martial arts apocalypse that has, quite apparently, wiped out scores of the tight-knit, chivalrous adventurers who usually find themselves battling across similar, Shawscope frames. Hark and cinematographer Fan Gam-yuk's picturesque depiction of rural China is, therefore, one littered with the remains of these doomed warriors and the carrion insects that feast upon their rotting bodies. This viewing, done so under the less than ideal conditions of an ancient Laserdisc rip with perfunctory, burned-in English subtitles, had the unintended effect of adding a layer of analogue obliqueness to a film already plotted around incomprehensible deceptions and strange, ulterior motives. What is clear though, despite the smudgy delivery system, is that Hark came out of the gate with an obvious gift for staging and shot design: the deserted fort, where a great deal of the non-underground action takes place, is wrapped in butterfly nets to keep the poisonous lepidopterans out; the billowing, diffused photography of high-end advertisement is gifted not just an organic but an axial purchase within the piece. Dotted with nature doc close-ups of massing moths, it does eventually become apparent that Hark views his disturbed, distrusting heroes with a similar sort of detached fascination. Motivation is rarely parsed and accords are fleeting; instead these costumed heroes strike and claw at each other, to no clear advantage, until their fragile arenas collapse in on them. 

Nina Simone - Tomorrow Is My Turn

Adam Hunter by grendelsagrav

Thursday 15 February 2024

The Marvels



The Marvels has every opportunity to (literally) sing: not only is the film premised on the surprisingly high stakes-presenting idea that each of the three central heroes (Brie Larson's Captain Marvel, Teyonah Parris' Monica Rambeau, and Iman Vellani's Ms. Marvel) can switch places, instantly, if they happen to use their light-bending powers at the same time but a significant stop along the way takes place on a planet where it is customary to serenade rather than converse. Unfortunately for Nia DaCosta's salmagundi sequel, and really the vast majority of the Marvel cinematic universe at this point, the tease of these ideas is more important than following them through to any of the terrifying (or even just satisfying) conclusions they seem to guarantee. The situational vice versa that should see each of the Marvels constantly swapping in and out of perils explicitly tuned to a completely different power scale does make itself known in the film's early action sequences; the relatively underpowered, street-level Kamala Khan is thrown into much higher stakes scenarios than she is equipped to deal with but her presence there is quickly nixed before a genuine sense of life-threatening danger can be generated. 

The Marvels does even (briefly) toy with the idea that Larson's superhero can have her powers leeched away by Zawe Ashton's strangely hesitant Kree warlord but, as is expected, this neutering is so brief that it barely registers in the grand scheme of the overall piece. As for the singing planet, well, before any of these interlopers are forced to awkwardly trill and warble their way through the basics of communication they have already been placed in the company of a handsome alien prince who is happy to talk to these humans in their own, non-musical language. Post-Downey Jr., Disney's Marvel films seem to be premised on a pointed overindulgence that has recently tipped into complete wastefulness, one that denies characters any opportunity to really suffer or be put into positions where they are forced to transform themselves, either physically or emotionally. Although entire planets blink in and out of existence, the stakes have never seemed so low or so easily resolved. In one of the sequel stings, drip-fed as the credits roll, the displaced Rambeau finds herself in an entirely different superhero universe, one that allows her the instant opportunity to meet an alternative version of the mother she lost to cancer. These kind of interactional possibilities, which, at a minimum, should deal with hesitance if not outright horror, present as misshapen and repulsively unreal when the dead are not only returned to life but, in this instance, given exciting superpowers as well.

Spider-Man / Kraven by Corey Lewis

DJ BOG X DJ AKOZA - Inferno