X-Men Origins: Wolverine - radio review

I was a guest on the BBC Radio Scotland Movie Cafe today, and reviewed the new Hugh Jackman movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine with the show's host, the lovely Janice Forsyth. It was a great experience and will hopefully lead to more. You can listen to the review here:

Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine by paulcgallagher

Sci-Fi Spotlight #3: The Man Who Fell To Earth

This was a strange one. I should have suspected that science fiction from Nic Roeg would not be anything I could anticipate, and sure enough I’m still struggling to decide what to make of The Man Who Fell To Earth. At the simplest level, it shows an odd-looking man named Newton (David Bowie) appearing in small town America - literally falling from the sky - and swiftly becoming one of the most powerful businessmen in the country. He is a cold, reclusive type, and we eventually discover that he is an alien, come to earth as his planet has run out of water. We see brief shots of his alien family dying back home, but Newton becomes distracted by the money and entertainment available to him on earth, and never returns home.

Roeg doesn’t so much tell this story as make you work to tell the story yourself. Large chunks of time are skipped over, and you have to fill in what happens inbetween with your imagination. So we see Newton arrive on earth with nothing, and in only a few moments of screen time we are several years down the line and he’s running World Enterprise, a massive company that is leading the field in American research and technology. This initially suggests that he has unearthly intelligence or resources, but if this is the case it is never made explicit, and doesn’t seem to feature as the story progresses and Newton is ultimately overcome by the world.

Bowie’s performance is excellent, impenetrable and otherworldly. His pale skin and dyed red hair, combined with his hollow stare, make him seem more like an alien in human shape than when his character sheds the human disguise and is revealed in his ‘real’, make-up heavy form. Throughout the film, apart from a couple of scenes, he remains without emotion, and his thoughts and desires are similarly obscured. If there is reason or purpose in his actions then Roeg is not interested in discovering it.

What, then, is Roeg interested in showing or discovering in The Man Who Fell To Earth? He creates a lot of fascinating visuals, but there isn’t a lot of sense behind them; while the film certainly seems to have artistic intentions, watching it is something of an empty experience. It also feels very dated, being full of gratuitous nudity and extended sex scenes that may have been provocative in the 70s but now beg the question ‘why?’ Similarly, Roeg plays with the timeline of the film as if to challenge conventional storytelling techniques, but to no discernible purpose.

So roll on Alphaville, I say. Perhaps I can make more sense of Jean-Luc Godard. Errr…

Sci-Fi Spotlight #2: THX 1138

Fresh from experiencing Tarkovsky for the first time, the second film in my Sci-Fi Spotlight is from a director that I need no introduction to, one George Lucas. The funny thing is, watching THX 1138 caused me to question if this was actually the same Lucas I knew from the Star Wars films, as the only link between his blockbusting series and this near-avant-garde film is the sense of technical innovation. THX 1138 is something of a revelation as far as my perspective on Lucas is concerned, and it seems a shame that he has never returned to making this kind of film.

The story is very simple. In an unspecified future society where everyone is sedated to the level of emotionless consumer-drones, THX (Robert Duvall) neglects to take his prescribed drugs and begins to see the reality of his predicament. His room-mate LUH (Maggie McComie) has already broken free from her sedation, in fact she intentionally caused THX to miss his required dose, and as the two awake to emotion they fall in love and have sex; illegal activites in this society. They plan to attempt an escape, but are already being pursued by the beaureacratic system of government and its police droids.

Lucas unfolds this story using a very pared-down style, not attempting to draw the viewer in by conventional storytelling methods. Working with the now-legendary editor/sound designer Walter Murch he cuts together images and voices, often unsynchronised, in a nonlinear style. Lucas uses very few establishing shots and mostly close-ups, so the individual performances and character actions become the audience’s main guide through the story’s landscape.

While there is a simple story thread running through the film, THX 1138 is most effective and memorable for individual moments, sounds and images. In a scene where police droids beat THX with electric prods, for example, they repeat the mantra “everything will be alright” even as he cries out in pain. It is a powerful image of brutal and unfeeling authority, both disturbing and absurdly funny, and Lucas injects the film with many of these moments.

On his DVD commentary Lucas insists that everything in the film is metaphorical and refers specifically to the political situation in the late 1960s. He makes a good argument for this being the case, but I don’t think it’s necessary to identify these correlations to take anything of value from this story. Many of the images and ideas in THX 1138 are arguably even more relevant today than on the film’s 1971 release, and it seems to me a great example of science fiction’s timeless potential.

Next up, The Man Who Fell To Earth. David Bowie is an alien - I knew it!

Sci-Fi Spotlight #1: Stalker

In a new addition to this blog, I’m starting a thematic strand called Screen Fever Spotlight, beginning with a series of five Science Fiction movies, linked by the fact that a) I’ve never seen them and b) I’m curious to find out more. I chose Science Fiction to begin with as it’s a genre I love but have considerable gaps in my knowledge of. So the five films, which I intend to cover over roughly the next five weeks, are Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979), THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971), The Man Who Fell To Earth (Nic Roeg, 1976), Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977). Let's get into it...

Stalker is my first foray into the films of Andrei Tarkovsky: I’ve read and heard a lot of great things about his works, but never plucked up the courage to sit down and take in one of his notoriously dense features. The closest I’ve got to his films in the past is watching the Steven Soderbergh/ George Clooney remake of Solaris which, it turns out, is actually a reasonably useful bridge between contemporary mainstream sensibilities and the more metaphorical, philosophical preoccupations of Tarkovsky’s cinema.

Stalker has a simple and compelling scenario; in an unspecified post-apocalyptic location there exists a Room that, if entered, causes an individual’s deepest desires to come true. The Room is situated in The Zone, an area that has been cordoned off by the military, out of bounds to civilians. But there are rebels, called Stalkers, who will lead people willing to pay and risk their lives into The Zone and to the Room. In the film we are introduced to a cynical writer in need of inspiration, and a curious scientist whose motivations are less clear, both of whom have hired a Stalker to take them on the journey.

It sounds like a standard sci-fi adventure, but in Tarkovsky’s hands the result is two and a half hours of philosophical musing and spiritual questing that ranges from moments of unique insight to stretches that really test one's ability to stay awake. As the journey unfolds, the director uses the three characters to represent opposing ways of thinking about life and faith, and it becomes clear that the story itself is less important than the philosophical and religious questions it allows Tarkovsky to explore. In this way the director offers a lot for a viewer to chew on, but also makes this a film that is more engaging in a post-screening analysis than in the actual moment of watching it.

Stalker is impressively shot, and several of the images Tarkovsky captures are stunning in their originality – a close-up of a pool of water that looks like a gaping hole in space, the unfathomable expression on the sleeping Stalker’s face. I felt occasionally frustrated as so much of the film’s content is wide open for interpretation, leaving not much clear meaning to hold onto, but it has certainly made me keen to see more of Tarkovsky’s films. Perhaps not all at once though.

My Science Fiction Spotlight will continue next week with George Lucas’ THX 1138.

The Natalie Wood Collection (DVD review)

Despite a career in movies that spanned 40 years and earned her three Oscar nominations and three Golden Globe wins, Natalie Wood has never been elevated to the iconic status of her similarly gorgeous contemporaries Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe et al. While none of the six films in this collection can rival the classics from those actresses’ resumes, this set reveals Wood as an actress of considerable talent and worthy of investigation for any fan of classic Hollywood.

Having first gained attention as a child star, appearing in twenty films before she turned 16, it was Wood’s 1955 performance opposite James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause that established her as a serious adult actress. The films in this collection all come from the decade that followed, certainly Wood’s most critically and commercially successful period, making this set a great primer for anyone keen to find out more about her.

The pick of the bunch is Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961), stunningly restored for its DVD debut here. Wood plays Deanie Loomis, a teenage girl struggling to cope with her growing sexual desire in repressed 1928 Kansas, and the role showcases the very best of her talents. Her ability to appear childishly naive one moment and all-too-worldly the next is harnessed by Kazan to emphasise his film’s dark undercurrents. While some of the writing hammers the themes home a touch harder than necessary, the On The Waterfront director’s eye for a strikingly-framed image is always dead on. And as a study of attitudes towards women in ‘20s America Splendor in the Grass makes a fascinating companion piece to Clint Eastwood’s equally disturbing recent film Changeling.

Wood’s childlike face seems to have been the key reason for much of her casting, as in Inside Daisy Clover (1965), the behind-the-scenes Hollywood drama in which she plays 15-year old Daisy, plucked from trailer-park obscurity by Svengali-like studio head Christopher Plummer to become a movie sensation, only to go spectacularly off the rails. Boasting a tomboy haircut and a sharp tongue, Wood plays effectively against her image, but the film is overlong and only sporadically engaging. Still, a great ending and a pre-stardom appearance from Robert Redford make it worth a look.

She plays a part 10 years her junior again in Gypsy (1962), a big-budget musical about the early life of infamous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. The Sondheim-scored extravaganza was nominated for 3 Oscars in its day but fails to impress in a modern context. Like Splendor… Gypsy has been lovingly restored for this release, but pretty colours can’t cover up how slow and uneventful the story is. It runs for well over two hours and all the best songs and scenes are in the last 40 minutes, so my advice, in the words of Tim from Spaced, is “skip to the end!”

Sex and the Single Girl (1964) sees Wood successfully tackling a more comedic role, and there’s plenty of fun to be had as her headline-grabbing sex researcher is unwittingly seduced by sleazy hack journalist Tony Curtis. It’s very silly stuff, but Curtis gets some hilarious lines and there’s a great running gag referencing his Some Like it Hot co-star Jack Lemmon; only a farcical chase sequence at the end spoils things somewhat.

The set is completed by so-so romantic drama Cash McCall (1960) and forgettable Air Force propaganda pic Bombers B-52 (1957). Overall it’s no classic collection, but with five of these six films making their first appearance on DVD it’s a must for Natalie Wood fans, and a good starting point for the uninitiated.

EXTRAS

Disappointingly, none of the discs have any documentaries or further insights into Wood’s screen canon. Trailers, a few deleted musical numbers on Gypsy and, bizarrely, various Warner Brothers cartoon shorts is all you get.

Release date: 9 March 2009