1917
The accomplishment of the cinematography at the heart of 1917 is so phenomenal that I didn’t even notice it. Film nerds tend to get very excited about the single tracking shot that accompanies Henry Hill into the Copacabana, from the exterior street through the kitchens and the back ways to the interior and the seats before the stage. It’s a wonderfully accomplished bit of cinema, and it’s fair for it to receive the attention it does.
But 1917 is pretty much told from the perspective of one single tracking shot through an entire warzone. I mean, not really – it’s made up of a lot of cuts and edits and such but the way it manifests to the viewer makes that difficult to see. The cuts are surgical, the merges exceptional. It is so seamless and absorbing that you might miss it entirely.
The basic premise of the movie is simple – two soldiers are recruited to deliver news of a trap to a general that has been on the receiving end of some poor allied intelligence. Where he thinks he is about to close in on his opponent, it’s actually his opponent that is about to close in on him. The soldiers are to deliver a more accurate portrayal of German troop dispersal to avoid the emergence of a charnel house. To get there, the soldiers will need to brave No Man’s Land and pass through territory held by the enemy, all in defiance of the Kipling quote, ‘Whether to Gehenna or to the throne, fasted is the man who travels alone’.
It’s a movie that manages to communicate a lot with its visual design. The crossing of no-man’s land is unbearably tense and doesn’t shy away from the horror of a battleground. Maggoty horses, rats chewing on bodies, and the exceptionally horrible sight of a man losing his footing and plunging his hand directly into the gnawed stomach of a soldier. When reaching the empty German trenches, they find themselves beset by rats (‘even their rats are bigger than ours’) and dealing with booby traps left behind by the enemy. The claustrophobia is palpable.
The film makes excellent use of tension throughout really, and the cinematography is routinely outstanding. The interplay of light and shadow as the flares illuminate a ruined village are wonderfully evocative, and the unreliability of light (along with the danger of its presence) highlights the tension that is so effectively wielded throughout. Soldiers face each other illuminated by burning buildings exchanging frantic shots between the rubble. Our lack of visual clarity underpins just how chaotic war must feel like to its participants.
Also palpable is a casual indifference to death. ‘I hate to lose these flare guns to the Hun’, says a jaded lieutenant. ‘Throw them back to us when they start firing at you, there’s a good chap’. His casual benediction as the two soldiers go to cross No Man’s Land is oddly respectful while being completely dismissive. It’s a gesture of futile hopelessness. ‘I am sending you to your death, and all I can give you is this profane blessing’. The soldiers here aren’t portrayed as the gallant heroes of classical cinema. They’re portrayed as damaged and wounded from the trauma of being at the front.
It’s a film that feels shockingly lonely – so many World War I narratives focus on the ‘we happy few; we band of brothers’ camaraderie – that no matter what horrors are being faced, they are lessened by facing them together. But that’s not an option for our protagonists. There is only the mission, and the consequences associated with its failure. All that exists is the overpowering weight of obligation.
Still though, for all its obvious accomplishment it’s not a movie that I felt really stayed with me long after I’d watched it. Worth your time, I’d say, but I don’t know if it’s going to stay with you any longer than it did with me.
A Glitch in the Matrix
Simulation theory (the theory that we are living in a digital rather than a biological university) comes in and out of favour on an almost yearly basis. A Glitch in the Matrix is a documentary about the idea, as expressed through the personal perspectives of about half a dozen ‘believers’. Some of them are ordinary people who believe they have experienced extraordinary things. Some of them are genuinely thoughtful philosophers with interesting thoughts to express about the concept. And it’s all packaged up through the lens of The Matrix as the first mainstream movie to really address the concept.
Unfortunately, it’s not very good. And in fact, I think it might be genuinely harmful.
I have no great reason to take a swing at simulation theory itself. I don’t find it convincing, but I find it compelling. For those that may not be aware of the idea, this is the basic argument for it:
- It is far more likely, mathematically speaking, that we live in a simulated universe rather than a real universe.
- A simulated universe, assuming finite computing power, would contain within it upper and lower bounds for physically observable properties. Like absolute zero, or the speed of light.
- Life is full of weird synchronicities and patterns that suggest that the matrix in which we live is full of glitches. The Mandela Effect is often cited as the best evidence for that.
Each of these main arguments has many sub-arguments (for example, that video game technology will eventually become indistinguishable from real life) but that’s the main gist of it. And taken together, it does create an interesting albeit fundamentally unprovable proposition. And a documentary that looked at each of the arguments weighing up evidence and counterevidence could have been fascinating.
However, a Glitch in the Matrix takes the usual lazy easy-way out by focusing more on people than on concepts. And the people they drag into this give off very real signs of genuine mental illness and chronic depression. When one of your main participants is a disturbed teen who killed his mother and father because he watched the Matrix too much… maybe it’s time to rethink the structure of your entire approach.
Nick Bostrom and Emily Pothast, along with archive footage of Phillip K. Dick talking about his own firm belief in alternate realities, are the real intellectual core of the movie and I found their discussions to be interesting and well conceived. But when you add in people saying ‘I remember Kit Kats used to have a hyphen’, and ‘I tracked things that happened to me on a daily basis and began seeing patterns’ you start to move away from thoughtful analysis and in to cognitive distortion.
‘I noticed every third day something happened related to my career’. I’m sure you did. I notice stuff happing relating to my career every day. And if I logged them too, I’m sure I’d begin inventing convincing patterns as well. We know that humans tends to see patterns where they don’t exist – it’s a survival patch that got incorporated into our evolutionary firmware. It’s not evidence of anything except ‘If you alone are responsible for categorising noteworthy events in your life, eventually you will invent a mythology around yourself’.
One guy talks about how his dad would take him from the ass-end of nowhere (where he lived, because his dad wanted to reduce the CPU cost of rendering his son’s environment) into the big city. ‘He’d obviously want to control the trip to direct me to places where the façade wouldn’t show’. Man, that is classic psychosis talking. He didn’t let you roam free in the city because he’d go to jail when you were abducted and murdered by alley-dwelling hobos.
Often a documentary will be accused of ‘cherry picking’, where the facts it incorporates are selected for the maximum alignment with the thesis of the work. Here, even the concept of a ‘fact’ is cherry-picked. The whole thing is as convincing as the drunken rant of your covid-denying alt-right uncle at Christmas dinner. It makes the entire concept seem ludicrous, because the treatment is so completely asinine. More than anything else it seems irresponsible to indulge the delusions of those obviously finding the real world difficult to process.
Delve into simulation theory – it’s fascinating. But don’t use this as a jumping off point.
All is Lost
I’ve written before of my long-lasting dream to give up life on the land and live out the rest of my days as a maverick buccaneer. Youtube channels like Sailing Millennial Falcon, while not hiding the difficulties, make it look like a wonderful way to live your life. I think this movie though may have disabused me of the notion. It is an intensely, violently grim movie about all the things that can go wrong at sea. Detritus in the ocean that damages a ship. Ruined equipment. Battery problems. Storms. It’s all there. Sometimes several times over.
The largest bulk of the movie focuses on Robert Redford as a mostly silent protagonist fighting his darndest against whatever God of the Sea that he managed to piss off. The lack of dialogue is a brave choice, but Redford manages to sell the performance with nothing more than an occasional grimace or a desperate look at an imminent threat on the horizon. He’s a hell of an actor – he’s not a young man here and I can feel my own muscles grimace in sympathy with the effort he goes through. He sells pain, anguish, heartbreak, resilience, anger and acceptance with a deftness that is remarkable. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that ‘action is character’, and All Is Lost is a masterclass in trusting in that maxim, and in the power of good casting.
It is unbearably tense in places – so much so that it gives the work of Kathryn Bigelow a run for her money. As a movie, it reminds me of nothing so much than it does the disaster options in the Sim City builder menu. When everything is going well, you can test the resilience of your city by throwing a tornado. Then a fire. Then a Godzilla. Then a flaming Godzilla riding a tornado. All is Lost is like Poseidon, in a fit of boredom, decided to keep clicking that menu option in his divine iPad just to see what happens. If it can go wrong, it does go wrong.
Very good stuff, if a little hard to watch occasionally.
American Sniper
American Sniper is a decent movie, competently helmed by an equally competent director. The problem here is that Clint Eastwood is against some stiff competition in this space – that of the ‘clenched anus second-hand stress’ thriller, especially when it comes to miliary movies. Kathryn Bigelow – particularly in relation to the Hurt Locker – had already nailed the ‘tense exploration of a warzone full of threats’ formula. American Sniper covers a lot of the same territory in its plot and its character development and it suffers in comparison. American Sniper is the Hurt Locker that Stallone would have made in the 80s during his Rocky 4 and Rambo 2 phases – in that this American Sniper is sure set up to be a) American, and b) a hero. It’s a movie that only ever really lands glancing blows against the larger context of its focus.
Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is oddly likeable in his role as a man who killed at least 160 people in Iraq. He has a charm and charisma at odds with the body-count, and the story itself shies away from too much of the fallout of the conflict – which is to say, deep-seated PTSD. It’s not that it doesn’t address the PTSD that Kyle carried with him from the war – rather it never truly confronts it, which is a shame given how Kyle did so much work with veterans after his tours of duty were complete. Kyle, a real sniper, was killed by someone he was trying to help and I don’t really think the finale of the movie really does that justice. What could have been compelling and meaningful becomes a whole ‘Poochy was killed on the way back to his home planet’ kind of off-hand thing.
I’d also suggest that the movie offers a cartoonish perspective of a complex situation. They’re the bad guys. We (as in, the Americans) are the good guys. Good guys shoot bad guys and there’s no more moral complexity to it than that. The major villains of the piece are irredeemably evil – the movie has no problem in setting this out as a morality play – and the good guys are always justified in their war against evil. It veers dangerously close to propaganda, actually. In one sense I think that’s fine – the movie is a character study more than a geopolitical thesis. But I also think it’s a very shallow study. I don’t know Chris Kyle (obviously). I’m no expert on the Iraq war. But I suspect that the intersection of those two unknowns was more complicated than the movie sets out to portray. For one thing, the movie explicitly casts the Iraq War as a war on terror. Perfectly appropriate to the Republican message at the time. There’s nothing in the movie about regime change or the more cynical foreign policy objectives the war would serve. It’s just ‘White hats good, black hats bad’.
We know Kyle himself did have reservations about Iraq since he famously argued that America should support the troops because the troops didn’t choose the wars they fought. “If you hate the war, that’s fine. But you should still support the troops. They don’t get to pick where they’re deployed. They just gave the American people a blank check for anything up to and including the value of their lives, and the least everyone else can do is be thankful. Buy them dinner. Mow their yard. Bake them cookies.”. That’s thoughtful and considered. You don’t get that impression from the movie. American Sniper puts forward a thesis that Kyle was a meatheaded patriot who never gave the war any deeper thought.
It’s a well made movie, but as hinted above it’s a war movie in the vein of some of Stallone’s least critical American exceptionalism tales during the 80s. It’s a slightly more sophisticated Rocky, or Rambo, where the enemies are impossible to misidentify and the purity of spirit that undermines America’s conception of itself is never sullied. It’s black and white in a world that is inherently grey. It’s a curious throwback of a movie really, to a time when the entertainment value always rode front-seat with the moral judgement taped up in the boot. That’s not a sin, really – a lot of the reason why the 80s and 90s had more fun films is that they kept the moralizing to a minimum. But it’s a slightly odd film to see lauded so highly in today’s cinematic climate.
Arlington Road
Arlington Road is a good movie that could have been a great movie if it didn’t rely so much on fortunate happenstance to sell the conclusion. It fluffs the dismount because it relies too heavily on everything happening the way it was all planned to, and that’s not how life functions.
That might have been okay if it didn’t rely on this so heavily through the whole movie. The ending is clever, but in that way that makes you think you just watched an immaculately constructed magic trick. If you can just let it wash over you, that’s great. Me, I always need to have an idea of how the magician did it. What did they touch, when, and where? What access did they have to the ‘audience participant’ before? Was the long, funny story they told just to warm up the audience or was it a cover for a confederate to do something time consuming?
If you approach Arlington Road with that mindset, it’s a bit disappointing because there isn’t much sophistication in the way it constructs its narrative magic trick. It’s all built on ‘Despite people being unknowable, this person will always do what we expect of them’. All it would have taken for the whole edifice to come crashing down would have been for the main character to, just once, have been a tiny little bit more rational.
Nonetheless, this is an interesting character study in the construction of narrative – not in the movie, but in real life. About how the perspectives from which we view things are often more powerful than anything as unsophisticated as ‘the facts’. It’s all about how we’re more swayed by convincing stories than we are by convincing explanations. And had it not relied so much on suspension of disbelief, it would have been an excellent execution upon a very compelling thesis.
It’s nice though to see a movie like this where the ending is such a subversion of the conventional Hollywood norms of crime and punishment.
Ashens and the Polybius Heist
This is easily the nerdiest thing I have watched in Many Moons, and since you’ve seen what my viewing is like on a regular basis… that’s saying something. Stuart Ashens is a moderately well known youtuber who mostly reviews pound-shop tat on his channel, but he managed to convince enough people to give him sufficient funds to make a movie. It’s about the urban legend of the Polybius – an arcade video game that was apparently so addictive the government had to step in and have the machines destroyed. Ashens Eleven make a plan to steal the only remaining working prototype for… reasons I’m not sure were ever fully explained.
You can’t hold a movie like this to the same standards you’d have for a ‘real’ movie – the Indiegogo campaign raised £150,000 and that doesn’t go very far in any context these days. It is though weirdly enjoyable given that it is written by, and stars, a whole pile of people you’ve likely never heard of. As you might expect from people working on Youtube, the writing is sloppy, the plotting is nonsense, and a lot of the humour derives from recognition of geeky in-jokes. It’s a bit like a less well executed version of Spaced – appropriate given how much Ashens looks like a poundland version of Simon Pegg. The acting is way over the top from a lot of the people involved, and the special effects are occasionally Laugh Out Loud. But still – it’s earnest and it’s endearing. I certainly wouldn’t recommend you drop everything to watch it, but you might perhaps drop something inexpensive onto a soft carpet if the movie passed in front of your eyes.
Avengers: Endgame
None of these movies are exactly cinematic gold, but my word they’re genuinely thrilling at times. This one in particular offers an unusually sophisticated blend of storytelling elements – at various points it’s poignant, hopeful, despairing, and melancholy. The events of Infinity War put the stakes about as high as they could go, and much of the first two hours of the movie are spent on reconciliation with loss and tragedy. All the Avengers deal with things in different ways, and it’s cool to see them carry consequences that last beyond the finale of whatever the current crisis is. It’s a movie about failure, but also about perseverance. It’s actually quite inspiring.
It’s also, like all of the truly big budget Marvel films, absolute bananas. It’s amazing how much talent these movies can marshall only to give scant seconds of screen-time to some of the biggest stars in Hollywood. And my word, do they each get their brief moment of glory – some of them too rapidly to even give you a chance to remember who they are. Not all of the participants in the movie are the front-bench of the Superhero Squad. It’s good that the movie draws a line under some of this narrative bloat because at the end it feels like the whole edifice is swaying dangerously under its own weight. If Endgame was a board game, it’d be Rhino Hero Super Battle.
As usual I will avoid spoilers, but there is a scene in the later part of the movie where the camera sweeps over a whole army of significant faces from the grand roster of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For a good third of them I just found myself thinking ‘Who the hell was that and why do they deserve a lingering camera shot?’. More and more these movies have become caught up in their own sprawling, incoherent storytelling and on occasion it turns out to be utterly exhausting. There is too much homework that goes into understanding the character relationships here, and that’s made even more significant given the temporal aspects that Endgame introduces.
The sheer excessiveness of the action too occasionally blows right past exciting and into just visual white noise. I don’t know who told the writers and directors that subtlety was a bad thing, but they took that message to heart. As enthralling as much of the movie is, it could do with being dialed back a scooch. The dial doesn’t always need to go to eleven. The movie is at its most genuinely involving when it focuses more on the character development and less on the psychedelics. There are a lot of character arcs that reach their terminus in Endgame, and it would have been good if it spent a bit more time making sure the viewer had time to really notice that. It’s a movie with a runtime of around three hours – it’s not like it had to rush anything.
I liked the movie a lot overall, as I do most Marvel movies, but I’m glad that this cycle of the franchise is over. I’ve run out of unallocated spaces in my Dunbar number so I can’t keep track of what the hell is going on. ‘I tried like hell to get her back’, says one character to another later on. I honestly couldn’t tell you ‘her’ was and why she was so important to the other. That’s a fair sign that your list of Dramatis Personae needs a damn good downsizing.
BlacKkKlansman
As Mrs Meeple said to me, Spike Lee is pretty hit and miss in his movies. When he hits though, he hits hard – I think this is one of those movies. It’s a scorching attack on the American racial experience, executed through some not-very-subtle digs at the current president. It’s Lee doing some of his most incendiary work in quite some time – it reminded me a lot in fact of Malcolm X, which is I think the finest thing he ever filmed. Weirdly though, as the situation in American has gotten even more intense, Lee seems to have become ever more conciliatory. I expected his take, however removed from the specifics it was, to be very much along the lines of ‘abolish the police’. This movie comes across as a more sophisticated, and complex, meditation on identity and working within power structures to improve them. I checked after watching the movie to see where he was on that issue and found that he is, I believe sensibly, of the ‘defund the police’ persuasion.
“Now it gets tricky when they say ‘defund the police’ because people are not thinking like ‘we don’t need police officers.’ We need police! Let the record state, I’m telling my brother, Al Roker, we need police, but we need a police system that is just.”
With that in mind, BlackKkKlansman is probably the most accessible of Lee’s movies on racial justice because it speaks to a spirit of compromise. It doesn’t try to argue that the system is fair, or even that it’s mostly fair. The police department in which Stallman finds himself is institutionally rotten… but it’s also one capable of reflection and improvement. Lee’s tone overall is hopeful – perhaps the perfect expression of ‘history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme’. Every time it the rhyme comes around, you get to take a chance to reinvent the melody.
Perhaps most interesting thing to me though was how the film segues into real world footage of racially motivated violence. Not because it was effective, but because modern Internet culture means that this footage is so easily seen, and so easily retweeted, that it loses its ability to shock. The takeaway from the final few minutes of the movie is not, as I think is intended, ‘you are comfortably divorced from the lived reality of racism’. I think it’s ‘You are comfortably numb because apocalypse fatigue has set in and online escapism is no longer an option for any of us’.
I really recommend this movie. It’s a lot more fun than I have made it sound. And holy shit, after watching the entire last trilogy in the Skywalker saga I’m amazed to find that Adam Driver can actually act.
Blade Runner
Since I want to finally get around to watching Blade Runner 2049, Mrs Meeple and I prepped by watching the original. Even now, all these years later, it’s a movie that exudes what looks like effortless cool and confidence. The extraordinary Vangelis soundtrack, the hypnotic neon, and the dark noir angles all combine to create an aesthetic that is woven through sci-fi like neurons through your nervous system. It’s an intensely admirable film, full of allegory and innuendo. And I appreciate it doesn’t patronize its viewers (because we didn’t watch the Theatrical Cut). But also… I don’t know. It’s a bit like Alien – I really admire all the moving parts but I don’t really engage with them when they come together. There’s something about this immaculately designed Swiss watch that seems off the beat to me, and I can’t really articulate what.
I’ve tried to watch Blade Runner far more times than I’ve actually succeeded. My interest over time could be charted into a schematic for a terrifying rollercoaster design. It begins extremely high with the taut, tense confrontation of the Voight-Kampff test – a sequence so absorbing that it’s the most quotable part of a movie that also contains the ‘Tears in Rain’ soliloquy. From there it goes into a life-threatening plummet until the middle peak of Roy Batty confronting his maker, and then into another descent until the rising plateau finale where Rutger Hauer delivers one of the most weirdly effective personal epitaphs in cinematic history. All in all, maybe ten minutes (for me) of emotionally effective storytelling, and the rest is mostly filler. The story it tells is about artificiality, consciousness, oppression and emotion, the right to exist and the limits of personhood. The thing is though that all exists in the gaps between the actual story. You get a lot out of a viewing of Blade Runner, but only in proportion to what you’re prepared to dig for in its admittedly rich and redolent layers of philosophical subtext.
Bolt
While this movie didn’t cover much in the way of new territory, it is very charming. I mean, I love dogs and as such a Disney movie about dogs is always going to score a hit with me. Bolt is a dog working under a delusion – that he’s really a super-dog solving super-crimes along with his beloved owner. But the truth is that he’s an actor in a kind of weird Truman Show style scenario where everyone has to work to keep him in the dark. His absolute belief, you see, is what sells the performance.
But one day he falls into a box and finds himself very far from home in a world where his powers don’t seem as reliable as he would have thought. With the help of a cast of scrappy friends he makes along the way, he strives to find his way back home.
Yeah, it’s formulaic. Yeah, you can see the twists and turns (such as they are) coming from a mile off. But it’s still very heart-warming and sometimes there’s joy to be had in simple stories told from vaguely novel perspectives. I liked Bolt a lot, and I suspect you would too. I’d watch a sequel, and I thought given the age of the movie there might well be one.
There isn’t though. Woof.
Borat
I know that Borat is a movie you’re not supposed to like in this modern day and age. We’ve collectively, as a society, allowed the gerrymandering of ‘comedy boundaries’ by the least funny people on the planet. But man, Borat made me laugh out loud more times than any movie in recent memory. It is so unabashedly transgressive and so unapologetically nasty that the whole thing comes across more as a piece of avant-garde performance art design to punish people for their personality deficiencies.
The shallow response to a movie like this is ‘Wow, this is really offensive so it must be castigated and cancelled’. But really what Borat does is reflect the stereotypical assumptions of those people it fools into engaging with the character. If meeting an ‘idiot foreigner’ with backwards ideas is all it takes for a bunch of frat-boys to say ‘I wish we could still own slaves’, or ‘Women are objects’… well. In those circumstances all Borat is really doing is holding up a mirror that lets people see how they behave when they don’t feel like they’re being judged. Some people come out of this movie pretty well. Others… not so much. But in the end those that weren’t part of the ‘scripted’ parts of the show end up showing who they are rather than who Borat is.
But still, it’s a mean-spirited movie. It punches down aggressively and without mercy. It’s only real redeeming quality is that it also punches up quite cheerfully as well. Much of its comedy in the end is driven by shock… such as when Borat, pretending that there’s no such thing as a flush toilet in his home country… comes down to a fancy dinner party with a bag of shit asking where he can bury it. Some people have said Sasha Baron Cohen is a comedy genius, but if so he’s one in the vein of Ricky Gervais in that he has perfected a style of second-degree cringe. I’m not the biggest fan of this kind of humour – for one thing, it’s just too easy to be worthy of a lot of respect. It relies on the essential guilelessness of normal people caught by surprise. When it lands though… yeah, it lands hard.