Month: May 2017

The trees have eyes!!!

Posted on by victorfraga

Filming in the Amazon is no easy task: there are more eyes in the jungle than there are leaves. There is life on every surface and the life vibrates and does unexpected life-like things in the jungle. The jungle sees, the jungle hears, the jungle eats, the jungle screams and whispers and moans and gossips and transmits information through a vast rhizomatic network of cellular nodes. Filming in the jungle is no easy task.

This way the jungle quickly finds out you are there. It knows what you do and what you like, but mainly it knows what you don’t like. It knows that your crew from the city doesn’t like the jungle, because city people want to be apart from the jungle. But for the jungle there is no outside. It makes everything a part of itself. Including you.

We shot Icaros: a Vision at an Ayahuasca centre in the Peruvian Amazon about an hour outside the city of Iquitos, where 30 years ago Werner Herzog shot Fitzcarraldo. We shot there for five weeks straight (plus a week in town), with a cast and crew that at its height reached 40 people, a handful from the US, most from the capital Lima and a number of people who lived at or near the centre. Compared to what some doc crews go through ours may have been a comfy shoot. We didn’t track jaguars or sleep in tents. For its regular foreign visitors, the somewhat dilapidated centre had a number of tambos – Amazonian bungalows – with hand-sawn wooden beds.

We bought a load of new Chinese mosquito nets from the market. And though the centre’s old mattresses were cratered like a lunar landscape and occupied by unseen and unknown bugs, at least we had mattresses. Still, it’s not easy keeping city people happy with no running water, and the catering done on an open fire – an open fire indoors, under a thatched roof, in a ‘kitchen’ that has no fridge and no sealed storage. The cooking was done by the amazing Gloria, who was born in a canoe, did the catering for the original Fitzcarraldo, and carried a machete on her motorbike. But even she didn’t escape unscathed. A week in, she was hospitalised with burns on her chest and neck. Fortunately she was fine and back on the job a few days later.

Very quickly, the jungle found out about the kitchen. The Amazonian saying is, when ants come into your home, change homes (or don’t keep unwrapped protein bars inside your mosquito net). We had ants, but they weren’t the big problem. Jungle rats were. After dinner, our kitchen became their kitchen. Which is fine, in principle, except in that region the rats seem to carry leptospirosis, a potentially deadly bacteria they deposit wherever they urinate and defecate (i.e. wherever they eat, i.e. our kitchen).

That is why we got very worried when one of our New York crew reported with alternating cold sweats and fever. He was hospitalised for several days before being released without a conclusive diagnosis, though the bets were on leptospirosis. Whatever it was, it involved non-benevolent bacteria since antibiotics seemed to have mended him. He wasn’t the only one. Three other crew members were hospitalised with a range of symptoms without a precise diagnosis – Malaria? Stomach bug? Leptospirosis? Fatigue? Amazonian poison ivy? Eventually, everyone came out alright, but this sort of thing sucks out a lot of energy.

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How do I protect myself?

So insurance is a good idea. For everything you can possibly think of and a few you can’t. Also, if you have a friend who is a doctor, specifically a doctor who is willing to show up in the jungle for no meaningful compensation, on his way loot a Western hospital for emergency medical supplies, dispense antibiotics on a daily basis to fight off potentially deadly diseases, dispense advice on psychoactive substances and keep track of the crew’s laundry too, we definitely recommend you take him or her along. Probably you should consider paying for the airfare.

Clearly, a shoot involves the disruption of a pre-existing ecology, and therefore also an opportunity for the rise of a new one. Here is how the jungle co-evolved with us. Crew member A feared rats, B feared spiders, C feared bats, D feared snakes, E hated frogs. Rats attacked A. B woke up every night with tarantulas crawling above her mosquito net. A bat landed, wings sprawled, on C’s face. Snakes crossed in front of D on the first night and the last. E came back from the bathroom in the middle of the night to discover her bed covered in blood, the blood of a pregnant frog, crushed somehow on her sheets. That is what the jungle does to you. It is its way of making you a part of it. If it works, you won’t have your fears anymore. But it doesn’t work for everyone. So you have to be ready to book a hotel in the nearest city where they also serve beer.

The jungle hides things too. It hides guerrillas, drug dealers and water buffaloes. You don’t want to bump into the last two, especially if you have lots of camera gear. Since no roads lead from the capital into Iquitos, our equipment, including a generator, was shipped up the Ucayali river on a barge, on two trucks with four armed men. It was all supposed to arrive at the site four days before the start of the shoot. The camera came in with the camera crew on a plane from Lima, and the lenses, we brought with us from New York. Everyone was beginning to stream in. The Ayahuasca center in the jungle was rising to that pre-shoot hum, everyone flipping through the schedule, waiting for the first call to ‘action’. Except we had no tripods, no lights, no generator, no gear. It was all on a couple of trucks on a barge somewhere on the river.

Word from the transport company was that the river marine had stopped all traffic for large boats because the river was too low. We had to wait for the levels to rise. The shoot wisely had been planned for the non-rainy season, but we had never accounted for this contingency. We waited another day. For rain. And another. Still nothing. The good secular crew from the city was about to ask the Shipibo shamans to do a rain ceremony. The local producers finally went around the barge company to contact the truck drivers who were on the boat, waiting to be released. Apparently, there was no water level problem. The problem was that the barge had been hijacked along the way by smugglers and a bunch of the trucks had been stuffed with cocaine. The marine had gotten whiff of it and impounded the barge. Thankfully, we didn’t need to wait for the rain, but we hadn’t planned for this contingency either.

We began the first couple of days of the shoot without proper gear (if you buy some amazing inexpensive light weight battery-operated LED fresnels – I say Fiilex – they can save your ass in such situations, as well as other ones throughout the shoot). On day 3, we heard that the marine had released the barge and our trucks with it. It was scheduled to dock into a neighbouring port the next evening. To gain a day, our Peruvian partners, who felt that the jungle had cursed the shoot, sent out the single production truck to meet the boat in Nauta, one port down river from Iquitos. This way we could start day five with proper gear.

Our commando team left the centre at the end of the shoot day, boarded the barge at midnight armed with flashlights, swiftly unloaded the crucial gear and was back on the road by 1:25. That road is the only one leading out of Iquitos. And, 100 some kilometers later, ends in Nauta, a closed circuit. It is also, mile for mile, dollar for dollar, the most expensive road constructed to date in the world. At 2:00, half way between the port of Nauta and the centre, a big grey water buffalo began to cross that expensive, paved, asphalt road. Jungle lined both sides and the moon was nowhere to be seen. There were no white lines dividing the road. It was all one indistinct greyscape into which the truck moved quietly until it hit the water buffalo smack in the ribs. The buffalo mooed (or whatever sound buffaloes make) and walked off into the jungle. The truck crumpled on its axles and we lost it for the duration. It was a big buffalo. No humans were hurt, but the lesson was that it is not a good idea to have a tired crew commandeer a drug-smuggled barge and drive back through the jungle at 2:00 in the morning.

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The panacea for all modern ills?

One last thing. Ayahuasca. You’ve probably heard of it. Its main job is to teach you lessons. It’s a teacher plant, a vine that grows in the Amazon. It gives its name to a hallucinogenic or medicinal brew that has made its way out of the Amazon into the rest of the world, including Brooklyn. And Moscow. And Paris, London, Rome, Cairo, probably Shanghai too. It’s everywhere, even in the New York Times so you can easily find out about it. But it’s not so much that Ayahuasca has made its way out; it’s that this is just another way the jungle is taking over again.

That may sound optimistic, of course, because the jungle is also under deep threat.

The lungs and the roots of our biosphere, the jungle is truly powerful and along with said biosphere may well find a way to survive our best efforts to destroy it for instrumental purposes. But we can’t underestimate these other equally powerful forces out there, with their own networks and flows and ecologies – the ecologies of capital and consumption. Some loggers in the region obviously do turn a profit, but these are always subject to market fluctuations; to hedge their bets, then, they often also do double duty as fronts for cocaine smuggling. They stuff bags of coke into the tree trunks and ship them off. Effectively, they hollow out the amazon to pack it with cocaine for consumption in Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

Peru has now surpassed Colombia as the leading exporter of cocaine. On top of that, there are the oil and gold companies, and waste management companies. If the loggers and timber companies are cutting down trees to make yachts and mansions and paper products in the big global metropoles, the waste companies are buying cheap land in order to dump toxic waste brought back from those very metropoles, and the oil and gold companies are there doing what they generally do best, making a big irredeemable toxic mess.

These are just a few things you should know if you want to shoot in the jungle. And, yes, don’t forget the bug spray…

Click here for our review of Icaros: A Vision.

Nevermind Wes Craven: the hills are not the place where you are most vulnerable. Find out more and learn some very useful tips from those who passionately embraced the challenge in the Peruvian Amazon. DMovies held three screenings of Icaros: A Vision in London between July 5th and 7th.

Wonderstruck

Posted on by victorfraga

Every single frame of this movie borders perfection. Every angle has been carefully studied, every light carefully tested and every prop carefully placed. You wouldn’t expect any less from the director of Carol (2015), which was voted the best LGBT movie of all times just last year, would you? If you liked Carol (which like me, you probably did), you will probably like Wonderstruck. Yet you won’t be wonderstruck. The movie might make you smile, but that’s about it. While extremely beautiful and elegant, Todd Hayne’s latest is also a little too convoluted for its own sake.

Wonderstruck is a highly ambitious and complex endeavour. It blends many layers: reality, memories, imagination and images of a film within a film. Plus it tells two stories: a boy in 1977 and a girl in 1927. Plus some of the characters are deaf, and the sounds effects don’t always match the visuals. Plus photographs, drawings, stuffed animals, dolls and a giant diorama are an integral part of the story. Plus these are often juxtaposed. Phew! Can you think of any further narratives devices and layers that we could throw in?

Ben (Oakes Fegley) lives in Minnesota, and he has recently lost his hearing due to a freak lightning accident. He flees to New York in search of his parents. Fifty years earlier, Rose (Millicent Simmonds), who’s also deaf and from Minnesotta, runs away from home with the same destination. One million puzzle pieces slowly come together until the two narrative strands inevitably and predictably meet. The problem is that you might be a little bored by the time it does so. Or even a little confused by the myriad of narrative devices, tricks, characters plus a couple of red herrings (or are they just loose ends in this enormous cinematic ball of yarn?).

A great chunk of the film is without dialogue, and there are many references to silent cinema. Haynes sees a strange connection between silent era and hearing disability, which I fail to grasp (as with many other elements of the film). And obsession with New York (which extends from Carol) renders the whole experience somewhat manneristic.

Wonderstruck attempts to blend a multilayered narrative with a puerile and dreamlike language, but the result is a bit clumsy. The film does have gentle and touching moments, but overall it’s not profoundly moving. You might leave the theatre asking yourself: “so what???”

The movie is scripted by Brian Selznick from his own novel written in 2011. And there’s Julianne in a double role. In fact, a lot of things are double in this highly ambitious and self-righteous piece of fiction. Using the majestic ‘Also Sprach Zaratrustra’ (the song from Kubrik’s 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey) to close your film is a gesture of extreme conceitedness.

Wonderstruck showed in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was been well-received and also when this piece was originally written. Out in cinemas on April 6th (2018), and available for digital streaming on August 6th (2018).

Loveless (Nelyubov)

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Mother Russia has failed her children. It has neglected and relegated them to a life without hope and love. The latest movie by Andrey Zvyagintsev, possibly the biggest exponent in Russia cinema right now, is a bleak allegory of life in Russia. People carry on with their existences in a robotic and dehumanised fashion, without any regard for their neighbours, family and other citizens. Not even their own offspring. Yet, who’s to blame them? They are too busy searching for a purpose and a solution for their very own loveless predicament.

Zhenya (Mariana Spivak) is estranged from her husband Boris (Alexey Rozin), and they are now seeking a divorce. She’s very busy with her newly-found wealthy affair, while he is catering for his heavily pregnant new girlfriend. Their son Alexey (Matvey Novikov) feels entirely ignored, and his lack of friends and anhedonic life are obviously a reflection of the no-love and attention that he receives from his parents. The situation is remarkably similar to the Angela’s in Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette (1976), who blames her disability on her parents ,who are too busy with their respective lovers. The difference is that the German girl creates a trap for her folks, while the Russian boy simply vanishes without leaving a trace.

Some of the moments in the film will leave you astonished. The fear on Alexey’s face hiding behind the bathroom door while Zhenya henpecks and abuses her husband would make Edvard Munch jealous. And Zhenya’s description of motherhood and hate for her own son is shocking. She despises him for nearly cleaving her in twain at birth, and she simply cannot stand his very sight.

It is no exaggeration to claim that Loveless is a metaphor of a failed Mother Russia. Andrey Zvyagintsev has dotted the film with political reports coming from the radio, conveniently reminding viewers that our private life is an extension of the public sphere. This is a film about the failure of the traditional nuclear family, and Russia’s failure to accept such changes. Divorce can lead to joblessness. Gay marriage can… well, let’s not even go there (Zvyagintsev didn’t).

The Russian state is also collapsing. There’s talk of social apocalypse. Boris and Zhenya have to deal with a incompetent police unprepared to support them in their search for their son. The subject of failed government institutions is a recurring theme in Zvyagintsev’s films, particularly in the superb Leviathan (2014).

Loveless is a gripping and disturbing film, but it’s not a perfect one. It lacks the lyrical excellence of Leviathan, and it feels a little too long at 120 minutes. The second half of the film doesn’t have the emotional depth of the first half, focusing too much on the search efforts to locate Alexey. On the other hand, the ending of the film is very powerful, and it will leave a bitter taste of ambiguity in your mouth. Fassbinder ended Chinese Roulette with a gunshot, without revealing who the victim was. Zvyagintsev wraps up Loveless with a scream, but I can’t reveal what the ambiguous event is without spoiling the film. You will just have to wait a few months when the film comes to a cinema near you and see.

The Russian film title Нелюбов is a made-up word meaning “no-love”, just like Serge Gainsbourg’s song L’Anamour (also a made-up word meaning “no-love”). Perhaps the French and the Russian Soul have more in common than previously thought.

The movie probably deserves a higher rating, as this is a dirty film guaranteed to haunt you for a long time. The problem is that Andrey Zvyagintsev set the bar so high with Leviathan, that I felt compelled to give Loveless a lower mark. This is one of the problems with being a film genius!

Loveless showed at the last Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It then won the BFI London Film festival in October. It is out in UK cinemas on February 9th (2018) and on all major VoD platforms in June.

The Red Turtle (La Tortue Rouge)

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From the get-go, this is not your usual 2D animated film. The Red Turtle is slow-paced, has no dialogue and is certainly not aimed at children. Yet there’s nothing here you wouldn’t want kids to see, as its PG certificate testifies. Whether young minds would be spellbound or bored I wouldn’t like to say. Nor is it Studio Ghibli’s usual home-grown, Japanese fare being a French-Belgian production by a Dutch director based in London. Nor does it start off where you might expect: a man adrift in a powerful, stormy grey sea separated by some distance from his overturned, small boat. There is no indication of how he got there, there are no flashbacks later on to show us what happened before that. Rather, the character reaches dry land and must survive there alone feeding on crabs and seagulls.

Understandably, the man builds a raft out of bamboo to escape, but out at sea his attempts are thwarted and he ends up back on the island. Somehow a woman appears on the island. They have a son and the son grows to be a man and leaves the island. The couple grow old. If the woman’s appearance sounds somewhat unbelievable, it makes sense within the narrative. Without wishing to reveal any story spoilers, let’s just say that, one, a red turtle and indeed a whole bale of turtles are involved and, two, the myth of the selkie (a sea creature that can turn into a woman) is invoked.

The story functions as an effective fable about adulthood and life. Michaël Dudok De Wit and his team brilliantly develop the character of the man through the various challenges he must face. For example, one early scene has him slip down a rock face to become unexpectedly trapped in a deep pool of water enclosed by sheer rock on all sides; he must find a way out or perish. When his small son later experiences the same predicament, the viewer wondering how this might play out recalls the father’s earlier experience as well as the mysterious, magical nature of the mother.

The film understands which details it needs to emphasise and when to emphasise them. The initial arrival on the island has the wind blowing through the rippling bamboo forest bordering the beach while the clouds move slowly, almost imperceptibly across the sky to enforce the sense of stranded isolation. These minutiae are abandoned later on by which time we have completely accepted the world of the island as real. Towards the end the island is hit by a terrifying tsunami which decimates the forest, as devastating a sequence as the storm which opens the picture.

Scuttling crabs provide lighe relief while an extraordinary dream sequence has the protagonist fly along the length of a mysterious jetty on the island. Yet the overall tale has a grit to it which plays against the overall mythical feel, grounding its characters in another world that looks and feels utterly tangible. The human experience of arriving in adulthood alone, reaching out and propagating the species runs very deep. That experience is essentially what this extraordinary film is all about.

The film is a co-production between the Japan’s Studio Ghibli and France’s Wild Bunch. Click here for another deliciously dirty animation, this time a fully Japanese one.

The Red Turtle was out in the UK in May, when this piece was originally written. It was made available on DVD and Blu-ray on September 25th.

The top 10 dirtiest separated at birth in film!

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Along our 15 months of existence, DMovies has come across some of the most audacious, thought-provoking and dirtiest movies being made in all corners of the planet. We have visited 19 festivals, as well as written nearly 500 reviews, articles and dirty profiles. So it’s only natural that we identified some long-lost twins along our short yet very intense journey, often with the help of our enthusiastic readers on Twitter. Of course most of these people would rather forget about estranged siblings.

That’s why we decided to dig up the dirt from under family tree of the some of the most recognisable faces in the world of cinema, thereby revealing some of the strangest fraternal relations conceivable. For example, did you know that Nigel Farage has a twin in cinema, and that he could be about to star in a brand new movie? Did you know that fox-hunting supporter Theresa May has a sister that likes killing puppies? And what about the “late” Rowan Atkinson, and the old Frankenstein Herman Munster? You’d never guess where their siblings are now!

So read on find out more about how some of the prettiest and the ugliest faces in cinema relate to people everywhere!

Our first entry is Cate Blanchett playing a homeless man in Manifesto (Julian Rosefeldt, 2016). As soon as we published our review earlier this year from Sundance, we almost instantly received a barrage of tweets pointing to her long-lost twin Ian Beale. He is pictured here in British soap Eastenders, also playing a homeless person.

The year of 2016 was horrific. There was a coup d’état in Brazil, the Brexit debacle in the UK and an extremely dangerous pussy-grabber was elected president of the US. We soon noticed his uncanny resemblance with Hannibal Lecter. So we investigated his documents and to our surprise… they were indeed born in the same year and in the same place. If you are brave enough, click here in order to meet Donald Trump’s extended family!

This is probably the least secretive relation on our list. By now, the entire world has probably realised that Michael Fassbender and Christopher Plummer are identical twins. We can only assume that they froze Fassbender’s egg for a few decades, which would explain the age gap between the two actors!

Not even the extreme make-up can conceal it. The former UKIP leader Nigel Farage has a twin in cinema: the star of the original It (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1990). He will probably deny this even given the irrefutable piece of evidence above (well, the man is very good at spin and covering up the truth, we must recognise it). A remake of It will be released this year by Andres Muschietti, but we are not entirely sure whether the role has been given to the controversial politician’s relative.

Geoffrey Rush looks a lot like Einstein, particularly when his hair is disheveled. So it’s no wonder the Australian actor was cast to play the German scientist in the TV series Genius. But Rush has a much closer relative: his identical twin is the late Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. He has even landed the lead role in Alberto’s upcoming biopic The Final Portrait (Stanley Tucci), which DMovies saw earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival.

This one was spotted by one of our followers on Twitter, who also has a very sharp eye for detail and bizarre resemblances. Who would’ve thought that the American heartthrob Humphrey Bogart and the controversial Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt came from the some womb?

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Cinema and politics do mix. And here’s a testament of it: the former US Secretary of State John Kerry and the 5th Earl of Shroudshire Herman Munster from Germany are undeniably related. We just need to find out where they were born and who was it that crossed the pond!

These two didn’t need to cross the pond, but just the Channel instead. Rowan Atkinson (Mr Bean), who fell victim to a death hoax after it was claimed he had died in a car crash earlier this year, and the former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero obviously share the same DNA.

Cruella de Vil and Theresa May were tragically separated at birth, even if the reason for the split remains unknown. Not only to do they share the same facial features, expression and hair, but the two women also nurture a love for killing canines. The only difference is that May goes for foxes, while de Vil goes for Dalmatians.

Well, well, well. Ok, we’ve cheated. These two aren’t twins. They are just siblings instead. June Cowell, who plays the demonic girl in Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960) is INDEED the sister of the equally evil reality television judge Simon Cowell. Sometimes reality is scarier than fiction!!!

Detour

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Opening with a lengthy, single locked off camera shot title sequence of a woman pole dancing, this then switches to law student Harper (Tye Sheridan) visiting his comatose mother in hospital. He’s convinced his stepfather is cheating on her using out of town business trips as a cover. Hitting a bar to drown his sorrows, he overhears a conversation in which Johnny Ray (Emory Cohen) explains how his girlfriend Cherry shot a man who cut her face. Johnny Ray berates Harper for eavesdropping and drags him to the pole dancing joint where Cherry works and whisky gets Harper talking.

Brief echoes of Strangers On A Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951) are played up in the film’s trailer (at the bottom of this review) as Johnny Ray offers to take care of his stepdad at a price. But Johnny Ray has a different deal in mind: he wants Harper to accompany him on a shady, out of town journey to Vegas. He refuses to introduce Harper to Cherry (Bel Powley) when she approaches the table.

Next morning, the hungover Harper answers his door to find Johnny Ray, with Cherry in tow, calling to pick him up. The screen splits into two images, one for each man. Will Harper go with Johnny Ray or retreat to the safety of his house and shut the door behind him? The second split screen image cuts to Harper. In one image, he goes, in the other he stays. Thereafter, two parallel narratives follow what happens to him in both cases. Where he goes, it’s a cross country drive into hell featuring a roadside encounter with a suspicious state trooper (Gbenga Akinnagbe) that goes bad and, in a nod to Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), a visit to a dubious friend of Johnny Ray’s named Frank (John Lynch). Where he stays, the antagonism between him and his stepfather Vincent (Stephen Moyer) will escalate into murderous mayhem involving a kitchen knife, recalling films by not only Hitchcock but also Brian De Palma. The film also references Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945) with its bleak narrative of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The movie develops into a split narrative, which follows a character’s life in more than one direction after a decisive incident – similar to Blind Chance (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1987), Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998) or Sliding Doors (Peter Howitt, 1998). But while his film is crammed with cinematic references, Bristol-born writer-director Christopher Smith (Triangle, 2009; Black Death, 2010) makes the territory very much his own and has a lot of fun both creating memorable characters and playing around with the narrative form(s) in which he places them. At the centre is the concept of the decision which changes things – and of how things might have worked out if a different decision was made. It’s this concept for which Smith so brilliantly utilises split screen, to emphasise the moment of the decision.

But there are other, dirtier pleasures here too. The plot/s is/are a mix of sleaze, manipulation, deceit, threat, abduction, violence, murder and more. It’s a genre-busting crime movie par excellence, switching between personal crime between family members in the one narrative strand and professional crime between cops and robbers in the other. For good measure, Harper’s best mate Paul (Jared Abrahamson) spends his time doing drugs or consuming internet porn, rendering him rather less helpful to Harper than he might otherwise have been. (There’s the film’s main “if only” theme again.) This thoroughly satisfying little picture even has the wit to throw in an hilarious outtake which adds another minor element to the overall package as the final credits roll.

Detour was out in UK cinemas in May, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on DVD and VoD on July 24th.

Spaceship

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This is a gentle, warm and soothing movie, some sort of journey into the dreamy world of a teenage girl. There are nuclear rainbows, unicorns and giant babies flying around. And everything is colourful: from the blue dyed hair of a friend to the clothes, the walls and lights beaming from the sky. Welcome to the strangely charming world of the cyber-goth Lucidia, played here by the beautiful Alexa Davies.

There’s also sadness and mourning infused in all the bright colours and lights. The teenager lost her mother seven years earlier in a swimming pool accident, although it’s never entirely clear what really happened. Her father Gabriel (Antti Reini) is still struggling to move on, and he remains partly alienated from his daughter. He often makes utterances and speaks to himself in Finnish, emphasising his estrangement from those surrounding him. When Lucidia fakes her own abduction by aliens, he is forced to engage with her exotic friends obsessed with mythical creatures and outer space action.

Spaceship is narrated from multiple perspectives, and the story isn’t entirely linear. It’s willfully disjointed, like the mind of the highly imaginative teen. The fast editing, fragmented dialogues and kaleidoscopic montage contribute to a strange feeling of alienation. Conversations about the limits of reality and illusion serve to confirm that not everything in the film is quite what it seems. Both adults and teenagers are searching for a greater purpose, and they are unable to relate to each other along their journey.

Supported by an indie soundtrack from lesser-known artists, Spaceship is overall a pleasant experience. It feels a little bit like a film made for a music album by Saint Etienne: essentially British, fun, easy digestible and calming. It also feels very feminine in its sensitivity and abstractness, despite being directed by a man (Alex Taylor). But not everything is perfect. The manneristic aesthetics subdue the storyline. There’s a very interesting twist in the end, and yet that gets a little diluted in the incandescent lights, fluorescent paint and luminescent clothes. Sometimes it feels you are walking inside the Cyberdog store in Camden instead of watching a film.

This is not the only recent British film about difficulties that different generations have to communicate. The superb The Levelling (Hope Dickson Leach, 2017) also deals with the topic, if from a much less abstract and dreamy perspective.

Spaceship was out in cinemas in May, and it was made available on all major VoD platforms on July 10th.

The Secret Scripture

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Does a satisfying ending have to include peace and happiness? Can a story stun audiences by embracing inner tragedy? These are some of the questions raised by Jim Sheridan’s The Secret Scripture. The Irish director’s career is dotted with major achievements such as My Left Foot (1989), The Field (1990) and In the Name of the Father (1993) and the expectations for this new feature film once again set in Ireland were high.

The Irish Catholic church has become infamous in history books for bigotry and repression, and The Secret Scripture creates an interesting portrait of the controversial institution. It follows the path established by movies such as Frear’s Philomena (2013) and Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002) – both expose abuse in the Catholic Church of Ireland – and adapts the original novel written by the Irish writer Sebastian Barry.

This is the story of Rose (portrayed by a stunning Rooney Mara and a superb Vanessa Redgrave) and is set in two different periods of the protagonist’s life. The first part depicts her lonely and solitary life in Belfast, where she lives with her sister. The troublesome priest Father Gaunt (Theo James) begins to develop an obsession with her. He is the key figure of the story, representing both the cruel manoeuvres of the clergy and the forbidden sexual desire. After a series of events, she is accused of murdering her own child while being locked in an asylum. The first part is thought-provoking and tense: the first 40 minutes develop a proper plot, but then as we move to the second half everything changes.

Move forward 25 years. We are still projected inside Rose’s troubled mind and feel her suffering, but the storytelling changes dramatically. The plot is desperately seeking a happy ending as well as an explanation for the events that the viewers have witnessed. All the dark and pleasantly unforeseen turns of the first timeline suddenly come undone. There is no room for ambiguity. After a series of unfortunate events, the universe has decided that Rose should be the protagonist of a series of fortunate coincidences.

This shift of tone doesn’t help the movie, instead making it implausible. Lots of storytellers always want to end on a positive and hopeful note, but sometimes it’s better to deliver a realistic and gripping outcome, instead of a far-fetched one. I not saying this film is not worth a shot, it just lacks audacity.

The Secret Scripture is out in the UK on Thursday, May 19th. You can watch the international film trailer right here:

The Levelling

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Beware: The Levelling is not comfortable viewing. Female British director Hope Dickson Leach shows a Great Britain that some people only became acquainted with after the EU referendum last year. Life in Britain can be hard, and people in the rural areas are often left on their own.

The movie is a profound family drama set in Somerset 2014 after the disastrous floods. Clover Catto (the excellent Ellie Kendrick) returns to the farm where she grew up after her brother died, in a possible suicide. She is not at all happy to come back home and she needs to get in touch again with her father Aubrey.

In terms of narrative and rhythm, the film is slow. The first dialogue is a little redundant; instead Leach could have jumped to the scene in which Clover arrives in the farm. That is the crucial point to the film and a microcosm of it too. The opening scene must grab the audience immediately. But once you survived the initial heavy atmosphere, you will be led to the territory The Levelling is. Don’t forget: it gets very muddy!

Grief sets tone of the film. No wonder a party turns into a funeral. The actors move into very dark places and there is no space for understanding. In real life, farmers are still waiting for the insurance to cover the losses caused by the floods. At least 1,135 homes were flooded in January 2014. Clover is trying to reconnect with her past and her parents, but the lack of dialogue is an issue. There is denial, silence and plenty of other difficulties in confronting emotional problems. It is devastating. The Levelling captures a real modern-day feeling that prevails in the region.

Compare, for example, what we are used to see on the tellie in shows such as ‘Grand Designs‘, with Kevin McCloud at Channel 4. From that point of view, moving to the countryside is a luxury, a ticket to a glamorous lifestyle. But a single look at Ellie can transform your magic dream into a nightmare: muddy wellies, stinky animals and no make-up (she still looks pretty, though).

In her debut, Leach looks at the British class system from a brand new angle. She is not talking about the working class that Ken Loach usually depicts. And she doesn’t gaze at the aristocracy either, something that the British period films do all the time. The Levelling investigates the middle class.

Don’t miss The Levelling, out in cinemas nationwide this weekend.

How many Black people can you leave waiting outside?

Posted on by victorfraga

Not even in his wildest dreams could actor, filmmaker and DJ Idris Elba have guessed the commotion that he was about to cause in Hackney. The artist has recently decided to step behind the camera in order to direct his first feature film (he had previously directed for television), a movie about the London Afro-Caribbean community in the 1980s. That’s about as much as we all know about the film. In order to help him, he hired Key Casting, a casting company that seems to have underestimated Elba’s popularity. The announcement invited everyone to come to an open audition set in a single day. At 16:00, when Key Casting was due to open its doors, there were already 500 people queuing up.

Apparently, all was going according to plan. There was no one controlling the queue, apart from two doormen. No one handed out queue numbers. And the two ushers were confident everyone would get in, as they had plenty of time – the casting process would end at 21:00. Waiting was supposed to be a fun, after all.

Black faces were to be seen everywhere in the queue.

Express yourself

And indeed it was fun. Almost everyone in the line was Black. I saw two Japanese women, a White couple and maybe three more Whites close to me. There was a tap dancer who entertained us for two hours. There was also a singer/cheerleader who talked to passers-by. There were people greeting each other as if they hadn’t met in ages. And some of the costumes were fabulous: there was a guy dressed up like a Soul Train character, and another one as Eddie Murphy in Coming to America (John Landis, 1988).

Black people are hungry for representation in film, it soon became clear to me. They want to be heard, they want to be seen, they want to tell their stories. And they have Idris Elba as a role model. Last year, he made it to the Time’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Suliman Suliman, an aspiring actor, told me that he has been waiting for 50 minutes. “I just went to the back of the line. There wasn’t anyone of the company [Key Casting] to inform me of what to do”.

Dionne Wright, an adolescent therapist, got in. She arrived at 17:00 (I arrived at 16:10 and I didn’t get in). “We just came through this way”, she said pointing to some sort of secondary queue next to the entrance. “My partner works at the casting company. But we don’t know when the film is going to be shot”.

Maysa (left) and the lucky Dionne are pictured together.

The pearly gates are shut

After two hours queuing up, we realised that no one was moving. Some people – among them Whites – were blocking the entrance. The two doormen asked people to step back, but that was nigh on impossible. Some people were filming the queue. Then a few people were cherry-picked to go inside. Marie-Felie, a comptroller in an oil and gas company, was one of the lucky few. “I don’t know why I was chosen. Maybe because I sent them an email, but I didn’t receive an answer. Inside they were very gentle. They took my details, they took my measures and my picture. But I know nothing about the film”.

People at the front of the queue then began pushing and trying to force their way in, and chaos quickly ensued. The police were called and they shut down the entrance at around 19:00, two hours prior to the scheduled closing time.

The police also showed up, but they surely weren’t joining the audition.

This whole experience is a testament that there are few opportunities for Black people in British cinema. There is a huge gap between offer and demand, hence the tumult and the anger that I witnessed. We need more black stories in cinema. It’s not right to call for an “open audience” and then shut down the doors prematurely with large crowds left outside. Black people need a large gate into the film industry, not a very small door.

Alien: Covenant

Posted on by victorfraga

This is Ridley Scott’s third Alien movie as director. His second Alien (1979) prequel or first Prometheus (2012) sequel – take your pick – is more like the former than the latter. On the one hand, its sci-fi ideas are more coherent and in line with other Alien franchise outings; on the other, unlike Prometheus it doesn’t periodically throw out lots of new ideas mining some of Alien‘s unexplained elements. Yet it does refer back to Prometheus.

In what is perhaps its most epic sequence, two spaceships dance in flight watched by a crowd of bald humanoids last glimpsed at the opening of Prometheus while a deadly virus is released into the atmosphere.

Before that sequence, there’s a whole civilisation of charred or petrified bodies amidst otherworldly, ancient classical architecture which suggests Scott is revisiting the Roman world of Gladiator (2000) or toying in his head with a film about Vesuvius erupting onto Pompeii. Again, take your pick.

The aliens come in two main forms – a new one which is small, white and possesses a tail poised like that of a scorpion and the familiar xenomorph of earlier franchise entries. The special effects – creatures, spaceships and more – are top notch, which is a definite improvement on Alien where one or two effects scenes never quite worked.

The whole endeavour starts off promisingly enough in a scene where the android David (from Prometheus and again played by Michael Fassbender) talks with his corporate human creator in a futuristic looking balcony room. This is paid off later when David crops up having piloted a spaceship to the planet to which the spaceship Covenant and its crew – which includes the latest generation android Walter (Fassbender again) – are attracted by a mysterious distress call.

You can probably see where this latter plot strand is going and that is at once the strength of the film and its weakness: it’s a rehash of Alien. So on one level it will deliver what everyone wants and do well at the box office but on another the further into the proceedings you get, the more it feels like it’s playing it safe. That said, it occasionally throws the unexpected into the mix – the two androids kissing one another, for example.

As in the original, there’s much more metaphorical (plus towards the end actual representation of) sex. The human crew are all couples. Some of the metaphorical material is pilfered wholesale from Alien – dark passageways looking like overhead backbone and rib cages, people running breathlessly through claustrophobic spaceship corridors moving in and exhibiting facial expressions suggestive of sexual ecstasy. And the final reel posits a couple indulging in foreplay in a shower before they’re attacked and penetrated by a third party in the form of a malevolent xenomorph.

However, for all its faults Prometheus took a lot more risks, even down to its title not including the word ‘Alien’. It could so easily have been called Alien: Prometheus. If you take Alien: Covenant as a none-too-deep sci-fi horror flick, it works fine with shocks, scares and twists in all the right places but if you’re expecting another Prometheus expanding the franchise’s mythology or another Alien expanding its sexual symbolism in numerous weird and wonderful directions you’ll be largely disappointed. Masterwork or wasted opportunity? Again, take your pick.

Alien: Covenant was out in UK cinemas in May, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on iTunes on September 4th. On Disney + UK on Friday, March 18th. Also available on other platforms.