Month: July 2018

Rondo

Posted on by victorfraga

The emblematic French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said: “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.” After watching Rondo, I no longer think this is true. This is a movie that is faithful to Godard’s maxim, thinking that all it needs to be a success is to have its main protagonist wield a machine gun in her underpants. Godard probably only said that because it sounded controversial and cool. The problem with Rondo is that director Drew Barnhardt took this phrase seriously and actually made a movie turning that quote to life. Lacking anything else in the form of plot, character development, acting ability or dialogue, Rondo’s juvenile construction will only satisfy the most rampant of gun fetishists.

Luke Sorge stars as Paul, a war veteran suffering from PTSD, which he medicates through drugs, drink and endless cigarettes. As a result of his addiction, he has lost his home, his money and even his will to live. He stays with his sister Jill (Brenna Otts), who recommends he sees a therapist. Played with lively charm by Gena Shaw, she is a heavily pregnant woman who recommends him to replace his many addictions with sex, even going so far as to give him a card to a mysterious party. With nothing else to lose, Paul heads over to a high-rise flat where he is quickly given graphic instructions as to what he and two other men can do while having sex with a rich man’s wife – anal sex, violence and spitting are not only allowed, but also encouraged. From there, Barnhardt tells an extremely bloody tale of sex and murder that has little to say and even less to show for it.

It’s hard to say what the movie wants to be about. Without giving Paul any real character traits, we cannot feel that he is an effective conduit for someone suffering for PTSD, even seeming completely bored by the prospect of sex as a means to alleviate his emotional state. His sister fares even worse, given almost no dialogue as a woman hellbent on doing right by her brother. Why she wants to help, we will never know. Ultimately, it’s a movie uninterested in situating its characters in situations with any context, managing to shoot almost entirely in two Denver apartments alone but without creating any memorable dialogue to show for it. At times, some subpar Tarantino-esque gangsters-but-also affectations are put in, but these feel almost weightless, just biding time until the next bloody murder or salacious sexual encounter. The movie exists almost entirely to shock, but there’s nothing shocking when there’s literally no reason to care.

All of these thematic problems may have been forgiven if the movie had been better made, but it suffers from a series of choices that are not only distracting but ultimately become downright annoying. The movie’s biggest issue lies with its soundtrack, which is not only at times literally incongruous with what is on screen, but has a generic, repetitive quality reminiscent of what plays over epic football montage videos on YouTube. In addition, copious voiceover is used, which although initially setting the scene quickly and effectively, becomes obtrusive when filling in for moments when characters could literally just talk to one another.

The best parts lie in the gory special effects and the quick-panning cinematography, which at times suggest what the movie could’ve been if it had been allowed to breathe. Yet even the best qualities are overcooked – such as a climactic bloodbath that seems to never end, and an endlessly moving camera that doesn’t let its characters space to actually act. Coming in at a brisk 85 minutes, these bizarre choices make it feel like a commercial for yet another movie, one where characters really talk to each other for more than 10 seconds and their decisions come with real moral weight. Rondo film has the girl and the gun for sure. But as she shoots that gun, nothing else comes out but empty spectacle.

Rondo premieres as part of Fantasia Film Festival, taking place in Montreal, Canada between July 12th and August 2nd.

The Escape

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tara (Gemma Arterton, also executive producer) is married to Mark (Dominic Cooper) with two small kids Teddy and Florrie (real-life siblings Teddy and Florrie Pender). He has a secure job and they’re living somewhere in a housing development in Gravesend, Kent. Her life consists of responding to his sexual advances, which no longer satisfy her the way they once did, getting him to work and the kids to school in the mornings, keeping the house tidy during the day and playing with the kids after school. She has her own car but doesn’t get out much except to do the household shopping. If her life ever possessed any significant meaning, it’s long lost in the humdrum of a housewife and mother’s everyday married routine.

Something needs to change, and judging by a pre-title scene where Arterton wakes up alone in a house with framed art prints on the wall and walks alone to a park, it’s about to do so. The first hour after that charts the gradually worsening situation of her relationship with her husband and kids, punctuated by a trip up to London and the purchase from the Southbank’s second hand book market of The Lady And The Unicorn, a tome about six medieval tapestries which hang in Paris and represent the five familiar senses and an unfamiliar sixth one which represents something like our moral judgement. Which is what the film is about: taking stock of one’s life and making any necessary changes if and where it seems less than satisfactory.

The remainder sees Arterton take off to Paris, visit the museum with the tapestries and get picked up for a one-night stand in her hotel room by charming French photographer Philippe (Jalil Lespert). She tells lies to redefine her identity, saying she works for a London commercial company and she’s not involved with anyone. When it turns out he has a wife and kids, she tells him what he did was wrong and turfs him out, which seems a little bit two faced to say the least given she’s done much the same to him. After that, will she be able to go back to her husband? The pre-credits scene, which also closes the film, suggests not.

The whole is light on dialogue and heavy on improvisation, especially in the family scenes with the two kids, with writer-director Savage opting for a fluid, handheld camera approach to capture the potential of open-ended performances. He’s helped by his decision to use a small crew which allows for great versatility in shooting. If it sometimes feels like not that much happens in its 105-minute running length, there’s an intensity to events as they unfold in the moment on the screen.

Long after viewing, most of the domestic scenes fade but the memories of the trip to Paris and the one-night stand remain, as will Cooper’s hurling her tapestry book across the kitchen in a moment of rage and Arterton’s losing her composure and swearing at her kids. The highly effective music by Anthony John and Alexandra Harwood cleverly adds a sense of longing in the domestic senses and a feeling of satisfaction when Arterton finally gets away. Ultimately, it’s a clever little film which, through a mixture of script prep, strong casting and improv, achieves its aims. So, worth seeing.

The Escape is out in the UK on Friday, August 3rd. It’s available on VoD from Monday, December 3rd.

Sicilian Ghost Story

Posted on by victorfraga

In an idyllic Sicilian village surrounded by verdant hills and forests, prepubescent teen Luna (Julia Jedlikowska) becomes infatuated with her classmate Giuseppe (Gaetano Fernandez). Shortly after their first kiss, Giuseppe mysteriously disappears from school. Luna is adamant that something is very wrong, and that the boy isn’t simply ill. She investigates and finds out that, in reality, Giuseppe has been kidnapped by the Mafia because his father is a well-known supergrass. She sets herself on a lonely quest to rescue the young boy whom she loves from the dangerous mafiosos.

Sicilian Ghost Story starts out as a straightforward teen romance, and then quickly morphs into a fantasy drama once the boy goes missing. As Luna seeks to find Giuseppe, the two directors blends reality, imagination and allegory. His “ghost” is often present, and the two teens seem to communicate telepathically. There’s also a mysterious lake with some sort of underwater gate that could lead to Giuseppe’s hiding place, where he’s being kept shackled and in captivity.

The Sicily portrayed here is lush and vibrant, and there is no poverty at sight. It’s a million miles away from the Sicily you will recognise from the films of Roberto Rossellini, or – more recently – in the superb Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018).

Based on a short story by Marco Mancassola, which on its turn reimagines a real-life event that took place in the 1990s, Sicilian Ghost Story is a film that takes a lot of poetical and artistic freedoms. But it also overdoes them. The last third of the movie has more endings than Lord of the Rings. It just keeps going around in circles before reaching the final closure (which is quite shocking and powerful). It overdoes the fog/haze machine and the ultra wide-angle lenses. I think the directors intended to make a sensory film with a dreamy soundtrack (that includes Sinéad O’Connor). The outcome is little tawdry instead.

The nature and mythological tropes are also overused. Luna draws a giant image of herself penetrating the woods. Giuseppe’s profile is seen on a door in front of a magical yellow light. Plus, the directors get carried away with the symbolism of the forces of nature, particularly water. The magical connection between the mysterious lake and an underground sauna in Luna’s house is a bit awkward. Ultimately, these representations feel insipid and colourless. Just like water. Plus there’s a Shakespearean device at the end that’s beyond clichéd. Guess what that could be? You guessed it right!

There are also other problems with what could be otherwise a fascinating movie. Some of the acting is quite stilted (particularly Luna’s formidable mother), and some of the secondary plots feel unfinished and redundant (Luna’s strange relationship to her mother, and her friends in school). All in all, this is a moving film with way too many filmic shortcomings.

Sicilian Ghost Story is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 3rd, and then on VoD on Monday August 6th.

Mad To Be Normal

Posted on by victorfraga

The psychiatrist RD Laing was one of the most radical – and controversial – voices of his generation. After completing his psychiatric training in the early 1950s, the Scotsman became a sharp critic of the medical wisdom of the time, namely that electroshock therapy and an emergent pharmaceutical market could provide long-term remedies to mental health conditions. In 1965, he began to use the historic East London building Kingsley Hall as a psychiatric community residence. People experiencing psychosis could live there as Laing trialled an existential model of psychiatry. Robert Mullan focuses on the Kingsley Hall period in his biopic Mad to be Normal (based on a series of interviews with Laing that he published in a 1995 collection). Sadly, rather than providing a radical account of one of modern medicine’s most interesting characters, the film quickly descends into a radically incoherent and boring mess.

Mad to be Normal opens vaguely ‘in the 1960s’ as Laing (David Tennant) gives a lecture to a packed-out hall of London intellectuals, among them academic Jim (Gabriel Byrne) and Columbia University psychology postgrad Angie Wood (Elizabeth Moss). Moments later, Laing and Wood end up having sex in the psychiatrist’s Kingsley Hall bed, thus establishing one of the film’s central (albeit fictionalised) relationships. The remainder of the plot jumps haphazardly between various episodes from 1965 to 1970, incorporating a trip to a New York psychiatric unit, visits to Laing’s estranged family in Glasgow, and various dinner parties. Every now and then, the narrative peers into Kingsley Hall to observe how residents such as Sydney Kotok (Michael Gambon) deal with Laing’s leftfield methods (e.g. exploring childhood trauma with the help of LSD).

The cast is brilliant and the period setting seems authentic, if somewhat contrived. Regrettably, the narrative is so bafflingly mixed-up that it does Laing an unforgivable disservice. The script is laughably didactic, to the point that characters literally re-describe scenes that have just occurred. The temporal pace is never really clear, nor is the nature of Laing’s career. Rather than focusing on his influences (notably Jean-Paul Sartre), his major works (The Divided Self, The Politics of Experience), or milestones in his intellectual trajectory (the Dialectics of Liberation Congress), we get poorly sketched out lip service – some Hare Krishna monks momentarily materialise; his books lay on a desk; a predictable scene with an American patient is confected from scraps of cod psychology.

In fact, Mad to be Normal has a significant issue with the truth. Laing operated alongside many other sympathetic psychiatrists and New Left intellectuals. There are documented case notes of his patients. He fathered 10 children from four women. Yet, very few of these characters are anywhere to be found in the film. Instead, there are two-dimensional creations like Angie Wood, who we are supposed to believe jumped into Laing’s bed for five years because the promise of being an older man’s sexual plaything was so much more appealing than finishing her studies. Even when Mullan tries to tell the truth – notably regarding Laing’s alcoholism and the death of his daughter Susan from leukaemia – he can’t help but caricature it or alter the dates, all in the name of melodrama.

This is a grand shame. Laing was a thought-provoking, flawed and fascinating man, yet he’s never been portrayed in his own feature film. For this first biopic to be so shockingly slipshod and uninteresting kills hope of a second chance. Perhaps Mullan sought to use his chaotic plot as a metaphor for Laing’s disordered thinking. It might have been more effective a decade ago, but in 2018, television shows such as Legion have pushed mental health and unreliable narrators far beyond what we see in Mullan’s biopic.

There’s a scene mid-way through Mad to be Normal where Laing intentionally smashes a vase and then asks another Kingsley Hall resident to glue it back together, as a means to distract him from his depression. The method is fictitious and nonsensical; the repaired vase looks careless and jagged around the edges. It’s the perfect metaphor for Mullan’s script, direction and production of what could have been a stunning film.

Mad to be Normal is available for digital streaming from Monday, August 13th.

Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero

Posted on by victorfraga

This looks like harmless, child-friendly fun for the whole family. Stubby was a stray mutt that witnessed horrific battles, saved lives and performed a multitude of heroic feats during WW1. Now his story has been turned into an adorable computer-animated film, voiced by Logan Lerman, Helena Bonham Carter and Gérard Depardieu. The film celebrates the incredible bond between man and his best friend, even in arduous conditions. What’s there not to love? Well, I do have a few reservations. Please allow me to unearth the dirty facets of this charming – and yet not entirely innocent – movie.

The titular mongrel was found on the grounds of Yale University in Connecticut in July 1917, where members of the 102nd Infantry were practicing for the imminent combat across the Atlantic. He almost immediately became their official mascot. Stubby (called such because of his stubby tail) served for 18 months and partook in 17 battles on the Western Front. He saved his regiment from surprise mustard gas attacks, found and comforted wounded soldiers, and even caught a German infiltrator in the trenches – all of these episodes are portrayed in the animation.

The film centres on young U.S. Army doughboy Robert Conroy (Logan Lerman), the first person to adopt Stubby. The story is narrated by his sister Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) – a peculiar way of inserting a female voice into a movie. Eventually, French poilu Gaston Baptiste (Gérard Depardieu) joins the Americans along their epic journey through hell, as they fight against the Germans near the French/German border.

The filmmakers opted not to give Stubby a human voice in order to keep the film as realistic as possible. Stubby barks and whines. His facial expressions and sounds will make even the coldest of hearts melt. Yet he does not talk. Stubby is not anthropomorphised, at least not in the physical sense.

Yet Stubby is anthropomorphised in the military sense. He is thoroughly obedient, boundless courageous and he will fight to the end without questioning the nature of the battle. In other words, he possesses all the qualities that a good soldier should have. He’s the epitome of indomitability and servitude, the core qualities of nationalism. In fact, there is no shortage of nationalistic signifiers in the movie: an enormous American flag taking up the whole the screen, an emphatic “God bless the United States of America”, “Vive Les États Unis”, a tub-thumping soundtrack, and so on.

There was one little detail in the film, perhaps irrelevant to most people, that caught my attention. Stubby does a hand salute (or rather a “paw salute”) upon request, demonstrating unwavering loyalty and obedience. Cute? Well, I happen to find such gesture very disturbing. It reminded me of those who teach their dog how to pray before they get a treat. Dogs don’t understand military protocol and religious doctrine. It’s us humans who push our credence and rules upon them in order to make our very own bizarre rituals more palatable and humanised.

I have a dog myself, a loving chihuahua called Lulu, and I understand that a pooch can connect us to our most profound human qualities. But I find it regrettable that we should use animals in order to make a military apparatus more attractive. War is war, and it’s ugly; it should never be sanitised and romanticised, particularly through the use of animals in a film made for children. I see the war bravery embodied by Stubby as propaganda for recruiting young soldiers, in a country that should instead give up its military belligerence.

Of course this is WW1, when the US had an entirely justifiable and recommendable role in the conflict. They indeed helped to save the world. In such context, it’s easy to justify a “good vs evil” narrative, thereby celebrating Americanness. The problem is that the world has changed enormously in the past 100 years, and it’s now Americans who perpetrate the majority of illegal wars and atrocities in the world. That’s why any war apologia and signifiers of nationalism must be taken with caution, particularly if coming from the US.

Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero “marches into cinemas” on Friday, August 10th.

The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales… (Le Grand Méchant Renard et Autres Contes…)

Posted on by victorfraga

Those nostalgic of the old times when cartoons were gingerly and lovingly hand-drawn are in for a treat. The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales… will take you back to the 1930s and 1940s, the golden age of the American animated series Looney Tunes. All infused with dirtylicious French countryside flavours. Except for the anthropomorphic animals, The Big Bad Fox has very little in common with the far more sophisticated British animation Chicken Run (Nick Park/ Peter Lord, 2000) and Pixar’s Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007). You are literally in for a journey back in time.

The drawings are extremely simple and puerile, and that’s what makes them so charming. At times, it looks like they were made by a child, and that a thick brush was used for colouring. Well, in reality all the drawings were computer generated, in a small team of just six animators (10 at peak times). The outcome is nevertheless very convincing, and you will feel transported to the good ol’ times of Bugs Bunny, the Tasmanian Devil and Wile E Coyote (from the “Beep Beep” cartoon). In fact, the titular protagonist looks a little bit like the latter, if a little more clumsy and benevolent.

It all begins in a theatre – with red curtains et al – where a group of various animals are preparing for a show. The Fox, who happens to be the host, announces that you’re about to witness an anthology of three short stories. They all take place in an animal farm somewhere in the French countryside. By “animal farm” we mean a farm run by animals!

The first episode is entitled “A Baby to Deliver”. A lazy stork pretends to be injured in order to delegate a baby delivery in Avignon to the farm animals: the clever and grouchy Pig, the careless Rabbit and the clumsy Duck. Along their journey, they will encounter enormous obstacles, including a hungry wolf and a mysterious animal from China.

In the second episode, entitled “The Big Bad Fox”, our host stars as the protagonist. He steals three chicken eggs, but eventually becomes attached to the three chicks, who take him for their mother. Meanwhile, the same hungry wolf from the first episode wants to eat the three chicks. Their real mother (a hen) is also desperately looking for her long-lost children, in the hope to create a real family.

The third episode is a little out-of-season, particularly in such a sultry and oppressive Summer. “We Must Save Christmas” follows the Rabbit and the Duck, who believe that they ruined Christmas after accidentally destroying a plastic Santa. The two animals go on a quest in order to fix the perceived disaster, and ensure that all children receive their gifts. The clever Pig tries to convince them otherwise, but they all end up locked up in the company of a pack of hapless dogs. Ultimately, fate takes an unexpected turn and they meet the real Santa, and the equilibrium is restored.

The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales… is in cinemas Friday, August 3rd. Avoid the dubbed version and seek the French original instead. Otherwise the whole experience might taste a little bit like marmite on brie. Unless, of course, you have a little bad fox who cannot read subtitles!

Cocote

Posted on by victorfraga

It’s not every day that you get the opportunity to look at life in the Dominican Republic so closely. Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias’s debut feature Cocote is a film about grief, injustice, religious fanaticism and revenge, and also a sneak peek into a part of the world rarely shown on film.

Alberto (Vicente Santos) works as a gardener for a wealthy family in Santo Domingo, the country’s capital. One day, he returns to his hometown in the countryside for his father’s burial. His old man was killed by a local policeman, beaten up “like a dog” in a savage attack. The calm Alberto – who remains mostly stoical in the face of tragedy – soon finds out that he has to attend nine days of Evangelical funereal cults. To top it all up, his family wants him to avenge his father’s murder.

The movie aesthetics are far from conventional. The images and the textures shift constantly. Black and white is contrasted against vibrant and tropical colours. The aspect ratio of the pictures changes for no apparent reason, a little bit à la Jean-Luc Godard. A sublime chiaroscuro is combined with a screechy music score, jump cuts and non-synchronised dialogues (characters are heard when they mouth isn’t even open), all in good ol’ Nouvelle Vague style.

The use of documentary-making devices is also conspicuous. Non-professionals local were utilised in the cult scenes, and much of the dialogue was improvised. There are also faux television reports, and the topics are often absurd. They include the news of a goat’s funeral, who locals believed to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. A delicious melange of fiction, documentary and mockumentary.

Overall, Cotote has an oneiric quality that dilutes and mitigates the tragedy depicted. The tragedy isn’t just death, but also the blind devotion to the Bible – which happens to be the only book on the mostly empty bookshelves. In this precarious society controlled by brutes, doctrine prevails above culture, and brawl above dialogue. This is very disturbing. You will feel the urge to help these people, but by not by giving them money. They need books instead.

The film title is Dominican slang for an animal’s neck, and here this has many connotations. It refers to how Alberto’s father was murdered, and also to the possibility that Alberto and other living Christians might also lose their head. “Hacer cocote” (“to make cocote”) also means to look forward to something. You will be surprised as to what Alberto and other locals are looking forward to in the end of the film!

All in all, Cocote is a impressive debut and also a landmark for Dominican cinema. It is out in cinemas on Friday, July 27th.

Peterloo

Posted on by victorfraga

Four years after the release of the commercially and critically acclaimed Mr Turner, a dirty biopic of the radical painter JMW Turner, Mike Leigh returns with yet another very British film set in the early 19th century. The difference is that instead of investigating the life of a revolutionary figure, this time Leigh decided to portray a (equally revolutionary) historical event: the Peterloo Massacre.

The film is being marketed as “an epic portrayal of the events surrounding the infamous 1819 Peterloo Massacre, where a peaceful pro-democracy rally at St Peter’s Field in Manchester turned into one of the bloodiest and most notorious episodes in British history. The Massacre saw British government forces charge into a crowd of over 60,000 that had gathered to demand political reform and protest against rising levels of poverty.” The Peterloo Massacre was a defining moment in British democracy which also played a significant role in the founding of The Guardian newspaper.

Judging by the trailer, an historical epic with a message of “people have the power” is on its way. The Amazon Studios and eOne production has convincing costumes and special effects, and a conventional period drama look. The cast includes Rory Kinnear, Maxine Peake and Neil Bell, yet super stars are absent, suggesting perhaps that Leigh wants to emphasise the message of collective action ahead of big names.

Peterloo is in cinemas in November.

Tracking Edith

Posted on by victorfraga

A ferris wheel. Silhouettes dancing through tunnels in Vienna. The effects of WW2 linger, corruption slipping through the cracks of public consciousness. If this sounds like British noir masterpiece The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), that’s intentional, as Peter Stephan Jungk’s new documentary Tracking Edith is all too aware of its resemblance to stories we have heard before.

Jungk, in this biography of his aunt, the KGB spy and street photographer Edith Tudor-Hart, attempts to consolidate these two sides of her life with the damage that she caused.

But is it a thriller? An inspirational story of a woman ahead of her time? There is a lack of tone that holds this film back from being more than a factual recounting of a life. Historians describe the KGB’s lack of ideology, so what then what did Edith stand for? Jungk’s closeness to the subject seems to conflicts with an illuminating story he wants to memorialise.

This isn’t helped by a lack of formal filmmaking. Among the large number of interviews, Jungk sometimes appears as interviewer, but sometimes they’re talking heads. It’s as though he can’t work out how to imprint his personality on the film, whether he needs to be present on screen to guide the story. This leads to a reliance, of course, on animated sequences. This is a reconstructive device so common as to be rote in the modern documentary. Here the animation is elementary and barely functional – the scenes have no character and rely on black and white to maneuvre their lack of development. Thematically, Jungk’s use of Edith’s photography is much more dramatic and illustrative of her personality.

Whenever we see Edith’s photographs there is a reminder of her apparatus, a hefty Rolleiflex shot front on. This is a fun motif, nodding to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 documentary Man With a Movie Camera (which gets a shout out along with some of the other early Soviet filmmakers). But a potentially fascinating early interview about her photographic style is ruined by the way it is presented on camera. The curator speaks directly about photographs which placed too far from the camera for the audience to parse details, and he presents the information to director rather than the camera, which takes away the impact as he isn’t telling us. Her photographs reminded me of the street photography Patrick Modiano describes in his triptych of novellas, Suspended Sentences. Those semi-autobiographical works interact the mysteries of the past with the uncertainty of the present. But Tracking Edith cannot pull of the same sophisticated inquiry.

Instead we have, unintentionally, a portrait of the modern middle class in Germany. In the psychologists, historians and authors, we see what became of Edith’s world. A shame that the personality of director is not strong or awake enough to interrogate this. Considering she’s his aunt, he never addresses his own relationship with her. ‘Every family has its secrets. Some are never revealed.’ These first lines of voice over establish the theme of the film as a voyage of personal discovery. Yet his brief interactions with his family are as though with strangers. Polite, ineffectual. We never really find out what director is looking for. And so, we too find nothing.

Tracking Edith is in cinemas Friday, July 27th.

The key talking points from John Dahl’s Rounders

Posted on by victorfraga

Director John Dahl’s 1998 exploration of the private, underground clubs dedicated to high-stakes poker in New York City captured the imagination of poker fans around the world. Many of today’s professional poker stars cited Rounders as one of the main reasons they got into the game, with Dahl’s depiction of the age-old card game proving a cult hit, scooping almost $23 million at the box office. A “rounder” is someone that ventures from city to city in search of high-stakes poker games, and this perfectly describes the film’s two central characters, Mike McDermott (Matt Damon, pictured below) and Lester “Worm” Murphy (Edward Norton).

In my humble opinion, Rounders is a film that’s up there with some of the dirtiest films in recent memory. It excites and makes you empathise with Mike McDermott in equal measure. It contains moments of high drama, due mostly to the sterling acting from John Malkovich, who plays Russian mobster Teddy “KGB.” It also contains moments of hilarity that are up there with some of the funniest themed scenes in film. However, if you delve even deeper, you can get a sense of several common themes that run through the heart of this gritty movie.

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You have to play the hand you’re dealt (in life and on the table)

It’s one of the most popular taglines from Rounders, and it is somewhat apt considering Mike is left having to clean up Worm’s mess created by burying his head in the sand regarding his debts to Teddy “KGB.” Mike is proactive in trying to clear Worm’s debt by setting up a host of home games around New York City to try and help him win back some money to pay off the debts built up prior to Worm’s time in jail. Mike’s stance is admirable, as he puts everything on the line — his law degree and his relationship with girlfriend Jo (Gretchen Mol) — to resolve his old friend’s financial situation.

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The importance of doing what makes you happy

Of course, it helped Worm’s cause that Mike enjoyed the buzz of playing poker more than anything else in life. Mike had always dreamed of having a bankroll that he could take to Las Vegas to live and play professionally and win the World Series of Poker Main Event. Despite harboring those aspirations, Mike signed up to law school and attempted to lead a normal life by studying and holding down a steady relationship, but there was still a void in Mike’s life that needed filling. In helping out Worm in his hour of need, Mike also helped himself to feel alive again and to realize the importance of doing what makes him happy — taking his “three stacks of high society” to Las Vegas and quitting law school.

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On the flip side: the fragility of relationships

Mike’s relationships in the film are quite fragile and volatile, both with his male and female friends. His friendship with also Worm is turbulent, particularly when he finds out Worm has been playing poker on Mike’s credit behind his back. It makes him question the legitimacy of their friendship, but the pair’s shared thirst for thrills at the poker table is what keeps their relationship together by a thread. Mike’s love interest, Jo, had been a calming influence on Mike since packing up poker and focusing on his law degree. However, by not doing what made him happy, Mike quickly began to resent Jo and his law pursuits, resulting in his decision to break Jo’s heart and leave New York for Sin City.

Extinction (Extinção)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Conversations. In Russian. At border checkpoints between countries in the former Soviet Union. And at places in between. Monuments, striking architecture. Much less arresting locations, too. Some of these conversations are accompanied by black and white footage. Very occasionally, someone’s lips move and you see and hear them speaking at the same time, but most of the time, you don’t. Other conversations are accompanied by blank, dark blue footage, nothing but the uniform colour on the screen (unless you count the white, English language subtitles), just people talking on the soundtrack. Monologues discussing various aspects of modern, Russian history and the ethnic diversity of the countries bordering it also appear on the soundtrack along with unsettling music ranging from avantgarde orchestral to drone.

Kolja comes from Transnistria, formerly part of the Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic (now a self-proclaimed republic, not recognised by any other countries). He has a passport, so he’s travelling, the interpreter on a film crew making a film about Russia and borders and ethnicity. It might be this film or it might be a film we never see. For much of the time we see him driving to or from Eastern Bloc border checkpoints or being questioned by officials in rooms about his nationality and loyalty. Although it clearly has its own identity, with which he identifies, Transnistria doesn’t appear to be recognised by any other country.

As Kolja crosses over and waits in between a seemingly endless series of borders between one country and another – actually five in number – the very idea of nationality, of separate nation states, seems to diminish in significance to the point of evaporation into thin air. Although when at one point he dismisses the suggestion that he might want to live in the EU, you can see him complying with the idea of borders inside his head. A citizen of nowhere? A citizen of somewhere?

In places shots are held for some considerable length of time, whether it’s the opening shot of Kolja’s face against a background of white walls in a waiting room somewhere as we hear him questioned at length by border official on the soundtrack or a passenger seat shot of him driving through nondescript territory.

Much of the time, nothing really happens. It’s a lot like the effect of 2001, watching someone perform mundane tasks or, more often here, wait around for officials to perform their functions so the people in question can move on. As I wrote of Kubrick’s SF outing on its recent reissue, there’s something quite hypnotic about the mundane. If anything, that effect is even stronger here – the vivid black and white images lend an almost dreamlike quality to the whole thing and there are no dramas to suddenly leap out of the humdrum.

It’s barely even a narrative, more like a very strange and empty yet somehow unforgettable surreality, memorable as much for the places in which events (don’t) occur as it is for the things people say and the ideas that float around within their words. At their most focused and extreme, the content of those words explore incidences of genocide under Stalin.

Anyone looking for cinematic equivalents might recognise the feeling of the languorous waking dream from Tarkovsky narratives (Ivan’s Childhood/1962, Stalker/1979) or the bleak architectural images and mom-synchronised voice over of early, pre-feature film Cronenberg (Stereo/1969, Crimes Of The Future/1970). But again, both these examples look positively action-packed by comparison with Extinction – a film which might, just might, be destined for cult status.

Nation states seemingly have mechanisms to exert control over people, but in the end that really doesn’t matter in vision of the female Portuguese filmmaker Salomé Lamas: no matter how much states try to confine those who reside in or pass through them, people and their words, thoughts and consciousness potentially transcend all that.

Extinction is out in the UK on Friday, July 20th. Watch the film trailer below: