Tag: son

Ad Astra

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), under constant psychiatric evaluation to check he’s still up to the job, must journey first to the Moon, then Mars and finally to a space station at the far reaches of the solar system to stop his father Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a hero explorer officially declared dead having disappeared who is unofficially believed to have turned rogue. Power surges emanating from the vicinity of his father’s last known position are causing severe disruption to and may eventually destroy all human life on Earth.

That’s the essence of James Gray’s simple story, fundamentally a father and son tale with shades of Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). The film was written in collaboration with Ethan Gross, and the images of space travel and tech hardware are effectively realised.

The father was the leader of an expedition called The Lima Project to make contact with extraterrestrial life, a cause about which he was passionate. Because you already know (from the trailer, below) the father is played by Tommy Lee Jones, you also know he’s going to appear at least in flashbacks, comms messages and imaginings inside the hero’s head if not in the main, real time narrative.

The son is an isolated, self-centred individual. He’s away from home most of the time and his partner (played by Liv Tyler) scarcely gets a look in – either in their relationship or, indeed, in the film itself. And he needs to be isolated and self-centred in order to complete the mission on which he’s been sent – and of which he wryly observes at one point, “they’re using me”.

The Earth – Moon – Mars – father? trajectory is the main narrative spine. Roy travels with a series of different companions and ultimately alone as he heads towards whatever awaits him at his journey’s end. The episodes en route to and at the Moon in particular recall 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) although given that film’s lengthy prehistoric apes opening, some may consider Gray’s narrative narrower in scope.

Roy’s first companion is Colonel Pruit (Donald Sutherland) who travels with him to the Moon. Pruit knew Roy’s father and is one of the few people briefed with full details of Roy’s top secret mission. The octogenarian Sutherland plays Pruit as an adviser and guru, a substitute father for Clifford who left home on his one-way mission when Roy was a teenager.

Mars base supervisor Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga, just as good here as she was in British indie outing Iona, Scott Graham, 2015) later delivers him to the launchpad for the final leg of his journey after he fails a psychiatric evaluation.

The spectacular, opening action set piece has an interplanetary pulse cause an explosion on a huge man-made structure in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Roy falls off, perilously plummets towards and ultimately parachutes down to the planet’s surface. The threat facing the Earth and our hero’s ability to perform calmly under extreme pressure are both clearly discernible.

That tension is felt throughout the film which, as lovingly lensed by Hoyte Van Hoytema the cinematographer of Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014), varies between vast shots of space, ships and interiors that you’d expect in a film like this and intense close ups of Pitt plumbing the psychological depths of his own inner space and spirituality. On a digital IMAX screen, which is highly recommended for full appreciation of this particular movie, both sets of Ad Astra’s images prove spectacular.

It’s light years away from superficially similar space travel sci-fi which recently played cinemas Aniara (Pella Kagerman, Hugo Lilja, 2018), about an enclosed society coming to terms with the vastness of space rather than a single individual doing so.

Ad Astra delivers further full blown action sequences for those who want that sort of thing – a multiple Moon buggy battle inspired by the Mad Max franchise (George Miller, 1979, 1981, 1985, 2015), a distress call from a seemingly lifeless vessel complete with subsequent shocks comparable to Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) – although the film seems both more on track and more original when, for example, lone hero Roy must negotiate a series of underground tunnels to perilously board from below via its rocket thrusters a NASA style space rocket on its Martian launch pad. There’s even a passing nod to Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) when he travels through an asteroid belt in nothing but a spacesuit and a makeshift, handheld shield.

Further originality can be heard in Max Richter’s eerie, atmospheric score – a very different proposition from either the classical music selection in 2001 or Hans Zimmer’s pounding electronics in Interstellar – which perfectly fits the film’s double themes of the vast emptiness of space and the dark depths of the human soul.

There are many reasons why you should watch this fascinating sci-fi flick. Leaving aside the considerable twin pleasures of seeing ageing legends Sutherland and Jones acting on separate occasions in close up on an IMAX screen, not to mention Negga’s impressive turn, there’s also Pitt’s impressive portrayal of an isolated individual coming to terms with his absent father. At the same time, as a space exploration epic it compares favourably to both 2001 and Interstellar with special effects, cinematography and score to match. Altogether, a magnificent piece of work.

Ad Astra is out in the UK on Wednesday, September 18th. On VoD in April. Watch the film trailer below:

Drive (Pulsión)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This Argentinan short, although computer generated, has the feel of stop-motion. It brings to mind work by Lars Von Trier, the Brothers Quay, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. A narrative conveyed by a series of disturbing vignettes (think: the opening minutes of Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011) is put together with the same kind of fastidious technical attention to detail you find in the Quay Brothers’ films. A couple of scenes borrow directly from one of the murders in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), but in a clever way that shocks you much as those scenes in Psycho originally did. There’s a Lynchian feel about the whole thing – not just in the strange, quasi-industrial sounds recalling Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) or the weird lighting and heavily controlled mise-en-scène, but also in the overall feel of strange and terrible things happening within families and local communities, people adrift within the darkness of human existence.

One single viewing is not enough for this film which really only reveals itself on repeated viewings. There’s so much going on here in the characters of a father, a mother, a teenage boy and flashbacks to the teenager as a small baby. After the death of the father who is run over while drunk, the relationship between the son and the mother moves into abuse as she hits him for not eating his food and voyeurism as he spies on her through her bedroom keyhole, referencing similar scenarios in Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) and, again, Psycho. Added to the mix are an animal corpse, a gratuitous rabbit killing and human murders. One particularly shocking scene involves the boy’s estranged friend kissing a girl near an abandoned, wrecked car and the boy hurling a brick at the amorous couple from behind a wall.

The vignettes make the locations appear as model sets suspended in darkness, each built upon a square patch of ground lifted from a wider Cartesian grid. These scenes don’t just appear then disappear in time, their appearance is also isolated spatially from everything around them. It’s an extremely unsettling experience and a unique, highly idiosyncratic vision. One can imagine Casavecchia going on to further forays short or feature length, animation or live action. If he does start working in live action, I hope he keeps returning to animation too because his use of the medium is part of the reason the film works as well as it does here – and it feels as if he has a great deal more to offer audiences.

Drive (Pulsión) played in Annecy where it won a jury distinction for powerful storytelling. Watch the film trailer below:

Mothers (Dangshinui Bootak)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Hyo-jin (Im Soo-jung) and her stepson Jong-wook (Yoon Chan-yong) didn’t really know how to react when his father died. And they haven’t seen each other for around a decade. But now, the grandmother who’s been looking after the boy in the interim is no longer in any fit state to do so. So, would she be able to take the boy in?

It’s a good question. Hyo-jin’s already busy running an academy to teach teenagers and her assistant Mi-ran (Lee Sang-hee) is pregnant with another child. And Hyo-jin’s relationship with her own mother is hardly exemplary – it seems that whatever Hyo-jin does, her mother criticises or disapproves.

A further mother appears in the shape of a different female, Joo-mi (Seo Shin-ae), a friend of Jong-wook who is not exactly his girlfriend, more a companion. Initially, she gets on better with his mother than he does, for instance ringing Hyo-jin to let her know where her son is when he doesn’t want anything to do with his mother and won’t even call her.

Then Joo-mi announces she’s pregnant. Jong-wook is not the father. (We’ve seen no sign of any physical sexual activity between them). He likes the idea of parenting a child. She, on the other hand, thinks the child would be better off if adopted by a responsible family.

There is great potential here for exploring all manner of complex mother/daughter, mother/son, mother/foetus relationships and director Lee Dong-eun does so by complex, almost novelistic dialogue. The filmmaker has an extraordinary sense of flow about the way he shoots scenes with his excellent cast. This striking quality is one the passable but somewhat insipid trailer, with its much faster cutting, completely fails to convey.

Some of the difficult behaviour of the boy towards his mother is anticipated by her behaviour towards her own mother in earlier scenes. The way this is handled within the larger body of the narrative is extremely subtle, not at all forced and, consequently, most impressive. Jong-wook aside, since he plays quite a pivotal role in the proceedings, the male characters are largely peripheral with an assortment of female characters major and minor to the fore.

I’m not sure if this is a exactly ‘woman’s picture’, although it certainly contains much material of interest to women. Watching as a man, I found its situations drew me in while the deftly sketched characters held my attention. Its concerns may be undeniably feminine concerns, but at the same time they’re the sort that interest not only women but also men.

Mothers could so easily descend into mawkishness, sappiness or sentimentality, but it never does so and is all the better for it, opting instead to deal in intelligent observation of ordinary lives. That may have something to do with it being an independent rather than a mainstream Korean movie. Whatever, it makes for fascinating viewing.

Mothers plays in the London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below: