Bloodbaths: "Snowtown" and "Breaking Dawn Part 1" (ST 20/11/01)

Snowtown (18) 119 mins ***
Breaking Dawn: Part 1 (12A) 117 mins ***

Justin Kurzel’s true-crime drama Snowtown sometimes feels like a self-conscious attempt to subvert every last sunkissed image and happy-go-lucky sound we’ve come to associate with Australia as a nation. It opens as a deceptively low-key, naturalistic study of life in a working-class district, circa the late 1990s. A single mother with more kids than space to put them in enlists a friendly older neighbour to look after her boys for the night. Little does she realise this man will spend the evening taking nude Polaroids of his charges. We’re not on Ramsay Street any more, Toto.

Be warned: it gets grimmer yet. One of the teenagers, the sensitive Jamie (Lucas Pittaway), wakes to find mum’s new boyfriend John (Daniel Henshall) chopping up kangaroos in order to douse their entrails over the pederast’s front porch. Oldest son Troy (Anthony Groves) challenges Jamie to a wrestling match, only for their intra-sibling roughhousing to turn to hierarchy-enforcing sodomy. All this playing out to the gentle rhythms of a TV cricket commentary. What next, we wonder – Clive James assaulting the band Men at Work with a didgeridoo?

I jest – you have to here – but Snowtown retains a seriousness of purpose that keeps one gripped for a good while. When John subsequently vows to make a man out of Jamie, heads get shaved, the drug use ratchets up, and we intuit – if we hadn’t already – that everything’s likely to turn out somewhat less than bonzer. Among several wilfully scuzzy elements, the extras sport the grimy authenticity one might only get from holding casting calls in a skip, or by looking under a rock. Upfront, meanwhile, Henshall demonstrates a chilling intensity, giving the viewer the terrible sensation John is capable of doing anything at any moment.

Kurzel’s generally impressive control wavers in places. Those scenes goading actual Snowtown locals into a kind of improvised paedophile-baiting around the family’s kitchen table feel unnecessarily uncomfortable, if not downright exploitative, in their illustration of a particular mentality and complicity. Indeed, too often one catches the film punching at our disgust buttons; Kurzel tools it for shock value, throwing up his hands before violence even as – in one pivotal torture sequence – his camera lingers on shots of a nail being prised from a toe.

Snowtown has forty minutes left at this point, and you come to sense it bashing you about the head from here on in. Most viewers, even hardened critics, have emerged traumatised, and that bluntness is both its strength and a liability: Kurzel can’t resist placing Jamie at a clangingly literal crossroads ahead of the final mise en abyme. A forceful debut, nevertheless: compelling and problematic in equal measure, and a worthy successor to the Ozploitation-informed likes of Romper Stomper and Chopper – Snowtown’s closest, uneasy bedfellows in that category of Films To Make You Go Strewth.

In Twilight-land, meanwhile, we hear the patter of contentious tiny feet. Breaking Dawn Part 1, the first half of the grand finale, appears to comprise a 21st-century update of Roe vs. Wade, with Teams Jacob and Edward taking sides round Bella Swan’s baby bump after her vampire beau impregnates her on honeymoon. Gods and Monsters director Bill Condon lends this instalment an intimacy rare in modern blockbusters, edging towards a final-reel shift into (fairly intense) gynaecological horror: if such moments suggest the franchise remains petrified of sex, elsewhere it continues to give surprisingly good swoon.

Snowtown opens in selected cinemas from today; Breaking Dawn Part 1 opens nationwide today. A longer version of the Snowtown review can be read here.

"Breaking Dawn Part 1" (The Scotsman 18/11/01)

Breaking Dawn: Part 1 (12A) ***
Directed by: Bill Condon
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner

Despite its vamps-versus-werewolves action, the previous instalment of Twilight – the world’s favourite playground love triangle – felt like a stalling exercise, evading the issue of who was going to get off with whom. Though Lautner’s Jacob stages a late counter by going shirtless within fifteen seconds, BDP1 resolves that issue decisively, with Bella and Edward (K-Stew and R-Pattz) mumbling through their vows at a ceremony so floridly romantic some viewers may wish they’d hired Melancholia’s Udo Kier to plan it instead. Thereafter, it’s all about the newlyweds prepping for their first time: as lovers, then – gulp – as parents-to-be.

That appalled fascination with sex remains a sticking point, cueing a final, surprisingly intense eruption of gyno-horror. Yet in the skilled Condon’s hands, this instalment proves more intimate besides, confining its action to kids in rooms wrestling with the consequences of their own crushes: such unashamed emotionality – oft-dismissed as “girly stuff” – is actually what distinguishes the Twilights in a marketplace otherwise cluttered with noisy boys’ toys. Minor quibbles aside – the werewolves are stubbornly wooden, and why would a vampire honeymoon in sunny Rio? – these remain the most empathetic event movies in the business.

Breaking Dawn Part 1 opens in cinemas nationwide today.

On DVD: "Love Live Long"

Mike Figgis has been busying himself with various educational, experimental and publishing ventures over the past decade; his return to feature production, 2008's Love Live Long, was sponsored by, of all institutions, the Gumball Rally, that annual blight on the planet that sees posh twits like Jamiroquai roaring around Europe in a variety of souped-up penis substitutes. The idea was to take two actors to Istanbul, where the Rally was due to stop over, and film them interacting with the cars and drivers - only the Rally in its usual form failed to show up (German police had shut it down for speeding offences), and so Figgis, cast and crew had to improvise their way around its absence.

What we get is the story of one of the drivers (Daniel Lapaine), cocky, gum-chewing heir to a hotel fortune, who "parties for a living" despite a wife and kid back home in the UK. Cut to: a troubled young woman (Sophie Winkleman, Claudia's sister), who hides behind sunglasses and stages "suicide diaries" - easy prey, in other words, for a reckless charmer such events as the Gumball only encourage. Quickly, you grasp that Figgis didn't need the cars: what we're watching has the look of a collision, an emotional pile-up, in itself. And yet slowly, just as you've settled into rubbernecking the results, it dawns the tables, as per the title, are set for turning, both before and behind the camera.

The Rally gained its biggest press to date in this particular year, when two British participants killed an elderly man and injured his wife - an incident that gets folded into the drama here, as Lapaine attends the real-life press conference set up to "deal with" this tragedy. I got the impression that the Henrys and Henriettas behind the Gumball didn't entirely realise what they were letting themselves in for allowing Figgis to shoot around them, or that, with money to burn, they didn't really care. Either way, Love Live Long is not the best advert the Gumball Rally will ever received; it's as though Shane Meadows had finished his Eurostar-sponsored Somers Town by having all the characters perishing in a Chunnel fire.

That sense of subversive mischief afoot is almost enough in itself to keep this particular experiment bubbling away, but the film also functions as a useful digest of Figgis themes and motifs. As in Miss Julie, we see the collateral damage left behind in the wake of privilege (Figgis has a way of shooting hotel rooms without ever becoming seduced by them); we have a damaged protagonist akin to the leads in Leaving Las Vegas, only - in this, a more affirmative piece - the heroine emerges with renewed reason to live; there's the weird sex, with the driver ignoring his latest conquest, writhing semi-clad in front of him, to instead engage his wife in telephonic foreplay.

There's also the supreme attention to actors. Lapaine can't, surely, be this much of a slimeball in real life, while Winkleman goes some way beyond her previous incarnation as a pin-up girl for socially awkward comedians (Peep Show, Harry and Paul). The director's filmography is becoming riddled with oddities and curios like this, but Love Live Long is one of the better ones - taut, tense and narratively satisfying - and Figgis's investment in digital technology is really starting to pay off: the flexibility of lightweight cameras and skeleton crews allows him to go wherever he likes, while the colours - particularly in the Istanbul scenes - fizz and pop off the screen.

Love Live Long is available to rent and buy from Monday.

1,001 Films: "Pinocchio" (1940)

Far from a hit on first release - being too dark for kids (all those creepy automatons in Geppetto's workshop, all those Honest Johns luring innocents off the path of righteousness) while still too much the cartoon for even those grown-ups who'd cooed at the novelty of Snow White just a couple of years before - Pinocchio now looks like one of the most fascinating (and flawed) animations of the classic Disney era. Its most notable interpolation - and this was very much still the moment when Uncle Walt's influence was hands-on, and keenly, often resentfully, felt by his employees - was adding the folksy Jiminy Cricket to Collodi's source text, instantly transforming a bedtime story into a work of moral instruction; it's when the cricket falls asleep on the job that Pinocchio gets led astray in the first place. You need to keep a sharp eye and a firm grip on your young ones, the film insists - just one of the elements that was to make Finding Nemo's rethink of this line so progressive some sixty years later.

When Pinocchio is removed from his home and his "father" by the bibulous, money-counting impresario Stromboli, the film effectively tips over into an early parable of the exploitation the entertainment industry recognised it was capable of even back in 1940. Pure melodrama, this stretch, right out of the silent cinema: Stromboli booms "You will make lots of money, and then... FIREWOOD!" (They build you up, just to chop you down.) The whole is riddled with dire (and in the Monstro sequence in particular, Biblical) prophesies of things to come - even the dirty, chaotic Pleasure Island looks like a very Walt-ish warning against letting your theme park get out of hand - so it's no surprise the film rarely seems magical or even much in the way of fun. Petrified by the dangers that come from curiosity and sticking your nose in (the animators were obliged to add Victorian-like leaves and flowers so as to make Pinocchio's swelling wood appear less phallic), it has ultimately to rate as a failure, because all its artistry goes toward control in a highly prescribed form: it views youngsters as entities whose strings need to be clipped, and their natural enthusiasms as something to be curbed. Heaven knows its message would be comprehensively lost on a subsequent generation of Mouseketeers (Britney, Lindsay et al.), who could perhaps have done with a Jiminy Cricket on their shoulders.

Pinocchio is available on DVD through Walt Disney Pictures.

Pony trap: "Justice"

Uh-oh, Nic Cage has spotted a joblot of rare comic books on eBay again, and we all know what that means: six or so films in as many months, generally of medium-to-low quality. The reportedly shoddy Trespass, released a week ago, will have been and gone by the time you read this; now we have the dumb-as-nuts thriller Justice, whose title I, for one, can’t hear without thinking of the Martin Sheen-voiced capital punishment animatronic from TV’s The Day Today. Cage is here playing Will Gerard, a New Orleans high-school teacher – yes, you see him earnestly lecturing on Shakespeare – whose life is thrown into turmoil when his musician wife Laura (January Jones, getting typecast as trophy wives) is raped coming out of rehearsals one night. In the hospital, Will is approached by Simon (Guy Pearce), the leader of an army of boneheads meting out vigilante justice: with Will’s assent, they arrange to have the rapist killed, but in doing so open a tab they expect our hero to repay in kind, by pushing a pederast off a flyover.

What we’re watching, in effect, is a horse-and-pony show: one of those entertainments where the protagonist is made to jump through hoops until he decides he doesn’t want to jump through hoops anymore, and the hoops, in this instance, are quite patently absurd. Simon pressures Will to order a particular chocolate bar from a vending machine, by way of giving his assent to the hit, then later asks him to post an envelope addressed to “Santa Claus, North Pole” as a way of testing his obedience. Other amusing diversions include an eye-opening look at the U.S. education system, where punching a student only lands a teacher a three-week suspension, and da kidz only come to respect an educator like Will once he's landed himself on a murder charge.

That said, the plot mechanics – and the underlying idea of vigilantism as a chain letter, penned by malcontents – prove to be weirdly sound, and the film has a saviour of sorts in veteran Roger Donaldson, who directs as though this were still the early 1990s, and these things weren’t going direct-to-DVD any more: he lends Justice brisk, effective pile-ups and suspense sequences, casts interesting, characterful extras and bit-parts, and generally nudges the whole package along at more or less the right tempo. The hero’s surname gives some indication of what everybody’s aiming for, and if Justice never quite escapes its own murky flyovers, and doesn’t strain for the batshit extremes of such recent Cage fodder as Knowing, it’s nonetheless semi-acceptable schlock: almost certainly no-one’s idea of a good film, but something that functions on its own, unambitiously low level.

Justice opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.

From the archive: "Thirst"

After his wacky misfire I'm a Cyborg (But That's OK), OldBoy director Park Chan-wook returns to more generic territory, and full form, with Thirst, a type A-positive vampire movie. Self-flagellating priest Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) survives a rare tropical virus after undergoing a transfusion, only the new blood comes with side effects: heightened senses, the ability to leap from high ledges without incurring any injury... Soon he's gulping down blood from those patients he's been called to administer the last rites to (well, if it's going to go to waste...), and ditching his dog collar and Harry Potter specs to commit ever more athletic sins of the flesh.

Priest-as-vampire's a new one - the one half of Sang-hyun forever trying to suppress desires the other half can't help but give into - but Thirst's real stroke of imaginative genius is in transplanting its bloodsucking to a mundane domestic environment. Most of the action takes place in and around a cramped flat above a dressmaker's shop where the priest lodges with a hypochondriac weakling, the latter's overbearing mother, and his underappreciated wife. Once bitten, the latter is anything but shy; indeed, her desires become too great for her to remain faithful to Sang-hyun, and so one unhealthy love triangle comes to replace another. What do you do when you find somebody else's blood on your partner's collar?

Let the Right One In demonstrated how the vampire movie could deal in delicacy and restraint; Park, as is his wont, goes to the opposite extreme, and brings back sickly set design (a turquoise waterbed!), armpit-licking, mutual wrist-sucking and all the baroque directorial flourishes Park's admirers have come to expect. Yet an emotional undertow pulls the film out beyond the shallow waters of simple fanboy enthusiasm: the above transgressions are those of characters testing just how far they'd be prepared to go for love, and Park seems acutely aware of the horrors that can follow whenever our affections begin to clot. More wild Gothic melodrama than outright horror, it's nevertheless a potent, intoxicating cocktail: the work of a supremely confident director prepared to break all the rules by trying to do The Thorn Birds, Thérèse Raquin and Tod Browning at the same time.

(October 2009)

Thirst screens on Channel 4 tonight at 1.40am.

From the archive: "Twilight"

Twilight forms a two-hour advert for all things pale and interesting. Pale, interesting teenager Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) moves to the small town of Forks, Washington to live with her father. She's looking for stability; instead, she catches the eye of the tall, pale and awkward Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) across the school canteen. He's a strange one, this lad, coming across as badly constipated when they're paired up in a biology lesson, and unable to get his words out when he attempts to apologise for his erratic behaviour shortly thereafter. Yet when he saves Bella from being crushed by an out-of-control vehicle in the school car park, she too becomes convinced he's a special one, or at least one with special powers. For Edward Cullen derives from a family of vampires; and while some part of Bella wants to give herself to him, he loves her for what she is, not what's running through her veins, leading him to keep his distance. Boys, eh? Pain in the neck.
Twilight has been ushered forward to fill the hole in the Christmas release schedules left by the delayed Harry Potter, but the first thing that strikes you is that this is a more immediately sophisticated proposition than any of the previous Potters. As directed by Catherine Hardwicke, of the teens-gone-wild drama Thirteen, the setting is a leafy, rainy Washington ("the wettest place in America", hence the ideal spot for creatures afraid of the sun) that takes us back in the direction of Twin Peaks. Twilight is only a 12A in comparison, but it doesn't talk down to its core audience, and allows its on-screen teenagers to be gangly, pallid and uncoordinated, recognising how their emotions (and hormones) are liable to be unruly at best. "Your mood swings are kind of giving me whiplash," Bella tells Edward, and there's something so perfect in the interjection of that "kind of" there: it could be a beautiful line, but the character's instincts won't let it be so. 
The effects are TV level, the stuff of Smallville and Supernatural - in this respect, the Potter producers have nothing much to fear - and the script could do with a meatier second act: once Edward's secret is out, we get somewhat too much of his and Bella's drippy mooning (sitting up treetops, or at the piano), not enough of their potentially deadly spooning (Edward pulls away from one encounter, insisting "I can't ever lose control with you"; once more, vampirism becomes a metaphor for sex). Pattinson, a future cover star of Unthreatening Boys Weekly, is clearly going to stir up all sorts of previously unknown passions in the breast of the average 13-year-old girl, and there's a lovely, career-making performance from Stewart as a girl unsure of herself, her feelings, her own feet, even. (Jena Malone must be kicking herself that no-one got round to filming these books five years ago.) The beginnings of a fresh, likable franchise, then, with a distinctive, light-gloomy mood (these vampires hold a baseball game during a thunder storm) and pleasing traces of Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark in its vampire family mythology. Short of selling snakebite at the concession stand, Hollywood has come up with no better way of getting Goths into the multiplex.

(December 2008)

Twilight screens on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm.