High anxiety: "A Quiet Place"

Here's one way to get a modern multiplex crowd to shut their traps. A Quiet Place, the directorial debut of the actor John Krasinski, unfolds in a post-apocalyptic America stalked by vicious long-legged creatures - part-Gremlin, part-Louise Bourgeois spider - attracted to any sound, any noise humanity's survivors might let slip. We explore this landscape - barefooted, on tiptoes, with sand set down to muffle our heavier footsteps - alongside Everycouple Lee and Evelyn Abbott (Krasinski and Emily Blunt) and their young family: three kids in one of those lethal prologues the horror genre has traditionally sprung upon us, then two, with a third on the way. (Try stopping that one wailing when it comes out.) It's such a simple idea - kill the sound, because sound kills - that you spend much of the film marvelling that it hasn't been done before; only upon walking back to the carpark do you recall it sort-of has, in 2016's Don't Breathe. Krasinski, however, pushes the hushed hide-and-seek conceit further, beyond closed doors, and makes enforced silence the whole damn world.

The real marvel is that he does this with such elegance; rarely, if ever, does A Quiet Place seem like a gimmick-movie. From the off, we're offered a detailed sense of how life has to be lived in this environment: tentatively, in the middle of some Midwestern nowhere, far from even the possibility of noise, with soft cabbage leaves substituting for dinner plates, and a rudimentary sign language as the only permissible means of communication. There are, obviously, limitations to this way of living. Clock the look in Lee's eyes after his offspring topple a kerosene lamp while playing Monopoly: boy, does pa want to bawl the pair of them out, but he knows the rules of the game won't allow for it. (His tongue-holding here finds a poignant echo in a later scene where it becomes apparent he wants to tell these kids he loves them.) There's a particular cleverness to the way prologue connects to action proper: here is a family who not only cannot speak, but scarcely feel inclined to speak, to articulate their losses. Instead, they must internalise their traumas - put up and shut up, as the viewer must too.

It is, then, the strongest imaginable riposte to that shallow quiet-quiet-loud strain of horror movies: there are at least another couple of quiets in there, for starters, and it may be that Krasinski's loud is really just normal as heard in a different context. (Take the brook father and son visit around the halfway mark, which doesn't babble so much as drown everybody out.) The Krasinski character has had to become something of a handyman to survive, and there's something of the technician in the way his direction continually tests everybody's levels. The family's deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) interprets this environment in a slightly different manner to everyone else, comparatively serene when inside her own head, but also prone not to hear encroaching risk. Of that, there is plenty, for the film is entirely ruthless about paying off everything Krasinski sets up. The growing curve of the Blunt belly should concern us, as should the exposed nail sticking out of a cellar staircase, and the daughter's scowly-faced independence. Screams, of one kind or another, never seem far away.

We might concede that Don't Breathe, from the Spanish outlier behind the Evil Dead remake, had a harder, nastier edge than this, which is still somehow recognisably the work of Jim from The Office. The earlier film was a brilliantly cynical construction; A Quiet Place builds towards an attempt to put a family back together in the dark, without a single cry of Marco, let alone Polo. Yet Krasinski orchestrates this movement like a master-in-waiting, recruiting editor Christopher Tellefsen (Moneyball, Joy) to ensure there's not an inch of flab on the entire movie, the better to hustle us, without lasting objection, past the vaguely contrived means by which man begins to fight back against monster, and Blunt's remarkably uncomplicated recovery from the stresses of unassisted labour. It is, at the last, a pared-to-the-bone parable of parenthood, and the sacrifices we make to give the next generation a shot at a better world: a film at once radical and conservative, terrifying and deeply moving, and proof - after last year's Get Out and It Comes at Night - that horror is just about the one thing American cinema has going for it right now. Just don't shout too loudly about it, that's all.

A Quiet Place is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

Baywatch: "The Islands and the Whales"

What do we know of the Faroe Islands? Geographically, that they're the stepping stones between Scotland and Scandinavia; in the footballing arena, that they've become, along with San Marino and Liechtenstein, the whipping boys of many a World Cup and European qualifying campaign. Beyond that, not so much, which is why The Islands and the Streams, a brisk documentary primer, might come in unusually handy. Director Mike Day senses he could pique our interest by filling the screen with the islands alone: craggy, fog-topped promontories that might appear entirely uninhabitable were it not for the odd lush valley his helicopter shots catch out of the corner of their eye. We're being exposed to the elements here, and there's something equally bracing about the human activity Day captures, right from his opening sequence: hundreds of locals charging down to a bay to hack the whales swimming into Faroese waters into meat, and turn once-blue waters blood-red.

In other words, we're deep into hunter-gatherer territory - sailing out on boats whose crew think nothing of picking up a puffin to serve as a starter - and part of what makes Day's film so fascinating is its apparent anticipation of the response some of its material seems likely to provoke. Judgier viewers, sitting in the warmth of a privilege-lined mainland cinema with box of aioli-drizzled popcorn to hand, will surely rage: who are these barbarians, who seem to think they own this place, and any poor creature who seeks to swim around or fly over it? (The scenes of whale hunting can't fail to remind us of the sorry fate of the dolphins in the 2009 doc The Cove: Day amps up the high-pitched squeals of distress on the soundtrack, and trains his lens on young men whose faces have been splattered with blood.) Equally, though, the locals can be heard maintaining that this is a necessity, given the islands' scant agricultural possibilities, and a tradition that was going on well before we came along. 

What the film bears witness to is a process of self-regulation, a subtle shift in thinking that may have greater long-term impact than any more vocal protest movement. It turns out that mercury levels are increasing in the North Sea, and in any fish to be found there - Day has the footage of concerned medical professionals to prove it - and even some of the community's elders have started to worry about the effects of overfishing. The world is changing, at a faster rate of knots than ever before, and the Faroese, as a part (however remote) of that world, are having to adapt. From the halfway mark onwards, every onscreen conversation over kitchen tables piled high with seared blubber, every press conference, each radio phone-in Day eavesdrops on forms a continuance of a dialogue already running through the engaged viewer's mind. Is this a sustainable way of life? And, even if so, is it a healthy one for anybody?

There is a pronounced split between the oldtimers - whom hunting has allowed to live long and prosper - and the islands' youngsters, who seem more inclined to hear out any arguments; and then there are those caught in the middle, like the thirtysomething fisherman - one of those self-same puffin-pluckers - whose test results give him pause to wonder what he's putting on the table, and in his children's mouths. The conflict is palpable even before a group of environmentalists (spearheaded by, of all people, pretend lifeguard Pamela Anderson) arrive with an eye to blocking the hunt, one of those surreal stunts that tend to generate more noise than consensus or enlightenment. The latter, like mercury poisoning, tends to come as a slow and haphazard creep: the film is, in the final analysis, an education for subjects and audience alike, using its time on the islands to reassure those who would sit in easy judgement, and show the Faroese realising for themselves that something's got to give.

The Islands and the Whales is now showing in selected cinemas.

Barkipelago: "Isle of Dogs"

It's only a small pawprint forward, but Isle of Dogs is the first Wes Anderson movie to be founded on mess. After two-plus decades of rectilinear neatfreakery, this most buttoned down of auteurs finally looks to have abandoned some of his usual methods, or rather elected to scuzz those methods up a little. The new film, which returns Anderson to the stopmotion animation of 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox, unfolds and sprawls across a giant floating trash heap, a leper colony off the shores of mainland Japan to which the country's canine population has been banished after an outbreak of so-called "snout fever". In place of the pristine design of earlier Anderson endeavours, we now get a bric-a-brac aesthetic, mountains of detritus, mutts who start out looking pretty mangy and get mangier still, and an overall sensation of lived-inness - every last slipper on screen has clearly been worked over before being tossed to the dogs.

Fans may be reassured that this filmmaker hasn't entirely abandoned his trademark dryness: it's there in the recognisably wry interpolation of chapter headings, and the manner in which Anderson's "underdog dogs" pause for a beat before talking to one another like upstate New Yorkers lamenting the gentrification of their favourite neighbourhoods. These pooches are at their funniest early on, when the airs and graces of the voice performers (Edward Norton, Bob Balaban, Jeff Goldblum) are held in balance against the basic-bitch characterisation. Pack leader Chief (Bryan Cranston) informs his charges, in no uncertain terms, that they make him sick, a feeling demonstrated when he turns his head to regurgitate dinner; his insistence that they stop licking their wounds in order to reorganise and find a way back to civilisation cues a cut to his audience literally licking their wounds.

Evidently, these are no cuddly Gromits nor adorable Marmadukes. One dog tears off another's ear in an early territorial dispute, and as a group, they tend to enter all too readily into cotton-wool commotions that recall the representations of fight scenes in a Beano strip. Alexandre Desplat's melancholy score announces Isle of Dogs as going for a more singular, indeed peculiar tone than most animated fare. Analysis of a black box recording turns up a kid pilot's last wish to be cremated alongside his pet pooch; every other character appears to be on the brink of death or the verge of tears. It was, let's say, optimistic of studio Fox to book the film into matinee slots, because there's no guaranteeing what holidaying pre-teens hopped up on Mini Eggs are going to make of it. At the public screening I attended, Isle of Dogs played out to a silence that suggested those present were either utterly bemused or mentally resolving to go home and snap up everything else this Anderson fellow has made.

There is, undeniably, considerable imagination at work here. The island plays host not just to towering ziggurats of trash but a thousand tiny sake bottles, an abandoned theme park, and an overgrown golf course, worlds within worlds. For much of the first hour, I found myself succumbing to Pixaritis - that desire to immediately watch the same animation play through all over again - although not strictly because the sheer weight of detail was pleasurably overwhelming, rather that much of it had left me, too, squinting quizzically: I wanted to better work out where the film was coming from. The offbeam line of approach informs the canines' very movement - they pull up in strikingly odd positions within the frame, then sneeze - as it does their mode of address. "I guess we'd be dead by now if anything worked," barks one as the pooches take a wrong turn through a malfunctioning processing plant, the kind of New Yorker cartoon drollery that passes for a joke in Anderson country.

It's the pauses placed either side of lines like these that lets the dead air into Anderson's films - they're meant, I think, to punch up the genius of the boy wonder pulling these quips out of nothing, but over the long haul, the archness of the construction undercuts the excellence of the design. That said, I'll take Isle of Dogs' forty-or-so minutes of amusement over whatever it was that was going on in Moonrise Kingdom or The Grand Budapest Hotel. One of my issues with Anderson's live-action ventures is that his obsessive quest for symmetries, his desire to pin down his flesh-and-blood performers, goes against the grain of his chosen medium. A blithe origami creation like Dogs, on the other hand, is so obviously the kind of thing he wants to make, and has some aptitude for, that you're happy to leave him to it. I suspect he's still chiefly pleasing himself and a small coterie of admirers, but with a little less smugness, a pinch less supplementary whimsy, US cinema's second most indulged director after Tarantino may yet produce something that merits pinning to the fridge.

Isle of Dogs is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office 
for the weekend of March 23-25, 2018:

1 (1) Peter Rabbit (PG)
2 (new) Pacific Rim: Uprising (12A)
3 (3) Black Panther (12A) **
4 (2) Tomb Raider (12A)
5 (4) The Greatest Showman (PG)
6 (new) A Wrinkle in Time (PG) [above]
7 (new) Unsane (15) **
8 (new) Blade Runner: the Final Cut (15) ****
9 (5) Red Sparrow (15)
10 (6) Game Night (15) ***

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five: 
1. Cake
2. Blockers
3. Journeyman
4. Ready Player One
5. Sajjan Singh Rangroot


Top Ten DVD sales: 

1 (1) Paddington 2 (PG) ****
2 (new) Daddy's Home 2 (12)
3 (3) Thor: Ragnarok (12) ***
4 (2) Murder on the Orient Express (12) ***
5 (4) Paddington: Double Pack (PG) ****
6 (6) Moana (PG) ****
7 (new) Rex (12)
8 (9) Paddington (PG) ****
9 (7) Beauty and the Beast (PG) ***
10 (new) Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (12) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
2. Paddington 2
3. The Florida Project
4. Battle of the Sexes
5. The Final Year


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Gone with the Wind (Saturday, five, 10.10am)
2. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Easter Sunday, ITV1, 1.40pm)
3. Dumbo (Easter Sunday, C4, 4pm)
4. Selma (Easter Sunday, BBC2, 11pm)
5. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Friday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

From the archive: "Selma"

Finally, as far as this year’s Best Picture nominees are concerned, the film about a cause that became a cause. That Selma failed to stir the massed Caucasian ranks of the Academy and BAFTA in the way Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave did last year may be down to its sober treatment of the genesis of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; it is, nevertheless, a stinging irony that a film about institutionalised racism should have met with some indifference from the highest ranks of movie society, and had to prompt renewed calls for voter reform.

If you wanted to dress up Ava DuVernay’s film as sexier than it is, you could pitch it as a man-on-a-mission movie. We’re watching Dr. Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo) leading his followers into the heart of segregationist America – the Alabaman backwater of the title, where the shops proudly bore “Serving Whites Only” signs – to stage the march that would eventually give a public face to those persons of colour who were being denied any such representation at the ballot box.

Not everything is black and white, however. Paul Webb’s filigreed script adopts a multi-strand format in order to outline the divisions that existed within even King’s own ranks. Scenes are given over to King’s wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), who stalks off to meet with Malcolm X, and confronts her man with accusations of philandering; to those activists nudging King towards more and less extreme positions; and to those volunteers who put their bodies on the frontline, and suffered the chokeholds and baton charges.

DuVernay shares her subject’s concern with crowd control: she gathers up all this grassroots activity, and allows the film to assume its own gravity. Given that key episodes here take place in the backrooms of power, the legitimate comparison point wouldn’t be McQueen’s blood-and-thunder tableau, but Spielberg’s Lincoln, a paleface retelling of a no less crucial part of the black experience that expressed a similar hushed fascination with tactics, rhetoric and realpolitik.

Like Spielberg, DuVernay and Webb are as interested in the detail as the grand historical gesture. Their film opens backstage at the 1964 Nobel Prize ceremony, with a conversation about a tie that goes to King’s concerns that he might have become untethered from street-level realities, then cuts back a year to find a stark illustration of those realities: the 1963 firebombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama that claimed the lives of four young churchgoers.

Generally, Selma is far less confrontational than the McQueen film in the struggles it depicts; indeed, Bradford Young’s handsome, burnished period images are exactly those the Academy typically laps up. DuVernay is, however, very shrewd in her shot selection: she knows there’s a particular charge in seeing Oprah Winfrey – arguably the most powerful black woman in America, cast here as campaigner Annie Lee Cooper – knocked to the ground by racist police.

She’s less assured whenever Webb attempts to give voice to those on the other side of this divide. Both Tom Wilkinson, stuffed into crummy tailoring as LBJ, and Tim Roth as Alabama governor George Wallace, struggle with the tricky task of having to return to credible life some cartoonishly antiquated attitudes; FBI surveillance reports on King, tapped up on screen at regular intervals, outline the establishment’s chilly, paranoid outlook with far less blustery fuss.

Some viewers expressed a resistance to the way Lincoln clogged up with voices, speeches and noble intentions; it wouldn’t surprise me if history repeated itself again here. The considered politicking gives Selma rare integrity, but at the expense of some dynamism: King, with a decade’s activism under his belt at this point, proves rather better at nudging everyone forward than DuVernay does in only her third full-length feature.

Still, you can’t help but be struck by the ambition, intelligence and seriousness of the latter’s project, and in those sequences that foreground Oyelowo’s formidable oratorical skills, you really can feel the film, and the movement it depicts, snapping into the sharpest of focuses: suddenly the whole world seems to be hanging on one man’s words. It’d be a fool who turned a deaf ear to a film with this much to say about America then, and America now.

(MovieMail, February 2015)

Selma screens on BBC2 tonight at 11pm.

"Cake" (Guardian 30/03/18)

Cake ****

Dir: Asim Abbasi. With: Sanam Saeed, Aamina Sheikh, Adnan Malik, Beo Zafar. 125 mins. Cert: 12A

Pakistani cinema has long struggled to match its Indian cousin’s commercial reach, but this very impressive debut from Asim Abbasi feels like a sound bet, and even quietly revolutionary in places. Abbasi here revitalises a trope beloved of mawkish Bollywood melodrama – two thirtysomething sisters, reunited around an ailing father’s sickbed – by addressing the fallout with the deft, novelistic realism of a New Bollywood item like 2015’s Piku. Uncommonly alert to small, telling details, while more expansive in its attitudes, the result proves far richer and worldlier than anything previously observed coming down the Khyber Pass.

The fresh approach becomes apparent the minute younger sis Zara (Sanam Saeed), who fled to London when the going was easier, is overheard calculating her annual paid leave allowance. The scenario she returns to – that terrible wait for the prognosis to improve, or not – grants Abbasi time to excavate the tensions between Zara and elder Zareen (Aamina Sheikh), who’s had to forsake her patisserie ambitions to empty catheters, but also between worldviews shaped by time spent in disparate hemispheres. VHS tapes, Archie comics: the past stalks these characters hard, so it feels natural, not forced, when it gets close enough to bite them in the rear.

An eventful anniversary party threatens to topple backwards into the domain of movie activity rather than real life, but Abbasi casts wisely: economically conveying a shared history of joy and pain, the excellent Sheikh and Saeed (spotted in last year’s Shakespearian Rahm) rank first among equals in an assured ensemble. He’s shaping up as an accomplished imagemaker, too: Mo Azmi’s attentive cinematography helps outline not just a series of relationships to be tried, but a vivid, rarely communicated sense of Karachi as a place where people live their lives, make choices, muddle through – and still the lights go out sometimes. 

Cake is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Losin' it: "Blockers"

Terrible title - made no better by the knowledge it's preceded on the poster by a giant silhouette of a cock-as-in-chicken - but Blockers arrives as further proof, after last month's Game Night, that dotty old Hollywood has suddenly remembered how to make comedies, if not perhaps how to market them. What's back in vogue is that tightness of plot the revolutionary Judd Apatow tossed to the wind in favour of semi-improvised set-ups: an over-extended first act introduces us to three teenagers (Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan and Gideon Adlon) who've determined to lose their virginities by the end of prom, and the concerned parents (Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz) who've found out about this sex-pact via a fortuitously open laptop, and elect to run interference. Writers Jim and Brian Kehoe and debutant director Kay Cannon (latterly a screenwriter on 30 Rock and the Pitch Perfect series) thereafter dust off the One Wild Night arc beloved of countless 80s teen movies: the obstacles faced by our guardians of decency will include those laws of physics the Fast & Furious films have sped around, and a commendably game Gary Cole and Gina Gershon as parents using their offspring's absence to refresh their own sex life. 

For those of us who grew up on the tatty and tacky sex comedies of the 1980s - Porky's, Meatballs and their ilk - the one eyebrow-raiser here will be just how genial Blockers is, and how relaxed and non-leery it is around the prospect of sex. The joke, from first frame to last, is that it's the oldtimers who have the weird and/or fucked-up attitudes, and that those can partly be attributed to their own bad experiences in the sack. One wonders whether this is the legacy of the broader-minded American Pies, although in a cultural climate where even episodes of Friends are being reassessed as if they were Triumph of the Will, perhaps even those might now be considered #problematic; the real gamechanger in this field - operating with too-scant credit, and a fraction of the viewers switching on for Mad Men and Game of Thrones - strikes me as Masters of Sex, a show that posited American creatives might start approaching intimacy without the usual puritanism - and in ways that were more often than not funny, thoughtful and, yes, sometimes even sexy. The Blockers girls' predicament is both complicated and opened up by the fact Adlon's Sam is identifiably gay, yet feels pressured by her thirsty pals into pursuing the cock-as-in-cock. (The gay-themed Love, Simon opens in multiplexes next week: for all our fears that the world is becoming more repressive, something looks to have shifted in our movies for the better.)

Cannon's film has its grosser manoeuvres - beer bongs inserted in unusual orifices, a separate incident of projectile vomiting - but it's not trying to put us off so much as win us over. Nothing in the performances matches Game Night's sparkling McAdams-Bateman pairing, but its parallel threesomes do gel to carry the film from A to B: the Kehoes' script is on some fundamental level an ode to that camaraderie and closeness that perhaps only develops when underpants stay on. The juvenile leads are very sweet and credible in their responses, particularly once their ragbag of suitors have them behind closed doors; the grown-ups, meanwhile, busy themselves wringing their hands, and all the laughs they can from this material. Cena has been settling nicely into the role of living, breathing sight gag ever since 2015's Trainwreck, and he has an easy chemistry with Mann's adorable single mother, clinging onto Newton's Julie in the desperate hope her daughter can prevent her from dying alone; halfway through Blockers, you come to the odd realisation that Apatow - Mann's own husband, who directed her in Knocked Up and This is 40 - has never let her be quite this funny. 

The MVP here, however, is Barinholtz, the amiably disgusting Nurse Morgan on TV's The Mindy Project, who's always looked somewhat like Mark Wahlberg if Mark Wahlberg had been raised in a Grundon recycling bin. His Hunter is on some basic level Morgan in a suit, but the movies have had many worse ideas than that of late: Barinholtz makes something very funny out of the disproportionate antagonism the character stirs in one nerd he keeps running into, and a casual example out of the scene in which Sam comes out to her dad. That scene is typical of Blockers' tendency to swerve the crude or crass in order to locate the sweet spot in any given set-up: as in most recent American comedies, there's not much in the way of visual elegance, but even the potentially farcical/nightmarish scenario of parent-trapped-in-hotel-room-where-child-plans-to-do-the-deed is elevated by one close-up of Mann that reveals the love in a mother's eyes, her hopes that her daughter's lovelife (and sexlife) will run smoother than her own. The remainder is hardly so profound, being no more or less than a fun night out, but it's not the first or last time Blockers demonstrates the benefits of running a female gaze over this coarse-grained variety of material.

Blockers is now playing in cinemas nationwide.