Cars 2

When ‘Cars’ opened in 2006, the critics were lukewarm. The main bone of contention seemed to be that it wasn’t as good as ‘The Incredibles’. Which it wasn’t. That said, I preferred it to ‘A Bug’s Life’ and ‘Finding Nemo’, the brilliance of which is punctured, in scene after scene, by the irritant that is Dory (the second most annoying character in the Pixar canon; we’ll come to the first in a minute).

‘Cars’, ultimately, is a decent film with a terrific ending. Aesthetically, its anthropomorphism of human traits, personalities and nationalities into automobiles throws up illogicalities left, right and centre – as Bryce muses in his excellent review on Things That Don’t Suck, “I wouldn’t be the first to wonder if there are not piles of human corpses just offscreen” – but once one rationalizes this in the context of John Lasseter’s love of ’50s Americana, a time as much defined by the fins, gleaming chrome and whitewall tyres of its cars as by its music or its fashions, then one can settle back and enjoy a homely tale of a race car who learns to slow down. ‘Cars’ has plenty to offer: incredibly beautiful visuals, some great supporting characters (the banter between Sarge, a 1940s US Army jeep, and Fillmore, a hippie VW Microbus, is priceless), a finale that tells the kids that, actually, winning isn’t all that important, and an end-credits sequence that transposes the film’s anthropomorphism to Pixar’s previous outings in a montage that’s arguably wittier and more inventive than anything else in ‘Cars’.

I can understand the hesitation to embrace ‘Cars’ as wholly as the ‘Toy Story’ trilogy, ‘The Incredibles’ or ‘Ratatouille’ – but it’s still a film I have a lot of time for.

When ‘Cars 2’ opened last month, it was to the absolute all-time worst reviews in Pixar’s history. Which is kind of understandable given that a whole lot of folks were ambivalent about the first one. The question of why Lasseter was so committed to the project when, say, ‘The Incredibles 2’ or even ‘Ratatouille Part Deux: The Masterchef Years’ would have been a far safer option.

But commit to it Lasseter did and, for all that I enjoyed the manic energy of the film’s last half hour, it was in many ways a bad decision. Don’t get me wrong: I wish I could thumb my nose at the naysayers and declare ‘Cars 2’ a jewel in Pixar’s crown; I wish that all the things I enjoyed about it (Pixar just keep raising the bar visually; there are some inspired in-jokes; it’s a U-rated film that has a “your mother” moment) outweighed the faults. Hell, I’d consider it acceptable if the fun and flaws simply balanced each other out on the scales of critical analysis.

Unfortunately, there are two things about ‘Cars 2’ – and they are inextricably interlinked – that present an almost insurmountable problem:

1. Fucking Mater.

2. It’s a Bond movie. With talking cars.

Or, tying those to together in one unholy bundle the way the script does: it’s a Bond movie with talking cars in which Mater gets his secret agent funk on.

I could end this review right here and I think we’d all be au fait as to what’s wrong with this movie.

For the defence, the fact that it’s a Bond movie doesn’t bother me all that much. Bond movies lend themselves well to satire, particularly the Roger Moore entries which about one micrometer from being cartoons anyway. The mild controversy about the amount of shoot-outs doesn’t bother me either: there were men with guns providing a threat to the protagonists of ‘The Incredibles’ and nobody whinged about that. It does bother me that ‘The Incredibles’ has already ticked the Pixar-spoofs-Bond box and that the material mined by ‘Cars 2’ would have worked a lot better as an ‘Incredibles’ sequel. (Seriously, Mr Lasseter: ‘Incredibles 2’, any time you’re ready. I really want to know what the deal is with the Underminer.)

It also bothers me that the set-pieces ram home the illogicalities of the anthropomorphism more gratingly than anything in the original. Talking cars in a roadside diner I can just about get my head round. Talking cars getting fitted with new tyres by another talking car assisted by a talking forklift truck that uses its blades to operate air-tools …. okayyyyyy. Talking fucking cars on a fucking oil rig being spied on by another talking car which is balanced on a fucking tightrope - that’s pushing it!

The overall aesthetic of ’50s small town America was the key to the first film. It’s what allows everything else to cohere. ‘Cars’ only functions as movie because of Radiator Springs. Location defines many films; with ‘Cars’, it permits the film. ‘Cars 2’ removes the action from Radiator Springs, and in doing so replaces the peaceable and harmonious values of its predecessor with raucous, over the top action. Yes, it’s called ‘Cars 2’; yes, it features Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater and Sarge and Fillmore and the rest of the gang (except for Paul Newman’s Hornet Hudson, whose absence is, credit where due, sensitively acknowledged in an early scene); yes, they’re all demonstrably the same characters. But ‘Cars 2’ exists in an entirely different fictive universe to ‘Cars’ and it’s this as much as anything that makes it such an awkward, unsatisfying viewing experience.

The second problem, as mentioned several hundred words ago, is Mater.

I will not speak of Mater.

I will give the nod to the entertaining and likeable new characters – the suave Finn McMissile (voiced by Michael Caine) and the elegant, albeit inelegantly named Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer). I will mention the nifty portrayal of the villains (the monocled Professor Zundapp is spot on). I will high-five anybody involved in the production for the last act piss-take of the Royal Family and the unmitigated chaos the protagonists wreak through the centre of London.

But I will not speak of Mater. I owe it to my blood pressure not to.

The Man Who Would Be King

Posted to coincide with Sir Sean Connery’s 80th birthday.

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they're starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.
Then it’s Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, ’ow’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin red line of ’eroes” when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s “Thin red line of ’eroes” when the drums begin to roll.

These lines from Rudyard Kipling’s bitterly expressive poem ‘Tommy’ are something you can easily imagine Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine) or Daniel Dravot (Sean Connery) muttering vehemently to themselves, ex-serviceman with a grudge against the Forces and a healthy disrespect for the politicians they feel have let them down; men, it has to be said, who were just as petulant when they were in uniform, the majority of their time spent up on a charge or doing jankers.

No wonder, then, that Carnehan is introduced to us picking someone’s pocket in the crowds at Marwar Station, or that Dravot makes his first appearance dozing in a railway carriage and lambasting the individual who disturbs him with a message from his old mucker Peachey. The victim of Carnehan’s wandering fingers and the receipt in Dravot’s tongue-lashing is one and the same person: journalist and aspiring writer Rudyard Kipling (Christopher Plummer). His interaction with our (anti) heroes provides the framing device for John Huston’s enjoyably cynical epic.

Carnehan returns Kipling’s stolen pocket-watch when he recognizes the symbol on the watch-chain as Masonic; passing himself off as a Mason, he inveigles Kipling into passing a message to Dravot. Tipped off by Dravot as to a blackmail scheme he and Carnehan are planning, Kipling reluctantly passes the information along to the British consul. In the first of many uproarious scenes where Connery and Caine play off each other like a music hall double-act, they troop into the consul’s office, cock a snook at authority, and troop right out again.

They next cross paths with Kipling when they gain access to the newspaper offices he works at to consult maps and documents in the planning of their latest head-in-the-clouds scheme: travel to the far country of Kafiristan (the last white man to successfully mount an incursion: Alexander the Great), back some local tribal leader, defeat his enemies, install him as monarch, overthrow the poor bugger and reign as kings.

The extended mid-section of ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ details their arduous journey and the means by which they set about conquering Kafiristan. It’s a shaggy dog story of the highest order, riddled with coincidences, twists of fate, broad (and borderline xenophobic) humour, sweepingly epic set-pieces and two rip-roaring lead performances. The final stretch of the film, when the deus ex machina of Kipling’s watch-chain (presented to Dravot as a gift at the commencement of their lunatic odyssey) compounds a misapprehension by the locals that sees Dravot hailed as a god – any implausibilities are easily excused by the fact that he’s played by Sean freakin’ Connery! – takes things into darker territory.

The friendship between Dravot and Carnehan – the characters’ jocular, bantering relationship and the actors’ palpable chemisty is the backbone without which the film would be little more than some pretty cinematography and a few impressive crowd scenes – is compromised by Dravot’s burgeoning egomania, his to-the-manner-born assimilation of absolute power culminating in his suggestion that Carnehan demonstrate subservience in order to continue the façade. Then Dravot takes a fancy to a local woman, Roxanne (Shakira Caine), whom he believes the reincarnation of the bride his spiritual predecessor, Alexander the Great, took when he ruled Kafiristan two and half thousand years before.

This righteously pisses off the country’s holy men and the scene is set for the film’s justly famous denouement.

‘The Man Who Would Be King’ is bustling, colourful and ultimately poignant. It begins as a Flashman-like romp, occupies buddy-movie territory for most of its running time, delivers a couple of sweeping battle scenes reminiscent of Caine’s earlier turn in ‘Zulu’, and finally becomes a cautionary tale of the wages of greed and the price of hubris capped off with an almost affirmative moment of reconciliation. It’s a high point in the careers of both Connery and Caine, as well as nestling in the top tier of Huston’s filmography. It’s the kind of Sunday afternoon movie that reminds you – with a glint in its eye, a swagger in its step and a dash of ballsy attitude beneath its seemingly breezy exterior – that Sunday afternoon movies can actually be good.

Inception

There’s a recording of ‘Mack the Knife’ where Frank Sinatra deviates from Brecht and Weill’s tale of white gloves, jack-knives and blood flowing in scarlet ribbons, and goes into a fantasia on all the other singers who have stamped their personality on the song:

Old Satchmo, Louie Armstrong, Bobby Darin

They did this song nice, Lady Ella too
They all sang it with so much feeling
That ol’ Blue Eyes, he ain’t gonna add nothing new

This is kind of how I feel about reviewing ‘Inception’. Is there anyone on the blogosphere (or at least that region of the blogosphere occupied by writers on film) who hasn’t written about ‘Inception’ yet? Is there a single review out there not weighted down by a comments section wherein rages debate on the implications of that already infamous final shot?

Is there anyone who doesn’t know that the film is about dream hacker named Cobb (Leonardo diCaprio) who is hired by a businessman to implant an idea in the mind of a rival? That the first half details how Cobb puts his team together and the second details their (mis)adventures in the dream state when their carefully delineated plan goes awry after their victim’s subconscious proves a little more resistant to their machinations than expected?

Is there anyone who hasn’t sung the praises of Nolan’s audacity in the set piece involving a van plunging from a bridge in the kind of slow motion that makes Peckinpah look like a speed demon? Who hasn’t marvelled at the intercutting between this and two other extraordinarily orchestrated set pieces which play out simultaneously in different levels of the dreamscape and across different lengths of time? Who hasn’t been impressed by how efficiently Nolan sets up the rules of this world of the imagination and plays scrupulously fair by them?

Have I missed any reviews that haven’t acknowledged how heavily the dialogue errs towards the expositional and remarked upon the heavy-handedness of some of the character names? (Cases in point: Ellen Page’s dream architect Ariadne, introduced in a scene where Cobb asks her to design a maze. Or Marion Cotillard’s Mal, the fact that the actress is French ramming home what the name translates as.) Have any of these reviews not written these tendencies off in the final analysis, minor quibbles compared to how goddamned entertaining, audaciously executed and beautifully shot the whole thing is? (Wally Pfister, Nolan’s regular DoP is worthy to be spoken of alongside Roger Deakins and Christopher Doyle.)

Is there anything in ‘Inception’ that isn’t absolutely flawless, from the often breath-taking visual effects and mise-en-scene (a train barrelling out of nowhere down a city street; an unblemished city of mind filled with the oddest little details; a street bending over and folding in on itself) to the uniformly excellent performance: diCaprio is as good as he’s ever been; Joseph Gordon-Levitt revisits his cerebral/cynical persona from ‘Brick’ but underpinned here with a streak of badass; Ellen Page graduates from the quirky, borderline annoying teenie of earlier roles and her intelligence shines through fiercely; Tom Hardy, unrecognisable from ‘Bronson’, camps it up to hilarious effect; Cillian Murphy, so often cast in cold or villainous roles, imbues the film with a wounded humanity; Marion Cotillard is sultry, dangerous and seductive and I for one wouldn’t have it any other way; Ken Watanabe imbues what could have been a plot function role with real gravitas; and Michael Caine, in what is essentially a cameo, proves that he’s Christopher Nolan’s good luck charm plus VAT.

In fact, the only problem with ‘Inception’ is that it’s almost too polished and accomplished. There’s none of the unpredictably that Heath Ledger’s magnificently reinvented Joker brings to ‘The Dark Knight’, crashing through Batman’s clearly defined moral rectitude and sending the movie spinning off in unexpected directions. Nor, despite the levels of the dream state and the brilliant construction of the climactic set piece(s), is the structure quite as clever or effective as that of ‘The Prestige’. Indeed, the last shot of ‘Inception’ seems almost manufactured in its ambiguity compared to the gradual and thought-provoking way in which ‘The Prestige’ slowly and slyly reveals its secrets.

None of which should detract from the fact that ‘Inception’ is one hell of a good movie. Seven films into his career and Nolan has yet to disappoint. ‘Inception’ might not be the absolute touched-by-genius best thing on his CV (that honour, as far as I’m concerned, still goes to ‘The Prestige’), but evaluated for what, after all, it is­ – ie. a big-budget tentpole studio release – it sets the bar arguably higher than any mainstream director currently at work.

The reinvention of the bat

Now don’t get me wrong: I like George Clooney. A lot. But it has to be said: ‘Batman and Robin’ is a piece of shit. It was my friend Paul who delivered the most accurate and coruscating verdict on ‘Batman and Robin’: “It says something when a movie’s got Alicia Silverstone, Uma Thurman and Vivica Fox in it – and you still walk out halfway through.”

‘Batman and Robin’ is what it had come to. It made the Adam West incarnation of Batman look like an exercise in documentary realism. It made the lacklustre ‘Batman Forever’, in which the mantle so convincingly worn by Michael Keaton was transmogrified into a mooching slab of banality by Val Kilmer, look like a rediscovered masterpiece by Powell & Pressburger. It made a five year old with a snot nose and scabby knees running through a council estate screaming “nana-nana-nana-nana, nana-nana-nana-nana, BATMAAAAANNN!” at the top of his voice look like Sir Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet at the Old Vic. It made –

*steels himself*

*gnashes teeth*

*types the motherfucker anyway*

– it made ‘Twilight’ look like a proper film.

In short, ‘Batman and Robin’ presented a pretty convincing argument for the end of the franchise. Only a madman or a genius would have attempted a reboot.

Enter Christopher Nolan. (Clue: he ain’t no madman.) Even then, if I’m being perfectly honest, I had my doubts. Taking my seat at Nottingham’s Showcase Cinema back in 2005 (a scant eight years after Joel Schumacher had raped the shit out of my sense of aesthetics in exactly the same cinema with ‘Batman and Robin’), I wondered if Nolan – who had delivered a minor masterpiece with ‘Memento’ and an assured big-name studio picture with ‘Insomnia’ – wasn’t making a mis-step.

Ten minutes in, with Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) roughing it up in down and dirty style in some godforsaken prison, and I gave myself a mental rebuke for doubting Mr Nolan’s talent. An hour in, with Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Tom Wilkinson and Morgan Freeman delivering the goods and Bale himself wiping the slate clean in terms of how you portray Batman onscreen, and I was in hog heaven.

This was a Batman that was dark and nasty. Wilkinson’s Falcone was a proper mob boss, the kind of guy who’d shoot you in the head halfway through a meal and still be on coffee and desserts while his henchmen were dumping you in the harbour. Cillian Murphy’s Dr Crane (a.k.a Scarecrow) was a chilling and nightmarishly-visaged fiend … even before he put the freakin’ mask on! Ra’s Al Ghul and the League of Shadows were terrifying in their implacable certainty that their genocidal plans were the only reasonable option.

And then there was Bale’s Batman. You only need to remind yourself of Bale’s filmography. The man’s intense. His performances eviscerate. You could put him in ‘Teletubbies: the Movie’ and he’d tear the screen apart in an exegesis of method actor ferocity that would have the pre-school audience in therapy for decades. Or, to put it more simply, cast the man in a comic book movie and it stops being a comic book movie pretty damn quick.

Not that Nolan’s take on Batman was ever going to be comic book. There is very little of the gothic iconography that defines the comics. Nolan’s Gotham pays lip service with some shots of a monorail and the quasi-Victorian architecture of Arkham Asylum, but otherwise the film plays out across an unapologetically gritty milieu: the docks, the slums, Falcone’s downtown bar, an authentically grubby police precinct.

Case in point: it’s halfway into the film before Wayne dons the bat-suit. Most directors would mark the moment with a big, iconic close-up of Bruce Wayne as Batman, cape fluttering, zooming down through the night sky to combat villainy. Nolan does things differently. Nolan stages Batman’s first appearance during a drug deal, there various miscreants and heavies darting between containers as something – something shadowy and deadly and preternaturally fast – picks off their numbers one by one.

Context: Bruce Wayne picks his alter ego based on what scares him the most. Reasoning: if he conquers his own fear (pace the teachings of Ra’s Al Ghul), the very thing that scares him will terrify his enemies.

Nolan keeps the bat to the shadows. The effect is so much more devastating.

In a film that has only one weak spot – Katie Holmes’s indifferent performance – Nolan effortlessly portrays both sides of the persona, Bruce Wayne and Batman, as intertwined. Where most of the previous outings (only Burton’s first Batman film comes close to synthesising the two) unambiguously delineate Bruce Wayne the millionaire playboy and Batman the masked avenger, Nolan uses Wayne’s outward appearance of gentleman of leisure to strip away the concealing layers of his psyche and get to grips with the day-to-day hardships and psychological implications of leading what is essentially a double life.

‘Batman Begins’ gave the cinema-going public a credible, obsessively driven and sometimes vulnerable Batman. A gritty, ballsy Batman. A Batman largely free of glib one-liners and casual heroics. A superhero, in other words, for our troubled and ambiguous times.

Then he spent the two and a half hours of its genre-bending, expectation-shattering sequel demolishing every aspect of his anti-hero’s granite-like rectitude, irreversibly compromising Batman’s morality and turning him into a post-Guantanamo Bay one-man Patriot Act, beating the shit out of arrested suspects, clandestinely deporting foreign nationals, fucking over the basic civil liberties of every resident of Gotham (a Gotham, moreover, now free of monorails and Gothic buildings; a Gotham that could easily pass for New York) and basically proving right every naysayer who decries him as a vigilante. ‘The Dark Knight’ is the Ingmar Bergman of summer blockbusters, an unremittingly dark foray into the depths of its supposed hero’s ravaged humanity; a film whose gleefully amoral villain, Heath Ledger’s definitive Joker, remains utterly and perversely true to himself while forcing Batman at every turn to overturn every tenet of justice he stands for.

Earlier in this blogathon, Bryce linked to a thought-provoking and elegantly constructed essay at The Movie Blog which weighs the evidence of ‘Batman Begins’ as a deconstructionist or reconstructionist film and finds it reconstructionist. It’s an argument I’m entirely convinced by. But there’s no doubt that Nolan’s two Batman films are also reinventions.

David Bowie is Nikola Tesla: the unsung hero of The Prestige

Posted as part of Bryce Wilson’s Christopher Nolan blogathon at Things That Don’t Suck

The first time I saw ‘The Prestige’ – the first of three viewings on the big screen and umpteen more on DVD – I was struck by the charismatic actor playing Nikola Tesla. There was something familiar about him, but I didn’t give too much thought to the matter. I had other things to think about; ‘The Prestige’ is, after all, a thinking-caps-on kind of movie, one of those incredibly rare films that not only sucker-punches you with a hell of a twist first time round but gets even better on subsequent viewings when you know what’s coming and can marvel at the filmmakers’ skill in conjuring misdirections, concealing lacunae and – more impressive still – leaving enough ambiguity to allow for endless debates as to who was who and who knew what in any given scene.

I wholeheartedly love ‘The Prestige’. It’s easily my favourite movie of the last decade and my favourite Christopher Nolan film – with ‘The Dark Knight’ coming a close second*. It’s also a real bugger to write about (I originally reviewed it a year and half ago as part of the Personal Faves project) since you can’t get into any really interesting discussion without giving away an amazing double- (or possibly even triple-) whammy ending. And if there’s anyone reading these pages who hasn’t seen ‘The Prestige’, I want their first viewing of it to be as jaw-droppingly revelatory as mine.

The basic premise is a friendship that turns to rivalry between two magicians in the Victorian era: the working class Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and slumming-it aristocrat Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) – career bests, performance-wise, from both stars. It’s an adaptation of Christopher Priest’s epistolary novel which veers startlingly into science fiction in a denouement which explicitly homages an H.G. Wells novel.

Although Nolan, co-adapting with his brother Jonathan, wisely stops short of Priest’s OTT finale, a suspension of disbelief is still required for one of the big reveals (although it works brilliantly as a metaphorical device even if you don’t buy it as a plot point) which involves a device created by Tesla. Which is where we came in. And, like I said, I didn’t waste too much time sitting the cinema wondering who was playing Tesla. For me, he was Tesla.

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian inventor, one of the pioneers of electrical engineering. His work in the field of electricity favoured alternating current while his great rival Thomas Edison espoused direct current. History records Edison’s name as synonymous with electricity, but Tesla’s work – while tending on occasion to the more conceptual and eccentric – remains incredibly important. In a similar twist of fate, Tesla undertook some early and groundbreaking research into x-rays; however, it is Wilhelm Röntgen who is credited with discovering the technique (it also netted him the first Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901).

Tesla’s brilliance can be reckoned by the sheer amount of devices, principles and research he pioneered: rotating magnetic fields, the induction motor, voltage multiplication circuits, the arc light, polyphase systems, charged particle beam devices, the electronic logic gate (based on Babbage’s analytical engine), telegeodynamics, bladeless turbines, wireless electrical transfer, radio-controlled weaponry, theories on robotics and his famous (or infamous) Tesla coil.

He was eccentric. He claimed his genius was coterminous with his celibacy (though I guess that would explain Paris Hilton’s mediocrity!); he had a phobia of dirt; he ended his days in a room at the New Yorker Hotel. He kept pigeons in said hotel room. I’m still not sure how that squared with his abhorrence of dirt.

The Tesla of ‘The Prestige’, however, is the Tesla of middle age; the impeccably dressed, elegant, slightly formal, slightly aloof Tesla. The Tesla already starting to exhibit signs of paranoia, principally due to Edison who by this point has graduated from rival to nemesis. When the film ended, I sat through the end credits. “David Bowie!” I exclaimed, turning to my wife. “That was David Bowie playing Tesla!” Bowie’s given good – sometimes inspired – performances in movies before, most notably Nic Roeg’s ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’. His turn in ‘The Prestige’ is something else, though. I honestly didn’t recognise him on that first viewing; he had become the character.

‘The Prestige’ is a dark story of blame, grudges, guilt, secrets and sacrifices. One of the magicians, in the final stretch, emerges as slightly more sympathetic than the other. Throughout the rest of the movie, though, it’s left to the supporting characters to supply the humanity: Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson as the women in the feuding conjurors’ lives and, particularly, Michael Caine as the impresario whose association with them goes right back to the beginning of the story.

David Bowie as Nikola Tesla contributes something else entirely. He brings real gravitas to his portrayal of Tesla and, in turn, Tesla lends a crazed credulity to the single most fantastical element of the film. The only actual historical character in the film, he’s also the erratic genius who delivers into Angier’s hands a device that utterly changes what he can accomplish in his stage act. The story goes into such brilliantly bizarre realms at this point that no-one else but Tesla could have served the narrative. Put simply, you couldn’t make up a character like Tesla. When the fiction is this strange you need the kind of truth that is stranger than fiction. Watch ‘The Prestige’. Think about what Tesla’s invention does. Don’t ask yourself why anyone could actually believe that such a thing would work. Ask instead if Nikola Tesla would even believe it wouldn’t.

*For the record, I’ve not seen ‘Inception’ yet.