Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • Moon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Duncan Jones (2009)

    The BFI showing I went to had been transferred from NFT2 to NFT1 in response to ‘overwhelming demand’.  With the director coming along to introduce his film and take part in a Q&A afterwards, the place was nearly full.  Unless this was some hard-to-fathom publicity coup on the part of BFI, you can only assume that a more likely  explanation is the correct one – another programming miscalculation.    The genial Duncan Jones was given a hero’s welcome on arrival and there’s plenty to applaud him for.  This is, as he said in his commendably brief introduction, an independent British film and it’s attracted widespread praise.   Jones has certainly carried out his stated intention of evoking science fiction classics that he remembers from his youth (he was born in 1971), including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien.   His success with an extra-terrestrial story is pleasingly apt too because his father – Jones was once Zowie Bowie – was Major Tom and Ziggy Stardust.

    Sam Bell, the protagonist of Moon, is, to quote Wikipedia, employed by:

    ‘Lunar Industries to extract helium-3 from lunar regolith, for much-needed clean energy back on Earth …. He is stationed for three years at the largely automated “Sarang” lunar base (“sarang” means ‘love’ in Korean), with only a robotic assistant named GERTY … for company.’

    Moon dramatises the crises of the last few weeks of Bell’s lunar exile, including the discovery that he’s a clone.  Jones, who devised the story from which Nathan Parker developed a screenplay, always wanted Sam Rockwell for the part of Bell – but if you’re going to make a drama that deals with the poignant fragility of human identity you need someone more distinctive and penetrating than Rockwell.    As an actor, he seems to have been cloned:  the multiple versions of Sam Bell that materialise are inadvertently meaningless because the competent, hard-working Sam Rockwell is a generic presence.   I don’t doubt that Jones’s admiration for Rockwell is genuine but it illustrates the director’s order of priorities – perhaps the order of priorities of sci-fi film-makers more generally.   I think they don’t want actors with personalities strong enough to divert attention from the fruits of their visual imagination and their technological achievements.   It’s surely no coincidence that, as in 2001, the liveliest character in Moon is a piece of machinery:  the computer HAL (voiced by Douglas Rain) upstaged the astronauts (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood) in Kubrick’s epic and the robot GERTY does the same here, thanks to Kevin Spacey.   At first Spacey’s voice is too self-consciously insinuating but it grows more compelling as GERTY is revealed to be infinitely co-operative – and more intriguing as the only alternative to watching and listening to Sam Rockwell.

    Photographed by Gary Shaw and with a production design by Tony Noble, Moon certainly looks good, even if the visualisation of the moon as a dark, cold landscape and the palette used inside and outside the spacecraft – black, dark blue, silvery grey – are just what you’d expect.    The human details are clichés without technical wizardry to redeem them – the supposedly moving exchanges between Sam Bell and the wife and child he left behind, the fragments of popular culture from planet Earth which emphasise how away from home the hero is.  This time it’s TV sitcoms like Bewitched and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (although it’s hard to see, if Moon is set even in the fairly near future, how those would be part of the memory of someone of Sam Bell’s age).

    31 August 2010

  • The Killing

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stanley Kubrick (1956)

    A really tense, taut thriller (it runs just 84 minutes).  The source material is a pulp novel, Clean Break, by Lionel White.  Kubrick wrote the screenplay, with dialogue by Jim Thompson (a well-known crime writer of the time).  It’s about the planning and execution of a $2m robbery at a San Francisco racecourse – and the variously down-on-their-luck and desperate members of the band of robbers.  Kubrick’s clinical temperament and technical imagination are ideally suited to the material.  You can sense his pleasure in presenting the details of the gang’s preparations, how each of its members reaches the scene and moment of the crime.  But The Killing is much more than technically accomplished.  The casting is very acute:  the actors are physically perfect for the types they play; most of them are good enough – and with the help of Thompson’s pungent writing – to give some individuality to the generic characters they’re interpreting.   The racing sequences are some of the best I’ve seen (unusually, even the horses’ names are fairly convincing).  Kubrick not only makes them exciting to watch (the photographer was Lucien Ballard); he draws out the formidable potential of the sights and sounds of a horse race – so that the racing seems ominous, linking to the impending crime and foreshadowing the doomed ending of the enterprise and of all concerned with it.

    Gerald Fried’s wittily discordant music has racetrack reveille notes worked into its brassy, insistent overtones.  And the gradual disintegration of the robbers’ plan is brilliantly structured.   Things start to go wrong, then seriously wrong.  The point comes when you realise the crime is bound to fail – but Kubrick builds the tension so expertly that that point is imperceptible.  You’ve become aware that things are spiralling downwards but you’re not sure when the tide turned.   By the time the film’s climax, in an airport, arrives, most of the characters are dead (and the picture’s title has acquired a double meaning).   You can guess, when a little poodle dog and his doting elderly lady owner appear on the scene (they’ve come to the airport to meet her husband), that they’re going to influence the final outcome but you’ve no idea how.   When the poodle delivers the coup de grâce, the effect is a relief (the dog survives), desolating (you wanted the crime to succeed) and elating – because of the director’s visual aplomb.   The robbers have failed to bring off their ‘perfect crime’ (it seems too daring in several respects to justify that label) but Kubrick has made a virtually faultless film noir.

    Sterling Hayden, the best-known name in the cast, is Johnny Clay, recently out of Alcatraz and the gang’s leader, and he dominates proceedings, not just through his physical presence but in the way he suggests a despair that’s never far below the surface of Johnny’s professional cool and competence.   The other vivid performers include Elisha Cook Jr (as a loser who knows it), Marie Windsor (his acid, vampish wife), Vince Edwards (her lover), Jay C Flippen (an older member of the gang, with a oddly ambiguous liking for Johnny),  Ted de Corsia (a crooked, debt-ridden policeman), Joe Sawyer (a racetrack barman, who completes the core membership of the gang), Dorothy Adams (his invalid wife), and James Edwards (a black parking attendant at the racecourse – a racial insult partly catalyses the first death in the story).  Timothy Carey, as the marksman hired to shoot one of the horses (and thus trigger a stewards’ enquiry during which the robbery can take place), is magnetically nasty – although he acts viciousness in a way that looks rather crude in this context.  Coleen Gray, as Johnny’s girlfriend, seems conventional in her first scenes but her anxiety in the closing stages is affecting.   As a wrestler brought on board to provide a crucial distraction in the racecourse bar, Kola Kwariani is a startling physical presence even if his thick accent makes his lines mostly incomprehensible.    Cecil Elliott is the poodle owner.

    5 February 2009

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