Month: September 2019

Remember the Joker’s catchphrase from Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman – have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?

Well, this 2019 incarnation of the Clown Prince of Crime is one devil who just loves to dance.

He dances to old show tunes. He dances to music in his own head. He dances just for the heck of it. He dances to express his rage, his frustrations, sometimes even his hopefulness, and to invite us into his headspace.

Some of the time, he dances shirtless, and this is where star Joaquin Phoenix’s bones – he shed many pounds for the role, reportedly to the detriment of his well-being – appear to take on an identity all their own.

Physically, his character is difficult to look at while his mesmerising performance makes it just as hard to look away. (I’ve not felt more unsettled looking at someone lacing up his shoes than I did here.)

The overall effect of his near-cadaverous appearance, coupled with his deeply layered, strangely sympathetic turn as an iconic comic-book villain in a highly un-comic-book-like movie, is stunning.

Eschewing most previous Joker origin stories, the film introduces us to Arthur Fleck (Phoenix), a struggling individual. Not struggling comedian, or struggling employee, or struggling, devoted son, nope. Just plain struggling.

‘You wanna know what’s really funny? DC fans everywhere are going to be saying, “Jared Who?” after this.’

Already broken (by what, we eventually learn as the film goes along) when we meet him, Arthur has been left with a condition that causes him to laugh uncontrollably when he is troubled. Yep, he only laughs when he hurts.

It is a pained laugh that is not just difficult to hear, but also speaks volumes about his internal anguish. It is one more element of Phoenix’s tour de force performance that invites us to ponder just what is going on behind those makeup-obscured eyes.

We may find fleeting but familiar glimpses of our own struggles, or those of people close to us. Or recognise some of the heartbreak, the yearning, the pain of bluntly dismissive remarks from the ones we look up to, or count on.

Those given to more introspective moments may even recognise our words and actions in the people around Arthur. Whether we identify with victim or victimiser, this feeling of familiarity combines effectively with the film’s own relevance to the societal fractures of 2019, despite its early 1980s setting.

This dangerously evokes a sense of empathy for a character whose CV, as any fan of the comics will tell you, includes “mass murderer”.

‘A little bitty tear let me down, spoiled my act as a clown. Guess I’ll just dabble in anarchy and nihilism then.’ – Warner Bros

The story of Joker, however, is set well before he carved out that credit on his resume. It is inspired by the character’s beginnings as told in the acclaimed graphic novel The Killing Joke, by way of Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy.

And if you needed any further proof of those two cinematic influences, their star Robert De Niro is right here as well – ironically enough (and where The King Of Comedy connection comes in), playing a popular talk-show host whom Arthur idolises.

For a good deal of its running time, Joker seems to play fast and loose with what fans may hold sacrosanct. At one point, it even starts down a road that makes you want to shout curses at the screen, and at co-writer/director Todd Phillips.

Rest assured, however, that when all is stabbed and done, the film does not disrespect your … um, fanhood.

It begins as a grim, grimy character study, with the story gradually taking shape around Arthur’s travails (and with his transformation come callbacks to great screen Jokers of the past, notably the Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger versions).

With most of the proceedings seen through his eyes, expect some twists and surprises that, increasingly, make us simultaneously sympathetic yet repulsed by Arthur’s actions.

‘All hail the new king in town, young and old, gather round … dang, I just can’t get “Partyman” out of my head.’

But at this point, it seems all right to feel that way. After all, here, Arthur is just a guy sincerely trying to do what he believes is his calling in life. And, as life beats him down one crushing blow at a time, Joker seems to be inviting us to walk with Arthur and at least find common ground with his situation.

Make no mistake, though: it is ultimately about a descent into insanity.

The slow burn of Joker’s initial 80-odd minutes chronicle, in parallel, both Arthur and Gotham City’s downward spiral (this is a far more squalid and dismal Gotham than we’ve seen before) and show us just how entwined the two are – in a sense, setting up his future rivalry with Batman.

Then the whole powder keg is set off in staggering fashion, leaving us clutching the singed strands of our own expectations and wondering if, indeed, it just takes one bad day to bring our carefully curated worlds crashing down.

And we leave in a half daze, pondering the way Phillips and Phoenix harmonised so wonderfully to deliver a hypnotic, disturbing and challenging product that fairly transcends the genre, while remaining respectful towards it. And that’s no joke.

Joker

Director: Todd Phillips

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Glenn Fleshler

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Is it humanity’s doom, that it takes its greed and nationalistic/ ideological differences everywhere – even to the stars?

In the unspecified near future of Ad Astra, mankind has established colonies on the Moon and Mars, but still fights over their resources.

It’s no different from what we’ve seen on shows like The Expanse, and certainly a far cry from the optimistic, integrated future posited by Star Trek and its spinoffs.

Ad Astra (Latin for “to the stars”) is not, however, a film about such conflicts, even if they do make their way into some scenes and conversations.

It is instead tightly focused on one man’s transformative journey and, in the process, powerfully drives home the enormity, burden and toll of space exploration (or any endeavour that seeks to bridge vast gulfs and blaze trails).

That man is astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), a tautly self-controlled individual as distant from the people around him as the stars are from our grasp.

When a lost space mission commanded by his long-presumed-dead father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones) suddenly becomes a threat to Earth, Roy is summoned to help.

But it’s a mission fraught with danger (from the conflicts mentioned above) and obstacles (from his own secretive superiors).

Are you sure you should be wandering around without a helmet, Bard? You never know when a Face Hugger might attack you.

It is in the journey required by Roy’s mission, and his own path to dealing with the effect on his life of his father’s absence, which co-writer/director James Gray (Little Odessa, We Own The Night) tries to get us invested. For the most part, he succeeds.

Firstly, by staggering us with one reminder after another of how vast, desolate and yet dangerous space can be, and turning even seemingly irrelevant detours into little capsule nightmares that leave the viewer more thoroughly shaken than entire movies (I’m looking at you, Life).

Secondly, by eliciting a remarkably contemplative and relatable performance from Brad Pitt, whose subtle shadings of Roy’s bottled emotions (and their gradual uncorking) keep the viewer glued to the personal drama unfolding amidst all the spectacle of space exploration.

The difficulties, however, come in connecting this effectively realised portrayal to the characters and situations around the main character.

‘I’m so glad we’re finally taking the fight to the Pod People’s home planet. Wait … what do you mean this isn’t a sequel to Invasion Of The Body Snatchers?’

For one thing, the inevitable meeting of father and son (hardly a spoiler) is a little disappointing.

Clifford’s Captain Ahab-ness is frustratingly left undepicted, and we do not get enough of a handle on his character; snatches of classified transmissions and the brief face-to-face do not suffice.

(Some screen time would have been better utilised on this instead of, say, the lunar buggy chase sequence, impressive and believable as it is.)

And, with nearly every other supporting character reduced to mere plot propellant, we just have to make do with being told how much Roy’s aloofness has cost him – we never really get a sense of it, until quite late into his mission.

Fortunately, we have Donald Sutherland along for the early part of the ride (did his Space Cowboys connection to Tommy Lee Jones play a part in his casting?) to serve as kind of a guiding light, and we do get the sense that Roy misses having a father figure in his life in their scenes together.

‘And this is our Mars base library. Excuse the empty shelves … it’s so dull here that all our colonists are actually reading again.’ – Walt Disney Studios

Knowing of Gray’s work only from his gritty crime yarns, I have to say that the director proves quite sure-footed in his maiden voyage through a genre that can trip up the best of them.

And as space exploration dramas go, Ad Astra deserves praise for its scope, stunning visual achievements and strong central performance.

I did not feel cheated, like after watching Interstellar, for example; but was not as exhilarated as I was coming out of The Right Stuff, Gravity or The Martian, either.

While the intent of Gray’s bookends for the film is clear, too many unanswered questions remain about the aftermath of Roy’s journey – given everything that happens – for Ad Astra to be as uplifting and liberating as the personal triumph it declares.

Ad Astra

Director: James Gray

Cast: Brad Pitt, Liv Tyler, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Donald Sutherland, Loren Dean

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One could well imagine the screening of this movie taking place inside a sold-out arena full of WWE fans, with the “You’ve still got it!” chants rocking the house in the final, brutal third act.

Yes, well, one could also imagine this as a (mean) spiritual cousin to Home Alone, with an aging John J. Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) tackling a home invasion in the bloodiest and most explosive way possible.

Actually, one could imagine quite a bit, as old Han was fond of saying, to serve as the story for this purported finale to the Rambo franchise.

Too bad that what the filmmakers have settled on is kind of … generic.

On and off since 1981, the traumatised Vietnam War veteran has been dishing out punishment and revenge to rednecks, Viet Cong, Soviet military advisers and special forces, Burmese SPDC troops and the like.

Now, he tangles with sex traffickers in a Taken Lite plot line that serves only as the springboard for some pretty extreme violence (though I can’t shake the feeling that, bloody as it is, our local version has been sanitised a little).

The stakes have to be personal in order to warrant the kind of payback meted out in the finale, and the person picked to suffer this time is Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal). She’s the girl Rambo practically raised as his own daughter from the time we saw him take those first hesitant steps towards his father’s home at the end of 2008’s Rambo.

When she sneaks off to Mexico in search of her estranged biological papa and is ensnared by a human trafficking ring, nasty things ensue.

Rambo War Journal entry #4753: It was a lot easier beating my sword into a ploughshare than it is trying to reverse the process now, lemme tell ya.’

As a setup for vengeance, this whole business is a bit unevenly executed.

Director Adrian Grunberg (Mel Gibson’s Get The Gringo), working from a script co-written by Stallone and Matthew Cirulnick, makes some odd choices that result in a clumsy structure and out-of-character sloppiness for Rambo.

Still, Stallone and Monreal have a nice and easy chemistry that makes you buy into this whole surrogate dad relationship and appreciate the pain that the film’s events bring.

But the villainous traffickers, the Martinez Brothers (Sergio Peris-Mencheta and Oscar Jaenada), are so thinly written as to resemble animated cinema lobby standees. If cinema lobby standees came rigged with blood bags.

As spleen-venting franchise cappers go, I would have been more than happy to see the saga come to a close with the 2008 movie, which ticked all the correct boxes for visceral thrills, nasty bad guys, heroic sacrifices and Rambo’s trademark “war you wouldn’t believe”.

But now we have Last Blood, which is worthy only in its final act. It is content to coast through its first hour purely on the goodwill established by the first four films – and let’s be honest here, not all of them were great to begin with.

‘Gosh, you guys really mean business with your No ID, No Entry rule, huh?’

Though it must be noted that, whenever Jerry Goldsmith’s rousing score for First Blood was used in the subsequent films, it singlehandedly elevated them well above their actual merits.

Such is also the case here. In the film’s OTT climax, Stallone uses the Goldsmith motif, his own familiarity with the character, some deft editing and stunt work, and our willingness to vicariously buy into this vigorously violent vengeance, to really stoke the furnace.

By the time the obligatory montage of scenes from the entire series plays over the closing credits (with even a mid-credits scene of sorts), we do experience a sense of closure.

It is accompanied by a feeling of loss, too, brought on by the realisation that one of action cinema’s most enduring (38 years, brah) heroes is about to sheathe his rather intimidating knife for good.

At least, until the box-office grosses are tallied, and The Very Last Blood will be spilled.

Rambo; Last Blood

Director: Adrian Grunberg

Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Yvette Monreal, Adriana Barraza, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Oscar Jaenada

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With shapeshifting humans, moon witches, fetish priests, devils and demons, gods and demigods, there is a stunning amount to grasp and unpack in Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Booker Prize-winning Jamaican author Marlon James.

The novel feels like an allegorical mash-up of Hans Christian Anderson stories with Alice Through The Looking Glass – there are mystical doorways, slavers and necromancers, and monsters that spring from ceilings and vanish into smoke when they hit the floor.

All the elements have a familiarity about them if you’ve read enough fairytales and fantasy fiction, or if you’ve heard the tall tales from generations past. And yet the 48-year-old author’s storytelling cunningly makes these tropes and characters feel fresh and new.

This book is the first part of a planned Dark Star trilogy. We know that the series will take a cue from Japanese filmmaking legend Akira Kurosawa’s acclaimed movie Rashomon and retell the same story from different perspectives in the two sequels.

Book #1, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, begins as a first-person narrative, as our loquacious hero emerges out of an ancient Africa that exists only in imagination. He doesn’t remember having a name, so “Tracker” is the moniker with which he identifies. Tracker has been captured and he is recounting his life story to the inquisitors interrogating him in his prison cell.

The opening chapter reads almost like a High Chant, something a chorus of Greeks in a long-forgotten play might relay. As Tracker recalls his teenage years, there is a lot of talk about sex, sexuality, rites of passage and more sex – a fairly accurate depiction of a pubescent boy, really. A lot of detail has gone into the sexual relations – who’s having it, when, how, and who’s not – and Tracker has all the information. Consider this a heads-up for anyone who’s prudish about carnal depictions.

James’ prose is dense, but in the most wonderful way. It’s a delicious ache to know we’re going to read about these events again from someone else’s point of view in the coming years. Because James makes it clear that his characters lie, and we have only Tracker’s word for now.

Meanwhile, fight scenes read like well-choreographed action sequences in a film as James vividly captures the cracking of skulls, the eruption of blood, and the horror at facing witches and demons the likes of which thrive in our nightmares.

Legends, myths and practices from across Africa’s vast history, landscape and diverse peoples are woven into this rich story. Pulling from Ashanti folklore, James’ depiction of Asanbosam and Sasabonsam, monstrous vampire brothers that feed on humans, are particularly terrifying.

Ostensibly, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a quest book: Tracker and his friend Leopard are hired to find a boy who would be king. As we get further into the quest, meeting new companions just as old ones get left behind, the mystery deepens around the lad they’ve been sent to find.

Like a wolf, Tracker is gifted with a “nose”, the ability to smell a scent and follow it to the ends of the world. The smell changes if the quarry dies, but once he has picked up a scent, he can track it anywhere. In one story, he even goes beyond this earth and down into the underworld following his target.

Meanwhile, Leopard is a shapechanger with the power to transform himself into his namesake. The two men share a goal, a companionship and a deeper love – and anyone who has truly lost their very first love will know the pain that Tracker refuses to admit in his storytelling.

Tracker recounts his years to his captors. In speaking to them, he tells us about the death of his father and how this set his life on the course that ultimately gets him captured and interrogated. How the fame of his tracking ability spread far and wide, such that a queen whose son was kidnapped sends moon witch Sogolon and various retainers to find and hire Tracker to locate and rescue her boy.

Ulterior motives abound, and as Tracker tells it, Sogolon feeds him information in dribs and drabs as they search for the missing prince. According to Tracker, Sogolon kept potentially vital information to herself, perhaps because she felt Tracker may not have done as requested should he have known the entire truth.

This is not a novel to consume in one feverish sitting. It’s a chronicle that wants you to take your time, linger and sweat over its words and meaning, and challenges you to piece together the path you’re being taken on before the protagonist can reveal the outcome.