Post-tabloid feeding frenzies and the c-word: Gone Girl and Maps to the Stars (2014)

For some reason the will to write about films this year has been lacking. I say, 'for some reason' yet I think I'm being disingenuous for the simple fact seems to be that great films this year are in worryingly short supply. Pessimists (or optimists, depending on your point of view) would refer to the rise of the box set diet and point to the the 'wealth' of quality drama series, with top box office talent to boot, leading to a leaching of talented writers and directors, lured - in straitened financial times - by guaranteed returns, efficient factory-line production processes and the strong chance of repeat fees until they turn grey. This is no shock to anyone with a TV or a laptop.

Yet I see no reason to regard this zenith of chapterised entertainment as any kind of 'threat' to serious cinema. To me that's a little like saying that soap operas could challenge literature - the two function entirely separately in their cultural purpose, and anyone who regards TV as offering any really serious talking points is missing the point entirely. I refer to this age we inhabit a 'zenith' for a simple reason. TV, like all mass communication in capitalist frameworks can only reach a certain point before it starts to mimic itself and rely on formula. And it's way past that point as far as I can see: with new 'landmark' series being announced virtually weekly. 

Sure, cinema does this too (and Hollywood is nothing, if not a knee-jerk reactionary industry mainly devoid of people able to think beyond percentages and sequels. Thanks again, George Lucas etc. etc.), but like the literary novel, its medium allows for (and demands) a rigour and an economy of story-telling that is notoriously hard to pull off on a small screen. I loved Hannibal, but it's still a prequel that has strayed into one forthcoming season too many. Elementary was another re-tooling of Arthur Conan Doyle for the 21st century; House of Cards was a remake of a '70s British drama… you get my point. 

People who think Game of Thrones is high art, just because it comes from a multi-volume series and thus requires several seasons to cover or because it's a loose analogy of early medieval history, have missed the point (again). We watch these weekly instalments because we long, like children, for narrative closure. I recently watched the excellent True Detective with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey being dragged through the swampy underbelly of Louisiana towards some kind of Lovecraftian non-revelatory climax: it was superbly acted, written and directed. In fact, only the awful T Bone Burnett faux-bluesyness of the opening music, and the hurried last episode spoiled the thing. And yet… by the end I realised that the whole thing worked better as scene setting for a new long-running detective series starring Marty Hart and Rust Cohl, because now we really had explored their respective back stories (and still left more to explore, for instance: Rust's Alaskan upbringing) and had established a rather fine dynamic. But also at the same time I enjoyed it because I knew there were only eight episodes and that I would have the requisite closure.

I admit that I never got through more than five episodes of Breaking Bad, not because I didn't enjoy it, admire it or even want to see more. Put it down to time constraints. And yet I'm willing to bet that no one really got a great deal of philosophical, moral or didactic grist from the series, despite the slick writing, superb acting or the thrilling portrayal of a descent into darkness. Actually, I've just realised that I lied just now: it wasn't time constraints alone that put me off completing these commitments to fiction - it was the sure and certain knowledge that I would always, in some way, be let down. I lost (haha) six YEARS to Lost and look how THAT turned out. Homeland was, and is, when all's said and done, pure fantasy with one coruscating central performance (Claire Danes) by a character who you very quickly get sick of. What's more, its central premise: that any one of us may be the mole/spy/religious nut, was directly lifted from Battlestar Galactica. 

I used to write a lot about BSG. That was my first real experience of the joy of box-bingeing. And yet it celebrated its ten-year anniversary this week. Homeland appeared in 2011 - which implies that in seven short years the now-ubiquitous water cooler series has reached its tipping point. BSG was both an exemplary and a terrible place to start my series-watching habits, mainly because it dared to address contemporary matters both spiritual and political in a brutally serious way, and also because space opera is a far more forgiving arena for examining  such weighty matters. Maybe because our expectations are lowered by the genre it succeeds far better at sneaking in the subversiveness. Nothing these days can really compete with that initial thrill of seeing something that dared to openly criticise American society on a small screen. But even re-watching BSG revealed the occasional hackneyed sub-plots or dodgy performances. And on a week after David Lynch and Mark Frost announced a return to Twin Peaks - surely THE high-water mark for TV drama subversion - no one seems to have remembered how bitterly disappointing the second season was - descending into soap opera and second-rate sci fi nonsense when Lynch fell out with the network. 

Lynch's recent pronouncements that now only TV has the funding and scope to produce serious high-level drama is both cowardly and incorrect. I'd argue that TV can easily subvert our expectations, but its format can only ever lead to serious compromise and ratings chasing. Let's face it, the BBC wouldn't be in such a parlous state today if it hadn't bowed down to these market forces. And no amount of HBO/Netflix/Amazon Prime shenanigans will replace the rigour of sitting still with no adverts for two hours watching a large screen. And while this insistence on the effort involved in getting off your fat arses and hauling them to the local fleapit may seem quaintly archaic or even Stalinist, I truly believe that for true film art people will always need to return to the cinema.

Which brings me onto the two films mentioned in the title: because one is an example of a director who dabbles in both genres quite happily (as Lynch used to do) but sees no paradox or even crossover. The other is an auteur who consistently derides the constraints of shrinking budgets by creating superb, low budget arthouse movies that always challenge thinking and twist perceptions of modern/future thinking.

David Fincher's remake of House of Cards was undeniably superb on every level. The cold-hearted dissection of the Washington snake pit moved like a well-oiled machine through the degradations of a modern, socially networked and post-tabloid world. Of course it didn't hurt that the leads (Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright) were completely believable as steely-eyed pragmatists and power game whores. But Fincher's heartland (again like Lynch) is still the big screen as Gone Girl proves. There's nothing in House of Cards doesn't appear in some form or another in his cinema, in fact it's pretty much all there in Gone Girl, apart from the overt political overtones.  The adaptation of Gillian Flynn's novel (with apparently a slightly more ambiguous ending) is crisp despite being overlong, biting and above all: funny. Really funny, in fact. The skewering of the media frenzy surrounding an alleged disappearance of a beautiful wife from small town Missouri is filled with knowing dialogue, priceless asides and brutally accurate portrayals of the human scum that rises to the top during a circus that attends every high profile court case, from Madeleine McCann to Oscar Pistorius: this is a timely movie, just as The Social Network was. I have to admit I found the story of Zuckerberg slightly more compelling in its observances of the rise of social media and the bratty nerdy heart at the centre of this latest phase of 'civilisation'; but then I've had to work in that particular swamp of egotism for a few years now.

But with a razor sharp script, an outstanding collection of casting choices (not one actor seemed out of place) and denouement that refused to see so-called justice meted out, Gone Girl is a truly 21st century film. The meta jokes come thick and fast: even including Ben Affleck's chin (even the investigating police officer in charge of the investigation makes a joke about the bar Affleck's character owns as being a 'meta bar' because it's called The Bar). It's the kind of film you wish you'd seen with a notebook, so many are the great one-liners. I guffawed when Rosamund Pie's rube ex-boyfriend of  (played by Neil Patrick Harris doing his best Niles Crane impersonation) says, of the plan to run away to a Greek Island: 'fresh octopus and scrabble!'. Gone Girl is not a great movie but it is a very good one. Fincher has his signature style, yet he falls far short of being an original (no matter what you may think of boys' 'cult' stuff like 7even or Fight Club) - relying too often on established forms or other people's words. On watching Mark Gatiss' guide to European horror films last night I realised that Gone Girl was very similar to Les Diaboliques, although it cleverly avoids the final twist ending that would make it another bloody M Night Shamalyan 'why see it more than once' special.

Maps to the Stars, meanwhile,  continues David Cronenberg's recent spate of literary adaptations although this time it's merely the script (and experiences) of Hollywood writer, Bruce Wagner (who, like Robert Pattinson here, worked as a limo driver while attempting to get his scripts filmed). Wagner may be remembered by some readers as the man behind Wild Palms - a wonky mini-series based on his comic book, which recycled a lot of Cronenberg (and Philip K Dick's) ideas.

If there's one sure sign that you've made it as an arthouse, yet mainstream auteur in Tinseltown, it's by making a film about Tinseltown. Billy Wilder, the Coens, even Lynch etc. etc. the list is almost inexhaustible. And if we're talking meta, Maps… is so stuffed with self-reference and cultural nods that there's barely time to fit in a scant plot about incest, madness and (what else) narcissistic self-involvement. Beginning a little like a Robert Altman movie (disparate characters whose paths gradually enmesh) - in fact it was The Player which I was most reminded of. Many lines brought to mind that fantastic scene in Palm Springs where Greta Scacchi says to Tim Robbins: 'I thought these places only existed in movies'.

It's not just Altman who gets a nod here: there's a line about P T Anderson (and his ability to resurrect careers): and of course Julianne Moore gave another powerhouse performance in Magnolia, as similar tale of self-interest and incest in Los Angeles… And other actors don't get of lightly either. Robert Pattinson, a man whose career is completely worth following in my opinion, gets to reprise his limo-dwelling role from recession-fever dream, Cosmopolis, only this time he's driving the limo. He still has sex in the back, however (in years to come, people may possibly refer to this period of Cronenberg's career as his 'Robert Pattinson shagging in the back of a limo' phase). Come to that, even Cronenberg references himself - as one character is bludgeoned to death with one of his own (Canadian) film awards. Talk about sneaky and snarky,eh?

It does have its flaws: Wagner's cynical dissection of John Cusak as self-help snake oil salesman, 'Dr' Stafford Weiss seems a little hypocritical when you consider that he's a pretty new age guy himself (as most cynics tend to be): a former follower of Carlos Castaneda and a current follower of some other guru. Here his harsh nibbling of the hand that feeds him is also predictable as hell. But this is why Cronenberg can now be considered a master. In his hands the material takes that brilliant odd half-turn that always leaves you feeling slightly disoriented.  While, just like Fincher, he's fascinated by the rapid changes that shape all of our lives, he also layers it with a surrealism that's never obvious. In any Cronenberg film there's always bound to be sex, disease and decay, yet here you get the sense that Cronenberg holds out some hope that there's a universality in the suffering of these spoilt denizens of the Hollywood Hills. Evan Bird's Justin Bieber-alike brattishness masks a deep, and surprisingly mature worldliness. His final line is 'I made 13 summers, not so bad.' which sounds like the words of someone five times his age. He's a boy who grew up far too fast.  His parents played to perfection by Cusack and a wonderfully under/out of control power-hungry Olivia Williams are only one step ahead of the same media feeding frenzy that consumes Ben Affleck and his family in Gone Girl. The ending is inevitable, yet the Greek tragedy aspect adds weight and dignity to these deeply flawed lives. 

It's only Moore as fading, mother-obsessed star, Havana Segrand who doesn't escape complete damnation. Like Madonna… well, pretty much as you\d expect her to be, she's a egotistical harridan who bludgeons her way across the screen. Her end is almost welcome and while all reviews have identified her as the real kinetic force behind the film, I found myself tiring of her 'intensity'. at times. She's brilliant, of course she is, yet such an unsympathetic character diluted the film's important message about how ageing and death haunt each character, like the spectres they glimpse in the wee small hours. At one party young Weiss' two girlfriends cackle about anyone over 30 being 'menopausal'. It's a world where time is both literally and figuratively catching up with everyone. And while this is by no means Cronenberg's best moment (I've been so sick of every geeky hipster critic waxing nostalgic DC's early body horror shockers - as if he's not allowed to stray into serious cinema - while letting us know how well-versed they are in his work. Idiots) it's, as always, reliably intriguing, wonderfully performed and as creepily funny as everything else he's made in the last ten years. But then, I thought Cosmopolis was near-genius. Feel free to disagree. 

And while I've just written a huge amount on the reasons why cinema will survive (goddamit) - I also get the feeling that what links these two films is that they dare to say 'cunt' a lot. Something you still can't get away with on TV.

This is the end, beautiful BSG

All good things etc. But how ridiculously hard it's going to be to say goodbye to the very last season of BSG. In as much as it's been a stop start ride, necessitated by the writer's strike, it's also been as full of amazing acting, nicely skewed story lines and (lest we forget this is Sci Fi) fucking amazing special effects as we've come to expect from THE SINGLE BEST TV SERIES FOR THE LAST TWENTY YEARS. Like all great art BSG has made me think in totally new ways about the world around me. Over the last few episodes the tale that's addressed topics as pertinent to our times as war, torture, fundamentalism, religious bigotry, racism, the role of the family and just good old human relationships has one rather big card to play. The end of the humanity itself.
It's come to me as a slow creeping feeling of grim resignation and almost depression. Every day I get on an overcrowded tube train and smell hear and almost drown in the weight of a city at near breaking point. And while it may seem odd to compare the fate of a planet bulging with a species that over-consumes and over-pollutes its home to the point of destruction with the story of a race that's almost too few to continue, and without a home, the parallels are inescapable.
BSG shows us a deeply flawed, selfish, half insane society, tearing itself apart and at war with its own technology while squeezed into a constricting space. The world this society has left itself (let's not forget that the Cylon rebellion was man's sins come back to visit them) is drab, almost universally grey and literally now collapsing under their feet. The last few episodes leading up to this Friday's denouement have featured one element that's added to the sense of approaching disaster and apocalypse: the sound of the old battleship herself, groaning as she stutters towards her last battle. I urge anyone who's a fan to watch the last one or two shows wearing headphones. If the sound designer doesn't get some kind of award this really isn't a fair world at all.
So, this may be a television show about robots and spaceships and such, but it's also turning in its last moments into a commentary of how truly frakked (hem hem) we all are. It's brutal, ugly and by no means pretty, but it's as true as you can get in this day and age.
For anyone yet to experience this show: you better grab it fast. It's so of its moment that in five years it may look oddly pessimistic (or ridiculously optimistic, depending on this brave new dawn we all live in).
Personally I will feel the loss of all of this cast like i would the death of a close friend or relative. And if you think I'm being stupidly over the top, ask someone else who watches BSG. I bet they agree.
So, farewell angry, contrary, feisty, irritating Starbuck. Bye bye old man Bill Adama with your face like a car crash and voice like gravel. Toodle-oo one-eyed drunken Tigh; slut-supeme Ellen; self-doubting, essentially decent Chief; self-serving, slippery Gaius; calm yet oh-so-passionate President Roslyn; bombshell bland Six/Caprica and all the others. It was a doomed, miserable affair, but sometimes misery needs company. So say we all...

Me And My Big Mouth (another PLOT SPOILER!)

Typical. In my last post I sang the praises of Katee Sackhoff - Kara Thrace AKA Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica, the most irksome, infuriating, contrary, warm, lovable, sexy and downright HUMAN character on the whole shebang and what happens? Yup, THEY KILLED HER OFF!!!
Now I'm paranoid. Is someone at the Sci Fi channel reading this?
Of course not.
But after everything I said about the whole family schtick that BG has goin' on, this hit hard. Too hard actually. It can't be healthy to grieve for a fictional character can it? But it just goes to prove that I was on the money too. This series is awesome and (by all accounts ) will continue to be so right up to the last episode of this season.
Meanwhile, bye lovely Starbuck. You were frakked-up, but still wonderful...sniff. See you on the other side...

(ps I KNOW she'll be back, so don't write to tell me)

Lost in Space

Now that Lusht has returned from its 'hiatus' (ie: 'hey guys, how do we make this thing start moving again?'), let's look at exactly how wayward it's become shall we? Firstly the two month break was an insult that no amount of calling it a 'mini-season' could disguise. Don't be surprised if a slew of time-wasting episodes followed by an eight week disappearance affects your ratings, you morons at ABC. Frankly I would have thought that the success of the thing so far would have guaranteed some kind of top-level solutions as to how to get it back on track. But no...
From this you have probably gathered that I'm losing my patience. OK, I've lost it. maybe that was the point of the title all along. They could have a new mega billboard campaign with the words: 'HAVE YOU LOST IT YET?' hovering over the lush jungle. Or a picture of one of Jack's fabulous Jackfaces! Boy, they've been plentiful over the last couple of weeks.
Of course the real problem was that when they started revealing stuff the whole edge-of-your-seat feeling was going to decrease exponentially. Like Pandora's box, no amount of trying to retrospectively stuff things back in will stop its steady decline. Thus we end up with a dismally extended section on the awful 'others' and their 'it's more complicated than that' explanation-avoidance stuff that they trot out instead of actually summing it all up in one sentence and thus making the next two years completely redundant. The people who watch this aren't total idiots (apart from the subscribers to this kind of nonsense) and can only take the same type of disappointment so many times before we know that any question posed will only result in some kind of vague obfustication that delays any gratification for the sake of franchise extension. This week's episode (plot spoil...oh who CARES?) was a fine case in point. Hurley's questions to the returned Sawyer (after weeks in the Others camp) amounted to 'Where's Jack?' (answer: the doc didn't make it) and were left at that. See? Even the main characters have given up hoping for anything but vagueness!
To be fair the series is still high on production values - this week's meteor strike was both hilarious and impressive, while still filling the viewer with the usual post 9-11 dread at it came whistling outta the sky (see pic). Plus it contained some genuine laugh-aloud moments - Sawyer's getting ALL the good lines these days. It still manages to produce a palpable sense of mounting edginess that gets the heart pumping. So, pace, editing etc - not bad, but as I say now we know that one mystery just leads to another, less-interesting one (cf: the Others' 'real' home ferchrissakes. I'm starting to wonder if there's an infinite number of islands now). It means that no matter how many weird bits the writers gratuitously shove in (the brainwashing room, the man with the eye patch, Desmond's life flashing before his eyes, Claire's incredible changing hairdo - in fact EVERYONE'S hair. Jack's appears to have just stopped growing etc.) you can't help shake the conviction that whatever happens will be a disappointment. Oh well, for one and a half seasons it was awesome...
Which brings me to my other televisual obsession, Battlestar Galactica. At approximately the same point in the run (season 3) as Lusht, it may have vaguely gone into hibernation with a couple of holding-pattern episodes about racism and unions in time of war (small-time stuff, then), but it's still the most compelling thing on MY screen these days. (I know, I'm missing Heroes, Deadwood, the Sopranos and err...Primeval out here, but frankly, I've only got a spare 40 minutes here and there these days, and life goes on). I know, I know - I'm even losing friends to this series, I keep banging on about it so much. But it occurred to me - as I wept like a pussy the other night as The Chief got the President's approval to begin union negotiations with the government and Admiral Adama demonstrated gritty determination in the face of Baltar's evil faux-prole scheming (I wish he HAD put Cally in front of a firing squad, mind) - that the big difference between Lusht and BG is the ability to make you care. While BG has just as much manipulation and nonsense it involves you by making you part of the family. Lusht just leaves you slightly satiated and wondering about all the enormous plot holes (and I'm not just talking about the imploded hatch).
There, I've said it; these people ARE like a family, with all their bickering, dysfunctionalism and deep, deep love (Starbuck's a fine case in point: never have I simultaneously hated, admired and just plain fancied a character). I used to wonder why the person who writes the TV Without Pity summaries got so deeply upset by the characters' moral and spiritual foibles until this week, when I realised I was doing it too. It sounds heavy, but frankly it's cathartic and all the healthier for it. PLUS it makes you think about the real world, while you're digging the awesome space-based action. How cool is that? Still on the agenda are the extremes a state/race will go to ensure its survival, the notion of one god verses a pantheon, and the true existence of fate. Such trivia.
Look, you can get the DVDs of the first two series on box set. Do it. You'll thank me. Honest...

Popular TV as political allegory (beware the Cylonic jihad! etc)

It being the end of the summer and with nothing but the mighty CSI (which, one day, I will bore you to DEATH about hehe) on the TV, I've been steeping my brain with box set binges. Notably series one of the reversioned Battlestar Galactica. While worrying that maybe I was taking it all a bit too seriously I read this and realised that it really IS something quite special (I need critical back-up in these times of blog paranoia to allow me to form an opinion, natch).
More post-9/11 than Lusht (though it uses the same clever metamedia ideas to keep its fanbase involved), more pointedly dealing with bad recent history than an Oliver Stone movie, BG is a real eye-opener, especially for those who still subscribe to the wrong-headed notion that dumb USA makes dumb TV.
It takes the late 70s original which was all post-Watergate/sub-Star Wars laser infused disco fantasy and turns it into something predictably darker, and then some...
People old enough to remember the original (hem hem) will have fun initially with the inversions. Starbuck's a woman (as is the president). Colonel Tigh is white. Gaius Baltar is a jittery English sex symbol. The Cylons look like us! etc etc. This final point isn't just an excuse for cost-cutting though. The old Cylons are there in all their metallic CGI glory, but the new ones, naturally ramp up the paranoia factor.
They're TERRORISTS. We get ships loaded with nukes ramming the Battlestar, suicide bombers, security breaches and an enemy that's religiously fanatical. Meanwhile the humans are drunks, liars, sexually wayward, prone to bickering, bigoted...oh, and religious fanatics.
The reason the human race fails? Because of the internet - we learn that networked computers led to the first defeat at the hands of a technologically advanced enemy with a good idea how to plant viruses. What's more WE created the enemy.
Sci Fi is so good at this stuff - I remember my film tutor telling me that Star Trek was 'imperialism in space' - and while I know that for any film student raised (as I was) on basic theory it will seem a little heavy-handed, but in this day and age, and from a nation whose president makes apocalyptic tales of mankind's demise seem that much more feasible, this is something special.
Now I'm wading through series 2 and the fact that the producers are political science majors is really starting to shine out. Somehow they manage to reference the assasinations of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald, make pertinent points about the true nature of democracy and still fit in a few good battle scenes (I LOVE the way the CGI is all shot as though with hand-held - in fact the camera work is all super-dynamic. Adding to the rushed, panicky, ragged feel of the whole thing). I get the feeling this is subversion by stealth. While the pilot was competent, the first series became gradually more insane in its exposure of the desperate straits of a race on the brink of extinction yet split by internal politics. Now, beginning series two you get the idea that this could stretch out to be the first long-running series since Twin Peaks that could have the ultimate in downbeat endings (as Leslie Halliwell used to say). At times you even question whether the human race SHOULD survive. Now that's dark...
I know all you West Wing fans will be screaming 'nothing new here!' but I urge anyone who wants a really good idea of how America is coping with the war on terror to watch this as soon as possible.
POSTSCRIPT: Since I wrote this I've entered the considerably darker world of Series two. If Season One was bold, this one beggars belief as to how the hell it even got made. halfway through and I feel as drained and strung out as the crew. As to the basis in contemporary political atrocities...let's just say 'abused prisoners of war' and leave it at that...