Sunday 25 November 2018

Assassination Nation review

As I left the cinema after seeing Assassination Nation, I remember saying to my fiancĂ©, “They’re going to be talking about that one.” I didn’t just mean because it has a lot of attention grabbing ingredients - an emphasis on social media and technology, a female-led cast, a transgender actress in a lead role - but because this film is clearly setting itself up to be the film of the Instagram generation. Every aspect of it, from the storyline to the directorial style to the constant references to social media, makes it clear to the audience that this film has something to say, and intends to say it in a way that will carve out s place in cinematic history. The question, then, is this: does it succeed?

Let’s start with what works. The cinematography is phenomenal. From the opening sequence to the final frame the camera, the audience and the actors are like partners in an elaborately choreographed dance routine. Every shot feels deliberate, precisely framed; every movement of the camera adds something to the presentation of the film (something desperately lacking in modern mainstream cinema). The dynamism of the camerawork is reminiscent of Spike Lee - not content to ask you to pay attention, this is a film that reaches out, grabs you by the lapels, and shouts in your face, and that approach extends to the colour palette. In a world of teal and orange blandness, director Sam Levinson saturates his film with blood reds and canary yellows that resemble post-Kill Bill Tarantino. The colours and the lighting are bold and, above all, deliberate - one gets the sense that not a single prop came on set without Levinson checking it to make sure it wouldn’t disrupt the colour scheme of the scene.
    I could go on for pages about all the little things in the film that I love - the fourth wall breaks, the use of split screens, the characters that, while obnoxious, still somehow get you rooting for them - but that would take too long, and I’m lazy. So instead, I’ll focus on the opening. This is what really set up my expectations for the rest of the film, and it’s almost worth the price of admission on its own. The first scene takes place the morning after the rest of the film, and it’s a fairly standard set up that has the audience wondering what exactly happened. What follows, though, is one of my favourite intros in recent cinema. The main character, in voiceover, gives us a few hints as to what we’re about to see, and then runs through a list of “trigger warnings” for the film - violence, suicide, homophobia, etc. Each warning is accompanied by a short clip demonstrating what we’re being warned about - not long enough to spoil anything, but enough to invalidate the warning and create a feeling of affect overload that functions as a kind of pre-exhaustion, bludgeoning the audience into submission so that we are primed to accept the conceit of the film. We no longer have the energy to disbelieve.
    In the hands of lesser filmmakers, this could have been an excuse to mock the idea of trigger warnings in a “look at the millennials” way. Levinson, however, has something else in mind: he’s mocking the people who are offended by the words “trigger warning”, and doing so in a way that signals to the audience that we’re being divided. We’re being sorted into those who are turned on enough to get the film, and those who can’t handle it. This is an attitude that informs the rest of the film, not only in the camerawork (there are a lot of very intrusive, very unconventional shots that might turn off more conservative critics) but in the dialogue. Hari Nef’s tongue-in-cheek references to “LGBTQIAA+ people” are not a jab at the ever-expanding alphabet soup acronym, but a challenge to people who would be turned off the film by any discussion of queer issues. The film is daring you not to get the joke - I’d call it punk, but that word hasn’t meant anything since the eighties.
The film is excellent for the first two thirds or so, and it retains certain qualities even into the disappointing third act. The performances are solid throughout - I can’t think of a single actor who isn’t on form from beginning to end. The script retains its wit, and the acting sequences are tense and well shot, and there are individual scenes that are as good as anything that precedes them. There are problems, though, that prevent the film from delivering on its promise. First, the title has the word “nation” in it twice and that bothers me. Second, there’s that thing that I thought filmmakers had grown out of, where characters’ guns hold a seemingly infinite amount of bullets. But neither of those are major concerns. What is a major concern is the plot. The film pulls off the trick of maintaining its forward momentum right up until the climax, and still somehow screwing it up. The plot careens toward its finale and then...it stops. There’s no resolution, not even a disappointing one - the plot reaches boiling point, and then we cut to the epilogue. Not only that, but we never even find out what happens. The question that the film sets up at the very beginning - what happened that night? - goes unanswered.
    Assassination Nation is a frustrating film. It sets itself up as something far bolder and more original than it turns out to be, and what makes it worse is that for a good hour or so it actually seems like it will deliver on that promise. That said, while it falls at the last hurdle, this shattered jewel of a film still gets enough right to be worth the watch. I’ll take it over whatever Benedict Cumberbatch is in this week.

Sunday 20 May 2018

The Right To Violence


Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people oppressing them.

                - Assata Shakur



How many people were killed in Gaza over the past few weeks, I don’t know. The estimates of the dead vary wildly, and the number of people injured by Israeli soldiers is in the thousands. I’m not here to try to count the bodies, or name the dead. They’re dead, killed by worthless cowards every one of whom is lower than a tapeworm, and nothing I say or do can make any difference to them. What I can do, though, is point out the hypocrisy of the liberal response to the slaughter, and maybe change a few people’s minds.

                I’ll be addressing a very specific reaction to the events in Gaza, namely the endless debate over whether or not the march for return could be described as a peaceful protest. So if you’re one of those people who don’t care about that, who make excuses for anything Israel does regardless of how obviously evil it is, this post isn’t directed at you. You’re a supporter or apartheid, an apologist for genocide, and you should be ashamed of yourself, but I’ll get to you another time. I’m talking about the more reasonable, non-bloodthirsty liberals that I see on my Facebook newsfeed. The ones who might actually be receptive to a well-thought-out argument.

                The question on a lot of people’s lips seems to be: were these peaceful protests? The answer is: it doesn’t matter. This is a conflict between two groups of people. One has been forced out of their homeland, packed into an overcrowded ghetto where the electricity is turned off for twenty hours a day, where ninety-seven per cent of drinking water is contaminated by sewage, where settlers are still encroaching ever further into their land, stealing their homes, uprooting their olive trees, spraying their houses with raw sewage. They have been subject to systematic violence and oppression for seventy years.

                The other group have built and maintained a colonial ethnostate, backed by the most formidable military on the planet and given billions of dollars per year by the world’s richest government. They drop white phosphorous on civilian areas, torture children, and lock people up for years without trial. They are invaders and the children of invaders, carrying on the legacy of colonialism and oppression bequeathed them by their parents. In every encounter with the indigenous inhabitants of the land they stole, they are the aggressor.

                To talk of Israel’s “right to self defence” is nonsensical. If I break into your house, I have no right to defend myself against you. In that situation, I am the aggressor, and any violence I enact towards you is an extension of that aggression. You might just as well talk of the right of a slave owner to “defend himself” against a slave uprising.

                Likewise, all this insistence on “peaceful protest” denies Palestinians the most important right of all: the right to self-defence. This liberal discomfort with self-defence is something I see a lot – whether it’s an individual fighting off a burglar, or an oppressed population fighting back against those who victimize them, liberals don’t like any action that complicates the victimhood dynamic. What I mean by that is that there’s a tendency among liberals to want every victim to be passive, peaceful, and pure in their suffering; the Harriet Tubmans and Leila Khaleds of this world complicate that. They make it hard to maintain a kneejerk opposition to any and all violence. They challenge the intellectually catabolic pacifism that far too many people seem to uphold.

                To demand peace from Palestinians is monstrous, especially when in the same breath these people will talk of Israel’s “right to defend itself”. Do the victims of a decades-long campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing not have a right to defend themselves against the perpetrators of this violence? Do they not have a right to throw stones at the people who have killed their loved ones? Of course they do. Even if, as zionists are claiming, the Palestinian demonstrators used Molotovs and stones to fight back against Israeli troops, they were still in the right. They were defending themselves against an occupying army, while attempting to cross a border imposed on them by said occupier.

Monday 19 February 2018

How Wolverine Invented the Circus


La La Land probably among my top ten or fifteen favourite films. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking film, one that aches with loss and yet is still imbued with such joy that even in still images its cast seem to be moving. The Greatest Showman is none of those things. What it is is a lazy, tawdry piece of tat that somehow manages to be over- and under-written at the same time.

                The Greatest Showman, starring Hugh Jackman and directed by some mediocrity or other, is a musical biopic of PT Barnum, the founder of the Barnum and Bailey circus. It starts with Barnum (Jackman) as a child, the son of a poor tailor, with a crush on a rich girl. Five minutes later his father dies and he’s out on his arse, and we get a montage of him being poor that might have elicited some emotion from m e if there’d been any attempt to make me care about this kid. Five minutes later (I’m exaggerating, but not by much) he’s grown up and married the rich girl with basically no difficulty. We see her father slap child-Barnum for making her laugh, then literally the next time we see her she’s riding off into the sunset with adult Barnum. This is a problem that will recur throughout the film – a problem appears that seems significant, only to be resolved almost immediately. It happens at what should be the pivotal moment in the film, when Barnum loses his job and decides to take out a massive loan in order to set up his circus. You expect this to be his big risk – he’ll offer his home as collateral, his entire life will be ruined if the business venture fails, and he’ll have to grow as a character in order to succeed. What happens is, he fraudulently takes out the loan, using a non-existent fleet of ships as collateral. He risks basically nothing – if the circus goes under, he’s in the same situation he was in before.

                This is a good metaphor for one of the major flaws in the film – there’s no conflict. Barnum takes a leap of faith by setting up a freak show, and after a quick montage, he’s a millionaire. Barnum’s wife leaves him because she thinks he’s having an affair (and also because he bankrupted the family), then they sing a song at the beach and she takes him back. The building that houses the circus burns down, Barnum says “let’s do it in a tent”, and – I swear I’m not exaggerating – we cut to a big musical number in a hugely successful tent circus. That’s the end of the film. No drama, no conflict, no real risk for anyone.

                I want to elaborate, here, on something I mentioned earlier – about the film being both over- and under-written. On the one hand, there is a stupid amount going on – you have Barnum’s attempts to make a name for himself (and shove his success in his in-laws’ faces), the prejudice the circus performers face (because they’re funny-looking, obviously, not because most of them are black – there definitely weren’t any problems for black people in 19th century America, or at least none that the writers considered screen-worthy), and a love story between Zac Effron and a trapeze artist who I’m only now realizing looks kind of like Vanessa Hudgens. And yet, it still feels like nothing happens, because there’s no characterization, no space for any problems to develop enough to become significant, and no moment of tension that isn’t resolved almost instantly, as if the writers were terrified of anything resembling an involving story.

                And come to think of it, isn’t PT Barnum the least interesting character in this story? Why didn’t we get a film about a black brother-and-sister trapeze act who came to New York from the deep South to make their fortune? Why didn’t we get a film about the bearded woman who can sing like an angel, but is shunned by society because of her face, or the others who have been so outcast that the only way they can make a living is by being exhibited in a freak show? Why didn’t we get a film about Dog Boy? I want a three-part, Godfather—style epic about Dog Boy, including a scene where he punches PT Barnum in the dick for deciding that his stage name would be Dog Boy. Seriously, how did that conversation go? You’ve got this incredibly athletic man who’s covered from head to toe in hair. Should you call him the Wolf Man? The Incredible Half-Ape? Nah mate, fucking Dog Boy.



Throughout all this, we are presented with a series of what I can only describe as crap pop songs. The mark of a great musical score is that it sticks in your head for days after you see the film, but the songs in The Greatest Showman are so generic I forgot what they sounded like as I was hearing them. Not one of them is remotely interesting, affecting, or memorable in any way.

                This leads me to the cardinal sin of this film. I could forgive more or less every other flaw – poor writing, pacing, directing, an overwrought score, uninteresting set design, the fact that one of the actors has no surname for some reason – so long as I felt like the filmmakers had tried their best, but as the credits rolled I was left with the overwhelming impression that no one involved with the writing and directing of this pile of shite had actually put much effort in. Everything, from the songs to the dialogue to the endless failed attempts at a plot, is half-arsed. That is the ultimate sin for any artist. If you give your best effort and fail, there’s still something noble in the attempt – you can respect yourself for what you did. But when you phone it in, all you’re doing is taking up space that could have been taken up by someone who gives a fuck about what they do.