Burning Bright (2010)

Your mother has committed suicide. Your brother has autism. Your stepfather has robbed you of your inheritance, your future, your dreams of independence and all...to set up a safari ranch in your back yard.

You sit, stewing, angry, depressed, lost to a future as a handmaid to your brother's outbursts that to you, sad and exhausted, sucked of all vitality and hope, appear as the whims of a spoilt brat.

As caged animals gather outside, a hurricane approaches. The windows are being boarded up. You don't know that a horror film set is being...

...built around you.

Night falls and Kelly dreams of slipping out of bed with a pillow and smothering her brother. She awakes in a cold sweat on the roar of a wild animal, the manifestation of all her worries, her invisible adversaries, come together.

Up and about, dazed by guilt and slumber, she spots something at the bottom of the steps that halts her own. The nightmare. Hers isn't a run-of-the-mill disaster movie for a common-or-garden moral storm; no, for a fate as pathetic as hers, the fallacy must be loftier and more elegant. Stalking the empty rooms and halls is her stepfather's prize attraction, now prize ally in opposing and ending his own sea of troubles: a tiger.

She discovers that even the door has been boarded up. There are no chinks of light, no bright lit exit sign. She drags Tom into a bare room, undecorated but for two standing lights, like those you might find on a TV or movie production. It is like she is off-set and the panic oscillates between the two implications of a space like this: "you're safe here" and "no script can help you".

From room to room they go, stalking safety. From a purely dramatic standpoint the siblings make a brilliant pair. She is tense, terrified, always thinking. He is emotionless and blank (his autism isn't played for sympathy) even in the face of a jungle predator roaming the downstairs loo.

It is exceedingly claustrophobic - the house is dark and the low hum of the hurricane buffeting against the boards is another layer of oppression.

Kelly seems ready to burst, eat up from the inside and always a step away from being eaten up from the outside. Room to manoeuvre narrows and the close shaves accumulate. They hide in a laundry chute (cleaning of stains, sins?), in a freezer (long-term preservation?), in a closet (secrets?), under a bed (over-reading?) but the tiger can jump, can burst through walls, can reach its claws into the tightest spaces.

All the while point of view shots are well used, the glass of the screen becoming the lens of our eye, ever close to being scratched and gouged.

The tiger isn't vindictive or sadistic or playful. It's a tiger. It does however have a piercing stare and a desire (it licks Kelly's sweat off the kitchen floor) for flesh. The situation is (obviously) contrived, the story off-the-wall, but the actions of the animal and the people are not. Kelly doesn't make silly decisions. This is a compelling story that has been well constructed.

Eventually Kelly manages to escape but realises she cannot abandon her brother and that she must be the selfless mother he needs.

As morning breaks the stepfather John arrives back with a sniper rifle, unscrews the boards and scopes for the tiger. The end is poetic justice and dinner is belatedly served.

Horror as salvation : It is a way through for Kelly and Tom. They escape John. They escape the tiger too but, at the end of the film, it is still alive - problems persist but are ready to be faced, lived with and overcome. They are better off after than they were before.

Both of them look out from the front steps of their home at the now-calm world. Tom looks for Kelly's hand with his and she happily takes it.

The idea behind Burning Bright is simple and exciting, the concept outlandish and believable, the symbolism sharp, the emotional grip strong.

The Dark Knight Rises

contains spoilers

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Gothic, the romantic horrific, the dark powerful majestic. Today's Batman and his Gotham aren't Gothic but Goth: listless, cynical and unimaginative.

Gotham used to be different, a black world of fear. Now Gotham looks like our world : we are black.

Batman the superhero used to give you a frisson of fear-tinged excitement. Bruce the man used to be an enigma, he used to be impressive.

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The Dark Knight Rises, sometimes badly edited and wrongly accented, makes you realise how hard it is to make a film, especially one of such scope.

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The film feels like a perfunctory ticking off of scenes, as if the film already exists in Christopher Nolan's mind and the filming process is book-keeping, information-sharing and joining the dots.

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Bruce climbs out of imprisonment (a dark passage with a brilliant light at the exit) after abandoning the rope which is the umbilical cord still linking him to his mother and father and their deaths. It is also a rebirth out of himself.

*

Selina Kyle, curious and opinionated, a woman in an improvised dance with morality, is the most insightful (and interesting) of all. She sees Batman for what he is, sees people for what they are good or ill and, despite being a cat burglar and despite her disdain for the fat cat capitalists who "live so large" learns to see  Communism for what it is :

Selina: "This used to be someone's house"
 Jen: "It's everyone's house now".

She has a strong mind and she is not afraid to change it.


*

Bane plays with the populace and buys their passivity by namechecking the latest fashionable grievances - rich people, corrupt institutions, hierarchies built on lies. He has no (at least easily ascribed) political position. He is power-hungry and murderous. He is a showman with a scary/playful voice. It's unsurprising that to defeat Bane the inspirational rabble-rouser you have to punch him in the mouth.

What marks Bane, Batman and Selina out is attitude. It is will. Batman and Bane's final fight on the steps of the city hall is devoid of trickery, theatricality, martial artistry. It is a brawl of pure rage and willpower.

*

Where are the normal people who would fall victim to Bane and Talia? The neutron bomb is the perfect refuge for the uncreative scriptwriter and film-maker because it is as impersonal as it gets.

The most heinous act of killing is the one that will move us the least.

*

A story of the poor and criminal underclass vs the rich and powerful may have worked better without Bane.

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The statue of Batman erected in Wayne Manor makes no distinction between Bruce and the costume, between man and symbol. They are of the same bronze. Is Wayne subsumed by Batman for all eternity? Has the costume become Bruce's skin?

*

Batman and Catwoman are outcasts who humanise one another by cancelling out their animal halves. The cat elopes with the bat and Selina hightails it with Bruce.

In the end the bomb isn't a clean slate for Gotham but for Bruce and Selina.

The climactic shot of Selina and Bruce in Florence recalls a paparazzi shot, catching them having abandoned character, out of the world in which they made their name. They look completely and utterly relaxed. Selina is unaware that she is being looked at. The feeling of freedom and contentment is lovely.

Sport is the Perfect Fiction

Sport is the perfect fiction. We build the sets, we set the rules. We ensure that each play has a beginning a middle and an end. We guarantee that each story has triumph and tragedy.

And then it writes itself.

Sport toes the line between fact and fiction, self-contained and endlessly renewing.

The racers are voracious readers wanting to get to the end as quickly as possible, impatient characters wanting to learn their fate.

Warhol / Matisse

Face of a Woman (1948) - Poor Little Rich Girl (1965)

Portrait of L.N. Delekorskaya (1947) - Chelsea Girls (1966)

Film Olympics : Archery to Judo

The Olympics, the thirtieth modern Games, start in less than a fortnight. The Olympics themselves have long been filmed as well as cinematically reenacted. What of those films in which Olympic feats and endeavours are achieved? Who are those characters who have tried out these sports, perhaps out of competition and outside of any rules, and succeeded to extraordinary effect?

I am especially interested in characters performing / practising the sport's activity without participating in the actual sport itself.

In 21st Century cinema the ancient art of Archery may have been overwhelmed by louder and more devastating machinery, abandoning Artemis/Diana, William Tell and Robin Hood to another, quainter time.

And yet, out of the woods of old myth came first the bow-wielding elf Legolas in Peter Jackson's adaptations of the Lord of the Rings books, then the equally adept Paris in Troy (both played by Orlando Bloom).

In 2012, archery is relevant in new versions of old worlds or a future made old by apocalypse, as in The Hunger Games. Archery is cool in its own context, one could say, in the hands of Princess Merida, for example, in Brave's Scottish highlands, or in fables such as Snow White and the Huntsman. The 10th Century, that's where it belongs. However, Marvel comic book character Hawkeye in The Avengers, a film very much set now, amongst the most explosive of powers and weaponry, has demonstrated that the archer is verily back in vogue.

Much like the lightsaber was more civilised than the blaster to Obi-Wan Kenobi, so the bow and arrow maintains an aura of honour. It is a tool of exquisite precision which seems to concentrate all the character's personality and energy into its form.

The disciplines of Athletics are the foundation of any action film: Captain John Carter doing the high (high) jump; Ethan Hunt long jumping over a hole in a bridge in Mission Impossible 3; pole vaulting over prison walls in Naked Gun 33 1/3 or across deadly ground in Tremors; Mayans hurling javelins/spears at escapees in Apocalypto; the Man of Steel hammer-throwing a Kryptonian into the sky by his feet in Superman II; James Bond hurtling down the streets of London in Skyfall. Put in the effort, push yourself, run against fear and for desire, race against time and against fate.

I cannot say that Badminton, or anything like it, makes an appearance in too many films. King, an Indonesian film from 2009 about a boy who fulfills his dreams through badminton, is supposedly the only fiction film that revolves around the sport. Certainly there have been brief scenes of people (children especially) playing badminton or of improvised bats and shuttlecocks but none stick in the mind. 

Basketball is ubiquitous in depictions of American life. This year high school student Peter Parker showed his (arachnid) powers/prowess on the court in The Amazing Spider-Man. The court is often the battleground for self-esteem and the weighing of social worth, issues of power flux that film is and always will be concerned with. The documentary Hoop Dreams gave us a glimpse of how basketball can be important in the same way in real life.

Have dreams been so finely balanced as in the moment when the clock has stopped and the ball is flying in slow motion towards the net?

If basketball has always been a part of Americana (cinematica), BMX bikes, or Mountain Biking, became something of a phenomenon in the 1980s. Every kid wanted one and every cool kid on the silver screen had one: The Goonies, E.T... There was even, in 1983, an Australian film about BMX Bandits. Super 8, an homage to the films of the Eighties, made sure to put its kids on bikes, cruising through small town suburban streets as they always did, criss-crossing from schools, to diners, to secret hideouts.

More recently mountain bikes are taken up the slopes where riders get lost or are slain by monsters.

To these characters, pushing for the first time at adulthood, the bikes represent freedom and escape. The same goes for Cycling in general, as seen in the Dardenne brothers' Le Gamin Au Velo, about a kid who is constantly on the move, running from disappointment towards a love and security always just over the horizon. The motorcycle offers a more dynamic, steroidal version of this feeling of unanchored power (The Wild Ones...).

As cycling often goes in tandem with the countryside, so Canoeing is the favoured mode of transport for characters in the back of beyond, slipping through the veins of the exotic, banked by forests and the sounds and calls therein; Deliverance, Pocahontas, The New World. Canoeing can be an adventure happening to you. It can also be an adventure that you have claimed, riding the rapids for recreation. You're a daredevil one inch away from having your pride bruised and your life taken. One minute you are laughing at nature's boasts, the next it is swallowing you whole.

It is very much the same story when it comes to Diving. You can dive in a pool decorated with babes just for the hell of it. You can dive to show off, or make a stand, like in Studio Ghibli's From Up on Poppy Hill. It's a show of courage. It's a last resort in Apocalypto, The Fugitive or Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and a key ingredient in many a chase. A choice : face the enemy or risk it all.

 

The Exhilaration of Panic and Love :  

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and From Up On Poppy Hill

A woman or a man standing on the edge of a bridge ready to jump is the start of many films - Dario Argento's Trauma and Patrice Leconte's Girl on the Bridge are just two. It is a turning point before we've even started our journey.

They want to end it all, like David in A.I., but in that act discover there is more to live for. A dive into the cool, deep waters when all seems lost leads to rebirth in The Bourne Ultimatum and Femme Fatale too.


Like archery, Equestrianism and Fencing take place in, or are evocative of, a time before. They are practices wrapped up in concepts of uncomplicated and uncynical heroism (be it generals or renegades). As you are perched above, the horse's back becomes a muscular marble or steaming mahogany throne.

The amount of men and women who have ridden into battle, high-tailed it into the forest leaping over fallen trees, or galloped into the sunset cannot be counted. Again, cinematically, horse-riding is freedom. Romantic interest is piqued by a feisty lady at one with the beast, hair blowing in the wind, or by a man who has tamed and harnessed nature. Both sights provoke slack-jawed awe.

The riderless horse, a picture of abandonment and loneliness as well as of liberty and play, is an intensely dramatic image.

There is something oddball and old-style queer about fencing, or sword fighting undertaken in the fencing style. It is for those who like matters decided cleanly and in a dignified manner, to touch the point upon your adversary's chest as if it were an accusing finger; The Princess Bride, Errol Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood.  

In films It is likely the least dangerous of confrontations with a blade. In Die Another Day, the real danger comes when the foil, epee or sabre are swapped for a meaty sword that promises a pound of excised flesh.

Football is a fertile ground for storytelling, given its vast culture of professional, semi-professional, Sunday league and recreational play, of passion, of community and place, of the richest and the poorest, the West and the Orient united. It is like Basketball to Americans, only more so.

It lends itself to small tales of girl soccer teams, to tales of pluck (Mike Bassett, England Manager), of inspiration (Bend it Like Beckham) of those practically unhinged by its demands on the soul (The Damned United, The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty, Fever Pitch, sundry depictions of hooliganism).

[Image from http://blogs.walkerart.org]

If you discount the documentary which followed a master through the course of the game (Zidane : A 21st Century Portrait), the professional game, it is fair to say, has never been satisfactorily depicted (see Goal!). It is impossible to replicate something that, to billions, is more dramatic than fiction could ever be. So something magical or historically momentous must be added - a fight for democracy and good itself against the Nazis in Escape to Victory or a literally super-powered battle in Shaolin Soccer.

But what of football in films that isn't football itself? What about Crank 2's hero Chelios booting a severed head into a swimming pool. Good technique.

Films which feature Gymnastics, prominently or at least in a meaningful way, are thin on the ground. In 1984 a TV movie was made about Romanian gymnastics legend Nadia Comaneci (entitled Nadia). In 2006 came Stick It! about a teenage gymnast who learns to positively channel her rebellious nature and White Palms (from the chalk gymnasts put on their hands for grip), a Hungarian film with a similar story arc, this time a troubled young man on the way to maturity.

The most haunting and beautiful moment of gymnastics outside the hall may very well appear at the beginning of Alexander Sokurov's biopic of Adolf Hitler, Moloch. In the Bavarian Alps, outside a vast holiday house / military complex shrouded in dense moonlit fog, a nude Eva Braun exercises on the precipice.

Chak de India (2007), about a women's team, seems to be the only major film about Hockey. Field hockey is a strictly female pursuit in the cinema, and certainly no-holds barred (St.Trinian's for both). Knee-shattering, ankle-scraping brutality seems to be hockey's calling card in films, and that's ignoring the damage an ice hockey stick can wreak in films like City of Violence and Running Scared. 

Away from the field this hard wood can be deadly (a shepherd's crook with which to batter lost sheep), a lifesaver for Lisa (Rachel McAdams) in Red Eye.

Sanshiro Sugata marked the directorial debut of Akira Kurosawa in 1943. As is often the case in fiction, the acquiring of skills and discipline in sport, here Judo, are a metaphor and catalyst for the taking on of the responsibilities and knowledge of adulthood. Therefore the development of a person is a matter of self-moulding, of achieving proficiencies and expertises.

Those proficiencies serve James Cagney (an actor famous for his portrayals of pugnacity and a black belt in Judo) well in a fight in Blood on the Sun (1945).

Sanshiro Sugata (Top), Blood on the Sun (Above)

Prometheus

From the very moment Alien is evoked Prometheus is doomed, not because Prometheus might demystify the allure of its mother-offspring or be lost in its shadow but because its inheritance inhibits it, paralyses it and brings crashing down. Bathos. Anti-climax. Head tilted heavenward, eyes lashed to the ground. An android because of Alien. An axe because of Alien. A white shirt and panties because of Alien. This is nonsense.

La pregunta de todos : 'Where are we from?' 'Why?' ends with the birth of a spindly creature (the least impressive one of all, despite evolving from the others) hissing unmenacingly. All our journeys, our existential tumult our hope our fear, the awesome void, laic sanctity, divine whim, expectant children are all for nought because all we are doing is meeting an old friend in a strange place.

Small things have big beginnings.

There is such potential in that opening sacrifice, the grandeur, the otherness. There is a frisson and a tremble ("They engineered us"). There is more potential here than in a hundred Aliens. It is always almost there.

Parallels, yes, allusions. Black goo that creates and destroys: oil, Iraq, arrogance and hubris. That works and could have been explored. Feet-washing, miracle births, arms outstretched cross-like, 2,000 years, christological symbolism. A Greek fable in the name and sprinkled around works like a clever wink for a pat on the back.

With little of its own grandness. Prometheus doesn't feel what it says in its sinews and in its heart. It is curiously empty. It lacks atmosphere. There is no time for things to sink in or their significance to be felt. It is one thing after another. Prometheus does have ideas, and complexities and 'themes' but what do they do? They don't flourish through the story or through the people. It knows the world but not itself.

That which it does best is universal: parents and children, bonds of love given, withheld, squandered, unresolved (life, death and sex). Cycles. What is creation? What are we worth? Are we Gods?

Even better, it has thoughts, though rare:

"Why do you think your people made me?"

"We made you 'cos we could"

"Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?"

Eventually all this gets lost.

We want visions, art to give its answers and not more questions. It has that freedom and we give it that right but Prometheus is a timid shout.

All that existential wonder and terror is flattened into fight or flight, aaaah into AARRGH!! Peril and not much more.

Prometheus needs its own story. Why other mythologies? Why Greek , why Christian? Is this so we recognise it as myth, as something important? Abominable monsters and the cold gaze of Engineers ultimately point not upwards to the hands of Gods but down and back to us and what we already knew was not enough to know. We have the Bible, we have Alien and Prometheus stays in their shadow.

Elizabeth is the light of the film, the through-line through the dull gloom, still looking for her God despite, longing for her father gone, wanting to bring life into the world and to understand it. She wants to embrace her instincts and feed her mind. She carries on to another planet, another adventure. She fulfills the imperatives of her faith in testing it. She has dreams and doubts and pains unlike the crew, the room-fillers. We don't believe in them.

One would like to think she is like us.

We should decide : do we go with her now to find our maker, fair, foul or fate, or do we want a story about a story, a myth about myths, truths about truths? Do we want another  Alien, a tuppenny fright, or do we want something different; bigger, better, bolder?