Shadow in the Cloud (2020)

Moving onto another quite different NZ film from the documentary I reviewed yesterday, there’s this. Roseanne Liang is a NZ-born and raised director who made an interesting debut (which I shall cover later in the week) and went on a few years later — presumably it took time to bring the project together — to make this utterly ridiculous B-movie action horror thriller, which I really enjoyed but certainly pulled down mixed reviews.

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I saw the trailer for this and it seemed like something I’d definitely not want to watch. After all, I’m hardly the biggest fan of the lead actor (though she’s been in some good films), and it looked silly. Well, it is silly. It is beyond absurd. But the thing about starting from a place of absurdity is that you can pretty much do anything, and this film goes to places other films don’t, or at least not since that classic era of weird off-the-wall B-movies (the 50s? maybe the 70s). It takes its low-budget constrictions and spins them off into all kinds of things in its taut running time: an intense horror-inflected chamber psychodrama; a film about toxic masculinity in war; an emotional story of domestic abuse and motherhood; an alien film; a WW2 fighter film; the kind of action film where characters climb across the outside of a moving plane; and a bunch of other stuff, although I feel that this much is in the trailer if you’re attentive. And somehow, despite the involvement of screenwriter M*x L*nd*s (who I can only assume contributed the misogyny, though that’s one of the film’s themes, and it’s pretty clear that it’s very much set against it), it all seems to work somehow — or at least it does for me. I can imagine other people finding this just downright bad, but I think it might be some kind of masterpiece. It certainly deserves a release on one of those psychotronic video labels in maybe 50 years as an undiscovered classic.

CREDITS
Director Roseanne Liang; Writers Max Landis and Liang; Cinematographer Kit Fraser; Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Taylor John Smith, Nick Robinson; Length 83 minutes.
Seen at the Light House Cuba, Wellington, Tuesday 16 February 2021.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

Another recent filmmaking talent who straddles both American and British film cultures is Desiree Akhavan, who was born and brought up in the States, but lives in London. Her film work feels very US-centric, but she’s also made a British television show, The Bisexual, which like her films explores queer sexual identities.

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I’ve been waiting a long time for a Chloë Grace Moretz film I could really get behind (she’s done some good work in some sub-par films), and this film goes some way further towards proving she’s an actor with range — here never better than when she’s just quietly observing. That said, the actor I want to see more work by is Forrest Goodluck, who plays one of the misfits at a Christian ‘gay conversion’ camp to which Moretz’s title character is sent following a rather telegraphed same-sex coming-of-age story. However, in a sense, everyone there is a misfit, and that does seem to be the point the film is working towards.

This is quite tonally different from director Desiree Akhavan’s first film Appropriate Behavior (2014), for though it has moments of levity, it’s mostly quite a quiet reflective film about traumatic events. I was expecting more anger, given the subject matter, but it’s set in the early-90s and so takes on a tone of, if not nostalgia, a sort of hazy ruefulness about past life events. It’s a film about trauma from the point-of-view of someone who has (presumably at great length) started to move past it.

CREDITS
Director Desiree Akhavan; Writers Akhavan and Cecilia Frugiuele (based on the novel by Emily M. Danforth); Cinematographer Ashley Connor; Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Sasha Lane, Forrest Goodluck, Jennifer Ehle; Length 90 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Soho, London, Sunday 9 September 2018.

Sils Maria (Clouds of Sils Maria, 2014)

Aside from the pre-scheduled Criterion posts, there’s been slim pickings on this blog in recent weeks as I’ve been on holiday in the States and Canada, which means I’ve largely not been seeing films. However, I did catch up with one while over there. UPDATE: It has since been added to the Criterion Collection, so you see just how far I’ve strayed.

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I’ve always had the sense from the infiltration of celebrity gossip into news coverage that Kristen Stewart has been underrated as an actor, apparently on the basis of, I don’t know, her lack of a sunny Californian disposition? It’s obviously a shallow criticism, as even if you’d only been aware of her since her turn in Twilight (2008), she’s already proved her acting mettle many times (my favourite being the 2010 musical biopic The Runaways). Clearly French director Olivier Assayas has been attentive, as he’s cast her alongside acting heavyweight Juliette Binoche, and Stewart very much holds her own (though perhaps it helps that Binoche is called upon to deliver much of her performance in English). It’s a classic self-reflexive European narrative about actors and acting, about ageing and egos and a sort of psychic transference between the older (Binoche) and younger generations (Stewart, as well as Chloë Grace Moretz in a small role). Stewart plays Valentine, the harried but largely unflappable PA to Binoche’s Maria, a well-known theatrical actor who is travelling to Zürich to deliver a tribute to the (now-deceased) director who discovered her when she was a teenager. There’s something about the way it all unfolds with its narrative ellipses, its teasing character linkages and its self-reflexivity about the craft of acting and cinema, not to mention the mountainous Swiss setting (the film’s title is taken from a notable cloud formation), which reminds me of the Swiss auteur Alain Tanner and a 1960s/70s tradition of this kind of story. Clouds of Sils Maria hints at the boundaries between the real and the fictive in a playful, literary and engaged way, but leaves us on a questioning note, unsure of exactly how much has changed for its title character and those women around her.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Olivier Assayas; Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux; Starring Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz; Length 123 minutes.
Seen at Cineplex Forum, Montréal, Wednesday 15 April 2015.

Laggies (aka Say When, 2014)

Sometimes, even though a film isn’t the kind of thing you’d usually make much of an effort to see, you read reviews of it that just seem grossly unfair (hello, The Guardian), and it makes you feel more warmly disposed. It helps that I’ve found Keira Knightley more likeable as an actor in recent years, while Sam Rockwell has always been dependable. Add to that my resolution to see more films by woman directors, and I felt I had to catch this in its brief window of cinema release. I’m glad I did. The American title (not retained for the UK release) is rather idiosyncratic, but captures the sense of the central characters lagging behind their peers. Chiefly this is Knightley’s character Megan, in her late-20s but lacking motivation, with no sense of what she should be doing and with cold feet about her relationship, who hides out at teenager Annika’s home (Moretz). If the central character were male, this kind of regressive ingenuousness would no doubt be grating, but actually I found the friendship between Megan and Annika rather sweet. At a certain level, yes, the film is hardly original, and so many of its details suggest screenwriterly contrivance, and yet I’m willing to forgive all that, because it’s a likeable film which avoids relying on humiliation and pratfalls for its comedy, but rather focuses on likeable people grappling with real, if familiar, issues in an identifiable way.

CREDITS
Director Lynn Shelton; Writer Andrea Seigel; Cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke; Starring Keira Knightley, Chloë Grace Moretz, Sam Rockwell; Length 99 minutes.
Seen at Empire Leicester Square, London, Thursday 20 November 2014.

Kick-Ass 2 (2013)

There’s a refrain that’s repeated over and over in this film: “this is real life”. It’s repeated often enough that I get the feeling the writer-director must have a bit of a complex about quite how abstracted all this stuff is from any kind of recognisable reality. I mean, that’s fine — it hardly hides its comic book origins with all those luridly saturated colours, the glib violence, the superheroes and supervillains storyline and the superimposition of comic book captions — but the repetition of that particular phrase just comes across as witless irony in such a uneven work.

The unevenness is in the tone, which bounces around in a rather discomfiting manner. There are so many big melodramatically emotional crescendoes that it’s very easy to stop caring about any of the characters, though certainly the filmmakers must expect their audience to be fairly apathetic given the casual slaughter involved (most notably of a squad of police officers, who appear to have done little to merit such treatment, unlike the misanthropic ‘super’-branded characters). There’s scarcely a scene lacking a major character repenting of his/her actions, pledging to change, being confronted by the bitterness of life, and grappling with their life choices. There are earnest close-ups and stirring music but little real emotional catharsis — it feels more like desperate sententious back-peddling to justify the next bout of “real life” cartoon violence, all nunchucks and red dye packs.

And yet, somehow, I don’t really hate this film. It’s not that it’s particularly funny — it may be going for action-comedy, but the latter never really gets much beyond the colourful cartoonishness of the characters and a bit of underage swearing, and so is easily forgettable. It also has a troubling relationship to race — (white) characters make jokes at the expense of racist stereotypes yet the fact that there are always other characters to call them on it doesn’t really change some of the racial dynamics in play. Almost all the ‘super’ characters are white, and more often than not possess a fair amount of independent wealth, while there’s an extended sequence of them battling a group of shady oriental clichés lifted straight from some fever dream of Hong Kong cinema. Plus there’s a real underlying nastiness to the film’s worldview, that familiar reactionary politics of vigilantism with which filmmakers like Michael Winner or John Milius would surely be comfortable — but that was all there in the first film, and every bit as troubling.

No, I think what I like is Chloë Grace Moretz as an action hero, and as Hit-Girl she’s very much the focus of this second film (over the nominal titular character played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, gawky, geeky and very much post-adolescent by this point). She’s charismatic and capable, with greater fighting skills not to mention self-confidence than most of the rest of the cast, and hardly requires saving at any point — except perhaps from her ‘normal’ self, as she spends rather too much of the film not being Hit-Girl. Her nemesis in the film is Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s pathetically-likeable supervillain Chris, who dubs himself The Motherfvcker, and gets the closest in the film to laugh-out-loud comedy, generally while doing something unspeakably vicious. Pretty much everyone else is rather lost amongst the peaks and troughs of ersatz emotion.

Reading back over what I’ve written makes it sound like I was seething throughout this film, but if that’s not the case, it’s certainly not a film that leaves me feeling particularly charitable. It’s a nasty vision of a broken society that’s only barely held together by brightly-coloured spandex and pleather.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Jeff Wadlow (based on the comic books Kick-Ass 2 and Hit-Girl by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr.); Cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones; Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jim Carrey; Length 103 minutes.
Seen at Cineworld Haymarket, London, Monday 9 September 2013.