Get on your bike and look for work

(Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, US, 2012, 95 mins)

Before proclaiming Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance a dehumanising spectacle, consider this: Johnny Whitworth’s villain has been invested with the power of decay by suited Satan Ciarán Hinds, a palsying process that’s collapsed one side of the Devil’s face. In his new incarnation, Whitworth, now undead and a peroxide blonde, tries to feed himself, utilising the logic that all demonic wraiths carry a packed lunch. As everything he touches rots to nothing, it proves difficult. A sandwich blackens and disappears; an apple becomes emaciated, then dust. Finally, Whitworth fishes out a Twinkie, the sponge and cream cake beloved by our American friends. Neither the packaging nor the snack degrade when Whitworth touches it and he gobbles it down. I guess some things are beyond the reach of biodegradation.

This isn’t just a smart gag, it’s a hint of what might have been had Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the low-rent maestros behind the Crank movies, been permitted to let this movie run away with itself. As it is, the duo’s signature good humour and excess struggle to break through; it matters not that the movie is ridiculous, what matters is that it isn’t ridiculous enough.

You have to wonder why the production hired Neveldine and Taylor, if it wasn’t to bring out the worst (for which read best) in Nicolas Cage. In theory, this directorial partnership, whose Jason Statham jaunts included al fresco intercourse, shotguns up the shunter, the villain’s head preserved (and kept alive) in a tank, and cocaine editing, seem like the personifications of Cage’s wild man Id, but Crank was shot for the price of Whitworth’s lunch, the players permitted to indulge themselves. Ghost Rider is a multi-million dollar franchise and consequently the two directors have been obliged to tone down their act; a vintage example of the catch-all mentality that makes many of these movies mechanical, joyless affairs. The PG-13 rating slapped on this sequel before a frame was rendered proved to be a shackle on all concerned. The duo manage to force the square peg of their ambition through the round hole of the formulaic screenplay, but inevitably the edges are blunted.

There’s some life in this beast; a couple of scenes in which Cage looks like a man living well during the last days of Weimar. He snarls and twitches as he tries to intimidate a hood, walking the tightrope that separates high camp from ham, while another scene has him crazed and enflamed, as he rides toward the camera like an epileptic pyromaniac. Yet these instances are few. For much of the running time, Cage barely shows; it’s just another mercenary turn from a man yet to satisfy his creditors. He looks barely cognisant, the feeling being contagious. We hope for more, anticipating further excess when Cage and his cohorts arrive at a Tatooine monastery stacked with good wine and guns, but the brown shirts are already roughing up the cabaret audience; the party’s over.

So our only hope that Spirit of Vengeance may fondle the mind rests with its story but here too, we’re on a hiding to nothing. The setup is paper-thin; hazy talk of a prophesy and a child shaped receptacle (what is Hollywood’s obsession with violating kids?), with characters we have no time nor inclination to know, giving way to listless action and an outbreak of gurning amongst the cast. By the time the film settles down, having an idea that some introductions may be in order, our stock of attentive-capital is all but used up. It’s a pity; the potential was there, but the imagination wasn’t. Still, Cage’s tax bill is a little smaller tonight and consequently there’s hope that one day soon he’ll be able to turn down a pay day like this one or at the very least insist on a re-write before he lets blood on the dotted line.

More of Cage’s tax woes:

• Justice (a.k.a Seeking Justice)
• Season of the Witch

The House on Hokum Hill

(The Woman in Black, James Watkins, UK, 2012, 95 mins)

[Warning: This review reveals the film’s ending]

I’ve never read Susan Hill’s novel, The Woman in Black, and I never will, but I once attended Stephen Mallatratt’s stage adaptation. It was an okay sort of evening; harmless hokum; in which success depended upon the creation of mood and clever lighting. It didn’t work for me, the manipulations a little too conspicuous, but I could understand why people were drawn to its penny dreadful sensibility. Hammer, the once mighty British horror outfit, made its name with similarly ripe gothic travails, so it’s little wonder they spied this creaky 80’s pastiche of Victorian horror and partnered the bollocks with breasts, in the form of scribe Jane Goldman.

It wouldn’t be fair to deride the film adaptation for luxuriating in clichés – director James Watkins and the aforementioned Ms Goldman are only giving the public what they want and it’s all eminently pleasurable; the haunted house, dead children, sinister Victorian dolls, crows, mist, graveyards, the successor to the grimpen mire – you name it, it’s here. A mood is created. The problem is that there’s a lifeless vacuum at the heart of this ghost story. Radcliffe be thy name.

So familiar is the iconography in this movie, it’s tempting to say you’ve already seen it. In fact, strictly speaking you have. Watkins knows the playbook by rote, employing all your favourite standbys; the Tinnitus inducing musical cue when a character backs into another, hitherto unannounced, a silhouette briefly passing the camera, lots of “it’s behind you!” audience baiting and a surfeit of creaking, whispering and yes, screaming. Nothing wrong with that you might think, and you’d be right, but because we greet these conventions like old friends, the only thing that prevents them becoming dull is close identification with the story’s protagonist; more than that, we rely on his fear to feed our own and instill that all important unease. The bad news for this Hammer picture is that this crucial role has been entrusted to the inanimate, perma-stunned visage of the former Mr Potter.

As the Harry Potter series meandered along and the cast started to sprout twatling-strings, it became apparent that the star of the show had a limited emotional and indeed, facial range. Perhaps it mattered less when he was ten, but by the time he was eighteen and called upon to deal with the story’s emotional setpieces, though I couldn’t tell you what they were, these deficiencies were as conspicuous as Jane’s Goldmans. That’s the chance you take when you cast a child actor and commit them to a role that will see out their adolescence.

On miserabilist British soap EastEnders, child actors that no longer meet the demands of the scripts are dispatched to their character’s aunt, either abroad or in the countryside, only to emerge a year later with a new face and formal training from a drama school, ready to chow down on dramatic red meat. No such mechanism existed in Harry Potter, so we were stuck with the miscast mannequin until the bitter end.

Radcliffe has been brought out of storage here in the hope that he’ll bring his Rowling-normous fanbase with him, but popular though he is, the cost to the film is considerable. Muggles that make the journey will find themselves watching paint dry for 95 minutes. Whether he’s trying to take in news of his wife’s death from childbirth, or contemplating the horror of a malevolent babe-slaying spirit, Radcliffe looks like a man for whom rigor mortis has set in prematurely. As his fear and sense of panic is undetectable to the naked eye, the audience’s ability to invest in his plight is fatally compromised. Without a surrogate we can believe in, we’re sitting on the ghost train with the lights up.

Mildly less depressing, though no less regrettable, is Goldman’s decision to import a little Americana into this very British ghost story. Perhaps under pressure to make Hill’s resolution more upbeat, and conscious that if the film is to play well stateside, any family destroyed must be restored, she provides a new ending in which Radcliffe’s Kipps (it’s all very Dickensian), is pulped by a train while trying to save his son from the vengeful spirit. Both man and son are squished but no matter, Kipps’ dead wife is waiting for them on the other side, allowing all three to walk off into the mist together; dead but, we infer, blissfully happy. I suppose it’s an “everybody wins” sort of ending, but like the preceding hour and a half, it fails to unsettle an audience who by that time are in desperate need of a shock.

Sex and Death

(A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg, UK/Ger/Canada/Switzerland, 2011, 99 mins)

Any self-respecting film scholar will argue that a biographical take on the two fathers of Psychoanalysis, hated Fathers from an infant’s perspective (if Freud was right), is long overdue. The field and the medium were made for each other.

Lacan will tell you that cinema’s all about closely identifying with the subjects on screen – you’re sutured into the narrative (did it have to be a clinical metaphor for something so enjoyable, Jacques?), whereas for Mulvey, men allay their fear of castration, which I can assure you is very real, by controlling women in front of the camera. We objectify them and/or punish them, says Laura. Well, anyone watching Fassbender’s Jung smash the backside of Keira Knightley’s hysteric in David Cronenberg’s film, her nipples exposed, isn’t going to argue with that; how unfortunate then, that after decades of being exposed to a medium that is thought by some to act as a prism through which the psychical processes Freud and Jung talked about are refracted, a movie that actually deals with the early days of the discipline is so…uninvolving.

The dangerous method to which the title refers is the talking cure: the idea that whatever’s troubling you is rooted in your subconscious and by discussing it, in detail and at interminable length, you’ll inadvertently reveal where you’re broken. Cronenberg has a dangerous method of his own, however; to re-enact the disagreements between the two analysts while repressing all the drama. In one scene, Freud turns to Jung and says, “do you realise we’ve been talking for 13 hours?”. He could just as easily be referring to the film itself.

That isn’t to say it isn’t interesting craic; if you can stay awake during the series of solemn exchanges in which neither man seems particularly animated – both being mannered to the nines, then you might spot now common terms in their troubled infancy; references to being anal, autoeroticism, transference, projection, scopophilia – all of which, you’ll be excited to learn, are integral to both the story and your response to it.

So how does Cronenberg contrive to make this a holiday for the conscious mind? By structuring what is on paper, the fraught conflict between Jung and Freud, and Jung and his patient, later mistress and psychoanalyst in her own right, Sabina Spielrein, as a series of dry exchanges, sans punctuation, in which only Spielrein’s emotional register tips the audience to the seriousness of the relationship depicted. You have to take the movie’s word that Jung and Freud are estranged, as any sense of escalating conflict is nebulous at best; we’re told not shown.

Freud comes across rather well; a man who knows enough about sexual impulses to repress them as work demands. In contrast, Cronenberg would have us believe Jung was a capricious loon, bewitched by the neurotic clusterfuckette that is Knightley’s Spielrein, and obsessed with the supernatural – a tendency that the movie sadly endorses, giving undue prominence to Jung’s super-sense, and a dream in which he symbolically (and improbably) predicts the Great War.

Given the film’s verbosity and sedentary staging, you might think A Dangerous Method would have made a better play. As it is, it’s curiously uncinematic; there’s a conspicuous lack of visual imagination on display, astonishing given Cronenberg’s pedigree, and a wasted opportunity in light of the subject matter. In thinking about how the film’s many dense concepts might have been translated, the free association of images, acute focalisation and provocative editing all spring to mind. Instead you’re invited to sit in the corner of the room and listen to people trade abstractions.

A sense of who Jung and Freud were, beyond their clinical personas, might have helped; so to the impression that something was at stake; that Jung’s relationship with Spielrein mattered a frig. Cronenberg relies on the details of Spielrein’s case to throw up enough intellectual meat to feed our interest, but as that’s all you get, you may as well skip the movie and read the case notes instead.

Disney’s New Darlings

(The Muppets, James Bobin, US, 2011, 103 mins)

When there was first talk of getting things started on a muppet-ational revival of Jim Henson’s troupe of felt vaudevillians, competing with super-fan Jason Segel for the right to write was Miss Piggy herself, Frank Oz. In the event, franchise owners Disney, whose sticky fingerprints are all over the finished product, chose the newbie. Oz, who you might think is somewhat integral to any Muppet outing, responded with a visit to a vineyard and the plucking of sour grapes. “I didn’t like the script” he said of Segel’s approved blueprint, and so neglected to participate.

That Disney went with Segel, the 32 year old Judd Apatow acolyte, suggests they were after a treatment that had the ear of the childhood Muppeteers that would, they hoped, bring their freshly sired tadpoles into cinemas and make brand loyalists of them. At first glance Oz’s criticism of Segel’s script seems mean-spirited; The Muppets is a monstrously wholesome comedy; the kind where the heroes are dewy eyed, indecently decent and inseminated with gooey innocence, complementing our collective memory of Piggy’s pride. It’s gently wry, often sweet and yet, and yet…

Whereas no-one who’s seen Oz’s work in the last 20 years would hire him as a script doctor; this, after all, is the same Frank Oz who didn’t object to Yoda’s treatment in the Star Wars prequels and who liked the homophobic script to In & Out enough to direct it (and to think he doesn’t even have John Landis’ excuse that he killed three people to explain the loss of mojo!), it’s possible that the old hand was on to something when voicing displeasure at Segel’s treatment of the characters he and Henson created.

Behind the movie’s felt veneer, there’s plastic; saccharine polish supplied by Disney Pixar’s committee approach to movie making. Henson’s Muppets had a nice line in dry wit. They were anarchic. Segel’s are corporate stooges. Kermit’s gang now sell product for the parent corporation. Their theatre sits next to the Disney Store on Hollywood Boulevard and no aerial swoop of the area can miss the Cars 2 billboard that reminds Gonzo’s new friends that said Blu-ray is now in stores. The script, which like most movies fed into Pixar’s demographolizer®, has its fair share of good clean lines, comes sanitised, lest it taint the brand.

The irony is that Segel’s plot pivots on the Muppet name being co-opted by an unscrupulous capitalist. Henson’s Muppets might have had the balls to make him a media executive; instead in a neat example of bait and switch, he’s, er, an oil salesman. Still, there can be little doubt that Bob Iger, Disney’s chief, is the real Tex Richman; a man hoping to drill into an as yet untapped resource: your kids.

The Muppets have been successfully transplanted to the 21^st century alright; it’s just a shame that while pretending to eschew the corporate mentality that informs modern family films, they’ve brought it with them. It’s impossible to dislike Kermit’s coven; even their bygone post-modern asides cause the ends of your vaginal simulacrum to turn upwards, but there’s no getting around it; it’s underhanded stuff. It won’t do.

Cultural Vandalism

(Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, George Lucas, US, 1999/2012, 136 mins)

It was with much trepidation that I took to the cinema to see a new version of my all-time favourite movie, The Phantom Menace. I did so despite news that George Lucas, the tinker, interned in his Xanadu, had changed it utterly. A new screenplay, pages ripped from a monkey’s typewriter, replaced film’s blueprint for modernism. Qui-Gon Gone! The political intrigue stripped out and overlaid with vulgar adventure! Oh George! Vandal! Your drive for perfection, your compulsion to reshape the clay, pressing harder into that dun dough, has made a hag of a once beautiful face.

Oh beard! Space-Bard! What possessed you to do it? At night, at the ranch, were you tormented by the ethereal flapping of slack-jawed adolescents; dunces with biblical facial hair, doe eyes and sloganised tees? Did they reveal themselves to you, as Kenobi did to Luke on that Hoth glacier, raping your sense with the battering ram of indignation?

Had you asked me I’d have told you, for the virtues were clear enough, why not so much as a frame should be touched. I was there on that first day, back in May ’99, emaciated and half-mad, tripping over my own whiskers, having queued for half a year, lashed by the elements like some ancient coastline. I’d suffered the buggerings, the dysentery, the dependence on pain medication and charity; all for the chance to say I’d been there, to write myself into this history, and what I saw on that opening night changed my life. Oh George, you were bold! Bold as brass taps affixed to a milkmaid’s teats!

No-one had used a fully autistic cast before. We were moved. Many in my row wept. In a stroke you’d pioneered a new technique, full immersion for the audience, allowing them to project their own characters onto blanks. For the first time we were psycho-active participants in the Star Wars universe. Because I knew you, knew your influences, I understood that The Phantom Menace was the realisation of twenty two years of studious reflection on film form – theories of space and movement that you’d studied under Lester Novros at USC. No teacher could have been more proud.

Those long wide angle shots in which your mannequins stood idle, beset by curiously un-alien Italian architecture; your humanoids rooted to the forest like the surrounding trees; yes, this was a break from the received wisdom of the past. The first three films had been enslaved to Hollywood convention; they had no claim to art. The compositions were so crude, so obvious, so intimate; the look so constructivist, so high-tech. My Menace was a different beast – a movie without intrusive characterisation or bulk; a film in which everything was smooth and inert; a film we had time to study without unnecessary clutter or distraction; fortified with a sedate score that rendered those initially excitable audiences meditative and suggestible.

I despise Menace Redux. I hate its insufferable logic, its conspicuous schema; the simple matinee character-focused action, full of jeopardy and excitement. I loathe the fact I can remember every polished line, hum every leitmotif. What was opaque now has garish clarity. Where were the caricatures of Jews, Japs and Blacks that imbued the original narrative with such tension? Where was the scatology for toddlers still fixated on rectal refuse?

The daring thing about the 1999 film was its conscious identification with its audience and their filmmaking prowess. It mirrored their understanding of story structure, character and dialogue, subverting their expectation of something more professional. It’s the movie that said, “This is the film you’d have made, had you had Mr Lucas’ resources. Not because you’d have wanted to, but because you lack the ability to do otherwise. You can hardly complain if we’ve made the movie you’d have made yourself.” This new version plays like a filmmakers’ labour of love. The imprint left by my youth has been filled with Bungaroosh made from pixels and folly. Oh George, why?*

*The reviewer later learned that the remade movie was a mesmerist’s illusion. The above had been suggested by subliminal messages inserted into the interstices between foreground and background plates in an otherwise unremarkable 3D conversion.

Cult Following

(Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin, US, 2011, 102 mins)

When the lost Martha is inducted into her boyfriend’s “commune”, the first act of group leader Patrick, a Catskills Christ made of sinew, beard and vest, is to change her name. “You look like a Marcy May” he tells her. His attempt at flushing away her past identity and imprinting anew goes from there, including the stipulation that the girls should assume the identity of Marlene when answering the house phone. It isn’t long before “Marcy May” is physically as well as psychologically branded. One horrific scene has Martha awaken mid-way through her inaugural rape by Patrick. Her “buddy”, the female friend assigned to the new arrival to smooth over doubts, recasts the violation as a spiritual joining with the talismanic leader, though you can see reality’s attempt at breaking through etched on the new girl’s face. “We’ve all done it,” her handler assures her, “so it can’t be wrong, can it?”

Sean Durkin’s film is a mesmeric investigation into how people get subsumed into such cults. Patrick’s system of indoctrination and subsumption is marked by its matter-of-factness and quiet brutality. No sooner has Martha been deflowered, emotionally lassoed, with Patrick selling himself as a replacement Father figure for her absent Pop, and cut off from contact with the outside world, she’s helping to ensnare a new recruit with the same reassuring female friend routine. Watching Martha add a knock out drug to the newbie’s herbal cocktail and hold her hand as she sits in a virginal white robe awaiting her initiation, is more disturbing than that first rape. All the while Elizabeth Olsen, excellent in every scene, manages to look less sedate than the others, with just enough doubt showing behind the eyes to allow for her escape. This could have been retitled Cognitive Dissonance: The Movie.

Durkin’s keen that we should understand what catches the lascivious eye of Patrick and his army of libidinous male scouts. He eroticises Martha, turning her into a nymphet for our delectation. His camera focuses on her figure, especially her breasts, the full shape glanced from the side as she’s changing, the cleavage leered upon as she cleans on her knees, erect nipples cameoing on a cold lake. She’s dressed like a virgin sacrifice for her sister’s house party (a consideration for Patrick, whose girls are encouraged to think of their initial violation as their first time); one of many callbacks to her cult experience; and she’s often shot through a milky white gauze, which we’ll take on trust is no error in cinematography.

In short, we’re primed to see her as a sexual object and this makes for much discomfort, not least in present day scenes at sister Lucy’s lakehouse. Discomforting signs of sexual abuse, from a lack of shame in being naked in front of her brother-in-law, to casually lying in bed next to the couple while they’re having sex, make that objectification problematic. The film acts on the audience like an extension of Patrick’s Id; it fills our head with conflicting ideas and controls our perceptions. In the end we’re as paranoid and disorientated as poor Martha. This is its power; a jagged psychological topography; the reconstitution of the world as a fearful and sinister place informed by experiences that only we and Martha are privy to.

Durkin never lets us off the hook. At the lakehouse, a sanctuary on paper, both Martha’s newfound security and the people who provide it are questioned. An excellent scene has Martha challenge the values of her host, the affluent and self-absorbed Ted. All things being equal it would be reasonable to suggest that her brother-in-law’s middle class values are reassuringly natural. However, by making Lucy and Ted atomised beings, with a streak of accompanying selfishness (enough for Martha to suggest Lucy would make a terrible mother), Durkin invests Martha’s repudiation of Ted’s, and by extension, the audience’s cosy beliefs, with additional sting. It’s a challenge to our complacency but also a reminder that the communal values perverted by Patrick and his followers (who aspire to self-sufficiency but steal from nearby houses and murder the occupiers), hold a romantic allure for young people adrift amongst the debris from a broken family. This is the vacuum that predators like Patrick move to fill. Martha Marcy May Marlene shows us how and it’s not a lesson easily forgotten.

To fetch a pail of DASANI ®

(Jack and Jill, Dennis Dugan, US, 2011, 91 mins)

Anyone who’s serious about sitting through this execrable Adam Sandler money printing wheeze, should first watch Mike Stoklasa and Jay Bauman’s autopsy; a one hour episode of their Half in the Bag web series, that left the rest of us with little to do but regurgitate the main points. Chief amongst them, the observation that this is a film in name only, or, to put it another way, a film that exists not to tell a story or entertain an audience, but to facilitate a huge payday for Sandler and his retinue of SNL also-rans; a film that doubles as an $80m commercial for Sony, her subsidiary companies and related products. These include Coca-Cola, laptops and CBS television shows. Other companies that contributed to the pot, but are not wholly or part-owned by Sony, include the US chain Dunkin’ Donuts (a brand that consumes a third of the plot) and terrorists’ favourite American Airlines.

The premise, conceived as the golden thread that would link these paid messages together, involves an advertising executive chasing an Al Pacino endorsement for his donut client. The complication, the only complication, is that Pacino (playing himself without due regard for his diminishing reputation), wants to possess Sandler’s twin sister but she’s not interested, thereby jeopardising the ad man’s prospects. We’re invited to conclude that this was the conceit chosen because it allowed Sandler to do the least amount of work. The film’s humour is derived from his heritage schick – the stuff he can do in his sleep – a routine that Woody Allen might have called “Jewish with a vengeance”. It’s a turgid cocktail of identity politics, misogyny and casual racism. Easy laughs to mine, so the thinking went, but those chortles come at a price; this is the worst representation of Jews on screen since Jud Süß.

The early and unwelcome appearance of fellow SNL alumnus Dana Carvey, reminds us that the odious use of product placement is something that generation of contributors embraced wholeheartedly. Audience members with long memories will remember a sketch in Wayne’s World, in which corporate stooges Carvey and Mike Myers, pretended to send up intrusive advertising, while simultaneously giving Pepsi and Pizza Hut cameos. Myers ran with the ball and stuffed his second Austin Powers with similar endorsements, again insulting the audience’s intelligence by making the companies that had paid his enormous salary a part of the story (Dr Evil hauled up at Starbucks HQ, ho ho). We laughed, we had a Starbucks latte, we hurled.

Myers got away with it because he met the audience’s not unreasonable expectation that the film should contain jokes (many reused from the first film), thereby using a form of bait and switch that drew lingering attention from the distended commercial break on screen. It’s harder for Sandler to pull off, perhaps because he’s consciously and conspicuously disinterested in making Jack and Jill succeed as a comedy. The jokes are crude and obvious, the cynicism is breath taking, the disrespect for the audience obscene. Still, with the production budget clawed back and the endorsements branded into pliable brains, there’s little incentive for Sandler, or anyone else in his address book, to sit down and think about making a real movie any time soon. They say you should save your ire for the game, not the player, but Jack and Jill’s success is a testament to the fallibility of both.

Mind Games

(Chronicle, Josh Trank, US, 2012, 83 mins)

A philosopher, a jock and a tormented loner are endowed with telekinetic powers after stumbling upon a hole and a psionic device of undetermined origin, in Josh Trank’s enjoyable debut. If you need to guess which of the three lapses into megalomania and fascism, becoming the audience’s vicarious instrument of revenge against authority, then this is probably your first movie too. There are worse introductions. Chronicle is an engaging, if conceptually flawed thriller, and something of a pixelated magic show. Trank, a mere whippersnapper at 26, marks the piece as Bildungsroman by showing admirable concern for the moral and psychological makeup of his troubled teen protagonist. We’re grateful for that concern. A visual effect isn’t brain food, y’know.

Invited to consider, as in parent stories like Stephen King’s Carrie, whether the brutal Darwinian bolthole that we call adolescence is to blame for the escalating madness that follows, the movie’s conclusions seem at odds with its marketing hook. In keeping with the bipolar nature of the piece, the poster asks the question “what are you capable of?”, suggesting the responsibility remains with the individual. The great thing about Carrie was that it didn’t sit on the fence this way. Chronicle’s philosophical even handedness adds moral ambiguity but subtracts focus. Still, half a brain trumps a hollow skull.

Ostensibly an addition to the found footage sub-genre (though it isn’t clear how the footage was found as we’ll see), Trank’s film embraces the ubiquity of visual media in homes, businesses and on personal devices, making the wry observation that a continuous line of action can be patched together using this confluence of sources. Dane DeHaan’s withered teen taps nicely into the self-obsession that characterises this never ending wave of visual vomit, resolving to record himself around the clock. The close identification with Andrew that follows leaves the indelible stain of foreboding on the audience. This is the smart decision that ultimate saves Chronicle from itself, for there’s a tension in the movie’s architecture that remains unresolved; a tension that would sink a less assured film.

That tension is the ontological versus the aesthetic. What does that mean? Beats me. Probably that you gain a sense of immediacy from the “first person” camera – the sense of being immersed in the action as it unfolds, but there’s a problem: If the footage comes from a multitude of sources – Andrew’s two cameras, CCTV tapes, television, phones and finally a camcorder flown to Tibet and left there while the remaining telekinetikid flies off, how was the footage collated and edited into a coherent narrative? Did God chronicle the chronicle using footage backed up to his iCloud; footage ported to the divine edition of Final Cut Pro?

The “found footage” movie holds you close with its realist aesthetic, inviting you to believe you’re watching life caught in the act. The archetypes – Cannibal Holocaust, Blair Witch – made it easy. These were single source narratives that the audience understood to be recovered. Recent additions, Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, didn’t screw with that convention, but Chronicle is so preoccupied with achieving the same effect that it forgets to introduce a plausible mechanism for the recovery and collation of its footage.

Trank might have hoped that this conceptual lapse would be overlooked, given the care he’s taken with the aesthetic and the imagination he’s employed in keeping his camera mobile (the manipulation of the camcorder by telekinesis being a clever conceit that frees the in-narrative camera, allowing for God’s eye shots unburdened by the character’s movements), but that’s wanting it both ways. Either your movie is grounded in reality or it’s not. If it is, the acquired footage and the technology employed in acquiring it must be governed by real world considerations. If the editor and by extension, the movie, is constituted in the ether then the film is undone by its own internal logic.

The month is toast but there’s still plenty of January fodder out there. Here are a few that full reviews might have shortchanged.

Haywire

(Steven Soderbergh, US, 2011, 93 mins)

The battle of the sexes is comprehensively settled in this retro-styled thriller, punctuated by 60’s arthouse touches including sober fistfights and a snazzy, jazzy soundtrack. Gina Carano is the formidable gun for hire, taking the fight to the men who double crossed her in the field. The story’s been done to death but not since the days of Harry Palmer has it been told with this much style. Paced with care and broken up with edgy, visceral violence, Soderbergh directs a compact, little nonsense thriller. It might have been no nonsense, but Ewan McGregor’s never-welcome American accent and the occasional use of black and white are cause for regret. A funny and perfectly judged ending might just make up for it, however.

J.Edgar

(Clint Eastwood, US, 2011, 137 mins)

This lavish biopic of the former FBI director and proto-fascist, J Edgar Hoover, is one of Clint Eastwood’s less inspiring efforts. Competently made but content to paddle in the shallows, it’s ill-equipped to understand how this fastidious, repressed little man, came to hold such unchecked power. Leonardo DiCaprio works hard, attempting to build a character from the biographical remnants left to posterity, but that’s all we get; any ideas Eastwood and writer Dustin Lance Black had about Hoover fail to cohere into a probing thesis on screen. Eastwood can’t ignite the narrative and some of the worst old age makeup ever seen in a modern motion picture kills the final third. Both DiCaprio and Arnie Hammer look ridiculous under layers of conspicuous latex, with Hammer in particular the victim of an over earnest makeup artist with a liver spot fetish. The net effect, as with movies blighted by terrible accents, is to make a mockery of scenes that could and should have carried considerable weight. Isn’t it high time that Eastwood cut loose and made that third Orangutan movie?

Underworld: Awakening

(Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, US, 2012, 88 mins)

Following Rise of the Lycans, it’s hard to imagine anyone demanding the return of this monster mash-a-rama, yet here’s a second sequel (the last movie being a prequel) anyway. Kate Beckinsale, star of the first couple, can still pour herself into skin tight latex and thank goodness for it, because there’s little else to stimulate our feeble human minds during 88 loud and showy minutes. The setup moves the series into the near future and a Goth nightmare; the world purged of fangs and beasts by boorish, life loving humans; Coldplay fans one and all. Frozen by an evil biomedical company, or something, Beckinsale awakes, as the title suggests, to find she has a franchise friendly daughter and the war has taken a nefarious turn. You’ll note I said setup and not plot, because the forth Underworld movie isn’t big on the details. Fans who’ve come for the gore, choreographed fights and coke-head editing will not be disappointed. There’s even an Evanescence track to close proceedings, for God’s sake. Another is threatened, so completists should bite the silver bullet and make the time while they still have the strength.

Coriolanus

(Ralph Fiennes, US, 2011, 122 mins)

Given the dramatic meat on Shakespeare’s play, it’s surprising that no one, until RSC big hitter Ralph Fiennes, made a serious attempt to adapt it for the big screen. In the event Fiennes, debutant director and lead, relocates the action to the modern day, matt, grey environs of the Balkans, evoking memories of the recent war; shorthand for the kind of regional ethnic conflict that lines the play. It’s a sombre, serious update, intense exchanges abound. Fiennes walks the tightrope between the stage and screen with some aplomb, just occasionally tipping over into conspicuous theatricality. Gerald Butler, as his nemesis, later ally, Aufidius, is superb however, while Vanessa Redgrave brings her own RSC training to bear on the role as Volumnia, mother to a murdering son. Fans of the play, for surely there are some, won’t complain about this production; others will credit Fiennes for putting enough steel and grit on the screen to keep first timers hooked.

The Grey

(Joe Carnahan, US, 2012, 117 mins)

The first quarter of the year belongs to two men, one is Nicolas Cage, who’ll be along shortly, the other is the former Mr Natasha Richardson. Getting Neesoned means being up against it in unenviable circumstances. Last year’s Unknown was a damp squib, but the good news for fans of the skyscraper-tall Ulsterman is that The Grey’s harsh Alaskan locations and survivalist plot are a great match for his humourless, bad-tempered persona. This is also comfortable territory for director Joe Carnahan, who couldn’t adapt his grimy, brutal aesthetic to candyfloss like The A-Team, but is as happy as a wolf trying to break into a straw house, here. Neeson plays a suicidal oilrig worker, pining for his recently deceased wife, who temporarily finds new purpose when he and some of his “asshole” colleagues survive a plane crash and find themselves being hunted by the furry natives. Conveniently for the survivors, Neeson is the man employed by the company to protect the rig from the canid menace, so knows his foe. What follows is a tense trawl through the middle of nowhere in which Carnahan wisely finds time for character development and a few pertinent philosophical questions. A nicely judged and ambiguous ending is somewhat undercut by an unnecessary additional scene after the end credits, so for once not staying for the roll call of names is the right move.

A Shock to the System

(Margin Call, J.C.Chandor, US, 2011, 107 mins)

J.C Chandor’s disaster movie literally evokes the business end of the 2008 market meltdown; the crisis that ushered in the period we’ve affectionately named The Age of Austerity. Though a false witness, endowed with hindsight, it’s a commendably sober and even handed drama, that gives the much loathed bankers human faces (tethered to animal metaphors, notably fat cats and dead dogs), while noting the culture of profligacy and flippancy within which they operate.

Paul Bettany’s middle manager might have spent $76,000 on prostitutes in the preceding year, but the look of horror on a face we imagine to be doused in expensive aftershave, looks real enough. The implications are writ large across his pore cleansed puss. A later scene has Bettany trying to justify the disaster by pushing the blame onto the millions that lived beyond their means; the baby boom and busters if you like. Chandor’s wise to remind us of our complicity in this world of never never economics, but Bettany’s self-serving rant begs the crucial question; why didn’t the men and women holding the giant chess pieces take more responsibility, when each was a Trojan hollow carrying the security of millions?

The moral tone is set from the off with a lesson in pitiless capitalism – the bank laying off a third of its employees. This is the eve of the crisis; an institution that believes itself to be in rude financial health, yet number cruncher Stanley Tucci is shown the door to keep profits healthy. Forced to stop work with immediate effect, he hands his calculations to protégé Zachary Quinto. That night the younger man completes the sums that foretell of imminent disaster. What follows is a story told over a single evening; events that chart the path from complacency to realisation to panic and finally, the pitiless pragmatism we came in with.

It’s a fascinating setup: if you were the first bank to realise that you were carrying an unsustainable mountain of toxic debt with the potential to destroy the entire banking system, what would you do? The dilemma is given real urgency by compressing the time frame so the bank’s board and risk assessors, having made the discovery after hours, must make a decision before the markets open the following morning. Any delay and they risk being on the wrong side of a fire sale.

It’s then, in a series of terse exchanges between company veteran Kevin Spacey and the billionaire owner, Jeremy Irons, that the moral dimension comes to the fore. Spacey realises immediately that the bank is contemplating an unethical, if perfectly legal move; the underhanded sale of its worthless assets to rivals, pulling the trigger on the entire system. For Irons it’s an exercise in minimising losses. He reels off a depressing roll call of crash years, 1929, 1937, 1974, 1987 and at last we understand the mentality at the top; it may be a livelihood question for those with a junk mortgage but when you’ve got a billion dollars in the bank, it’s a trip to the casino. Irons will be back to have another spin of the wheel tomorrow, we realise, because gambling is how he makes his money.

The movie trades figures that are eye opening (and watering). We learn that “8 billion dollars of paper money” rely on a now defunct equation. Our sympathies are taxed with traders offered a one off bonus of $1.4m to offload our bad debt onto soon to be bankrupt institutions. Tucci, who uncovered the mess, is brought back to the bank’s offices, shut in a room and given $176,000 an hour for agreeing to keep his mouth shut throughout the crucial day of trading. It’s a cavalier world, a poor relation to our own, that nevertheless decides whether we’re prosperous or poor. It’s that insight, something we thought we knew, given dramatic form and urgency, that gives Margin Call an edge; it’s matter-of-fact and really rather frightening.

“They’re fucked” is Bettany’s assessment of the taxpayers who’ll soon be stumping up to bankroll his next run of hookers, and to think some people lose sleep over families claiming housing benefit. Best of luck with the cap, Prime Minister.