This movie bombed at the box office, was universally mauled by the critics and booed at the Cannes Film Festival. There have been other failures in Gus Van Sant’s otherwise illustrious career but nothing on such a disastrous scale. I will include spoilers in an attempt to identify what went so horribly wrong.
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There is something sick and depraved at the heart of this movie, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.
As the director of bona fide classics The French Connection and The Exorcist, William Friedkin has nothing to prove but it is as if he still wants to show audiences that he still has the power to shock and outrage audiences. It is the director’s second collaboration with screenwriter Tracy Letts after 2006’s Bug (which I haven’t seen).
About a third of the way in, you get the notion that the film is meant to be a kind of Southern Gothic black comedy but the noir-ish humor falls flat unless you’re the type who finds the exploitation and humiliation of women amusing or get off on watching repeated images of folks getting their heads beaten to a pulp.
Should we stay or should we go?
Brion Gysin , the English-born painter and poet who introduced William S Burroughs to cut-ups believed that leaving the planet was the only thing that gave any purpose to life on earth; “we are here to go”, he said.
This perverse notion is one that Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan transform into the interstellar overdrive of their extraordinary cinematic vision – a space odyssey of epic proportions.
Reasons to go are indeed pressing since Earth is rapidly becoming uninhabitable with crops literally turning into dust. We are not privy to the precise reason for this state of affairs but Professor Brand (Michael Caine) alludes to humankind’s selfish tendencies as being a primary cause. This is also something Naomi Klein, in her book This Changes Everything, has rightly identified as a key factor in climate change.
If, as seems probable, the future of humankind is due to the largely man-made catastrophe of global warming, it begs the question as to how we are going to prevent fucking up another planet too. The mysterious Eureka solution that saves the world suggests that a last-minute reprieve is possible; a central message that is as delusional as it is dangerous. Continue reading
Having spent four days bingeing on the 8 episodes of HBO’s True Detective (season 1) I was left bemused by the weak finale but otherwise in awe of the faultless acting of this superbly sustained TV drama.
The contrasting personalities of homicide cops Martin ‘Marty’ Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rustin ‘Rust’ Spencer (Matthew McConaughey) create a genuine sense of tension.
The mismatched pair travel down the lost highways of Louisiana on the trail of a demonic cult and ritualistic murderers.
Their long running investigation takes them into the twisted underbelly of American life where superstition and old-time religion hold sway. The moody atmosphere is helped by a magnificent soundtrack of traditional blues, folk, alt-country and hard-driving rock overseen by the ever reliable T.Bone Burnett.
Brilliantly scripted by Nic Pizzolatto and stylishly directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, the power of the gothic drama is undermined by a ludicrously contrived happy ending which sheds false luminosity onto this journey into the heart of darkness. Continue reading
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