The Trib

by David Kenny

  Emmerich, meanwhile, goes to work with the Easi-Singles like a man making school lunches. Kate’s beau (Thomas McCarthy) stands in a supermarket aisle. ‘I feel there is something coming between us,’ he tells her. There certainly is. A giant crack appears right between them which then tears the supermarket into a canyon. Then we watch a spoof Arnold Schwarzenegger tell California: ‘It seems to me that the worst is over.’ Thirty seconds later, California pretty much ceases to exist. Giant earthquakes toss the state into the sea, solving in one shake California’s spiraling budget deficit. The inhabitants of 2012 are screaming. In the stalls, the audience is screaming laughing.

  2012 careers with the campy tone of a 1970s disaster movie. I’m happy to get into the spirit, slurping on its hokum with only the occasional gulp of disbelief – for Emmerich cannot surprise you with his silliness. But for all his earthquakes, neither can he move you. Not once do you get a wobble in the gut, a stir of adrenalin, a rush of feeling for a character. It’s mass destruction on a comic-book scale. Worse, whatever direction our hero travels in, the dismantling of the earth follows conveniently just inches behind. All that’s left for you to do is figure out who among the film’s many Russian characters will be killed off by our disaster-meister. (Answer: pretty much all of them). Our American heroes are never in doubt.

  2012 is the kind of disaster movie where everybody has to keep telling you it is the end of the world. Now, you would assume most people who go to feed on this kind of falderal know exactly what they’re in for. But Emmerich has absolutely no trust in his audience. Old bums are wheeled out wielding The End Is Nigh slogans. The US president tells us, ‘The world as we know it will soon come to an end.’ Soon, everybody’s mouthing it, with dialogue being delivered on screen as if it were written in bold underline with exclamation marks. (‘You need to read this! You need to read this now!!!’ says one). All this leads us to believe Emmerich doubts his ability to communicate the importance of what’s happening on screen. So he dials in the music on high alert. Or, failing that, he has a character comment on the patently obvious. From an aeroplane, Hawaii looks like a melted Terry’s Chocolate Orange. ‘Thiz iz not good,’ a soon-to-be-killed-off Russian tells us. Really? How so?

  I put much of this down to the fact Emmerich believes you won’t pick up on his telling details because you’re so busy being wowed by his special effects. And the CGI is impressive. On a scale of one to ten, it goes to eleven. Having discarded any interest in human interplay, the Stuttgart native opts for global blitzkrieg. He demolishes Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue. He rolls a decapitated St Peter’s Basilica around the screen like it was the Pope’s salt shaker. He drops an aircraft carrier onto the White House. He sinks whole cities into the sea. He must have been a terror as a toddler.

  You start to wonder, too, what someone like James Cameron could do with this kind of CGI muscle. But the thought is quickly squashed as Emmerich moves whole continents at finger snap. I imagine it was hell in the effects studio:

  ‘I’m afraid, Mr Emmerich, we can’t make the global destruction any bigger.’

  ‘Say vhat? It must be bigger!!’

  ‘But Mr Emmerich, the computer is on the brink of a meltdown. And anyway, we’ve already blown everything up.’

  ‘Vhat! Vhat! But I vhant to blow up ze world again, again!! NOW!’

  Running out of things to blow up, Roland Emmerich’s next movie will have to be set in outer space.

  His and Hers

  20 July 2010

  Here’s a film they could have called Magnolia. His and Hers, Ken Wardrop’s multi-ensemble documentary, is shot in ordinary homes around the midlands of Ireland and that damned and drab wall colour is everywhere. It gambols up gables, crouches behind couches, bestrides blandly beside blinds. Then there are the bolder houses. The houses of reckless abandon. There are living-room walls laid out like sick patients slapped in iodine; walls the colour of slippery snot or Saturday night hurl. The houses of the Irish become unexpected characters, lurking behind the heads of Irish mammies who spend much of the film talking about their sons. Listen to the walls exclaiming boldly behind them: you gave birth to us too! We too are your children!

  Ken Wardrop is certainly an original. And His and Hers is the blossoming of a directorial voice. His first full feature is a formally-conceived documentary beaded together in bite sizes. A parade of seventy or so females, from children to grannies, discuss in beautifully framed, snappy stories the men in their lives. We watch the women. We imagine the men, though never see them. A picture of life emerges.

  The film’s eighty-minute lifespan grows old with its protagonists. Like that devastating sequence in the Pixar cartoon Up, the one that made you and me cry, where the cuddly couple grew old together in a quick series of knotted ties, Wardrop’s film is a document of the passing of time. A child crawls through a doorway and another emerges older on the other side. Young faces grow knowing then harden from living. Long hair sneaks up from shoulders until it sits short and eventually grey on shriveling faces. Men die and all we see are their empty chairs. The women live on alone. Some of them have sons for comfort.

  Don’t expect anybody to say anything mean about anyone. Little girls talk affectionately about annoying daddies. They become young ladies and talk of daddy is soon forgotten. The men in their lives now are their young fellas. The young fellas become their fiancés, their fiancés their husbands, their husbands fathers to their children, these fathers companions in later life when the children leave. Later, they become the ghosts that stalk the house when they die.

  A gentle humour and sweetness bubbles throughout. ‘I had to give him a tenner to get him to sleep,’ says one mammy of her young son. ‘I took it back when he fell asleep.’ And then there’s the mollycoddling mother who tells us that when her smothered boy gets older, ‘he’s going to mind me’. Let’s see how he feels about that in ten years. Males are all kinds of everything: carefree and careless sons; daddies who dink about with footballs, or drill their daughters to drink their milk, or who teach them to drive. There are husbands that cook meticulous curries but leave collateral damage in the kitchen. There’s the joker who has built a pond in his garden and hangs a life-ring outside it. And there’s the fat man who fancies a younger woman and cheats greedily on his wife. (Sorry, wrong film.)

  Where Up could move you to tears, Wardrop, you begin to suspect, doesn’t want any of that kind of thing at all. ‘The small things are the big things,’ says one woman, speaking of her dead husband. And Wardrop advances with his eye fixed on the mundane. The just-cleaned-for-the-camera houses reflect a false neatness in the film’s form. Stories are just too tidy; every tale is nice. Men are bizarrely trouble-free. The film does its best to insulate us from any of the difficult undercurrents of life that it is the job of the artist to expose and explore. Without those shadings, the film is in danger of being twee.

  There is a poignancy, though, that creeps in and it is worn in the frayed faces of the elder aged. This achieves its greatest depth in scenes with Wardrop’s own mother – a woman whose entire frame drips with sorrow. We saw her before in Wardrop’s terrific first short, Undressing My Mother, and perhaps there is a natural advantage, for her story is more keenly felt than all the others.

  Wardrop displays a real interest in real people and their stories. But I can’t help but feel he is assuming the role less of a documentarian probing real stories, than that of a stereotypical mammy: he wants to see the best in everybody.

  The cinematographers, Kate McCullough and Michael Lavelle, overcome a major obstacle: how to make the anodyne architecture of Irish homes interesting. They frame rooms like postcards and create careful symmetry by splitting rooms in half. The camera peeks like a small child through doorways or watches from the Irish mammy’s viewpoint of the kitchen window. Their images revel in the familiar. But they create something spiritual out of the mundane.

  Broken Embraces

  30 August 2009

  It w
ould be unfair to say that Penélope Cruz stars in Broken Embraces, the great new film from the Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar. Better, perhaps, to say she supernovas her way through it: Cruz emits a white-hot blast of radiation that would outshine a galaxy of other stars. Her eyes glitter with a soul straining under passion. When she parts her mouth, she shows teeth that glisten like fresh water pearls. She wears red velvet high heels that punctuate the screen like exclamation marks; a red dress that would outflame passion. In Broken Embraces, Almodóvar shows us why Cruz is the great sensualist actress of our age, capturing her in ways no other director has. He drinks her in deep.

  The film is a noir-tinged story about sexual obsession and high passion. And it is also, perhaps, Almodóvar’s most ambitious film – something you look upon as you would one of Picasso’s Cubist faces, observable from many angles. The centre of the picture is Harry Caine (Lluís Homar), an intriguing blind writer who used to direct films under his real name of Mateo Blanco. And the story veers out in multiple perspectives from there.

  Harry, we learn, lost his sight years ago. Or did he? It does look like a fantastic ruse: in one scene, he appears to be looking through the keyhole of a door. And then there is the leggy stunner he seduces after she takes his arm to cross the road: the sex scene that follows is one of gentle amusement – the camera tracks craftily behind the back of a bouncing couch till we get to the woman’s painted toenails curling over the top. Mateo seems to know exactly what he is doing.

  A bag of cut-up photographs in his drawer suggests he is blind, too, to the past. That is until the past comes looking for him. A knock at his door reveals Ray X (Rubén Ochandiano), a wannabe director who transforms hilariously, when the film takes us back in time, to a super-camp limp-wrist. And the past takes us to Cruz’s Lena, who we meet back in 1994 – an upmarket call girl and aspiring actress.

  French filmmakers, so in thrall to the love triangle, look like anaemic amateurs beside the love polygon Almodóvar cooks up. Ray X has a dangerous crush on Harry, now called Mateo. Mateo’s scowling assistant Judith (Blanca Portillo) clucks over him like a hen and looks at him sidelong with unrequited longing. While Mateo develops a passion for Lena, who lives with her jealous old husband, the powerful businessman Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez), a live-action version of Montgomery Burns.

  As the entanglements ensue, there is much to savour. There’s Almodóvar’s playfulness, and the humour that bubbles gently to the surface. There’s the warmth he shows to his characters – one scene, on a street that involves Lena’s elderly parents, is achingly tender. And then there’s Almodóvar’s ability, abetted by his long-time composer Alberto Iglesias, to effortlessly switch tones.

  Cruz’s blazing high heels nod to the films of Douglas Sirk, similar terrain to Almodóvar’s high passion and studied female characters. Though unlike the lopsided world of his earlier film Volver, Almodóvar has let men into this universe. That red dress screams femme fatale. The music turns smoky. A scene opens with a shot of a pop-art print of a revolver and the camera trains slowly down its barrel as if danger is about to come shooting out of it. There are shades of Hitchcock and classic noir, while duplicity and obsession snake about the shadows. And when Mateo falls for Lena, he’s suddenly wearing a blood-red shirt, as if she has spilled on him the hot blood of her love.

  There is something very autobiographical in the way Almodóvar explores his passion here for making movies. Certainly this is a celebration of acting and role-playing and of our love affairs with great actresses. In one scene during Mateo’s movie, Lena, his lead actress, stands in a kitchen cutting tomatoes, while he whispers directions over her head. The moment is funny because it slices through the artifice of making movies. And yet Broken Embraces is all about capturing that unique magic that occurs on screen when a movie really works, with playful nods to Almodóvar’s own early work.

  Cruz is magisterial, an actress playing an actress. She transforms from office grey to a red ruse. Auditioning for Mateo, she’s a wide-eyed Hepburn; a platinum-wigged Monroe. When she has to make love to her ancient husband, she turns grey out of disgust. Then she puts on her make-up and emerges beaming. Mateo sees her as his muse and they make love hungrily. Almodóvar does too. But he makes love to his actress with the camera.

  There is always at work here an elegant see-saw between sense and sensibility; raw passion and intellectual rigour. You do feel, though, the film straining under the weight of Almodóvar’s desire to make the parts fit and his determination to drive it home. The movie loses its glide but it gains something else – a spirituality, if you will.

  You think of a film like Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, so infused with movie love yet riding along on a glossy surface with nothing beneath. Almodóvar’s surfaces are beautiful – take the scene where Lena makes love to Ernesto: a whispering sea, crinkling white sheets and their bodies ghosting underneath. Yet beneath those sheets is a woman grappling with momentous decisions. Underneath, too, Broken Embraces twists with feelings and ideas about the nature of film-making that can barely be expressed. For dedicated fans of cinema, these are immense pleasures to be had.

  Wall-E

  28 July 2008

  Wheeling myself out of the new robot cartoon Wall-E, my rusted eyelids re-oiled with glee and my enthusiasm for Hollywood recharged to optimum power, I was struck by a thought: Harrison Ford, Will Smith, Edward Norton, Robert Downey Jr and James McAvoy have been out-classed this summer by a robot that can’t even talk, let alone preen, pout or pull a face.

  Wall-E is the new animation from those clever clogs at Pixar and it is a film for the ages – a masterwork of visual, almost silent, poetry and a gentle love story between two robots set on earth and in space. It sets out to restore our faith in reckless humans who cause nothing but disaster, but it had the unlikely effect instead of restoring my faith in machines. For Wall-E does something not one of Hollywood’s live-action blockbusters has done this summer: it moves us. Not that low rumble you feel in your backside from the sonic assault of something blowing up on-screen, but that rare thing nowadays: a tug of the emotions. Those A-listers look like unfeeling androids beside Wall-E, whose eyes are shaped like metal teardrops and who has but a few metal prongs for hands.

  But none of this would come as a surprise to Wall-E. In his world, set in the distant future, humans have long lost the ability to look after their own planet, let alone manufacture heart-rending entertainment. Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) is the last robot on earth. He was built 700 years ago as a trash compactor because earth was being consumed by mountains of rubbish. This was before humans gave up on the planet and jetted forever into space. All these years later, he diligently keeps going at his work. For what is a lonely robot supposed to do?

  Wall-E has a boxy torso, but is resiliently quick on his tracks, and his wide-spaced eyes are not unlike that other great flat-head of the cinema, E.T. And Wall-E is just as wholesome: he is so unfettered by anything other than a desire to do good, it is impossible not to take him into your heart. Yet if he could talk, instead of beep, he would tell you all he wants is a heap of junk to squash in his chest cavity and for someone to squeeze his little robot heart.

  This comes in due time with a white droid called Eve who is sent to earth by space-shipped humans to rummage for plant life. And Wall-E, in the kind of reckless but gallant bravery beknown to love-lorn men throughout the ages, follows her back into space. Their love affair develops in a flurry of electronic beeps and a magical pas de deux in space that involves the use of zero gravity and a fire extinguisher. The moment would make Nijinsky look like he had flat feet.

  And amid the techno hair-chase that ensues, one can detect a gentle homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the real nod here is to Charlie Chaplin: were it not for snippets of human talk, Wall-E could be a great silent film. This is not something you see at the movies very much, though recently Paul Thomas Anderson had a masterful and silent fifteen-minute opening sequence to T
here Will Be Blood. There are few films where you could turn the sound down and understand what is going on: telling a story visually without the crutch of dialogue is the calling card of cinematic greatness. But to do it with robots who cannot talk and have limited facial gestures? Wow.

  Director Andrew Stanton, who made Finding Nemo, achieves in Wall-E something of the pathos of Chaplin’s tramp, a hapless yet poetic physicality and that low-slung dignity. How poignant is the sight of this lone robot caterpillaring through the rust and dust of toppled cities, collecting rubbish, which he compacts into giant trash skyscrapers like monuments to mankind’s once towering status? Or the sight of him gently rocking himself to sleep?

  When he’s not building junk cities, he collects human trash, searching them for signs of what made us human: an old bra, an engagement ring, a Rubik’s cube. Here is a robot whose curiosity unknowingly keeps alive the last vestiges of humanity. He watches a clip from an aged VCR recording of the 1969 musical Hello, Dolly! and Wall-E learns something that can’t be learned from the detritus of human objects – what it is to touch another person, what it is to feel. He sees how humans used to love one another and Stanton later uses this to stunning effect.

  The director of Wall-E insists he had nothing in mind other than a love story. I wonder who he’s trying to kid? The lives of his space-trapped humans are controlled by a dystopian corporation. They are fat and indolent: space has crippled them with bone-loss; and they are only able to travel strapped into hovering armchairs with mini TVs wired inches from their face. Watching this it is hard not to think of the present, when Wall-E is more likely to be watched on micro-screen iPods, or at home on TV, with the complete loss of awe and scale you can only find in the cinema. And underneath all the whizz and bop of a future imagined is the tone of an elegy: that we are destroying our planet and destroying ourselves.