by Andy Cox
Over in a comics universe next door, Brett Ratner’s HERCULES has boldly chosen to honour the memory of the late Steve Moore by ignoring his final wishes and plastering his name all over this Rock-headed adaptation of his comic series Hercules: The Thracian Wars, while still not paying Moore’s estate a penny. Even before this indignity, Steve’s mentee Alan Moore was urging a boycott, and while the film can seem entertaining enough as a big-budget, low-forehead extended episode of Xena, it’s certainly not the memorial one of British comics’ mightiest bronze-age heroes would have wished. (That would be Unearthing, Alan Moore’s psychogeographical biography from 2006, particularly in its Crook&Flail audio incarnation.) The Thracian Wars wasn’t Steve’s best work in comics, but it had a lot of fun with the conceit of a league of extraordinary gentlefolk recruited from the heroic names of pre-Trojan myth cycles, with Herc heading up a super-team of Theban and Calydonian celebrities in a euhemerised age of myth. Ratner’s version has taken bits of this, randomised the characterisations, scrambled the plot, and jollied it up with a jokier tone, while cheerfully shredding much of Moore’s careful regard for sources and canon. Despite a Greek co-writer, Amphiaraus and Sitalces can no longer pronounce their own names, and the opening scene is captioned “358 B.C.” without anyone apparently noticing there was probably meant to be a 1 on the front of that. Dwayne and McShane seem heartily amused by the whole thing, but when Herc introduces his buddies as “Atalanta of Scythia, Amphiarus of Argus, Autolycus of Sparta”, you can hear the distant sound of Steve Moore’s ashes spinning on the wind.
SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR takes us back to the dark inside of Frank Miller’s head after nine years’ respite, to find that even the few light switches that used to work are now broken. This second tour is a perplexing narrative space, in which old faces who ought to be dead (Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis) play alongside old faces who aren’t (Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Powers Boothe) and new faces playing old ones (Josh Brolin as Clive Owen, Dennis Haysbert as Michael Clarke Duncan) at variously later or earlier stages of their timeline, some of them so completely warped by time that they might as well be completely new characters, while new new faces Eva Green and Joe Gordon-Levitt try to out-noir the noirest of them with still more preposterously overblown character arcs that it’s fair to expect will not end well for either. The film as a whole is set in a kind of Pulp Fiction hole in the first film where the Willis/Alba story has happened but the Rourke one hasn’t, so that anyone reliant on nine-year-old memories is going to find themselves as frazzled as Rourke’s punchdrunk vigilante Marv, who can’t remember why he’s beating up whoever he’s beating up tonight, but knows they must have deserved it. The stories are pretty infantile, the underlying misogyny trumped by the overarching misanthropy, and the sadism as stupid as ever. The old hands are better than the new at making their characters seem actable, even if the indomitable Green gives it her heaving best as the titular dame: “a witch, a predator, destroying men sometimes for profit, sometimes for power, sometimes for sport.” But even old Dwight and Nancy are tainted now by long marinading in Miller’s imagination: “This rotten town,” she sums up. “It soils everybody.” The film has now tanked in the States but cleaned up in Russia, so for worse or better we may not have seen the last.
Thirty years ago, when Syd Field’s three-act model of screenplay structure was starting to establish itself as the industry paradigm, Columbia University’s Frank Daniel fought back with a model that broke a film down into eight “sequences” of ten to fifteen minutes, corresponding to the reels of early cinema. Now Noel Clarke seems to have been studying the sequence model in his latest exercise in shoestring Brit-skiff THE ANOMALY, a bodyjacking thriller whose gimmick is that the hero only wakes to consciousness and ownership of his body for 9'47" intervals while the system reboots after a crash. The rest of the time he’s possessed by Brian Cox, which is a bit of a hardcore thespian challenge for our Noel but luckily happens mostly in insterstitial downtime, as the film is constructed of a series of ten-minute sequences during which the hero has to do his Source Code thing before the window closes. The idea is cool, but the execution risible, with diabolical performances and dialogue, cheesy slo-mo fight sequences, and a scheme-chain of villainy that swiftly spirals off into the outer reaches of absurdity: “The acid between the sheets is gradually spreading towards your son’s body. It’s a little much, I know, but I have a penchant for theatrics.” (Everyone: oh no you don’t! Villain: oh yes I do! Repeat and fade into oblivion.)
EARTH TO ECHO is a found-footage homage to ET with a dash of Super 8, as a group of ten-year-olds rescue a spacewrecked alien owlbot and go on a geocaching quest to return him to his ship in defiance of the government’s men in orange who want to do horrid things to our heroes’ little space buddy. It’s a film with little obvious reason to be than the technical challenge of finding a child-friendly version of a film genre otherwise associated with scary movies, which on the whole it does with sufficient ingenuity to pass the time. The kids are all rather good, and seem to have been cast for their willingness to go all in with the on-screen crying; and there’s quite a sweet framing plot about the disruption of childhood friendships as parents move away from town, and how the universe gives you ways to keep distant friends close. Particularly affecting is a Boyhood-style final scene where we revisit the young cast a year later, and see that growth spurts and breaking voices haven’t changed the bond between them despite their months apart. I’m not sure that happens in life, but it’s a nice bit of manipulation.
VAMPIRE ACADEMY begins with a carcrash, which in hindsight may have been a bit of a hostage. Richelle Mead’s sextet-and-counting about a high school in Montana for trainee bloodsuckers and their half-blood guardians is a long way from the bottom of the YA barrel, with an attractive focus on the intensity and resilience of teenage girls’ friendships, and some ingenious if exhaustingly overmythologised use of traditional Romanian vampire lore. For teen-movie afics, this film version is a bit of a superhero teamup in itself: a decades-overdue collaboration between Mean Girls and Freaky Friday director Mark Waters and his screenwriter big brother Daniel, who wrote Heathers as well as Batman Returns and a wonderful unproduced early Catwoman, since which, well, not so much. It should be a can’t-miss, but it became clear as UK release dates approached, whipped past, and receded in the rear mirror that something was not at all well, and after the most fleeting of theatrical appearances it’s shuffled straight off to stream and rent.
This is either a huge shame or a gift to humankind, as Vampire Academy is one of those endlessly rewatchable fiascos that restore your joy in films that are able to achieve that perfect balance of awfulness and brilliance. Vampire Academy is a UK/Romanian co-production, which isn’t something you see every day and may explain a series of curious references to a Romanian delegation to the school which never materialises, at least in the version seen. It was made entirely in the home counties, a part of the world not known for its insistent resemblance to Montana; St Vladimir’s is played by Charterhouse, and the local mall, which includes a prominently visible Superdrug, is unmistakably Brent Cross Shopping Centre, while the vampires are mostly played by a distinctly low-fat cream of such young British acting talent as hasn’t already been skimmed by every other franchise in the industry. The film does, however, have one absolute killer asset in its star Zoey Deutch, who comes across as yet another of those 26-year-olds preposterously cast as a teenager, whom you can’t quite place but who is thumpingly familiar from something you saw years ago when she was young. In fact it turns out that she’s her character’s age, and that the reason she’s naggingly familiar, effortlessly charismatic, and has the comic timing of someone twice her age is that her mom is Lea Thompson and that stuff is genetic as all hell. But the spice in the recipe is that Deutch’s sassy vamp-guardian is paired, catastrophically and yet also wonderfully, with Australian TV actress Lucy Fry as the teenage vampire-princess bestie she’s sworn to protect, and Fry, bless her, is a proud
alumn of the Rosie Huntington-Whiteley school of the dramatic arts. I can’t really describe it. It’s like watching a panther eating a Toblerone. The thing is, they genuinely do lift each other, so that by the end of the film you can’t remember which one is wonderful and which is terrible, or why this isn’t the most fun you’ve ever had.
Down under in Fry’s homeland, David Michôd’s THE ROVER positions itself in the grand tradition of Australian post-apocalyptic westerns, as world-weary badass Guy Pearce pursues the bestids who stole his vintage Holden Commodore across half of South Australia from one Tarantino-inflected interaction to the next, with Robert Pattinson in twitchy tow as the baby brother with learning difficulties that target Scoot McNairy abandoned for dead. Pearce turns in a career top-five performance, right from the wonderful early moment where a sudden sense of absolute purpose appears in his hitherto-dead eyes; while even Pattinson is certainly doing something in very great quantity, even if acting isn’t quite what you’d choose to call it. The event ten years earlier, known only as “the collapse”, seems to be an economic rather than a natural or technological catastrophe, and is fairly peripheral to the film’s central puzzle of what the car means to Pearce and how it’s tied to his dead man’s view of the world. Many will find the answer a bit of a groaner when it comes in the final scene, undoing much of the good work the film has done till then; but Michôd has said when called out on it that that’s of course the whole point, and certainly the signs have long been there that Pearce’s behaviour is diagnostic of a deeper and more systemic moral damage that just being a bit moody and good with a handgun. As Pattinson puts it in his coarse-acting Southern retard drawl, “Not everythin’ has to be about sump’n’” – particularly in a world where order, justice, civilisation, morality, and meaning no longer exist, for reasons all the characters know but nobody is in a hurry to tell us.
Ari Folman’s THE CONGRESS takes an unusual approach to adapting Lem’s The Futurological Congress, about a kind of Worldcon on hallucinogens that gets overrun by terrorists, by making the novel just one mezzanine level in a bunker of rabbit-hole realities from which the film has to find its way back to the surface. Lem’s regular comic adventurer Ijon Tichy is here substituted by an actress sharing the name, body, and CV of Robin Wright, who in a long prologue sequence allows herself to be professionally replaced by a S1m0ne-style digital avatar, and then twenty years in the future slips inconspicuously into a Congress where everyone appears as a Fleischeresque animation, thanks to the compulsory ingestion of low-level hallucinogens at the border of the “animation zone”. But once inside, she drinks some spiked tapwater and falls into a much deeper pit of weirdness, from which she eventually wakens into a future world in which everyone now lives in a drug-made consensual hallucination overlaid on a grim red-pill dystopia, and her quest takes a different and more poignant personal turn.
Everything about this film is as insane as it sounds. Israeli writer-director Folman is best known for his Flash-animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, about the Sabra-Shabila refugee camp massacres in the 1983 Lebanon war. The Congress is a fiercely determined attempt to do something as far from that as possible: teeming classical animation, a story of American futures rather than Middle Eastern history, shuffling through genres and mindstates like in-show wardrobe changes. But for those who know Folman’s earlier work, the obsessions sing through: the madness and unreality of the surface of the world, which can be broken at any moment by the detonation of a bomb, the fall of shell, the sudden sound of copters overhead. Almost none of it works at all in any normally recognisable sense, but it’s a film of phenomenal strangeness and power which has, among other things, recognised an unexpected mirror of darkness in Lem’s satire, and stays with you longer than is easily explained. The French got it over a year ago, and I’m still not sure they’ve recovered.
Back in the Parisian metropolis of the surreal, MOOD INDIGO is the third film version of Boris Vian’s unfilmable 1947 novel L’Écume des jours – itself an untranslatable text translated three times into English, but never the modern classic it’s been in French. The novel follows two couples from frothy, surrealised, language-popping romance to darkness and desolation as tragic turns intrude on the cartoon silliness and word jazz: Audrey Tautou develops a growth on her lung, Gad Elmaleh is destroyed by addiction, and both are reduced to destitution and final tragedy as the couples’ resources burn through and the light, joy, and colour drizzle out of their lives; and though the growth is a waterlily and the addiction is to the works of jazz philosopher “Jean-Sol Partre”, the arc into darkness is the more powerful for the adolescent whimsy from which it descends. This latest version being a Michel Gondry film, the visual canvas bubbles with strangeness and the characters (who with hindsight one can see were always hovering in the background of his Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine, and Science of Sleep) travel a path from romantic optimism to existential melancholia that systematically and hauntingly deconstruct the initial whimsy and music-video popping candy for the eye. It’s about as French as a film can get, and undoubtedly a challenge to viewers whose filmic tastebuds have been burned out by the refined sugars and saturated fats of the Hollywood narrative diet. But it’s the only film in this pile of fourteen with no guns, no carchases, and no edged weapons. If that seems odd, perhaps we should use more of our brains.
