Drum Media reviews, May: RUBBER, PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN 4, OCEANS, SOURCE CODE, OF GODS AND MEN

Rubber is a film about a sentient rubber tire, which roams the desert, exploding the heads of its victims with unexplained psychic powers. Miraculously, this isn’t a willfully bad movie ala Machete or Snakes on a Plane, but rather a kind of essay -film masquerading as a prank – or maybe it’s the other way around. It opens with a striking shot of a police car that drives down a desert road in a zig-zag toward the camera, strategically knocking over two rows of evenly-placed chairs en-route. A policeman then steps out, and begins a to-camera address, detailing the pervasive element of ‘no reason’ in films. When he rhetorically asks why the protagonist of Polanski’s The Pianist “has to hide and live like a bum when he plays the piano so well?”, you’ve got an inkling of the hyper-absurdist shenanigans to follow.

Rubber has been criticized elsewhere for, variously, hating its audience, being over-stretched short film material, and overall pointlessness (well… yeah). But the film, shot using the video function of a still camera, has too much surreal visual splendor and wit to be dismissed as a half-hearted ‘eff you’ to the paying viewer. And the dialogue – delivered by a police team on the tire’s trail, and a group of spectators watching the action transpire through binoculars, like a real-life drive-in feature – is frequently hilarious.

Its writer/director is Quentin Dupieux, the French house music producer best known under his alias Mr. Oizo. On the basis of this Dada-ist delight, he could very well become a surrealist force to be reckoned with.

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Near the end of Pirates of the Caribbean: Secret of the Mermaid’s Womb, Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow observes that he doesn’t know who’s fighting who or why. In a spryer and more fun film – the first instalment in the series, for one – such a knowing moment would be a bone thrown to the audience lost in the thicket of exposition; cluing us in that the story is negligible, so just sit back and enjoy what else is on offer.

Alas, in the case of Pirates of the Carribean: Legend of the Parrot Ghost, there’s little else to cling onto. The film plods and plods along, briskly but affectlessly. It plays a lot like an amusement park funhouse version of the series, only with the car set on double speed, so there’s nary a chance to actually process the succession of attractions. Even mermaid vampires are rendered dull. After a while, the film resembles a hungover recollection of itself: Depp’s shambling gait, silhouetted figures revealing themselves as famous actors in pirate garb, Penelope Cruz’s heaving cleavage, and piercing music cues, all merging into a miasmic blur.

Additionally, with its endless night scenes, Pirates of the Carribean: Sequel of the Sequelly Sequel has about as much business being shown in 3D as I do being elected leader of Siberia - it’s a friggin’ eyesore to look at. You’ll have more fun raising your glasses and playing a game of spot the difference. Occasionally something’ll hurtle toward the viewer - it might as well be the hand of a Hollywood mogul.

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Oceans contains a lot of elements that would kill most other documentaries. It features a pervasive, vacuous narration from Pierce Brosnan, who constantly offers nuggets like "to understand the ocean, you have to experience it" and "Maybe instead of asking what exactly is the ocean, we should be asking who exactly are we", among other groaners. Its eco-treastise late in the film feels too tacked-on and obligatory to register with any conviction. There's some fascinating behind-the-scenes footage during the end credits, but you’ll have to suffer through a duet between Demi Lovato & one of the Jonas Brothers on the soundtrack.

None of this really matters though, since the experience of the film – much like similar IMAX-destined nature docos – involves simply letting one’s guard down and surrendering to the natural beauty on rich display. Director Pierre and his heroic film crew get in astonishingly close to their environmental subjects, and create an experience that absolutely requires a theatre viewing to do it justice. For all the faults of the, Oceans – much like its brethren, including Perrin’s own Winged Migration – is an essential big screen experience.

So toke up, soak up, and you’ll be tempted to agree with Brosnan’s stoner-undergrad voiceover observation: "the ocean isn’t just a giant mass of water: it’s a state of mind" (OK, I made that one up).

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With his debut Moon, and now his latest sci-fi thriller Source Code, Duncan ‘David Bowie’s son’ Jones has carved out a distinctive niche: nifty, modestly-scaled sci-fi thrillers that favour ideas over action. What Source Code offers is an egghead riff on Freaky Friday and Groundhog Day, with Jake ‘aw shucks’ Gyllenhaal playing an ex-marine who wakes up in the body of another man, aboard a train that is set to explode in 8 minutes. After this intriguing abstract, he – and we – discover from some solemnly delivered pseudo-science from televised overlords that he is part of a military experiment, in which he has to relive these 8 minutes of someone else’s life to find a mad bomber ready to detonate an even bigger bomb in downtown Chicago, with 2 million lives at risk.

For its writer/director, Source Code represents a step forward in scale and ambition, as well as a step backward in its packaging of lofty ideas into a satisfying narrative. If Moon generated enough goodwill for one to forgive that it promised slightly more than it delivered, Source Code sadly pisses away all its potent intrigue in its final stretch. The ethical dilemma at the film’s centre eventually requires a great leap of faith to actually register as a dilemma, and the final combination of facile uplift, unanswered questions and moral confusion leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Likewise, since the film argues for the validity of alternate realities, you could just as well groove on the heaps-fun first hour and a bit, and walk out 10 minutes before the end, and imagine a conclusion of your own choosing to greater reward.

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If you were to replace the Algerian-alps-dwelling Trappist monks in Of Gods and Men with cowboys, and the Islamic fundamentalists (holding them under siege) with Indians, you’d have the setup for a classic Hollywood western. Applying the shorthand of familiar genre conventions to a sobering, true-event story – the events leading up to the 1995 kidnapping and assassination of seven of the aforementioned monks – can be a reductive and even trivialising process. But director Xavier Beauvois’ use of classical western archetypes and genre tropes honors his subjects’ resolve, and the no-frills filmmaking lets his ensemble cast’s tremulous, expressive faces register their should-I-stay-or-should-I-go predicament with considerable force. Only several members really manage to emerge as fully-fleshed characters, but the sense of group dynamics is what counts here, and Beauvois sketches it beautifully.

Of Gods and Men is certainly slow-going in its depiction of an ascetic lifestyle, yet it derives its considerable empathy from this adherence to the Monks’ principles; a brisker pace would be the equivalent of sacrilege. When the film goes for baroque emotion in the final stages – impassioned hymns drowning out a helicopter roar, a teary dinner as the group listen to ‘Swan Lake’ on a stereo – it feels completely earned, like a finally-answered prayer. Beauvois maintains a rigorous attention to the specifics of religious doctrine, but it’s a broader message of love and perseverance that emerges, rather than strictly one of religious faith. It’s this aspect that makes the film as movingly humane as it is ‘important’ – think of it as a particularly tasty brussel sprout dish.