Drum Media reviews, October p2: THE THREE MUSKETEERS, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, DRIVE

The creative team behind this latest take on The Three Musketeers doesn’t merely take liberties with Alexander Dumas’ text, so much as dig up his rotting corpse and play urine-swordfights over it. It’s the kind of blockbuster spectacle in which everyone involved has together decided ‘Screw It!’; in regards to trivial things like faithfulness to source material, historical accuracy, narrative cohesion… even to the idea of bringing gravity to the sight of celebrities in period dress. All that’s missing is a Justin Bieber song over the end credits. And frankly, it’s a lot of fun for exactly those reasons.

Shown in surprisingly tolerable 3D, the film’s inconsequential plot provides a loose framework for a barrage of lame quips and lots of swashbuckling action scenes, edited frequently in hilarious Matrix-style slo-mo by director Paul ‘Adamantly Not Thomas’ Anderson. The cast play all this silliness admirably straight-faced; Inglorious Basterds’ Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz takes the dubious honour of top acting prizes here, while Orlando Bloom proves infinitely more enjoyable as a Tim Curry-esque slimeball than the bland heartthrob of thePirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings films.

Meanwhile, Anderson generously affords a never-more-lush Milla Jovovich as Milady the kind of kickarsery that she mastered from their Resident Evil movies (try not giggling during the scene where she acrobatically defeats a wire-trapped room). It’s all unmistakably Hollywood hackwork, but it also has a crucial element lacking in so many franchise kickstarts/cash grabs – notably that lumbering latest installment of the Pirates series – and that’s joy. And really, who doesn’t prefer anarchic liberty to slavish fidelity?

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If you’ve ever taken pleasure in imagining your windshield as a cinema-scope frame whilst driving at night (preferably to synth-pop), Drive is the film for you. A largely dialogue-shorn adaptation of James Sallis’ well-regarded novel of the same title, its center is a nameless Hollywood-stunt-driver (Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals of the LA underworld, and the violent fallout of a job performed seflessly for his neighbour-crush (Carey Mulligan). It’s a film that self-consciously aims for a brand of 80’s retro-chic cool, and improbably succeeds; achieving a kind of purity that reminds you why its clichés and archetypes of choice have endured.

Its director is Danish maverick Nicolas Winding Refn, a talented stylist frequently let down by projects bereft of actual ideas (cf. Bronson and Valhalla Rising). With a potently pared-down template to work from, Drive emerges a textbook example of style-as-substance; the ethereally rendered Los Angeles acting as a romantic dreamscape counterpoint to the cool-headed professionalism and practicality (and eventually brutality) of its protagonist. Refn favors moody languor over the quick-cutting and incoherent spatiality so detrimental to many a modern suspense film, and in Gosling, he has a soulful lead presence whose all-in-the-eyes sense of internal conflict energises the many brooding stretches.

Simultaneously reminiscent of a billion films (from Le Samourai to Punch-Drunk Love to every LA neo-noir of the 70’s and 80’s) yet unmistakably its own unique concoction, Drive is the closest genre filmmaking gets to inducing a narcotic state, and in the process, ensures ‘postmodern’ doesn’t have to be a dirty word.

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Woody Allen’s recent Euro-travelogue instincts come out in full force for Midnight in Paris, in which Owen Wilson joins the long line of actors saddled with the task of Allen-mimicry playing Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter and aspiring novelist holidaying in Paris, with his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams). Being a woman in a Woody Allen film, Inez is a gorgeous but unpleasant shrew, written with no redeeming qualities aside from the ability to deliver the occasional Allen-zinger, so Gil strolls the Parisian streets at night while she hangs out with her friends.

The film picks up considerable steam when the clock strikes midnight during Gil’s stroll, and he’s magically transported back to the Paris of the 1920’s, where the bespectacled Wilson is greeted to the likes of the Fitzgeralds, Picasso, Dali, Bunuel, and many others. All are impersonated to perfection, with Corey Stoll’s mercurial take on Hemingway being a particular showstopper. Gil – and by extension, Allen – questions both his talent as a novelist and his nostalgia for a bygone era he was never a part of, and it’s through these historical digressions that the film becomes a very on-the-nose rumination on what it means to look back.

Indeed, the ultimate theme is delivered in a monologue that counts as a spoiler of the ending, which really just shows how filmsy the whole thing is as a narrative. But then, context is everything: I suspect the disproportionate praise for Midnight in Paris has to do with the poignancy of seeing Allen, among the most antiquates of filmmakers, finally delivering a critique of his own nostalgic tendencies (a critique undermined by the sense that the story could be taking place any time in the last 50 years, excoriation of Tea Party republicans nonwithstanding). See it for the featherweight charms, and look elsewhere for true insights.

Drum Media reviews, October p1: RED STATE, TABLOID, TAKE SHELTER

The ads for Red State have been upfront about the fact that writer/director Kevin Smith is an unlikely candidate for a gritty, ultraviolent genre film; the hangover of the 90’s indie film boom is noted for his indifference to cinema as a visual medium (self-confessed; I’m not being mean) and reliance on ‘witty’, pop-culture-reference-heavy dialogue that always calls attention to its ‘wittiness’ (OK, I’m being mean there). The film’s opening portion, which follows a group of sex-obsessed teens, displays Smith at his most grating and tin-eared as writer of speech – there’s the constant sense that we’re watching placeholders for his lovingly written vulgar banter, rather than flesh-and-blood characters whose fates we’re supposed to care about.

But then, maybe we’re not. There’s a constant sense of remove throughout Red State – especially its larky, willfully anticlimactic ending – and it’s what makes the film Smith’s most interesting work to date, even if it’s altogether unsatisfying. You can’t fault him for not trying to engage with hotbed political and religious topics, but just as his 1999 Dogma traded sincere religious critique with preaching to the converted, so too does Red State collapse under the weight of its pandering, and a lack of trust in his audience. Smith pretentiously divides the cast into three distinct sectors: ‘sex’, ‘religion’ and ‘politics’; it’s telling of his myopia that in a film which strives for contemporary resonance, ‘politics’ is represented by a very bald invocation of the infamous Waco siege of 1993, as an ATF Agent (John Goodman, in top form) is called upon to perform a full-scale raid on the Church where the film’s action takes place in. In this respect, it’s merely lazy and apathetic – or rather, another Kevin Smith joint after all.

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Has Errol Morris’ moment passed? It’s a thought that came to mind while watching Tabloid, his thoroughly entertaining and thoroughly hollow screen treatment of the notorious “Mormon sex in chains case” of 1977. A textbook tabloid story, it involved the exploits of Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who kidnapped a Mormon missionary, chained him to a bed in a British cottage, and eventually raped him. The salacious and bizarre appeal of the case remains undiminished, but that seems to be the only reason for Morris to dust it off for a new generation; for this reason the film would seem an empty exercise from any other filmmaker, let alone one whose The Thin Blue Line (1988) led to the re-opening of a Texas murder case and subsequently the reversal a man’s death sentence.

Morris’ goal for the film is to one-up the British rags who milked the story dry in its day. Built around a long interview with the fascinating McKinney, he accentuates the wacky contours of the story to a giddy hilt – rapid-fire montages of headlines and photographs are present throughout – all while letting his subject bare her soul in a way that the tabloids of the day couldn’t allow for. Even then, the bid for pathos in the film’s final stretch feels too little and too late; an obligation in contrast with the revelry displayed beforehand. More worryingly, Tabloid casts into relief a latent tendency for tabloid sensationalism that has been in Morris’ filmmaking starting from his 1978 debut Gates of Heaven, which examined a small clan of kooky owners of deceased pets, to his unilluminating 2006 Abu Ghraib doco Standard Operating Procedure. Had Rupert Murdoch’s name appeared in Tabloid’s ‘thank you’ section of the credits, I wouldn’t have batted an eye.

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Michael Shannon… goddamn. The actor has been a consummate scene-stealer in a number of recent films, including manic turns as Kim Fowley in The Runaways and Dicaprio and Winslet’s unhinged neighbor in Revolutionary Road, the latter of which he earned him an Oscar nomination. Take Shelter marks Shannon’s second collaboration with writer/director Jeff Nichols after 2007’s underseen Shotgun Stories, and is an even more potent vehicle for the actor’s unique mixture of cagey stillness and live-wire energy.

Here he plays a family man plagued with nightmares and hallucinations of an oncoming apocalypse in his Texan hometown – tornados, storms, swarms of birds, and an unearthly petrol-colored rain that turns man and animal alike into creatures of violence. Shannon’s performance forms a totemic depiction of American anxiety and masculinity in crisis, and as his conflicted wife, Jessica Chastain makes her predicament as deeply felt as her counterpart. Together, they make the film a terrifying and sad tale of mental illness’s toll on a family.

Take Shelter is ostensibly a psychological thriller, but it’s an unmistakably non-sensationalist one, whose genre conventions never comes at the expense of character nuance. Likewise, whereas many young American filmmakers seem hell-bent on announcing a trademark style in the form of a cavalcade of stylistic tics, Nichols’ approach to his material is skillfully plainspoken, creating CGI sequences that rarely call attention to their virtuosity. A close-up of a gas pump display’s gallons/dollars digits escalating at different speeds in separate windows encapsulates the film’s unshowy, grounded representation of a mind out of sync with the world around him – though it could just as well be the other way around.