On the edge of my seat for the Edge of Tomorrow

Within minutes of this film starting I was on its side.  Why?

It is about an alien invasion of Earth, but not of the USA;  this time it’s  Europe. 

A multinational force has been fighting these aliens, led by – an Irish General.

And Tom Cruise was playing a cowardly, malingering, mendacious American Officer,  Major Cage, a PR man who wanted to stay as far away from the action as possible.

When Cage was demoted and sent to the front lines to be insulted and demeaned by Master Sergeant Bill Pullman I cheered up even more.    And I was always aware that Emily Blunt was just waiting to make her entrance.  

OK, so I knew that the premise of this movie was the Video Game conceit that when you die you get another life, and can use whatever you learnt before you died to help you survive this time,  and the next -  that is was essentially Groundhog Day meets Halo, but the pace and wit of the movie, and the way it expected the audience to keep their wits about them, rather than being led gently by the hand through any difficult transitions,  all encouraged me.   And then Emily did arrive - and she was magnificent.   Sgt Rita was the real warrior.   OK, so the aliens were very similar to the robots of The Matrix 2, and the warriors wore exo-skeletons that reminded me of Ripley in her Waldo suit in Aliens, in fact Emily Blunt’s character has a lot of the later Ripley about her, but no harm in that, and this movie played its frequent and witty references and tropes without becoming a parody, unlike, for instance, Cruise’s last SF effort, Oblivion, which just seemed like a mix and match script written by people who might have read SF but had never written any of it; utterly lacking in originality.     I even enjoyed the timing of the release, enacting an invasion of Europe on screen to save it from terror and destruction, so close to the commemoration of the original D. Day.

I liked the way Cruise slowly becomes a hero  not by becoming a killing machine but by being prepared to die, time after time until his goal is reached.   I like the way his character became likeable by not trying to be likeable.   I also liked the way Emily Blunt became impressive without trying to be impressive.   I remember that when I saw her in The Adjustment Bureau and saw her dance I  assumed she had trained before becoming an actor.   But then, when I discovered that she had no previous experience as a dancer, I was even more impressed by her physical authority.   The same goes here.   She completes her choreographed moves with grace and power. 

Despite the inevitable reiterations of the day of invasion, the battle that has to be repeated until  Cage and Rita get it right,  I was kept on the edge of my seat.  And I laughed a lot.  Not at the movie, but with the movie.  At one stage I was even tempted to cheer, and felt a similar frisson in the audience around me.   In fact I was so satisfied that I even forgave its Spielbergian ending.    Spielberg always gives us what we want.  He just makes us wait for it, and then delivers it in ways we did not expect, as when ET and Peter take flight in his bicycle.

So congratulations to  Doug Liman, who directed it using the skills he honed during the Bourne franchise; to  Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote the labyrinthine The Usual Suspects, and Jez Butterworth, who wrote this and Fair Game with McQuarrie;  to  Dion Beeb who filmed this and had previously shot Collateral and Chicago;  and perhaps most of all to James Herbert, who edited it with daring and precision  (just the characteristics displayed, as it happens, by Emily Blunt, and Rita, the warrior).     Herbert edited both the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, and the two of the terrible films he has edited, Sweeney and Gangster Squad, were not bad because of the editing.  No blame there.

I am dismayed by the poor viewing figures for Edge of Tomorrow.  It deserved much better, but maybe sank in the wake of Oblivion and maybe asked a little too much of one of its target audiences.  But you are an intelligent and discerning readership and watchership, so  get the DVD and enjoy yourselves.

Under The Skin

How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.

I love thee because Jonathan Glazer and Walter Campbell have adapted Michael Faber’s 2000 novel in ways that make it less explicit and   more mysterious and a-literal.   You are a true movie, not a filmed novel.

I love thee because  you are beautiful and terrible,  evoking curiosity, horror and pity.  And do so honestly. 

I love thee for your audacity, courage, technical brilliance and unending commitment to the task.

I love thee because you are saying important things.  You are about an alien and concerned with alienization.    Alienization is a compelling, tragic and horribly topical subject.

I love thee because  you persuaded Scarlett Johansson to undertake what is surely her most demanding role, ever, and made it work, wonderfully.

I love thee because here a film-star’s glamour is discounted.   Human beauty is about truth, not artifice.

I love thee because you are your own thing.

I love thee because you approach what Alfred Hitchcock called ‘pure cinema’.  Everything you have to say to us you show to us by throwing coloured shadows on a wall.

I love thee because your score is entirely uncommercial.   It is organically essential to the film.

I love thee because you are a humane movie.    You move me deeply. 

And this is not just an intellectual or emotional effect, it offers the possibility of my moving on, myself, of becoming more human. 

Let me be more explicit. 

This movie is made of images, not words.   Most science fiction movies demand exposition.    Long long ago in a Galaxy far away…..even The Man Who Fell to Earth,  the film I was most immediately reminded of, explains where and why ‘Thomas Newman’ came from.   Under The Skin  tells us nothing about its protagonist’s origins or motivation.   All we know is that  she is alien.    But even the alien’s gender  is only a persona.  We have no idea about ‘its’ real gender, if it has any.   We observe what ‘she’ does, but are given no explanations as to why. ‘She’ appears to be preying on young men, but we do not know their actual eventual fate.

This film is beautiful and terrible,  evoking curiosity, horror and pity.   It never use clichéd cinematic devices to confound or enlighten us, or tricks to shock us.   The horror is implicit.  It never plays for our sympathy, or colludes and flatters us with irony,  and yet I was deeply moved.  

A lot of the film takes place as ‘Laura’ (she does use this name at least once) cruises Glasgow in a van, stopping to talk to young men.    Many of these encounters were ‘for real’.  The van was unmarked and stuffed with hidden mini-cameras that kept recording.    A lot of these men had no idea they were being chatted up by a Hollywood Superstar.    At times there were 9 mini-cameras running simultaneously,  giving the cinematographer Daniel Landin,  the Editor Paul Watts and the Director hundreds of hours of material to work with, and on.     They  used much of this  cinema verity material, but also  sometimes overlaid and montaged it in ways that are beautiful and  truly – and here’s a too often misused word – iconic.   This is technically innovative and brilliant.

This is a movie about alienation.   At one point a TV clip of Tommy Cooper is used  wittily, letting us glimpse how alien we must be to an alien.   The broad Glaswegian accents used by the males do the same for most English speakers.   But this film goes much deeper than that, and this is where its horror and power lie.   Outside the cinema we do not have to be aliens to dehumanize and even demonize human beings.     How can anyone behead another human being unless they have first discounted their humanity?    We might also ask how can anyone target an explosive drone or drop a bomb from 30,000 feet without doing the same thing.     It is a truism that modern warfare is too often conducted like a video-game.  

But alienation can be countered with empathy.  During the film  'Laura'  picks up a man suffering from neurofibromatosis,  the facial disfigurement often called Elephant Man disease.    The actor playing this role is Adam Pearson, a sufferer of this affliction, so no prosthesis was needed.   It may be that to alien eyes he looked much like everybody else, but this encounter is pivotal to the plot.   Empathy may be essential for our humanity, but it also dangerous – especially to those who feel it.

I wonder what film maker’s  pitch was to Ms Johansson.  

We’re making this movie, and we want you to  play an alien in human disguise, cruising Glasgow, picking up unsuspecting members of the public,  whose accents will probably be impenetrable to you, and  improvising your responses to them.  You will take some of your ‘pick-ups’  home and strip in front of them.  You will be naked for a lot of the movie, but your nakedness will not be glamorized or flattering.  In fact you may be the most un-erotic femme fatal of all time.  You will have hardly any other dialogue.   In fact you will say nothing that tells us anything about what you are or why you here.  There will be changes within you, but nothing will be said or happen to illustrate them explicitly.   Oh, and we do not expect to make a lot of money.   In fact we will probably divide audiences and  critics sharply.

But maybe Ms Johansson remembered Jonathan Glazer’s previous film Birth, which pivots on a scene where Nicole Kidman’s character is in the audience at a concert.   The  camera rests on her face for three or four minutes,  during which time there is  neither action nor words, but as we watch we see her heart and mind change.    There is a similar subtle transformation in this movie and Scarlett, like Nicole, rises to the challenge.   Her performance is understated, subtle and effective as never before, not even in Lost in Translation.    And yet for much of the film we see nothing behind her eyes.   When there is a change within her it is minutely signaled, yet has the impact of a Diva’s aria.

In this film a Hollywood actress’s glamour is discounted.   She is literally stripped bare and  shown exactly as she is.   She is transformed by being revealed as a woman, not a star.   Not just as a woman, but as the woman she is.   What courage this must have taken, fully aware  that these images would no doubt be later misused and abused by others in ways over which she has no control.   At a time when naked or sexually explicit selfies are embarrassing many celebrities there is a strong message here.

This film reminds me of many other great movies, including of course The Man Who Fell to Earth, but also Repulsion,   2001 and The Tree of Life,  and Vertigo, yet it is utterly unique.    

That said,  in many ways this is a contemporary Hitchcock movie.  The psychological use of colour matches Hitch’s, and it comes close to what he called ‘pure cinema’,  with images and actions telling the story, rather than dialogue.   Hitch first worked in silent movies first, and  Glazer has worked in advertising, creating the arresting images of the white horses melding with the surf for Guinness and irrupting paint fountains for Sony Bravia.   I am sure this film would work just as well with no dialogue, just its images and soundtrack.    The opening credits echo Saul Bass’s for Vertigo, and there are other links to that movie, in which  Kim Novak played two women, one of whom appeared to be dead, the other being a fake.   Scarlett also plays two women here, one of whom we presume to be dead, the other we know to be a fake.    Two women, one body.  Both films are about duplicity.    Under the Skin even used (temporary) duplicity in its making, as it invited men to talk to a woman they never suspected was an actress, never mind her being Scarlett Johansson.   I don’t know if or what they were paid, but what a story they have to tell now!   

The soundtrack for Under the Skin  also reminded me of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo,  as it accompanied the psychological state of the characters.    This similarity is  not in its orchestration, but in the ways Mica Levi’s score uses acoustic,  electronic and electronically distorted natural sounds  that act directly on our nervous system and echo the intuitive, almost subconscious, ways in which the images also invade us.   

Making Under the Skin relied on Scarlett Johansson’s ability to improvise in real conversations.   Hitch did not allow improvisation, he already had the script and movie completed in his head before he began to shoot it, but he did give the actors he trusted room to play their characters according to their instincts.  He told Kim Novak  I will tell you what to wear, where to stand and what to say, but how you do these things is up to you.  That is why I contracted you.

Under The Skin is Hitchcockian in many ways, but Hitchcock never approached the seriousness or courage of this movie, and never showed such compassion.  Do not be misled by the word compassion.  It does not mean sentimentality.  This is a very hard movie to watch.    I have often said that movies can help humanize us by allowing us to step into another person’s shoes for a mile or an hour.  Sometimes those shoes hurt.  

As Matt  Zoller Seitz has written of this film,  on the site that still bears Roger Ebert’s name and seeks to continue his critical tradition, saying

"Here is an experience that's nothing like yours, and here are some images and sounds and situations that capture the essence of what the experience felt like; watch the movie for a couple of hours, and when it's over, go home and think about what you saw and what it did to you."  

That is what I  have done, and been doing, and I think I will continue to do for some time.    Sometimes a movie inhabits us, gets truly under our skin.   In this case I think that is a good thing.   

A rewarding Walk Among the Tombstones.

The Hebrew Bible allows the offended to take ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’ but that is intended to be the limit of just recompense.  We may only take an eye for an eye, only a tooth for a tooth.   

One definition of the word ‘taken’  in the Oxford Reference Dictionary is  ‘to have sexual intercourse with’.   When I saw Liam Neeson’s 2009 film  Taken I felt that I had been taken, in the most unwelcome way.  I could use a shorter, blunter,  word.   I also felt taken advantage of, taken in, taken down, and if it came to taking or leaving it I was sure what my choice would be.   Taken sickened me not because of its depiction of violence, but for its approval of it.    I have written at length  about my severe discomfort at the way modern cinema promotes vengeance as a morally justified activity, and gives it’s protagonists unlimited license to maim and kill anyone who gets in the way of exacting such vengeance.  (See Taken for a ride, below).   Taken, produced and co-written by Luc Besson, directed by Pierre Morel, starring Neeson as Brian Mills, the ex-CIA agent trying to rescue his teenage daughter from Middle Eastern kidnappers, epitomised this genre, and was so well made – thanks to Morel – that it became very popular.  I was not pleased with Neeson for lending his presence and credibility to it, or saying such lines as this internet favourite quote

 I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you're looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it.  I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you.

I wonder how many misguided teenage boys have learnt those line and growled  them into their bedroom mirrors, thinking they were the quintessence of manliness?    And these words came out of  the mouth of the man who once played Schindler!    One NY Times critic asked The conundrum posed by “Taken” is as old as cinema itself. Do stars degrade themselves when they take a role in trash, or does their very presence?   This appeared to be a rhetorical question.     I understand that Taken 2 was in some ways less meretricious.  It was also, of course, less popular. 

And so I rejoice at the release of Neeson’s latest film, A Walk among the Tombstones.

It is adapted from one of  Laurence Bloch’s 'Matthew Scudder' novels.  There have been over a dozen books featuring this New York Private Eye (unlicensed),  an alcoholic ex-cop.    The tone of the books could be judged by the titles.  The first two, back in the 1970’s, were  The Sins of the Fathers and In the Midst of Death.  The titles that followed contained the words or phrases Murder, Stab, Die, Cutting Edge, Eight Million Ways To Die, Boneyard, Slaughter House, Dead Men,  Everybody Dies,  and Hope to Die.   But these dark books are also credited with depth and nuance.  They are not Micky Spillane celebrations of violence and misogyny.    Matt Scudder  has the kind of integrity once found in Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, both of whom are name-checked (somewhat clumsily) in A Walk Among the Tombstones.

In 1986 Oliver Stone co-scripted and produced Eight Million Ways To Die,  directed by Hal Ashby,  with Jeff Bridges playing Matt  Stutter.  I did not see it, but apparently it did not work well. In the New York Times Walter Goodman asked  How did ''Eight Million Ways to Die'' commit suicide?

But A Walk Among The Tombstones works much better.   It had Frank Scott at the helm, and he also adapted the novel for the screen.   Scott has an impressive record,  having written  or adapted Little Man Tate, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, The Interpreter,  The Wolverine and Minority Report.   This is first full length movie, although  he was 2^nd unit director (uncredited) for the Minority Report .   But combining script-writer and director works well here, giving us an evenness of tone  and a cohesion of plot. 

The villains, played by David Harbour and Adam David Thompson, are clearly insane, but theirs is a cold implacable madness rather than scenery-chewing eyeball-rolling and they are all the more frightening for that.  The plot revolves around  their sadistic murders of women,  but these killings are mainly off screen, showing us instead the terrified vulnerability of the victims  and are in no way exploitive.   

The gradual disclosures of plot and character are well paced, and in the inevitable and shockingly violent finale Scott bravely cuts into the action with sequences reiterating the AA’s 12 steps, the road to Scutter’s recovery and his spiritual discipline.    This has troubled some reviewers, but in the Bloch novels the AA plays an important and recurring role, and Scott has been true to his source.   The climax is for Scutter as much spiritual – challenging his values -  as physical.   Neeson is so well cast here.    His Scutter is tough but vulnerable,   humane but world-weary.  When a killer has him at gun-point and asks Why aren’t you afraid?  he answers  I don’t know.  Maybe it doesn’t matter much to me whether I live or die,  and I for one believed him.

Scott has cut the gum-shoe’s girlfriend, who in the novel is a prostitute, from the script,  but kept Scutter’s  teenage side-kick TJ, a smart homeless black kid,  played by Brian “Astro” Bradley, who wants to be a PI himself.   When TJ first appeared I wondered what this familiar and sentimental trope was doing in so tough a movie, but his inclusion is justified when he plays a crucial part in the plot.   The gritty photography by Mihai Malaimare Jn.  and music by Carlos Rafael Rivera  (both relatively newcomers to Hollywood) complement the style beautifully, showing once again that noir does not have to be shot in black and white and scored with jazz.     Dan Stevens, Eric Nelsen and Olafur Darri Olafsson provide solid acting support, helped by believable lines of dialogue.     It has been said that Emily Blunt brings out the best in good actors (see Looper, The Adjustment Bureau and Edge of Tomorrow),   and maybe Liam Neeson has the same gift.

This is not a perfect movie, it spends a little too much time on inessentials, sometimes lapses towards sentimentality, and may tell us more than we need to know about its villains,   but at its heart is Matt Scutter.    He is a thinking man with a soul, and this is a thinking movie with a soul.     I think it gave Neeson his best script for 20 years, since the days of Schindler's List, Rob Roy and Michael Collins.  I would very much like to see more films with him embodying the role.    Mr. Neelson; all is (almost) forgiven.