-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --
The Bleeding Edge (dir. Kirby Dick, 2018)
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Terrifying revelations about the US medical device industry – its abuse of regulation, corporate cover-up ploys and profit-driven strategy – encourage change in this attentive, expository documentary, if marred by its horror-show tactics. Should you trust your doctor? Or, looking more broadly, can you trust your health system? The Bleeding Edge wishes to confer doubt on such basic assurances, looking to five products on the US health market and their subsequent damage to the lives of patients – irrevocable, in some frightening instances. Dick looks to a somewhat neglected, uncinematic topic, and provides it with due spotlight and emphasis. Sporadically throughout, however, I felt myself swamped by the sheer volume of content presented, facts and figures whose relevance was almost dimmed by the need to excavate and relate information. Oddly, the film concludes with a blurred, quasi-hospital-bed staging of a patient being sedated; only we are the patient, the camera lens filled by an oxygen mask and the cooing words of a nurse: “Relax.” Its ending metaphor felt excessive, but the documentary is crucial viewing.
The Cube (dir. Vincenzo Natali, 1997)
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Five strangers awake in a cube-shaped room, with no memory of how they got there or where to now go. It is a deceptively simple premise, somewhere between arthouse and mainstream. Early in the film, a phrase rings out: ‘I mean, nobody wants to see the big picture. Life’s too complicated.’ It is picked up by another voice, later: ‘You can’t see the big picture from in here, so don’t try. Keep your head down, keep it simple. Just look at what’s in front of you.’ It is whilst inside the structure that the ‘bigger picture’ of the cube is implicitly realised – it is simply a game, like life itself, that distils the essence of worldly life into a sequence of rooms (if you can imagine the world as box, you have it). It is whilst the group occupy the cube(s) – an industrialised, byzantine nexus of rooms, many of which hide deadly traps – that they learn to work together, a process that inevitably finds them learning more about each other. Sins are revealed, motives exposed. Slowly we learn of their lives outside, invariably characterised by plainness (‘I'm just a guy. I work in an office building, doing office building stuff’), ignorance (‘human stupidity’), negligence and quiet, joyless suffering. The Cubewould later spawn various sequels and prequels, embellishing the survivalist concept, whilst laying a blueprint for future horror franchises (think of Saw).Natali’s picture, in spite of such intelligence, straddles levity and seriousness to poor effect, the film blemished by horrendous acting, contrived dialogue, and peculiar moments of humour. Original, but flawed.
Hard Eight (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1996)
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Originally titled Sydney– short, finite and eponymous – the later title, Hard Eight, emerged as something far more uncertain of itself, its narrative as subject to chance as the dice roll in the game of craps where both dice aim to land on the number four. Written and directed by Sundance-alumni Paul Thomas Anderson, it is a picture that marks the bold first steps of one of Hollywood’s finest, and most alluring, working directors. Sydney, an elderly gambler in his 60s, finds a young man slumped outside a restaurant, John, who (for reasons not immediately apparent) he then takes under his wing and guides amongst the stools and conspiracies of the Las Vegas casino industry. Two years later, John begins a relationship with a cocktail waitress, Clementine – played by Gwyneth Paltrow, enthralling in every scene – whose private troubles play into his own troubles, further endangering their livelihood and future together. Uniquely, any sense of plot is not immediately available. Anderson begins with neat character studies – the wizened gambled, the troubled youth, the unfulfilled girl – inviting their paths to intersect, as if soaking into one another, before drawing back the curtain on the many intricacies of what is truly going on. Watching Anderson’s picture unfold reminded me of first listening to a composition of jazz: what we at first mistake to be loose, improvisational, is in fact the work of a highly-structured design. Effortless and compelling filmmaking.
Madeline’s Madeline (dir. Josephine Decker, 2018)
✭✭✭✭✩
“What you are experiencing is just a metaphor,” an unknown speaker announces at the beginning of the film – an allusion, perhaps, to Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive: ‘It’s all a tape. It is an illusion’ – the register between life and the dramatic complicated, uncertain. Two troubled lives cross, part and collide in the cinematic dance of mother and daughter in Madeline’s Madeline– dependent on whether you stress the ‘e’ or ‘i’, its phonetics prompt a duality of the same name. The experience of watching Josephine Decker’s latest feature is of being lost in a tormented consciousness, otherwise a wonderland maze of mental-health disorientation. Even if we are presented with a lot, we glimpse very little. One mind swallows the other, only to then find itself swallowed up. Grief is exchanged, forced between the hands of mother and daughter, before left to stagnate in other scenes. Decker’s soundscape crowds out its images: the sonic equivalent of a hand-held camera struggling to follow movement. It is not unsurprising that its editorial process resisted the completed form, its seduction, erotica and desperation requiring editor after editor, including the advice of Spike Jonze and Mike Mills. Rhapsodic, lyrical, with moments of theatrical craft, Madeline’s Madeline is one of the year’s best. Upsetting, affecting.
Booksmart (dir. Olivia Wilde, 2019)
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Eighth Grade, only adultified, slick, and favouring audience expectation over that of the subject matter itself. Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, (executively produced by maestro’s Will Ferrell and Adam McKay,) abounds with pre-College antics, reckless inanity and feminist strength, whilst grappling with the all-too-familiar movement between high school and university. Two best friends, Molly and Amy, compensate for their bookworm mentality – ‘we missed out. We didn't go to parties because we wanted to focus on school and get into good colleges’ – by joining, carpe diem, a party the night of graduation. Their plan stumbles from the onset, i.e. they find themselves unable to locate the address, and stumbles further as the night deepens. Quick humour is complimented by solid performances all-round, whilst its use of musical cue – not dissimilar to that of Eighth Grade – sees the smallest of moments given magnitude, style and ultimate coolness. Together with the aforementioned feature, and that of Ladybird, the ‘female coming-of-age’ genre is experiencing a unique resurgence, entirely unpretentious and contemporary. Seek out several viewings; if anything, the end-credit sequence of water-ballooned actors is worth paying for.
Out of Sight (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 1998)
✭✭✭✭✩
Intelligence and charismatic sensuality steam from Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, a Pulp Fiction-esque narrative of modern romance. George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez star as flushed lovers at opposite sides of the law – one a career bank robber, the other a U.S. Marshall – who, after sharing a car trunk during a getaway escape, find themselves unable to forget their memory of the other. Ingenuous editing traffics between various scenes and asynchronous timelines, basking in the freeze-frame technique in a stylish offhand: in one pause, so do we find ourselves smiling and/or revelling in the pleasure of the onscreen moment. Soderbergh, as with Sex, Lies and Videotapes, plays with the intersection of men and women to great effect, only here to a mainstream audience, delivering a kind of playground battle of the sexes. Auteur cinema.
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