-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films watched this week --
Too Old to Die Young (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn, 2019)
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Premiere: June 14, 2019 (Amazon Video); episodes 4 & 5 at Cannes Film Festival, 2019
Created by: Nicolas Winding Refn, Ed Brubaker
Starring: Miles Teller, Augusto Aguilera, Cristina Rodio, and others
Too Old to Die Young is the latest offering from enfant terrible Nicolas Winding Refn, a ten-part canvas of ultraviolent, Trump-era opulence. Now a popular terrain for auteur directors (Campion, Scorsese, Lynch, to name a few), event television is once again used as a fertile ground for provocative entertainment. Each episode envisaged as a ‘chapter’ – of varying lengths, ranging between 30 to 90 minutes – a typical Refn picture is inflated to a thirteen-hour lumber, striking its audience dumb with its real-time unfolding. It is not difficult to find yourself intrigued, repulsed even, by its cinematic grammar: slow, minute-length shots; the occasional, tinsel-like flush of its electronic soundtrack; or the sculpted, ultra-masculine presences that occupy each scene … to name a few. Such visual humidity lends itself not only to stupefaction, but also to an exquisite, magic realism.
Stone-faced cop Martin Jones (played by Miles Teller) witnesses the murder of his partner whilst on patrol, exposing the long-planned design of a Mexico-American cartel, Jesus, who is seeking to avenge the death of his mother. As later revealed, Jesus and his equally dangerous brother, Miguel, broil over who is to succeed as figurehead of their family dynasty, whilst both captivated by nightly dreams of their dead mother. Jones, meanwhile, finds himself plummeting into a world of sadistic violence and pornography whilst instated at a new LA district, balancing the job and his role as boyfriend to a 17-year old model, Janey Carter, whose billionaire father exposes yet more toxic sexuality. Slowly, each world grazes the other in a style not dissimilar to planetary collisions – bruising, irreparable and protracted.
Its title, moreover, seeks to ambiguate our understandings with its core paradox: a) are these characters beyond the time that ‘die[ing] young’ would have provided, ‘too old’ to be who they were in time past; b), are these figures attempting to salvage a form of protection (or glory) once found in youth, yet now endangered by their own age and knowledge; or finally c), could it refer to people who are at once aged and ageless, individuals who appear to belong to another time yet are made to suit their present.
Inspired by the ‘video-nasties’ so fundamental to Refn’s own creative expression – you only have to look to MUBI to find his #byNWR euro-porn restorations at hand – both he and co-screenwriter/co-creator Ed Brubaker sculpt a vision of America abandoned to its own corruption. Sexual and racial violence twin with Trump-era politics in a kind of double-helix model, an axis about which each episode revolves, again and again. A self-confessed narcissist – “I'm a pornographer. I make films about what arouses me. […] Very rarely to understand why I want to see it and I've learned not to become obsessed with that part of it" – Too Old to Die Young is soaked with such private indulgence, gratuity and style. If the allurement of television violence is what Refn seeks to illustrate, or, rather, the attraction we all feel towards witnessing suffering, then it somewhat succeeds as a self-reflective project. I suspect he might not entirely know exactly what he has delivered.
Voyage to the End of the World, “Ikarie XB 1” (dir. Jindrich Polák, 1963)
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Adapted from a novel by sci-fi philosopher Stanisław Lem – an author best known for his 1961 classic Solaris, later mastered by Tarkovsky – Ikarie XB-1 stages a spaceflight across the universe in search of life on the planets of Alpha Centauri (balls of cloud, mostly), with various misfortunes along the way. Serio-comic in mood, in particular, with its onboard love affairs, stately dinner parties, and all-male downstairs gymnasium, the film juxtaposes gravity with weightlessness, seriousness with levity. Polák buries his characters within its anamorphic format, the majority of scenes shot within extensive, tomb-like corridors, its walls filled with enough flashing buttons to compete with Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet. A joyous precursor to Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Sunshine.
The Clowns, “I Clowns” (dir. Federico Fellini, 1970)
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Inside the cinema of Federico Fellini, clowns are a familiar resident, often performing, often integral to some grand project. But Fellini isn’t interested in their profession, as such, rather their hidden mortality (often held in the face), as exposed by age, melancholy, or in the corner of the frame – white faces, like Gelsomina in La Strada, that emit a kind of emotional purity. I Clowns is a study of such faces, of Fellini’s own fascination with the art of clowns, inside a trifurcated narrative of childhood reflection, interviews, and a final requiem to a star of the stage. It is rare that a director brings new colour to a well-worn topic, but Fellini manages it, successfully, with beauty, tenderness and a reverence to the clowns themselves.
Apollo 11 (dir. Todd Douglas Miller, 2019)
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Composed out of never-before-seen, 70mm archive footage, Apollo 11 triumphantly restages the experience of the 1969 moon landing, almost as if they knew it would one day (50 years later, perhaps) be replayed on cinema screens. In many way, Miller has helped facilitate a document of social history, otherwise indisputable evidence of the past; viewed from 2019, it is such records that hold truthful against the modern storm of fake news. Similar to a current trend in documentary filmmaking, Apollo 11 features no voice-over narration, aside from material available at the time, a method that allows each image to breathe and engage purely from its visual standpoint. It is a highly accomplished piece of work, with no aspect of the work compromised or seemingly neglected. Inspirational and breath-taking in equal measure, Miller delivers an artful work of spectacular reach, a moment in time not to be forgotten, but instead celebrated as a totem of what collective passion can achieve.
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