Mini Reviews: Deadpool, The Witch, Everybody Wants Some!!

Deadpool

The X-Men universe has always struck me as being the most sterile of the Superhero universes; a genre itself synonymous with invariable tedium. Even Days of Future Past – which was seemingly designed to shake up its foundations’ rigid monotony by uniting the original and current cast in some time vortex thingy – forgot its charming conceit in favour of dreary bombast by the final act. Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool, first introduced in the dreadful X-Men Origins: Wolverine, explodes through the banality in style. Ultra-violent, entirely self-aware, and featuring some of the most wildly inventive swearing you’ll hear outside of Joe Pesci’s slam poetry, Deadpool is certainly a refreshing subversion of its lycra-obsessed compadres; at least on the face it. While it’s undoubtedly funny, its wit isn’t quite clever or diverse enough to withstand its gag-a-second bombardment, and the knowing winks to the audience not infrequently transform into jarring elbows to the gut. Together these contrivances leave the impression of the try-hard, reaching for the R-rated glee of a Kickass but falling short at something lively but only fine. That its central narrative is withheld by the same tired origin story of its peers, corroborated by the appalling one-dimensionality of the villain, implies that the studio’s vision of Deadpool isn’t as liberal as Reynolds’s. Fun but forgettable.

The Witch

Horror’s going through something of a purple patch recently; The Babadook and It Follows are not only impeccably crafted, authentically chilling terrors, but brilliantly marry oldschool premises with contemporary anxieties. While The Babadook utilises the haunted house format to shrewdly underscore the psychological claustrophobia of dealing with a problem child while wallowing in grief, It Follows adopts the conservative teen slasher, you’ll-die-if-you-have-sex setup, and elevates it into a brilliant, frightening parable about STD paranoia. The Witch is arguably the most apt example of this consolidation; it opens with the subheading ‘A New England Folktale,’ immediately invoking the idea of a very specific fantasy of time and place. This is not a mystery story about the is-she/isn’t-she culpability of Thomasin – the daughter – as the titular witch terrorising her puritanical family; the witch in question is introduced early on. Rather, it’s an exploration of suspicion, faith and madness more lucid than its antiquated dialogue – ripped directly from pilgrim documents of the time – and precise specificity necessarily suggests. Cutaway shots of Caleb glancing at his adolescent sister’s breasts, the look of agony on the father’s face as he confesses his lies to his wife: this is a family sinking in the fear and guilt of sin. The witch as a character is a plot device to drive their dysfunction to boiling point. Fronting callous imagery, an acerbic original score, and an omnipresent throbbing of dread, The Witch is both metaphor and literal, a folktale that crawls malevolently under your skin to remind you that we're still teetering precipitously at our own neurotic frontier. 

Everybody Wants Some!!

What Richard Linklater does better than almost anyone else working in film today, is portraying the intricate dynamics of human relationships. Whether these are romantic – as in the superlative-defying Before trilogy – or platonic, he acutely captures the earnestly moded connections, the tiniest heartfelt details and complexities which transcend characters in stories into reality. Everybody Wants Some!! – a spiritual brother to his 1993 breakthrough Dazed and Confused – is a fantastic example of the latter. Examining Jake, our proverbial entry point, as he experiences his first few days of college life before classes start, Linklater nails the humour and implicit intimacy of male friendships. That women are reduced, with the exception of Jake’s romantic interest, to sexual opportunities, isn’t misogynistic but a reflection of the puerilely horny mentality of Linklater’s baseball team. The focus is unilaterally on the delights of male bonding, and it succeeds because of it. Linklater initially raises these lads as tiresome uni-film stereotypes; the charismatic intellectual, the stoner, the psycho – before peeling back the layers as they interact with one another. It’s a fair point about our own first meetings, where we attribute stereotypes because it’s easier to comprehend. These guys are sympathetic, complex individuals, with their own respective vocabularies and philosophies. Like Boyhood and Dazed and Confused, any meaning we derive from this is incidental to our personal participations; there’s no overt theme, only that which we infer ourselves. Above all else it’s incredibly funny, but in a way rooted in the believable joshing and mocking of its characters rather than artificial jokery. Like a great uni night-out, Everybody Wants Some!! is evanescent and inconsequential, but immensely enjoyable and discreetly life-affirming.

Radiohead 'A Moon Shaped Pool' - Review/First Impressions

It’s difficult to be impartial when your favourite band of the last seven years releases something new and essential. I won’t feign objectivity; this will be an unapologetically partisan first impressions, not a proper criticism. Considering The King of Limbs represents, in retrospect, an oblique experiment rather than a substantial release, A Moon Shaped Pool is positively seminal in its relationship with not only Radiohead fans, but with the general music zeitgeist; especially since, as Alexis Petridis observes in his Guardian review[i], the cosmos of truly colossal albums now seems exclusive to Hip Hop and R&B. It’s not ludicrous to suggest that Radiohead are perhaps the only Rock band who could impact the pop culture Richter Scale as intensively as Beyonce, Kendrick or Kanye. Nine years is a long time to remain as insular as they have. And now they’re back.

The opener ‘Burn the Witch,’ recently released as the lead single accompanied by a bizarre stop-motion reworking of The Wicker Man, delicately washes over you as quintessential Radiohead; the awesome concord between the unnerving and the beautiful. Its strings are operatic, zealous, menacingly persistent, but disquietingly handsome, built like the cold magnetism of a nameless model on a thirty foot billboard. ‘Burn the Witch’s’ aesthetic minimalism betrays its obvious complexity, an illusion symptomatic of the record. Whether it’s the chameleonic stratums of ‘Daydreaming,’ – the most Kid A-lite track – propelled by cryptic bleeps, acquiescent groans and an inveterate piano backbone, or the veritable tempest of conflicting, symphonic sound that is the centrepiece ‘Ful Stop,’ A Moon flourishes in its delicately layered sonispheres.

Yorke’s cadence – often mockingly reduced to inscrutable dourness – operates on its own ethereal plane. Cascading from wailing banshee to phantasmagorical whisper, he visually champions the beatific discord. Additionally A Moon is arguably Radiohead’s most vocal-centric, and most syntactically diverse, record to date. Beyond the now accepted distorted sighs which heave in the background, Yorke’s vocal range remains Radiohead’s most vital instrument, transcending elongated moans into glorious climax, or unintelligible vowels into convincing affect with the wisp of a key change. He’s not alone. The choir boy sample in ‘Decks Dark’ elevates glum introspection into such serenity which Yorke cannot reach; indeed, across the record there are frequent relapses into the angelic. The emotional uplift is not ignored.

Lyrically, they even sound… hopeful? Affirming? Yes, and no. The crooning sentiment of ‘Desert Island Disk’ is that “Different types of love/are possible,” while the assertive refrain of ‘The Numbers’ emphasises that “The future is in ourselves/it is nowhere else,” and that it’s our prerogative to “take back what is ours” and maintain our innate individualism. Elusive echoes proffering to “avoid all eye contact/do not react” and that “dreamers/they never learn” hypothesised in ‘Burn the Witch’ and ‘Daydreamers’ respectively register as the inverse, a nihilistic resignation to the tedium of social norms. The clanging command “Don’t get heavy, keep it light,” from ‘Present Tense’ sounds resoundingly ironic from a band notorious for their solemn and overtly political discography. Has it all been a laboured, twenty year joke? Maybe. When he comments “Hey, it’s me,” it’s practically impossible to imagine Yorke without a cathartic, knowing grin. If this weaving of cynicism and validation is incongruous and indefinable, then it’s because of course it is; it’s fucking Radiohead. If their career polemic says anything, it’s that paradox is never disingenuous; it’s our most natural state, a state of anxiety and ambiguity. A Moon is sagging with meaning, and significance, and feeling, but it’s entirely interpretable. Ambiguity breeds personal investment.

Optimism and pessimism, new and old: dichotomies overcast the record. ‘Burn the Witch’ was written in 1999, while ‘True Love Waits,’ nebulously extracted from their live recordings collection I Might Be Wrong (2001) and conceived in 1995 during The Bends, has discarded the acoustic guitars for haunting pianos overdubbed on one another. It’s never quite exactingly melodic, and it never goes where you expect and especially want it to; much like the relationship it describes. Its very musicality rebounds Yorke’s despondency, stirring one of the most shattering, heartrending, brilliant love songs of the last thirty years into something intangibly more moving. 21 years and it hasn’t aged a day. The new/old paradigm prevails equally in their sound. The soaring drifts of ‘Glass Eyes’ marries the languid frenzy established in The King of Limbs with Jonny Greenwood’s – now a film composer with serious pedigree – precise control over the string movements. ‘Present Tense’ is the most pertinent collaboration between the ontology of their musical sensibilities; the frothy percussion of OK Computer, the sneeringly casual guitarwork of In Rainbows, the mellifluous orchestral arrangement of Hail to the Thief, the distant vocal ticks of Kid A. A Moon is a time capsule, elegiacally transient yet immutably enduring.

It’ll take weeks, months, years before I, and everyone else, can properly digest A Moon Shaped Pool, but it’s assuredly Radiohead at their peak, and assuredly a tumultuous portfolio of their accomplishments. A lurid amalgamation of new and old, an ostensible Best Of compilation – sonically as well as chronological – that cogently clicks as a collective. It is, bluntly, magnificent. I’ve waited over a third of my life for a Great Radiohead album. It’s here, and it's worth it.

***PLZ also listen to ANOHNI – Hopelessness. It’s unfortunate that the two best albums of the year so far released within two days of each other.***

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[i] Something this dense should not be consumed and reviewed so prematurely though, otherwise resulting in critical indigestion.

Mini Reviews: Hail Caesar, High Rise, Zootropolis

Hail Caesar

The 4^th entry in George Clooney’s ‘Idiot Trilogy,’ and the Coens’ most recent, Hail Caesar is more sketch show than film, a scattershot wave of vignettes circling the central denouement of Josh Brolin’s Eddie Mannix and his career crisis. There’s opaque allusions to conflicting ideas of faith, politics and celebrity through curious if malnourished subplots involving the potential scandal of Scarlett Johansson’s single motherhood or the ethicality of Hollywood’s audience manipulation, but Hail Caesar isn’t so much about the detail as the effect. Esoteric glimpses into these fictional, inspired 50s-based movies are charmingly inconsequential, the easy standout proffered in Channing Tatum’s sailor-kitted musical number. It’s raucously fun, but often feels underwritten and overstuffed, with a conclusion that is less satisfyingly cohesive than it believes itself to be. Yet its ending paradoxically remains one of the Coens’ most provocative; America might be stoutly Christian, and the Coens may come from Jewish orthodoxy, but the real religion at the heart of their Art is a devout reverence for cinematic joy; and just like every organised church, Hollywood is a complicated, flawed and benevolent monolith. Minor Coen but still worthwhile.

High Rise

Despite more-than-respectable adaptations from Spielberg and Cronenberg, JG Ballard is still considered luridly unfilmable. So trust Ben Wheatley – one of Britain’s most indefatigably idiosyncratic directors – to tackle arguably Ballard’s most narratively abstract work. Ballard’s literary style is characterised by a minutely observed, pseudo-scientific precision, with scatological structure as case study rather than plot. High Rise is ostensibly a pop-psychology experiment, deeply unnerving in both its interminable prescience and its gaudy pleasures. Wheatley nails it, purporting a world with an – only slightly – exaggerated social hierarchy in a tower block embodying by some design the human Super Ego, given way to the uninhibited Id. The cast, particularly Luke Evans’s “sanest man in the building” Trotsky-with-sideburns, are great, but Wheatley’s manic glee in subverting the pompous ennui of the British class system is genius. His most clever device is the simplest; immediate juxtaposition. The interminable sequences of dustless walls, impeccable Savile Row suits and constant, constant showering, transition, in only a 30 second montage, to a veritable orgy of starved violence and ceaseless shagging, signifying the precipitous edge on which all collective inhibitions function. It’s completely incoherent, but that’s the point. Rarely has Sergei Eisenstein’s theory on the power of montage been so apt.[1]  It’s about semiotic emotional responses, not some trivial plot. We’re 30 seconds away from primitivism. It’s sartorially funny – ‘Bafta him!’ has already tied up the race for best one-liner of the year – and explicates Ballard’s social commentary; its anarchist proclivity on class immobility and paranoia is bleakly adroit. Intensely carnal, hysterically political, and just a little bit madly brilliant.

Zootropolis

Thematically, kids films are invariably difficult to get right. Sure, you can apathetically toss in platitudes about being yourself and the importance of family etc. because they’re children right? Children can’t grasp subtlety or inferential meaning because they’re ignorant and require graceless theme-bashing, right? Countless films abide this policy, to their great detriment. It’s a lose/lose paradigm; adults are bored and kids understand they’re being patronised. Then you have Zootropolis which, while inevitably didactic, is mature, cerebral, achingly existential, and bizarrely pertinent.  An anthropomorphised examination of the ubiquity of prejudice, Disney’s newest adventure delves into gender inequality, racial bigotry, and to what extent identity and behaviour is biological or artificially constructed. It floored me. Everyone’s a bigot, our charismatic bunny protagonist is no exception. While it’s a thoughtful, hopeful plea for inclusivity and liberalism, it’s unafraid to tackle its darker delineations; that prejudice is so casually exploited, the villain’s snarl that “fear always wins” is beguilingly apposite of a certain presidential candidate’s campaign strategy. It’s wickedly funny too, with vividly animated characters, witty dialogue, inspired visual puns – the bank’s title as Lemming Brothers endures as a personal highlight – and the, purely platonic, chemistry between Ginnifer Goodwin’s rabbit and Jason Bateman’s fox is more compelling than that of any RomCom you’ll watch this year. Zootropolis is a staunch reaffirmation that this current purple patch is Disney’s finest since their 90s Silver Age, and very possibly their best film since The Lion King. With Miyazaki’s retirement and Pixar’s modern inconsistency, are Disney reclaiming their throne as the dominant force in animation?

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_montage_theory

I Can Die Harder Than You Can: The Enduring Legacy of the Action Movie ft The Fugitive

There’s a certain breed – homogeneously if not exclusively male – who crave an undying love for 80s and 90s action films. I’m a devout member of this church. It’s curious; their marriage of steroids-for-breakfast masculinity and residual campness is innocuous but fruitful, perfectly captured in a single frame by Predator’s notorious bro handshake. My initial preconception, before I delve into this trivial, self-aggrandising project, is that our enjoyment is based on its embellishment of nascent male fantasy. Cool stunts, contrived pun one-liners, and the prospect of women finding cool stunts and contrived pun one-liners sexually appealing, is something inherent to the chimpanzee male psyche. In turn the campness perhaps suggests the innate desire for an idealised bromance not dissimilar from the idealised romance of cinema’s love stories. I mean, look at Top Gun; just look at how close Maverick and Goose are. This whole notion is obviously reductive and offensive – we men are far more complex than this – but I do think this hypothesis is at least partially founded. I guess that’s one positive from this idea for a new project, discovering something inherent and primeval about our love for action films that maybe isn’t completely denigrating my own gender (gender is fluid yes yes, but I’m just saying for argument’s sake okay? Cool).

Said frame from Predator. My theory epitomised

Nothing in cinema attracts such a cult following like these films, because they’re indeterminately evaluated by their fans. It’s a love that is concurrently completely ironic and completely sincere. We know that they’re primarily not very good, but in a roundabout way they are fantastic. How does this make sense? The hell if I know, but let’s try and find out over the next few articles. They’re effortlessly, entertainingly watchable, and bizarrely difficult to objectively critique because they’re so distinctive. An action movie can be structurally inept, punctured by hapless acting and lame effects, but if it fulfils the idiosyncratic criteria of the action movie it can still achieve stone cold classic status. What these criteria precisely are, I hope to educe in the next few weeks. It’s the same with horror films after all; a horror can be bland and unimaginative, but if it’s scary and provocative, it can be Great; the most obvious recent example in my opinion of this is The Conjuring, which peddled every ghost story motif and trope in cultural history and came out with a gleefully terrifying smash. The Conjuring took some eggs, flour, cheese, tomatoes, spring onions, chocolate icing, digestives, and ending up with a Michelin star pudding. Maybe this eclectic scrimmage is applicable to the action.

What I’ve realised, is that genre cinema generally fails to appeal to the academy (THEOSCARSAREASHAM) because it’s not predicated on conventional systemic formats, but through audience interaction and reaction. Horror films and action films are synchronous because their value and worth depends on making the viewer feel something, whether it’s the Freudian thrill of The Shining or the primitive wish fulfilment of Point Break. For all we joke over the ridiculousness, ludicrousness and preposterousness of action films conceptually, they subliminally touch its fans in ways Best Picture winners simply can’t. Again, hopefully I’ll be able to articulate the what, and why, of this theory, or, again, prove it to be complete bullshit.

My workmates have essentially bullied me into watching The Fugitive, which steered me towards the idea of writing about this most quietly bountiful of genres in the first place, therefore, by process of logical association, The Fugitive will be the first in the series where I approach this subject with a critical analysis; part-review, part meandering rumination on each film’s individual implications, and their immutable impact in the endurance of the action movie as a collective and our semiotic responses to this. I hope to at least attempt to paint tangible some of the most testing questions of our time; why don’t cops in their 50s just retire already if they’re too old for this shit? Is Die Hard the best Christmas film of all-time? Will we ever know categorially whether Nic Cage is a good or bad actor?

There'll be a LOT of Cage

I’ll hopefully do The Fugitive before the weekend. Please provide recommendations for me for after The Fugitive as well, people, with two criteria; it must have been released in either the 80s or 90s, and it must to some extent constitute an action film. Get involved people, you love action as much as I do.

Shoutouts to Andy, Pete, Abs, Ali, Huw and Nath for verbally bludgeoning me to death with the demand to do this.

PS: This AV Club running series on the history of the action film is really cool.

http://www.avclub.com/features/a-history-of-violence/

Kanye West: The Life of Pablo First Impressions

Kanye’s previous two albums have been very coherently conducive to their ideas; while frequently adventurous with sonic and structural experimentation they ostensibly remain drinking from the same conceit, somewhat at odds with the scatology of his earlier work. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – as I’ve often recorded in this blog – is a solipsistic self-exploration of egoism so layered and ambitious it registers as the cumulative Ulysses, Infinite Jest and Moby Dick to its contemporaries’ airport paperbacks. An absorbing Freudian goldmine overshadows what is a musically complex, enormously fun record. Furthermore, Yeezus confronts the precept of Black identity and its tumultuous history with a lairy aggressiveness that compels and threatens; neither as sophisticated or as intellectual as last year’s To Pimp a Butterfly (which examined a similar discourse), but more direct in its often misappropriated, sometimes confused, always justified fury. Before my first listen of Life of Pablo, I What’s App’d my friend Nic explaining my curiosity over the subject of Kanye’s latest homily, as it's evidently his new and abrasive format of composition. Two minutes into ‘Ultralight Beam’ and its gospel choir and self-aggrandising wordplay reveal little except flirtations with self-parody. When Chance The Rapper arrives with his perpetually weed-chilled croon, he warbles some thanks to Kanye and congratulates himself on his gorgeous ‘Sunday Candy’ from last year. But he also observes something we’ve only glimpsed in our fifteen years of Kanye. He opens with “when they come for you/I will shield your name,” evoking Kanye’s doubt, fear and paranoia with a nebulous, protective couplet. When they routinely stress that the Ultralight Beam in question is a “God Dream,” the emphasis is decisively on Dream. Kanye knows that his fame and infamy is a goddamn lie and everything could crash in on him at any moment. Even Gods need friends.

The dichotomy between deity-sized narcissism and inveterate vulnerability is overpowering. Famous begins as an anthemic self-endorsement of sexual prowess, Kanye riling up every woman he’s ever slept with and smugly backs himself with Taylor Swift despite all the melodrama they’ve shared, before transcending into a bellicosely heartfelt plea, no; a vocalisation of necessity, for authentic love, propelled by an affectionate, syrupy Rihanna refrain as this nameless idealisation of romance. One of the few sequences of contentment is the track ‘Waves,’ which Chance now famously fought to keep on the album. It’s pronounced and adulatory before abruptly switching to the intimate exposition of “birds can’t fly in a cage.” It’s a poignant, ephemeral verse, compounded by ‘Waves’ being bookended by the sneeringly confident put-down ‘I Love Kanye,’ which somehow encapsulates all the love/hate paradigms which he laboriously provokes into under a minute, and the jarringly despondent ‘FML,’ a spiralling panic-attack of forgotten spirituality. These three tracks are roughly six minutes chronologically, but could legitimately function as a self-contained EP and would still be as traumatically effective. 

This fluctuating juxtaposition is coalesced with the instrumentation, screaming drones and thunderous bassdrums - reminiscent of Yeezus's politically charged adrenaline - bang when Kanye's at his most defensive, while mellifluous synths and iconoclastic, revealing sample choices complement his cathartic disclosures. While Kanye begins defiantly and controlling, the cracks to his diamond-studded fortress are always translucent and ‘Waves’ is the emphatic breach. The two most notable pre-release singles, ‘Real Friends’ and ‘No More Parties in LA,’ are eloquent expressions of not so much pain as exhaustion. Kanye confesses his anxieties, because he’s just too tired to hide; the gaping artifice of building sincere relationships in the background of notoriety and opulence is destructive and impossible. The clever back-and-forth dialogue Kanye employs with Big Sean in ‘Real Friends’ suggests not only an attempt to, inadequately, communicate on an emotional level in an established but faltering friendship, but a sense of desperate isolation, as Big Sean’s distorted vocals ring out as if on some other sonic plane. Superlative speech and superlative hedonism is afforded by his stature in celebrity culture, but it’s a deal with the devil, proffering an inability to connect as a return. 

For his impact on rap music and general pop culture, Kanye is a veritable God; but on Life of Pablo he discloses a precipitous chasm of human insecurity. Maybe Kanye will have to settle for being merely a demi-god, omnipotent and immortal with the Achilles heel of the capacity to feel; a metaphor aptly emblematic of his lasting legacy as a beautiful contradiction.

Mini Reviews: Creed & Goosebumps

Creed

At the centre of the Oscars Diversity debate lie Ryan Cooglar and Michael B. Jordan, respectfully Creed’s director and star. Despite its “Oscar worthiness” – by which I mean its serious subject matter, serious performances, and ultra-super-special serious disposition, Creed hasn’t been nominated for Best Picture. A critic provocatively hypothesised that this is because Creed’s a film with a black protagonist that isn’t approaching issues of race with its caps-lock on. Of course every film’s about racial experience, but enough of my pseudo-intellectual tangents. The director/actor partnership resurges following their magnificent Fruitvale Station, incidentally a film very much concerned with the present black reality, and I’d be quite happy with them just making movies together for the rest of time. Cooglar uses shaky, proactive framing entwined with more cinematic Steadicam to generate a sense of murky actuality while maintaining an assured air of confident elegance.  The result is compelling, and he’s ably aided by Jordan establishing his own quiet classiness with a telluric performance, not Oscarly bombastic but rather beguilingly exacting and naturalistic. Same goes for Stallone, an always unfairly derided actor. Di Caprio can chew all the frozen scenery he wants and win an Oscar, but he can’t act like this. Maybe Creed’s nost interesting paradigm is its mutual timelessness and contemporariness. It’s immutably and pleasurably Rocky in its not-quite-rags-to-riches redemption narrative, a timely prompt that we’ll always be a sucker for these stories, but its economic literacy around the financial crash and excellent Cloud jokes, compounded by Tessa Thompson’s Bianca existing as a FKA Twigs-esque alternative R&B singer, suggests a context rooted in the of-the-now. Presumably this is the point; Rocky’s aged and his working class background contrasts with Adonis’s privilege, which in turn is an interesting inversion of normal race/class models, and his oldschool dependency alienates him from modern technocracy and ease of living. Creed’s very overtly about the idea of building your own family and identity, and while at times it can be didactic it is morally moving, and thankfully refuses to beat you to death with its “themes” (CC. Trumbo). Creed never goes anywhere you wouldn’t expect – despite passing up a radical, and in my opinion prosperous, opportunity to do so – but it’s accomplished and layered, perhaps a fine reminder that good cinema doesn’t have to be original or dynamic as long as it’s finely tuned. And for the record, the Oscars are a malodorous irrelevance and a taintedly arbitrary valuation of film.

Goosebumps

 The Goosebumps TV show used to scare the crap out of me. I’ve not watched an episode in over a decade but the memory of F-grade CGI blobs and animatronic, carnivorous chickens languishes in the deepest recesses of my subconscious. Sceptical is an imprecise description of my initial impression of this reimagining of RL Stine’s bestselling series; rather, I was uninterested. Transposing Stine as an definite character while having his lurid, monstrous machinations come to life in a Spielbergean suburbia sounds sorely twee. After unprecedentedly positive reviews I indulged myself, and came away pleasantly surprised. It’s a quirky, fun caper evidently inspired by the great adventure films of the eighties, a la Goonies and Gremlins in its accumulated breezy and eccentrically knowing tone, unremarkable setting and gregarious ensemble. In fact, easily its most potent quality is its intractable self-awareness. Its ceaseless nods and winks to monster history, including a great Stephen King gag, never feel unwelcome because it’s so authentic, and its scattershot structure works because it’s an exercise in charming shenanigans with familiar pop culture icons. Zombies in a graveyard is so nailed-on that it can’t be anything other than unpretentious genius. Why not have zombies in graveyards? Where else would you have them, in a Jane Austen novel? Jack Black is impressively restrained, while relative newcomer Dylan Minnette possesses everyman affability as the lead. It’s funny, simultaneously clever and deferential, and is enjoyably simplistic.

Room Review

The Transatlantic delay between US and UK release windows has intriguingly seen an eruption of Oscar favourites arrive in British cinemas in the space of a week. While Ryan Cooglar’s Creed has opened to fairly universal critical and commercial success, its three most notable companions have proved more divisive. While I’ve yet to see The Hateful Eight, its quintessentially Tarantinian ultraviolence and abstract narrative structure has incited widespread debate with some contending that Tarantino has regressed into self-parody and that the bite of his dialogue has been blunted. Similarly, The Revenant has drawn parallels to Inarritu’s preceding film, the Best Picture-winning Birdman; they’re undeniably both masterclasses in visceral visual filmmaking, but rather it’s their depth and graces which inflame discussion. Meanwhile Room, despite festival buzz, is allegedly too slight, too dissonantly specific to function as the parable of human spirit its champions portend. In truth I was pessimistic myself, turned off by its marketing as something more aligned to a high-concept thriller than a grounded drama, and by the problems inherent in making compelling, two-hour viewing from such a confined space.

Room usurped my expectations, perhaps because it is in many ways unexpected. It is a film of two halves, each wholly different but equally significant. To reveal much more would be to spoil what is one of the most thought-provoking and subversively comforting films I’ve seen in a long time. Much of its value comes from Lenny Abrahamson’s curious interplay between naturalism and impressionism. While Room is unequivocally rooted in reality, Abrahamson’s intelligent decision to stick rigidly to Jack’s, the son’s, perspective, allows the Irish director the opportunity to delight in the mundane. Through the eyes of a brightly imaginative five-year old a blank, damp wall becomes a canvas of possibility, and Brie Larson’s mother becomes a benevolent deity. A single room is the entire mode of existence, and Larson’s mother constructs a native vocabulary to rationalise this conceit as something tangible to her infant child; to the extent that when she reveals that trees and leaves are not only a fiction off ‘TV’ – which acts as the portal to an apparently non-existent, illusory universe – but emblems of the actual world, Jack finds it incomprehensible. It’s a fascinating, disturbing notion, but one which is sustained remarkably throughout; it reveals the venerable wonder of our world without being preachy, or even overtly thematic. All big ideas and emotional resonances are effectually personal stimulations and projections rather than conscious narrative intentions, or at the very least it appears that way. People will feel very strongly about this film, and very differently, but they’ll at least feel.

Another benefit of restricting the viewpoint is the generation of palpable tension and breathless claustrophobia. Objects and character are framed uncomfortably close, with a sense of desolate unease colliding with abject beauty as he cuts from mouldy wallpaper to the condensation on their skylight – their solitary link to literally everything else, beholding not only the promise of freedom but actuality itself. Jack’s hiding in the wardrobe, peering through the cracks while we hear their captor’s carnal groans is conceivably more devastating than showing us his mother's rape. The violence is infrequent but abrupt and effective, as Jack’s infant confusion and terror mirrors our own through rapid-fire editing and uncompromising staging. The dynamic between triumph and horror is elaborate and continuous, but never jarring.

Full disclaimer; I’ve been ostensibly in love with Brie Larson ever since my 16-year old self delighted in Scott Pilgrim’s blend of comic-book slapstick and authentic teenage turbulence. Her send-up of the adolescent-romantic myth of the prototypical Dream Girl (or Manic Pixie Girl) – the surprisingly perpetual idea that there’s one beautiful outcast whose base prerogatives are to act quirkily and be attracted to the angsty boy equivalent which was explicitly confronted in last year’s Paper Towns - was touching, and her earthquake performance in Short Term 12, easily one of my favourite films of the decade so far, reinforced her position as a God of independent cinema. In Room she is awesome. Flitting from between despair, fear, vulnerability, reckless defiance and unperturbed bravery, without a whiff of melodrama or hysterics, she is a vessel we displace ourselves in, yet also a fully formed, achingly real character. Room is as much an experience as it a story, and it’s testament to her talent that she remains admirably understated despite moments of sentimentality. Her relationship with Jack is the best representation of her layered complexity, comprising her understandably primal compulsions of protectiveness and imperious affection, but also the brilliantly downplayed suggestions of matriarchal resentment, the persistent and lasting reminder of her agony.

Jacob Tremblay’s Jack is so convincing that part of me feels that he isn’t acting, that his position is one of sincerity. This is obviously untrue, but it’s indicative of how believable he is. For a child actor to play someone his own age whose physical and mental development has been indefinitely malformed is equivalent to Tom Hanks playing Forrest Gump as a five-year old; the fact that Tremblay comes across as naturalistic rather than hammy or kitsch completely defies logic. It doesn’t make sense how good he is. I’m prone to hyperbole, but I struggle to remember a better kid performance, with the exception of Quvenzhane Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild. He is as intricate and interesting as his mother, so twisted by his experience that he cannot be anything else. But then again this shouldn’t be a surprise. Room doesn’t restrain itself to arbitrary relationships or concepts at any point, and refuses to cast judgement. Its refined poise is all the more emotionally beguiling, intellectually challenging, and cinematically engaging. We take the story and almost unconsciously relate it to our own. Its plot is unambiguous and autonomous, but its implications for the audience are as expansive as Jack’s imagination.

It’s astonishing that a story as objectively small and self-contained as Room’s could prove so deeply fulfilling. This is not only a heartfelt exploration of trauma and its inscrutable psychological permanence, but an often difficult, finally uplifting realisation of the redemptive power of human intimacy, something infinitely relevant to our own experience.