Change Your Image
geofftaylor-20727
Reviews
Wireless (2019)
Homage to Hemingway short story?
Am I wrong in thinking this short film is an homage to Ernest Hemingway's short story "A Clean Well Lighted Place?" That story and this have so many parallels. In Hemingway's story, an old man sits at a table at a cafe or restaurant at the end of the evening, with a pile of saucers in front of him, drinking coffee, observed by two waiters, one who is sympathetic, the other who is not. It is late and they should have closed already and one want to turf the old man out and go, while the other wants to give the old man a bit more time. They discuss this, maybe the impatient one gets a bit tetchy, can't quite remember, but in the end they close for the night and the old man leaves. What is not written, what is left out of the story, is what happens afterwards, which is that the old man kills himself. It was a legendary literary experiment by Hemingway to see if knowledge of a key event in the writer's mind would inform the text and communicate to the reader, although the writer intentionally did not include the event in the text, part of his theory, if I recall correctly, that a fiction operates like an iceberg, with a lot of its functional parts invisible to the reader. Actually, the experiment failed with me in that story by Hemingway, at least; I thought the story was rather flat and dull and did not intuit the unspoken suicide at the end.
National Theatre Live: Good (2023)
Terrific investigation of how a good man does evil
Sadly unknown to me until this viewing, "Good" is a famous play by British playwright C. P. Taylor set in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, investigating the incidence of evil in one of the most highly cultured societies in the world. The play is about a German literary academic, John Halder, whose best friend is a Jew, that charts his move into active racist Nazism. Very interesting production, taking the audience in and out of the main character's head, his inner psychology, via the dramatic device of externalising his inner ongoing mental dialogue. Terrific lead performance by Tenant, excellent support from the other two main actors, Sharon Small and Eliot Levey. In the final count, emotionally, honest and very affecting. Other plot strands are the issue of Halder's mother's descent into dementia, which he investigates fictionally in a novel, and his shift from one wife, who has psychological issues, to a love affair with an adoring and uncritical young female student who he then marries.
The dramatic arc requires a smooth transition from someone just like us, albeit perhaps the best of us, a cultured inclusive liberal, to a committed antisemitic fascist. The play shows this transition pretty well, with perhaps a few skips or jumps, but despite the use of vocalised interior monologue / dialogue, I did not feel it was quite smooth enough. (Better though than the coin-flip transition of do-gooder Dr Otto Octavius to evil Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2, one of my all-time favourite films, I should add.) However, there is good use of transition assists (assisting devices), such as the recruitment to consult on justifiable termination of medical subjects, based on his discussion of last-resort euthanasia in his novel, that later will blur into termination of categories of people deemed damaging to the advancement of German society. In summary, the play excellently depicts the progression of a person into Nazism, but does not quite convincingly communicate the internal psychological changes required.
The question the play asks is how ordinary people can be brought into the process of implementing evil policies. The play "Good" investigates the question in the context of the individual, from a bourgeois perspective. A Marxist perspective might involve the principle of alienation from a mass murdering or genocidal project by breaking the project up into components that in themselves are not (overtly) inherently evil. Organising mass murder into an industrial process, like an assembly line, dilutes and dissipates guilt for evil actions, and divorces individuals' actions from the horror of the overall project. It is Marx's alienation of the worker from their work by the structural nature of the manufacturing process, applied to mass murder. Likewise, the industrialisation of WWI is evident near the beginning of the latest film adaptation of "All Quiet on the Western Front", when a new army recruit finds the supposedly new uniform he has been issued with, due to a failure in the recycling process, still bears the name tags of the dead soldier who had previously worn it. The ability of workers to disrupt such industrial processes can be seen, for example, in the 2018 film "Nae Pasaran", which gives the case of the Scottish Rolls Royce workers in East Kilbride who blocked shipment of fighter plane engines needed to continue to bomb people protesting Chilean dictator Pinochet's military coup.
Jung_E (2023)
Top notch South Korean science fiction
From the publicity, I expected a science fiction actioner, and was therefore surprised to find this a very moving drama - with action - like Blade Runner meets Groundhog Day, from the director of 2016's super pell-mell zombie actioner "Train to Busan"?
Set in a post-apocalyptic future, smart robots are common, and the remaining humans are engaged in a long-running civil war. The grown up daughter (Kang Soo-yeon) of a long-dead (well, brain dead) uber mercenary soldier (Kim Hyun-joo), who fought and died to earn money for the daughter's life-or-death operation, leads a team of engineers developing a battle A. I. based on her mother's brain, to win the war. Her young boss (Ryu Kyung-soo) is a repellent character, all style and no substance.
The story, characterisation, action, special effects and direction are all great (though the traffic light AI activation material is excusably science-lite), and the lead performances are top-notch, in particular, Kang Soo-yeon's luminous performance as the daughter. Horrible to learn from Wikipedia that in real life, the actor died before the film was released. This film would be a good companion film to the Blade Runner films.
Viewed with subtitles.
Operation Ragnarök (2018)
Brilliant exposition of fear of the "other"
This film brilliantly uses the trope of "fear of the monster" in a science fiction life-or-death drama setting to interrogate the "fear of the other" (the alien, the outsider, the stranger, the immigrant). It doesn't approach this indirectly as a sub-text, but openly, head-on. This is cleverly woven in as an integral plot point. The characters are naturalistically portrayed, making them quite believable. This is very moot in contemporary European countries, for instance, in this case, Sweden, where the general public is being fed anti-migrant, anti-asylum seeker, anti-refugee rhetoric by right wing political pressure groups, including various governments, and their media outlets. Highly recommended.
Carriers (2009)
On reflection, way better than I first thought
I first wrote, "Small budget, characterful rather than action-driven, good performance by Pine in particular, pretty effective, pretty dark in message." I watched it thinking it would be a kind of run of the mill low budget zombie action flic, and it was only towards the end that I realised it was not like that. On reflection, the film was much better than that. Won't say more for fear of spoiling it for others.
Calls (2021)
Must see proper science fiction series
CALLS is a terrific English-language science fiction TV series, consisting nine shortish episodes of telephone conversations. CALLS is proper science fiction: exploring the very human consequences of a scientific hypothesis. It is based on a great premise and is super-smartly envisioned and implemented. It is probably best to come to it knowing as little about it as possible, as I did. When I started watching, I knew nothing about it, not even that it was science fiction. It was just the next new thing on Apple TV+, which so far had only delivered very high quality material. There is a weakness in the last episode that stops me awarding it 10 stars, but that is a minor flaw in a top notch, very original science fiction series.
CALLS is based on a French TV series of the same name by Timothée Hochet. I checked out a trailer and an episode of the original French series, and that too is very good. The American cover version seems mainly to add smarter relational graphics, which contribute significantly to our understanding. The helpfulness of the visuals lead me to disagree with people who suggest CALLS should not be a TV series, but instead a radio or audio podcast show.