DEAD SNOW (Død Snø)

.
Fully Undead 900 word Version:

This is an early eighties American movie … it just happens to have been made in Norway in the late noughties. It begins, as Evil Dead (1981) does, with a group of students in a car heading out into the woods for a weekend getaway in an isolated cabin. We even have a few aerial shots of them driving along the side of a snow-bound lake in the mountains, which will put us immediately in mind of The Shining (1980).

Of course, these references, and the others that pepper the film, are quite deliberate. As the students wade through the snow along the repeatedly-mentioned “45 minute hike” from the road to the cabin, one of their number, a film-geek named Erlend, asks: “Hang on … How many films start like this?” Lots. About as many as have the obligatory post-modern film-geek character, I’d say.

Unlike your typical Grindhouse schlock-fest, this film features some stunning snowscape photography by the not-remotely-Nordic-sounding Matthew Weston. While Sweden’s Let The Right One (2008) and, to a lesser extent, America’s 30 Days of Night (2007) showed us how dark and claustrophobic snow could be, this film immediately opens up the aperture to let all that reflected sunlight come flooding in. It has the audacity to allow its horror to take place in the broadest imaginable daylight which, of course, means that you can see the horror coming from further away … the downside being: It can see you, too. You can run, but you certainly can’t hide.

During their first night in the cabin, the traditional Mysterious Stranger knocks on the door, to warn the unwary of the horrors they can expect to encounter. In a mesmerising monologue, the unnamed stranger tells the students about the Eisatz, the platoon of Germans who were stationed there during the war and who were “evil, hellish bastards” led by the devilish Colonel Herzog. He finishes with the wonderfully quotable warning “People tread lightly up here” then takes his leave to, rather foolishly, pitch his tent somewhere in the middle of the killing snowfields.

Soon after he leaves, the students find a box of Nazi gold under the cabin floorboards (“Fortune and glory, kid” mutters the film geek … if you don’t know why, I won’t bore you with the reason) which discovery brings the long-dormant local undead rising from their resting places in the snow to retrieve it.

Død Snø wears its heart (and its intestines) so openly on its sleeve that Erlend has on a Braindead t-shirt when he is torn-apart, in a good-old-fashioned latex prosthetic special-effect with lashings of livid red 80s-style blood. Vegard, the nominal leader of the gang, gets to act like Bruce Campbell engaging in a fist-fight with the first zombie. Martin, the specky nerd character, has to chainsaw his own arm off. This is the film that My Name is Bruce wishes it was!

If you haven’t already clicked, it’ll be about here that you realise you’re actually watching a comedy. One which very quickly escalates to almost undreamed-of heights of gory slap-stick. The silliest and sickest effects take place in bright, unforgiving daylight, with gouts of bright blood spraying liberally against the pristine white background, with the considerable short-comings of the effects unashamedly there for all to see but, of course, quality counts for nothing: When a character is hanging off a cliff, clinging to a rope made of writhing zombie entrails, you don’t really worry too much about how realistic they look.

For all its fearless exuberance, the film has some real problems. You are left to wonder where, exactly, have the Nazis been hiding for the last sixty years and may notice that, since they’re working together and taking orders from their commander, they can’t really be zombies! Even the central conceit, the Nazi zombie idea, has been done before in Shock Waves (1977) and, more recently, Outpost (2008), but that’s okay because there is no attempt to be original here … this film is a celebration of schlock, not an attempt to rehabilitate it.

So, you are encouraged to look upon this film as disposable, forgettable slap-stick, but then the wonderfully sophisticated visuals, sharp editing and excellent use of music are all quite at odds with the lampooning of the one-dimensional characters and loopy half-written plot. I think, with a bit more experience and the support of the more highly-developed American studios (who have apparently already drawn him into their web) director Wirkola will hopefully turn into an inspired and enterprising new talent. He certainly has the connections to make it big!

Sara, the girl who owns the cabin and who was, unbeknownst to her friends, killed in the film’s pre-title sequence, is played by Ane Dahl Torp, a veritable Norwegian mega-star; while The Mysterious Stranger is played by Bjørn Sundquist, Norway’s favourite serious actor. He clearly relishes his time slumming it in a genre movie and presumably both he and Torp supported this project (and worked at considerably below their usual pay scale, no doubt) because Wirkola persuaded them that this was an opportunity to push Norwegian cinema onto the world stage. Which is exactly what Død Snø has done. Apparently it received only lukewarm reviews in the Norwegian press upon its release but then it wasn’t made for Norwegian critics … it was made for people who love The Evil Dead … it was made for you!

Director: Tommy Wirkola.
Writers: Stig Frode Henriksen & Tommy Wirkola.
Cast: Charlotte Frogner, Ørjan Garnst, Stig Frode Henriksen, Bjorn Sundquist, Ane Dahl Torp.
Dur: 91 mins
Cert: 18

BLU-RAY: JCVD

.

Comebacks are big news these days. Some actors, like Julia Roberts for example, have hardly been away long enough to warrant calling their latest work a ‘comeback’. In the case of Jean-Claude Van Damme, he never even went away … we just stopped paying attention to him.

He’s been churning out straight-to-DVD films on a fairly consistent basis since he fell off the big screens round about the time of Maximum Risk (1996) As with Bruce Campbell’s My Name is Bruce (with which this film would make an entertaining double-feature) this is a B Movie Legend having a pre-emptive pop at his own work.

The film weaves together two narrative threads, one in the present tense and one in the past tense leading up to the present. In the flash-backs we see JCVD’s career on the rocks. He has lost custody of his young daughter and loses a film job to his arch nemesis, Steven Seagal. His misery is palpable and one feels the genuine heart-felt nature of this self-critique (well, until a spot of research reveals that ole J-C doesn’t have a daughter, just an adult son).

Against this rather glum background, he stops off at village post-office to draw out some money, is turned down by the teller and gets himself caught up in a heist. The police descend on the post-office, hotly pursued by the media, keen to cover the story of the disenfranchised movie-star who has gone off his rocker and taken hostages.

These early scenes, where we’re not sure quite what is going on, are deftly, teasingly handled and make the film most engaging. I don’t think it’s too shocking a spoiler to reveal that J-C isn’t really the bank-robber, but rather a hostage as well, one who his captors treat rather like a performing seal, getting him to perform his kicking-a-cigarette-out-of-your-mouth trick for their amusement. Throughout these scenes, J-C is passive, restrained, almost submissive … he is so depressed by where his life has taken him he doesn’t even have the will to fight two bad-guys whose collective intelligence is slightly lower than that of a sponge.

The lighting is cold and sullen, the music mournful and bluesy, the humour bitter. Essentially this multi-millionaire world-famous movie-star is asking we poor working stiffs to feel sorry for him. Well, at least he does have the common decency to parody his image and his own work but, as when Schwarzenegger did this with The Last Action Hero (1993) one feels compelled to wonder what his actual fans make of this “Sorry I’ve been taking your money and turning out such shit films all these years” confessional.

This movie is shot through with a knowing post-modern sense of self-analysis … never-more-so than in the much-talked-about soliloquy, where he turns to the camera and addresses the viewer directly, pouring his heart out in jumbled, incoherent, half-finished thoughts that were clearly un(der)rehearsed. This is a cry from the heart, with him bemoaning his betrayal of the simple, pure principals of his Martial Art, judging his achievements as being hollow and discussing the confusion he feels in just being himself. He is, in other words, having his mid-life crisis on screen.

Well, I wish he’d had it earlier because this is the most entertaining I’ve seen he being since Hard Target (1993) This is not a film in which he stars, it’s a film in which he acts. Despite all the doubt on show, he obviously knew what he wanted – and he got it – a chance to make his peace with himself and prove that he doesn’t have to keep making and re-making the same unambitious plodding action fodder.

The question is: where will his career go from here? Is this just an aberration before returning to the comfort, and guaranteed income of B-movies, or will he pursue this far-more experimental, far-more-interesting, doubtless far-less-lucrative path?

Myself, I hope it’s the latter, but a glance at IMDB suggests that his next film will be Universal Soldier 3 … Ah well. His comeback was nice while it lasted.

.

Directed by: Mabrouk El Mechri
Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme & loads of other people of whom you’ve never heard.
Dur: 97 mins

Cert: 15
.

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

.



Here, on the eve of its Academy Award shoot-out with Benjamin Button, I feel I ought to put down my thoughts on Slumdog Millionaire the, if you will, Oscar underdog.

The first thing that is worth noting is that the ad campaigns which have touted this as “the feel-good film of the year” are shamelessly failing to prepare you for the shocking cruelty and tragedy you will see in the film’s first half. If you walk in expecting this to be another Millions (2004), you're in for a steep learning-curve but, by the same token, if you go in expecting something as stark and edgy as Trainspotting (1996) you, again, will be surprised because Slumdog Millionaire manages to bridge the apparent chasm between both those films. It isn't scared of staring into the abyss of human weakness, like Trainspotting did but, like Millions, it also never loses its faith in the tenacity and raw humanity of children.

In typical style, director Danny Boyle doesn’t make things easy for himself as he weaves together no fewer than three narrative strands, cutting backwards and forwards between them in a way that could, in lazier hands, be very confusing.

The three stories are: The childhood of our hero, Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar / Tanay Chheda), an infant scavenging on the mountainous rubbish tips of the city then known as Bombay. Fast forward about fifteen years to modern-day Mumbai and the second strand, where we have the grown Jamal (Dev Patel) sitting in the hot-seat in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The third strand then takes place during the night after the Millionaire recording, where Jamal is being tortured by the police because they think he has somehow cheated on the show.

The way these three threads are drawn together, informing and supporting each other throughout the film, making a ferociously complex structure clear, dramatic and deeply moving, is an admirable example of good construction, a job of work achieved initially by Simon Beaufoy’s unflinching script and then by Boyle and his editor, Chris Dickens, who has rightly been nominated for one of the film's Oscars.

The game-show is the key to this structure as every question Jamal is asked sparks off a memory flashback to a key incident in his life, which tells us his story and tells him the answer. This framing technique really is a thing of beauty and lifts this film far above the mere travelogue/life story the film could have been. In my (not especially) humble opinion, it is, like the editing, entirely worthy of the Oscar nomination it received and, if Beaufoy doesn’t take the statue home, he can consider himself robbed!

I can’t sing the praises of the script highly enough, but I think I’ve made my point, so I’ll move on.

The flashback scenes show us a life that we, in The West, cannot easily (or willingly) imagine existing in our modern world. If this film does nothing else, it shines a light into the dark and ignored corners of the world that we, in our own comfortable, privileged little corner, prefer not to think about but, rather than dogmatically pounding us about the head with the injustice of it all, Boyle’s style and pace gives these scenes a vibrancy and aesthetic which is almost ecstatic. Saturated in turmeric yellows and cayenne reds, Slumdog is very (one suspects, deliberately) reminiscent of Cidade de Deus / City of God (2002), since that film deals with a very similar world of corrugated shacks, rank squalor and casual brutality.

The performances of the children in these heart-breaking early scenes are a revelation. One is lost in awe of them and fear for them as we see their big, trusting eyes looking out at a world where they are completely alone and where a human life has no value whatsoever. Quite how Boyle managed to get such consistent and convincing acting from pre-school children, who don’t speak English (when he, presumably, doesn’t speak Hindi), is just one of the many secret treasures buried in this film. In fairly short-order, we see these children orphaned, then gathered up by the Fagin-like crime-lords who operate gangs of beggars. But, far from the avuncular image we may have in our minds of Ron Moody or, now, Rowan Atkinson, these loathsome parasites deliberately maim the children, because this elicits greater sympathy from the tourists, and therefore more money.

Jamal and his brother, Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail / Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala), make their escape, unscathed, and begin fending for themselves, surviving on their considerable wits. In this, the film also reminds me of the harrowing anime Hotaru no Haka / Grave of the Fireflies (1988) but, here, the children’s stoicism in the face of unremitting brutality stops the film from tipping over into maudlin sentimentality or high tragedy. One wonders if this would be the case if an American director had made it.

At one point, after we’ve been lulled into a deceptive sense of security by watching the boys, now about ten or twelve years old and fluent in English, enjoying themselves by harmlessly hoodwinking the cow-eyed American tourists flocking round the Taj Mahal; Jamal is caught by an Indian taxi-driver and savagely beaten in front of the tourists. Picking himself up, he wipes the blood from his face, turns to the Americans and informs them: “You wanted to see the real India, well, here it is!”

These early scenes very much reflect the way that a lot of Western eyes (and all Western films that I can think of) see India, as a vast, incomprehensible and frightening beast; but, as the boys travel from infanthood through their teens to eventual adulthood, so the film travels in style and content from this out-dated Westernised image to a more contemporary, better-informed, more Eastern perspective.

This is where the casting of Anil Kapoor as the game-show question-master, Prem Kumar, is a master-stroke. His performance will be seen very differently by the two audiences this film will attract – the Western and the Eastern. For us in The West we see him as merely an increasingly arrogant, sarcastic and conniving egotist, but for those familiar with his Bollywood work, this performance will be all the braver and more powerful, rich with the echoes of Amitabh Bachach, Kapoor’s Bollywood contemporary, who used to host the real Indian Millionaire show, Kaun Banega Crorepati and who is referred to early on in the film in the notorious toilet scene.

He and the show he hosts and the vision of Mumbai it represents, demonstrate how far India has come even in Jamal’s short life-time. As an adult, he works in a call centre and, in one significant moment, he stands with his brother, dozens of floors up in an unfinished sky-scraper, looking down at the other buildings rising from the land which had, a few short years before, been the rubbish-tip of their birth. As the country has crawled out of The Dark Ages into the light and prosperity of Modernity, so the innocence of Jamal and Salim falls away, but not the love that runs just beneath the surface of this film, finally to break through in these latter scenes.

The transformation from Western perspective to Eastern continues, with the film adopting more and more Bollywood motifs. As the colour palette shifts from the warm rural colours to colder urban greys and blues – and white – the film becomes a love-conquers-all tale, where the brothers war over the heart and soul of the girl, Latika (Rubiana Ali / Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar / Freida Pinto), who had stolen Jamal’s heart when he was too young to know he even had one. Mix in some obvious Gangster Movie tropes, involving Salim transforming into a Tony Montana clone, and you have all the ingredients you need for a traditional Indian melodrama.

These latter scenes, shot through with the miasma of textures, colours and perspectives that we have come to expect from Boyle and his Cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, are designed, I feel, to show Hollywood, that it doesn’t own the copyright on the big, universal themes like love, loyalty and trust which drive we poor, fragile human beings, even in moments of extremis.

The conclusion of Slumdog is pure schmaltz, with an explosion of joy, movement and music that finally, stamps the Bollywood hallmark on the film so you can emerge from the cinema and back into your life with a grin and a skip in your step and only, after, will the memories of those eye-opening early scenes leak through, serving to make the joyous achievement of the film’s dénouement all the more emotional, and all the more impressive.

So, composure regained, do I think this film will win the ten Oscars for which it has been nominated? The short answer is … no. I don't think it'll get the Best Film award, or Doyle the Best Director because, as I mentioned earlier, Slumdog Millionaire eschews sentimentality until the very end, also because it is set in an almost completely alien world and, ultimately, because it has no big name (American) stars. I think Slumdog should and will win some significant statues for its craft and technical virtuosity but, if it comes down to a straight decision between this film and the no-less impressive Benjamin Button, I suspect the latter will win the big categories because it is a more conventional, more American tale, and history suggests that American Academy members favour American stories.

Still, as I type this, I'll know for sure in about twenty-four hours.

If Slumdog does lose the big statues to Benjamin, I feel this would still be an honourable result. I am convinced that Slumdog will take home the less-prestigious-but-no-less-important behind-the-scenes awards and that would, I feel, be the best of both worlds: East and West.
POST-AWARDS ADDENDUM:
And so, as the slumdog immigrant workers in their high-vis jackets are pushing brooms down the wrinkled, heel-scuffed red carpets and the millionaires are heading-home after the high-vis parties in the hotels and night-clubs all across town ... The 81st Academy Awards are now about twelve hours in the past and, it turns out, I was wrong. I underestimated the Academy members. This wasn't a protective, patriotic Awards at all. I confess I'm surprised that Benjamin Button ONLY won for its make-up and effects (and art direction) ... But not as surprised as I am that Mickey Rourke won't be taking a statue back home to his Chihuahuas. Just goes to show ... even after twenty-five years of watching Oscars, I still can't tell which way things'll go. Sometimes the Should Wins and the Will Wins are the same thing ... and that's when cinema wins!
.
Directed by: Danny Boyle
Written by: Simon Beaufoy
Starring: Dev Patel, Madhur Mittal, Freida Pinto, Anil Kapoor
Dur: 120 mins
Cert: 15
.
image © Celador Films / Film Four
.

BLU-RAY: TAKEN

.

.
The Film:

Oddly, even though this film has already hit our DVD shelves, it has yet to make its debut even on the big screen in America. For the time being here in good ole Blighty, you can rent it on DVD or Blu Ray exclusively at y’r friendly neighbourhood Blockbuster.

If you’ve ever seen its fish-hook trailer, you’ll know the basic set-up. Neeson plays an ex-CIA agent who has given up his career to try and be a better father to his spoiled 17-year-old brat of a daughter, Kim. She goes on holiday to Paris, rings him up when she gets there and is promptly kidnapped, which he hears over the phone. He swears to her kidnappers that he will hunt them down and kill them. Which is exactly what he does.

The appeal of the film turns entirely on Neeson’s performance during this key scene. The pain, rage and hard-eyed determination which flash across his face as he hears her kidnap, is an exemplary piece of acting and draws the viewer wholly into his world. At least for a while.

So, it’s a fantasy. A rescue fantasy. Every daughter’s dream of the perfect dad, who will stop at nothing to save her if she’s in trouble. Accordingly, once he arrives in Paris, he pretty-much Jack Bauers everyone who gets in his way. However, the world his investigations lead him into is a dank, dark, disturbing vision of a man-made Hell … the sex slave trade, depicted in a way which, almost accidentally, makes you as uncomfortable in your complacency as Joel Schumacher’s much under-rated 8MM did deliberately back in 1999.

And there-in lies the film’s problem, for me. If Kim had been kidnapped by one of her dad’s old enemies bent on revenge, or as part of a government conspiracy, or by a camp French archaeologist who wanted to put her in a dress, or in any way befitting a rescue fantasy, then this film could have emerged as a kinetic, powerful, brilliantly executed entry into the action genre.

But, instead, we have these superhero fight scenes and James Bond chases set against a background which depicts, in chilling, disturbing detail, one of the greatest evils in the real world.

The background and the foreground just don’t go together. They don’t belong in the same diegesis.

The world of pale, emaciated, near-corpses chained to beds, drugged into incoherence and raped every few minutes until they eventually die is portrayed so convincingly, you just can’t believe in the heroics of Super Dad. You wonder about the girls he leaves behind, still chained-up. You think about their families. You become sadly aware that any world which could invent such atrocity and suffer it to exist, has no room for such super-heroics.

After which, the dénouement becomes inevitable and irrelevant and, I have to say, more than a little ridiculous.

I can’t imagine this film will do any favours for the French tourist industry as it portrays Paris as an open sore, in which nasty and conspicuously foreign bad-guys thrive. The French writer and director take pains to cut their villains from stereotypically racist Eastern cloth, which allows them to wash their hands of any responsibility for this simplistic, highly-polished but ultimately distasteful attempt to exploit the international sex-trade by making an action-movie out of it.

The Disc:

I watched this on Blu-Ray. The sound is awe-inspiring, with bass notes which verge on the seismic. As for the extras, they aren’t very special. A standard-issue making-of is only interesting because it reveals that director, Morel, adopts the Robert Rodriguez method of film-making, by directing with the camera on his shoulder. He apparently shot every foot of this film himself.

There is also a pointless little five-minute package from the French premier of the movie followed by about twelve minutes of alternate camera-angles on the stunt scenes we’ve already seen.

The oddest and, given the text of the film, most distasteful extra is the Real Time Mission Intelligence feature, which allows you to keep a running count of all the people Neeson has killed and injured in the film (I won’t spoil the surprise, but it’s lots) interspersed with the occasional satellite map so you know just where in the world he is. That’s in case all the shots of Paris don’t give you sufficient clues, I guess.
.
Directed by: Pierre Morel
Written by: Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen
Starring Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Framke Janssen, Arben Bajraktaraj
Cert 15
93 mins

.

image © 20 Century Fox
.