Month: August 2018

Double Date

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★★★½
“They’re just girls, man. What’s there to be afraid of?”

Oh, be afraid… Be very afraid. For Lulu (Wenham) and Kitty (Groome) are not your average twenty-somethings. They are sisters, on a mission. A Satanic mission, to resurrect their dead father. All it needs is a series of human sacrifices, culminating in a ritual involving the death of a virgin. And wouldn’t you know it, they’ve found Jim (Morgan), who is about to turn 30 and has been looking for love in all the wrong places. That’s despite the best efforts of pal Alex (Socha) to help, until they encounter Lulu + Kitty, ladies who seem almost too good to be true. As should be clear, that’s exactly what they are. But a wrinkle occurs, when Kitty realizes Jim is a nice chap, and begins to have second thoughts.

If an unashamed B-movie, this has enough fun with the concepts to justify itself, not least gender-reversing the whole “sacrificial virgin” trope. That has been the territory of innocent damsels in distress for a century, so making it a gormless “bloke in distress” instead is a lovely idea. There’s a hint of Shaun of the Dead here as well, in that you have two friends who find themselves trapped in a lethal scenario, almost without noticing it. It helps that everyone here is likeable, in their own ways, not least in their loyalty to friends or relatives, and the women mirror the men, in there being a leader and a follower.

Even Lulu’s slaughter is born out of a familial bond, and the lengths to which she will go are almost touching. Kitty, meanwhile, gets the biggest arc; it’s during an unexpected birthday party at Jim’s house (where he’s off his face on pharmaceuticals!) where you can see a change come over her character. Credit the script, written by Morgan as well, since it hits most of its targets, though the aforementioned drugging feels a bit of a rapey misstep, to be honest. Otherwise, it’s a good balance of the emotional and the comic. In the latter department, I particularly loved the scene where an incredibly nervous Jim is trying to chat up the two not-so-ugly sisters, from a script sent through text message by Alex, only to be betrayed by the vagaries of auto-correct.

Save for that humour, it reminds me somewhat of 1974’s Vampyres, which also had a pair of women abduct people and take them back to their country manor house. Except here, in Wenham, we may potentially have a new British action star, too: if they’re looking to reboot the Underworld franchise and replace Kate Beckinsale, she would seem a viable candidate. Her early “kills” are brutal to the max, but things reach their peak near the end. She has an amazing brawl against Alex, which is one of the best inter-gender battles I’ve seen of late. His raw strength is balanced by her technique, and the results are both impressive and highly destructive of property in the area. Like the film in general, it was a pleasant and unexpected surprise.

Dir: Benjamin Barfoot
Star: ‎Kelly Wenham, Danny Morgan, ‎Michael Socha, Georgia Groome

The Last Dragonslayer

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★★★½
“Here be dragons. Well, a dragon, anyway…”

This slice of British televisual fantasy was offered up on Christmas Day, and provides a pleasant, warm and unchallenging slice of family fare. It takes place in a world where magic has ruled, but is gradually fading from consciousness and being replaced by technology. The magic appears connected to the dragons with which humanity shared the planet, uneasily. After previous battles, a kind of apartheid was set up, with the world divided into dragon and human areas. Overseeing the peace is the Dragonslayer, who is charged with killing any dragons who violate the treaty and attack humans or their territory. But some members of mankind are casting envious eyes on the unspoiled territory of the dragons, and would love an excuse to take it over.

Into this comes Jennifer Strange (Chappell), an orphan who was adopted as an apprentice by the magician Zambini (Buchan). A decade or so later, he vanishes suddenly, and while Jennifer is still coming to terms with that, a bigger shock occurs. Fate has decreed she is to become the Dragonslayer, the one prophesied to kill the final dragon. Having grown to love magic in all its forms, she’s extremely reluctant to do so. But how is a teenage girl supposed to escape what the apparently immutable finger of fate has written? And never mind, having to cope with all the other unwanted attention, from interview requests to merchandising deals, that comes to Jennifer along with the unexpected position.

It’s a nicely constructed alternate world, part steampunk, part modern and a declining part magical – wizards, for example, are now reduced to doing rewiring work for employment, such is the low demand for their skills. This offers scope for satirical elements, such as the Dragonslayer having to do adverts for a soft drink to pay off an unexpected tax debt. There are also any number of faces you’ll recognize if you watch much British TV: Buchan is familiar from Broadchurch; Bradley, who plays Jennifer’s sidekick Gordon, is best-known as Jon Snow’s wingman Samwell Tarly in Game of Thrones; and King Snodd is Matt Berry, who played a similarly mad boss in The I.T. Crowd. Richard E. Grant voices the final fire-breather, though is largely wasted in the role.

Chappell makes for a good, plucky heroine, even if her willingness to accept the hand dealt to her is a little fatalistic. Why not just walk away? Can’t kill the last dragon if you don’t pick up the sword – even if it does have your name engraved on it. While light in tone, this does have its action beats, not least when Jennifer has to fend off an assassination attempt, and an occasional moment of surprising poignancy. The finale perhaps asks more questions than it answers, and it’s clear the aim is an ongoing saga of films to follow the books (there are three volumes in the series by Jasper Fforde with a fourth in preparation). Yet if this does become a Christmas Day media tradition in Britain, it’s one to which I’d not object at all,

Dir: Jamie Magnus Stone
Star: Ellise Chappell, Anna Chancellor, Andrew Buchan, John Bradley

American Terrorist by Wesley Robert Lowe

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Literary rating: ★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

This was a disappointment, and a real chore to get through. If it had been a film, I’d have been reduced to surfing Facebook distractedly on my phone for the majority of its running time. Unfortunately, you don’t get to leave a book on in the background. It’s a stylistic and literary mess, throwing at the reader Canadian Special Forces heroine Rayna Tan, without providing any real background or character building beyond an incident in the Middle East. It then randomly switches around between her, a brother/sister pair of Islamic terrorists, Ahmed and Fatima, and their startlingly incompetent American recruits, who appeared to have strayed in from Four Lions. Throw in some unsubtle politicizing – even if I don’t necessarily disagree with the ideas expressed, it’s not what I want to read in my fiction – and it feels more like a half-finished collection of ideas than a coherent novel.

For example, after quitting the military, Tan goes to work for a group called Fidelitas Capital. Their cover is that they’re a money management company with no qualms – except, when they discover evidence of wrongdoing, they also target the customers with their in-house super-secret group of former soldiers. It would be putting it mildly to say this raises more questions than it answers. Another problem, is that the “American Muslim Militia” whom Rayna and her pals are hunting are, as noted above, pretty crap as terrorists go, and likely pose a danger to themselves, more than any innocent bystanders in the USA. For comparison, the book briefly describes an attack by another group, who blow the top third off the Washington Monument using a fleet of twenty explosive-laden drones. Now, that’s what I call a terror attack. Why wasn’t the book about them?

I get that the author is trying to spin his narrative out of several threads, depicting both the terrorists and those who’re hunting them. Yet it’s all remarkably bitty, and lacking in any flow at all, such as when Rayna and her colleagues are suddenly the targets for some Japanese assassins. This seems to have strayed in from another book entirely, coming out of nowhere and going nowhere either. It all builds to a climax at Seattle’s Safeco Field, which sounded interesting because it’s a baseball park I visited last summer. As depicted here, I completely failed to recognize it. Lowe is no more adept at creating a sense of place, than he is at creating credible or interesting characters. I can also assure him that those who rent suites at a ballpark are not immune from all security searches, as is claimed.

According to the author, Rayna is “Smart—IQ off the charts. Lethal—more kills than Chris Kyle. Black belt martial artist. She’s sexy, vulnerable and complicated.” There are worthy aims. Shame there’s precious thin evidence of these traits to be found in this novel.

Author: Wesley Robert Lowe
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available from Amazon only as an e-book.
Book 1 of 2 (plus a prequel) in The Rayna Tan Action Thrillers series

Run Lola Run: 20 years on

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On August 20th, it will be twenty years since Run Lola Run – or as it was originally titled, Lola Rennt – was released in its native Germany. And, given the significance the number “20” has in the film, it seems appropriate to take a look back at it. Let’s be clear: this will not be a particularly critical analysis, more of an adoring reminiscence. For I love this film, and have since Chris first mailed me a bootleg copy (recorded in LP mode!) in 2000. I’d seen the poster outside an art-house cinema on Long Island, but knew little or nothing about it. Certainly, when I banged that VHS tape into the player, I had no clue I’d be watching a film which would become one of my all-time favourites.

Note: THERE WILL BE ENORMOUS SPOILERS BELOW THIS LINE

Why do I adore it? It’s amazingly rewatchable – we saw it in the cinema together for the first time a couple of months ago, at a 20th anniversary screening, and it was still near-perfect – perhaps because it works on so many levels. On one, it’s a simple action tale. Lola (Potente) has 20 minutes to come up with 100,000 Deutschmarks lost by her boyfriend, Manni (Bleibtreu), which belong to a crime boss. That, in itself, is a brilliant pitch for a thriller, and the first third unfolds in an incredibly stylish, yet straightforward way, as Lola runs across town, fails to convince her father (Knaup) to help, gets involved in Manni’s supermarket robbery… and then gunned down by a policeman in the subsequent stand-off.

Wait, what? We’re not half an hour in, and the title character is already bleeding out on a Berlin street? How the hell is Tykwer going to sustain this? And this is where the film pulls of its master stroke, which is breathtaking in its audacity. After a brief interlude of Lola and Manni lying in bed, the film simply resets. It goes back to the point where Lola left her apartment, and the story unfolds again. However, this time, we are introduced to another of the film’s main themes: chaos theory. A tiny change in initial circumstance has a knock-on effect – there’s a pointed shot of dominoes toppling – and leads us to a completely different conclusion.

It’s still not what Lola wants. And, as the old song goes, whatever Lola wants, Lola gets. So we reset once more, with a further slight tweak at the beginning, subsequently causing the dominoes to fall in another, radically different way. [The moment when you figure out what’s going on is perhaps the greatest “Holy shit!” moment I’ve ever had in my film-viewing career] This time, she not only raises the money, Manni recovers his as well, and the pair wander off. Happy ever after? Hard to say. The enigmatic look on Lola’s face when he asks her, “What’s in the bag?” suggests her hard-won ending and new-found skill-set might have broadened her horizons, beyond the slightly shady and scatterbrained current boyfriend.

It can be enjoyed simply on that level: a demonstration of how a tiny change at the right point can have an extraordinary effect. This impact isn’t limited to Lola. Throughout the film, as her path crosses with various other people, we see what happens to them in this version of the future, through a series of still photos preceded by an “And then…” caption. It’s another brilliant idea, conveying an entire story in a few seconds. Like so much in the film, there’s absolutely no fat. Tykwer can’t afford that: the entire film runs only 80 minutes, and has to tell three similar, yet divergent story-lines, so time is, literally, of the essence here. The film and its heroine, must keep moving forward.

As a purely kinetic spectacle, it’s great, powered in part by the pulsing techno soundtrack, crafted by Tykwer along with Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil. They had previously collaborated for the music on Tykwer’s second feature, Winter Sleepers, and hit the ball out of the park with this collection of electronica. There are only two movie soundtracks which I’ll listen to on a standalone basis: this and Bollywood comedy, Singh Is Kinng. With lyrical work by Potente, it’s no less ceaselessly in motion than the movie – except for one scene which flips the script, going into slo-mo as it crashes into the sultry jazz tones of Dinah Washington. “What a difference a day makes,” she tells us. What a difference, indeed.

But it’s only when you dive deeper you realize the film has layers, with aspects deliberately left open to the viewer’s interpretation. It sets its philosophical stall out early, opening with quotes on the cyclical nature of life from poet T.S. Eliot… and German football coach, Sepp Herberger. “After the game is before the game,” says the latter; or in the context of the film, after Lola’s run is before her run. There’s a voice-over, by Hans Paetsch (well-known in Germany as, appropriately, a narrator of fairy-tales), who poses a set of philosophical queries before revealing their semi-pointlessness since these are, “questions in search of an answer, an answer that will give rise to a new question, and the next answer will give rise to the next question and so on.”

Then it’s game on. Right from the start, it appears that Lola has “a very particular set of skills”. At the end of her conversation with Manni, she throws the phone into the air, only for it to land, neatly on the base. This is… not normal. There’s also her scream, which can shatter glass and perhaps alter the outcome of a roulette wheel: it’s her method to “take control of the chaos” which is threatening to overwhelm her life. And that’s not even getting into her ability to rewind time, and get a “do over”, a power which may be driven by her intense love for Manni, and refusal to accept being separated from him. I hypothesize that she may be a goddess of some kind, slumming it in the body of a young German punkette. It’s as valid a theory as any the film provides.

Nowhere is Lola’s dominance over petty reality more obvious than in the casino. She doesn’t have enough money to buy a chip, yet the cashier gives her one anyway. Her clothes are clearly at odds with the casino’s dress code, yet she’s allowed to take part. And when she’s about to be ejected after her first win, she turns to the employee, stares levelly at him and says “Just one more game.” This is not a request, or even a demand. It’s a statement of fact, utterly undeniable. There will be one more game. What happens subsequently is further proof that what we perceive as chance is Lola’s tool, and not the other way round.

Yet in that light, it’s worth noting she’s not immune to external forces. Indeed, the first domino is her descent of the staircase in her apartment block and an encounter with another resident and his dog. The resulting outcome begins the process of changing the timeline. These are also not complete “resets”. In the opening run, Manni has to show her how to operate the safety on a gun; in the second, she knows what to do. Nor is her power without limits, or Lola could simply go back and prevent her boyfriend from losing the money to begin with. There are, apparently, rules to this game, though who sets them and why, is not a topic addressed in the film.

I love the use Tykwer makes of colour in the film, in particular red, yellow and green [likely not by coincidence, the same ones used in traffic lights]. Once you’re primed to look for their use, you’ll see them appearing, over and over again. Interpreting their meaning is trickier; it’s not something the director appears to have addressed, even on the DVD commentary. Red is clearly the dominant shade, from Lola’s hair to the filters applied to the scenes between runs, where she and Manny are lying in bed. While often associated with danger, it is also a colour associated with love and passion, and both are highly significant elements here.

Meanwhile, Manny is linked to yellow, most obviously in his dyed hair, and the phone booth in and around which he spends much of his time. At a guess, I’d says this symbolizes his life grinding to a halt, Manny’s anxiety and subsequent inaction (particularly in comparison to Lola) and perhaps the cowardice of his refusal to ‘fess up to his boss and face the consequences of his incompetence. Also of note: the scenes in which the pair do not appear are, quite deliberately, shot on noticeably lower-quality stock than scenes with Lola and Manny: Tykwer said he wanted those scenes to seem less “real”.

Something else which shows up repeatedly are spirals: the staircase down which Lola runs, the bar outside which is Manni’s phone-box; even the slow descent into entropy of the ball on the roulette wheel. This seems to have been inspired by Tykwer’s love of Vertigo, something explicitly referenced in the casino. There, the mysterious painting on the wall, of the back of a woman, is a portrait of Kim Novak in the gallery from Hitchcock’s movie, whipped up in 15 minutes and from vague memory by the art director, to fill an annoying blank space on the wall. [It went on to hang in the director’s living-room!]

Chris and I love the film so much, that when we went to Berlin on honeymoon, one of the things we did was spend an afternoon visiting as many of the locations as possible. We discovered the film does play fast and loose with local geography. The settings are situated well beyond the capabilities of even an Olympic athlete to cover in 20 minutes, so we were not able to get to the supermarket, for instance. I do, however, still have pics of Chris “running” outside the bank (which is now the Hotel de Rome, with rooms starting at $300 per night…)

Though not the first feature for either Tykwer or Potente, this has become the one by which both are defined. Such is our love for Run Lola Run, we’ll pretty much watch anything they’re involved with, even though nothing has come close to matching it. Probably wisely, Tykwer hasn’t tried, even when re-uniting with his lead actress and soundtrack composers for The Princess and the Warrior. While their other works have certainly had their merits, it feels like this was the cinematic equivalent of catching lightning in a bottle. Small enough for the director to be allowed artistic control, yet large enough to be able to deliver it, it’s a film which is every bit as fresh and invigorating now as it was in 1998.

The upcoming Chinese remake, announced last year, will have some very large, black boots to fill…