Wan: Fast & Furious 7 (2015)

Over the last decade and a half, the Fast and Furious films have expanded their cast to become one of the most realistic representations of America today, taking us into the heart of a country that is predominantly Hispanic and African-American – though by no means prejudiced against whiteness – and is driven by broader, homosocial and homoerotic ideas of family and fraternity than you usually find in blockbuster Hollywood. For obvious reasons, Fast and Furious 7 takes stock of that situation and, although it’s quite poignant to see Paul Walker acting in what would turn out to be his final film role, the film itself tends to shy away from anything too morbid or tragic, placing him in one comic near-death situation after another, and writing him out of the franchise with a soulful retirement narrative that makes peace with his legacy in quite a tactful, respectful and lyrical way. In fact, the lingering impression is of his resilience, endurance and survival more than anything else, especially in the last couple of scenes, where you really get a sense of how much he’ll live on in the minds of the characters, cast and audience, as well as how much his rapport with Vin Diesel evolved into one of the great serial romances of the 00s and 10s. Nevertheless, it necessarily jettisons some of the wit and irreverance of mid-period Fast and Furious films to achieve that, not least because The Rock is now relegated to a side character, with Tyrese and Ludacris taking over the comic reins with a little less dynamism and a little less of a taste for the preposterous. Still, that works well with this most melodramatic installment in the series so far, as does Vin Diesel’s melodramatic delivery, which has never had quite as much flow as it does here, drawing all the dialogue into its parsed-out, slow-mo hip-hop diction as never before. Where this film does expand upon mid-period Fast and Furious films – and Fast Five in particular – is in the way it continues to move further away from illegal street racing in the direction of heist action. Make no mistake, car chases are still at the heart of it, but over the last couple have years cars have become vehicles for social media as never before, with the result that it doesn’t take much to propel the crew’s automotive pyrotechnics into the realm of global surveillance, as they work with Black Ops leader Frank Petty (Kurt Russell) to recover a NSA-esque metadata processor in order to bring assassin Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) to ground. Never before have the cars of the franchise been so plugged into global surveillance systems, perhaps explaining why the action is so aerial, as we move from a first act in which the crew parachute their vehicles into the Caucasus, to a second act in which they building hop across the Etihad Towers in Abu Dhabi, to a showdown in Los Angeles in which they’re forced to both track and elude a series of helicopters and drones across and above the downtown cityscape. In the process, that creates a fantastic globetrotting vibe, but it also clarifies how much Los Angeles is these characters' natural home, even or especially as it gathers more and more of a multicultural flavour from everywhere else the crew visit in the interim. Some fifteen years after it started, the series still has the same taste for California as a Hispanic state, an extension or enclave of Mexico, and it feels right that this film in particular should end on that note, laying Brian O'Connor to rest where the crew first got to know and love him. 

Poitras: Citizenfour (2014)

Before Citizenfour was even fully conceived, the world was already familiar with some of its footage, namely the iconic interview that director Laura Poitras shot with Edward Snowden on June 9, 2013 in Hong Kong, catapulting his claims about the NSA’s surveillance tactics into the global spotlight. Released two years later, her Academy Award winning documentary expands upon that interview, compiling footage from the eight days that she and Snowden spent together in the Mira Hotel with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. As might be expected, it’s an extraordinary interview, largely because there’s no effort to delve into Snowden’s personal or professional life any further than he chooses to disclose, a discretion in the face of his right to privacy that actually ends up emphasising and dramatising his precarious position at the coal face of the information economy, as well as the likeliehood that, at this point in time, he was already well on his way to becoming the prime target of NSA data collection. And, in some ways, the film works first and foremost on a visceral level, by putting the audience in that unbearable position as well, not least because it culminates a decade, for Poitras, of being followed, surveilled and intercepted by the NSA, experiences which make her quite scrupulous and selective about how much – and how much of herself – she includes outside of Snowden’s testimony. As a result, the film is not eespecially expository or explanatory – there’s been more than enough journalism and legal commentary in that vein – so much as interested in evoking the sheer pressure of data brought to bear on Snowden, the informational burden he is trying to divest, in an approach that occasionally recalls Steven Soderbergh, who serves as executive producer. Oscillating between heavily redacted – almost self-censored – background information, and sequences that are so explosive – usually footage of transactions that took place in person, or on paper – that they induced Poitras to edit and complete the film in Berlin, it makes sense that there are a list of data encrypters included in the closing credits, since most of the scenes we’re watching are highly privileged legal documents, documents that could have wrecked everyone involved if they were released at the wrong time or place, and might still have the power to do so. Perhaps that’s why it feels more like a an act of hactivism than a film per se, or at least a film that’s been so heavily encrypted, protected and concealed at one point or another that the shadowy, covert conditions of its production are as much its subject matter as Snowden - and in that sense a reminder that his story is still present, rather than a fait accompli relegated to history.

Rickman: A Little Chaos (2015)

Costume dramas tend to be an emphatically humanist genre, taking us back to eras where personality, subjectivity and experience were supposedly more centred, embodied and ordered than they are today. And, on the face of it, that’s exactly what Alan Rickman’s second film as a director is all about, a period drama revolving around the construction of the legendary garden at Versailles, with Rickman in the part of King Louis XIV, Matthias Schoenaerts as Andre Le Notre, a landscape gardener who firmly believes in the credo of order over nature, and Kate Winslet as Sabine de Barra, a landscape gardener who, as the title of the film suggests, believes in injecting a little chaos into the landscapes over which she presides. The stage is set for a drama of geometries, symmetries and vistas in the vein of Peter Greenaway, so it’s a little surprising when it turns out to be something of a riposte to Greenaway – and The Draughtsman’s Contract in particular – largely thanks to the way in which Rickman reserves the most romantic relationships for the landscape architects and their canvases, with the most sensual scenes reserved for their communion with plants. As a result, the film moves at a vegetative, vascular pace, generating a quite unique ambience and a hypnotic stillness, until it’s quiet enough that you start to sense all those other organisms and natural processes unfolding just below the threshold of audibility, sap flowing and buds opening, leaves decomposing and soil forming. Reinventing Versailles as thoroughly and audaciously as Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Rickman presents us with a world in which human consciousness is continually decentred, as his camera gravitates towards impossible and counter-intuitive vantage points, and humans themselves become progressively plant-like, sprawling, swaying and extending in strange dances, with little regard for the mores of gender, sexual orientation and class, which seem to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. That syncs perfectly with Rickman’s reserved, restrained diction, which is abstracted and rarefied here as never before, but it’s particularly impressive in Winslet’s hands as well – and, in their scenes together, they recall something of the vernal splendors of Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, the same sense of a lush, vegetative vortex of a lifeworld continually expanding beyond any sightline that might contain it. Rococo artifice has become so inextricable from contemporary costume drama that it’s easy to forget how titillating, disorienting and sensually organic its tendrils were when they first emerged to grace gardens, furniture and paintings, but Rickman recovers that here, in one of the strangest and most alien costume dramas to grace our own stultified and stifled conventions for some time.  

Baumbach: While We're Young (2015)

Over the last couple of years, hipster-bashing has become almost eponymous as hipsters themselves, so there’s something quite refreshing about a film that manages to make both parties feel as original – in a sense – as Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young. In part, that’s because Baumbach’s tone is more quizzical than cynical, as he outlines the relationship between a New York couple in their forties, Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) and a New York couple in their twenties, Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried). Josh is a struggling documentarian, and the film largely revolves around his efforts to nurture and mentor Jamie, an aspiring documentarian, by way of his father-in-law, Leslie (Charles Grodin), a legendary, canonical documentarian in the vein of the Maysles brothers or Frederick Wiseman. As their relationship develops, insights into hipster ritual abound, from a psychedelic vomitorium set to the Love Theme from Blade Runner, to a wonderful conversation in which Josh and Cornelia go to check their SmartPhones for a factoid, only to be told by Jamie and Darby that it’s cooler to try and remember and, if they can’t remember, to simply not know. Set pieces aside, though, the film beautifully captures the peculiar puzzle that hipsters present to Generation X – namely, that they’re not actively rebelling against anything, or trying to create some definitive, original generational statement, but instead open to the past in a way that makes seem them seem more alive and authentically connected to Josh and Cornelia’s generation (and every previous generation) than Josh and Cornelia are themselves. In fact, precisely what’s unsettling – and comic – about Jamie and Darby is how open they are to Josh and Cornelia full stop, embracing their oldness with a reparative gusto that’s so uniform and all-encompassing that it gives the first and most distinctive act of the film a weirdly narcotised mildness, a burgeoning sense that the conflict is actually that there is no longer any generational conflict. Totally uninterested in positioning themselves at the forefront of some up-and-coming avant-garde, Jamie and Darby epitomise the arriere-garde that drives hipster culture, furnishing their lives with the detritus of previous youth culture and, far from deriding Josh and Cornelia as old fogeys to be thrown out with the past, curating and revelling in cultural associations that even they can barely remember or recognise personifying. Whether it’s pro or anti-hipster culture, then, is a little bit ambivalent, just as it’s unclear how much these hipsters are curating and how much they are cannibalising the past that suddenly seems to be even more authentically theirs than the people who lived through it. Some critics have argued that the ending – an extended, intercut monologue by Stiller and Grodin – removes this ambivalence, but that’s to ignore the wonderful way in which brings it all back to documentary, positing hipsters as the products of a world in which the differences between documentary and fiction, on-camera and off-camera, and cinematic and lived experience have been dissolved as never before. Perhaps that’s why Bambach’s tone often feels documentarian as well, both in its breathlessness and banality – there’s an uneasy alliance here with a world in which documentary per se no longer exists (if only because no film can entirely escape it anymore) that gives this film just enough grace, and just enough awkwardness, to prevent it ever feeling too old. 

Liman: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

In an older, more classical brand of action film, you often felt as if the stars were fighting for a particular future – for America, for masculinity, for conservatism and, of course, for themselves, showcasing their bodies with each new release to remind you that they were still had what it takes. Over the last decade or so, however, action films have felt more and more as if they’re fighting for the future as a concept, or category – a discrete entity that’s somehow separate from the indefinite, dispersed present in which they seem to unfold. Edge of Tomorrow presents one of the most elegant, beautiful responses to that quandary in a long time, partly because it also draws upon the World War I nostalgia that seems to be everywhere these days – or, perhaps more accurately, taps into the fears that WWI nostalgia assuages, fears of a world in which the threat of warfare seems to have escaped the regular strictures of space and time that operated a hundred years ago. Set in the near-future, the visceral, atmospheric opening transports us into the aftermath of an alien attack that has decimated most of Europe, turning Verdun into the next major front. Into that malaise comes Major William Cage, played by Tom Cruise, a former advertising CEO who travels to London with the expectation of a nominal or ceremonial role, but unexpectedly finds himself thrown into battle. Doug Liman cut his teeth on comedy, and a great deal of the film’s enjoyment comes from the unlikeliness of Cruise playing this character, who’s essentially a corporate coward, light years away from the Tom Cruise of Jack Reacher and Mission Impossible, the Tom Cruise who can stare chaos in the face. Confused, disoriented and frightened for the first third of the film, he tries to desert before he’s even transported to Verdun, as Liman offers up a wry vision of post-human warfare by way of a character who’s still clunkily, clumsily human, burying Cruise under enormous robotic gear while making no effort to conceal how short he really is. Of course, the moment Cage arrives in Verdun, he’s decimated, but in a brilliant twist, he’s sprayed with a rare alien secretion that gives him the power to live this day over and over again, which he does, refining his skills and becoming the Tom Cruise we know in the process. It’s only a matter of time before he comes across Seargent Vitriski (Emily Blunt) – the “Rose of Verdun” – who had the same power and lost it, but had it long enough to discover that the aliens they’re fighting are in fact a single organism, with the power to contain and change the future. In other words, the war is unwinnable in real time and space, making Cage the vanguard of the human assault, so long as he manages to find, locate and destroy the hub of the alien organism on the single day he has. What follows is a bit like watching Cruise try to complete a video game – there are distinct echoes of Oblivion - albeit a video game with the most brutal difficulty curve imaginable, as Cage navigates his way through the same scenario again and again – always anchored in Verdun – while trying to deal with dead ends and negotiate apparent non-win situations. Some critics have argued that this deconstructs the mindlessness and predictability of both action films and gaming, but that’s to ignore James Herbert and Laura Jenning’s exquisite editing, as well as Doug Liman’s comic sense of timing, both of which inject this very suspenseful scenario with as much wit and warmth as Groundhog Day, providing Cruise with one of his most memorable comic roles in years.