Pfister: Transcendence (2014)

At first glance, Wally Pfister’s first film as a director after working as a cinematographer on Christopher Nolan’s films is driven by a classic Nolan high concept: an eminent computer scientist, played by Johnny Depp, is uploaded to a network after being assassinated by a group of anti-technological activists, where he proceeds to wrap infrastructure and data around himself, with the help of his wife (or widow), played by Rebecca Hall. In some ways, though, it is too conceptual for one of Nolan’s films, which tend to wrap their quandaries in earnest, compelling character studies. As a cinematographer turned director, Pfister doesn’t quite have that gift for extracting character from his actors, but, given the nature of the film, that tends to work to his advantage. Most immediately, it allows him to capture the way identity disperses and disaggregates when it is networked – and Depp is very much a networked presence in the film, appearing for the most part as a multiplicity of images and voices, much like glimpsing all of Scarlett Johannson’s presences in Her. Strangely, that doesn’t feel so strange, since Depp has felt synthetic for years – somewhere around his fourth or fifth Burton film he became a  free-floating, charismatic elasticity more than a corporeal actor, and Pfister is perhaps the first director to really take advantage of that. More than any of his recent films, Depp feels like a process, which means that the network also feels like a process, albeit the process by which it continually transcends its own material parameters. And that means that Pfister’s experience as an analog cinematographer works as well as his inexperience as a director (and it is striking that this allegory of becoming-digital is shot in analog) – he’s used to forcing the material basis of the film to transcend itself, used to coaxing his audience into thinking they’re glimpsing something more like a mere collision of light and celluloid. Watching it, then, is a bit like experiencing the moment at which a network’s brain turns into its mind, transcends any one hub or node (and the film is fascinated with network junk, with most key scenes playing out against banks of servers or corridors of hard drives). That tends to bypass human characters – people tend to be subhuman network nodes or portals for post-human network perception – but that’s what makes the film so memorable; it is cinematographic and post-cinematic without ever quite being cinematic.

Green: Prince Avalanche (2013)

Over the first part of his career, David Gordon Green perfected a vision of the American South that was equal parts pastoral and post-apocalyptic. All his characters seemed to exist in a vacuum that was determined by catastrophe but somehow oblivious or immune to it - a space that tended to work against most of the tropes and tendencies of Southern Gothic while still remaining enthralled by them. Prince Avalanche is very much a return to that mode – it was actually inspired by a massive environmental catastrophe, the Bastrop County Complex Fire, which decimated one of Texas’ most iconic national parks, and prompted the post-rock band Explosions In The Sky to contact Green and suggest they make a movie about it. As that might suggest, great swathes of the film play like a post-rock video – and, since the sweeping, widescreen instrumentals of post-rock often feel like films in filigree, that’s a pretty natural fit. With such a clear return to Green’s earlier output, then, it’s a bit surprising to find a narrative that’s drawn straight from his recent trio of stoner comedies – we might be back among the landscapes of George Washington, or All The Real Girls, but the characters are more akin to those of Your Highness, or even The Sitter. In that sense it feels a bit like an existentialist bromance – Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch play a pair of characters commissioned to repaint the roads snaking through the park, during which they discurse about women, love, life and the future. There’s a certain camaraderie, but the rest of the world feels too distant, too decimated, for their words to really resonate or echo. Watching it is like being a privy to a conversation that falls on deaf ears, full of unexpected tonal shudders and strange correspondances – it makes you realise how rare it is to hear someone talk without the total conviction of an audience. That makes the conversations feel quite fragile, at risk of falling in on themselves, as well as recovering something quite intimate and innocent about apocalypse – as crude and unlikeable as these characters are, they’re possibly the last people on earth, and that gives them a kind of grace, even if they don’t quite know what to do with it.

Stoller: Neighbors (2014)

In many ways, Neighbors feels like a companion piece to This Is 40, or another sequel to Knocked Up. Once again, we’re presented with a couple of bromance regulars in suburban mode – Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne play a couple who’ve just had their first baby and bought their first home, only to discover that a frathouse has moved in next door, led by Zac Efron. Although Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s script might seem to draw on the tradition of Animal House or, more recently, Old School, it’s not really played for laughs – instead, the comedy tends to feel more like a way of concealing or cushioning a stark renewal of the vigilante films of the 1970s and early 1980s. Those films often had explicitly racist or sexist agendas which are no longer tenable, even as camp, so Neighbors  redirects all its exploitative energy at young people – it is as terrified of youth culture as, say, the Deathwish cycle was terrified of African-American culture. That works perfectly with Efron, who’s presented as a frank invitation to paranoia, a vision of unimaginable futurity – you can almost see him graduating from Zefron to Zac Efron over the course of the film, slotting into the niche that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have carved out over the last decade. Suddenly old enough to realise how much of an asset his youth really is, he flaunts himself with lavish abandon, gyrating through one moral panic montage sequence after another, until it’s like watching an alternative version of This Is The End in which Seth Rogen wasn’t invited to James Franco’s house party, especially since Dave Franco makes an appearance as Efron’s sidekick. And that apocalyptic mentality brings a strangely old-fashioned analog suburbia back into existence, bypassing social and digital media to crouch, paranoid, at the cusp of windows, doors and other fixtures, voyeuristic in a creaky, almost comforting way. Almost, but not entirely, since it’s still driven by brutal, bromantic rage, the siege mentality of an entire genre bunkering down and taking up arms against a new generation.

Siegel: Charley Varrick (1973)

Seeing a great director paired with the perfect actor can always be something of a revelation. Over the course of his career, Don Siegel worked particularly well with Clint Eastwood – they shared a certain clipped lyricism, an ability to cloak brutality in the most delicate poise. In Charley Varrick, his first and only film with Walter Matthau, there’s something of the same synergy, except that Matthau’s infinitely relaxed screen presence perhaps brings out an even suppler Siegel. On paper, it’s a brutal, unrelenting story of a heist gone wrong – Matthau plays Varrick, a small-time criminal who robs a sleepy New Mexico bank, only to find out that it’s a hotspot for Mafia drops. However, it doesn’t play out quite as kinetically as that might suggest, partly because Varrick quickly realises that the best way to deal with stolen Mafia money is to do nothing – don’t spend it, don’t try and get rid of it, don’t confess to having stolen it. Unfortunately, his partner, Harman (Andy Sullivan), doesn’t see things that way, leading to a chilling Mafia hitman, played by Joe Don Wilson, coming after the two of them. Still, you never really escape the sense that Varrick would rather be doing nothing, or that doing nothing is what he does best, and that couches all but the most brutal moments in an ambient, Southwestern haze, aided by Siegel’s exquisite taste for atmosphere and place. At times, it’s hard not to believe that Siegel personally curated the locations as well as the location shots – there’s a contagious relish for street names, signage and other minutiae, while the film could almost play as a sequence of location shots, a photographic record of small-town, Southwestern Americana. Almost, but not quite, since it’s clear that Siegel is a master of dynamic composition – as perfectly constructed as his mise-en-scenes might be, there’s also something infinitely elastic, supple and flexible about them; they’re peculiarly open to unexpected bursts of wind, unchoreographed cars in the distance. And that’s the nature of Varrick himself – like Siegel’s camera, he’s dynamic, buoyant, equally dexterous on land or in air, having worked as a stunt pilot and cropduster before becoming a bank robber. By the extraordinary final car-plane chase, there’s no real distinction between what is airborne and what is grounded – every composition and decision feels architectural and provisional all at once, in one of the most elusive, mercurial masterpieces of the 70s.

Bay: Pain and Gain (2013)

Pain and Gain marks a bit of a break from Michael Bay’s recent ouput – it’s a period drama, set in 90s Miami, about the notorious Sun Gym crime ring, a trio of bodybuilders and personal trainers, played by Mark Wahlberg, The Rock and Anthony Mackie, who kidnapped, tortured and extorted one of their wealthy clients. In many ways, it feels like a return to a goofier, earlier Bay – Bad Boys in particular – which gives it something of an elegiac tone, as if Bay were contemplating and consummating his distinctive style before giving himself over to the Transformers series forever; at times, it feels like his last film as a director before becoming a franchisee in the manner of, say, Bryan Singer. Perhaps that’s why it feels so flamboyantly, extravagantly, anarchically embodied – Bay has long been the poet of the American military-industrial complex, and all his frenetic poetry is condensed here to the buff male body. Shot in convoy, the bodybuilders take their workouts – and their crime – as seriously as military service, and they need to, since they’re continually on the verge of becoming a mere bundle of autonomously twitching muscles; only the most punishing, severe workout routine allows them to retain some semblance of coherence. The Rock, in particular, has never worked better as a swathe of autonomous twitch – he seems to have reached some peak of muscular achievement where his body is exercising without his conscious intention or direction. And the more muscles and twitches dissociate themselves from characters, the more synthetic they seem – it is like watching a digital sensibility gradually dissociate itself from analog hardware, as Bay’s efforts to return to some moment of originary, self-made muscle continually thwart themselves. In that sense, it’s not unlike Nicholas Winding Refn’s yearnings for pre-digital machismo – except that where Refn’s analog bodies are threatened from without, Bay’s bodies feel threatened from within; you sense his bodies have always had prosthetic, synthetic, digital yearnings that the digisphere is just making harder and harder to resist. And, by the end, Bay has oversaturated his mise-en-scenes with so much machismo that testosterone itself feels just as artificial as the lurid, dayglo Miami backdrops – it’s just another exotic drug cocktail that the bodybuilders learn to navigate and manipulate, the intoxicating substrate of this frenetic, fratcore fever dream.