I often go to watch cheesy Hollywood movies: I probably watch about as many Hollywood films as I do foreign or independent arthouse movies. There’s an unspoken assumption that Hollywood movies are terrible, whereas arthouse movies are somehow more worthy, if occasionally boring. Well, if reading Roland Barthes has taught me anything, it is that any subject matter is fit for scrutiny. I also think that films succeed or fail on their own terms, so Hollywood movies may be generic, but that doesn’t mean they are all equally good or bad. Often the familiarity with the action/thriller/ sci-fi genre means that it is easier to identify things which are a deviation from the norm, and that’s part of what is interesting. ‘Arthouse’ cinema (an awful term) is usually more original, and Hollywood generally has a parasitic relationship with it. But there’s still an awful lot of poor movies in this category.
This month I saw two Hollywood movies at the cinema: Limitless and Source Code, and two european films: Les Petits Mouchoirs (Little White Lies) and Essential Killing.
Limitless was the most enjoyable of all four of these movies, mainly because of its extremely satisfying premise: a pill that allows the consumer to instantly fulfill their potential. Now I can imagine marxists, neo marxists, pseudo marxists and even Karl Marx getting annoyed by this idea: I mean the whole idea of advertising pushing the line that you have unfulfilled potential and are basically unhappy in order to sell you products. All I can say to that is that they already tried socialist realism and it didn’t produce very much good art. Whenever I read a critique of a movie or book or album or whatever that criticizes the politics of the art, rather than the expression of the art, I get a bit uncomfortable. There are people who profess to like The Clash, for example, because it’s supposedly not middle class, and it expresses raw political angst. I suspect these people just like the music and are trying to justify their arbitrary taste by other means. So politically suspect or not, Limitless is a lot of fun. It’s basically a superhero movie, by another name: a guy finds a way to obtain super powers, and then spends the rest of the movie trying to deal with the positive and negative effects of those powers. The one unusual device I noticed in Limitless was the use of a voiceover to explain the story to the audience. Now I’ve always regarded this as a pretty lazy device, and I think Limitless could have done without it, as it prevents total immersion in the story, as you are constantly reminded that you are being told a story. Another slightly unusual aspect of Limitless was the ending, which allowed the hero to carry on taking a performance enhancing drug in the way he had been doing throughout the whole movie. Now most of the time, Hollywood films come with a strict message: you are who you are and any attempt to better yourself through artificial means will ultimately fail. Limitless breaks that convention, by letting the hero get away with an immoral act that profits himself. In that sense, it’s an emotional heist movie or a comedy.
Source code is another gimmick movie, in this case the gimmick being that a guy has to go back and relive the same 8 minutes of a fatal train journey countless times, until he finds the bomber. It was a slick, well-made, ridiculous movie, which at times got - believe it or not- repetitive. It was all about time travel, altering realities, and parallel dimensions. What’s possibly worth focussing on with Source Code is the backdrop to the movie, which is war in Afghanistan, fatally wounded soldiers, the general exploitative and dishonest nature of the US military and government. We’re back in the 1970s again, post Watergate, in other words. Source Code is an independent movie trying to be Hollywood, or vice versa. It has an incredibly depressing premise, but also a need to leave the viewer with a happy ending. The contortions that the plot goes through to get to this stage might be too much for some people.
Speaking of Afghanistan, I saw Essential Killing, a film which sounds like a Hollywood movie, but isn’t. It’s about a terrorist in Afghanistan, who is picked up by the US military, waterboarded, rendered to Poland (is that the verb) before escaping. The rest of the movie is like a less-good version of Herzog’s Rescue Dawn escape sequence. It’s the familiar trope of man-layed- bare, struggling to survive, just killing and eating and running. I suppose it’s possible to infer some interesting stuff about our common humanity or the necessity of killing for survival, but I got a bit bored. There isn’t any dialogue in the movie either, which doesn’t help. We don’t get to know anything about the hero; we couldn’t really care less about him by the end of the film. Is that the point? Hollywood would have taken this film, stuck another act on the end, cast someone charismatic, thrown in a love interest, and made him turn out to be an undercover CIA guy being framed by his own boss.
At the bottom of the pile is Little White Lies. I actually enjoyed this film for the first two hours, which follows six irritatingly self-obsessed Parisian friends on a holiday retreat by the sea after a (brutal, predictable) accident which puts their friend in hospital. There were some problems with tone: at times, the director plays it for laughs, with one of the characters running around obsessed with weasels in the attic, and mowing the lawn at six am. But at other times, the film wants to be a realistic drama, with piercing insights into the characters’ lives. I actually got to like the characters after a while, which is quite an achievement, since, for the first hour or so, I was wishing they were dead. Sadly, the last half hour undoes all the good work of the first part of the film, and I wished them all dead again, and since it ends in a cemetery, that would have been serendipitous. The soundtrack, which consists of popular hits, starts to become more intrusive, so that nearly every scene turns into a music video montage. Then the revelations start: the film has about four or five dramatic scenes in which characters confront each other. Finally, the guy in hospital kicks it, and the friends all go to his funeral, hence the cemetery. In a horrific scene, which will live with me until my own funeral, I expect, all the friends gather whilst Nina Simone sings My Way in the background. After lots of moving speeches, one friend races late to the funeral (no explanation given) not wearing a suit (emotions don’t need formal dress) and pushes his way to the front of the crowd. He is carrying a bag. For some reason, i thought it was going to be full of fish. Unfortunately it was full of sand. From the beach where they all used to... Yes, yes. Then the soundtrack cranks up, and all the friends put their differences aside and start crying and hugging each other like some twenty-tentacled emotional octopus. My expression, by this stage, i noticed, had frozen into a rictus of repulsion and I had to leave the cinema lest I vomit on the person on the seat in front. Ghastly.
