Future Shock: The Story of 2000AD (2014)

Long before dark and moody superheroes were all the rage, 2000AD was presenting a bleak, funny and subversive take on the comic genre. Future Shock does an excellent job of gathering together many of the names who created and nurtured the magazine, and presenting their funny, astounding and, at times, contradictory stories of how it all happened.

We see the rise both artistically and commercially, as it strikes a chord with 70s readers through strips such as Strontium Dog, Halo Jones, and the legendary Judge Dredd. We also get the lows in the 90s when a dip in the quality of the writing, coupled with poor management and jaw-droppingly stupid marketing ("Women just don't get 2000AD") nearly saw the comic fold.

Watching the parade of faces, it's astonishing to think what a school of talent 2000AD has been, from the early days of Alan Grant, Alan Moore (absent in person, but instantly recognisable in photographs) and mainstay Pat Mills, through to the 80s and 90s eras of the likes of Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison.

The main thing the documentary achieves is placing 2000AD into a historical and cultural context. The original group of writers and artists all say how the grim world of 1970s England, with strikes, food shortages and riots, along with the angry energy of punk, all fed into their stark vision of the future. In turn a generation of writers, film-makers and musicians have all had their lives and imaginations shaped by the comic. This ranges from modern writers such as Lauren Beukes, to musicians like Scott Ian from Anthrax (who wrote I am the Law about Judge Dredd) to filmmakers like Alex Garland (who wrote and produced the second and far superior Judge Dredd film) and Richard Stanley, whose 1990 film Hardware borrowed so liberally from a 2000AD strip called SHOK! that the lawyers had to get involved.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014)

Although Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is often little more than talking heads interspersed with clips, the jaw dropping stories, both on and off the screen, coupled with the contrasting, larger than life characters of maverick studio heads Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, makes for riveting viewing.

Golan's early life was spent learning the ropes in the Israeli film industry, before teaming up with his business minded cousin Globus and moving to Hollywood. There, they proceeded to do what many film producers before them have done, taking the latest movie trends or news stories (Operation Thunderbolt was based on the Entebbe hostage crisis) and churning out cheap and cheerful product that people wanted to see. By 1979, they were in a position to snap up Cannon Films, and spent the next decade filling cinemas and video stores with a mix of quickly made, quickly shot action flicks, (often starring the likes of Charles Bronson or Chuck Norris), thinly plotted cash-ins on the pop culture phenomenon de jour (such as the mega hit breakdancing flick Breakin' and it's sequel Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, which gave this documentary it's title), and, surprisingly, occasional forays into the arthouse. All these were helped by an efficient marketing machine, churning out lurid artwork and film titles. 

 

They also had strong links to the horror genre, having started with slashers such as Hospital Massacre and New Years Evil, before teaming up with Tobe Hooper for the likes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and the vampire/zombie/apocalypse/nudie oddity Lifeforce

Without the participation of Golan and Globus themselves, the film relies on those who worked alongside them in front of and behind the camera. Some of the anecdotes border on farcical, my favourite being Golan's demand that he get "that Stone woman" for the 1985 Indiana Jones knock-off King Solomon's Mines. Sharon Stone was duly cast, the film was shot – only for Golan to be horrified at his leading lady – he meant Kathleen Turner from Romancing the Stone.

Three things soon become apparent; firstly, the speed that many of the films were produced at, coupled with Golan's inability to stop coming with ideas, regardless of relevance to plot or character, meant that a lot of them were not always as good as they could have been. Screenwriters who had crafted tightly plotted stories found their screenplays jettisoned in favour of random action spectacle at the editing stage. Still, without that willingness to try anything we would have been denied Ninja 3: The Domination, which manages to cash in on Cannon's existing success with Ninja films, as well as ripping off Flashdance, and putting in a possession storyline straight out of The Exorcist.

Secondly, it didn't matter one jot about the quality, audiences lapped them up. This coupled with Globus keeping a tight rein on the purse strings, and the tried and tested business model of pre-selling films that had not been written yet, meant the money flowed in at an astonishing rate.

Thirdly, this success clearly offended some people in the Hollywood of the mid 80s, who regarded the crude noisy studio as lowering the high tone set by the likes of Top Gun and the Police Academy franchise.

The documentary also sheds light on the Cannon studios indulgence of some of the top arthouse directors in cinema, bankrolling films by the likes of John Cassavettes, Barbet Schroeder, Franco Zeffirelli and Jean-Luc Godard. Unlike their more commercial product, with the highbrow material, Golan and Globus seemed happy to let the artists get on with it undisturbed. The results were as mixed as their less intellectual efforts. Cassavettes' Love Streams, Schroeder's Barfly and Zeffirelli's Othello all garnered critical acclaim, but Godard's take on King Lear is a tedious baffling mess.

Inevitably, our heroes fly too close to the sun, and stray from their careful business model. Overreaching themselves, they tried to move into comic book and toy franchises, snapping up Superman, and Masters of the Universe. Both had millions spent on them before having budgets slashed (leading to Milton Keynes doubling for Metropolis) and both tanked at the box office. The final straw was the aborted attempt to make a low budget Spiderman, to be directed by Tobe Hooper, an attempt that never got in front of the cameras, and by 1988 they were bankrupt, and the movie world was a duller place.

This is not the first time Electric Boogaloo director Mark Hartley has explored a specific strand of weird and wonderful cinema, having previously made Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed, which covered the exploitation films of Australia and The Philippines respectively. Here he manages to sort the crazy tale into a coherent and fast moving narrative, resisting the temptation to show off visually, letting the stories and clips tell their own incredible story.

It's easy to sneer at Cannon Films and their output, but to me they simply follow in the tradition of the likes of Roger Corman, giving people what they want (and letting people behind the camera get a foothold in the movie industry). This torch has been passed nowadays to the likes of the Asylum Studio, but although the business model may be the same, their end product usually feels too self knowingly ironic and sanitised for my taste, lacking the unhinged insanity of a Cannon classic.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Midnight (2014)

Equal parts brilliant and exasperating, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Midnight borrows liberally from lots of clichés and tropes in vampire and indie cinema, and puts them into a new context. Ultimately, though, it fails to develop them any further, and ultimately feels like a short film overstretched to feature length.

The emphasis is more on mood than plot, but what story there is revolves around a fictional Iranian town, where a female vampire is stalking the residents – the difference here is that the vampire wears a chador (a traditional Iranian cloak) and rides on a skateboard.

Director Ana Lily Amirpour has a great eye for visuals and the film looks and sound great, steeped in creepy and off beat atmosphre. It owes much to the eccentric and indie side of 80s American cinema, directors such as Lynch, and Jarmusch especially, and stylish vampire films like The Hunger. It is shot in black and white and looks, everybody smokes, characters meet at a run down power plant and the vampire lives in a bedsit festooned with posters, listening to vinyl.
 
However, the style overwhelms the substance too often and for too long and too many scenes drag on with people staring at themselves or each other while whole songs play, and it begins to feels at times like a music video or commercial. 
 
The vampire is interesting, as she is not presented in the clichéd overtly sexual way. There is sexual imagery and a metaphorical castration involving a finger – but perhaps ultimately she represents something heterosexual men find threatening – a woman who is indifferent to and uninterested in them.

Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

Magic in the Moonlight is an affable, distracting, but ultimately unsatisfactory effort from Woody Allen. The whole thing looks great, the actors do a good job with what they are given, but the central premise is spread far too thinly to carry a feature length film, and the dialogue is clunky and awkward.

Colin Firth plays Stanley, a world famous illusionist, better known as Wei Ling Soo, who is roped in by an old friend and fellow magician to unmask a psychic, Sophie (Emma Stone) who is preying on a wealthy friend of his. At first, Stanley thinks this will be a simple task, but as he gets more involved, he finds himself starting to doubt his materialistic worldview. Could Sophie really have the power to talk to the dead? In addition, could Stanley be falling in love with her?

The problem, as is so often the case with modern Woody Allen films, is the script, which feels rushed and poorly thought out, and fails on several levels. Firstly, the central idea, essentially "is it a bad thing to believe in an illusion if it makes you happy?" is interesting and thought provoking, but thinly stretched over a feature length film. Allen has done multiple storyline films before, such as Hannah and Her Sisters or Crimes and Misdemeanours, and maybe that approach would have worked better here. To his credit, despite Allen’s well known atheist leanings, he does not lecture or polemicize in the script.

Secondly, none of the characters feel as though they are real people, and are only the doing the things they do because the script says so, not because that is what the character would do. Stanley’s conversion from devout atheist to true believer in the afterlife is not in the slightest bit convincing, (especially given his “thorough” testing of Sophie seems to consist of one séance and her telling him things about his beloved aunt), and neither is the idea of a love affair between Stanley and Sophie.

Thirdly, is the dialogue, which is grating, clunky and artificial sounding, something that perhaps reads better on a page than coming out of somebody's mouth.

Finally, and I have no idea if this is done for budgetary or artistic reasons, but there is far too much “tell don’t show”, with interminable scenes of characters explaining what has happened off screen, or how they feel, giving some of the film a turgid lifeless feel. Noticeably absent is any version of "The Woody Allen character", a staple of his films, whether played by Allen or an impersonator such as John Cusack in Bullets over Broadway. This character can usually be relied upon to inject some life into any situation, with his neuroses and collection of good one liners (another element missing from this film - it simply is not funny)

However, if the script is lacking in depth, detail and poetry, then the production design certainly is not. The costumes, cars and country estates all look wonderful, but beyond that, help to make the Great Gatsby meets Wodehouse world completely believable. The music, another staple of Allen films is well chosen, a mix of well-known and more obscure big band songs from the era.

Sadly, though, these elements on their own cannot save the film, and Magic in the Moonlight goes on the "pleasant but forgettable" pile of Woody Allen films. A shame, as he has shown with Blue Jasmine and Midnight in Paris that when he spends a bit of time crafting the script he can still make interesting, thought provoking and funny work. The Allen juggernaut roles ever onwards with shooting underway on his latest film, so, who knows - maybe next time?

Under The Skin (2014)

Under the Skin is one of the creepiest and most unique films I have seen in a long time. Despite the originality and thoroughly modern trappings, however, the success is down to a mix of some old fashioned tricks and techniques, and a brilliant lead actress.

Scarlett Johansson plays an extra-terrestrial, on earth, specifically Scotland, for reasons left unspecified in the film, whose life revolves around luring men into a van, taking them back to her flat and killing them. However, the longer she stays on Earth and the more men die at her hands, the more she starts to understand human beings - is she starting to turn into one?

Although the bare bones of the plot may make it sound like a rip-off of something like Species (or even Devil Girl from Mars, which also has a female alien hunting Scottish men) the key to the film’s success is in the highly original execution. The style flits between extreme realism and highly stylised (and gore free) murder sequences, where victims slowly disrobe and walk into an inky black lake before realising too late that they are literally and figuratively, out of their depth with this woman.

However enticing the idea of Scarlett Johansson stripping and seducing men may sound on paper, this is not a titillating or even erotic film. The seduction is a means to an (admittedly unclear) end, and her character seems to take no obvious pleasure in what she is doing, seemingly locked into an emotionless, joyless, stoical struggle to survive, a sharp contrast with the men she picks up, who are after sensual, physical pleasure.

The scenes of her interacting with the real world become all the more startling with the realisation that many of the people she mixes with, both in and out of her van, are not actors, with director Jonathan Glazer using hidden cameras to capture the footage of unsuspecting participants, who don't seem to recognise they are being chatted up by a Hollywood star. The blend of real people and actors is so seamless that when a group of feral teens attack her van I honestly could not tell if it was staged or not. Hidden camera TV shows, capturing genuine reactions from the public, have been around for decades, as have guerrilla filmmaking techniques, but to see the two blended together so seamlessly is quite disconcerting and disorientating. Johansson stays totally in character throughout, and seems unfazed by anything thrown at her, including some very thick Glaswegian accents, but as with so many aspects of this film, it is tough to know what is “real” (i.e. spontaneous) or “fake” (rehearsed).

For all the contemporary themes and techniques however, the storytelling is done almost entirely through the images, and editing, techniques and anything we learn about the alien, we learn through watching her actions, with dialogue irrelevant or non-existent.

All this is backed by Mica Levi's eerie discordant score, mixing high pitched strings, ominous rumbling noises and percussion, lush synthesizers, and, during the seduction scenes, a pulsing hypnotic rhythm. This mix of live instruments with treated sounds and electronics is entirely in keeping with the mix of new ideas and old techniques in the film.

There are a few laughs to be had to amongst the death and chills, laughs which mostly come from unexpected details in a scene, such as one victim who, in the middle of his slow motion seduction dance, whips off his trousers to reveal a particularly revolting pair of underpants, or simply the sight of Scarlett Johansson sitting in a council house living room, eating beans on toast, watching Tommy Cooper repeats.

Ultimately, what may derail enjoyment for some, as much as the disturbing subject matter and glacial tone is the stubborn refusal to explain every detail, but what that does mean is that Under the Skin is wide open to personal interpretation. My favourite way of looking at the film is as a symbolic representation of the filming process itself, with Scarlett Johansson, the being from another planet (Planet Hollywood), landing in the real world and having to assimilate to a strange people and a new way of life. This gets an extra layer of interest thanks to one recurring character, a mysterious man on a motorcycle, who sources the alien’s clothes and is always one step behind her, clearing up the mess and aftermath of her activities, in much the same way as minders and PR people smooth things over for Hollywood celebrities.

Under The Skin is not a film for anyone after uplifting, transcendent art, or easy shocks or titillation, but a work this distinctive and provocative deserves a look. With cinemas as full of loud empty spectacle as they have ever been, it is a pleasant surprise to see something that speaks so much by often saying and doing so little.