Tag: GREY MATTERS (Ian Grey)

By Ian Grey
Press Play Contributor

[Editor's note: This review of the new version of The Thing contains spoilers. Read at your own risk.]

Forget Drive. Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr.’s prequel/re-think of John Carpenter’s classic is easily the most intelligent genre film of the year, and the best horror film in I don’t know how long. Like Nicolas Winding Refn’s failed vision, it uses genre elements in all sorts of ways — except in van Heijningen's case, it's for good reason.

Van Heijningen lets us know he loves the cinematic source material as much as the rest of us; his Thing opens with the ‘80s Universal Pictures logo, a familiar John Carpenter-type credits font, and slices of the 1982 film's immortal, minimalist score by Ennio Morricone. But in contrast to Refn’s shiny noir-like toy, this Thing eschews fetish for its own sake, and moves on to real, scary, even triumphant human places. The first act cuts, pastes and reconfigures Carpenter’s iconography with new cinematic elements. It’s downright symphonic, and its classicist approach to postmodernity multi-tasks by doing what genre does best: acting as stealth cover for talking about things we mostly can’t discuss without genre.

Instead of Carpenter’s U.S. military base, we’re at Thule Station, a Norwegian scientific encampment in Antarctica where nobody is going buggy with cabin fever, because, say what you want about socialists, they at least take care of their peeps in horror prequels. The head of Mission: Thule is an asshole, Dr. Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen). To help excavate something strange beneath the Thule site, he hires Dr. Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) because she’s smart and junior enough to treat like crap; this helps the rest of his crew better understand their place in the pecking order.

Van Heijningen's Thule base is all about hard work, but it's also about the camaraderie of the group, which includes an upbeat French Canadian woman (Kim Bubbs), and is thus a far cry from Carpenter’s claustrophobic male purgatory. But the good vibes don't extend to the American helicopter team members (Joel Edgerton and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) who serve as walking, talking homages to the original film’s iconic Kurt Russell/Keith David duo. And there's tension between Kate and a weaselly blond named Adam (Eric Christian Olsen) — but whether that's the remnants of an affair gone bad or just because Adam's kind of skeezy, I can't say.

Even with a dick like Dr. Halvorson in charge, the crew is stoked about what’s under the ice a few miles away. (Van Heijningen recalls that Carpenter's film had a signifying song, Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” and one-ups him by having a worker play “Who Can It Be Now?” by Men at Work. That’s two ironies for the cost of one song.) You know what comes next: a vast alien ship is discovered under the surface along with something trapped in the ice above it, trying to make its way out ….

Matching a similar scene in Carpenter’s film for sheer, nail-biting craftsmanship is one where a team member, urged on by Dr. Halvorson despite Kate’s repeated warnings, drills the ice to obtain a tissue sample. We watch the drill bit slowly enter the ice, and in an extraordinary bit of sound design — perhaps as good as that pioneering analog work done in the original by the great Warren Hamilton — we are treated to a symphony of foot movements, rustling jacket material, crackling ice, intakes of breath, and then … nothing.

And then the merriment at discovering alien life begins — as does delightful group drinking and dancing, complete with Norwegian folk music. But Kate? She smiles, nods along, but she’s just not one to give in to the moment. By showing her reserve and thoughtfulness — not exactly prominent features in American film — director van Heijningen and actor Winstead silently make their case for why Kate will be the person of the moment when the chips come down.

Meanwhile, there’s yet another threat; it's us Americans. Throughout the film, there’s a low-key tension between the Scandinavians and the Yanks. Later, Adam cravenly wimps out on Kate’s findings at a crucial juncture; this will lead to more deaths, and an American will accidentally kill a Norwegian; none of this will help international relations. As if to allay viewer fears that they're reading too much subtext into the film, subtitles confirm that a character is yellingm “The Americans are the real enemy!” Later, when some Americans survive, a Norwegian aims his gun at them and yells, “Don’t move, demons!” Bush-era blowback? Anger at the very idea of U.S. exceptionalism? The film's disoriented anger is inarguable, and adds another layer of paranoia.

Knowing he can’t eclipse Carpenter in the slow build, van Heijningen shock-destroys the party with explosive chaos. Watching The Thing, I was 12 again, seeing my first horror film and riding the thrill — the weird liberation at having total anarchy reign. No shit, I forgot to breathe. What a rush. Perhaps that’s why I’m oddly protective of this movie. Is it as good as Carpenter’s? By new film's halfway mark, the question no longer applies; at that point, it is Matthijs van Heijningen’s The Thing.

He improves on Carpenter's creature and his hero. Creature effects masters Tom Woodruff, Jr. and Alec Gillis perform cover versions of original effects master Rob Bottin’s greatest hits while updating the idea of The Thing itself, which looked like pissed-off abstract art. Woodruff and Gillis’ Antarctic Lovecraftian monstrosity is superficially similar to Carpenter and Bottin's, but there’s a design logic to how it functions, specifically in how it splinters into smaller but still deadly versions of itself. The film's biological specificity lets us imagine where the creature might hide. Van Heijningen’s Thing is just plain scarier than Carpenter's.

And its protagonist is more interesting. The director found somebody born five years after Alien was released, someone who had no interest in playing an assembly line badass, tomboy or tough. Courting hipster media disaster, Winstead plays Kate as — her words in an interview — “smart … strong and kind of put together” and decidedly not “neurotic or shrill … the things we [women] are in movies.”

Despite the ambient fear of America and Americans, the crew members trust and cleave towards Kate. Why? She represents some kind of class revolt against those at the top — namely the head dick, Dr. Halvorson. But there’s more to her than that. Kate is easy to trust. The others have watched Kate observe and process the whole crisis. The know that she identifies problems before others do, and asks for input, and comes to useful conclusions before everyone else. They stick with her for the same reason Kate stays alive: because she's smart.

I keep returning to my negative opinion of Drive because in the way it uses, or fails to use, genre, in many ways it's The Thing's polar opposite. While I consider Refn’s Valhalla Rising and Bronson as two of the last decade’s bravest, strangest, most singular films, I think Drive encapsulates much of what is wrong, even poisonous, in mass culture. The treasuring of unearned irony above all things, the embrace of genre out of laziness, the reduction of human behavior to wading-pool pop psychology, the viral acceptance of the Zooey Deschanel option as a desirable identity kit: it's as if a great artist made contact with American culture and the aesthetic part of his brain just fried. Drive pales in comparison to near-great genre film art like The Thing, especially in its pitiful excuse for a lead female character: a damsel in distress.

Kate's character in The Thing builds on a type perfected in Ridley Scott's original Alien over 30 years ago. She also reminds us that the brand of feminism that James Cameron showcased in Aliens and Terminator 2 drew on butch, top-girl fetish. Kate's character is an update and a corrective to that vision of action heroines. Just as van Heijningen’s camera is so elegant that you don’t notice any filmmaking! going on, Kate requires no big movie moments. Even in that giant, labyrinthine alien ship, events take place in confined, metallic, intestine-like spaces in which a woman’s smaller body mass is a plus for survival. In the end, van Heijningen makes a final nod to the film that spawned this onel he also adds a witty twist that’s symbolically tied to Kate being female that separates it from Carpenter’s macho bleakness. When facing the Final Guy who may or may not be an alien, Kate doesn’t want to spend her last moments freezing over a bottle of Scotch. She wants to live. In its own weird way, The Thing is optimistic.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. His column "Grey Matters" runs every week at Press Play. To read another piece about Drive, with analysis of common themes and images in all of Refn's films, click here.

By Ian Grey
Press Play Contributor

Have you seen Homeland? Claire Danes plays a C.I.A. operative whose failure to deliver on some intel possibly led to the 9/11 attacks. Now she's half crazy in her obsession with tracking a Marine (Damian Lewis) held by terrorists for eight years. Why wasn't he killed? Has he turned? What kind of threat does he represent — if any? It's a superior show in every way, a risky Manchurian Candidate for the terror generation, but right now my heart just isn't in it, because I just saw You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo. Already, I fear people are tuning out: "Oh great, more about that." But bear with me, because it just isn't often that one sees, in real time, the systemic shattering of a child's mind by American-led forces, a ruination that continues to this day. Homeland takes real chances, but the only thing you can do with Luc Côté and Patricio Henríquez's heart-wrecking documentary is endure it. We will examine both works, but for now, I just want to talk about Truth, which takes a look at a Canadian named Omar Khadr.

At the age of 15, he was recruited to a compound in Afghanistan by his militant father, and in July 2002, U.S. forces attacked that compound. Army medic Christopher Speer died. Omar was horribly injured.

Recall that after 9/11, Vice President Cheney claimed sweeping rights to spy on and torture anyone he so desired, with impunity. Any part of the Constitution dealing with civil rights as it related to suspected terrorists was dissolved. And so Speer's death went unexamined, and was instead pinned on Khadr.

Canadian authorities gave Omar to the Americans as a sort of ritual offering. He was sent to Bagram Air Base and summarily tortured by American experts before being dumped down the moral and legal black hole that is Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. At no point was he formally charged or given the right to representation, never knowing if he would ever be released.

Côté and Henríquez's film centers on a recently declassified seven-hour "interrogation" of Omar. We see him in blurry low-resolution video, a slight boy bewildered and trapped in three video quadrants, the lower right one left an unnerving black. Occasionally the Montreal-based filmmakers cut to footage of freed co-survivors from other American torture sites; all exhibit an eerie calm. There's also gut-wrenching testimony from Omar's mother and sister; empathy and clipped outrage from Lieutenant Commander William Kuebler, Khadr's military council and a conservative clearly disgusted that lawless big government crawled from the id of the Right; and Damien Corsetti, once the Army's "King of Torture," now seething with acid shame over sins you'd need Dante to catalogue.

But for the most part, we watch this boy whose Atlantic accent betrays an achingly sweet disposition. At first, he's almost jaunty when his interrogators show up (Canadians, their faces covered with digital black circles), thinking that he's finally being delivered from the Americans. But they're actually C.S.I.S., the Canadian version of the C.I.A. They ply him with offers of Subway and McDonalds, air conditioning and fluids.

For four days they systematically crush him, and we come to see that these "interrogations," these grueling sessions away from family and friends in constant terror that the American torturers will return, have little to do with fighting the War on Terror and everything to do with the interrogators. One ex-victim compares them to "salesmen whose job is on the line" — getting their subject to utter what they need to add to valueless reports that justify their employment. Seriously, what information could a child offer up to anyone a year after doing nothing in particular with people he didn't know?

I thought of the film The Lives of Others, of dead-souled East German Stasi ticking off boxes on a report as they force the answers they do or don't desire. And yes, I thought of Homeland and — this is essentially silly, I know — I got angry at it. I thought of a scene where Lewis' Sgt. Nicholas Brody takes off his shirt to reveal those awful torture scars. Morena Baccarin, playing his wife, weeps, showering him with kisses and love. In Truth, Omar also pulls up his shirt to show his tormentors his still festering torture wounds and, in pain, begs for medical help. With astonishingly glib cruelty, they mock him and tell him to be a man.

If history requires a single scene to summarize the stupid evil of Cheneyism and the uselessness of torture, it's that of Omar finally breaking. His interrogators say they want the truth. Omar begs them to please, tell him which truth they want, any truth, and he'll tell it to them. But they say they think he's lying.

Omar snaps. He curls into a fetal position, begging in Arabic for "Mommy, oh mommy." Disgusted, the monsters turn off the A.C. and leave him alone in a room that must stink with terror-sweat. The filmmakers do not cut away. He doubles up, his body wracking. "Mommy, oh mommy." It goes on and on, brutal beyond the telling of it.

The day after watching Truth, after accepting that its subject matter would never gain wide American distribution, I then wondered about Homeland, which is still a genre show — and I like genre TV. I believe it often functions best when it uses symbols and metaphors as tools to present the terrible and morally intolerable. But even with characters and situations as complex, conflicted and cruel as the show is already offering, there's something essentially safe about Homeland, even as it pushes hot buttons.

Then there's the show's central conceit that Danes' character would be be driven to illegal ends to spy on the Manchurian Marine. Until the show bends to reality and incorporates/updates its characters' and institutions' positions in the lingering torture and wiretap infrastructure, the idea that Danes' character would encounter any resistance to discretely eavesdropping on any single security risk will continue to feel like something ported from a dreamland, or, put less charitably, a fig leaf of never-mind pasted over the lingering horror of the terror state.

Just by existing, Homeland is doing its genre stealth work. Viewers who will never know Omar's story are being confronted with a show ballsy enough to show an American soldier tortured so horrifically that he beats his friend — an African-American soldier — to a bloody death. But even so, the series is localizing the disease: just one Marine destroyed by Others years ago. While it starts a conversation, Homeland's convincing vérité may also be an ornate means of denial. Omar's life still ticks away behind bars. Guantánamo is still open.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. His column "Grey Matters" runs every week at Press Play. To read another piece about Drive, with analysis of common themes and images in all of Refn's films, click here.

By Ian Grey
Press Play Contributor

Drive is an empty bully of a film, and its creator, Nicolas Winding Refn, is a swindler, a Generation-Whatever Malcolm McLaren whose proven high-art skills are completely absent in this U.S. directorial debut.

The film coerces audiences through an overwhelming, belligerent accruement of cultural stuff, including the bogus gravitas of sophomore semiotics, alluring but irrelevant fetish objects, and Jeopardy-level allusions to high culture. Such elements are meant to make the audience feel clever while watching this film as a beyond-hip house and synth-pop soundtrack reminds you that your CD collection could never compete with it. Cravenly expecting you to buy into all this nonsense, as well as the notion that there’s nothing more hardcore-Sartre than a fairly agreeable man-child in a shiny white satin jacket, Drive banks on American aesthetic insecurities and the tendency of some viewers to fill empty-canvas art with invented meanings. Refn’s interestingly terrible film is as close to being nothing as you can get while still having something to run through a projector.

Meanwhile, the monoculture buzz surrounding Drive has nothing to do with a sudden mass desire for the latest from the bright lunatic who gave us the gorgeously transcendent but exhausting Valhalla Rising and Bronson, a convulsively inventive, incredibly brutal film about the horrors of deformed masculinity that never forgot the broken humanity of its eponymous antihero. No, Drive instead suggests a new brand of cool, one created when an infantilized strain of Comic-Con and fanboy culture discovered serious film. It's fanboy haute couture, with its prettified coloring book simulation noir a safe pre-adolescent fantasy dotted with Mattel Hot Wheels, Peter Pans and Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Ryan Gosling, who already played a child-man in love with a doll in Lars and the Real Girl, is the perfect actor for this adult baby world.

But back to nothing. In his quest for maximum nullity, Refn’s given us a film noir that isn’t, a ‘love story’ that never materializes, and an action film with little of it shot in arty-explosive bursts — a sort of fancy-schmancy chaos cinema — instead of the rhapsodic kinetics of a Peter Yates (Bullitt) or Paul W.S. Anderson (Death Race). And for the plot, Refn — working from a screenplay by Hossein Amini, based on James Sallis’ novel — goes for the barest of bones.

(NOTE: There is one spoiler here.)

Drive is about a quiet young fellow (Gosling) with the best kid leather driving gloves money can buy. He wears that aforementioned satin jacket, the back of which sports an embroidered scorpion patch, and sports impeccably cut hair, presumably kept in place with products that contain lots of petroleum. Nobody asks him his name and he doesn’t give it; perhaps he saw Walter Hill’s The Driver at an impressionable age.

Nameless Driver works as a stunt driver in the movies while taking less savory gigs at night. His boss (Bryan Cranston) hooks him up with a mobbed-up scum bag played by Albert Brooks, who’s faintly interested in the idea of Driver tricking out a car so he can race it somewhere. Meanwhile, Driver also meets and likes a Manic Pixie named Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her kid (Kaden Leos). He likes the mom enough to help prevent her violent, ex-con, loser of a husband (Oscar Isaac) from getting killed due to some amorphous shit he did in the joint.

All of this leads to a robbery that goes astray. A redhead played by Christina Hendricks gets her head blown off and Driver, his girl Irene and her kid all end up as mob targets of one sort or another, with our boyishly laconic wheelman arguably becoming a default hero defined by the film's supporters as existential, because he doesn't seem to care if he bleeds to death.

Let me clarify that I do not hate or even dislike this film, and god knows I’ve projected myself onto some blank canvasses. And there are tiny pleasures here. The painstakingly assembled electronica soundtrack by Cliff Martinez and a variety of other like-minded artists really is terrific and at times even threatens to become a sort of audio libretto to what’s not happening on-screen. The give-and-take between Brooks, Cranston and Ron Perlman offers the sparkle of old pros having a hoot, although Cranston’s performance can meander into overly twitchy weirdness.

As for the media gush about Albert Brooks playing a schmuck — I’m at a loss there. I mean, Albert Brooks has always played a schmuck; the only difference is that this time, he likes to slice people open with a straight edge razor.

Speaking of blood: I’m guessing the rationale of hiring Hendricks was that such a high ticket attraction would dupe viewers into thinking she was — how silly — a character, and not something to attach squibs to. Still, her obliteration is nothing compared to anything that happens in any given True Blood episode and yet cineastes out there are making like Refn is the second coming of Peckinpah. He isn’t. With his sudden splats, cutaways from violence and skilled sound design, he’s more like the new Tobe Hooper.

In other news, Refn’s newfound infatuation with semiotics is, if nothing else, proof his perversity didn’t die crossing Hollywood and Vine. Portentous signs and images are everywhere. For no known reason, the Los Angeles City Hall building overlooks scenes like the Eye of Sauron. A shot lingers on a super retro “BIG 6 MARKET” sign. Other signage announces “Godless America” like a sore thumb of lameness. It’s a real heart-sinker when you think how previous Refn films — fearless, strange, conceptually conflicted on purpose — actually dealt with Big Themes — Nature vs. Essential Human Identity, Identity vs. The State — as opposed to the theme at hand: Dane director dupes Americans hungry for Next Big Thing.

Meanwhile, at the screening I attended, I heard caws about noir this, and later read stuff about existential that. As a noir, Drive is a non-starter because there is no malign fate pushing Driver into a dark corner, no fatale, no awful thing that won’t stay in the past. No-Name Driver has a hard time of it because he constantly makes stupid decisions. So does Eric Cartman. Does that make South Park noir?

Meanwhile, Driver likes driving, and lives pretty much as he pleases, which would seem to preclude any thoughts of existential suffering or even mild world-weary question-asking. That is, until his boneheadedness returns, and then he’s just blasé about it, making him a hipster with a defeatist streak.

Actually, there is one great scene in Drive. It sits there, out of place, like a Post-it for Refn’s next, good film, the one that would actually meet the height requirement for film noir. Driver and Irene are in an elevator. Some terrible darkness in Driver’s gut says the other guy in the elevator is bad news, so he just up and starts beating the crap out of the guy as the elevator dings at Level 1.

But Driver can’t stop beating up this guy and we hear his victim’s skull crumbling as Irene looks on in horror at the monster that her Peter Pan has revealed himself to be. Their eyes meet, Gosling gets that woebegone, lost-boy Gosling look, and the audience is forced to ask themselves: What if he just killed some guy who never hurt anyone? What if the hero’s boyishness covers a real monster — and the hero doesn’t even know it?

A movie like that, that’d really be something.

But until we see it, the sporting thing to do is congratulate the young, hot director for his canny entry into the American market. Drive is indeed an impressive feat of hocus-pocus. Nicolas Winding Refn has accomplished the impossible — that of selling a film on the merits of qualities it so plainly doesn’t possess.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. His column "Grey Matters" runs every week at Press Play. To read another piece about Drive, with analysis of common themes and images in all of Refn's films, click here.