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Reviews
Pet (2016)
Nobody move, or the N****r gets it.
Well written, well acted, well scored, and dramatically shot.
I actually loved it: for sheer originality, it deserves more recognition - and, for services to grand guignol, I have rated it highly.
But the way our heroine ultimately negotiates her escape is worthy only of Mel Brooks.
I don't know - is that a spoiler?
Sundays (2015)
If only investors took risks....
Boy. Some of the subtlest, shaky-cam, CGI I've ever seen. Utterly dreamlike and engrossing. Couldn't catch, by eye, the joins between stock footage, cinematography, and rotoscoping. Gloriously lo-fi soundtrack to match; hugely bold to drop it entirely for the last six minutes.
If Inception had taken proportionate risks, I'd be a Nolan fan for life: it would have bombed at the box office and lived on, a cult: Linux to Apple; cinema's Mozart to Hollywood's Salieri.
All credit to Rozema, Espevold, Bonelli, Mader, Portal, Noval, the innumerable host of VFX artists — and the even more numerous sponsors who took a punt with PostPanic. (I have no personal interest; I stumbled on this by way of a highly competent, but far less risky, rip-off of Blade Runner on YouTube — and took trouble to search the credits here.)
This may be the most compelling argument for crowd funding I've yet come across.
The Man in the High Castle (2015)
Very bold pilot from brand new Amazon Productions (slight spoilers - more of the novel, though perhaps future episodes?)
Firstly, I am hugely impressed by the subject matter. This was a fine, subtle, almost impressionist novel which has waited over fifty years to be popularised; and, for a first attempt at the long-form drama from Amazon studios, it was a truly daring choice. Scott, Semel and Spotnitz have, by and large, met that challenge with aplomb. The trans-American supersonic rocket arrival scene was superbly caught - as was most of the journey through the "neutral" mountain regions of USA. To have pulled off great performances and fine cinematography in their very first pilot is a phenomenal achievement and, were I an investor, I'd be reaching for my chequebook now.
That said, as a lover of Philip Dick in general, and of this novel in particular, I am slightly disappointed that the inspiration which I took from his very first few chapters has so far been missed: in the search for a storyline recognisable to postmodern America, I think they watered-down the message Dick hoped to pass to our quantum-dynamic C21st world.
In 1962, America, though muscular and confident in business, had yet to catch up with Russia (then way ahead in the Space Race, orbiting Earth with male and female cosmonauts - whilst in America, as Tom Wolf observed, only white, protestant males from the macho, conservative air-forces had the "Right Stuff" to take on manned-rocket flight). America may have felt richer than Europe, Russia and Japan, but had much to learn from each culturally.
When Dick's novel looked to Eurasia, middle-east, Africa, and Eastern America, dominated by Nazis, he did not picture the late brownshirt thugs of Horst Wessel, but the thrusting, gleaming, dynamic, oil-, aviation- and rocket-fuelled culture which America itself, by the sixties was rushing to develop. (After all, where did all those Nazi rocket scientists and aviation engineers find employment after the war? Why, Washington and Los Alamos, of course; only die-hard mass-murderers vanished into Argentina.) Yes, Dick's Nazi regime was brutal - but it was far more gleamingly modern than even 1960s USA: and, though his Germany had a slave workforce throughout Africa and the newly-drained Mediterranean, they also had moon-bases and colonisers for Mars.
Far more of Dick's novel was devoted to ordinary Californians; their awe at backward-looking, genteel Shinto Japanese colonisers. That aspect is so far missing from this pilot. Dick's novel does not open in New York, but at that machine shop which (if you were watching closely) was retooled to manufacture fake US Pioneer memorabilia – such as cowboy Colt-45s - to sell to refined Japanese collectors.
If there's another thing we know about old Japanese culture, it is that women do not exude our heroine's overt confidence and strength; the Origami reference to Blade-Runner (a film in which every female turns out to be a male-pleasing android) is undermined by our actual Lara Croft lookalike. In Dick's America, divided between two totalitarian societies, women are now deprived of overt physical, martial, or work-place prowess - and fulfil the rather less than Indiana-Jones-style roles of: nurturing housewife, hostess, sales-girl, mother. Only in the neutral mountain states is there a sense that a girl might know how to fix an automobile.
So I was not impressed that we met our heroine in an Ikedo class among humble Japanese male students; nor would she have repaired alone to any bar - and certainly not one where Californian youth were served by Japanese barstaff. In Dick's novel, the waiters, shop-keepers, mechanics (and, no doubt pool-cleaners) were North-American - working for Imperial Japanese colonisers. It is a key feature of Dick's novel that many hugely admired their colonisers for being refined, enlightened and spiritually aware (especially compared to the menacing Nazis from further East). Reading the novel, I pictured a San Francisco similar to today's; just one in which humble Americans were the ones in service to richly-dressed Japanese. For this to have worked well, a bright and vibrant colour-palate for this city might have been appropriate: Tokyo, even in 1962, was far from dull. And it would have contrasted nicely with the more washed-out, Waltons-esque, backward-looking, 1940s Mountain-Zone in which our TV protagonists meet.
In short, what makes Dick's novel so great, is a lack of the clichéd American exposition about who are the good-guys, 'fighting for freedom', and who the bad. In Dick's, the victorious Japanese were rich, successful and, with all their self-control and meticulous manners, admirable - whilst even the slave-state Nazi collaborators were impressive in their confident modernity. Winning alone decides who will become history's "good guys". Dick offered an underground resistance - but he did not endow them with exceptional good looks and intelligence.
Anyway, I'm reserving judgement. The key thing for me, will be seeing that Semel and co. haven't ditched what I took to be the subtle, underlying crux of Dick's multidimensional message: that, actually, modern America is not so different from his dystopia: rocket-scientists, über-corporations and paranoid, crew-cut-types do finance and govern most of modern America from Dakota to Texas to Florida to Columbia, focused less on Lincoln's constitution than on who runs the Bundersbank; whilst Pacific-Rim hippies, having absorbed Japanese sensibilities, marvel at their own countrymen's widespread abandonment of democratic isolationism for European-style technological, corporate and imperial adventure.
In one disorientating moment, in the latter-third of Dick's masterpiece, his main West-Coast protagonist finds himself very briefly in our modern 1960s San Fran - yet it is barely different: just that the better-dressed civilians are briefly American men and women in Western clothes instead of Japanese; the shop-signs English. This trance-like dimension-shift is unexplained. And that, I think, might be the essence of Dick's multi-dimensional world: no matter which path you take, there are only so many possible outcomes: human destiny (even when discovered with the apparent randomness of i- Ching) will tend to orientate in the same direction. Only when you perceive this, can you chart your ideal course between the societal tides.