adamarts Reviews

Figures in a Landscape (1970)

Stagey and austere at the same time

[6/10 · 28 March 2012]

It's difficult making films which rely on a two-hander at their heart... especially when that film is pared back so much that the two actors have no interaction with anyone else anywhere in the film. In Figures in a Landscape, the intensity of the relationship between Robert Shaw and Malcolm Macdowell aspires to Waiting for Godot, but comes across as occasionally contrived and hokey. It seems that Robert Shaw himself adapted the screenplay... there is constant banter between the two main characters, but the verbal set pieces come across as being too theatrical. Malcolm Macdowell has a monologue about their being animals, but what is really lacking is the animus in these characters, the id... if they had the instinctive cool of the spaghetti western - a genre invoked by the film sharing the mountainous Andalucian landscapes of spaghetti classics such as Cut-Throats Nine (1972) - this would be a superior film. The classic Italo-Spanish spaghetti westerns also always intercut the terrains of the human face in close up and the badland landscape, and, curiously, close ups of the actors are almost absent in this film.

That said, a film in which two fugitives run through a landscape hunted by a black helicopter and a faceless army has to be pretty cool in its own right.

Slow Action (2011)

Weak and underwhelming artist's film

[2/10 · 27 March 2012]

Artists' film is a genre in its own right, and may not fulfil an audience's expectations in the same way that other dramas and documentaries might. There are good and bad artists' films, and the occasional glorious hybrid that brings an artist's sensibility to 'conventional' filmmaking - Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg is an example of that.

Ben Rivers' Slow Action is an artist's film which aspires to be a modern take on the cinema genre that threw up landscape films such as Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana. It does not come across as being an awful artist's film - it's more or less technically competent, and the artist has had the fortune to visit some exotic locales in which to film. But it is a very weak artist's film that fails to deliver on the promises of its landscapes/cinematic time/literary texts.

Put simply - the first three parts of the film are visits to a volcanic landscape on the Canary Isles, a low-lying Pacific island, and an abandoned coal mining town on an island off Japan. The camera frames up a handful of landscape shots in retro-chic anamorphic 16mm film in each location, and monotone voices read monotonous texts on the soundtrack.

The annoying thing about it as an artist's film is that, lazily, this is all the film does. The literary texts used are rubbish, and their juxtaposition over the landscape shots - without connection to anything in the image - is the obfuscation of weak art.

The final section of the film - people in 'tribal' masks goofing around in Somerset countryside - is just appalling. It's so bad, I've blotted it from my memory.

Overall, this is the sort of artists' film that seems to appeal to public sector funders and art programme curators - a bit of far-flung exoticism, a bit of retro filmmaking grammar. But, for an audience, it comes across as conservative, leaden plod through what should be a stimulating, challenging genre.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Rather less than the sum of its parts

[6/10 · 27 March 2012]

I've not read the book or seen the original Swedish film, but I'm more than willing to go to the cinema to see a new David Fincher film... more often than not, his films have impeccable cinematography and sound design. These are both present in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but, as a film, I found it underwhelming and verging on genre silliness. The film it reminded me of the most is the Charles Bronson vigilante drama Death Wish... here, our lead actress (who plays an unknowable, almost Bronson-like cypher) is violated and seeks revenge. The violation is nasty, fetishised and dwelled upon by the filmmakers for too long, and the revenge is comic book and simplistic.

This 'cause then consequence' narrative structure continues throughout the film - it's very formulaic. The plot about dark family secrets is rather stodgy, although it would like to be edgy, like the Danish dogme melodrama Festen. There is excruciatingly awful dialogue in the sex scene between Daniel Craig and The Girl, the climactic action scene underwhelms on a genre level, and the long, drawn out coda had people in the cinema heading for the exit early.

Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)

Kind of misanthropic but fun

[8/10 · 27 March 2012]

The thing about watching a film like this at a time when the American high school genre has moved on to the much rosier visions of Napoleon Dynamite and Glee is that it strikes you how almost every character is a flawed, unlikeable person. Sure, you feel sorry and empathise with Dawn, the main character, but she's equally willing to bully, and doesn't have saving graces like the standard US school film geek - she's no brainbox.

The guys in the film are portrayed as far less vindictive than the girls - bad boy Brandon has a sort of rogue honour, and the main fault of the other males in Dawn's life is that they are obsessed with doing their own thing or else following expectations laid down for them.

It's a very watchable film - more so than Todd Solondz's later works. It looks like the work of an embittered outsider, but at least an outsider who, like the main character, tries to do their own thing against the odds.