PERFECT SENSE – d. David Mackenzie, UK/Sweden/Denmark/Ireland, 2011

This is another film I watched on a long-haul flight, so the viewing conditions were hardly great. However, as far as I could tell, despite my initial scepticism as I started watching it and realised what it was ‘about’, it ended up being a surprisingly intriguing and moving film that I really enjoyed, and actually did feel moved by.

Both Ewan McGregor (Michael) and Eva Green (Susan) are excellent, and the cast overall works well. I could’ve done without the setting up of Susan and Michael as hopeless singles who are nonetheless destined to fall in love, and generally felt the start of the film was quite rocky. It does, though, quickly move to being more convincing and more engaging, and when the futility of Susan’s job (contrasted with the initial way Michael and his colleagues start to address what’s happening to people) becomes evident, the film takes on more depth: no explanation is offered for what happens to people’s senses, and the emphasis is very much on how different people respond to it, and what it might ‘mean’ in a more existential, or even ontological, sense. It is in that way I think more interesting than other films about the actual or potential end of the world as we know it – from disaster films to zombie films to something such as Signs (d. M. Night Shyamalan, 2002) – and also does more (at least on film) with ideas around different senses and synaesthesia than does even an interesting film such as Blindness (d. Fernando Meirelles, 2008). Its focus on everyday, mundane things such as what we eat - and how important taste is to us, and how it's in fact far from mundane when it's taken from us, and how people realise that and cope with it - well, that alone is probably worth watching this film for, especially as what we eat is used as a pwerful metaphor for all sorts of other aspects of our existence, the environment and bodies within which we exist, and our attitudes towards them. ("Fat and flour", indeed!)

The poignancy of the ending works, which surprised me, even as I’d been drawn in as the film goes along: it was not quite the ending I expected, and was all the more powerful for that. The whole film, in retrospect, was thoughtful and engaging and makes one think about the importance of our particular ways of being embodied in the world, and what might happen – literally and metaphorically – when we mess too much with the world in which we have to be embodied, in order to be.

PREMIUM RUSH, d. David Koepp, USA, 2012

I just saw Premium Rush – a movie about bike messengers in New York City who get caught up in some illegal dealings involving a crooked cop and a (legal) immigrant friend of theirs… Didn’t sound like it’d be up to much, and also started out feeling VERY much like Crank… But ended up going in quite a different direction, although being stylistically interesting in some sometimes slightly similar ways (good ways, I might add!). 

The film is really well cast, I thought. From the one true bad guy (Michael Shannon; who managed to be remarkably sympathetic – quite a feat given just what a ‘douchebag’ his character in fact is) to the central protagonist (amazingly, a young white guy! ) and his fellow messengers and bikers – not to mention the cycle cop and the kids on school buses – there were no real cracks in the acting. The cycling politics were interesting (especially when our hero has the bad guy shouting in his face that everyone in the city hates him – which is possibly true! – and when, in passing, we see the aftermath of what happens when messengers use the sidewalk instead of the road)… But interesting not just about cyclists’ place vis-à-vis cars and pedestrians, but also in terms of the motivation and risks to those who choose to cycle at breakneck speed around Manhattan rather than work in an office… and how significant those motives are to their involvement in the cyclist community. It’s not deep or anything, but it is thoughtful(!).

And while there is – of course: *yawn* – an element of ‘romance’ to the film, whereby the main female protagonist is introduced to us largely via our hero, Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), she is at least an excellent cyclist and an active participant in the narrative as well as the action: she (Vanessa, played by Dania Ramirez), like Gordon-Levitt, is also immensely engaging and likeable, which certainly helps. The visual (re)presentation of the characters is also not too bad when it comes to gender: Vanessa wears a sleeveless top, sure – but also, loose shorts like Wilee, and she’s not overly objectified, ‘even’ in scenes where she easily could be (such as the flashback sequences in a bar). Similarly, the film avoids sexualizing/objectifying its other key character, Vanessa’s roommate Nima (Jamie Chung), who walks around in flats and plain work clothes. (Nima is, though, very much a female character in terms of her role, and the particular predicament she’s in that sets off the film’s core narrative.) And even if the gendered stuff seems okay, nothing is simple: it’s fellow bike messenger Manny (Wolé Parks) who wears a vest and tight lycra shorts – and Manny is, you guessed it, a Black guy. He’s also referred to (by Wilee) as being ‘roided up’, and is framed as a sexual predator, albeit not an aggressive one. In contrast to them all, Wilee predictably remains un-raced and un-gendered in that he’s just who he is, dressed in loose shorts and a t-shirt, with his physique correspondingly treated just that bit differently from both Vanessa’s and Manny’s… So you know, it’s not as if there aren’t some issues around the film’s representations of both gender and race – but it could be one hell of a lot worse!

Actually, it might be. The way the Chinese are ultimately represented is... problematic at best. But at least interesting-problematic, rather than just crappy-problematic. (And it maybe gets away with it because sympathetic or not, Michael Shannon's bad guy really IS bad!)

Oh and the action in this movie is pretty great. I really enjoyed the cycling scenes – even the ‘race’ between Manny and Wilee, and even when Wilee uses his cycling skills to send the poor cycle cop flying!

A fun movie, some nice action, and an interesting take on cyclists and how and why they do what they do. Also, Wilee’s bad luck with sandwiches did elicit my sympathy – as did, of course, the play on Wil E. Coyote and the Road Runner inherent in his name (even if Gordon-Levitt is not quite Tommy Lee Jones!).

THE BOURNE LEGACY – d. Tony Gilroy, USA, 2012

I have very little bad to say about this film, but not that much especially positive either. To be fair, the latter in particular could be because I saw it too late at night, but who knows! 

In essence, I liked Jeremy Renner, I liked Rachel Weisz, and was very happy to see Zeljko Ivanek (whom I remember always as Ray Fisk in Damages) in the movie. I also liked how they had Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) back in the film (in a scarily convincing turn of events), and Oscar Isaac (of whom it was all too easy to believe his only sin was to have fallen in love!)…

What I did not enjoy, though, was the really rather boring and repetitive central heterosexual ‘romance’ around our Bourne-esque protagonist and his partner-in-escape; nor the glaringly conspicuous ‘united colours of…’ aspect of the movie’s having various ‘diverse’ ethnicities represented across the range of Treadstone/Outcome agents (and even a woman, shock horror): really, WTF is the point, anyway, when the film is in fact focused quite intently on a young white male with a number of similarities to Matt Damon? None of these ‘faults’ can be laid at the door of the actors – Renner included, who was excellent. However, the lack of thought and range of diversity of relationships (as much as ‘colour’) did detract from the whole thing, for me.

And don’t get me started on the Asian Terminator-like character…

The fight scenes were a bit crappy, too (not helped by the iddiot jock sat right in front of me who guffawed in that moron-like way only they can EVERY frickin' time someone got hit. Gah.): they were over-edited and as a result there were too many flailing limbs and insufficient evidence of actual fighting. Hardly a major cmplaint, but when the action is about the most exciting thing a film has to offer, it really should be better than it was in this one!

The echoes of Renner’s role in The Hurt Locker were also slightly problematic, and set up a slight dissonance, I think, which was a shame.

All that said, for what it was (and it was nothing special), the film was interesting and had plenty fun parts, and some great acting. It also acknowledged that the early parts in which wolves are apparently tracking human prey is not the norm (the suggestion being that perhaps the Bourne clones aren’t ‘human’), which I appreciated – having been pretty pissed off when the early scenes implied that’s what wolves do. (In fact it gave me flashbacks to sitting through The Edge (1997, d.  Lee Tamahori), in which a bear chased Anthony Hopkins and a Baldwin brother relentlessly, and made me wish it would just eat them already, to get over the ridiculousness of it all.) 

Really, I just wish it had mixed things up a bit: much as I love Weisz, I just would’ve been that much more interested in a film that had her in the crazy doctor role, and  Ivanek on the run with Renner. Now that would’ve been doing something new and interesting!