Missknee's Blog

Thursday night I raced from work to the cinema to see Micmacs, the new film from Jeunet (Amelie, Delicatessen, City of Lost Children). I’d read the reviews: most of which had criticised it as a bit of meandering storyline and such, but all my friends who’d managed to catch it had said it was brilliant. So I went in with middling expectations, but as is the way, I sided with my friends and thoroughly loved it!

Micmacs is somewhere in the middle ground between the sweetness of Amelie, the darkness in Delicatessen and the righteousness of your average liberal eco-ethical angry person. The sort of person for whom protesting is an art of breaking no nasty laws and simultaneously causing as much difficulty and annoyance as possible. I’m not going to give the story away but the film is great! There are some minor inconsistencies in the reality of what would have happened had anyone actually done all these things, but as a viewer I was thoroughly in agreement with their vigilante manner of justice. The characters were lovely, the props and gadgets were beautiful and the face of the security guard whilst doing some naughty peeping was something that will come back to haunt in my in my nightmares. Jeunet produces cinema with beautiful small details, these tiny touches tell their own stories within the plot. As with many of Jeunet’s films very theatrical with its focus on the body as a physical, lusting object. Something which is sanitized in most of the films you’d see in a cinema these days (I’m not talking about obligatory sex scenes, but rather the physical limitations and possibilities of the human body). If someone ever made a theatrical version I wonder how much they would really have to change.

Disharmony appears in the disturbingly real characters of one of the arms producers (not the one who owns Churchill’s nail clippings), who shouts at his son, lives in a soulless house with an army of posh cars, bullies people and suffers from anger issues. As well as the arms dealers who are planning a coup, their behaviour is so real and disturbing that I felt  very uncomfortable. At first I thought this was an inconsistency in the narrative but I think it could be read that the real world couldn’t help but have encroached into Jeunet’s fantastical world. The worlds of Amelie and Delicatessen are small (sometimes threatening) but always confined within their own carefully constructed spheres, Micmacs seems to accept that these small bubbles are now being transgressed through technology, and that Paris is a world city: simultaneously local France and a focus-point of France’s greater world power. I think this film can be enjoyed on many levels, whether just as a wonderful adventure tale or as a deeper criticism of captalism. If you get the chance rent this on DVD and have your imaginations stimulated, your heart warmed and your thoughts provoked.

(May contain spoilers!)

Last night we went to a cinema in which tickets can be bought for UNDER £4! Miracles! The screen was a lot emptier than I expected, maybe this is due to all the new super-cinenas in town so our little Odeon was forgotten. Kick-Ass was laugh-out-loud funny, and even if it hadn’t been funny, some of the laughter going on in that cinema was. There was a girl on the front left who honked like a duck! But back to the film.

I’m glad I saw it in the cinema, it had excellent action sequences and the gore was quite explosive in parts. Of course nothing on something like Thirst or Anti-Christ, as it was pretty cartoon but I expect that was the idea. I’d read, for my own amusement, the Mail’s review of it earlier in the day. They gave it one star and recommended it for paedophiles and claimed it was encouraging a Jamie Bulger situation all over again. Hilarious stuff, and though the Mail may be delusional and talking out it’s ass, most of the reviews I’ve read have hinged on how uncomfortable the character of Hit-girl made the film for them. Certainly there is something absolutely disturbing in the training of an 11 year old girl to feel nothing when slaughtering people. It was funny in places but I have to agree with some people that the film seems to be marketed at and focusing on a younger audience. I felt a bit old for the film and I’m twenty two. I enjoyed the references made to other things but the problem for me was the loss of integrity (I always wanted to use that sentence.) in what could have been quite a brutal and brilliant story into a classic Hollywood narrative of boy gets girl. The film spent a lot of time beating up the main character to prove that violence is not like it is in the comics or films. Yet the climax is little more than a ridiculous shoot out, thereby making defunct the dry wit of earlier scenes, so the fallibility and idiocy of the main character can validated by the end. He gets the girl… who in any normal woman’s view would have chucked him out after he’d pretended to be gay, but then what woman would let a man she barely knew rub fake tan over her nearly naked body? That scene was setting itself up for an embarrassing erection scene, which could have been hilarious or terrible… 

Kick-ass, our hero, was sensitive and a dunderhead. After experiencing his mother’s sudden death, you think he’d have had a little more sympathy when Big Daddy died. And surely he should have had serious cramps and a huge amount of bruising from the kidnapping, which might have been solved by a bit of pill-popping. I like the idea that Kick-ass might have become completely addicted to painkillers. The narrative was certainly a bit deluded in places, but the filming was superb, I loved the night-vision goggle scene. It was exactly like watching an incredible computer game, and I liked the commentary on the power social networking. To be a better film for me Kick-Ass would have been shorter, less ridiculous and more focused on the damage of stepping into a heroes shoes without any training. Big Daddy was terrifying, Nicholas Cage scares me anyway but it would have been nice to have demaksed him for the psycho he really was. Some of the violence was wholly without retribution, like the deaths of the junkies and drug dealers. After watching the Wire I felt a bit sickened when Hit-Girl thought it was okay to commit mass murder on these social outcasts. But saying that it was thoroughly enjoyable, the best friend banter was witty and there are parts of the film that were just incredible. Like the bit with the microwave. Or the ‘mist-maker’. I just couldn’t quite console my id with my super ego. I wouldn’t watch it again, but it was worth seeing once.

It would appear even disneyland- er, I mean, Wonderland or ‘Underland’ as Burton calls it has fallen prey to the Hollywood narrative, unlike the inevitably destroyable jabberwocky, this feasting nothingness of boredom sat its big fat slimy belly on this film and squeezed the ideas out of it. Maybe my reaction is due to the seminar I’d had on adaptations of Alice earlier in the day, maybe it’s from my basic knowledge of hollywood fantasy films, or maybe it’s the fact that I’ve studied creative writing (granted I may still be dodgy) and I understand the idea of writing to an audience.

Many films have failed where Shrek, the Harry Potter books and the Northern Lights trilogy succeeded: in appealing to an adult and a child audience (mmm profitable!). This dual address (which we’ve been studying) is extremely difficult to achieve and it takes films like Nightmare Before Christmas, Pirates of the Caribbean and… I almost said ‘Up’ then. Seeing as everyone seems to love it. But the pedantic child inside me could not quite grasp the possibility of floating a house, my hours of watching documentaries on tornadoes gave me the impression that American buildings were half-arsed sheds. Which is probably wrong, but still. Buildings can’t float!

Alice. Could have been amazing. But… the storyline tried to focus on a grown-up Alice coming to terms with responsibility, choice, and asserting her rights in a rapidly industrialising world. If you want to do a grown-up alice you make it for grown-ups, you deal with the obscure sexualised images that have appeared out of the Alice cult. (Alice is a fetishized commodity, search on ebay and you’ll find cheap polyester mini-dresses, or classier, but still as short, lolita dresses.) It’s interesting. Really interesting. I’m not talking ‘lets show alice’s sexual awakening’ but Burton tried to hint at pubescent undercurrent. Odd considering Alice was nineteen, and long past puberty. It was just a little half-arsed, maybe this was because Disney was dribbling all over his shoulder. I have no idea. I’m a pedant. I think Burton probably did the best he could do with a studio giant watching his every move. That doesn’t mean I forgive him of course.

But the narrative… Alice must fetch a sword and kill the jabberwock and everything will neatly be solved. This isn’t Alice in Wonderland… that was a surreal tale that interrogated the experience of childhood, the onset of bizarre abstract ideas and the terrifying, bewildering problems of language for children. There was no need for a real plot, Alice’s only aim is to make it home for tea. What happens when a beloved classic becomes a hollywood blockbuster? It becomes a basic tale of coming-of-age, goodies and baddies, taking up the sword and fighting, doing what people tell you sometimes and not always at other. Blah blah blah.

Alice is an english tale; it just doesn’t translate without major issues to American mainstream culture. Issues of class are massively embedded int he text, you need that rancorous, fading, aristocratic heritage, the vile kings and queens and other things of muchlier importance. And these aristocrats don’t need weepy backstories, they need self-righteousness and pomp.  The animals were right when they identified Alice as not Alice. Alice didn’t have a painfully boring dead father story. Oh god. The death of the nuclear family. Such issues.

Burton did try and play with language, but the urge to keep the whole thing PG seems to have put the Hatter on repeat. How many times does one have to be asked why a raven is like a writing desk?! Oh only until it stops being a provocative question, and instead becomes a suitable catchphrase that can be inscribed with sentimentality… don’t you know he only asks this so as to express emotions that he can’t express any other way?! How touching! If only I could stop touching my gag reflex.

Some of the performances were wonderful: Helena Bonham Carter (shame about the backstory, but she was wonderfully mental.), Johnny Depp (if only we could have made friends with all the personalities!), and Stephen Fry (as the Cheshire cat which was the best thing in the whole film! The person who came up with the evaporating, constantly swimming cat is a genius!). Anne Hathaway was part of the way there, but it just required someone more odd looking, more floaty, something between Cassie from skins and Romola Garai and Tilda Swinton or Cate Blanchett. It was just like her character from the princess diaries was taking the piss. She isn’t really a character actress, she’s more of a main character, someone it’s easier to identify with as an everyperson. That’s not an insult, some people are just excellent vessels for films to follow. To be that person who can show enough personality to draw people in to identify with you, but too much so that people can project their own feelings and identify with the character is a difficult balance. But the white queen was not the vessel of our attentions, she was a secondary character. Alice was well acted, no fault there, it was just the painfully obvious dialogue in places that showed how talented she was.

The wonderfully uncomfortable english tea party with crazy Aunt Imogen, Hamish and Hamish’s mother was great. If only there had been more of it. The sympathetic father of Hamish was a big fat narrative device in a jacket, I got the feeling that behind that fatherly smile was a businessman who visited brothels and wanted nothing more than to lure Alice into his boudoir (Maybe that’s just my overexposure to violent and disturbing films talking). But the subliminal message seemed to be that English people are tight arses who like to inspect their hankerchieves for oddly shaped bogies, and what the young Alice wants, is not to make sense of the world, but to escape temporarily into a hollywood narrative and then put aside childish things to become an integral part of the capitalist society. Alice doesn’t want freedom, Alice wants power and money. I think? Or does she want not to be told what to do? Or does she want to tell people what to do!? (Was anyone else annoy by her self righteous pomp as she told poor Aunt Imogen she was delusional) Or does she want to sell the Chinese useless commodities in exhange for opium to fuel her trips to wonderland!? Oh god! I’m so confused. Just like the film.

Still it was alright. Like avatar, see it in 3d or don’t bother at all. Not that I like 3d. We decided that it has too much control over what we focus on, I wanted to be gazing around in awe and I could only stare at Alice’s face. And it doesn’t look 3d. It looks like a series of cardboard cut-outs placed one in front of the other, if anything it reminds me of the fact we are watching a screen. 2D was adequate, it was like looking through a window, much more realistic. And they keep throwing things at the screen. If I wanted to be scared by people I’d wander about my house in the dark waiting for someone to jump out at me. It’s like when you play with a dog and you pretend to throw the ball, then laugh at it when it flinches and looks bemused. I don’t like being that dog.

I went to The Brewery in Bedminster, Bristol last night which is part of the Tabacco Factory (I think) and saw Publick transport’s new theatre production. I was very excited since I’d missed their previous show (I think it was called 50,000 leagues under the office?) and this was set in the office of Russian civil servant. My favourite kind of setting! The whole thing was hilarious from start to finish and theatre suited them perfectly, it was intimate (if a little cold). The accents were brilliant or brilliantly dodgy, didn’t matter anyway because the dialogue and timing was perfect. Jokes which might have failed in another context went down a treat. I don’t want to spoil it ( I think it’s still touring for a few more weeks) but it involves two men in an office trying undermine each other. Things occur such as a nose turning up in an odd place, language is turned on its head and you will truly believe these men are mad. No pun intended. (If you watch the show you’ll get that!)

I also saw the wonderful Pepino at the Golden Lion, they have new songs which are wonderful and should be up on their myspace at some point very soon: www.myspace.com/pepinoband They had a great solo from Leo the lobster. We then spent an hour outside playing the game where you replace a word in the title of a movie or song with the word Ovary. Ovaries of Steel, Ovary’s Eleven, a Fistful of Ovaries. The list goes on. And on. And on. Passion of the Ovary.