Big Trouble in Little China

Big Touble in Little China

Director ~ John Carpenter

Writers ~ Gary Goldman, David Z. Weinstein, W.D. Richter

1986, US

Stars ~ Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, Dennis Dun

 

Certainly, when I first saw it, I didn’t get the joke. Oh sure, ‘Big Trouble in Little China’ was amusing, but I was in my later teens that the mainstream and VHS were saturated with American super-machismo: Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Van Damme, Segal, etc. This is before I got any nuance from the first two. This film seemed of a piece with scene and I didn’t register the satire. Certainly Kurt Russell knew the assignment and pushed more and more for this to be a send-up of the Swagger Saviour that he himself had earned a reputation with. Not least of all, with Carpenter himself, having played Snake Plissken and MacReady in ‘Escape from New York’ and ‘The Thing’.

 

It becomes apparent that there are two films going on: firstly the wuxia homage taking place in an American city with a huge heap of the supernatural where Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) is the hero; and then there’s the film that Jack Burton thinks he’s in, being the John Wayne star when actually he’s a truckin’ blowhard that is culturally out of his depth. This where the film’s longevity and cult status comes from, as it wasn’t originally much thought of due in part to a studio that didn’t get the joke and, surely, some audiences too. If the portrayal of Chinese culture is a little broad, well this is broad strokes humour and homage and there is no meanness or condescension here. The humour is almost exclusively at the expense of the Jack Burton, although it is neither mean nor condescending towards him either. It feels more like the gentle ribbing between buddies rather than derisive mocking.

James Berardinelli’s review seems confused at the film’s irreverence and that Burton seems to get more screen time in the service of the joke; actually, he’s just louder and wants to make it all about him. Similarly Kathleen Carroll seems bewildered by its scatological nature, resorting to descriptions such as culturally specific cuisine  zingers as “stir-fried mess” and “as impenetrable as chop suey”, whatever that means. Hal Larper is more on-the-ball with “A campy, convoluted series of outrageous adventures that careens through an imaginary world for two hours before depositing you, breathless, back in your seat.”  Nobody familiar with the likes of ‘Mr. Vampire’ or ‘House’ will be surprised at the bonkers silliness, although its monster inflections and tone are more in place with the likes of ‘Ghostbusters’ .

The dodgy/dated 80s effects, ludicrous street tuff posturing and wuxia pile-ups has proven ‘Big Trouble in Little China’ more a cult favourite with time, its mash-up aesthetic sustained by a concentrated satire which perhaps proves more in tune with later zeitgeist further attuned to genre and culture medleys. Distinguished by its refusal to be mean-spirited, ‘Big Trouble in Little China’ remains happily irreverent and fun.

 

The Immortal & Gomorrah: the series

The Immortal

Director ~ Marco D'Amore

Writers ~ Leonardo Fasoli, Maddalena Ravagli, Marco D'Amore

2019, Italy-Germany

Stars ~ Marco D'Amore, Giuseppe Aiello, Salvatore D'Onofrio

 

Robert Saviano’s book ‘Gomorrah’, about the Neapolitan Mafia the Camorra, is an outraged diatribe against the influence organised crime has on ordinary citizens, the fashion world, etc, etc. There is a section about how the gangsters started imitating films; for example, how a female gang started dressing like The Bride from Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’, or how one crime lord wanted a bath like Pacino’s in ‘Scarface’. There is perhaps no better symbol for Saviano’s disgust than when he reports that he pissed upon that bath when researching.

 

The Italian TV series very loosely based upon the book is more soap opera, but despite lots of garish often tasteless jumble to symbolise wealth, there is never the sense that these people are happy or joyous. There’s little showboating because they’re too busy being morose, plotting and grim to cosplay films. There is little glamourisation of the lifestyle. Soap opera miserabilism helps to convey that this is not a life of contentment: after all, for all the garish trimmings, nearly everyone ends up dead.

 

Since the look and feel of the series ‘Gomorrah’ tended towards the cinematic by nature, this spin-off film resembles an extended episode, but for that there’s no disappointment. This film is directed by its star, Marco D’Amore, so the look and feel is of a piece. The show stuck to its staples: people facing-off constantly; men glaring into each other’s faces, close enough to kiss; women quite often toxic and enabling; men swaggering; women crossing their arms disapprovingly; occasionally characters will decry their lot or swing between declarations of loyalty and angst. Our main man Ciro (D’Amore), for example, says little but occasionally laments his existential loneliness and lack of feeling. Occasionally, the actors get to flutter vulnerability and lost humanity on their faces; and sometimes it is unintentionally amusing as posturing tends to be.

 

This spin-off tells the tale of what Ciro was doing while season four was taking place, the difference being that we get flashbacks to when he was a little proto-gangster orphan shit. It’s not a show with much sympathy, being more fascinated with the politics and betrayals with a little weepiness over male bonding. If the crucial ingredient with Ciro is that he was a mystery (but don’t cross him), then the flashbacks perhaps attempt to give him some context or motivation, but it also reaffirms that he was always thus and no crush on an older girl is truly a redeeming backstory.

 

Marco D’Amore continues smouldering as Ciro and his work as director on some of the episodes, and this certainly doesn’t scare the horses or go any deeper. This doesn’t have the outrage of Matteo Garrone’s original film, nor, for example, the deconstruction of machismo, mythology and fighting that Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Battles Without Honour and Humanity’ series, but ‘The Immortal’ follows the format of the series. You won’t get the moral challenges of ‘The Sopranos’ or the jaw-dropping facts of 'Narcos'. But as with the series, most of the cast are scumbags so guilt levels and empathy is not a high demand; the betrayals are thick and occasionally surprising, the turn-over is high, the pace swift, the locations of backstreets and alleyways are excellent, interspersed with beatific panoramas of the city.

 

It all makes for diverting gangster soap and this film fills in the last jigsaw piece from the series.

 

Late Night With The Devil

Late Night with The Devil

Writers and Directors ~ Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes

2023, Australia - United Arab Emirates

Stars ~ David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss

 

With this kind of horror premise, there’s only one likely way it will go. And it does, so it is the journey and the execution that counts. Instead of the trending Eighties homage, Cameron and Colin Cairnes go to the Seventies for an era of talk show TV and Satanism. There’s plenty of Seventies aesthetic but played straight instead of kitsch; although it becomes evident quickly that the live and “backstage footage” doesn’t hold up, being too evidently clear and edited for maximum effect to be convincing. And then there’s the disappointment/outrage at AI usage for the transition cards, which at the very least seems lazy. Long before the denouement, the film has jettisoned and kind of “found footage” credulity pinned by the opening narration (Michael Ironside!) summarising a tumultuous decade and the never-quite-making-it career of our central show host. It becomes apparent that any demand for sincerity or continuity as found footage is shrugged off whenever it needs to, even before and especially when we get to the worms. ‘Ghostwatch’ it isn’t. It sets up and then breaks its own rules. If you can’t make allowances for such shrugs, enjoyment will be crimped.

 

 

But what it does have is pleasureable period detail, a little satire on backstage melodrama and fame,‘The Exorcist’ and theremin gags and, mostly, David Dastmalchian. Dastmalchian manages to convey subtlety in a role that could have been just showboating and/or obnoxious in a context where he is always on show. When someone says he’s a good guy, it’s easy to believe that he is misguided rather than egotistic. Everyone projects layers of real characters underneath the televised veneer, even hammy clairvoyant Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), for a broad-strokes producer, Josh Quong Tart (Leo Fiskewhen); and we get to the apparently possessed girl, Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), she’s obviously doing the Creepy Kid thing from the outset, talking like someone half her age, that there is nowhere for her to go. It all escalates into a few shocks and reality breakdown which jettison once and for all the TV format pretence.

 

It's true that this has mostly been heavily guided by gripes about internal logic, but with ‘100 Bloody Acres’, the Cairnes brothers made it clear they are out to offer fun and extremity in equal measure, and there’s plenty in ‘Late Night with the Devil’ so that any shortcomings don’t stop the enjoyment. They know how to serve up a most entertaining horror concoction.

 

 

 

The Zone of Interest

 

 

The Zone of Interest

Director ~ Jonathan Glazer

Writers ~ Martin Amis, Jonathan Glazer

2023, US-US-Poland

Stars ~ Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Johann Karthaus

 

“What are you looking at?”

“Teeth.”

 

Glazer’s film is full of tiny moments that are simultaneously mundane, surreal, quotidian and chilling. From the moment that daddy steps out in uniform, to the way the son keeps glancing offscreen hinting towards a horror that we shall know of presently, to the giggly “Queen of Auschwitz” boast, the way these men discuss optimising their industry, and countless other instants. And that’s the point. Glazer talks of how his research showed up nothing truly remarkable about his central couple, except their ordinariness. Just an ordinary couple making their dream of a privileged life come true.

 

Except that couple are Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, the former the commandant of the most infamous of Nazi death camps. Possibly more than any other film, it requires you to bring with you a knowledge and a revulsion of the horror, one that is never seen but is heard and colours every inane utterance of dialogue. The closest we get is a close-up of Rudolph’s stern/indifferent profile (the skull on his collar) as the screams and terror of his workday play out around him, sounding like Dante’s inferno. And indeed, it is the aural film that we never see that terrifies. Johnnie Burns’s sound design and sound department works just as hard and effectively as anything onscreen for the increasingly disturbing effect of industrial noises and the constant, increasing pops of gunfire. Never have commonplace lives in extraordinary contexts been so repellent. 

 

Inspired by Martin Amis’ book, Glazer eschews narrative – this is virtually melodrama free, there’s barely a story (slight anxiety and friction when they are told they must move, developed from witness accounts) – wary of the tricks of cinematic fiction. The agenda is to avoid the comforts of screen dramatics, less this cheapens the disgust at this Banality of Evil. You will not find the tension and suspense deployed by the skills of Spielberg in ‘Schindler’s List’ here. Glazer vocally does not favour these for this truth. Some atrocities should not be seen. Rather, ‘The Zone of Interest’ utilises almost Brechtian techniques from the start: the credits roll but the screen is left black as the music progresses, forcing the viewer to abandon their need for the film to hurry up and get going. No, you must engage yourself, and this prolonged start is forcing you to slow down, to meet the film’s agenda. Instead of emotive music that will hold your hand, there is Mica Levi’s startling blasts of noise that certainly feels more akin to a horror film (similar hair-raising trick as her score for ‘Monos’). There are subtitles to piano, lyrics that the player is unaware of as she plays. There is thermal night vision for a digressive story of a girl at night leaving apples for prisoners to find. There is a vision of the future that brings home the scope and numbers. In other films, these devices might be as disruptive, as distracting as 3D, but here they serve to remind you that you are actively watching a dramatization of one facet of a vast atrocity, that you must not disassociate yourself from the role of witness. 

 

But it’s gorgeous to look at with a warm, clean palette that appeals to the desire to rewatch; it’s a challenging and haunting viewing but not gruelling in any explicit sense. It has the attractive look of old photographs achieved with naturalistic lighting (that dress looks the same green as the grass). This fidelity to natural lighting is also the reason for the thermal/night vision. And then you learn that they actually filmed in Auschwitz and that they filmed using cameras positioned around the house, “Big Brother” style. These are technical details that further impress and raise the material, and the more you know inspire repeat viewings.

 

 

A Jewish friend of mine said that his experience of watching the film was visceral, that it made him feel unsafe to watch, that he “shouldn’t be there”, and added that another of his friends reacted the same way. I would posit that watching people go about their ordinary lives while perpetrating and living adjacent to atrocity provokes a particular terror; fear of their standardising it, or giving it normality, leaving an appalling helplessness for the victims. Equally scary as malevolent men in uniform. Mark Kermode says, “I don't think this is the banality of evil. I think it's the kind of screaming silent horror of indifference or callousness.” And it’s hard to disagree with that, that absorbing atrocity as everyday life is terrifying, although it happens daily whether near or far.

 

In discussion, I have found myself spiralling out into relating the basis of the film to Goebbels’ ideas of propaganda and how that relates to advertising and business. And see how the nice clean look of the Höss’ home resembles the lifestyle magazines of aspiration very much. The faintly fractured presentation and non-reliance upon cinematic suspense and narrative leaves plenty of room to contemplate and ruminate, to spiral out into interrogations of civilisation, during and long after Mica Levi’s final choral assault.

 

A masterpiece not only of filmmaking but a success of artistic morality, then. Come armed with fear and outrage.

 

Out of Darkness

Out of Darkness

Director ~ Andrew Cumming

Writers ~ Ruth Greenberg, Andrew Cumming, Oliver Kassman

2022, United Kingdom

Stars ~ Iola Evans, Arno Lüning, Rosebud Melarkey

 

Horror tropes in a Stone Age setting makes for a freshening of familiar material. There are deep shadows, conflicts in the group, noises in the dark and a pit of bones and remains. The mood is dour and desperate with the wide-open spaces just as threatening as the claustrophobia of the dense forest. Its most impressive and distinguishing feature is the invented language that the characters/actors speak – called “Tola”, invented by Daniel Andersson and based on Arabic and Basque, a defining highlight that is akin to the linguistic attention and ambition of Robert Eggers. It certainly sounds meticulous and convincing. But this conceit doesn’t crimp the pace as Ruth Greenberg’s script and Oliver Kassman directs to tear through the familiarities and with the accent on characterisation. 

 

This is a group not of familial bonds but one brought together by despair and necessity. They are not the usual two-dimensional characters that this kind of scenario can coast on, although the script is clear to make clear how their identities are subsumed by hierarchy and their designated status in the social unit. They are recognisably layered outcasts, defined by the roles they must play and the conflict this has with their deeper personalities. This is then the point, an attempt at a realistic rendition of the brutality needed to survive and at the basis of civilisation.  

 

In this way, it makes this tale of a burgeoning civilisation an introspective, pensive, and credible one. ‘Out of Darkness’ emerges from its use of tropes to make a commentary on the brutality inherent in the survival and brutality of civilisation, developing as a headier excursion than it seems to superficially begin. It’s this that elevates it more than just its entertaining allusions to horror.  If not quite exceptional, a little bit of a minor gem.