The Battery

The Battery, written and directed by Jeremy Gardner, is a zombie film which follows two former baseball players as they wander the desolate backroads of New England.  Reportedly made for a mere $6,000 (£3,500), The Battery is a shining example of what all micro budget filmmakers should aim for: an engaging story with solid performances and a filmic approach that suits the tone of the movie.

Rural locations are a favourite of low budget horror directors.  The authorities are usually nowhere to be seen, leaving your actors free to run round bashing in each others heads in relative peace.  And if you're trying to represent the world after some terrible catastrophe, heading out into the countryside gets you away from all those neatly trimmed lawns and tidy streets.  The problem is that a lot of movies make it feel painfully forced.  It's often obvious that the location has been chosen for practical reasons and has little to do with the story the audience are expected to buy into.  The result is that we can often feel disconnected and drawn out of the film world which the characters with whom we're expected to identify inhabit.

The landscape of The Battery works entirely in its favour, with Gardner's locations encapsulating the characters and providing a convincing environment through which the two heroes can wander.  This is how locations should work - as characters themselves, contributing to the story and blending seamlessly with the actors.  Like good effects work, you should never be able to see the join.

Another thing that horror movies are notoriously bad at handling is sex and depictions of gender.  Gardner's movie features the obligatory heterosexual 'sex' scene but he's admirably found a way of covering the ground in possibly the most original way I've seen yet in a zombie flick.  The scene opens with wanderer Ben cavorting naked in a waterfall before cutting to a low dolly shot following the bare legs of a young woman.  What follows is certainly unusual but perhaps perfectly natural.  Or maybe that says more about me than the writer.  Calling Dr. Freud.

Although shot using a DSLR on an incredibly low budget, DoP Christian Stella's handheld approach to filming The Battery is consistent and engaging, making you feel as if you're on the road with Ben and Mickey without being over stylised or distracting.  Alicia Stella and Michael Katzman's editing is well judged, giving the film a bouyant pace and providing the right opportunities for scenes of horror, drama and comedy to shine through in their own right.

There's one particularly long shot near the end which is a bold move for a low budget zombie horror but fits perfectly in a film which, in many respects, has more in common with slow cinema's existential dramas than it does with more fashionable exploitative gore fests.  The Battery makes the same claim as many zombie movies - diverse characters trying to survive each other as much as the undead hordes.  Most films never live up to the promise, with unskilled directors favouring blood over brains.  Gardner, however, has succeeded where most others have failed.  He and his fellow filmmakers have crafted an existential zombie film, where the heroes wander the land trying to figure out who they are now and whether or not they have any purpose in whats left of the world.  In this respect the long shot of Ben sitting inside his car near the film's end is the perfect reminder of how intelligent and well-crafted low budget horror movies can be.

McCullin

McCullin is a portrait of Don McCullin, a photo-journalist renowned for his harrowing images of human suffering from the streets of London to the jungles of Vietnam.

McCullin came from an impoverished background, growing up in the grit and grime of post war Finsbury Park.  It was here that he began photographing his world, a world of violent hoodlums, streetfights and murder.  One photo, of local gang 'The Guvners' posing in the shell of a bombed-out factory, was published by The Observer newspaper, becoming what McCullin now calls his "ticket out".  Inspired by the now famous photograph of an East German soldier leaping a Berlin barricade to the West, McCullin took himself off to Berlin with an amateur camera and no commission.  Given his paltry equipment, the images he brought back are simply stunning.  And so began a career that was to take Don McCullin into some of the darkest and most disturbing corners of the earth.

McCullin is composed of contemporary interviews with the photographer cut together with newsreel footage, his own photographs and archive interviews with McCullin.  Filmically it's incredibly simple, a great advantage which allows the haunted McCullin to captivate.  Given his experiences, it's incredible that he has made it to the age of 75 without self-destructing.

Don McCullin is a man who clearly continues to be troubled by questions of morality, not specifically by whether or not he could have done more to help but of the value of photography itself.  Despite being one of the few photo-journalists to actually spend time sharing the mud and blood of his subjects' lives, it still bothers him that his photos haven't made much of an impact on the world.

Adressed in the film, by both McCullin and Harold Evans, his former editor at the Sunday Times, are the sweeping changes that have taken place across the media since their heyday.  As McCullin points out, when Andrew Neil was appointed editor of the Sunday Times, war and famine were out and lifestyle features were in.  Advertisers, to whom the press are beholden, don't like their fancy cars sitting next to pictures of mangled bodies.  It's a sad fact that bold humanitarians like Don McCullin remain tormented by doubt while people like Andrew Neil, who should feel guilty for denying the true horrors perpetrated by the wealthy against the poor, sail off into the sunset without a care.

Dundead line up (plus a couple of others)

The Cabin In The Woods
Inferno
The Divide
The Errand
Blood Feast
Dracula
Babycall
Videodrome
Cat People
The Raid
The Fog
Ponyo
Meloncholia

Most of what I watched in April was at the excellent Dundead Horror Film Festival held at the DCA.  In fact it's everything on the above list with the exception of Ponyo and Meloncholia.

One highlight of the festival for me was The Cabin In The Woods (you can read my review of it here) which is an excellent film and, only because I'd be on iffy ground calling anything 'original', one I'll describe as highly innovative.  Despite this, the film makes a wealth of references to other movies, most obviously Westworld.  The fact that it manages to do so and not come across as too clever for it's own good is a pretty fine achievement.

Another highlight was Videodrome which I hadn't seen in a long time yet pleasantly surprised me with how relevant it still is.  James Woods watching VHS tapes on a player the size of a shoebox doesn't matter; meaning takes precedent over the style and technology of the era making Videodrome a great reminder of what intelligent mainstream cinema should look like.

The only rotten film at Dundead was The Raid, an Indonesian action flick directed by Welshman Gareth Evans.  Okay, first things first.  I'm a martial artist and have been for the last 9 years.  I train in Wing Chun and have also studied Karate, Tai Chi, Brazilian Ju Jitsu and most recently Systema.  One might suspect that I was the target market for this film.  Yet The Raid is one of the most boring films I've seen in a long time.  In fact I can't recall the last time I actually caught myself sitting in a cinema idly gazing at the walls rather than the screen.

This isn't to say that it isn't a loud, explosive, violent movie with lashings of impressive martial arts action.  But that's it.  Even the most wooden Van Damme vehicles have more engaging story lines than this.  And even if action movie fans don't care about story and all they want is full on action, I really struggle to see what's so impressive about The Raid's action scenes.  I say scenes.  The entire film is one long action scene and as such is more comparable to unapologetic pornography than narrative cinema.  Still, I got a free poster at the screening.  Anybody want it?

The Cabin In The Woods

Described by its distributor as "a mind blowing horror film that turns the genre inside out", The Cabin In The Woods, which opens in the UK this weekend, certainly feels like a breath of fresh air. The horror genre is often burdened by unimaginative film-makers more concerned with gore than story and while The Cabin In The Woods doesn't hold back on the blood, it offers a new take a familiar story.

Five friends, the usual ensemble of pretty young Hollywood types, go for a holiday at a remote cabin.  Even before they arrive, however, we realise things are not quite as they seem. Soaring high through a mountain pass, a majestic eagle crashes incongruously into some kind of hidden electronic forcefield. The tourists continue on their way, oblivious to their impending doom. It eventually becomes clear that they are being watched and manipulated from afar.  If you've seen any of the trailers for The Cabin In The Woods you'll be aware of a second group of characters, a bunch of techies sitting at banks of monitors, pressing switches and pulling levers.  It's this parallel storyline that helps make The Cabin In The Woods something really special and a little bit different.

I've already said too much.  This is one of those films that you have to see with as little prior information as possible.  Not because there are any great plot twists but because it would ruin the flavour, just like eating a mint before drinking a glass of orange juice.

So if you like your horror films to be interesting, to have depth, a perfectly chosen cast, humour and plenty of nods to other classics of the genre without being smart-arsed then book your tickets to see The Cabin In The Woods now.

The Films Of March

Another month down, and indeed that's us through the first quarter of April.  Time flies when you're having fun watching films.  So here's March's list:

L'Appartement
Blood In The Mobile
Cube
Insidious
Somnolence
Cell 211
Michael
Ruin
Paths Of Glory
Knowing
The Woman In Black
Syriana
Into The Abyss

I've been having problems with my net connection to my PS3 so wasn't able to stream anything from Lovefilm last month.  Good news for my local (40 mile round trip!) cinema, however, which got more of my trade.  Here's a wee breakdown of the first quarter of 2012, showing how I watched most of my films...

Last year I decided not to renew my TV licence.  It seemed like a lot of money for something which I'd become completely uninterested in.  All I was watching was the news and documentary strands such as Panorama and Unreported World, some of the few programmes that hadn't been turned into competitions.

It seems like most of what passes for television programming these days are competitions.  Preferably humiliating ones with or without celebrities.  So with the money saved I invested in a Playstation 3 and a Lovefilm subscription.  I now get a large selection of films through the latter and the BBC iPlayer, 4OD and more via the former.  Plus the PS3 provides me with a decent sized hard drive to copy my CDs onto, a Blu-ray player and an awesome games console as well.

So has this meant I'm watching a greater diversity of films?  Well, that's the point of this blog - to chart any changes made throughout the year.  So far I seem to be using Lovefilm mainly to catch up on lots of relatively mainstream English language movies that I missed when they first came out.  So we see, for example, Syriana and Cell 211 on March's list, Body Of Lies, In The Loop and Moon on February's list and 3:10 To Yuma, Black Death and The Guard on January's.  Two films, however, seem worthy of note on the list above - Paths Of Glory and Cube.

These two films provide an example of an on-demand service being used to re-acquaint myself with movies that made a big impact on me many years ago, when I first saw them.  Paths Of Glory, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas, is possibly the finest war movie ever made.  As Ken Loach has argued, so-called anti-war films are often nothing of the sort, revelling as they do in the spectacle of destruction.  In my view, Paths Of Glory is a noble exception being as it is a genuine anti-war film with a further strong anti-authority streak.  Kubrick apparently had a happy ending in the can because he knew the production company wouldn't go for something as critical and bleak as the script demanded.  Luckily he changed his mind and the original version was slipped past the producers.  Paths Of Glory is, however, so much more than a scathing attack on First World War incompetence and the futility of war in general, it is also an attack on the upper classes who hold everyone else in total disdain.  This includes not only the unfortunate soldiers put on trial to obscure the failures of the generals but also Colonel Dax, the former lawyer and men's commander who is the lone voice of sense in an otherwise senseless world.

The other re-visited film is the excellent Canadian sci-fi horror Cube.  This is a film that uses a very simple concept to explore more complex ideas.  A group of people find themselves trapped in a cube with 6 doors, each door leading to another cube, some of which possess deadly traps.  With no recollection of how they got there and the growing realisation that they've been kidnapped without explanation, the survivors must figure out how to escape or face inevitable death by hidden trap or starvation.  Cube is everything that the later Saw franchise is not.  There is no explanation of how the survivors came to be there and very little explanation of who made the Cube and for what purpose.  As one survivor, Worth, says, "There is no conspiracy.  Nobody's in charge.  It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan."  The real feeling of horror comes not from inventing new ways to spill more blood but from illustrating just how pointless violence often is.  In different ways, and in different genres, both Paths Of Glory and Cube succeed brilliantly at doing this.

Into The Abyss

Werner Herzog's latest film Into The Abyss opens in the UK this weekend.  The film, subtitled A Tale of Life, A Tale of Death, took less than $50,000 on it's opening weekend in the US.  That's nowhere near as much as violent action flicks Act Of Valor ($24.5 million) or John Carter ($30 million), both panned by critics for being big on brawn, light on brains.

Despite Into The Abyss having all three, it would seem that violence, sex and fast cars don't sell.  Or maybe audiences are just naturally scared of death, preferring a grotesquely glamourised version to having to confront their own mortality.  This confrontation with what it means to be alive and accepting death as something that can at once be sad, chilling, absurd and even funny, is something rarely on offer from mainstream cinema.  Lucky we still have film-makers like Herzog to redress the balance.

Into The Abyss is a documentary about what it means to take a life.  At the outset Herzog states his opposition to the death penalty, yet this is not an activist film.  Herzog uses a triple homicide which took place in Conroe, Texas in 2001 as a doorway to examining how the perpetrators reflect on their crimes, how the victim's families cope in the aftermath and how agents of the state feel about their participation in the routine duty of extinguishing other people's lives.

Herzog has been deeply critical of television documentaries that focus purely on fact, distinguishing this from truth which he asserts can only be experienced by total acceptance of film as a highly constructed and opinionated medium which can never be, as some still claim, balanced and impartial.  Indeed Herzog has provocatively claimed that he tells downright lies.  Provocative because he wants us to be much more than passive recipients, rather he wants us to come away from his films with a greater understanding having experienced, as he calls it, the 'ecstatic truth'.

Essential for getting at this 'ecstatic truth' is the film-maker's choice of interviewees and the way he handles each.  Herzog's ability to coax the most amazing stories from his characters in such little time (he claims to have spent no more than 1 hour in total with each interviewee) is nothing short of exceptional.  "Please describe an encounter with a squirrel", as the director says to a prison chaplain, is typical of his approach.  Thinking back over the tales of the squirrel, the man who was stabbed in the chest with a 14 inch screwdriver but didn't go to hospital because he had to be back at work, the death row prisoner who was attacked by monkeys as a child and other equally bizarre and darkly comic accounts, Herzog's method becomes clearer.  It is only by eschewing the conventional documentary technique of listing facts in their purest form and delving instead into what might seem like the peripheries of people's lives that we can achieve a much deeper understanding of the world around us.

Into The Abyss is one of Herzog's finest films.  It is also probably one of the best for getting to grips with Herzog's concept of 'ecstatic truth'.  I left the cinema feeling a lot closer to life and death.  This is how cinema should handle violence.  Sadly it's repugnant propagandistic guff like Act Of Valor that rakes in the cash at the box office, leaving young men believing in killing without consequences.  Into The Abyss proves that there is no such thing.

Blood In The Mobile

As I walked into the cinema on Monday I did what I always do.  I switched off my mobile phone.  I've been using one for so long that it's come to feel like the most natural of appendages.  Only it's not.  It's easy to forget that behind all the cute little icons and touchscreen swooshiness lies an ugly pile of electronics.  It's even easier to forget that those electronics have to come from somewhere.

A key ingredient of many electronic products, including mobile phones, is cassiterite which is mined in DR Congo.  The problem is that the mining of this essential mineral is controlled by warlords and corrupt officials who rely on our insatiable appetite for technology to fund a conflict that has seen over a quarter of a million women raped and 5 million people killed.  Perhaps more concerning, however, is film-maker Frank Poulson's demonstration that the big mobile manufacturers have absolutely no interest in stopping this.

Blood In The Mobile is a documentary directed by Danish film-maker Frank Poulson who traces the minerals used to make components for his beloved mobile from the mines of DR Congo to the headquarters of phone giant Nokia.  The word 'mine' is a little misleading though, children as young as 10 are going deep down below the earth through tunnels held up with little more than a few wooden props.  They have little in the way of everyday clothes and safety equipment is non-existant.  A head torch and a pair of wellies is as good as it gets here.  The miners and their families are trapped in makeshift shanty towns with extortionate taxes levied against them by armed groups and the Congolese army.  Escape is next to impossible.

All of this, however, may not come as much of a shock and although Poulson has collected many strong images and verbal testimonies during his time in DR Congo, it is when he challenges Nokia itself that the film makes its biggest impact.  We have become accustomed to stories of poverty, war and brutality from the darkest corners of the world.  But what many activists routinely fail to tackle is the issue of consumer accountability.  The overarching message throughout Blood In The Mobile is that it is our materialistic attitudes, our demand for new phones, TVs, games consoles, laptops, tablets and more that is funding the rape and murder of millions.

While rightly attacking businesses for their unethical practices, activists often demonstrate their lack of understanding of how business works.  Businesses have no inherent need to care about ethics.  Sure, many products on supermarket shelves now feature happy smiling black farmers and many companies have established 'corporate social responsibility departments' but these are nothing more than fronts to keep increasingly ethically conscious customers placated.

The only thing that matters to business is profit.  The only way to get businesses to move on an issue of ethical concern is to threaten their profits, something that Poulson demonstrates in a series of revealing interviews with Nokia management.  The best of these is when he confronts a Nokia spokesperson with stories of rape, occurring as a direct result of her company's activities.  Her response is not shock nor even concern.  She just casually reels off another mouthful of corporate babble-speak leaving us wondering which is worse; the open, honest brutality of the Congolese mines or the twisted, insidious brutality of European corporations and us, their customers, who know but just don't care.