Category / American films

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Out Damned Scott

The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015)

I hate this. I really hate this. I really don’t have the words to begin to describe how much I hate this. I mean, everyone else loved The Martian.

For a decade or so, I’ve wrestled with two dilemmas:

a) is Tony Scott a better director than his brother?
b) is Ben Affleck a better actor than his old mucker Matt Damon?

I’d think I’d have it resolved and that it was Tony and Ben and then I’d see a film directed by Tony or Ben and suspect I was wrong. I realise that Tony died in tragic circumstances and his oeuvre is complete, but he gave us The Hunger and (the best Tarantino film) True Romance. On the other hand, Ridley has two genuine masterpieces: Alien and Legend (not, obviously, to be confused with the recent remake). Tony rarely seemed to hint that his films were anything more than vacuous tosh (although with an African American protagonist surprisingly often), whereas Ridley seems to try for the Meaningful and miss, whilst white washing all too often.

Then there’s Matt and Ben. Meh. I’m a fan of Kevin Smith films. What can I say?

Everyone else has done the jokes already — if you want a character who gets left behind and needs to be rescued, Damon’s your man. You’d think he’d get the message. So, as in the book, Matt Watney (Watt Damon), has been left behind in a sandstorm on Mars and begins to work out how he can survive until the next mission survives. There’s rather more of the crew than there is in the book, softening us up so we actually care when one of them dies.

And then, otherwise, there’s a fidelity to the book. Damon might strike you as being more buff than normal, but that allows for the malnutrition of later sequences and film is much better at given you a tabula rasa onto whom the audience can project emotions than a book in which the author has to tell you what they are thinking. The mission log can be used to justify voiceover, but it isn’t overwhelming.

The fidelity is a problem. Just as it is a bit of a wrench when we cut away from Watney to Earth for the first time, so it is here. The parallel editing is surprisingly clunky as characters wonder “I wonder what he is up to right now?” or “Do you think he’ll work this out?” out loud. For a Ridley film, the cast is surprisingly more multiethnic than of late, although there are a couple of whitewashing. And there’s also, spoilers, some additional sequences at the end to Get All Meaningful. To turn it into a recruitment ad for NASA.

And somehow Damon can pull that odd combination of nothing-special and resourceful man. The NASA team balance that concern and bureaucracy. This is a film — like the book — where the only enemies are the cold equations. The lone astrogating genius perhaps needed to have his performance dialed back a bit, and I was uncomfortably reminded of the Random Pot Smoking Rastafarian in Thelma and Louise. There’s a geeky Lord of the Rings reference in the novel which gets repeated here, with added nuance that Sean Bean is in the scene.

And of course, we know that Sean Bean has to be killed off. It’s what he does well.

So, unbelievably, and I hate this, Scott has produced a reasonable film. I think Moon and Gravity pull off similar situations of isolation with more aplomb, and there are similar moments of massive disbelief suspension, but this might be the first non-crap Scott film since well… well… his Hovis ads.

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Reservoir Wolves

The Wolfpack (Crystal Moselle, 2015)

For a form about voyeurism, cinema is very narcissistic. Coming up soon is Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, 2015), where the characters make their own movies, and there was Son of Rambow (Garth Jennings, 2007) and Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008), alongside all sorts of Hollywood satires and actors as characters.

Apparently Moselle saw half a dozen teens, dressed like characters from Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992), in Manhattan. See spoke to them and found that they were part of a large family of children, all named for Indian gods, who had spent most of their lives locked in an apartment. Their father, Oscar Angulo, a Peruvian, had the only key to the place and strictly regulated any trips out — perhaps several a year, perhaps none. He wanted to protect them from the outside world of drugs and sex and violence and yet one cant’t help but feel this is another kind of abuse — especially given mentions of violence against their midwestern mother Susanne and his frequent drunkness.

And yet they were perfectly at liberty to watch Quentin Tarantino movies, indeed the apartment apparently had five thousand VHS tapes and DVDs. Not only could they watch these films, they could film their own versions of them with home made props. Movies within movies. A real life version of Gondry’s films.

As they reached adulthood, there was clearly going to be conflict — and finally Mukunda escaped, leading the others in turn. They go on a train for the first time, to Coney Island for the first time, to a cinema for the first time.

The documentary leaves more questions than answers and is not comfortable. We are given no indication as to how it came about and what access Moselle had, and how much her intervention made the story. It is not clear how the apartment is paid for — Oscar has worked but doesn’t seem to, Susanne has home schooled them with some payment, but they have no visible means of support. And you get the feeling you wouldn’t want them for neighbours. The abuse has clearly been normalised — the Angulo family seem curious happy and content, despite their imprisonment. It is as if the have been living in Plato’s cave their whole lives.

You can only hope that the world will live up to them.