HIGH-RISE: Jump Cuts

Director: Ben Wheatley
Writer: Amy Jump
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss, James Purefoy
Runtime: 119 mins.
2016

I've never seen a movie edited like High-Rise. It's a 1970's period piece follows the occupants of a towering apartment complex. The narrative focuses in particular on neurophysiologist Laing (Tom Hiddleston). The socially stratified high-rise--richer up top, poorer at the bottom--provides all necessary amenities to its occupants, including food, drink, schooling, and entertainment. One would never need to leave the high-rise if one were so inclined, and that is exactly what happens. Its occupants are sequestered there by their own vague need to stick around, even after the parties turn sour, the rich begin siphoning resources from the poor, and the social system careens into violent anarchy.

More than anything High-Rise reminds me of the early Cronenberg film Shivers. The reality of this world is just off-kilter enough to be especially disturbing and surreal. Characters make choices that they only seem to be loosely in control of, and everybody tacitly refuses to acknowledge the weirdness cropping up around them.

What truly defines this film's unique tone, though, is the way the editing slips in and out of scenes like a moray eel. A great deal of High-Rise is told in montage, buoyed by Clint Mansell's brilliant score.* This formal choice emphasizes the passage of time and thrusts the viewer into a dreamlike state. We get snippets of clips that can more or less fit into our conception of the plot, but large chunks of these montages feel unmoored from reality. Deprived of context and set to music, even everyday moments, like forgetting something and turning around to retrieve it, seem uncanny and bizarre. Then there are clips of Laing dancing down a hallway with what appear to be five stewardesses dressed in red, and you have no idea what you are watching.

*No question, in the running for best soundtrack of 2016. Unsurprising coming from Mansell, whose work on Moon was the first film score I ever loved.

These alienating storytelling methods do become exhausting after a while, but they never lose their bite. High-Rise may be to on-the-nose to achieve the allegorical insight it's shooting for, but the result is a treat of crackling madness nonetheless. Watching High-Rise is like stepping into a Normal Rockwell painting that slowly morphs into a Dali. Director Ben Wheatley and writer/co-editor Amy Jump paste together a uniquely offputting experience from a great many familiar elements, which is one of the prime gifts of art: seeing old things in a new way.

3 / 5  BLOBS

THE HATEFUL EIGHT: America's Secret Sin

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writer: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Demian Bichir, Bruce Dern, James Parks, Channing Tatum
Runtime: 187 mins.
2015

I take pains to keep my reviews here as substantive as possible while providing the fewest number of plot and story details I can get away with. The lowest form of film criticism is by-the-numbers plot recap. I admire film reviews that can give me an idea of the movie while skirting any information that might influence my experience of the story.

However, I don't feel like I can give a proper review of The Hateful Eight, one of Tarantino's more controversial works, without digging into heavy spoilers. So I'm going to split this post into Spoiler and Non-Spoiler sections.

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD - Furiouser and Furiouser

Director: George Miller
Writers: George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nick Lathouris
Cast: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton
Runtime: 120 mins.
2015

The current age of Hollywood has been defined by the resuscitation of long dead intellectual properties. Film producers have been picking through the elephants' graveyard of defunct franchises in an effort to find bankable properties that have preexisting brand recognition. The idea is that if we recognize a string of words in the title of a new product as something familiar that existed ten or twenty or thirty years ago, that's free advertising. It's treading water. It's safe.

So we've been given the dubious gifts of humongous updated versions of Robocop, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Trek, and The Evil Dead. Coming down the pipeline are new Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, Terminator, and even National Lampoon: Vacation updates. Not to mention the impending annual release of Star Wars film after Star Wars film.

These safe choice reboots elicit little more than a shrug from folks with the slightest degree of better judgment. Dipping into the pool of nostalgia just because it is relatively risk-free never produces anything worthwhile. The businessmen at the top do this because the built-in fanbases will bring in enough $$$ to turn a profit on these films regardless of quality. They aren't passion projects. They're where passion goes to die.

I can't wait for the Full House reboot.

But what about reboots that see the original creators return to the franchises they birthed decades ago? Surely there is some merit in this, surely the passion can be rekindled? Unfortunately we have seen this a few times, and we have let ourselves be excited, only to have the rug pulled from under us. George Lucas returns to Star Wars in 1999. Steven Spielberg returns to Indiana Jones in 2008. Ridley Scott returns to Alien in 2012. Crushing disappointment after crushing disappointment after crushing disappointment.

Everything mentioned above is what Mad Max: Fury Road is not. Now let me tell you what Mad Max: Fury Road is.

IT FOLLOWS: STDos and STDon'ts

Director: David Robert Mitchell
Writer: David Robert Mitchell
Cast: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Olivia Luccardi, Lili Sepe, Jake Weary, Daniel Zovatto
Runtime: 100 mins.
2015

The first and only thing I knew about It Follows before walking into the theater was that it is an allegory for STDs. That's already interesting, but what breaks the movie out of "interesting" and into "fascinating" is that it's so much more than that. Just when you think the film is sinking into its subtext, it's abandoned for pure horror movie thrills. Not to worry though, it always returns to its themes in more complex and circumspect ways than you could reasonably expect from a slashy horror film starring beautiful, sexually active young people. It Follows doesn't fall into the oldest of horror cliches: sex is bad, if you have sex you get killed. Instead it makes that trope the premise, thereby setting it on a pedestal for us to examine its subtleties.

It Follows is a horror movie with a lot on its mind that never forgets to be a horror movie.