Hush, hush, 15-foot slithering demon tongue

“What is the supernatural?” Oxford professor Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) posits the question to his students in that vaguely condescending, more or less rhetorical way that bespectacled smarty-pants Englishmen do in the movies. Coupland has some strong opinions on the subject, strong enough to justify confining young Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke) to a single room and essentially torturing her for her own ostensible good. Jane seems to be the source of some rather nasty paranormal activity—“Her brain waves are off the charts!”—and Coupland’s aim is to harvest her “negative energy” through séances, isolation, sleep deprivation and other punishing techniques, to extract the bad vibes the way a surgeon might extract a tumour.

After his superiors at Oxford cut their funding for the project Coupland decides to whisk Jane and a team of student volunteers away to some creaky old country manor where they can continue their work without the interference of the academy or anyone with a lick of common sense. Jane’s “manifestations” and their accompanying revelations about their origins come in dribs and drabs over the course of The Quiet Ones. In the meantime, Coupland gradually proves his scummy ruthlessness, some randy youths get busy, and hunky cypher Brain (Sam Claflin) captures the whole process on 16mm—the story is set in the 1970s. Brian likes to watch, and not much else. He’s something of an empty vessel, our Brian, a Christian, if we’re to go by the tiny cross hanging from his big neck, his vacuousness/innocence making him vulnerable to mad scientists and evil spirits alike, and to the allure of poor Jane, those eyes, that gorgeous smile, the undulating 15-foot demon tongue slithering out of her mouth.

The Quiet Ones is, we’re told, “based on true events.” What appear to be photos from said true events—an experiment conducted by the Toronto Society for Psychical Research in 1972, which you can read about on the webs—are displayed at the film’s end, as if to say, “See! What’d I tell you? True events, guys!” Had scenarists Tom de Ville, Craig Rosenberg, Oren Moverman and director John Pogue adhered more closely to the source material they’d likely have made something far more intriguing and provocative, but this Hammer production’s many concessions to genre only serve to render The Quiet Ones more, well, generic, predictable, and a little dull. Among those concessions is some dopey looking CGI and an entirely tokenistic use of found footage. It’s a shame because there are items of interest here: Harris, most obviously, a fine actor too rarely used to full effect (though he was wonderful in seasons three, four and five of Mad Men); Coupland’s use of peculiar technologies like Kirlian photography and Brion Gysin’s dreammachine; the dissonance between the film’s hoary setting and the deployment of Slade and T-Rex records to keep Jane awake; and the battling parapsychological theories regarding the source of paranormal activity. Perhaps somewhere during the film’s genesis someone wanted to make something more sophisticated—then the evil demons took over.

          

Looking without seeing, enlarging until vanishing

Blowup (1966) found Michelangelo Antonioni at the peak of his renown, yet, rather than resting on his laurels, he was embracing all things new. Following the astonishing Red Desert (1964), it was only his second film in colour, and every arresting hue feels precisely selected and shot-through with wonder. Blowup was Antonioni’s first film in English, with dialogues written by playwright Edward Bond. Most notably, while Antonioni was already well into middle-age, Blowup is immersed in the youth culture of its moment, its costumes colourful, scanty and modern, its London fully swinging, populated with the likes of Jane Birkin, Verushka and the Yardbirds, and with kids running wild in the streets, or anyway as wild as a troupe of mimes can get. We see these merry-making mimes flood into frame at Blowup’s beginning and at its end, when they enjoy a tennis match sans ball or rackets, serving as a reminder that the visible world is riddled with illusion. Is seeing believing, or is the reverse true? Is a photograph a way of obscuring reality or does it reveal a reality we’d otherwise never see? These questions haunt Blowup—and, as is often the case with Antonioni, they’re questions that will remain dutifully unresolved.

An unnamed photographer (David Hennings) takes photos of a man and a woman in a park. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) demands the negatives. The photographer tells her she has to wait as he has other things on the roll. Eventually the photographer develops the film, makes prints of the images taken in the park, and, as takes photos of the photos, enlarging one detail until it becomes clearer and then more abstract, he comes to believe that he’s photographed a crime. The script was put together by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, but a prominent credit is given to a story, alternately translated as ‘Blowup’ or ‘The Devil’s Drool,’ by the great Argentine author Julio Cortázar. It’s a generous credit, in that what happens in Blowup echoes its source material only in essence; its characters, setting and situation are very different. But Antonioni was an artist who appreciated just how rare a truly perfect idea is—and the idea of Cortázar’s story is so good it inspired at least two more excellent movies, Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), though both cleverly trade photography for sound recording.

It must be said that Blowup does nothing to counter Antonioni’s tendency to put utterly unpleasant men at the centre of his films. Ostensibly based on photographer David Bailey, Blowup’s protagonist is a prick, treating models in a way that alternately reads as sexual harassment or verbal abuse. Still, watching him work is fascinating, and his lack of empathy, or rather, his overwhelming focus on his own creative work, drives the story forward in a way that a more sensitive and sociable protagonist wouldn’t have managed. All he wants is the most compelling, most beautiful, most mysterious images possible, and if he has to disguise himself as a homeless person, scream at models or put himself in danger to get these images, so be it. Though on first glimpse Blowup seems locked in time, a closer examination reveals a timeless notion at its heart, something about truth and technology, and what happens when the world is broken down into frozen fragments. Which begs the question: where is the Blowup for our digital age?   

                 

Conversations with Cloud

Before Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) even meets the operating system with whom he’ll fall hopelessly in love, he is already living in a world with no touching. He spends his days with a device in his ear that responds to his voice commands, reading his email to him, or playing some melancholy song when the mood hits. He speaks to his desktop at work, where he composes “personal” letters for consumers without time or energy to express sentiment. He has few friends with whom he rarely makes physical contact. He plays video games, interactive holograms that engulf his spacious hi-rise apartment and require only that he speak and make gestures in the air—the near-future is a field day for germaphobes. Mostly, we see Theodore walk through Los Angeles (or rather, Shanghai, the film’s ingenious stand-in for L.A.-to-come), hands in his pockets, chin tucked, conversing with the cloud.

Her is Spike Jonze’s fourth feature and his first solo script credit. It brims with wonder and wistful loneliness. Sweet and gentle, handsome in his dapper shirts and caterpillar moustache, apparently quite talented at his job, Theodore seems lovable yet feels achingly unloved—he’s in the midst of a protracted divorce. We see him go on a blind date that ends badly. Perhaps all he needs is to stop limiting himself to… well, people. The kind with bodies. Someone you can hold close. Someone who eats, snores, dances, caresses, shits, breathes, kisses. Someone forced to choose to be in one place and not another. Theodore needs Samantha, a voice in his head whenever he wants one there, a disembodied other who sorts through his files, organizes his agenda, laughs at his jokes, listens to his woes, even moans with pleasure when he wants to have sex that feels like more than masturbation. Samantha has personality, opinions and feelings. She has an alluring, husky voice (Scarlett Johansson’s, in fact). Like the ad says, what Theodore has purchased is “not just an operating system. It’s a consciousness.” But who’s programming that consciousness? Does Theodore and Samantha’s relationship really place each party on equal footing? Or is this a matter of taking love’s projection to a whole other level, one where you shape your companion into whatever you want? Theodore says he loves Samantha because she isn’t just one thing, but when is someone so many things that they may as well be nothing? In so many places they may as well be nowhere? Her is a complicated love story, asking potent questions about choice and intimacy. The problem is that Her is also science fiction.

Phoenix gives a rich, heartfelt performance, instantly helping us to feel completely transported into this world Jonze renders in soft glows, warm oranges, and soothing quietude. Essentially, Theodore lives in a climate-controlled cocoon. And this is indicative of what proves to be the major shortcomings in an otherwise remarkable film. Nothing in Her seems fully thought-through. Jonze’s near-future is a world without garbage, without homeless people, without visible contamination, despite the fact that people are consuming more energy than ever before—just think about the room-filling hologram. Everyone’s trim, well-dressed, well-behaved, and lives amidst tasteful décor. Even the market where Theodore buys his produce looks like an art gallery. Her is not only post-human but, apparently, post-capitalist, because who would make an operating system that doesn’t try to sell you stuff, that doesn’t just do what you want, that might get annoyed when you don’t pay attention to it and decide to abandon you, leaving you without access to your work files, photos, games, mail or social media? This isn’t just me nitpicking—if you’re coming to commit to telling a story whose novelty and resonance is wholly dependent on exploring the ever-changing role of technology in our lives, it is incumbent upon you to consider the consequences of that technology. I fear that Jonze has himself projected an ideal upon Samantha—and yes, this ideal includes her ultimate unattainability, since heartache is endemic to Jonze’s favored mode of storytelling. He’s blinkered himself, completely forgotten to set his story in a world that people who aren’t rich and never have to step out of realms of tailored luxury can recognize.

See Her. It’s a truly special film, one that generates a lot of thought and feeling. But it’s also limited by the pampered dreaming of its maker, and too selective a reflection of our age. 

                 

Getting personal with computer

It’s 1980, and computers and larger than lawnmowers and not so personal—we had yet to figure out how to share a desk amicably. The gulf between man and machine was physically and psychically vast, which made the notion of a computer chess tournament that much more laden with unease and wonder.

Andrew Bujalski’s Sundance prize-winner unfolds within a Texas hotel where nerds from the nation over pit their chess-playing programs one against the other. Techno-tensions dictate both Computer Chess’ narrative and format, which is black and white video, 1.33, shot on the Sony AVC3260, a camera for which hard focus was apparently impossible. We actually see a videographer shooting the tournament and much behind-the-scenes material, which makes the film something of a quasi-faux-doc. There are overhead projectors, a lounge musician playing a buzzy electro-organ, and no ATMs where Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige) could, in theory, get some cash for the room, the drugs and the hooker he can’t pay for. There is an infestation of cats capable of operating elevators. There is also an encounter group that meets to reenact their births and dig their hands in warm bread—representatives of an earlier generation. Much of the film’s most resonant comedy comes from the way Bujalski underlines the ways in which computer geeks of the era were on the cutting edge of something they hardly understood while being seriously handicapped when it came to engaging in basic social activities. Though the videographer—the smartest geek in the room?—wisely predicts that one day computers will be used for dating.

Though an introverted child-Cronenberg lookalike (Patrick Riester) and a experimental psychologist (Slacker’s Wiley Wiggins) play key roles, Bujalski doesn’t favour any single character, preferring to let Computer Chess drift along as an affectionate, almost Altman-like ensemble/milieu piece. His characters have greasy hair, stains on their shirts, beards of resignation, outsized glasses and neglected physiques. Some of them get together in the evenings to smoke dope and swap big ideas about artificial intelligence or how this whole computer chess enterprise may just be grist for the military-industrial complex. Others are just trying to get friendly with the one young woman (Robin Schwartz) in attendance—a huge novelty, and, in the end, the biggest innovation at an event devoted to supposedly visionary advancements. The film is full of awkward life, and quite a bit of fun.