Film
-
Australia (A Festive Review)
There seems to be a growing trend among modern day films to run with the promise of being an ‘epic’. However it appears that ‘epic’ no longer means exactly that. This is arguably a simple way of getting around the fact that the storyline is way too bloated and the running time is at least 45 minutes too long. Australia is the next in a long line of films guilty of such a misleading label.
The film has far too many story-lines to do any of them any real justice. Firstly we have the arrival of Nicole ‘I-play-the-icey-straight-laced-bint-who-will-inevitably-have-her-her-cold-heart-warmed’ Kidman’s Lady Sarah Ashley an English aristocrat who visits Australia to confirm the suspicions of her husband’s infidelity. Things take a wrong turn when her husband appears to have been murdered by an aboriginal tribesman, well, I say appear. The tribesman has been framed by a plot by rival King Carney to have the land taken from the Ashley’s. Employing the help of Hugh Jackman’s Drover Kidman decides to herd the cattle to a port where the army needs the meat to feed the troops. Oh and forgetting to mention that this is all set during World War Two where the Japanese are bombing the mainland. Oh and forgetting to mention that there is a mixed-race aboriginal boy that is under threat from segregation by the nasty Christians. Oh and forgetting to mention that Nicole Kidman falls in love with Hugh Jackman. As my rather rough plot explanation shows, this is one schizophrenic story.
The film also comes at a time when this Impacter just so happens to be head deep in an essay on South African post-colonial literature (Oh yes, I went there! Who says Uni work can’t be fun and integrated into reviews during festive period?). As a result I felt unbelievable uncomfortable all the way through the film, nervously anticipating how they were going to ‘wrap up’ their ‘subplot’ on the segregated ‘Lost Generations’. My nerves did not disappoint! The film culminates (I do not think I give much away by doing so) with the head tribesman saying: “We’re going back to my country” only to totally reverse the statement with “No, We’re going back to our country”. At which point my face writhed and contorted with great muscular pain. I find it hard to believe how they would, in the 1940s, be able to look at a white man without extreme contempt. Australia’s Prime Minister has only just apologised for the atrocities committed against the Aborigines this year. A fact so well timed that it, in a moment of mind-blowing swaggerying fuckery, the filmmakers celebrate their own smugness by featuring it in an epigraph, as if it were their ultimate goal to achieve such ‘justice’. Bear in mind that the film had been in development for the last four years and so the speech was totally coincidental and of no credit to the actors, director, producers or financiers.
This goes hand in hand with the sympathetic portrayal of Kidman’s colonial land owner who is no different, in ethical terms, to King Carney. In fact I would go as far to say that King Carney seems less of a bastard because at least he acknowledges his role as a colonial master. Kidman’s character struts around the screen as if the only moral struggle she has as she wakes in the morning is in the applying makeup to her pale, dead, emotionless face. Kidman has become an actress so uninspiring in her latest films that I am sure that directors are reverting to using stock footage and using CGI wizardry to try and motivate some sort of performance from the actress’s lifeless body.
Jackman isn’t much better. When he does appear on screen it is for those scenes where it requires him to be topless, muscular and sweaty (if it wasn’t obvious before he’s the guy playing the diamond in the rough!). It comes to a point where it becomes a glorified perfume advertisement or preparation for his new X-Men film. He is also called upon when the audience needs reminding that the film is set in Australia with the disgraceful overuse of ‘Crikey!’ There are also kangaroos don’t-ya-know! I realise that some audiences can be particularly slow to cotton on to things but come on Baz Luhrmann, give us some credit!
And yes I have until this point refrained from mentioning the director’s name in the review which seems to be the other selling point of the film! Before you Luhrman-ites (just roll with it!) start claiming “oh you just don’t understand his visionary masterpieces”, I do! I loved Moulin Rouge (that felt like more of a coming out than it was supposed to). I also thought his version of Romeo and Juliet was quiet impressive. Australia can by all accounts be counted as a rather bum note by Luhrmann. His wife on the other hand has managed to carry on the flame from his previous films with incredible set designs making the look of the film as impressive as Moulin Rouge.
In short, the film has far too many problematic elements to overcome. Poor acting, poor plot, but pretty looking. It can also be classed as the wrong place and wrong time for this reviewer who just got extremely angry with it all if that were not obvious enough. Overexposure to post-colonialism and bitter at the robbing of his Christmas festivities by the hands of cruel, cruel coursework. Bah, humbug.
-
Che Review
Hugely successful at the Cannes Film Festival, with rumours of Academy nominations being thrown up left, right and centre, Che is a two-part, four hour long biopic about the Marxist revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. Impact takes a look at the first, The Argentine, and asks if it really lives up to the hype?The first part charts the late 1950s oust of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista under the leadership of Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement.
Considering this is a biopic about one of the most iconic symbols of our century, the director Steven Soderbergh seems overly concerned with guerrilla warfare and revolution in general. These are obviously interesting topics in themselves but it is frustrating to watch a biopic about Che Guevara completely ignore some of the other equally important aspects of his character. His alluring and persuasive intellect, his experiences as a doctor and his darker, more negative qualities didn’t feature at all, leaving the portrayal feeling absent of complexity.
The question of Benicio Del Toro’s performance and its merit for an Academy Award is difficult to answer, purely because he has unfairly had his wings clipped by a director who, rather annoyingly, hasn’t allowed him to fully explore some of the most interesting and admirable aspects of Che’s personality. Del Toro’s performance was therefore fairly convincing given that he never had the opportunity to exhibit any significant amount of inner emotion.
Che
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Release Date: 1st January 2009. UK
Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Franka Potente, Rodrigo Santoro In response to criticism, Soderbergh said “the bottom line is we’re just trying to give you a sense of what it was like to hang out around this person. That’s really it.” Well I didn’t leave thinking I knew the real Che at all, especially since a lot of the film was spent slogging through the jungle. I can only assume the justification for giving such a fractured and diluted depiction is that he has assumed a certain level of prior knowledge about Guevara (Soderbergh is unrealistically hoping his audience has already seen The Motorcycle Diaries) and doesn’t feel it necessary to do any more than scratch the surface. This is just, quite frankly, lazy. A four hour ‘epic’ entitled Che shouldn’t need any prior knowledge about the subject and should stand up as a self contained film in itself. Anyone with little knowledge of Che Guevara, and knows him only as “that guy on the t-shirt”, will leave the cinema feeling genuinely confused and with no greater understanding as to why he is such an emblematic symbol today.Soderbergh was trying to show the world what it didn’t already know about Che Guevara, but his insistence on maintaining a sense of detachment and formalism means you never enter into Che’s world, frustratingly remaining confined to his politics and never going any further. Disappointingly average.
Laurence Eliott
-
Impact Gets Nasty With Steven Sheil
Impact talks to local filmmaker Steven Sheil about his new film, Mum and Dad, and video nasties about melting homeless people!
Over Halloween weekend the Broadway Cinema played host to the Mayhem Horror Film Festival where national and international independent films were shown for three consecutive days. Local writer and director Steven Sheil was part of the team responsible for the organisation of the festival which, unashamedly (and why not?), featured his own debut feature-length film Mum and Dad. Sheil describes the film as “a brutal and perverse horror film about a murderous family who live in a house at the end of an airport runway…It’s kind of a Heathrow airport chainsaw massacre.” The film follows Lena, a young airport cleaner who is stranded after missing the bus home after work. Invited back to a colleague’s home, events take a turn for the worse with an explosion of pure unadulterated torture when Mum and Dad come out to ‘play’.
Now, you could easily make the mistake of thinking of it as yet another torture porn film ‘inspired’ by the likes of the Saw franchise and any other rubbish that Lionsgate Studios release. But you would be very, very wrong. “You know what, I really don’t watch those type of films,” says Sheil. “Over the past few years I’ve ended up watching more and more older films and less newer films.” This is no lie as 80s ‘video nasty’ film titles are thrown into conversation left, right and centre. “Street Trash: the original ‘melt’ movie. It features great effects of people melting. The story is about a guy who owns a liquor store who finds a case of really old booze and decides to sell it to all the tramps around the area. So all these bums start drinking and it causes them to melt. It’s a classic B-movie”. But it is in the British film scene that most of the film’s influences lie. “With Mum and Dad there was this seventies British, slightly sleazy, film that I wanted to get across. There is a guy called Pete Walker who made a few films - Frightmare and House of Whipcord - which in terms of tone were quite influential”.
As with most gutsy horror films it has been met with some controversy. Reports from a Dublin showing note that there have been some walk-outs, and even faintings, as a result of the macabre and brutal subject matter. “I think one of the reasons why I like horror films is they have this ability to create such a strong reaction from people. They really work on a gut level. Mum and Dad isn’t some kind of full on gore fest by any means… well, there are a few choice moments in there. It depends on what you are expecting”.
Sheil joins a long line of film-makers that are based in or have come from Nottingham. He reveals, “what has really kept me here is the film scene. It has always been really strong and over the last 15 years has grown up despite there not being any real industry in terms of television or production companies. There has always been a really strong backbone to independent film-makers”. This is certainly true when one observes that the East Midlands alone accounted for 6 BAFTA awards in 2008 from the talents of Shane Meadows, Samantha Morton and Paddy Considine.
Sheil admits that “it’s kind of hard in this country, it’s not that easy to get a continuous career out of film-making and it is quite hard work. There are only a few film-makers who have [succeeded].” This is not to say that Sheil is disparaging about his industry and does indeed have some tips to any budding student film-makers. “It sounds clichéd but the best thing to do is to go out and start making films. Stick to what you know and what things you have around you. People always say ‘but I don’t have the money’. If you know someone with a mansion and a pool use them! When it comes to getting a job, it really isn’t what qualifications you have but the experience you have in making films.” Sheil claims his own family life had no reflection on his work, so all you budding film-makers need to create a film as intense and shocking as Mum and Dad is just £100,000 and one hell of a disturbed imagination.
James Warren
Mum and Dad
Sheil inventively sets himself apart from not only horror porn but the entire genre, with his decision to deprive the heroine of a voice to scream about the horrors to come. He does this by having Mum lovingly inject her new prisoner with a solution that prevents her from speaking, treating her like an insolent child whose days of passive innocence are gone: “now you be a good girl”. Leaving the truly…truly… truly horrible 17th minute a mystery, the horror of the film not only comes from gross-out nastiness, but also an inversion of a very British family dynamic. On Christmas Day Dad gets slightly pissed, screaming “Christmas is family time”, and turns his attention on the innocent captive in a scene that captures this uncomfortable look at the traditional British household. The film brilliantly adopts Dad’s means of controlling his “family”, choosing to surpass the conventional approach for the desired effect, and the effect is lasting.
Oliver Holden-Rea
-
Impact Watches The Watchmen
Watchmen
Director: Zack Snyder
Cast: Billy Crudup, Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino, Jeffrey Dean MorganToday, Impact feels special. Along with all the best publications in the country, and an especially random one from New Zealand, we were sent to a press conference for the new Watchmen film. The following words contain no spoilers; unless you haven’t read the graphic novel, in which case we have no sympathy for… nay, actually pity you.
Zack Snyder’s elation at being able to direct the highly-anticipated, forthcoming adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen is seen on his face as he states: “pop culture’s ready to have their shit shaken up a bit”. With this, Snyder is addressing the concerns that the audience may not extend past those who have read the graphic novel, or “big fat comic book”. Watchmen emerges in a superhero-saturated era of cinema, where Snyder admitted embarrassedly “even his mother knows Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider”, and where Batman has become the world’s largest cinematic franchise.
Snyder claims he has had his battles with the studio, which he appears to have translated cathartically into the Comedian’s brutally destructive, set-destroying fist fight, and is now able to provide his audience with a true representation of the comic that “changed the perception of that form of media”. And, as the man for the job, the director has made it beautiful.
The tittering crowd was made up of fanboy-turned-journalists trying to maintain an air of slight professionalism and those who justify their ignorance of the text by claiming to be representative of the members of their audience who would enter the cinema equally ignorant. Either way, everyone seemed to be excited by the three scenes we were shown.
The first, and opening to the film itself, is the death of the Comedian, sharing the source material’s employment of this scene as the catalyst to the ensuing narrative. Then Snyder offers context for the second scene, in which Dr. Manhattan compares the solidarity of Mars with his experiences on Earth, offering an insight into the graphic novel’s pessimistic view of humanity, “I’m tired of being involved in their lives”. The character’s background is evoked with a series of consecutive flashbacks that, in the original text, are spread out to coincide with the character’s emotions at that stage of the story. The merging of various scenes setting up Dr. Manhattan (including his body reassembling itself like watch pieces across a long period of time) is probably a tactic employed by Snyder to allow more room to unravel the events of the central mystery. I’ll admit I was as thrilled to see the prison-break sequence as the director was to introduce “a scene that I picked for you with a little bit of action in it”. Putting down any pretentious reservations I had about Watchmen not be about the action spectacle, I guiltlessly enjoyed this scene and began to understand Hollywood’s fascination with reproducing any literary work on film. Zack (I feel we are close enough to now be on first-name terms) stated that these clips gave a sense of the “tone of the overall piece” and sat down to be grilled (and burned by one particular front-row questioner, who clearly enjoyed expressing the impression left on him by 300).As succinct as Zack Synder’s quotes can appear in this written piece, the man’s conversation (largely with his own shoes) and his understanding of both text and audience does not seem to come naturally and proof of this can be seen in the inconsistencies between all quotes from this presentation (anything from Empire to the Metro). However, the director was clearly ready for the first few questions and coolly produced answers for the big 3: the censors, the squid and the Moore.
1) The Censors: At the beginning he stated that he fought with the studios for, what he believes to be, an essential tenet of the comic, the eloquently put “really cool sex and violence”. I tend to think not many who have continued reading this far into my article would disagree. The pressure upon the director to follow a pg-13 rating was suppressed from simple ideas like the fact that you “can’t blur Dr. Manhattan’s penis”.
2) The Moore: The frighteningly stereotypical geek/critic in the front row (an exact replica exists in The Simpsons’ Poochie episode) stirs the director by pointing out that Alan Moore, the graphic novel’s creator, claimed it to be “unfilmable”. Snyder quickly and easily told us Moore had wished his name to be removed from the production from the start. He also claimed that he wasn’t mentioned on set because the director did not want to make assumptions about Moore and his intentions. Dave Gibbons, who was also at this screening and answering questions, offered his own personal view of his co-creator and stating that “Alan has had bad experiences with Hollywood”.
3) The Squid: As with the question about Alan Moore, Snyder lightens the subject by injecting some humour into the tense room and saying “I had a horrible calamari incident as a child”. Needless to say, it was a funny joke, but the laughter died swiftly into silence, willing a satisfactory response from the nervous director. “Watchmen is more character than it is story and I feel that, by including the squid and Moore’s exact ending, I would have to sacrifice something else”. Snyder’s belief that the ending is about “taking the superhero thing all the way” shows his grasp of the material, as well as his own personal involvement in the project. He says he felt he had to make the choice between “squid or moral dilemma” and that his decision matches “what Watchmen is to me”.
Snyder finished with an appeal to the whole audience, both to those who have and those who tragically have not read the graphic novel, “I hope to give them something different”. What this (and the sneaky shot I noted of a large blue hand crashing through a glass ceiling in the extra clips) means is a mystery…
I left with one thought, which can be shared with any who have seen the trailer and Snyder’s previous film. 300 was also beautiful and because of this it was able to linger on its strong images, employing an excessive amount of slow motion to highlight either the film’s status as a mythological piece or just how pretty it was. Snyder’s reliance on slow motion was never going to disappear, but a body of hardcore front-rowers may be concerned with his preoccupation to make everything look glamorous. One of my personal attractions to the graphic novel was a sense of real life events, where the domestic setting of many scenes represents the characters’ mundane existences. This separates the “costumed heroes” from their predecessors, such as Spiderman, and the fact that many key sequences happen in small apartments and dingy kitchens (something all students should be able to identify with) made the heroes more normal and the comic a revelation. The moral ambiguity at the end matches the unglamorous nature of the source material. My anticipation for the film’s release is tied to a curiosity about whether Snyder’s unavoidable Hollywood gloss will miss this aspect of Watchmen, the aspect that really would shake pop culture’s shit up a bit.
Watchmen is out on the 6th of March 2009 and I am first in line.
Oli Holden-Rea
-
Max Payne Review - Max Lame?
Max Payne
Director: John Moore
Release Date: 14th November 2008. UK
Cast: Mark Walhberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Christopher ‘Ludacris’ Bridges.There is film noir then there is Max Payne, John Moore’s latest offering which is so dark and grey, it appears the colour printer was having troubles during production, more a film of negative balance occasionally dipped into the fountain of colour.
Rockstar games conflicted revamp, with all the trimmings in 20th Century Fox’s videogames New York cop Max Payne, gets a Hollywoode adaptation. With Hollywood heavy, weight Mark Walhberg in the titular role of our ‘antihero’ Max Payne, proves to be another questionable role choice for our Marky Mark, whose performance in The Departed received plaudits from across the board. The film opens with the action witnessed in the trailers. It works explosively on screen as we, see Payne body deep underwater somewhat unconscious before exploding into life and attempting to swim to the surface. Prior to this we hear Payne informing us through voiceover “I don’t believe in heaven, I believe in pain, I believe in fear, I believe in death”. Chilling words from our protagonist, laying the road work for a thrilling, dark cop action adventure, only to disappoint.
We soon meet Max, a solemn, broody, unsociable figure of a man. A depleted, washed up NYPD cop now working in the Cold Case Unit of the local precinct. We then learn that his wife and baby boy, were murdered some three years ago, with the case going unsolved. Furthermore, Payne since has been on an off-duty quest to the last living killer. Staying to true to form of the video game plot, this is as far as the movie goes, bar the mention of Valkyr. Of which, the rest of the plot revolves around this dangerous hallucinating blue drug, a addictive drug taken by US soldiers to anguish fear in them in their fight in Iraq. (Another Hollywood film with a mention to America’s war on terror. Making me think, hold up I thought this was Max Payne, not another war on terror puppet film, two conflicting film ideas??) The rest of the plot, consists of Marky Mark meeting Natasha (Kurylenko), at a party and her sister, one notorious Mona Sax (Kunis) appearing at the party and the two of them engage in some sort of conflict, which is not clear or developed greatly. One thing leads to another, and Payne ends teaming up with Mona Sax as they both seek revenge. It appears the same killers have done with Natasha as had with Payne’s family. Their trail leads them to a mysterious bald man (Sergeant Lupino we later find out). There are some more altercations and other twist and turns as the film drags on.The dark, dank, sets and colour resonate the mysterious and baleful feel of the film under John Moore, almost appearing to copy the dark colour resolution used by the superb Sin City. The opening third of the film plays well in respects to the bigger picture, action sequences, and script appears to work well. I took a personal pleasure in the action sequence where Payne is pursued by AERIS security and Central dispatch, which plays for cinematography, but not much else. Moore fails to inject the excitement and spark that the videogame contained (as it became a success through major gaming platforms). Walhberg despite his normal impressive character development (bar his 2008 stinkers) even fails to ignite the lead Payne. However, he does prove to be a wise choice, considering other possible options, but it is not hard to play a straight-laced morose, permanently scowling figure. The script and plot also lead for the downfall of the film, with little care taken for either, and modest input of the plot from the main game, is frank to many lovers of the videogame platform. The figure the Max Payne embodies though is of a more humdrum cast. Payne is scorned by his superiors, abandoned by his peers, (even the friendly BB turns against him) and left to more of less fend for himself in a world he tries to appears to truly understand but like everyone else struggles to come to grips with. Max Payne will work well with the videogames adolescent fans target audience, but will encounter difficulties swaying the older players of the game franchise. Furthermore, thanks to the gory less 15 age rating
Max Payne ultimately packs little punches, far more scarier are the scowls of Walhberg’s Payne.
Much happens in Max Payne, some of it incomprehensible, a lot of it at times pointlessly preposterous, and at times less interesting then watching cress cow in a bowl of dirt. Max Payne offers better than other video-game to film adaptations in all.Ian Thompson
-
Win Tickets to a Screening of ‘Choke’
If you don’t know who Chuck Palahnuik is, you’ll surely be familiar with the most famous adaptation of one of his books, Fight Club, a journey (with a predictable twist) through the mind of a psychotic Ikea critic slash anarcho-syndicalist. Choke is the latest of Palahnuik’s novels to be adapted for the big screen, and early indicators are that it’s a doozy.
The Plot: Victor (Sam Rockwell), in an effort to pay for his demented mother’s (Academy Award® winner Anjelica Huston) private healthcare, engages in a brazen scam. While dining in upscale restaurants, he deliberately chokes on his food, allowing himself to be “saved” by wealthy good Samaritans who grow so close to him in the wake of their heroic Heimlich Maneuvers, they lavish him with cheques. His day job at a historical theme park is no more conventional; and when he isn’t busy being a put upon Pilgrim, gagging violently or visiting the mother who doesn’t recognize him, Victor is cruising sexaholic recovery meetings for action.
The Prize: On November the 19th, Nottingham Cineworld are putting on an exclusive preview screening of the film ahead of its 21st November general release. We have 50 tickets to giveaway so if you want this then best get onto it pronto.
The Question: In Fight Club, what is the first rule of Fight Club?
a) You do not talk about Fight Club.
b) No smoking.
c) No dogs, except guide dogs.Entries to magazine@impactnottingham.com.
Correct entries received a week before the screening will be entered into a draw, and the winners contacted via e-mail.
-
W - Review
On taking my seat at the Showcase Cinema with half of my brain on the US election, I did not know quite what to expect. Having taken quite a while to get into a slow-starting film I was quickly finding myself learning a hell of a lot about ‘Dub-ya’s’ life. It detailed his college life, his father’s disappointment in him and his floundering public relations skills. Sometimes the narrative was quite complicated, with it switching back and forth from the 1970’s and 2000’s and perhaps this was just to keep the audience engaged with Bush’s character ,maybe because if Stone deployed a linear-narrative, it would have resulted in a mundane plot.
Throughout the film there were little dig’s at Bush’s intelligence, with the former US president being shown repeatedly spitting food whilst talking and making sentences that were grammatically incorrect. The audience lapped this up, especially because the majority them got tickets to this advance screening through an advertisement in The Guardian.
Overall, the film was a great build up to the presidential results and was an excellent insight to Bush’s life and thoughts. However, don’t come to this movie expecting all-out entertainment, come expecting to learn a lot about Bush and expect to have your thoughts twisted for a brief moment as the director creates a slight feeling of empathy for a man who, in the eyes of some is amongst the most evil and stupid in the World. It was definatly worth a watch if you are an avid moviegoer or a keen expert on politics, but I heard many people on the way out saying “well…. It was OK” and this definatly mirrored my thoughts.
-
Quantum of Solace - Shameless Advertising in an Otherwise Forgettable Film
"Like my car? Buy it! Buy it please!"
“That was c#@p!” the words I heard as soon as the screen turned black and the lights came up in the cinema, and I have to say I agree with my less-than-discrete fellow movie watcher as I checked out the latest release from the Bond franchise.
-
Tarantino, What a Basterd!
Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds
So the first picture was released a week ago from the set of Tarantino’s latest effort along with a very curious name change. ‘Inglorious Bastards’ is no more; we should now refer to QT’s WW2 epic as ‘Inglourious Basterds’. Why this sudden name change has come about is unknown, whether it be a major plot point or simply to dodge the censors but fans seem to be taking this curious twist lightly, maybe as the news was coupled with a tantalising screenshot of Brad Pitt as Lieutenant Aldo Raine, leader of ‘The Basterds’. The story revolves around a group of Jewish soldiers sent on a suicide mission to kill as many Nazis as possible behind enemy lines, with a parallel plotline involving a French woman named Shosanna Dreyfus who witnessed her family murdered at the hands of the Nazis and her subsequent escape to become a cinema operator in Paris. The second part of Dreyfus’ storyline is rumoured to be filmed in French New Wave black and white, similarly to how Kill Bill went from colour to black and white, and even turning into anime for one scene. Inglorious Bastards as it was has been in the pipeline for Quentin Tarantino for almost ten years, so it a relief to finally see at least some of the fruits of his work so far; the image Pitt looks very promising, capturing the intense look we’d expect to see from Raine. This role follows a string of more serious characters played by Pitt in recent years starting from Babel and up to his exciting role as the lead in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Inglourious Basterds hasn’t been an easy ride for QT, but after all the delays with shooting and a leaked script on the internet, it seems that Tarantino isn’t going to let us down yet.
Luke Mead
-
Hunger (15)
Hunger (15)
Director: Steve McQueen
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Stuart Graham, Brian Milligan, Liam CunninghamThe debut film by Turner Art Prize winner Steve McQueen is nothing less than stunning. Depicting the struggles IRA members to gain their status as political prisoners, a title denied to them by the British Government under the guidance of Margaret Thatcher, in the notorious Maze Prison. As the film progresses focus is turned to Bobby Sands, IRA member and leader of the 1981 hunger Strike that would inevitably result in the death of ten prisoners, including his own.
Despite the particularly heavy subject matter, Hunger is an immensely beautiful film. McQueen’s artistic expertise is perfectly honed as he utilizes weird and unsettling angles. One such stunning scene, between Sands and Father Dominic Moran, lasts for an uninterrupted 22 minute shot. The whole experience feels like a sensory deprivation experiment that suddenly shocks its patient by immersing them into a pool of extreme sound and intense lingering visuals.
The film pulls no punches. The audience is thrown into the experience of living in the Prison as inmates smear their excrement onto the walls of their own cells and flood corridors with urine. The consequences of which are not saved for the frames of the screen as the brutal beatings, given by the prison guards, prove a difficult watch. However the audience is never allowed to fully sympathise with the ‘political terrorists’. We are reminded of the full brutality extracted on the opposition to the IRA when one prison officer is murdered in front of his mother, in a scene that will haunt you longer than the trip home from the cinema. Upon much reflection the piece feels more horrific than the recent spate of ‘horror porn’ films as it demonstrates that the real horror lies in history and what men can do to fellow man.
The film shows a rare occasion where the quality of visuals is matched by equally brilliant performances. The cast itself should be commended for the realism, humanity and sheer torture that they brought to their performance. But it is Fassbender, who reportedly starved himself for 2 months for the role, that turns in an incredible performance that is comparable to the dedication shown by Christian Bale in The Machinist.
It makes one wish that those that see them as glamorous, like actress Rose McGowan who recently claimed “had I grown up in Belfast, I would 100 per cent have been in the IRA”, that the troubles were nothing to be romanticised. If this film does nothing else but educate the ignorant or bring art to the mainstream it will have done its job.
James WarrenHunger is released on the 31st of October
