More than once in the special features to Bone Tomahawk the producers say they filmed the first draft of the script, and did so with a much reduced budget in order not to give away control. The director and writer S. Craig Zahler (what does the S stand for?) has apparently sold over two hundred scripts to Hollywood (without seeing one made!) so you'd expect he could turn a half decent one out in his sleep by now, but even so, Bone Tomahawk is definitely evidence against Hemingway's maxim that the first draft of everything is shit.
The lack of budget is obvious in hindsight. The action takes place in a limited number of small sets and tight locations with simple camera setups and few extras, giving the whole film a stage-play feeling. The weather, which should almost be a character itself in the arduous journey across empty badlands, is noticeable only by it's absence.
They must have been very clever with the money they had: S. Craig is also a cinematographer and nothing looks cheap. The actors are top notch, and well cast. The sets are simple but look genuine and lived in. The fight scenes (no CGI! They used arrows on wires just like Kurosawa) look perfect. The one big gory effect is especially effective.
You ignore big Ern' at your peril though. Could the film have benefited from a rewrite or two?
S (can I call you S?) has drawn his characters with a broad brush to be sure. A grizzled sheriff. A sweet old man. A viscous dandy. A rough cattleman who may not use no highfalutin' city words but is brave and loyal to a fault. These are archetypes but that is not necessarily a bad thing. In a genre film (a genres film!) it may even be necessary. It is hard to see what else he could have done.
For if S has drawn them with a broad brush he has done so very deftly. Nobody in the movie is ever less than interesting, and it is chock full of fun little character moments, from a sex scene that is not only funny but genuinely tells you something about the lovers' relationship, to the very final shot where the old man discards his makeshift weapon in an act of complete trust in the sheriff.
There are moments though where I think a second draft might have helped: The locations never quite achieves the sense of pioneer-town isolation wanted. Relationships with the other townspeople are hinted at but never expanded upon. The mood as the party approach the Indian hideout, which should be growing darker, remains strangely quirky and light even as they are being attacked by murderous brigands.
Twice items are set up but come to nothing. A much discussed telescope never shows anybody anything of interest; and most jarringly, dynamite, which the audience is first told of at the start of the second act, reminded of at the end of it, never explodes. Perhaps this was a budget issue where they were going to blow something up but decided too late they could not afford to. It feels to me more like a first draft issue though. The writer equipping himself with some ready device and then never actually needing it.
I had assumed, when the producer said he was adamant they would not give away any creative control, he was worried about financiers trying to tone down the horror. And it is truly horrible. Not so apparently; in a different interview S tells an audience at a film festival he wanted to avoid jumpy editing and a heavy metal soundtrack (and him a heavy metal musician too!). Bone Tomahawk is such a delightfully clever, quirky, inventive little film, and so unusual, and still so brutally harrowing when it wants to be, I am certain whatever they lost to keep control, it was worth it.
Monday 20 March 2017
Thursday 9 March 2017
Cop Car
Here is a list of things that are not in Cop Car.
- Any explanation why the two kids ran away from home.
- Any explanation what nefarious activity Kevin Bacon has been up to.
- The radio dispatch lady on-screen.
- Literally anybody or anything which does not have a vital role in moving the story forward.
It is the tightest, most pared down film I've ever seen. There's nothing unnecessary there.
It's good too. The kids are sweet and likable, and their very quick journey from daring each other to touch the car to driving around and trying to fire off the guns is completely believable. Kevin Bacon's character is so purposeful and tenacious that even when he is a serious threat to the two boys you still kind of root for him.
My plan for this blog is to talk about storytelling by discussing the decisions taken, and other possible options, but with Cop Car I can't think of any. It's such a perfectly formed little film that it might have sprung complete from a magic movie spring.
So that's it, really.
- Any explanation why the two kids ran away from home.
- Any explanation what nefarious activity Kevin Bacon has been up to.
- The radio dispatch lady on-screen.
- Literally anybody or anything which does not have a vital role in moving the story forward.
It is the tightest, most pared down film I've ever seen. There's nothing unnecessary there.
It's good too. The kids are sweet and likable, and their very quick journey from daring each other to touch the car to driving around and trying to fire off the guns is completely believable. Kevin Bacon's character is so purposeful and tenacious that even when he is a serious threat to the two boys you still kind of root for him.
My plan for this blog is to talk about storytelling by discussing the decisions taken, and other possible options, but with Cop Car I can't think of any. It's such a perfectly formed little film that it might have sprung complete from a magic movie spring.
So that's it, really.
Kajaki
Kajaki is an extraordinary film for two reasons: Firstly because there is twenty minutes in the middle that are the most tense I've ever seen in a movie, both L and I were sitting up on the sofa gasping in horror. Secondly because, as one of the men depicted puts it in an interview: this is not based on real events, it is real events, everything is exactly as it happened.
Certainly it's only a voice-over away from being a really good docu-drama rather than a really good film. I don't recall it having any soundtrack and much of the dialogue felt unusually accurate. I'm thinking of both the jargon filled back and forth before firing a mortar round and the clearly very procedural conversations around treating injuries. These would surely be rejected by a normal script editor as too long-winded in the first case and too repetitious in the second. Here they help give the weight of realism to the movie which is what makes it work so well.
There are two things, and another third thing, I think, that would have been done differently in a based on real events movie:
1. You would have whittled down the characters. It is always a problem in soldier movies to introduce the characters well enough for the viewer to distinguish one from the other by the time the action starts; they all have the same haircut and wear the same clothes. Dog Soldiers does this very well. Aliens exceptionally well. In Kajaki there are simply too many and, faithfully depicting the boredom of life at the damn, not enough for them to do.
It makes up for this with some good naturalistic acting and a very good ear for squaddy dialogue, I had little idea who most of them were but they felt so real I still cared about them.
2. You would pace the action differently. The first mine goes off about 45 minutes in I think, which is as much a script decision here as it would be in any other film, but after that they come pretty regularly (once every ten minutes or so) until they don't anymore. This is not what you'd chose. You'd either hammer them at the audience one after the other with no let up and then make it a film about trying to save the lives of the injured for the last half hour, or you'd let them build, with a long break after the first one so that the audience felt safe again, and the ratchet them up, each pause being smaller than the last, so the action builds toward the climax.
The risk in exploding the mines at regular intervals is that the audience comes to expect it, feels safe, and then fails to take it seriously. Kajaki is focused on the reaction though, how the men handle each new blast and each new set of injuries. Consequently there is roughly the same amount of movie after each mine. It gets away with it, again, because it feels so real, and also because it's so intense. The performances and the effects work are the key. The injuries look all too horribly real and the men all too close to cracking under the pressure. This is a big achievement for what was a pretty low budget movie.
3. Finally, and this is where it would become another film entirely, you'd have to up the ante somehow at the end. They'd have to make some superhuman effort to carry the wounded out on foot, or there would have to be a race against time to fetch more medical supplies, or, most obviously and most destructively, the Taliban would attack. Something silly.
If Kajaki has a weak point it is the final fifteen minutes which is, fundamentally, just some blokes sitting in the dirt waiting to be rescued. Tension only exists because one of them might die, but there is no desperate CPR, no E.R.-style scenery chewing and rending of garments at the bedside. We get a small amount of shouting and a handful of tell my kids I love them, but, true to the characters, that is all pretty low key.
Kajaki was good enough that I didn't care though, I was wholly invested in the characters by that point and, rather than wondering why the film lost pace, I was just desperate that they should get out of there without treading on another mine.
It took risks this movie, and they paid off.
Certainly it's only a voice-over away from being a really good docu-drama rather than a really good film. I don't recall it having any soundtrack and much of the dialogue felt unusually accurate. I'm thinking of both the jargon filled back and forth before firing a mortar round and the clearly very procedural conversations around treating injuries. These would surely be rejected by a normal script editor as too long-winded in the first case and too repetitious in the second. Here they help give the weight of realism to the movie which is what makes it work so well.
There are two things, and another third thing, I think, that would have been done differently in a based on real events movie:
1. You would have whittled down the characters. It is always a problem in soldier movies to introduce the characters well enough for the viewer to distinguish one from the other by the time the action starts; they all have the same haircut and wear the same clothes. Dog Soldiers does this very well. Aliens exceptionally well. In Kajaki there are simply too many and, faithfully depicting the boredom of life at the damn, not enough for them to do.
It makes up for this with some good naturalistic acting and a very good ear for squaddy dialogue, I had little idea who most of them were but they felt so real I still cared about them.
2. You would pace the action differently. The first mine goes off about 45 minutes in I think, which is as much a script decision here as it would be in any other film, but after that they come pretty regularly (once every ten minutes or so) until they don't anymore. This is not what you'd chose. You'd either hammer them at the audience one after the other with no let up and then make it a film about trying to save the lives of the injured for the last half hour, or you'd let them build, with a long break after the first one so that the audience felt safe again, and the ratchet them up, each pause being smaller than the last, so the action builds toward the climax.
The risk in exploding the mines at regular intervals is that the audience comes to expect it, feels safe, and then fails to take it seriously. Kajaki is focused on the reaction though, how the men handle each new blast and each new set of injuries. Consequently there is roughly the same amount of movie after each mine. It gets away with it, again, because it feels so real, and also because it's so intense. The performances and the effects work are the key. The injuries look all too horribly real and the men all too close to cracking under the pressure. This is a big achievement for what was a pretty low budget movie.
3. Finally, and this is where it would become another film entirely, you'd have to up the ante somehow at the end. They'd have to make some superhuman effort to carry the wounded out on foot, or there would have to be a race against time to fetch more medical supplies, or, most obviously and most destructively, the Taliban would attack. Something silly.
If Kajaki has a weak point it is the final fifteen minutes which is, fundamentally, just some blokes sitting in the dirt waiting to be rescued. Tension only exists because one of them might die, but there is no desperate CPR, no E.R.-style scenery chewing and rending of garments at the bedside. We get a small amount of shouting and a handful of tell my kids I love them, but, true to the characters, that is all pretty low key.
Kajaki was good enough that I didn't care though, I was wholly invested in the characters by that point and, rather than wondering why the film lost pace, I was just desperate that they should get out of there without treading on another mine.
It took risks this movie, and they paid off.
Wednesday 8 March 2017
Logan
I have some small issues with Logan: that the genetically modified super-children are a somewhat tired trope, that the evil-Wolverine never really works very well, that the seemingly endless reams of burly men with guns are nothing but anonymous claw-fodder, that the adamantium bullet is a clunky plot device you can see coming a mile away. I think the last three could have been solved together without too much difficulty and a better movie made as a result. The first would be much harder to deal with and would necessitate the film becoming something else, not a superhero movie.
And there-in is the point, that all my issues are with it are with its superheroyness, the necessarily silly fantasy elements that drive the plot, give Wolverine something to fight for, a lot of someones to fight, and a final someone you don't see how he can beat, and a way to beat him that has hung on the mantelpiece from the first act; but the rest of the film is so good, so not silly, so not comic-booky, that they stand out.
And it is very good, from the opening scene where we not only see Wolverine reluctant to fight and then explode in berserker rage with brutal results, but also see one of his claws fail to extend - a beautiful visual metaphor that tells you exactly where you are with the character; to the penultimate shot of a boy clutching a Wolverine toy having just buried his hero, having learned that hero was all too human, but then learned that he was still a hero after all.
Seriously, just because I am still a bit excited, here are some other very good bits in no particular order:
- At the end of the first act the Mexican lady precisely explains how the third act twist is going to work, but even while you are feeling clever for having spotted the bullet you don't spot that.
- In his short time with her, professor Xavier expertly teaches Laura everything she will need in life. Firstly in the conversation about the lioness, which is not even addressed to her, where he simply says: we know you are a killer and we accept you and value you for it. Secondly in watching Shane with her, saying: this is the moral code you will need. Finally in showing her a family, saying: this is what you are fighting for.
- The high camera angle when evil-Wolverine enters Xavier's bedroom, alerting you that something is up.
- The fundamental power fantasy of superheros writ large in the final child fight.
- Wolverine can't remember if he killed Richard E. Grant's father or not.
- It has the balls to kill off two major franchise characters.
- The mutants are not supermen. Caliban describes himself as a glorified bloodhound. Wolverine is checked by just a handful of well trained burly men. Professor X's very powerful brain fails him and becomes a danger to those he cares about. The children at the end are still just children, maybe lethal, but easy to overpower.
- Genuine throat-slashing, skull-skewering, limb-chopping violence.
- Every scene with Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart. Literally every one.
X-Men has always ladled on the internal tensions: Rogue's inability to touch another person, Cyclops' inability to look anyone in the eye, Professor X's inability to use his powers without violating his own moral code, Mystique's inability to settle on a form that does not disgust the world, Magneto's inability to reconcile his fight for survival with his friendship with Charles. These are Alan Moore's 'superhero but with a bad leg' 2-dimensional characters to be sure, but this is comic books and they work.
In this light it is a surprise that Wolverine, who is on the face of it quite a weak character (kills people but then feels a bit bad about it), has proved so strong. I think the secret is his effective immortality and his lack of memory. It makes Wolverine a character disassociated from the world. He lives entirely in the present with no investment in the future. His tensions is his inability to reconcile his morality with his nihilism. He can protect but cannot belong. Only his anger makes him fight.
You also can't downplay the role of Hugh Jackman who has always been the chief source of humour and charm in all the (generally strong) X-Men casts, only Patrick Stewart's chummy sparring with Ian Mckellen has been more fun to watch.
An old and fading Wolverine makes perfect sense then. He's always been old so the only place for the character to go is to finally die. To truly be in the world he has to leave it. When he know's he's going to die he worries about those he'll leave behind.
X-Men has always worked well because the mutants are an all purpose metaphor for oppression, racial when they can't pass - homophobic when they can, and the argument about how to fight it (Martin Luther King vs Malcolm X in a transposition of the role and the initial).
This one is obviously meant to be viewed through the lens of immigration, the border with Mexico is a prominent background feature, Laura is fleeing toward asylum in Canada, but it's a theme not the plot. There are no excitable fox-news style cutaways vilifying mutants, there is no sense of the general public being afraid of them (quite the opposite in fact). The movie avoids politics and focuses on the characters, which is what makes it feel like something more than a comic-book movie, which is why the comic-book aspects of it (far better than robot samurai or any of Magneto's silly macguffins though they may be) grate a little.
Could Laura had been, say, Logan's daughter from just a fling, not a genetic experiment? Could it be, say, the police pursuing her rather than a shadowy force of cyborg soldiers? Maybe because of something as prosaic as a murder? Or simply because she's only a child and her legal guardians want her back? The situation escalating because of her and Wolverine's tendency to solve problems by slicing throats. Could the final bad guy have been not yet another mutant but, say, a swat team and Wolverine's own weakened state?
The best bits would still be there, Logan and Charles would still swear at each other in a filling-station toilet. Daddy and daughter would still team up to stab people at the end. They would still watch Shane in a casino hotel room. But would it still have been an X-Men movie? I guess not. And maybe if the rest of it became more serious then it would be the silliness of Wolverine and the Professor that grated.
And so it has it's own tension; its inability to be as good as it could without becoming something else entirely. But maybe that's actually what makes it so strong.
And there-in is the point, that all my issues are with it are with its superheroyness, the necessarily silly fantasy elements that drive the plot, give Wolverine something to fight for, a lot of someones to fight, and a final someone you don't see how he can beat, and a way to beat him that has hung on the mantelpiece from the first act; but the rest of the film is so good, so not silly, so not comic-booky, that they stand out.
And it is very good, from the opening scene where we not only see Wolverine reluctant to fight and then explode in berserker rage with brutal results, but also see one of his claws fail to extend - a beautiful visual metaphor that tells you exactly where you are with the character; to the penultimate shot of a boy clutching a Wolverine toy having just buried his hero, having learned that hero was all too human, but then learned that he was still a hero after all.
Seriously, just because I am still a bit excited, here are some other very good bits in no particular order:
- At the end of the first act the Mexican lady precisely explains how the third act twist is going to work, but even while you are feeling clever for having spotted the bullet you don't spot that.
- In his short time with her, professor Xavier expertly teaches Laura everything she will need in life. Firstly in the conversation about the lioness, which is not even addressed to her, where he simply says: we know you are a killer and we accept you and value you for it. Secondly in watching Shane with her, saying: this is the moral code you will need. Finally in showing her a family, saying: this is what you are fighting for.
- The high camera angle when evil-Wolverine enters Xavier's bedroom, alerting you that something is up.
- The fundamental power fantasy of superheros writ large in the final child fight.
- Wolverine can't remember if he killed Richard E. Grant's father or not.
- It has the balls to kill off two major franchise characters.
- The mutants are not supermen. Caliban describes himself as a glorified bloodhound. Wolverine is checked by just a handful of well trained burly men. Professor X's very powerful brain fails him and becomes a danger to those he cares about. The children at the end are still just children, maybe lethal, but easy to overpower.
- Genuine throat-slashing, skull-skewering, limb-chopping violence.
- Every scene with Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart. Literally every one.
X-Men has always ladled on the internal tensions: Rogue's inability to touch another person, Cyclops' inability to look anyone in the eye, Professor X's inability to use his powers without violating his own moral code, Mystique's inability to settle on a form that does not disgust the world, Magneto's inability to reconcile his fight for survival with his friendship with Charles. These are Alan Moore's 'superhero but with a bad leg' 2-dimensional characters to be sure, but this is comic books and they work.
In this light it is a surprise that Wolverine, who is on the face of it quite a weak character (kills people but then feels a bit bad about it), has proved so strong. I think the secret is his effective immortality and his lack of memory. It makes Wolverine a character disassociated from the world. He lives entirely in the present with no investment in the future. His tensions is his inability to reconcile his morality with his nihilism. He can protect but cannot belong. Only his anger makes him fight.
You also can't downplay the role of Hugh Jackman who has always been the chief source of humour and charm in all the (generally strong) X-Men casts, only Patrick Stewart's chummy sparring with Ian Mckellen has been more fun to watch.
An old and fading Wolverine makes perfect sense then. He's always been old so the only place for the character to go is to finally die. To truly be in the world he has to leave it. When he know's he's going to die he worries about those he'll leave behind.
X-Men has always worked well because the mutants are an all purpose metaphor for oppression, racial when they can't pass - homophobic when they can, and the argument about how to fight it (Martin Luther King vs Malcolm X in a transposition of the role and the initial).
This one is obviously meant to be viewed through the lens of immigration, the border with Mexico is a prominent background feature, Laura is fleeing toward asylum in Canada, but it's a theme not the plot. There are no excitable fox-news style cutaways vilifying mutants, there is no sense of the general public being afraid of them (quite the opposite in fact). The movie avoids politics and focuses on the characters, which is what makes it feel like something more than a comic-book movie, which is why the comic-book aspects of it (far better than robot samurai or any of Magneto's silly macguffins though they may be) grate a little.
Could Laura had been, say, Logan's daughter from just a fling, not a genetic experiment? Could it be, say, the police pursuing her rather than a shadowy force of cyborg soldiers? Maybe because of something as prosaic as a murder? Or simply because she's only a child and her legal guardians want her back? The situation escalating because of her and Wolverine's tendency to solve problems by slicing throats. Could the final bad guy have been not yet another mutant but, say, a swat team and Wolverine's own weakened state?
The best bits would still be there, Logan and Charles would still swear at each other in a filling-station toilet. Daddy and daughter would still team up to stab people at the end. They would still watch Shane in a casino hotel room. But would it still have been an X-Men movie? I guess not. And maybe if the rest of it became more serious then it would be the silliness of Wolverine and the Professor that grated.
And so it has it's own tension; its inability to be as good as it could without becoming something else entirely. But maybe that's actually what makes it so strong.
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