Trinity Film Review - The Women in Film Issue

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The

Women in Film issue

C

HANGE COMES SLOWLY. In a tumultuous year, it’s important to remember that the forces which cause upheaval do not sway overnight.

After decades of inequality, it appears as if the film industry is starting to change. Prominent women are more vocal about their mistreatment.

Female characters are becoming more than token love interests. Women like Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold are directing some of the most vital cinema around.

In making ‘Women in Film’ the theme of this issue, we hoped to cover as broad a range of topics within the subject as possible. Looking at the finished product, I also see how many we missed. It would take volumes and volumes to include every worthy filmmaker and film. I hope readers use this issue as a point of departure, to watch the films we’ve written about and to seek out those we’ve overlooked.

Anyway, we hope you enjoy the work we’ve done. I’d like to thank all of those who contributed in any way, large or small. I’d also like to give my sincere gratitude to my predecessor Louie Carroll for his grounded guidance, as well as Choy-Ping Clarke-Ng and Dermot O’Riordan for their indispensable work on the cover and layout respectively.

Thanks for reading,

Liam Farrell | editor

Editor Liam Farrell Deputy Editors Ken Donnelly Finlay Glen Naomi Keenan O’Shea Clare Martin Contributors Natalie Burke Louie Carroll Thomas Emmett Caolainn Daly Leo Hanna Andrew Kerr Wei Jie Lam Jack Thornton Rebecca Wynne-Walsh Eva Wyse Layout Dermot O’Riordan Cover Choy-Ping Clarke-Ng

contents

Trinity Film Review • Vol. VIII – Issue 1 • December 2016 Playback: Women in Film

Page 04

Feature: Kingsman

Page 20

Modern Masterpiece

Page 06

Feature: Scream to Be Heard

Page 22

Feature: Motherhood

Page 08

Overrated

Page 24

Feature: That Kind of Girl

Page 10

Underrated

Page 25

Review: The Edge of Seventeen

Page 12

Hidden Gem

Page 26

Review: United States of Love

Page 14

Netflix Graveyard

Page 27

Review: Sully

Page 16

Feature: On the Borderline

Page 28

Review: Paterson

Page 18

Five Easy Pieces: Best of 2016

Page 30 3

playback | Women in Film Betty Blue (1986) | Naomi Keenan O’Shea

J

EAN-JACQUES BEINEIX’S 1986 film Betty Blue (originally titled 37°2 le matin) is an equally as infamous as it is celebrated exploration of female psychology and sexuality. With the physically striking and vampish Béatrice Dalle playing the young titular protagonist, and the film’s canonical place within the cinéma du look movement, Betty Blue is an undoubtedly sensuous and frankly sexy cinematic experience, imbued with genuine pathos and tragedy. The film charts the rapidly budding relationship between Betty and Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade), an older, hyper-sensitive and classically masculine aspiring writer, and the impact that Betty’s deteriorating

mental health has upon their deeply loving and sexual relationship.

With a run time exceeding three hours, Betty Blue offers a protracted and intimate insight into the development and demise of its characters’ lives and relationships. Dalle gives a profoundly raw and vivacious performance, embodying a distinctly youthful and liberated female sexuality, and she commands centrestage with her daring and provocative female presence.

Margaret (2011) | Liam Farrell

K

ENNETH LONERGAN’S SECOND FEATURE Margaret is a criminally underseen film, perhaps as a result of the six-year struggle between the writer/director and studio over control of the final edit. The film that emerged from that battle is a threehour-long winding psychodrama, a searing interrogation of morality and justice played out against the epic backdrop of Manhattan’s concrete jungle. The action follows the fallout

from a fatal bus accident which precocious Upper West Side teen Lisa, played by Anna Paquin, believes she may have caused. Lonergan populates the film with a host of uniquely fascinating characters, and the lengthy run-time allows them enough space to come to life and clash. At the core of the film are the hyper-intelligent Lisa, angsty and belligerent, and her actor mother (J Smith Cameron), whose attempts to connect with her daughter often end up with the

pair spitting venom.

Scenes build to frictious crescendos.

Lisa’s crusade takes on Dostoevskian proportions. The humming city gains a life of its own. Add in terrific supporting performances from Jeannie Berlin, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon, and Matthew Broderick among others, and the result is an operatic tapestry soaked in post-9/11 nausea.

The Craft (1996) | Clare Martin

T

HE CRAFT IS ONE of those cult 90’s movies that is forgotten far too often.

Sarah (Robin Tunney) moves to L.A. with her dad after a suicide attempt, and on her first day at high school attracts attention from jock Chris and a group of three girls

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who Chris dismisses as witches. After Chris spreads lies about Sarah being the worst lay he’s ever had, Sarah joins forces with the girls – Nancy, Bonnie, and Rochelle – to complete their coven. Before, the trio had practiced witchcraft with no results, but with Sarah’s powers as a natural witch they

begin to make things actually happen.

Fairuza Balk gives the most terrifying performance as Nancy, with her elastic, mask-like face. Nancy is the most disadvantaged of the girls (drunk stepdad, neglectful mom, ostracized by other students, etc.), and she turns into a villain as her weakness makes

TFR writers on the films that have been on their minds her lust for power even stronger. Each girl has her own desires that they use their witchcraft to gain. However, like with a genie’s wish everything

eventually turns sour. The film makes you root for Sarah, pity the others, and just have a good time basking in how 90’s everything is. And in case

you were wondering, of course the film has an amazing soundtrack.

Unrelated (2007) | Finlay Glen

U

NRELATED WAS THE FIRST feature by the British filmmaker Joanna Hogg (Archipelago, Exhibition) from 2007, about a childless, middle-aged woman who joins her old school friend and teenage family on a holiday in a Tuscan villa.

Feeling alienated and apart from her adult peers she finds herself spending more time with the teens, joining in their adolescent antics. The central relationship is between Anna and the charismatic teenager Oakley, played by a young Tom Hiddleston fresh out

of drama school. As the plot unfurls, Anna must admit that she belongs to neither the teens nor the ‘olds’, and is pushed towards personal crisis.

The central performance by Kathryn Worth is brilliant, unobtrusively capturing Anna’s vulnerability and perfectly complementing Hogg’s distinctive cinematic technique.

The unapologetic stillness of the camera is a revelation - crosscutting is limited and there are few short shots. The effect is that, instead of immersing us in the action and determining our interpretation, we

absorb the narrative in our own way as we might a novel or a play. We are made to feel like observers, and what we are observing is rendered with remarkable authenticity. Hogg takes the milieu of the British upper-middle class, and although scrupulously observant of their trappings, resists easy moral judgment. The drama is handled with sensitivity and great artistic confidence, and reminds you why you turn to art in the first place to show you life.

The Innocents (1961) | Leo Hanna

A

DAPTED FROM HENRY JAMES’ seminal ghost story The Turn of the Screw, 1961’s The Innocents encapsulates a lot of what made the Silver Age of horror so distinct. The sweeping visuals, the eerie atmospheres and the incredible sets; all these are reasons why The

Innocents packs such a punch. The central turmoil of the protagonist Miss Giddens, portrayed elegantly by Deborah Kerr, is uniquely maternal.

Her quest to protect the two charges under her care from the nefarious spirit of the deceased valet Peter Quint transforms domestic themes into supernatural gothic horror. The lack

of a male role model for the children allows Quint’s spectre to exert a paternal power over them, which Miss Giddens must guard them from at all costs. Giddens’s slow mental deterioration throughout the film becomes apparent as her bond with the children is slowly broken by this strong male figure and the inexplicable link he holds with the orphans. With gorgeous scenery worthy of a Jane Austen adaptation and the spine-tingling tension of an Ealing horror, The Innocents is an often-overlooked horror classic. Mixing quasi-psychedelic scenes of mental descent and beautifully constructed scares this is an excellent way for any burgeoning horror fan to dip their toe into the water.

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modern masterpiece | Naomi Keenan O’Shea

U

NDER THE SKIN (2013), Jonathan Glazer’s third feature film, has stayed with me since I first saw it screened at the IFI in March of 2014. It is a film I have seen many times since, although never again in the cinema, and one which I mention time and time again when asked for my opinion on the greatest films of the twenty-first century. I imagine it will take its rightful place in the repertoire of films studied as part of university film degrees, and it will forever resurface as a worthy retrospective to be screened at horror and sci-fi film festivals. But most importantly, Under the Skin deserves to be celebrated as one of the rare films of the twenty-first century that is a true masterpiece of cinema.

With a scant filmography of just three feature films, Glazer’s command of the cinematic language is strikingly profound.

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Sexy Beast (2000) and Birth (2004) display Glazer’s adept manipulation of genre convention, ranging from the gangster film to the family melodrama, with his distinct authorial proclivity for surrealism carefully thrown into the mix. With Under the Skin, Glazer has hybridised the iconography of the sci-fi film alongside a thematic revision of the body-horror genre, as well as a distinct engagement with the legacy of British social realism, producing a film that is at once acutely self-aware of its indebtedness to cinematic history and simultaneously distinctive in both its vision and execution.

Evocative of Stanley Kubrick or David Lynch’s surrealist aesthetics, as well as the gritty urban realism characterised by the films of Andrea Arnold, Glazer has found his own unique place amongst the masters of cinema.

Under the Skin is first and

foremost a film of visceral texture.

With an uncanny and disorienting soundscape composed by Mica Levi, a fervent eschewal of dialogue throughout most of the runtime, and a focus on the surface aestheticization of the cinematic image, Glazer has produced a film that is fundamentally about cinema itself. Under the Skin is rare and masterful because of its hyper-experiential quality. It is a film that deserves to be seen in the cinema, in absolute silence and darkness, so as its force and its brevity- it is notably criticized for being too slow, too boring, too uneventful- can be understood and absorbed in its rightful capacity. The closest feeling I could associate with experiencing the film is that of homesickness, a sense of palpable displacement.

While contemporary sci-fi films often produce the goosebump awe of immense high-budget spectacle, generally combined

with a melodramatic family crisis or romantic relationship to carefully balance the macromicro dichotomy of apocalyptic uncertainty, Under the Skin resonates on a far more corporal, emotional and identifiable level.

Scarlett Johansson plays the unnamed extraterrestrial Other who arrives on earth in urban Glasgow. She curb crawls through the Glaswegian streets in a white van on a quest to sexually seduce and kill lone, local men.

Ritually applying red lipstick, wearing a dark wig and donning a fur coat, Johansson becomes the iconographic embodiment of a contemporary femme fatale.

Her victims, a conglomerate of young, macho, working-class men, are systematically killed in a ritualised danse macabre that takes place in a cinematic nospace of textured darkness. Their bodies are calcified in a liquid expanse, metamorphosed into balloon-like figures, and their organs and skin harvested on an industrial treadmill. On the surface, Under the Skin is a sci-fi horror of female sexuality turned deathly sinister. And yet, Glazer deftly manipulates all facets concerning the ‘surface’ of things; thematically engaged with ideas of identity and human relations, and saturated with the hyperaestheticization of the cinematic image, Glazer inverts the classical tropes of the sci-fi and horror genres in a plethora of narrative and stylistic ways to produce a film that is groundbreaking in its subversive approach to issues concerning gender and sexuality, as well visually masterful in its negotiation of realist and surrealist aesthetics.

Glazer has succeeded in deconstructing and obliterating the legibility of surface and skin, which emerges most astutely

through the casting of Scarlett Johansson in the lead role.

Johansson’s ability to transcend her star persona is not only indicative of an expert performance but also a commanding manipulation of the structures of recognition and dissociation on Glazer’s part as the director. The resultant film is one that induces a dual sense of the familiar and the uncanny, supported by the blending of realist and surrealist aesthetics, as well as the use of hidden cameras and the casting of unprofessional actors. We are at once inside a hyper-realist and recognisable world, furnished by the hallmarks of twenty-first century consumerism and the sexual politics of heterosexual flirtation, only to be forcefully and viscerally ejected from these familiar settings and interactions and brought into a cinematic space that is visually unplaceable and emotionally discomfiting.

Glazer’s deft negotiation of these ostensibly irreconcilable worlds, as well as his nuanced engagement with both horror and pathosmost profoundly displayed in the protracted coastal scene, in which an infant is left stranded on the shore after his parents have drowned attempting to rescue their dog from being dragged out to sea- are indicative of his daring and provocative directorial vision, as well as his masterly command of a unique and resonant cinematic language.

Under the Skin is a challenge to speak about. It is even more challenging to write about.

It powerfully eludes our conditioning of cinematic expectation and eschews the conventions of filmic language

within which we traditionally articulate our understanding and response to cinema. And it is for this very reason that it must earn its status as a modern masterpiece. Under the Skin is about film as a visual experience, the power and the resonance of the cinematic image, and how it impacts our understanding of, and our relationship to, the world beyond the frame. It is not didactic, it is not moralising, it refuses the binaries of good and evil through which genre cinema has traditionally conditioned us to receive and perceive film narrative and aesthetics. Glazer has offered a reappraisal of cinema as first and foremost an imagistic form, something that has been drowned in the deluge of cinema’s drive toward narrativity and plot that characterises the majority of genre filmmaking. The image of the alien standing naked before a fulllength mirror, bathed in a deep orange light, and observing her body as human for the first time, is something that has remained with me for several years now.

And if the image remains, and the feeling it incites achieves a profundity of such measure, then Glazer has achieved nothing short of a cinematic masterpiece.

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feature | Ken Donnelly

“

Mo t herhood

HUMAN SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON us falling in love. Me falling in love with my mother, and my mother falling in love with me, but if that doesn’t happen, we’re pretty much doomed.”

These are the words of Olivia (Patricia Arquette) as she attempts to explain John Bowlby’s attachment theory to a college lecture hall. It is the theory which has dictated her life up to this point.

Her innate attachment and obligation towards her children is, in many ways, her tragedy. She adores her children and cannot avoid the responsibility of raising them on her own. She is essentially trapped.

Shot over the space of 12 years, Boyhood, the 2014 feature directed

by Richard Linklater, tracks the journey of Olivia’s son Mason from the age of six, right through his childhood and adolescence to the age of eighteen.

H o w e v e r , Boyhood is essentially Olivia’s story. Her life decisions carve out the narrative of the film. By raising Mason and his sister on her own she is completely responsible for them and they rely on her totally. She exclaims ironically to her son Mason towards the end of the film that she “really enjoys making poor life decisions to keep you guys on the brink of poverty”. She has made a series of life choices, constantly attempting to make life better for her and her children, only to end up miserable and dealing with the consequences.

We empathise with her at the start as motherhood takes up her entire existence.

We feel the full force of her despair as she endures a violent and abusive marriage.

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We argue along with her, we cry with her and we long for her to find her feet. The intense honesty of Arquette’s performance makes it impossible for the viewer not to think of their own mother. Olivia’s rollercoaster journey and personal despair create an empathy which resonates deeply.

Boyhood forces us to experience the often painful life of a single mother and we can’t help but feel deeply affected by it.

Motherhood has obscured Olivia’s entire identity. In everything she does she is judged as a mother. She can’t date without it becoming an issue and she can’t go out and enjoy herself without people seeing her as irresponsible. It is here where Boyhood begins to echo the 1937 classic Stella Dallas, starring Barbara

Stanwyck as the titular character. Stella is a young woman living at home who falls for a successful businessman named Stephen Dallas. They go on to get married and have a daughter named Laurel. However, Stella is then discarded by Stephen as she is seen as being too wild and adventurous to be his wife or the mother of his child. Both Olivia and Stella have been caught up in the restrictions of motherhood. They are immediately expected to shed their bold or fun-loving sides in order to adopt Victorian notions of being a woman and a mother. Olivia proclaims in Boyhood: “I was someone’s daughter and then I was somebody’s fucking mother”. Motherhood has robbed these women of opportunities in life while the fathers are allowed to carry on as they were.

The comparison between the two characters suggests that neither the 1930s nor the 21st century have gone very far in alleviating these outdated expectations.

For both Stella and Olivia, their innate connection with their children has been used as a weapon to subjugate them and confine them to the restrictions of parenthood.

The respective fathers in Boyhood and Stella Dallas, endure none of the same constraints or expectations. Both Mason Senior (Ethan Hawke) and Stephen Dallas (John Boles) are far less defined by their roles as fathers than the respective mothers. They are both largely absent in the children’s formative years but experience none of the stigma that an absent mother would. Mason Senior is allowed to be the kooky, fun

and uninhibited Dad character that the kids love but see rarely. He doesn’t have to carry the burden of raising them or disciplining them. Stephen Dallas is seen in a similar light, though more applicable to the 1930s. He is idolized from afar by his daughter Laurel and is allowed to fabricate a persona of being the wise and responsible one, in spite of his negligence.

The actions and attitudes of the fathers further stigmatize the mothers.

The exciting and appealing image of the fathers polarizes them with the mothers making the mothers appear mean and controlling in comparison. Mason Senior remarks to his children, “Your mother is a piece of work”, demonstrating a complete lack of empathy and reinstating this polarized portrayal. This negative depiction is scant reward for a mother who has effectively sacrificed her adult life to raise her children.

Mason Senior initially comes across as unreliable and untrustworthy while Stephen Dallas is completely unreasonable and arrogant. How many modern films are there which involve a rogue father who loves his kids but just can’t hack sharing the responsibilities of parenthood? The father starts off being a vagabond, gets kicked out of the house and eventually comes to learn that he was wrong and must do better, ultimately becoming the hero. While not fully the case in Stella Dallas, Stephen does emerge as the saviour to his daughter while Stella is made out to be the villain.

The difference in Boyhood is that the contemporary viewer is never rooting for Mason Senior, in the way they might have sympathised with, for example, Robin Williams’ character in Mrs Doubtfire. The viewer is aware of Mason Senior’s failures and realises that the real hero is in fact the discarded mother Olivia.

Both Olivia and Stella find

themselves drifting towards obscurity and despair in the second half of the respective films. Their role as mothers and primary carers has expired causing them effectively to cease to exist. However, the conclusions and implications of both films differ greatly. The climax of Stella Dallas is one of the most iconic moments of preWW2 cinema. The film ends with Stella locked out in the pouring rain, desperately trying to catch a glimpse through the window as her daughter gets married to an upper class gentleman. She manages to see her kiss the groom before being told to move on by a policeman and walking off triumphantly. It is an ending that has been central to the discourse of feminist film theory throughout the 20th century, crucially because of the way Stella reacts to this apparent tragic ending.

It is an ending that poses several uncomfortable questions. Does Stella really emerge victorious? Does the 1930s audience notice or care about her misery and uncertain future? Does the conclusion represent the perpetuation of a dominant patriarchy? Certainly viewers today are left deeply affected by Stella’s hollow victory. Her delight comes in seeing her daughter Laurel marry a man who is almost certain to treat her in the same manner that Stephen did to Stella herself.

There is seemingly no escape for women from this cycle. Stella’s unconditional love for her daughter has been used against her. She will do anything to ensure a bright future for her daughter. However, any concept of a successful life for a woman could only be achieved through marriage into a higher social class, one that inevitably undermines women and reinforces male domination. The real victory of the film is in the harrowing depiction of the entrapment of women within this patriarchal society.

Olivia in Boyhood gives the response that Stella Dallas is crying out for. Olivia calls out her circumstance for what it is; an utter tragedy. Upon sending her son Mason off to college and finally abandoning the constraints of motherhood, Olivia feels the pain that we expected from Stella.

After sacrificing her entire adult life up to this point for her children she finds herself left behind and wondering what it was all for. Olivia’s final scene is perhaps the most striking and honest outburst of emotion and frustration seen in 21st century cinema. She reduces her life to a series of sacrifices and milestones which slip away and ultimately lead to nothing.

Olivia does not get the phony confused happy ending that Stella has forced upon her. Instead of striding away triumphantly like Stella, the camera focuses on Olivia despairing with her head in her hands after she utters the pertinent words; “I just thought there would be more”. These words linger with the viewer and announce Olivia as the standout character in the film, overshadowing Mason’s seemingly trivial adolescent experiences. She has been left feeling completely empty and now faces into an increasingly dark and uncertain future. While her main concern is of being cast aside and forgotten about, anybody who has seen the film will not forget Olivia’s story. Boyhood is a wake-up call to society and the film industry of the realities of patriarchal dominance and the dangers of well-defined societal roles and norms. It is not only a tribute to women and mothers but a stark reminder of the continued subjugation and oppression faced by women everywhere.

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feature | Eva Wyse

L

OVE HER OR HATE her, anyone who has watched 5 minutes of Girls or seen one interview segment with Lena Dunham has an opinion on the 30 year old actor, writer, producer, director, blogger, (professional whiner?)

Hailing from New York City, this young woman has cemented her artistry in homage to the city itself.

Perhaps taking the phrase ‘write what you know’ a little too seriously, this may be the crux or the beauty of Dunham’s work- let’s leave everyone to their own opinion on that one. Her breakthrough film came in the shape of Tiny Furniture (2010), a meditation on a young woman returning from college to the big city to her picture perfect Tribeca-based artist-mother’s loft. Upon reading Dunham’s autobiography, Not That Kind of Girl, one can very quickly see just how autobiographical Tiny Furniture is.

Dunham’s stage character is neurotic, self involved, self righteous and, frankly, unlikeable. But despite all the criticism Dunham receives there is a certain charm about her work that keeps a lot of us coming back for more. Speaking for women, it is her consistent effort to normalize honest depictions of sexual experiences and body image that is so affirming and comforting to see on screen. But we cannot forgive or ignore the very valid point that Dunham miraculously managed to create a depiction of contemporary twentysomethings living in New York city that has no people of color in it – an achievement in itself for all the wrong reasons.

One of the most fundamentally irritating things about Dunham is her ability to harness a sense of empowerment for female sexual liberation and bodily autonomy, only for the advancement of her own agenda and belief. Within the strictures of feminism she negates and ostracizes other key issues such as race and class, to name a few. Dunham is very much part of the current branding of white feminism receiving huge public

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That Kind of Girl

backlash. Through understanding white feminism we can start to understand the true problem festering in Dunham’s public persona and art. In short, white feminism refers to the movement of white women creating a brand of “white girl power” (cough Taylor Swift #squad cough) for the advancement and pleasure of other white middle class women, whilst idiosyncratically labeling itself ‘feminism,’ hence giving the term a very convoluted and misleading inflection. Dunham neglects to represent and create art that has real appeal to anyone who identifies outside the realm of privileged white cis women. This is an inherently problematic system of oppression and does little to constructively service any grouping of people in the long run, but potentially causes huge harm to minorities. In order for feminism to be a progressive and bettering force, the mainstream cultural bodies need to begin wholly embracing the multifaceted nature of the feminist community and intersectional feminism.

Despite the fact that it appears

fashionable to dislike Dunham these days, we collectively need to separate her irritable on-screen persona, her poor efforts with regards to diversity and her lack of class awareness from an appreciation of her searingly honest exploration of the specific group of people she depicts in her work. For all her faults, Dunham does capture something acutely fascinating to watch. She preys on a worldwide audience of young people who fantasize about the grungy-glam lives of Brooklyn’s overly privileged, pseudo-hipster-artist communities.

In this there is something relatable to those in their twenties trying to make their dreams a reality whilst dealing with the crippling stress and reality of being self sufficient and witnessing one’s own principles and ideals gently disappear under the duvet as the lure of monetary necessity takes the reigns of everyday life.

Dunham has managed to negotiate a screen space for a very specific group of women to show their bare naked breasts and talk about the discoloration of their panties whilst PMSing. An admirable

feat by any means, but for all her accomplishments with Girls, she has some very major problems with her own celebrity. No matter how many times Marnie and Jessa tell her she is a self-involved narcissist, it is always a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Despite the self-awareness of the inherent narcissism of the show, it is boring, it is distancing and it disables an active engagement with the characters in question, thus making the television experience feel inherently shallow. It refutes the universality of good television, which I believe HBO’s latest comedy, Insecure, has successfully achieved.

Cue Issa Rae, HBO’s newest, shiniest, feminist pony-power showgirl, who I believe to be wholly deserving of the title. Insecure is a contemporary TV treasure, it is the TV that millennials deserve, need, want and should be consuming. Rae conceived her YouTube hit Awkward Black Girl, in her dorm at Stanford University, the hit went viral and this in turn sparked a contract with HBO in 2013. Insecure was co-created with comedian Larry Wilmore and charts the life of Issa, a black woman in her early 30s living in Los Angeles with her lackluster boyfriend of 7 years.

Issa works at a non-profit organisation for underprivileged kids in the greater Los Angeles area, providing plentiful scope for both keen satire and social commentary.

Of course there are some obvious differences between Girls and Insecure. One is set in New York and the other in Los Angeles, Girls focuses on characters in their mid twenties and Insecure on late twenties/ early thirties, the cast of Girls is predominantly white, while the cast of Insecure is predominantly black.

In Insecure our protagonist Issa and her best friend Molly have chosen drastically different career paths but both women are highly driven and ambitious. Notably, Molly comes from a disadvantaged background and has worked her arse off to succeed as a cut throat corporate lawyer.

Situating herself outside traditional representations of class restrictions she finds herself having to ‘act white’ in order to advance her career. In contrast, Issa comes from a middle class background and finds herself working at a non-profit organization that focuses on the advancement of underprivileged children. Molly performs the duty of role model on careers day to these children, serving as an example of what’s in store for these kids if they work hard, asserting positive depictions of real AfricanAmerican women, but not without the tongue in cheek humor Issa uses to undercut this potentially preachy message. In contrast, Girls centers on a group of privileged white women who are unwilling to alter their plans of achieving artistic stature for real-life

obligations and are horrified that their parents have cut them off financially at the ripe old age of 24. Both might be reflective of real-life social class groups, but one undoubtedly asserts itself as a far better television show with much more scope for positive public discourse.

Dunham represents white feminism in all its danger through her faulty belief that gender serves as an immunity card, protecting her from being conceived as offensive or discriminatory. Indeed, I believe she is a contradiction of herself; if a man did half the things she does Dunham would be the first and the loudest voice against it. A perfect example of this contradictory persona is her joking about dressing up as a rapist/ serial killer in 2013, or most recently her ‘Grabbed Pussy’ costume. It seems she has utilized the fight for gender equality as a continual opportunity for self-victimization and asserting female superiority. She seems to have very little understanding of the true meaning of feminism. She uses her fame to develop a brand of activism that relates only to her own life experiences, body shape and social demographic. She sees the world as being against her when, in reality, she operates in the top one percent. Ultimately, I believe she is dangerously close to feeding the appetites of people who are seeking to trivialize the feminist cause.

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review | Clare Martin

of EDGE Seventeen

The

K

ELLY FREMON C R A I G ’ S DIRECTORIAl debut The Edge of Seventeen feels familiar for two reasons.

First of all it comes across as incredibly real for anyone who had an awkward adolescence.

Secondly the film recycles tropes that most other coming-of-age movies have beaten to death.

Nonetheless it is an enjoyable, hilarious, and vulnerable teenage dramedy, mainly due to its stellar lead players.

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The Edge of Seventeen starts with a frantic Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld of True Grit and Pitch Perfect 2) announcing that she is going to kill herself to her crank of a teacher (Woody Harrelson, who essentially plays himself – the lovable, wise curmudgeon). The film then traces back to what brought Nadine to her suicidal thoughts. It turns out that Nadine is a misfit, and always has been, but while she’s been a misfit she’s had her best friend Krista by her side. She had her dad as well, until he died of

a heart attack. Now her mother Mona (Kyra Sedgwick) relies on her son Darian (Blake Jenner of ‘Everybody Wants Some!’ fame) to serve as her emotional rock while she gallivants around trying to find romance and keep her neurotic self together. Life wasn’t perfect for Nadine, but at least she had Krista – until Krista and Darian fell for each other. Nadine’s life spirals from then on. There are some romantic misadventures, and voila, she ends up in front of Woody Harrelson hyperventilating.

Hailee Steinfeld as Nadine carries the film with the sincere, empathetic, and hilarious performance you would expect from a Hollywood leading lady.

There’s a reason she was nominated for an Oscar at the tender age of 13 for True Grit - the girl has chops. She’s a brilliant actress and also incredibly likeable. Despite Nadine’s many missteps during the film, it’s hard not to empathize with her throughout because Steinfeld plays her that well.

Her friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson), looking like an extra from Hannah Montana, is probably the weakest character. You see her quickly fall head-over-heels for Nadine’s dreamboat brother and abandon her childhood best friend for him. While Krista makes some efforts to include Nadine and says that she is “not going to choose” between them, by saying this she has essentially already made her decision. She’s going to go out with Darian, even if it makes Nadine uncomfortable. Also, at no point do you see what it is that makes Krista so incredible. Why does Darian feel he absolutely has to go out with her at Nadine’s expense?

Her laugh is nice. She has one of those warm, trustworthy lowerpitch voices while still being

conventionally attractive. That’s about it. It’s obvious why Nadine needs her – she has no friends otherwise. At the end of the day, Krista is an utterly boring character who simply serves an important role in the plot.

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Hailee Steinfeld...carries the film with a sincere, empathetic, and hilarious performance Perhaps one of the most inspired choices Craig makes (she wrote the script as well) is choosing a Korean teenager as Nadine’s primary love interest. Asian men have long been maligned in Hollywood when it comes to their sexuality, often portrayed as effeminate and asexual. However, Hayden Szeto as Erwin Kim quickly turns around this stereotype. Though he fumbles in his attempts to court Nadine, it all fits along the lines of the

“adorkable” trope he is playing. As for being asexualized, that notion flies out the window as Erwin shows off his Adonis-like muscles when he and Nadine go swimming.

Thank you, Edge of Seventeen, for employing the female gaze.

The only time Erwin’s ethnicity is directly addressed is when Nadine guesses what his parents are like, and effectively typecasts them as a Tiger Mom and a stoic, distant father. And even then, Nadine apologizes and acknowledges she may have been racist.

The narrative on sexuality in this movie feels a bit trite. While it feels obvious to the viewer that Nadine should be with caring and funny Erwin, she is infatuated with bad boy Nick (Alexander Calvert, who’s apparently in Arrow). When she asks if he goes to her school he responds coyly, “Sometimes.” This storyline is old. It’s tried, it’s tested, and although it is true sometimes it is also boring. It plays out exactly as you would expect, beat by beat.

We need something new and more daring, and Craig has disappointed in this department.

While the dialogue is fresh and the performances lovely, The Edge of Seventeen could honestly use a bit more edge.

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review | Liam Farrell

T

O M A S Z WASILEWSKI’S BLEAK NEW drama United States of Love will do little to change the image Western society has formed of life behind the Iron Curtain. Set in Poland in 1990 as the Soviet Union crumbles, the iconography is unmistakable.

Tower blocks appear as ghostly obelisks which dominate the skyline. Interior scenes mostly take place in cramped flats, unfriendly functional chambers, and concretewalled churches. Joy is a scarce resource.

The plot focuses on the unfulfilled sex lives and desires of four women of varying age and social-standing. Agata (Julia Kijowska) is trapped with a husband she doesn’t love, and develops an obsession with the local priest. School principal Marzena (Marta Nieradkiewicz), sees her six-year long affair with a doctor come to an end. Renata (Dorota Kolak), an older teacher nearing retirement at Iza’s school, is infatuated with Marzena’s younger sister Iza (Magdalena Cielecka), an aspiring model. Little satisfaction is found by any of them.

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In the United States of Love everything feels frozen. The characters seem paralysed in unhappiness and dissatisfied with their lives, full as they are with emotional isolation. Their actions are primarily motivated by sex, though their drives are divested of any affection. Each of the women is reduced to desperation, having to resort to silent voyeurism, strange pantomime, and extreme manipulation in their attempts to find happiness. The sex itself is joyless, often playing out in single long takes in icy circumstances.

Agata’s work sees her renting out seedy bootleg porn tapes on VHS,

the cartoonish pleasure in stark contrast to the more frank sex in the film. A mood of oppression dominates everything, and the process of creating a true emotional connection seems fraught with difficulty. Life for the women of Wasilewski’s Poland is suffocating and fundamentally lonely.

The director’s control of tone is masterful. There is no score and little music in the film. The glaring silences in conversation and between scenes become stifling indicators of a breakdown in communication. This is the thirtysix year-old’s third feature, but it feels like his thirtieth, so assured is

his grasp.

The cinematography by Oleg Mutu, best known for his work on the highly acclaimed films of Romanian director Christian Mungiu, is also worthy of high praise. The characters appear boxed in by their surroundings, as Mutu makes clever use of the camera to place characters uncomfortably close to one another. Zoomed tracking shots which focus tightly on the back of character’s heads also draw us further into their perspective, showing them to be locked into their predicaments.

The colours are completely washed out, and sickly hues of green and blue tone the predominantly grey Soviet milieu. The characters take on the same corpse-like pallor as the similarly lost characters of the films of Roy Andersson, giving us the feeling that the living and the dead are not all that far apart.

There is much to be gained for viewers willing to brave the cold. The mood bears resemblance to the austere work of Michael Haneke, and Wasilewski similarly manages to make misery and sexual frustration compelling, not an easily-accomplished

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A mood of oppression dominates everything, and the process of creating a true emotional connection seems fraught with difficulty

feat. Credit is due to the four central performers, who give the film a devastating humanity.

Kijowska gives an emotionally raw performance as Agata, alternating between a haunted detachment and violent outbursts of passion.

Marta Niewkiewicz creates an impressively tightly wound headmistress, giving us a sense of her inner panic once her finely composed life begins to unravel.

Dorota Kolak’s beady-eyed gaze adds an unsettling vulnerability to her lonely character. Together they form a strong ensemble, and make the characters a source of empathy in a film that is often difficult to engage with.

Watching United States of Love, you get the sense that the filmmakers got very close to making the film they set out to make. However, the action can occasionally feel inaccessible, the characters too cut off to have any deep connection with, the mood too grim to bear. It is undoubtedly an accomplished piece of work though, a study of women at the end of their tether, ground down by lives which seem scarcely worth the effort.

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S U L LY MIRACLE ON THE HUDSON

review by Natalie Burke

O

N JANUARY 15TH 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 had to make an emergency water landing on the Hudson River due to bird strike. This saved the lives of 155 passengers and crew members. The pilot responsible for this incredible feat was Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger. This actually happened.

Sounds like an interesting premise for a movie, right? It’s really not. It’s really awful. Worse still, it’s boring. Director Clint Eastwood has managed to churn out yet another clunky male melodrama about the ‘everyman.’

He has taken a story about a man landing an airplane on the Hudson River and made it a nonevent.

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Tom Hanks as Sully is a large part of the problem. His attempt to be understated and compelling, translates into a languid and dull performance. There are moments when he looks genuinely constipated.

However, you cannot really blame Hanks when the film is so strained by Eastwood’s struggle to crowbar tension into the narrative.

The director opts out of a simple re-enactment or an interesting character piece, and instead focuses on trying to create a villain in the National Transport Safety Board, the civil

servants who were responsible for the subsequent investigation into the landing. Here they are depicted as cynical and snide in what feels like a flaccid effort to create yet another story about the ‘unappreciated’ American hero.

It genuinely feels as if Eastwood fabricates most of the unnecessary hostility and arrogance from the members of the board because it simply does not match up to what is depicted in the real life Sully’s autobiography, on which the film is based.

Elsewhere in the film, playing Sully’s wife, the fantastically talented Laura Linney is barely utilised in scenes that evoke a Saturday Night Live sketch. She appears only to generate warmth or panic over the phone to her husband. Aaron Eckhart is just as one dimensional as the cringe inducing co-pilot who is merely a collection of “way to go Sully” type lines that make him more suitable for a Judd Apatow bromance.

The performances are incredibly uneven.

Eastwood also creates thrilling sequences by portraying the visions that plague Sully throughout the film of the plane plowing into one of the many skyscrapers in the New York skyline. This cannot but conjure up those 9/11 images that filled every television screen across the world in 2001. However, the only act of terrorism here is the emotional terrorism Eastwood tries to perpetrate in an effort to fill out the film’s running time of 96 minutes. He is practically begging for the spectator’s outrage and sympathy. This film cannot stir the emotions. It’s too smug.

An argument could be made for this reviewer’s reaction being the result of a contemporary society that tends to be desensitised by its highly mediated nature. Why doesn’t Sully’s extraordinary story make for compelling viewing? It could be because the film feels like propaganda. There are undertones of a suggestion that Sully was able to pull this off because he is American. It could be because another depiction of a white middle class male as the ‘everyman’ feels dated. Or it could just be that the fault lies with the director’s choices. Bad casting, bad pacing, bad writing. Bad Eastwood.

The depiction of the claustral fame that accompanied the landing for Sully works as an interesting contrast to the NTSB’s investigation. The constant media attention must have made for quite a surreal couple of months, adding pressure to the very traumatic experience of, ostensibly, surviving a plane crash. If Eastwood was a little more adept at subtlety, this could have made for compelling drama.

Where Eastwood excels as a director is in the action sequences.

The re-enactment of the bird strike and the subsequent decision to land on the Hudson River, accompanied

by Sully’s announcement to “brace for impact,” leaves you breathless.

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review | Wei Jie Lam

J

IM JARMUSCH’S NEW FILM is one that goes against Hollywood conventions. It is a rather quiet, pleasant affair.

For one, our main character does not have a goal, there is very little conflict and drama that occurs throughout the film. However, with Paterson, Jarmusch once again proves that a film can celebrate the everyday minutiae of life.

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The film centres around Paterson (Adam Driver), a quiet bus driver who lives in Paterson, New Jersey.

He lives with his adoring wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani). Each day, Paterson gets up early to go to work, eats a bowl of Cheerios, and drives the bus. When he comes home after work he then takes his wife’s pet pitbull out for a walk and makes a stop at the

local bar for a drink, where he observes the owner Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley) interacting with a variety of friendly patrons.

Paterson writes poetry before each shift in his secret notebook and in between breaks. Laura urges him to share his poetry to the world, however he has no desire to do so as he finds writing poetry to just be a part of his life that he

enjoys. Funnily enough it turns out that Adam Driver’s portrayal of Paterson comes across as a gentle and generous soul, a huge contrast to the vulnerable portrayal of Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens.

Throughout the day, Paterson observes the world around him, from the passengers on the bus to the beauty of Ohio Blue Tip matchboxes, sometimes drawing influences from these observations for his poetry. Paterson’s poetry appears on screen throughout the film as simple squiggly handwriting when he writes. Instead of having the poems be purposely bad for comedic intent or inadvertently revealing aspects of Paterson himself, like a typical approach in perhaps another film, Paterson’s poetry is just a facet of who he is, someone who just also happens to writes poems for his own enjoyment. What is conveyed in the film very effectively is a natural invitation to share a moment of observation with Paterson and

appreciate that the mundane is in fact rather beautiful, through Jarmusch’s very distinct aesthetic.

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What is conveyed in the film very effectively is a natural invitation to share a moment of observation with Paterson and appreciate that the mundane is in fact rather beautiful

While the film is set in reality, the tone is somewhat whimsical. The streets are strangely uninhabited except for when Paterson comes into contact with strangers who appear in cameo-esque roles.

Paterson’s week is especially dipped in serendipity. For example, Paterson starts noticing twins after his wife tells him about a dream she has about twins. Later on in the film, while Paterson is walking his dog, a crew of gang members pull up to Paterson and ask him questions about his pet. However our suspension of disbelief is not completely lifted, rather that we accept these almost surreal events as part of Patterson’s life, which remains to be repetitive in structure but far from dull.

Paterson’s blissful relationship with Laura does however exasperate as it is suffocatingly sweet. Laura has a love for monochrome, and it is seen through the decor of the house, the colour scheme of her cupcakes and even her desire for Paterson to buy her a monochrome guitar. It is fairly questionable how Paterson puts up with her at times.

This is a film where not much happens. Even a brief altercation in the bar has little consequence, only giving little insight into Paterson’s military past, and leaving us to speculate. Ultimately inconsequential moments are extremely compelling to observe.

The audience throughout the movie feels the same amusement and appreciation of these moments as Paterson experiences, perhaps even more clearly. Its appeal is subtle, its delight comes from the mundane, and that’s what you will find so rewarding about it.

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feature | Finlay Glen

I

N THE OPENING SCENE of Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014), directed by Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Kick-Ass) and adapted from an original comic book by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons (Kick-Ass, Wanted), we are thrown into the middle of a deathdefying Kingsman mission to a generic Middle-Eastern desert warzone, where a very unreasonable foreign chap is about to blow himself up along with everyone else in the room. One of the members of the Kingsman secret service sacrifices his life by smothering the bomb, and Harry Hart (Colin Firth) gives a medal of honour to the man’s widow, saying that if she or her young son ever need help they should ring the number on the back of the medal. Seventeen years later and her son, Gary ‘Eggsy’ Unwin (Taron Egerton), a stereotypical council estate chav, gets nicked by the police for some typical criminal behaviour, and is about to get locked up until he calls the number on the medal. Hart gets Eggsy released, fills him in on who his father was, and recruits him for Kingsman training, where Eggsy and his rival candidates must battle it out for a vacant spot in the spy agency. Alongside the Kingsman training, Eggsy is also coached by Hart in the art of being a true British gentleman.

Eggsy is trained up just in time to help take on Kingsman’s biggest challenge yet, which arrives in the form of the Silicon Valley technocapitalist plutocrat Richmond Valentine (Samuel L Jackson).

The megalomaniac villainous plan is to

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give away free SIM cards to everyone on the planet which, on Valentine’s command, will issue a tone that causes people to become uncontrollably violent. Everyone will murder each other (other than a select group of rich and important people who are in on the plan), the land will be purged, humanity will be redeemed, and the issue of global warming overcome. Job done.

At first, I must admit, I thought it slightly odd that our arch-villain is a climate change activist, if a rather extreme and unorthodox one in his approach.

Perhaps, I wondered generously, it serves as a reminder to the viewer that climate change really will push civilization towards crises and resolutions of Biblical proportions. However, this magnanimous

interpretation somewhat flies in the face of the film’s plot. The suggested attitude to environmentalism on the narrative level, although hardly worth getting offended over, is basically reactionary, if not potentially ironic. Environmental interventionism is blatantly aligned with the corrupt schemes of a global elite, a narrative you’re more likely to find in the columns of Breitbart than in the movie-scripts of Hollywood. In fact, Richmond Valentine’s entire project reads as if it might have been lifted from one of Donald Trump’s campaign ramblings.

Valentine and his cohorts represent the modernizing, post-national forces of globalized capitalism: a high-tech economy, multiculturalism, liberalism, Janusfaced politicians, and immense economic inequality.

His sidekick Gazelle (Sofia Boutella) has futuristic prosthetic metal legs, carrying the marks of technological progress on her body; the uniform of the faceless army that defend Valentine’s headquarters is plain white (they belong to no past, no tradition, no culture); Valentine is a materialist who wears a new set of matching flat cap and tracksuits in every scene and eats McDonalds on a silver platter. The threat he poses is clearly far more insidious and pervasive than the self-detonating jihadi at the start of the film, because Valentine bears the seductive fruits of consumer capitalism.

One of Valentine’s key conspirators is the Swedish Prime Minister: an emblem of the spineless, amoral, establishment politician. He has long abandoned his role as statesman and representative of his people in service of the global elite, and is

deliberately contrasted with the Swedish Crown Princess, who takes a moral stand against the conspiracy and is subsequently imprisoned by Valentine for the rest of the film. Royalty are symbols of national heritage, embodiments of sacred, cultural tradition. Valentine, the global capitalist entrepreneur, wants to lock them up.

Seen in this light, the film dramatizes the essential narrative of reactionary populism: pitting a morally pure people rooted in a sacred past, against a corrupt, immoral elite who rule the present.

Our heroes, the Kingsmen, as suggested by their name, are defenders of national culture and traditional values.

An independent secret service founded by aristocratic families after World War I and operated out of a Savile Row tailors, they are not beholden to the government, and thus not specifically in service of the British people. However, in the context of the film’s insinuation that there is deep corruption amongst the ruling elite, this is arguably a sign of even greater fidelity to national ideals. The Kingsmen represent a time when Britain really was British.

Indeed, the film very self-consciously positions itself within the genre of the British heritage drama, which runs on feelings of cosy nationalist nostalgia.

Harry Hart – codename Galahad – sits in his office, half way through the film, surrounded by front pages of The Sun posted on the walls. They are the headlines, he says, from days on which Kingsman saved the world. British national history, the events collectively remembered as a nation, wouldn’t have been possible without the selfless work of Hart and his fellow servants to the crown. Spies, in the mythology of British nationalism, are like guardian angels, working in a hidden realm to protect the flock from the enemy outside.

The Kingsmen also represent a turn towards an older version of British masculinity, which the film presents as timeless: the self-sufficient, upperclass English gentleman. They model themselves on the Knights of the Round Table, placing their fraternity in the context of one of the foundational myths of the British people, and more specifically, the noble British gentleman.

Hart and Eggsy, like Galahad and Lancelot before them, are noble in manner, elegant in conversation, and peerless in battle.

Hart’s timeless mantra which he incants to a bunch of ungentlemanly oiks is the British gentleman’s abiding ethos, from Lancelot through to Bond: “Manners... maketh… man”. The film stages a contemporary version of the Arthurian armouring scene, where Eggsy is given his “modern gentleman’s armour”: shoes, pen, umbrella, cufflinks, bespoke suit. A token woman, Roxy, is added to the fraternity, which belies Kingsman’s conservative gender politics. She, I presume, isn’t eligible for the gentleman’s armour.

The Kingsmen (which, let us not forget, is one letter away from ‘kinsmen’) consecrate homosocial relationships, constructing a patrilineage where each generation inherit the customs and values of the last. In contrast, the role of the mother is spurned. Eggsy’s mum should have been nominated for the Academy Award for the most helpless character in the history of cinema. She is a passive object, beaten and sexually exploited by her layabout boyfriend and completely dependent on her son for help.

But clearly most of this is beside the point. The film is fun, and entertaining, and snappily done. None of these things are meant to be taken very seriously.

The jaded moral message at the heart of

the film is that a true gentleman’s virtue comes from within, but this is hardly what we’re supposed to come out of the cinema talking about. Neither should we be talking about the film’s ideological subtext, or about how genuinely moved we were by the Kingsman struggle in the face of Valentine’s plutocratic scheming.

Kingsman is a toying, postmodern pastiche of a Bond movie. Its gratuitous violence and sensational action sequences are taken to such extremes that it displays an ironic self-awareness of its own status as coarse entertainment. The Princess of Sweden is set up as a Gloriana-figure, an idealized symbol of moral purity, but the film closes with a joke about her having anal sex. The real reason they make their arch-villain an environmentalist is, well, why not? All religious belief in the film is fanatical and ridiculous: the megalomaniacal Valentine repeatedly compares his Chosen People to the Israelites, and we see, in a set-piece scene, a fundamentalist preacher spewing laughably overblown hate-speech into the ears of his congregation. The film knowingly and playfully aspires to nothing more serious than commercially successful blockbuster entertainment.

Kingsman is a product of the capitalist entertainment industry, and we can enjoy this film like Valentine enjoys his McDonalds. Matthew Vaughn put his name to an open letter in the days preceding the Brexit referendum urging the British people to vote remain and help preserve the creative industry’s status as “the global powerhouse it currently is”.

He is apparently a fan of Mrs. Thatcher and a member of the Conservative party.

I think we can safely conclude that, when he made the film, it was all a big joke.

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feature | Thomas Emmett

Scream to be Heard

T

HERE IS A PARTICUL ARLY gratifying scene late on in this year’s Don’t Breathe where Jane Levy’s character Rocky, having been tied down in a basement to be inseminated with a turkey baster by a blind ex-marine (the film lends itself excellently to social realism), escapes from her predicament and deep throats said ex-marine with his own turkey baster to a wave of gagging from the audience. The reason it is gratifying is not that the scene is an emotional breakthrough, or even that it is the victory lap for Rocky, but rather that there is finally a sense of vengeance from a female character on the genre that has so abused her.

Women don’t do well in horror films. The term “scream queen” emerges from a central female character who spends most of her screen time- you guessed it- screaming. It is the damsel in distress role and even appears in

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silent cinema, where only the act of screaming can be seen. The issue is that many of the great horror franchises- Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, every Dracula filmseems to involve a man hunting a woman. I am a massive horror fan, but the repetition of this trend does seem- to invoke an overused term problematic. Is cinema getting any better at representing women as time goes on as more interesting characters than simply the woman to be chased/ mauled/attacked/raped? Horror in 2016 shows mixed results.

Lights Out, a highly anticipated David F. Sandberg film, based on his own exceptional short film, is far from masterpiece. It is a cruel interpretation of mental health problems, it devolves quite quickly into jump scares and its resolution is simplistic at best.

However, its three main characters are all women. Rebecca and Sophie are mother and daughter, the latter being the childhood best friend of

the film’s monster, Diana. Diana was photosensitive when she was alive, and for that reason was forced into a radical experiment where she was exposed to lots of light and melted.

While it’s quite far from the stuff of your average Dardennes brothers film, it does have some good moments, not least its opening sequence where one of the few male characters is attacked in his mannequin factory. Rebecca and her mother do not get on, because Rebecca thinks her mother is insane and therefore spends a lot of the film trying to gain custody of her little brother. As previously said mental illness is deeply misrepresented, but the concept of a monster that can only exist in the darkness is so ingenious, one has to wonder how it has taken this long to write an entire film about it. Unfortunately the characters are underwritten and Rebecca is rather boring, so watching her for ninety minutes sulking, rolling her eyes and pouting is only slightly easier

than watching Marion Cotillard try to work out if she is indeed a double agent in the turgid Allied.

Don’t Breathe is quite the opposite.

It’s a very tense, well executed film.

Though there was very few people in the audience when I saw it, it still got more of a reaction than Lights Out and the terrible Ouija 2. Three petty thieves find themselves robbing a blind man who got compensated when his daughter was killed in a hit and run. If you think that sounds like a very convenient premise, so did I until midway through the film where they discover said drunk driver is tied up in the myopic maniac’s basement, in what is possibly the best horror set piece of 2016. The three protagonists, one a plucky woman trying to rescue her sibling, one a rebellious loudmouth, and a lovesick nice guy doomed for the friend zone, are quite fleshed out before being traumatised by the lovechild of Tim Burton and Mr Magoo. The tension in the film is palpable and there are at least three moments when you think there is finally hope of escape only for it to be dashed by the blind homeowner or 2016’s scariest dog.

Perhaps the worst example of female characters this year can be found in Ouija 2. The first Ouija film is the most basic horror film that I have ever seen. It is the kind of film that markets itself at people who don’t like horror films, but do enjoy screaming ridiculously loudly. It is the Wayans Brothers of horror, an effigy of bad writing, bad acting and bad scares. Its sequel is not a good film, but when placed beside its trashbag predecessor it could be selected in that annual Library of Congress National Film Registry event for films that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”. Its pedigree is so much higher than its mongrel predecessor that it should actually never be connected with it. Perhaps in years to come, Ouija will retroactively declared a lesser prequel to Ouija 2, but one can only hope.

Anyway, the film concerns the titular Ouija board being used in a house where seances are faked. It is a classic Blumhouse feature, with a

period setting, a creepy child, though this time far better cast, and a shedload of jump scares. The film has some good moments, but most of them are not particularly new. Elizabeth Reaser is excellent as the widowed charlatan and Lulu Wilson steals the film as her possessed daughter Doris, which has to be the least scary name for a child who has been taken over by the spirits of the victims of a Nazi doctor. It is here that the film runs into problems.

The Nazi doctor is scary, his victims less so. Why couldn’t she have been possessed by the Nazi doctor? What do her victims have to gain from terrorising anyone? The other huge problem is that neither of the two previously named characters are its central protagonist. That role goes to Annalise Basso, who does very little but pout, have a faintly dangerous (sweater-vest sporting) boyfriend, and then scream a lot. Which is a pity because the film does have potential, and that is saying something considering it comes off the back of the cinematic equivalent of the funeral selfie.

The most complex female character comes out of Under The Shadow. Set during the Iran Iraq war it is the story of a family whose daughter’s doll goes missing. Its jump scares involve a pot-bellied man and a toaster going off. Its last shot is the pages of a book flickering in the wind.

And yet it is the scariest film of 2016. It is perhaps best not to read what I have written about it, and go and see it, because half of its power comes from not knowing anything about what is going to happen. For the first hour or so the casual viewer wouldn’t realise it was a horror film. Narges Rashidi’s Shideh gets denied her wish to return to medical school, which her husband blames on the recent death of her mother, who always wanted her to be a doctor. Shideh is moody, capricious, half the time very unlikeable. Her husband and daughter are far more amiable.

Her husband is called away to the battleground to tend to the sick. And it is on this premise that the arrival of a djinn into their tower block is timed perfectly. With the disappearance of

the doll and Shideh’s dismissal of her daughter’s plaintive calls to help her look for it, that the djinn can tempt her away. As the war increasingly threatens their native Tehran, more and more of the tower block residents disappear, and as talk of the djinn is quickly shot down by Shideh she finds herself alone with her daughter in a tower block with something else lurking, waiting to strike. The film is exceptional, and writing about it certainly takes away some of its impact.

Shideh is 2016’s greatest heroine because she is every audience member during their bad days (or future days) as a parent. She loves a daugher who is far fonder of her father, and as a result risks losing her to a wonderfully undefined monster. Scenes play out slowly, and the tension mounts to what is 2016’s scariest scene, involving a basement and Shideh’s inability to work out which of two hooded figures is actually her daughter. I went to see Under the Shadow on Halloween, and walking back out across the square in Smithfield I felt genuinely quite scared to return to my house where I live alone. And that is the power of this film, writing these words I feel a slight chill, even at such a distance from it.

There were of course other horror films that came out this year.

The Boy was quite an adept exercise at watching characters adapt to living with a possessed doll instead of rallying against it, but it is undone by its final third. The Conjuring 2 represented a struggling single mother being haunted by a nun. The Witch is a glorious return to moody bloody horror and doesn’t have a single scene that allows the audience to feel comfortable. But it is Under The Shadow that wins out as the best horror film of 2016. As to female representation the all important Bechdel Test shows that all of the films talked about actually passed the test.

This is hopefully a sign of progression in the horror industry towards female who have more to say than merely screaming.

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overrated | Liam Farrell

A

LEJANDRO GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU’S The Revenant arrived on our screens amid a blaze of hype. Stories of the film’s production had been circulating in the media for months, each more sensational than the next. The cast and crew braved freezing weather conditions to film in remote locations. Leonardo DiCaprio ate a raw fish. The Mexican director made the decision only to shoot using natural light, meaning they could only make use of the short hours of bleak daylight during the winter. Leonardo DiCaprio ate raw bison liver. The production fell behind schedule, meaning the entire apparatus had to be moved across two continents, from Canada to the southern tip of South America, to catch the last of the winter snow. Leonardo DiCaprio fought a bear.

The veracity of these stories varies. Well, the last one is definitely not true. What is important to note, is the fact that these stories served to construct a macho mythology surrounding the film, a tale of Man against Wilderness, a march of progress into the frontier, the very stuff American exceptionalism is built on. Both Hollywood (unsurprisingly) and the critics fell for the film, as it was showered with awards, and many were shocked to see it lose the Best Picture Oscar to the worthy, if unadventurous, Spotlight.

There is much to be admired about The Revenant. It is certainly a film committed to its aim, being two and a half hours long and fairly unrelenting in its misery and grime.

The cinematography by the muchlauded technical wizard Emmanuel Lubezki is dynamic, comprised of acrobatic Steadicam manoeuvres and lens flair. The soundtrack is superb, as Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto’s sparse work fits the widescreen hibernal vistas perfectly.

The film’s opening sequence is undeniably thrilling, a Saving Private Ryan-meets-Peckinpah barrage on

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THE REVENANT

the senses. However, the problems which ultimately hamper the film are on evidence here. Arrows split heads, people are decapitated and maimed, and DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass is choked in an extremely uncomfortable closeup shot. The Revenant fetishizes suffering, pain, and violence, and over the course of its extended running length, the film doesn’t as much provide a sensory assault as attempt to bludgeon the viewer’s brain into a bloody, frozen mess.

There is very little room for subtlety, as the director’s plot is writ large. The film follows Glass, on his quest for vengeance on Tom Hardy’s John Fitzgerald, the man who left him for dead in the snow. Despite its length, the film offers only one subplot, concerning a rival group of French hunters, which feels halfbaked and forced. The Revenant also fails to flesh out its central characters leaving us with bare-bones basic archetypes, a resilient hero and a greedy villain. The sole threedimensional character in the film, Will Poulter’s Bridger, is completely sidelined, and the ethical dilemma which confronts him goes unexplored.

Iñárritu chooses to include a series of extraneous flashbacks and a dose of pseudo-spirituality that comes off as shallow and pretentious. The Revenant misunderstands its own characters and story, and a film that might have been a gripping search for maturity and moral struggle instead becomes a plodding slog.

The debate surrounding the film was marked by sensationalist headlines trumpeting the extreme ordeals DiCaprio underwent during the shooting. The film often plays out as if Iñárritu and his lead actor were involved in a strange

game of one-upmanship, pushing each other to see how far the orgy of torment could go. Glass spends an interminable amount of time clawing through the muck and snow. His exploits constantly involve the gory innards of various beasts, a particular point of interest for Iñárritu. The performance may be committed, but the attempt to capture the sublime eventually capitulates and becomes ridiculous. The film tries to create an American Übermensch, but fails to bring any humanity to Glass, as he spends most of the film wheezing and gurgling through his slit throat.

Tom Hardy, for his part, grumbles and mutters his way through the film, sounding and looking like a drunk pirate, and rendering a huge chunk of his dialogue inaudible.

There are two female characters in the film. One is raped and the other murdered. Both are Native American, but the film chooses not to engage with its Other. Make no mistake, The Revenant is a film that celebrates Men. Not the men of the present, intellectual, sensitive, and weak. This is for the real Men of yore, bearded grunting killers. It’s a shallow celebration of primitive masculinity, joining the canon of films more suited as motivational viewing for school rugby teams than for film lovers.

Caolainn Daly | underrated

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T’S THE LATE NINETIES. The Disney Renaissance is in full swing.

Hercules comes out. Mulan comes out. Tarzan comes out. Amidst this cluster of late-Renaissance films, a direct-to-VHS sequel to the beloved The Lion King is released and receives no love at all. Panned by critics and ignored by consumers, dismissed for being derivative or underwhelming, The Lion King 2 was tossed aside and left to fester in the crowded cauldron of forgotten B-list Disney sequels alongside the likes of Cinderella 2 and Aladdin: The Return of Jafar.

When The Lion King was released it was nothing short of a revelation.

It captured the hearts of parents and children alike with its music and memorable characters and became an instant classic. The Lion King 2 is a rather humble sequel in this regard. It did not have the budget of the original, and therefore lacked the enchanting production values of the original, but this only makes the sequel more impressive.

The film, like the original, is a retelling of a Shakespearean tragedy. However, this time the story is based on Romeo and Juliet. The cast for the film is almost untouched from the first with the likes of Matthew Broderick, Robert Guillaime, Nathan Lane, and Ernie Sabella reprising their roles. Timon and Pumbaa’s comic relief proves so irresistible that they have their own film, 2004’s Lion King 1½, which retells the events of the first film but from their perspective. The Lion King 2 gives us a satisfying preview of what was to come from them as the self-appointed godparents of Simba’s cub.

Suzanne Pleshette lends her voice to the scheming Zira, the widow of Scar and

mother of the alleged rightful heir to Pride Rock, Scar’s stepson Kovu. The premise involves the forbidden love between Simba’s daughter, Kiara, and Kovu, who is conditioned by Zira to one day usurp Simba as the king. When they meet for the first time as cubs we are gifted with a charming scene that has echoes of The Fox and the Hound (an underappreciated film itself). Here we learn that in the aftermath of Scar’s defeat his conspirators, Zira among them, were exiled from the pride lands and forced to inhabit the termiteinfested caves of the outlands with not much food and even less sunlight. Simba must confront the consequences of the events of the first film, this being one of them.

From the opening song, ‘He Lives in You,’ the film establishes itself as a continuation of Simba’s story. The first film saw Simba discover that that he couldn’t turn away from becoming king.

The second shows how well Simba copes with leadership. The Lion King puts a cork on the kingship problem with its reprise of the ‘Circle of Life’ and presents a happy resolute ending, but its sequel explores the nature of Simba’s reign. It asks the question of whether Mufasa is really still with him, whether he can live up to the expectations put on him as the son of a great ruler, and simply what must he do

to be one himself. We see a conflicted Simba still clearly troubled with the death of his father and his part in the events. He finds himself confronted with questions of trust, compassion, and forgiveness. The result is a tale that questions the notions its predecessor sets out (the treatment of the hyenas, for example). It also does this without betraying the original, and this itself makes The Lion King 2 a worthy sequel. Finally, where it certainly stands up to the original is in the music.

The aforementioned opening number, ‘He Lives in You’, sung by Lebo M, is inarguably an enchanting song.

The vibe for the opening is quite a far cry from the original ‘Circle of Life’. Firstly, this one is sung in a minor key. Where the first was celebratory and triumphant, this is surprisingly haunting, taking cues from all walks of music and even allows room for a trickle of 80’s synth rock a la A-ha or Duran Duran. It is perhaps the only element of the film that has survived obscurity as it features in the Broadway musical. The standard does not falter from there, with the touching duet between Simba and his daughter, Kiara, in ‘We Are One’ establishing the prominent theme of unity. ‘One of Us’ marvellously masks the limited resources of the production team by creating something bigger than itself, as does ‘My Lullaby’, performed by the menacing Zira, which is the real showstopper. Much like ‘Be Prepared’ from the original, ‘My Lullaby’ is the big piece that acts as the contemporary counterpart to the Shakespearean villain’s soliloquy. It tells of her plight, her twisted ambitions, and her wicked heart which rivals Scar’s number, if not surpassing it. O, the drama.

For its music, its willingness to question the teachings of the original, for its impressive and unexpected grandeur, The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride deserves way more praise. It is a spectacle that will flatter, deceive, and fundamentally delight.

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hidden gem Rebecca Wynne-Walsh

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LOVE YOU PHILIP MORRIS is the quirky, under-appreciated film, sure to one day become a cult classic, that should have been ticked off your Netflix watch list ages ago. The film follows Jim Carrey’s conman Steven Russell who, while incarcerated, falls madly in love with fellow prisoner Philip Morris, played by Ewan McGregor in one of his most nuanced performances in years.

Netflix is plagued with complaints that its television content outranks its films. But, nestled amongst the B-level rom-coms and horrors sits a true hidden gem. I Love You Philip Morris is a love-story, a crime film, a comedy and a tragedy. It is also none of these things, defying definition in the best way, shamelessly playing with your emotions and assumptions. If there was ever a time for Netflix to shine it is in this run up to Christmas, and I Love You Philip Morris provides a viewing experience like none other.

A near-fatal car crash causes Steven to finally start living as an openly gay man.

He embarks on a lavish lifestyle with his beautiful, with a capital B, new boyfriend Jimmy (Rodrigo Santoro) in Florida.

Steven’s flamboyant taste soon forces him to realise that “being gay is really expensive,” and so begins his long string of moneymaking schemes.

I Love You Philip Morris definitely gets a bit crazy at times, and the true but farfetched story paired with Jim Carrey’s comedy chops might have undermined the more serious and genuinely heartbreaking moments the film has to offer.

Thankfully, Ewan McGregor succeeds in grounding the outrageous antics of Jim Carrey with a gentle and timid performance. McGregor undoubtedly provides the emotional centre and stability for the film. Carrey’s calculating conman could have come across as quite cold without the warmth provided by McGregor. He falls head over heels in love with Carrey’s character without knowing the full extent of his fraudulent escapades.

McGregor centres the film whenever it loses its focus amongst Carrey’s antics.

Even when we are treated to an extended sequence of Steven entertainingly fooling everyone he comes into contact with we

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are never allowed to treat this film as a screwball crime caper.

Before long, Steven’s schemes catch up with him and Carrey’s trademark grin slips. At times like this we see Steven at his most frantic and we realise this film is so intent on keeping its audience laughing because if you don’t foreground the funny aspects of Steven’s story, the heartbreak would overwhelm them. His estrangement from his mother, the loss of a friend to AIDs and his inability to ever be truly himself combine to make Steven a devastating character beneath all his exuberance and charm.

Every action Steven makes after meeting Philip is motivated by his need to care for Philip. Providing for Philip in excess sees him launder extortionate amounts of money and his need to be reunited with Philip sees him repeatedly escape from prison. With a character so incapable of telling the truth, Steven’s scenes with Philip are perhaps the only really honest moments in the film. Their relationship returns the narrative to one of a lost soul just trying to find a way to be with the only person he ever cared about.

It’s hard to imagine that the writers formerly best known for penning 2003’s Bad Santa (John Requa and Glenn Ficarra) could bring to life such a heartfelt romance. Naturally their penchant for the darker side of comedy comes through even in the sweetest moments. Steven sneaking Philip chocolates in a roll of toilet paper is undercut by Philip’s being diabetic, just as when Philip and Steven share their first dance it is to angry sounds of screaming inmates. All these features go towards highlighting the stranger than fiction nature of the film. Requa and Ficarra choose not to downplay the crazier aspects of their story but to make them larger than life, a fitting homage to their protagonist’s real life counterpart.

I Love You Philip Morris is an emotional rollercoaster of a film. It’s fast-paced, darkly comedic opening lures the

audience into a false sense of security presenting itself as a somewhat offbeat screwball comedy. As the title would suggest, the entire narrative hinges on Steven’s relationship with Philip. From the moment they lock eyes, in true rom-com fashion, reaching for the same book, the film turns from a comedy to a whirlwind romance, unfortunately their relationship seems doomed from the start, undermined by Steven’s incessant duplicity. Nothing could emotionally prepare the viewer for the wild turn of events that brings the film to a close while also bringing it full circle.

That more people haven’t had the pleasure of watching I Love You Philip Morris is the real tragedy. This film is hilarious and heart wrenching, over-the-top yet incredibly subtle when the story needs nothing more. The performances of the supporting cast are perfect, fulfilling their purpose without adding unnecessary baggage to the film or pulling focus from Steven and Philip. Rodrigo Santoro’s as Steven’s ex-boyfriend and Leslie Mann as his ex-wife stand out in particular as characters that both establish and raise questions about Steven’s good character in a film that presents one of the strangest character studies ever to grace the screen.

I Love You Philip Morris is wonderful by virtue of its weirdness. A real treat easily lost amongst the rabble. So the next time you log in to Netflix, instead of binging on Gossip Girl or watching another Louis Theroux documentary, turn on I Love You Philip Morris. Make yourself a cup of tea or, better still, crack open a bottle of wine, sit back and enjoy. This is a film that will see you join the eponymous Philip as he learns to love Steven, to hate him, and ultimately to find him to be an unignorable enigma – as apt a description for the film as it is for the lead character.

GRAVEYARD

Boy Eats Girl Leo Hanna

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OR A LONG TIME the Irish horror scene has seemed like the little genre that could. Staying mostly in the shadows and not attracting much critical attention, we have had a few decent entries over the last number of years.

2005’s Isolation supplied decent thrills but gave little else. 2012’s Stitches was a fun albeit slightly messy vehicle for comedian Ross Noble to wear clown makeup and crack one-liners. Even 2016’s eco-horror Without Name, which seemed primed to lead the genre in a new direction, has rather unfortunately flown under the radar.

But certainly one of the biggest missteps in Irish horror came in 2004. During the midnoughties, director Stephen Bradley decided to throw his hat into the flourishing zombie genre with the by-the-numbers ‘romzom-com’ Boy Eats Girl, or as I prefer to call it ‘Sean Ó the nDead’.

Garnered with the odd distinction of being pop diva Samantha Mumba’s film debut, it was met with a mixed reception and quickly disappeared into the midst of an over-saturated genre that was only gathering steam at this point.

Combining the gore of a straight to video Romero zombie film and the off kilter Irish quirkiness of TG4’s Aifric, Boy Eats Girl has little to offer the viewer. The characters are under-developed stereotypes that could be seen in any bland horror comedy of the time. We have the dull dreamy lead played by David ‘Not Quite Cillian

Murphy’ Leon. The wooden onedimensional love interest is played by the aforementioned Mumba, whose performance is reminiscent of someone being videoed on Snapchat while dozing off in a lecture. Rounding out the cast of characters are dopey friends, played by Love Hate’s Laurence Kinlan and Tadhg Murphy.

The plot is standard zombie comedy fare. Boy loves girl, girl loves him but doesn’t show it, boy gets depressed and (I’ll admit this isn’t as commonplace) accidentally hangs himself. In a curious turn of events, his mother revives him using voodoo and he begins to unwillingly infect his classmates. Ultimately the film suffers from one of the biggest issues surrounding the genre: consistency. Scenes of extreme gore and attempted suspense are intercut with moments of pseudoThree Stooges slapstick and lazy and puerile gags consisting mostly of sexual desire being thwarted when girls are turned into zombies.

In the flag bearers of horror

comedy, films like An American Werewolf in London, or the muchimitated but never-bettered Shaun of the Dead, you are able to see an effortless shift from scenes of dread and horror to humour. In the case of Boy Eats Girl, we see a film that flails under such pressure.

Lazy set ups are resolved with even lazier pay offs. One character enjoys receiving blowjobs in his car, so no prizes for guessing how he dies. It fights a losing battle throughout for tonal consistency, as a disemboweling moment is followed by viewers being dropped into a hodge-podge of substandard immature sketches.

The film is not helped by the constantly distracting fact that every second actor is a recognizable Irish star. Trying to recognize actors who have gone on to greener pastures became a game for me, one that was almost more entertaining than the film itself.

There’s a smidge of Gary Lydon, a sprinkling of Deirdre O’ Kane and an amuse-bouche of Domhnall Gleeson who steals every scene he is in through his sheer charm and charisma.

But all that aside, the biggest sin of the movie is that it’s just plain boring. The actors struggle with the so-so script by Skulduggery Pleasant scribe Derek Landy and go through the motions like, for lack of a better term, zombies.

In summary, unless you are a die hard Samantha Mumba fan, and I’m sure some of you are, Boy Eats Girl is one zombie film not worth resurrecting from the Netflix Graveyard.

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feature | Louie Carroll

On the Borderline

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OU MIGHT HAVE NOTICED that the world is in a bit of an odd spot at the moment, politically, socially and culturally.

For the most part, cinema reflects the context in which it is made.

Whether that is older films portraying prejudices that we no longer deem acceptable, or more innocently using outdated special effects. However, while most cinema is a product of its time, it’s becoming increasingly rare for mainstream cinema to even obliquely reference a political viewpoint, at the risk of alienating part of the market. A recent example of this aversion to politics saw Tilda Swinton’s character originally Nepalese in Doctor Strange (2016) have her nationality changed so as not to draw the ire of the increasingly profitable Chinese market. The message was clear: there’s big bucks to be made there.

Outside of the obvious examples like Oliver Stone, who never gets off his soapbox, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is the most interesting series of films in recent years to deal with the political landscape in which it was 28

created.

However, politically charged mainstream cinema has a new kid on the block, the incredibly prolific Denis Villeneuve. The most handsomely put together and engaging, grown up thrillers of the last five years belong largely to the French Canadian director. His English language debut Prisoners was messy but showed the promise to come. His two most recent films however, take it up a notch. In Sicario (2015) and Arrival (2016), Villeneuve has put his finger directly on the pulse of the issues that have dominated the news headlines over the last eighteen months, in ways that are both abstract and more direct.

Sicario deals with America’s war on drugs, the Mexican Cartel versus the US establishment, told through the eyes of Emily Blunt’s naïve FBI officer, taken through the mill by her superiors. A better photographed film, you will not find, thanks to the work of director of photography Roger Deakins.

On an aesthetic level, the film is excellent, ideologically, slightly less so. There has been a fight for the soul and identity of Mexico over

the last two years in American film and television. The stereotyping of its citizens as drugs traffickers and rapists is one that ignited a swell of fear throughout the more ignorant factions of US society.

Unfortunately, Sicario does little to assuage these anxieties.

There’s a scene early on in the film in which, following a police raid on a Cartel safe house in Arizona, the camera closes in on a bullet hole ridden wall. Beneath the plasterboard, the rotting corpses of cartel victims are revealed. This shot is a perfect summation of the film’s attitude towards the issue of Mexico: beyond the safety of the American border lies death, danger and the unknown. The xenophobic love-in continues when a convoy of American agents cross over the border to extract a Mexican gang leader. The music is ominous and the tension among the agents is almost unbearable. Upon arriving in the city they are greeted by decapitated corpses hanging from a bridge. “Welcome to Juarez”, Benicio del Torro’s mysterious Alejandro says to Blunt’s character, as if this is what the city is all about.

You almost get the sense

that Donald Trump had watched Sicario just prior to descending his golden escalator to spew his bilious presidential announcement speech. You know the one, the one with the aforementioned “rapists”, line, the one that signaled the beginning of the rapid normalization of racism and neofascism in our culture. Yeah, that one. To top it all off, the film also has a strong whiff of sexism in how Emily Blunt’s character is treated, used and abused and largely passive throughout. In Sicario, Mexicans really are murderous and women aren’t really capable.

Arrival on the other hand couldn’t have… ahem…”arrived”, at a more prescient time. Released last month, it’s an alien invasion movie, in which the central premise emphasizes the need to communicate with those we think we can never understand.

It’s about as appropriate a metaphor for the times we live in as you can get. Arrival feels like Villeneuve’s apology for his previous film. While Sicario plays to the audience’s fears, Arrival delivers the message that one’s own viewpoint is not definitive, and there are always other sides to a story.

Contrast the treatment of borders in Arrival with those in Sicario. While the Mexican border is fraught with danger, the barrier between the Aliens’ and humans’ is transparent glass, and both sides are able to reach out their hands in greeting.

The two films deal with the

issue of Aliens, be they Mexican or extraterrestrial, however, their perspectives on the issue are worlds apart. In Arrival, Amy Adams’ linguist leads the efforts to understand the purpose of the visitors before humans do what they do best; destroy things.

Villeneuve even goes so far as to demonstrate the dangers that arise when our will to communicate breaks down. The film ultimately has a relatively positive outlook on the human race’s ability to resolve i t s issues.

Sicario and Arrival can be viewed as two paths laid out in front of The United States, one fearful and isolationist, the other co-operative and optimistic.

Judging by the orange turd that the American electoral system has just shat out, you could be forgiven for a lack of hopefulness for the latter.

We’re in the very early stages of figuring out what the cinema of a Trump era presidency looks like. The period spanning the

election itself seems to have been it’s own cultural pocket, in which Villeneuve has covered the spectrum of popular opinion with this pair of films. While the Obama era was typified by an optimism and multiculturalism, reflected in the Academy Award’s best picture nominee line up (The Help and Lincoln to name a few).

Ultimately, most mainstream cinema has failed to scratch below the surface to address the failing neo-liberalism and Bush-style foreign policies which have come back to bite them.

The United States no longer has a handsome face to mask its rotting core. Now they have the cheese-puff tinted monstrosity fitting of both their history and current place in the world.

On a side note, the presence of the commanderin-chief in some capacity is a staple of most Alien invasion movies. However, the connotations of hearing that ‘the president is on the line’ have forever changed since the election of a petulant man-child. Bill Pullman and Morgan Freeman are no longer suitable candidates.

From now on Gary Busey should be the only person allowed to play the president in movies.

Cinema that buries its head in the sand just isn’t good enough anymore. As the world descends further into the current malaise, film has a vital role to play in processing world events.

Perhaps Villeneuve has answered the call and is now taking on his responsibility as a conduit for progress.

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five easy pieces | 2016 in Review 2016 is nearly over, and we’ve been thinking about the highs – and lows – of the year in cinema.

Andrew Kerr

best

worst

1. Neon Demon: Glitz, glamour, and lesbian necrophilia. What • War On Everyone: Everyone’s more could you want? second favourite McDonagh 2. 10 Cloverfield Lane: A claustrophobic scenario, dominated by tries to make a buddy-cop an oscar- nomination-deserving Goodman . film with meaning.

3. Arrival: TEFL for Aliens.

4. Swiss Army Man: Harry Potter farts his way into our hearts.

5. Everybody Wants Some!!: We all finally find out how the Trinity Rugby team lives.

Clare Martin

best

worst

1. Hunt for the Wilderpeople: From the film’s playful storytelling • Dr. Strange: Boring and unnecessary – how many movies to the plucky soundtrack, Taika Waititi is quickly proving himself focus on an overly arrogant to be the Wes Anderson of New Zealand. white male protagonist who’s 2. Swiss Army Man: This dreamlike movie is unlike any other humbled into becoming a thanks to the ethereal music and heartwarming friendship hero? between a man and his corpse.

3. 10 Cloverfield Lane: Tense and claustrophobic, it’s a solidly acted film even if you didn’t like the ending.

4. Arrival: Arrival’s focus on linguistics brings a fresh perspective to the typical UFO film and delivers an incredibly relevant message on communication.

5. Everybody Wants Some!!: Richard Linklater bottled 1980 and created the perfect college film with it.

Jack Thornton

best

worst

• Suicide Squad: A straight-up 1. The Neon Demon: A visually stunning film that forces you to mess, from the strange editappreciate the beautiful aesthetic and leaves you horrified at the ing to the horrible standout same time, a feat which is very seldom achieved in cinema. performances, *ahem* Cara 2. Swiss Army Man: The most original film to be released in a Delevingne, this film really long time, you find yourself deeply invested in the emotional struggled to prevent you from narrative all while cracking up at fart joke genuinely cringing at the 3. I, Daniel Blake: A pseudo-documentary style film that portrays many filmmaking blunders. the harsh reality of the people whom society has failed, a truly eye-opening film that has so much to say on both the individual and societal level.

4. Café Society: An extremely stylish and elegant film with quite a simplistic but nonetheless entertaining plot, the charming 1930’s Hollywood aesthetic in the hands of someone like Woody Allen is always going to be a pleasant and enjoyable watch.

5. American Honey: A very naturalistic film with very ‘real’ performances, the sobering reality of the American Dream is the emphatic message of this film, think of Arnold’s previous effort Fish Tank and simply “Americanise” it, which is basically this film in a nutshell.

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Naomi Keenan O’Shea

best

1. Mustang: As cinematically accomplished as it is culturally and politically pertinent, Ergüven’s beautiful debut feature explores the vibrancy and tragedy of five sisters’ lives under familial imposed house arrest in contemporary Turkey.

2. American Honey: Arnold’s latest cinematic masterpiece is an exuberant addition to her succinct but outstanding canon of work, exploring a conglomerate of youths, predominantly cast with nonprofessional actors, living vicariously on the margins of American society.

3. Victoria: Schipper’s love letter to Berlin is visually and aurally masterful, with a haunting soundtrack composed by Nils Frahm and an outstandingly adept one take shot lasting the entirety of the film’s two hour and twenty minute runtime.

4. Weiner: So hilarious it is almost unbelievable, Kriegman and Steinberg’s intimate real-time portrayal of the infamous Anthony Weiner and the unfolding of his latest political campaign is the first documentary to emerge about the radical Democrat turned dick-pic fanatic.

5. Zoology: The second feature from the young Russian director is a surrealist fable reflecting contemporary Russian society and politics, equally beautiful and powerful as it is disturbing and repulsive.

Liam Farrell

best

1. Anomalisa: Kaufman’s haunting and uncanny stop-motion takes an unflinching look at the hair-thin line between love and loneliness.

2. The Neon Demon: Electric dissection of the fashion industry in all its vapid glory.

3. Paterson: A beautiful zen haiku about a man, his wife, his bus, and his dog.

4. Nocturnal Animals: Stylishly taut and multilayered psychological thriller fueled by revenge and spite.

5. Rams: Feuding sheep-farmer brothers are forced to cooperate to save their livelihoods in an emotional, witty, and heartbreaking human drama.

Ken Donnelly

best

worst

1. Paterson: Jim Jarmusch has created a film which wonderfully • Deadpool: The movie that deconstructs and celebrates the familiar and the ordinary. was supposed to lift the 2. Weiner: The incredible documentary following the story of superhero genre out of its Anthony Weiner, the New York politician whose sexting scandals never-ending cycle of blandshook the world. ness turned out to be more of 3. A Date For Mad Mary: The best film ever to be set in Drogheda. the same rubbish. Annoying, Too good to be overlooked. crass and stupid.

4. Arrival: A gripping sci-fi with both an exciting plot and a main character you actually care about.

5. Finding Dory: Disney Pixar’s much anticipated sequel is actually pretty good.

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