July 2010 ¦¦ -2- ¦¦ ‘Predators’ [6/10]; ‘Wild Grass’ [4/10]; ‘Leningrad Cowboys Go America’ (1989) [6/10]

Published on: July 13th, 2010

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.Predators.
   Hungarian/American director Nimrod Antal is a film-maker of quite maddening consistency, in that each of his films to date - Control (2003), Vacancy (2007), Armored (2009) and now Predators - is an efficiently well-made time-passer that never quite breaks through to the next level.
   Rather appropriate that all four have such functional one-word titles: Antal does what he does, then moves on to the next project – steadily increasingly the size of his budget and the starriness of his casts along the way, but without showing any discernible development in terms of craft, scope or flair. 
   Here he delivers a belated third entry in the Predators series – two decades after Predator 2, since when the franchise’s DNA has become interwoven with the Alien movies thanks to 2004′s unfairly maligned Alien vs Predator and its 2007 sequel. Antal goes back to basics, stranding seven strangers on what is fairly quickly revealed – after some modish Lost-ish disorientations - to be a jungle-covered alien (but not an Alien) planet whose flora is Earth-like but whose fauna is more exotic: think a very low-rent version of Avatar and you won’t be far from the mark.
   The new human arrivals – six tough soldier/mercenary types and a geeky young doctor (Topher Grace) whose presence in such company is the source of some bafflement among the others – realise they’re the prey on what’s in effect a vast hunting reserve, with monstrous Predators (tall, bulky, technologically-advanced, heat-seeking nasties) avidly on their trails.
   By far the most effective part of Predators is the pre-credits sequence, which opens with main protagonist Royce (Adrien Brody) coming to consciousness in astronomically over-dramatic circumstances of direst peril: hurtling land-ward before being saved by the judicious opening of his parachute. Antal and scriptwriters Alex Litvak and Michael Finch (notching their first feature credit) are perhaps tipping their hats to the famously absurd climax of Crank (2006), whose writer/directors ’Neveldine/Taylor’ boast that rare ability to transcend and subvert the supposed limitations of B-grade genre fare. 
   Predators, in contrast, proves increasingly content to recycle various situations, characters, settings and ideas from various predecessors in the cycle – including borrowings from the Alien pictures – and is chiefly of interest as an opportunity for the likes of Danny Trejo and Oleg Taktarov to display their tried-and-tested tough-guy charisma (Sonia Braga is on hand as the inevitable Latina lass, somewhat regrettably the only female on view.) Laurence Fishburne pops up around halfway with an extended cameo that goes nowhere after a promisingly unexpected “reveal” – likewise, an intriguing subplot about the doctor’s motivations could have been explored to much more satisfactory effect.
   Brody, in his latest oddball career choice, has straight-faced fun with the type of no-mercy mercenary role more usually incarnated by the beefy likes of Vin Diesel - indeed, Royce’s hard-boiled dialogue marks him as a not-so-distant cousin of Riddick, who also tended to find himself stuck on hostile worlds with weird suns and planets filling the skies. The likes of Riddick and Royce find ways to triumph against the odds and blast away into new stratospheres - but Antal, the weight of evidence now strongly suggests, quickly established his level and won’t be lifting off any time soon.
   14th July
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.Wild Grass.
   If Manoel D’Oliveira wasn’t around, still making films into his second century, there would probably be more fuss about the fact that Alain Resnais – responsible for such cinematic landmarks as Last Year at Marienbad (1961) - has remained creatively active in his late eighties. His supposedly “final” feature, Wild Grass, premiered in competition at Cannes last year a few weeks before Resnais’ 87th birthday, and he let it be known that he’d rather have the Palme d’Or than any kind of “special” lifetime achievement honour. As it was, the latter is exactly what the jury awarded him – and given Wild Grass‘s numerous deficiencies, he can count himself fortunate that he didn’t go home empty-handed.
   A self-consciously absurd tale of destiny, amour fou, infidelity and petty crime, adapted by Alex Reval from Christian Gailly’s novel The Incident, Wild Grass unfolds with an air of carefully studied whimsicality and anything-goes arbitrariness that pretty quickly outstays its welcome. Main focus is on Georges (André Dussollier), a crotchety sort in late middle-age vaguely dissatisfied with his ’30-year’ marriage to the younger Suzanne (Anne Consigny). He happens upon a purse containing the passport and flying licence of flame-haired dentist Marguerite (Sabine Azéma), and quickly becomes fixated upon this intriguingly exotic lady.
   She responds with entirely understandable alarm to his stalker-ish attentions - but only at first. After a while, the wayward amour fou becomes mutual – indeed, pretty much everyone, even the local cop (Matthieu Amalric), starts acting strangely. The most sensible character is Marguerite’s dental colleague Josepha – nicely under-played by Emmanuelle Devos, not for the first time cast as the sole level-headed individual in an ensemble full of eccentrics and oddballs.
   It’s easy to share Josepha’s bemusement as the plot haphazardly ambles along without ever really threatening to come into focus – of course, to seek too much “meaning” in such an unashamedly offbeat confection is to miss Resnais’ point: this is less a film, more an elaborate jeu d’esprit by a revered master at the very end of his career. Unfortunately what results isn’t the kind of wry valedictory wit to be found in the final pictures by, say, Bunuel or Altman. With all due respect to M Resnais’ eminence, it’s more a case of what Captain Beefheart might sum up as an “old fart at play”.
   14th July
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.Leningrad Cowboys Go America.
   Writer-director Aki Kaurismäki’s big international breakthrough and an enduring cult favourite, this amiably daft belly-laugher concerns a rockabilly-ish band from the frozen Finnish tundra, trekking through the US en route to a wedding gig in Mexico. It’s simultaneously a spoof of America-as-land-of-opportunity pictures (it would make an interesting double-bill companion with Werner Herzog’s Stroszek) and also of band-on-the-road movies – the hapless troupe are relentlessly exploited by their Svengali-like manager Vladimir, a delightfully deadpan/dastardly chap played by Matti Pellonpää, in the closest thing the picture has to a conventional “performance.”
   Otherwise, just-soi stylisation is very much the be-all and end all, from the Cowboy’s matching outfits and massively-quiffed hairdos to the script’s non-dialogue to the framings and composition. Essentially a one-and-a-half joke comedy, stretched a little thin even at 79 minutes, but overall sufficiently charming to pass muster. Unexpectedly, it’s the documentary-style footage of the band’s cockeyed, back-of-beyond itinerary which has retains the most interest: Kaurismäki delights in some of the more economically challenged backwaters of rural, urban and post-industrial USA, finding moments of beauty in the most unprepossessing of surroundings, and generally managing to make the richest country on earth look rather like the hinterlands of northern Finland.
   15th July
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Neil Young
July 2010

LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA : [6/10] : Finland 1989 : Aki KAURISMAKI : 79m (BBFC) : Star & Shadow cinema, Newcastle, 14th July (£4) : {15/28}
PREDATORS : [6/10] : USA 2010 : Nimrod ANTAL : 107m (BBFC) : Empire cinema, Newcastle, 13th July (£3.95) : {16/28}
WILD GRASS : [4/10] : France(/Italy) 2009 : Alain RESNAIS : 104m (BBFC) : The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, 13th July (£7.50) : {11/28}