Tenet

After delay upon delay, Christopher Nolan's Tenet opens in Australia this weekend. It starts with a pumping opera siege and clicks along at a fair old pace, trying to get its premise across and mostly succeeding. John David Washington (from BlacKkKlansman and the loins of Denzel) stars with Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh but the story is boss here, and it's familiar ground for Nolan, dealing with the fiddly intricacies of time. In fact, it seems like he has lifted the structure of Memento and plonked it visually on screen, with the actual end of that film manifested as the big, clunky time inversion turntables in Oslo and Russia in this film. Watch Nolan talk through this blackboard sketch of the 'timeline' of Memento for more explanation. The gimmick of time inversion - backwards walking and driving, bullets flying out of walls into guns, buildings 'unexploding' - is actually quite fun and not too overdone. The combination of forward and reverse action, while technically stellar, might tend towards the "get your hand off it, Chris" end of the scale, if done to death.

I'm not planning to get too deep into the plot details here, but the podcast will be a free for all. (See bottom of blog entry). If it's possible to put it in a nutshell, the story deals with the need to stop a rotter from inverting time and basically destroying our current reality (a little like Thanos in Avengers: Endgame, he has a point). Needless to say, Tenet has a lot of heavy lifting to do in order for Johhny Public to follow the story. Nolan achieves this by having regular 'exposition dumps' throughout and it really pays to concentrate. I reckon either the sound mix was a bit off or the cinema needed to raise the general audio level, because I missed some sections of dialogue, though perhaps this was another Bane issue? But to be fair, these aural omissions didn't hinder any understanding.

Performance-wise, Washington smacks it over cow corner for six. He has an almost stilted quality, quite mannered, especially compared with Robert Pattinson, but it works for this character. I thought he was a bit unnatural in BlacKkKlansman but the gradual awakening of his Protagonist here matches his style (think Keanu in The Matrix). He also has a mint kitchen brawl where the use of a cheese grater on a face elicited an audible groan from me, and not in a good way. I'm getting a spine tingle now just thinking about it again. Pattinson is smooth yet wiry and he continues to choose meaty or unflattering roles post-Twiglet. Good on him. Debicki has an interesting part - at first it seems she's there only to be protected but as the film progresses, her role increases in importance. And she's always watchable. Branagh overplays it a touch as her nasty oligarch husband, upping the evil from his Russian in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. And of course, Michael Caine is back for a scene, sadly just the one, but he has one of the best lines of the film, when The Protagonist says to him, "You British don't have a monopoly on snobbery.", Caine replies, "No, more of a controlling interest." Incidentally, there's no credit, nor any other proof, but I'm almost certain that the concierge (?) of the restaurant they're in during this scene is Jeremy Theobald from Nolan's first feature, Following. I could be wrong, though. It's also nice to see Martin Donovan again. I know that he's been in loads of stuff since, but I mainly remember him as Hal Hartley's go-to guy in the early 90s.

So, I'd say even with all the fanfare of a new Nolan and the post-lockdown release anticipation (fnaar fnaar), this pretty much stacks up as an exciting, intriguing, fucking bonkers piece of cinema. Part Memento, part Inception, even part Dunkirk (with added talking), Tenet is a separate beast and well worth the time......emit eht htrow llew.

See also:

The temporal cold war angle put me in mind of the patchy Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005) and for some more timey-wimey stuff, why not Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995). At a stretch, Gilliam had a similar knack to Nolan of getting studios to give him money to make original, though-provoking films.

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Alien / Aliens

For the benefits of brevity, I've consolidated these two Alien films into one block, as I saw both of them back to back at the Luna Monday Double screening recently. I remember Alien more clearly, probably because I've seen it more often and more recently than its sequel. In fact, there were a few scenes in Aliens that I'm pretty sure I'd never seen before, this screening being the Director's Cut version.

So, if I'm comparing these two iconic films, I'm still of a mind to say that I much prefer the first one. It's a compact, grungy, flipping scary horror film. Some scenes - the creature stuff, in the main - don't really hold up to today's modern gaze, but back in 1979, I imagine folks were gobsmacked. The famous John Hurt scene is still shocking and the alien's life cycle was a cracking idea for some fun with the visuals, mostly due to H.R. Giger's design work.

Sigourney Weaver, as Ripley, holds the whole contraption together, Yaphet Kotto is great as Parker and Ian Holm brilliant as Ash - "I can't lie to you about your chances, but....you have my sympathies". The cinematography of the ship and planet LV-426 are sometimes too muddy, too murky to see as much as we'd like and the sound mix did seem a bit off at times, with the voices mumbly and the computer and ship sounds quite loud. These quibbles aside, Alien is still a fantastic sci-fi/horror, but on to the follow up.....

Aliens, made 7 years later, with James Cameron taking over directing duties from Ridley Scott, picks up at the final scene of Alien, though a fair amount of time has passed. 57 years, in fact. And one of the good things this sequel does is give the returning Weaver a great big swag of motivation running through the film. This version has a key scene the original theatrical one didn't - namely Ripley finding out that her daughter has grown up and died, aged 66, in her absence. The loss and helplessness of this situation makes Ripley's relationship with Newt (Carrie Henn) more fleshed out and understandable. It also adds relevance to the Mother-scrap at the climax, though I have to admit feeling a bit odd at Ripley's decision to incinerate the alien mummy's eggs. This seemed a bit nasty to me, but maybe it's a maternal thing;).

Visually, Aliens looks cleaner than its predecessor, and it's easier to make out movement but it's just as loud. Maybe my ears are getting old. The high points, aside from Weaver's performance (which is top notch again), would be the way the tension is built throughout, and the final showdown with Ripley in the loader suit (nice foreshadowing Mr. Cameron). But my historical gripe with this film is the portrayal of the army group. They're mostly cocksure dickheads, Bill Paxton being the most annoying of the lot. Between his 'game over man!' bullshit and Newt's glass-shattering screams, there's a bucket load of irritation in this film. There's also the obligatory 'just when you think it's all over....' bollocks, which is a facsimile dump from the first film.

Ultimately, Alien is a small, creepy horror film, whereas Aliens is guns and explosions porn; the bigger, the better. Visual grummer.

See also:

To round out the quadrilogy, have a look at David Fincher's Alien³ (1992) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien: Resurrection (1997).

Deerskin

Here's a nice little oddity. The fella behind Mr. Oizo's Flat Beat from 1999 has turned out a wacky, violent, comic farce, starring the Oscar-winning Jean Dujardin and the excellent Adele Haenel (from Portrait of a Lady on Fire). Mr. Oizo (or Quentin Dupieux, if you prefer) isn't new to the caper, with a few feature credits to his name, but I wonder if making Dujardin's Georges a novice filmmaker wasn't a bit of a slyly autobiographical flourish.

Deerskin is a warped tale of the very male rejection coping mechanisms of exceptionalism and brutality. Dujardin plays Georges as a post-football Eric Cantona physically, and the 'kung-fu', 'seagulls after the trawler' Cantona emotionally. Put simply, he's beardy, violent and prone to philosophical bullshitting. He stays on in a small Alpine town after buying an expensive deerskin jacket, which becomes the third lead of the film. I admit to knowing sod all about fashion, but this jacket he adores looks a little short to me, sexy tassels and straps notwithstanding.



This is heaving with 'what the fuck' moments, but I think you know where it's going when Georges has to suck his ring off the finger of a corpse. The mundane yet surreal conversations between Georges and the jacket make the ensuing antics understandable in hindsight and the reasonably abrupt ending works perfectly. No messing about searching for an extravagant way to finish (even though the use of the dim kid was a bit brazen).

Other points to note here: there were zero cops in the film by my count, Georges making a mass grave, but not for the bodies has more than a whiff of the macabre to it, and Haenel's Denise is really ambiguous throughout - is she affected by the 'killer style' in the same way as Georges? A must watch for anyone who likes their leather sentient.

Deerskin opens at the Luna Leederville on Thusday August 6th.

See also:

Jerome Boivin's fantastic Baxter (1989) has a malevolent bull terrier as its star and Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread (2017) is a fashion-related gem.

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