Shorts #105

Short Thoughts: Escape Plan (2013), Rambo III (1988), Rambo (2008), Days of Being Wild (1990), Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914)

Silly, and yet not that fun. Escape Plan simply lacks character; it functions something like a Sherlock Holmes narrative without stakes. We are left wondering how Sly and Schwarzenegger (and this is unquestionably who appears on screen - acting not required) will be pulled along a half-clever script full of bad dialogue and much nonsense it hopes you look past. The entire background of the world is wholly questionable; whilst it is established that the prison space is 'evil', why are we put on the side of convicts, and why are we to accept all the murder? The lack of logic is very distracting.

Not much more can be said. This is watchable, but not something you find yourself particularly wanting to watch as it unfolds.

Rambo III is a step-down from parts I and II. The series never ceases to take itself somewhat seriously, but there is little of substance in this third part. Whilst nothing about the first two films is particularly ingenious, they balanced theme, character and action better than this. Rambo III is a confusing tribute to Afghan freedom fighters with somewhat cheap melodrama and too much going on in the realm of political commentary without nuance and particular insight. We do get to see a tank crash into a helicopter though - and without one drop of CGI. The writers of modern day action melodramas (like the Fast & Furious films) think they're brash and ludicrous on the page, but Rambo III goes to show that the likes of Hobbs & Shaw is nothing - aesthetically speaking - too new.

It's a Rambo movie, but it's not. More blood, more guts, more violence and decimation and then some CGI. Characterisation (of the titular character alone) is well defined, yet character arcs and their motivation are meandering and ill-justified. Political context also gives way to thematic debate--nothing of great calibre. These are common traits of the Rambo film, but intensified and brought into the late 2000s. What changes most significantly in Rambo is the presentation of the titular character. He is elevated to the level of archetype here: a reluctant, pessimistic hero. In elevating J. Rambo to this status, this narrative contrives a sense of wholeness and completion, but lacks failure and stakes (a key structural beat of the previous film). This leaves Rambo front-end heavy, overflowing with action and melodrama emerging from the interior of an archetype, but rather light in the ass.

Days of Being Wild feels like the work of a filmmaker who has yet to come into his own. The technical aspects of the script and montage are mired by a lack of substance in the realm of character. Though this tries to say much about time, its persistence, its solid yet abstract nature, its formlessness that shapes ones personal history to sometimes devastating effect, it lacks affective impression. The structuring is obnoxiously obfuscated - likely in an attempt to conceal the shallow, ill-defined paths characters walk.

Days of Being Wild impresses with its conception of time and abuse - both cyclical and droning ripples through space and time - but does not do too well in other respects.

There is a subtle genius embedded within Chaplin's comedic sensibilities. It emerges most famously via his narrative constructs and gags, but Kid Auto Races at Venice allows him to demonstrate a rare Keaton-esque conception of the cinema screen as a window into a version of reality. Most of Keaton's best jokes - the screen sequence in Sherlock Holmes Jr. being of particular brilliance - were conscious interrogations of the realities a screen can present. This play with the screen as something of a window of diegesis is almost as old as the cinema itself, and Chaplin makes a fine go at not only muddying the line between documentary and narrative, but does so with an acute yet subtle understanding of the frame as the audience's eye - thus the world it shows the only world extant to the audience. How he plays in and perturbs it is first and foremost warmly amusing, but, secondly, a demonstration of a rather nuanced conception of cinema and its relationship with the spectator.