Shorts #109

Shorts: Edge of Tomorrow (2014), 13 Hours (2016), Cache (2005), A Night at the Opera (1935), Underwater (2020), Our Hospitality (1923), Wonder Woman (2017), Queen & Slim (2019)

Edge of Tomorrow is still as unexpectedly impressive as it was when I first saw it in cinemas. What makes this work so well is its unique concept and its production of a sentimental character capable of securing genuine comic moments. So whilst this leaves you wanting to know more about how organic matter can control spacetime and separate consciousness from said elements, Edge of Tomorrow does arrest you in affective, interesting drama. Cruise is great in this less serious, less noble, incarnation of a familiar character type he is often cast as. Blunt, too, is great. The script is structured incredibly well; and the spectacle is immersive. Edge of Tomorrow is easily slept on, but unquestionably good.

I cannot remember finishing 13 Hours - I fell asleep at some point the night I watched it. But, I still feel an unambiguous lack of bother to figure this out and return to the film. I can get down with a Michael Bay melodrama, but, this - a semi-realist configuration of the Bay drama and aesthetic - I haven't much patience for. Without exuberant excess and ridiculously boisterous, half-articulate symbolism, Bay's drama and aesthetic is left with its conventional crutches and an awkward political discourse I do not care to try and navigate through. 13 Hours is filled with weak characters, cliche and highly questionable representation. It is too conscious and too serious to be acceptable as a Bay production. I just didn't know what to do with this as I watched it.

Haneke's Cache, or Hidden, is as simple as it is dense. It has very few moving parts, but uses these in such a kaleidoscopic manner that they fractalise one another, constructing an ambiguous hall of mirrors. So much of Cache is concerned with the internalisation and processing of one's impact on the world and moral responsibility. The film subtly teases out of its audience an array of assumptions without ever confirming them, thus imposing back onto the spectator a question of their own associations. Take, for example, the film's subtle evocation of class and racial guilt. Do we see this as a post-colonial exploration of race-relations - prejudice, xenophobia, etc - in Paris as a result? Or, does this merely present such elements - peoples of certain races - that we cannot help but internalise and allow to awaken our conscience? Whose conscience and what conscience: Cache's conundrum.

A scintillating spectacle of smarts and silliness that stands out of the Marx brothers' filmography as maybe their most spectacular and expansive feature. How are you to speak of such an anarchic comedy? It is hilarious and rousing, but how and why? A Night at the Opera breaks its own logic as it constructs it. Like a cartoon character laying train track whilst they sit atop of run-away locomotive, this meanders through drama of intermittent intelligibility. But, as soon as plot points begin to resonate, they are solidified by illogic and silliness: everyone is trying to get a contract signed, but each time the topic is approached a gag of complete illogic destroys its intelligible place in the structure of narrative. Such is what makes A Night at the Opera so good. It is a pure comedy in that it constructs and deconstructs convention at a rate that is impossible to make sense of, but can somehow be followed.

Underwater is a mediocre and very familiar sci-fi adventure. It does nothing new with the monster in the house, lost in space, narrative form. Its monsters are ugly and uninteresting, its characters are mere caricatures subservient to a plot and spectacle that does not register as particularly affective. You cannot call this at all incompetent in any respect - it just isn't particularly original. Maybe the epitome of the mundane, Underwater isn't worth much to anyone familiar with this genre of film.

Our Hospitality presents a smart take on a romantic plot line regurgitated innumerable times in the genre. It heartedly resolves hatred with love, masking all true conflict with comedy that lambastes and sublimates the reality attached to its mimesis. There is nothing particularly special in this beyond Keaton's star persona. Such frames Our Hospitality as one of the actor-director's lesser films as this does not feel as inventive and ingenious as the likes of Sherlock Holmes jrn, One Week and The General. Chaplin may have been the better storyteller, Keaton the better technical filmmaker, but here Keaton doesn't revel in what he thrives in: the technical gag and smart stunt. Such comes in small bursts, but leaves one yearning for greater set-pieces and a more elaborate plot. That said, Our Hospitality has survived almost 100 years of film history, and is still worth watching.

Wonder Woman is just as I remembered it to be. The first 30 minutes are terrible, but as soon as Wonder Woman's character is cultivated through her relationship and movement into war, this film wakes up. DC are starting to understand what they are good at. Marvel can do the world building and can generate a vast narrative rife with symbols and sentimentality. DC have personalities. They have archetypes that can define worlds and energise an aesthetic experience of their perception of things. What DC cannot do is work within the confines of a coherent dramatic mode. Their usage of degrees of realism and seriousness is poison - it ruins their films. Unreal and subsumed in subjectivity, the DC film begins to work. All they need to do is continue to figure out their characters - that's it.

Queen & Slim is a very evocative piece of cinema. It consciously produces a sprawling and powerful invective discourse on the black American experience. This discourse is not simple and it does not resolve itself. There are many ambiguous and open ends left in this narrative. Maybe the most affecting emerges from a scene in which montage juxtaposes a sexual encounter and fatal protest. The two events are correlated and imbued with highly sensationalised sentiment, but their causal relationship and its ramifications are entirely subsumed in darkness. What does it mean that passionate protest causes violent destruction? This is the crux of Queen & Sim's discourse. It is challenging to engage and difficult to process, but this is a film that undoubtedly puts a lot into your hands.