Tag Archives: Alicia Vikander

HOPE (Na Hong-jin, 2026)

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There are so few foreign films shown in Birmingham that I grab every opportunity. That was my only reason to see HOPE (Na Hong-jin, 2026), even though I didn’t know the director or cast, and in spite of the film being over 2h30 long. I found it a bit prosaic at first. A chief of police (Hwang Jung-min) is sent on a call in a village near the Demilitarised Zone by North Korea.  A cow has been mangled. What has such large claws? Could it be a tiger? No, it turns out to aliens.

The first makes its appearance almost forty minutes into the film, and from then it’s non-stop action, shootings from cars, horses, in the town and in the forest. The aliens can leap into trees so they can literally chase the earthlings from any direction. It all had me on the edge of my seat and was exciting to watch. I loved the design and look of the monsters, which are sometimes CGI’d and sometimes  old-fashioned puppets. The film has a retro feel made contemporary with the crudity of its humour and with the speed and inventiveness of its action; a key type of shot is where the camera follows a speeding car or horse which ends up turning in one direction as the camera goes in the opposite one, creating a feeling of frenzied distance.

An hour into the film, during a frantic car chase, the police chief notices that the alien is crying, and that shifts the narrative. Why is he crying? It turns out there are more of them — we’ll eventually see six – and that a hick would-be militia-man has killed what looks to be a child.  Is that the reason for the tears and the franticness that has led to the destruction of the village and the killing of people?

At this moment the aliens become individuals too rather than concepts, the chases and shootings take on a different tone – they’re now killing people not things, and when Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender appear near the end as the aliens, who can speak to each other, and who’s speech is sub-titled for us, the film changes direction completely, ready to take us on another journey, which presumably is the sequel. I was a bit iffy at first, the set-up made worse by the rotten projection at Cineworld, with half the sub-titles being off-screen and the image lacking in necessary luminescence, but the film won me over by the end and I now hope there is a sequel.

I see that some critics have been using the term gonzo in relation to the film, which I frankly don’t get. Some of the humour is crude, the chase scenes are inventive, the special effects are sometimes basic but always effective…but there’s nothing gonzo about it in at least my understanding of the term. Ostensibly, South Korea’s most expensive production.

José Arroyo

 

A quick note on Irma Vep

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Just finished bingeing on Irma Vep which I started watching yesterday and loved. I was thinking what a great course it would make, using the original Feuillade and the nineties Assayas films as anchors but dealing with different topics the series brings up through other films about cinema in its broadest sense. Keaton’s Sherlock Holmes Jr, Hellzappopin, Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks in Another Town, Fellini’s 81/2, The Day of the Locusts, The Player etc.

I liked how the series brings up and has a view on almost every topic related to filmmaking: the beauty of a travelling shot; the carelessness of the production in relation to safety; stars and actors; the importance of costuming; the changing technology; blockbuster cinema; the scleroticism of current art cinema; the possibilities of micro-cinema; cinema as product for systems, in this case global luxury goods advertising; objectification and the #metoo movement; consideration of effects, affect and value on how and where one sees the work (some derisory comments on You Tube); the centrality of desire at every level and at every stage of the work; the role of fantasy and light. I liked the structure of the piece with the inter-cutting of Feuillade’s series, re-enactment of the making of the original Irma Vep, and the filming of the current series; and then interspersing all of that that with dramatic re-enactments of Musidora’s memoirs.

I also adored the actors, Vikander of course, but also Vincent Lacoste as the vain leading man and particularly Vincent Macaigne as the director – clearly based on some level on Assayas – but a director unlike we’re used to seeing represented: insecure, impotent, still obsessed by adolescent sexual fantasies — in this case originating, as with so many of his generation, with Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel in The Avengers ––  depressed and scared etc. Lars Eidinger, Tom Sturridge, Fala Chen and so many of the others also impressed and it was great to see Kristen Stewart appear at the end.

I liked the melodrama of the sexual infatuations, the fluidity of the representations and the matter-of-fact way they were presented. The series brings all these issues up and though one isn’t always in agreement – What is all this spirit stuff?- I welcomed the way it encourages us to think through the current mediascape historically, from a personal perspective. I have to think about it some more but I loved the experience of seeing it, both as metacinema and as a work in itself, and recommend if you haven’t already seen it; though I’m probably late to the party as usual.

José Arroyo

Jason Bourne (Paul Greengrass, USA, 2016)

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jason bourne

I tuned out of the last chase sequence AND the last fight sequence of the new Bourne film: I don’t know what I missed and I didn’t care. I hate the way Greengrass films action. And yet….I quite liked Jason Bourne. It has a terrific cast, all-star, an interesting development in the story, that great final song, the explicit commentary on the political, and that continuing sense of being completely alienated from everything except survival. I never get tired of watching them on tv. And I’m sure I’ll see this one many more times to come. A contradiction I suppose.

The all star cast includes Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel and Julia Stiles, all in great form and a pleasure to see.

 

José Arroyo