The cable guy

This is a review of Channeling (2013), as shown at Bath Film Festival 2013

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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30 November (revised 3 December)

This is a review of Channeling (2013), as shown at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm) and thanks to a complimentary ticket from the festival

89 = S : 15 / A : 15 / C : 14 / M : 16 / P : 14 / F : 15

A rating and review of Channeling (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



The title of Channeling* (2013) is deliberately multivalent, meaning both the sense of He channelled his energies into archery, and putting something on a channel (so that others can see and hear it).

As director / writer Drew Thomas told us in answer to one of my questions, the family of whom Wyatt (Taylor Handley), Jonah (Dominic DeVore) and Ashleigh (Skyler Day) are the grown-up offspring is a dysfunctional one : one son travels from Yemen for a funeral, and is then (in his only real-time appearance) told off by the father for not being there in time. I had asked because, when we see him, as a younger man caught on home video, pick up a boy at whom he has barked orders, it is unclear what he did, but it smacked of abuse.

As with Ashleigh’s confessional moment on camera into the mirror, Thomas said that he had intended to portray a self-loathing that might lead someone to seek approval from ratings for their actions or choices (made or to be made). When we saw this system of rating manipulated in the night club, and indeed the events that had led up to it, the film did seem momentarily a bit insubstantial and trivial in a way that The Bling Ring (2013) is in spades, but it moved away from it, and this was something, perhaps a little self-indulgently, that Thomas almost did throughout the film of mining different genres for what they were worth before moving on, and a little too much at the risk of lacking cohesion.

Saying that, the dummy commercial that opens the film is funny, thought provoking, and satirical, with insights into where the world of Twatter and what I call Arsebook logically lead to – it plunges one straight into a counterfactual world that, as in Looper (2012), does not stray far from the things that we know in what it changes.

The moments of humour characterize the film, although we are not always sure that it is permitted to laugh, and it also expects us to do some work in piecing together what has happened in and following the pursuit sequence that we see. Whether it is the equipment that was giving us the audio or how it has been recorded that made the early dialogue hard to follow was unclear – it might partly have been ‘tuning into’ Wyatt’s accent (different from that of his brother, but then his brother is an army sergeant, and has been serving for a long time), or partly that, as in Top Gun (1986) (for example), those in situations of combat or other peril are not perfectly audible in their pressurized communication.

Not least since this is set in California and begins with a car chase, expectations of topping Drive (2011) spring to mind, but the excitement of the action on the road, and elsewhere, has been styled, Thomas told us, to be more like the era of Dirty Harry (1971) (he did not name that series of films) and of film noir. Just in these things (there was a feel of The Rockford Files or Starsky and Hutch, not least with the token black guy who is the IT whizz), there was already quite a mixture of feels, let alone with a gangland punishment (including a British-sounding baddie ?) that made one wonder if it was going to have equivalent scenes in Seven Psychopaths (2012) or – sticking with Colin Farrell – In Bruges (2008) in its sights.

Whether these disparate elements enhance or dissipate the film’s energies, I remain unsure, as it is all too true that many a science-fiction film sticks to type, whereas this one shows off its director’s literacy of references. It also has an enviable soundtrack, making an impact right with the opening commercial, and even a live band in the night club reminiscent of The Doors.

The other question that I asked relates to a film that I only saw once, but which teasingly plays with the question of free will versus determinism, which is Michael Douglas in The Game (1997) : appropriately ‘channelled’ by the festival’s founder**, Chris King, I asked Thomas whether the technology of people sharing their actions and following their ratings, which the film initially seems to be about, had come first, or whether the deterministic theme had always been what interested him most (it had). He had wanted to explore the ways in which people do not (or refuse) to take responsibility for what concerns them, and had seen a link with how people in the US use the technology of social media to arrive at an answer based on what others tell them.

If that Doors tribute was deliberate, maybe it leads off in some other directions : Maybe not the advocacy of mescalin and other mind-altering substances, though, in the film, we see tablets of what turns out to be called Oxy crushed and then snorted as if it were coke, but using the edge of the pervasive sort of mini-tablet as a straight edge to line it up.

Perhaps the Warhol-type being famous for fifteen minutes, and just doing things to get a higher number of followers, is a sort of intoxicant or tranquillizer, not unlike Marx’s ‘opiate of the masses’, not least when we see both what use the club bosses are putting participants’ behaviour to and how they control it ?

All in all, a thoughtful film, even if it may be too much of a rich blend of influences for the competing calls on our attention to allow us to settle down – though, since Thomas seems to have aimed at the feel that it has, and if it does still hold together, it may not be right (in a film about people taking responsibility) to imagine a film that he have made by suppressing some of those instincts***…


Postlude

Through fatigue and oversight, a few comments did not get formulated originally as more than notes, from which this text is developed :

Wyatt is not alone in his perilous exploits, for he has an accomplice (or whose side is she on ?) in Tara (Kate French). When Jonah tries to explore what his elder brother has been up to, Tara's allure is tangible, but her first reaction to Jonah using Wyatt's device and channel is hostile (a number of retorts to his attempts to speak, such as wishing him cancer).

Comparisons between the brothers are inevitable and deliberate, and, although we see that the professional soldier (Jonah) is tough, and can also drive, he is never going to be Wyatt (perhaps a pressure that he has always put on himself, helped by his father's attitude and actions).

Perhaps it is Tara's confusion, on all levels, that leads her to blow hot and cold towards Jonah, but she definitely starts by imputing blame : here, there seems to be a sort of fog of war about who people really are and who did what, which, in a digital age, when people do masquerade, and when the film explores the boundaries between what is real, what staged (and what predictable, what fixed), makes for even greater richness of reference.



Other questions from the Q&A

Had the Eyecast technology been patented ? Thomas seemed pleased enough not to have been sued, and did mention Google glasses (which, he said, make one look like a dork). He did not appear to have investigated whether it had any commercial possibilities.

Was Eyecast a real application (some would say 'app'), or had the screens that showed it been green-screened ? Yes, it is a real application, but, for technical reasons, some screen-shots had been re-done in post production.

Was Ashleigh meant to be sympathetic or irritating ? Thomas took it that the questioner must have found her irritating (which was confirmed), but answered by emphasizing her position as a person seeking approval (see main text, above).

Given the acts that people are performing or committing on a live channel, why were the police not - or slow to be - involved ? Thomas pointed to other works on film and t.v. where the police lag behind, and suggested that the same might be as true here. (The Agent Apsley wondered whether Eyecast had bought them.)



End-notes

* One ‘l’, because it is a US spelling.

** Who relayed questions through a microphone linked to the laptop for the Skype connection.

*** Just one likely flaw : when Jonah goes to Eyecast, gains access by his brother’s account name, and passes himself off as he, the assumption is that Wyatt never did what Ashleigh does and put herself on camera by reflection. (It could be that, given how the account has been used, that was never done.)


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

It ain't worth a thing...

This is a review of The Bling Ring (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 July 2013 (revised 7 August 2019)

This is a review of The Bling Ring (2013)

Afterwards, someone was heard describe this film as immoral. It is unlikely that she meant that The Bling Ring (2013) should have been a documentary, but, if she thought that it glorified shameful behaviour ‘inspired by true events’ (as the credits coyly put it), maybe she would have been happier with one : ot might have been less exultant in the burglary / trespass scenes, and, except in a film like The Imposter (2012), could have given greater emphasis to the victims and the sentences delivered…

The Bling Ring did not succeed as an account of matters as a feature film, because there were far too many flaws. For example, people (repeatedly) enter Paris Hilton’s house without her knowledge and, when not scanning through her possessions, smoke cigarettes – whether or not she smokes, is its lingering scent not going to be a strong indication to said Hilton that all is not as it should be, even if care had been taken to dispose of the ash and the butt (somehow unlikely, as this question was not addressed) ?

In another scene involving cigarettes, when Nicki (Nicolette ? played by our own Emma Watson) is in Marc’s (Israel Broussard's) bedroom, hiding a lit one behind her back when the door is opened by his father is not – unless he has no sense of smell – going to conceal anything. She must hide the cigarette because she is not meant to be a smoker or to smoke there, but it makes no credible sense : if someone opens a door into a room where someone else is smoking, it is obvious.

It is as if someone who has no notion of what a cigarette actually is (or of its taint) has observed behaviour and then represents it in the script without knowing what it means. The same is true of how Hilton’s house is depicted. Say 'Aladdin’s Cave', and you would not be far wrong, even down to the guessed means of entry being a substitution for the overheard password – once one is in, one can have and do what one wants, as it is the forty thieves who are the ones looking around…

Hilton, apparently, arranges everything neatly in pairs on racks by colour, no more pairs than there are spaces, and everything else on a hanger and in its place, with a room for this, a room for that. (But no one lives in to maintain this order for these stars, who are without exception methodical and ordered just in this way – apart from having no security, when they look concerned to have everything just so.)

Every other female icon’s house entered is conveniently somewhere we are meant to believe that she lives alone (no live-in staff to prepare that hot meal or snack when she comes in, no alarms, and safes left open), and Hilton even goes off on a trip and leaves her tiny dog behind. Credible, or just a passing resemblance, not thought out beyond how wealthy people might live if really wanting to show these youngsters nosing around and taking a few representative items ?

It’s either insulting to the audience’s intelligence to think that this – although it may be straight from the glossy pages of the celebrity magazines, with which ‘the adventurers’ busy themselves – in either case, is this how these people live their lives or is the film only aimed at those in the audience who would buy into the gang as it invades stars’ homes, but they are none the wiser ?


If so, then Sofia Coppola is too in love with her own vision, and has traded many forms of credibility for the reality that her invaders have nothing much better to say all the time than a wretched O my God !. From this point of view, a film like Spring Breakers (2012) is more honest – here are scantily clad young women doing scandalous things, and there is no moral, but maybe it’s convincing.

In Coppola's film, keys to cars get casually taken, but what happens to the cars themselves (or even the keys) is, as with cigarette smoke and ash, casually ignored. So, early on in Rebecca’s (Katie Chang's) acquaintance with Marc* (whom she certainly chose not for his charms, but to exploit), she asks if he has any friends whose parents are away. On impulse, when they leave that friend’s house, she drives them off in the family car (Car B), with no reference to what happened to the car that she earlier turned up in outside the school to take them there (Car A), both plastered with her fingerprints.

This makes no sense at all on even slight examination : Car B (and where they dispose of it) is a pretty big clue to the home location of the thieves, and to the possibility that the house where it had been parked was burgled first (or, as they say in the States, burglarized !), since it will have been clear that car-keys were used to drive it away.

Unless Rebecca is entitled (by absentee parents) to drive Car A (Marc also magically has a car, though never shown driving before, when he drops her at the airport), the location where it came from also links those who take Car B to it (where Car A is still parked : even if Rebecca had been allowed to drive it, she has abandoned it there, rather than getting Marc to drive it back).

Cozily, it all goes along with Marc the only one who seems to be a bit edgy about what they are doing, although he has his fair share of OMGs, until some injudicious boasting about who has been where (which widens the circle of those in the know), and the initially relatively cautious limit of taking only what might not be noticed missing is abandoned, with paintings lifted from the wall and carried through the gates.

Some star, at last, has invested not in shoe-rack no. 38, but some CCTV, although it seems operated by security staff who think that turning up and apprehending those who have made an entry to their employer’s property is beyond their remit. (The other stars, with as many racks as shoes, must have been in the I-cannot-spot-an-empty-space category, because the outrageous red heels that Marc enjoys sporting (except when his mother is at the door) would scarcely just get overlooked.)

And so it all unravels, and the intermixed Vanity Fair interviews (the media seem to have given the gang its title) leave us uncertain as to what has already happened in the rest of the story. Is the epilogue with Nicky a surprise ? Not really, as the possibility had already presented itself when Marc and Rebecca spoke at the airport, and, by then, the core group of five’s actions were widely known (or even witnessed).


I know little more than anyone brought up on American crime-drama about how plea-bargaining really works and interacts with clear evidence that someone participated more than he or she claims, although any such evidence is going to come from others whom he or she has implicated and who, necessarily, are on the other side of the divide. (Puzzlingly, Rebecca, for all that she seems savvy, waits until the police find stolen items on her before she offers to locate where everything is.)

How who was found guilty of what I do not know, but, cannily, we were spared a court-scene by the expedient of the doors closing and reopening for sentencing. (Presumably a full trial, which would have had to identify these awkward issues.) What does seem apparent was that there was no remand prior to trial, and no prohibition on the gang-members (no doubt for a fee, which would help with restitution) speaking to the press. (For what it is worth, I cannot see the latter being allowed in a case such as this in the UK.)

As to the dialogue, it was not astoundingly bad, but it has to be said that, of all the leaden lines, leadenly delivered, by far the highest percentage came from the mouth of Ms Watson (who also sounded, sometimes, as though she came from The Bronx rather than anywhere near The Bay). She was not, though, helped by the editing, which several times left the ostrich eggs of her utterance exposed in mid-air – to plummet and crash.

The evaluation reportedly made of her performance by Baz Bambagoyne beggars belief, if only on these counts alone. There was nothing that home-grown talent could not have brought to the role of manipulating a home-schooling mother, full of wise saws and inculcating the right image, but incapable of seeing that her adopted daughter, Nicky and their sister were out all hours, snorting coke.

Altogether, never high on the credibility states on many counts, but, as I have already said, those seeking a vicarious thrill of rifling through Hilton’s things – rather than those who have little idea who she might be – could probably and happily have swallowed all the imperfections of what someone doing so inspired.


End-notes

* NB there is not even a whiff of sex between him and any of the four main girls in ‘the ring’, despite copious amounts of dope and of snorting cocaine. Maybe that was something to do with the BBFC certificate that was sought…


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That film thing

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

6 July

People who mention Spring Breakers (2012) in the same breath as The Bling Ring (2013), as if one complements the other, should have to re-take their cinema licence :

It’s almost as if, because both involve the same number of heroes, one could believe in a comparison of the literary merits of the novelization of Ghost Busters and of The Three Musketeers. Not that I believe that the latter’s claims to them are great, but yet not so scant as to justify the exercise in seeking a likeness.

So I shall watch – the trailer for Breakers was bad enough to confirm me in what to expect – the Sofia Coppola film, and trust that I will find it a good piece of cinema…


Post-script (as of 11 July)

OK, I was wrong - Spring Breakers is the more honest film, because it's quite open in its contract with the members of the audience that they want to see, and will see, scantily dressed young women, amply presented...

Review of The Bling Ring here


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