Jonathan Glazer is best known for his music film clips, including work with artists like Nick Cave, Radiohead, Massive Attack and The Dead Weather to name a few. His third film, Under the Skin has been making the festival rounds this year and its one on my “must see” list for when I get the opportunity here in Australia. Sexy Beast is one of the best gangster films you’ll see, and a fantastic film debut for Glazer for whom everyone immediately had high hopes. However, crouched in this middle of all this mind blowing success, is a film that is so odd, so strange in its choice of subject matter, that it has been panned by critics and fallen into the forgotten realm of films best rarely talked about. That film is Glazer’s second and his first go at co-writing.  That film is Birth.

To claim that Birth is an odd film is an understatement. Critical reception falls primarily into two camps; the “this is appalling” camp and the “this could have been brilliant and falls slightly short” camp, and as a film fan, I fall into the latter category. The “appalling” camp primarily can’t get over the films placing a woman in her thirties (Kidman) into a bath with a ten year old child (Bright), and this scene, along with another where Kidman kisses Bright (whom she belies to be her dead husband reincarnated) take the film over and run away with it into an ugly place that tends to override the other more subtle aspects of the film. For me, there are moments of great cleverness in Birth, and Glazer can certainly direct his cast very well.  Birth’s problem may be in its writing, because the script was worked on for many months between Glazer and Jean-Claude Carrière (who worked in Bunuel in the past) and was then changed by Glazer and Milo Addica, into the woman’s point of view, just weeks before shooting was to begin.  As the film progressed scene’s were re-written and often changed in response to the film making process. Although Nicole Kidman is excellent in the role as a woman possessed with the madness of grief, all those re-writes and carry on may have been that which crippled what could have been a great project.

For those of you who haven’t seen the 2004 film, Nicole Kidman plays a woman (Anna) who lost her husband ten years earlier.  She is still in mourning, but has made the decision to get on with her life. She is engaged to Joseph (Danny Huston), a man who loves her and is truly devoted, if his persistence can be seen to hover on possessiveness. In the course of their wedding preparations, a young man appears in their house and claims that his name is Sean, that he is Anna’s dead husband come back to life, and that she is not to marry Joseph. Anna, still vulnerable in her loss, gradually crumbles toward the child, in a way longing for him to be her dead husband.  As the story plays itself out, we find two people with very different problems have collided by a string of coincidences that threatens to destroy both their lives. But in the end, it is only Anna who will suffer for the depth of her love.

One of the strongest aspects of the film are Glazer’s long loving shots of Kidman, playing to the strengths of actress and director. There are several shots that hover in an uncomfortably close examination of Kidman’s face as we watch her grief slowly take over her rationality. One particular shot, filmed as she sits in a crowd listening to part of the tumultuous score by Alexandre Desplat, is all pure auteur, reminding me of so many films of the 1960′s when subtlety could exist because the actress and director had intuitive connection. The image of Kidman is stripped bare, pared back.  Her long, luscious hair is gone in favor of a close cropped boyish do, a-sexual and withdrawn.  Her clothes are muted greys and beige and her skin is matte.  She is the ghost she seeks in the child; her grief makes her appear every waking moment as though she died ten years ago with her husband. There was a lot of praise for her acting at the time, and were it not for the “nudie-bath” stuff, and Lauren Bacall (who is also extremely good in the film) calling her a novice, it may not have been overshadowed.

Glazer uses his camera favorably over the entire cast, fleshing out a depth in everyone that is difficult to access through the sparse language. Glazer wants to evoke feeling via image from the astonishing introductory scene of a jogging Sean-the-living-husband running in the snow toward his death, to the despairing Anna walking into an ocean in her wedding dress at the end. Everyone in this film looks beautiful and sad and somehow desperate, and all of this comes through Glazer’s vision and DOP Harris Savides camera. In Sexy Beast Glazer  perfectly captured personality through image and setting, he clearly has a knack for it, because it’s one of they key connections to the complex layers in Birth. It is this film style that prevents Birth from being the silly film it became accused of, despite the harsh criticism. Its the writing, the narrative, the odd plot holes that halt Birth’s vision being properly realized, and as I said above, this truly is a shame. Because so long was spent building the story about a young boy, then changed at the last minute to be the story about a grieving widow, then changed again in response to Kidman’s strength in the role, we lose our grasp on the film and it loses its subtle reach for its audience. Its a great shame, because much of what Glazer can do with a camera disappears behind these problems.

For my money, Glazer remains a director to watch, even if Birth has lots of problems. I’m still looking forward to Under the Skin, and hope there are many films fro him after that.

Zal Batmanglij comes from a family of overachievers. His Mother, Najmieh Batmanglij is the award-winning cook book author and his brother is one of the members and primary song writers for the band Vampire Weekend, so it isn’t such a stretch to see how Brit Marling could have been impressed with his short film and wanted to work with him.  Aside from all that, he’s a good film maker, and if The East is a tad too polished for its subject matter, it isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a light weight film.  Its complex philosophy is well handled by cowriters Marling and Batmanglij which is saying something seeing as its thorny ground they cover.

The East, which previewed at the Sundance film festival this year and opened in the States around May, is the story of Sarah Moss (Marling), a FBI agent who now works as an operative for a private intelligence company, Hiller Brood.  She’s landed the case she wanted (and competed for) to infiltrate an undergroud anarchist group known as The East who meter out punishment to the CEO’s of corporate giants commensurate with eco damage they have inflicted on the environment and or on human beings. The opening scenes see them filling a home with oil, sending it in through the vents, when it is revealed the owner is CEO of the company that was responsible for an oil tanker spillage in the ocean. Like many left-wing revolutionary groups, they operate with a complete sense of self-righteousness, except the fine writing of Batmanglij and Marling has been able to move beyond this into a realm where the viewer can learn and see without being “taught”. It won’t come as a big surprise to learn that Sarah (after drinking the Kool-Aid) will start to question her role in trying to prevent the group from their “jam’s” which involve forcing the individuals benefiting from their companies illicit behaviour to experience their own product, whether it’s taking a drug they distribute knowing it has dangerous side effects, or making them swim naked in water their companies have contaminated.

It sounds a little like the film is filled with clichés, and it is, from the sensitive spiritual leader of the group wanting a better world through to the chemical companies being the “big baddies” but Marling and Batmanglij bring a surprising legitimacy to the script so that the clichés become believable and the direct action approach appears rational and effective. They lived for two months as freegans, people who “harvest” perfectly good food from dumpsters in a stand against capitalist waste as well as the drive to work simply to provide blood to oil the cogs of industry.  Freegans are a fascinating anarchist group that our art scene (at least as far as I can tell) visits far too rarely, as many of their practises send direct and clear anti-capitalist messages. It is not so much that I think their message “needs to be heard” (even if that may be the case) its more that the practise is an excellent illustration, broadening the mind into new perspectives on capitalism. Watching the film was very intellectually stimulating, so that the clichés cease to matter, and the deeper perspectives the writers hope to impart come to the fore very succinctly.

The East‘s flaw, however, is in its polished look. It’s not the kind of writing that’s going to attract blockbuster film launch, and so its slick look seem at odds with its ideals. It needed some of that District 9 energy about it, as you get the feeling all the way through that something got sold out – even though I’m sure that’s not the case. The cast is all great and good, with Alexander Skarsgård (gee he’s been really good lately) as the charismatic leader Benji, Ellen Page as the initially-sceptical-but-soon-comes-around Izzy and Patricia Clarkson cold and gorgeous as Sharon, the CEO of Hiller Brood.  Britt Marling is convincing as Sarah, playing the part of the individual questioning their morality in the line of duty nicely, but there is too much polish and “beauty” doesn’t suit the films esthetic at all. It’s a shame, because the script is so good and the cast so fine the film had the makings of being one of those underground success stories. Instead it carries this oddness where it seems to be battling within itself.

All that aside however, The East is worth seeing for its integrity and the well delivered and unexpected intelligent revelations by Marling and Batmanglij. I’d like to see more of this sort of film made, with subject matter that shakes things up a bit politically rather than complies so willingly, and it’s always healthy for a democracy to have films like this floating around. I guess for me that is what The East is, a good solid piece of intelligent democratic entertainment.

If the title alone doesn’t inform you Prisoners is a film about war, the opening shots leave the viewer in no doubt. A beautiful image of a deer walking a snowy path is soon framed by a forest of irenic trees as the camera pans slowly back, Hugh Jackman’s voiceover recites the Lords Prayer eventuating in a single gun shot that brings a swift, almost gentle-looking death. The image is Cimino’s central theme in The Deer Hunter, Mike being the wielder of the “single shot” that prepares him to face any challenge like a man and Nick, his best friend and alter ego, being the gentle introspective soul who loved hunting simply for “the trees… the way the trees look.” When Hugh Jackman slaps his son on the back and congratulates him for the one shot, he offers his accolade with a warning from his own father, “Be prepared”. This is no council on the daily struggle of life, rather an expectation of a kind of post apocalyptic world of survival.  The warning, already framed in the intense Deer Hunter imagery is: get ready with your one shot. The war is coming to us this time.

Apparently Aaron Guzikowski’s script was kicking around Hollywood for years, with various parties showing an interest in the film at different times, but for some reason it never quite got off the ground. This might account for its now rather dated theme of the war on terror, because you get the feeling the film would have packed a much harder punch had it come out five years ago. It’s startlingly obvious connections to the Abu Ghraib tortures, Jackman’s cries of “you’ve wasted time chasing me” and the overt defense of the right to bear arms are dulled with economic crises and gay marriage being hot political footballs right now – in some ways I’m so Excited seemed more politically relevant. This timing issue robs the film of a vitality that was desperately relevant, but also reveals how transitory the conversation on war really is. By connecting to The Deer Hunter, and using the war on terror as its basis, rather than tap into a universal, Prisoners reveals a lack in contemporary cultural discussion, that by accident informs us we keep missing the point when we think we are discussing the complexities of war.

Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover (Keller is German for cellar and Dover means water… this man has some deep emotional issues) a religious man who expresses his masculinity through a protectionist attitude toward his family in the absence of an enemy. This ethic is encapsulated in a phrase he and others repeat in the film, “Pray for the best but prepare for the worst,” a phrase that can be seen to embody the spirit of American foreign relations, particularly during war-time. It is while Kellar Dover is celebrating Thanksgiving (!) with his family and their best friends and neighbours Nancy and Franklin Birch (Viola Davis and Terrance Howard) that their two young daughters Anna, and Eliza (Erin Gerasimovich and Zoe Borde) go missing. Suddenly the war Dover has been expecting is upon him.

An RV parked out the front of their homes, seen earlier and now missing is suspected to be involved with the disappearance of the girls.  When a search is started for the vehicle, Jake Gyllenhaal as Detective Loki (the norse god who challenges Thor) comes across the RV and its driver, one Alex (Paul Dano) as a “touched” young man and the girls are nowhere to be seen.  Alex can only be held on suspicion  for twenty-four hours, but upon his release, when Dover storms toward him he makes a small statement that gives Dover the impression he does know where his girls are, and this sets off a chain of events that pit the legal strategies of Loki against the vigilante revenge heated efforts of Dover in trying to find the girls. Dover will capture Alex, and it is his methods of trying to get Alex to talk that the connections to the war on terror come to a sledge-hammer-obvious surface.  Alex is Dover’s “one shot” and it is crucial he is on target.

Prisoners is successful in putting a human face on vigilante-style methods of the USA when the post 9/11 war on terror was at its height, particularly in a stirring moment when Dover cries to Loki, that his little girl is sitting there in the dark wondering why he isn’t coming to her rescue. “She isn’t waiting for you, she is waiting for me!” is his cry and we begin to get a glimpse of the self-righteous protectionist aesthetic that haunts the religious right in the US.  However, this is all presented without the counter argument, as the only opposition Dover faces is from the emasculated Franklin, a man immediately put in place by his wife. This is a silly way to deal with the maze-like problems associated with torture and unfortunately Jackman does look a little like a cross between Jean Valjean and Wolverine at times, which only adds to the juvenile subtext of the way his character’s perspective is treated.  Contrary to this, Gyllenhaal is a sophisticated underplayed detective in a performance that exudes authenticity, giving the film the strange and unexpected problem of a myth and a man in a sort of battle with each other, neither being played out fully to give the impression of two styles of masculinity at war, nor two alternate perspectives on the way to handle war, but rather a happenstance of incidences that occur on the search for the girls.

Add to this strange relationship between the two men the rather poorly conceived mystery of what happened to the girls, being unravelled without the Fincher-esque cleverness of Seven or Zodiac and you have a strange film that combines outright cleverness, with poor timing and rushed mystery writing so obsessed with mcguffins, at times objects displace people and themes.

Yet, above all, Prisoners is a stunning film to watch and there are several scenes, the aforementioned deer in the forest scene is one and a thrilling and shocking car ride to the hospital that are some of the best cinema you will see this year.  Uber brilliant cinematographer Roger Deakins gets to use all his skills in partnership with the direction of Denis Villeneuve and the team is so good, the problems that weaken Prisoners will be virtually invisible to the main stream film watching public.

Like Deer Hunter, I couldn’t quite position Prisoners message on the left or right-wing arguments, and also like Deer Hunter I think this is an accident. Deer Hunter was a left-wing, anti-war film that was so racist in its execution and writing style, that its muddled message encouraged vilification of the Vietnamese out of sheer ignorance. Prisoners writing seems deliberately settled on a right-wing defense of the vigilante Christian protecting his family, but the message becomes muddled when shown out of context of the headlining discussion of torture techniques and enemies who primarily target on home turf and at the heart of spiritual values. However, where The Deer Hunter can never be seen separate from its point, Prisoners doesn’t strike hard enough at its own message and becomes diluted into a beautifully shot hero film about a super dad.  It is in this way, Prisoners misses its crucial “One shot.”

A fine scene in The Butler, defined by power and message (in a film that tries to deliver both in every frame) occurs when Cecil Gains (Forrest Whitaker) and his wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) attend a gala dinner at The White House as guests, invited by Nancy Regan (a weird-looking Jane Fonda).  Cecil has been on the opposite end of the tilted plate at every official dinner, but it is not until he is served that he understands how little power and respect the wait staff have. It’s the moment Uncle Tom meets Malcolm X in the spirit of African American survival, and the scene carries deep insight into how a person is led to seeing something that has been right under their nose for, in some cases, many years.

The Butler is worth seeing for scenes like this one, and a few stand out others, and worth sitting through the oddly laboured tale and the comic caricatures of presidents through history, that much as been made of in the swirl of reviews. The performances are truly odd, the strangest being John Cusack’s Nixon, but no one looks easy with their role and truckload of makeup. Jane Fonda really looks like she’s about to break out in leg warmers and demand we feel the burn, and Alan Rickman seems to have a hot poker up his ass, never for a moment looking comfortable playing Ronald Regan. James Marsden looks twelve years old – but perhaps that’s how Kennedy looked to the masses, he was young after all, and Minka Kelly’s almost silent Jackie Kennedy made me think of Marilyn Munroe every moment she was on-screen. It’s a huge shame, because the downright silly cartoonish quality of the white house performances steels power and more importantly screen time from the excellent performances connected with the black civil rights workers and the very interesting home life of Cecil Gains.

Lee Daniels can be touch and go. Prescious was overrated, but still strong and in my opinion The Paperboy was one of the worst films made in 2012, however both films are watchable if you think of them as classy junk rather than poorly made quality. The Butler takes another step in this film making style, at times almost parodying itself in its laboured cliché, and at times striking a rare deep chord as a film with a message. One rather long scene is devoted to Sydney Poiter and the film Guess Whose Coming to Dinner, with its role as change agent in America hotly discussed at Cecil’s dinner table.  It was during this scene I saw the connection between independent social criticism and the embracing of cliché. The Butler as a film is an amalgam of each side of its own story. Black Americans as Uncle Tom’s and Black Americans as rebel’s with a cause, and Daniels absorbs this into the films style. Daniels successfully uses epic Hollywood style manipulative techniques (splicing “real” footage of emotive historical events with recreations) along side his real strength (and how he got his start in Hollywood) character and female character in particular.  Daniels knows his strength is in casting (he cast Monsters Ball, which he also produced) and he directs women exceptionally well. The strength of all his films have been his female leads, and The Butler is no exception.

This idea of using / including a cliché against / for itself within a serious film is seen in Precious, with the juxtaposition of Gabourey Sidibe who reflects a brutal truth and the Paula Patton character (Precious’ teacher) as a schmultzy cliché.  Daniels does everything short of using a fuzzy “Doris-Day-lens” when he films Patton so that she literally becomes Hollywood fantasy built into the film. Daniels leaves this to subtlety, so I missed it at first, thinking instead that the Patton character was poorly written and false, but it was during The Butler that I noticed the combining of cliché and the real as a cinematic technique. Cecil Gaines represents a persistent unsettling truth about the position of “the black domestic” that is delt with powerfully in the film, and yet Louis Gaines (David Oyelowo) as Cecil’s revolutionary minded son, is a string of over-the-top Hollywood clichés of the “power-black” in film making as well as in American folklaw. Daniels pitting them against each other, including the clash of filming styles allows for a messy clanging chaotic representation that includes and reveals a black-sploitation Quentin Tarantino can only dream of conjuring up. At the same time, Daniels uses all the power that a laboured film can evoke to deliver his message.

Even if The Butler is famous for its odd cameos, Oprah Winfrey’s welcome return to the screen (she’s great in this, so large – she is amazingly large – she is bigger than the screen itself) and that gorgeous face (and powerful acting) of Forrest Whitaker, Daniels style as a film maker is starting to emerge with more clarity.  The film looks at times like some sort of James Cameron-esque cry for dollars, but it has an integrity and soul that Cameron couldn’t ever grasp, and it is in the successful (or maybe not quite successful just yet) combining of soul, schmultz and star-power that gives Daniels films some oomph.

Like many Czech films, Autumn Spring cannot be defined by its surface matter, and considering Vladimír Michálek’s first feature film was an adaptation of Franz Kafkas novel ‘Amerika’, it is safe to assume the absurdism is emblematic of something other than what it appears to be. Autumn Spring uses some tropes / actors of the Czech New Wave, particularly the very fine Vlastimil Brodský of Closely Watched Trains fame, and Stella Zázvorková from the great film Lemonade Joe, along with a combination of absurdist and dark comic aspects that in the case of Autumn Spring turn out to be very dark, even to the point of being unsettling in several key scenes, however it is not strictly a New Wave homage film, raising its own questions about the impact of cinemas history in Czechoslovakia. What it is, rather is a commentary on both the obsessions and denials of death and that relationships impact on our lives. Death is the spectre that haunts all living things, and its impact on our life results in one of our key defining belief systems, whatever your beliefs about death.

Fanda is a retiree who is nearing the end of his life. He can count his many ailments on two hands and he and his wife are in the stage of life defined by visits with the grandchildren and the decision to enter a retirement home. However, Fanda doesn’t want to accept his mortality, or rather he doesn’t want to accept the consequences of accepting his mortality. When responsibility seems to be wrapped in maturity, Fanda sinks into immaturity and childishness to stave off serious thought and therefore the prospect of death. Fanda chooses instead to have fun; and fun means antics! Cheeky adrenalin pumping capers such as pretending to be a wealthy maestro intending to purchase a mansion, so he is chauffeured in limousines and fed expensive food by a real estate agent. However Fanda isn’t terribly good at management, what he used to be when he worked, is an actor, so he tends to lose more money than he makes on these hijinks, and regularly resorts to stealing the money from his wifes savings jar; savings for, paradoxically, their funerals and graves. His wife Emilie (Stella Zázvorková), is his opposite: a woman so obsessed with death that she finds it endearing when their son buys them a used burial plot for their birthdays and the grandchildren draw them pictures of their tombstones.  Eventually Fanda, now a little pissed off that his wife is so welcoming their death, plays a final prank on Emilie – he fakes his own death, but it is so traumatic for his wife of over forty years, that she decides she’s had enough and they need to get a divorce.

The relationship between Emilie and Fanda is the contrary basis for most of the films comical and absurd turns, with both actors playing a perfect straight man for the other when the need arises. Brodský’s face when his wife proudly reveals the grave site (complete with buried older corpses) their son bought them for their birthday is a treat, but Zázvorková’s look when she explains that she admires her husband’s desire to fly around the world in a balloon is just as dead pan and matches his comedic talents perfectly. Part of the treat of Autumn Spring is the talent on display and Michálek wisely gets out of their way, giving them the opportunity to riff off each other in long, very funny dialogues about their complicated relationship that is defined by their different perspectives, and laced with that intrinsic Czech humour.

At the heart of their arguments is a repeated theme of death v’s life, subtext for responsibility v’s irresponsibility, the implication being that a staid and steady life is one tied to death, to death’s inevitability and to all of life’s consequences. Michálek uses each character to imply each can’t exist without the other, and yet both live under death’s spectre in their own way, Emilie through her preparation for it and Fanda in his refusal (it’s not strictly denial) of it. Both see themselves as accepting, but Michálek seems to be asking how is acceptance possible, and aren’t we deluding ourselves that it is? One of the absurd implications in the life of Fanda and Emilie is its history, they have been acting this way for years, and this open-ended irrationality (they would have divorced long ago in reality if this were the case) gives the tale a fable-like quality, but it also removes the films narrative from one strictly about old people. The age of the protagonists is added to bring death closer, and to make a point about Czech cinema through the years. Emilie’s attitude in particular would never have gained any sort of traction if she were in her early fifties, and yet the way she has been cow-towing to the selfish needs of their son (played by Ondrej Vetchý, as a man who not only keeps remarrying, but keeps the wives living in the same home) for so many years, implies she’s had an attitude of “old gives way to the young” for decades.

Fanda’s irresponsibility is largely tied up in finances and fiscal management. There is mention of Fanda having endured great poverty as a child that he never truly recovered from. We know Vlastimil Brodský from the early days of the Czech New Wave, the era when The Prague Spring gave Czechs a hope that was quickly dashed, crushing film making and life in general, and launching a flood of art critical at the financial management of the various Czech governing bodies (Stalinism for one) and Ondřej Vetchý and Stella Zázvorková were in the highly acclaimed (and highly accepted by Western audiences) Czech film Kolya made in the late 90′s, under a completely different political climate. There is a touch of the film retrospective and commentary in Autumn Spring, especially when three actors from the past gather to dance and drink well aged wine together to celebrate their lives and their performances. The impact of the New Wave still reverberrates accross all Czech film, in good and bad ways, but perhaps there is a place for this influence still?

Even with all the typical Czech subtext happening, Autumn Spring is an entertaining film at its surface, warm-hearted and extremely funny. It is worth watching for the performances of  Stella Zázvorková and Vlastimil Brodský in his last role before his age and illness related suicide.

Pi or π, Darren Aronofsky’s first feature film that was good enough to launch him as a bit of an indie darling back in his early days, is one of those films one loves or one hates, primarily because they are made to show off intelligence that may or may not be present, but wants to be known none the less. Like Carruth’s Primer, it makes you feel smart while you watch, and has therefore gained a cult following with undergrad superior males but is despised for the same reasons by those who don’t fall for its bullshit. No matter what you think of its blatant (and rather sorry) attempts to appear clever, however,  π has enough going for it that it deserves its accolades. Whether it deserves its cult status is another question.

Unlike Primer,  π mathematics are easily recognised and understood, which we will discover is typical of Aronofsky, but does give rise to the aforementioned problem of appealing to those who think they are smarter than they are. It isn’t a study in fine mathematics (as Mathematics is elegantly explained in a film like A beautiful Mind for example) rather a Polanski-esque apartment film of alienation, hallucination and the dangers of prescription drugs  - something Aronofsky will visit in more depth in his next film. Max is a stereotype style of genius, a recluse who has “no time for the petty concerns of consumerist culture”, but who rather rejects society in favour of a search for an elusive string of numbers that he eventually believes have the power to crash his computer and might be the name of God. If Aronofsky comes off as a crashing bore when it comes to the clumsy show-off-ish-ness of  π, he recovers from this properly with a rather subversive position on the romance, spiritual potency and yes, even mysticism of numbers. Given this buoyant disdain for the pop-culture-passions of mathematics as seen as some sort of elusive holy grail only the most brilliant in society can access,  π cleverly turns on itself eventually taking a bit of a shot at the very type of viewer who has fallen for its earlier seductions. If you love  π, it’s very likely Aronosfky is having a go at you.

This is where arguably  π is his best film.  Not famous for his subtlety, this is the only time Aronofsky will openly turn the cultural tables on his initial premise and it if it makes for confused viewing, it definitely remains with you.   π is a subtle film, very much tied to its audience and equally disdainful of them. Seen in this context, all the trappings of genius are the trappings of a viewer, that person watching who secretly believes they relate to Max and can understand him when no one else can will be forced to confront that conviction when Max goes into wild territory that embraces not just mysticism, but orthodox religion, eventually punctuating his skull in a last minute ode to Taxi Driver.  With this relationship between viewer and protagonist, π becomes a kind of essay on Scorsese characterisation and his ability to make us loath and want to emulate them together, but it goes a little further, in that with the embracing of mathematics pop-cultural opposite, the viewer who sees themselves will get more than they bargained for. Scorsese doesn’t preach like this, but as we will see in future films, Aronofsky has no problem preaching. π speaks to that white middle class male fantasy of exclusive genius, so easily disproved these days, but hard to let go of none the less. Crucial to this dialogue is  the key: In the end  Max produces nothing.

Because of the nature of π, it may seem a stretch to be attributing Aronofsky with the talent to disavow the exclusivity of “male genius” the way I am suggesting, but my defense in this case is the body of work Aronofsky produces. If π is nothing more than a bright young film student desperately truing to convince the world he is a genius by gathering the slim witted into his fan-fold, there would be no obsession with greatness being played out in his future films. But genius will become the most important thread in Aronofsky’s work, the only exception at surface level is requiem for a dream, but that visits another of Aronofskys favourite subjects, drug addiction. Certainly in the future Aronofsky will extend his study to incorporate female genius, but he never leans on questions of gender, except in π, which is arguably a case for his criticism. In a body of work that will focus on human accomplishment and the elusive quest for the intellectual holy grail, Aronofsky starts the exploration with what genius is not by providing a film that indulges the tropes and then turns it back on its head.

The Nice Guys

The complex notion of the teen age girl as seen through the eyes of men remains predictably unresolved in Shane Blacks The Nice Guys. The opening scenes reveal a teenage boy coming to terms with females and as expected its through a sexual context. The Nice Guys is set in nineteen seventy-seven, so the film’s time frame acts as a superficial rescue for its clumsier attempts at realizing a young teenage girl as subject. But it is worth noting the brilliant opening scene reveals a boy of comparable age stealing a girlie mag from under his father’s bed, and this scene and its consequences give us a more rounded figure of the teen boy than the attempted fully-fleshed character of Holly March (Angourie Rice), one of the films leads. We first meet Jackson Healey (Russell Crowe) as a muscle man for hire choosing to focus on keeping hebephiles away from teenage girls, but he does it for money (not enough and he’s out) and to satisfy a notion he could be a good person inside after all. As anticipated he is rescued from himself by the angelic aspects of Holly, as is her father (Ryan Gosling) whom she is desperate to admire despite his hopelessness and general bumbling engagement with life. The character of Holly is reduced to the clichés of saving innocent while haunted in real life by detective work (alongside her father) that takes her deep into the world of pornographic film.

Starkly missing from the film is the female voice. Holly is horribly under-realised and exists as a male fantasy; part innocent savior, part budding nymphette, part Hermoine Granger super sleuth. The younger males who appear in the film with shorter screen time are always full subjects, separate from parents, eking out their identity as teens. Holly is stuck to her father, condemned to a life reflected in the consequences of his actions. One of the few times we see Holly as subject is when she is fascinated by a porno film, watching it with one of its stars, with whom she becomes friends. Her only avenue to autonomise is via sex (hetro male identified of course) and as the visions of Russell Crowe beating up older suitors tells us – teenage girl sex is bad, no matter how much we subliminally reinforce it. While this can be claimed of the teen males in the film, their sexualisation represents freedom. Holly’s represents danger and compromise.

Because under-realized female characters are the norm rather than the exception, one is forced to forgive a film this good for going there (again) and consider other aspects of what makes it such an enjoyable ride. The principle leads work better together than expected, and Russell Crowe’s laid back aging hit man is perfect for the fast paced snappy dialog proving to be a formidable straight man. Ryan Gosling (who packs a mean bulge through the film) emerges as a strong comedic talent with a facility for slapstick exemplified in a well executed toilet scene. But the real star of The Nice Guys is Richard Bridgland’s production design supported by David Utley’s art direction and Danielle Berman’s set decoration. Forgoing the yellow wash symbolism of late seventies visuals, the colors in the sets are vibrant and rich, preferencing seventies neon over the dusty realism of films from the era. It makes for a thrilling take on the now cool retro look, suddenly made vogue as a kind of anti-hipster statement, infusing the scenes with a visual vibrancy missing from the other films.

An attempt at depth is made with a spurious but successful narrative connection between Detroit’s car industry, smog killing birds and the porn industry. This connection is carried forward by our knowledge of Detroit’s demise but the porn connection is left curiously unrealized to the detriment of the film. The opening scenes, a teen boy looking at an image of a naked woman in a girlie mag who then crashes her car through his house, only to be flung from the car covered in blood in the same pose as the erotic image, evokes a strong indicator the subject of porn, its sacrificial symbolism and its infiltration into society and in the seventies are up for examination. This never happens although strong messages continue to be fed to the audience. The aforementioned image of Holly watching porn with the film’s star and a teenage boy offering to show his penis for twenty dollars, hint at the contemporary proliferation of pornography but never engage with it. Given the films successful intention to marry future knowledge with the past its surprising this goes nowhere. In his resistance to clumsy preachiness, Shane Black has avoided dealing with a subject he perpetuates and while this is a blessing if he really doesn’t know what to say, the inclusion of young teens in the conversation at all appears exploitative for the sake of risqué comedy – something this funny film refuses to do on other subjects. It’s a bit messy and smacks of lost opportunities.

However, with all this, The Nice Guys is a fun film full of genuinely funny laughs including strong performances from its three leads. It’s a film I’d reach for again – mostly for the production design.