Review: Black Heaven

Country: France

Genre: Thriller, Action/Adventure

Run time: 100 minutes

Director: Gilles Marchand

Starring: Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, Louise Bourgoin, Pauline Etienne

Produced by: Haut et Court

On a trip to the beach, Gaspard (Leprince-Ringuet) and his girlfriend Marion (Etienne) find a cell phone. Their quest to return the phone to its rightful owner, Audrey (Bourgoin) leads them all over town and up into a quarry where they find Audrey and her companion mid-suicide attempt. They pull her out of her smoke-filled car and Gaspard finds and stashes a handheld camera that had recorded her entire attempt. On the camera, Audrey talks about going to the Black Beach and Gaspard quickly discovers that she is talking about a place in an online live-action game called Black Hole. Within the game, players create an avatar that wanders around a Gotham-like city called Black Hole where when players die (which is often, the city is rife with violence), they temporarily go to the beach. As Gaspard delves deeper and deeper into the mechanics of the game and Audrey’s way of life, he discovers a singer in the video game, named Sam, who he believes is Audrey’s avatar. As Marion quickly vanishes from Gaspard’s mind and seducing Audrey via talking with Sam becomes his top priority, Gaspard becomes entangled in a complex web of sex, slavery, murder, and suicide. The film culminates on the rooftop of Audrey’s penthouse when Audrey’s lifestyle falls apart and she and Gaspard have to suffer the consequences.

The complex plot of Black Heaven questions where the line between real life and fantasy lies, going so far as to suggest that in modern times, the influence and importance of the internet means that the line does not exist at all. In fact, Black Heaven’s best quality is that it questions the lines between many subjects. When Gaspard discovers that Audrey and her brother Vincent use the game to trick lonely players into a false joint suicide attempt, he struggles with the idea that technically, Audrey is a murderer. However, his attraction to her overpowers his fear of what she and her brother could do to him and he uses his avatar, who looks and sounds nothing like him, to convince the player behind Sam to have sex with him. Unfortunately for Gaspard, the player controlling Sam is not Audrey but her violent brother Vincent, who lures him into coming to their apartment so he can try to kill him. The multiple platforms on which the characters communicate complicate what seems like a simple question of life and death. The indestructibility of the players within the game encourages them to take risks that they otherwise would not consider, like breaking into a house to go swimming and spend the night. The fact that players can come back from “death” in Black hole gives Audrey and Gaspard a feeling of invincibility that is expressed not only in the plot but through the cinematography as well.

The “world within a world” created by the game is reflected in how Audrey tapes her suicide attempts and the audience sees them in a shot over Gaspard’s shoulder as he watches them on TV. The theme of a screen being showed on screen is repeated in the many shots of the video game on a computer screen, but the video game’s flat texture and monochromatic color scheme make the video game shots boring. Though this may be done intentionally to emphasize that the video game is different from the vivid colors of Gaspard’s and Audrey’s real lives, the game’s matte appearance is not on par with the highly thought-out camerawork of the rest of the film. The most striking shot of the film is from inside the car when Audrey and her brother/owner Vincent (it is known that she is technically a slave, but the story behind how she became one is never revealed) are in the car with their friends outside in a rock quarry. The group is playing chicken; Audrey rides along while Vincent steers the car towards their friends to see who dives out of the way first. After each try, Vincent reverses the car while looking straight ahead and it seems that Audrey and Vincent are stuck in rewind. The shot makes it look like they have the ability to go back in time, demonstrating the mentality of lack of permanence embraced by the players. In the game, as well as in their lives, nothing is for sure and anything can be undone; suicide can be committed again and again and players can cross between life and death whenever they please. This way of thinking instills a fearlessness in all of the characters, even minor ones, but death eventually catches up with Audrey. Unlike in the opening scene of the film, where Audrey’s avatar jumps off a building and gracefully falls through the air, when Audrey jumps off her apartment building at the end of the film, she lands broken on the concrete below. Between these two parallel scenes, the movie is full of shaky camerawork that reflects the stress felt by the two main characters and an eerie but overplayed theme song that becomes more comedic and grating as the film progresses. The frequency of long takes and tracking shots makes the real-life scenes more credible but the underdevelopment of characters like Marion and a lack of information about Audrey’s past and motivations leave the audience confused at points. Some editing changes concerning backstory would make the film easier to watch and connect the audience more with the film.

Black Heaven is not as thrilling as its plot suggests because of its bland mis-en-scene and vague characters, but it is deliberately shot and asks more questions than it answers. It effectively explores the themes of life and death, fantasy and reality, and how the four mix, and leaves it up to the viewer to decide who is to blame for the suicides of the players of Black Hole and deaths of major characters. It brings into question the overuse and abuse of addictive media platforms like live-action role playing games while remaining, for the most part, objective.

Review: Splice

Director: Vincenzo Natali

Run Time: 107 minutes

Starring: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley

Splice follows two young and revolutionary scientists, Clive (played by Brody) and Elsa (Polley), who work in a genetics lab that “splices” together strands of DNA from different species to create creatures that have the potential to produce disease-curing proteins. After learning that their program is set to be shut down, the pair decides to take the program into her own hands and create a scientific first: a hybrid human-animal that possesses the best and worst qualities of each species found in its DNA. Their plan to abort the creature before it comes full term becomes impossible and Elsa insists that raise the creature, named Dren, as if she were her own child. Dren grows at an accelerated rate and is extremely intelligent, and though she can read and spell, does not possess the capability for speech.

The skittish Dren eventually has to be moved out to Elsa’s mother’s abandoned farm, but Elsa is uncomfortable with the idea of anything that has to do with her mother. Once there, Dren continues to prove to be a genetic wonder, sprouting wings and showing of a poisonous stinger in her tail, but she also seduces Clive, and midway through the act, Elsa walks in. This event proves to be a turning point after which Dren becomes more violent and escapes out into the woods. Clive and Elsa, along with Clive’s brother and the program director, set out into the woods to find her, but like the spliced species before her, Dren has changed sex overnight and become and extremely aggressive male. The final scenes in the film are of a violent showdown between the couple and the monster they have created.

Though the story line sounds intriguing at first glance, the many sub-plots that are not played out make it frustrating to watch. Much time is spent in the opening scenes showing that Elsa does not like her mother and when the pair end up in her mother’s old farmhouse, she shows Clive her tiny, dirty, sparse bedroom, implying that her mother was abusive. Throughout the film, she gazes at a picture of her mother and her when she was a child, but the audience never learns exactly what happened between them. In another scene, Dren has layed stuffed animals under a blanket in her bed to make it look like she’s asleep there, followed by a cut to where her stinger poised over Clive’s head as if she were about to kill him, but she abruptly falls ill and “dies”. These undeveloped but still present storylines, combined with continuity errors (we see a close-up of Clive waking up in his pajamas on the couch in the barn, then cut to him walking back into the barn dressed in a parka) undercut the real storyline. With some re-editing and either the fleshing out of the sub plot (in the case of Elsa’s love-hate relationship with motherhood) or eliminating it completely (the scene with Dren’s stuffed animals and stinger), the movie would make a lot more sense and have a tighter plot.

Another reason the film is hard to watch is the implausibility of parts of the story. Clive and Elsa frequently note, via their tape recorder, that the next creature they create needs to have fewer human features, but they tell their project manager in the beginning of the film that they can pick and choose exactly which genes and characteristics go into each splice. It is clear early on that the spliced creatures change gender mid-way through their life cycle and become extremely vicious, but Clive and Elsa seemed surprised when Dren changes and tries to kill them. I feel that much of these inconsistencies could be fixed through more editing, but some aspects of the film can’t be.

The harsh way in which Sarah Polley’s Elsa is lit with fluorescent lights from a low angle her washed-out costumes already makes it difficult for the viewer to like her. It doesn’t help that her idea of acting is raising her eyebrows and doing a lot of stomping around. More than anything, she is overly dramatic in her delivery, as if every line were the most controversial and important one in the script, leaving Brody to jumpstart the dialogue after almost every time she speaks. And Brody does a relatively good job of just that, though the viewer can sense at times that he is annoyed with his costar. His character stands in stark contrast to Polley’s with darker clothes and a more rational mindset. In watching the film, the audience discovers that we are not meant to like Elsa, and the viewer, like Elsa’s mother, struggles with the idea of whether she is good or evil. In the end, it seems she is lonely, and has created Dren so she can play mother and child, dressing her up and cuddling her when she’s scared.

The high stakes in this thriller are what make some of the characters’ crazy actions plausible, and dealing with billions of dollars and breakthrough cures could understandably send anybody over the edge. Unfortunately, overacting highlights the holes in the story and frustrates the viewer, but with some re-editing, loose ends could be tied down to create a better-flowing plot. Though I don’t believe that this should be the finished product, the film is undoubtedly scary in parts, and its ironic use of soundtrack in the credits gives it an eerie tone. The ethical issues of cloning and “playing god” are explored thoroughly through Elsa’s struggle to remain objective in what was originally a small experiment. It is because we don’t connect with or like her that we can see where the pair went wrong.

Pirate Radio: classical hollywood dressed in a pair of plaid bellbottoms

Directed by Richard Curtis, Pirate Radio details the rise and fall of illegal offshore Rock radio stations in 1960’s Great Britain by focusing of the evens on the ship Radio Rock. Here's the trailer. Though the story is based on true events like the exaggerated typical bad-guy government’s attempts to shut the station down, the film also combines the protagonist’s search for love and his long-lost father. When Carl (Tom Sturridge) is kicked out of boarding school, his “mum” sends him to live with his godfather, Quentin (played by Bill Nighy) on board his radio ship, thinking that a few months at sea will straighten him out. About halfway through the film, after having seen how promiscuous and unprincipled the men aboard the ship are (no girls allowed, except for the lesbian cook), Carl finally finds out that the real reason he’s on board is to find his real father. He finally figures out who his father is, but then offshore radio finally becomes illegal. Lead by The Count (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the gang refuses to shut the operation down, and as a result, when their engine explodes and the ship begins to sink, their SOS cries fall on deaf governmental ears. Lucky for Radio Rock, their loyal listeners come in droves in all sorts of nautical equipment to save them not minutes before the boat becomes completely submerged.

The film’s best characteristics are that it’s nice to look at and listen to. The soundtrack includes The Beach Boys, Procol Harum, The Who, Cream, and many other classics from the early days of Rock n’ Roll that are perfectly matched (if not cheesily so) to the events unfolding on screen. The film does an excellent job with costuming and set design, and perhaps the second-most striking scenes of the film (more on the first later) are when the women arrive to the ship via tugboat for their bi-weekly visits. Sporting the bright colors and patterns and progressive shapes of 1960’s fame, the women shout and jump and wave in excitement at seeing the group of legendary DJs, but the most representative figure of 1960’s fashion is Carl’s mother, who arrives alone in a high collared houndstooth trench coat and oversized sunglasses and stuns every man on board. The most impressive scene in the film is by far when Carl goes down into the ship to save his stoner father, Bob “the dawn treader” Silver. Bob refuses to leave without his records, and an underwater tug of war between father and son ensues, with some of rock’s most famous albums floating around the cabin as Carl tries to save what he’s only just found.

What the film earns in aesthetics, sound, and it’s witty british one-liner script, it loses in its montages and over-the-top bad guys. Pirate Radio could be divided into three parts: events on board, events on shore, and montages. The scenes featured in these montages make them look more like music videos and have little to do with plot. Their appearance at the opening and closing of the film makes sense to me, but their frequent punctuation of the storyline seems to simply increase the movie’s run time. In addition, the government officials in charge of shutting down the radio staion, the Prime Minister and his assistant, Twatt (played by Jack Davenport, who deserves an award for the highest number of evil, British antagonists ever played) are so overly dedicated to their cause that any humor that could be found in their dialogue is destroyed.

Pirate Radio is a classical Hollywood film set out in the water during the 60’s. Its plot is, for the most part, predictable, and its attempts at suspense and seriousness are undermined by the DJs’ “stick it to the man” attitude, but the film is still funny and entertaining. The plot was less complex than I had anticipated but its clear cut face off between rock n’ roll and the system makes it easy to sympathize with and adore the characters.