Swallow is one of the hardest watches in years. It’s
not long and there isn’t much gore, but director Carlo Mirabella-Davis knows
how to get under the audience’s skin with a simple premise. The film stars Haley
Bennett (Hardcore Henry) as Hunter, a housewife recently married to a
man from a wealthy family. They live together in the stunning mansion overlooking
a river purchased for them by his parents
and she spends her days decorating and cleaning it while he works for the family
business. During this time Hunter develops a strange fascination with consuming
inedible objects.
Even knowing its topic beforehand will not prepare you for
the acts on display. Hunter’s behavior starts small, with a marble, but quickly
escalates to disturbing heights. Mirabella-Davis films these scenes in medium
shots where Hunter’s body language takes center stage. We see her subtle
grimaces, convulsions, and pain as she swallows things no human being was ever
meant to eat. These scenes are universally revolting. The director doesn’t rely
on extreme close ups or tracking into Hunter’s face to get the point across.
Instead, Mirabella-Davis’s static shots eliminate any potential distractions
forcing the viewer to unwillingly imagine Hunter’s physical experience and
contemplate what emotional state could
have caused someone to behave in this manner. Very little graphic imagery is
shown, but Mirabella-Davis frames the actions in an uncomfortably inviting way.
Some will find these moments, and therefore the film itself, unwatchable due to
their repulsive nature yet this is only a testament their effectiveness.
Hunter examines the objects in unsettling detail before consuming.
Haley Bennett is incredible in the difficult role and
carries the film. Hunter has a disturbing, inexplicable habit that could make
her too strange for viewers to relate to, but Bennett’s performance highlights
her vulnerability. Hunter isn’t crazy, despite her actions. She seems fragile,
broken by some aspect of her past, yet good-natured. Hunter wants to be a good
wife to make her husband happy, she wants to fit in with her in-laws, and is too
timid to do anything to offend them. She gives the impression that she is trying
to redeem herself by being what others desire and is an extremely sympathetic
character. When her compulsion develops, it is disgusting, but it calls
attention to some unknown emotional baggage she carries. Bennett gives her the
frailty needed to make Hunter a victim using a terrible coping mechanism rather
than a lunatic.
In it’s final act, the film shifts its focus from Hunter’s present to her past. Mirabella-Davis examines Hunter’s background and allows her to confront issues that have been plaguing her. These scenes are heartfelt and tender as Bennett again displays Hunter’s sincere vulnerability. While other filmmakers would have focused on the gross-out elements, Mirabella-Davis takes the more difficult route to understand rather than to judge. He is invested in the characters motivations rather than her actions and creates the same interest in the audience. Swallow is a stomach-churning experience, but one that sympathizes with its subject and delves beyond the obvious to comprehend the compulsion without vilifying its victim.
Whether it’s used to enhance an emotion or add an interesting contrast, music has always been intertwined with movies. Some of my favorite scenes in all of cinema rely heavily on their music and last year’s lineup was no exception. Here are the best musical moments of 2016, in no particular order. Some minor spoilers follow, but will be called out before each movie as needed.
Captain Fantastic – Sweet Child O’ Mine
Beginning with gentle acapella vocals, this rendition of Sweet Child O’ Mine starts out as an elegiac goodbye to a lost loved one and the past they carried with them. The children in the film are about to start a new chapter of their lives, but before the melancholy sets in they switch to a rousing, upbeat, acoustic sing-a-long. The jump in tone exemplifies the family’s resilience as they quickly move beyond their sorrow to face the future ahead, remembering the joy their mother brought them rather than their sadness at her absence.
Sing Street – Up
This is probably the most difficult film to pick an entry from, but also the most deserving. Like John Carney’s previous movies, Sing Street is filled with amazing original music. The film is an ode to the music of the 80’s and its songs come straight from the youthful hearts of the band members. Up may be my personal favorite from the soundtrack. It’s a boy basking the ups and downs of his first love. The vocals lift off to new heights as the singer experiences his first feelings of romance. His genuine naivete and joy are infectious. Be sure to also check out the other songs from the film.
Everybody Wants Some!! – Rapper’s Delight
The characters’ aggressive hypermasculinity of Everybody Wants Some!! was often repulsive as they continued to turn on each other for the slightest appearance of victory. However, their one moment of unity was in a short car drive. Between trading insults, they take a break to sing when the Sugarhill Gang comes on the radio. Their playful handoffs finally reveal the deep comradery hidden underneath the insults they normally hurl at each. It’s a welcome, exuberant expression of male friendship.
Girl Asleep – You Make Me Feel
An unwanted birthday party with everyone in your school invited is a wallflower’s worst nightmare. As the film’s shy lead stands in fear, the celebration ends up being something far beyond the normal. The party becomes surreal as each classmate dances their way in and drops off their gift. Just when it feels like things are back to normal the entire crowd erupts into an unexpected, synchronized dance number. It might be far-fetched but the 70s spirit is too contagious for anyone to care. This scene is a glorious abstraction and one of the grooviest moments of the year.
Hardcore Henry – Don’t Stop Me Now
As if Hardcore Henry’s action scenes weren’t exaggerated enough, the director uses Freddie Mercury’s bellowing vocals to take the film to the next level. Caught in a state of weakness and surrounded by enemies, Henry double fists shots of adrenaline and jumps back into the thick of it. The Queen song best exemplifies the film’s gleeful take on violence and has oddly appropriate lyrics. This isn’t about serious fighting. It’s a respite from the gritty realism of many modern action movies and a celebration of the euphoria that can be created with well-choreographed violence.
American Honey – American Honey
When the titular track finally plays, it’s more than background music, it’s a culmination of the lead’s aimless life. The song’s sweet, nostalgic vocals reminisce on a past long gone. For Star (Sasha Lane), it creates a moment of realization of what her journey has been and will continue to be. It’s a redefinition of what the American Dream is to young people like her. Not a path of upwards mobility, but a horizon of limited opportunity. As she looks around at the troubled youth just like her, the song becomes a farewell to her aspirations and an acceptance of her constrained future.
Swiss Army Man – Montage
Last year’s weirdest film also came with the most meta musical moment: a montage featuring an acapella track titled “Montage”. The strangely anthemic vocals underscore an uplifting spirit and narrate the actions onscreen as we discover just how many odd uses the corpse of Daniel Radcliffe has. It’s the arts-and-crafts quirkiness of Michel Gondry combined with Spielberg’s sentimentalism as the bond between the two leads grows and allows them to escape their own loneliness – and use a dead body as a machine gun. Honorable mention must be given to the film’s use of the Jurassic Park Theme. Remember: “If you don’t know Jurassic Park, you don’t know shit”.
Toni Erdmann – Greatest Love of All
A series of increasingly uncomfortable interactions created by an eccentric father trying to be involved in the life of his stressed out straight-laced daughter build to a moment of what could be pure embarrassment. Ines (Sandra Hüller) is forced to sing in front of strangers, something she is completely unprepared for and her performance is as cringe-inducing as it is funny. Her singing begins shyly as it takes several intros for her to even start but she unexpectedly escalates into a full, committed performance. Each note belted out and every sassy expression on her face is a masterclass in awkward amusement.
La La Land – Audition (The Fools Who Dream)
My opinions on La La Land were much more lukewarm than most, but the real standout moment of the film is during a crucial audition. Mia (Emma Stone) has been crushed by her constant rejection as an actress and only returns to Hollywood at the behest of her boyfriend. Instead of being guarded, she opens herself up and delivers a personal tale. The background fades to black as Stone’s increasingly mournful expression dominates the frame with a painful ballad of pursuing one’s dreams at all costs. The vulnerability and reflection of her unsuccessful career turn the song into an aching eulogy for her own failed aspirations.
Star Trek Beyond – Sabotage (SPOILERS)
Director Justin Lin brought a fun, frenetic energy to the action of Star Trek Beyond and nowhere is this more apparent than in the finale. After being attacked by a horde of interconnected spaceships, the only solution is to beam low-tech radio at the frequency of their communications and disrupt their flight patterns. Instead of some forgettable signal, the only available transmission is a Beastie Boys song. Their anti-establishment spirit and the silly setup make the film’s climax a playful wave of explosions that stick it to the man (err…bad alien).
At the end of last year, 2016 looked like it would be the year of the video game adaptation. Beloved franchises from PC to mobile to console were being brought to the big screen in ways that seemed like they could actually work. This year we have Angry Birds, Ratchet & Clank, Warcraft, and Assassin’s Creed. The first two are animated films, Warcraft is live action with significant motion capture, and AC is live action. Before we discuss this year’s lineup in detail, let’s revisit the history and background of these films.
Video game movies are bad. That’s not an opinion, until now it’s been an accepted fact. The track record of video game adaptations has become a running joke to the point that fans of either medium groan whenever news breaks that a franchise has been optioned. In theory, it shouldn’t be abnormal for a video game movie to be good. Games have great, imaginative settings and, like blockbuster movies, they’re often driven by spectacle. The problem behind this sub-genre can be answered with two simple questions: “Why?” and “Who?”.
Whenever a work is optioned, it is usually done for either love of the source material or potential for financial returns. In the case of video games, it has mostly been the latter. Instead of viewing a game as an individual piece of content, producers and executives have been making video game adaptations based on the built-in fan base. Everyone played Super Mario Bros. growing up so why not make a movie? If even a small percentage of people who played the video game buy a ticket, the movie will profit. But what they’re not thinking about is what makes these games popular. People don’t play Mario because they love bipedal mushrooms or a giant turtle-dragon thing. They’re fans because of the interactive element and how it makes them feel. In Mario, it’s the tension created by barely landing on a platform, but this doesn’t translate at all to a film. You can’t adapt gameplay.
Instead, producers use their regular toolkits. They take successful video games with outlandish premises and try to shoehorn in a generic script. Was there anything about the Need for Speed movie that reflected the actual game? No. It was a heist movie made because The Fast & the Furious is popular and Need for Speed is a recognizable brand. It didn’t matter that the franchise had almost no storyline or greater world development, because financiers were only looking at the large box office potential given the sales of the video games and the success of similar films. They took the existing name and forced in a basic plot so bland that no fan would have been able to guess that it was an adaptation without being told.
Mordin sings Gilbert and Sullivan. Hard not to love this guy.
Video games don’t easily conform to standard storylines. This is true on multiple levels. On one hand, video games can be long. A retail game can sustain between 8 and 100 hours of playtime, depending on the title. Telling a story across this kind of timeframe not only allows for more plot points, but gives the player a chance to live in the setting and understand the characters in a way no regular film can. After spending 40+ hours playing Mass Effect 2, the side character Mordin Solus wasn’t just a character I liked, he was my friend. The mere constraints of the medium prevent single films from forging these kinds of relationships between the audience and the characters or settings.
Video games are not only story-based. If someone were to recommend a book and say “Just ignore the story” that would be a ridiculous suggestion. Unlike books, video games aren’t solely defined by their writing and unlike films, they have an additional layer beyond their visuals. The key to video games is interactivity. There is a tension created by the collision of prewritten narrative and player agency. As a character grows, the player is not just a viewer of the change but an active participant. They feel ownership over the events that have taken place.
It is the interactive element of video games that those adapting them to film most often miss. Anyone adapting a video game needs to look beyond the surface level a franchise’s features. Yes, the Prince of Persia series’s signature move is wallrunning, but shots of Jake Gyllenhaal scampering along a wall won’t have the same impact. It’s not just what a character does in a video game that matters, it’s how it makes the player feel. Wallrunning is about agility, power, and resourcefulness. You, the player, were able to outwit the precarious architecture and the feeling that results is one of nervous relief, satisfaction, and pride. These adaptations need to target the core feelings produced by playing, not watching, the video game.
Watching this is nowhere near as fun as playing it.
Much of the issue stems from the types of people making these films. As stated earlier, there are some that look at a video game and only see the guaranteed fanbase, but there are also issues of familiarity, both with the particular franchise and with video games as a medium. A successful director would need to understand filmmaking techniques as well as the language of video games. In most adaptations so far this hasn’t been the case. Often times the director has failed on both accounts, neither being an accomplished filmmaker, nor having any understanding of video games.
The best examples of how to make a successful adaptation come from a different medium – comic books. Pre-2000s there were many comic book film adaptations that were unsuccessful. This happened for very similar reasons to video game adaptations. The people making the films did not have the understanding needed of both mediums. It wasn’t until this century that the comic book era we currently live in began. Unlike previous films, these were being directed by talented filmmakers who grew up with comic books giving them a deep understanding of the medium and how it was both similar to and different from film. Video games have not been around nearly as long as comic books. If we want to start counting with the Nintendo Entertainment System, it’s only been a bit over 30 years. Most higher ups in the film industry tend to be over 50, so the people in charge now likely didn’t grow up with the medium. They’re trying to understand something foreign to them and fumbling the adaptation in the process.
However, soon the kids that grew up on Zelda and Final Fantasy will be in charge of directing or producing feature films. Once that happens, I expect the abysmal results of video game adaptations to improve significantly. Will there be a Nintendo Cinematic Universe? Probably not, but as video games diversify and grow there are more franchises that are ripe for optioning and more people qualified to take full advantage of them. Each of this year’s adaptations showed promise. Angry Birds lacks any story as a video game, but as an animated feature, it wasn’t a hard sell to think that someone would be able to tell a decent story using those characters. The Ratchet & Clank franchise on the other hand has always felt like a playable animated movie so the adaptation seemed completely natural. Unfortunately, the film was unable to capture the charm of the games and by all accounts was generic and forgettable.
Warcraft represented the best chance at a good, perhaps great film. The lore of the franchise had been developed for over a decade and was expansive with many individual plotlines that would function well in a film. That combined with the rising star director, Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code), should have created unprecedented enthusiasm, but it didn’t. Despite Jones’s filmography, the consensus prior to release never rose above cautious optimism. When it finally debuted after a long post-production, Warcraft was panned by most critics and bombed at the US box office (although it did well in China). In reality, it was an enjoyable, but flawed film. Jones is a fan of the video games and was able to bring the appeal of the large-scale battles. Sadly, the overall quality was undercut by the burden of establishing a Warcraft film franchise. It wasn’t a giant leap forward, but did move in the right direction.
The next shot at true vindication is Assassin’s Creed in December. Directed by Justin Kurzel (Macbeth) and starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, the film has a good pedigree. Furthermore, the franchise has an intriguing premise and plenty of opportunity to tell a contained story without requiring the greater world setup that Warcraft did. Whether or not the film succeeds, it is only a matter of time until the right team, with an understanding of both films and video games, gets behind the right franchise to produce the adaptation we have been waiting for. Until then, the unique style and presentation of video games will continue to seep into films, like Hardcore Henry, and fans of both mediums will patiently wait for the day we can watch Commander Shepard’s signature dance moves on the big screen.
From B-movies in the 70’s to comic books in the present, blockbusters have always been influenced by the media their creators grew up with. Finally, enough time has passed that the generation that grew up playing video games is sitting behind the camera. Many films have played with flourishes that reference video game aesthetics (see any movie by Neil Blomkamp), but now we have the first film where the main inspiration in every feature, from craft to story, comes from interactive entertainment. Hardcore Henry, directed by Ilya Naishuller, is an action film shot entirely from the first person. Henry wakes up being literally put back together by his wife with no memory of his past. Before he can learn what has happened to him, they are attacked by a cartoonishly evil Kurt Cobain-esque villain who kidnaps Henry’s wife. The rest of the film is Henry trying to kill the bad guy and save his wife, aided by the help of a mysterious man (or men?) named Jimmy (Sharlto Copley; District 9).
And that is everything you need to know about the plot. Actually, it’s more of a setup than anything else. Taking a cue from many video games, Naishuller uses the barest of narratives because the film isn’t about the story, it’s about the spectacle. And that spectacle is fantastic. The first person perspective increases immersion and causes you to wince with each blow directed at the camera. It’s especially effective when Henry is getting thrown from planes, trains, and exploding automobiles. The stunts are always exhilarating even if they stretch believability. How does someone thrown off the roof of a moving van because it was blown up by a grenade fly through the air and land on the end of a motorcycle? Who cares. It looks cool.
Up close and personal.
This irreverent tone gives the film a winning playfulness except for the moments where it descends into juvenility. The film brands itself as “HARDCORE” and isn’t satisfied with just action in that regard. It has to be about hard guys doing hard guys things and it uses blatant misogyny to break up the adrenaline. Women in the film are relegated to being strippers, hyper-sexualized ninjas, or hollow plot devices sometimes literally used as props or background dressing. These instances aren’t frequent, but their casual nature is appalling. It’s a shame that the gleeful violence is tarnished by these adolescent male tendencies when the stunts are exceptional and deserve to be seen in theaters.
Many of the set pieces could be called direct adaptations of video games or video game trailers. The opening credits are played over a gruesome montage of slow motion kills bathed in red lighting that clearly imitates the initial Killzone 3 teaser. Later scenes pull from famous levels found in popular first person shooters. The sniper scene from the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is recreated here from the abandoned concrete building right down to the ghillie suit. The stunts only falter when rather than introduce a new set piece, the film just throws in more enemy henchmen (which ironically is a common complaint in video games). Even though these stunts are not always novel, the translation to a new medium creates a fresh, frenetic energy and the film happily revels in that chaos.
