As a film reviewer, one gets used to films with pleasing content undone by a sense of form that just fails to measure up, but the opposite is much rarer and perhaps more depressing occasion: a genuinely decent film were it not so misguided. And misguided Kingsman: The Secret Service certainly is. Honestly, its quite difficult to make heads or tails of, but the problems, I suspect are shockingly similar to director Matthew Vaughn’s previous film Kick-Ass, although worse here for this film’s greater ambitions. Kick-Ass sought to critique the superhero individualist myth, or at least it purported to do so, but mostly ended up falling head over heels with what it sought to subvert (no wonder Vaughn was soon after hired to direct the relatively straightforward X-Men: First Class on the grounds that he had directed a superhero film and a ’60s style crime film and not placed at the back end of the pile for destroying the superhero myth from the ground-up). Truffaut once said that one cannot make an anti-war film because depicting war on film is an innately exciting act that cannot critique itself. A bold point, but not an incorrect one, and not one that only applies to war films.
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The Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending is not a particularly good film, which is itself not as much of a problem as we might think. I deeply wish it was a better bad movie, however, and this is a problem.

Here we have another in a (not so) long line of indulgent sci fi operas from just about the only directors in mainstream Hollywood regularly performing these sorts of old school “film as magic” feats of personal expression filtered through glossy, high-concept sheen and kitsch-levels of production value. In the 80s, this stuff was thick on the ground to the point of old hat productions being released almost monthly. But in the 2010s, what a rarity it is for a maxi-budgeted tentpole film to seem like the product of two minds furiously at work rather than a corporate machine.

We should be happy, then,  for the simple fact that this sibling pair make some of the only blockbusters that have the legs to stand up and peer beyond the post-Nolan fence of “glum, serious, morose” standing in for “high quality” that has been built and re-fitted over the past ten years time and time again, given a new coat of paint every so often by gloomy hack Zack Snyder. And for that fact, Jupiter Ascending has enough to like to grant it the label of interesting curiosity. But it never, not for a second, not like Speed Racer and not like Cloud Atlas, “goes for it” by throttling itself right back into the mid-century like its progenitors did. Instead, it has the luster of a questionable, half-written slice of modern fan fiction pretending to be the genuine mid-century article, painted over with a new coat to hide the rotting wood underneath.
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In honor of another Wachowski bullet ready to be thrown away and left out in the cold by an undiscerning society, Jupiter Ascending, here is a review of their previous film, a work that draws out their strengths and weaknesses for creating passionate, alive, messy, confused, singular cinema like few others. 

Let no one say the Wachowskis aren’t unique, and neither is their friend Tom Tykwer. When they succeed, they succeed in a way that no other film these days even dreams of. And when they fail, they fail gloriously and unapologetically, not for laziness or lack of trying but for the sort of self-aggrandizing messiness the likes of which we haven’t seen since the New Wave auteurs were drowning in their own sweaty ambition thirty five years ago. Usually, they achieve the extra fascinating feat of accomplishing both such success and failure within the same film, to the point where they don’t so much swing wildly between the two as construct an edifice wherein the distinction between success and failure is no longer meaningful or even useful.

Case in point, Cloud Atlas, a film for which good and bad hold no meaning, a stew where achievement and failure are mixed together so that they are inextricable and one-in-the-same. Cloud Atlas is surely a unique concoction, but saying anything else takes us into uncomfortable, un-confident territory where every statement is merely a half-guess loaded with so many qualifiers it often serves no purpose in and of itself. Continue reading →