Requiem FAD

Critically described as 'the greatest movie you’ll never want to see again', this intense psycho-drama of how drugs crush any shred of humanity in addicts is a bleak tragedy of errors. On first viewing, Darren Aronofsky’s REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) was so powerfully grim, it was a week before I recovered from its lingering depressive mind-set. Hyper-charged editing patterns combine with surrealistic images and uncompromisingly morbid repetitions to create its unsettling moods. The provocative affect is mesmerising yet equally disturbing.

The furious barrage of hypnotic visuals sets RFAD far apart from any typical junkie pictures, like Terry Gilliam’s black-comedy Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (1998), so its relentlessly downbeat model of cynical pessimism eventually becomes a mind-shattering experience, that’s also heart-breaking because an addict’s quest for yet another dose of high sometimes mirrors wishful thinking about freedom  from inhuman cruelty in this modern world. Drug culture means no possibility of any fleeting escape from that all-consuming desire for a fix. 

While Ellen Burstyn steals the show as widow Sara Goldfarb, hooked on diet pills and obsessed by trashy TV shows, her low-life son Harry (Jared Leto), and his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly), fail as heroin dealers, very soon falling into crimes that spiral all the way down to scenes like hell on Earth. Some pictures are unforgettable. This is not usually classified as genre horror and yet that’s exactly what this scary, weird, and crushingly depressing drama really is. 

What sticks in memory is genuine horrors without a pause, bloated with grisly shocks and intense suffering, evocative of social depravity for a devastating emotional landslide of startling images. Mental collapse and physical infection eventually results in hospitals or prison abuse, with paranoid hallucinations until... there’s no such thing in reality as a happy ending that exists beyond fantasy. 

Stunning evidence of a visionary imagination this cements director Aronofsky’s reputation as a fascinating American auteur to watch, and so his later work, in particular, The Fountain (2006), Black Swan (2010), Noah (2014), and Mother! (2017), reveals a talent for conjuring up weird wonders to rival those by David Lynch.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Ang Lee’s magnificent ‘wuxia’ sword-play adventure proved to be a breakthrough production as the biggest international success for Chinese language cinema. CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000) established a mainstream presence for Asian costume-drama martial arts, with its great popularity reflecting that of The Water Margin series on British TV in the late 1970s. Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh lead a varied cast, and CTHD helped to make Zhang Ziyi a star. Certainly, this fantasy is an improvement on the director’s western Ride With The Devil (1999). It offers a wonderfully seamless blend of kung fu thrills, romantic dramas with engaging characters, and plenty of exhilarating action, even if there’s about 15 minutes of set-ups, establishing dialogues and introductions, before the first battle sequence.

The main stars are both great, and they easily dominate proceedings with a hypnotic presence not always shared by the supporting cast, although Zhang is exceptional as Jen, a young rebel against several Chinese traditions. The story is basically familiar hokum, simply but honestly revising many of this genre’s Asian elements - about honourable warriors with idealistic passions, and the minutiae of a closed society still alien to westerners - but also inverting (and re-inventing) other diverse themes, including decisive feminism, optimistic nostalgia, and the tragedy of heroes burdened by repressive social mores.

Best known for his stylised gangster roles, Chow swaps handguns for a Green Destiny sword, and sunglasses for a Manchu ponytail. Yet, even with a newfound mastery of a blade, instead of his trademark automatic pistols, the two heroines eclipse Chow’s reluctant champion, and the longest combat scenes involve women. There’s one vigorous duel that’s equal to any of the spectacular fighting displays in The Matrix (1999), although unsurprisingly, because extremely capable stunts master Yuen Woo-ping was action choreographer on both films.

Unlike typical Hong Kong movies, such as New Dragon Gate Inn (1992), this lacks an almost relentless pacing, with black comedy, and general weirdness, but CTHD offers a distinctive energy, with high levels of visual polish and artistic style that only major projects can hope to achieve. I really can’t recommend this enough, especially to any wuxia fans who ever felt disappointed by the often low-grade finishing roughness applied to many similar movies.

Eternals

Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao’s condensed epic brightens the possible future of superhero cinema with splendid narrative style while it crams the scope of what previous Marvel movies did in their first decade, and a franchised scale of ‘DC extended universe’ from Man Of Steel (2013) to Justice League (2017) into a single feature layered with mega-structural plot-arcs, and flashback episodes that span millennia of the Earth’s history. In essence, ETERNALS (2021) is the greatest story in the MCU. Its imaginative cosmology is a blend of sci-fi with ancient myths, where android immortals protect humanity from alien monsters. Zhao had read Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 3001: A Final Odyssey (1997) which explains early views of starship ‘Domo’, like a triangular monolith approaching Earth. 

After ten superheroes finish their mission to exterminate monstrous Deviants, any collaboration slowly breaks down while they await further orders from Celestials. Now scattered around the world, their distinct identities blur with legendary fictions, especially notable for the characters of Ikaris, Gilgamesh, Phastos, Thena, and Sprite. When new Deviant mutants appear and their secret origins are revealed, the group is drawn back together for apocalyptic battles with space ‘gods’, and against each other.

Much better than expected, ETERNALS eventually reveals its artistic genius, and it’s a marked improvement on other Marvel adventures, like Black Widow or Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings (both 2021). It’s good to see gigantic space-beings presented just as they appear in bizarre comic-books, instead of a ‘realistic’ depiction like ‘Galactus’ in Tim Story’s faulty Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer (2005). In perhaps this movie’s definitive sequence, a dangerous Thena (formidable Angelina Jolie) proves that her ‘goddess of war’ persona cannot be defeated, or even disarmed, but she surrenders - albeit briefly, before she kills the shape-shifting humanoid ‘Kro’.

ETERNALS boasts just the right balance of timeless uncanny perspective, droll MCU franchise in-jokes, some worthy but sardonic human dramas, and plenty of SF genre thrills. With its grand ‘uni-mind’ link-up finale to demo gestalt powers, an intriguing teaser intro about Dane Whitman - alias: the Black Knight, and the greatest ever use of Pink Floyd’s classic song ‘Time’, this establishes new conceptual standards for any future super-teams to match, if they and their makers dare to try.

Loopy tales

Much more than just another art-book, Simon Stalenhag’s TALES FROM THE LOOP delivers a compendium of illustrated fiction about mysterious technology, centred on various industrial-scale science projects at a particle accelerator hidden under the Swedish countryside.   

This fascinating mix of drawings and paintings with nostalgic anecdotes is the stuff of a childhood growing up within sci-fi dreams about big robots, and levitating vehicles, as mere backdrops to several uncanny events and family legends. An unlikely source, The Loop was adapted as eight episodes for a TV series created by Nathaniel Halpern.

Despite some thoroughly modern concerns, the melancholy spirit of genre-giant Ray Bradbury seems to haunt alternate-history dreamscapes for this competently Americanised show, its rural settings switched to Ohio, but decidedly elegiac tones of narrative maintain its lost futurism with quaintly styled 1970s era decor. 

Mark Romanek directs first episode LOOP, where time-slip discovery intros the core SF theme, while British stars Rebecca Hall and Jonathan Pryce provide a semblance of science-team rationality when the curiosity of young brothers Cole and Jakob find weird examples of experimental failures in abandoned but never forgotten hardware. Loss and grief emerge from Loop tales without much chance or expectation of happy endings. Jane Alexander heads the support cast with an increasingly matriarchal role in the extended family. 

Flashback episode ENEMIES, directed by Ti West, offers key plotline material with a misadventure on robot-monster-island, before Jodie Foster’s season finale HOME, that benefits from better and more intriguing storytelling techniques, and includes a cameo/ subgenre in-joke by cult-auteur Shane Carruth, who observes that a life-time is merely “blink of an eye” in duration for this lonely milieu of retro visions, complete with evocative music by Philip Glass.

There’s also table-top games, and Russo brothers’ movie version The Electric State (due next year), for quest adventure starring the now ubiquitous Millie Bobby Brown. 

Long live the New Weirdo

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE harks back to director’s own 1970 experimental short but is otherwise unrelated. Instead of remake, sequel or whatever, we get full exploration of Cronenberg milieu’s bio-anarchy medley & more, to date, with grisly alternative futurism composed of notable thematic riffs, to deliver thinking-man’s surrealism: The Brood, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash, eXistenZ, plus Crony combo’s fatherly recognition of Brandon’s worthwhile genre pictures Antiviral (2012), Possessor (2020). SF subversion reigns here as neo-organ creator Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen, veteran of DC’s previous A Dangerous Method, Eastern Promises, A History Of Violence) wallows in modern freak-show legends of pain-free subculture where ‘sexy’ surgery is creepy theatrical performance while provocative satire unfolds with partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux). 

Legal, social, & bureaucratic problems arise from ‘New Vice’ cop & registry offices for body-horrors, when Saul attracts fan-girly stalker Timlin (Kristen Stewart), as taboo-breaking Tenser & Caprice prep their bio-tech gear for arty autopsy on murdered mutant boy. In a trans-human world without infections where illness can be easily managed by cyber sleep, weirdo sensationalism has become darkly beautiful, seemingly repulsive, yet strangely alluring. CRIMES... gets my vote as movie of the year. After this surprise return to directing Crony is also making THE SHROUDS, now in pre-prod for 2024.