'Savages'

You ever just really wanna go to the cinema, no matter what's on? More often than not, afterwards, you know you just wasted 106 minutes of your life that could have been invested in, oh, I dunno, your tax return or a root canal at he dentist.

Cue the new Oliver Stone film 'Savages'. Set mostly in California, the film follows two drug dealers, but they're good ones, you know, they're really handsome and do charity stuff in, like Africa, and last but not least, they're American. When they refuse a deal with a Mexican drug cartel, who want in on their business, coz their stuff is really crap, shit hits the fan, plot-wise and, I'm afraid cinematographically as well. Disguised as gardeners (!) those Mexicans are a murdering bunch, who, more often than not wear dirty clothes. Benicio Del Toro is particularly bad, dressed in T-Shirts that carry the greasy remnants of the last lunch-burrito. Racial stereotypes, anyone? But, no, assures us Stone, this is all in the name of depicting the war on drugs and the savagery that is inherent in the business.

As if aware of this stereotyping shenanigans, Stone desperately wants to introduce some redeeming features. Salma Hayek, as the reina of the cartel, really is a big softie once her mother-instinct kicks in. Yes, she murders people for a living, but look, she really doesn't want her daughter involved. AAWWWW, it's all good!

Then there's the love interest, or blonde plot-device as I like to call her, in the form of Blake Lively, yes, yes, the one from Gossip Girl, who really is a bit of a greedy bastard as she not only sleeps with one of the guys, but both of them. But it's all really lovey-dovey, but you know how people are: They don't understand these bohemian youngsters. Don't get me wrong, faced with the numerous shots in which the two hunks have their top off, I don't blame her one bit, if I didn't have the over-bearing voice-over shoved in my face constantly: 'Chon is cold like metal, Ben is warm like wood'. COME ON!!! and it's all like really deep, right?

Anyway, Barbie is kidnapped by the evil Mexicans and kept as a continued guarantee for Chon and Ben's cooperation. Good thing Chon is an Iraq veteran who knows shit about building bombs and the like, whereas Ben is the smart one, who, unfortunately has to give up his decency in favour of lighting people on fire. Well, you really can't have it all! Otherwise we'd all be going into the drug business willy-nilly and, then, where would we be? Someone needs to keep making Cappuccinos.

So, waiting to be rescued, Barbie is kinda tortured by Benicio Del Toro, who must have really thought at the film première: Fuck! How did I go from 'Traffic' to this? She then forms a weird relationship with Elena, the queen, and explains to her how her rich mother never really had any time for her. Elena, being the ruthless drug-bitch that she is, really sympathises. 'I could be your daughter' Ophelia brokenly whispers into the CCTV camera in her prison cell and, Bob's your uncle, she's out of prison and in the guest-house in the Tijuana mansion.

Then there's John Travolta, a corrupt cop who's playing all the angles. So, he's switching sides quicker than a naïve country girl in a gay bar in London, and it all works out. You don't mess with the Travolta. Pay attention! Coz this is the really controversial bit Stone subtly shoves in your face with a sledge hammer! In the American war on drugs, corruption often keeps the upper hand. Of course, all the Mexicans end up dead or in prison, while the Californian excuse for a ménage-à-trois heads off to a beautiful beach in Indonesia. What? I'm spoiling the ending for you? You never got the point of this review then, which is: Do not, under any circumstances, even under the threat of Benicio Del Toro coming to your house, disguised as a gardener and force-feeding you Tacos, go and see this film!

Don't even get me started on Stone's mise-en-scène! If I see another colour-tinted or black-and-white shot of clouds racing across the sky, I will personally swim to L.A. and beat Stone up. The whole film is interspersed with shots of wild animals in the sun-drenched desert, yes, exactly, like in Natural Born Killers, but its all to do with the savagery in human nature, you see. It's kind of a big deal in this film, but in the name of the whole human race, I'd like to apologise for the symbolic abuse that all those coyotes had to suffer at the hands of Oliver Stone!

Stone was never a brilliant film-maker, let's face it. But, here, his obsession with the media really goes through the roof. As such, the gangsters Skype, text and probably update their Facebook status in the lines off: just taking this guy's eye out, then off to have a ham sandwich!

At least, the title's appropriate: This film really does bring out your savage side! As such, as soon as a release date comes out for a new Oliver Stone film, call your dentist! Coz you just found the date for your next appointment.

'Holy Motors'

Leos Carax's first feature in thirteen years has been long awaited by critics and world cinema lovers all over the world and what a cinematic ride it was. From the moment the lights went out, this film managed to grip the audience in a way the likes of which I have, so far, not experienced. If you are only seeing one film this year, make it this one.

A plot is a plot is a plot is, em, not a plot. Denis Levant plays no less than eleven different roles all combined within the overall character of Monsieur Oscar, a professional, well, let's just say, a professional full stop. He is driven through an barely recognisable version of Paris, an urban Metropolis, by his suave driver Céline. Is she real? Is she a robot? An alien? An air plane? The audience is told that he has nine 'appointments' that day. Starting off as a beggar woman, Monsieur Oscar then moves on to portray a series of characters which the so-called upstanding members of civilised society would, more often than not, like to ignore, from a Quasimodo-like imp-man, to a weirdly sexualised human machine, to a murderer, to a passive aggressive father-figure. In between appointments, he drives around in a post-modern version of the river Styx ferry, with Céline an uncanny and ambiguous Charon, while the changing masks become emblematic of the eternally fragmented notion of human identity. There appears to be an all-pervading emptiness running through the film, it is the emptiness at the core of our times in which the only reality available to modern being is a mediated one. As such, it comes as no surprise that Oscar is an actor, everything is a performance, even death, the other predominant image of the film. With each performance, life seems to be draining from Oscar and brings him always a step closer to Death, which is not so much a terrifying possibility as a welcomed relief. The only thing that keeps him going is the beauty of the gesture. The notion of beauty is the only thing that cannot be negated in the film, and, indeed in post-moderntiy, in which a mediated copy of experience might be devoid of a traditional core of reality, but is infused with beauty nonetheless.

Who is this cruel spectator, this inhuman consumer, spurring Oscar on to perform ever more deviant tasks for, what we can assume, pure entertainment value? It's not a far stretch to imagine it being us, the cinema audience from the mirror shot in the beginning in which Carax himself is observed by us observing a cinema audience. Could there be a more revealing image of consuming a mediated reality?

Carax does allow for moments of dark humour, such as the sequence in which Monsieur Merde jumps over tombstones bearing the inscription: 'Visitez le site' or 'visit the website'. Nowadays media promotion does not halt before death.

It is only when the spectator gives up the desire for coherent narrative that the film unfolds its true power. This is, indeed, the beauty of the gesture, as Carax takes pure delight in the human body and the very physicality of it. There's beauty or at least fascination in repulsion. Carax plays with the spectatorial senses, quite often, through the means of visual shock and thus blurs the boundaries of pre-conceived notions of beauty and ugliness as the latter can be found in the former and vice versa. He makes us question any 'natural' reactions we might have in stripping away the mantle of socially constructed vision. He lays bare a raw concept of humanity which is as characterised by a rough animalism as it is by almost ethereal beauty.

All the while, Carax plays with textures which range from the sleek smoothness of the limousine and the machine in general to the rough in, for example, the dirty fingernails of Monsieur Merde. Carax is of the opinion that everything belongs in film, just as everything just is, in life and in this, Holy Motors becomes near all-encompassing.

Casting the queen of pop, Kylie Minogue, as the long lost love proves a stroke of genius. In a beautiful musical pastiche, Minogue resembles Jean Seberg in an almost uncanny way, naturally, emphasised by the fact that Carax names her Jean. There is something sublime in this sequence. The post-modern self-reflexivity of this sequence only enhances the beauty of the gesture and the melancholia culminates in a death which is almost poetic in its performance.

I don't even know how to begin talking about Denis Lavant. This is what Daniel Day Lewis wishes he could do! Lavant doesn't portray characters, he becomes them. The control and precision Lavant has over his physicality can only be found in dancers in their meticulous striving for perfection. Innocence, tenderness, brutality, maliciousness, love, Lavant goes through the whole spectrum of human emotional capability and manages never to succumb to banality. He uses his body like a contortionist. Expression through gestures can quite often seem contrived and unnatural. Lavant, however, infuses the roles with life. If this isn't the performance of the decade, I don't know what is.

Ironically, in light of the theme of mediated reality and post-modern pastiche conveyed by the film, critics, in their eternal desire to compare and link, likened Holy Motors to Mulholland Drive. Whenever a film opens which celebrates the narrative nonsensical, poor Lynch must again function as a critical tool. Of course, Holy Motors strives through its filmic references, from its gleeful incorporation of the musical genre, to its keeping-alive of the nouvelle Vague tradition. It even incorporates elements of music video aesthetics. These visual references are woven together to, literally, paint a picture of a mind living in the cultural confusion of an eternally simulacrum-experience. So, let's leave poor Lynch alone, he's probably still busy finding the key to that damned box anyway.

The best thing about Holy Motors is its very existence, meaning the fact that cinema on this artistic scale is still being made. This cinematic experience can be likened to a visit in a turn-of-the-century circus; an eclectic, sensual and bodily journey before the notion of ugliness became the one social taboo. Holy Motors is a feast for the eyes, an assault on the senses. It's strange, it's weird, it's wonderful...it's cinema.