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dir: Steven Soderbergh
Lot of people gonna die
As if germophobes and compulsive obsessives didn’t have it hard enough already.

Speaking as someone who has long been pathologically afraid of germs and contamination (the psych term used to be mysophobia, or, having too much time on one’s filthy, filthy hands), I don’t need flicks like this. I’m already freaked out enough by the prospect of infection that I am the person the scientists lament creating superbugs by using hand sanitiser and giving other neurotics a bad name.

I’m not at the mask or tinfoil hat stage just yet, but, you know, it’s only a matter of time.

Contagion does me no favours, does me no help. It’s almost as if it’s aimed specifically at people like me for whom the horrifying prospect of an epidemic like this, of evil germs finishing off many, many people, is almost too close to home to appreciate. It’s easy enough to handle zombie flicks, where the virus is transferred through biting. Hand washing and ethanol can’t do anything about that. But a bunker mentality and obsessive hygiene could, actually COULD help if this scenario came to pass. And that’s why it hits closer to home. It’s practically goading us with the propensities into indulging them further and falling even further down the rabbit hole.

Conversely, or perversely, actual epidemics that the media and World Health Organisation beat up don’t affect me at all. I’m no more afraid of the spectre of bird, swine or monkey flues than I am of meteorites or werewolves. But when they explicitly spell out in the flick (Kate Winslet’s character does so) the vectors of infection, and how basic they are, my skin crawled, and my stomach lurched multiple times.

Soderbergh does a tremendous job grounding this flick in reality. It’s a what if, but played out as a what if in the real world, rather than requiring sci-fi or genre horror concepts beyond the grim reality of what would happen if a percentage, even a small percentage, of the world’s population contracted such a virus.

The people that try to deal with this outbreak are the characters that are depicted here, albeit by very recognisable actors. It’s the heads of the Centre for Disease Control, the World Health Organisation’s epidemiologists, and the microbiologists whose expertise would, we hope, be our species’ saving grace.

Exploiting the situation are shitheads like an Australian blogger (Jude Law), and a lot of the American population, who seem to go batshit crazy like they’ve watched too many post-apocalyptic flicks. A flick like this, like lots of American flicks, contends that the general population, the great unwashed and nicely washed, are always a bee’s dick away from turning on each other. All it needs is a flu outbreak or a hurricane called Katrina, and the general American population that doesn’t have a panic room or an underground, fully stocked bunker is immediately going to start bashing in the skull of the person next to them in order to feast on the scooped-out goo.

dir: Duncan Jones
No, I don't have any spare change, sorry
Singer and national treasure Paul Kelly had the violent alcoholic’s lament If I Could Start Today Day Again, reincarnation-believers base their whole religious-spiritual existence on the allowance of do-overs, and computer game players long have known the joy of getting another chance (depending on how many lives you have left) to make things right.

They all come from the same source, they all appeal to the same part of us that wishes the universe could allow for multiple chances to get things right. If we could just have one more shot, if we could only have replayed some moment from our lives, and done something right, then everything else would have worked out right. If only…

Well, our universe doesn’t work like that, but our art does, so when a science fiction flick comes along based around that very idea, then we’re supposed to be throwing our hands up in hallelujahs at the chance to bask in the warming glow of wish fulfilment with Jake goddamn Gyllenhaal as our stand-in.

Are we fuck… Source Code does, as you might have guessed or heard, sound and play out like a less Buddhist and more sci-fi Groundhog Day, with a bit of the television series Quantum Leap thrown in for good measure. Although it is dependent on repetition, and a same set of 8 minutes is played out multiple times, it’s not really the multiple viewpoints kind of repetition that we’ve seen in some films lately (something like Vantage Point is what I’m thinking). No, through the magic of technology, Jake Gyllenhaal’s character gets to try to save a trainload of people, and then, the people of Chicago.

How? Well, through the quantum magic of the Source Code. I understood the individual words which the expositioners used to describe the maguffin, but there’s no goddamn way I will ever understand what any of it really means. I know what it means in terms of the flick, as in, they explained something, so now they can continue on with the plot. But it’s pretty unbelievable.

dir: Philip Noyce
Who is Salt? Who is Pepper? Who is Vinegar? Who is Wasabi?
And you thought it was about the mineral…

Were you disappointed to find out that Angelina Jolie wasn’t going to be playing this most ancient of food additives? I know I was. Imagine her, sitting on a table, in one of those grinders or in a shaker, just sitting there patiently, waiting for someone to pick her up and sprinkle her onto their food during dinner. The twist is, though, the middle-aged people at the dinner are all on a low sodium diet, due to doctor’s orders, and Angelina Jolie goes sadly unused, uneaten, untasted for the whole film.

It’s a story about longing, about unfulfilled potential, about loss of purpose.

Sure, it’s far more sedate than what’s actually on offer here, but there should be a place for films as deathly dull as the one I just described. Salt, this Salt, is possibly a lot of things, but it certainly can’t be accused of being dull.

It’s 90 minutes long, and most of it is action action action, with Jolie’s character of Evelyn Salt, running, punching and shooting her way through almost every minute of that running time. Is it preposterous, is it unbelievable, is it absurd? Yes, to all three, but to assert that all those descriptives are a problem here is to basically forget how absurd all these kinds of spy thrillers are: it’s no more or less fundamentally or conceptually absurd than the Bond flicks, the Jason Bourne franchise, The Fugitive, or any flick where someone evades The Man and a bunch of bad guys for any great length of time.

So from there I guess it becomes the inherently sexist argument of “Well, I can accept Matt Damon as some kind of superspy killing machine, because he’s a big beefy guy. Jolie’s a girl, and thin and feeble-looking enough to look like she’d need help tearing open a packet of salt, let alone play a superspy called Salt.”

To that I have no real argument. Both require suspension of disbelief, because neither Damon nor Jolie are actual ninjas, but I guess it’s down to the individual, and also down to the filmmakers as to whether they can sell it adequately, and whether we can buy it.

Jolie, for all of what her faults might be, as a tabloid individual, as a baby stealer, and as an actress, she does attack her acting roles with relish. She’s not always great in every role, but she can be a damn fine actress, which people forget because she seems to be more famous for always being on the cover of those fantasy chick fulfilment magazines that come with added made-up bullshit about her strange life.

But when she’s on, and the role’s right, she’s more than decent. She’s great. Sure, she’s not always as great as when she played Alexander the Great’s mother Olympia in Oliver Stone’s travesty Alexander, where she inexplicably used a Russian accent. Here she goes one better, and actually speaks in Russian. How’s that for progress?

dir: Pou Soi Cheang
Look both ways when crossing the street, and then kiss your ass goodbye
There’s this thing about Hong Kong films: most of them aren’t good, and most of them are the same. The rare good ones, to people who don’t watch a lot of Hong Kong flicks, could be indistinguishable from the bad ones.

Actually, that’s probably not entirely true. The really bad ones usually have lots of annoying screaming, people eating snot and Stephen Chow pretending to laugh until food falls out of his mouth.

But good goddamn do they get it right when they get it right. The last of the contemporary HK directors that I considered worthy of following each and every project that came down the chute was Johnnie To, with his atmospheric and contemplative crime dramas. Now I have to look out for this chap, Soi Cheang, as well, because I haven’t seen something this good in a while.

The problem is that it won’t be easy to translate the ineffable ways in which this very slight, very moody, and virtually silent flick gets everything so right into a worthwhile film review. Of course, it’s never stopped me before, so it’s not going to stop me now, is it?

There’s this crew of people, four of them, and their job is to carry out contracts on selected targets. Yes, they’re assassins, but their job is not only to kill people, but to make it all look entirely like an accident, happenstance, a random and unfortunate occurrence.

Everyone knows their job, and more so they know how to look at a particular environment meticulously in order to figure out a sometimes incredibly complicated way to take someone out with what’s available to them, or the innocuous stuff they can inject into the environment to have the cumulative affect of snuffing out some poor triad boss’s lights.

They are led by Kwok-Fai, or Brain, as his team call him (Louis Koo), who is a very uptight but effective leader. He clinically observes every location until he can feel comfortable that he’s taken every variable into account. And then, after exhaustive reconnaissance and theorising, and only then, do they put their complicated plan into action.

Being meticulous, and with their objective being not only the ending of the target’s life, but the overarching requirement to make the deaths look like accidents, it’s not anywhere near as easy as just finding the right place to pull a trigger. These deaths are intricate works of art.

dir: Dennis Illiades
Is there anyone else we can torment?
The original horror flick does have a nasty reputation, which is certainly well-earned. Since everything is getting remade, from the Friday the 13th flicks, to Halloween, to Gone with the Wind, so naturally, Last House on the Left has to, nay, must be, remade too. On the most part, I would contend that the flick doesn’t do too bad a job for what it is. The ending, though, shows just how worthless the whole setup really was, and how it’s ultimately a lazy entry in both the revenge and nice white middle class people under siege in their own homes genres of quality filmmaking.

The original is a nasty, exploitative, vile flick. It truly is. This certainly isn’t, and for most of its running time actually seems like a highly charged drama more than an out-and-out horror flick. Of course it relies way too often on “someone comes out of nowhere to either attack or save a person that looks like they’re about to die”, but it’s virtually impossible for hacks to make these films otherwise.

A family, consisting of a doctor (Tony Goldwyn), tightly-wound mother (Monica Potter) and their teenage daughter Mari (Sara Paxton), go on holiday to their lovely house by the lake. The house is so lovely, it even has a guest house right next to it. And that guest house has a guest house, onwards to infinity like an unending sequence of Russian dolls.

No, that’s not entirely accurate. But they do have the lovely lakeside mansion, the rich bastards.