Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Under the Skin

Each week we pick a film and ask brave cinephiles to choose what they think of as its Best Shot. Next Tuesday is Ingmar Bergman's Oscar winner for Best Cinematography Cries & Whispers (1973) but before we get to that dying sister merriment, let's travel to Scotland where Scarlett Johansson is luring men to their doom. Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin is mysterious enough that it need multiple eyes to decipher it. And the film even repeatedly suggests you do the looking what with it's eyeball construction (?), predatory gaze, and actual dialogue.

Do you want to look at me?

We do, Scarlett, we do.

I normally show the choices in chronological order within the context of the film but given Under the Skin's brooding enigmatic events and telling repetitions, the articles are displayed in the order they were brought to my attention from the Best Shot club members. 

BEST SHOT(s)  UNDER THE SKIN
Directed by Jonathan Glazer. Cinematography by Daniel Landin.
19 shots / 23 participants. Click on the images for the corresponding article
MAJOR VISUAL SPOILERS FOLLOW - DO NOT CLICK IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE

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Under the Skin and Into the Fog

Formless void and darkness. And then light, blinding light. Jonathan Glazer and his gifted cinematographer Daniel Landin present them in that Biblical order. They toy with them for the remainder of Under the Skin, separating them like they're playing god.

Honorable Mention

Perhaps they are since this haunting film begins, as far as I can tell, with Creation, or a creation of sorts. Is it our protagonist being formed (?) or, rather, assuming a new form complete with vocal exercizes to play the role. (The mystery woman is never named in Under the Skin, and none of the men she entices and lures into her formless void, ever think to ask her for it so we'll refer to her as "She" or "Her" since it's Scarlett Johansson we're talking about). What She needs language for is something of a mystery. She seems to communicate best telepathically in the eery repeated shots of her and her driver/accomplice staring at each other or staring into windows / mirrors. That's as good an explanation as any for how she understands the thick Scottish brogues around her when English is not her mother tongue.

Though the details of what exactly is occuring in any given sequence of this great picture are often indecipherable, the artistry of the film is not. It's alternating visual schemes of darkness and light, its elemental preoccupations (water, air, fire... and, well Earth, all play key roles) and its weird asides (the blinking mask, that golden shimmer interlude, the cake!) and Scarlett's fascinatingly alien comportment all prove more rewarding on second viewing. 

Runner Up

The most powerful recurring image and in some ways the most inexplicably frightening is watching the men slowly sink into blackness, like sailors willfully drowning for a siren's call. You may have your own ideas about what exactly She is harvesting their skin for but I assumed it was the creation of more faux humans like herself. And if so, how perverse that Creation is always doubling as Destruction. 

And speaking of perversity, Here's my choice for Best Shot, below. In a film full of startling imagery, it's something as mundane as a car on the road, and a woman in the fog, from the point of view of a car's dashboard. It's a visual choice as it continues the film's often ingenious play on stark blacks and bright whites while reversing the now familiar feeling of men swallowed up in blackness. It's a narrative choice, marking as it does the transition to the film's last act and reverses our usual view of looking out the car's window with her and for a moment, the same view looking at her. It's an emotional choice as I forgot to breath watching it. She has rejected her calling, an apostate suddenly wandering in a strange land without purpose.

Best Shot. Into the Fog

Glazer leaves us waiting for Her return a full 14 seconds before we join her in the fog. Her emotions are still totally alien to us as she rotates in place, staring into the liquid air. Looking for what? Everything that should be mundane, including this view from inside a car we've spent half the film in, is riddled with complexity and eery wonder. Glazer has the power to render the familiar alien and by the film's end, and rather movingly, the alien familiar.

I'm not otherwise a religious person but the cinema is my church and Jonathan Glazer is one of the new gods. I've watched Under the Skin twice now, both times with equal parts reverent awe and abject fear. I'm a true believer. 

See the whole roster of chosen shots from 22 other HMWYBS participants

Tweet of the Capsule of the Dawn of The Planet of the Apes

Of the. of the. of the. Help, stuck in a prepositional loop! I regret to inform that there is no full review of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) -- you may have noticed unusually sparse off my game posting -- but I press on with this exhaustively multi-tasking post. It's a list. It's a tweet roundup. It's a review.

I can't go on. I'll go on."
-Samuel Beckett 

Were I to write a traditional review of the surprisingly strong sequel to the surprisingly good Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) it would essentially be some sort of fussy expansion and tangent filled detours of these 10 points:

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Running From Spoilers. A Snowpiercer Story

Snowpiercer is confrontational and alien even though the faces are welcome and familiar: Chris Evans, John Hurt, Jamie Bell, Tilda Swinton, etcetera....

On my first viewing (there will be another) I tumbled through a cascade of dischordant feelings from revulsion to pleasure, from excitement to confusion, from ehhh? to awe! I'm not sure I quite got to "love" (that takes more time with the chilly pictures and for once I wished the movie I was watching was longer) but it's a must-see with enough ambition and visceral excitement to charge a handful of lesser movies. Why is it in limited release like an arthouse curio? It could easily be sold, and not fraudulently, as a sci-fi action flick with Captain America himself leading its linear (in both sense of the word) charge through a speeding allegory train.

In many years of running a movie blog I have struggled in the chasm between my preferred viewing style (cold, with no knowledge of the movie beyond premise/director/cast) and the reality of moviegoing in the 21st century when you know EVERYTHING in advance. Snowpiercer has been open for exactly 6 days and on only 8 screens in the US and there's already articles at major sites analyzing its ending. Before 99% of its audience ever gets a chance to see it.

Yet somehow, bless the cinema gods, I had escaped ANY knowledge of Snowpiercer beyond the post-production battle over the final cut and its basic premise (Earth has frozen over / Only survivors live on a train). I was intrigued by the eccentric Global cast list and its South Korean director (seek out his inventive monster movie The Host and his incredible actressy mystery Mother) and that was it. Somehow -- and I don't know how I managed it -- I had never seen a single clip or trailer. I was THRILLED the entire time, never knowing what lurked beyond each gate on the train, or how important each actor would be to the plot, and surprised virtually every time by the shifting visuals and forward charging action beats.

Speaking of forward charging: Luke Pasqualino, a 25 year-old British Italian actor I wasn't previously familiar with, is mesmerizing in fleet-footed action as "Grey". He's also ridiculously easy on the eyes despite the fact that the entire cast looks like they haven't bathed in 3 years. Can he be in every action movie now? (I guess I'll have to watch some of his TV work - any recommendations?)

Seeing a movie cold is impossible to do regularly of course -- especially when you run a movie blog and know that the biggest traffic drivers are future-based (trailers, Oscar predictions, casting). That's why most movie blogs focus solely on what's yet to come that endless grind of rumors and speculation, rather than time-travelling constantly like this one does.

But I highly suggest trying this experiment - no clips, trailers, reviews - valiantly for ONE movie you're looking forward to this year. Pick that movie. See if it changes the experience and makes that particular film instantly exciting and less predictable while you're watching.  

Three Quickies: Caesar, Victor, Jared

Caesar
Have you ever considered the job of Location Manager? I can quickly confess that I have not despite often considering plentiful jobs that go on behind the scenes on motion pictures. The Credits discusses the complicated work with Catou Kearney the Location Manager of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. It's a technically challenging movie, not least of which because they shot so much outdoors and needed a lushly overgrown forest.

The apes ... have created a vast forest utopia. Finding such a place, one that looks as abundant as the script demands, but that could also support a large crew and a ton of equipment, takes months of research, legwork, and a few thousand phone calls. Kearney is a seasoned location manager, and relishes the opportunity. “It’s like putting a ten-thousand piece puzzle together,” she says. “When that last piece falls into place, there’s nothing like it.” 

As it turns out the Vancouver rainforests got the job of portraying futuristic California wilderness.

Igor (Marty Feldman) in "Young Frankenstein"Victor
Since we're in an era wherein everything that is enormously familiar is being regurgitated nonstop, we're going to get a new Victor Frankenstein movie shortly after getting a new Victor Frankenstein on TV in Penny Dreadful. Next October to be exact. The new angle this time? The story will be told from the perspective of Dr Frankenstein's assistant Igor who will be played by Daniel Radcliffe. The mad doctor is James McAvoy. I've always felt a little bad for the Frankenstein Monster because of the classic monsters, he's the least popular... though that never stops Hollywood. My theory on this is because he's not thematically easy like the self-generating metaphor machines that vampirism and to a lesser extent lycanthrophy are. Maybe when science evolves to a point where we all have organ transplants and articifial limbs and cyborg parts and we worry about what we've become everyone will be really into him. 

Jared
Remember when I interviewed Jared Leto last year for Dallas Buyers Club and he was all 'don't expect me back in the movies anytime soon'. Liar liar pants on fire! He's being talked up for Doctor Strange. I think Cumberbatch & Hardy are great actors but I honestly like the idea of Leto so much more in that particular role. That's partially because he's less familiar as a screen actor and feels 'other' already which would help -  and he's just replaced Will Smith in the lead role in Brilliance.

As In Contention astutely points out

To those who say winning an Oscar makes no difference to one's career, here's evidence to the contrary. This time last year, news of Jared Leto replacing Will Smith on a major commercial project would have seemed like crazy talk ...

Brilliance is a thriller based on the novel by the same name by Marcus Sakey about a federal agent chasing a deadly terrorist. They're both "brilliants" which is a sort of human being with 'extras' if you will. Everyone's gotta be superpowered these days whether they get it honestly by mutations, under duress via bags of leaky drugs implanted in their stomachs, or they're airlifted in from other planets.