Ben Wheatley's High Rise

My buddy Scott told me today that my favourite director is making a film of a book by my favourite author. This has got me pretty excited. My favourite director at the moment is Ben Wheatley who is one of the best British directors of his generation. He's made 4 films, 2 of which are utterly brilliant and the other 2 aren't bad. The brilliant ones are Kill List and Sightseers. 
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My favourite author, of course, is JG Ballard who also just happens to be the greatest English novelist since WW2. A surrealist satiric poet often pigeon holed as a science fiction author, Ballard's reputation has only grown since his death five years ago. When you read Graham Greene or Kingsley Amis or Ballard's other contemporaries these days their novels feel like period pieces whereas Ballard somehow is as fresh and exciting as ever. That's a clue that he's the real deal. 
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The great Ballard period was 1972 - 1979 when he produced award winning collections of short stories and a run of novels, all of which became classics: Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise and The Unlimited Dream Company. Ben Wheatley is making a film out of High Rise and if he's allowed a good budget it could be one of the great British films of this decade. A great film like Sightseers or Fish Tank I mean not tourist board rubbish like the Kings Speech. High Rise is the story of a group of people who live in a high rise apartment building that gradually descends into civil war between floors while the inhabitants at least initially continue to commute to their day jobs in the city of London. Its a classic Ballard conceit carried out with all the iron logic you'd expect from a master surrealist with a sense of humour, qualities Wheatley has in abundance too. Please don't let me down Ben.    

Kill List

the two hit men about to get way out of their depth...
one of the few non spoiler pictures of Kill List available on the internet

If you're a sensitive soul like me you should not watch Ben Wheatley's Kill List. I watched it last night and I was pretty darn disturbed. So disturbed that I stayed up for hours watching the utter head pounding banality of the live stream of Mike and Mike on ESPN2 in an attempt to get some of the images out of my mind. It didn't work. Even when they replaced one of the Mikes with a different guy who wasn't called Mike and Alex Rodriguez's insane attorney called in to the show with a crackpot conspiracy theory about the New York Yankees. And speaking of conspiracies... 
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As I've explained here before I have an empathy problem which prevents me from liking horror films. I wasn't prepared for Kill List's third act because I thought that the movie was going to be a conventional thriller about hit men. It isn't. About two thirds of the way in it goes in an entirely different direction. The acting is great, it's beautifully shot and if I were giving out stars I'd probably give it four and a half out of five but I don't really know who to recommend Kill List to. Horror film fans will probably find it too tame whereas thriller fans might not quite buy into the denouement and the scenes leading up to the denouement. I don't want to tell you any plot spoilers because surprise is a key element here but it's defintely got a sort of a (I'm going to put the following sentence in white text on a white background that you can only read if you deliberately highlight it) Pulp Fiction meets The Wicker Man vibe. Ok? 
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Neil Maskell was a fantastic leading man and it was really nice to see Michael Smiley, the actor who played "Tyres" in Spaced, giving a brilliant, low-key, brooding performance but I hope he doesn't mind if I prefer to think of him in Spaced and never try to think of anything in this film ever again. 

"There might be blood on the paws of that dog, but it's smug complacency that killed Ian": The Comedic Brilliance of Sightseers

I don't really keep up with the latest trends in cinema so I hadn't heard about Ben Wheatley until a month ago when I began to read reviews of his latest film, A Field In England, which apparently divided the British critics into those who hated it and those who thought it was merely a disappointment. I haven't seen A Field In England but the trailer looks fantastic. On Friday night Ben Wheatley's second feature film (or perhaps third, Wikipedia wasn't completely clear about this) Sightseers (2012) was on TV here in Melbourne and I thought it was one of the best British films I've seen in years: maybe the best British film since Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, which I've blogged and raved about several times here. 
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How to describe Sightseers? Well like all really good films its sui generis but I suppose if it fell into a genre that genre could be low-budget-black-comedy-British-road-movie. If I was pitching it to a distributor I would say that it's Thelma and Louise meets Carry On Camping meets Deliverance. Directed by Ben Wheatley it stars Alice Lowe, Eileen Davies and Steve Oram. It's the story of Chris, a ginger bearded chippy left wing Brummie who wants to show his girlfriend Tina his favourite places in England on a week long caravaning holiday. These places include a tram museum, a pencil museum and Ribblehead viaduct. If you like deadpan British humour you're in for a real treat as this is an extremely funny film. I haven't laughed this much at anything since Steve Coogan's The Trip or series 3 of The Thick Of It. It is dark and it is violent which is why it's definitely a black comedy but my God is it funny. If you're not familiar with British accents you should watch it with the close captions on because you do not want to miss a single line of this dialogue. The film's script seems to have been at least semi-improvised and how any of the actors managed to keep a straight face is beyond me. What else to say? It's beautifully shot, the soundtrack (Soft Cell and Vanilla Fudge) is perfect and the dog Poppy/Banjo is the funniest border terrier on film since There's Something About Mary.