Men (Alex Garland, 2022)

[therewillbeblus]

Now that he's completed his follow-up, Garland will stop directing and return to screenwriting for other directors

[domino harvey]

Now that he's completed his follow-up, Garland will stop directing and return to screenwriting for other directors

While it’d be sad for “Civil War” to be Garland’s final film as a director, let’s not forget he’s a great screenwriter. His script for 2012’s “Dredd” (a film he surreptitiously had a hand in directing) is a cult favorite. And the two films based on Garland’s novels, Danny Boyle‘s 1999 flick “The Beach” and 2003’s “The Tesseract” have their devotees, as well.

These sentences in this order are surely an error

[beamish14]

Now that he's completed his follow-up, Garland will stop directing and return to screenwriting for other directors

While it’d be sad for “Civil War” to be Garland’s final film as a director, let’s not forget he’s a great screenwriter. His script for 2012’s “Dredd” (a film he surreptitiously had a hand in directing) is a cult favorite. And the two films based on Garland’s novels, Danny Boyle‘s 1999 flick “The Beach” and 2003’s “The Tesseract” have their devotees, as well.

These sentences in this order are surely an error

The Beach has its admirers, but I really wish he’d produce a new novel

[DarkImbecile]

The actual ScreenDaily interview sounds a little less definitive than the Playlist regurgitation:

I’ve got a quite complicated but serious internal dialogue about what I’m going to do next. Years ago, I started out as a novelist and then stopped writing novels and started working in film. And I have been feeling quite strongly that I should stop directing films and I should write for other people with the intention of trying to execute the film they want to make, rather than trying to force through the film I want to make, which is what used to happen in the old days.

It could be in part a product that I ended post-production on Men literally 48 hours before principal photography of Civil War so maybe that was just exhausting. But I wonder whether it’s time to step back. Civil War will definitely be my last film as a director for at least a while. Definitely.

[therewillbeblus]

The Beach has its admirers

I think it's both his and Boyle's best work

[beamish14]

The Beach has its admirers

I think it's both his and Boyle's best work

I’m that lunatic you hear about in hushed tones who thinks that A Life Less Ordinary might be Boyle’s best. I still find myself quoting some of Ewan McGregor’s lines in it.

[therewillbeblus]

That's one of three or so Boyles I either haven't seen or don't recall having seen, so maybe I'll join you in the asylum some day

[colinr0380]

The Tesseract is a brilliant novel but, whilst it has been a while since last seeing it, I remember feeling that the film adaptation really did not do it justice. It is a kind of fractured narrative story in which a violent incident is told amongst multiple character perspectives (hence the title) in that en vogue early 2000s 'everything is connected' manner of Amores Perros, Babel, Crash and so on. But the film rather broadens the characterisation too much so it eventually feels more like an ensemble film than specifically a multiple viewpoint perspective one, if that makes sense. It might just have been me, but I found that a small but important distinction. It may be telling that Garland did not adapt that for the film version, as I certainly agree on how good the adaptation of Dredd was.

[moreorless]

i think as a director Ex Machina his by far his best work and perhaps part of the reason for that is that it also feels like more a writers film?

[DarkImbecile]

Kristin Thompson on Men

[brundlefly]

Kristin Thompson on Men

Unannounced spoiler in there for Last Night in Soho for those who haven't seen that.

[therewillbeblus]

Eh, kinda, it's vague enough not to be and since our surrogate is engaging in some seriously unhinged reality testing, it's more of a ruse than anything. If I read that, and then watched the movie, I'd have a similar experience to when I went in blind

[Mr Sausage]

I really enjoyed this. It was great to see Garland pushing so confidently into wild abstraction. I don't know what it means, aside from the feminist, religious, and mythological themes being obvious. But I can clear up a literary reference I found striking. The vicar quotes some lines from William Butler Yeats' poem Leda and the Swan:

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

Yeats' poem is a retelling of the story of the rape of Leda, where Zeus in the shape of a swan overpowered Leda, after which she bore twins, Helen and Klytemnestra. Helen of course was widely blamed for the Trojan war (not unlike the treatment of Eve), and, depending on the source, Klytemnestra either murdered her husband, Agamemnon, or encouraged her lover to do it. Two women whose lust and violence brought down two noble houses, those of Priam and Agamemnon, and for centuries have been symbols of female baseness. (Never mind of course Menelaos' jealous wrath at is wife going off with a younger, prettier man, or Agamenon ritually sacrificing he and his wife's eldest daughter, Iphigenia, to his wife's horror and despair.)

Not as much remarked on is that those two women fated to end empires with their violence and wantonness were the product of male violence, a male violence inextricable from divine power and authority. When Harper asks the Vicar, "What the fuck are you?", he whispers, "a swan." It's not hard to see parallels: Harper, a victim of male violence who is unfairly blamed for the aftermath; the Men, including the husband, needing her love above all things and whose subsequent violence engenders endless self-begetting cycles of further violence and need. Each of these cycles is born entirely of itself, and yet each one blames someone outside of itself. Endlessly self-begetting, endlessly externalizing. The abstraction with which it's presented turns this into more than just an interpersonal critique. It's a vision of culture as well, the way culture feeds on its own products, self-perpetuating cycles of myths and stories that blame the Other for their own self-generating content.

There are lots of images of fertility, but one of the most unsettling before the final phantasmagoria is a seed floating into the carcass of a deer. The next shot of that carcass shows it to be in advanced decay. The significance is ironic: rather than rebirth, rot has been quickened. Or maybe not: there are plenty of maggots, so the fertility symbol is not of rebirth but of the way some lifeforms feed on the death and destruction of others to sustain themselves.

It does seem that pagan fertility myths are being used as metaphors for cultural attitudes to gender.