Back in July, it didn't even seem remotely possible that The Internship could be touched as 2013's most transparent feature-length advertisement for one of our global corporate overlords. But all it takes is one scene of the awful, awful Jobs to let you know that there's a new contender on the block: the flick beginning with its titular character, Apple Computers founder/figurehead Steve Jobs, holding court at the product launch of the iPod. After spilling empty corporate speak and shilling his portable-music-player, our hero is met with swelling string music and a standing ovation. This sets the tenor of Joshua Michael Stern's film, a hagiography for one of the most famous saints of the dominant global religion: hyper-capitalism.
Standing behind Jobs is the apple logo, an image that's shown, again and again, in one of the most heavily-branded motion-pictures to be made by someone other than Michael Bay. To call it 'product-placement' would be to sell it short: Jobs is a film about corporate cult-dom, about a svengali figure out to 'change the world' by selling shit to every man, woman, and child. The devils of the PC trade are here, hated, in the periphery: IBM an Orwellian superpower, Bill Gates a buttoned-down corporate crook, John Sculley a soda-pop salesman cowed by shareholders; yet there's no persuasive case made that its subject is anything different; he merely the lesser-evil in a two-party system.
The opening ovation isn't the only one that meets a product launch in Jobs, a film that makes a motif of people wildly applauding any time the omnipresent corporate logo is in shot. It's a celebration of one man and his life's work; yet as it cobbles together a toothless tribute to the individual, it takes great pains to build a glittering shrine to the incorporated entity. It's called Jobs, but it could just as easily be called Apple: the business the hero of its own drama; a company set on the rise/fall/rise three-act-arc of the hack biopic. Here, Apple feels like a fantasy film's 'chosen one': born in a shitty garage but destined to end up the world's wealthiest brand. The movie hasn't just been vetted by its corporate sponsor, but written in worshipful reverence of it.
I swear, the film's called Jobs! Honest!
Like Jobs himself, Jobs disguises its own cutthroat corporate ways in the cheesy rubric of leftover counter-cultural tropes. With its '70s-rock hits and endless sunkissed montages (soldering a motherboard clearly needs to be shown in slow-motion, set to REO Speedwagon), Stern is trying to make us believe his picture is a paean for “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers” et al. When really it's about a soulless alpha-male screwing his friends over, denying his paternity, speeding about in a procession of convertibles, losing his way in a pique of egomania (lowest moment: cue the rain), then coming back from the wilderness to wreak vengeance upon those who did him wrong. Jobs is a Shakesperean King in Birkenstocks and socks; yet another Baby Boomer who dropped acid and travelled India barefoot, then came back to the Bay Area to make his morally-questionable millions.
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Pre-release press for Jobs has revolved, entirely, around its piece of central casting. With sitcom-star/hidden-camera-stooge/Twitter-powerhouse/gossip-rag-houseboy Ashton Kutcher carrying none of the Serious Actor cachet expected of leading-men affixed to prestige pictures recounting the lives of recently-dead celebrities, thus both he and the film were ripe for memey mockery before it'd even hit post-production. Were some serious method-actor cast in the lead role, there would've been from-the-set stories breathlessly intoning how Actor X became Steve Jobs; how he stayed in character between takes and made Laurene Powell Jobs cry. Yet what Kutcher is doing is no different, really: merely submitting a form of mimickry reminiscent of sketch-comedy shows. AKA: the shit that gets hailed every Oscars, even though it's a far lesser form of acting.
As the biopics-of-recently-dead-celebrities come later and later from human history, and the subjects in question have been widely videotaped, what you see on screen in films of this ilk - be they superior models of the genre, or, like Jobs, inferior ones - is, really, just one celebrity impersonating another celebrity; very-unvisionary directors like Stern getting to merely recreate videos they've watched on YouTube. Sure, Kutcher does it worse than so many might, but pinning the failings of the film on him is the work of 'critics' as small-minded as the suits his on-screen proxy must nobly battle. If we swallow the hook, and believe Steve Jobs was a dreamer who wanted to empower other dreamers to create, then what're we to make of a dream as meagre, mediocre, and mining-for-cliché as that dreamt up by writer Matt Whiteley? Whiteley has taken Apple's tools and whittled a screenwritten square peg; Jobs not pushing the human-race forward, but setting it back.
We like to wear matching colours!
It feels as if the first English-language film by Korean maestro Park Chan-wook should be a bigger deal than Stoker, but if the guy behind the Vengeance trilogy wants to transition to a mass audience by making an artful horror thriller-rife with Hitchcockian homage (from Shadow Of A Doubt's Uncle Charlie to Psycho's swinging lightbulb), chilling audiences via the ghoulish visage of Nicole Kidman's taut face, then let's shed no tears. The set-up sounds silly: Matthew Goode's mysterious uncle arising out of the mists of history, his return - to a family mansion as cold and empty as a mausoleum - coinciding with the 18th birthday of Mia Wasikowska and the death of dad Dermot Mulroney (killed yet again!). Yet the finished film is anything but: Park's direction is suitably evocative, from a bravura opening sequence to numerous scenes of formally-brilliant tension. Hitchcock is the big comparison, yet Stoker feels like a close kin to Kim Ji-woon's A Tale Of Two Sisters, another film in which a Korean auteur turns a family-secret horror-piece into a venomous psychodrama mounted as if Shakespeare. It's Park's visual style and A-grade film-grammar that Stoker will be most praised for, but it'd be remiss not to pin plenty of its success on Wentworth Miller's taut, symbolically-rich script, which has a yen for symbolic images, a wonderfully bleak sense of mischief, and sly take on skewed sexuality. In the film's most unexpected development, Wasikowska's Goth youth discovers she's not so much into autorerotic asphyxiation as into the erotic pleasures of administered strangulation; a not-so-Psycho shower scene gleefully leaping into the ranks of cinema's most devious acts of masturbation.
We're off the build a rocket...
The Rocket recently won the Audience Award at both the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, and you know what that means: it didn't play quite so well for your old pal Film Carew. Kim Mordaunt's feelgood feature is a piece of prime crowdpleasery set to be 'inspirational' to white people via its vision of rural Laos. Filmed with a cast full of non-professional locals, it tells the tale of a raffish young scamp who is, from birth, seen as a 'bad omen' by his crabby grandmother, arousing her superstitious belief that all that ails the village is his doing. Given it's rural Laos, there's plenty to ail them: death, displacement, disease, squalor. Things are bad for anyone, but especially the most hated kid in the hills. But, lo, a rocket-building competition looms on the horizon, and anyone's problems can be solved by winning the big sporting finale in a moment of triumph begging an audience to stand and cheer.
