Let's Hope Jimmy's Hall isn't Loach's Last Waltz

It's fitting that the general feeling that one comes away with after watching Ken Loach's maybe/maybe not final film is one of hope. The veteran filmmaker and Bath resident has spent decades defining the social realism genre with hard-hitting cinema verite fare like Kes and My Name is Joe. Films so stark and uncompromising they seem to have been filmed through a filter the colour of gravel. But social realism should never be an endless onslaught of misery for it is the sweet that makes the bitter so bitter and despite a backdrop of poverty, religious persecution and whippings (lest it be outdone by 12 Years a Slave) it may be Loach's sweetest film yet. 

The story is of troublemaker and Communist activist Jimmy Gralton (Barry Ward) who returns to his native Ireland in 1930 after a decade exiled in New York. While Jimmy insists he simply wants to live a quiet life on the family farm with his frail mother the glint of mischief remains in his eyes. That mischief takes the form of the tiny village's community hall which Jimmy had established years earlier but the church parish shut down over fears of Marxist indoctrination. The hall represents joy and hope for a community with no jobs, no means of education and no hope for the future. But the fears of indecency, anarchy and Communism are stirred by the church again, represented by the pious and rigid Father Sheridan (Jim Norton).

The clash of buttoned down religious figures and free-thinking hedonists may be cliched as Hell, Sheridan is after all played by Bishop Brennan, but the effect the church has on the community is effective nonetheless. Loach manages to taint the simple image of people leaving their pews with a sinister tone and the devastation felt by the characters is brought to the fore by fearful performances. The whipping exchanges the bloody body horror of 12 Years with the stilted, detached brutality of a documentarian. 

If there's one weak link it's regrettably Ward himself who, despite hardly leaving the screen, is never afforded the opportunity to communicate any kind of internal conflict. Here Gralton is an unambiguous folk hero, a figure of hope and courage with Wards performance easily able to light a fire in people's hearts. Instead the figure of ambiguity is found in Father Seamus (Andrew Scott) the young priest serving as the progressive counterpoint to Sheridan. It's a character that Scott presents as reserved and compliant, only passively voicing the rational arguments against Sheridan's zeal. It's only when the situation intensifies that he breaks, passionately and hopelessly observing how far Sheridan and his followers have fallen.

Like with most of Loach's work there appears to be little in the way of cinematic structure, for when does life progress so neatly. But there is an escalating sense of intensity that gradually builds with a balance struck between the harsh consequences and Graltons drive to continue the fight. While indeed true to life this does rob the final act of some of the emotional impact. Everything is taken from Gralton yet the film is rarely able to communicate the sadness in it all, instead swiftly moving to its conclusion. Even Father Sheridan's attempt at redemption, showing respect for Graltons courage and conviction, comes across as hollow.

Jimmy's Hall is a celebration of people's ability to find hope in the direst of circumstances and in that respect it succeeds. It may lack the nuance of a weightier character piece but it is an energetic and engrossing tale. The biggest hope that it inspires is that it is not the last we will see from Loach.

Transcendence, entirely descendent.

So yeah, Transcendence is every bit as stupid as you've heard and stupid in the worst kind of way. A badly written film that thinks if it just puts enough large words in the script while talking about distinctly smart subject matter it can pass for intelligent, thoughtful science fiction (e.g. Gattaca or Moon). But it can't, nothing about Transcendence holds up to any kind of basic scrutiny. It's got bad writing, bad characters, bad structure, bad editing, nice visuals though. This is after all the directional debut of beloved cinematographer Wally Pfister, the very reason film buffs were looking forward to this. Now they're probably wishing they hadn't gotten their hopes up. If Transcendence proves anything it's that film is a collaborative medium and one really talented guy at the helm isn't enough to make it hold together.

For what it's worth our protagonist is Will Caster (Johnny Depp) a brilliant and respected AI researcher but you'll have to take my word for since the film never bothers to establish his work or show how far it's developed. Instead he gives a speech on the concept and it is at this point that we see just how dumb the script is. The characters all talk about incredibly smart things like the singularity and transhumanism but in the broadest, vaguest terms possible. There's no detail provided, no indication of how far this research has come, no evidence that these people actually know what they're talking about. Hey screenwriter Jack Paglan! We've come to see a film about transhumanism, you don't need to dumb things down!

Anyway because of the informed dangers of his research Will is shot by a member of RIFT, a militant anti-technology group. That nuanced breed of neo-Luddite that's strangely comfortable using cars, cellphones and guns embedded with radioactive isotopes but what the hey right. The bullet leaves Will with weeks to live during which time his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and best friend, um.... *checks IMDB* Max (Paul Bettany) work to hook his brain up to the same sever used for his now scrapped sentient computer.

They succeed but are immediately discovered by RIFT, presumably by means of clairvoyance because even if they were able to hack the Caster's computer, which is established as being offline, how the hell do you process the uploading of brainwaves from a remote laptop? So they kidnap Paul Bettany and go to destroy the system but but not before Will is connected to the internet. Evelyn then flees...which is also strange as there's no way she could have known that RIFT were coming. Will never detected the hack and Paul Bettany never sent her a warning text.

In addition to being rife with plot holes and logical flaws this sequence forces the film to move at a breakneck pace when really it should be slowing down to allow Will and Evelyn to reconnect. While watching the film I found my mind going back to the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back, in which a widow used her husband's online footprint to recreate his voice and personality on the phone. In that story scenes were dedicated to the wife talking to the voice, allowing herself (and us) to become lost in conversation, only to sharply remind us that the husband was only a simulation. This is what Transcendence badly needed because all of Will and Evelyn's actions are motivated by their relationship. A relationship whose value we are never allowed to see and as a result cannot invest in.

The film then takes an epic leap forward in time as Evelyn moves out to the middle of nowhere to turn a blighted desert town into Wills personal solar-powered server farm. With infinite power and the collective knowledge of the internet Will is able to make huge scientific leaps in medicine and nano-technology. Eventually able to heal all ailments, clone a new body and built a personal Extremis-style army. Frightening stuff, so frightening you'd think it would attract huge attention from the military, media and general public. But no, even though the proof is posted online a miracle cure for the sick and disabled doesn't even get a hint of local news. And the military seems to be limited to exactly one guy whose only job is to arm RIFT to the teeth with more filthy, evil technological weapons. 

Oh and in the two years RIFT has managed to convert Paul Bettany to their side despite presenting no logical argument and the fact that there are way, way better equipped people to stop Will than a gang of hipsters. But hey, Bettany (yes I've given up trying to remember the characters name) needs to be there because he knows Will's source code and can use it to create a virus to destroy him. And it's not like the most intelligent being on earth with two years of planning would think of safeguarding his one weak spot is it?

Eventually they get Evelyn onside too, apparently she was cool with giving up their old life, staying confined to the desert and experimenting with innocent people but the moment Will started monitoring her bio signatures that was a step too far. Which is handy because the film needs a virginal sacrificial lamb to make the idiotic ending seem weighty and emotional. The plan being to give Evelyn a dose of Will's nanobots with the virus as Will now wants her to upload her brainwaves so that his transformation into the ship from Futurama can become complete.

Needless to say this tearjerker of an ending can't play out without the stupidity of the script coming to the fore. It's revealed that Will has cloned himself a body...which means I guess they can't do the upload? A firefight breaks out and RIFT uses Bettany as a hostage so Will has to choose between uploading the virus or healing Evelyn. I mean sure he doesn't need to do the upload, he can just heal Evelyn and be with her in the physical world but DAMMIT this is Paul Bettany's life that's at stake!

The film then tries to reconcile the stidity of its ending with an epilogue, showing the ripple effect of destroying Will has also killed the internet and most forms of technology. In stopping Will and Evelyn being together we have in fact driven ourselves apart. Which would be meaningful if we cared about Will or Evelyn or their relationship and if the things which drove them apart had any semblance of believability to it. Transcendence is a mess, a terrible debut for Pfister and likely to rank among the worst of 2014.