I bought an Amazon Fire TV Stick in their recent Prime Day, so these Moving pictures posts may become a little less frequent as I can now catch up on some 2015 television series I’ve missed. Because, despite having umpty-zillion cable television channels, there’s generally fuck-all on them worth seeing or that I haven’t seen before. One channel, for example, has been back-to-back episodes of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda for several weeks. Why? And other channels have gone right back to the first seasons of their most popular television shows, which of course I’ve already seen. Anyway, this all sort of explains why I watch so many movies…

Trance, Danny Boyle (2013, UK). A charity shop find. Boyle is a name I know, though I can’t say I’m a fan, and the plot sounded twisty-turny enough to promise a reasonable night’s entertainment. And so it proved. James McAvoy works at a high-end auction house when a very valuable painting is stolen by thief Vincent Cassell and a team of thugs. During the robbery, McAvoy is beaten about the head by Cassel and subsequently suffers retrograde amnesia. Which is a problem, as he was actually in on the robbery and seems to have hidden the painting before apparently handing over the case containing it (under feigned duress) to Cassel. So McAvoy visits hypnotherapist Rosario Dawson in order to recover his lost memories… and it then gets all twistier and turnier. And there you have it. Thrillers this twisty-turny are nothing new, and the twenty-first century seems to have added a level of unnecessary gloss, and even-more-unnecessary gore – not to mention an often dodgy treatment of the female characters – and Trance is one of these in pretty much all respects. You’ll watch it, you might well enjoy it, but a couple of days later you’ll probably need hypnotherapy in order to remember it.

World Without Sun, Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1964, France). This is one of a number of documentaries Cousteau made about his underwater exploits, but I bought this one because it focused on Conshelf Two, the habitat he built ten metres underwater in the Red Sea. I remember Cousteau from my childhood, his films were a staple of Middle East English-language television channels, so I knew all about the Diving Saucer and the Calypso and I have fond memories of the films featuring them. But Conshelf Two I find much more interesting these days, so hence my purchase of this. And it was… weird. They all smoke! In an undersea habitat! Two of the divers spend a couple of days in a heliox environment in a tiny habitat much deeper, and the first thing one of them does on his return to Conshelf Two is… light up his pipe! The underwater photography was, of course, excellent and fascinating, and Cousteau’s narration was interesting and informative. But the sight of half-naked Frenchmen smoking Gauloises in a metal box thirty feet underwater is just…

From The New World, Pt 1 (2012, Japan). This was the second anime mentioned by David Tallerman, and while I sort of liked his first recommendation – Royal Space Force: Wings of Honnemâise, see here – I really didn’t take to this one at all. (He did say, incidentally, to ignore the somewhat dodgy cover – but, of course, Amazon rental only send me the disc so this is actually the first time I’ve seen it and… oof, it is pretty dodgy.) Anyway, From The New World is apparently based on a novel by Yusuke Kishi, and the anime adaptation is done in that big-eyed tiny-nosed style which is what most people probably think of when they think of anime. The story is set in the distant future, long after humans start manifesting psychic abilities and so bring about the collapse of civilisation. But everything is now happy and peaceful and agrarian – or so it seems. Much of the story concerns Saki Watanabe being trained in the use of her powers, her friends and lovers at special powers school, and a long adventure in which Saki and some friends get involved in a war between two groups of Monster Rats and there’s this creature which spends an entire episode giving them a history lesson and… I found this really quite dull. While I began to think more kindly of Royal Space Force: Wings of Honnemâise several days after watching it, I can’t say the same of this. Just Not My Thing. At All.

Ordinary People*, Robert Redford (1980, USA). A week or so after watching this film from 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and I’m having trouble remembering what it was about. I can recall it was Robert Redford’s directorial debut, and it was nominated for a load of Oscars… but the story has mostly gone. Something about a teenager suffering after a suicide attempt, and Mary Tyle Moore as his completely unlikeable mother. Let’s see… There’s an American family, middle-class, affluent, normal by Hollywood middle-America standards, and the eldest son drowned in a boating accident before the film started, the younger son has been suffering from survivor guilt and attempted suicide before the film started… and things on the home front are now pretty fraught. But the son is seeing an unconventional psychiatrist and the therapy seems to be working. However, things are getting worse at home because mother is being mean and father’s peace-keeping isn’t always successful and… yawn. Cross this one off the list, I’ve seen it, I’m likely never to watch it again and I’m perfectly happy with that.

The Passionate Friends, David Lean (1949, UK). The DVD cover alone should tell you this is a romantic triangle story, and the year and country indicates that it is, of course, all terribly terribly, with Ann Todd married to Claude Rains but still in love with ex-boyfriend Trevor Howard, against a backdrop of the Swiss Alps, and based on a novel by, of all people, HG Wells. It’s structured, as many British romantic dramas of the time seem to be, as a series of extended flashbacks. Todd arrives at a Swiss hotel, and learns that Howard has booked into the room next her, quite by coincidence. And so the film goes back nine years to Todd and Howard’s relationship, and then slowly winds its way forward through Todd’s rejection of Howard, her marriage to Rains, and thence to the meeting which opens the film. And from there it moves smoothly into a rekindling of their relationship, hubby finds out, divorce papers served, etc, etc. I actually quite enjoyed this – Todd is very watchable, the flashbacks explained the story rather than confused it, and the ending was a pleasant surprise. It’s a minor Lean work, although to be fair I’m pretty sure that everything he did except Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and The Bridge On The River Kwai was a minor work…

Jupiter Ascending, Wachowskis (2015, USA). I waited for the DVD before watching this because, well, what I’d heard about it didn’t bode all that well. It did, however, prove to be mostly accurate. You can call Jupiter Ascending bollocks or tosh or fluff or any number of terms that basically require you to turn off your brain before you attempt to watch it, but it is nonetheless undeniably pretty. This is a film which exists because of its visuals, and the fact they don’t entirely make sense is irrelevant. The story, a rags to riches, toilet cleaner to heiress to the entire galaxy, is just so stupid it completely bypasses the stupid filter. Eddie Redmayne is bloody awful as the main villain, Mila Kunis as the eponymous heroine is a charsima-free zone, and Channing Tatum’s character, a soldier engineered from dog/human genes, is just too daft to take seriously (not to mention Sean Bean’s half-human/half honeybee). There is some very pretty CGI, lots of gurning, evil villainess Tuppence Middleton looks weird for half the film but that’s because she’s wearing make-up so she appears old, and I really can’t remember most of the plot even though it’s only been a couple of weeks since I saw the film. Ten years from now, no one is going to be sticking this on their list of “ten great sf movies”, not unless they have zero critical faculties.

Dolce, Aleksandr Sokurov (2000, Japan). This is one of three films on Sokurov’s Oriental Elegy DVD, which is extremely hard to find. I’d seen one or two copies on eBay and Amazon, going for between £200 and £250 each, which was way more than I was prepared to pay no matter how much I admire Sokurov as a director. But then a copy of Oriental Elegy popped up on eBay with a Buy-It-Now price of £25. I bought it. I was a little worried the item had actually been mislabelled, as there was no photograph, but it not only turned out to be a proper copy of Oriental Elegy but also still in its shrinkwrap. Result. But, Dolce… Sokurov’s documentaries resist easy classification, some more so than others. This one opens with a quick summary of the life of Japanese writer Toshio Shimao, a series of photographs with Sokurov in voiceover, the sort of stuff he started his career doing back in the early 1980s with Dimitri Shostakovich: Sonata For Viola, patching together archive footage and photographs to form a narrative. Dolce then becomes an interview of sorts with Mihao Shimao, who talks about her life with her father, although not in a conventional interview-sense, more as private reminiscences spoken out loud while alone (in Japanese, which Sokurov then speaks in Russian, and then appear in English subtitles). It’s affecting stuff, and very Sokurov – which means it’s likely to take a number of rewatches before I begin to understand exactly what is being said. Which is, of course, one of the reasons I like Sokurov’s stuff so much.

The Exterminating Angel*, Luis Buñuel (1962, Mexico). I have so far found Buñuel a bit hit and miss for me, but this particular film I found I liked the idea of it much more than I liked the execution. Which is not to say it’s a bad film – on the contrary, it’s very good. But the premise is one I find particularly appealing… but I do wonder if perhaps it wasn’t stretched out a bit too long. A group of affluent people meet up for a dinner party. Over the course of the evening, the servants quit and leave for no reason. The diners retire to the sitting-room… and then find they can’t leave it. At first it seems that they have no desire to, and start bedding down for the night. But then it becomes obvious they are psychologically incapable of doing so – for reasons no one understands. And as their “imprisonment” continues, so their civilised veneer is stripped away and their bestial natures are revealed. Now I don’t believe in all that “animal natures” crap, but I do like the idea of people being mysteriously trapped in a room which has a clear and obvious exit. Buñuel makes a proper meal of his conceit, before eventually reeling it all back, and leaving cast and audience no wiser as to what has happened. I liked that. Worth seeing.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 603