Gosh, only thirty-three Moving pictures posts and less than a fortnight left in the year. Last year, I hit post #33 in early June and finished the year on post #69. Which I guess means I’ve watched a third as many films in 2019 as I did in 2018. My move to the far north is not entirely responsible, although it did result in something of a life-style change (for the better, I hasten to add). But I’ve also been watching more television series box sets than in previous years, because of, er, reasons. I don’t know; perhaps it was too easy previously to find the sort of movies I wanted to watch – I was, after all, subscribed to two postal DVD services…

The Girl on a Motorcycle, Jack Cardiff (1968, UK). I have seen many films made in the 1960s, that could only have been made during the 1960s – and some of them also starred Alain Delon or Marianne Faithfull – but The Girl on a Motorcycle must be a top contender for the most 1960s film I’ve ever seen. And, astonishingly, it’s a British film. Faithfull plays the nubile daughter of a bookshop owner in rural Alsace. She’s engaged to be married to the local school-teacher, but then Delon, whole lives over the border in Germany, walks into the bookshop. A friendship that is clearly not innocent, although apparently no one can see it, sees Faithfull and Delon doing the rumpy-pumpy, and enjoying the freedom of the roads on Delon’s motorbike. He even teaches her how to ride a motorbike. And then buys her a motorbike as a wedding present. The film opens with Faithfull leaving her husband, and riding her motorbike into Germany to visit Delon. The story is mostly told in flashback, with voiceover by Faithfull. There are several psychedelic dream sequences. And the film ends with Faithfull dying in a pretty gruesome road accident. It’s all very 1960s, and while both Faithfull and Delon both smoulder on screen, there seems to be little chemistry between them. The shots of Faithfull riding are also patently fake, which does not help, although that may not have been such a hurdle back in 1968. But the film fails chiefly, unlike French films of the period, because it feels too calculated. There’s a feeling of rejection of commercial cinematic values evident in most Nouvelle Vague movies, and while The Girl on a Motorcycle seems superficially similar to them, it doesn’t exhibit that attitude. Which, perversely, makes it feel like more of an historical document then they do. Still worth seeing, however.

The Red Monks, Gianni Martucci (1989, Italy). I had thought this was another of the many gialli made available on Amazon Prime by Shameless, but when I went looking for the DVD cover art I discovered it wasn’t. It is, of course, giallo, and if it wasn’t directed by Lucio Fulci, it might as well have been. Which is somewhat ironic, as the makers went out of their way to associate Fulci’s name with it, first by crediting him as “director of special effects”, when he had never set foot on set, and then later marketing it as a movie “by Lucio Fulci”, which was only dropped when Fulci threatened to sue… There may well be a signature style to various giallo directors’ movies, but at present I see giallo itself as more of a signature style. In other words, I could identify a giallo movie, but whether it was directed by Fulci, Miraglia, Bazzoni or Petri I’ve no idea, although I think I might be able to spot a Bava or Argento… The Red Monks seems fairly representative, and somewhat average, for gialli. A young man inherits a mysterious castle, moves in, and has various strange encounters, which seems to involve lots of expository flashbacks, none of which in total actually make much sense. One for fans of giallo only.

Eva, Kike Maíllo (2011, Spain). I should not be surprised when I see an actor performing in a language other than their native tongue, and I say that as someone who speaks several languages (to varying degrees), but my upbringing has been mostly English-language and the Anglophone world is a dismayingly monoglot one… Which is a long-winded way of saying I should not have found Daniel Brühl’s presence in this film at all remarkable. Especially since, as I discovered on looking him up on Wikipedia, he was born in Spain and his mother is Spanish. But I knew him as a German actor, with several English-language roles under his belt, so there was a moment when he began speaking Spanish, with apparently native fluency – not that I would be able to tell the difference – that caused a moment of cognitive dissonance. Which is soft of appropriate to Eva. Brühl plays a robotics researcher in a near-future Spain, who returns home several years after walking out on a project to build a robot with real emotions. He picks up where he left off, but needs a source for the emotional model he plans to create for the robot he abandoned, a robot child. He spots a young girl and recruits her. It turns out she’s the daughter of his girlfriend, who was also a robotics researcher, who married Brühl’s best friend after he left. Except, it then turns out – slight spoiler here – the young girl is in fact a successful prototype of Brühl’s original robot, except she does not know it. Eva was one of those near-future films which treats its setting with a matter-of-factness that does more to ground the story than any amount of flashy effects. And with its top-drawer cast – not just Brühl, but the actors playing Eva herself and Brühl’s robot, Max, are really good. And, it all looked really good too. I wouldn’t be surprised if this film makes my best of year list.

The New York Ripper, Lucio Fulci (1982, Italy). Apparently this is the only film by Fulci which is still censored in the UK. I am horribly squeamish, and refuse to watch any film that has at some point been described as “torture porn”, and don’t really enjoy watching modern horror films, but I didn’t have any problems with The New York Ripper. For a start, it’s a 1982 film, so the effects, while gruesome, are patently special effects. They don’t look real enough to trigger my squeam. They are, however, pretty gross and brutal. It’s the usual giallo serial killer stuff, which means a string of seemingly unrelated, but vicious murders, usually of attractive women while undressing, but the plot which knits together the murders and the investigation often doesn’t make much sense when you think about it. I mean, you look up a giallo film on Wikipedia, and it usually takes a couple of thousand words to summarise their plots. Not because they’re complicated, but because they’re not entirely logical. To be honest, I’m not sure why The New York Ripper continues to be censored. It’s pretty tame by modern horror effects standards. Its sensibilities are early 1980s and Italian, which is likely to offend twenty-first century viewers more. Fans of giallo, and Fulci, are probably the only people likely to enjoy the film, but I still think Shameless are doing a marvellous job releasing these movies on DVD (and Amazon Prime).

The Arrow, Don McBrearty (1996, Canada). The UK had the TSR.2 and Canada had the Arrow. Both were prototype high-performance military aircraft, years ahead of anything produced by the US or USSR. Both projects were cancelled after a change of government, and everything to do with the aircraft was completely destroyed. Neither project managed to stay within budget or meet the original deadlines, but then neither has any military aircraft the UK has bought from the US. In fact, after the cancellation of TSR.2, the UK government was forced to buy the General Dynamics F-111 – but had to cancel the order due to significant cost and development time overruns. The Avro Arrow was a Mach 2 interceptor, designed to meet encroaching Soviet bombers over the Arctic and shoot them down with missiles, before they could drop nuclear bombs on either Canada or the US. The requirements were ambitious, but the eventual design promised to meet them. Unfortunately, that ambition turned the Arrow into a bit of a money-pit, and by the time the project was cancelled Avro had bought so many suppliers, in order to ensure it had parts and materials it needed for the aircraft, that it was one of the largest companies in Canada. There’s little doubt the Arrow was a ground-breaking aircraft but, given the Soviets never sent a fleet of nuclear bombers over the pole to North America, in hindsight it seems it was a solution for a problem that never manifested – or at least could be avoided by other, less expensive, means. (Well, “less expensive” in financial terms, definitely not cheaper in political terms, given the US’s hegemonic drive.) The Arrow, a straight-to-TV docu-drama hits all the main points of the story, although it takes several notable liberties, such as suggesting the Canadians invented the delta-wing and area-rule, or that one Arrow escaped the scrapyard. Dan Aykroyd plays Crawford Gordon, the industrialist brought in to make the Arrow reality, like, well, like every other Aykroyd character, but the real Crawford Gordon was actually a fascinating person. As drama, The Arrow doesn’t really stand out, but it’s of interest to aviation buffs because of its subject. Incidentally, after the cancellation of the Avro Arrow, most of the engineers who had worked on it – many of whom were British – were recruited by US aviation companies and were instrumental in putting the Americans on the Moon.

Gemini Man, Ang Lee (2019, USA). I must admit I’ve never been that much of a Lee fan. He’s a name I know, but I couldn’t tell you what he brought to his movies that any other director might not have brought. He’s certainly had a go at pretty much everything – Jane Austen, wu xia, MCU, literary adaptation… well, lots of literary adaptations, pretty much all North American, from Annie Proulx to Daniel Woodrell… And now we have Gemini Man, a high-concept thriller. Which incidentally bears no resemblance to the TV series of the same name starring Ben Murphy… The twist premise of Lee’s Gemini Man, kept carefully hidden for the first third of the movie but given away on the movie poster (doh), is that star Will Smith is an assassin, the most accuratest that evah lived, but he’s getting old and wants to retire, so his masters decide to “retire” (ho ho) him using their new young super-talented assassin, who happens to be… a clone of Will Smith. So you have like a cat-and-mouse chase movie where the hunter and hunted are equally matched because they’re the same person. Sort of. There’s an impressive amount of dumb in the premise, and the fact the film was actually made gives you little confidence in the collective intelligence of Hollywood. But even stories that are bad on paper can occasionally make good films, and Lee is a relatively good pair of hands… But even he can’t make Gemini Man into more than just a tired CGI-heavy thriller. It doesn’t help that Smith (old) opens the film by shooting a man in a fast-moving train from at least a kilometre away, an astonishing if somewhat implausible feat, but then spends pretty much the rest of the movie missing everything he shoots at. Because plot. I would be surprised if there such a thing as an “Ang Lee fan”, and if there were, their lives must be a rollercoaster ride of elation and disappointment. Gemini Man is definitely the latter. Even for them.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 942