Back to the old style reporting on my viewing. New title for these posts, though.

Indochine, Régis Warnier (1992, France). French film about the country’s colonial past that somehow manages to ignore the fact that it was, well, colonialism. Catherine Deneuve runs a plantation in French Indochina, but things start to get difficult when the nasty Communists start attacking the “benevolent” French regime. Deneuve has a fling with a French officer, but after an unseemly demonstration at a Christmas party he’s sent to an obscure outpost. Deneuve adopts the young daughter of some Vietnamese friends, but the adopted daughter falls in with the Communists – after a fling with the French officer – and marries a Communist student. She then ends up in the indentured labour transhipment centre where the French officer has been sent… and he recognises her and shoots his superior officer to help her escape. Because the French were basically offering up the Vietnamese as slaves to the Chinese, and while he disagreed with it, he only took action when his Vietnamese girlfriend turned up as one of the slaves. I don’t think Indochine whitewashes the role of the French in Vietnam, which makes it even more surprising the film was not accompanied by controversy when it was released in 1992. On the contrary, it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Thirty years ago, this was merely food for drama to the West. Now… The treatment of the Vietnamese is horrific, and this film documents it, without seeming to realise how bad it was. Indochine is not a condemnation of the French presence in Vietnam, it’s a drama set during a period in time. That’s what’s wrong with it. The film makes it abundantly clear the French were responsible for numerous atrocities, but a lot of the blame for the troubles in the region is placed on the Communists. If only they hadn’t fought the existing regime, the narrative, goes, everything would have been peaceably handed over… and all the violence of the changeover would have been forgotten… Seriously? I can only wonder why we let such stupid people lead our nations…

Sisters, Brian De Palma (1972, USA). We all have our guilty pleasures, and I’m convinced De Palma’s is one of Hollywood’s guilty pleasures. He makes B-movie thrillers that are treated with all the seriousness of A-movie ones, if not given the same marketing budget. De Palma has gone on record as saying he’s a big Hitchcock fan, and that his career was inspired by him, and certainly Hitchcock was one of the truly great directors (and not just in Hollywood), but so many of De Palma’s films are schlocky thrillers it’s hard to decided how seriously to take him. His films are always entertaining, but always more of a guilty pleasure than outright admirable. Margot Kidder plays a pair of sisters, one of whom is homicidal, who were conjoined but then separated in a famous operation many years before, except it seems there are no sisters, there is only one, and she has two personalities. A film that is probably best remembered for the body that’s hidden in the put-you-up sofa. It feels more like Cronenberg than De Palma, but lacking the body-horror. One for fans of B-movies.

Bad Poetry Tokyo, Ansul Chauhan (2018, Japan). I watch a lot of films, and I try to spread my watching across the cinemas of as many nations as possible. I have watched many Japanese films, and am familiar with the works of many of its famous directors. But I cannot for the life of me remember what happens in this film. There is no Wikipedia page and the imdb.com plot summary is not very informative. A hostess in a Tokyo club is beaten badly, and decides to return to her home village to recuperate – and people leaving the city for the country to “solve” problems in their lives is a common theme in Japanese movies. But other than a general feeling the film was well-made, and the lead actress was good in her role… I remember very little. I should probably watch it again, and I probably will. But there gets a point where waiting any longer would delay this post past a reasonable point and only lead to a bigger backlog of “watching diary” posts. So, I think Bad Poetry Tokyo was quite good film, but I can’t swear it. I certainly intend to rewatch it.

The Sect, Michele Soavi (1991, Italy). As is clear from the DVD cover, this is a giallo and, like most gialli, the plot doesn’t make all that much sense. At least, not when you think about it. Which was probably my first mistake. Anyway, it opens with a weirdo stumbling out of the desert into an encampment of hippies, who he then brutally slaughters. Cut to present-day Germany, and a school teacher accidentally runs over an old man, who she invites home to recuperate from his minor injuries. The old man sneaks way and enters a tunnel network beneath the woman’s house, where he finds a deep well covered with a steel lid. And, well, a full description of the plot sounds completely bonkers – just check out the Wikipedia page – and yet the film isn’t all that different to other gialli. It was weirdly entertaining, even if the plot was opaque for much of its length. It felt a lot like a 1970s Euro drama in places, but then kept on doing that weird giallo thing. I’ve watched a lot of gialli the last few years, and some of them still surprise me and prove to be actually quite good, if off-the-wall, movies. Most are video nasties, but some I’d happily recommend.

Viking Destiny, David LG Hughes (2018, UK). A low-budget Viking film that actually looks more like a documentary about LARPers than it does a period drama. And stars Terence Stamp as Odin. Although he only appears for a few minutes. They probably spent most of their budget on him. And Paul Freeman. Which is not to say it’s a bad film. The opening scenes, which explain how the king’s daughter was swapped with his best friend’s son, are pretty bad. Years later, that son kills his father and seizes the throne – at the behest of Loki (Murray McArthur channelling Nicol Williams’s Merlin from Excalibur) – and blames it on the real king’s daughter. So she goes on the run. He proves to be a weak king, unsurprisingly. And his allies strip the kingdom. She meanwhile falls in with a bunch of forest pacifists. Of course, a battle between the two is inevitable – and so it goes. The fact the hero of the story is the princess is notable, and that the forest pacifists decide to fight, but the film was made on the cheap and it shows. To be fair, I’m more inclined to think better of a film that means well but fails in the execution (through lack of money, vision or talent) than a movie that boasts money, vision and talent but doesn’t mean well – and the fact the latter describes pretty much all Hollywood films is perhaps not a surprise.

Passengers, Rodrigo Garcia (2008, USA). This is not the sublimated rape fantasy where Chris Pratt condemns Jennifer Lawrence to a slow death on an interstellar spaceship because he was lonely. This Passengers is entirely different and entirely rips off The Survivor by James Herbert (which was made into an excellent film of the same title by David Hemmings and starring Robert Powell). It didn’t help that things in the story just didn’t work as shown, and the final reveal didn’t give a good enough explanation for those discrepancies. A psychologist, Anne Hathaway, is assigned to treat the survivors of a plane crash. But there is a shadowy figure stalking them and the airline insists the crash was caused by pilot error and not an exploding engine as witnessed by the survivors (hello? FAA investigation? Black box?) and Hathaway gets a wee bit too “therapeutic” with one of the survivors, Patrick Wilson… And then the survivors start to disappear one by one… Yawn. Watch The Survivor, don’t bother with this piece of crap.

Stranger from Venus, Burt Balaban (1954, UK). Classic British B-movie science fiction. A stranger appears at a remote country inn and claims to be from Venus. He’s able to demonstrate he’s not human – in one scene, he translates a newspaper article on the fly from English into a dozen different languages – which only creates bad impulses in some of those trapped in the inn with him. In other words, while some are dreaming of peaceful relations between the British Empire and Venus, others just want to steal his technology. Of course, the Venusians are too savvy for that, and the UK establishment’s greed only sours any possibility of future relations between the two planets. Science fiction has churned out thousands of these sorts of films, on both sides of the Atlantic, and elsewhere in the world, over the last 70 years, with a pretty simple message – stop being arseholes or things will go badly. Guess what? Things are still going badly. Perhaps because for every sf film that says “stop being arseholes”, there are 100 more that say “arseholes get rich and/or powerful”. But hey, it’s only entertainment. I mean, people don’t internalise that shit, do they, just like that they don’t internalise everyday racism and everyday sexism and so on. I call bullshit. If you make art that normalises Nazi sensibilities, you’re no different to a Nazi.

Furious, Dzhanik Fayziev (2017, Russia). I’m not sure what the English title is meant to evoke – bafflement, I would have thought, rather than anger – given that the original Russian, Легенда о Коловрате, translates as Legend of Kolovrat and the movie is about… a thirteenth-century Rus knight called Kolovrat who fought the Mongol Golden Horde to revenge the destruction of his home city, Ryazan. The film mostly covers the siege of Ryazan, and it’s more Game of Throne meets sanitised current-regime-Russia history than it is serious period drama. I mean, China has its wu xia and Russia… doesn’t. Although, with this movie, and both the remake of Viy (AKA Forbidden Kingdom; WTF?) and its surely-they’re-taking-the piss-with-this-retitling-thing sequel, The Iron Mask, there does seem to be an overlap between the two nations’ cinemas. It’s a bit like MCU. Except based on actual history. Sort of. Having said all that, Furious was good entertainment for a night in front of the telly. With beer.