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Bondathon!

During December I watched all of the 007 films in order after buying the Blu-ray collection for a cheap price on Black Friday. That’s twenty-four films, stretching from 1962 to 2015, featuring six actors as James Bond. Most people have their favourite Bond movie, and indeed their favourite Bond actor, but opinions differ widely on which are the good ones and which are the bad ones. Some, I think, we can all agree on… But I was surprised to find my own internal ranking of the films changing considerably as I watched the movies.

So, in reverse order, from worst to best, that’s worst to best, here are the movies…

24 Moonraker, Lewis Gilbert (1979). Bafflingly, some people actually think this is a good Bond film. They’re wrong. It’s fucking awful. It’s fan service all the way through, married to a plot that sticks like glue to the Bond formula, with a central premise as dumb as the Fake Moon Landings. Hugo Drax has stolen his own Space Shuttles so he can send crew to his stealth space station, from which he plans to re-populate the Earth after he has wiped out everyone with a deadly toxin. There are more holes in the script than in a block of Gruyere. There’s a resurrected Jaws, who eventually joins forces with Bond. And Moore’s Bond is at his most sexist – Lois Chiles is supposed to a scientist and astronaut, but is treated as if such a thing were impossible for a beautiful woman to be. Truly, Bond’s worst outing.

23 Die Another Day, Lee Tamahori (2002). The Brosnan films surprisingly proved to be quite bad, which I had not expected, although Brosnan certainly looked the part. Of the four Brosnan movies, this one is easily the worst – a North Korean general who has “gene therapy” to make himself look like Toby Stephens, discovers a lucrative diamond field in Iceland, and in under a year manages to become a darling of the UK’s political set. And then there’s the invisible car, FFS. I’m not sure what killed it for me: the invisible car, Will Yun Lee “becoming” Toby Stephens, the villain with the diamonds embedded in his face, or Bond walking into a Hong Kong luxury hotel after escaping from a North Korean prison and looking like an escapee from a, well, North Korean prison, and being treated like a frequent and much-valued guest. FFS.

22 A View to a Kill, John Glen (1985). The most eighties of the 007 films, from Christopher Walken as the villain, eighties icon Grace Jones as his sidekick, and a plot that focuses on Silicon Valley. To be honest, I was  cheering for the villains. Silicon Valley is full of a lot of very horrible people and the world would be a better place without them. But back in 1985, Silicon Valley was still viewed positively. Walken wants to destroy Silicon Valley so that he can corner the market in manufacturing microchips, which Intel have pretty much done entirely legally in the decades since, and most integrated circuit foundries aren’t in Silicon Valley anyway, it’s mostly software, but never mind. It sounded plausible back in 1985. If you didn’t think too hard. What didn’t sound plausible was corporate executives falling out of the sky when Walken dumps them from the blimp in which he holds his business meetings. Tanya Roberts was a very eighties Bond girl, part TV detective, part damsel forever in distress; and the chase scene with the ladder truck was quite good if over-long. No discussion of A View to a Kill would be complete without mention of the theme tune, which was by Duran Duran… and not the worst the theme tune by a long way.

21 Skyfall, Sam Mendes (2012). There was a general atmosphere of back-to-basics with the Craig Bond films. No more silly gadgets, no more jet-setting playboy (well, okay, maybe they’d keep that), but it would be a darker, more callous, more brutal Bond, like the one in Fleming’s novels… Instead, what we got was a superhuman Bond, able to snap restraints just by pulling his hands apart, and villains who could run giant server farms without the use of airconditioners. The giant server farm is important, because it allowed the villain access to all sorts of stuff, including MI6’s highly-secure computer network. Which is, er, not how computer networking works. When you remember that Tomorrow Never Dies actually mentions secure sockets, but by Skyfall it’s back to Star Trek levels of magical abilities with computers in order to drive the plot. The title refers to a house in the middle of the Highlands, the Bond family home, long since abandoned, where 007 takes a final stand against villain Javier Bardem, who is especially villainous because he is a little bit gay. Having said all that, Skyfall accidentally served quite well as the lead-in to the total retcon job that was…

20 Spectre, Sam Mendes (2015). So the secret organisation alluded to in Casino Royale, and which drove the plot of Quantum of Solace, was called Quantum. And Skyfall was totes unrelated to that story arc. But then Eon finally resolved the rights issues over Thunderball with Kevin McConroy, and that included the use of SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), so they retconned all three Craig films into one story arc such that Spectre (they ditched the naff acronym) could be the Big Baddies. And that’s what this film is all about. It’s about writing Blofeld back into the Bond franchise. And, to be honest, I’m not convinced it’s better than Skyfall – in fact, the two films should probably be considered 20= except…I like the way they introduce Moneypenny, and the chase sequence in Istanbul is pretty cool. On the other hand… in From Russia With Love, Sean Connery and Robert Shaw fight aboard a train and do a bit of damage to Bond’s compartment; in The Spy Who Loved Me, Bond fights Jaws and they trash 007’s compartment; but in Spectre, Craig Daniels and Dave Batista manage to destroy the interior of an entire fucking train during their fight scene. Craig’s Bond is some kind of superpowered superhero, which ruins the character; and Spectre does not help by having a wimp of a vaillain like Oberhausen.

19 Tomorrow Never Dies, Roger Spottiswoode (1997). Michelle Yeoh was probably the best Bond girl of them all, and there’s something frighteningly plausible about a media mogul kicking off a war just so he can break into the Chinese market… but Tomorrow Never Dies committed the common Bond sin of having an extended very violent action sequence in a real place which seems to go completely unnoticed by the authorities. In this one, a convoy of black SUVs and a black helicopter shoot up Bangkok (standing in for Ho Chi Minh City) and there’s not a single police officer or soldier to be seen. Compare that with the tank scene in St Petersburg in GoldenEye. The plot of Tomorrow Never Dies also depended far too much on a single piece of gadgetry – the stealth ship. These exist, of course – the USS Zumwalt, for example – but the problem with centring the plot on a single piece of gadgetry is that the writers have to stretch denial of its existence far longer than is plausible.

18 Live and Let Die, Guy Hamilton (1973). Two things about this film stand out: the Wings theme tune, and Jane Seymour in the role of Solitaire.This should be one of the good ones. It’s moore’s first outing in the role, and Yaphet Kotto makes an excellent villain. But, for all my preference for Bond films which dial down the gadgets and supervillains, Live and Let Die leaves me feeling meh. The speedboat chase had its moments, but goes on for far too long. The redneck sheriff should have been left on the cutting-room floor (and certainly should never have made it into a second Bond film), and the voodoo stuff seems to be used chiefly for colour without much actual explanation.

17 Diamonds Are Forever, Guy Hamilton (1971). In some respects, I think of this movie as the iconic Sean Connery Bond movie. It has it all: the silly gadgetry in that Moon Buggy, Blofeld (played by Charles Gray this time), and even a maguffin as ridiculous as a music cassette to drive the story – because of course the guidance program for a satellite launch would easily fit onto a C60… On the other hand, it all feels a bit tired, since Connery was only back after Lazenby walked away. Jill St John makes an excellent Bond girl, but villains Mr Wint and Mr Kidd are characterised as evil because they’re a little bit gay… It has that sort of emblematic, but not especially great, 007 feel to it all. It seems entirely fitting it is mostly set in Las Vegas…

16 GoldenEye, Martin Campbell (1995). This was Brosnan’s first outing as Bond, and the indications were he’d make a good fist of it. Okay, so the central premise of this film is pure bollocks – the Russians built a giant orbiting EMP gun which the US knew about, but they didn’t know about the second one they built and put into orbit? Er, right. And the control centre for this EMP gun, it has big tanks of liquid nitrogen and fuel alongside the computers. Who does that? Who puts fuel tanks in their server room? Isn’t that a recipe for disaster? Oh look, it all blows up very nicely. Sean Bean makes for a good villain, and the tank chase scene in St Petersburg at least had the advantage of being acknowledged by the authorities – even if, wierdly, no one seems to die after being crushed by a tank; shot to death, yes, but no one is killed in the chase scene from automobile accidents. There’s an optimism to GoldenEye the other Brosnan films lack, not just because there’s a new Bond but because glasnost means they can now film in Russia even if they have to look elsewhere for villains – but hey there are plenty of leftover bits of the USSR they can use… GoldenEye promised much, but Brosnan’s later outings as Bond failed to deliver. Mostly.

15 Dr No, Terence Young (1962). This was a difficult one to rank. Dr No is not an interesting villain – it’s a white actor in yellowface, FFS – but it’s the first Bond film, and that sort of gives the movie a certain cachet. It’s also a pretty stripped back story. Since it’s the first film, some of the elements of the formula had yet to become cliché, which works in its favour  – even so, there’s still a Bond girl, and Bond still has sex with an ally and a henchwoman. Ursula Andress is mostly a blank and she’s effectively written out of the story in around 30 minutes. The central premise – Dr No seizing control of US rockets after launch – is one the Bond films used several times – as indeed did Bond-spoof Matt Helm – and it has never really stood up to scrutiny. Plus, all that machinery at Crab Key… what was it for?

14 The Living Daylights, John Glen (1987). This was Timothy Dalton’s first appearance as Bond, and I vaguely remember people being unsure about his casting…. which is probably why Eon Productions went all out for this one. It even has a Harrier jump jet taking off from inside some sort of cooling tower! Dalton plays a no-nonsense Bond, who from the moment he first appears on screen takes no shit. The story has some interesting locations, but the two villains – Soviet general Jeroen Krabbé and toy soldier arms dealer Joe Don Baker – are a bit pathetic. Their tame assassin, played by Andreas Wisniewski, manages to make a completely monkey of the British secret services, which didn’t come across as all that plausible. And then, of course, there’s the theme tune, performed by A-Ha, which was a lot worse than I remembered it.

13 You Only Live Twice, Lewis Gilbert (1967). This was the first Bond film where the producers pretty much only took the title from Fleming’s novel. Not that the novel had much of a plot, it reads more like fleming showing off his research about Japan. Roald Dahl wrote the script, and kept the action in Japan, but instead threw in some SPECTRE silliness about rockets launching from a secret base inside a defunct volcano caldera in order to hijack US space capsules in orbit. Seriously? Their first rocket launch would have burnt out their entire secret hideout, and probably triggered an eruption. Also, to lift a spacecraft into orbit that could swallow the US Gemini capsule, they’d have needed a much bigger rocket. This was Connery’s fifth film as Bond, and he pretty much sleepwalks through it. In fact, he called it a day after this one, but ended up coming back for one more film after Lazenby walked away from the role. There’s some good aerial photography in the air combat scene with Little Nellie, but the formula had already pretty much taken over the franchise by this point.

12 For Your Eyes Only, John Glen (1981). This is the Bond film everyone forgets. It’s the one where, you know, Roger Moore, and, er, the Bond girl is Caroline Bouquet, and it’s set in Greece, I think?, and oh yeah, the chase scene with the 2CV… I watched the film around a month ago, and I’m having trouble remembering the plot. There was some secret device that could track nuclear missile submarines, and something about Olympic ice-skating, and then the scenes set in that Greek monastery on the top of a rock pillar… Despite all that, I remember enjoying it. Bouquet actually made a good Bond girl, with way more agency than pretty much all the Bond girls before her. The theme tune, sadly, is insipid.

11 Casino Royale, Martin Campbell (2006). I suspect I may have placed this much higher than it actually deserves. But Casino Royale was never covered by previous Bonds, despite being the first 007 novel by Fleming. The only previous feature film version was a spoof that had had half a dozen directors and only a passing acquaintance with the story. This version, the first appearance by Daniel Craig as Bond, hews much closer to the novel. And it’s sort of impressive, in how physical Craig has made the character, right from the start with the extended parkour sequence. Of course, ten minutes in and plausibility goes out of the window, when Bond shoots up a foreign embassy – I mean, he’s a trained agent of the government, and I’m pretty sure it says somewhere in the civil service handbook that you shouldn’t shoot the shit out of foreign embassies. The fact it all comes down to a very dull game of cards is a bit unfortunate – and all the jet set playboy stuff doesn’t quite gel with Craig’s hard man government agent 007 – but at least there’s the torture scene where Bond gets repeatedly thwacked in the scrotal sac. Eva Green is excellent, possibly the best of all the female characters to appear in Bond films, although leaving in Fleming’s completely misogynistic last line was a mistake.

10 The Spy Who Loved Me, Lewis Gilbert (1977). Okay, so the underwater Lotus was cool. Totally fake. But cool. But this is Moore’s Bond on top form – charming, urbane, witty, some actually quite neat gadgets, and a villain with the coolest hideout yet. And we also got Jaws, who proved so popular they resurrected him for a second outing. Barbara Bach played an ally and henchman Bond girl, and while she may not have made a convincing Russian, her character held its own against Bond. The model work, unfortunately, was a bit crap, and shipping magnate villain Curd Jürgens was no more plausible a megalomaniac than Moonraker‘s Hugo Drax. The supertanker was a neat idea, although the battle for it stretched credulity and felt pretty much like a restaging of the final battle in You Only Live Twice. The novel, incidentally, is the best in series – and its plot couldn’t be further from the film: a young woman working at a motel out in the sticks is saved by Bond passing through when gangsters turn up to torch the motel for an insurance scam. No supertankers, no underwater bases, no KGB.

9 Quantum of Solace, Marc Forster (2008). Popular wisdom has it that this is the worst of the four, to date, Daniel Craig Bond films, except… It’s clearly the best-looking of the four. Some of the staging is quite astonishingly pretty. And the plot doesn’t ask too much of the viewer. But, crucially, Bond doesn’t go superhuman in this one. He plays it like a hard man, but they dialled back the violence and it pays off in credibility. The story is not brilliant, but it’s Craig’s most human outing as Bond. And for that reason, it beats the other Craig 007s hands down.

8 Octopussy, John Glen (1983). I remembered this as bad, from when Bond became pretty much a parody of himself, so I was somewhat surprised to discover that time has been kind to Octopussy. The section set in India comes across as a homage to Bollywood, and the later sections are not so far-fetched they ruin suspension of disbeilef. True, it’s all a bit pantomime in places, and the Cold War is presented something more like Star Wars than an actual real piece of geopolitics. Moore looks over the hill as Bond, although it doesn’t affect his performance; and Maud Adams is appealing in the title role. It’s lightweight Bond, but it’s lightweight Bond that manages to put very few feet wrong. An under-appreciated film.

7 The Man with the Golden Gun, Guy Hamilton (1974). I would have been eight when this was released, but for some reason I remember it as fondly as if it were the first ever Bond film I saw. It’s from the height of 007’s silly gadget phase – a car that turns into a plane! the Solex solar-power doohickey! the giant solar-powered laser gun! – but Moore is on fine form. And I do like Scaramanga’s secret island. The redneck sheriff should have been left on the cutting-room floor, and making Bond girl Brit Ekland a comic turn was a good move. The film is one of the best-plotted in the franchise – and it’s a franchise which has alway been strong on plot, if not on incidental details – and runs like clockwork. I suspect one of the reasons I like this film more than I should is because I probably saw it first shortly after visiting Thailand on holiday. So I had the country fresh in my memory. This is Moore’s Bond at his best.

6 Thunderball, Terence Young (1965). Okay, so this one scores higher than it really should because central to the plot is an Avro Vulcan and I love me some V-bomber. The script was a collaboration between Fleming and two scriptwriters, and when the film looked to be delayed, Fleming went ahead and turned it into a novel, infringing the copyright of the other two so much that Connery was allowed to remake the film as Never Say Never Again in 1983. It wasn’t sorted out until after Skyfall was made. It takes Bond an inordinately long time to long to find the missing nuclear bomb, and he’s out on a limb with Whitehall all the time he’s looking. Unfortunately, there’s little drama because we know Bond is in the right place. That’s probably what spoils this film – that everyone else is looking in the completely wrong place, and only Bond is on the right track. Connery always played Bond smug, but here it’s much worse because he has the perfect right to be smug.

5 The World Is Not Enough, Michael Apted (1999). I wrote above that the Brosnan films are bad but, like all of the Bond films, they worked quite well when they didn’t bother with the stupid gadgets. The World is Not Enough keeps it simple: an oil pipeline, a nuclear warhead. Okay, so the USSR didn’t have missile silos, preferring mobile launchers they could parade past the Kremlin on May Day, but never mind. But the paraglider/ski chase is a neat nod to earlier Bond films. Robert Carlyle’s villain isn’t entirely convincing – he hams it up something terrible, although his accent is quite good – and Denise Richards made a poor Bond girl. But Sophie Marceau more than makes up for both. The final scenes set in the Maiden’s Tower in Istanbul are among the best in a Bond film.

4 From Russia with Love, Terence Young (1963). After the rocket-launch-interfering Dr No, From Russia With Love went straight back to basics and the Cold War. It was Fleming’s fifth novel, and Connery’s second film, and in the book its story takes place before Dr No. Bond is sent to Turkey after a cipher clerk in the Soviet embassy there professes to have fallen in love with him. It’s all a plot, of course, to get rid of Bond, by setting Robert Shaw on him. I seem to remember it was a KGB plot in the novel, but it’s SPECTRE in the film. Istanbul makes a much more interesting setting than Dr No’s Caribbean island, and From Russia With Love makes full use of it. I visited Instabul as a kid, but remember very little of it. I do remember seeing Sean Connery while we there, however. Myself and my father were in an antique gun shop in the Grand Bazaar when Connery, dressed as Bond, entered and posed for some publicity photos. He was actually in Istanbul filming Murder on the Orient Express, which would make it 1973 or 1974, so he was still playing 007 at the time.

3 Goldfinger, Guy Hamilton (1964). Of all the Bond films adapted from novels, this is probably the most faithful (Thunderball, of course, was a novelisation of the film, so it doesn’t count). It’s mostly remembered for Shirley Eaton being murdered by Goldfinger by having her body covered in gold paint. I’m still not sure if that’s for real, the skin “needing to breathe” thing – look on Youtube and you’ll see loads of videos of people body-painted all sorts of colours. Gert Fröbe is excellent in the title role, Bond’s best villains without a doubt. I know Honor Blackman gets a lot of love for her part, but I wasn’t especially impressed. The film also introduced Bond’s most iconic car, the DB5, with its ejector seat (which, to be honest, I never understood the logic behind). And the film includes the best line ever uttered by a Bond villain: “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.” To be honest, Bond gets out of that one a bit too easily. Goldfinger is definitely Connery’s most, well, Bond film.

2 Licence to Kill, John Glen (1989). After The Living Daylights, which felt slightly cheap despite clearly having a substantial budget, I was surprised to discover that Licence to Kill, the second Dalton 007 movie, felt even cheaper but also managed to tell a good story. Perhaps it’s that the desire for revenge humanises Bond, but whatever the reason, the story works really well. It also has one of the best Bond girls in Carey Lowell (although Talisa Soto is a bit of a wet blanket). Bond is on the hunt for a Central American drug lord whol killed Felix Leiter’s new bride and threw Leiter to a shark, resulting in him losing a leg and an arm. The film plays like an extended episode of a US maverick PI or cop show, but that sort of works in its favour. Bond does Bond things, without really being Bond – but then even if the Dalton films had not cut back on the gadgets, Bond would not have had access to them because he’s been cut off by MI6. I hadn’t expected much of Licence to Kill, and in fact remembered very little of the film from previous viewings (probably only one viewing, to be honest), but I enjoyed it and thought Dalton made an excelllent Bond.

1 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Peter R Hunt (1969). I had not expected to like this. Everyone says it’s bad, and Lazenby is generally considered the worst Bond… except… really? It’s not like Connery was especially good in the first two in which he appeared. But Lazenby does actually make Bond a more sympathetic character, and his relationship with Tracy is completely believable. Best of all, however, is that Lazenby can fight. The fight scenes in OHMSS are hugely superior to any in the Connery or Moore films. When Lazenby throws a punch, he fucking punches. During a screentest, he apparently knocked out a stuntman by accident. It shows. The fourth-wall-breaking quips to camera are just gravy. This is a Bond that fits the books and the films. It’s a shame Lazenby never took it further.

So there you have it. Twenty-four films, ranked. As they should be. Anyone who disagrees is, of course, wrong-headed.


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Moving pictures 2018, #4

I still seem to be watching a lot of films. Normal service – well, normal as of 2015 – should be resumed soon…

Cinema Komunisto, Mira Turajlic (2010, Serbia). Back in the day, Yugoslavia as was decided to attract foreign investment by opening up one of its state-run studios, Avala Film in Belgrade, to foreign film-makers. President Tito was a big movie-fan, so it gave him the opportunity to meet many film stars, such as Orson Welles or Kirk Douglas. Cinema Komunisto uses both archive footage and interviews with those who worked at Avala. The facilities are now pretty much ruins, but the massive wardrobe and props departments still exist. It’s interesting stuff, with lots of nice touches – like the bridge Avala helpfully blew up for a US war movie, only for the film-makers to use a model shot in the final cut; or the US film star who complimented Tito on his wonderful palace, only to be told it was the “people’s palace”. Yeah right. “Socialist” dictators and their insulting fiction of non-ownership of their wealth. Worth seeing.

Yojimbo, Akira Kurosawa (1961, Japan). I thought I’d seen this, but it seems I think I’ve watched more Kurosawa films than I actually have. And this was one of the ones I hadn’t actually seen. That has now been remedied. Obviously. The title means “bodyguard” and refers to the character played by Toshiro Mifune, who is never named. He wanders into a town in which two rival gangs have the local populace terrorised. Mifune decides to do something about it, by playing one gang off against the other. I’m told the story is based on Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, which I’ve never read, although Kurosawa claimed it was based on Hammett’s The Glass Key. Yojimbo was certainly lifted pretty much wholesale by Sergio Leone, however, transplanted to the Wild West and made as A Fistful of Dollars. Which seems entirely approproate as, despite its setting in mediaeval Japan, there is very much a Wild West air to the film. There are guns – one of the enforcers in one gang has a revolver, makes much use of it – but most of the fight scenes feature swords. The characters seem a little caricatured, much like in a spaghetti Western, including the boar-like brother of one gangster, and the seven-foot tall enfrocer of the other. Kurosawa clevery ramps up the violence as the film progresses, until the final showdown results in the destruction of the businesses of the two merchants who back each of the two gangs. I’ve stuck a load of Kurosawa on my rental list recently, as I really should watch more of his films.

People on Sunday, Robert Siodmak & Edgar G Ulmer (1930 Germany). I had thought this was a documentary, but it isn’t. It’s actually a drama, made by a film club in Berlin, a fact the film actually makes a point of. It opens by introducing the main actors, and points out that once the film is over they will be returining to their day jobs, which it helpfully indicates. The story follows four friends on a Sunday, as they head for Wannsee to enjy the summer sun on the beach. As siilent dramas go, People on Sunday ticks all the boxes, but what makes the film remarkable – and it can hardly be “a pivotal film on the development of German cinema”, as Wikipedia puts it, if Lubitsch was making popular films in Berlin more than a decade earlier – but what is certainly remarkable about People on Sunday is the number of people involved in it who went on to have careers in Hollywood. Not only the two directors, Siodmak and Ulmer, but also Curt Siodmak, Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann. Worth seeing.

The Calm, Krzysztof Kieślowski (1976, Poland). One of Kieślowski’s favourite actors, Jerzy Stuhr, plays an ex-con who tries to turn his life around after being released from prison. It’s never revealed what he was sent down for, although it seems unlikely to have been a violent crime. Stuhr leaves Kraków and heads out into the country. He gets a job on a building site, where the manager seems to trust him – although not, it transpires, for necessarily the right reasons. He meets a young woman, the two marry and a baby is on the way. His has turned his life around and everything is going well. He is a model member of society. But materials keep on disappearing from the building site, and when the manager threatens to take the cost of the missing materials out of everyone’s wages, they go on strike. Stuhr ends up as an unwilling liaison between the two. And learns that the manager himself is responsible for the thefts – and that he trusts Stuhr because Stuhr, an ex-con, would make a good patsy should the scheme be uncovered. Stuhr can’t resolve the situation and his fellow workers decide he is a scab. So they beat him up. This is not a cheerful film, although it initially appears to be. It seems Kieślowski is trying to say that no matter how hard you work to improve yourself, the system will still fuck you up in the end for no good reason. And in 1970s Poland, that was likely true. So it’s a little ironic that The Calm was banned by the Polish authorities, and didn’t get shown until 1980, because it depicted a strike and strikes were illegal in Poland.

Still Life, Jia Zhangke (2006, China). That’s the last of the Christmas presents, and the last of Jia’s films until the box set containing Mountains May Depart that I’ve pre-ordered arrives. His films really are brilliant, so much so that each time I watch a new one I have to decide whether or not it is my new favourite Jia film. Still Life came close, perhaps just inching out 24 City but not managing to steal the top spot from The World. Still Life is set in the Three Gorges area and tells the story of Han Sanming (played by Han Sanming), who has returned to travelled to track down his wife and daughter who ran away sixteen years earlier. But the address he has for them is now underwater, part of the city that has been destroyed for the Three Gorges Dam project. Sanming joins a local demolition crew, who are demolishing buildings using lump hammers. The film then shifts to Shen Hong (played by Zhao Tao, who played the lead in The World, and Han Sanming played her boyfriend), a nurse who is in Fengjie to look for her husband, who it turns out has become a successful local businessman. In fact, he runs several demolition contracts, and Sanming works for him. He also has a rich girlfriend. When Shen Hong finds this out, she asks for a divorce. In the final section of the film, Sanming’s wife turns up and reveals that their daughter is now working furthe rsouth in indentured labour to pay off the wife’s brother’s debt. Sanming offers to take wife and daughter with him, but he would have to pay off the debt – and he doesn’t have the money. so he returns alone to the coal maines of Shanxi… Although a drama, Still Life plays like a documentary – it’s one of the chief appeals of Jia’s films – and some of the scenery on display is fantastic. The Three Gorges region is astonishingly beautiful, but it is also heavily built-up and, during the period the film was made, was being slowly demolished and flooded for the dam. It makes for some striking cinematography. Excellent stuff.

Ich möchte kein Mann sein, Ernst Lubitsch (1918, Germany). The title translates as “I don’t want to be a man”. Ossi Oswalda plays the high-spirited daughter of an indulgent uncle. When he leaves, she is put in the charge of a new guardian, who is far more strict. So she dresses up as a man and goes out on the town, ending up in a posh ball, where she finds it much harder to be a man than she had expected. She bumps into her new guardian, and tries to steal his date in revenge. Unfortunately, someone else has more success, and Oswalda and her guardian drown their sorrows in drink and become great friends. So much so they begin kissing each other. When they leave the ball, the cab driver drops Oswalda off at the guardian’s house, and vice versa. But it all works out in the end. Oswalda is undoubtedly the star of the film – there wouldn’t be a film without her. Her bad behaviour in the opening section of the film does an excellent job of outlining her character; and her antics when cross-dressed, most of which are based on a complete obliviousness to her disguise, display excellent comic timing. When you consider that Ich möchte kein Mann sein was made a dozen years before People on Sunday, and there’s not all that much that’s technically different between the two… it does undermine the claims to importance of People on Sunday. The latter is undoubtedly the better film – it’s longer, 73 minutes to the 41 minutes of the Lubitsch, and it’s a drama played completely straight and which makes a feature of its amateur cast. Ich möchte kein Mann sein is a flat-out comedy, although not the fall-about slapsatick comedy Hollywood was making at the time, and it makes a meal of its “fish out of water” story. A fun film, but one chiefly for fans of silent cinema.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 895


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Moving pictures 2018, #3

Moving swiftly on… This year, this blog is not going to turn into a repeat of last year. Honest. There will be content other than film reviews (or rants). But it’s going to take me time to get to that point, as I need to change a few of the bad habitds I’ve picked up over the last two years, so you’ll have to bear with me for a few weeks…

The Red Turtle, Michaël Dudok de Wit (2016, France). Sometimes, Amazon Prime really does throw up pleasant surprises. It would have thrown up more, recently, but it seems when they upgraded it they broke the subtitling thing, and they don’t show now unless they’re burned into the print. Which is fucking annoying. Streaming, eh. And people wonder why I prefer DVDs and Blu-rays… Not that the subtitle bug caused any problems with The Red Turtle, as it is notable for having no dialogue. A man is washed ashore on a deserted island. His attempts to escape on rafts are thwarted by turtles. Especially a large red turtle, which he manages to capture and drag on shore. The following morning, the red turtle has become a woman with red hair. The two live together and have a child. The child grows to a man. Who attempts to leave the island. And, okay, I admit, when the son was an adult, I spent most of the time wondering where his trousers had come from. It’s not like his father had a spare pair. But the animation in The Red Turtle is astonishingly beautiful, although not in a Makoto Shinkai way, more a ligne claire way. It’s not the most dramatic story to make it to the silver screen, true; but there’s some clever foreshadowing, and the lack of dialogue is no handicap to following the narrative. The Red Turtle has been praised by many and won a couple of awards, and Dudok de Wit won a special prize for Un Certain Regard at Cannes. The film was nominated for an Oscar but lost out to Zootopia (which I’ve not seen, but… really?). A definite candidate for my best of the year list.

Becoming Bond, Josh Greenbaum (2017, USA). My promised Bondathon blog post is still to come – that’s the one in which I rank all twenty-four official 007 films in order, after watching them over 2 to 3 weeks… It should come as no real surprise that I think the best Bond film is… On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In fact, I thought the best Bond movies were the stripped-back ones, without the stupid gadgets or supervillains. OHMSS was George Lazenby’s sole outing as Bond and popular wisdom likes to have it the film was bad and he was fired from the role as a result. In fact, Lazenby turned down a seven-film contract and a $1 million signing bonus (this was in 1969, so it was a fuckton of money). True, the film was generally considered one of the lesser movies in the franchise, but it has since been critically re-appraised and many consider it the best. I happen to agree. Becoming Bond is Lazenby’s story. He’s interviewed by the film-makers, but parts of his life are also dramatised, with Josh Lawson playing a young Lazenby. Lazenby’s career path to Bond is pretty well-known: mechanic to car salesman to male model. At the time Connery announced his retirement from 007, Lazenby was best known for a series of adverts for Big Fry chocolate. Broccoli met Lazenby and asked him to audition for the role of Bond. When Peter Hunt, editor on previous Bond films who had been given the director’s chair for OHMSS, met Lazenby, the role was pretty much his. Filming went well, although Lazenby insisted on doing his own stunts – there are conflicting stories about relations on-set, although the one about Rigg despising Lazenby, so much so she chewed garlic before a scene in which they kissed, is apparently untrue. Once OHMSS had been released, Lazenby refused to play ball with the producers. He turned up to the premiere sporting a beard. And he refused to sign a seven-film contract, despite the $1 million signing fee, partly thanks to bad advice from his agent who told him he could probably get $500,000 a role for any film going forward. Unfortunately, his film career pretty much died. He went into real estate, and earned a very comfortable living. Lazenby made a really good Bond. True, he was a bit stiff at first, but as the film progresses he settles into the role, so much so that he’s more convincing when undercover as Pursuivant, Griffin Or Sir Hillary Bray than Connery ever was as Bond himself. And in the action scenes, Lazenby displays real physical presence. The Bond fight scenes were always a bit crap, but Lazenby throws punches like they were real punches (he actually knocked out a stunt man during his audition). The next Bond to come close to Lazenby’s physicality is Timothy Dalton. Daniel Craig may be very physical, but it’s cartoon violence – compare the fight scenes set aboard a train in From Russia with Love and Spectre. Anyway, I should be saving all this for my Bondathon post. Becoming Bond is a fascinating documentary, which cemented my view that OHMSS is the best of the 007 movies.

Pedestrian Subway, Krzysztof Kieślowski (1974, Poland). I bought this box set when it was released a year ago, and it’s sat in its shrinkwrap until now. But Cinema Paradiso and the Royal Mail were conspiring against me in the week before and after Christmas, so I dragged it out and bunged in the first  Blu-ray… And this collection is really well presented. Really well presented. I had Dekalog on DVD, on two DVDs in fact, bought back in 2002 and 2004; but when this box set appeared, I bought it, and passed on the DVDs to a friend. And I’m glad I bought the boxset, and not just because of its additional material. As well as the ten episodes from Dekalog, two per disc, there are also one TV movie per disc and one documentary. I’ve not watched all of the latter, but Pedestrian Subway is the first of the TV movies. It was shot in black and white and takes place in a subway in Warsaw which boasts a dozen or so shops. A teacher is on a school trip to Warsaw, and sneaks away to visit a shop in the subway, in which works a woman, whom he apparently knows. The dialogue reveals that she is his wife and that he threw her out after catching her in flagrante delicto with another man. But now he misses her and regrets his decision. Apparently, Kieślowski threw away all the footage he had originally shot as he wasn’t happy with it, and hurriedly reshot the film from start to finish. It’s a clever piece of work – the relationship between the man and woman is revealed piecemeal, the events in the subway are a subtle criticism of the Polish regime, and some of those who appeared in the film had professional relationships with Kieślowski over a number of years. Dekalog is good drama on its own – which was something I had forgotten until I rewatched them, and I do find Kieślowski’s feature films a bit middle-brow – but these TV movies new to me turned out to be pretty damn good, so this is definitely a collection worth having.

Bahubali: The Beginning, SS Rajamouli (2015, India). I was recommended this film by Indian colleagues at work, and I’m happy to add Bollywood film to my rental list – classic or modern. In fact, I’ve now got my mother watching Bollywood films. I lent her a couple, and now she looks for them in charity shops and has just given me Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna to watch … But Bahubali. Or Baahubali. This is very definitely modern Indian cinema, despite being set some five hundred years ago. It’s not actually Bollywood but Tollywood – a Telugu-language film rather than Hindi, and the second Bahubali film has been been India’s biggest box office hit ever. The first one also did really well, and clearly had a huge amount of money spent on it. It is, in fact, a total CGI fest. It opens with a woman falling down a massive waterfall. She dies, but her baby survives and is brought up by local villagers. But he is super-strong and repeatedly tries to climb up the waterfall to discover the land above. When he finally does make it, he witnesses a young woman being chased by soldiers. She escapes and he follows her to a cave, and learns she is a member of a group of rebels in the Mahishmati empire, supporters of a queen who is being held by the current emperor. So the young man, called Shivudu, helps her, and discovers that he’s actually the queen’s son. The film then goes into total flashback and explains how Bhallaladeva and Shivudu’s father, Bahubali, went to war for the throne of Mahishmati. The battle scenes are fantastic – a cast of tens of thousands, almost all of which are CGI, but pretty convincing CGI. The waterfall too is CGI – it appears to be several thousand feet high, which is just ridiculous, but all in keeping with the general scale of the film. It’s like Lord of the Rings without the hobbits and elves and orcs. But turned up to eleven. And I’ve yet to watch the second film…

Side/Walk/Shuttle, Ernie Gehr (1991, USA). While hunting for a Benning film to watch on Youtube, I stumbled across this. Gehr also makes experimental films, and his career too began in the 1960s. I do like experimental films, although the most prominent examples appear to be American and I’d like to see more by other nationalities. But I’ve watched Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage and Bill Baillie, and I’d like to see more US ones too. Side/Walk/Shuttle was filmed from an outside elevator at a San Francisco hotel, and consists of footage from the lift and an unrelated soundtrack. It’s hypnotic, in the way real art can be, despite its simplicity. One of the beauties of video art is that anyone can do it, but it has to all fit together for it to be art. If you know what I mean. What differentiates random footage and art is purpose and structure, even if neither are apparent. A person locks off a camera and films ten minutes of a forest. That’s not art. But if the film-maker is trying to prove a point, or has a message, then it is. Even if not all the clues to to that point or message are evident. I’m reminded of a Turner Prize nominee from a decade or so ago which was basically a copy of the cover art of  a science fiction novel – by Tony Roberts, I seem to recall – but the art was more than just a painting. I’ve said before that video installations are my favourite form of art, and one of the beauties of video art is that you can embed the extra-textual knowledge in it. Which some do. Other make it part of the exhibit – ie, the text explaining the installation. You can’t avoid extra-textual knowledge in any artform. The alternative is “As you know, Bob,” conversations and the worst sort of exposition, which we science fiction readers know all about. On the one hand, I think art should be more than just is presented because it needs to be in dialogue with previous art and with culture; on the other, not everyone is sufficiently informed to plug into that dialogue. Catering to the latter only results in bad art.

Personnel, Krzysztof Kieślowski (1975, Poland). One of the ways in which this collection proves its worth is in the included documentaries. In KKTV, critic of Polish cinema Michael Brooke discusses Kieślowski’s career. Brooke doesn’t have much screen presence, and is clearly reading from a prepared script (and I was amused to spot the Mondo Vision editons of Żuławski’s films on the shelves behind him). But what Brooke had to say was very interesting. And when talking about Personnel, he made the film seem far more interesting than it would have initally appeared. A young man joins the staff of a local theatre in the costume department, and witnesses how the company operates on a day to day basis. He becomes involved in a denunciation of a colleague, and has to choose between loyalty to his friend or his own career… It’s a dilemma many, even in the UK or US, can likely identify with, although in communist Poland the consequences were far more severe. Brooke mentions that Personnel is partly autobiographical, that one of Kieślowski’s first job was in a theatre, and that some of the incidents in the film Kieślowski has admitted in interviews were taken from his own experiences. I don’t think the central one is, however, in which one of the performers publicly bollocks and humiliates a member of the wardrobe department on stage (the man who is eventually denounced, in fact). But I think the incident with the exploding cigarettes might have actually happened to Kieślowski.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 895


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Moving pictures 2018, #2

I plan to watch less films in 2018 than I did in 2017, and already I’m spending an hour reading when I get home from work, and only putting a film on afterwards. And yet I’m three dozen films in and it’s only the 17 January as I type this, and I’ve a third and fourth post, with another dozen movies already lined up… Oh well.

Nightfall, James Benning (2011, USA). I found this on Youtube, which seems to be the place to find Benning films, as the Österreichisches Filmmuseum has only released half a dozen or so DVDs of his work. Some of his films are apparently available via Mubi, but I’ve yet to subscribe to it. Meanwhile, there are (often low-quality) copies uploaded to Youtube by various fans, plus Benning’s own Youtube account. Nightfall has nothing to do with Asimov, thankfully, but is 98 minutes of a forest high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the sun sets. That’s it. Benning locks off his digital camera, and leaves it running. It’s about as stripped-back Benning as you can get. Unfortunately, there’s an extra-textual element to much of Benning’s work – the juxtapositon of sound and vision, for example, and the reasoning behind it – and watching one of his films on Youtube means you don’t have access to that extra-textual knowledge. You can google for it… and I did. But all I could find claimed that Nightfall was precisely what it presented to be. But, knowing Benning’s work, I suspect there’s more to it than just that. I shall have to look further.

Elle, Paul Verhoeven (2016, France). This was a Christmas present. The last I’d heard, Verhoeven was working on some project back in the Netherlands after his successful Black Book, and it seemed pretty certain his Hollywood career was on hiatus as, despite the success of his Hollywood films, I suspect he was too idiosyncratic and the sequels by other hands to his movies had seen diminishing returns. Now, the movies he made in Hollywood were (mostly) top-notch, and while the Starship Troopers live-action franchise (not to be confused with the CGI one) upped the satire with each new installment, it also lowered the audience figures. The Robocop sequels went into a death spiral in terms of both quality and commercial success. And the sequel to Basic Instinct was a Sharon Stone vanity project, and rightfully bombed. (There was also an unofficial sequel to Showgirls, made by a porn actress who had a bit part in the original; it’s absolutely fucking dreadful.) So, Verhoeven: no longer Hollywood. And now he appears to have reinvented himself as French cinema’s successor to Andrzej Żuławski. Because Elle pretty much plays like Verhoeven channelling Żuławski. Which is no bad thing, I hasten to add. Plus, it stars La Huppert. Which is also a good thing – she is probably the best actor currently making films. In Elle, she plays the CEO of a video games company which has a fairly typical testosterone-driven nerd culture. One night, she is raped by a man who breaks into her house. Afterward, she carries on as if nothing had happened – but now she is suspicious of every man in her life: employees, friends, neighbours… The violence is played flat and brutal, which is a Verhoeven trademark, but the way the story pans out feels more Żuławski… although Verhoeven doesn’t have his cast acting as emphatically as Żuławski does. It’s an odd film, a very French drama into which these violent incidents erupt. Which is, I suppose, very Verhoevenesque.

Utamaro and His Five Women, Kenji Mizoguchi (1946, Japan). David Tallerman, who likes his Mizoguchi, gave me this box set as he had upgraded his copies of the films it included. (I’ve done the same for him when I’ve upgraded from DVD to Blu-ray.) Utamaro and His Five Women is set during the Edo Period in, er, Edo. The film opens with a samurai art student taking issue with the text on a print of a painting by Utamaro. He tracks him down and challenges him to a duel. Utamaro challenges him to a drawing contest instead… which he wins so handily, the art student joins him as an apprentice. And it’s the new apprentice’s girlfriend who becomes the first of Utamaro’s women, each of whom are combinations of model and muse. The second is a famous courtesan who has him paint on her back for a tattoo artist to use as an outline (as per the box set cover art). Another of his women is a lady’s maid he spots at the beach, diving into the sea among a large group of women and bringing out fish. One of the interesting things about this film – and it’s a good film if you like Japanese historical films – is that it was made under American Occupation immediately following WWII, and the Americans didn’t like the Japanese to make historical films as they thought they were militaristic and nationalistic (according to Wikipedia). But they let Mizoguchi make this.

Mystery, Lou Ye (2012, China). Another Christmas present. Lou is a Sixth Generation director from China, and I’m a big fan of those films by the group I’ve seen. Other members include Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai, Zhang Yuan,  whose films I’ve seen and much admire; and Lu Chuan and He Jianjun, whose movies I haven’t seen. Lou’s Suzhou River is a thriller/drama with a very clever structure; Mystery, a later film, also uses a non-linear narrative to tell its story. It also has that same documentary style approach to its narrative, which is, I freely admit, one of the real draws of Sixth Generation films. The movie opens with a young woman wandering out into a road and being hit by one of two racing sportcars. Except it may not have been an accident, as she appears to have been fatally assaulted beforehand. Lu Jie makes friends with Sang Qi at a playground where both their kids play. Sang is convinced her husband is having an affair and asks Lu to meet her at a coffee-shop to discuss the advisability of hiring a private detective. But it turns out the coffee shop overlooks the hotel where Sang’s husband meets his mistress. Except… Lu sees her own husband entering the hotel with a young woman. So Lu investigates, and discovers that Sang is also her husband’s mistress and Sang’s young son was fathered by him… You have to keep your wits about you to follow this, although the way the story is presented is deceptively simple. It’s the flashbacks, you see. The situation is complicated, and only revealed piecemeal. Definitely worth seeing.

Notre musique, Jean-Luc Godard (2004, France). I’m almost done with this Godard box set, and I’m really glad I bought it. These are films to watch again and again. Godard’s films have never been exactly traditional. Even in his early Nouvelle Vague movies, he played around with narrative forms. Later, he experimented even further. And continues to do so. Notre musique is from Godard’s phase when he mixed fact and fiction, and often played the protagonist himself. After an opening non-narrative section of documentary war footage, the film presents Godard waiting at an airport prior to flying to an arts conference in Sarajevo. He meets a man who will be an interpreter at the conference, French, but originally Israeli, whose niece will also be at the conference. Godard is interviewed by an Israeli journalist, who later interviews Mahmoud Darwish. Both interviews concern Israeli-Palestinian relations. For all his cleverness and cinimatic tricksiness, Godard was never especially subtle. His films are always about something, and if it’s not that which drives the narrative, then you can be sure the characters will discuss it a number times during the movie. Some of his films in fact are little more than discussions among members of the cast. In order to make a point, Godard not only uses language, ie, the spoken word, but also the language of narrative, and even the language of cinema. The epitome of this being, of course, his film Goodbye to Language (see here). (Although I prefer his Film Socialisme (see here), which is similar.) It’s not necessary to agree with Godard’s argument to appreciate his films, but then I don’t think he expects his films to be persuasive per se, more that they’re presented as arguments and their chief purpose is to provoke discussion (but from a sincere position). Anyway, this is by no means Godard’s best film of this sort, nor his most intriguing; but it certainly bears rewatching.

Emperor, Peter Webber (2012, USA). My mother lent me this one. I’ve watch a film about General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito before, but it was Sokurov’s The Sun (see here), which could not be more different to this US take on the same historical events. Emperor is told from the point of view of Brigadier-General Bonner Fellers (a real person, like everyone in this film), who was a member of MacArthur’s staff and tasked with discovering Hirohito’s complicity in declaring war on the US. Before the war, Fellers had been in a relationship with a Japanese woman studying in the US, but she had returned home hurriedly for family reasons. He followed her back to Japan, weathered anti-Western sentiment from newly-militarised Japanese society, and met her father, a decorated general. As a Japanist, he’s a good choice to investigate Hirohito, although he did abuse his position during the war so that his girlfriend’s town was avoided by US Army Air Force bombers. MacArthur, meanwhile, is more concerned about using his occupation of Japan as a stepping-stone to the US presidency. To that end, he runs roughshod over Japanese imperial protocol. I happen to think humans are not gods, divine right is a con, and anyone who thinks royalty is any way different to anyone else is stupid. Despite that, Emperor was based on historical events and, as far as I can tell from some quick online research, quite accurate. Okay, Tommy Lee Jones somewhat overwhelmed MacArthur, but the remaining cast were, I guess, sufficiently unknown to me they could be seen as the historical characters they played. The CGI showing a devastated Japan was quite effective but, to be honest, the whole felt more worthy than it felt notable.

1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die count: 895


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Moving pictures 2018, #1

I’ve no plans to give up writing about the films I’ve watched – and I still plan to chase completing the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list 2013 edition, and to watch films from as many countries as I can. But I’m not intending to write another seventy of these posts in 2018 as I’m going to try and read more books this year.

The Salt of the Earth, Wim Wenders & Juliano Ribeiro Salgado (2014, France). I don’t know if I stuck this on my rental list because it was by Wim Wenders or because it was a documentary that looked interesting. But it certainly shouldn’t be confused with the excellent 1954 social drama about a strike at a US mine, whose title lacks the definite article. The Salt of the Earth is about photographer Sebastião Salgado. Born in Brazil, Salgado was originally an economist. While living and working in Paris, his wife bought him a camera. He began using it on his trips to other countries. Eventually, he gave up his career to focus on photography. His photographic work tends to stark black and white photographs of people in extreme situations – refugees, famine victims, war, workers at a vast open gold mine… It’s fascinating stuff, and Salgado’s work is both beautiful and harrowing, some of it perhaps too harrowing. Although Salgado has been exhibited all over the world, I’ve never seen any of his exhibitions – but then it’s only the last five or six that I’ve started visiting art museums, and I usually go to the modern art ones… but I did discover the work of Richard Mosse at one such. (Although this Christmas, I visited the David Collection‘s exhibition of Islamic Art, which was cool; and I liked their exhibition of paintings by Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864 – 1916).) Anyway, The Salt of the Earth is worth seeing.

Logan, James Mangold (2017, USA). Professor X says “fuck”! He says it a lot! I mean, okay, you expect that from Wolverine, but Professor X dropping the f-bomb is just weird. One day, someone will decide Logan is a post-superhero film, when in fact it’s just a straight-up superhero film, and if it does something new in MCU terms, I’m pretty sure the comics have covered similar ground many times in the past. Logan works as a limo driver, he is ageing and his powers are waning. He lives just over the border in Mexico, in an old industrial plant, where he and Caliban look after a doped-up Professor X. Who is doped-up because he had some sort of mental fit which killed a lot of people and they’re medicating him to prevent a re-occurrence. And then a woman turns up with a young girl in tow and begs for Wolverine’s help. It turns out Nasty Corp has tried to weaponise mutants by breeding kids with superpowers – come on, who wants to play in a universe in which scientists experiment on children? Are you sick? – and the girl is one of them, in fact she has Wolverine-like powers and is a pretty mean fighter to boot. So snarky cyborg enforcer, with private army at his back, and Mengele-like scientist played by Richard E Grant, go mano a mano against Logan, who has gone on the run with the Prof and the girl… And that’s about it. Yawn. It’s a chase movie, the baddies are tooled up, the good guys are either old or young but still not massively outmatched… It’s a definite improvement on the usual dreadful superhero films with their cartoon characters, who cause as much damage as the supervillains, and cartoon violence and cartoon morality. They don’t even have the saving grace of cartoon wit. It might well be that Logan is the superhero film growing up, but it’s got a long way to go yet.

The Sense of an Ending, Ritesh Batra (2017, UK). I read Julian Barnes’s novel of the same title during Bloodstock last year. I seem to remember it being a bit of a damp squib. A very nicely written novel, but it just sort of petered out, and its concerns were so trivial I really couldn’t care about any of its cast. And the same is, unsurprisingly, true for the film. Jim Broadbent plays a very Jim Broadbent character, who has his past rudely thrust in his face when he’s willed a diary by the mother of a woman he used to see when he was at university thirty-plus years earlier. Except he doesn’t have the diary. Because the woman, played by Charlotte Rampling, won’t give it to him. In fact, she tells him she destroyed it. So he stalks her, and discovers she has a mentally disabled son called Adrian… which is also the name of Broadbent’s best mate at school, who went on to marry Rampling after she and Broadbent drifted apart. Prompting a really shitty letter to them on his part. However, Adrian junior is not Rampling’s son, but her half-brother. And Broadbent sort of remembers an afternoon alone with Rampling’s mother… Yawn. We all confabulate, it’s a fact of life. It seemed a really feeble point to a story that didn’t appear to be going anywhere – no matter how well-acted, or -written, it was. Missable.

Suntan, Argyris Papadimitropoulos (2016, Greece). You know that story in The New Yorker that went viral the other week, and the writer ended up with a $1.2 million advance for her short story collection? There’s no logic behind why one thing goes viral and another doesn’t, although the story clearly described a situation many women had experienced. I’ve seen plenty of evidence of it happening on social media myself. It’s the same premise which drives Suntan. Kostis is hired as a doctor on a small holiday island. He keeps mostly to himself, but one day he treats a twenty-one-year-old female tourist, Anna, who flirts with him and invites him to the beach with her friends. So, after work, he heads down there, and sees Anna and her friends sunbathing nude or in skimpy outfits. They recognise him and he joins them… and over the space of several days, he spends his time after work hanging out with them. One evening, the two have sex on the beach. But then Anna disappears for several days, and when she returns Kostis is furious she left without telling him. She saw no reason to tell him, and is put off by his behaviour. He does the male thing, and stalks her. The film ends with a drunk Kostis, who has been fired from his job for his bad behaviour, kidnapping Anna… I have not watched much Greek cinema, only four films in fact, by Angelopoulos, Lanthimos, Tsangari and now Papadimitropoulos; but what I’ve seen has been very good. Recommended.

Your Name, Makoto Shinkai (2016, Japan). There’s no doubt Shinkai has produced some of the best feature-film anime to have come out of Japan this century – Your Name‘s home box office is only second for anime to Spirited Away (and Spirited Away holds the record for highest-grossing film in Japan). Mitsuha lives in a small town in central Japan. She has dreams about a boy in Tokyo. One day, she finds the words “Who are you?” written in her exercise book, and her friends remark on her weird behaviour the day before. It turns out she and the boy, Taki, have been swapping bodies. They help each other with other’s lives, communicating via notes or text messages they leave each other. Taki tries to track Mitsuha down, but all he has is a sketch of her town. He eventually discovers the town was destroyed by a meteorite, a piece of a passing comet, three years earlier. Their body-swapping time-slipped. So Taki tries to tell Mitsuha she must persuade the town to evacuate on that night… As you would expect from Shinkai, the animation in Your Name is gorgeous. It takes a moment before the story starts to pick up and it’s clear what’s going on – the viewer is initially just as confused as Mitsuha. But as the plot unfolds – as it’s clever how it works out – so you’re drawn into, first, the mystery, then the rush to warn Mitsuha, and, finally, the race to change the past. Good stuff. I suspect this may be an early runner for by top five of the year.

Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson (2017, USA). So let’s talk about The Last Jedi. It is, I think, the dumbest of the Star Wars films yet, and that’s not an especially high bar to clear. It does some things well and it makes some interesting choices, but in its headlong rush to reset the universe back to what it was when the franchise kicked off, it runs a series of set-pieces which make zero sense either in relation to the world-building, the characters, or the warped physics that pertain in space opera movies. I liked that the Resistance is now run by women, older women, and I can’t help but wonder what the film might have looked like had Carrie Fisher completed filming. I liked Laura Dern’s character and I thought she was used well. But. Poe Dameron is not only a liability, he was pretty much responsible for the destruction of the Resistance. I realise the story template needed to have the Resistance reduced to a small band of heroes (which is a blatant retcon of the original trilogy, anyway; but never mind), but Dameron should have been booted out of the airlock after his first stupid stunt with the space bombers. (“I like him,” says General Organa… even though his dumb plan just resulted in the deaths of around 90% of the Resistance? Huh.) And… space bombers. WWII in space is one thing, but… space bombers. Bombs don’t fall in space… because there’s no gravity. It’s one thing to send a squadron of really slow spaceships on a suicidal mission – stupid, but it fits Dameron’s character and the Resistance’s clear military incompetence – but making them bombers is… Ugh. Next, there’s the central narrative of the film: the First Order’s big fuck off superstardestroyers are chasing the ragtag fugitive fleet of the Resistance… who can’t go very fast, only just fast enough to keep out of range of the First Order’s big fuck off superstardestroyers’s guns. I mean, really? Was that the best they could think up? Hugely powerful stardestroyers can’t catch up to a medical frigate? And they used to have a gun that could fire across the entire fucking galaxy in an instant? But now their superstardestroyers’ guns have an effective range of a few thousand kilometres? It’s such blatantly manufactured jeopardy, it feels like it’s treating the audience with contempt. Yes, yes, the General Organa blasted into space thing was silly, but made more sense within the universe than the space bombers did. On the other hand, I did like the sections set on Skellig Michael, and I thought the bit with the mirrors was especially good. Rey, in fact, makes a really good hero, much more so here than in The Force Awakens, where she seemed overwhelmed by the story. Kylo Ren, however, is still a petulant blank, whose characterisation and motivation bounce all over the place. (Having said that, the fight scene in the throne room was a proper bit of action sf cinema.) The Last Jedi also muffed its major villain – we don’t know where Snoke came from, and he dies without us learning. All that build-up for… zip. But then I still don’t understand how the First Order managed to pay for, build and staff a fleet of big fuck off superstardestroyers, while the actual government of the galaxy, the New Republic, ends up stuck with the pieces of crap it had when it destroyed the Death Star. That’s the big problem with this new Star Wars trilogy – it wants to go back to the plucky band of heroes versus the big bad empire, but it can’t plausibly get there within the lifetimes of its heroes. So the film-makers just went, ah fuck it, let’s have a new evil empire that’s more powerful than the Republic which defeated the old evil empire hiding out somewhere all along, just in case, you know, the old evil empire was defeated… Or something. And we’re supposed to swallow it. Can you imagine if the Fourth Reich turned up from nowhere in the 1970s, and it was better-equipped than the USA and USSR combined? Having said all that, lots of people have been finding positive things in The Last Jedi that were sadly lacking earlier Star Wars films. If we can just add intelligence to that list, then the next one might turn out alright…

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 895


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All the new year feels

I think on the whole 2017 is best forgotten. I did have some good times – conventions in Sweden, Finland and Denmark, for example – but on the whole the year was a bit of a dead loss. I had plans, I had modest plans. I failed them all. Well, I didn’t manage to get much done during the year outside the day job. I’m hoping 2018 will be much better in that regard.

Having said that, it’s hard to be optimistic when your country has decided it would sooner be racist and poor instead of prosperous and a member of the planet’s largest trading bloc. And then the US elected a posturing baboon to the White House, and the GOP seems determined to roll back every piece of legislation that had begrudgingly dragged the US into the 21st century… So, the world went to shit and it sort of killed my motivation to do much other than lose myself in movies.

I’m not expecting 2018 to be any better politically or geopolitically. I’d like to move to a more civilised country. But it’s hard to change a situation that isn’t personally broken – I work four days a week at a job I enjoy, for money that more than pays for the stupid number of books and films I buy. And my current situation certainly doesn’t prevent me from writing, or reviewing. I’ve done both in previous years.

So in 2018, I want to start writing again. I want to finish the third book of my space opera trilogy, A Want of Reason. Which is all plotted out and about a third written, and will likely turn out to be the most un-space-opera space opera that ever space opera’d. I’m basing an entire chapter on Le grand meaulnes, FFS. It opens with a terrorist attack. By one of the good guys. And wait until you see the Space Communists from Space… I also have several ideas for novellas I’ve been mulling over for a few years. I could have a bash at the Poseidon Quartet (as mentioned in Apollo Quartet 5: Coda – A Visit to the National Air and Space Museum). Or maybe the Jupiter Quartet, which I’ve been thinking of doing for a while… I’d like to write some short fiction too, although I am notoriously crap at it, well, at finishing it. I envy people who can sit down and bang out a first draft in one sitting.

I also intend to drag SF Mistressworks out of mothballs. I read several books that qualify for it during 2017, so I just need to write the reviews. And I’d like to start reviewing again for the venues I reviewed for previously. It’s all very well banging out a couple of hundred words on books I’ve read, and films I’ve seen, on my blog, but most of those “reviews” sort of turned into rants and I really need to be a bit more disciplined in my criticism. In fact, I’d like to write more about science fiction in 2018. At one point, I was going to write a whole series of posts, Fables of the Deconstruction, on individual sf tropes. I did space travel (see here) and robots (see here), but never got any further. And then there’s the spoof how to write space opera guide myself and another award-winning sf writer drunkenly hacked out one night… We really should finish it.

Of course, I’d like to read more books too. I managed to reduce my four-figure TBR pile by exactly one book in 2017. That’s excessively rubbish. I didn’t make my target of 140 in the Goodreads Reading Challenge (I finished the year on 128), so I plan to beat that for 2018. I’m an inveterate list-maker, so I’ve already started putting together a list of the books I want to read this coming year. I think I should buy less books too – I mean, buying eleven per month on average is not good for, well, for the fabric of the building I live in. I should probably have a clear-out at some point, but some authors I’ve been collecting for so long I’m reluctant to get rid of their books, even if I no longer read them…

So, resolutions… They should be in a handy list (see above). Twelve is a good number; there are twelve months in a year, twelve days of Christmas, twelve eggs in a dozen, er, eggs… So how about twelve resolutions for 2018?

  1. Read more books than last year – I have to beat 128 books but would prefer to beat 140 books
  2. Speaking of which… only start reading a new book when I’ve finished the last one
  3. Read at least six books from countries whose literature I’ve never read before
  4. Watch less films than last year – I mean, 602 is a bit fucking excessive; anyway, now LoveFilm has packed in I’ve only got one DVD rental service
  5. Finish the damn space opera novel – it’s all there in my head, and has been for a two years; I just need to get it down on paper
  6. Complete at least one novella – they’re probably going to take a shit-ton of research; why do I do this to myself?
  7. Complete at least four short stories – bonus points if I can actually sell the bloody things
  8. Get SF Mistressworks back up and running, start reviewing books again
  9. Write more about science fiction on this blog, so it’s not all films I’ve watched and books I’ve read
  10. Drink less wine
  11. Exercise – I’ve made half-hearted attempts at developing a running habit several times in the past; it usually lasts a month or so
  12. I plan to attend two Nordic cons in 2018, but maybe I can squeeze a third one in?

There, they look achievable. All I need is a bit of motivation. And self-discipline. I don’t expect to complete all twelve, but they’re mostly about getting me back to where I was before 2016 landed on my head at the day job. And then, in 2019, I can start building on them…

Happy New Year.


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2017 in movies: the stats

In 2017, I watched 532 films – well, some were seasons of television series, which, thinking about it, I don’t know why I track as I only do so for those I watched on DVD or Blu-ray. Anyway, I watched 532 “films”, some of them more than once. Some I’d seen before, in previous years. In fact…

… over three-quarters of what I watched I saw for the first time in 2017. Some of them I rewatched a second, or even third, time during the year (SY). Others I had seen once previously in an earlier year (1P) and some I’d seen several times in previous years (MP).

Nearly half of the films I watched were ones I owned. LoveFilm, which closed at the end of September, was the next biggest source; followed by Cinema Paradiso, another DVD rental service (and the only one left, I think). The only streaming service I have is Amazon Prime, which throws up the occasional good film. I might subscribe to MUBI or Curzon in 2018. I haven’t decided yet. There are a couple of Netflix TV series I’d like to see but I’m not sure if they’re worth paying the subscription. Annoyingly, Amazon are apparently dropping the Youtube app from their service – too much of a competitor for out-of-copyright material, I guess. Monoplistic bastards.

During 2017, I decided to track the gender of the directors of the films I was watching. The film industry is even more of a sausage-fest than book publishing. I made an effort to seek out films by female directors – and even found some I intend to follow, like Claudia Llosa and Lucía Puenzo (both South American) – but I did stick to the sort of films I like, and while women do make them, they’re a small percentage of the total. I hope that changes. In the chart above, “P” means two or more directors, which can be anything from a pair, like the Archers, Powell and Pressburger, to an anthology film by half a dozen directors. And “S” is TV series.

I’m not very good with film genres. I tend to classify most films as “drama”. I’m not convinced there’s a good way to categorise film genres. Okay, so SF, horror, fantasy… those are quite obvious. But what’s the difference between a thriller movie and an action movie? When is a drama a rom com? What the fuck is “action comedy”? I cheated a bit – I’m not sure if the 007 films are thrillers or action films, so I made them their own genre, “Bond”. Chiefly because I bought the complete films box set on Blu-ray on Black Friday. And “Disney” is its own genre, irrespective of whether the films were cartoon or live action. I watched a bunch of Elvis Presely films, so he got his own genre too.

I like to think I watch a wide spread of films, so it always comes as a surprise at the end of the year to discover that the most popular decade among the films I watched was… the current one. Oh well.

In 2017, I made an effort to seek otu films from countries I’d not seen films from before, and managed to add another 14 to the list: Thailand, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Venezuela, Mongolia, Georgia, Vietnam, Peru, Singapore, Jordan, Jamaica, Estonia, Cuba and Romania. I also managed to keep the US films I watched to around a quarter of my total viewing. As a result of expanding the countries from which I watch films, I’ve become a fan of China’s Sixth Generation directors, and am keen to watch more movies from Cuba, Peru, Chile and the Baltic states. In total, I watched films in 2017 from the countries in the map below.


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Moving pictures 2017, #70

This is it, the last post of the films I watched in 2017. I hope they’ve been entertaining, and perhaps informative. And if I’ve made new fans of some of my favourite directors, then I can honestly say I’m happy and they’ve been worth the effort.

Of course, because that’s the way it goes, this series of post ends with more of a whimper than a bang…

Life, Daniel Espinosa (2017, USA). I can just imagine the pitch meeting. Hot young producer: “So they take this alien creature, a microbe say, onto the space station to study it, and it grows… and this is the kicker… it grows into an alien killing machine! And it kills off the crew one by one!” The studio executives are all nodding and going: “This sounds very original and exciting.” Meanwhile, the PA in the corner is banging her head against the desk and muttering, “It’s Alien, for fuck’s sake. It’s Alien, for fuck’s sake. It’s Alien, for fuck’s sake.” And yup, that’s pretty much what this is. Okay, so it’s no facehugger, but a microbe is brought from Mars by a probe; and it’s not the Nostromo, a corporate tug light-years way from Earth, but the ISS (of a decade or two hence) some 400 kilometres above our heads. But the plot is Alien from start to finish. And it adds nothing to the original. I like the idea of using the ISS and showing an accurate depiction of living in space in a commercial sf/horror movie… except it’s not that accurate. The ISS of the film looks like it was initially based on the real thing, but the Cupola is ten times larger, and everywhere is a bit dim and ill-lit, not the shining white of the real thing. As for the rest of the movie… microbe grows into alien monster, alien monster kills astronauts. Yawn. Apollo 18 did the monster space fiction thing better; Alien did the haunted house with monster in space thing better. Life is shit. And then you die. Or something.

Tre Fratelli, Francesco Rosi (1981, Italy). Until I started watching this, I hadn’t realised it was by the director of Christ Stopped at Eboli, which I watched last year and liked a great deal. I’d also thought Tre Fratelli was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. But apparently not. Or, at least, not the 2013 edition I’ve been using. And, for some bizarre reason, despite the year of release, I had it in my head it was Italian Neorealism Which it is not. It’s a well-observed and -played drama, much like the other Rosi film I’ve seen. Well, except for the dream sequences. Whech were quite odd. Especially the one for the brother who works as a counsellor at a borstal-type place. The other two brothers are a judge, who has just accepted a terrorism case and his wife now fears for their lives, and a factory worker involved in a strike. The judge’s wife, it turns out, has good reason to be scared. I should watch more films by Rosi, I think. I thought this one pretty good, too.

Mindhorn, Sean Foley (2016, UK). I found this on Amazon Prime, it was late, I’d had a glass of wine or two, and it proved entertaining enough I sat through it to the end. The title refers to an early 1970s detective character on television played by a now washed-up actor. There’s a murder on the Isle of Man, and the chief suspect goes into hiding and insists he will only give himself up to ‘Mindhorn’, as if the fictional detective were a real person. So the actor has to play him one more time. Naturally, being a complete dickhead, he tries to take over the investigation, but the police treat him with the contempt he deserves. Just to confuse matters, Mindhorn’s love interest from the telly show (and real life) also lives on the Isle of Man… but she married the stuntman who doubled for Mindhorn. Who is a smug, and none too bright, plonker. That’s the problem with films like this: the characters are all “characters”, not real people, comic caricatures on which the writers and/or actors have lavished much time and effort. It can kill a comedy. Happily, here it doesn’t. Not because the characters are well-drawn, but because they grow, Mindhorn himself especially. Yes, he’s a total dickhead, but he becomes more sympathetic as the film progresses. The central premise is not especially original – and, to be honest, Norwegian Ninja spoofed the concept way better – but Mindhorn manages to be a consistent, and plausible, low-budget alternative. I enjoyed it. Worth seeing.

South, Frank Hurley (1919, UK). Hurley was an Australian who accompanied Shackleton on his 1914 to 1916 expedition to Antarctica. South is a compilation he made of the footage and photographs he shot during that period, as well as on a 1917 expedition to South Georgia. This is similar material to Herbert G Ponting’s footage of Scott’s ill-fated expedition, although Shackleton of course returned home. It’s fascinating stuff, not just seeing unspoilt wilderness as witnessed by among the first human beings to visit it, but also the crude yet effective methods used to combat the appalling conditions. South doesn’t have the same frisson as Ponting’s The Great White Silence, and not just because there’s no tragedy attached, but because it has less of a narrative through-line. It’s a compilation of documentary footage almost a century before non-narrative cinema became a thing. It’s fascinating, but it’s probably an acquired taste.

The Letter, William Wyler (1940, USA). Bette Davis is the wife of a British rubber plantation owner in Malaya. She shoots a man in cold blood, and then claims it was self-defence as he had assaulted her. Everyone rallies to her side, and she seems to take the legal hoops through which she must jump as no more than an inconvenience she had herself initiated by shooting her assaulter. Except, it’s not so cut and dried. As the husband discovers when Davis confesses the dead man was her lover and she loves him still. My mother found this DVD in a charity shop, and it was only after watching it that I discovered it appears on a best films list – not one of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before you Die lists, but perhaps a They Shoot Pictures Don’t They one – so clearly it’s held in regard by some. I found it a well-played, if dated, drama, likely due to its origin as a play by Somerset Maugham, although Wyler, a name I know quite well and normally a safe pair of hands, didn’t seem to bring much to the adaptation. It played like a Davis vehicle, and while perhaps better written than most such, it had more the feel of that than of a cinematic adaptation of an ensemble theatre piece. Enjoyable enough, but not one to seek out.

Foolish Wives*, Erich von Stroheim (1922, USA). I had to buy this from a seller on eBay who had ripped an out-of-copyright version,  because it’s not actually available on DVD in the UK or US. Despite being such an important film. But, of course, it was a silent film, and importance means fuck-all when compared to commerical success, and silent films stoped being commercially successful back in the 1920s, shortly after The Jazz Singer was released (although many excellent silent films were released years later – FW Murnau’s Tabu wasn’t released until 1931). Von Stroheim plays a con merchant who pretends to be a German aristocrat in order to separate rich US women from their riches. It’s a genre of film which, to be honest, should really be instructional for the prospective con artist rather than tell the victims’ stories, and it’s only the fact films take so long to make it into the cinemas that renders the techniques they reveal useless. Well, that and rich people’s desire to safeguard the wealth they’ve stolen. But who gives a fuck about them. Our culture does not always reflect our concerns, sometimes it drives them. So long as the rich are valourised in popular media, so their depredations will be accepted in real life. Commercial media is a powerful tool, as the right wing press has learnt, and attitudes can be changed through film and tv. But for all, say, Dr Who’s progressiveness, Hollywood’s regressiveness has meant two steps back for every one step forward. Foolish Wives is nearly a century old, but it had a more responsibile attitude to its topic than anything produced by Hollywood in the past thirty years. True, it was going for a moral lesson, and it was one that punished the director’s character – but he did little more than Wall Street has done, and he saw his just desserts. Wall Street never has.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 895


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Moving pictures 2017, #69

I have two of these posts left to round off my film-viewing in 2017. Which means 70 Moving picture posts, each of half a dozen movies (although one or two might only have been five movies), which by my reckoning, if my maths is right, is around 420 movies I reviewed during the year. Although, “review” might be a bit strong a term for my rambles and rants. Anyway, this time around I managed it again – six films, six different countries. Admittedly, half of the the films were by directors known to me, and I’ve seen other films by them, but never mind.

Hollywood Hotel, Busby Berkeley (1937, USA). That’s the last of the Busby Berkeley Collection 2, with only four films in this set instead of six. And they weren’t especially good ones. Hollywood Hotel was directed by Berkeley but doesn’t feature any of his signature production numbers, unfortunately. Dick Powell plays a small-town saxophonist who’s been hired by All Star Pictures in Hollywood. He leaves his position with Benny Goodman’s band – Benny Goodman played by Benny Goodman – flies to California and is put up in the eponymous hotel. Which is also where big movie star Mona Marshall has a suite. And Marshall has just thrown a diva tantrum and refuses to go to the premiere of her new film. So All Star Pictures put out a casting call for a lookalike, and hire Virginia Stanton to impersonate Marshall at the premiere (Marshall and Stanton are played by real-life sisters Lola and Rosemary Lane, of the Lane Sisters), and and also order new-hire Powell to accompany her. No one tells him, however, that she’s not the real article. Cue mistaken identity hilarity. Powell is then fired, and ends up working at a drive-in burger joint, before getting another chance at stardom, with the help of Stanton. Hollywood Hotel is mostly entertaining, although the musical numbers are a bit weak – except perhaps for the Benny Goodman ones. Lola Lane is terrible, but Rosemary Lane is good, which is weird. Unfortunately, the film suffers from a lack of a big production number, and, it has to be said, a completely unrealistic depiction of how Hollywood works… Meh.

Souvenir, Bavo Defurne (2016, Belgium). I found this on Amazon Prime, which occasionally throws up films worth seeing. Isabelle Huppert plays a factory worker who was once a winner of an analogue to the Eurovision contest. A young boxer who starts work at the factory recognises her, enters into a relationship with her, and persuades her to have another go at stardom. So she re-enters the pan-European song contest, with some help from her ex-mentor (and ex-lover), and proves a big success. Huppert plays her part with a weird distanced sort of smile on her face all the time – the character is an alcoholic, but I don’t think that’s what she’s trying to convey. And the song she sings during her auditions and performances isn’t actually very good. I don’t recall when Huppert is supposed to have won the contest, but it can’t have been that long ago, the eighties perhaps. And yet it sounds to me – and I’m no expert on French pop, although I’m a big fan of French bands Niagara and Guesch Patti, both of which were successful during the late eighties and early nineties, but they were pop rock, and not the drippy saccharine ballard Huppert sings. It’s an interesting story, and played well by its cast – although this is Huppert, so what do you expect – but it all felt a bit dated, and the music on which the story rested seemed too weak to carry the movie.

A mohácsi vész, Miklós Jancsó (2004, Hungary). This is the fifth of the Kapa and Pepé films, and just as baffling as the earlier four. Unlike the previous four films, it appears to be mostly historical, alth0ugh it doesn’t make a great effort to present an historically accurate mise-en-scène – which is not in itself a problem, as some great historical films have made little effort to convince in terms of mise-en-scène, and I’m thinking of several by Sokurov here as good examples…  But, of course, the Kapa and Pepé movies don’t so much revel in their anachronisms as make it a feature of the series. The two titular characters are, after all, supposed to be timeless. So while A mohácsi vész – the title translates as The Mohács Evil, and refers to the Battle of Mohács… although I’m not entirely sure if it’s the 1526 battle or the 1687 one, although the costumes suggest the former. But Péter is crowned king – and to be honest, I suspect the two swap identities beween films, if not in the films themselves – is crowned king, and battles the… Ottomans? (Not Ottomen obvs.)  But then the film jumps to the modern day, and the same character dynamics and relations – and even arguments – still seem to apply… although the mise-en-scène is now an abandoned factory or something. Music features just as heavily, although in this case it’s provided by a male-voice choir. Partway through the film, Kapa and Pepé make use of an autogyro type vehicle – it’s clearly faked up for the film and would otherwise not fly – but it feels more like a time-machine, especially that from George Pal’s 1960 film, although that may be simply be me layering my own cultural references on the film, especially given that in A mohácsi vész the autogryro seems to only fly. If that makes sense. I’m a big fan of Jancsó’s sixties films, with their overtly political stories, declamatory dialogue, and almost dance-like staging in which the cast are continually on the move. These Kapa and Pepé movies are completely different, although they play just as many games with the medium’s form and expectations – there are layers and layers to the movies, and that’s not taking into account the meta-cinematic nature of some of them in which Jancsó himself appears… and is killed… only to re-appear later as himself again. The six films, offered as a “set”, were a lucky find on eBay. I’m glad I bought them. And I’d still like more of Jancsó’s oeuvre to be made available.

The Legend of Bhagat Singh, Rajkumar Santoshi (2002, India). Back in the 1940s, while Mahatma Gandhi was waging a campaign of non-cooperation against the British in order to win India’s independence, Bhagat Singh was a member of the Hindustan Republican Association and fighting his own battle for independence. Where Gandhi promised self-rule, and replacement of the British by the Indian upper classes, Singh preached true equality and independence. He also used more traditional terrorist tactics to make his point – beginning with the murder of a police officer, and ending up with a symbolic bombing of the Indian parliament (symbolic in as much as it wasn’t intended to harm anyone, and Bhagat and his fellow bomber surrendered immediately afterward). Once in court, the HRA use the dock as a platform to get their message out to the country. In one scene, they cross-examine an ex-member of their group who is a government witness and trick him into revealing the recipe for a homemade bomb – which the press dutifully record, and print the next day. But, of course, this is also a Bollywood film, so there are dance numbers. And they’re handled quite well. To anyone not used to the Bollywood formula, their presence in an historical drama about the fight for Indian independence might seem odd, but… Bollywood. I enjoyed this, and learnt something about India’s twentieth-century history I hadn’t known (I had known the British behaved like total racists bastards, as we have done throughout our history, but I’d not known about Singh and the HRA). Worth seeing.

Indiscretion of an American Wife, Vittorio De Sica (1953, Italy). Apparently top US producer David O Selznick wanted a vehicle for his wife, actress Jennifer Jones. For whatever reason, he chose De Sica to make it – a story set in Italy, based on an Italian novella, starring Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift in the lead roles and an otherwise mostly Italian cast. De Sica did not deliver the happy rom com Sezlnick wanted, which is probably why this film is more or less forgotten. Which is a shame, as it’s actually pretty good. Unfortunately, the copy I watched – on one of those “three classic films on one disc” cheapo DVDs – was a pretty poor transfer. There’s a Criterion edition, which includes both Selznick’s cut and De Sica’s cut (I don’t know which cut I saw). It’s probably worth getting. Jones plays an American wife who returns to Rome to meet her ex-lover, an Italian. They discuss their relationship, and her impending departure (and return to her husband), and it’s all very well done. Jones and Clift are good in their roles – although the production was apparently troubled. I’ve seen the film described as a lost classic in several places and, Criterion edition notwithstanding, that does seem to be the case. Worth seeing.

Kangaroo, Tim Burstall (1987, Australia). My mother found this for me. It’s an Australian made-for-TV movie based on DH Lawrence’s semi-autobiographic novel Kangaroo, which is about his time in Australia. Although Lawrence is from the same part of the UK as I am – or perhaps that should be the other way round – ie, Nottinghamshire, and his most famous novels are set there, it’s easy to forget that he travelled a lot and lived in several different countries. He died in France, but his ashes are interred in Taos, New Mexico, USA. In Kangaroo, a notorious British writer arrives in Australia, only to find his reputation has preceded him. He is treated with hostility by the local authorities – they even search his lodgings for anti-war material. It doesn’t help that the writer gets involved in with several secretive political organisations, especially one run by the title character, a nickname for the fascist “Diggers Club”. One for fans of Lawrence only, and they’d probably be better off with the novel.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 894


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2017, the best of the year: films

A couple of years ago, I thought it might be a good idea to try and watch all the films on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list (the 2013 edition). This year I also decided to try and watch a film from as many countries as I could. Both challenges have been going quite well: I’ve watched 897 of the 1001 so far, 56 of them seen for the first time this year; and I’ve watched movies from 53 countries… although only Thailand, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Venezuela, Mongolia, Georgia, Vietnam, Peru, Singapore, Jordan, Jamaica, Estonia, Cuba and Romania were new to me in 2017.

It also occurred to me in 2017 that most of the films I watched were directed by men. So I started to track the genders of the directors whose films I watch in an effort to see more films by female directors. Unfortunately, female directors are hugely outnumbered by men, especially in Hollywood, and I managed only 43 films by women during the year. Having said that, a couple of those female directors became names I plan to keep an eye on, such as Claudia Llosa and Lucía Puenzo.

films
I watched 602 films in 2017, although only 532 were new to me this year. I also decided in 2017 to watch more documentaries, and ended up watching so many that I thought it best to split my film best of the year lists into two, one for documentaries and one for “fictional” films… except I’m not sure what to call the latter, but I think “narrative cinema” is the preferred term.

documentary
1 I am Cuba, Mikhail Kalatozov (1964, Cuba) [1]. I loved Humberto Solás’s Lucía after watching it, and I wanted to see Tomáz Guttiérez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment a second time, and there was this box set from Mr Bongo that included both, as well as I am Cuba and Strawberry and Chocolate. So I bought the box set… and was blown away when I watched I am Cuba, a documentary commissioned by the Soviets to promote Cuba, but which was so innovative it was never actually released. Kalatozov reportedly strung cameras on wires, but even knowing that it’s hard to work out how he achieved some of his shots. And this was in 1964, when there was no CGI. I am Cuba also presents the island as a near-utopia, and while the USSR and its satellite nations were never that, they at least aspired to it – which is more than can be said of the West. The American Dream isn’t utopia, it’s a deeply mendacious justification for the success of the few at the expense of the many. Even now, 53 years after I am Cuba was made, Cuba remains poor, but has one of the best free healthcare systems on the planet, and the US is rich and its healthcare system is unaffordable by the bulk of its population. Some things are more important than giving a handful of people the wherewithal to buy their own Caribbean island.

2 The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzmán (2015, Chile). If you’ve not watched a film by Guzmán, why not? The Pearl Button is a meditation on the universe, water, the history of Chile, especially the Pinochet dictatorship, and the genocide of the country’s indigenous people. It’s a mix of stock footage and gorgeously-shot film, all tied together by the calm voice of Guzmán. He describes how Pinochet’s goons would torture people and then dump their bodies offshore from helicopters. He interviews supporters of Salazar, president before Pinochet’s coup, who were put in concentration camps. He speaks to the handful of survivors of the Alacalufe and Yaghan tribes of Patagonia, which in the late 1880s were infected with Western diseases, and the survivors hunted for bounty, by settlers. He discusses Jeremy Button, a a Yaghan tribesman taken back to Britain on the HMS Beagle in 1830 (it was when returning Jeremy Button to Patagonia a year later that Darwin first travelled aboard the HMS Beagle). The Pearl Button is not only an important film because of what it covers, but a beautifully-shot one too. You should watch it.

3 Behemoth, Zhao Liang (2015, China) [2]. This year I went on something of a China/Taiwan cinema kick. I forget what started it off, but I discovered lots of new names to watch and lots of excellent films. Zhao Liang I had, I think, put on my rental list because his films sounded like Jia Zhangke’s , who was already a favourite. But Zhao makes documentaries, and Behemoth is about coal in China, the mines and those who live on their periphery and survive by gleaning. Zhao’s earlier work has been very critical of the Chinese authorities – meaning his films are not wholly official – but they are also beautifully framed. And in Behemoth, he goes one further and uses split-screen, but also arranging his screens in such a way they’re not initially obvious as split-screen and then suddenly turn kaleidoscopic. It’s not a technique I’ve seen before, and it probably wouldn’t work in most situations, but it’s absolutely brilliant here. Zhao Liang is a name to watch.

4 Francofonia, Aleksandr Sokurov (2015, France) [4]. I’ve been a fan of Sokurov’s films for many years and own copies of much of what he’s directed during his long career. I’d heard about Francofonia some time in 2014, but it wasn’t until 2015 it appeared, and not until 2017 it was released in the UK – and only at Curzon cinemas, but, annoyingly, only the Curzon cinemas in London. FFS. I’d liked to have seen it on a big screen. But I had to console myself with the Blu-ray. Which was pretty much as I expected – a typical Sokurovian mix of documentary, meditation, narrative cinema and autobiography – although the production values were a distinct cut above his previous work. It’s a good entry in Sokurov’s oeuvre, if not one of his best ones, but even merely good Sokurov is still so much better than most film-makers can manage. It’s also been heartening seeing how well it has been received… because that means we might see more films from Sokurov. Because I want more, lots more.

5 Samsara, Ron Fricke (2011, USA). I loved Koyaanisqatsi when I watched it last year, and I later learned that its director of photography, Ron Fricke, had made a pair of similar non-narrative films himself: Baraka and Samsara. They’re basically footage of various parts of the planet, with only the most tenuous of links and no over-arching story. The emphasis is entirely on the imagery, which is uniformly gorgeous. Of the two, I thought the second, Samsara, much the better one.The footage is beautiful, the parts of the world it covers fascinating, and it’s one of the few films out there which gives you faith in humanity. I quite fancy having my own copy of this.

Honourable mentions: The Epic of Everest, JBL Noel (1924, UK) astonishing silent documentary of an early attempt to climb Everest; Baraka, Ron Fricke (1992, USA) gorgeous non-narrative cinema from around the world; Festival Express, Bob Smeaton (2003, UK) 1970 tour across Canada aboard a train featuring Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and others; Cameraperson, Kirsten Johnson (2016, USA) Johnson’s life stitched together from outtakes from her documentaries and privately-shot footage; Sofia’s Last Ambulance, Ilian Metev (2012, Bulgaria) affecting fly-on-the-wall film of an ambulance crew in Sofia’s beleagured healthcare system; Petition: The Court of Appeals, Zhao Liang (2009, China) filmed in the shanty town outside Beijing where petitioners lived while waiting the years it took for their appeals to be heard, if ever.

narrative
1 The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, Ben Rivers (2015, UK). I loved this film – it’s perhaps a stretch to call it narrative cinema as it’s also partly a documentary. Anyway, I loved this film… so much I went and bought everything by Ben Rivers that was available (no surprise, then, that his two other feature-length films get honourable mentions below). The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers – the title is taken from a Paul Bowles story, which partly inspires it – opens as a documentary of Olivier Laxe filming Mimosas. But then Bowles’s story intrudes, and Laxe, a real person, and his film is indeed real and has been released… Laxe’s story morphs into the plot of Bowles’s short story. This is brilliant cinema, an unholy mix of documentary, fiction, literary reference, art installation and narrative cinema.

2 Privilege, Peter Watkins (1967, UK). I knew Watkins from The War Game and Punishment Park, both mock documentaries about very real horrors; so when I watched Privilege it came as something of a surprise. True, it’s similar, in as much as it’s a mock documentary, set a few years ahead of when it was made; but it also seems a more tongue-in-cheek film, and plays up the ridiculousness of its premise. The segment where the star is filming a government commercial for apples, for example, is hilarious. In the movie, Watkins posits a fascist UK in which a pop star is used as a symbol to make unpleasant government policies more palatable. We’ve yet to see that happen here, if only because politicians foolishly believe they have media presence. They don’t. They’re as personable as a block of rancid butter. And often as intelligent (BoJo, I’m looking at you; but also Gove, Hammond, Davies, Rudd…) We should be thankful, I suppose, because if they ever did decide to use a media star with actual charisma, we’d be totally lost. On the other hand, satire apparently died sometime around 2015, so perhaps Watkins may prove more prophetic than he knew…

3 Embrace of the Serpent, Ciro Guerra (2015, Colombia) [3]. I stumbled across this on Amazon Prime and stuck it on my watch list. It was later recommended to me, so I sat down and watched it, and… it was excellent. It’s set in the Amazonian jungle, and covers a pair of expeditions for a legendary plant, one in 1909 and the other in 1940. There’s a bit of Herzog in it, and probably some Rocha too, and the cinematography is often amazing. I wrote about it here.

4 Arabian Nights, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1974, Italy). 2017 was a bit of a Pasolini year for me. I bought a boxed set of his films on Blu-ray, and worked my way through them – although a number I’d seen before. Arabian Nights feels like an ur-Pasolini film, in that it does so well some of the things some of his films were notable for – a non-professional cast acting out elements of a story cycle in remote locations. The title gives the source material, but the look of the movie is pure Pasolini – although much of it comes down to his choice of locations in North Africa. Of all the Pasolini films I’ve seen, this is by far the prettiest; and if its treatment of its material is somewhat idiosyncratic, 1001 Nights is far too complex a source for honest adaptation.

5 The World, Jia Zhangke (2004, China) [5]. I “discovered” Jia in 2016, but it was obvious he was a director to keep on eye on, and so I sought out his other works. Including this one. Which I thought worked especially well – not that this other films are bad, on the contrary they’re excellent. But something about this one especially appealed to me. It’s set at a theme park containing famous buildings from around the world. The movie follows two workers there, one a dancer and the other a security guard. The film is a sort of laid-back thriller, in which the cast move around the artificial world of the theme park, trying to make ends meet, and trying to keep their relationship together. The World has a documentary feel to it, and often seems more fly-on-the-wall than narrative drama. But I think it’s its literalisation of the term “microcosm” that really makes the film.

Honourable mentions: Marketa Lazarová, František Vlačíl (1967, Czech Republic) grim mediaeval drama, something the Czechs seem to do well; Elena, Andrey Zvyagintsev (2011, Russia)  languidly-paced character study of a rich man’s wife as she attempts to provide for her son from an earlier marriage, beautifully shot; Reason, Debate and a Story, Ritwik Ghatak (1974, India) more ethnographical film-making and political debate from a favourite director; Shanghai Dreams, Wang Xiaoshuai (2005, China) grim semi-autobiographical drama from a Sixth Generation director; Suzhou River, Lou Ye (2000, China) cleverly-structured mystery from another Sixth Generation director; Madeinusa, Claudia Llosa (2006, Peru) affecting story of a young woman in a remote village in the Andes; The Case of Hana and Alice, Shunji Iwai (2015, Japan) a lovely piece of Japanese animation; Je vous salue, Marie, Jean-Luc Godard (1985, France) a thinly-veiled retelling of the Virgin Mary Godard turns into a compelling drama; Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2010, Thailand) the best of Weerasethakul’s atypical fractured-narrative films I’ve seen so far, mysterious and beautifully shot; O Pagador de Promessas, Anselmo Duarte (1962, Brazil) the only Brazilian film to win the Palme d’or, an excellent piece of Cinema Novo;  Muriel, Alain Resnais (1963, France) enigmatic meditation on memory presented as a laid-back domestic drama; The Love Witch, Anna Biller (2016, USA) pitch-perfect spoof of a 1970s B-movie supernatural thriller that also manages to be feminist; Two Years at Sea, Ben Rivers (2011, UK) and A Spell to Ward off the Darkness, Ben Rivers & Ben Russell (2013, UK) see above.