It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible

Category Archives: watching diary 2021


by Leave a comment

Watching diary 2021, #7

We had a fit of spring weather, then another week of snow and sub-zero temperatures, and now the sun is shining again… It seems weird to mention the weather, given what’s currently happening. I remain fervently glad I’m in Sweden. It’s not handled the pandemic well but, unlike the UK, it has at least not descended in fascism. On the other hand, I’m reminded of the same fascist tricks being pulled by Thatcher’s government back in the 1980s. They ultimately failed then, they will ultimately fail now. Although the current crop of greedy intellectual lightweights have had much greater impact  – first Austerity, and now Brexit. As I’ve said before, they belong in prison.

No box-set bingeing this time. Still working my way through Water Rats. Which has started to get increasingly implausible. What is it about TV programmes? TV show starts to shed audience, so let’s make it even less fucking believable? I read somewhere about the “idiot ball”, the mythical token held by the character who has to act like a complete idiot – usually out of character – in order for that episode’s plot to work. Now, let’s be clear. This is shit writing. It’s not a TV writing convention. It’s a consequence of TV writers being bad at their jobs. As is my own invention: the “penis hat”. This is worn by the character who acts like a complete dick to make the episode work. This may not necessarily be out of character, and may even be a character parachuted in just for that episode. Sadly, penis hats are all too common in real life, so their presence in a TV drama is hardly implausible… but it’s still a cheap trope, and any writer worth their salt would avoid it.

A Cat in Paris, Jean-Loup Felicioli & Alain Gagnol (2010, France). An animated feature about a cat who accompanies a cat burglar – get it? – called Mr Cat – get it? – during his burglaries. The cat spends its days as the pet of Zoé, whose mother is a police inspector trying to prevent a known gangster from stealing a priceless statue. Zoé and Mr Cat get dragged into it all when Zoé’s nanny turns out to be an accomplice of the gangster. I wasn’t too keen on the highly stylised look of the animation, and the film never really seemed to be sure whether it was a comedy or a drama. The version I watched was dubbed into English, with a weird mix of US and UK actors, and so accents. While the setting was identifiably Paris, it all felt a little trans-Atlantic. Meh.

Nazis at the Centre of the Earth, Joseph Lawson (2012, USA). I have no fucking idea why I watched this. Okay, it’s by the Asylum, and while their “mockbusters” are pretty much always really bad, they sometimes spin a few interesting changes on the original material. The title to this film, like that of most of their films, is perhaps more descriptive than the movie they’re ripping off, but I’m fairly sure Nazis at the Centre of the Earth is a pastiche of Iron Sky 2: The Coming Race. But it’s not always easy to tell, because the Asylum usually don’t even bother spoofing the original’s plot. Here, a team of international scientists at the South Pole inadvertently find an entrance to the hollow Earth, where the Nazis have set up shop after losing WWII. Doctor Mengele has been trying to find a means to extend the lives of the surviving upper echelon Nazis, but grafting on the skins of those they capture is not doing the trick. (This is not a film that’s high on, well, credibility.) One of the American scientists introduces Mengele to foetal stem cells, which Mengele uses to reanimate Hitler’s head on a robot body. And Hitler is going to use his zombie Nazi army to take over the world… It would all be sorts of fun if it weren’t so badly done. But then that pretty much describes all of the Asylum’s movies…

Alternative 3, Christopher Miles (1977, UK). I thought I’d seen this before, but apparently I was familiar only with the title. It’s highly regarded as a piece of 1970s British science fiction television, and that’s during a period which produced a lot of really strong science fiction television. And  having now seen it, I can understand why. Alternative 3 was originally intended to be broadcast as an April Fool’s joke, but not actually shown until June. It opens discussing the mysterious deaths and disappearances of several people in the UK from various professions, and gradually leads up to the suggestion they’ve become part of a programme to settle Mars because Earth is due to suffer imminent climate crash. Alternative 3 is very much a product of its time – a 1970s UK documentary. But it’s cleverly done, and if the UK it presents has none of the actual diversity of the UK of the 1970s, that was the nature of British television back then. Which is still a tad better than that of other nations. Most present-day viewers won’t relate to the 1970s setting, but it’s worth a go for sf fans (and those of us who do remember the 1970s).

Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara (1992, USA). The sequel to this film, Bad Lieutenant: Port of New Orleans, is in many respects a typical Nicolas Cage movie – ie, completely batshit and more often bad than it’s anything else – but it was also directed by Werner Herzog, who also does batshit but does it well. And in Bad Lieutenant: Port of New Orleans that manifests in a single scene that is just so bizarre it is inexplicably good. Bad Lieutenant, on the other hand, is a cheap thriller made by a cast and crew that were mostly drugged up at the time, and directed by a man who was usually good at making cheap thrillers that sometimes transcended their origins. I’m not convinced this one does. Keitel plays Keitel, and I’ve never really understood why people cast him, although he has more screen presence here than in other films I’ve seen him in. The plot runs on well-oiled rails, the supporting cast are a collection of genre stereotypes, and it all seems entirely pointed, in a sort of more-by-accident-than-design sort of way. Worth seeing once.

White Cargo, Ray Selfe (1973, UK). The title alone is red flag here – but this is the early 1970s, and the UK, and and there’s a good reason why most early 1970s British films – and not just “British sex comedies” – have vanished into obscurity… And this should almost certainly have been one of them. But somebody somewhere decided to upload it to Amazon Prime. And I was foolish enough to watch it. David Jason, who has apparently not aged for at least half a century, plays a hapless government clerk who becomes embroiled with a group which smuggles British women to overseas markets – the old “white slavery” trope… which was little more than an astoundingly racist and sexist white male sex fantasy. I write “was”, although I suspect there are many men who still subscribe to it. White Cargo makes an especially poor fist of it even for its time – with an inept hero who fantasises success before failing in reality, racist caricatures for the villains, and women with zero agency. One aspect I suspect is relevant to our times – the hero who imagines himself 007, but fails to even open a door without falling over, which is a pretty good description of the UK’s current government…

Carol, Todd Haynes (2015, UK). I’ve always wanted to like Haynes’s films more than I do. After all, he made a pretty good homage, Far from Heaven, to my all-time favourite film, All That Heaven Allows. And the first half of Safe is a pretty good commentary on the central character’s life-style, before the film turns into some weird treatise on “chemical sensitivity”. Carol is an adaptation of a semi-autobiographical novel by Patricia Highsmith, and is very much unlike her other novel – but the film is not unlike Haynes’s other movies. Highsmith’s life was… complicated. More so during its time than it would be now, of course. And its time was 1950s USA. Carol is the glamorous wife of a successful husband. She meets a young woman who works in the toy department of a department store. The two enter into an affair. And the rest plays out pretty much as you’d expect it to in 1950s USA. The whole is beautifully shot and played, much more so than Haynes’s other films – but also slightly less interesting because of that. His other films subverted expectations, but Carol does not.

The World’s Fastest Indian, Roger Donaldson (2005, New Zealand). The title refers to a motorcycle.  It was perhaps not the most culturally-sensitive name for a motorcycle marque, but the film takes place in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the motorcycle itself dates from the 1920s. The film is also based on a true story. New Zealand motorcyclist rebuilds an Indian Scout motorcycle so it can break the world land speed record for motorcycles with engines of less than 1000 cc capacity. He travels to the US with his motorbike, take part in Speed Week, and eventually breaks the record. Along the way, he makes lots of friends. While Munro was reputedly an easy-going and likeable bloke, the film pretty much condenses his decades-long record-breaking career into a single trip to the US, in which Munro had no idea what needed to be done or what would happen. Little of which was true. By all accounts, Munro’s character is close to that depicted by Anthony Hopkins in the film. Although Hopkins’s accent was far from close to Munro’s. Or even a New Zealander’s. The rest is fantasy. But it’s an entertaining feel-good family film, and not your usual subject. Enjoyable.


by Leave a comment

Watching diary 2021, #6

Yet more Aussie crime shows. Water Rats, this time, which is about the Sydney Water Police, although they seem to get involved in all sorts of crimes. Part of the fun is spotting faces and then figuring out where you first saw them. And it’s not always another Aussie police series. One minor character turned out to be a major character from Canadian series The Murdoch Mysteries a decade or so later. And Claudia Black plays the cheating wife of the victim in another episode. Amazon Prime have also done the usual and screwed up the seasons, not only broadcasting them in the wrong order, but even mis-numbering and misnaming them. So Season 4 Episode 13 ‘Double Play’, according to Amazon Prime, turns out to actually be Season 3 Episode 14 ‘Soft Target’. While not a problem normally, both of the two principal detectives are away for several episodes at different times, so others fill in – and it’s all bit random which of those replacement partners is going to appear in the next episode. Not to mention episodes referencing events in episodes that have yet to be shown. Amazon’s curation of their data is piss-poor. Sooner or later, it will be their undoing. Assuming anyone actually gives a shit about accuracy or facts or even truth by then…

Haywire, Steven Soderbergh (2011, USA). Soderbergh is sort of like an auteur but not really an auteur. He makes films as if he were an auteur but he makes resolutely commercial films. If Terence Malick has amassed so much influence he can make the films he wants in Hollywood, then Soderbergh can do the same… as long as the films are commercial. In Haywire, Gina Carano – you know, the Trumpist actor who got fired from The Mandalorian for tweeting fascist shit – plays a US government assassin who is specifically recruited for a protection job, only for it to go horribly wrong, and then certain other things happen, which persuade her everyone is out to kill her. It’s all completely implausible, but Soderbergh is a safe pair of hands and the end result is a polished thriller. Apparently, he wanted the fight scenes to be as realistic as possible… and it works. A good cast – except for Carano; let’s not ignore someone’s shitty views just because they were involved in a project you liked – and a convoluted plot, although not too convoluted, and good action sequences. You could watch worse.

I Vinti, Michelangelo Antonioni (1952, Italy). The film opens with an assortment of scans of newspaper stories apparently showing the lawlessness of the immediately post-war youth. The newspapers look genuine, and the three stories which make up the film are apparently based on true stories… but it’s all very lurid and sensationalised, and even the fact it’s by Antonioni can’t really make much of such thin material. The first is set in France. A pair of teenage boys – although these are 1950s teenagers, so they look like they’re in their late twenties – shoot a friend who claims to have buried treasure. The second takes place in Italy, and concerns a youth involved in smuggling cigarettes. The third, set in the UK, is the most interesting. A young man finds a murdered woman’s body on a nearby common, and uses it to get himself in the newspapers. Eventually, he admits he murdered the woman, but only after his new-found fame as the body’s discoverer has failed to earn him the admiration of the young ladies. I was somewhat surprised the man was allowed to write his own story for the newspapers. Seems extremely unlikely. One for completists.

Il merlo maschio, Pasquale Festa Campanile (1970, Italy). The image depicted on the poster for this film is pretty much all I can really remember from this movie – a fevered dream in which the protagonist, a cellist in an orchestra, played his wife’s naked body instead of his instrument at a concert. The cellist’s career is stalling, his conductor picks on him repeatedly… but he finds solace in his wife’s appearance. His wife’s naked appearance. Only in Italy. And only in the 1970s…. The cellist’s fantasies grow ever more lurid, and his wife seems content to go along – and everything climaxes at a concert where the cellist’s wife is accidentally disrobed. The words “Italian sex comedy” generally indicate a film is definitely to be avoided, especially when it was made in either the 1960s or 1970s. Much like “British sex comedy”. Sadly, Il merlo maschio is pretty much a textbook example.

Shree 420, Raj Kapoor (1955, India). The “420” refers the section of the Indian Penal code for “cheating”, much like advance-fee frauds are known as 419s after the Nigerian Criminal Code section number. The director plays a country bumpkin – modelled on Chaplin’s Little Tramp – who moves to Mumbai and ends up a con man after falling in with the wrong crowd. But this is a Bollywood film, so there has to be a boys-meets-girl, etc, plot, and here, Kapoor meets the love of his life on his way to Mumbai, but she rejects him when she learns he’s defrauding the poor. Of course, he eventually sees the error of his ways and wins back his lady love. This is classic rom com Bollywood (rather than cast-of-thousands historical epic Bollywood) at its best, and the signature song, which is performed twice, ‘Mera Joota Hai Japani’ (‘My Shoes are Japanese’), is definitely one of the catchiest Bollywood songs I’ve heard.

Slave of the Cannibal Gods, Sergio Martino (1978, Italy). Yet another Shameless release available on Amazon Prime. I’ve no idea how many I’ve watched so far, but it must be at least thirty or forty. I only rate three or four of them, which is not a particularly good hit ratio, but most are worth seeing at least once. Except perhaps not this one. Ursula Andress plays the wife of an anthropologist who disappeared while on an expedition in New Guinea. She arranges with a local anthropologist, played by Stacy Keach, to retrace her husband’s movements… Which leads them to a sacred island. Which all the locals are too scared to visit. For good reason. The title is a clue. But not fearless Ursula! You can guess the rest. This film is from the lower end of the Shameless gialli releases, and even though it was filmed in Sri Lanka, and so the scenery looks convincing, it’s hammy stuff. One for fans.

To the Wire, Károly Ujj Mészáros (2018, Hungary). Amazon Prime insists on recommending the latest shit Hollywood movies to me, despite the fact I don’t watch them, but there’s some good stuff available on the platform. It just takes a fuck of a lot of searching. I don’t recall how I found this Hungarian thriller, but it was a good find. A detective with severe anxiety issues is called to help when it looks like two murders are connected. Except it seems there are several more, and so a serial killer must be operating in Budapest. To the Wire (AKA X or The eXploited; the Hungarian original title apparently translates as X – Deleted from the System) was clearly inspired by David Fincher’s Se7en, but actually presents a story that is very much tied in with the country’s culture and recent history. This isn’t serial killer murders people because psychopathology – as pretty much all such US films are. Here, the victims were killed, and their deaths staged as suicides, for a solid reason. The film has a dark washed-out look in keeping with its story, and most scenes open with aerial upside shots of the city. An interesting, if overly quirky, lead, a solid serial killer mystery, a resolution that’s specific to Hungary and its recent history, and good cinematography. Definitely worth tracking down.

The Daughter, Simon Stone (2015, Australia). A man who has lived in the US for decades returns to Australia for his father’s second marriage – to his much younger housekeeper. The “American” is a reformed alcoholic, but events in Australia drive him back to drink. It’s all to do with the daughter of his best mate, and the identity of her real father. The American’s father owns the local mill, the town’s single biggest employer, and it has just declared bankruptcy, which has created a lot of bad feeling. Mostly a small Australian town drama – where the one big false note is when the two blokes head to the nearest big town, end up in pub near the university, and are later picked up by two female uni students. A strong cast – Sam Neill is excellent as the crotchety granddad, Geoffrey Rush is under-used as the mill-owner, and Anna Torv mostly sleepwalks through her role as the housekeeper/bride-to-be. The rest were pretty much unknown to me.


by 4 Comments

Watching diary 2021. #5

Not much box-set bingeing this time. There was The Broker’s Man, a TV series starring Kevin Whately, apparently filmed in between episodes of Lewis. Despite being made in the late 1990s, it feels like it was made a decade earlier. It’s no surprise Whately is better remembered for Lewis. He plays an ex-copper who now investigates insurance claims. The first season saw him end up in hospital every episode. The series changed format for the second season, and budget too, it seemed – and two of the supporting characters were played by entirely different actors… I missed The Broker’s Man when ti was broadcast on British TV because I was in the Middle East. Should have left it like that.

Band of Thieves, Peter Bezencenet (1962, UK). I’ve mentioned the Renown Pictures available on Amazon Prime before. This one has a simple plot – while in prison, a group of inmates form a jazz band under the auspices of the warden. They are eventually released. An upper crust wastrel sort of chap hires them to play in his new café, but also to follow their previous careers during a tour of the country – his contacts among the gentry, their criminal skill-set. All very British, and entirely implausible in 21st century UK. The leader of the band is Acker Bilk, who I once saw perform live in Abu Dhabi in the early 1980s. I remember it well. It was by the side of the pool at the Sheraton Hotel. One bloke was so drunk he fell in the pool. Another couldn’t get his disposable camera to work and threw it over the wall in disgust. Bilk was drunk, but didn’t drop a note. He did tell several off-colour jokes, however. Fun times.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, Terence Fisher (1974, UK). An admirer of Frankenstein – and there’s a red flag – approaches the sanatorium where Frankenstein died, and discovers he didn’t die after all and in fact is continuing his experiments. The two continue to experiment, which basically involves creating a monster from a couple of sanatorium inmates… Neither of which, I think, were actually dead when they were chosen as donors. The nubile mute daughter character also pops up again – seems to have been quite a popular trope at Hammer… I have a lot of time for Hammer films, although they’re very much of their time, and even then that’s probably giving them more credit than they’re due. They were made on the cheap and it usually shows. They made a brand out of tackling the best-known horror monsters of their time, but they managed to do it with a level po-faced seriousness only the British, and possibly the French, ever really pulled off. They’ll never be great cinema, but there’s something to be admired about them.

The Age of Shadows, Kim Jee-woon (2016, South Korea). During the 1920s, Korea was occupied by the Japanese, and they were brutal occupiers. A police captain, working for the Japanese, who used to be a member of the resistance, is present when a friend who stayed in the resistance movement is shot to death by the police. He’s then tasked by the new Japanese head of the police in Seoul with tracking down and apprehending the head of the resistance. But when he realises that a Japanese police officer has been undermining his investigation and that, as a Korean, he was never going to be rewarded for his work… then the police captain begins to work with the resistance, helping them to smuggle some explosives from Shanghai to Seoul on the train. An excellent period drama. Despite an action-packed opening sequence, it takes a while for the plot to shift into gear, but once the characters have sort of settled and the story gets going, this is good stuff. Recommended.

Loaded Guns, Fernando di Leo (1975, Italy). Ursula Andress plays an air hostess who gets unwittingly involved in a war between two drug lords. At least, I think it was unwittingly. She is asked to deliver a message to one drug lord, but there seems to be a third group who steal drugs from one drug lord’s goons and money from the other’s, and interrupt deals, until a war kicks off. And Andress seems to be involved. The story was a fairly typical poliziottesco, but it seemed the film was mainly made in order for Andress to display her legs as often as possible. The film had its moments – an all-out fist-fight between the two drug gangs in an empty funfair at the end has to be seen to be believed – but the story tried to be a bit too clever and failed dismally to pull it off.

Space Sweepers, Jo Sung-hee (2021. South Korea). I’ve seen so much love for this film, but it strikes me they’re all missing the point. Yes, it presents a multi-cultural future – but it’s only US and UK films that don’t. Don’t celebrate something that’s common in other cinemas because it doesn’t exist in yours. Sadly, in all other respects, Space Sweepers is the usual neoliberal near-futura corporatist bollocks. Earth is near-dead, and the super-rich – or, “citizens” – all live comfortable and privileged lives in some giant orbital habitat. But, being in orbit, there’s a lot of  space junk… The “space sweepers”, who are all non-citizens, and one unsuccessful flight away from having their ships impounded – could it get any more clichéd? – collect the junk. One such ship finds a young girl in a piece of wreckage. She’s alive… and also apparently an android who contains a fusion bomb. Eco-terrorists plan to use her to destroy the citizens’ habitat. Except, she’s not a bomb. And the terrorists aren’t terrorists. But the villain of the piece is a pantomime billionaire fascist piece of shit (all credit to the actor for managing to play the role without permanently corpsing). Having said all that, the special effects are quite spectacular. But a lot of the science is complete bollocks. “Krypton waves”? WTF? An entertaining pizza-and-beer sf tentpole blockbuster, that’s fun if you don’t think too hard – well, don’t think at all – and if you’re happy with all that 1980s cyberpunk crypto-fascist bullshit. Of course, it will probably win the Hugo Award this year.

Despicable Me 2, Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud (2013, USA). I have been known to actually laugh while watching films, even comedy films, but it doesn’t happen very often. I don’t mean laughs of disbelief, those are quite common. But actual that’s-really-funny laughs. Apparently, Confucius once said the funniest sight in the whole world is watching an old friend fall off a high roof, which I guess means he was a fan of slapstick. Despicable Me, and this sequel, Despicable Me 2, being animated, include a lot of slapstick, a lot of very funny slapstick. You know, with the Minions. But it also makes clever use of its premise. And if it tends to mawkishness as, inevitably, all US animated films do, because it probably says they need to do that in some book about a cat or something, well, you can always fast-forward through those bits these days. Formulas for success are usually self-fulfilling because only the formulaic then becomes successful. Which the Despicable Me films are mostly not. A twenty-first century US animated film that made me laugh. Worth seeing.

Nick the Sting, Fernando di Leo (1976, Italy). A mobster boss fakes having his safe robbed, and plants a ring from the “stolen” jewellery on a small-time con man, in the hope the con man is either arrested or fences the ring, and so provides evidence of the robbery. The mobster will then claim the insurance. After two failed attempts on his life, the con man hatches an overly-elaborate sting to have his revenge on the mobster, which involves a feeble disguise no one seems to see through, and a mock-up of a Lugarno police station with a cast of a hundred or so extras. None of it seems to go smoothly, although that’s all part of the con man’s cunning plan. There’s an interesting use of split-screen at times, but the rest of it is stupidly complicated and stupidly implausible. Di Leo apparently worked as a director-for-hire, and was not happy with the finished movie. Hard to disagree.

The Titan, Lennart Ruff (2018, UK). A few years from now, the climate has crashed and the NATO governments decide there’s a desperate need for a new home for humanity. They pick Titan. As you would. I mean, so what if it has a surface pressure of 1.45 atmospheres, surface temperature of -180C, completely toxic atmosphere, and is flooded with radiation from Jupiter? Oh, and it’s 1.3 billion kilometres from Earth. Obviously, it’s the, er, obvious choice. Settling the moon without either terraforming it or altering humanity is impossible. They decide to re-engineer a squad of military volunteers to survive on Titan. So, pretty much Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus, then, but with Titan instead of Mars. But this is a movie, so a serious commentary on the difficulty, ethics or ramifications of the process is not going to happen. Instead, the sole survivor of the programme goes on a murderous rampage because lost humanity. Complete tosh. Avoid.


by Leave a comment

Watching diary 2021, #4

I’m beginning to wonder when normal service will resume, so to speak, on this blog. I remember there being a vibrant conversation about science fiction online, but these days it’s all squee or uncritical promotion by friends of creators. I’m not interested in marketing. Online debate is effectively dead. The so-called “culture wars” have seen to that. You can’t debate bad ideas away. Because the people who hold those bad ideas, the stupid makes them invulnerable to debate. You can only de-platform them.

These days, I tend to think of this blog as little more than a diary open to the public. “Today, I went to Systembolaget. An issue of a UK magazine I subscribe to was delivered. I had to pay one crown import duty (plus fees). Fucking Brexit.” Yes, my life – during this pandemic, at least – is as boring as that. So thank fuck for books and, in this case, TV series and films…

I tried a couple of episodes of The New Professionals, a Sky-only reboot of the 1970s series, this time with Edward Woodward as the head of CI5 (which was now international). It was… fucking awful. I can see why it was killed after a single season. Lexa Doig, the ship’s avatar from Andromeda, played one of the team, called “Back-up” because – and yes, this is racist – her real name was foreign and sounded a little bit like like the word “back-up”. Ugh.

The Blue Rose, a single-season New Zealand series, was actually really good. A temp joins a law firm as a PA, and is then approached by the best friend of the woman who’d previously held the position. She’d drowned a week or so earlier, after drunkenly falling into a canal. But the best friend thinks it was murder… The mystery of her death lasts the entire season, but in each episode the central four characters play Robin Hood and fix social injustices they either come across or are brought to their notice. Definitely worth a go.

I also watched the one and only season of Young Lions, an Australian cop show… and it’s easy to see why it never made it to a second season. Four likeable leads, yes, but the writing was pretty crook, the second episode is horribly transphobic, and the lives of the detectives outside of work careered from the implausible to the clichéd. Avoid.

Smokescreen, Jim O’Connolly (1964, UK). Peter Vaughn plays a penny-pinching, and perpetually smirking, claims adjuster who investigates the alleged suicide of a businessman who drove his car off a cliff. It’s clearly murder, but by whom? The business partner and the wife both benefit. Vaughn investigates, as cheaply as possible, and solves the crime. Renown Pictures have dumped a lot of forgotten 1950s and 1960s British films on Amazon Prime, and from the few I’ve seen it’s no surprise they were forgotten. True, the English-language world is flooded with US culture, with the in-built assumption it’s better than all the others. It isn’t. It’s more prolific, certainly. But the funny thing about British films is their cultural references make more sense to British viewers than US ones do. I may love me some classic Hollywood movies, but they might as well be foreign language films most of the time. British films are actual historical documents for British viewers. Never discount that.

Franklyn, Gerald McMorrow (2008, UK). My first thought on watching this was it was trying too hard to be Dark City, a  film I’d liked a great deal when it was released some twenty-plus years ago, My second one was, when the central character can move from London to a dystopian alternate universe and back again, why is it that present-day London looks more dystopian than the dystopia? Oh wait, that’d because of ten years of corrupt Conservative government… And, after all that, I was seriously underwhelmed by Franklyn, although friends of mine, whose opinions I trust, liked it. Perhaps it was lead Ryan Philippe, whose entire face appears to have been Botoxed, and who I find an implausible lead at best. Plus, the whole Gothic architecture as “dystopian” is just bollocks because, as any fule kno, it should be Brutalism. And if it had been I’d have loved the film. Because I love Brutalist architecture. True, not enough is said about the fascist and dystopian elements of Victorian Britain, and no fascist regime ever actually embraced Brutalism, but it does sometimes feel – post- His Dark Materials and all that – that British dystopias are more about service staff at Oxbridge colleges who weren’t sufficiently servile to over-privileged academics and students than actual inequality. And fuck that for a game of soldiers.

The Tunnel, Pål Øie (2019, Norway). There are apparently a lot of tunnels in Norway. The opening to this film actually gives the number, but I can’t remember it. The plot of The Tunnel is gloriously simple. A tanker truck overturns in a tunnel and starts a fire. Emergency services struggle to rescue those trapped in the tunnel – which includes the estranged daughter of one of the firemen. It’s clichés all the way down, and they don’t get any more original for being presented in Norwegian. The scenery is, unsurprisingly, spectacular, and a good cast do the best they can with poor material. But this is dull, predictable stuff. Expect a Hollywood remake any day now.

The Confidant, Juraj Nvota (2012, Slovakia). A young man in Communist Czechoslovakia joins the secret police, only to discover he’s under surveillance himself. He accepts the job offer chiefly because he and his wife can’t get an apartment.. but suddenly they can once he’s a secret policeman. Hs job is mainly listening in on conversations at a countryside cottage occupied by an old poet, and whenever the poet’s friends say anything subversive, the eavesdropper makes sure it’s not recorded. Fortunately, the secret policeman has evidence of a past crime by the powerful police captain who’s nurtured his career. Not that it helps when it comes to the crunch. As a fictionalised account of living under a repressive communist regime – and let’s be clear, communism as practiced by the USSR, and its satellites, under Stalin and afterwards, was closer to totalitarianism than anything Marx, Lenin or Trotsky might have envisaged – The Confidant is good. Unfortunately, that version of communism has made a handy bogeyman for the US for around 100 years, and some Americans still can’t get over it. The Confidant is not going to help them – but, you know, when you think about it, how is the Czechoslovakian secret police of the 1950s any different to the NSA of today?

Freaky Deaky, Charles Matthau (2012, USA). Elmore Leonard’s books make good films. Well, perhaps not good, but certainly entertaining. They’re well-plotted, funny, with snappy dialogue and slightly off-the-wall characters. We’re not talking great literature here, but certainly something worth a night with pizza and beer. Freaky Deaky is set in 1974 in Detroit. A pair of hippies try to extort money from a drugged-out millionaire playboy by threatening to kill him with a bomb. But their bombs fail to kill him, and he’s so spaced out he’s no clue what’s going on. And then a disgraced detective is pulled onto the case… No insight into the human condition here, but a couple of amusing set-pieces, the cast play their parts well, and it raises a smile or two. One of Leonard’s better tricks, according to my pet theory, based on the few film adaptations of his novels I’ve seen, is he makes the victims more sympathetic than either the villains or good guys, even though the victims are often pretty horrible people. But it’s all about them somehow surviving, rather than good or bad winning. It makes for entertaining books and films, but it does all feel a bit disposable.

Through Black Spruce, Don McKellar (2018, Canada). The background of the author of the novel on which this film is based has apparently been questioned. He claims First Nations ancestry, but there’s no evidence of it. Sadly, the controversy around the author has reflected on this movie. A Cree woman goes missing in Toronto, and her identical twin sister goes looking for her. The missing sister had been working as a fashion model, but her disappearance could be tied in with drug runners back in her home town. I have no way of judging the presentation of the First Nations experience in present-day Canada, but I thought this a well-paced thriller with an interesting lead in Tanaya Beatty. The part where the uncle flies off into the country, and bumps into a family out hunting, may not have added much to the plot, but certainly helped lift this thriller above the ordinary. A nice, slow, well-shot thriller.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard, Patrick Hughes (2017, USA). I think this must be the laziest-made film I’ve ever seen. Set in the UK and the Netherlands, although apparently very little of the UK-set bits were actually filmed in the UK. And it got pretty much everything wrong. Gary Oldman is the despotic leader of Belarus, currently on trial at the International Criminal Court in the The Hague for crimes against humanity. If he is not found guilty, he will apparently be reinstated as leader of Belarus, which is not how I thought it worked, but never mind. All the witnesses against Oldman have either disappeared or died, and the only one left is Samuel L Jackson, an assassin, currently incarcerated in a Manchester prison. So Interpol arrange for him to be transported to The Hague to give testimony. But their plan comes a cropper in Coventry, and Ryan Reynolds, a private bodyguard, is brought in by an ex-girlfriend Interpol agent. Jackson and Reynolds cross the UK, chased by Oldman’s goons, then catch a ferry across the Channel – despite not having passports – and are then chased around Amsterdam before Jackson makes his way to the Hague and his appearance in court. I went to university in Coventry. I know the city well. And while it may well have changed in the 30 years since I was last there, the Coventry in this film was not actually Coventry. It wasn’t even an English city. You can tell from the architecture. You also can’t enter the Netherlands from the UK without a passport. And you can’t cross the Channel in a twenty-metre river ferry. And cross-Channel ferries to Amsterdam don’t actually go to Amsterdam. This was a film made by Americans who knew nothing about Europe and were too lazy to learn. Avoid.

The Princess and the Pirate, David Butler (1944, USA). Virginia Mayo is a princess on the run because she’s fallen in love with a commoner. Bob Hope is an impressionist. The two are on the same ship, which is captured by pirates, and Hope impersonates the pirate captain so they escape. Oh, and then Hope has the map to the pirates’ treasure tattooed on his back, not that he knows that. This is peak Hollywood – a vehicle for Hope, a leading lady popular at the time, a plot designed to showcase a) Hope’s self-deprecating wit, and b) Mayo’s legs. High culture, this is not. The only really interesting thing about these Hope films is the jokes they played on the Road to… series of movies. The fact the studios were so comfortable with Hope as a lead they’d end the films with a joke at Hope’s expense using Bing Crosby is… remarkable. I can’t think of anything remotely like it in the present day.


by Leave a comment

Watching diary 2021, #3

I’ve no idea what’s been happening to my movie watching of late. It seems a bit all over the place. Likewise, the TV series. First up, there was UK six-part TV series Apparitions, starring Martin Shaw as a Catholic priest who ends up in a personal battle with a demon bent on recruiting him for Satan. An interesting treatment of demons and the Catholic Church – and I’m no fan of religion. I tried the first season of the much-lauded Stranger Things, but didn’t like it at all. Derivative, the kids were annoying, RPGs were presented as something only twelve-year-olds played, the uncritical depiction of bullying, the fact a modern-day Mengele was experimenting away in middle America and no one seemed to have a problem with that… Not impressed. I doubt I’ll bother with seasons 2 and 3. And then there’s The Flight Attendant, about a, well, a flight attendant. Who wakes up in a Bangkok hotel room, next to the bloody corpse of the man she’d met the previous night and gone to bed with. It’s all to do with a big finance conspiracy – fucking one-percenters, they’re a blight on global society – but what lifted this series above other thriller series was the flight attendant hallucinating commentary sessions with the murder victim, and her general cluelessness. I enjoyed it.

The Message, Moustapha Akkad, (1995, Lebanon). Another film about Islam, but this one at least mentions the religion. The Prophet, of course, is not mentioned by name, nor seen on the screen. While his presence is not there, enough of Islam is there for the story to make sense. However, there’s a problem here – Muslim viewers will see what they already know, non-Muslim viewers will not see anything that provides any kind of commentary on the history or origin of Islam. True, The Message is no different to the vast number of straight-to-DVD movies churned out by the “Christian” film industry – and I’ve inadvertently seen some of them – but it at least has the integrity not to hide the fact it’s religious propaganda. I would much sooner watch The Message, a movie about Islam, than some fantasy film with “Christian values”. But, to be honest, I don’t think I benefit from either. Cinema may be a powerful medium for propaganda, as Goebbels no doubt said at least once, but it does often seem the most partisan cinema is often aimed at those who share the same values as the film-makers. There’s no changing minds here, only validating worldviews.

The Twenty Questions Murder Mystery, Paul L Stein (1950, UK). The title refers to a popular radio programme back in the day – from 1947 to 1976, apparently. And while I know of the concept, I was not aware of the radio show. The stars of that show appear in this film, in which a person writes in with a phrase for the panel to guess, only for someone to be murdered a day or two later in a fashion relating to the phrase. And that’s only the first of several murders. It’s all to do with a man who was imprisoned while serving in India during WWII, and his revenge on those who put him in prison. There simply aren’t enough clues initially to guess the murderer – plenty of red herrings, however – but then two-thirds of the way in, it’s obvious who the killer is, and it’s then annoying how slow on the uptake the cast are. This is very much a film of its time – the cast are all terribly terribly, and terribly enthusiastic and energetic, and not a little dim with it, and the use of actual real life celebrities of the day is treated like some sort of jolly jape. And if there’s a deeper message in there about the behaviour of British troops in India post-war, it’s… No, WTF am I thinking? Of course there’s no such thing. English culture is nothing if not resolutely non-self-critical. Self-deprecating, yes. Self-critical, never.

Accumulator 1, Jan Svěrák (1994, Czechia). If there is one cinematic tradition in Europe that could plausibly be from another planet, it’s Czech films. Well, maybe except for Hungarian films – or at least movies by Miklós Jancsó. Or Armenian ones – or at least movies by Sergei Parajanaov. I don’t know. Maybe the two directors were descended from Czechs… Having said that, there could be a perfectly normal and resolutely commercial domestic Czech cinema industry, whose output is considered too low-brow, too banal, and too unoriginal to be released outside the country. But I suspect none of that is true. Accumulator 1, however, is a Czech film and I have no fucking idea what it is about. I am, I hasten to add, a huge admirer of Czech cinema, which has both been technically innovative and used cinematic narratives to comment entertainingly, and not always obviously, on its various regimes. In Accumulator 1, surveyor mysteriously collapses and while in hospital meets a man who can draw energy form his surroundings. The surveyor develops this, so much so he becomes more or less the battery of the title. Meanwhile, he’s met this girl and he fancies her, but his Lothario colleague is making things difficult, and then the surveyor’s energy problems begin to affect those about him so he has to come up with some plan to dispel that energy… It all feels like a clever analogy that isn’t quite clear enough. Much of the film plays like an off-centre rom com – in other words, a Czech rom com –  but the final act is all pyrotechnics, and  all I could think of was there were Polish films that did something similar but better. Although, to be fair, Accumulator 1 was likely better than any Hollywood attempt at the same material.

Hollywood Boulevard, Allan Arkush & Joe Dante (1976, USA). And  speaking of Hollywood… When a film was made because of a bet, it’s a fair guess the film is shit. When the bet was whether the directors could make the cheapest film ever for a studio, New World Pictures, which was not exactly known for the lavishness of its budgets… Well, “shit” is perhaps over-estimating the film’s quality. Hollywood Boulevard won the bet by making extensive use of stock footage. It’s likely that’s where the bulk of its budget went. The story follows three women who, via an agent, sign on as contract players at Miracle Pictures, a studio even cheaper than New World. Except someone is killing off female Miracle Pictures stars, and basically figuring out who the villain is simply a matter of seeing who’s still standing by the start of the third act. Hollywood Boulevard is not just cheap, it aspires to being cheap. It may have won the bet, but it actually detracted from the sum of culture produced by Hollywood. If you know someone who watched this film, feel for them. Do not be them.

The Last King, Nils Gaup (2016, Norway). It’s sometimes easy to forget that pretty much every European’s nation’s history is as fucked up as that of England. Until moving to Sweden, my knowledge of Scandinavian history was pretty much non-existent, which is hardly surprising, and if I’d imagined it to be the usual run of  invaders and dynastic struggles and shifting borders, I would not have been entirely wrong, if not entirely close to the truth. In Norway, for example, in the 1200s, there was a dynastic struggle between supporters of a family from the south, the Baglers, and the incumbents, from the north, the Birkebeiners. Which at one point resulted in the Birkebeiner heir, while a baby, being spirited north to save him from death at the hands of the Baglers. The Baglers had the support of the (Roman) Church, but the Birkebeiners had history, and the general populace, behind them. There is a happy ending – the baby eventually assumed the throne and proved one of the best kings of Norway of the period. But this is is a movie, and chiefly about the Birkebeiners keeping the baby Håkon Håkonsson, later King Håkon IV, out of the hands of the nasties. Infotaining stuff, with a lot of snow and beards and faces familiar from pretty much every other Norwegian film I’ve watched. You could do much worse.

A Song is Born, Howard Hawks (1948, USA). Many directors have remade one of their own films. Hitchcock did it with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956), Capra did it with Lady for a Day (1933) and Pocketful of Miracles (1961). There’s Haneke and his Funny Games (1997 and 2007), although the latter was an English-language remake… And many other directors have made English-language remakes of their non-Anglophone movies. A Song is Born is Hawks remaking Ball of Fire, in which a nightclub singer on the lam hides out in an institute where a group of professors are putting together a comprehensive encyclopaedia of music, and have been doing so for the past decade. In the original film, it’s Cary Grant and Barbara Stanwyck, and the sparks are visible on the screen. In A Song is Born, it’s Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo and… oh dear. Reputedly put together to cash in on the craze for jazz, the film certainly features a number of impressive performances by a lot of well-known names. But Kaye had just split from his wife and refused to sing (she was his lyricist), and was also apparently disappearing off to therapy every day – and it’s almost like he’s phoning in his performance. Mayo vamps as best she can, but she can’t match Stanwyck. The end result is a Technicolor remake that feels colourless compared to the original. One for fans.

Almost Human, Umberto Lenzi (1974, Italy). Grateful as I am to Shameless for dumping all these gialli and poliziotteschi films on Amazon Prime, I suspect I’ve heard Italian spoken more than Swedish over the last twelve months, and they do not speak Italian here. Most gialli/poliziotteschi are, of course, complete trash, but quite a few are weirdly good, even if mostly it comes down to sheer style, something the Italians do so effortlessly. But other such films are clumsily “European”, which often adds a charm all its own. They may have their faults in  plotting and story, but they there’s still something weirdly compelling about them. Almost Human, sadly, is not one of them. It’s the life of a minor criminal who finds himself committing ever more heinous crimes simply in order to stay ahead of the law. And when he’s finally caught, and released on a technicality, the cop who had pursued him kills him. Some of these Shameless releases are, as I have said worth a go. This one is entirely missable.

Come and Get It, Howard Hawks (1936, USA). Another controversial Hawks picture. Controversial chiefly because he was fired, and the film was finished and recut by William Wyler. Who then refused to have his name on it. The story is adapted from a multi-generational novel about loggers in late nineteenth-century Wisconsin. The source novel is a paean to North America’s natural resources and a criticism of their pillaging by “robber barons”. The Silver Fox turned it into a romantic triangle. Sigh. Hawks could cheapen anything, and often did, but he could also make damn a good film out of it. Unfortunately, in this case, his interpretation of the story drew the wrath of the studio, ie Samuel Goldwyn, and Hawks was sacked. Wyler was bought in to “fix” the film, but could do little to rescue it. And, other than reshooting it all from scratch, it’s hard to see how he could have rescued it. There’s some good cinematography here, but the story is trite and banal, and the larger themes implied to exist in the novel are hastily pushed to one side here as the hero of the story lusts after the daughter of an old flame but she’s already fallen in love with his son. It’s pure soap opera – and that’s soap opera at its least imaginative. One for fans.


by 4 Comments

Watching diary 2021, #2

Eight films and eight countries. Been a while since I last managed that. Admittedly, one movie is from the US, but it’s definitely not a Hollywood film, although it is pretty recent.

As for TV series… I  worked my way through all five seasons of Black Mirror, although I’d seen the first season several years ago. The change from UK series to US was somewhat abrupt, and not helped by the opening episode of the US-produced series being a bit pants. The series had its moments, but it lost its bite when it moved to Netflix.

Then there was Bridgerton, which was… a thing. I read Heyer, so I’m familiar with the whole Regency romance thing, and seeing it on a screen was certainly something I’d looked forward to. But… the whole Quality thing is dodgy at best, and Bridgerton‘s use of a diverse cast (which was good to see) couldn’t make it palatable (and sectors of society other than the aristocracy were notable by their absence). There were also times when it felt a little bit, well, off, not something that had been written by a Brit. Plus, everything was so bright and clean, more like a picture postcard than an actual historical period. There are plenty of Regency book series Netflix could have adapted for TV, this one was not a good choice. (And it’s “duchy”, FFS, not “dukedom”.)

I also watched Proof, an Irish mini-series from 2004, in which a discredited journalist discovers evidence that the leading candidate in a general election is being funded by thousands of dodgy shell companies, each of which have donated one cent less than the minimum amount that needs to be reported. And one of the firms funding those shell companies is a local night-club run by Albanians (the villains du jour of the early 2000s) who sex-traffic young women into Dublin. The proof is on a CD-ROM, and the disk continually changes hands but not a single person thinks to copy the data on it. So the villain wins because he ends up with the CD-ROM. Rubbish.

The Dress, Alex van Warmerdam (1996, Netherlands). Black comedy from the Netherlands, a country I don’t really associate with black comedies. (Although, on reflection, haven’t pretty much all of Paul Verhoeven’s movies been black comedies?) Anyway, a print designer witnesses some racist violence outside his house while working on a fabric design. The design – large orange leaves on a blue background – is printed onto material, which is then made into summer dresses. An old woman buys one of the dresses… and everyone, including her, who comes into contact with the dress suffers, well, a bit more than just “bad luck”. As black comedies go, this is grim stuff, with not much in the way of the absurd – other than the way the dress moves from person to person – to offset the misery. A good film, but definitely not a cheerful one.

Mothra, Ishiro Honda (1961, Japan). I’m somewhat late to appreciating Honda’s films, but I seem to have timed it right as it’s only now remastered editions of his films are starting to appear. Those of his films I’d seen previously were bad transfers of US-dubbed versions, probably from video-cassettes hastilu banged out back in the 1980s. But Eureka! have done this edition of Mothra proud, including both the original Japanese audio and dubbed versions. And the film is, well, an Ishiro Honda film. Mothra is, obviously, a giant moth-like creature, which causes global havoc, including laying a giant egg – do moths lay eggs? – on the Eiffel Tower. It’s complete nonsense form start to finish, but the commitment of the cast and crew to the premise is worthy of admiration. I remember many years ago Patrick Troughton being quizzed on, I think, Pebble Mill at One about playing Doctor Who and whether he was into all that sci-fi stuff. He looked quite offended. “It’s a job,” he replied. There’s something about Honda’s films which make it seem like it’s all more than a job to those involved. Plus monsters. Which are men and women in rubber suits. Good stuff.

White Space, Ken Locsmandi (2018, USA). There are a lot of US straight-to-DVD sf movies on Amazon Prime, and I normally avoid them because, well, there’s usually a good reason they went straight to DVD. There are also a lot of sf movies that rip off the plot from Moby Dick. White Space is both of these – but actually proved slightly better than I expected. It’s not a good film, by any means. It’s the usual neoliberal corporate crypto-fascist future Americans seem to think is the only future imaginable. The characters – the crew of a “space whaling” ship – are all stereotypes, and the jeopardy is created as much by their stupidity as it is by events beyond their control. But the production design, sets and effects aren’t too bad, and it all hangs together entertainingly. I’ve seen worse, much worse.

Guardian, Helfi CH Kardit (2014, Indonesia). This was my very first Indonesian film. A teenage girl becomes the target of kidnappers but she doesn’t understand why. Nor does she understand why her mother has been teaching her martial arts and self defence since she was little. Meanwhile, a North American woman has broken out of prison, and she and three others also help defend the girl from the kidnappers… And it turns out the girl is the daughter of gang lord who has since gone legit and is about to be elected to high office. The North American woman is the girl’s mother. And the girl’s mother is her guardian. Not a bad action film, although the production values were not especially high. I suspect most of the budget went on all the cars that were destroyed during the film.

Theeran Adhigaaram Ondru, H Vinoth (2017, India). This was actually based on a true story, and covers the long-running investigation into a series of robberies and murders which took place along national highways in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh between 1995 and 2006. It takes the police a while to figure out it is a gang of lorry drivers, all of whom are from a village of bandits, but they cannot prove it. The fact the perpetrators were eventually caught pretty much comes down to the determination of a single police inspector, who spent eight years hunting down the members of the gang and gathering evidence against them. Watching this film, which is set this decade, it’s surprising how much of India still remains effectively lawless. The nature of the investigation means the film drags in places, but some of the set-pieces are well-staged, and it’s hard not to sympathise with the beleaguered police. Worth seeing.

Baby Jane, Katja Gauriloff (2019, Finland). A young woman from a small town arrives in Helsinki and hooks up with a charismatic woman some years older. The two move in together, and life seems to go well. But then they fall apart, the young woman leaves, marries and becomes more or less a regular member of Helsinki’s middle class. Then she discovers her old partner is ill and dying and… No synopsis is really going to do this film justice, although much of the marketing seems to have focused on the older woman’s death – was it assisted? and who assisted it? But that’s more or less a coda to the third act. The story is mainly about their relationship, and the young woman’s walking away from it, to her cost. A good drama.

Macadam Stories, Samuel Benchetrit (2015, France). The original French title for this Asphalte, and asphalt is a term that some people still use in English. But no one ever says “macadam”. “Tarmac”, yes; “tarmacadam”, very very rarely; “macadam”, never. And it’s not like the title is actually relevant to the film. It is, ostensibly, based on the director’s own experiences growing up in a run-down apartment block in a poor suburb of Paris. I find it doubtful a US astronaut parachuted onto the roof of his building after his spacecraft went ballistic while returning from the ISS, but perhaps that’s meant to be a metaphor or something. On the other hand, Isabelle Huppert as the alcoholic struggling actor new neighbour is, well, who wouldn’t cast Huppert as their neighbour? For all that, the film was actually entertaining, contained a few good, if very gentle, comedic set-pieces, and no one involved need walk away embarrassed. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re a Huppert completist – and who isn’t? – but I’ve seen much, much worse.

Telstar, Nick Moran (2008, UK). I was not aware of record producer Joe Meek, although I’d certainly heard the song ‘Telstar’, which was the most successful song he ever produced. What I hadn’t known was that both Ritchie Blackmore and Mitch Mitchell started their career with Meek. Mitchell was a blink-and-you-miss-him appearance, but Blackmore was a regular member of Meek’s house-band, The Outlaws, which also included Chas Hodges of Chas & Dave, as well as the band that backed Screaming Lord Sutch on tour. Meek comes across as a complete nightmare to work for, and while much is made of the fact he’s gay in his biography little of that comes across in the film (and yes, I know, “family entertainment”, and homosexuality was criminalised then, and gay culture was very much underground – Polari and the handkerchief code and all that – but there’s barely a hint of it in the film). There is also little about Meek’s actual technical innovations in producing music. In fact, the whole thing is mostly a horrible boss comedy, with a tragic third act. Dear god, if you’re going to celebrate the man’s achievements, at least actually fucking show them, and not just present the bland instrumental ‘Telstar’ as the highlight of what was an influential career. For all that Telstar was educational, it did a piss-poor job on its subject. But that, unfortunately, is the English film industry for you.


by Leave a comment

Watching diary 2021, #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


by Leave a comment

Movie roundup 2020, #24

Just working my way through the last few films I watched last year. A very mixed bunch, from all over the world.

Mariam’s Day Off, Arshak Amirbekyan (2017, Armenia). This is apparently the second film I’ve seen by this director, and the first one was also just over an hour long. Mariam is a sex worker, who turns up to her patch one day to find it occupied by an old man. They get talking, and he reveals he has a friend who’s an artist, and would she like to model for him? There is nothing salacious in their discussion, nothing suspicious, so she agrees. And experiences an entirely different world, in which two old men in the arts enjoy each other’s company and treat Mariam with respect and courtesy. The next day, she returns to her patch, and she tells her fellow sex workers she did something different yesterday. Filmed in black and white, with a small cast, and only two locations – the sex workers’ patch, a stretch of fence outside a park; and the artist’s studio. Enjoyed it.

Inferno, Ron Howard (2016, USA). Who remembers Dan Brown, and his series of novels about a “symbologist” (sic), which were not only badly written but also managed to be badly researched? They were best-sellers, big enough in fact to justify a film series. True, the first book to hit the big time, The da Vinci Code, which was not Brown’s first novel, actually prompted the film series, and none of the sequels, or prequels, matched it in sales. But they still made films of them. And, really, it’s easy to like Tom Hanks, who plays the symbologist (sic). He’s a nice guy (and a huge space nut, which I think is great), but his involvement in these films really does make me wonder about him… I forget the plot of Inferno – it was something to do with Dante Alghieri, and I’m all up for popular culture being used as a vector for complex ideas, sort of like Sophie’s Choice. But Brown’s fiction is not that. It’s a dumbing-down of the complex ideas it robs wholesale from other sources. Which it freely mixes with complete fiction and downright distortions of history. And the films are no better. They replace Brown’s lumpen prose with polished visuals. Avoid.

The Third Wife, Ash Mayfair (2018, Vietnam). A fourteen-year-old girl is given in arranged marriage to a man with two wives in nineteenth-century Vietnam. Her status in the family depends on her providing her husband with a son. She is soon pregnant, but unfortunately gives birth to a daughter. Meanwhile, the second wife is having an affair with the son of the first wife. And when he is married off in turn, he reuses to accept his new child bride and she commits suicide. Meanwhile, the fourteen-year-old wife contemplates poisoning her daughter… I recognise this is real historical practice, but why turn it into drama? While sex trafficking and child brides still exists in some parts of the world, the former much more so than the latter, The Third Wife is an historical movie. It evokes its period impressively, at least to my untutored eye, but I’m not sure how its story maps onto the present day, and without that I don’t understand what the point of the film was. I mean, it’s not entertainment. This is no brainless popcorn action flick. It’s a commentary-free period drama.

Slave Widow, Mamoru Watanabe (1967, Japan). This is a “pink film”, which is a term used in Japanese cinema for films that contain sexual content. The title is… a pretty good summary of the plot, although the film is more of a domestic drama than anything salacious. A businessman dies unexpectedly, and it transpires his business was failing and he was massively in debt. His largest creditor offers to cover the debts if his widow will stay on in their house and sexual service the creditor when he desires. But the creditor’s eldest son, who is in training to take over the business, falls in love with the widow. It’s presented in a very mundane style, almost like Yasujiro Ozu, although without his eye for detail or elegiac quality. But the trap in which the widow is caught is laid out clearly, and she eventually takes the only way out. A  bit slow in places, and a bit obvious in others, but better than expected, or its title might suggest.

Rift, Erlingur Thoroddsen (2017, Iceland). A man receives a fraught telephone call from an ex-boyfriend who has retired to a remote cottage and, scared the ex-boyfriend might be thinking of taking life, he goes to see him. Something weird is definitely going on – a strange figure haunts the exterior of the cabin, one of the neighbours has been behaving oddly, and something peculiar happens in a nearby rift, a fissure no more than a metre or so deep, when they visit it. Any Icelandic film and your eye is mostly on the scenery, because it’s so distinctive and bizarre, and Rift scores pretty highly in that respect. But despite being a two-hander film, Rift also does a really good job of maintaining the suspense and fear throughout its 111-minute length. The ending is somewhat ambiguous, although unexpected. Worth seeing.

The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola (1974, USA). Gene Hackman plays an expert surveillance expert who slowly discovers that a conversation he recorded of a woman and her lover doesn’t mean quite what he thought it did. Much is made of the fact Hackman’s character is generally considered the best in his field, although he despises self-promotion – as demonstrated by his reactions during a local surveillance tech expo and his treatment of a rival whose reputation rests more on promotion than results. There are a few inconsistencies – Hackman’s growing paranoia is fed by his privacy in his apartment being breached, but there’s nothing in the story to justify or explain those breaches. Hackman has taken precautions, and they’re not trivial precautions. The Conversation is generally recognised to be a classic New Hollywood thriller, and it’s easy to understand why. It’s slow and takes its time to reveal its twist, but it also makes a character out of Hackman’s surveillance expert, rather than just the usual stereotype or archetype you get in most thriller films. Recommended.

Tam Cam: the Untold Story, Ngo Thanh Van (2016, Vietnam). It’s astonishing how much the early parts of this story resemble that of Cinderella, although the Vietnamese predates the French version by, I believe, several centuries. It’s also considerably more gruesome. A prince encounters a young village woman while riding back to his palace. He thinks little of it, but then the king dies, he takes the throne, is persuaded he needs to find a wife. So he invites all the unmarried women in the kingdom, high-born and low-born, to a ball. The young village woman, Tam, has two stepsisters and an evil stepmother (played by the director), and they conspire to prevent from attending. But with the help of a fairy godfather-type, well, fairy, she makes it to the ball, charms the prince, loses her shoe and so on. But then the stepmother kills Tam, and one of the stepsisters, Cam, takes her place. And tries to poison the king. But Tam reincarnates as a bird and saves the king from the poisoning attempt. Cam kills the bird and eats it. Tam reincarnates as two trees. Cam chops down the two trees and burns them. But the ashes are blown away on the wind and where they settle a golden apple tree grows. An old woman takes an apple from the tree home, and it turns into Tam. The king passes by, meets Tam, and the two are back together. Not part of the original legend, as far as I can discover, is a subplot about a demon who has disguised himself as human and acts as chancellor to the new king. He’s done a deal with a neighbouring state, so they invade and the demon gets the throne. So the king is off fighting a war, which he loses, and then his best friend turns on him and tries to kill him… Tam Cam: the Untold Story gets through a lot of story in 116 minutes, and in laces it feels more like fantasy than Vietnamese legend.