It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

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Moving pictures 2017, #37

To people visiting this site after following the link from the Apollo Quartet audio book humble bundle (here), apologies. I normally write about science fiction and writing and critcism and sometimes even space exploration and technology… but for the past 18 months the $dayjob has sort of taken over and this blog has sort of turned into a film blog. I like films, I’ve always liked films. And I like to think I have good taste in films. I especially like films from other cultures, or from directors with very distinctive visions – auteurs, if you will. So, sadly, I’ve been blogging a lot about films for the last year or so. Normal service will be resumed at some point. Then I’ll starting writing criticism and stuff about science fiction, I’ll have the bandwidth to to invest in that sort of stuff. But, for now, it’s movies mostly. But they are good movies. Mostly.

King Kong*, Merian C Cooper & Ernest B Schoedsack (1933, USA). Everyone knows the story of King Kong – you know, giant ape, “was beauty killed the beast” – although it’s likely from one of the remakes. The one I remember best is the Jessica Lange one from 1976… although, I say “remember”, but all I can actually recall is the basic story – you know, giant ape, “was beauty killed the beast”… This 1933 edition is the original, made by the guys who actually invented King Kong. A film director known for making adventurous and dangerous films is about to embark on his latest project, shooting on an island whose location he refuses to reveal. He has decided his project needs a love interest but can find no actress willing to accompany him on his expedition/shoot. Desperate, he goes looking for a suitable star on the night the ship he has chartered is due to depart… and stumbles across homeless Fay Wray, who is more than happy to accept his somewhat vague offer of employment. The ship sails to an uncharted island somewhere in the Pacific, where the natives worship a giant ape called Kong, and sacrifice young women to it at intervals. When the natives catch sight of Wray, they know Kong just gonna love her. (Why? Kong is a gorilla. Surely he lusts after, well, other gorillas?) The natives kidnap Wray and leave her for Kong. First mate on the ship and male love interest charges off to rescue her. There’s lots of stop-motion photography of Kong fighting dinosaurs. For 1933, it’s pretty effective. The hardy Americans manage to capture Kong, and take him back to New York to exhibit him to an eager audience… This is pure pulp, and unashamedly so. And, I guess, it could qualify as seminal, given that King Kong himself has become a cultural icon. And I can certainly understand the argument that seminal movies, as well as ones that are just plain excellent, belong on the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You die list… And, let’s be fair, King Kong is pretty trashy, but it’s entertaining trash and it never claimed to be anything more (unlike some of its remakes kof kof). I’ve now seen it, I’m glad I’ve seen it, I’ll likely never ever see it again, but that’s okay.

The Salesman, Asghar Farhadi (2016, Iran). The title refers to Arthur Miller’s play, as the film’s two leads are rehearsing for a production of it in Tehran in which they play the chief roles. The film opens with their family fleeing from their apartment building as the tenants are afraid it is about to collapse – a wall has fallen over, and building standards are apparently so poor in Iran it’s not uncommon for the entire building to follow suit. Forced to find another home, they turn to a fellow cast-member, who offers them a recently-vacated apartment in his building. So they move in. The other tenants in the building, remembering the previous tenant of the apartment, are a little worried, because, well, because of what happens. One evening, on her own in the flat, the wife takes a shower. The entryphone buzzes. Thinking it’s her husband returning from the supermarket, she presses the button and unlocks the front door. It is not her husband. And when he does arrive home, he finds his wife is missing and there is blood in the bathroom. She’s in hospital, having been assaulted. She doesn’t know who her assailant was. But he’d been surprised by neighbours, and ran off, leaving his pickup truck behind. So the husband uses it to track the man down… You can imagine how this would go if it were made in Hollywood, with either Bruce Willis or Liam Neeson… Happily, it doesn’t do that. The wife wants to forget about the incident, the husband wants revenge. And when he identifies the attacker, he sets out to have his revenge, only for that to go not as intended. I know of ‘Death of a Salesman’, but I’m not that familiar with it, so how it integrates into the story of the film is lost on me. I suspect the two stories resonate off each other, but I’m guessing – you don’t see enough the play in the film to judge. I was less than taken with Farhadi’s film prior to this, The Past, which felt like an ordinary French drama, but The Salesman is much, much better, a return to the films Farhadi had been making before.

Sofia’s Last Ambulance, Ilian Metev (2012, Bulgaria). The title is a bit of a fib, as this documentary doesn’t follow the actual last ambulance still operating in the Bulgarian capital, although the fleet is a fraction of what it once was. It’s the age-old story: a civilised society creates free healthcare for all… but then in come the capitalists and rentiers and plutocrats and they know people will never refuse to pay for medical care so they defund and destroy the public system, then mendaciously claim it doesn’t work, and so privatise it, thus earning themselves great profits. This should be made a crime. It’s no better than selling arms – worse, in fact, because people can choose not to pull the trigger, but they cannot choose not to be ill or injured. It’s past time for a change in attitude: profiting from healthcare is the action of scumbags. Anyway, Sofia’s Last Ambulance follows a single ambulance over several days. The camera remains focused throughout on the crew, and the patients are never revealed. Many of the scenes show them sitting in the cabin of their ambulance. Judging by the way the vehicle bounces around, the roads in Sofia are also in a shocking state. There are several scenes also set in the back of the ambulance, including one where a man involved in a RTA is in severe pain and keeps on sitting up, despite being repeatedly told not to – so much so, the paramedic tells him, “If you don’t lie down, you’ll leave your leg here on the stretcher!” (or words to that effect). The scariest part about Sofia’s Last Ambulance is that it’s a pretty good indication of what the NHS will look like post-Brexit, post- a decade of Tory cuts and corruption and robbery and lies. I’m actually starting to look back on Thatcher’s government with fondness, that’s how incompetent, malicious, corrupt and damaging both Cameron’s and May’s governments have been, and still are being. Their excuses are so thin, only a moron would swallow them. Bah. Sofia’s Last Ambulance: an excellent documentary. The UK’s Conservative government: a bunch of criminals that has repeatedly abused human rights.

Children of Heaven, Majid Majidi (1997, Iran). While there’s no mistaking Iranian cinema, I do sometimes have trouble distinguishing its directors – well, mostly. Children of Heaven, for example, reminded me of The Apple, but that was directed by Samira Makhmalbaf. And while Kiarostami possessed a singular vision, it was evident more in the structure of his films than in the shots he framed or the stories he told. Of course, there’s always a danger in confusing characteristics of a nation’s cinema with the visions of individual directors. After all, not every film made in India is three hours long and features singing and dancing. And while I’ve seen a number of films from Iran – twenty-one, at the last count – I doubt that’s enough to get a true handle on the film-making traditions in the country. After all, in this Moving pictures post alone, there are two Iranian directors, Majidi and Farhadi, and both create very different films, but both of which seem, to me, very much portraits of their country. In Children of Heaven, a young boy and his younger sister are forced to share a pair of ratty old plimsolls – because the sister’s shoes were stolen when the boy was on way hone from picking them up from the cobbler. The shoe-sharing results in the boy being late for school several times, and also several amusing incidents with the girl losing one or the other plimsoll (as they’re too big for her). But then she spots her old shoes on another girl’s feet, and follows her home. But she can’t work up the courage to claim her shoes back, and the girl seems in innocent of the theft anyway. The boy’s school then announces there is a nation-wide children’s 4-km running competition, the third prize for which is a holiday and a pair of Adidas trainers. The boy enters, and wins a place on his school’s team. He wants to win third prize, so he can have the trainers, and his sister then have the ratty plimsolls for herself… For a film whose two leads are under the age of ten but operating in an adult world, it comes as no surprise that Children of Heaven is big on charm. There’s not a great deal in the lives of the working-class Iranian in Tehran that’s actually charming per se – their father has to beg for work, and goes round pressing on entry buzzers at big houses asking for gardening work. and, to be fair, the whole plot hinges on the fact the family cannot to keep the two children properly shod. But the two kids are absolutely fantastic in their roles, and seeing how well they handle their parts actually makes the movie quite uplifting. They’re all in tears at the end, and they’re not tears of happiness, but it’s nonetheless a happy ending. I forget now why I added this film to my rental list, but it really is very good. Definitely worth watching.

Once upon a Time in Anatolia, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2011, Turkey). I forget also why I added this to my rental list – or rather, I forget who recommended it and when. I’ve watched less than half a dozen films from Turkey, but I know Ceylan’s name from Uzak, which I watched back in 2012. And I remember it as being very good. Which ended up making Once Upon a Time in Anatolia something of a curate’s egg. It feels in part like an attempt at a Tarantino film (but why would anyone want to do that?), and follows a plot that could take place just about anywhere… yet it’s still peculiarly Turkish. The police have driven two murders out into the country to dig up the body of their victim. But the murderers are having trouble remembering precisely where they buried it. Meanwhile, the police talk among themselves, sometimes in Tarantino-esque dialogue, sometimes in the sort of elliptical hypothetical story more common in East European/West Asian films and stories. Eventually, the murderers take the police to the right place, and they dig up their victim. But then they realise they have no body-bags, and the corpse won’t fit in the boots of their cars. Ths is a film in which the story being told is actually incidental to the dialogue – the hunt for the murder victim’s buried body just provides structure, everything is in the conversations between the principals. And the problem with such films is that because the dialoguie skips all over the place, there’s no real structure to the story. Once upon a Time in Anatolia works because the hunt for the body is surreal enough, and yet real enough, to provide a framework for the dialogue. And some of the dialogue also links back into the framing plot – such as the one about the man whose wife died of mysterious means on the day she said she would die, and how an autopsy revealed she’d had a heart attack but not how she’d been able to predict it – and that connects to the autopsy of the murder victim and its findings. A good film. I think I’ll add the rest of Ceylan’s oeuvre – he’s made seven feature-length films, all of which are available – to my rental list.

Eroica, Andrzej Munk (1958, Poland). Munk’s Passenger is an incomplete classic of cinema, but he apparently managed to finish three movies, of which Eroica is the second. Though the the title refers to a piece of classical music – by Beethoven – its alternative title of “Heroism”, while obvious in the way US publishers like to be obvious, does explain its story better. The film consist of two separate stories, both of which take place in Poland during WWII. (There was apparently a third segment, but Munk cut it, and it eventually appeared on Polish television fourteen years later.) In the first story, a con-man deserts from his home guard unit and returns home to discover his wife has taken up with the commanding officer of the Hungarian company garrisoned locally. The Hungarian tells him he’s willing to change sides, and bring his men and artillery over to the Poles. So the con-man – called Dzidziuś, which Google translate tells me means “baby”, but which the subtitles translate as “Babyface”, an odd name for a man in his thirties – must walk to Warsaw to tell the Home Army about the Hungarian’s offer. And then head back home to offer terms, and then back again to give the Hungarian’s response. The second story is set in a POW camp. A Polish officer allegedly succeeded in escaping, the only one to do so, and his success has been good for morale. Except, he didn’t escape, he’s been hiding in the attic all the time. But those who know this can’t reveal it because he would then be taken by the German guards and, of course, it would be bad for prisoner morale. Meanwhile, the other prisoners make assorted fruitless attempts to escape. The story focuses on a group of officers sharing a single bunk-room – the camp comprises stone buildings, rather than the wooden huts more commonly seen in such films – as seen thrugh the eyes of two new prisoners assigned to the room. It doesn’t take a genius to see how the alternative title applies, although they’re typically Polish, and blackly comic, definitions of the term: the man who performs heroic deeds simply in order to have an easier life, and the hero whose reputation rests on a deed that was a lie. Another solid entry in the Masterpieces of Polish Cinema volumes.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 873


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Moving pictures 2017, #36

I watch on average two films a night. I’ve pretty much given up on broadcast and cable television, which is a shame as there are programmes on there I’d like to see. But with 200-odd channels, it’s almost impossible to find when and where they might be. I used to buy a newspaper every Saturday so I had a TV guide, but it was a piss-poor guide and only included about a tenth of the channels. I tried buying one of those TV guide magazines, the one that’s only about 65p and seems to be mostly about soap stars (oh wait, they’re all mostly about soap stars)… Anyway, they have schedules for far more channels than I have access to, so finding what I wanted to watch was no easier. I’ve also tried using tvguide.co.uk, but it’s horribly designed and never seems to remember my settings. I suppose these days people use Tivos and YouView boxes and such, and they have the facility to calendar and/or record programmes… but Virginmedia refuse to give me a Tivo and I even had to wait until my old set top box broken before I was given a HD one. Bah, technology.

On the other hand, I do get to watch a large number of (mostly) great films, with a much greater variety in topics, locations and languages. So it’s not like I’m losing out.

To Catch A Thief, Alfred Hitchcock (1954, USA). Hitchcock is one of my favourite directors, I have about eighty percent of the films he made – and he made a lot of films. As far as Hitchcock movies go, To Catch A Thief is a bit of fluff, which has been over the years its chief appeal. It’s the Hitch equivalent of Graham Greene’s “entertainments” – although that would presuppose Hitch made other films of the same ilk, and it’s hard to think of which might qualify – The Trouble with Harry, perhaps? Nonetheless, To Catch A Thief is so much lighter than his usual fare, which is probably why it’s great fun. Cary Grant, at his most teabag-tannish, is a retired cat burglar living on the French Riviera. But someone has been stealing the jewellery of wealthy guests to the region and everyone assumes Grant has come out of retirement. He’s determined to prove his innocence. So he teams up with an agent of an insurance company, and gets to know a rich US widow and her nubile daughter (Grace Kelly). Grant is at his most oleaginous, but it actually feels a little creepy in this, which is not something I’d noticed before. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen so many early Grant films since last watching To Catch A Thief. Kelly is great – it’s one of her three best roles, along with Rear Window and High Society  – and the supporting cast are all top-notch. It’s all pure Hitchcock from start to finish, from the adept use of location shooting to studio close-ups, from the script full of misdirection to hints at a back-story.  It’s the setting more than anything that makes it feel like fluff. I only mention this in this film post because I recently bought a Blu-ray copy of the film – it was only a fiver (but not anymore, I see) – and I have to admit it’s a very nice transfer. The richer colours don’t work in everyone’s favour – Grant looks like he’s been creosoted – but it’s a superior print to the one on my DVD. Well worth £5.

Tabu, Miguel Gomes (2012, Portugal). I think I stuck this on my rental list because it was a Portugese film, although apparently it was at some point one of the most internationally successful Portugese films of all time. And while it reminded me in several ways of another Portugese film I’d seen, Manoel de Oliveira’s Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (see here), so much so I wondered if the similarities were actually a characteristic of Portugese cinema, it also reminded me a great deal of Jauja (see here), which is from Argentina… Tabu opens with a prologue set in the nineteenth century in Africa – it doesn’t say where, but it’s implied it’s Lusophone… so Angola or Mozambique? – in which a man hunts a crocodile following the suicide of his wife, is killed by the crocodile, and henceforth there are sightings of a ghostly woman and a crocodile. The film abruptly shifts to present-day Lisbon and a trio of women. The oldest of these, Aurora, is eccentric, and when she goes into hospital and is near to death’s door, the other two women at her request track down a man called Gian-Luca… and the film flashes back to Aurora’s early twenties in Portugese Africa… where she married a local land-owner, but then had an affair with Gian-Luca, and nearly died in childbirth. The whole film is shown mostly with a voice-over standing in for dialogue. It gives the story a literary feel, but also distances the viewer, something I also noted about Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl. The thing is, it’s so different to most popular narrative cinema that, if it is a peculiarity of Portugese cinema (and, admittedly, I don’t know that it is), then I have to wonder how Portugese film-goers actually, well, view films. Imagine someone who had been brought up on entirely on nineteenth-centiry literature being given a modern best-seller to read. It feels like that. Which is not to say that Tabu is a bad film. On the contrary, it’s very good indeed. And if the prologue never really quite justifies its place in the story, it’s well presented and entertaining. Otherwise, the present day sections are not so interesting, but the flashback is good – the actor playing the young Gian-Luca, Carloto Cotta, is especially good. I added Tabu to my rental list on a seeming whim, you can add it to yours knowing it was recommended. Worth seeing.

Daughter of the Nile, Hou Hsiao Hsien (1987, Taiwan). I’m a big fan of Hou’s films, and have been ever since stumbling across his name somewhere, ordering a box set of his DVDs from Korea on a whim, and watching them and discovering how bloody good they are. He’s made a lot of films, and their availability in the UK is… Random, at best. Perverse, possibly. Happily, eureka! have just released a dual edition of one of his films, so that’s one I can cross off the list. Daughter of the Nile is a very Hou film, amost emblematic of his style without being representative of his oeuvre – if that makes sense. Hou makes films about the disaffected, as do the Sixth Generation Chinese directors, although Hou is, obviously, Taiwanese not Chinese. But Daughter of the Nile is also about affluence and adulthood, and while Hou does his thing with static shots and long shots – and it’s a style I very much like myself – Daughter of the Nile does feel more… kinetic than others films by Hou I’ve seen. Maybe it’s the gangster sub-plot… The main story describes a young woman who works at KFC, attends night school, and must look after her younger brother and sister. He’s the gangster. And he provides the film’s few moment of real drama – a shooting touside a night-club being one. I’d forgotten while watching the film that it was released in 1987… until a character pulled out a pager and then rang someone on a dial telephone. The fashions weren’t especially eighties, and usually films made in the 1980s look very eighties. But that’s more of an observation than a criticism. I think I’ll have to watch Daughter of the Nile again some time. Happily, Hou’s films bear repeated watchings.

Goodbye Gemini, Alan Gibson (1970, UK). I saw a trailer for this on a rental DVD, Say Hello to Yesterday (see here), and thought it worth seeing… and luckily managed to find a copy on eBay for a few quid. And, well, it’s okay, I guess. It’s very much a film of its time. A pair of twins arrive in London from South America, immediately arrange for the – murder? I’m not sure – of their housekeeper/guardian, go out pubbing and run into an unsavoury crowd. Well, not really unsavoury. They’re movieland 1960s swinging Englanders, into Johnnie Walker, flares, sideburns, fatuous dialogue and a social scene in which all men over the age of thirty are depicted as camp chickenhawks but no one is actually gay… Anyway, it seems the twins like each other a bit too much, and when the female of the pair falls for a gambler and wastrel, who then tries blackmailing the male of the pair, it all ends badly. While Goodbye Gemini was every bit as 1970 as Say Hello to Yesterday, it didn’t have Minis or silver birches. In fact, it looked generic 1960s. It did well on ther fashions, but less well on the scenery. So-so.

Sia, The Dream of the Python, Dani Kouyaté (2001, Burkina Faso). There are, to date, four volumes of Great African Films, each containing a pair of movies, and I plan to get hold of copies of all four. But they’re not easy to find. Well, in the US they seemingly are, but the company responsible for them seems reluctant to sell outside North America… Which is a shame, as these are are Region 0 DVDs and well worth seeing. I tracked down a second-hand copy of the first volume – Haramuya by Drissa Toure (Burkina Faso) and Faraw: Mother of the Dunes by Abdoulaye Ascofaré (Mali) (see here and here) – and  the raw potential of the two films more than justified the hassle and expense in finding copies. And while this second volume was no easier to find, although at least this one was new, the pure film-making story-telling of, at least, Sia, The Dream of the Python, proves it was another good purchase and well worth the expense. The story is relatively straightforward. It;s based on, apparently, a seventh-century myth, but there’s no real indication of when it is set. Some elements of it feel contemporary, some feel historical. Basically, a man’s daughter is earmarked for sacrifice to the python god, but she runs away the night before. The king’s troops fail to find her. Then her boyfriend, a powerful warrior, returns from the front, and overthrows the king and takes the throne. And it’s like watching half a dozen bog standard fantasies played out in their ur-version in a world that is richer and more real than the authors of said fantasies could ever conceive. It’s a not a perfect film, by any means. Some of its cast are plainly amateur, and it often promises more than it can deliver on its budget. But these Great African Films DVDs are definitely worth tracking down, and certainly belong in the library of self-respecting film fan.

Footprints on the Moon, Luigi Bazzoni (1975, Italy). Sometimes you see a film and you think, I’ll have a bit of that, and then when it arrives you wonder why you picked it in the first place. I’ve watched several giallo over the years – both those classified as thrillers and those classified as horror – and some I’ve enjoyed while others I’ve thought were trash. Footprints on the Moon certainly has arresting DVD cover art, and an opening credit sequence in which a black-and-white LM descends onto the lunar surface, so surely it has to appeal… And I’ve watched it twice now and I think goddamnit I’m going to buy myself a copy because it’s a hidden gem and bears rewatching. It’s a giallo,  no doubt about that; but it’s one of those rare giallos that falls into no known genre. A woman who works as a translator discovers she has mysteriously lost three days. She finds a postcard from a holiday island that has fallen on hard times, and goes there. Where she is repeatedly mistaken for a woman who looks exactly like her but who was on the island several days previously. The plot resembles a psychological thriller with a twist in which the writer hadn’t quite thought everything through properly. But the decision to film the scenes on the “island” in Istanbul gives the whole film a sort of, well, Hav-ish feel, which, unintendedly, has made the place much more interesting. The invented island has become an even more so invented place. This is only confused further by the protagonist finding, and then wearing, a wig which makes her look precisely like the woman for whom everyone is confusing her. Add in a bizarre subplot, which gives the film its title, in which the woman dreams of a secret project where an astronaut is left to die on the Moon, and which is where top-billed star Klaus Kinski briefly appears… And, well, it’s completely insane. I can see I’ll be spending a lifetime defending this film, but I really do think it’s a forgotten classic. Go and rent it.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 872


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Moving pictures 2017, #35

I was described recently as a “film nerd”, which felt wrong somehow. I’m a “film fan”, certainly. In much the same way I’m a science fiction fan. I’ve been a subscriber to Sight & Sound since the late 1990s, and when I’ve liked a director’s work I’ve tried to watch as much as their oeuvre as I can find. The first director for which I did this was Alfred Hitchcock. Back in the late 1990s, when I was living out in the Middle East, I visited the UK one leave, and bought two DVD box sets of his films – the box sets, in fact, I recently upgraded to Blu-ray. My taste in movies has changed a bit in the years since I bought those Hitchcock DVDs, so much so that I now have to look a bit further afield for the sort of films I like to watch. Although I do still think Hitchock is an excellent director. But sometimes – often – I have no choice except to purchase a copy from some obscure source, because it’s not available for rental, streaming, or in your local HMV. I don’t think that makes me a film nerd – although, to be fair, I do currently own rather a lot of DVDs and Blu-rays…

Cyclo*, Tran Anh Hung (1995, Vietnam). There is only one Vietnamese film on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and it’s this one. I’ll admit I’ve seen very few Vietnamese films – in fact, this is only the second. Although, weirdly, it’s the second film I’ve seen by Tran – I reviewed his 2009 film, I Come with the Rain, actually a French film, for videovista.net several years ago. Anyway, I find it hard to believe the compilers of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list could find six films by Vincente Minnelli to include but only one from Vietnam. But it is, it must be said, a good one. The title refers to the profession of the main character – he pedals a bicycle taxi, or “cyclo”, about the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. He is not named throughout the film. His father died in a traffic accident some time before. He lives with his grandfather, who repairs bicycle tyres for a living, his older sister, who carries water in a local market, and his young sister, who shines shoes in local restaurants. They are dirt poor and pretty much live hand-to-mouth existence. But then the cyclo gets involved with gangsters, and his prospects start to look up. But it all goes horribly wrong when he is asked to kill someone but fails after overdosing on the drugs he was given to “calm him down”. This is all pretty grim stuff, and the way the lower levels of society prey on each other, facilitated by those with means, is hard to watch. At one point, the cyclo driver stops for a piss, and while he’s peeing against a fence, thieves run up and steal his cyclo. Given how much he depends on his cyclo, and how little he earns, and the fact hge doesn’t even own it but has paid a deposit to the owner of a cyclo company so he can use it… well, that’s pretty low. Of course, it’s always in the monied classes interests to have the lower classes fighting amongst themselves, because then they’re not fighting for what should rightfully be theirs. Cyclo certainly belongs on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, but I’d like to have seen more films from Vietnam on it. I shall definitely be keeping my eye open for more movies from that country that I can watch.

Forever Amber, Otto Preminger (1947, USA). For some reason, I decided to work my way through Preminger’s oeuvre… and it’s not a bad oeuvre for a Hollywood director, especially a non-US-born Hollywood director (of which there were, and are, many). Although best known for noir movies, Preminger’s films are especially interesting because of their variety, and their varied levels of success at whatever he made – Preminger’s one Western for example, was River of Now Return (see here), which was something of a failure but is still quite an interesting film. And Forever Amber, despite being a historical romance based on a schlocky best-seller, is nearly an interesting film. The same might also be said of Preminger’s attempt at a Euro-thriller, Rosebud. But, Forever Amber… The title character is the adopted daughter of a farmer in seventeenth-century England. After the Restoration, Amber, now a sixteen-year-old beauty (played by the twenty-three-year-old Linda Darnell) meets a Cavalier captain, and follows him to London. She starts moving in high circles, but no sooner has she found wealth then she is conned out of it and sent to Newgate. Her cavalier captain, meanwhile, has been a given a ship and sent privateering. She breaks out of Newgate with a footpad, and the two go into partnership, she luring and he mugging fops in dark alleys. The Watch catch her, but the captain gets her a job as an actress so she won’t hang. An earl takes a fancy to her after seeing her on the stage and marries her. But she still pines for her absent cavalier captain… The film is an adaptation of a 1944 best-selling romance by Kathleen Winsor. It was her first novel. Wikipedia says of the book: “The fifth draft of Winsor’s first manuscript of Forever Amber was accepted for publication, but the publishers edited the book down to one-fifth of its original size. The resulting novel was 972 pages long.” WTF. Winsor went on to write a further seven novels, the first appearing six years after Forever Amber, and the last in 1986. It’s clear from Forever Amber, however, that she didn’t know much about seventeenth-century England. Rags to riches might be a romance staple plot, but Amber’s ups and downs beggar belief. And for a farm girl to end up married to an earl! While working as an actress! True, this is around the time Nell Gwynn first started appearing on stage  and later became the king’s mistress – but she was still under twenty and Amber would be almost a decade older. I suspect Gwynn might have been an inspiration for Amber. Even so, Gwynn’s career was far more… calculating than Amber’s history of lucky breaks. Foolishly, I went and bought a copy of the book on eBay for a couple of quid. One day, I might even get around to reading it.

A Gorgeous Girl Like Me, François Truffaut (1972, France). I’ve been enjoying the Truffaut films I’ve been watching, but this one was hard work in a way that made me think that perhaps it was me at fault. So I watched it again. And felt the same. I still don’t know why I bounced out of it, although I’m not apparently the only one to do so. A young sociologist arranges an interview with female inmate Camille Bliss, and records her as she tells her tale of woe – which is then presented in flashback. He decides she is innocent and finds sufficient evidence to prove her innocence, and she is duly released. After her release, Bliss becomes a singing star but a fling with the sociologist ends badly when her husband catches the two in the act. She kills her husband and frames the sociologist. Who is then sent to prison for the crime. I’m not sure why I didn’t click with A Gorgeous Girl Like Me. The more Truffaut I’ve been watching, the more I’ve come to appreciate his films. But not all of them. The Last Metro I thought a bit dull, despite a good story and high-powered cast. Shoot the Pianist I decided was the New-Wavest film that ever New-Waved. Day for Night had bags of charm, and Mississippi Mermaid had bags of gallic cachet. But A Gorgeous Girl Like Me just seemed to fall flat. Perhaps it was the self-centredness of Bliss, or the fact that some of her adventures just didn’t ring true, or even plausible. Fortunately, I went and bought The François Truffaut Collection on Blu-ray, which includes A Gorgeous Girl Like Me, so I’ll be able to watch it again and decide wther it really does work for me or not…

Miss Hokusai, Keiichi Hara (2015, Japan). I think it’s pretty clear who recommended this film, if not actually added it to my LoveFilm rental list one afternoon in the pub. The title refers to the daughter of the historically-famous artist, who was a reknowned artist in her own right. There is no plot as such to the film, just a series of incidents from her life. Some of them are fantastical, like the one where her father recounts a series of dreams where his hands sort of astral-project and travel all over the city, and he tells this to a famous oiran whose face, it transpires, astral projects while she is asleep. The animation is mostly very attractive, although there’s a lot of that anime-style mugging whose appeal bounces off me. In particular, there’s a student who works in Hokusai’s studio who’s played for laughs, and the comedy doesn’t work for me. The visiting artist who’s put forward as a love interest was a much more interesting character. Unfortunately, the episodic nature of the film works against it, because while it’s very nice to look at, and the characters quite clear, none of it is in service to a plot. True, I’ve not seen a great deal of anime, but I’ve seen a number of anime feature films I’ve thought very good – good enough, in fact, to pick up copies for myself. Miss Hokusai was somewhere around in the bottom of the top third, I think – much better than meh, but not quite really good.

Toni Erdmann, Maren Ade (2016, Germany). I had this on my rental list after hearing positive things about it (Sight & Sound were very complimentary, I seem to recall), but then discovered it was free on Amazon Prime. Result. And… it was one of those films which are quite obviously good, but you’re not sure if you’re enjoying it much. One minute, it’s engaging; the next you wonder why you’re watching it. But then, after it’s over, you decide on balance that it was actually a pretty good film. The title refers to someone who does not exist. A man in his sixties, a bit of a slob and a practical joker, decides that his workaholic daughter, currently working as a consultant on an asset-stripping project in Romania, needs to lighten up. Well, ostensibly, she’s helping a Romanian oil company outsource the maintenance of its oil refineries, but we all know that’s the first step in selling off national assets cheap to plutocrats so they can profit at the taxpayers’ expense… Anyway, he travels out to visit his daughter, but his presence is not really welcome – nor is it helped by him playing silly jokes, like handcuffing himself to his daughter and losing the key. So he leaves. Except he doesn’t. The day after, he introduces himself to the daughter and two of her friends in a restaurant, wearing a wig and false teeth, as “Toni Erdmann”. And he continues to pop up. It’s clear everyone thinks he’s a complete buffoon, but they’re not really sure if they should take him at his word, no matter how implausible it often is. And that’s part of the problem with the film, because Erdmann is a comic character who’s not all that comical. He’d be tragicomic, except there’s no tragedy here, only a father-daughter relationship that has eroded over time to almost nothing, and is now being strained by his intrusion into her life. But, of course, something has to give, and in Toni Erdmann it’s her resistance to his buffoonery and attempts to rebuild their relationship. Despite that, Toni Erdmann never manages to feel like a, er, “feel good” film. It makes for a weird disconnect, and it only really succeeds because everyone plays their part completely straight. A good film, but it takes a while before you realise it.

Arabian Nights, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1974, Italy). I wasn’t sure what to make of Pasolini after seeing two of his films, but after watching Arabian Nights I think I have a better handle on his work, and I sort of like it, but I’m still not entirely convinced… If that makes sense. Arabian Nights has been described as the best cinema adaptation of (some of the stories in) The Arabian Nights. It’s true that it keeps the nested narrative structure of many of the stories, which is confusing enough when reading them… although Pasolini somehow manages not to confuse the viewer. And the locations in the film – Eritrea, Yemen, Iran and Nepal – are fantastic. Arabian Nights looks fabulous, but… like the other Pasolini films I’ve seen, the acting seems amateurish at best, the plotting somewhat haphazard, and the dialogue often just repeats what is plain to see there on the screen. But everything looks so, well, appropriate to the story, so much more so than in, say, The Thief of Bagdad from 1924, with its ersatz Arabian studio sets and made-up script standing in for Arabic (or Farsi). And yet, although the cover art suggests Arabian Nights is pure spectacle, it never quite seems like it. I’m not sure how Pasolini manages it, but there’s power in his films and that overcomes all the bits that don’t add up – the acting, the dialogue, the plotting. Also, Pasolini seems to like long shots, and I’m a sucker for long shots. Whatever the reason, I really liked Arabian Nights. Pasolini has two films on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, but this isn’t one of them; I think it should be. There’s a Blu-ray collection of six films by Pasolini available from the BFI, only two of which I’ve seen, Arabian Nights and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.  I’m sorely tempted by it…

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 872


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Films, glorious films

I threatened in my last book haul post I might start posting my DVD and Blu-ray hauls. And, well, I got a bit bored on Saturday morning, and before I knew it I’d taken photos of the films I’d purchased over the past month or so and was banging out a post on them…

Three Blu-rays from Curzon Artificial Eye, one of the best sell-through publishers out there. They even have their own chain of cinemas now. But they still didn’t show Francofonia in the Sheffield Curzon Cinema. Grump. The Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry are Alejandro Jodorowsky’s return to film-making after many, many years and are apparently based on his childhood in Chile. The François Truffaut Collection – so, yes, more than three Blu-rays, more like ten – was one of those “accidental” purchases you have after a glass too many of wine. All three were bought from a large online retailer.

Two more Blu-rays. To Catch A Thief was only £5, so I thought it worth upgrading my old DVD copy. It’s a pretty good transfer, although the improved colours do mean Cary Grant looks like he’s been creosoted. Daughter of the Nile is a new release, the first time in the UK, I think, of a Hou Hsiao Hsien film from 1987. Both were purchased from a large online retailer.

The Bad and the Beautiful is on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, but having now seen it (see here), I’ve no idea why. It’s a typical Hollywood melodrama, although apparently not typical enough to be available on DVD in the UK or US – so I had to buy a Korean release on eBay. Goodbye Gemini is a 1970 British thriller, found for a third of the price on eBay. Mississippi Mermaid I actually watched on rental (see here), but I found this Blu-ray edition copy going for a great deal less than the Amazon price on eBay.

Three non-Anglophone/European films – well, four, actually, since the Great African Films Vol 2 package contains two films on two discs. They are Tasuma, the Fighter and Sia, the Dream of the Python. Both are from Burkina Faso. Cyclo, on the other the hand, is from Vietnam, and also on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. In the Room is from Singapore. I stumbled across it on eBay, and thought it looked intriguing. All three were bought on eBay, in fact. I wrote about In the Room here.


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Moving pictures 2017, #34

I think I might start posting DVD haul posts as well as book haul ones. Admittedly, many of the films I watch are rental DVDs, but those I can’t find at either LoveFilm or Cinema Paradiso, and are not recent releases, I generally have to hunt down, so perhaps it’s worthwhile recording that. Except, well, of the six movies below, only the first and last are from my collection. Nazar is the third of three films from the box set, and the other two have appeared in previous Moving pictures posts; while The Bad and the Beautiful is a Korean release I bought on eBay as the film is apparently not available in either the UK or the US. Go figure.

Anyway, time to start doing the bap-bap-baa bap-bap-baa bap-bap-baa from the Pearl & Dean theme tune as the main feature is about to begin…

Nazar, Mani Kaul (1991, India). After three movies by Kaul, I still have no idea what to make of him. Nazar, a later film than the other two, and apparently based on a Dostoevsky short story, as was the movie he made following this one, is, well, is pretty much Kaul channelling Godard. I like many of the Godard films I’ve seen – not that I’ve watched anywhere close to half of his total output – but he is pretty much a mixed bag. Some of his films, for me, work much better than others – and not for obviously discernible reasons: I love, for example, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, but was mostly left cold by Made in USA (I have the Criterion editions of both), and yet Godard shot both films simultaneously, one in the morning, the other in the afternoon, during the same month. However, one thing that is true of all of Godard’s films is that they bear, and sometimes demand, repeated watchings. I get that same sense from the three films in this Mani Kaul box set, but Nazar still strikes me as much more consciously Godard-esque than Uski Roti or Duvidha. And for that reason… it also seemed to me less successful. The well-off owner of an antiques shop in Mumbai marries a seventeen-year-old orphan. The film opens with her suicide, then flashes back to describe the events that may or may not have prompted the suicide. There are a lot of close-ups and pullbacks, with voiceover by the male lead Shekhar Kapur, but also some dialogue too. Much of the film consists of slowly moving shots with only music and sound effects. Kaul also does something interesting where he sits the camera in one spot, has the actors approach it, perhaps by crossing a room, and although the camera follows them it does not always pull back, and so an actor, or a part of them, fills the frame. Another Godard-esque aspect is that the dialogue sometimes feels like a series of non sequiturs. Certainly real-life conversations skip about, but the staginess of Nazar‘s dialogue, and the long silences in between, break the continuity. This box set was a good buy, and I’ll certainly watch the three films in it again, indeed I’d like to see more by Kaul… but I’m still not entirely sure what I’m watching.

Behave Yourself!, George Beck (1951, USA). My mother gave me a bunch of DVDs recently to watch, mostly classic Hollywood movies and recent UK TV mini-series. This was the first one I watched and, well, the cover art does over-sell it somewhat. There’s no Shelley Winters reclining lasciviously in lingerie in it, for one thing. According to Wikipedia, the script was written in four days, and they’ve not done a bad job given the time they took. Winters and Granger are happily married, but it’s their wedding anniversary and he’s forgotten it – until Winters drops heavy hints, at which point he does the usual and claims to have arranged a surprise… Meanwhile, two groups of villains are attempting to exchange, I think, counterfeiting plates, for cash, and are using a trained dog to do it. One group has trained the dog to lead the other group to the wanted goods. Except the dog takes a liking to Granger, screws up his attempt to buy his wife some lingerie by trashing the store, follows him home… and is immediately assumed by Winters to be the surprise present Granger had hinted at. Except now one gang of villains wants the dog back, another have figured out the dog’s role and want it for themselves, and the other gang think whoever has the dog is their contact from the first gang… The one-liners come thick and fast, there’s plentiful slapstick, and the plot manages not to collapse into a heap. But. It’s all a bit, well, corny, the characters are stereotyped, and Granger is far too smiley and amiable for his role (it was apparently written for Cary Grant). It’s an entertaining 81 minutes, but it’s no surprise it was quickly forgotten.

Grey Gardens, Albert and David Maylses (1975, USA). This movie is on one of the iterations of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, or perhaps another best of list, but it’s not on the list I’ve been using. But I watched it anyway. The title refers to a mansion in East Hampton, New York, USA, a property owned by members of the Bouvier family, relatives of Jackie Kennedy (as was). By the time the film was made, the mansion and its garden had fallen into disrepair, and the two women who lived there, the aunt and first cousin of Jackie Kennedy, both called Edith – Little Edie and Big Edie – were living in squalour. They were also quite eccentric. Grey Gardens is pretty much pure fly-on-the-wall, with some prompting by an off-screen interviewer. There’s an extensive look at the two Bouviers’ past, especially Little Edie’s career as a model and socialite in 1920s and 1930s New York. However, the problem with Grey Gardens, especially given its direct cinema approach, is that its worth depends entirely on its subjects. It handles the two women well, but I honestly don’t think they’re interesting enough in and of themselves, or because of how they’ve let the house fall into wrack and ruin, to justify the reputation this film has. Little Edie and Big Edie are not particularly interesting people. Odd, certainly. But not fascinating or admirable or important or even representational. Their only real claim to fame – because there are plenty of women, and men, who have let their homes fall into total disrepair – is the family connection to Jackie Kennedy and JFK. But, and I’m sorry I have to break the news to the US, the Kennedy family were not royalty and, more than that, actual royalty is not all that fucking interesting anyway. I suppose in some ways it’s the antithesis of the American Dream, ie, riches to rags, but in a world where, as Noam Chomsky has said, debt is little more than slavery (but hardly equivalent to it, because slavery is an abomination), and poverty is increasing massively thanks to the actions of the one-percenters, the two Edies’ downward trajectory is neither entertaining nor edifying. In other words, I don’t pity the Bouviers, I pity the people who pity the Bouviers. And that includes the Maysles.

52 Tuesdays, Sophie Hyde (2014, Australia). No idea how this one ended up on my rental list – I don’t think it’s the sort of film David Tallerman would have recommended, so perhaps I saw a trailer or something. Billie is sixteen, her parents are divorced, and her mother is now transitioning from Jane to James. Because of this, Billie goes to live with her father, and visits James every Tuesday after school. For a year. Hence, 52 Tuesdays. Unfortunately, James’s body rejects the male hormones, so his treatment stalls. Meanwhile, Billie has hooked up with Josh and Jasmine, two older kids from her school, and while the three experiment sexually, so Billie films them… leading to her sending a nude photograph of herself to Jasmine, which the school learns about and goes mental because it’s technically paedophilia as Billie is under the age of consent or something… I remember taking this out of the LoveFilm envelope, reading the précis on the DVD sleeve and thinking it didn’t sound too bad, but getting pulled into the story as I watched it… because Tilda Cobham-Hervey is really good in the role of Billie, the film iss played as a low-key drama, and it touched enough points out of the ordinary, in a nicely sensitive fashion, to give the story added interest. I’m guessing that adding it to my rental list was pure whim, but I really enjoyed 52 Tuesdays. A well-played uplifting drama about something personal, and a perfect antidote to Grey Gardens. Worth seeing.

Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2004, Thailand). Weerasethakul’s name is not unknown to me, although this was the first film by him I’ve watched. I seem to recall seeing a trailer of it on another rental DVD. But it was released by Second Run, and their catalogue is generally pretty damn good. So, despite not really knowing what to expect, I had reasonably high hopes when I slid Tropical Malady into the DVD player… And it both met them and failed them. The film tells two stories. In the first, a soldier is assigned to a provincial village, falls in love with a local villager, and the two spend time together. In the second, a soldier – not necessarily the one from the first story, but played by the same actor – follows a lost villager into the jungle and meets a tiger spirit – played by the love-interest of the soldier from the first story – who haunts and taunts him. Unfortunately, the links between the two stories – despite the shared cast, despite the shared setting – aren’t strong enough, although the individual stories themselves are very good. Had it been two separate films, I’ve have thought them much better – but as a conjoined work, and this despite my own experiments in literary structure – it didn’t to me seem as if it quite hung together. Despite that, I want to watch more Weeraserthakul, and perhaps I may later have cause to re-evaluate Tropical Malady. It’s nonetheless worth seeing – I enjoyed it, but it never quite gelled for me.

The Bad and the Beautiful*, Vincente Minnelli (1952, USA). As the asterisk indicates, this film is on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list and, while Minnelli has made some classic Hollywood films, I think putting six of them on the 1001 list is over-doing it. By quite a bit. Particularly with this one. The Bad and the Beautiful opens with a person telephoning a famous director, a famous actress and a famous writer, all of whom refuse to talk to the caller. They’re then called to the office of a top Hollywood producer, who explains they have good reason to refuse to speak to the caller, ex-producer Jonathan Shields but… The film flashes back to each of the three’s history, explaining how they came to know Shields (played by Kirk Douglas) and how he shafted them, before returning to the producer’s office… It’s a clumsy-as-hell narrative structure, the characters are all archetypes, and Minnelli was never more than ordinary in his framing… but it’s a Hollywood film about Hollywood and… yawn. Seriously, this is on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list? It’s a clichéd melodrama, in which the prize goes to who chews the most scenery. And yet… it was nominated for six Oscars and won five of them – and still holds the record for the most Oscars for a film not nominated for Best Picture or Best Director. For the, er, record, it won Best Supporting Actress, Best Art Direction (Black and White), Best Cinematography (Black and White), Best Costume Design (Black and White), Best Adapted Screenplay… but lost Best Actor. Incidentally, awards for black and white films were dropped in 1967, and both colour and B&W films competed in the same categories thereafter. It’s possible 1952 was a bad year, Oscar-wise, to prompt so many nominations – and wins – for this ordinary melodrama… Um, I see Best Picture went to The Greatest Show on Earth, Best Director to John Ford for The Quiet Man, Best Actor to Gary Cooper for High Noon and Best Actress to Shirley Booth for Come Back, Little Sheba… So, yes, a shit year. Seriously, this film does not belong on  the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and I seriously doubt Minnelli deserves so many places on it either.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 871


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Books, glorious books

My book reading has slowed somewhat this year, but it seems so has my book buying. So I’m still managing to chip away at the TBR. Which has been joined by the following books over the last couple of months…

The Escort Carrier Gambier Bay means I now have all twenty of the Anatomy of the Ships books on warships (plus one about the RMS Queen Mary). And no, I paid nowhere near the silly price currently shown on Amazon. They were originally published in the 1980s and early 1990s, but the series was expanded, and some of the earlier ones republished in new editions, in the early 2000s. The grey cover design means this is one of the original series. I missed buying This Brutal World when it first came out last year, and second-hand copies immediately started going for silly money. Happily, the publisher decided to reprint. Hostages of Ultralum is the sixteenth volume of the Valerian and Laureline series to be published in English. I wrote about it here. Several years ago, Midland Publishing (a company associated with Ian Allan, if that name means anything to you) published a series of “Secret Projects” books about military aircraft – from the US, UK, WWII Germany, Japan and, I think, France. I bought several of them, but they got increasingly harder to find. It looks as if they’ve now kicked off the series again, and, annoyingly, they’re numbering the volumes. But I actually bought Britain’s Space Shuttle because the subject interests me… and who knows, I might get a story or two out of it.

I recently pre-ordered the fourth novella of Eric Brown’s Telemass Quartet, and added Project Clio to my order, despite having sworn off buying and reading more Baxter after finding the Proxima/Ultima diptych disappointingly juvenile. Oh well. The red book in the middle is a really hard to find Lucius Shepard, The Last Time, which I found going for less than half its usual price on eBay. The slipcover is, bizarrely, made of clear plastic. Finally, Modern Masters of Science Fiction: Iain M Banks is a book I wanted from the moment Paul Kincaid first mentioned he was writing it. I thought Banks an excellent writer, although he often disappointed me – but not enough for me to stop buying his books, all of which I have in first edition, some signed.

These two are charity shop finds. I discovered Elizabeth Taylor’s writing (no, not that Elizabeth Taylor) perversely through a film – François Ozon’s adaptation of Angel. But I could never find a copy of the book, and was never that engaged in reading her to buy the book new. Whenever I stumbled across copies of her novels in charity shops, I’d buy them and read them. I’m now considerably more of a fan of her writing, and I’m sort of wavering now about buying the rest new… Oh well. The Paperchase was just a random find. I know the author’s name from Far North, which was shortlisted for the Clarke Award and which I didn’t really like, and Strange Bodies, which seemed to be ignored by most sf awards and was actually pretty bloody good.

These three books were my only purchases at Kontur, the Swedish national convention in Uppsala (see here). I bought them from Alvarfonden, a charity that sells donated books at Swedish cons. I’m not entirely sure why I bought any of them. The Final Circle of Paradise I’d never heard of, but I’d like to read more of the Strugatsky brothers’ fiction, if only because of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (I was disappointed by Roadside Picnic when I finally got around to reading it, as everything had been translated into US idiom and that ruined it for me). I’m sure I’ve heard approving things about The Birth of the People’s Republic of Antarctica, but I can’t remember where. Or how long ago. Alan Brennert writes middle-of-the-road well-crafted sf and fantasy stories, and I’m not really sure why I bought Her Pilgrim Soul. But I did.

I’ve been buying volumes from Newcastle Publishing Company’s Forgotten Fantasy Library when I can find them, although they’re getting harder to find. Annoyingly, the series doesn’t seem to have a consistent design, or even size. The Food of Death by Lord Dunsany is the third book in the series and the sixth I own (of twenty-four). Son of the Morning is by yet another pseudonym of Mark Barrowcliffe. The fantasies he writes under the name MD Lachlan are very good, and I’ve heard good things about this Mark Adler book too. I won it in the raffle at the last York pubmeet.

Last of all, some recent sf… Well, okay, The Chrysalids is hardly recent, but the SF Masterwork edition is new, and, astonishingly, I don’t recall ever reading Wyndham at novel length (only a collection of dreadful short stories, the cover art for which was a blurry photo of an Airfix model of a Battlestar Galactica Viper fighter). I see Penguin are still paying Amazon more than Gollancz do, as a search of the title returns the Penguin edition first and no mention of the SF Masterworks edition… I thought Anne Charnock’s Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind very good (see here), so planned to buy Dreams Before the Start of Time when it was published. Which I did. Central Station seems to have won, or been nominated for, lots of awards, so it was time to see what all the fuss was about. I think I’ve read some of the stories which form it, but perhaps they’ll appeal to me more as part of a novel. Proof of Concept is s new novella from my favourite sf writer, so of course I was going to buy it. I wrote about it here. Adam Roberts was foolish enough to make a wrongheaded prediction about this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, I bet him a fiver he was wrong, he was wrong, and generously included a copy of The Thing Itself with the £5 note he sent me in payment. I’d been wanting to read it, so that proved a happy accident.


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Moving pictures 2017, #33

One from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, which, to be honest, I didn’t much like, a rewatch (after many years), another strange Indian film, I finally cracked open the BBC Shakespeare Collection I bought a couple of years ago, and a pair of dramas, one made in 1970 and one set in 1970…

Buffalo 66*, Vincent Gallo (1998, USA). There are many puzzling films on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, is, their presence is puzzling, not the film itself, such as all the ones by Woody Allen… but you can add this one to that not-so-select group too. An indie film directed by and starring Vincent Gallo, with a feeble plot, and featuring a central character who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It’s also supposed to be set, I think, in the early 1980s, although it’s hard to tell, and the soundtrack contains some 1970s UK prog rock anyway so who knows. Gallo has just been released from prison, and goes to visit his parents. Except he’s been lying to them for years, about his incarceration, even about his relationship status. So he kidnaps Christina Ricci and demands she impersonate his invented girlfriend. Which she does, for not-actually-discernible reasons, and does it a bit too well for Gallo’s liking. The title is apparently a reference to an American Football game in 1966 or something, as if anyone outside the US either knows or gives a shit about the country’s dumb sports. I really couldn’t see why this film was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list – there were a couple of nice-looking scenes, and I actually like 1970s UK prog rock so I  enjoyed hearing the music. But… Buffalo 66 might be an above-average example of its type, but it’s eminently forgettable and doesn’t belong on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list.

Duvidha, Mani Kaul (1973, India). Uski Roti (see here) was Kaul’s first film; Duvidha was his third movie. I’m not really sure what to make of them – well, the two I’ve seen so far. I have watched Bollywood, I have watched parallel cinema. I like both, but I love the films of Ritwik Ghatak. And yet Kaul is nothing like either. If anything, he’s more consciously in the tradition of European art-house cinema, but without seeming to settle on a particular style. True, this is after seeing only two of the films on this DVD, but I’ve seen a lot of European art house films, and Kaul’s pacing reminds me of Béla Tarr (although he predates him), and some of his staging reminds me of Sergei Parajanov, and his use of voice-over and dialogue feels more Russian than Indian… In other words, Kaul presents a singular vision, not just in Indian cinema, but internationally… and I’m still trying t work out how much I like it. Duvidha at least boasts a more straightforward narrative than Uski Roti – a young couple marry, and the husband heads off to a distant town for five years to make his fortune… But a ghost in a nearby banyan tree learns of the husband’s plan, and so impersonates him and returns to the wife and takes the husband’s place. It’s based on a story by Vijayadan Detha, which was in turn based on a Rajasthani folk tale. Unlike the previous film, this one is shot in colour, but I can’t tell if the slightly washed-out palette is deliberate or a consequence of the transfer. The framing, however, is obviously down entirely to Kaul, and he shows a considerable amount of inventiveness in placing his camera and framing his shots. The pacing is once again slow, and the story is told through a mixture of voice-over and looped dialogue. There’s a bleakness to the landscapes depicted, something also notable in Uski Roti, but more visible here because the film is in colour. Clearly Kaul deserves his accolades and reputation, but I think I need to watch more of his films – or the ones I have a few more times – before I can get a real handle on his work.

Blind Chance, Krzysztof Kieślowski (1987, Poland). I last watched this over a decade ago – I had a DVD copy of it, which I gave away when I bought the Masterpieces of Polish Cinema Blu-ray box sets – and sort of remembered the story when I sat down to rewatch it. You know, the plot… the guy who catches a train, and his life goes one way… but then he doesn’t catch it and his life goes another way… twice. Sort of like Sliding Doors. But Polish. And political. And not a rom com. And without that annoying John Hannah chap. It’s clearly early Kieślowski, with its television staging and heated political arguments. This impression is hardly lessened by the second of the three “alternates”, in which the protagonist fails to make the train, attacks a station official and is arrested… and so ends up in the Polish prison system and becomes a dissident. I’ve seen pretty much everything Kieślowski made – Artificial Eye released most of them on DVD around a decade or so ago – and the one I remember most fondly is No End. Having now rewatched the Three Colours trilogy, after replacing my DVD copies with Blu-rays, I approached this rewatch of Blind Chance with mixed feelings. I’d remembered the basic plot… but I’d forgotten quite dull most of it is. At the time I first watched Blind Chance, I’d not seen much Polish cinema, so the political element of the story I found fascinating. But I’ve since lots of Polish films, and I’m a little better informed on the country’s political history… It’s a bit like… I’m currently reading Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, and it sometimes seems like its reputation rests on the fact it portrayed life in the USSR as some sort of blackly comic farce… and yet that has always been my impression of the Soviet Union. It is books like Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty that are really eye-opening about the USSR. And so Blind Chance – despite its tripartite structure, it doesn’t seem to offer any particular insight, or especially interesting commentary, on the Polish regime of the 1970s and early 1980s. Wajda’s Man of Marble and Man of Iron seem, to me, to make their point with much more bite than Blind Chance, although the latter is certainly the cleverer script. I don’t know; I found this rewatch of Blind Chance somewhat disappointing, much as I had the Three Colours rewatch.

Coriolanus, Elijah Moshinsky (1984, UK). I’d been renting DVDs from this box set, but then decided to go and buy so I could watch them at my own pace… so, of course, it’s taken me 18 months to crack open the box set and start watching it. I did rewatch The Comedy of Errors before watching Coriolanus – you know, the one with Michael Kitchen and Roger Daltry playing a pair of twins, both of which have the same names (as if), leading to all sorts of mistaken identity merry japes. Coriolanus stars Alan Howard in the title role, a Roman general who reluctantly stands for consul in Rome, and wins. But that pisses off the political classes, and Coriolanus blames it all on the plebians, whom he holds in great contempt. This is not the most edifying of Shakespeare’s plays – kof kof, of the ones I’ve seen; although to be fair there’s few enough of them that qualify as “edifying”. Coriolanus is apparently a tragedy, and not a historical play, although I don’t understand the distinction as surely Roman times were considered historical even in Shakespeare’s day? I mostly remember it as a lot of standing around pontificating in front of “crowds” of a dozen or so people, several after-the-battle scenes, and lot of Coriolanus feeling sorry for himself. Meh.

Say Hello to Yesterday, Alvin Rakoff (1970, UK). I think I saw a trailer for this on another rental DVD, and so stuck it on my list. Jean Simmons plays a suburban wife, who travels in to London one day on the train and comes to the attention of flighty young man Leonard Whiting. He badgers her incessantly, on the train and once she has arrived in London. Eventually, she succumbs. They end up in bed in a cheap hotel. He professes his undying love; she is more pragmatic. This is hardly a unique or insightful story, but it is an astonishingly accurate portrayal of its time. Okay, so I don’t actually remember 1970, but I do remember 1975 – and not a great deal had changed in terms of, well, the sort of things that would concern a production designer, during those five years. Everyone drives Minis, everywhere looks grubby, the whole aesthetic is just so naturally early 1970s it’s clearly unforced. Whiting is hugely annoying, but Simmons is good; but it’s the look and feel of the film where it truly scores. Though you can’t tell it from the film, it’s obvious the hotel sheets are drip-dry nylon. It’s that kind of movie. I tweeted while watching it that silver birches seem to embody the 1970s style of utopia for me. They’re there in Fahrenheit 451, and they feel almost emblematic of the sort of utopian, or comfortable, lifestyle the 1970s considered futuristic. For me, they’re a science-fictional tree.

The Commune, Thomas Vinterberg (2016, Denmark). Vinterberg’s Festen was the first film made following the Dogme 95 rules, and it’s a bona fide classic film. But he also made the bafflingly crap It’s All About Love. And the very good The Hunt. And, well, they were the only films by him I’d seen prior to watching The Commune. But I knew he was a name worth watching, so I bunged The Commune on the rental list – and I should really add a few more. In Copenhagen in 1970, a successful couple want to move into the large house in which the husband grew up, but they can’t afford the rent on their own (even though the wife works as a newsreader on television). So they invite friends of similar political leanings to share the house as a commune. They advertise to fill up the last few places. Unfortunately, the original couple’s marriage disintegrates – he’s a university lecturer and falls in love with student – and this causes problems in the house. This is not a Dogme 95 film, not judging by the lighting at least. And the plot is pretty much a lit fic staple – college professor sleeps with student, starts to question his marriage, it falls apart… except the girlfriend joins the commune, and the wife stays, and it’s all pretty obviously uncomfortable. Or helped by the rest of the commune, who are all the sort of earnestly progressive types more likely to get bogged down in trivia than actual worthwhile causes. A watchable film, better made than most, but not a great film.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 870


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Reading diary, #50

Oops. I appear to have missed a number. I went straight from Reading diary, #47 to Reading diary, #49. I could have gone back and corrected the numbering, but I can’t be arsed. So this forty-ninth post is numbered fifty, and it’ll just have to carry on from there. All together now: deal with it.

The Memoirist, Neil Williamson (2017, UK). This is the fourth and final novella in NewCon Press’s new series of novella quartets (I wonder where they could have got that idea from?). These first four are straight-up sf, so I will admit to some surprise at seeing Neil Williamson’s name, since he’s not known for straight-up sf. But, thankfully, The Memoirist certainly qualifies as that, and even better, it’s a pretty damn good piece of straight-up science fiction. A ghost writer is hired to write the memoirs of the lead singer of a long-since defunct rock band that had a Moment a couple of decades previously. That Moment was at a near-legendary gig in a small club, of which no recordings or footage exists. And yet the myth of the gig overshadows what meagre impact the band itself ever had. In this world, ubiquitous “bees” provide 24/7 surveillance… but it seems that mythical gig triggered something which led to a new type of “bee”… and to say any more would give the plot twist away. I’ll admit I thought the mystery dragged out a little, but the way the plot then shifted into left-field more than made up for it. I enjoyed this, a good piece of near-future sf, almost McLeod-esque in places, with an interesting premise and an in interesting, and nicely oblique, approach to that premise (okay, it was a little Espedair Street too, but that’s hardly a complaint). Good stuff.

Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, Ismail Kadare (2000, Albania). So I went looking for novels from countries I’d not read literature from before, and came up with this one. Kadare has won several international prizes, and been mooted as a Nobel laureate a number of times. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost is his eleventh book, and his entire oeuvre – of novels, at least – appears to have been translated into English. Mark Gurabardhi is an artist in the provincial town of B—– and, well, things happen. Beginning with a bank robbery. People also tell each other stories, and each chapter is followed by a counter-chapter which expands on that story, as if it were the plot of the novel (but the counter-chapters are not a single narrative). Some sections of the novel deal with the old Albanian mountain code of Kanun, blood vendettas that go back generations, so far no one remembers what they were actually about, and how they’re in danger of kicking off again now that Hoxha’s communist regime has collapsed. Much as I enjoyed Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, it didn’t blow me away. I’m glad I read it, but I doubt I’ll read anything else by Kadare. But at least I can cross Albania off the list.

Project Clio, Stephen Baxter (2016, UK). I remember seeing this at the 2016 Eastercon in Manchester, but I own so many Baxter novels and novellas already, and had been badly disappointed by the last few I’d read, that I’d decided to give Project Clio a pass. But then recently I placed an order for the final novella of Eric Brown’s Telemass quartet and this novella sort of accidentally fell into my basket… It reads a little like Baxter had watched Danger: Diabolik, or any number of similar films, once too often, and while it’s a lot of fun it does read somewhat compressed and elided. It’s a carry-on from two earlier stories, which I have not read, even though I own the collection, Universes, in which the stories appear, which does mean Project Clio throws the reader in at the deep end since it assumes prior knowledge of the characters and set-up. There’s mention of Brutalist architecture in the novella, but I can’t work out if it’s approving, because being unapproving of Brutalist architecture would of course be unforgivable. The novella ends with a bit of a Dr-Who-style finish, which didn’t work for me. I liked the use of 1960s iconography, and the piss-takes of 1960s cultural artefacts, but the plotting did feel more like that of a television episode than an actual novella.

Lila, Marilynne Robinson (2014, USA). I’m still not entirely convinced by Robinson’s books, but they’re so beautifully written I’m prepared to forgive them much. Lila is written from the point of view of the wife of John Ames, the protagonist of Gilead and the patriarch depicted in Home. She was stolen as child, a neglected child, by a woman who calls herself Doll (and who gave Lila her name), and subsequently dragged about the Midwest looking for work. This was during the Great Depression, and anyone who has read Steinbeck, or even seen the film of The Grapes of Wrath, will have some idea of the abject poverty these people experienced. Eventually, Lila fetches up in Gilead as a young woman, and slowly, in much the same way a wild animal would, begins to explore the small town and its inhabitants. She starts working in the pastor’s garden, in return for his unprovoked acts of kindness toward her, and the two sort of drift together until he asks her to marry him and she says yes. While both Lila and Ames are drawn with an impressive amount of sensitivity – and Ames is clearly a remarkably, perhaps a little too remarkably, sensitive man for his time – and the interactions between the two are beautifully-written… but there’s that leap from friends who know very little about each other to marriage that seems somewhat ungrounded. I really do like Robinson’s prose – it’s deceptively simple – and I also really like the gentle pace of her novels, and the depth to which she explores her cast and their various interactions. But… they do also feel like they’re missing an edge, a bit of bite to temper the smoothness. The depiction of Lila’s childhood during the Great Depression is too bland to do the job. It means Robinson’s novels can feel a bit too, well, too pleasant. But still worth reading.

vN, Madeline Ashby (2012, Canada). According to my database, I bought this at the 2014 Fantasycon for £1. So it’s taken me nearly three years to get around to read it. I seem to recall it being quite well-received at its time of release, but, to be honest, I wasn’t all that impressed. The title refers to von Neuman machines, although in this novel they’re actually AI in humanoid bodies thatare faster, stronger, etc, than humans. They’ve integrated into society such that the story opens with a man, his vN wife and vN child (vN children are identical copies of their parent – created by both female and male vN; and, in fact, all vN come in a limited number of “models”, each one identical to the original vN of their line). In order for the child vN, Amy, to “grow” along a similar time-frame to a human child, her parents have been limiting her “food” intake. But when her vN grandmother, Portia, turns up to her kindergarten graduation and goes berserk, Amy eats her. And so grows almost immediately to adult size.  And goes on the run… The problem with vN is that the vN over-balanced the world-building, and Amy was a completely unconvincing character. The vN are so physically superior to human beings they made no sense unless they were non-sentient. But they’re AIs, and supposedly not dangerous because they have a “failsafe” (sort of Asimov’s Three Laws rolled up into one maguffin). Except Portia has overriden hers. And it’s likely Amy will be able override hers too. But since the entire novel is told from Amy’s POV- and she’s a very implausible five-year-old – we can only guess at what this might actually mean to society at large. If you want to read a book about robots and humans, Machine by Jennifer Pelland is much better. There’s apparently a sequel to vN, titled iD. I’ll not be bothering with it.

Blood Enemies, Susan R Matthews (2017, USA). I’ve been a fan of Matthews’s Under Jurisdiction series since reading the first book, An Exchange of Hostages, back in the 1990s when it was published. so I was pretty disappointed when Matthews’s original publisher, Avon Books, dropped the series after the original trilogy. It was then picked up by Roc, who published a further three novels before dropping it. A seventh novel was published four years later by Meisha Merlin, who went into administration shortly afterward. And now, eleven years later, we finally have the next book in the series, published by, of all people, Baen. Which at least explains the shit cover art. Happily, Baen are also rereleasing the earlier books in omnibus editions, which is just as well as Blood Enemies follows straight on from the previous book, 2006’s Warring States, and would be hard to follow without knowledge of the preceding books, despite Matthews’s lengthy introduction. Kosciusko had sent his freed bondsmen off into the Gonebeyond, but when he tried to follow them he found himself stuck on Safehaven. Meanwhile, Cousin Stanosz, an agent of the Malcontent (the Dolgurokij Combine’s unofficial secret service), has been investigating a series of brutal terrorist attacks on Gonebeyond colonies. He thinks Kosciusko’s brother is involved, and so impersonates Kosciusko to visit the brother in the company station he inhabits in Gonebeyond, travelling there in the bondsmen’s ship. Except Kosciusko manages to escape his house-arrest and tracks his b0ndsmen to the company station, inadvertently ruining Cousin Stanosz’s plan… This book is better-written than I remember the earlier books in the series being, and Kosciusko seems to have settled down as a character. But a lot happens in its 256 pages, and the constant referring back to events and people in the earlier books does tend to confuse in places. The Under Jurisdiction novels don’t have quite the same level of shine as they did back in the late 1990s and, while the genre has moved on in the eleven years since Warring States, although it has moved in much the same direction as the Under Jursidiction books were sort of heading… Blood Enemies still doesn’t feel much like a 2017 science ficiton novel. The world-building is strong, but it’s not the focus of the narrative. Nor are the characters’ emotions. Which does make it feel, when compared to present-day sf, as though everything in Blood Enemies is slightly off-centre. I’m not all that interested in the current sf narrative style, to be honest – world-bling and feels and word salad – but Blood Enemies reads like it’s trying to catch up rather than do its own thing. Having said that, I still intend to continue reading the series.

1001 Boks You Must Read Before You Die count: 129


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Moving pictures 2017, #32

Two Hollywood films in this batch, although I’m not entirely sure that label can be applied to the first US film mentioned – Noomi Rapace as the female lead! Isabelle Huppert as her mother! Although otherwise, it’s solid mid-Hollywood casting down the line – Colin Farrell, F Murray Abraham, Armand Assante… But there’s also two Indian films, although one isn’t actually Bollywood… plus another Filipino movie, and the second film I’ve seen by Lucía Puenzo. In fact, aside from the shitty animated one, it’s a pretty good collection of movies.

Uski Roti, Mani Kaul (1970, India). There are two 20-DVD box sets released by the National Film Development Corporation of India, but I’ve had trouble finding copies at reasonable prices. Meanwhile, individual films – or in this case, three films in a single case – seem to be readily available… but are almost impossible to find on Amazon because the data entry is so piss-poor. And don’t get me started on big data… Anyway, I recognised the cover design of this Mani Kaul triplet as being from NFDC, and spotting that the back-cover described the films’ genre as “offbeat/social”, I decided they were worth a punt despite having never heard of the director… Only to later discover that Wikipedia describes him as “arguably the greatest Indian director of Hindi films” and also points out he was a student of Ritwik Ghatak (a favourite director of mine). The greatest Indian director Hindi films… and yet the DVD here is the only one of his films available in the UK.  (Not entirely the UK’s fault, as most Bollywood movies available here on DVD are released by Indian labels, not UK ones.) Had I known of the Kaul-Ghatak link, I might have guessed that Uski Roti is “parallel cinema” rather than Bollywood. No singing and dancing here. In fact, the first line of dialogue isn’t spoken until ten minutes into the film. And there isn’t a great deal of dialogue anyway. Kaul seems to like static shots in which there’s very little action or movement. He also likes voice-over narration, and indirect dialogue (if there is such a term – I mean where the character is on-screen, but the dialogue is voice-over). Despite watching Uski Roti twice, I’m still not entirely clear about the plot. Roti is a type of unleavened bread, and Uski Roti appears to be about a woman who makes lunch for her husband, a driver, and then walks to the road along which he drives to hand it to him when he passes. But he spends most of his time away from the family home. The pacing is languorous at best, there are lots of carefully-framed shots, and the whole thing feels like it was consciously made to be nothing like a Bollywood film. Worth seeing.

Insiang, Lino Brocka (1976, Philippines). This was the second disc included with Manila in the Claws of Light (see here), and also stars Hilda Koronel, this time in the title role. Insiang is a young woman living with her mother in a Manila slum district. She has a boyfriend, but her mother’s boyfriend rapes her. Her mother believes her boyfriend and not her daughter, and so Insiang runs off with her boyfriend. But after having consensual sex with her, he deserts her. So Insiang returns to her mother’s boyfriend, seduces him and persuades him to enact her revenge on her boyfriend. She also tells her mother she has slept with her boyfriend… and so her mother stabs and kills him. This is definitely social drama, but not, I think, Pinoy-style. It’s played very straight, the cast are excellent, and the scenes are all shot on location. Koronel is good in the title role – hugely better, in fact, than she was in Manila Claws of Light. I think, on balance, the earlier film is the better of the two, perhaps because its story has wider scope. Insiang is quite claustrophobic – deliberately so, I imagine, in order to evoke life in the slums – but it’s also a very incestuous story, which means it has a small cast. Manila in the Claws of Light was a bigger story, and while Insiang‘s narrower focus works well for it, I don’t think it’s as good as the other film. But the DVD set is definitely worth seeing. And I heop we’ll see more films by Brocka made available.

Dead Man Down, Niels Arden Oplev (2013, USA). I found this on Amazon Prime, and I’ve no idea what possessed me to watch it. I’m by no means a Colin Farrell fan, and while the thrillers in which he appears – Euro or Hollywood – are nowhere near as bad as those in which Liam Neeson appears, they’re often thin and implausible stuff. As, er, was this one. But in Oplev it had an interesting choice of director, which led to an entirely unexpected direction for the film, and, as mentioned above, Noomi Rapace plays the female lead and Isabelle Huppert is her mother. Farrell is an enforcer for a gangster, except it seems he isn’t. He has infiltrated the gang in order to exact revenge, because they accidentally killed his young daughter, and then killed his wife and himself (but failed the latter, obvs) when the couple chose to act as witnesses against the gang. However, Rapace, who lives in a neighbouring skyscraper on the same floor as Farrell, so their windows look onto each other’s flats, saw Farrell kill a man. And she’s disfigured from a car crash caused by a drunk-driver who was only lightly sentenced and still continues to drink-drive. She wants revenge, and blackmails Farrell into committing it for her. And there’s the problem… This is a dull dull dull ganster/revenge/lone hero plot, and there a zillion films like it, pretty much all of which are bad. Oplev, however, has chosen to approach the film entirely differently, and he slows down the pace, pulls back on the glorification of violence, and puts the emotional landscapes of the characters of Farrell and Rapace front and centre. And the whole lot is filmed in a low-lit style with a limited colour palette. With a good story, this would have been a superior thriller. With the story it has, it’s a dog food gateau. Oplev could not apparently lift inferior material to something more than inferior, even with a good cast and an art-house look and feel.

The Secret Life of Pets, Chris Renaud & Yarrow Cheny (2016, USA). My finger must have slipped or something, that’s the only explanation. Okay, so Hollywood has churned out some big-budget well-regarded animated feature films over the last couple of years… but every good one there are thousands of inferior ones. And since these days it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between marketing copy and critical commentary, I had mistaken believed this might be one of the few good ones. It wasn’t it. In fact, it was really bad. With a voice cast who seem to have made careers out of sounding like much more famous actors. I can’t even remember what the film was about, something to do with some house pets and the sewers, I seem to recall, but it was just one long uninterrupted stream of clichés and hoary old potted routines. Even the stylised animation looked a bit 1990s, albeit being digital it looked cleaner and smoother than it would have done in that decade. Avoid.

Wakolda, Lucía Puenzo (2013, Argentina). I think it was a trailer on another rental DVD that persuaded me to add this to my rental list. I’d seen a film by Puenzo several years ago, XXY, but had not at that time taken note of the director’s name. It was only after watching Wakolda that I put two and two together… and on the strength of these two films, I’d like to see more by her. A family heading south to Patagonia are asked by a German immigrant if he can drive with them as the roads are dangerous. They agree. After arriving at their destination – a hotel on a lake the family plan to re-open, the German goes on his way. But he reappears a couple of days later and asks to move into the hotel. He is a doctor, and he has noticed that the young daughter is small for age, due to her premature birth, and often sickly. He offers free treatment to improve her health, but the father is sceptical. Meanwhile, a photographer working locally turns out to be a Mossad agent and she identifies the doctor as Mengele. The film is based on Puenzo’s own novel of the same title. Mengele is portrayed as something close to a sociopath, so obsessed with his medical researches that he doesn’t even consider his patients as human beings, and his acts of kindness are merely part of his strategy to get people to agree to his plans. The film is told partly in flashback voice-over narration by the young daughter, and it’s all presented as a sort of gentle drama with an undercurrent of thriller. Good film, definitely worth seeing.

Pakeezah, Kamal Amrohi (1972, India). I forget why I added this to my rental list – it’s certainly not on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, although it certainly belongs on it, but perhaps it was on some list of best Bollywood  movies or something. Anyway, I bunged it in the player not expecting much, I mean, a forty-five year old Bollywood film… boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again, lots of singing and dancing, and probably a terrible print as well… But, well, it was all that, but it was also bloody good. It was if the Archers – Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, that is – had made a Bollywood film. Which in no way is to erase Amrohi’s achievement, which apparently took some sixteen years. But Pakeezah had that same Archers look of detailed interior sets built to resemble exteriors. And some of the photography is, despite the poor print, really quite astonishingly good. In fact, everything about the way this film was made is good. It’s set in Lucknow at the turn of century. It opens with a woman dying in childbirth, and her baby being taken by her sister, who brings the child up in her brothel, where she becomes a much fêted singer and dancer. The local nawab takes to her, and starts wooing her. While on a river trip, their boat is attacked by elephants and the dancer is thrown into the river. She is rescued by a forest ranger, and the two fall in love… There is plenty of singing and dancing in Pakeezah, but it’s classical Indian music rather than the popular musuic you might find in a more recent Bollywood film. The sets are fantastic, and the costumes are amazing… so it’s a shame the DVD transfer isn’t especially good. I’ve seen worse – the Guru Dutt ones, for example; and at least one of the recent Bollywood films I’ve seen was a really low res picture – but it’s a shame that a film that’s held in such high regard isn’t available in a better edition. Excellent film.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 869


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Moving pictures 2017, #31

I managed to cross a few films off the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list this time, although two of them were US films by directors whose works I don’t especially like – and no, I don’t understand how the films made the list in the first place. This post also marks my first Singaporean film, wihch I stumbled across on eBay and which seemed intriguing enough to buy. The seller contacted me to point out the DVD was region 3, but I replied I’d bought a multi-region Blu-ray specifically because I want to watch DVDs and Blu-rays from other regions. This post has my first Jordanian film too – although I’m fairly sure this is a Jordanian film for the international market, rather than the Arabic-language market.

The Color Purple*, Steven Spielberg (1985, USA). I’m not a big Spielberg fan – in fact, I’m not a fan of his films at all, especially not of his push-button emotional content films – and that’s what The Color Purple is (despite my dislike of US spelling, it seems to fit in this case). I’ve not read the novel by Alice Walker but I fervently hope it’s not as bad as this film, which is an over-sentimental drama covering an African-American family over several decades from the 1920s onward. Whoopi Goldberg plays a poor and uneducated woman (when she’s an adult) in rural Georgia. She is married off to Danny Glover, even though he had turned up at the house intending to marry another sister. That sister runs away, and goes to “Africa” (I don’t recall the actual African nation being named) with a missionary couple. In the novel, at least according to Wikipedia’s plot synopsis, she ends up marrying the missionary husband after his wife dies; in the film, she marries a young man she meets in the “African” village in which she is living. Goldberg, meanwhile, is abused by Glover over many years, decades even. There are also some scenes at a bar, where a musical number is performed by the fallen wife of the local preacher… leading to a frankly ludicrous scene later where said fallen wife hears the choir singing and marches around a mile, singing all the while, and being heard by the congregation as she marches. I really didn’t like this film. It was manipulative to a degree I’ve not seen in a Spielberg film before, and he’s entirely about manipulating his audience. I also fail to understand why it made the 1001 Movies To See Before You Die list instead of like, say, Black Girl, a Senegalese film which makes a similar point albeit much more honestly. Still, I guess there was a lot of money pumped into The Color Purple…

Theeb, Naji Abu Nowar (2014, Jordan). I’ve watched a number of Arabic-language films, but they’ve mostly been ones aimed at non-Arabic audiences – not badly-acted Egyptian dramas, in other words. Even the films of Elia Sulieman, a favourite director, are not really made for a Palestinian audience, although they are very Palestinian films. Amd while I’m all too happy to watch such films, it not the same as watching a Bollywood movie, which is a movie designed to appeal to its home audience. It seems to me, though I have no proof, that Theeb, a film made in Jordan by a Jordanian/British director, is a film designed more to appeal to an international audience than a Jordanian audience. And as a big fan of non-Anglophone cinema I have no real problem with that, but as someone who dislikes the concept of “world cinema” I’m less approving. Theeb is a good film, of that there’s no doubt. It’s an excellent historical drama, set in Jordan during WWI, and a clever character study of its central character, a young boy caught up in events he does not understand. But different countries have their different populist cinemas – I’ve mentioned Nigeria’s Nollywood before, and the difficulty of finding its popular films with English subtitles – but what I fail to understand is why it is assumed populist non-Anglophone cinema cannot find an Anglophone audience and only non-Anglophone auteur films are worth releasing in English-language markets. True, the English movie market is pretty much 99% Hollywood, and they can’t even work out how to handle Spanish-speaking audiences, which is a huge part of the US population. But in the UK, we have Welsh and Cornish and the two varieties of Gaelic, and TV channels and programmes and films for each, albeit small scale. And, personally, most of my favourite directors do not make English language films, so I have to watch with subtitles. In fact, subtitles are a passport to a world of cinema and only a fool would ignore them. Subtitles are good. And so is this Theeb.

Hannah and Her Sisters*, Woody Allen (1986, USA). I really don’t understand the appeal of Woody Allen’s films, and I certainly don’t understand why he has six movies on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You die list, since none of them to my mind are all that good. Hannah and Her Sisters fools the viewer initially because it opens with a voice-over by Michael Caine, and no one on-screen resembles Allen. But then he appears, and it all begins to  slide downhill. Caine is married to Hannah, but fancies one of her sisters. Allen is an ex-husband of another sister, but once went on a date with yet another sister which ended badly. And, oh god, this sort of middle-class American bed-hopping drawing-room farce is tedious at best and embarrassing at worst. Allen at least manages not to entirely embarrass his viewers or his cast, but it’s a close-run thing. Caine does not do needy very well, and the film pretty much hinges on his needy desire for sister Barbara Hershey, Max von Sydow’s wife. I watched this film so I could cross it off the list. I only have one more Allen film left on the list to watch – Crimes and Misdemeanours – and then I never have to watch another Woody Allen film ever again.

Manila in the Claws of Light*, Lino Brocka (1975, Philippines). When I set out to watch all the films on 1001 Movies You Must See Before You die list, copies of this film were almost impossible to find. But then Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project went and restored it – yay for Scorsese – and then the BFI released it in the UK on dual format – yay for the BFI. And… it’s good, good enough to make want to watch more films by Brocka. Fortunately, as the DVD cover art indicates, there is another film bundled with Manila in the Claws of Light, Insiang. But my chances of finding any further Brocka movies is, I suspect, extremely remote. Anyway, Manila in the Claws of Light… A young man from the provinces (well, an island other than Luzon – the Philippines is an archipelago, after all) moves to Manila to track down his girlfriend, who had left earlier after being promised employment in the capital by a visiting woman promising jobs there for young women (yes, yes, it’s pretty obvious to us, but these are unsophisticated probincianos). The guy ends up working on a building site as casual labour, where he learns how they are treated, how their wages are garnished, and what life is like at the bottom of the heap. But he spends all his spare time looking for his girlfriend. And eventually finds her. Which is where, of course, things start to go wrong. The film opens in black-and-white, and the print quality is not especially good, which I thought odd for 1975… but then as the opening credits end it changes to colour and the print quality greatly improves. I’m not sure this adds anything to the film, or why Brocka chose to do it. Manila in the Claws of Light treads a fine line between melodrama and social realism, but manages not to fall off in either direction. Brocka is apparently “one of the most influential and significant Filipino filmmakers” (according to Wikipedia), and while I’ve known of Pinoy cinema for many years – there used to be a column in Gulf News’ weekly magazine dedicated to it; and one to Lollywood too – I’ll admit I didn’t take much notice of the directors’ names (although such columns tend to focus on the stars anyway), but even in my years of following “world cinema” (ugh) I’d not come across Brocka’s name before. Mostly my fault, yes, but given how so many directors from other countries are lauded in Anglophone cinema – Tarkovsky, Ray, Kiarostami, Kurosawa, Almodóvar, Tati, Fassbinder, Bergman, etc. – I’m surprised I’d not stumbled across Brocka’s name before. But then, as mentioned previously, Manila in the Claws of Light was, until this edition appeared, extremely hard to find. Perhaps the appearance of Two Films by Lino Brocka means more films by him, and other Filipino/Filipina directors, are going to be released in the Anglophone world. I hope so.

Girl Gets Girl, Sonia Sebastián (2015, Spain). I forget where I came across this – probably a trailer on another rental DVD – and decided to add it to my rental list. Bur I thoroughly enjoyed it. The film was almost like someone trying to out-Almodóvar Almodóvar himself. Ten years after running away from a wedding, Inés returns to Spain from Miami, just when her ex-girlfriend’s ten-year-old daughter is have a “first period party”. There then follows a series of mildly comic and well-written scenes in which each of the characters at the party try to get their own way. A previous girlfriend, for exmaple, turns up with a dodgy guy as her “boyfriend”. and he tries to drug her drink but the wrong woman drinks it. One of the two mothers of the young girl is desperately trying to hide her sexuality from her mother. The other mother thinks Inés still loves her, but Inés is basically just hiding from some enemies she made in Miami, And not just enenies, as one is an editor who fell in love with her and follows her to Spain to win her heart and/or get back her money. The script is witty, the characters are likeable, the plot is, despite being a but obvious in places, is clever. It’s by no means great cinema, but it is a fun film that entertains without annoying or insulting the viewer’s intelligence. Oh, and it doesn’t just pass the Bechdel Test, it comes top of the class. Worth seeing.

In the Room, Eric Khoo (2015, Singapore). As mentioned above, I stumbled across this on eBay and decided to take a punt on it (it’s not actually available on Amazon). It was a good call. The title refers to a room in the Hotel Singapura (an alternative title for the film) in which events happen over several decades. The story opens in 1942, in black-and-white, with a Brit and a Singaporean lamenting the loss of the Brit’s livelihood – a plantation – but also quite clearly about the love affair between the two men. Another story is about a madam who trains young women to be prostitutes in the early 1960s in the room, and in this sequence the production design and colour scheme is appropriate to the decade. There’s a rock band who occupy the room in the 1970s… and so on. There’s a variety of styles on display, all of which seem appropriate to the decade being depicted, but it does mean In the Room doesn’t feel like it presents a singular vision. Sometimes it feels like Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, other times it feels a bit like Almodóvar. Or maybe not. It’s not the most original plot on the planet – I can think of at least two bad films that have the same premise – and Khoo’s decision to give each sequence an appropriate flavour does tend to dilute his vision. But I still thought this was rather good, and I’m glad I took a chance on it.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 867