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Moving pictures 2018, #41

I have seen other films by all the directors in the post, except for the last. Some, of course, more than others – Lang is my 8th most-watched director, with 25 movies. (Alfred Hitchcock, unsurprisingly, occupies the top spot.)

House by the River, Fritz Lang (1950, USA) Unsuccessful author Louis Hayward is left on his own with attractive maid Dorothy Patrick. Enraged by his latest rejection, and drunk, he sexually assaults Patrick, and strangles her when she resists. His brother, Lee Bowman, then turns up, and Hayward persuades him to help him dispose of the body – in the river by, er, the house. Hayward then puts it about that Patrick has run away with clothing and jewellery belonging to Hayward’s wife. But then Bowman learns that the meal sack in which they hid the body had his name on it. And the body has re-appeared. Hayward claims Bowman was the murderer. And it looks like he might go down for it. Lang made some classic noir films during the 1940s and 1950s, but this isn’t generally reckoned one of them. It apparently flopped on its release, but time has been kind to it: the starkly-lit studio sets, indoors and outdoors, look really quite effective, and if the script and acting is perhaps a bit overwrought there are some really effective scenes. The scene where Hayward tries to recover Patrick’s body from the river is especially good. Despite that, it’s probably one for fans – of Lang or noir.

Space Amoeba, Ishiro Honda (1970, Japan). The original Japanese title of this film translates as “Gezora, Ganimes, and Kamoebas: Decisive Battle! Giant Monsters of the South Seas”, which, er, pretty much describes the entire plot. Admittedly, it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as readily as Space Amoeba, or the film’s US title, Yog-Monster from Space (although what a “yog-monster” is, is anybody’s guess). Anyway, space probe on its way to Jupiter encounters a strange energy alien, which takes over the probe and sends it back to Earth. It crashes in the Pacific, and the alien takes over the body of a cuttlefish and grows it to giant-size. Meanwhile, a group of photographers and developers have travelled to Selgio Island to explore the sight of a future resort. The giant cuttlefish attacks them, and when they defeat it, the alien turns into a giant stone crab, and then a giant mata mata. So, lots of monster fights. And, er, that’s about it. There are a few character arcs and stuff, but let’s not get carried away – kaiju films are all about the monsters, after all. Strangely, the lead characters seemed to have been dubbed by Australian actors.

Ali and Nino, Asif Kapadia (2016, UK). I learnt of this story watching a documentary about Baku (see here), but at the time thought it was only a 1937 novel. But it was apparently adapted two years ago by a British director, with a Palestinian playing the Azerbaijani and a Spaniard playing the Georgian. Oh well. Casting aside, the film makes a good fist of the story and even manages to present Baku as it was in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Both Ali and Nino are from well-off families, aristocracy if not minor royalty. A rival for Nino’s affections kidnaps her, but Ali rescues her. But the rival dies during the rescue, so Ali has to hide out in the hills. Meanwhile, WWI breaks out. A friend re-unites the two and they marry in the hills. The Russian Revolution takes place. Post-WWI, Azerbaijan becomes independent. The couple return to Baku and Ali is made a government minister. But then the Russians invade and Azerbaijan becomes a vassal state. Ali and Nino flee. Ali and Nino is all a bit, well, Dr Zhivago, with a bit of Lawrence of Arabia mixed in. It’s clear where Kapadia’s inspirations lay – and it’s no bad thing, as those are both excellent films. The two leads are, perhaps, a little bland, although Mandy Patinkin, one of only two faces I recognised in the cast, makes a good Grand Duke Kipiani, Nino’s father. Kapadia at least does a better job of making his locations look like Baku of the 1930s than Lean did making Spain look like Russia (athough both are good-looking films). Kapadia is probably better-known for documentaries made from found footage, but if this, his feature film, is any indication he has a good career ahead of him in that area too.

Through the Olive Trees*, Abbas Kiarostami (194, Iran). This is probably Kiarostami’s most highly-regarded film and yet, despite the fact pretty much his entire oeuvre is available on DVD, this one film isn’t. Every other film he made: available on DVD, probably soon to appear on Blu-ray. Through the Olive Trees: nope. I can only hope that when that long outstanding Kiarostami collection appears on Blu-ray, it includes this. Through the Olive Trees is about a director making a film in a village in Iran that recently suffered a bad earthquake. I can’t think of another film director whose movies were so consistently meta – whether it was the pull back to the crew at the end of Taste of Cherry, or the plot of Close-Up (see here), which consists of a man pretending to be rival director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. In Through the Olive Trees, two of the locals the director has cast have a bad relationship: he asked for her hand in marriage but was rejected by her mother. Acting in the film has brought the two together, and while he still burns a torch for her and is incensed by his rejection, she doesn’t seem especially concerned and is happy to accept her mother’s decision. But the two start to confuse the parts they’re playing and their real lives – I believe most of the cast were amateurs from the area where the film was made, and many of the events in the film happened in real life. In and around this, the director has to cope with making a film far from Tehran, with only local support, living in tents and using a much-reduced crew. This hasn’t overtaken Where the Wind Will Carry Us as my favourite Kiarostami, and I think I like Close-up slightly more as well, but it’s certainly in the top five. Excellent stuff.

The Warrior and the Wolf, Tian Zhuangzhuang (2009, China). I watched this twice before returning it to Cinema Paradiso and I’m still not sure sure what it’s about. I think I know what it thinks it’s about, but that’s not the same as what appears on the screen. It receive some stick because it’s a Chinese historical film starring a Japanese man and a Hawaiian woman in the lead roles – cf Zhang Yimou for casting Matt Damon in The Great Wall. The Warrior and the Wolf opens with on-screen text explaining that General Zhang guards the northern border, but during the winter months his army returns home. When Zhang is captured by barbarians, a new recruit, Lu, frees him. Zhang leaves Lu in charge and heads home. Winter arrives and Lu leads the garrison home, but they end up trapped in a village by a snowstorm. Lu takes a village woman for himself, She tells him that sex with outsiders turns the villagers into wolves. When the soldiers leave, they are attacked by wolves. This is definitely a film that’s all about the visuals, not to mention the sex scenes between Lu and the village woman. Occasional screen-fulls of narrative text, however, fail to bed the story into the visuals, so the end result is a film that looks gorgeous but is as dull as dishwater. I’ve now seen three films by Tian, and he definitely seems stronger on cinematography than narrative. The Horse Thief (see here) had the most interesting setting, but The Warrior and the Wolf doesn’t seem all that much different to the current crop of wu xia and historical epic films flooding out of China.

A Fantastic Woman, Sebastián Lelio (2017, Chile) This is one of those films where the plot is easy to describe. That, however, is the only thing that’s “easy” about it. A man in a relationship with a transgender woman, Marina, has a seizure one night. She manages to get him to the hospital, although not without him falling downstairs at one point. Due to the injuries sustained from the fall, the police are called. The man dies of an aneurysm. The police seemed happy Marina was not responsible for the death, but they are afraid she might have been a victim herself in the relationship. So while trying to manage her grief, she’s having to deal with an officious police officer intent on digging into her private life. Then her late lover’s transphobic ex-wife turns up. And she wants everything back. Like the car. The son moves into the flat and throws Marina out. He even keeps the dog, which was given to Marina. And the family refuses to allow her to mourn her lover’s death – they ban her from the funeral, and the son and his mates physically assault her when she turns up. The one thing I don’t understand is why the ex-wife has such powers. Her relationship with the deceased ended when she divorced him. It’s implied Marina’s relationship was relatively recent, but even so she lived with him, they were a couple. A Fantastic Woman won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and it’s certainly a good film. Its star, Daniela Vega, is excellent in the title role. But it’s also a film that makes you angry with the injustices heaped on its title character. Obviously, they’re making a point – and the success of the movie shows the point is getting across to some people. But the fact it has to be made in the first place… and the treatment meted out by transphobes… It’s disgusting, makes you ashamed to be human. An excellent film, definitely worth seeing.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 925


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Moving pictures 2018, #15

The best thing about watching a wide variety of films is finding one you would not normally watch and loving it. It has happened several times. I would not be a fan of James Benning’s films if I’d not watched his Deseret because it was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. I would not be a fan of Ben River’s movies if I’d not stuck his The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers on my rental list on a whim. And two films in this batch… well, one I purchased a copy of my own; and the other, I went and bought a collection of the director’s films on eBay (because it’s apparently deleted and not available from a certain online retailer).

The Lure, Agnieszka Smoczyńska (2015, Poland). I’d seen approving mentions of this but knew almost nothing about it. I suspect I may have mentally filed it as a Polish version of The Shape of Water. If I did, then I did it a huge disservice. It is way better than anything Hollywood has produced. I’ve described it to friends as a horror-musical mashup set in the 1980s featuring a pair of carnivorous mermaids in a Polish nightclub. Which pretty much sums it up. But does not quite get across how fucking good it is. Two mermaids meet a rock band on the beach, and return with them to the nightclub where they perform. They become backing singers and strippers. One of the mermaids falls in the love with band’s bassist, and has her tail surgically replaced with legs, which means she loses her singing voice. But he marries another woman, and the mermaid turns into sea foam – because she had to eat him before daybreak if she wanted to live – and the other mermaid rips out his throat in revenge… And a summary of the plot doesn’t quite get across how beautiful this film looks, how amazingly appropriate is the 1980s music, and how bonkers the whole mythology surrounding the mermaids really is. I think this is going to make my best of the year list. I’ve already bought my own copy. You should definitely see it.

Pulp, Mike Hodges (1972, UK). It’s a Michael Caine film but it nonetheless sounded like it might be worth watching – which is not entirely fair, of course, as Caine has made some good films during his long career, like Get Carter. And director Mike Hodges too has made some good movies during his careers, such as, er, Get Carter. And, um, Flash Gordon. Whatever. It’s a team that has produced good stuff in the past. So it’s a crying shame Pulp is so bad. It has its moments, and it’s by no mean badly made, but… Any film that relies on voiceover needs to seriously think about the story it is telling. In part, the voiceover is baked into this story, as the lead character, played by Caine, is a successful pulp writer and he frames the events of the film, in which he is an unwitting protagonist, as a pulp narrative starring himself. He is in Malta to ghostwrite the autobiography of a mysterious celebrity. This involves taking a coach tour to some ruins, where he is contacted by a representative of the celebrity… and also meets a would-be assassin who is later mysteriously murdered. The celebrity proves to be Mickey Rooney, an actor famous for playing gangsters and with Mob friends and connections. At his birthday party, Rooney is killed, but everyone else thinks it’s one of his practical jokes. Some of Rooney’s Maltese associates, it transpires, did something very bad years before on a hunting trip, and they were afraid Rooney would reveal all in his autobiography. I wanted to like Pulp so much more than I did. The setting – Malta – looks very nice. The plot is pure noir – and just in case you didn’t realise, Caine describes what’s going on in pulp-style throughout – and the central mystery is satisfying. But it all felt like a comedy that had no jokes: sort of tonally wrong, neither actual noir nor a murder-mystery. Missable.

Amuck!, Silvio Amadio (1972, Italy). I do love me some giallo, although I prefer the thriller giallo to the horror giallo – and I admit it’s a bit of a grey area with giallo as to which is which. The titles don’t help. Nor, in fact, do the names of directors. I’ve been using as my yardstick, and it’s probably not a good one, the presence of Barbara Bouchet in the cast. She made a lot of Italian films, many of which were giallo, and many of which are actually not bad. True, she’s not in Footprints on the Moon, which I have an inexplicable love for, but she’s in Milano Calibro 9, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, Don’t Torture a Duckling, The Black Belly of the Tarantula and… Amuck! The original title of this film, Alla ricerca del piacere, translates as “In pursuit of pleasure”, and it was also released as Hot Bed of Sex, Maniac Mansion and Leather and Whips. Although, since giallo has a habit of being inappropriately titled in the US market, they should not be taken as indications of the story. Nor indeed should Amuck!. Bouchet plays the new secretary to louche novelist Farley Granger. His last secretary disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and Bouchet is there undercover to find out what happened to her (they were lovers). It turns out the previous secretary had died during a bout of sex with Granger, his wife, and their brutish manservant. And now that Bouchet knows, they have to get rid of her… The plot summary probably tells you all you need to know about this film. I must admit I quite like that these gialli are slowly being made available in the UK – on several labels – as they’re always entertaining. Call it a guilty pleasure.

Vampir Cuadecuc, Pere Portabella (1970, Spain). I think I saw mention of this tweeted by Second Run, who I follow as they are an excellent label, and thought it was a Romanian vampire film or something, so of minor interest. But I bunged it on my rental list anyway. I got a lot of things wrong. It’s not Romanian, it’s Spanish. It’s also an experimental film, shot on the set of Jess Franco’s Count Dracula, starring Christopher Lee and Herbert Lom. But it’s no fly-on-the-wall documentary. Portabella haunted the set of Count Dracula, and shot his own footage – but it’s all in stark black and white, and the soundtrack consists of loud experimental music comprising hums and noise. I loved it. I loved it so much I hunted online for more by Portabella and found an OOP collection of twenty-two of his films (including Vampir Cuadecuc), which I promptly ordered. There is no way to describe Vampir Cuadecuc that makes sense, or in any way prepares you for the experience of seeing it. Just go and watch it.

The Beyond, Hasraf Dulull (2017, UK). After a couple of abortive attempts to watch films on Amazon Prime I ended up on this one, which had the advantage of an interesting premise. But with cinema, it’s all in the presentation. And the originality of the premise is often considered secondary, if not ignored. The Beyond does indeed have a quite good central conceit, and it treats it well. It just fails a little in the execution. Which puts it in a strange position – do you admire it for what it tries to do, or criticise it because it fails to meet what you expect it to do? Its story is straightforward enough in sf terms. An anomaly appears in Earth orbit and sucks an ISS astronaut into it. The scenes set in orbit are handled convincingly. Then mysterious spheres appear all over the earth, hovering in mid-air. Investigation of the anomaly reveals a world just visible through it, and so the US repurposes a black defence programme to create cyborg soldiers, Human 2.0, to create astronauts to explore through the anomaly. The programme does not go well when the first volunteer dies. The best qualified person turns down the chance to join the programme, but is eventually persuaded otherwise when it transpires she’s just about the only possible choice. What happens on the mission through the anomaly is left mostly unexplained, but what the astronaut brings back does cause earth to re-evaluate the purpose of the alien spheres. The whole thing is framed liked a documentary, with talking heads and interviews with those involved. The special effects are generally of a high-quality. If anything lets the film down, it’s the acting, which often doesn’t quite manage to hit that difficult line between acting and acting-as-if-in-a-documentary. Given all the really shit independent sf films available on Amazon Prime, The Beyond came as a pleasant surprise. Worth a punt.

American Guerrilla in the Philippines, Fritz Lang (1950, USA). I’ve been trying to watch all of Lang’s films but, like many other directors of his generation, such as Wilder, Preminger, Sirk, who moved to Hollywood from Germany, they were happy to cut their cloth to whatever was needed. Despite that, they still managed to produced classics, often while constrained by the studio. But not every film they made was good, or in any way remarkable. Some of them were likely done for the money, and the director’s investment in the project came down to nothing more than simply being professional about it. Of course, old school directors of that type tended to put their own stamp on whatever material they worked on, but, to be honest, I couldn’t see anything in American Guerilla in the Philippines which struck me as especially Lang-ian (Lang-isch?). I mean, without knowing the director, could anyone have said it was by the same guy as the director of Metropolis or Man Hunt or While the City Sleeps? American Guerilla in the Philippines has US Navy MTB ensign Tyrone Power stranded in, well, the Philippines during WWII. In his attempts to rejoin the fighting, he ends up helping the resistance in the Philippines. There’s an initial attempt to sail to Australia, which fails. And, of course, there’s a love interest, the French wife of a local planter. As WWII films go, there’s nothing notable about American Guerilla in the Philippines, except perhaps the fact it was filmed on location and uses a lot of local talent in supporting roles. Otherwise, it’s your usual self-aggrandising US war film, although perhaps a little more open than most to the contribution of others (although, of course, it would still like the viewer to believe the US single-handedly liberated the Philippines from the Japanese). Yawn.

1001 Moies you Must See Before You Die count: 896


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The endurance of the human bladder

As Alfred Hitchcock famously said, “the length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder”, but some of the films below stretch that endurance somewhat – happily, not as much Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó… which is 432 minutes long! Of course, these are DVDs and Blu-rays, so there’s always the pause button, a boon to the bladder….

I’ve started to become a bit of an Orson Welles fan, even though I’ve had a DVD of Citizen Kane for a couple of decades… but it’s his other stuff I’m now finding more interesting. Macbeth was cheap on eBay and and Touch of Evil was a charity shop find. La note bleue, on the other hand, is the latest Mondo Vision release of an Andrzej Żuławski film, and I ordered it from their website.

I liked Pakeezah so much (see here), I wanted my own copy. It wasn’t expensive (I see it has now gone up in price). And the rental copy of Mughal-e-Azam I watched (see here) was the original black and white, but I wanted to see it in its colourised version. Which I now have done. And my eyes are still burning. Ran was a charity shop find. I’m not a big Kurosawa fan, so maybe I need to watch some of his films again.

I’ve been trying to complete my Bergman collection – hence, Crisis and Prison. I’m still nine short, although seven of them don’t appear to have ever been released on sell-through… The Beast in Space (see here) was a whim purchase – I’d enjoyed a couple of other Shameless releases, so I chucked this one onto an order.

I pre-ordered the new Metropolis 90th anniversary edition from Eureka’s own website. It arrived recently. The  Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was a charity shop find. A Brighter Summer Day I bought because it’s on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list and wasn’t available for rental. I seem to have picked up a few Edward Yang films now. And Oedipus Rex, well, 2017 has been the Year of Pasolini for me…


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Moving pictures 2017, #39

It pleases me when the six films I write about in these Moving picture posts are from six different countries. I mean, I make an effort to watch movies from nations other than the US and UK, but I don’t plan my viewing so meticulously that I hit six countries every six films. And it’s an odd bunch of films too. Half by directors I’ve seen films by before, and half that I knew nothing about when I slid the disc into the player…

Moonfleet, Fritz Lang (1955, USA). I’m pretty sure I read J Meade Falkner’s Moonfleet when I was a kid, so sure, in fact, I always get it confused with every book written by Wilkie Collins, even though the only Collins book which comes close, and that’s only in the title, is The Moonstone, which has nothing to do with Cornwall or smugglers and isn’t even set in the 1700s. Um, I see Wikipedia says of Moonfleet, “The book was extremely popular among children worldwide up until the 1970s”, which probably explains why I read it (I was a child in the 1970s). But this was Lang’s adaptation of the novel, a film that star Stewart Granger described as “a bloody awful film”, and it certainly isn’t a children’s film but more of a Hollywood swashbuckler. Sad to say, it’s easy to see why this film and Clash by Night (see here) aren’t actually readily available on DVD, despite being made by a director of Lang’s stature. A young boy is sent to Cornwall by his late mother into the care of an old flame. Unfortunately, said old flame, the local squire, is the head of the local smuggling ring. And the local magistrate is out to get him. The rest, despite the English source text, despite the German director, despite the mostly British cast (although it was shot on the MGM backlot)… is pure Hollywood historical. It has its moments, but Moonfleet is a Sunday afternooon film, and quickly forgotten.

Mughal-e-Azam, K Asif (1960, India). The cover art claims this film is in colour, but it was the only decent cover art for the film I could find. In actual fact, when released in 1960, Mughal-e-Azam was black and white. But in 2009, an extensive, and expensive, digital colourisation of the entire film was done. However, the edition I saw – a rental – was black and white, but for a ten-minute colour section in the middle, and another ten-minute colour section at the end. And, to be honest, given the sets and costumes and the abundant use of jewels and bright colours, I suspect 197 minutes of colourised Mughal-e-Azam would have burnt out my eyes. The film is considered a classic of Bollywood cinema, and it’s easy to see why. It’s set in the late sixteenth century. Emperor Akbar is desperate for a male heir, and walks barefoot to a shrine to pray for a son. Which he soon has. The son grows up to be spoilt and cruel, so Akbar sends him away to become a man. Fourteen years later, Prince Salim returns as a victorious soldier. Meanwhile, Akbar has got himself a new slave girl dancer, Nadira. Salim falls in love with her, and asks his father for her hand in marriage, but Akbar refuses. So Salim rebels, raises an army, there’s a big battle and Salim loses. He is sentenced to death, but if Nadira gives herself up, he’ll be spared. So she does and is entombed alive. But way back at the start of the film Nadira’s mother was granted a boon by Akbar, and she uses it now to save her daughter’s life – but the two must leave the country and spend the rest of their days in exile. This is a proper epic movie – the plot, the characters, the sets, the costumes, the cast of thousands (or at least what seems like one)… As a black and white film, it’s pretty good, but on reflection, despite my earlier comment, I think I probably would like to watch the colourised version. Mughal-e-Azam is a different type of film to Pakeezah, same basic Bollywood plot, of course, but more historical drama than romantic drama, and, despite also being filmed chiefly on massive sets, it doesn’t have that same slightly theatrical look of the other film (which was, to be fair, one of the chief attractions of Pakeezah). I’ve watched around two dozen Bollywood films by now, I think, and while I’ve enjoyed most of them, it’s the historical ones I’ve been tempted to buy my own copies – the Guru Dutt movies, for example, Pakeezah, and now perhaps Mughal-e-Azam…

Tasuma, Daniel Sanou Kollo (2004, Burkina Faso). Sogo Sanou is an ex-soldier who fought in Algeria and Indochina for the French, and every month bicycles from his village into the nearest town to collect his military pension. Except it never arrives. Most Burkinabé ex-soldiers, it transpires, left the French army unaware they were eligible for a pension, so someone formed a Burkinabé organisation to apply for those pensions. But Sogo’s application has been delayed because bureaucracy. But he’s convinced that every time he bikes into town, it’ll be waiting for him. So much so, that on one trip he buys a much-needed motorised milling machine for his village from a local trader on credit. But his pension doesn’t arrive, the trader complains to the authorities and tries to re-possess the milling machine. Sogo is so pissed off with all this, he takes the local prefect hostage in his office, and demands he write a letter to General de Gaulle. “But he’s dead!” protests the prefect. “I know that,” says Sogo, “now start writing.” He’s easily taken by the police and thrown into jail. The women of the village then descend on the jail and, thanks to them, and the help of a friendly army lieutenant, Sogo is released. All of which leads to Sogo’s pension being expedited, relations with the trader mended, and there’s a celebration with music and dance at the village for all concerned. I’ve seen the film criticised in a review online as bucolic and a little too slavishly tied to a supposed “African formula”, which seems grossly unfair, if not a bit racist. Tasuma is certainly a product of its setting, and of the concerns which occupy the people in the village and town depicted. But that doesn’t make it formulaic. Anyway, Tasuma is a good film, perhaps not brilliantly directed or acted, but a lot of fun, makes a serious point, and has bags of charm. Worth seeing.

The Dance of Reality, Alejandro Jodorowsky (2013, Chile). Jodorowsky’s last film was 1990’s The Rainbow Thief, which was embarrassingly bad. He then spent two decades trying to interest investors in a sequel to El Topo, and various other projects, but failed. But in 2009, he turned to crowdfunding to finance a film based on his own childhood in northern Chile. That film is The Dance of Reality and… it’s actually pretty damn good. It’s also pretty much a recapitulation of all the ideas and symbolism Jodorowsky has used throughout his career. Jodorowsky’s grandson plays himself – Jodorowsky, that is – at age eleven, the son of a staunch communist and admirer of Stalin, who owns a lingerie shop in the Chilean port of Tocopilla. Convinced Alejandro is not manly enough, the father arranges various tests of his masculinity, which culminates in the boy becoming the mascot of the local fire brigade, accompanying them on a call-out to the local slums, and then breaking down at the funeral of a fire-fighter killed during that fire. In amongst that, you have a variety of life lessons taught to Alejandro by both real and symbolic characters. But it’s not so much the symbolism and imagery, these are things Jodorowsky has used both in his films and his bandes dessinées, and to anyone familiar with his work, they’re clear and obvious and play unambiguous roles in the story. But, more than that, The Dance of Reality actually looks pretty damn good too. The colours are vibrant, the tracking seamless, and the editing unobtrusive. The Dance of Reality is technically expert – and it’s an odd realisation to have while watching it because a) Jodorowsky’s films are better known for being bonkers, b) he hasn’t made a film for two decades, and c) the film is very nepotistic, with Jodorowsky’s three sons playing major roles and his grandson playing the lead. But it’s a good film. It’s a weird film, of course – but you expect that. And though I’ve seen all of Jodorowsky’s feature-length films (er, except the sequel to The Dance of Reality, titled Endless Poetry, which I have on the TBR (see here)), I was surprised at how well made The Dance of Reality proved to be. I’m now looking forward to watching Endless Poetry.

The Man from the Future, Cláudio Torres (2011, Brazil). I’ve no idea where I stunbled across this, but you can’t go wrong with a time-travel movie – even if they do all use the same damn plot – so I bunged it on my rental list. It was kinda fun, without ringing any fresh changes on the genre. I enjoyed it, but if you want to see a time-travel film there are better examples out there. Zero is a genius physicist who teaches at a university, much to his disgust, but is also experimenting on the side with a project to develop a new energy source. He is bitter and twisted, having never recovered, emotionally or mentally, from being humiliated at a university party twenty years before by his girlfriend of the time, Helena, now a world-famous model. It turns out Zero’s invention sends him back in time to the night of his humiliation, which he obviously tries to prevent by telling his past self what’s about to go down. But that changes the future and Zero wakes up in a new – to him – present, in which he is a multi-billionaire, has lost all his friends, and the love of his life, Helena, is in prison for drugs offences. So he has to go back in time again to correct his interference… You can see where this is going. It’s actually quite cleverly done, although the multiple iterations of the same short section of time, the aforementioned university party, do pall a bit. And Zero isn’t a great hero. But there’s a happy ending, so all’s well that ends well, so to speak.

To Joy, Ingmar Bergman (1950, Sweden). When I put this in the DVD player, I tweeted “am about to watch a Bergman film called To Joy and I think that title is probably a lie”… And within five minutes, the movie’s dialogue went something like “The paraffin stove exploded” and “Your wife died on the way to the infirmary”. So I guess I was right. Not joyful at all. Except, it sort of, well, is. Because the film immediately jumps back in time to when the two leads – the lead violinist and a violinist in an orchestra – first begin seeing each other. They had met at the academy but it’s only when he joins the orchestra that they fall in love and eventually get married. And the film follows their marriage, through its up and downs, and through the career ups and downs of the lead violinist, up to the point where they reconcile after a bad split and she takes the kids off to a holiday cottage with a paraffin stove… The film is set in Helsingborg, and the town features quite heavily, which gives the film less of a stagey aspect than many of Bergman’s films. The same is also true of the scenes where the orchestra rehearses, five minutes of just orchestral music, with no dialogue or narrative impetus. It’s not one of Bergman’s best, but it’s an interesting piece.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 874


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From silver screen to silver disc

I’ll continue to post these DVD hauls posts, I think, since I seem to be spending as much time on this blog writing about movies as I do books. Er, actually probably more about movies, this past twelve months or so. And so here are the latest batch to join the collection…

I decided it was about time I completed my collection of Bergman DVDs, so I went hunting on eBay… and found myself cheap copies of The Virgin Spring, Port of Call, Three Strange Loves, To Joy and Music in Darkness. Some of them are currently deleted. And I’m still missing about a dozen or so titles. I’ve only watched To Joy so far. It was not very joyful.

A pair of sf Blu-rays picked up in the recent Amazon Prime Day. Colossus: The Forbin Project, a classic giant-computer-starts-WWIII movie, was on my rental list. Mars, a National Geographic docudrama about the first mission to Mars, clearly designed to cash in on the success of The Martian, was already on my wishlist.

After watching Arabian Nights (see here), I wanted to see more Pasolini, although I’d been tempted back in January when I’d watched Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom… But I’d managed to resist temptation then. Except, well, you know how it goes… relaxing of an evening in front of the telly, laptop on your knees, bottle of wine… and oops I’ve gone and bought Six Films 1968 – 1975 by Pasolini on Blu-ray. But I don’t begrudge buying films on a whim that I know I’ll watch several times. Having saidthat, I’m not sure why I bought Orson Welles’s Macbeth – well, I put a bid on it, and actually won it – but I do like Welles’s films.

A pair of out-of-copyright Fritz Lang movies, bought on eBay for a couple of quid. Neither are especially good. I wrote about Clash by Night here and Moonfleet will be in the next Moving pictures post.

This set was a lucky find on eBay. Second Run have released several films by Miklós Jancsó, but these six Pepe and Kapa movies are from the end of his career and are unlikely to ever be released in the UK (these are Hungarian editions, with subtitles in a variety of languages, including English). The titles translate, approximately, as The Lord’s Lantern in Budapest, Mother! The Mosquitos, Last Supper at the Arabian Grey Horse, Wake Up, Mate, Don’t You Sleep, The Modhács Evil and Eddie Has Eaten My Lunch.0


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Moving pictures 2017, #38

I had a Reading diary post lined up next after my last Moving pictures post, but it takes me longer to write about books – chiefly because books take longer to read than films to watch, so I need to remind myself of the earlier ones in a post, and, also, a lot more happens in a book than in a film. I’m also working on a post about the Clarke Award, perhaps even the current state of awards, but I’m not even sure I’ll bother publishing that one. These days, no one gives a shit about honest criticism, reviews are indistinguishable from marketing hype, and fans are more concerned with protecting the ego of their creator friends than they are in any sort of real conversation about the genre. But who knows, perhaps I’ll end up in a ranty mood one evening… and publish and be damned…

But, until then, it’s…. the return of the film post! Only a couple of days after the last one! And the one before that! And it’s only the thirty-eighth I’ve written so far this year alone! (Out of probably about forty-two actual blog posts. Oh well.) The movies in this batch were all a bit random, chosen chiefly because I wasn’t in the mood to think too hard about what to watch.

The Woman Next Door, François Truffaut (1981, France). So I went and bought the François Truffaut Collection Blu-ray box set, because it was going cheap and I’d found myself increasingly drawn to his films, and of the eight films in the set I’d only seen four, so it was pretty much a bargain. And the first disc I pulled from the box was The Woman Next Door, a film about which I knew nothing. Although from the cover art, it clearly starred Fanny Ardant, whom I’d watched only the week before in, er, Truffaut’s Finally, Sunday, also in this collection (see here). The male lead is Gerard Depardieu, and while I’ve always thought him a good actor, in this film he seemed to shift between blank-faced and hyper-emotive, with nothing in between. He and his wife and small boy live in a house in a village near Grenoble. The empty next-door house is rented by a couple around the same age… and the wife, Ardant, turns out to be a woman Depardieu had had a turbulent relationship with before getting married. Their affair rekindles, but it doesn’t go well. He kicks off at a barbecue with the neighbours, she has an incident at the local tennis club… Much as I enjoyed The Woman Next Door, it felt like many of its narrative hooks were left unexplored or unresolved. Ardant was good, as indeed were the supporting cast, but I wasn’t convinced by Depardieu… And the end result was a film that promised more than it delivered. Even the final shock twist felt a bit meh, given what had gone on before. I still admire Truffaut for his films, but this isn’t one of his best ones; and though its slick performances might convince some that is the case, he’s made much better.

The Lavender Hill Mob*, Charles Crichton (1951, UK). I had a feeling I’d seen this before, but I couldn’t remember the details… and when I came to watch it, pretty much everything in it was immediately familiar. Alec Guiness plays a mild-mannered bank clerk whose job entails fetching gold bullion from a foundry, and accompanying it in an armoured lorry to the bank. He’s completely trusted, but he’s planning to steal a shipment of gold just before he retires. His only problem is how transport the stolen gold out of the country. When the owner of Gewgaws Ltd, a company that makes tourist trinkets, moves into the boarding-house in which Guiness lives, he has his answer. Among the souveniers Gewgaws manufactures are gold-painted lead miniatures of the Eiffel Tower, sold in Paris. By making a consignment out of real gold, they can send them to France undetected. To help them in the robbery, the two recruit a pair of criminals, using the Gewgaws premises as a honeypot by talking loudly about a broken safe there, full of wages, on the Tube. The robbery goes more or less according to plan – there are a few hiccoughs, but the police are clueless, so it all comes right in the end. Until they get to France… and discover their Parisian contact has sold six of the real gold Eiffel Towers… to a party of British schoolgirls. And it’s the robbers’ attempts to get back those missing Eiffel Towers that proves their undoing. Ealing Studios have always been well-branded, and it’s easy to see why – their films are very distinctive. There’s a breeziness to the comedy in them, despite their obvious Britishness, that no other studio of the time managed. It’s almost a a sketch-show type of humour, but grounded in quickly- but effectively-drawn characters that carry over from one set-piece to the next. It is, in other words, jolly good fun. And if it all seems a bit implausible in places, that’s the part of the charm. But I’m not entirely sure why it rates a place on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list.

Blow Out, Brian De Palma (1981, USA). I’ve never really known what to make of De Palma. He’s pretty much a straight-to-video director who manages to get theatrical releases, a sub-B-lister who is treated like a low-level A-lister. It’s not as if he makes bad films, although his use of split-screen is an affectation too far, but his movies mostly seem massively unoriginal. Blow Out is, apparently, De Palma’s homage to Antonioni’s Blow-Up, but if it is then De Palma has either never seen Blow-Up or has completely misunderstood it. Travolta plays a sound technician who is out one night recording ambient sound for the latest straight-to-video schlock horror movie he is working on, when he witnesses a car plummetting into a river. He dives in and rescues one of the passengers, a young woman. The other, who dies, proves to be a politician tipped to be the next president. Travolta analyses the recordings he made on the night, and realises there is a gunshot before the car lost control – someone shot out a tyre. The rest of the movie is Travolta trying to figure out what’s going on, while a hired assassin runs round trying to clean up the mess he has inadvertently made, and it’s all pretty much by-the-numbers thriller material. Lithgow is creepy, but not especially plausible, as the assassin, the parts about the film industry feel more like in-jokes than character development or background, and the dimwittedness of some of the characters contradicts their ability to avoid the noose the conspiracy is drawing about them. I have no idea why I stuck this on the rental list.

Clash by Night, Fritz Lang (1952, USA). I mentioned several Moving pictures posts ago that I’d been making an effort over the last few years to see every film directed by Otto Preminger. The same is true for Fritz Lang. Their shared nationality is a coincidence. As are their Hollywood careers as chiefly directors of well-regarded noir films. With Lang, you have those early silent classics, not to mention the Mabuse trilogy, or even the frankly bizarre India-set pulp adventure movies on which he finished his career. But, like Preminger, during his Hollywood years Lang made a wide variety of films – yes, including a couple of Westerns… and melodramas… like Clash by Night. Which is, er, not very good. Barbara Stanwyck plays the wild girl who returns to her fishing port home after years living it up away. She falls in with simple trawler captain Jerry, who introduces her to his wise-cracking mate, Earl, the projectionist. Earl is clearly more Stanwyck’s type, but she marries Jerry. But then Earl is a nasty piece of work, so it’s easy enough to understand why she rejects him. Although only for a few years… and then the marriage begins to fracture when Stanwyck does indeed take up with Earl… This is one of those gritty urban melodramas the US churned out by the yard back in the first half of the twentieth century, in which middle-class problems were ascribed to working-class families, but with added domestic violence. There is a horribly offensive thread running throughout this film in which men claim the only way to control their spouses is through violence. The relationship between Marilyn Monroe and Keith Andes (Stanwyck’s “brother”) basically consists of him controlling her through threats of violence. It’s nasty stuff. There are some classic US melodramas from the 1950s. This is not one of them. Despite its director. Best avoided.

In Bloom, Nana Ekvtimishvili (2013, Georgia). I can’t remember where I came across mention of this Georgian film, but I suspect it was a trailer on another DVD. The directors are actually given as Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß, but given that the former has a Wikipedia page and the latter does not, and the latter is also credited as a producer, I’m tempted to cast Groß as more of a facilitator… except it turns out the two are a couple, so perhaps it’s even more complicated. Still, this is a film set in Georgia, about Georgian people, and Ekvtimishvili is given preference as director, and she is actually Georgian, so I will do the same and credit her with the lion’s share. (And kudos to Groß, he seems content to let his partner represent the two of them.) Two fourteen-year-old girls get into trouble when one of them gets hold of a gun and uses it to rescue a younger kid from a bullying. Except it’s not about that, it’s about growing up during the Georgian Civil War, and about being a teenage girl during those turbulent times, and this is by no means a cheerful film, and certainly not one likely to re-affirm your confidence in humanity’s good nature – these days, the only films which do that are superhero ones, and they only do it for superheroes, so how fucked up is that? But there’s a rawness to Ekvtimishvili’s vision that lends her story a verisimilitude Hollywood could only dream of (this is not something unique to In Bloom, but it is something Hollywood strives for and fails to achieve). A depressing story, but worth seeing.

Two for the Road, Stanley Donen (1967, UK). Apparently eureka! have released a dual edition of this film, but the rental copy I watched was a terrible transfer, no better than VHS quality in places. And, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure why it deserves the treatment eureka! have given it. It’s pretty much a couple bickering, in cars, over a decade. Okay, so the chronology jumps back and forth quite cleverly, and the way the film signals at which stage of the relationship/marriage it is set works really well (er, it’s the model of car). But it’s still two people bickering. And it’s not helped by the choice of leads. I’ve never really taken to Albert Finney – he plays everything flat and snide, and it makes him unlikeable. When he tries for charm, as he often does here, it often falls flat, especially when he’s doing his terrible Bogart impression. Finney does some things really well, but romantic lead isn’t one of them. Audrey Hepburn, on the other hand, should be a natural romantic lead – and indeed has been in many films. But here she’s playing a woman from callow teenager to jaded housewife, and it’s beyond her range. She does either end of the spectrum well, but she can’t manage the transition – or rather, the transition doesn’t seem convincing when it happens to her. Of course, it doesn’t help that the version I saw was a terrible transfer. Perhaps there were subtleties I missed. Certainly, the film’s structure was cleverly done, and there were some good lines of dialogue (and an amusing running joke about Finney and his passport), but the couple also went from young and hapless to privileged and insulated with a speed and lack of commentary that is almost breathtaking (although not altogether surprising given the time the film was made). I wanted to like Two for the Road, either as fluff or as something a bit more serious… but it failed on both counts. One for Audrey Hepburn fans only.

1001 Movies You Must See Before you Die count: 874


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Moving pictures 2017, #17

The run of Chinese films from LoveFilm is still going, although only one of the two in this post from that country was actually a rental. We also have the re-appearance of Hollywood… although it’s a 1950s Western by a German director. And there’s a British “quota quickie” in there too.

Antareen, Mrinal Sen (1993, India). This is the only other Sen film I can find available on DVD, which is weird as he seems to be held in equal regard in Bengali cinema as both Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, but he also seems to have been working much later than Ghatak. But then Ray was the most prolific of the three, and has been championed in the west for years by David Merchant. Neither Ghatak nor Sen had such a champion – in fact, of the two, Ghatak probably has a higher reputation, although only three of his eight films were ever released on DVD outside India. The two Sen films I now own are both part of NFDC’s Cinemas of Indias restoration of Indian movies, and, I think, the only two by Sen in the  their three box sets. Which is a shame. In Antareen, a writer house-sits a friends decrepit old house – well, it’s more like small palace – and one day the telephone rings. He explains to the caller, a woman, that the owner is away, but they continue to chat. She’s in a loveless marriage and desperate to reach out to someone, and he’s lonely on his own in the big house. He sits by the phone, waiting for her to call. They become friends. Then they decide to meet. Sen’s films seem to have a gentler approach to drama than Ray’s. They also seem less stagier, too. Ray’s films feel like they’re often confined to sets, whereas the two movies by Sen I’ve seen are more cinematic. It’s a pity there’s not more available by him – he directed 27 after all, the last in 2002.

Shanghai Dreams, Wang Xiaoshuiao (2005, China). I watched this twice before sending it back to LoveFilm, and I still think it needs another rewatch. The story is simple enough: the government moves a family to a provincial town, but all they can think about is returning to Shanghai. But their new life is never going to take them back. The film focuses on the daughter of the family, who is realistic enough to build a life for herself in the town but can never seem to do anything right in her father’s eyes. He meets with other volunteers who agreed to move to factories set up in provincial towns to ensure the survival of China’s industrial capacity in the event of war and they plot to return to Shanghai. His bitterness makes him aggressive, and he stalks the daughter. Things then go badly wrong for her, which precipitates the family into moving without permission back to Shanghai. After a couple of Chinese films that hadn’t really grabbed me, this one I thought really good – but then Wang was the director of Beijing Bicycle (see here), which I also thought very good. Annoyingly, those two appear to be the only films by him available in the UK – this is getting to be an all too common complaint.

The Seventh Veil, Compton Bennett (1945, UK). I had thought this was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, but that was apparently The Seventh Victim – a B-movie about a Satanist cult – and not this one, which is a great deal better, if overly melodramatic, but nonetheless quite typical of its time. Ann Todd – who I always get confused with Anna Neagle, and, to be honest, I’m not sure which is the better actress – goes to live with controlling uncle James Mason, playing that smooth-talking villain he did so well, who turns her into a world-class concert pianist. And he’s there to ensure she maintains the discipline needed to stay at the top. She, however, has other ideas – like: love, relationships, etc. The title refers to a piece of simplistic psychology used by the film – each mind has seven veils, like Salomé, and the psychiatrist, Herbert Lom, must persuade Todd to drop that last veil if he is to discover why she tried to commit suicide in the later-set framing narrative. (Hint: James Mason.) It’s melodrama with a capital M, and, I suspect, knocked out as a “quota quickie”. The film it reminded me of the most, strangely, was The Ghost and Mrs Muir, which has made a couple of editions of the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list. Todd is probably The Seventh Veil‘s biggest handicap – she has to play her character from schoolgirl to, well, at least half a decade younger than her actual age – and is clearly Todd throughout. But Mason is certainly on top form. It’s almost as if the role were written for him – in fact, it’s a testament to his skill that so many of his roles did seem written for him. Mason deserves a lot more love than he received. He was one of our best actors.

Rancho Notorious, Fritz Lang (1952, USA). I’m trying to work my way through Lang’s entire oeuvre… which sounds like an admirable ambition until you discover how varied his oeuvre was. I mean, is there a typically Lang-ian film? There’s those early German silent films, and they’re all blindingly brilliant. But then he moved to Hollywood and churned out a series of noir films that weren’t all that much better than his rivals, although one or two did shine. And then he ended up with the quite brilliant serial-drama oddities that were The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb. And in between he made… all sorts of stuff. Like this Western, starring Marlene Dietrich. It tries really hard to subvert the form, but decades it feels almost typical of the genre. A man’s bride-to-be is gunned down in a robbery on a general store, and he vows revenge. All he has as a clue is the phrase, “Chuckaluck”. He eventually tracks this down to ex-prostitute Dietrich, who runs a ranch near the Mexican border which she allows outlaws to use as a hideout, for ten percent of their haul. The revengeful widower eventually ends up infiltrating the gang in residence at Dietrich’s, but he doesn’t known which one killed his wife. I think I’ve said before I’m not a fan  of westerns, and the ones that appeal to me are the ones that make a real meal of the landscape… which this one doesn’t. It seems ordinary, and I’d expected better from Lang.

Paper Airplanes, Zhao Liang (2001, China). This is the least satisfying of the three films in this box set, chiefly because it deals with drug addicts, who are, to be frank, not very interesting. On the other hand, this disc also includes three short films which are definitely worth seeing. So, in total, buying the box set was a good move – and now I have to get myself a copy of Behemoth, because Zhao is really very good indeed. In Paper Airplanes, the addicts discuss their addiction, with a surprising lack of self-awareness, but a very informed awareness of what the addiction is doing to them and what its consequences might be. Some of the addicts are in bands, and we see them performing, but if they’re looking for salvation, or even riches,  that way then they’re deluding themselves. Of the three feature-length documentaries in the box set, this is easily the weakest,. Nonetheless, Zhao Liang is a name to watch, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for anything new he produces.

The President, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (2014, Georgia). Despite his stature in Iranian film, Makhmalbaf doesn’t seem to get Western releases to the same extent as other Iranian directors – pretty much the entirety of Abbas Kiarostami’s oeuvre is available in the West, for example, and yet Kiarostami’s Close-up is about a person passing themselves off as Makhmalbaf! Even Makhmalbaf’s most celebrated film, Gabbeh (see here), has never been released in the UK, so I had to buy a US release. So the fact The President is available for rental is a bit of a puzzle… although it’s not really an Iranian film. It’s set in an invented East European/West Asian country, but its cast are Georgian, it was filmed in Georgia, and the Georgian language is used throughout. Which makes it a Georgian film, even if Makhmalbaf is Iranian. I had noted Makhmalbaf’s black sense of humour in other of his films, but it’s in full force in this one. A dictator of an unnamed nation is ousted by rebels, and must flee across the country in disguise, with his young grandson. And… it’s beautifully done. The kid is by turns a charming innocent and a total brat, the dictator is angry, afraid, unrepentant but pragmatic. The final scene in which he is recognised by a group of angry peasants is like something out of a brutal Monty Python. And The President is quite a brutal film in places, and its humour is about the blackest I’ve seen – although not quite as black as the scene in Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar where an army of one-legged men chase after artificial legs thrown from Red Cross helicopters. Recommended.

1001 MoviesYou Must See Before You Die count: 857


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Moving pictures, #39

Well, slightly less than half of this post are US films, although I’d prefer it to be no more than one or two per post. But we’re getting there, as our national railway famously once said only to be privatised and then completely fail to get anywhere…

only_live_onceYou Only Live Once, Fritz Lang (1937, USA). This was a cheerful movie. Henry Fonda plays a habitual criminal who decides to go straight – mostly thanks to the love of a good woman, in this case Sylvia Sidney, the secretary of the local public defender. But not everyone is so forgiving. Although the public defender (who is secretly in love with his secretary) gets Fonda a job at a delivery company, he’s fired when he takes time out to look over a new house with his new wife. And no one else will employ him because he’s an ex-con. Absolutely no one. And then someone robs an armoured car, and a hat is left at the scene which points to Fonda as the culprit. He’s found guilty (the trial is off-screen, probably because it sounds so much a travesty of justice Lang was too embarrassed to show it), and Fonda ends up on Death Row. But an opportunity for escape presents itself, he takes it, but accidentally kills the prison priest… seconds after the warden has received news that Fonda is innocent and has been pardoned. Too late! Fonda collects his wife, and the two go on the lam. To be honest, I’d expected more from Lang. I’ve seen a fair number of his noir movies, and I expected this to be as good as they were. And certainly the scene where Fonda escapes from prison is very atmospherically staged and shot. But everyone is so horrible to Fonda, and the odds are stacked against him so strongly, the set-up to justify Fonda’s abrupt shift from optimism to desperation feels forced and completely implausible. So, not one of Lang’s better films.

zabriskieZabriskie Point*, Michelangelo Antonioni (1970, USA). I’m a big fan of Antonioni’s films, and his Red Desert is one of my all-time favourite movies; but I also like late 1960s/early 1970s hippy films – or, at least, ones that comment on the hippy condition. It’s not just the direct rebellion, nor the questioning of society, but also that so many of these types of films throw in an additional dimension – which might well be typical hippy occult bullshit, but at least adds something a little more interesting to the story. And so to Zabriskie Point, which opens with semi-documentary footage of a protest at a California university. But when the police turn up, the protest takes a violent approach and several people are killed. Including a policeman. The film then abruptly switches to two characters: a young woman who is looking for a man in the Mojave Desert who works with emotionally disturbed children. Meanwhile, a young male student from the university protest, and a prime suspect in the death of the cop, steals a plane and flies off to Arizona… where he meets the young woman. And they go to Zabriskie Point, a real place just east of Death Valley, Nevada, where they have sex – well, actually, a full-blown orgy kicks off… and this isn’t really a film where you can describe the plot, or where such a précis would do the film any favours. But it is by Antonioni so it looks absolute fantastic and, to be fair, he makes just as good a fist of depicting the culture he’s filming as Demy does in Model Shop – they’re neither part of the culture, but their outsider status allows them see more than might be visible from inside. Antonioni made several excellent movies – I’d put Zabriskie Point in the top five of those; in fact I think I’d call it my third favourite after Red Desert and Blow-Up.

hired_handThe Hired Hand*, Peter Fonda (1971, USA). Sigh. Another 1970s Western on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. But… well, this is a surprise. I’m not a fan of the Western, and have only three in my DVD collection – and I’ve probably seen more than I ever really wanted to because they’re on the 1001 Movies list… Certainly I’d never have considered watching this one: an early seventies Western, directed by Peter Fonda… (Even though I liked Easy Rider a lot.) But in fact it turned out to be pretty damn good. For exactly the same reasons why it flopped on release back in 1970. It’s slow, its cinematography is poetic, and it has a great soundtrack. Its story, to be fair, is not very interesting, and its characters are not very strong… but the whole works because the pictures and story go together exceedingly well. Fonda plays a drifter who decides to return to the wife who kicked him out years before, and asks only that he be taken on as a “hired hand” in order to prove he has changed. But a stop-off en route had made enemies of some nasty sorts and they track him down, and your typical Wild West showdown ensues. Where The Hired Hand really scores, however, is in its opening third: the cinematograhpy goes mad for dissolves and montages, and it works wonderfully well. The bluegrass score by Bruce Langhorne is also really well done – and I’m not a person who really notices incidental music (I have, like, three original soundtracks in my music collection… er, except for all those ones by Andrzej Korzyñski). Altogether, this is good stuff, and I’m tempted to pick up a copy for myself.

24_city24 City, Jia Zhangke (2008, China). I had been seriously impressed by Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, so of course I added the rest of Zhangke’s oeuvre to my rental list… and this was the first sent to me. And, I’m happy to report, I did not choose wrong. Zhangke is a name to watch and a new director to join my favourites. The title refers to a new suburb built on the site of an aircraft factory. The film covers several decades in a semi-documentary style, first interviewing workers in the aircraft factory (whose location and purpose is a state secret because the aircraft are military). The film is divided into three sections: one during the days of the plant’s operations, another after it has closed and the plant has been mothballed, and one after the site has been redeveloped and a dormitory suburb now occupies the location. The mix of staged interviews, informal interviews (one scene consists entirely of a man at a bar reminiscing about his career at the factory), and small family dramas which illustrate the personal histories affected by the history of the factory and the town which springs up in its place, is extremely effective; and I especially like the factualness of it. 24 City is, apparently, a real place, and the story of the film is no doubt based upon, or inspired by, real events; but the mix of fact and fiction I find quite compelling – much as I did in A Touch of Sin. Excellent stuff.

mournfulMournful Unconcern, Aleksandr Sokurov (1983, Russia). This was another work by Sokurov that remained underground for many years – it was banned by the Soviet authorities – before finally being publicly screened after glasnost… and was promptly nominated for a Golden Bear. It’s based on George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, but is intercut with documentary footage. The cinematography is, surprisingly, straightforward, but the whole thing feels ike an unholy mix of David Lynch and Peter Greenaway, albeit put together in an entirely Sokurovian way. That documentary footage, for example – it’s contemporary with the setting, the 1920s, and features Shaw himself, a zeppelin, World War I, an Antarctic expedition, the River Ganges, and various places in Africa. The choices of incidental music is also typically Sokurovian, and often anachronistic. Heartbreak House, subtitled “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes”, which is apparently a reference to Chekhov, whose plays inspired Shaw’s, is set in the home of Captain Shotover – played by Ramaz Chkhikvadze as half Falstaff and half Lear – and is partly a drawing-room farce and partly an Edwardian sex comedy. Gunfire and explosions can be heard on the soundtrack throughout the entire film, which ends with a zeppelin dropping a bomb and blowing up the house. It’s… an odd beast. The story seems well-suited to Sokurov’s feelings about the Soviet Union. The use of documentary stock footage is perhaps more intrusive than in the other films in which Sokurov uses it, but it works really well (some of the inserts provide clever and amusing commentary on the main story). I’m not so sure about the story itself, however – I don’t know what changes Sokurov made to Shaw’s play, though the setting seems to be as described. Still, like all of Sokurov’s films, it’s one that will require repeated viewings.

brooklynBrooklyn, John Crowley (2015, Ireland). This was one of those films of the last year or so which received lots of positive buzz and reviews, and didn’t involve superheroes, so I thought might be worth watching. It’s also an adaptation of a novel (winner of the Costa Novel Award, but only longlisted for the Man Booker) by Colm Tóibin, who, I admit, I’ve never read. The story is relatively simple – a fact stressed by several of the reviews: young Irish woman in the 1950s travels to New York in order to build a new life. She lives in a boarding-house and works in a department store, but she is shy and unassuming and very homesick. Then she meets a young man, of American-Italian extraction, and the two enter into a relationship. She is is now much happier and more settled. But then her sister in Ireland dies unexpectedly, so she returns to succour her mother. And now life back in Ireland seems much more attractive than it did when she left for New York. That is until the town gossip reveals something the young woman had been sort of trying to forget… and so she returns to New York. It’s a very pretty film, the cinematography is quite lovely, and the cast are uniformly good. Julie Walters as the landlady of the Brooklyn boarding-house, however, is a scream. But the story all feels a bit drab and low-key and devoid of any real insight, which makes the movie feel more like well-shot wallpaper than actual drama. I enjoyed it, but I think it was over-praised.

land_freedomLand and Freedom, Ken Loach (1995, UK). I thought this was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, but not apparently the edition of it I’m using. Still it’s by Ken Loach and the subject matter – the Spanish Civil War – made it seem worth renting. And so it proved. An old working-class man in Liverpool collapses in his council flat, the ambulance comes, but he dies en route. Later, going through his things, his granddaughter discovers he had sailed to Spain in the 1930s to fight for the Republicans against the fascists. She reads his letters… and these are dramatised, with Ian Hart playing the young Scouser. On arrival on Spain, it all seems a bit haphazard, but Hart joins POUM’s milita and is soon out fighting (which basically seems to involve taking potshots from the POUM trenches at fascist soldiers in their trenches). At one point, the militia oust a troop of fascist troops from a village, and the villagers then conduct a fierce discussion on private ownership and collectivisation. After Hart is injured training new recruits – a rifle explodes when he fires it – things take a turn for the worse as the various left factions begin fighting amongst themselves, and even start killing those whose idealogies are not approved. It hardly comes as a surprise the fascists win (even for those who don’t know their history). The right always will… because the left seems happier fighting among itself than showing a united front to the enemy – just look what’s happing in the UK now. You look at Trump, and it’s 1930s Germany all over again; you look at the UK, and it’s 1930s Spain. Neither, of course, bode well… I’ve watched the occasional Ken Loach film over the years and enjoyed them, but have never really made an effort to seek them out. However, I find myself appreciating social realism in movies much more these days than I used to (and consequently despising fascistic sfx-heavy tentpole movies). I see there are three box sets of Loach’s films available – Volume 1, Volume 2 and At the BBC. I might well avail myself of them…

1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die count: 792


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Moving pictures, #19

Yet more movies, of varying quality, worthiness and entertainment value. Which I shall continue to document, even if a year from now I read what I’ve written and wonder why the hell I watched a particular film.

scarlet_streetScarlet Street, Fritz Lang (1945, USA). Godard’s Le Mépris has almost spoiled Lang’s films for me. There I was, picturing him as some sort of industrious Modernist German film-maker but in that movie he played a louche Prussian aristocrat with monocle and cigarette holder. And yet he made some wonderful noir films, full of Modernist sets and starkly-lit shots. Scarlet Street boasts plenty of the latter, but none of the former. Edward G Robinson plays a meek cashier. After a party celebrating his twenty-five years of faithful service, Robinson gets involved with femme fatale Joan Bennett, and is consequently persuaded to commit various crimes to support her… while he indulges in his hobby of painting. And then his art suddenly becomes desirable, but Bennett claims to be the painter and… well, it all gets a bit complicated after that. Scarlet Street is a well-made film, of course, but there’s nothing in it that makes it stand out from others of its time and genre.

picnic_at_hanging_rockPicnic at Hanging Rock*, Peter Weir (1975, Australia). So I’ve watched several of Weir’s films over the years and he’s not a director who’s really stood out for me – I mean, Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Mosquito Coast… er, Green Card? This is middle-brow, if not lower, Hollywood entertainment, sometimes with a nod at worthiness – Gallipolli, for example – but just as often not. But Picnic at Hanging Rock is on the 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die list, and I was aware of the regard in which it was held, so… Okay, the mystery is never solved and I can see how that sort of bounces you out of your typical Hollywood box, and the movie is also resolutely Australian, to a degree that a film such as Mad Max most certainly isn’t, so that perhaps some people thought better of the film than it deserved. Because it is, to be honest, a bit dull. It is also, to be fair, a period piece and it does present its period well. But, meh.

orientalelegyA Humble Life, Aleksandr Sokurov (1997, Japan). The third of Oriental Elegy‘s three documentaries – did I mention I managed to buy a copy for £25 and currently copies go for £200 to £300? Anyway. Like the other two films, it was made in Japan and takes as its topic an old Japanese woman who lives alone in an old house in a small mountain village. It is also engimatic, features Sokurov’s trademark distortion of the image, such that it often appears like a painting, and lots of intense close-ups. Sokurov documents the woman’s daily activities, often without voice-over, and achieves more in setting tone and mood than incidental music could have done (although Sokurov often makes excellent use of music). This is perhaps the most elegiac of the three films on the disc, and I’ll be watching again. Several times, no doubt.

bird_crytals_plumageThe Bird with the Crystal Plumage*, Dario Argento (1972, Italy). This was apparently Argento’s first film, and it’s pretty obvious it’s a giallo right from the start. An American writer resident in Rome – you can only tell he’s American because he mentions it in conversation, as, of course, his dialogue is dubbed into Italian – witnesses a man attack a woman in a gallery late one night. He fails to break into the gallery, but does scare off the attacker. Another passer-by calls the authorities, who arrive in time to save the woman, who had been knifed. Then further murders following the same modus operandi take place, and the inspector in charge of the case asks the American for help in solving it. It’s all very giallo, and there’s a twist in the end which I probably should have spotted, but it’s probably closer to Mario Bava’s Baron Blood and Lisa and the Devil than it is to Suspiria. I’m not entirely sure why it makes the 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die list, but there’s a lot of films on there I could say the same about.

bamboleLe Bambole, Franco Rossi et al (1965, Italy). This is another one of those Italian anthology films, which are, of course, about women – well, women as men see them – and perhaps might once have been described by Brits as “sex comedies” given that at some point the actresses usually end up clad in only their lingerie. The first of the four “episodes” is about a young woman on the telephone to her mother while her husband slouches about the apartment trying to amuse himself until she is ready to accept his sexual advances. The second has Elke Sommer looking for the ideal father for her child – something to do with the shape of his ears – before eventually recognising the suitability of her young and virile guide about town. The third sees a wife trying to rid herself of her husband so she can be with her lover, only for her various plans for his demise to go awry. And the final section is apparently an adaptation of a segment of Boccaccio’s The Decameron and stars Gina Lollobrigida, but to be honest I can’t really remember what it was about.

ace_in_holeAce in the Hole*, Billy Wilder (1951, USA). Oof, this was nasty one, not the sort of thing you’d expect from Billy Wilder. A disgraced big city reporter pulls into a small New Mexico town and persuades the local paper owner to take him on. A year later, while covering a rattlesnake hunt he learns of a local man trapped by a rockfall in a cave. It’s the story he’s been waiting for. If it gets syndicated, it could get him back into the big time. So when a mining engineer proposes shoring up the cave and then digging out the trapped man, the reporter vetoes it and instead they start to drill down from the top of the cliff. Meanwhile, the media has picked up the story and descended on the region. It becomes a complete circus. The reporter, of course, is loving it as he controls access to the trapped man. Meanwhile, the days pass, the trapped man weakens… The ending hardly comes as a surprise – people who play with others’ lives in flms generally get their comeuppance. Although, of course, it’s the trapped man who pays the bigger price. I can sort of see why this is considered a classic, but it leaves a nasty after-taste and for that reason I couldn’t like it.

1001 Films You Must See Before You Die count: 606


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Space movies

I saw a list recently of “space movies” and the first film on the list was… Star Wars. I like lists, and though they usually make me angry I also like bad lists – because they inspire me to create my own. After all, if you’re going to put together to a list of “space movies”, then you’d expect “space” to play a major role in the film. And yes, there’s the Death Star and the Millennium Falcon running away from the Imperial space destroyer and that final space battle and it’s space opera which even has the word “space” in it… but is Star Wars really a “space movie”?

There are plenty of films – not just Hollywood ones, either – where space or space travel forms a major portion of the plot, or is indeed the actual subject of the film. Having said that, any list of films which comprises almost entirely Hollywood output, bar one or two token world cinema entries, is also going to generate rage. I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve seen Tarkovsky’s Solaris as the token non-Hollywood sf movie in a lists of sf movies. Tarkovsky was a great director, no doubt about that, but he made two other sf films – all of which is beside the point, as there are a huge number of non-US and non-Anglophone directors who have made science fiction movies, many of which are excellent.

All this is, of course, a somewhat long-winded way of introducing my own list of “space movies”, ie films that are space-related – inasmuch as they are about space exploration, or the setting is space for at least more than half of the film. I have, as is my wont, tried to avoid the obvious and commercially safe choices…

space_odysseySpace Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets (2004, UK). This is my go-to for near-future space-based science fiction. It’s a television dramatisation of a near-future Grand Tour, made chiefly by the BBC. It’s hard to find these days, but it’s definitely worth hunting down a copy. The CGI hasn’t aged especially well, the acting is not great, and the talking heads often slow things down… but much of it was filmed on the Vomit Comet and it does a top job of presenting life aboard a spacecraft travelling about the Solar Sytem. In fact, it does a top job of presenting all the technology required to visit all the planets of the Solar System. Good stuff.

apollo18sdApollo 18, Gonzalez López-Gallego (2011, USA). Okay, so the rock monsters are a bit silly, as is the, er, plot. But this is still the best fictional presentation to date of an Apollo mission on celluloid. And it also scores highly because it shows a Soviet LK and gets it absolutely right. This is the proper way to do a space movie… even if it’s in service to a hoary old plot. Admittedly, it’s a found footage movie, and it’s never quite made clear how they found the footage, given we’ve never been back to the moon… but never mind.

cargoCargo, Ivan Engler & Ralph Etter (2009, Switzerland). This is a polished piece of sf from a country not really known for producing science fiction movies. The story takes place aboard a starship on its way to an Edenic colony world, which is closed to the masses teeming in space stations orbiting a poisoned Earth except as a prize in a lottery. En route, the film manages to pull in most modern sf movie tropes, but it handles them well and even manages a few – albeit somewhat predictable – scares along the way.

eolomeaEolomea, Herrmann Zschoche (1972, East Germany). Deutsches Film-Aktiengesellschaft made four big-budget – for East Germany – sf movies during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They’re a bit dippy, but they did go all out to make good-looking, globally-minded intelligent science fiction. Eolomea is perhaps the best of them, a mystery about the plan to settle the eponymous exoplanet and a space station that has suddenly gone silent. Some great 1970s retro-futuristic production design, too.

testpilotpirxTest Pilot Pirx, Marek Piestrak (1979, USSR). AKA Pilot Pirx’s Inquest. Based on the character created by Stanisław Lem, this sees Pirx take a trip to the rings of Saturn, with a crew which contains one or more androids – but he doesn’t know who is which. It starts as a weirdly-paced future thriller, before turning into a space movie that strives for accuracy in some areas but gets it bizarrely wrong in others. And, like most Eastern Bloc sf movies, the future is assumed to be a world of peaceful multinational cooperation, unlike in US films. The soundtrack is also surprisingly ahead of its time.

ikarieIkarie XB-1, Jindřich Polák (1963, Czechoslovakia). The titular spacecraft is sent on a long mission to Alpha Centauri, and various incidents happen en route, including one member of the crew going mad. The production design reminds me a little of Raumpatrouille Orion in places, and there’s plenty of Anglophone films that were later influenced by it – perhaps because, unlike Hollywood sf films of the time, it had an intelligent script.

frau-im-mond-loresFrau im Mond, Fritz Lang (1929, Germany). Not the first ever sf movie, that was Georges Méliès’s Le voyage dans la lune in 1902 (which is worth seeing), but Lang’s silent epic Frau im Mond is considerably more realistic and famously gave us the rocket launch countdown. It perhaps spends overmuch of its length laying out the background to the moon shot, and the scenes set on the lunar surface are unsurprisingly not especially accurate, but I’m pretty sure it’s the first actual space movie.

queen_of_bloodQueen Of Blood, Curtis Harrington (1966, USA). This is one of those films Roger Corman cobbled together from footage from a pair of Soviet sf movies – in this case, Небо зовет and Мечте навстречу – with US-filmed material starring John Saxon, Dennis Hopper, Judi Meredith and Basil Rathbone. Florence Marly plays the title role, an alien vampire stranded on Mars who is rescued by a mission from Earth. Although considered a B-movie, Queen Of Blood rises above its humble origins – those astonishing Soviet visuals, Meredith’s equal treatment alongside Saxon and Hopper, and Marley pulling a star turn as the alien vampire.

o_the-day-after-tomorrow-into-infinity-dvd-gerry-anderson-f508Into Infinity, Charles Crichton (1975, UK). AKA The Day After Tomorrow. A live-action made-for-television film by Gerry Anderson, it describes the maiden voyage of Altares, the first human spacecraft to travel at the speed of light. The dialogue is mostly exposition, there’s an explanatory narration by Ed Bishop, and, to be fair, the plot is somewhat on the dull side… but I remember loving it as a kid, and although a recent rewatch did reveal many of its flaws it still fired the sense of wonder I recalled from all those decades ago.

royalspaceforceRoyal Space Force: Wings of Honneâmise, Hiroyuki Yamaga (1987, Japan). An anime film about a space programme on an entirely invented world, and which ends with the first launch of a crewed rocket, should surely qualify for this list. I only watched this for the first time recently, and I wasn’t that taken with it – but in the weeks since I found myself thinking more kindly of it, and I’m even considering getting hold of a copy of my own.

There are some others I could have included, one or two of which I might even hold in higher regard, but for this list I wanted a good geographic spread.