Perhaps, at a time when it’s easy to turn to things that comfort, we should be looking outside our comfort zone. They say the sales of “bucket list” books are up. So… for films, turn off that Hollywood blockbuster. For TV, put down from that box-set you’ve binged on half a dozen times before already. Try something new.
The following films are not new to me, and one or two may not be new to many people. They are, as of the end of March 2020, my ten favourite films. (The list changes often, but this is what is is now.) The movies appeal to me for a number of different reasons, but the one thing they all have in common is that I can watch them – and have watched them – many times. I love every frame of them, in some cases with a passion that borders on mania. Those that are adapted from books, I have hunted down copies of the books and read them. Those that have been novelised, I have read the novelisation. Neither diminished the appeal of the films.
The films are…
All That Heaven Allows, Douglas Sirk (1955, USA). This one should come as no surprise to people who know me. A 1950s melodrama by a master of the form, starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, and based on a novel by mother and son Edna and Harry Lee. The film looks absolutely gorgeous from start to finish, but is also a razor-sharp skewering of US social classes.
A River Called Titas, Ritwik Ghatak (1973, India). Based on a novel, which is actually more of a collection, by Adwaita Mallabarman, which documents the lives of the villagers who live on the banks of the titular river, and its tributaries, and from which background Mallabarman came. Ghatak was a singular talent and made a handful of remarkable films, but this one is world-class, a harrowing tale about a man who loses his wife, as well as a perfect ethnographic documentary of a lost way of life.
Playtime, Jacques Tati (1967, France). The amount of money spent on this is legendary – the set was so large it was dubbed “Tativille”. But every centime spent is visible there on-screen. The humour is pure Tati, although perhaps less inventive than in other films, but the commitment to the world Tati built for the movie is astonishing.
Lucía, Humberto Solás (1968, Cuba). Cuba has one of the great forgotten cinemas. It has produced a number of world-class movies for more than half a century, and among those films Solás is a name to be reckoned. Lucía, like many Cuban films, is an exploration of the country’s history, through the lives of three women living in three different periods. It is its treatment of its material that is especially impressive. But watch more Cuban cinema, it is excellent.
The Second Circle, Aleksandr Sokurov (1990, Russia). If I have a favourite director, which I do, it is Aleksandr Sokurov. He makes both documentaries and narrative films, and the rigour of his work is astonishing. He is also not afraid to experiment with cinematic techniques, and many of his films use the presentation of the story as commentary on the story. I would be hard-pressed to pick a favourite Sokurov film, but the simplicity of this one has always appealed to me.
Red Desert, Michelangelo Antonioni (1964, Italy). I’m a big fan of Antonioni’s films post-L’Avventura and his new approach to cinema. But it is only in Red Desert that it really comes into its own. This is motion picture as art. It’s too long to be a video installation, but my love of this film is one of the reasons I love video installations. It is not just a new form ofe cinematic narrative, it is a new cinematic narrative language.
Alien, Ridley Scott (1979, UK). I was too young to see this film in the cinema when it was released, but I had already fallen in love with it because of its production design. And I still love it for that reason. It also has one of the most basic plots on the planet, and manages to present it flawlessly. If it has faults, they are a result of the state of the cinematic art in 1979. Alien kept its story simple and succeeded precisely because of that. None of its sequels have matched it.
Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan (2017, UK). I’m not a huge fan of Nolan’s films. Interstellar struck me as two movies badly welded together, neither of which made much sense. Inception felt like it thought it was cleverer than it actually was. So when I first watched Dunkirk, I was surprised by how much it appealed to me. It’s totally immersive, and yet entirely plotless. It’s far too emotional to be a documentary, yet it has a documentary’s authenticity.
Girls Lost, Alexandre-Therese Keining (2015, Sweden). As mentioned earlier, this list has changed many times over the years, and Dunkirk and these last two films are all recent additions, watched for the first time in 2018. In Girls Lost – Pojkarna, The Boys, in Swedish – three teenage girls who are being bullied at school drink a potion and turn temporarily into boys of the same age. There are numerous Disney films with a similar precis, but Girls Lost certainly does not play its conceit for laughs. Despite that precis, its story feels completely believable.
War and Peace, parts 1 to 4, Sergei Bondarchuk (1966, USSR). There is no good version of these four films in existence, despite its stature, its technical accomplishments, its expense, its sheer sweep and grandeur. The original 70 mm prints were left to rot, and only a 35 mm print, filmed in parallel and adapted for television broadcast, survives. Which makes watching it an odd experience, due to weird flips between dubbing and subtitling, not to mention French and German not being translated at all. But the film series truly is epic and deserves all its accolades. There is supposedly a fully-restored version from a recently-found print released by Criterion, but the only one currently available from them is a previous version.
I’ve been using the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list (2013 edition) to direct my film-viewing for a couple of years now, and I thought it might be worth having a look at how it’s been going… Before starting to use the list, I’d watched some 407 of the movies. My total is currently standing at 823 films seen, so I’ve watched slightly more as a result of following the list than I had before I even knew of it. What I find especially interesting, however, is the number of films I’ve subsequently bought on DVD or Blu-ray after watching them on rental only because they were on the list. Of course, there were films – by, for instance, Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Kieślowski, Kubrick, the Archers – I already owned as I’ve been a fan of their work for many years…
After watching Lola and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, I bought a Jaques Demy collection, which also included The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. On the other hand, much as I enjoyed Les vacances de M Hulot, it wasn’t until I’d seen Playtime, and loved it, that I decided to invest in a collection of Jacques Tati’s films. Carl Theodor Dreyer is another such director – I’d seen Ordet, I forget why I rented it, but not been especially taken with it; but after watching Gertrud I purchased everything by Dreyer currently available on DVD – which was, fortunately, pretty much his entire oeuvre (thank you, BFI). He became a favourite director. After buying a copy of James Benning’s Deseret – because it was on the list but wasn’t available for rental – I became a huge fan of his work, and bought every other DVD of his films released by Österechisches Filmmuseum. I am eagerly awaiting more being released. It also turned me into a fan of video installations, as I discovered recently when I visited the Hafnarhús branch of the Reykjavik Art Museum and saw Richard Mosse’s ‘The Enclave’ (I did like Örn Alexander Amundáson’s ‘A New Work’ too, although it’s not video, because it reminded me of my own approach to writing fiction).
There are also a number of films I’ve added to my wishlist because I might at some point buy them… or I might not. Such as Henry V, The Hired Hand, Easy Rider, Man with a Movie Camera, The Great Silence, Babette’s Feast… not to mention further films by directors who appear on the list… which is why I have picked up films by Guru Dutt, Yasujiro Ozu, Ken Loach and Satyajit Ray…
There are also a number of films I only got to watch because I bought a DVD copy of my own – they just weren’t available for rental. Not all have been especially good. Stella Dallas is on the list, but is not available for rental, or indeed for purchase on DVD, in the UK. I ended up buying Spanish release… and the film proved to be entirely forgettable. There’s also streaming TV these days, and I found a few, surprisingly, streamed for free on Amazon Prime – like The Gospel According to St Matthew and Salt of the Earth. However, Amazon Prime has not been an especially good source of films from the list – either free, as previously mentioned, or for “rental”, such as Sergeant York and Housekeeping, both of which cost me £3.49 for 48 hours.
One very real consequence of using the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list has been that my film collection has become much more varied. Not only have I bought films previously unknown to me by Brazilian directors (Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos), Cuban directors (Humberto Solás), Indian directors (Ritwik Ghatak, Guru Dutt), but I’ve also been encouraged to further explore the oeuvres of directors I had previously tried, such as Yasujiro Ozu, Federico Fellini or Jean-Luc Godard… and have since bought films by all three.
I don’t think the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list is perfect. Far from it. It includes way too many US films, and some nations’ cinemas are almost totally ignored. Albania, for example, apparently has a thriving film industry but, to be fair, I can’t find any films from the country readily available on DVD with English subtitles. And yet Greenland, with almost no film industry to speak of… there are DVDs of Greenlandic films with multiple-language subtitles, like Nuummioq, which is very good.
Having said that using the list has resulted in me owning a much more varied collection of films – most of the Hollywood blockbusters went to local charity shops, and I no longer buy them – it has also shown me that some particular cinemas, not just present-day Hollywood, don’t work for me. I’m not especially taken with French films, although I like some of them a great deal. Godard, mentioned earlier, is a good example – some of his films I like a lot, some of them I just can’t understand the appeal. I like the movies of Renoir and Vigo, but not Bresson or Carné or Malle or Chabron. And Buñuel I find a bit hit and miss.
When it comes to movie genres… Well, there are remarkably few classic sf films. Given the number of sf films produced since the beginning of cinema – and one of the earliest classics, La voyage dans le lune, is an actual sf movie based on an actual sf novel – the genre’s hit-rate has been pretty low. There are a lot of westerns on 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list, and I will admit that I don’t see the appeal of the genre. It’s a peculiarly American mythology, I get that, but too many of the westerns on the list seemed ordinary, and it was only the ones which broke the mould, or bent the formula, like The Hired Hand, which for me stood out. Speaking of US films, there are a number of movies by American indie directors also on the list, and those too I failed to see why they should make the list.
Part of the problem, of course, has to do with whether a film can be considered seminal or germinal in some way. It’s evident enough with a silent movie. Watch Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and you can’t help but understand how historically important it is. And some silent movies, which normally I’d never bother to seek out, and I’ve seen solely because they’re on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, they’ve proven to be excellent entertainment – not just Storm Over Asia from Russia, but even early Hollywood works like The Phantom of the Opera.
The 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list is a deeply-flawed list, but it has still enriched my film-watching. I don’t agree with many of the choices made for the list, but it has at least prompted me to watch those films. And then seek out other films similar to those I liked. My DVD collection is, I like to think, much more diverse as a result. I’ve still some way to go before I complete the list – in fact, some of the movies are so hard to find I may never get to see everything on it. And, of course, the list is updated each year, although I’m more likely to have seen recent additions. But there is still the cinematic traditions of a huge number of nations, USA not included, to explore…
In 2015, I decided to try and watch as many films as I could on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, started subscribing to a second DVD rental library, and bought myself an Amazon Fire TV Stick. As a result, I watched 571 films during the year, of which 115 were rewatches (some more than once). In among those were 170 from the aforementioned list.
The bulk of the movies I watched were DVDs or Blu-rays I’d purchased myself. (I bought a multi-region Blu-ray player so I could watch Region A Blu-rays.) But I also watched quite a number from Amazon’s Lovefilm by Post. See below.
Kinopalæst is the cinema in Denmark where I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and The Light is the cinema in Leeds where I saw SPECTRE. Yes, they were the only two films I saw at the cinema. I did quite well on my Amazon Fire TV Stick – 48 movies, all of which were included free with Amazon Prime.
In terms of genre, drama seems to have done especially well, although admittedly it’s a broad term and perhaps some of the films I’ve categorised as drama might better be labelled something else. Anyway, see below.
The two Bollywood films were from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list – or rather, one of them was: the other, Deewaar, proved to be a 2004 film of that title and not the 1975 one on the list (although both starred Amitabh Bachchan). Although last year I rented several of the plays from the BBC’s Shakespeare Collection from the late 1970s/early 1980s, the one Shakespeare movie this year was Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, which I thought very good.
By decade, the films I watched pretty much follows the same graph for books read: the current decade is the most popular (surprisingly), and there’s a steady increase through the decades which peaks at the 1960s. See below.
The late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century were a result of watching some early Dreyer silent movies and a DVD collection, Early Cinema – Primitives and Pioneers, because one of the films on it was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list.
By nation makes for an interesting graph. Although I’ve been working my way through the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, which includes movies from many different nations (but over half are from the US, sadly), I’ve been a fan of world cinema for years and many of my favourite directors work in non-Anglophone cinema. See below.
The high number from Russia is no doubt due mostly to Aleksandr Sokurov, a favourite director; for Denmark because of Carl Theodor Dreyer, and for Germany it’s probably Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Only two from Sweden – I obviously need to watch more Bergman…
Speaking of favourite directors, Sokurov comes out top for 2015 with 33 (most, it has to be said, were rewatches). Second is Jacques Tati, a 2015 “discovery”, at 15, then James Benning, another 2015 “discovery”, at 13. The remaining top ten goes as follows: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (12), Alfred Hitchcock (11), Carl Theodor Dreyer (10), Lars von Trier (8), Sergei Eisenstein (6), and lastly George Stevens, Michael Curtiz, Leni Riefenstahl, Jean-Luc Goddard and Jean Cocteau (5).
I finished the year having seen 703 movies on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and a quite large pile of DVDs and Blu-rays on my To Be Watched list. I plan to keep on with the list in 2015, although I think I’ll take it a bit slower, perhaps spend some evenings each week reading rather than film-watching. Plus, it’s getting to the stage now where I have to purchase titles in order to watch them as they’re not available for rental. We’ll see how it goes.
On balance, 2015 wasn’t a bad year for me. Things improved in $dayjob, goodish things happened in my little corner of genre, and I read a number of excellent books and watched lots of excellent films. Music-wise, it was both successful and not so successful: I discovered some more new bands on Bandcamp, and this year we went VIP for Bloodstock and it really was worth the extra money; but I saw fewer bands live than in previous years, and none of my favourite ones toured the UK – and if they did, it was only in the big cities, like London, Birmingham or Glasgow. But, like I said, some excellent books and films – so much so, I had trouble picking my top five in each. But I did finally manage it.
Oh, and I got a new cat. Oscar. He’s two years old, and I’d forgotten how much of a pain young cats can be.
books
A strange year of reading, on reflection, and I’m not entirely sure why. I read some books as research for All That Outer Space Allows (which was published this year), I read some other non-fiction books (on space and aircraft and submersibles, mostly), I read some sf novels for SF Mistressworks and some more recent genre works… And I decided to widen my reading to include more classic literature. While I like to think of myself primarily as a science fiction fan, of late I’ve found it hard to generate much enthusiasm for recent sf. In part, that’s due to the way fandom is changing as a result of social media and online promotion, but also because a lot of current sf seems to me more interested in style rather than content. I like sf ideas and sense of wonder, but I also like good writing, sophisticated themes and a willingness to experiment with form and structure. While some works which meet those criteria were indeed published in 2015, those I came across didn’t feel especially progressive. Which is why you’ll notice a few notable titles missing from my top five below (and I have only one, in fact, that was actually published in 2015).
1Loving, Henry Green (1945).
An author new to me in 2015, and despite being about a subject – life belowstairs in the Irish country house of an English nob during WWII – that doesn’t interest me in the slightest, Green’s writing was wonderful and his narrative technique amazing. I will be reading more by him – hell, I plan to read everything he ever wrote.
2Wolves, Simon Ings (2014).
There was some small fuss when this appeared in early 2014, but by the time awards came around it had been forgotten. Which was a shame. And I wished I’d read it in time to nominate it last year – because this is plainly one of the best sf novels of 2014. The focus of his novel tends to drift a little as the story progresses, but Ings has still managed to produce one of the smartest works of sf – if not the smartest work of sf – of the last few years.
3The Grasshopper’s Child, Gwyneth Jones (2014).
A new Gwyneth Jones novel is cause for celebration, even if it’s a YA addendum to the non-YA Bold as Love quintet. But there’s a reason Jones is my favourite science fiction writer, and they’re all evident in this short novel. On the one hand, this is a smart YA novel and I’m no fan of YA fiction; on the other, it’s Gwyneth Jones and her Bold as Love world. But it’s also self-published, so it needs to be on as many best-of lists as possible so that Jones keeps on writing. (And why was it self-published? Do the major UK genre imprints not want to publish new work by the country’s best sf writer?)
4Dark Orbit, Carolyn Ives Gilman (2015).
I’ve been saying for years that Gilman is a name to watch, and she has at last been given the opportunity to demonstrate it to a wider audience. (She amply demonstrated it with her fantasy diptych from ChiZine Publications back in 2011/2012, but genre commentators can only apparently see what appears from major imprints – which is, if you’ll forgive me, fucking short-sighted). Anyway, Dark Orbit deservedly received a lot of positive reviews, and though to me it didn’t quite feel like Gilman firing on all cylinders, it showed great promise. More from her, please.
5The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell (2014).
Friends have been singing the praises of Mitchell for years, but I’ve never really understood why. I mean, I enjoyed Cloud Atlas, and I thought it was clever… but it did seem a little over-praised. But The Bone Clocks is the novel that all the praise had led me to believe Cloud Atlas was. It’s his most insightful yet – and also his most genre.
Honourable mentions: a few titles got bumped from best of the half-year top five, although they were excellent books and probably didn’t deserve to be demoted – namely, The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958), a classic of Italian twentieth-century literature (a bloody good film too); A Division Of The Spoils, Paul Scott (1975), the final book of the Raj Quartet and as beautifully written as the other three; and What the Doctor Ordered, Michael Blumlein (2013), wich showcases why he remains one of my favourite genre short story writers. Also read and noteworthy were: Strange Bodies, Marcel Theroux (2013), a literate mystery based on an interestingly odd premise; Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov (1962), my first by him and, though perhaps overly prissy, excellent; One Thousand and One Nights, Hanan Al-Shaykh (2011), a bawdy, and multiply-nested retelling of some of its title’s stories; Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson (1981), her beautifully-written debut novel; and Galactic Suburbia, Lisa Yaszek (2008), used for research and a fascinating read.
films
I went all-out on the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list in 2015. So much so, in fact, that I signed up with a second DVD rental service, Cinema Paradiso, because they had some films from the list that weren’t available on Amazon’s Lovefilm by Post. And I bought an Amazon Fire TV Stick too, which gave me access to even more movies. Meanwhile, I purged my DVD collection of all the superhero films (why did I buy them in the first place?) and the shit sf movies (why did I buy them in the first place?), not to mention lots of other films I’d bought over the years. My collection is now looking very different, much more of cineaste’s collection (even though I say so myself), with lots of works by Sokurov, Dreyer, Murnau and Benning – and from earlier years, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski and Haneke, among many others.
The 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die challenge has been… interesting. It introduced me to the works of James Benning. I’ve also seen a lot of not very good films that really didn’t belong on the list (mostly from Hollywood, it has to be said). And I’ve seen a lot of early cinema, most of which proved quite interesting. Only one of the five films in my top five was not a “discovery” from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list.
1Playtime, Jacques Tati (1967)
How could this not be my number one choice? It certainly was halfway back in June, and it remains so now at the end of the year. I loved its Brutalist production design, its situational humour, its wit… it is a work of cinematic genius. I’d watched a rental DVD but I loved it so much I bought a Blu-ray copy for myself… and then bought a boxed set of Blu-rays of Tati’s entire oeuvre. A film that went straight into my personal top ten best films of all time.
2Deseret, James Benning (1995)
Ever loved a film so much you went out and bought every DVD you could find by that director? Oh wait, I did that for Tati. But I also did it for Benning. Fortunately, Östereichesichen Filmmuseum have been releasing Benning’s films on DVDs the last couple of years, so there were a few for me to get. And yet… Deseret is static shots of Utah landscape, and later cityscape, while a voice reads out stories from the New York Times from 1895 to the present day. It is cinema as art installation. And I loved it. I am now a huge Benning fan. And I have all of the DVDs that Östereichesichen Filmmuseum have released. And am eagerly awaiting more.
3Wings, Larisa Shepitko (1966)
Shepitko’s Ascent is on 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, but the only copy of it I could find was a Criterion double with Wings. I bought it. I watched Ascent. It was good. But then I watched Wings. And it was so much better. A female fighter pilot of the Great Patriotic War, and Hero of the Soviet Union, is now the principal of a school. It’s an artful juxtaposition, more so because the protagonist is female. And it was Shepitko’s debut film. War films, like Ascent, strike me as too easy as choices for assorted lists, but the social drama versus war of Wings is much more interesting. This film should have been on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. I’d also like to see more by Shepitko.
4Elegy of a Voyage, Aleksandr Sokurov (2001)
Come on, you didn’t expect me not to have a Sokurov film on this list, did you? I’m being nice by not putting five on it. Well, okay, five maybe could have made it, but one was a rewatch from previous years and so didn’t count. But four could have done. (Yes, the other three are in my honourable mentions below.) Elegy of a Voyage is one of Sokurov’s documentaries, but it’s more of a meditation than an informational film, in which Sokurov muses on journeys and art, particularly ‘The Tower of Babel’ by Bruegel.
5Cleo from 5 to 7, Agnès Varda (1962). I have found the Nouvelle Vague to be something of a mixed bag – in fact, I’ve found the oeuvres of Nouvelle Vague directors to be something of a mixed bag. But the only Varda I’d seen prior to Cleo from 5 to 7 was a documentary from 2000. Cleo from 5 to 7 may have covered similar ground to some of Godard’s 1960s films, but it does it so much better. Loved it.
Honourable mentions: two films were dropped from my best of the half year list, one a Sokurov, one a documentary: Jodorowskys Dune (2013) is a fascinating look at a major sf film that never happened, but still left its fingerprints all over sf cinema; Stone (1992) is a typically enigmatic drama from Sokurov… but I could just as easily mention Whispering Pages (1994; which he knocked together after his financing fell apart, but it still manages to hit all those Sokurovian notes), or Spiritual Voices (1995; a documentary about Russian soldiers on the Afghanistan border whose first 40 minutes are a static shot of a Siberian wood). But there’s also Tati’s Mon oncle (1958), nearly as good as Playtime; James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenge (2014), an excellent documentary on his visit to Challenger Deep, only the third person to do so; American Dreams (lost and found) (1984), another Benning piece with an unconventional narrative; Salt of the Earth, Herbert J Biberman (1954), an astonishing piece of social realism drama that deserves to be better known; Sleeping Beauty, Clyde Geronimi (1959), easily the best of the Disney feature films. Day Of Wrath (1943) was another excellent film from Dreyer, Effi Briest (1974) was I thought the best of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder box set I watched, and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) was a Jean-Luc Godard that I was surprised to find I liked very much.
albums
I spent much of the year further exploring Bandcamp, and so stumbled across yet more excellent music. I did not, however, see much music live this year – Sólstafir were excellent back in February, Voices and Winterfylleth were very good in September, and highlights of this year’s Bloodstock included Ne Obliviscaris, Sumer, Opeth and Agalloch.
1Sidereus Nuncius, Apocynthion (2013)
Spanish progressive death metal, not unlike NahemaH (also Spanish, and a favourite band… although they disbanded last year). It seems a little unfair to describe a group’s sound by how much like another band’s it is, but metal these days is such a wide and diverse genre labels are often next to useless. Apocynthion play prgressive metal with clean and growl vocals, some death metal song structures, sound effects and samples, a heavy post-metal influence and a great deal of technical ability.
2Autumn Eternal, Panopticon (2015)
Panopticon’s Kentucky from 2013, with its mix of black metal and bluegrass, is an astonishing album… but I picked it for my best of last year. Their new album (I say “their” but it’s a one-man show) mixes folky acoustic parts with intense black metal, and it works really well.
3Ghostwood, Navigator (2013)
This is polished progressive rock with a little bit of djent thrown into the mix, with solid riffs and some catchy hooks. They described themselves as “for fans of Porcupine Tree”, although I think this album is better than most of that band’s albums.
4Anthill, Grorr (2012)
A relatively recent discovery this one, Grorr play progressive death metal, but more like Gojira than, say, Opeth. There’s all sorts in here – bagpipes, sitar, various types of drums. It’s a wonderfully varied album, but still coherent.
5An Act of Name Giving, Butterfly Trajectory (2015)
Anothe rrecent discovery. Butterfly Trajectory also play progressive death metal – there seems to be a common theme to this top five… They’re from Poland, and while their sound is quite Opeth-ish, they’re a good deal better than fellow countrymen Gwynbleidd who play similar material. Butterfly Trajectory seem to like their progressive bits a tad more than their death metal bits, which works really well.
Honourable mentions:Worst Case Scenario, Synesthesia (2015), French progessive death metal with plenty of other musical styles thrown in, excellent stuff; Kyrr, Kontinuum (2015), Icelandic post-metal, a little more commercial than fellow countrymen Sólstafir… whose Ótta (2015) and Svartir Sandar (2011) are excellent heavy post-metal albums; Cold and the Silence, Martriden (2015), yet more shredding from excellent medlodic death metal group, who seem to have gone a bit funkily progressive with this new album, and it works really well; and finally, RAMA, RAMA (2015), which is a weird mix of doom, stoner, psychedelic and desert rock all in a three-song EP.
It’s that time of the year again, time to look back at the books I’ve read, the films I’ve watched, and the albums I’ve listened to, and decide which five earn a place on the much-coveted best of the half-year lists. To put these lists into perspective, I have – by 20 June – bought twelve albums (all from bandcamp), watched 234 films (which does include a number of rewatches), and read 74 books (which includes half a dozen previously read books). I’ve also been documenting my reading in a series of Reading diary posts (currently at #7, with #8 to be posted shortly), and my film-watching in a series of Moving pictures posts (fifteen so far this year).
So far, 2014 has felt like quite a good year. To date I’ve read 74 books, which is a slight dip from this time last year but up on the year before. And in both years I comfortably managed to read 150 books (which is just as well as I’ve entered 150 books for my GoodReads 2015 Book Challenge). On the film front, I have as usual failed to make it to the cinema even once, so most of my movie-watching has been on DVD – and I’ve started buying Blu-rays more often now too. Most of those DVDs were rentals, which has helped so far knock sixty titles of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, not all of which, incidentally, I’m convinced belonged on the list. I’ve also spent the year so far tracking down copies of films on DVD by my favourite directors, especially Aleksandr Sokurov. I now own all but one of his DVDs, but since the only copies of it I’ve found are priced around £200 to £250 I might have to use – kof kof – “alternative” sources. Anyway, I’ve been watching a lot of films – 238 to date. Some of them I’ve watched more than once. Finally, music… which has not been as successful this year as books or films. I’ve spent most of my time listening to groups on bandcamp, and have consequently discovered a number of excellent bands – in fact, all of the ones mentioned in this post were purchased there. I’ve only been to two gigs this year – one was Sólstafir, who were excellent; the second was half a dozen bands at a gig sponsored by Femetalism. None of my favourite bands have released new albums so far this year, although one or two have releases planned later in the year.
Anyway, here are the lists, with the usual honourable mentions as well.
books What the Doctor Ordered, Michael Blumlein (2013). Blumlein has been a favourite writer for many years, but his short fiction has always been more impressive than his novels. And this new collection – only his second since 1990’s The Brains of Rats – amply demonstrates why Blumlein is such a brilliant short story writer. A much undersung writer who deserves to be better known. Incidentally, Centipede Press have done a lovely job with the book.
The Grasshopper’s Child, Gwyneth Jones (2014). A new novel from a favourite author. It’s actually a YA novel set in the universe of the not-YA Bold as Love quintet. There is a fierce intelligence to Jones’s books which shines through her prose, and it’s one of the reasons I consider her the UK’s best science fiction writer currently being published – except she isn’t these days, as The Grasshopper’s Child was self-published. Seriously, that shouldn’t be happening.
A Division Of The Spoils, Paul Scott (1975). The final book of the Raj Quartet, and what a piece of work the quartet is. Scott is superb at handling voices, and in Barbie Batchelor has created one of fiction’s great characters – although this book belongs more to Guy Perron, a gentleman NCO keen to return to the UK now the war is over, but who comes into the orbit of the Layton family (who have been a constant presence running through all four books). I’m already looking forward to rereading the quartet.
The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958). I watched the film of this and that persuaded me to read the book. And I’m glad I did. There are Lawrentian elements to it, although a story which valorises the aristocracy and (mostly) presents the lower classes as venal in order to demonstrate the coming of a new world order… would not be my first choice of reading. But Tomasi di Lampedusa manages to give his fading nobles an air of tragedy as their time passes, even if the Salina family’s paternalism feels like a relic of a much earlier age.
Dark Orbit, Carolyn Ives Gilman (2015). Another favourite author. This novel is set in the same universe as Gilman’s excellent novellas ‘The Ice Owl’ and ‘Arkfall’, and while some elements of the novel are not entirely successful, it does make use of some heavy concepts and it handles them really well. A science fiction novel that makes you think – and we really could do with more of them these days.
Honourable mentions. A pair of polished collections – The Lady of Situations, Stephen Dedman (1999), and Adam Robots, Adam Roberts (2013), not every story in them worked, but the good ones were very good indeed. Strange Bodies, Marcel Theroux (2013), which surprisingly seems to have been missed by much of sf fandom, which is a shame. A Man Lies Dreaming, Lavie Tidhar (2014), a pulp detective tale with a failed Hitler as the hero shouldn’t work, but this blackly comic take on it definitely does. Touch, Claire North (2015), is perhaps not as successful as last year’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, as its fascinating premise is married to a weak plot; but never mind.
As usual, I’ve been collecting stats on my reading. And it breaks down as follows…
I hadn’t realised I’d read so many recent books, and I’ve no idea why the 1980s is the next most popular decade – perhaps it’s due to the books I picked to review for SF Mistressworks. The one nineteenth century book was HG Wells, the two 1920s ones were DH Lawrence.
I alternate genders when choosing fiction books to read, but I seem to have slipped up somewhere, and women writers currently outnumber men in my reading.
It never feels like I read a lot of science fiction, but at almost half of my reading I guess I must be doing so. Mainstream is the next highest genre, but only twenty percent. To be fair, it seems the mainstream books are often more memorable than the genre ones. But at least the numbers explain the good showing by genre in my top five and honourable mentions.
films Playtime, Jacques Tati (1967, France). I’d never actually seen a Tati film until I rented Les Vacances de M Hulot last August. I enjoyed it, but something I read somewhere persuaded me to add his Playtime to my rental list. And I watched it for the first time early this year. And loved it so much, I bought a Blu-ray of it. And then I spotted that a Tati Blu-ray collection was on offer on Amazon, so I bought that too. But none of Tati’s other films blew me away as much as Playtime, although Mon Oncle comes a close second (and so makes my honourable mentions below).
Elegy of a Voyage, Aleksandr Sokurov (2001, Russia). I’ve watched this three times since I bought it, as part of my 2015 love affair with Sokurov’s films. As the title suggests, the film is a meditation on travel, and art, with Sokurov in voiceover describing a journey he takes which ends up at a museum in, I think, a German city. Elegy of a Voyage is everything that Sokurov does so well, that makes a film a Sokurov film. Not to mention the somewhat idiosyncratic artistic choices Sokurov makes, such as using a 4:3 aspect ratio, distorting the image so it almost resembles a painting, and the use of colour filters to further distance the viewer from the picture. The beauty of Sokurov’s films is not that they bear repeated viewings, but that they require it.
Day Of Wrath, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1943, Denmark). This year I also became a fan of Dreyer’s films – his Gertrud had been a favourite for a couple of years – but in 2015 I bought DVDs of all his available movies. And worked my way through them. The silent films are astonishingly modern – especially The Passion of Joan of Arc – but I do prefer the later films, and after Gertrud, Day Of Wrath is I think his next best – and like Gertrud, it’s about women and women’s roles in society, but this time set in 1623 and describing how a young woman saves her mother from a charge of witchcraft by marrying the local pastor. And then it all goes horribly wrong.
Jodorowsky’s Dune, Frank Pavich (2013, USA). One of the reasons I bought a Blu-ray player capable of playing multi-region Blu-rays was because I wanted to see this film – to date it has not been released in the UK. Jodorowsky’s Dune is a documentary about the unmade film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, which only exists in concept art by Chris Foss, Moebius and HR Giger… and a complete storyboard “bible” which Jodorowsky’s producers sent to a number of US studios. A fascinating look at what could have been a fascinating film.
Stone, Aleksandr Sokurov (1992, Russia). A young man looks after the house Chekhov once lived in, and then one night a man who might be Chekhov mysteriously appears… Filmed in black and white, elliptical and, in the second half, featuring Sokurov’s trademark timelapse photography of a snowy landscape. While Elegy of a Voyage is a documentary, this is fiction, but deeply allusive fiction – which is why I woke up the morning after watching this and discovered I’d gone and ordered a pair of Chekhov books from Amazon…
Honourable mentions.Fear Eats The Soul, Effi Briest and The Marriage of Maria Braun, all by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974, 1974 and 1979, Germany), and all from a DVD box set I received for Christmas, these were I felt the best three. The Big Red One, Samuel Fuller (1980, USA), I’m not a big fan of WWII films but this is a good one, and even manages to rise above what is obviously a smaller budget than most such films get. Mon Oncle, Jacques Tati (1958, France), more modernist low-key humour, which may not be as cinematically beautiful as Playtime, but comes a close second. James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenge, John Bruno, Ray Quint & Andrew White (2014, USA), another Blu-ray not available in the UK which motivated my purchase of a multi-region Blu-ray player, this documentary covers Cameron’s descent to Challenger Deep in 2012. Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Jean-Luc Godard (1967, France), although not a Godard fan I do love some of his films, such as this one, a study of a bored housewife who works on the side as a prostitute; I’ve already bunged the Criterion DVD on my wishlist. Whispering Pages and Spiritual Voices, Aleksandr Sokurov (1994 and 1995, Russia), a completely opaque drama and a deeply philosophical documentary (about Russian soldiers), yet more evidence of my admiration for Sokurov’s works. Moscow does not Believe in Tears, Vladimir Menshov (1980, USSR), an odd drama about three women in Moscow in the 1950s and the 1970s, which makes a pleasing antidote to US “evil empire” propaganda. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Aditya Chopra (1995, India), a superior Bollywood film about UK-based NRIs and arranged marriages, with amusingly broad comedy, well-staged musical numbers and a pair of likeable leads. The Man from London, Béla Tarr (2007, Hungary), my first Tarr and probably the most plot-full of his films, and while I’m still not quite plugged into his brand of slow cinema, it’s definitely the sort of cinema that appeals to me.
As with books, I’ve been collecting stats on the films I’ve watched…
I still seem to be watching mostly American films, but that’s likely because so many on 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list are American – or, at the very least, the US ones are easier to find (ie, readily available for rental). The good showing for Russia is, of course, Sokurov – several of his films I’ve watched two or three times already this year.
A reasonable spread across the decades, although I would have expected the fifties and sixties to do better than the seventies, as I much prefer films from those earlier two decades. The first decade of this millennium doesn’t seem to have done very well either, which is odd.
albums Ghostwood, Navigator (2013). A US prog rock band I stumbled across on Bandcamp, and then began listening to repeatedly. In parts they remind me of Australia’s Chaos Divine, and though they describe themselves as “for fans of: Porcupine Tree”, I think I prefer this album to those by Steven Wilson’s band. There are a few bits of electronica in there somewhere, but also plenty of heavy riffing- the title tracks boasts especially good riffage. And very catchy melodies. Good stuff.
Sidereus Nuncius, Apocynthion (2013). A Spanish death metal band with a death metal / post-metal sound not unlike NahemaH’s – who were also from Spain, but have sadly disbanded after only three albums. I hope Apocynthion stay together and produce many more albums. The opening track with its insistent drumbeat is especially good.
Secret Youth, Callisto (2015). I bought a Callisto album several years ago, and though I enjoyed their brand of heavy post-metal I never bothered with any of their subsequent albums. But then Zero Tolerance magazine streamed this, their latest, I gave it a listen, discovered it was very different to their earlier album… and liked it so much I bought it. It’s still post-metal, but the growls have been mostly replaced by clean vocals, and in places there’s almost an early Anathema-ish sound to it.
Worst Case Scenario, Synesthesia (2015). This was very much a lucky discovery and while at first they reminded me quite heavily of The Old Dead Tree – who, like Synesthesia, are also from France – repeated listens proved they definitely had their own thing going. Like The Old Dead Tree, they drift between death and goth metal, but they also throw quite a bit of prog into it, and it’s a mix that works well, even if in places they sound a bit Muse-ish.
Ótta, Sólstafir (2014). These Icelanders were excellent live, so I bought their last two albums (the only ones available on Bandcamp), and it’s hard to say which is the better of the two. There are a couple of cracking tracks on 2011’s Svartir Sandar, but I decided Ótta was just a little bit the better of the two, if only for the banjo-accompanied title track.
Honourable mentions.Doliu, Clouds (2014), a UK doom band, and the track ‘if these walls could speak’ is absolutely brilliant. Entransient, Entransient (2015), a US prog metal band with a bit of post-rock thrown in for good measure. Good stuff. The Malkuth Grimoire, Alkaloid (2015), a German progressive death metal supergroup, containing (ex-)members of Necrophagist, Obscura, Spawn of Possession, Aborted, Dark Fortress, God Dethroned, Blotted Science and Noneuclid, this is quality stuff, in the same area as Barren Earth but a very Germanic version. Svartir Sandar, Sólstafir (2011), see above. Half Blood, Horseback (2012), as the album’s Bandcamp page puts it, “shifts from Americana twang to fiercely evil buzzing guitars to hypnotically meditative kraut-drone”, which is as good a description as any; file alongside Ultraphallus.
I’m trying to get caught up on these, since I’ve been watching so many films recently – all that bloody sportsing on television. Damn sportsing. Have never understood its appeal.
Murder, My Sweet*, Edward Dmytryk (1944, USA). Despite the title, this is pretty much a faithful adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. Dick Powell plays Marlowe and he doesn’t look quite rumpled enough to pull it off. Apparently, the studio changed the title from that of the book because they thought audiences might otherwise think it was a musical. Um, yes. The only other adaptation stars Robert Mitchum as Marlowe, and I seem to remember that being a better version than this. Incidentally, I have a lot of time for Chandler’s fiction – and yes, I’ve read this one – but I’ve found most of the movie adaptations disappointing in some way, even the Humph ones.
Largo Winch, Jérôme Salle (2008, France). This is what we used to call a “Euro-thriller” – ie, lots of different locations around the world, very glossy production design, plenty of action… and a plot that doesn’t make much sense. It’s adapted from a bande dessinée by Philippe Francq and Jean van Hamme (the latter, incidentally, has written several of the Blake and Mortimer bandes dessinées). The title character is an orphan secretly adopted by billionaire Nerio Winch. Some twenty-eight years later, Nerio is murdered and it triggers a fight for control of his Hong Kong-based company. Largo, meanwhile, has been bumming around the world. He’s arrested in Brazil but manages to escape, and heads to Hong Kong, where he declares himself to the board of directors. Some of them, however, don’t believe him. Handily, Nerio invested his stocks in some sort of bearer bonds, which he then hid. If Largo presents these to the board, then the company is his. Of course, the same is true if anyone else does. And the rival for Largo’s position turns out to be his adoptive brother. Plus there’s a shady rival who wants to buy the Winch corporation… and Largo makes a deal with him to secure his position. It’s all very cosmopolitan, with lots of action and exotic locales, and a plot that sort of lurches about in search of a coherent narrative. But it was also reasonably entertaining, and it didn’t take a pair of steel toe-capped boots to your intelligence, as Hollywood is wont to do.
The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg*, Jacques Demy (1964, France). I really liked Demy’s Lola, and despite knowing that this was a musical – even more, the dialogue is sung throughout – I sort of thought I might like this too. But I didn’t. Oh, it’s French and it’s 1960s and it looks mostly lovely and Catherine Deneuve is eminently watchable in one of the lead roles, but… Maybe it was because I’d watched Les Misérables only a week or so before, but the sung dialogue turned irritating quite quickly, and though the visuals were often quite eye-catching, I sort of lost interest. I think it deserves a rewatch, and given how much I liked Demy’s Lola, there’s a Demy DVD collection that looks quite tempting… except it’s bloody expensive. I shall stick some more Demy on the rental list, and see how I get on with them.
Alexander Nevsky, Sergei Eisenstein (1938, USSR). I seem to have ended up with quite a few Eisenstein films, despite not being especially a fan. Several years ago, The Guardian gave away a free DVD each weekend – remember when newspapers used to do that? – and one of them was Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Which is considered a classic of cinema. And I picked up a copy of Stachka (AKA Strike) because it was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list… and now I have a box set containing Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible parts 1 and 2. (It’s volume 2, and volume 1 appears to almost impossible to find. Argh.) Anyway, Alexander Nevsky… It’s about the eponymous prince, who led the Russians of Novgorod to victory against the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of the Ice (which takes place on a frozen lake). It’s a good solid historical epic, with a few more personal story arcs thrown in, but I couldn’t help comparing it to Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, and it didn’t wear the comparison especially well. Worth seeing, but I’m a little puzzled by the extremely high regard in which it’s held.
Fear Of Fear, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1975, Germany). This was a made-for-tv film, and having now seen three or four Fassbinder films I don’t think I could have mistaken it for anything but a Fassbinder film. Fassbinder regular Margit Carstensen plays a housewife who becomes addicted to Valium and alcohol following a series of increasingly stronger anxiety attacks. Her husband’s family, who live in the same apartment block, treat her as though she’s not good enough, which only worsens her condition. Eventually, she is committed, whereupon she seemingly recovers. A good, solid family drama, without much that struck me as essentially Fassbinder; but I enjoyed it and I thought Carstensen was especially good in the lead.
Jour de fête, Jacques Tati (1949, France). I have now seen all of Tati’s feature films, and of course I left his first until last. In this one he plays a postman in rural France and the film is a series of set-pieces in which first Tati does his usual round, and then, in the second half, he tries to introduce “American” methods in order to deliver letters faster. There are some excellent gags – in that respect, Jour de fête scores higher than Mon Oncle or Playtime, although it does not have the visual genius of those films – but a number of the set-pieces were recycled from the short L’école des facteurs (1947). Anyway, the Tati box set was an excellent buy, and despite never having watched any Tati before August last year, I can now happily call myself a fan.
Giant*, George Stevens (1956, USA). This is one of those films I always thought I’d seen but when I came to watch it very little of it actually proved familiar. It’s the sort of nonsense dynastic family saga the US – and especially Hollywood – likes to tell itself is proper art… especially when it involves oil. It’s not, of course, It’s not even melodrama. They try to throw in some social commentary – in this particular case, a Texan rancher turned oilman (Rock Hudson) discovers all his fellow whites are racist after his son marries a Latina woman. This, of course, comes as no particular surprise to, well, the rest of the planet. Hudson I could watch all night, and I do like films from the fifties, but this was long and not very inventive and all a bit thuddingly obvious from the start. James Dean was a bit rubbish in it, and not at all convincing – but then he’s another actor, like Brando, whose reputation mystifies me.
The Unbelievable Truth*, Hal Hartley (1989, USA). There are several Hal Hartley films in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and I’m not sure why. There are more interesting independent directors – such as John Waters, or John Sayles – but I guess the list-makers are fans of Hartley’s movies. I can’t say I am. I’ve seen two now, and they’ve both been pretty forgettable, certainly not something that’s worthy of the 1001 list. In this one, a man returns home after years in prison for manslaughter. He takes up with a local girl, while rumours after his “crime” grow ever wilder, but his putative girlfriend goes off to be a model in New York. There’s a family crisis, and relationship difficulties and… yawn. Not very interesting.
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 571
And now it seems the Blu-ray player is starting to act up. Bugger. Annoyingly, I recently discovered it’s also region-locked for DVDs, although I was sure it was region-free when I bought it. I definitely need to get myself a new one – region-free for both formats. Sigh.
All That Jazz*, Bob Fosse (1979, USA). There are some movies I’d never have come to watch if they hadn’t been on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and not just because I’d otherwise never have known about them. On first pass, All That Jazz doesn’t really seem to be my sort of film. It’s a semi-autobiographical musical, based on Fosse’s own experiences staging a big Broadway musical and editing a feature film, a work-load which led to health problems and hospitalisation. I am not much of a musicals-type person – in fact, there’s only one I actually rate, High Society – and if I were I think I’d prefer ones from the 1950s… But All That Jazz is also one of those films in which an unexpected dance sequence makes something very interesting of it. And “unexpected” is not a word associated with dance sequences you’d think would apply to All That Jazz. But there it is. As Roy Scheider lies in his hospital death, he hallucinates a big dance production number featuring the Angel of Death, and it’s cleverly and affectingly done. I found myself really liking All That Jazz, and I hadn’t expected to.
On the Waterfront*, Elia Kazan (1954, USA). Marlon Brando is apparently one of the great actors, but I’ve seen him now in two of his most famous roles – in A Streetcar Named Desire and this one – and, well, he’s just annoying. That stupid voice. I guess that must be Method Acting. Brando plays a dim-witted ex-boxer whom circumstances force into going up against his chapter of the longshoremen union and its corrupt chief. It’s the sort of story which is, I guess, meant to celebrate a good man, but all it does to me is demonstrate that the capitalist model is corrupt, open to abuse and a piss-poor end-result after ten thousand years of civilisation. Seriously, we’re meant to just accept the injustice and violent coercion which was apparently standard operating procedure on the docks of New York some sixty years ago? We shouldn’t be cheering on Terry Malloy as he battles the union, we should be asking why the US government is apparently so inept, corrupt or just plain evil to have allowed the situation to arise in the first place. Either way, this doesn’t really meet my criteria for a good movie.
Parade, Jacques Tati (1974, France). I’ve almost finished the Tati box set, and it was definitely one of my better purchases – even if this isn’t one of Tati’s better films. It’s a made-for-TV piece, set in a circus, in which Tati himself occasionally appears as a clown. It is also a film chock-a-block with dungarees. I’ve never seen so many pairs in a single movie before. There are some amusing set-pieces, but if this weren’t Tati it would be just another fly-on-the-ringside documentary, albeit a very 1970s one. Worth seeing, but buy the Tati box set for the other films.
Mother Küsters Goes To Heaven, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1975, Germany). And I’m about halfway through the Fassbinder box set. I like box sets. (I received a Bergman one for my birthday, only a week or so ago, incidentally). One thing I’m coming to realise from watching these Fassbinder films is that he definitely made use of a stable of actors. Brigitte Mira, who played the female lead in Fear Eats the Soul, plays the title character, a working-class widow who loses everything when her husband kills his supervisor and commits suicide at the factory. She and her family are interviewed by the press, who then libellously paint the dead man as a drunk who was violent toward his wife and a bully to his children. A pair of middle-class communists offer to help Mother Küsters clear her husband’s name, although her family are suspicious of the communists’ motives. But they prove too slow for Mother Küsters and she falls in instead with some anarchists… who invade the local office of the newspaper which published the libellous article. This isn’t exactly the most subtle Fassbinder film I’ve watched so far – he sets out to show the perfidy of the press and the way they monster people, and does precisely that. Interestingly, the film has two endings. One is represented by stills, while a voice-over reads the script, but the other was actually filmed. The latter apparently was written especially for the US market (it’s the happier ending), but I do wonder why the first ending was never actually put on film.
White Heat*, Raoul Walsh (1949, USA). “Look at me, ma! I’m on top of the world!” Yup, this is where that line comes from. It’s a classic gangster film, in which Cagney plays a complete psychopath – albeit a somewhat tame one by today’s standards, in fact superheroes in twenty-first century films show about as much remorse as Cagney’s character does after killing someone. That’s progress for you. Anyway, Cagney gives himself up for a crime he didn’t commit because it provides an alibi for one he did, a particularly brutal train robbery. A cop goes undercover in the prison, breaks out with Cagney and joins his gang. The film ends with an attempt to rob the payroll from a refinery, and Cagney ends up stuck on the top of a storage tank, starts of a gun battle… which causes the storage tank to blow. KABOOM. A good bit of classic noir.
Les Misérables*, Tom Hooper (2012, USA/UK). Here’s another film that I’d have otherwise assiduously avoided if it hadn’t been for the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, but unlike All That Jazz I can’t really say I’m glad I watched it. I knew going in it wasn’t going to be the sort of film I like and, lo and behold, I really didn’t like it. The singing was terrible, the songs were awful – even that brain-burning one popularised by Susan Boyle – the characters were unredeemable, and the CGI was so over the top it might as well have taken place in some fantasy world. Rubbish.
La Belle et la Bête*, Jean Cocteau (1946, France). I thought Cocteau’s Orphée really good, but this retelling of ‘The Beauty and the Beast’ fairy tale was a bit dull. While the staging was cleverly done, particularly for the time, the production design did resemble some amateur dramatic pantomime production (although the Beast’s make-up was good). Perhaps it deserves a second watch – but it was a rental disc and it’s gone back. On the other hand, I’m only just over halfway through the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list… although I would like to see more films by Cocteau.
Mother And Son, Aleksandr Sokurov (1997, Russia). I’ve watched this a couple of times now, and I continue to find it completely mesmerising. A young man cares for his mother as she lies on her death-bed. He reads to her, he carries her outside and shows her the surrounding countryside, he feeds her and nurses her. There is a dream-like quality to the visuals, so much so that some of the landscape shots actually resemble oil paintings. This is a beautiful film, one of the most beautiful I’ve ever watched. I’d place it a close second after The Second Circle as my favourite Sokurov, and while it doesn’t quite make my top ten it certainly makes my top twenty. But I also suspect that more often I watch it, the more my opinion of it will rise. I’ve been watching a lot of Sokurov recently, and have even tracked down copies of some of his hard-to-find DVDs. I think he’s one of the most interesting directors currently making films. There’s something very… literary about his movies. Watching them is like reading a beautifully-written short story.
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 567
Yet more movies. What I have watched. I’ve been averaging two a night, due to the fact there’s been nothing worth watching on the terrestrial channels or cable television.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre*, John Huston (1948, USA). Humph is stuck in Mexico, too poor to leave and look elsewhere for work. He’s offered a job, which he accepts, but when the job finishes, his employer doesn’t pay. Apparently, he’s known for doing this. That’s capitalism for you, folks. One man gets rich while others do the work; and all the better if he can get away without actually paying for it. Humph and a friend from the job hook up with an old prospector – played by the director’s father – and go looking for gold in them thar titular mountains. Which they find. But the prospect of great riches turns Humph all paranoid. And then bandidos turn up, bandidos with no stinking badges. Things go from bad to worse, Humph totally loses it, and it all ends badly. Not bad, although I thought Humph’s paranoia was a bit overdone. Huston senior was a complete star, however.
The Wind Rises, Hayao Miyazaki (2013, Japan). This is the Studio Ghibli one based on the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of the Mitsubishi Zero, Japan’s most successful fighter plane of WWII. It apparently caused a bit of a fuss when it was released on the grounds it celebrated the life of a man who had designed a highly efficient killing machine. Despite all that, the film is well, a bit dull. Miyazaki livens things up a little by throwing in some weird dream sequences, featuring Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Batista Caproni. He also chucks in a doomed romance – the woman Horikoshi loves has tuberculosis, and dies shortly after they’re married. Horikoshi’s real wife was perfectly healthy. This element of the story was apparently adapted from a completely unrelated novel (and to which the film’s title is a reference). Incidentally, Werner Herzog provides the voice for a German character (in the English-language version), and it’s really quite strange hearing him in a Ghibli movie.
Mon Oncle*, Jacques Tati (1958, France). This is how karma bites you on the ass. My rental agreement with Amazon involves them sending me 3 DVDs at a time, I watch them, return them, they send me 3 more. Except the copy of The Great Gatsby (see here) they sent me wouldn’t play. I reported it as faulty and returned it. They said they’d send me a replacement and it wouldn’t affect my agreement. Except they sent the replacement as one of my next lot of 3 DVDs. I complained, they apologised, and sent me an immediate fourth disc (The Virgin And The Gypsy, in fact). Situation resolved. And then they send Mon Oncle in my next 3, even though I’d bought the Jacques Tati box set only a week before – I’d forgotten to take it off my rental list. Argh. Anyway, this is definitely the next best Tati after Playtime, and it riffs off a similar conceit – but rather than city life being impersonal and oppressive, here it’s a single gadget-filled house, in which live Hulot’s sister and brother-in-law. There’s more of an actual plot than in Playtime, but again the film is built around a series of well-observed and cleverly executed set-pieces. More, please.
Arrietty, Hiromasa Yonebayashi (2010, Japan). And this is the Studio Ghibli film based on The Borrowers, about a group of tiny little people who live behind the skirtingboard in a house. And, er, that’s it. Boy spots Borrower protagonist, who then reveals existence of Borrowers to him. Boy is ill and due to go into hospital for a risky operation. Parents discover evidence of Borrowers, and rings up a pest removal company. Boy helps Borrowers escape from pest removal experts. If I thought The Wind Rises was dull, this one has it beat. It didn’t even seem much like a Ghibli film.
Moscow does not Believe in Tears, Vladimir Menshov (1980, USSR). An odd film, this. It won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1980, the third Soviet film to do so (the others were War and Peace in 1968 and, er, Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala in 1975). It opens in the 1950s, with three young women from the country now living in Moscow. One works as a mechanic, but wants to go to university to train as an engineer. Another works in a bakery, but believes in having fun and finding a rich husband. The third has a boyfriend who’s a farmer and they intend to marry. The baker and mechanic are asked to house-sit a rich relative’s apartment. They pretend the place is theirs and throw a party for eligible men (it’s the baker’s plan, the mechanic goes along with it reluctantly). The mechanic’s university plans are then scuppered when she falls for a television engineer, who makes her pregnant but refuses to marry her. The baker meanwhile marries a rich and famous hockey player. The film then jumps ahead to the 1970s. The mechanic is now the director of a successful manufacturing plant and a single mother, the baker’s marriage ended badly when the hockey player became an alcoholic, and the third one has been happily married to her farmer for two decades. And then a tool and die maker at a scientific lab picks up the director woman, not realising she occupies such an important position, and the rest of the film is their romance. While the movie carefully ignores many of the hardships of living under the Soviet system, and presents the USSR as a relatively affluent society, there are a number of details which are peculiar to its setting – in the 1950s, the three women live in a women’s dormitory, for example; or the mechanic is interviewed on television at one point because she is a female mechanic. It’s a well-handled drama, and despite a tendency to soap opera melodramatics in places, gives an interesting glimpse of a society that no longer exists. Worth seeing.
The Virgin And The Gypsy, Christopher Miles (1970, UK). I decided to read the DH Lawrence novella from which this film was adapted before watching it, which was probably a mistake. (The novella is also the source of “inexcusable puddings”, although the expression is not used in the movie.) Two daughters return from their French finishing school to their father’s East Midlands vicarage. Yvette, the virgin of the title, is flighty, but Lucille is made of more sensible stuff. Yvette’s character is blamed upon, and often alluded to, the vicar’s absconded wife (although she was Lucille’s mother too). While out motoring about with some local friends, the sisters come across a gipsy, and Yvette is taken with his macho charm. Even for Lawrence, this is all about as subtle as a black pudding in the face. The film ends with a dam burst which floods the area – and Yvette’s life is saved by the gipsy. The film didn’t quite portray the characters as they were written, if anything it seemed to tone them down a little (it also toned down the 1920s racism, thankfully). And it didn’t look like a very expensive production – although it did actually look like it was filmed on location (which it was; it’s more or less the part of the country I’m from).
Michael, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1924, Germany). I think I’ve come to Dreyer’s films backwards, starting with his Danish (sound) movies and then watching his earlier silent films. I’ve still yet to see Vampyr and The Passion of Joan of Arc, two of his most famous movies. But, Michael. This apparently didn’t do very well on release, likely because it’s centred around a gay relationship between a famous painter and his model. A bankrupt countess approaches the painter for a portrait, but actually plans to seduce him and then take all his money. But the model instead falls for her, and they go off together. The model steals from the painter, which then inspires the painter to paint his masterpiece. Soon after the picture is unveiled, the painter takes ill and dies, without being reconciled with his lost love. This is not much like the Danish films, neither in subject nor presentation. There are similarities, of course – Dreyer’s use of close-up, for example; but the sets more resemble German Expressionism than they do the Scandinavian starkness of Ordet or Day Of Wrath. There are also a lot of intertitles.
Gagarin: First In Space, Pavel Parkhomenko (2013, Russia). The title is probably a bit of a clue to this film’s story. It’s a fairly straightforward biopic of the first man in space. I didn’t spot any glaring inaccuracies, although I’m no great expert on Gagarin’s life. There was quite a bit of emphasis on the camaraderie of the cosmonauts and Titov’s jealousy, but it also really pushed the idea that everyone thought Gagarin should be first right from the start – which I suspect is casting a somewhat rosier glow on history than was the case. Gagarin’s Vostok 1 spacecraft looked surprisingly roomy on the inside, and the film handled its spaceflight well. I enjoyed the film, but then I’m interested in its subject matter.
Bride Of Frankenstein*, James Whale (1935, USA). A classic piece of horror that tries to link back to Shelley’s novel with an opening scene set in the Villa Diodati (in which a peculiarly stiff Elsa Lanchester plays Mary Shelley). Other than that, the plot can be pretty much inferred from the title. Karloff’s Monster actually learns to speak in this movie, and it’s really quite silly. “Good … gooood! Bad! Bad!” And so on. Despite a couple of neat set-pieces, this is a film that shows its origins and its age far too plainly. And suffers for it.
Trafic, Jacques Tati (1971, France). Apparently, Tati was only meant to co-direct this, but he fell out with his collaborator and ended up going it alone. He plays a car designer who works for a small French company, and is responsible a gadget-filled saloon car-derived caravanette. The company plans to display this at an automobile show in Amsterdam, and so transport it to the Netherlands in the back of a truck. But the journey doesn’t quite go as planned, as the truck keeps on breaking down. Like Playtime, the plot is carried as much by sound effects as it is by dialogue, and there are a number of impressively choreographed set-pieces. The car company’s PR agent, played by American model Maria Kimberley, is impressively high-handed and incompetent. One of the biggest “gags”, a multi-car pile-up, is spoiled a little by a few elements that are a little too intrusively faked. Not as good as Mon Oncle or Playtime, but still bloody good.
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 562
The first “films seen” post of 2015… Last year was a bit epic for DVD-watching, and I expect this year to be much the same… Three weeks into the year and I’ve already seen 29 films and rewatched season 1 of Babylon 5. I don’t document every movie I’ve watched in these posts – I mean, the less said about Solar Crisis the better (it was a charity shop find, okay?). Some films were rewatches, some were simply forgettable, and there’s not a lot I can say about Babylon 5 that’s not been said before by many others. So, it’s the usual mix of (mostly) classic films, I’m afraid…
Playtime*, Jacques Tati (1967, France). I knew very little about this film when I sat down to watch it – I knew who Tati was, of course; in fact, I’d seen Les Vacances de M. Hulot the year before (see here). But I hadn’t known quite how much of an… undertakingPlaytime had been, how expensive a production, how enormous a film it proved to be. Apparently, it was a bit of a commercial flop on release, although critics acclaimed it. I loved it. Right from the opening in the mock-up of Orly Airport, with its clean retro-futurist lines. I loved the modernist look of the film, its Brutalist interiors and futurist gadgets. The plot, in which Hulot wanders from set-piece to set-piece, is almost incidental. There are some genuine laugh-out-loud moments, more so than I seem to recall from the other Tati film I’d seen. And, of course, it just looks absolutely fantastic. So I bought a Blu-ray of it on eBay.
Fear Eats The Soul*, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974, Germany). Fassbinder famously based this film on Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows and, to be honest, I was expecting it to closer resemble Sirk’s movie that it actually did. Partly, this was because it was my first Fassbinder, so I had no real idea what to expect – it was probably also the first New German Cinema film I’ve seen; but I suspect my expectations were unrealistic and likely spoiled by Todd Haynes’ take on All That Heaven Allows, Far From Heaven, which apes the look of Sirk’s film while extending its story. Fassbinder, on the other hand, makes free use of the story, but sets his story in present-day (for 1974) Munich. A widow in her sixties drops into a bar to get out of the rain, and so meets Ali, a Moroccan gastarbeiter who speaks broken German (the film’s actual title, Angst essen Seele auf, is broken German). The widow, Emmi, and Ali become friends, and then lovers, and she invites him to live with her. When the landlord tells Emmi that her lease doesn’t allow her to sublet, she tells him Ali is her fiancé. So Ali and Emmi marry – much to the disgust of Emmi’s adult offspring. But soon Emmi’s attitude toward her husband begins to align with those of her racist neighbours and friends, even though her children have come to accept Ali. Like Sirk’s masterpiece, Fear Eats The Soul shows a conventional woman entering into a relationship that which is uncomfortable to her family and peers, and then choosing to formalise that relationship (although Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson don’t actually get married in All That Heaven Allows). But where Sirk’s film is about class, Fassbinder’s is very much about race, and especially about the presence of gastarbeiters in Germany. It’s a powerful story, and works especially well because of its low-key realist approach (unlike Sirk’s colour-saturated mise en scène, which I admit I love). Having now seen it, I think Fear Eats The Soul is not so much a reflection or homage to All That Heaven Allows as it is a complement to it.
The Marriage Of Maria Braun*, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1979, Germany). Did I mention I received a boxed set of Fassbinder DVDs for Christmas? It’s the Commemorative Collection 73-82 Volume 2. Obviously, I picked out the two best-known films in it to watch first. In The Marriage Of Maria Braun, the title character marries her boyfriend while he is home from the Front, they spend a day and a night together and then he’s off fighting again. Cut to the end of the war, and he doesn’t return home – she doesn’t know if he’s dead or still a POW held by the Russians. She gets a job at a bar that caters to American occupiers, and becomes the lover of one GI regular. At which point, her missing husband turns up and catches the pair in flagrante delicto. A struggle ensues, and Maria accidentally kills the GI. However, the husband takes the blame and is sentenced to prison for murder. Maria is determined to better her lot so when her husband is eventually released they can live a life of comfort. She meets a rich industrialist on a train, and he hires her as his personal assistant/mistress. She proves to have a head for business, and becomes rich. Meanwhile, the industrialist approaches the imprisoned husband, and the husband agrees to leave Germany on his release and not return to Maria. Later, after the industrialist has died, he returns – Maria has inherited everything, and is now very rich indeed. While Fassbinder didn’t evoke post-war Germany especially well – no doubt due to budgetary constraints; although von Trier, I thought, did a better job in Europa, albeit it was more representational – I thought this film a much more subtle piece than Fear Eats The Soul, and much the better for it. Maria Braun is a well-drawn and well-played character, and if the film puts the atrocities committed by the Nazis to one side (and, like Europa, paints the occupying Americans as heartless invaders rather than saviours), Maria’s profound selfishness and determination gives the story a solid anchor. Excellent stuff.
A Streetcar Named Desire*, Elia Kazan (1950, USA). One from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list I watched only because it was on the list. I was aware of the film, and that it had made Marlon Brando a star, but that was about all. And, to be honest, what I knew of it didn’t really make me want to watch it. But it was on the list, so I bunged it on my rental list and, in due course, it popped through the letter-box. So I watched it. And… meh. It’s one of those films made on an indoor set whose stark lighting can’t hide the fact it’s as fake as a theatre flat. Brando was widely praised for his acting in the film, but I just found his put-on voice really annoying. Vivian Leigh was better, and managed to evoke the fragility of her character, but the final descent into madness was pure bathos. I can see how people would have liked it back in the day, but it’s all a bit OTT, a stage play turned up to 11, with much yelling and wailing and outbreaks of sudden violence. Ah well. One to cross off the list.
Maleficent, Robert Stromberg (2014, USA). The title character is, apparently, the evil queen in the Snow White story, although quite how this dark fantasy fits into the fairy tale is anybody’s guess – I think even Disney’s marketing department gave up on trying to persuade audiences of that one. Angelina Jolie, with prosthetic cheekbones and a pair of big fuck-off horns, plays the title character, who is really just misunderstood and not the evil piece of work the Brothers Grimm et al have painted her. Her peasant boyfriend, on the other hand, is. Evil, that is. Well, nasty. He even gets to be king – which is not how dynastic succession or divine right works, but this is a US film and they’ve never really understood the concept of royalty. For reasons I now forget, said king decides to raze the magic wood near his castle and in which Maleficent and her Thumper-y friends all live. So she seeks revenge by cursing the king’s new-born daughter. But I don’t recall the daughter being put to sleep – it may have been me who was sleeping – but instead she gallivanted about the magic forest and played with all the weird faery creatures, while being maternally looked over by Maleficent. I’m not really sure what this film is meant to be – it reminded me of that other fairy tale mangled into a dark fantasy, Snow White and the Huntsman; and while I have no problem with using fairy tales as source material, I’m not convinced Maleficent reflects well on the Sleeping Beauty story.
The Cranes Are Flying*, Mikhail Kalatozov (1957, USSR). I’m a big fan of both Tarkovsky’s and Sokurov’s films, and I’ve seen a number of other Russian movies – including bonkers sf film Kin-Dza-Dza, yet more bonkers Через тернии к звёздам, and even mighty Soviet historical epic Ilya Muromets. But I’d not seen much socialist drama, so The Cranes Are Flying was something new for me. It’s a WWII film, centred around the character of Veronika, a young woman. Her boyfriend Boris volunteers to fight, but is posted missing in action. Her parents are then killed in a bombing raid by the Germans, so Boris’s parents invite Veronika to live with them. Boris’s cousin Mark is also staying there, and he begins to pursue Veronika – she, of course, does not know Boris is dead, and she rejects his advances. He assaults her and shames her into marrying him. The family are moved further east, and Veronika works in a hospital caring for wounded soldiers. After an incident in a hospital, she decides to commit suicide, but at the last minute saves a boy from being hit by a car and adopts him. Boris’s father then learns that Mark escaped conscription by bribing an official, so he boots him out of the house. A comrade of Boris’s then turns up and informs Veronika that her boyfriend died a hero’s death… It’s all very grim, and each of the characters quite clearly maps onto roles played by the people of the USSR during WWII, both good and bad. While Veronika’s ending is hopeful rather than happy, the bad guy is caught and punished for his anti-socialist actions. As propaganda goes, The Cranes Are Flying was entertaining, if a little heavy-handed. The stark black-and-white cinematography was effective, and Tatiana Yevgenyevna Samoilova was good as Veronika. Worth seeing.
Woman Times Seven, Vittorio de Sica (1967, Italy). Shirley MacLaine has made some odd films throughout her career, and this, I think, qualifies as one of them. It’s an anthology film, in which MacLaine plays seven parts, and they’re pretty much all the same. In the first, she’s a widow following her husband’s hearse to the cemetery, while her late husband’s doctor, played by Peter Sellers, tries to persuade her to marry him. In the second, she’s a young wife who returns home to find her husband (a different husband, obviously; MacLaine is playing different women) in bed with her best friend, so she heads out and meets up with a bunch of prostitutes. In the third, she’s a hippie translator who reads poetry, while naked, to a Scot and Italian who are members of the congress where she’s interpreting. The fourth sees MacLaine married to a best-selling author who is more in love with his fictional character than his wife, so MacLaine tries to become the fictional character, prompting the husband to have her examined by a psychiatrist. In the fifth, a society woman goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure a rival doesn’t wear the same designer gown as herself to the opera. The sixth appears to be set in New York and features a young married couple who are determined to commit suicide, except the husband isn’t quite so determined. And the seventh has MacLaine being stalked by Michael Caine after she meets Anita Ekberg for lunch. An odd film, and not even remotely funny.
An Affair to Remember*, Leo McCarey (1957, USA). Unbelievably, I’d never actually seen this TV perennial, and since it’s on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, I thought I should. I like 1950s melodramas, so I expected to like An Affair to Remember, but… Cary Grant was at his most tea-bag-tan-ish, and didn’t really convince as a French playboy (the former more than the latter). There was a little bit too much singing, and as the film progressed the schmaltz began to heap up in droves. And yet it all started so well – the shipboard romance was nicely handled, with plenty of witty banter. But after Deborah Kerr had been hit by a car… and gives up her singing career to teach poor children (sticks fingers down throat)… Obviously, a happy ending was always going to happen, but McCarey made sure he hit every emotional beat in Hollywood’s lexicon before reaching it. To be honest, it felt like a good 1950s melodrama badly welded to an inferior non-musical remake of An American In Paris.
2014 seems to be turning into the year of films. According to my records, I’d watched more films by the end of June 2014 than I had during all twelve months of 2013. Which is unfortunate, as I’m supposed to be a writer and a book reviewer, not a film critic. Oh well. Normal service will resume… soon, I hope.
Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray (1954, USA) Sterling Hayden plays the title character, a gunslinger who has swapped his revolvers for a guitar. He drifts into town and poles up at a saloon owned by Joan Crawford, who proves to be an ex-lover. But it’s Crawford’s character who’s the focus of this film, not the eponymous musician. She’s banking on a planned railroad making her very rich. The town worthies aren’t happy with this – they think they should profit. So they drum up some citizen outrage on a pretext (the blatantly-wrong accusation that a regular of the saloon had held up the stagecoach), and good old Wild West “justice” subsequently ensues. This is one of those films where the plot is driven by a bunch of people behaving like complete shits for no good reason, particularly the character played by Mercedes McCambridge. An interesting twist on the Western genre, and Crawford plays a good part – but it’s still very Hollywood.
Breaking The Waves, Lars von Trier (1996, Denmark) I think this is only the second film by von Trier I’ve seen – and the first was Melancholia (2011), which looked beautiful but the climax was complete tosh. Like Melancholia, Breaking The Waves centres on a young woman, here played by Emily Watson. She marries a Norwegian oil rig worker, played by Swede Stellan Skarsgård, despite the reservations of her close-knit strictly Calvinist Highlands community. Soon after, Skarsgård is paralysed in an accident on the rig. Confined to a hospital bed, he persuades Watson to have sex with other men and then recount the details to him. Eventually, the village finds out about this… Watson is good, managing to convey a child-like simplicity and devotion to God which pretty much makes the story. The film is split into chapters, each of which opens with a well-known song from the 1970s, the decade in which the film is set… but there was something a little off about them, as if they were played by cover artists trying hard to sound like the original artists. It was slightly weird. Nonetheless, I think I’ll add some more von Trier to the rental list.
Hirokin : The Last Samurai, Alejo Mo-Sun (2012, USA) There was a trailer for this on a rental DVD I watched and it looked sort of interesting. So I checked it out, discovered it was a couple of quid on Amazon and bunged it on the end of an order. I was robbed. It really is truly dreadful. I should have guessed – it’s a sf film and it has Julian Sands in it. Though Sands has appeared in a number of good films, none of them were genre. In fact, his presence in a genre film is a good indication it will be shite. As this one was. The writer/director had obviously seen Dune and decided it needed more Star Wars in it. Sort of. On a desert world conquered by humans and ruled by evil dictator Sands, Wes Bentley plays a rogue human who takes up with one of the indigenous aliens – who look just like humans, except when they hold their hands up and you can see black veins on their palms. Anyway, Sands’ stormtroopers are searching for the aliens’ rebel leader and take Bentley’s partner prisoner. He has to fight to the death for her, but fails (she dies, not him). He sort of joins the rebels, learns how to fight samurai-style in the most ineptly-choreographed fight scenes I’ve ever seen, and then goes off to overthrow Sands. Or something, Watching this film, I could only wonder who’d been daft enough to invest it – people with far too much money… and either an appalling taste in films or a complete inability to recognise shite, obviously.
Marty, Delbert Mann (1955, USA) Ernest Borgnine plays a butcher who lives with his mother, but he’s getting on a bit and everyone tells him it’s time to get married. And I mean everyone. But he’s not had much luck with the ladies. One night at a local dance hall while on the pull, he bumps into shy schoolteacher Betsy Blair, whose date has dumped her after running into a much prettier friend. The two spend time together, and discover a mutual attraction. But afterwards, his mother tells Borgnine that Blair is not good enough and his friends tell him that Blair isn’t pretty enough. So even though he promised to call her the next day, he doesn’t. But then he changes his mind, and decides he liked her very much so it’s up to him and not his mother or friends. He calls her. (And they all lived happily ever after.) Marty won the Oscar for Best Film in 1955, and it’s a nice enough film, a well-observed drama with a good cast. Interestingly, Blair had been blacklisted for Communist sympathies, but her husband Gene Kelly lobbied for her to get the role, and he had enough clout in Hollywood to swing it.
Les Vacances de M. Hulot, Jacques Tati (1953, France) My first Tati. The title character goes on, er, holiday. To the seaside. It’s sort of like Mr Bean, but the humour is more gentle and Hulot himself is a normal – if clumsy – human being. The plot is a series of set-pieces set in the town Hulot is visiting, most involving the other residents of the hotel in which he is staying. There’s an extended sequence with a horse and another with a shed full of fireworks… In fact, the more I think about the film, the more it strikes me how much of a rip-off of it that Mr Bean was. Although perhaps Mr Bean’s makers would claim it was an homage. Anyway, Tati’s is a good film and definitely worth seeing.
Bombers B-52, Gordon Douglas (1957, USA) I bet you can’t guess what this film is about. Go on, try. Yup, it’s about Boeing B-52 Stratofortress jet bombers. They first flew in 1955, and are still bombing the shit out of brown people even today. However, they’re complicated aircraft, and USAF clearly felt they might need more technical ground staff to keep them flying – hence Bombers B-52, starring Karl Malden, Efrem Zimbalist Jr and Natalie Wood. Zimbalist is an officer and a pilot, Malden is a tech sergeant and he hates Zimbalist. So when Zimbalist starts dating Malden’s daughter, Wood, Malden is understandably peeved. He decides to resign from USAF. But they’re getting these hot new B-52 bombers in and Zimbalist, who can’t understand why Malden hates him (neither, to be honest, do we), wants Malden to stay on. They go on a test flight, some fancy new equipment bursts into flames – bit of a design flaw there – and fills the B-52 with smoke. Everyone bales out, except Zimbalist, who’s piloting the aircraft. He brings it in to a safe landing. Meanwhile, rescue helicopters have found all of the crew except Malden. So Zimbalist steals a chopper and goes looking for him. And finds him. The two have to survive overnight in the wilds of California and become best buddies, and so Zimbalist is free to marry Wood. The end. There’s some good aerial photography in the film, though.
Madame De…, Max Ophüls (1953, France) This is around the third or fourth film by Ophüls I’ve seen and, I think, the best of them. The title character, whose surname is never given, is the wife of a French general and has a busy social calendar. To fund her activities, she sells a pair of diamond earrings given to her by her husband. She pretends to have lost them, but the jeweller to whom she sold them tells the general and he buys them back… and gives them to his mistress. But the mistress then sells them to pay off some debts, and they’re bought by an Italian count, played by director Vittorio De Sica, who then meets Madame de…, enters into a relationship with her, and gives her the earrings as a token of his love… The film is set, I think, around the turn of last century, and it’s the focus on appearances which drives the plot – and leads to its resolution. Apparently, Ophüls originally planned to shoot the entire film through reflective surfaces, such as mirrors, which would have been cool but the producers nixed the idea – which is not to say the end result is a disappointment. I’ve yet to fully appreciate Ophül’s films (unlike those of other directors mentioned in this blog post), but Madame De… is the first of his films I’ve watched which persuades me it’s worth seeing more of his movies.
Pioneer, Erik Skjordbærg (2013, Norway) I’d been keen to see this film since first learning of it last year. But it had a stupidly limited release in the UK – my nearest showing was 8 pm on a single Friday night in Leeds, an hour away by train. The film is set in the early 1980s in Norway, just as the country is starting to develop its oil and gas resources. The Norwegians have accepted US help in putting together the saturation systems needed for divers to work at depth. But something goes wrong on a test dive, a Norwegian diver dies, and his brother, also a diver and present when the accident occurred, tries to figure out what’s going on… I was really looking forward to this movie since saturation diving is not a topic often covered in films. And the underwater photography in Pioneer is actually quite stunning… But the rest of the film felt like a routine thriller – Bentley glowers menacingly, Aksel Hennie bounces from mysterious scientist to mendacious politician to grieving sister-in-law… While the film certainly has that stark realism the Scandinavians do so well – and Hollywood does so badly – the plot does seem disappointingly ordinary. On the other hand, as far as I could tell its subject was handled accurately.
The Palm Beach Story, Preston Sturges (1942, USA) This has to be one of the silliest films I’ve ever seen. It definitely puts the “screwball” in “screwball comedy”. The film opens with a quick montage of shots which shows a man and a woman overpowering their twin brother and sister, who are about to get married, and taking their places at the wedding. Some time later, life isn’t so rosy, so hubby Joel McCrea decides to head south to look for work and be less of a burden on wife Claudette Colbert. She goes looking for him and manages to wangle a free ride on a train with a bunch of drunken hunting lodge-members… before being rescued by eccentric millionaire Rudy Vallée, who is very taken with her. McCrea then turns up, so Colbert pretends he is her brother… prompting Vallée to propose to Colbert – and Vallée’s ex-wife Mary Astor to propose to McCrea… Happily, there are those twins from the opening montage. While there’s plenty of fast-paced wit and snappy one-liners in The Palm Beach Story, the story is so ridiculous it spoils it all.
Gertrud, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1964, Denmark) This was a rewatch – I’d originally seen the film on rental DVD, but was later bought a copy of it and Ordet for my birthday. The film is based on a play from 1906 and Dreyer gives it a very theatrical staging. It’s his last movie, and on the strength of it I’m keen to see more. Nina Pens Rode, in the title role, is the wife of a prominent lawyer who is about to be given a position in government. But she wants a divorce – she even has a lover, composer and pianist Baard Owe. But the pianist has made another women pregnant and so cannot go with Gertrud. There’s a luminous quality to this film, one that’s emphasised by its staginess. Rode is especially good in the title role, dominating every scene she’s in with a quiet strength… as is clearly evident in the coda in which Gertrud looks back on the events of the film from thirty years later and sees no cause to regret her actions all those years earlier. A film that’s just bubbling under my top ten movies.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Anthony & Joe Russo (2014, USA) I’ve no idea why I continue to watch MCU movies, perhaps it’s just foolishness – I see the hype and promotion and stupidly believe it. Or something. To be fair, I did quite enjoy Captain America: The First Avenger, with its weird Nazi science and silly spoof of the title character. But this sequel is set in the present day, and despite the massive hype and the many positive murmurings I’ve heard, is just complete bobbins. It turns out that SHIELD has been controlled by Hydra, the Red Skull’s organisation from the first film, ever since Operation Paper Clip shortly after WWII. And no one ever noticed. In fact, the only reason Cap discovers this is because SHIELD tries to kill him. Even Nick Fury doesn’t know – and he created SHIELD! The Red Skull, of course, died at the end of the first film, but his chief scientist, played by Toby Jones, survived, and he’s now the brains behind Hydra. Well, not “brains”, as he’s uploaded himself into a load of 1960s mainframe computers. Which are located in a seemingly-abandoned underground computer centre at an old SHIELD base, an underground computer-centre that appears to have no security. Not very clever that. The rest of the film is some nonsense about an unkillable assassin, there’s more explosions and fight scenes than you can shake a very large stick at, and as the movie progresses you can actually feel your brain cells dying off one by one.
All That Heaven Allows, Douglas Sirk (1955, USA) My high opinion of this film is no secret. I love it so much, in fact, I bought the Criterion blu-ray edition, despite already owning it on DVD. So I was bit fucked off to discover that the blu-ray is region-locked. And unlocking my blu-ray player is going to involve some faffing around with firmware or something. Argh. So I watched the DVD edition packaged with the blu-ray instead. And… it really is a beautiful film. The more I watch it, the more I love it. It’s not just that it looks so good, but also that it’s a pitch-perfect satire of middle-class American society. The grown-up kids, who behave like actual kids, are spot-on – although the daughter’s beau, played by David Janssen, seems somewhat out of his depth – and the part where they buy their mother Jane Wyman a television set, as if that’s all she needs now she’s a widow, is pure genius. I’ve watched All That Heaven Allows two or three times in recent months – partly for research for Apollo Quartet 4, of course – and my appreciation remains undimmed. Even the hokey bits – the deer! – don’t turn me off. I love the film so much, I even tracked down a copy of the novel it’s based on – and it wasn’t easy to find.
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