It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible

Tag Archives: luis buñuel


by 1 Comment

Moving pictures 2018, #10

I’m trying to get up to date with these. Despite spending a couple of weeks watching mostly television series – including Agent Carter, Star Trek: Discovery, The Expanse and, er, Silent Witness – I still seem to have built up a backlog.

Diary of a Chambermaid, Luis Buñuel (1964, France). This film saw a change in pace for Buñuel, and a change in fortunes. It was his most realistic film to date, and based on a popular 1900 novel of the same title by Octave Mirbeau, which had been adapted in Hollywood in 1946 by, of all people, Jean Renoir, and before that in Russia in 1916. The Mexican star of Buñuel’s Viridiana, Silvia Pinal, was originally intended for the title role, and even learnt French to play it, but the part went to Jeanne Moreau. Who plays a young woman who is hired as a maid at a country house in the 1930s that seems to be populated by oddballs and eccentrics. Her name is Célestine but they all call her Marie. The groom is an anti-semitic right-winger, the husband chases anything in skirts and takes out his frustrations on small game, the father-in-law is a shoe fetishist with a cabinet full of women’s shoes, and the next-door neighbour is fond of throwing rubbish over the fence. But then the father is found dead in bed, and a young girl who visited the house is found raped and murdered. The chambermaid suspects the groom, and promises to marry him in an effort to make him confess… The film plays like a farce set in an upper-class home, with a mix of belowstairs and abovestairs scenes and characters from several classes. For Buñuel, it’s also played straight. Moreau is precisely what her character seems to be, a chambermaid, although as the focus of the film she displays more character than the rest of the cast. Having said that, this is closer to La Règle du jeu than it is Downton Abbey (hack spit), and not just because of the language. There’s a slightly mocking tone to it all and, watching it, it’s easy to see how Buñuel, and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, began re-introducing surreal elements into “straight” dramas, as in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty. I will admit to preferring the latter films, but this is still excellent stuff. A box set worth owning.

Die Finanzen des Großherzogs, FW Murnau (1924, Germany). I still think David Tallerman is being unfair in his characterisation of Murnau as an uninteresting director, although to be honest I’ve yet to get a handle on what makes a good director of silent films. True, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is really quite astonishing, but I don’t see much difference between the silent films of Murnau, Lubitsch or Lang, since all three were working in the same country around the same time. And yet… Murnau’s Die Finanzen des Großherzogs – The Finances of the Grand Duke – was mostly filmed on location in Montenegro and Croatia – whch is not typical of German silent films. And it’s a gentle comedy too, where other silent comedies from Germany I’ve seen have tended to be broad – although certainly not like slapstick like Hollywood silent comedies. Die Finanzen des Großherzogs is set in an invented Mediterranean duchy, whose finances have pretty much given up the ghost. A US industrialist offers a large payment to mine the island’s sulphur deposits, but the grand duke turns it down as he rightly thinks it will affect the quality of life of his subjects… And that’s pretty much the plot: impoverished grand duke in danger of losing duchy to predatory capitalist interests because of lack of cash, but is saved at last minute through unlikely series of events. These events are in the person of a loaded Russian princess whom the grand duke doesn’t want to marry, but she ends up pretending to be the wife of a travelling salesman, or something, and gets to meet the grand duke in that guise, and they fall in love, and everyone lives happily ever after. The end. There’s a few other bits and pieces going on in there, like the finance minister aiming to seize the duchy for himself. It’s all very, well, Ruritanian. Fun.

Le Pont du Nord, Jacques Rivette (1981, France). I’m not quite sure what to make of Rivette, as he tells fantastical stories in real-life settings, but the fantasy is all in the minds of the characters – with the occasional bit of help from the director. In other words, he finds games and conspiracies and quests in the ordinary, in such a way that the games and conspiracies and quests seems perfectly real without in any way upsetting the ordinary. And so too in Le Pont du Nord, in which two two young women meet up and follow a quest involving several different men called Max, which leads to a dragon, which is actually a playground slide, which one of them then defeats by loudly challenging it. Everything happens in and around Paris, in the quotidian world, and some of it you suspect was guerilla-filmed, even though the two women plainly don’t entirely occupy it, and there is enough strangeness in the events which befall them to suggest something other than the ordinary world. And yet the bulk of the strangeness is supplied by the two main characters, who seem to be operating in a world that doesn’t entirely exist on screen. Rivette has form in this: Merry-Go-Round is a conspiracy story with no real conspiracy in sight; Noroît is a fantasy presented with such a light touch, it might as well be mainstream. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it all, and the lack of reviews seems to suggest others feel the same way. At 129 minutes, it’s short for a Rivette film. (And no, I still have not tackled Out 1, all 760 minutes of it, despite owning a copy for two years.) I came to Rivette through La belle noiseuse, which is on the 1001 Movies you Must See Before you Die list (2013 edition), and that inspired me to seek out more of his work. At which point I found myself watching films that were not like the one that had inspired me to seek out that director’s films… And yet, I find myself drawn to Rivette’s films, that are unlike La belle noiseuse, and more inclined to put in the time to watch the really long ones… Which I really must do, one of these days.

The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn (2016, France). Refn is lauded as a talent in Hollywood, although apparently not so much after all, since he needed French money to make this film. His movies certainly look very pretty, and this one is no exception. But the stories he tells really aren’t very nice. In this one, an ingenue moves to LA, is picked up by an agency, and becomes a a successful model. Which does not go down with the two models she spends her time with. One has had a number of cosmetic surgeries to improve her looks and career, but is castigated for it. For all that it’s about a beautiful woman, this is not a film that treats women well. They are pretty much all victims. Even the young model who is the central character – she has zero agency, and her only act is to walk away from it all at the end. The other models are driven by their obsession to be admired by men, even though the men in the film are just as much ciphers as the women are. The Neon Demon is a film that’s all about how it looks, which seems apposite given it’s about the modelling industry… but it also seems to be based on misconceptions and clichés about modelling. It has its central cast of three models, including the ingenue, and it uses them to tell a story of excess, and the cannibalistic nature of the industry, making the latter real rather than metaphorical, to no good end. A film best avoided.

Cemetery of Splendour, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2015, Thailand). I have no idea what these films are about, but I really like them. They’re sort of slow cinema, in as much as very little happens in them. But they also exhibit little in the way of plot – and nothing in the way of a three-act structure (hack spit) – and yet… things happen. Weerasethakul also has a tendency to use the same stable of actors, so the more of these you watch the more faces you recognise. And there are other commonalities: the military seems to always play a major part, as do hospitals or clinics; some of the cast are disabled; there’s always mention of Isan province, usually self-deprecratingly; and there’s always an element of the strange, or supernatural. Weerasethaskul has a shtick. Which does not detract from his films, I hasten to add. There is an oddness to his movies that I don’t think any other director quite manages, a sort of New Weird sensibility I’m not sure any other director is currently using. In Cemetery of Splendour, a sickness is causing soldiers to suddenly fall asleep, and there is a clinic with a ward full of sleeping soldiers, all lying in beds under weird blue lights. But then one soldier wakes, but can remember nothing of the time he was asleep. There’s also the cemetery of the title, which is a wood in which people have left mythic objects… It’s one of those films that, when it’s finished, you’re not entirely sure what you’ve watched. I’ve now seen five of Weerasethakul’s and I’m no closer to understanding them. He’s a singular talent and his movies, for all their glacial pace and enigmatic stories, are fascinating. If someone released a Weerasethakul box set, I’d buy it like a shot. I only own a copy of his first film, Mysterious Object at Noon, but all of them bear, if not demand, rewatching.

The Milky Way, Luis Buñuel (1969, France). And speaking of shtick, I sort of feel like I have a handle on Buñuel’s, except… have I really? I mean, he was making films way back in the 1930s, all the way through to the 1970s, in a number of countries, and in a variety of styles. That’s one hell of a career. But The Milky Way feels like a Buñuel film. Even based on my limited exposure to his oeuvre. The title refers to the route taken by pilgrims from France to the Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the Wat of St James. Two travellers follow the route and, en route, witness events which map onto the history of Christianity, especially its so-called heresies. It is very much the product of a Catholic mind, and I say that inasmuch as Catholicism is much more embedded in its followers’ lives that Protestantism, which is what I was nominally brought up as, but I’m completely atheist, and neither hold a candle to the integration of Islam in daily life… All of which means that not only do I not have a dog in this fight but I have a dog-free worldview (which pleases me, as a cat owner), and I suspect Buñuel, for all his mockery, was considerably more religious than I am, as it takes a certain degree of familiarity with the material to mock as much as is the case in The Milky Way. But for all that, religion is, to me, a soft target. I don’t believe a single bit of it. It’s also a completely pointless target. We l;ive in a world in which truth and facts and experts are routinely attacked because they don’t match the narrative of the authorities. There is no such thing as “fake news”. There is propaganda, which is unsupported by facts; and there is news, which is supported by facts. And the least trustworthy sources are those who are quickest to label something as “fake news”. Religion, and all the fucking tragedy it’s caused over the centuries, feels lightweight in comparison. Although, to be fair, The Milky Way does a good job in pointing out how shortsighted that view is. It’s not the best film in the box set, but, like Diary of a Chambermaid (see above), its presence is welcome. The box set doesn’t include some of Buñuel’s best films, but what it does include is bloody good. Worth getting.

1001 Movies you Must See Before you Die count: 895


by Leave a comment

Moving pictures 2018, #7

Things don’t change overnight, much as we’d want them to. Okay, so I did manage to post a rant about science fiction on this blog recently… but I’m still watching – more or less – a movie a night, and most of those I think worth documenting. So the Moving pictures posts haven’t quite dialled back as much as I’d expected. And I’m still a little behind with getting them up on the blog. But I hope to be in a position to basically post one a week, with content covering other topics either side. But, like everything, it’s a work in progress…

Black Jack, Ken Loach (1979, UK). I have Loach all over my rental list because I think he’s a director whose oeuvre is worth exploring, even if not every film he made is actually any good (also true of many directors, to be fair). But then David Tallerman texted me, “Have you seen Black Jack?”, and I hadn’t so I moved it up my rental list. And lo, it appeared in the next set of discs. Which happens sometimes. Black Jack is based on a 1968 children’s novel of the same title by Leon Garfield, although I’m not sure the film was aimed at children per se. It’s set in 1750 in Yorkshire. A well-off couple, Quality in other words, hand their daughter over to a pair of doctors who run a sanatorium, because the daughter is unmanageable – there are hints it’s mental illness, but in other parts of the film it seems to be behavioural. Meanwhile, a lad is paid to look after the corpse of the title character by a “Tyburn widow”, a woman who bribed the men who fetched the bodies of criminals from the gallows so she could display the dead men in her front-room and charge money for the privilege of viewing it. But Black Jack is not dead. And he escapes, taking the boy with him. After helping a stuck coach, Black Jack conceives the idea of boobytrapping a ford so travellers would require his help. For a fee. And the first coach he waylays is the one carrying the two doctors and the daughter… The boy and the daughter escape and join a travelling medicine show. Meanwhile, the rest of the cast search for the missing daughter… This is low-budget film-making at its best. Although set nearly 230 years before it was made, Loach manages to present a convincing eighteenth-century England. The main actors, who are all teenagers, are uniformly good in their roles, although none of them went on to greater fame. And yet it all feels a bit like a Children’s Film Foundation movie – no bad thing, it must be said – although I don’t believe it was made as one. It has that sort of sophisticated approach to telling a story through film coupled with a really low budget that characterised a lot of CFF films. I thought it really good – and I hope that was why David texted to me to ask if I’d seen it…

Manderlay, Lars von Trier (2005, Denmark). I really didn’t like von Trier’s Dogville, and Manderlay is the sequel to it, so why, I hear you ask, would I want to watch this film? Okay, I picked it up for 99p for a charity shop, so it was worth a punt… But… I have a lot of time for von Trier as a film-maker, even if I really don’t like some of his films. He has a very interesting oeuvre. And while I didn’t like the rape and violence in Dogville, I thought the use of black box theatre staging a fascinating way to present the story. The good news is that Manderlay uses the same black box theatre staging. The bad news is that the story is possibly even worse. Grace Mulligan, played in Dogville by Nicole Kidman but now by Bryce Dallas Howard, passes by the eponymous Alabama plantation on her way home from Dogville. A woman approaches them and tells them a man is about to be whipped for stealing a bottle of wine. They enter the plantation and discover that slavery still seems to pertain within its borders. Except not really. The owner’s ancestor had emancipated his slaves, but they chose to continuing living as slaves because… well, because… I don’t know. Is von Trier trying to say they were so unsophisticated they had no idea what emancipation meant, or that they could be hoodwinked into believing they were better off unemancipated? And that it need a crusading young female like Grace Mulligan to teach them the error of their ways? Which she fails to do, because they seem bizarrely sceptical of freedom, as if the institution of slavery were no more than the Stanford Experiment writ large, which is, quite frankly, deeply offensive. As I said earlier, von Trier is an interesting film-maker, and the staging of Manderlay as black box theatre is certainly interesting… but the story is such a bad take on slavery it’s almost impossible to watch… and you have to wonder if that was deliberate, and if so, why would someone make a film that was difficult to watch? Unless von Trier was daft enough to think that black box theatre was the only “difficult” element of the film… It’s not like Manderlay could be categorised as a noble failure. It’s an awful film, made in an interesting way – and I can’t think of a phrase that might make that description palatable, or any reason why I should think of a phrase to make it palatable. It’s a film best avoided, but you shouldn’t write off von Trier because of it.

That Obscure Object of Desire, Luis Buñuel (1977, France). I’m not a big Buñuel fan, although I’ve watched a number of his films. Um… checks records, discovers it’s actually ten Buñuel movies… A few of them I thought really good. But my finger sort of slipped on a near-monopolistic online retailer just after Christmas, and I ended up buying the Buñuel: The Essential Collection because some of the movies in it I’d not seen, and some of them I wanted to see again. The most recent film in the box set – it was actually Buñuel’s final film – is That Obscure Object of Desire, which was one I’d not seen. Initially, it appeared much like his other films from the 1970s – the same actors, the same presentation, the same sort of story… But like those other 1970s films it had that, well, genius twist that made it much more than the sum of its parts. That Obscure Object of Desire opens with Fernando Rey leaving Seville by train. A young woman tries to join the train, but he throws a bucket of water over her. He explains to the passengers in his compartment that he had been seduced by a woman called Conchita. The genius element of That Obscure Object of Desire is that Conchita is played by two actresses – Caroline Bouquet and Angela Molina, who play the character entirely differently – at different random times during the film. Rey is an unreconstructed 1970s male, and the film is presented from his viewpoint, but the use of two actresses as Conchita highlights their side of the story and so demonstrates the one-sidedness of Rey’s narrative. These films by Buñuel are not especially striking in the way they are filmed – the staging seems fairly unexemplary, to be honest – but the stories Buñuel chose to tell using cinema are excellent. Some are even pure genius. Not this one, perhaps; although it makes a series of pointed observations because of its peculiar presentation. I had bought this box set on a bit of a whim, having liked some of the films in it. But now I own it, and have seen more of its contents, I’m starting to realise it’s a bloody good collection to own. These are fascinating films and worth seeing.

Die Austernprinzessin, Ernst Lubitsch (1919, Germany). I bought this collection during Eureka’s Boxing Day sale, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Okay, so I am interested in early European silent cinema – which pretty much means early silent German cinema, and directors like Lubitsch, Lang. Murnau, and even Dreyer, who was Danish but made several silent films in Germany. The princess of the title – it translates as “The Oyster Princess” – is the heiress to a millionaire who built his fortune on oysters, and she is deeply unhappy that a rival will be married before her. So her father promises to find her a more impressive husband, and employs a matchmaker to do just that. And he finds an impoverished prince who is more than happy to marry a millionaire’s daughter… The film is apparently a comedy, although other than an element of slapstick to some of the action sequences, it’s hard to see why. True, it’s taking the piss out of the rich, and the American rich in particular, as the characters are all American – but that makes it new money which is the object of derision, as is explicitly shown in the fact an impoverished prince is seen as suitable marriage material. It feels like the film’s targets are just too obvious and over-used. I suspect even in 1919, they were obvious and over-used. The excessive consumption of the US, and its desire for validation by old world aristocracy, is lampooned to a ridiculous extent – there’s a scene, for example, in which a small carriage is pulled by ten horses, nine of which have liveried riders. The daughter is played by Ossi Oswalda, who is even more peremptory than she was in Ich möchte kein Mann sein, but it’s clear why she was such a popular star at the time – both the humour and drama are broad, and she plays them broad. But she is good on the screen, and looks to be having a great deal of fun, which is infectious. Die Austernprinzessin is probably the least satisfactory of the films I’ve watched so far from the collection – its humour felt too obvious, and there was nothing in its staging whcih made it stand out, other than a propensity to play every joke to the hilt. Watchable, certainly; but not especially memorable.

Colossal, Nacho Vigalondo (2016, Canada). I really liked Vigalondo’s Timecrimes, but I’d heard mixed reports about this one, his first film made outside Spain. And, let’s face it, the story didn’t sound like all that prepossessing – woman with a drink problem who works in a bar discovers when she walks through a playground the morning after finishing work, a monster appears in Seoul and apes her movements. I mean, how does that work? What does it mean? The answer to the first is: bizarre lightning strike. The answer to the second is: well, I suspect the only metaphor in action here is so obvious that most viewers would discount it: woman destroys Seoul like she destroys her own life. I mean, really? None of this is helped by having Anne Hathaway, a well-known actress, in the lead role. She is good, no doubt about that; but the rest of the cast are nobodies (so to speak) so she stands out. Things get complicated when the bar owner, and old friend, discovers that he materialises in Seoul as a giant robot. And he’s less concerned about hurting Koreans. So where Hathaway’s monster apologises for her actions, his robot goes on a rampage – and she is forced to fight him to stop him. To some extent, Colossal feels like an extended comedy sketch without a punchline. The fact that it’s well-played and the sections set in Seoul look really good seem immaterial. Meh.

Border, Alessio Cremonini (2013, Italy). I forget how I stumbled across this film, but it sounded like it might be interesting, so I rented it. A woman in Syria learns her husband has deserted the Syrian army and joined the rebels, meaning she is now in danger from the Secret Service and the Shahiba. So she and her sister hire a man to take them across the border into Turkey, where they hope to meet up with her husband. The man they hired introduces them to a driver, Bilal, a fugitive in his own right. But en route they are forced to abandoned their pickup truck after being followed by an army patrol. And then the two sisters are separated… Bilal and one of the sisters stumble across a village that was slaughtered by rebels. The only survivor is a young girl, who they take with them. But things do not go well for them… I’veseen a review of the film online that complains it fails “to adhere to clasic story structures”, which tells me more about the critic, and what’s wrong with the Hollywood film-making, than it does the film. The review also complains that because the two sisters wear the niqab for much of the film, and so only their eyes are visible, it makes it difficult for the viewer to identify with them. But it seems to me that’s actually one of the points Border is making, that’s it’s easier to dehumanise those suffering in wars in the Middle East, which in turn makes it easier for Westerners to ignore their complicity in creating, and fuelling, those wars in the first place. Border tell a straightforward story, in as much as the three characters head for the Turkish border and have random encounters along the way, but that reflects the arbitrary nature of survival in a war zone. I thought Border a good film.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 895


by 3 Comments

Moving pictures, #25

I catch up… then I get behind. But I’m staying reasonably on top of these posts for now… possibly because I’ve been rewatching Battlestar Galactica so I’ve not been watching movies all the time.

le_trouLe trou*, Jacques Becker (1960, France). As I was watching this, I kept on thinking I was watching a Robert Bresson film, because it could just as easily have made by him – in many ways, Le trou reminds me a lot of A Man Escaped, at least more than just “man escapes from French prison”. Which is pretty much the plot. A group of prisoners in a cell dig a hole in the floor, which leads them into the prison’s cellars. From there, they find their way into the sewers… except the sewer tunnel is blocked, so they must dig around the concrete plug blocking it. The story is based on a real prison escape and, in fact, one of the original escapees plays himself in the film (well, sort of, the names are all changed, although I’m not sure why). There’s a matter of factness to Becker’s direction, despite which the film remains too… personal, too readily creates a narrative from its cast’s back-stories… to come across as a documentary. It makes for an odd disconnect. True, Le trou can be watched as a work of fiction and, in fact, that’s probably the easiest way to watch it, and the way most people are likely to watch it. (I can’t remember if the film opens with text explaining it’s a dramatisation of real events.) It’s the opposite, I suppose, of the 1980s penchant for dramatising documentaries, making something with a fictional format of them.

city_girlCity Girl, FW Murnau (1930, USA). It’s the age-old story: farmer’s son goes to the big city to sell the corn harvest, meets a young woman, falls in love, marries her, doesn’t get the expected price for the corn, goes back home with new bride, but farmer is not happy – at the reduced price for the corn or the new wife. Things get worse. But then they realise the errors of their ways, and everyone lives happily ever after. While the cinematography and direction are up to Murnau’s usual standard, where this film really scores is in depicting life on a US farm in the late 1920s. The harvesting scenes are especially fascinating, because the technology used is sort of halfway between how you imagine it was done in the nineteenth century or earlier and how it’s done now. I do like Murnau’s films – they’re straightforward, the characters are well-drawn, if somewhat broadly so, and for their time they’re cutting-edge, which makes them interesting as historical documents. Murnau is also a good example of those German directors who crossed over to Hollywood and, you would like to think, caused Hollywood to up its game and produce serious films instead of endless variations on the Keystone Cops. It’s not as if Murnau was on his own – Lang, Lubitsch, Wilder, von Stroheim, Sirk, even Hitchcock, who cut his teeth in the German film industry. Not all of them stayed, of course. Lang’s last films were made in Germany (well, India – but they were German films), and von Stroheim retired to France. City Girl is by no means Murnau’s best – that would have to be Nosferatu or Tabu – but it’s still worth seeing. [dual]

faithThrough a Glass Darkly*, Ingmar Bergman (1961, Sweden). Two couples – father, son, daughter and son-in-law – are holidaying on Fårö, a Swedish island in the Baltic (which Bergman loved so much, he ended up moving there). Father is a novelist and has just returned from working abroad. Daughter has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, but refuses treatment. Son-in-law is a doctor and is having trouble persuading father of the severity of his wife’s condition. And son is not happy about his father’s absences. If films were books, then Bergman’s movies would be literary fiction. And watching one of his films is like reading a polished literary short story, the sort that fifty years later is studied in schools. Even the stark black and white cinematography of Through a Glass Darkly feels like a deliberate choice to create a precise atmosphere, much as a writer crafts sentences. Bergman’s use of ensemble acting and a stable of actors only heightens the likeness: three of the actors in Through a Glass Darkly – von Sydow, Andersson and Björnstrand – were all part of Bergman’s stock company at some point in their careers. [0]

lauraLaura*, Otto Preminger (1944, USA). I had high hopes for this famous noir film – not just because of the genre or director, but also because it starred Gene Tierney, who appeared in several classic noir films. But… the film opens after Laura’s murder, with a detective trying to find out who the killer is. He interviews Laura’s patron, an effete newspaper columnist, and Laura’s boyfriend, a louche playboy. The detective learns so much about Laura that he begins to obsess over her… so he’s somewhat flabbergasted when he falls asleep in her apartment and she walks through the door. Turns out it wasn’t Laura who was killed, but one of her models (the body’s face had been destroyed by a shotgun blast, but since it happened Laura’s apartment they assumed it was her). Preminger directed some killer noir films, and Tierney was the epitome of a 1940s Hollywood femme fatale – no matter the role, she seemed to take into herself all the baggage associated with the character. I suspect this was due to the fact she wasn’t actually a very good actress. She had screen presence, certainly; but she never seemed especially convincing – not that it was a requirement at the time, cf Ava Gardner’s career – and the same is true in Laura. Tierney is more of a centre around which the story revolves, in which position she does quite a good job. But Laura the character is about as convincing as a unicorn, and the story of the film is not much better. Had I been putting together the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list myself, I would have chosen a different Preminger noir film – Whirlpool, perhaps, or Fallen Angel. Not this lacklustre affair.

love+one+another+coverLove One Another, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1922, Germany). What an odd film. I say that having seen – and even liking – any number of odd films. I am, I admit, a fan of Dreyer’s films, and the more of his films I watch, and the more times I watch each of them, the more my admiration grows – but, let’s face it, most probably know of him only from his three Danish films of the 1940s, Day of Wrath, Ordet and Gertrud. But they’re products of the end of his career, and his earlier stuff is also very good (to be fair, The Passion of Joan of Arc is also pretty well known) but even so, the BFI aside, Dreyer’s entire oeuvre is not that readily available. He bounced around in his early years – working in Denmark, Norway and Germany… and it is the last country where this film was made. It’s based on a novel – Elsker hverandre by Aage Madelung from 1918 – and is set in Russia in the late nineteenth century.  The central character is a Jewish girl who experiences anti-semitism on a daily basis but falls in love with a Gentile, Sasha. When news of the affair surfaces, she is expelled from school and flees to St Petersburg to stay with her brother, who converted to Christianity. She becomes involved with underground revolutionaries and, against the backdrop of the Tsar’s pogroms against the Jews, she manages to get back together with Sasha, and they join the Jew fleeing Russia. Although set in Russia, Love One Another was filmed entirely in Germany. It is, in its way, as important an historical record as Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days That Shook the World, even though it’s fictional. (Apparently, some of the extras in the films were actual survivors of the Jewish pogroms in Tsarist Russia.) Worth seeing. [0]

manf_westMan of the West*, Anthony Mann (1958, USA). I can’t help comparing this film with Shane, released five years earlier, and not to Man of the West‘s advantage. Gary Cooper plays a retired outlaw who, en route to Fort Worth by train to find a teacher for his small town’s new school, finds himself caught up with the outlaw gang to which he once belonged. He has a saloon singer and a con artist in tow, and tries to protect the two from the outlaws (led by his uncle), but only manages by reluctantly agreeing to help them rob a bank in Lassoo. But when he gets to Lassoo, it’s a ghost town and the bank has long since closed. Cue shoot-out. To be honest, Cooper makes a more convincing cowboy than Ladd did in Shane, and even though it’s been a dozen years since he hung up his black hat, at 57 he was probably a little too old for the part. But that’s a minor niggle. The photography is not as impressivas in Stevens’s film, but the story is at least not quite so… melodramatic. It feels like a Western from a later period. After watching Shane on rental DVD, I bought myself a copy of the Master of Cinema edition Blu-ray. I don’t think I’ll be doing the same for Man of the West, although a Masters of Cinema edition has been released.

phantom_libertyThe Phantom of Liberty, Luis Buñuel (1970, France). I rented this to test if my Theory of Godard could be applied to Buñuel, even though it had already failed several times. I have this theory, you see, that Godard’s films in colour are better than those in black and white – at least, the Godard fims I’ve seen which I like have all been in colour. But that’s not strictly true for Buñuel – I liked The Exterminating Angel a lot (black and white), but not Tristana or Belle du jour so much (both colour). I did like Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (colour)… but did that mean I’d like The Phantom of Liberty… especially since it’s considered amongst his most surreal films (or rather, most experimental plot-wise)? The easy answer is… yes, I liked it; and no, it seems the theory only really applies to Godard. The Phantom of Liberty does not have a plot, it’s just a series of vignettes linked by characters, none of which are actually resolved. Some feel like failed comedy sketches – the Carmelite monks who play poker using holy relics as chips, Michael Lonsdale throwing an impromptu room party and then his wife dresses up in her dominatrix outfit and whips him on the arse, the dinner party where the guests sit on toilets at the table and shit but go to a private room to eat; others are not remotely comedic, such as the sniper in the Tour Montparnasse, or the police chief who gets a phone call from his dead sister. They are all, however, mostly surreal – like the emu that wanders through a man’s bedroom as he tries to sleep. On balance, I think The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie the better film, but I did enjoy The Phantom of Liberty, and I plan to watch more of Buñuel’s films.

1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die count: 768


by 4 Comments

Moving pictures, #21

And back to more films from the US than elsewhere. Given that only half the films described below are rentals, I can’t claim the vagaries of their service as an excuse. Oh well.

cindrelac2Cinderella, Kenneth Branagh (2015, USA). I bought a Blu-ray of the animated Disney Cinderella and the cheapest version available was a double Blu-ray box set with the 2015 live-action version of the film, because, probably, the live-action needs a bit of extra help to sell. I mean, whoever heard of a live-action Cinderella? Okay, it was directed by Branagh, and it’s got stars like Helena Bonham Carter and Cate Blanchett and Stellan Skarsgård and Derek Jacobi in it… but given the number of princess films Disney churns out, my expectations were understandably quite low. And yes, the film takes a few liberties with Perrault’s story, chiefly in order to give the characters more of a background. The two leads – Lily James and Richard Madden – are also a bit bland. But… there were some quite clever references to the Disney animated version, Bonham Carter’s absent-minded Fairy Godmother was fun, and Blanchett was on good form. However, the choreography during the ball scene just looked silly, and spoiled for me what had been up until then good family entertainment. A better film than I’d expected, but nowhere near as good as the animated version (although in its favour, its mice are considerably less annoying). [ABC]

rescuersThe Rescuers, John Lounsbery, Wolfgang Reitherman & Art Stevens (1977, USA). I have a vague memory of this film’s original theatrical release. I can’t remember if I went to see it at the cinema, or if on a trip to the cinema my sisters saw it and I watched some other film. Watching it this time, 38 years later, very little seemed all that familiar. The seagull I sort of remembered, and Madame Medusa I think I remembered… But nothing else. Apparently, The Rescuers was instrumental in turning around Disney’s fortunes – they had not a successful film since The Jungle Book in 1967. I’m not sure I understand why – I can’t think of a weirder pairing for the main characters as Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor. And the animation looked a little crude and not very crisp when compared to Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. I wasn’t that impressed. Amusingly, in 1999 Disney had to recall 3.4 million videocassettes of the second home video release because someone had spotted a photo of a topless women in the background of one of the shots.

hard_to_be_a_godHard to be a God, Aleksey German (2013, Russia). I’d heard a great deal about this film, and everything I’d heard led me to think I’d be much impressed by it. Not just that it was made by a Russian director, and made in that sort of very Russian style; or that it’s an adaptation of a novel by Boris & Arkady Strugatsky… Anyway, I bought the Blu-ray when it was released… and it sort of sat on the pile of films to be watched for six months or so before I finally decided to stick it in the player… An agent from Earth has infiltrated the society of another planet. The humans of the planet are anti-intellectual, and so are mired in the Middle Ages. The agent has taken the place of a local baron, and the local populace treat their nobles as god. On Blu-ray, the filth and squalour of the world German has created is visceral and obvious.  The film sort of meanders about, revelling in the awful conditions in which everyone lives, and the dumb laws under which they must survive (an old man is drowned upside down in shit, for example, for writing poetry – and being what the subtitles call a “smartypants”). It’s all very grim and very cheerless, but in a sort of weirdly unbelievable and implausible way. The cinematography is fantastic, the film’s commitment to its world is astonishing… but, even though I like slow cinema, this is not a film in which things happen at a particularly fast pace. I thought I’d like it more than I did, so in that respect it’s disappointing. But it’s definitely a film that stands numerous viewings, so I’m glad I bought a copy. [ABC]

black_godBlack God, White Devil*, Glauber Rocha (1964, Brazil). So I’d watched Rocha’s Entranced Earth – because it was on the 1001 Movies Must See Before You Die list, it was a rental, see here – and I really enjoyed it and I was a bit drunk, so I went and bought DVDs of Rocha’s three films, of which Entranced Earth forms the middle part of the trilogy. Black God, White Devil is the first of the three. Obviously, I was interested to see what I made of it. And… well, it’s not a very good transfer. I like that Mr Bongo are releasing hard-to-find non-Anglophone movies, but they don’t seem to put much effort into it. Happily, Black God, White Devil is a good film. A really good film. It has a bit of the Jodorowsky about it, and it works really well. A poor farmer has to flee when he kills his boss (after his boss insists the farmer carry the cost of the loss of the two cattle which died of snake bites en route to market). The farmer and his wife join St Sebastian, an apocalyptic preacher who suggests violence is necessary for redemption. Meanwhile, the government is getting worried about St Sebastian and his growing influence. So they hire bandit Antonio das Mortes to kill the preacher and his followers. Two are left alive to spread the word – yes, the farmer and his wife. And they in turn become bandits. I now want more of Rocha’s films, but the three I have appear to be the only ones that are available. Bah. [0]

nobodoy_knowsNobody Knows, Hirokazu Koreeda (2004, Japan). This was recommended to me by David Tallerman, who has previously recommended anime films, but this is live action… although “action” may not be the right word. It’s a dramatisation of a true story. A woman with a twelve-year-old son moves into a new apartment. However, she actually has four kids – two are very young and are smuggled into the building inside suitcases, the other is eleven and turns up later. The woman continues to pretend she only has the one kid to her landlord. One day, she heads off to work… and never returns. She has abandoned her children. The oldest boy tries to keep the other children safe and fed, although what little money the mother left soon runs out. Then the utilities are cut off since the bills haven’t been paid. When the youngest girl falls from a stool, hits her head and dies, the three children bury her in a field near the airport. The film is played very flat, like a documentary, which has the odd side-effect of making the mother appear merely flighty instead of criminally negligent. Apparently, the real-life case was somewhat more gruesome – there were five children, not four; the youngest died after being assaulted  by friends of the eldest; and all were badly malnourished when discovered by the authorities (after a tip-off from the landlord). Another of the children also died – Wikipedia does not give the cause – and the body was found with the three survivors. The mother gave herself up when the case hit the news. Astonishingly, after she’d served her three year jail sentence, the mother was given custody of the two surviving girls.

olvidadosLos Olvidados*, Luis Buñuel (1950, Mexico). The title refers to the forgotten kids and teenagers who live on the streets of Mexico City – although this is not a documentary. The teenage leader of a street gang escapes from juvenile jail, tracks down the kid who supposedly grassed him up, then beats him to death with a rock. A younger kid is witness but promises to say nothing. His mother persuades the kid to go straight and he gets a job as a blacksmith’s apprentice. But then the gang leader turns up and steals a knife. The kid is accused of the theft and sent to a progressive rehabilitation centre where, after a dodgy start, he seems to settle down. But then up pops the gang leader again, and he steals some money from the kid. They fight. During the fight, the kid tells everyone the gang leader is a murderer. The gang leader runs away. Later, he tracks down the kid and kills him. But the police are now after him – and they find him and gun him down. Shot in black and white, and in a social realist style, this is anything but a cheerful film. In fact, it’s really grim. To be honest, it didn’t much feel like a Buñuel movie, despite a bizarre dream sequence. To date, I’ve seen eight of Buñuel’s thirty-two films and only really liked two of them – The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, neither of which have that much in common. Much is made of Buñuel’s surrealism, or the surrealist elements of his films, and certainly the surrealism of the two I like is their major draw. But then I don’t see where Tristana, Belle du jour or Viridiana are especially surreal – and Un chien andalou and L’age d’or felt more like experimental films than anything else. An important director, undoubtedly, and one whose movies I will continue to watch – but I can’t say he’d make my top ten, or even top twenty…

kidThe Kid, Charlie Chaplin (1921, USA). I thought this was on the 1001 Movies Must See Before You Die list, I can’t think why I put it on my rental list otherwise, but it’s not. Strange. Anyway, I watched it. The Kid is one of Chaplin’s most famous movies, and probably because of the title character. A woman has her baby stolen, it’s then left in an alleyway, where Chaplin finds it. He tries to get rid of the child, but fails… and so takes it home with him. The film then jumps forward five years, and the baby has grown into a little gamin, whom Chaplin’s tramp uses in his various cons. The kid throws rocks through windows, then Chaplin turns up with a pane of glass and is paid to replace the broken pane. There’s a scene where Chaplin is beaten up by a tough who’s wearing a bizarrely-padded jumper, and lots of Chaplin-like visual jokes… and a frankly bizarre dream sequence in which Chaplin imagines himself as an angel, the kid too, and everyone else who has appeared in the film, and the two of them fly along the street set… and then Chaplin wakes up.  He decides to track down the kid’s mother, and return him to his rightful home. Which he does suspiciously easily – mother and son are re-united as if it had been five weeks and not five years, and everyone lives happily ever after. I actually prefer the other Chaplin films I’ve seen to this one, yes, even Monsieur Verdoux.

african_queenThe African Queen*, John Huston (1951, USA). Katherine Hepburn is the sister of a British missionary (Robert Morley) in German East Africa in 1914. Humph is the captain of the eponymous steam-powered river boat which regularly delivers supplies. WWI breaks out, the Germans burn down the missionaries’ village, Morley is killed, so Hepburn and Humph escape on the African Queen. They plan to follow the river to the lake at its end, and there destroy the German gunboat which is preventing the British from attacking. Along the way, they fall in love, sneak past a German fort which commands an excellent view of the river, fix a broken propellor, survive a trip through some fierce rapids… It’s all very adventuresome – but then it is adapted from a CS Forester novel. Hepburn and Bogart forever hover on the edge of parody; and half the time they feel like impressionists playing the actors playing their roles. It’s all very silly, and amazingly lightweight for a film that’s on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You die list. In fact, I’m surprised it actually made the list. Huston is on there eight times, and some of the choices are baffling – Prizzi’s Honour? WTF? After early classics like The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierre Madre (both also starring Humph), you have to wonder what happened…

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 761


by 2 Comments

Moving pictures, #34

Bit of a surprise this time round, a film I actually watched in a cinema. But before you get too excited – no, it’s not The Martian, it’s the latest 007, SPECTRE. And it was, well, it was…

spectreSPECTRE, Sam Mendes (2015, UK). The previous 007 film to this, Skyfall, was a massive international hit. I was less than enamoured of it – I laughed when I saw its open-air server farm, and I was flabbergasted, and deeply disappointed, when Skyfall itself turn out to be just a bloody house in Scotland. So my expectations – despite promotional advance notices – of SPECTRE were not high. And yet it still failed to meet them. The UK security services are being amalgamated under a super-technological super-surveillance organisation headed Andrew Scott (who seems to play the same character in every role), and whose technology was provided by a private contractor (plus much of its funding too). This is actually quite a pointed indictment of Tory politics and economics, but it’s unfortunately lost in the rest of the film’s crap plot. Which revolves around Oberhausen – later renaming himself Blofeld, er, for reasons – played by an unctuous Christoper Waltz, who is as threatening a villain as a week-old blancmange. Meanwhile, manly man Bond is totes old school and no one wants old school no more, so he’s persona non grata. Except totes old school is the only way to beat smiley villain Waltz and super-surveillance-state Scott. And the rest is all useless fat on a story already over-marbled with adipose tissue. The car chase through Rome in hypercars is superbly silly as there are no roads that allow the cars to reach the speeds they’re capable of. The family link between Oberhausen and Bond adds nothing. The female characters are paper-thin. Fiennes adds some much needed gravitas as M but is inconsistently written; and Wishart’s Q has yet to find a peg on which to hang his character. This is an underwhelming film. It has the big action sequences, it has the secret lair in the middle of nowhere, it even has the obligatory torture scene. But we’ve had more than half a century of Fleming’s hugely over-rated books, and it’s going to need more than state-of-the-art film-making to inject some much-needed life into the film franchise.

un_chien_andalouUn chien Andalou*/ L’Age d’or*, Luis Buñuel (1928/1930, France). I admit it, I looked away during the razor/eyeball scene. I’m squeamish, I won’t apologise for it. As for the rest of Un chien Andalou… er, um… Good question. It’s a surreal movie, and reputedly an early model for muscial promo videos, but to be honest I can’t remember what was part of Un chien Andalou, L’Age d’or or even Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet. They all seem to have merged in memory into one movie of bizarre cinematic non sequiturs. There was a man dressed as a nun, and a woman standing in the middle of street and then hit by a car, and, er… Nope, it’s gone. L’Age d’or at least boasted something approaching a plot, even if it was only a series of scenes of a pair of thwarted lovers. The opening sequence, however, seemed to bear no relationship to the rest of the film. And though it looked like a silent film (if that makes sense…), every now and again someone would speak. Meh. I’ve watched seven of Buñuel’s films so far, and I think I much prefer his later ones – although I did like The Exterminating Angel – and probably the one I’ve thought best so far is The Discreet Charm of Bourgeoisie. Oh well.

salt_earthSalt of the Earth*, Herbert J Biberman (1954, USA). I knew nothing about this film, other than it was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list and neither of the two rental services I used had copies. And then it appeared on Amazon Prime as a free-to-watch movie. So I watched it. Not the best quality, it has to be said – a cut above a rental VHS cassette, but about the same as a piss-poor DVD transfer. But. Amazing film. One that deserves to be restored and released on Blu-ray, that needs to be on every list of great films. Not because it is beautifully shot, or even amazingly acted, or fantastically scripted. It is, in most respects, a pretty ordinary drama of the early 1950s. But it is the reasons why it is not ordinary that make it stand out. Its story of a strike at a New Mexico zinc mine is based on real events. The US mining industry is notorious for its callous disregard of employees and environment. In Salt of the Earth, latino miners go on strike to demand equal pay to whites. But in order to get around an injunction against picketing their place of employment, it is their wives who actually picket. Leaving the men at home to look after kids and household. And the women are determined to win – so much so they continue despite being arrested repeatedly. And this is all based on true events. In fact, the bulk of the cast were not professional actors, but people actually involved in the strike which inspired the film. Go watch it.

out_of_africaOut Of Africa*, Sydney Pollack (1985, USA). I have yet to work out if I actually liked this film or not. As I watched it I sort of flipped from one state to the other. I liked the character played by Meryl Streep – Karen Blixen – but hated Streep’s weird accent. Robert Redford was a real charmer – but seemed too urbane for his part. The cinematograpy was mostly gorgeous – but still managed to hit every Africa cliché available. And yet… by the end I sort of found myself liking it. I think it’s possibly because it’s a dramatisation of Karen Blixen’s actual life, as documented in her book of the same title as the film, and that knowledge gave the film a much needed boost of credibility. The fact it’s a true story – it says so on the DVD cover – added an edge, more interest. I’m tempted to mention the cinematography, but it would be a piss-poor director who failed to find lovely visuals in Africa – and Pollack may not be an auteur, but he knows his craft and he’s been producing money-making films for decades. Not a great film, a borderline case perhaps, but I think I’m generally well-disposed toward it.

closely_observed_trainClosely Observed Trains*, Jirí Menzel (1966, Czech Republic). This is a title I’ve certainly seen mentioned a number of times in relation to classic films or recommended arthouse films or best world cinema. Despite all that, I knew little about it. It has, I now know, a typical Czech black humour, and its ingenu protagonist is a character Czech cinema has taken advantage of more than his fair share of times. In this case, the ingenu is a trainee station guard at a small country station in German-occupied Czechoslovakia during WWII. The remaining cast are… not grotesques, but certainly comic figures. And that’s about it. There’s a final sequence in which the ingenu places a bomb on a passing Nazi troop train, but the film is more a series of short character arcs than an actual story with a beginning, middle and end. Not a bad film, and probably deserving of its place on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, but not a great film.

tomorrowlandTomorrowland, Brad Bird (2015, USA). You know when you hear about a film and its premise sounds interesting and then you learn it was written by Damen Lindelof and you think oh fuck… Well, that’s Tomorrowland. On the plus-side, Disney have done an excellent job on the Blu-ray release. And the film does look quite lovely at times. On the other hand, it’s a complete hot mess that makes no sense and is about as rigourous as a bowl of strawberry jelly. Child Clooney visits the World Fair in 1964 and travels forward in time to a place called Tomorrowland. The film abruptly shifts to the present – except they’re taking apart Space Shuttle launch platforms and the last Space Shuttle mission was in 2011, so maybe not the present per se. Clooney is now a reclusive inventor after being thrown out of Tomorrowland – but Casey Newton, who has seen visions of Tomorrowland thanks to a special badge given to her – is determined to find her way there. And no, none of this actually makes any sense. The place Tomorrowland seems to be based more on magical technology rather than 1950s visions of the future (which was clearly the intent). And even in the so-called present-day, there’s the usual science fiction bobbins masquerading as plot – such as the robots with the shit-eating grins – but things really jump the shark when a wax exhibit on the Eiffel Tower proves to be the key to launching a secret steampunk rocket hidden under the edifice, which goes up into space, and, er, back down again but lands somewhere in Tomorrowland – because that’s how re-entry works obvs. And it’s all because the magic tech which keeps Tomorrowland together is slowly destroying our reality. Or something. The more you think about Tomorrowland, the less sense it makes. Which is pretty much Lindelof’s USP, I suppose. It doesn’t so much fail to suspend your disbelief as take your disbelief and throw it out of a fifty-storey window. I will no doubt watch this movie several times, and be even more confused by it – and not in a good way – with each subsequent viewing. A major disappointment.

1001 Films You Must See Before You Die count: 670


by 1 Comment

Moving pictures, #18

I bought an Amazon Fire TV Stick in their recent Prime Day, so these Moving pictures posts may become a little less frequent as I can now catch up on some 2015 television series I’ve missed. Because, despite having umpty-zillion cable television channels, there’s generally fuck-all on them worth seeing or that I haven’t seen before. One channel, for example, has been back-to-back episodes of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda for several weeks. Why? And other channels have gone right back to the first seasons of their most popular television shows, which of course I’ve already seen. Anyway, this all sort of explains why I watch so many movies…

tranceTrance, Danny Boyle (2013, UK). A charity shop find. Boyle is a name I know, though I can’t say I’m a fan, and the plot sounded twisty-turny enough to promise a reasonable night’s entertainment. And so it proved. James McAvoy works at a high-end auction house when a very valuable painting is stolen by thief Vincent Cassell and a team of thugs. During the robbery, McAvoy is beaten about the head by Cassel and subsequently suffers retrograde amnesia. Which is a problem, as he was actually in on the robbery and seems to have hidden the painting before apparently handing over the case containing it (under feigned duress) to Cassel. So McAvoy visits hypnotherapist Rosario Dawson in order to recover his lost memories… and it then gets all twistier and turnier. And there you have it. Thrillers this twisty-turny are nothing new, and the twenty-first century seems to have added a level of unnecessary gloss, and even-more-unnecessary gore – not to mention an often dodgy treatment of the female characters – and Trance is one of these in pretty much all respects. You’ll watch it, you might well enjoy it, but a couple of days later you’ll probably need hypnotherapy in order to remember it.

world_without_sunWorld Without Sun, Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1964, France). This is one of a number of documentaries Cousteau made about his underwater exploits, but I bought this one because it focused on Conshelf Two, the habitat he built ten metres underwater in the Red Sea. I remember Cousteau from my childhood, his films were a staple of Middle East English-language television channels, so I knew all about the Diving Saucer and the Calypso and I have fond memories of the films featuring them. But Conshelf Two I find much more interesting these days, so hence my purchase of this. And it was… weird. They all smoke! In an undersea habitat! Two of the divers spend a couple of days in a heliox environment in a tiny habitat much deeper, and the first thing one of them does on his return to Conshelf Two is… light up his pipe! The underwater photography was, of course, excellent and fascinating, and Cousteau’s narration was interesting and informative. But the sight of half-naked Frenchmen smoking Gauloises in a metal box thirty feet underwater is just…

from_the_new_worldFrom The New World, Pt 1 (2012, Japan). This was the second anime mentioned by David Tallerman, and while I sort of liked his first recommendation – Royal Space Force: Wings of Honnemâise, see here – I really didn’t take to this one at all. (He did say, incidentally, to ignore the somewhat dodgy cover – but, of course, Amazon rental only send me the disc so this is actually the first time I’ve seen it and… oof, it is pretty dodgy.) Anyway, From The New World is apparently based on a novel by Yusuke Kishi, and the anime adaptation is done in that big-eyed tiny-nosed style which is what most people probably think of when they think of anime. The story is set in the distant future, long after humans start manifesting psychic abilities and so bring about the collapse of civilisation. But everything is now happy and peaceful and agrarian – or so it seems. Much of the story concerns Saki Watanabe being trained in the use of her powers, her friends and lovers at special powers school, and a long adventure in which Saki and some friends get involved in a war between two groups of Monster Rats and there’s this creature which spends an entire episode giving them a history lesson and… I found this really quite dull. While I began to think more kindly of Royal Space Force: Wings of Honnemâise several days after watching it, I can’t say the same of this. Just Not My Thing. At All.

ordinary_peopleOrdinary People*, Robert Redford (1980, USA). A week or so after watching this film from 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and I’m having trouble remembering what it was about. I can recall it was Robert Redford’s directorial debut, and it was nominated for a load of Oscars… but the story has mostly gone. Something about a teenager suffering after a suicide attempt, and Mary Tyle Moore as his completely unlikeable mother. Let’s see… There’s an American family, middle-class, affluent, normal by Hollywood middle-America standards, and the eldest son drowned in a boating accident before the film started, the younger son has been suffering from survivor guilt and attempted suicide before the film started… and things on the home front are now pretty fraught. But the son is seeing an unconventional psychiatrist and the therapy seems to be working. However, things are getting worse at home because mother is being mean and father’s peace-keeping isn’t always successful and… yawn. Cross this one off the list, I’ve seen it, I’m likely never to watch it again and I’m perfectly happy with that.

the_passionate_friendsThe Passionate Friends, David Lean (1949, UK). The DVD cover alone should tell you this is a romantic triangle story, and the year and country indicates that it is, of course, all terribly terribly, with Ann Todd married to Claude Rains but still in love with ex-boyfriend Trevor Howard, against a backdrop of the Swiss Alps, and based on a novel by, of all people, HG Wells. It’s structured, as many British romantic dramas of the time seem to be, as a series of extended flashbacks. Todd arrives at a Swiss hotel, and learns that Howard has booked into the room next her, quite by coincidence. And so the film goes back nine years to Todd and Howard’s relationship, and then slowly winds its way forward through Todd’s rejection of Howard, her marriage to Rains, and thence to the meeting which opens the film. And from there it moves smoothly into a rekindling of their relationship, hubby finds out, divorce papers served, etc, etc. I actually quite enjoyed this – Todd is very watchable, the flashbacks explained the story rather than confused it, and the ending was a pleasant surprise. It’s a minor Lean work, although to be fair I’m pretty sure that everything he did except Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and The Bridge On The River Kwai was a minor work…

jupiter_ascendingJupiter Ascending, Wachowskis (2015, USA). I waited for the DVD before watching this because, well, what I’d heard about it didn’t bode all that well. It did, however, prove to be mostly accurate. You can call Jupiter Ascending bollocks or tosh or fluff or any number of terms that basically require you to turn off your brain before you attempt to watch it, but it is nonetheless undeniably pretty. This is a film which exists because of its visuals, and the fact they don’t entirely make sense is irrelevant. The story, a rags to riches, toilet cleaner to heiress to the entire galaxy, is just so stupid it completely bypasses the stupid filter. Eddie Redmayne is bloody awful as the main villain, Mila Kunis as the eponymous heroine is a charsima-free zone, and Channing Tatum’s character, a soldier engineered from dog/human genes, is just too daft to take seriously (not to mention Sean Bean’s half-human/half honeybee). There is some very pretty CGI, lots of gurning, evil villainess Tuppence Middleton looks weird for half the film but that’s because she’s wearing make-up so she appears old, and I really can’t remember most of the plot even though it’s only been a couple of weeks since I saw the film. Ten years from now, no one is going to be sticking this on their list of “ten great sf movies”, not unless they have zero critical faculties.

orientalelegyDolce, Aleksandr Sokurov (2000, Japan). This is one of three films on Sokurov’s Oriental Elegy DVD, which is extremely hard to find. I’d seen one or two copies on eBay and Amazon, going for between £200 and £250 each, which was way more than I was prepared to pay no matter how much I admire Sokurov as a director. But then a copy of Oriental Elegy popped up on eBay with a Buy-It-Now price of £25. I bought it. I was a little worried the item had actually been mislabelled, as there was no photograph, but it not only turned out to be a proper copy of Oriental Elegy but also still in its shrinkwrap. Result. But, Dolce… Sokurov’s documentaries resist easy classification, some more so than others. This one opens with a quick summary of the life of Japanese writer Toshio Shimao, a series of photographs with Sokurov in voiceover, the sort of stuff he started his career doing back in the early 1980s with Dimitri Shostakovich: Sonata For Viola, patching together archive footage and photographs to form a narrative. Dolce then becomes an interview of sorts with Mihao Shimao, who talks about her life with her father, although not in a conventional interview-sense, more as private reminiscences spoken out loud while alone (in Japanese, which Sokurov then speaks in Russian, and then appear in English subtitles). It’s affecting stuff, and very Sokurov – which means it’s likely to take a number of rewatches before I begin to understand exactly what is being said. Which is, of course, one of the reasons I like Sokurov’s stuff so much.

exterminating_angelThe Exterminating Angel*, Luis Buñuel (1962, Mexico). I have so far found Buñuel a bit hit and miss for me, but this particular film I found I liked the idea of it much more than I liked the execution. Which is not to say it’s a bad film – on the contrary, it’s very good. But the premise is one I find particularly appealing… but I do wonder if perhaps it wasn’t stretched out a bit too long. A group of affluent people meet up for a dinner party. Over the course of the evening, the servants quit and leave for no reason. The diners retire to the sitting-room… and then find they can’t leave it. At first it seems that they have no desire to, and start bedding down for the night. But then it becomes obvious they are psychologically incapable of doing so – for reasons no one understands. And as their “imprisonment” continues, so their civilised veneer is stripped away and their bestial natures are revealed. Now I don’t believe in all that “animal natures” crap, but I do like the idea of people being mysteriously trapped in a room which has a clear and obvious exit. Buñuel makes a proper meal of his conceit, before eventually reeling it all back, and leaving cast and audience no wiser as to what has happened. I liked that. Worth seeing.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 603


by 8 Comments

Moving pictures, #13

It’s the second week of December, and all that’s left of the year is the culmination of our annual consumerism frenzy and all the excesses of food and drink which go with it. So I might as well finish my viewing diary now. 2014 was definitely the year of films for me. I watched 345 films† on television, DVD / Blu-ray and at the cinema. Although very few of the last. Er, only two, in fact: Under The Skin and Interstellar. Most of the DVDs I watched were rentals – I averaged three a week for the entire year. And many of them I put on my rental list because they were on 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (as before, films on that list mentioned here are asterisked).

element_of_crimeElement Of Crime, Lars von Trier (1984, Denmark) After watching Breaking the Waves, I decided to try some more von Trier, particularly his early stuff; so I picked up a copy of his E-Trilogy, which contains this film, Epidemic and Europa. And deciding that Element Of Crime was the most accessible of the three, I sat down to watch it… And it’s all a bit like a film school project. Orange neon lighting is used throughout, which makes everything look, well, orange. Michael Elphick plays an ex-detective who undergoes hypnosis in order to remember his last case, the hunt for a serial killer in post-war Germany. In order to solve the case, Elphick tries to identify with the killer, and soon begins to behave like him. It all felt a bit obscure for obscurity’s sake, and whatever cleverness was there seemed lost in an orange haze. I also seem to remember lots of Dutch angles and light reflected in water. There’s an interesting idea somewhere in this film, but I’m not convinced its presentation made the best use of it.

worlds_endThe World’s End, Edgar Wright (2013 UK) A bunch of school friends get together for reasons that never quite convince in order to complete a pub crawl they had previously failed to complete twenty years before in the invented town of Newton Haven, a crawl of twelve pubs which ends at the titular hostelry. The five friends are drawn pretty broadly, as are their relationships, both historical and during the film, and for the first hour or so you’re wondering if it could get any more pointless… when it suddenly transpires that the town of Newton Haven has been taken over by alien robots. Which is where it all turns very silly. Parts of the town of Newton Haven looked scarily familiar – something that doesn’t happen in films or television very often if you happen to be from the north of this country – so I checked online and discovered The World’s End was partly filmed in Letchworth Garden City, a city I remember particularly well, despite only visiting it once, thanks to a Christmas work night out when I worked at ICL in Stevenage back in the early 1990s. Anyway, The World’s End: very silly, but mildly amusing; a bit juvenile in parts; probably best seen after a few beers.

IKnowWhereImGoingI Know Where I’m Going*, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger (1945, UK) I think I had this film confused with another Archers film, A Canterbury Tale, because I had thought it was about soldiers during World War II, but I Know Where I’m Going is actually set in the Hebrides, and while Roger Livesey’s character is on furlough from the Navy, the war is barely mentioned. Wendy Hiller is heading for the invented Hebridean island of Kiloran in order to meet up with her wealthy fiancé and marry him. But when she gets to the Isle of Mull, the weather prevents a crossing to Kiloran. There, she meets Livesey, who is the laird of Kiloran, and the film moves smoothly into rom com territory. It is, as you’d expect from the Archers, a polished piece, with bags of charm. Livesey, who possesses a voice only marginally less fruity than Brian Blessed, is eminently watchable and a surprisingly good romantic lead; as is Hiller, who exhibits a similar spikiness to that which bought Katherine Hepburn a bagful of Oscars. I’ve always been a fan of the Archers, and there’s nothing in I Know Where I’m Going to make me change my mind.

kippurKippur*, Amos Gitai (2000, Israel) This is based on Gitai’s own experiences in the Israeli military during the Yom Kippur War. Two friends on military service fail to meet up with their unit thanks to the Syrian invasion, and eventually end up joining a helicopter rescue unit. This involves flying out onto battlefields to evacuate the wounded. It’s dangerous work, but at least they’re not shooting at anybody. It’s all very realistic, blackly comic, and quite gruesome. The two end up wounded themselves, when their helicopter enters Syrian territory and is shot down by a missile. A good film.

father_and_sonFather And Son, Aleksandr Sokurov (2003, Russia) I have a lot of time for Sokurov’s films, but boy are they slow. They make Tarkovsky’s look like they were made for the MTV generation. The plot of Father And Son is almost inconsequential. It’s about a man and, er, his son, and their relationship. The son is at a military academy, but he spends time with his father in his roof-top apartment and… it doesn’t really matter what happens. Father And Son is a microscopic examination of the relationship between the two, beautifully photographed and remorselessly documented. I’ve maintained for the last couple of years that Sokurov’s The Second Circle (a favourite film) is the epitome of the father-son film and, though you’d expect from its title Father And Son would be more so, I’m not sure  that it is. But I do really like this film, I like the gentle construction of its central relationship, and I especially like the visuals. Sokurov is without a shadow of a doubt one of the best film-makers currently working. I only wish more of his stuff were available in the UK.

in_lonely_placeIn A Lonely Place*, Nicholas Ray (1950, USA) Humph is an acerbic screenwriter who has been asked by a producer to adapt a best-selling novel. Since the book is trash and he has no intention of actually reading it, he asks a hat-check girl at the nightclub who admits to having read it to come home with him and tell him the story. She does so, but during her journey back to her own home later that night she is murdered. The police immediately suspect Humph. He is partly alibied by next-door neighbour Gloria Grahame, and the two later enter into a relationship. Humph gets cracking on the screenplay, but the police still suspect him and he’s such a nasty piece of work that pretty soon everyone thinks he murdered the hat-check girl, even Grahame. So she decides to leave him… but then the real killer confesses to the police, but Humph and Grahame’s relationship has already crashed and burned. A neat little noir this, although Humph’s character really was quite unpleasant. And while the did he/didn’t he aspect never quite convinced, tying it to his relationship with Grahame was a neat move.

noahNoah, Darren Aronofsky (2014, USA) When I was a kid I went to Sunday School, but I don’t remember any of this from those Biblical colouring books we had. Six-limbed angels made out of stone? A giant fantasy stonepunk empire? Two races of humans? I don’t even remember it from history lessons at school. There was the big boat, of course, and the Deluge. And the animals going in two by two, and even the stranger creatures which got left behind. Apparently, the religious nutjobs in the US more or less approved of Noah, which is surprising given that the word “God” is not mentioned once – it’s “the Creator” throughout. So it seems turning a bit of the Bible into a fantasy film is fine, but using a fantasy novel or film to comment on Christianity is not. The Golden Compass was a much better film than this, and it’s a shame the trilogy was spiked. But one man and his floating wooden fort full of sedated animals in fantasyland seems to be acceptable. Huh.

rocco_and_his_brothers_masters_of_cinema_series_uk_dvdRocco and his Brothers*, Luchino Visconti (1960, Italy) Mother and four sons head from their village in southern Italy to go live with the eldest son in Milan, although he apparently doesn’t seem to be expecting them. And their sudden appearance puts the kaibosh on his impending nuptials. The five brothers, ranging in age from early teens to mid-twenties, and their mother struggle to survive. The film is presented in five parts, one for each of the brothers – the title role, incidentally, is played by Alain Delon. One brother becomes a boxer, but fails and becomes a gangster. Another turns his back in the family and settles down. Another gets a job in a car factory, and supports the rest of the family. A prostitute befriended by Delon becomes embroiled in the lives of the brothers, and is brutally murdered by the boxer – but Delon won’t give him up to the police, so one of the others does so. I don’t know if Rocco and his Brothers was the first Italian Realism film, but it’s certainly a textbook example – and so very far from Visconti’s later work, such The Damned or Death In Venice. I can understand why this film is on the 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die list.

belle_de_jourBelle de Jour*, Luis Buñuel (1967, France) Catherine Deneuve is the bored wife of a doctor, with an active and somewhat dodgy fantasy life (featuring, among other things, being whipped by coach hands), and when the creepy older friend of her spouse drops hints – not to mention outright lewd proposals – about a brothel on a particular street in Paris, Deneuve makes her way there and joins the staff as a part-time sex worker. One of her early customers is a young and angry gangster, and the two fall in love – although, to be honest, I couldn’t understand what she saw in him. Then creepy older man from earlier turns up and the cat is out of the bag. Meanwhile young gangster has worked out who Deneuve really is, and lies in wait outside her apartment so he can kill her husband. It goes badly, but ends well for Deneuve. An odd film, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. The men are horrible, it all feels horribly bourgeois, and Deneuve is a complete cipher. I much preferred The Discreet Charm of Bourgeoisie.

wolf_of_wall_streetThe Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese (2013, USA) This has appeared on several best of the year lists from film critics (although released on 25 Dec 2013 in the US, it wasn’t released in the UK until 17 Jan 2014). To be honest, I’ve no idea why. It’s a well-made film, certainly; as Scorsese’s films always are. But the reason I don’t like Scorsese’s movies is that he valourises scumbags. If it’s not Mafia, bonkers billionaires or psychotic killers, then it’s the sort of amoral Gecko-like figure the title of this film refers to – and he’s a real person, Jordan Belfort. Just after joining a Wall Street firm, Belfort finds himself out of a job when it crashes and burns as a result of Black Monday. He stumbles across the penny stocks market, and jumps in with both feet, basically ripping off ordinary people in order to make a fortune for himself. And he makes a very large fortune. Which, of course, leads to a lifestyle of complete excess – the film opens with Belfort explaining the drugs he takes during a typical day. The FBI take an interest in him because, well, because what he’s doing is illegal, although they can’t prove it. Chiefly because he’s salted away most of his funds in a Swiss bank. Although Belfort loses access to the account when his courier, a British aunt of his wife, dies. Eventually, everything comes crashing down. Belfort is indicted and sentenced… to 36 months in a minimal-security prison. They should have thrown away the key. And taken every cent his firm earned and given it back to the people he ripped off. Belfort, of course, remains unrepentant and claims 95% of his business was legit. (Reading up on him, it seems much of the memoir on which the film was based is doubtful, Belfort was ordered to repay $110 million but has to date only repaid $11 million; and he now works as a motivational speaker, making more, he claims, than he did as a stock broker/fraudster.)

peeping_tomPeeping Tom*, Michael Powell (1960, UK) This film pretty much destroyed Powell’s career. Although he was well-regarded as one half of the Archers, British critics savaged Powell’s film on its release – so much that he never made another feature film in the UK. It’s tempting to say the film is tame to a twenty-first century viewer, but to be honest I suspect the reaction to it in 1960 was nine parts the British press monstering someone to one part actual outrage. After all, they did the same eleven years later over A Clockwork Orange. In actual fact, Peeping Tom is a smart thriller, similar to Hitchcock’s Psycho in many respects, but made with a British sensibility and incorporating a number of Archer touches. A young man who works in a film studio, and as a photographer on the side, murders women and photographs them at the moment of their deaths. The film follows him, so there’s no mystery to it; but the film does discuss the psychology, as outlined in a number of conversations with the young woman who lives downstairs. Moira Shearer makes an appearance halfway through the movie, only to become the next victim ten minutes later – given her stature in British cinema of the time, this struck me as similar to Hitchcock’s trick with Janet Leigh in Psycho. Especially since she performs a quick impromptu dance number. Definitely worth seeing.

cone_of_silenceCone Of Silence, Charles Frend (1960, UK) I forget why I put this on my rental list, possibly because it’s an aviation drama and I enjoy them. As it turned out, it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Yes, it’s a drama about a particular aircraft, a jetliner called an “Atlas Phoenix” and which was played by an Avro Ashton – the Ashton was a prototype airliner which never entered production, but the one used in the film was actually a test-bed, fitted with two additional jets in wing nacelles for engine-testing. Bernard Lee plays a by-the-book captain who crashes a Phoenix at “Ranjibad” on take-off – the Phoenix flies the Empire route from the UK to Australia – and an inquest finds the crash the result of pilot error. Lee, and those who know him, of course disagree. Against the wishes of Atlas, Lee is permitted to once again captain the Phoenix. But some elements within the airline want to see him either fired or demoted to piston-engined airliners. And then he crashes again at Ranjibad, in identical conditions to the first crash. But this time everyone is killed. And it turns out Atlas didn’t let on that under certain conditions, the manual for take-off is incorrect. The story is, of course, based on the de Havilland Comet, and de Havilland’s reluctance to reveal data that might point to the aircraft itself being the cause of the crashes which grounded it. Given the prestige wrapped up in the Comet – not to mention the money – as it was the world’s first airliner, it’s no surprise de Havilland acted as they did, although many lives were lost as a result. Cone Of Silence spends perhaps too long on the lives of its characters, so the actual plot is wrapped up a little too quickly in the last ten minutes, but it’s a good solid piece of 1960s British cinema and worth seeing.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 535

(† This includes complete seasons of television programmes I watched on DVD, but not on terrestrial or cable television.)


by Leave a comment

Moving pictures, #11

Here’s more of those silvery round things with the moving pictures cunningly encoded on them. To date, I’ve watched 520 of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, although many of them I’d seen before I came across the list and decided to make an effort to complete it. (Again, asterisked ones are on the list.)

amourAmour*, Michael Haneke (2012, France) I bought this the moment it was released since I think Haneke is one of the most interesting directors currently making films, but I never actually got around to watching it until recently. I’m not sure why. I think it was perhaps because I’d bounced out of Funny Games the first time I tried to watch it and was afraid I’d do the same with this. I needn’t have worried. A retired couple in Paris, the wife suffers a stroke, and then surgery for a blocked artery goes wrong and leaves her semi-paralysed and confined to a wheelchair, the husband finds it increasingly harder to cope. Haneke doesn’t do cheerful films, but this is a completely cheerless one. Good, but not his best.

Tsotsi*, Gavin Hood (2005, South Africa). The title character is a young hoodlum in Soweto who steals a woman’s car, only to discover her baby in the back. He strips the car but keeps the baby, but soon realises he doesn’t know how to look after it. So he terrorises a young woman he sees at a public water pump into helping him. Meanwhile, the police are hunting for the car thief, and Tsoti’s friends have taken up with the local gangster. No one is really likeable in this film, they’re mostly thugs; but Hood manages to make the title character sympathetic. There’s an especially telling scene where he attacks a disabled ex-miner, but then realises that preying on the weak and helpless is no way to live. Worth seeing.

Stachka*, Sergei Eisenstein (1925, Russia). AKA Strike. This is Eisenstein’s first full-length film, made the same year, but before, Battleship Potemkin. It’s pure propaganda, but I was surprised to see how many modern film techniques, such as jump cuts and montages, that Eisenstein uses. The film depicts a strike in a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia, and its suppression by the capitalist owners and tsarist authorities. It’s pretty brutal in places and, sadly, less than a century later, its premise is not one we can consign to the dustbin of history.

Taza, Son Of Cochise, Douglas Sirk (1954, USA). Sirk made a handful of brilliant films, but he also made a lot of crap ones. This is one of the latter although, to be fair, it was slightly better than I expected – and it is subversive for a western as it’s told entirely from the Native American side and it shows them trying to seek peace with the US. Well, not all of them. The title character, played by Rock Hudson, certainly is, he’s trying to stick to the treaty his father signed, and he even becomes the first officer of the “Indian police”. But one of the other members of the tribe is not so willing to bend over backwards – the Americans have forced the tribe to move onto a reservation, for example – and kicks off a rebellion. The film’s heart may be in the right place, but it’s hard to ignore that so many of the cast are whites playing Native Americans.

zero_theoremThe Zero Theorem, Terry Gilliam (2013, UK). It’s been a while since Gilliam made a film that blew me away – in fact the last few have been pretty lacklustre, and I think his most interesting piece in the last two decades has been a documentary on his failed attempt to make a film about Don Quixote. The Zero Theorem has been called a return to form, a phrase which always make me suspicious. I’ve seen mostly positive reviews of the film, which, unfairly, had led me to expect something as good as his earlier masterpieces. It’s not. The metaphor used for the “entity crunching” doesn’t make much sense and Bainsley feels like the sort of character only a dirty old man would think is necessary. But David Thewlis plays his part well, and Matt Damon’s wardrobe is quite amusing.

The Discreet Charm of Bourgeoisie*, Luis Buñuel (1972, France). This is one of the those films that slowly sucks you into its somewhat off-kilter world. It starts unremarkably enough: two couples turn up to another couple’s house for a planned dinner party, only to discover they’ve got the wrong day and the husband is away that night. So they take the wife to a nearby auberge with a good reputation, but it’s closed. They persuade the maître d to let them – only to learn the proprietor died that day, which is why the restaurant is closed. The film then follows the three couples as they arrange other dinner parties, including one with a contingent of military officers, a party that turns into a play on a stage… and it all becomes increasingly surreal as the film progresses. I had not expected to like this film as much as I did.

Lady For A Day, Frank Capra (1933, USA). Capra later remade this in 1961 as Pocketful Of Miracles, with Bette Davis and Glenn Ford – that was, in fact, Capra’s last feature film. An old woman who sells apples on the street to make ends meet has a daughter she gave away when young and who is now living in Spain. And who now wants her aristocratic Spanish fiancé to meet her mother who, she believes, is well-to-do and lives in a posh hotel. Fortunately, a local gangster considers the old woman is his good luck charm and is happy to help out. So they turn the old woman into the “lady” her daughter believes her to be, rent a big penthouse and organise a big bash… but it doesn’t go quite according to plan. Fortunately, everything works out… The very definition of a feel-good film.

Ponyo, Hiyao Miyazaki (2008, Japan). I find many of the Studio Ghibli films unbearably twee and this one is little different. The title character is a magical fish, who falls in love with a young boy who captures her and so returns to land as a young girl. So it’s basically The Little Mermaid. But Ponyo’s father is not happy, not just with her betrayal but with the humans’ pollution of the ocean. Happily Ponyo’s mother, the Goddess of Mercy, saves the day.

Sansho_Dayu_DVDSansho Dayu*, Kenji Mizoguchi (1954, Japan). Feudal Japan, and a manorial estate managed by the titular character has a slave labour force, among which are the children of a disgraced governor. Once the children reach adulthood, they manage to escape – at least the man does, the woman gives herself up to distract their pursuers. The young man goes looking for his mother, who was sold into slavery elsewhere. En route, he runs into his old mentor, who gives him a letter to prove his identity as he wants to appeal to the Chief Advisor. After proving his bona fides, the young man is made governor of the province containing the manor which Sansho manages. The young man tells Sansho he is outlawing slavery, Sansho retaliates, but the young governor’s soldiers prevail. Slow, but affecting.

Brüno, Larry Charles (2009, USA). If I thought Sacha Baron Cohen playing Borat in redneck country, USA, was stupidly dangerous, then playing Brüno, a camp and very dim fashionista, in Jerusalem is, well, I’m surprised he got out alive. And I certainly hope the interview with the terrorist group leader was faked. Other parts clearly weren’t – especially those where he interviews celebrities after moving to LA. Much like the earlier film, there were some moments of comic genius – the velcro suit was classic; some of the cinema verité parts were scary; and other bits weren’t so good. Although I did think it held together better overall than Borat.

The Lost Weekend*, Billy Wilder (1945, USA). Ray Milland is such an alkie he hangs his bottles of whisky out of the window on a piece of string so his brother doesn’t find them. Or his girlfriend, Jane Wyman, for that matter. Milland claims to be a writer but he’s not written a word. When his brother leaves him alone in the flat for a weekend, he finds the money left to pay the housekeeper, and goes on a binge. I’m completely mystified as to why this is considered a classic, it was pure temperance propaganda, and so overwrought I’m surprised Milland’s liver didn’t spontaneously explode. I don’t think Lowry need have worried about this movie, his novel is hugely superior.

imposterThe Imposter, Bart Layton (2012, UK). In 1994, a thirteen-year-old boy disappeared from a Texas town. Three years later, a teenager in Spain claimed to be that boy, and the family flew him to the US and welcomed him into their home as their missing son – even though this teenager spoke with a French accent, was seven years older than the missing boy, and had brown eyes and dark hair instead of blue eyes and blond hair. It took a suspicious private investigator to realise something was wrong. The teenager turned out to be a con man, who had been impersonating other children for years. A very odd documentary, it’s quite astonishing the family were blind to the differences – although, as a few in the film suggest, they might have been keen to welcome the imposter to hide the fact they murdered the missing boy.

Gion Bayashi, Kenji Mizoguchi (1953, Japan). I hadn’t planned on watching this, as I hadn’t actually put it on my rental list. But it was part of a double set with Sansho Dayu, and I only discovered this when I received the disc and thought, hang on, I don’t remember this one… And, after all that, I enjoyed it more than I did Sansho Dayu. A teenage girl has left her uncle, who was supposed to look after her but instead tried abusing her, and instead up at an okiya and asks the geisha, a friend of her late mother, to take her on as an apprentice. The geisha initially refuses, but then agrees after getting a loan for the cost of tuition from her old tutor. But when the teenager, shortly after graduating from geisha school, fights off a client, it jeopardises an important business deal and she and the geisha are ostracised. Set just after WW2, the Japan depicted is on the cusp of change – the okiya and the geishas are traditional, but most of the men wear Western clothing and are involved in engineering. Really enjoyed this one.

failsafeFail-Safe, Sidney Lumet (1964, USA). This film was adapted from the novel of the same title, which also inspired Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, and was released in the same year as Kubrick’s film. An unidentified plane crosses the DEW line, fighters are sent to intercept – these are the days of SAGE, by the way – and squadrons of “Vindicator” bombers head off to their rendezvous points to await the order to attack the USSR with their nuclear bombs. The UFO proves to be an off-course airliner, but the stand-down message gets garbled when sent to one of the Vindicator squadrons. Which promptly heads for Soviet airspace at supersonic speeds to drop an atom bomb on Moscow. The US president is understandably upset at this, and the USSR premier is understandably sceptical that this is actually a horrible accident. WW3 must be averted. The film was all a bit intense, Walter Matthau’s hawkish political advisor character was annoying, the Vindicator bombers were actually B-58 Hustlers… which meant the interior shots of their cockpits was all wrong… And, well, I can understand why Dr Strangelove was more successful.


by 4 Comments

Moving pictures, #6

I’m not entirely sure what happened to June. It seemed to pass really quickly, without me getting much done. And July is looking like it might go the same way. But I have watched a lot of films – if only because of that damned f**tball. So while I scramble to catch up with various ongoing projects – including something a little more intelligent to post on this blog than just lists of books and films – here is a, er, list of films wot I have watched recently.

Sherlock Jr, Buster Keaton (1924, USA) Keaton is a cinema projectionist and dreams himself the hero of the film he’s showing, a murder-mystery among the wealthy, and, of course, there’s a nubile daughter, who Keaton wants to impress. There are some good gags in this, but none that matched the train journey in Our Hospitality (see here).

Wages Of Fear, Henri-Georges Clouzot (1953, France) The oil well is on fire, and the only way to put it out is using lots of nitroglycerine, but that’s stored a couple of hundred miles away at the company HQ, and the only way to get it to the wellhead is by truck. Which is, of course, really really dangerous – if not suicidal. But that’s okay because there’s loads of desperate men trapped in the nearby town, who have no jobs and not enough money to leave… The film takes a while to get going, but the drive over the mountains with two trucks full of explosives is pretty good.

Faust, Aleksandr Sokurov (2011, Russia) If Tarkovsky’s film often seem glacially-paced, then Sokurov’s are geological. But, like Tarkovsky’s, they’re also beautifully shot and observed. The title pretty much tells you all you need to know about the story of this film. The mise en scène looks fantastic, and the moneylender (ie, the devil) is horrible and creepy… a film to savour.

faust

Moscow Elegy, Aleksandr Sokurov (1987, Russia) Sokurov and Tarkovsky had been friends since film school, and this documentary was put together – from footage by Chris Marker, Tarkovsky himself (behind the scenes footage from both Nostalgia and The Sacrifice), and excerpts from Tarkovsky’s films – to be shown on Tarkovsky’s birthday in 1982. Interference by the Soviet authorities led to delays and, sadly, Tarkovsky died before the film premiered. Despite all the Tarkovsky footage in this, there’s no mistaking it for a Sokurov film. This is one of three documentaries on The Andrei Tarkovsky Companion, which I bought when it was released… and I see it now goes for around £88.

Lincoln, Steven Spielberg (2012, USA) I know only what most non-USians know about Lincoln, and this film pretty much covers all those – Civil War, emancipation, assassinated in a theatre, peculiar beard. It’s a dull film for the first half, but Lincoln proves a surprisingly pragmatic president – ie, openly buying votes to push his amendment through Congress. Things pick up a little in the second half, and despite it being an historical conclusion, Spielberg manages to wring some tension from the final vote scene. Having said all that, this is very much by the numbers American History 101. Day-Lewis plays a good part, but all those historical forces feel of the moment rather than the endgame of a long political struggle. Meh.

Make Way for Tomorrow, Leo McCarey (1937, USA) Old retired couple’s house is repossessed by the bank, leaving them homeless, and the grown-up kids are pretty adamant they don’t want the old folks dumped on them – though, in the end, one takes the father and another takes the mother. And they really are an unpleasant family. While this film may be 84 years old, not a fat lot appears to have changed since then. But when you have a welfare state with state pensions and council houses, old people don’t get left on the street to die as they are in some allegedly civilised countries…

Black Moon Rising, Harley Cokliss (1986, USA) A straight-to-DVD thriller notable only for the astonishing mullet worn by Linda Hamilton during the first half-hour (happily, it proves to be a wig). Tommy Lee Jones is a top thief, working for the government, but a job goes wrong, and he has to hide the stolen computer tape in an experimental 300 mph supercar invented by Richard Jaeckel. But then Hamilton’s gang of car thieves, run by shady billionaire Robert Vaughn, steals the supercar, and Jones must get it back.

blackmoon

Tristana, Luis Buñuel (1970, Spain/France) Catherine Deneuve plays an orphan who is adopted by a wealthy don in 1960s Toledo, who treats her like a daughter, but the moment she turns nineteen, he decides she’s his mistress. Meanwhile, she falls in love with a man nearer her own age, runs off to live with him, is taken ill, which results in her losing a leg, and she eventually ends up back with her don. An odd film, it played like an historical melodrama, but didn’t look like one.

The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke (2009, Austria/Germany) This is probably my favourite Haneke film, and it’s beautifully put together. A series of mysterious incidents in a German village just prior to World War I cause the villagers to turn on each other, but Haneke refuses to explain who is responsible or why. Beautifully photographed and really quite unsettling.

Golem, Piotr Szulkin (1979, Poland) That Szulkin box set was definitely a good buy. There isn’t a duff film in it, although this is perhaps the least interesting. In a future much like the ones Szulkin has depicted in his other films – ie, grim and dystopian – clones are used to fill out the workforce, and are treated very badly. But one clone may actually be a man – he’s not sure as he can’t remember, and the scientists are too clear on the matter either, as they may have got confused between the clone and the original human.

Mięso (Ironica), Piotr Szulkin (1993, Poland) I suspect this film is going to make my best of the year – which is a little perverse as it’s a 26-minute television short included as an extra feature in the Piotr Szulkin box set I bought earlier this year – and the actual films in the box set are all very good and worth seeing. But Mięso (Ironica) is in a class of its own. It’s a lecture on the history of Poland under Communism, using the availability of meat and meat products as illustration. It’s filmed in an outdoor meat market, by a cast who are clearly not actors, and in many cases are holding the script in their hand, or need prompting by others. There are also a number of dance routines, including one in which half a dozen riot police dance off against half a dozen Roman Catholic clergy in full regalia. In one scene, a woman in a wheelchair tries to position herself before the camera, but the cobbles are so slippery that by the time she’s in place she’s too knackered to speak.

Mięso (Ironica) (1993) 4 - 007

The Seventh Continent, Michael Haneke (1989, Austria) Another favourite by Haneke, and allegedly inspired by true events. A middle-class Austrian family, after spending much of the film going about their lives, suddenly tell everyone they are emigrating to Australia. They then eat a large feast, smash everything they own, and then commit suicide. Like The White Ribbon, it’s deeply unsettling, but this time the lack of explanation plays off against the prosaic nature of what has gone before.

Lola Montès, Max Ophüls (1955, France) This has one of the strangest framing narratives I’ve come across in a mainstream film. Lola Montès is a circus performer, enacting scenes from her life, with the help of the other circus performers and narrated by ringmaster Peter Ustinov. As each new chapter in her life begins, the view fades from the circus ring to a flashback of the actual events. It’s all very colourful, sumptuous even, but Montès is not a sympathetic protagonist and not even the well over-the-top staging prevents interest from flagging. Apparently, this flopped on release, and was butchered by the studio in an attempt to save it. I saw the restored version, and it clearly should have been left alone – but I think I understand why it did so badly back in 1955…

lola-montes--max-ophuls