INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS @ 70 (Spoilers)

Local doctor Miles gets back to town to find a number of people are claiming that family members have been replaced. Mothers, Uncles, children have suddenly changed to strangers. They look and talk the same and even have the right memories but there's an essence lacking. Miles dismisses this at first but is haunted by the number of cases being reported. One night, he is called to a friend's house, the town bohemian, as it happens, and finds an indentical copy of him lying on the billard table. The body is perfect but lacks all the signs of decades of life. When the guy accidentallky cuts his hand, a cut appears on the copy. Phone calls here, hurried drives there, the town is being taken over by people who form in giant pods and takeover their assigned bodies while those are asleep. A quiet and thorough invasion from space.

This, the invasion and evasion, is the plot but the threads are concerned with the loss of that essential humanity. When the pod people have a chance to speak, they appeal to the painlessness of their new form, no love but also no hate, no shame, no guilt. A moment of cornered affection between Miles and his love Becky negates that promise and firms their resolve to resist. 

It's the question of resistance that has driven both ends of the political spectrum to claim Invasion of the Body Snatchers for themselves. In the '50s of its birth, you can easily see how the McCarthyite watchdogs would see this dehumanisation as communism, the collective over the individual. But it's just as easy to see a critique of the apple pie conformity assumed by the anti communists. If you've got sides, it's plain fun to accuse the other one of being pod people.

What is clear is that mobs are mobs and the threat of control by them is terrifying. The scene before the mobs form is one of chilling conformity as the small town seems to move as one organism, appearing from the footpaths and silently swarming to the town square to recieve their new pods from delivery trucks. If you saw this in the mid-'50s in the USA it would have frozen you, either way you looked at it. The idea that the other is yourself is a perfectly hit note for the times. While this film keeps things a lot more grounded than I Married a Monster from Outer Space (a LOT less cheesy than its title) it knows its audience well.

And it had durability. Body Snatchers is one of the few horror movies that is cited as an exception to the rule of the inferiority of remakes. Along with The Thing and The Fly, this one was successfully reinserted into later cultures only it was redone well more than once which gives it the edge. In 1978 the me-generation with its psychobabble gets infiltrated by pod versions of itself that are beyond empathy. 1993's Bodysnatchers put the story into a military context (nuff said).

This original from mid century America with its poster pefect couple (Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter) does carry the first told charm. Miles's lustful banter with Becky feels like old man entitlement now but it does get well batted back by Becky and then the stakes between them are raised as it resolves as love to face the challenge of never feeling that again. A little context tolerance allows that indulgence effortlessly. The incident that breaks the couple's humanity while surrounded by the pod people concerns the safety of a dog. Later, in 1978 (which did not fall back on the love switch) this has become the sight of a monstrosity. A scream will always turn you in.

The original cut of this film (which did not make it to the first release) did not include the framing scenes in a Los Angeles police station where the raving Miles is calmed and tells his tale. There was a home video release without these scenes which starts in normality an ends in panic as Miles screams futilely in the middle of a busy highway that everyone around him will be next, at one point yelling it down the camera to the audience. In the early days o' DVD I bought a cheapo with a terrible transfer which featured this ending. This was my first viewing of it and it played very strongly. There had been a campaign to offer this restored form but it couldn't make it to the people who made the decisions about it, even as an alternative version. That's a pity as, without the reassurance of the good guys in the big city taking control with an early warning, the prospect was nightmarish. My scrubbed up 4K which looks so beautiful might have been presented with the Ur potency. But no.

Lifting the filter of vintage cinema and mores and presenting this version to today's America makes things a lot less tame in light of the apparent shift toward authoritarianism and hive mindedness. Imagine the January 6th insurrection done as a quiet swarm and you'll get the idea.

Viewing notes: I watched Kino Lorber's excellent 4K release, choosing the standard widescreen presentation over the offered 2:1 alternative (both were released originally). I'm calling it a 70th anniversary despite it normally being considered a 1956 release as I noticed it said MCMLV in the credit sequence. I was using it as a pallet cleanser from the excerable V/H/S/Halloween which was mostly tedious garbage. It was good to see the clean lines, solid characters and thoughtful craft of this one after that mess. At time of writing there are no local releases of this on physical media. It can be hired through Prime, Apple and YouTube.

GINGER SNAPS @ 25

Something is ravaging the dogs in the quiet and flavourless suburb of Bailey Downs. Brigitte Fitzgerald emerges from her family garage, laden with lethal equipment, and sees her neighbour screaming about finding the latest victim. She tells the dog on the other side to shutup and returns to the basement bedroom she shares with her sister Ginger. Ginger is wondering about suicide methods, toying with a knife at her wrist. The pair are a pact of two, teenagers in opposition to the world at large. As Ginger says, offering a hand of solidarity, "united against life as we know it. Out by sixteen or dead on the scene. Together forever." They then go about videoing their school project Life in Bailey Downs, a series of staged suicides as the credits roll.

The Fitzgerald sisters keep to themselves at school and are taunted by the other girls and (Ginger, at least) lusted after by the boys. Their secretive dialogue is entirely resistent to the teen-go-round of playing and mating. After a run in with the local alpha chick, Brigitte suggests a prank with alpha's dog. If it works, great, if it goes wrong, they can always blame the Beast of Bailey Downs. While putting the prank together one night, they come across another victim of the Beast and Ginger's first period begins (both girls are years late menstruating) and then the werewolf attacks, leaving Ginger a torn and bloodied mess. At home, after escaping the monster (who gets splattered by a van), Ginger's wounds begin to heal before their eyes. 

Karen Walton's and John Fawcett's upgraded werewolf story drags the mythology of the werewolf from the traditional burden of secreted animalistic violence and even beyond a sexual motive and plonks the condition squarely into adolescence where we all wade through our own tales of  body horror, no exceptions. The voice changes, ball drops, periods and skin explosions and the myriad rest of it have been there for centuries waiting for such recognition. It's only taken a few millennia of tale spinning.

What about Teenwolf? Good point but while this shares a comedic approach with the '80s piece, the underlying darkness remains core. The Fitzgeralds have discovered the futility of fantasising a lifelong pass from doing what the world wants of them but then, when joining it, there is only more futility, more struggle, more life-crushing hosility. Teenwolf did get through a few similar issues but Ginger Snaps concentrates on them: the superpowers of the transformation just accentuate the brutality. Every teenager, apart from the very one percent at the top of the pecking order, would use the nuclear codes at the drop of a hat. Nothing, neither power nor sex changes that. In the end all they have is sibling love but even that gets tested toward tragedy.

If that just sounds like more downers about angst ridden teens, be aware that this is a constantly funny movie. Only at the end, when it has to stand up an be a horror piece, does that change. The dialogue might remind you of the inventiveness of Heathers or the TV version of Buffy. "The fuck, B, this is your idea. If you don't like your ideas, stop having them." But then there are moments of poignancy in the sass. A local buck sees Ginger in pain, buying tampons in the supermarket and suggests that a toke would take the edge off. Ginger quietly rasps, "maybe I like my edge." Thoughts that seem to transcend adolesence are set so strongly within it that they convince.

Ginger is given a stomping performance by Katherine Isabelle who runs through every sudden turn and rip. Her bludgeoning eyes get her through freezeouts and one of the strongest suddenly-hot-dweeb-girl-strolls-down-the-school-hall scenes in cinema history. Her elder sister ptoection of Brigitte is quietly authoritative and her growing wildness never less than convincing. By the end she is the monster she promised to deliver but still the girl who tried to wish it all away. Emily Perkins as Brigitte gets most of the screen time and gives us a constant cringe from acting out of ghastly necessity. It's over for her, as well, as nothing will be like the confident life-denying pacts she made with Ginger. Her negotiations with the local drugster and agent of help see her taking her protective role into a maturity beyond her years. It's a great push-pull turn. Necessary shout to Mimi Rogers as the ditzy parachute mum whose every scene is a belly laugh.

This is a tale of latchkey kids, X to Millennial, who were yet to have their culture conquered by screen time and needed to work things out themselves. It's a story of the pressures of girlhood and coasting "along the way the world works". It's a mini epic of the need for the kind of culture that sneered at cosmetics called Teen Spirit and had just been taken to the entrance to hell in a $2 indy called The Blair Witch Project. This was neither Heathers nor Scream. It was unsafe and its comedy was on the prowl. That it still works is its message.

THE APPARTMENT @ 65

Charlie Baxter is a drone at an insurance company, buzzing away with a crowd of others in a low cieling office that is about as close as you get to a hive on a human scale. He's still young but has ambitions. He often works late, as he says in his narration. Then we find out why. Through a series of small favours that escalated, he lends his appartment to a small group of executives who use it for extra marital sex. They keep him strung with promises of advancement but by this time those are sounding hollow. 

On the way into work each morning he has a smile and banter with the lift girl Fran. He's impressed by her as she handles herself firmly with the handsy execs and seems above the exploitation mill that Charlie enables. Then one day the promises are made good and he gets called upstairs. The mighty Mr Sheldrake wants to see him. There is the prospect of promotion but, really, it's just another suit buying into the appartment rort. He's already been stranded outdoors while his higher ups take their time in his home, his neighbours complain about the noise and he seems to be shrinking into a barely functional stasis. Will having his own office be worth it?

Billy Wilder's 1960 interpersonal epic is hard to call a comedy. As a director of funny films he was no slouch with the likes of The Seven Year Itch or Some Like it Hot behind him. The Appartment plays like a drama with an overlay of warmth rather than a series of payoffs. The concern here is finding the moral centre among the urban hellscape of privilege and advantage. 

Jack Lemmon's Charlie understands the order, however much he resents it but when he benefits from it the sense of freedom overcomes him and he falls into form, another exec. Shirley MacLaine's Fran returns an expression of one who has been through the mill and is witnessing yet more corruption. Care is taken to illustrate Fred MacMurray's Sheldrake's skill at manipulation, his conscience-free lying and emotional pressure. This is a cast responding to the call of elegant writing about a brutal work culture. It cuts very close and the relief is often a sobering pathos rather than a joke.

However, this is a comedy the same way that Network or Boogie Nights are comedies in that they beg of you to reserve your judgement until you have seen everything. The stratification that frames the conflict is the same whether it's a capitalist industry or a remote politburo and it could as easily have been set in Classical Greece as mid century New York. Lemmon's decency begs his pathos. MacLaine's outward incorruptibility (according to Charlie) is amour against experience. And Fred MacMurray's effortless maintenance of his droit de segnieur is chilling. His dismissal of  a previous victim, kept close as a secretary, will have resonance but it probably won't be premanent. The final scene gives us what we want but its lack od sentimentality makes it feel earned.

Wilder's career is a list of bangers and (probably) others that will need seeking. That the same hand at the helm brought us the creepy Hollywood self-portrait of Sunset Boulevard and the durably hilarious Some Like it Hot could make this dark remionder of the world of work and the consequences of unchecked privilege should come as no surprise. It was films like this that broke the stiffness of the Hollywood in the decade to come and made way for the liberation of the '70s. Another debt we owe to Billy Wilder. Pay it in the best way: seek it out and watch it.

Review: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

A couple in the centre of a revolutionary cell Pat and Perfidia join in lots of fun activities like mass releases of border crossers and city wide power failures when Perfidia come across oaken martinet Captain Lockjaw. Perfidia stages a bizarre captor/captive scene with the soldier. He digs it, though or because he's renedered a sub, and pursues an encore. Over time she gets pregnant and has a daughter, ostensibly to Pat. When the gang gets busted Pat is plunged into hiding as Bob with the child. Perfidia makes a deal and flees south. Or did she? Young Willa has been told family legends that her mother died a hero. Others in the greater secret diaspora think she ratted them out. When Lockjaw gets his funny handshake opportunity to join an elite vigilante group, he has to pursue the evidence of his inter-racial failing to present cleanly and ascend to macho right Valhalla. 

Confused? You might be. This is an adaptation of a novel by Thomas Pynchon whose fairy tale named characters tote assault weapons and whose plots wind like medieval ornaments. I haven't read Vineland (nor anything but short stories by Pynchon) but what I do know is that Paul Thomas Anderson has apparently tamed Pynchon's sargasso plotting to deliver a cogent and engaging (if overlong) movie. You might not be able to keep up with all the great crowd of characters but you'll get the centrat quartet and more significant players and enjoy some well turned action and typical wry humour along the way.

The cast is not just on game but at the hands of a warmly capable actor's director and deliver. Leonardo DiCaprio is constantly funny as the punch drunk ex-agitprop operative who almost remembers what it was like three decades ago. Teyana Taylor is intimidatingly solid as a revolutionary who gets everything she wants out of what she encounters. Benicio Del Toro has a lot of fun as a martial arts instructor from the old revolutionary days who turns on a dime without a shift in his pulse. Sean Penn is given a dark, demonic other side to his ambitions to rid the galaxy of everything unAmerican, raging here and icy there. And, at the eventual centre of the quest, Chase Infiniti presents a teenager whose cool conceals a cheated mother's cosmic anger. And so on; in a Paul Thomas Anderson joint, you will end up knowing everyone.

The final act reminded me strangely of Boogie Nights, with important differences. Where Anderson's breakthrough hit used the porn mill to arrive at extended family values, One Battle After Another goes through that to pursue something more like a nature/nurture pride of craft. The culmination of the thrilling car chase along an undulating highway delivers a revelation of an intergenerational exchange. It really is a step forward for Anderson.

This is a film whose slickness masks anger. Because of the timelines of production, it would have been on its way before the Trump victory last year but it feels like a response to it. Perhaps it was more like an imagined worst case scenario. We marvel at the Rube Goldberg like falling into place of the evasive tactics of the networks and the warmth of craft of their organisers and we do begin at the border, such a centre of the worst excesses of the campaign. Anderson might well have chosen his material as a warning but found that it was more like a report.

I find it interesting that both he and the comparable Darren Aranofsky have landed on much more straightforward fare for their releases in the first year of Trump Secundus. We could also add Ari Aster's Eddington. America's social and political woes are benefitting from a surfeit of pummeling pushback from the arts. While that might come across as a big so what in light of the terrifying compliance of the nationwide cult, it can still serve as a beacon. May it glow.

SUNSET BOULEVARD @ 75

Joe Gillis came to Hollywood to make his fortune after dazzling the bosses of the dream factory with his genius. After a few B-movies he's hawking around his latest mediocrity and getting shown the door when his own door thunders with the sound of repo men after his car. He blarneys his way out of it but when he is seen driving the jalopy by those very agents, he takes evasive action and darts into the first ungated driveway he can find, parks the beast in the open garage and starts walking away, calculating his next move. When the woman in the window yells at him that he's late and he'd better get in there, he follows as only the down at heel can, because it's better than the motel room.

But this isn't just some Hollywood broad, an old dowager ordering a pool clean, it's former silent movie superstar Norma Desmond. Once he clears up the misunderstanding that he's not actually there to inter the dead chimpanzee on the slab in a shiny white coffin, and that he's actually a writer for the movies, he's kind of hired. Why? Well, Norma has a notion to break back into the flickers with a script as long as the Bible about Salome with her as the star, of course. Ulp! Well, if it gets the debt guys off his back, he's in. After all, as shes just assured him, she's still big, it's the movies that got small.

This Mad Hatter's tea party scenario from 1950 is one of Hollywood's most damning self portraits. If Singing in the Rain softened the notion of Hollywood hope two years later, Sunset Boulevard gave it a big chore. Its combined noir cynicism and deflating pathos create a kind of ethereal horror by which the favours of tinsel town demand the entirety of their applicants. Billy Wilder and co. even supply a more measured image of honest work with the figures of younger people taking more practical paths to careers but Norma's crazed hunger and Joe's own unquestioned opportunism to be elevated by it are the things that leave that bad taste. The focus is on the freak show, not the bright young things. That is what still makes this film essential viewing for anyone who fancies themself a likely player.

Norma's screenplay is a mass of hopeless narcissism and Joe's attempts at editing it, when discovered, are absorbed into her host's ingestion of him as parasite. Of course, he resists being bought at the beginning but he has neither idea nor defence against someone whose riches flowed in from staged histrionics and interpersonal atrocities. For any of his resistance, Joe knows he's signed the contract and, saving opportunity, is effectively doomed. We also know, from the opening scene and narration, that he didn't make it out. We meet him visually floating face down in the swimming pool. We're finding out how he got there.

The tuned casting of this is essential. William Holden was still young but wise enough in his carriage and demeanour to convince us to get behind him. His narration is the same husky snark of a Phillip Marlowe or Same Spade except it begins with a bitterness that both would avoid. 

The real coup is Gloria Swanson. She was a star of silent cinema. She did know De Mille and all the others. She knew the adoration, the parties and the endless champagne and attention. And her career, though it continued beyond the switch to sound, faded steadily to the point when she was more than ready for this. Among all those stars from the Hollywood firmament, she did know the tragedies and horror tales, the delusional and the heartrending. Though not one of them herself, she is in this role speaking for them, not just like them. If anything, she is more authentic and compassionate than the real life Cecil B. DeMille who appears in an extended cameo. Norma's quiet and stern butler is given a hate-filled gravity by silent auteur Josef von Sternberg. This film ain't kidding around. It is to Swanson's persistent credit that her own grotesque turn raises her to triumph in this sordid fable.

Sunset Boulevard was one of David Lynch's favourite films and it's easy to see why. It is an ornate nightmare of masks and fugue states set in a Hollywood that knows how stinking and cruel it always was. This would play seamlessly with Lynch's own attempt, Mulholland Drive, the pair of them craving deep into the horrors of delusion with the most convincing beauty.

Viewing notes: I saw this as Paramount's stunning 4K presentation. However, this one is always around. Not quite a Casablanca or Wizard of Oz, it's been treated well for home video from the DVD era on. If you don't want to commit to a home 4K you could easily come upon it at an op shop for a few bucks. I first saw it on midday TV and was capitvated but that doesn't happen anymore.

Review: FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES

A young couple in the '60s go to the opening of a new skyscraping landmark in their city. By Rub Goldberg increments, the building explodes and collapses, killing everyone, just after he proposes marriage and she confesses pregnancy. Cut to now and uni student Stephanie is being robbed of her sleep because she keeps getting woken by nightmares about the building disaster. She gets back home mid-semester to track down the truth and exorcise the terrors. A visit to her grandmother clears a lot up, including the horrifying news that she and her current family also are in line for Death's ire because Aunt Iris cheated and lived. So, this is a franchise film and we are in for a series of orchestrated kills and circumventions.

As that is the entire plot, I'm going to leave it there, keep this short and rant a little.

I saw the first Final Destination movie at the cinema when it was a new release. It was fine, some very inventive kills and a cameo by the great horror icon Tony Todd (most famous for Candyman). The franchise kept going, essentially repeating and riffing on audience expectations. What's wrong with that? Nothing at all, that's the way horror franchises are meant to work and it's why I avoid most of them. So, what's my problem with this one?

Well, it's historical. The first one was released in 2000. This was a time when mainstream horror had grown bloated by big budgets which saw them paralysed by massive CG effects but also a smoothing of any scares that might alienate the maximisation of their audiences. From the top dollar blandings of Coppola's Dracula and Branagh's Frankenstein, Blade, the cruddy remake of The Haunting, Darkness and too many others, Hollywood's snatching of the genre meant it got richer and stupider and stopped working. The maverick hit Blair Witch Project white anted this over the next decade and horror once again, aided by accessible technology, had a healthy undercurrent. 

This happens in cycles and we're once again at the peak of one whereby ineffective garbage like this, the Waniverse (Conjuring etc.) and so much else, rules the cinema screens and the streamers with nice and toothless horror. What is different this time is that the undercurrent is not affected by this and remains active and successful. So, again, why should I care about this one, can't I just live and let live?

Well, no. It's always worth calling out how a mighty genre can turn into soft serve and rake it in when stuff much tougher still struggles for clicks in the margins. A string of selfconsciously clever kills of people I cannot care about doesn't cut it. When I can be reassured that folk like the Philippou brothers are here to stay and will keep pushing their own envelope so that the big overstuffed popcorn muck like this can take its rightful place in the family safe section.

Tony Todd's cameo in this was his final screen performance before his death last year. It is the sole poignant moment in this movie and, for all its brevity, outclasses the rest of it. In memoriam.

Review: CAUGHT STEALING

When Hank agrees to look after his neighbour's cat in their Manhattan apartment block he quickly finds out how much trouble that has landed him when a pair of Russian mafia thugs beat him unto death's door and reveal a whole mini cosmos of bad behind them. Hank coulda been a baseball player, he is haunted by nightmares of why that didn't happen. Where others might feel like a failure, he reasons that he likes his job at the bar and loves his girlfriend and has pretty much what he needs. He doesn't want what the bad guys want but they have their ways and he's bargaining over riches he isn't pursuing as the stakes get deadly and real. Maybe he should just given the cat some of the tuna from his bagle and gone to the shop, but circumstances won't have that. It's 1998, before the whole world went off. At least there's trip hop on the radio.

After Black Swan, Noah, Mother, and The Whale, Darren Aranofsky might well have felt the need to make something more straightforward, something with a beginning, middle and end in that order that made hard narrative sense. I actually like his more allegorical work but watching this muscular crime thriller made me glad that he can turn something out like this, still. 

Austin Butler reminds me of a young Brad Pitt without the macho bluster. Ok, maybe not in Dune II but certainly here where his Hank lives with development paralysis that he will probably have for life. I won't spoil why he didn't make it into the baseball league but the reason is deep seated enough to give him painful nightmares many years after the incident. The more we learn of this the better we see that he's keeping his head just above the surface tension. He still hasn't quite confronted the possibility that he is destined to be just like the old characters who are his bar's regulars and owners. If he has a motivation it is to keep everything the same as it is now. He keeps the trouble of his past behind a placid face. It's this story's job to turn that into a rictus of agony.

And as this is an Aranofsky movie, we get all this with a layer of kitchen grease and a sheen of beauty. Yvonne (a luminous Zoe Kravitz) and Hank facing each other after racing to get their kits off is sweaty, smelly and alluring, a workaday erotic. Manhattan's weary old streetscapes are both enlivened through action and loom from the weather as indifferent artefacts. Goose that I am, I didn't look out for sight of the pre-2001 Twin Towers but the scene to scene setting doesn't need them. Portishead on the radio feels more like the time. As the storms of violence enter or converge, it's almost a comfort to think of the era before the crazy quilt we live under now.

The lightness beneath the mounting brutality and suspense is kept low. This is necessary to allow us to persist through some convincingly choreographed violence and very dark morality. It's nothing like the knockabout goofiness in the trailer which makes it look like mid-period Coen brothers, but the lightness is where the warmth resides and its supply is kept to a constant undercurrent. Aranofsky's helming is nothing but confident as he keeps the easier comedy from the extreme characters dangerous rather than comic.

A strange aspect of this movie is the sight of fine grain in a film that was shot on 8K digital. I can't find out why that is beyond assuming it was the same kind of process to make it look like film that other titles have used. The strange thing about that is that it immediately reminded me of how Madonna's 90's single Erotica had a sample of vinyl record noise imposed on its entirely digital soundstage. Portishead, heard on the soundtrack along with a host of other trip hoppers from the era, used samples of their own jams to build their sound. Aranofsky's use of the grain, here, feels like a sneaky kind of nostalgia. The pummeling violence, informed by Asian cinema choreography (but not campily, the way Tarantino uses it) stops the spread of that nostalgia. It's an odd moment of detail.

So, it works. Tim Smith's punk works. The Hassidic gangsters work (though their last line is too cute to work) and the setting of the last of the late nineties before the craved new world of runaway found footage success, mobile phone movies, unbridled internet turned capitalist captors and the mainstreaming of political fantasy. This was a time when a Hank could confront in clear lines, the worst of his faults and seek to rise to invention and success. Is this Darren Aranofsky's own farewell to the era that wtinessed his rise with Pi, another story about a talented nice guy beseiged by violent interests. It is harder to be that now, harder to discern the lines. It's the clarity we miss, even if we know it was also illusory. This is fun, it has grave concerns but it's still fun.

Oh ... stay for the end credits.

Caught Stealing is currently on general release.