2018: THE HIGH

THE FAVOURITE
Yorgos Lanthimos escaped the yoke of being the leader of Greek weirdcore a few films ago without needing to do much more than change languages. His third film in English is an energetic and deep essay on power with a cast for the ages.

HEREDITARY
This caused a lot of whinging as its massive midstream shift was seen as a letdown. I went with it and enjoyed it more than most of the new films I saw this year.

A QUIET PLACE
The story of a family struggling to maintain itself in the face of an existential threat. Beautifully realised by a first timer.

THE SHAPE OF WATER
Maestro Del Toro tells a fable like no other, this time of pride in difference opposed by the shame of keeping it secret.

OUR HOUSE
Parallel universe or haunting? This strange debut feature from a student of Kyoshi Kurosawa brings back what the teacher has apparently abandoned, the sublime in horror.

TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID
Tough and mean but heart rending in the most beautiful way.

THOROUGHBREDS
Nasty and stark but the more powerful for that. Great performances all round. Still waiting for a release locally.

HERE TO BE HEARD
Strong rockumentary that neither elevates nor bores which makes it almost unique in its genre.

LUCKY
A poignant farewell to an old hand managed also to serve as a deceptively light tribute to finding treasure in the everyday. Haunting.

BEAST
Unexpected. Like Ben Wheatley meets Ken Loach and a commitment to a devastating conclusion.

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU
Satire writ large in this lashing of contemporary and future capitalism. Might well prove to be the cinematic satire of its era.

TULLY
Tale of impossibly angelic stranger improves the more thought it's given afterwards. Good turns by the two leads and a very funny subversion of the let's-party drive to a golden oldie.

2018: THE MIDDLE

GAME NIGHT
It began, progressed and ended without great strides in the art de cinema but it was a well paced comedy that stuck to its guns. I don't see enough of them.

UNSANE
Stephen Soderberg is prolific filmmaker but has never been an auteur. Any of his films could be by anyone as he doesn't appear to be obsessed with making the big scratch of cinematic signatures. This tight thriller with the preposterous plot works a charm, never claiming to be anything else. Shot on a modified phone but you wouldn't know it.

CARGO
Interesting take on zombie/infected tale in the Australian outback is an efficient story of family, the land and its first peoples. Could have been a lot darker to better effect.

COLD WAR
Same director's Ida left me with more shivers of delight at seeing a great small film. This, though, was a fine piece.

LADY BIRD
My initial enthusiasm for this one was, I think, too driven by my relief that it wasn't a Noah Baumbach/Wes Anderson cringe but a genuine account told with underplayed flash. Superb performances are where most of the work went and it paid off.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY
Sheer joy when I saw it at the cinema but it doesn't linger so finely in the memory.

THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI
Solid plot of righting injustice with a powerhouse central performance by Frances McDormand. Some misdeeds by its chief lunkhead character never examined after his redemption which leaves a bad taste.

I, TONYA
A blend of redneck ridicule and the divergence of personal recollections of the same events could not resolve itself for me. Good performances and an appreciable treatment of domestic violence almost take it into the High list but not quite.

THE DEATH OF STALIN
Mighty cast and some tough satire give this grim political fable a place at today's political table but perhaps too many easy dismissed moments of horror which play lightly and move toward overload.

DISOBEDIENCE
Compelling tale of freedom and morality in a guarded culture let down by a few too many obvious metaphors where more concentration on the already strong central relationship might have served better.

NICO 1988
A good rock bio movie that has a good look at post-fame careers. Not quite loveable but impressive for its contempt of the hagiographic approach.

THE CHILDREN ACT
A decent tale of ethics and impressionability goes further than it needs to prove its point. Very good performances, though.

LADIES IN BLACK
Coming of age tale diluted by lack of sense of struggle despite great charm in some of the performances. Also, scores like this one don't belong in the cinema.

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME
Some very fine performances and an intriguing premise can't quite lift this one from its over-even treatment.

THE WIFE
Fine central performance in a story that could have done with more muscle from the writers and director. Not quite a waste of Glenn Close but ... close.

MY FRIEND DAHMER
Decent enough adaptation of the graphic novel but couldn't eclipse it.

THE BREAKER UPERERS
Consistently funny and subversive but perhaps a little too neatly wrapped.

2018: THE LOW

This list is usually comprised of movies that I found disappointing rather than poor. But this year my radar failed me more than once.

BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE
Old style Tarantino ensemble thriller never gets beyond ok and takes too long to get that far.

THE GREEN FOG
Recreating a vague version of Vertigo through a mishmash of other films with the same setting. Why hasn't anyone thought of it before? I hope Guy Maddin finds his form again some time soon.

SUSPIRIA
Good filmmaking wasted on unjustifiable remake that was so divergent from its source that its use of the same title was offensive.

GHOST STORIES
A promise of something pleasingly complex collapses into an unsurprising twist. Wish it had been better.

HALLOWEEN
The matrilineal message is undercut by a clumsy mix of tribute and new ideas that don't quite make it. And how come, if this is meant to be the real Halloween II, are there so many call backs to all the other entries in the franchise that this film pretends never existed? What did I expect? What T.S. Eliot said about poetry, a return to the banal.

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE
Why subvert something when all you are doing is using the title to make what you wanted despite the source material? This unscary extended psyche workshop is using the branding without substantial reason. See also Suspiria 2018.

WILD LIFE
A guy with loser syndrome, his restless wife looking to survive while he's off being a hero and a boy
who looks happy to stand around. Then it ends.

THE INSULT
Potentially explosive story of accelerating pride in a community of opposites keeps going when it should just get over itself and resolve without the grandstanding.

THE KING
Conceptual documentary of a road trip in celebration of Elvis Presley never quite answers its own question of why it was made.

THAT SUMMER
In which the footage of the failed first attempt of what became a great documentary proves why it was a failure. Is there merit in the meta?

Review: THE FAVOURITE

Films by Yorgos Lanthimos often sound like they're going to be comedies. But the weirdly cossetted kids in Dogtooth lived in an affluent nightmare. The Lobster's government-sponsored mating program (that results in surgical metamorphosis for the unsuccessful) was an absurdist horror. And here, Anne, last of the Stuarts, creator of the sovereign state of Great Britain, gout-stricken and quaveringly self-doubting is the goal in a fight between two manipulators. This film is frequently funny but it is not a comedy.

The opening scenes cut between a demonstration of how the Queen's favourite, Sarah Churchill/Lady Malborough, micromanages her monarch and the arrival of Abigail, fallen from high birth after her father lost her in a card game to a large German with a small penis. Sarah is staving off the parliamentary Whigs who want the current war to stop as it's bleeding the coffers despite British victories. Abigail is pranked into interrupting a meeting between Sarah and a politician and sent to work in the kitchen (where her pranker continues to prank 'er). All continues except that now Abagail has her eyes on the kitchen door and uses her expertise to find Sarah's favour. From that point the pair are in competition for the royal ear.

Lanthimos keeps the range of competition wide, from country dance moves that fall between mating rituals and partner-swinging jitterbugs, mating rituals that play like kickboxing bouts (with the female in the ascendant), afternoons of bird shooting which double as tutorials in manipulation and manipulation in itself, and so on unto direct physical harm. The surface might be powdered and tailored but the motivations are no different from the madames and ponces in the bawdy house we see at one point. But there is a difference between power attained and power applied skilfully.

Between scenes of opulence shot through a spherical lens that give a Vermeer's mirror look to wide, flat splendour to the details of faces known only to intimates we have a dark oak palette and a sense that, even within the appearance of gentility we might easily see brutality or gore. Though it's stylised to the last pixel of each frame this world looks lived in. And from the grandeur of Purcell and Handel to the unsettling monotonic scraping of the contemporary score we also know that we are in a film that can turn us.

There are major empathy shifts in the power play and for all the luxuriant space of the palace the squeeze of dominance can be stifling. The central trio of performances is thus crucial and we are served beautifully by Olvia Coleman's Queen Anne who can whimper like a lapdog or rage like a banshee, Rachel Weisz who brings a dark and fierce intelligence to Sarah, and the mercurial Emma Stone who, in an arc that takes her from a put-upon survivor to a character from The Harlot's Progress, can wait like a hunting hound and triumph like a shark. The charge the trio must create between them for this film to be more than a chess game is in every scene they share, as classically marbled as a John Dryden verse and as vulgar. I know I've tapped out some purple patches here but it's hard to describe this film justly without them: it's good, it's very good.

Review: THE CHILDREN ACT

Judge Fiona Maye manages her days with a clipped efficiency and intimidating wit at a pace that belies the notion that the top jobs are easy. Her husband, a heavily white collared American, proposes that he have an affair as their own union has long dried sexually and it might add a valve of relief to the marriage. She doesn't have time to be more than winded by this as a case comes up whose urgency all but erases it. A boy of seventeen is denying a blood transfusion to treat his leukemia through religious conviction: he a Jehova's Witness, as we learn from a well place vignette near the start the sect believe the blood to be the literal carriage of the soul so the ingestion of another's is pollution. Who's right?

Strained by strong arguments from both sides and preoccupied by her own personal crisis, Maye must rule either way and rapidly. Seeking to break the circuit she visits the patient, Adam, in his hospital bed to find out how much of the decision is his rather than his parents' and subculture. His plea has an adolescent naivete but it is convincing. Noticing the guitar at the end of his bed she asks his to play. His first stumbling few chords open a song they both know and she sings it while he strums. She makes her excuses (court) and leaves him screaming for more of her company, the first, we get the feeling, that has treated his intellect genuinely.

Maye makes her judgement for the hospital and the boy receives his lifesaving treatment. The husband,self-banished, is back but relegated to the spare bed. There's that .. and the next case. But her judgement follows her, literally. Adam, newly vital from her decision, is now obsessed with her. Although he pleas that he hasn't replaced one tooth fairy with another he is clearly in the kind of awe of her that anyone of his age might well be prey to. When they are in the same space it's as though it is encased in a kind of ectoplasmic bubble of his secretion. How to escape this? He has an idea. It's not a good one.

Emma Thompson brings to her judge a mind too engaged and busy to stop for a moment and every thought it deals with can be lightlessly deep. This means that we are given pause to see her in painful puzzle at her husband's sudden request (to him, one long in the making) but gratified at her resourceful dealing with the difficult boy at the centre of the case. We find ourselves watching keenly for a moment of strain that will break to his force as she understands simultaneously how similar the situation is to her husband's but how damaging it would be to indulge it. Even as an emotive human she must remain a judge. Thompson carries this into visceral territory amking this one of the year's most compelling onscreen performances I've seen.

The rest of the cast provide great support. Fion Whitehead as Adam scares us with his chaotic intensity. Stanley Tucci manages to put more than the boy-man mid-lifer that the script has him. Jason Watkins, one of those know him if you see him, U.K. character actors as Maye's patient clerk is a delight. And Ben Chaplin as Adam's father provides us with a man committed to a (to an outsider like myself) bizarre religious conviction and make it not just believable but reasonable and terrifying. He reminded me of no one so much as Michael Craig whose similar role in the 1962 Life for Ruth also impressed.

The Children Act does a lot with what might have been a scant canvas; big morality and bigger decisions, reconciliation and the weight (or lack of weight) of our convictions. The film looks and feels quite plain for this reason: it must traverse real melodrama to get to real pain and so can't go about complicating the business of putting it all on a screen. When you have Ian McEwan adapting his own novel and performances like Thompsons, you'll settle for that.

Review: CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?

Lee Israel loses her job as a literary editor and finds herself hanging by a thread. She's behind in the rent. Her cat's off its food and she owes the vet as well. She sells books for a pittance at a shop where her publishes biographies are on sale. Her agent avoids her calls and, when confronted, tells Lee she's out of touch and probably needs to play the game better. Lee is "fifty-one and likes cats more than people". She swallows pride to a tiny degree and sells a letter from Katherine Hepburn, getting a decent return. Finding a couple of letters from her biographical subject at an archive she lifts them and is able to sell one. The other, more mundane one she doctors with the subject's style of wit and makes hundreds on it. She has been told she has no voice of her own. Maybe, she thinks, that's a good thing.

While consoling herself about the sacking at the start, over a bourbon at a Manhattan dive bar she meets Jack, a flamboyant British fop past his best and they begin a rapport. When he sees what she has done and continues to do, forge the letters of famous dead people to milk a market in memorabilia. There's an obligatory montage involving Lee doing Dorothy Parker or Fanny Brice and raking it in until circumstances prevent her from operating. She sends Jack in. You already know that none of this can last.

That's not a problem here, though. The film makes it plain that Lee is a woman whose intelligence and wit are going to be her own undoing. You might even start looking for signs of a break in Jack. You won't really be surprised by the turn of events but the real game in this town (a dependably beautiful Manhattan) is the great furnace burning behind the eyes of Lee Israel.

Melissa McCarthy accepts the challenge of a lead role almost devoid of sympathy, a woman who subverts herself at every turn and seems to ignore the talent she is proving with her fraud. McCarthy's fierce humanity damns that torpedo and gives us someone we want to see winning despite agreeing with the opinion of the rest of the world on her. Her performance is strong in its restraint and gives this perhaps too evenly paced and textured film some real muscle. The film depends on it as it cannot condone the act of forgery but must celebrate the response to base talent that leads to it. Great credit must also go to Richard E. Grant as Jack, a kind of aged Withnail fallen on deservedly hard times. He shows the grey admission beneath the character's performance as though it were easy.

The world wanted to believe in the Hitler Diaries. There was a great desire for explanation. Konrad Kajau filled a need so well that his exposure led to his public damnation from dissapointment alone. Lee Israel tickled the fancy of fans of Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker at the top of the collector food chain and was put to professional death for it. The only thing she could write about after that was the story of it itself. This is why this deceptively plain film keeps its scenes to intimate dialogues and allows only the occasional burst of real feeling through: we whose awareness of fake news and election winning power must recognise how quietly it must begin. Israel's cover versions of her subjects are irresistable but we don't forgive cover versions lightly.

Even as a young second generation Beatles fan I knew the Klaatu album was not the Beatles. The song Sub Rosa Subway had such a Pepper vibe and tone perfect arrangement (and bullseye McCartney vocal) but even on one listen sounded affected and try-hard. It still played as a fun song, though. However, I did get the feeling that Klaatu were unable to be the Beatles in the sense that they were better at evoking a familiar sound than acting on their own musicality to forge new ones. That is what an inadvertent collector of a Lee Israel fraud might have felt: you were great at the golden era, why couldn't you have made your own?

This is a film as much about what the public wants as much as the invention of someone willing to bear false witness to satisfy it. It plays against the cuteness that might have won it more fans than it will have as a cinema release and, perversely, like Lee Israel herself, that is true to its word.

Review: SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

Cassius Green (in the American pronunciation Cashus or just Cash) gets a job at a call centre and fails according to the statisical probability plus one detail. The old guy in the next cubicle tells him to use his white voice. Cash tries it and soon he is plunged into a success montage where the scrawny overseer with the prison tattoos repeatedly high fives and fist pumps him as the red sale bulb flashes. As his workmates plot and carry out a strike he is sequestered to the admin office where he is told he has become a power caller. He's seen power callers. They take the golden art deco lift to the top floor and they wear styles bought with serious money. Cash breaks the picket line and takes the lift.

His artist girlfriend is turning activist. The union organiser who started the strike is taking a keen interest in her. There are protests nationwide over the Worry Free Corporation whose creepy ads make what looks like slave labour an option for the poor. Worry Free are Cash's employer's biggest client. In the sumptuous upper floor of the Power Callers Cash's mentor, a smooth rapper type with an eye-patch ("white voice only on this floor"), tells him not to worry about changing the world but instead going with the way it's heading. Cash is feeling the benefit of the big paydays but also the conscience-tugging of the real friends he was starting to make at the call centre and his own dear Detroit (the girlfriend, her mother wanted an American name). Will the mighty Steve Lift of Worry Free and his massive plans for the world's future buy it with Cash? No spoilers. Too much to say, anyway.

This is a satire that substantially could have been written hundreds of years ago by the likes of Jonathon Swift; a savage eye on the greed of the rich but laced with such off hand comedy that its dogma feels like part of that (yet still serious). As I watched I thought of Brazil, O Lucky Man, Eternal Sunshine, and the restlessly inventive humour of Being John Malkovich. This film is not really like any of those but it has the same strength of vision of all of them and the nervy humour they run on: it's on the same shelf.

Lakeith Stanfield brings a humanising confusion to Cash who never seems comfortable with either being poor or what he has to do to be rich. His constant shifting, oddly enough, allows us into what might have played as a cipher (in a different way think John Cusack in Being John Malkovich) to hand the satire on. His fidgety perception let us cope with the speed and frenetic gear changing the story needs. Armie Hammer, looking very like John Krasinsky in a full beard, plays the corporate ubermensch with a terrifying mix of alphacrat and frat boy. The stopmotion business video (that anagramatically namechecks Michel Gondry) is a jawdropping vision inside his head. The cast is hugs and everyone works but special mention should go to Stephen Yeun as Squeeze (the ex-Sign Twirlers Union rep) and Tessa Thompson as Detroit who brings real personality to a role that looks like it had its own art department.

References fly past in thick currents which warrant at least a second viewing but this highly energetic film puts enough in the central arc to let those go by if they get fatiguing. This also reminds me in tone of other films of the strong end of '90s early '00s years of great American mainstream pieces like Fight Club, American Psycho or Amelie: grab what you can along the way and have a look at it when you get a breath. I can think of people who might well think it loses its way in the third act but I think that's pacing rather than plotting, after a light adjustment I kept going with it and felt rewarded. It changes at the root but the result is worked for and works.

On that, the conceits like the deliberately dubbed look of the white voices (Detroit's is hilarious) one weird moment when a character who warns against using his name has it blanked by both audio and visual blurring, the WTF effect of Cash's attempt at ad lib rapping, that corporate video and so much more give this rich mix enough chewy fruit and nuts to give it a life well beyond the first cinema run. The market doesn't really work like this any more but if this were the '80s or even the early '90s this would be a cult film right out of the gate. Sick of the insidious cultural support creeping in for giant capitalists and the rising extreme right? Go and see this. It's the right kind of hate.

And it's bloody funny.

Review : BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

Some friends asked me if I was going to see this. I said yes, even if it's crappy I want to see it. They replied with the same thought. Why? Because the idea of anyone taking on the personality of Freddie Mercury gets automatic kudos from anyone who grew up in the 70s and even if it's a series of great moments in history gaffer taped together it might be fun at least until the end credits rolled. So, how is it?

We begin with Freddy waking up in his London home, getting ready for the day while an audio montage from radio news plays. He steps out of his Rolls Royce and heads into a stadium. His band is announced and they just about take the stage for the Live Aid gig when we zoom back to the late '60s knowing that we'll end at Wembley. So it's a framed biopic of a rock star. It might make you cringe or relax and delight you depending on how it deals with the tale.

Note, I didn't say how it deals with the truth. Fiction rock bios that attempt the truth usually try shoving in a wedge of myth as well. So in addition to the crowded canvas of a timeline that leaves too little of the characters you can get a lot of hagiography (for which see Oliver Stone's The Doors or Alex Cox's execrable Sid and Nancy). But if you focus on the character and appropriate here and borrow there form the timeline in service of the character's story and you do it while remembering you are making a mainstream movie for the pleasure of a crowd you shouldn't go too far astray.

And the good news is that despite some howling anachronisms we really do emerge with a compelling story about an interesting person. A lot of this has to do with Ramy Malek, the intense protagonist of Robot Man, fitting into the wigs and prosthetic teeth of his subject with a clear skill at distracting us from them. He fills it up with high camp and the insecurities behind the camp adding tension to almost all the scenes he's in. It's this that brings to the level we want because it's nuanced and unsettling and, while we might want a rockstar in a movie to be an alphamonster, getting that depth from a handful of consistent performance tricks is pretty impressive. Also the rest of the band is well cast with actors who don't just look like their historical subjects (Gwilym Lee as Brian May is uncanny) but get enough filling out to let the drama mean something.

So, I'm talking about characters and drama rather than historical accuracy. That's because this film prefers the people to the timeline and less to exalt the rockstars than bring us closer to the exaltation through acquaintance with the daily void between peaks. It's not Ken Loach but it sure as hell isn't The Doors, either (Freddie had far more physical reason to go around catching sight of the grim reaper than the "torn" movie version of Jim Morrison).

Bohemian Rhapsody was the first song I heard by Queen. At the end of grade eight I stumbled on it on the local radio and was blown away, noting the back announced band name. And then it couldn't have been better as the first Countdown of the following year (I think it resumed in late January) lead with the video. I bought Night at the Opera a few months afterwards and was a confirmed fan. The music was strong and ranged from the thrilling gravity of Prophet's Song to the biting humour of Death on Two Legs. Everyone at school loved them too and between us we bought up the backlog which was all just as good. I went as far as Jazz but by then they'd worn off and had been eclipsed by punk. When I moved out of home I gave all the Queen albums to my delighted eldest brother who thought I was nuts to do so. I've replaced every single one since.

So, even if this movie had been a dud the attempt alone won me. The good thing is that it's much better. There are wincey "great moments in history" scenes but the worst of them is cleansed with genuine humour (and mercifully a lack of smarmy self-reflexivity, the characters themselves are allowed to be funny). If you like Queen there's plenty here to enjoy. Oddly enough if you only like the notion of rock music history rendered into fiction there's probably a little more. Also, perhaps more importantly, for such a dry-eyed movie goer I welled up more than once. Just don't expect history; there are documentaries for that sort of thing.

Review: SUSPIRIA 2018

A young woman barges in on her psychiatrist on a bleak Berlin day in the late '70s. He shifts an appointment with her and makes notes about her delusions as she acts erratically in his office. She tells him she fears for her life and the lives of her friends back at the dance academy because it's run by a coven of witches. Exit screen left and that's the last of her ... maybe.

Elsewhere, amid scenes of stret protest and news commentary about the Bader Meinhoff gang, young Susie Bannion gets off a train and makes her way to that academy. She makes a big impression at her audition. So much so that the chief instructor, Madame Blanc is psychically alerted to her performance and abandons the class she is taking to witness this new raw talent. She's in!

From this point we follow Susie's progress through favour and skill at the school while we learn of her childhood in a forbidding ascetic Christian group and the psychiatrist's back story that has to do with the war years. Also, just as the political strife is on the boil in the streets and the world's stage the witches at the school are heading for a leadership spill. Yes, this time around they are revealed as witches from the get go. There's a point to this and it forms the wedge between this and the original version of the story from the real 1970s. But I don't spoil movies.

I am well behind on the works of Luca Guadagnino but do know he has risen from arthouse fare that has divided audience to more generally celebrated films like Call me By Your Name and A Bigger Splash. I might well choose to catch up with those but it won't be on the strength of this one. Not that it's a bad film. It is very well crafted and above all deliberate in the choices that give us its muted '70s pallet, underplayed score and character arcs. Cinematic quality is not the issue here.

This might well have been, given its troubled pre-production history, a tawdry point-missing Americanised travesty. There are pointers to that but Guadagnino steers those elements away from the mainstream cliches they might have been in the hands of David Gordon Green (who went on to yet another unbidden remake, Halloween 2018). And there is much to be admired in the way Guadagnino blends the supernatural with the socio-political elements so that without too much hammering they feel as though they belong on the same screen.

He's no slouch with horror, either, in this remake of a horror milestone. The scene in which Susie's dance seems to twist and rupture the body of a character in another room is terrifying. It isn't played for the slightest laugh and is richer for it. Other excursions into unironic horror work as well for that same commitment. Tilda Swinton is at her most intimidatingly confident as Mme Blanc. Her counterpart, Susie, is given real range and nuance by Dakota Johnson. No one the large multinational cast disappoints. So why don't I like it?

The original film is not something I grew up with but I only had to see it once, on a crumbling rental VHS at the end of the '90s, to be completely captivated by it. Why? Yeah, why? The thing has no depth, it's plot is a scattered and unconvincing mystery and is played by a cast who mostly are mouthing their lines which are very obviously dubbed by the stilted delivery of voice-over talent who sound like they're paid by the day. There is backstory but it's left till late, is dull in delivery and jolts the viewer out of the world of the rest of the film. There's a stupid and needless scene with a bat that leaves a bad taste in the mouth by its suggestion of animal cruelty. So, why do I love it?

Well, because it packs a wallop with ultra-violent kill scenes from the off, in eye popping deco settings in a pallet intentionally torn between deep reds and blues from a choice to shoot it with expired film stock. Suspiria 1977 does not pretend to be anything other than a scarefest. The whispered detective work between some of the characters is enjoyable but there's only a tiny fraction of the work given to the plotting of Argento's earlier Giallo films. It's witches/bad vs Suzy/good with a barnstorming score that sounds like the best prog rock ever. I love it because it gives all this in 98 minutes.

The new Suspiria adds almost an hour of screen time spent setting up relationships and contexualising witches and then what always feels like too long on back stories. In the end this is only in the service of an overall twist in a single character arc. Is that really worth adding a two thirds of the original's screen time: you want us to be a little more understanding about witches?

Backstory incursions are (to be in theme) a curse to horror stories if they take more than the equivalent of a few lines of a prose tale. There are exceptions but only very few. Mostly they add drag as they do here. If you've seen Sleepaway Camp you might know of a very late insert along these lines but it adds with its brevity and weirdness (which helps the otherwise too-bizarre revelation). It was backstory that turned the tale in Ringu from a freezing weird revenge story into a big bloated character piece as The Ring. Backstory allows the viewer too much control over the narrative: the horror of the original depends on the viewer's lack of this. While Guadagnino does this better than that his efforts suggest a question that is not answered by seeing the result of his efforts. Why?

Guadagnino stated that he wanted this to be different in every way? Why? You get a few extra themes in there but these have nothing to do with the intentions of the original. Reclaim witchcraft as part of the feminist narrative? Lovely, but go and make something new. To be iconoclastic? Suspiria isn't E.T. or Gone With the Wind, it's a cult favourite, tiny in the timeline. Do you really need to punish its fans with a contemporary history re-jig? The problem of this version is not whether it's well made but why it should exist at all. The recent Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, similarly told a story that did little more than appropriate the branding for what turned out to be a rather anodyne purpose that used a lot of exhausted special effects.

The main fracture between the two films really stresses the question of why we needed this. That is the issue of control. The point of the scares in Suspiria is that they are not easily controllable by the viewer. It's hard to rationalise them beyond the great sense of menace they give and the cold-sweat violence that ensues. This is nightmare logic. You can feel terror at anything in a nightmare, an ice cream cone will do, the effect of terror is your powerlessness to best or escape it. The new one is all about characters vying for control (including the offscreen terrorists). The audience in this just needs to sit back and follow, feeling at no time under threat from the film itself. This removes the power of the original. Why? You change the arc, rename characters but put the red and blue of the original in the shading of the subtitle font? That's just insulting. There is no point to this film taking the title of the earlier one. It simply doesn't earn it.

I'd planned on ending with the pun: there oughta be a lore. But there is one. Want to try a remake about witches? Do a real one on the backstory of The Blair Witch Project. Not the good but irrelevant sequel and certainly not the assembly line recent remake but something about the character of the Blair Witch herself. Or, really, if you really want to remake Suspiria and have something like the impact of the original, go all out and make it as the first drafts by Daria Nicolodi had it with the characters of the dancers being children. That's right, six to nine year olds. Make that one. Then you've got some real horror and the institutional darkness thrown in.

HOW THE NEW HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE FAILED ME

I didn't want a new version. Advance word was that it was a complete retooling. So, why still give it that title? Advance word was good so I gave it a go. What I found was that it's an interesting take but it doesn't resolve its own tension. I'll get to what I mean by that but for now I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't like horror who might see some of its lesser sung possibilities.

I'll start with what I liked. When I watch a horror story new to me I start looking for the metaphor. All good horror runs on metaphor and is happy for everyone to know that. Poor horror keeps that down and stitches scares together. I should note that by "poor" I do not mean low budget. The overwhelming majority of poor horror movies I've seen over the last twenty-plus years have been the production of major studios with big budgets. They're poor because they leave the metaphor flat and fill the screen with production and have bloated running times. The descent of illconceived ambition that plagues the students in the Blair Witch Project got to the screen with a lot of maxed credit cards and a canny way with the young popular internet. It remains great horror.

So, is The Haunting of Hill House great? It's metaphor is served with depth and grace and it is sustained. The straining dysfunction of a family that has known trauma didn't need a haunted house but it was a bold choice to reimagine an American classic with an insistence on that. The stories of individual characters and the growing complexity in the series can be impressive. but there's a problem. It has to do with look and feel.

Hill House (which is what I'm going to call it) runs on two basic aesthetic schemes. The present day timeline is given a sombre pallet. Jade greens, greys, pallor on the faces of the Caucasian characters, a kind of constant rainy day sadness. The world of childhood and the House is made from a kind of Disney gothic, rich colour pallet but desaturated, cobwebbed, dark and endless. This is where almost all the ghosts appear and there is a legion of them (including all the "hidden" ones). At one point a character walks down a hallway in the present and enters the House and the change is done by him going through a door. Otherwise, for most of the series, the two timelines are separate and distinguished by these aesthetics.

This is understandable but it means that the cold realist drama of the present day needs an extra strong reach to keep the viewer in touch with the wildly supernatural world of the past. What you get is jump scares, heavy makeup and truckloads of digital effects that look the same as the ones used in forgettable blather like Mama, The Woman in Black (2012) or Darkness or the clueless remakes of J-Horror from the 2000s. This is meant to inform the behaviour of the grown up children in the present day timeline. It just looks like they lived in a carnival ghost house.

All the spectres (with a very few notable exceptions) have the dessicated skin and boiled eyes of all the ooky spooky ghosts of those crap movies I mentioned above. I was enticed by reports of scares that the cast themselves found too scary or some audience members vomiting from them. Really? Have these people never seen a mainstream horror film from the past two decades? If they have ghosts they ALL look like that and emerge suddenly with giant orchestral stabs. There is just no fear left in me for this kind of presentation. It might as well be the Thriller video. There are, as noted, exceptions to this and their effectiveness completely eclipses the main ones and renders them goofy and try-hard. I do not believe anyone would emerge traumatised from such a derivative supernature (I know, the trauma is primarily from something else but the line was too good not to use).

What this does is highlight how laboured the rest of it is. The present day drama is plodding and overstretched. Even when it picks up and offers characters that aren't a trial to try and care for (i.e. the twins) you get the feeling that one rather than two hours might have done a fresher feeling job. The celebrated episode 6 done in an effectively faked single take (nothing wrong with that: it's been good enough for Hitchcock and Gaspar Noe in their time) begins compellingly but soon feels exhausting and strained (not intentionally). Some of the dialogue and a great deal of the performances in the series are superb but both are let down by an apparent mistaking of screen time for depth.

Shirley Jackson's novel puts an uneasily assembly of ghost hunters into a situation that grows increasingly menacing. There is no resolution of the reality of the ghosts and while there are manifestations nary a one is seen. It is a psychological horror and when the least stable character emerges as the one with the greatest affinity with the big threatening place and feels progressively at home there you feel a downpour of her history and the heartrending sense of fate she feels it gives her as the worst happens. The Robert Wise film from 1963 honours this. Even if it leaves much of the novel out it stays true to it and offers a single realm to which we offer without effort our suspension of disbelief. The Netflix outing makes hard work of the imagination (around the cliched effects) and then tries our patience with unlikeable characters. And then it betrays everyone who has read and loved the book and seen and loved the 1963 film with a goofy nice ending. There are no rich horror fiction metaphors here or if there are they have collapsed under all that positive thinking. Not one for me.

Review: GHOST STORIES

Professor Goodman, a professional skeptic dedicated to exposing charlatans, is given a task to explain three cases that stumped his predecessor. He meets a nightwatchman whose shift at a former women's asylum is disrupted by a strange girl ghost. Next up is a teenage boy who tells of an encounter with what might be a demonic figure in the woods at night. Finally, there is the tale of a well to do man whose wife died giving birth to a monstrous child who might be the work of a poltergeist.

The stories lack resolution but all seem to have easily provable rational explanations. Goodman returns to the man who gave him his assignments and confronts him with this only to be reminded of a phrase the man was famous for: the brain sees what it wants to see. Things then turn very strange as Goodman is given a series of tough lessons in the idea.

This film began life as a stage production devised by co-writers Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman (who plays Goodman). Dyson was the non-acting member of the team behind the uncomfortable comedy The League of Gentleman, all of whom were fans of classic British horror, from Hammer to BBC Christmas ghost stories. This film follows the pattern of the Amicus studio anthology films by having a connecting character uncover weird tales from a number of people, often strangers.

The homage ends abruptly at the basic form, here. There is no attempt to have the segments resemble '60s or '70s films. The irresolution of the stories is deliberately disturbing as we expect a tidy conclusion that we are not given. When the overall story widens to examine Goodman's own role and his motivation the trope of the travelling tale collector is anti-generically reversed. Where this leads I'll leave to the ticket buyer.

So does it work?

Well, it's scary if too reliant on jump scares. There's a lot of work put into the kind of atmosphere familiar from both the Amicus movies and The League of Gentlemen's homage. Apart from the third story's very effective quote of the bizarre '60s short Whistle and I'll Come to You and its insistence on the uncanny in a socially privileged  setting, we are left with a string of sudden shocks accompanied by jolting stabs from the soundtrack. The disappointment that the tales don't seem to go anywhere and aren't as baffling to a skeptic like Goodman eventually give way to questions about what might be in store for him. The resolution provides a neatly tied bow but suggests we do our own thinking over what it's fastening. The nearly female-free cast offers a clue but the film's own push back at the viewer challenges them to care enough to do this thinking.

So I'm torn between appreciating the textual complexity of what I've seen, the great atmosphere, the promise of a sinister undercurrent, and wondering if I left the gas on.

Review: HALLOWEEN (2018)

Horror sequels have it tough. Imagine if celebrity kids were expected to outdo their parents. Pick your favourite and be honest about the circumstances of their fame and the breaks in good movies or great bandmates to spur them. You'd need to do a Boys From Brazil job and recreate the wounds as well as the triumphs of each one. There'd still be no guarantee that the new breed would turn out anywhere like the original. With horror sequels the fans want more and better but the same. Kill more scare more but be as innovative. With Halloween that's a very tough call. I'll get into why that is later. So, how does this one go?

It's forty years later and Michael Myers is taunted by a pair of murderable podcasters in a mental health facility that could not exist in 2018. They bring out the white-face mask that gave him his look in the first one but he doesn't respond. All the other chained rent-a-character-actors do, though, writhing and squeaking just like their drama group teacher taught them. Meanwhile a psychiatrist who does a bang-on Donald Pleasance impression (he actually gets called the new Loomis halfway through) encourages the baiting twits for his own purposes.

Meanwhile, the aged Laurie Strode (welcome back Jamie Lee) in her backwoods fortress takes practice shots at a group of mannequins that justly give a character later a hell of a creep-out moment. We see her kitchen has a secret basement filled with survivalist preserves and probably an arsenal of lethal stuff. She's grandmother to teenaged Allyson and mother to Karen who is furnished with a series of flashbacks of Laurie's survivalist training. Allyson goes about her day like the highschool kid she is, getting hyped up for the Halloween party.

Laurie breaks out of her nervous self-incarceration on hearing the news about Michael escaping from captivity to warn her descendants about the threat. They are sick of hearing the old woman rant about this thing from four decades ago and try to steer the conversation back to more soap opera style dialogue. But it's no good. Michael's on the loose and killing like it's last years shirts. And he headed for Hadonfield in a fast car. You know where it's going. There are twists but not in this review.

But is it any good? As a sequel? Yes, it's good. The kills are brutal and jolting. The suspense is frequently white knuckle. There is a final tableau guaranteed to delight. And, simmering beneath the action and the violence, there is a sadness as we get increasingly familiar with Laurie's prison of trauma and its effect on the generations that followed her. The monster's resurgence carries a weight bearable only through cartharsis and, if anything, that is the overriding theme of the piece.

Is it any good as a horror movie? Easily as good as H20 was which demonstrates the worth of calling key creative figures form the original back into play. The score is tastefully upgraded though in some moments annoyingly like the ones they grab off the shelf for James Wan movies which can work against the great tension of Carpenter and Howarth's 1978 groundbreaker. There is a twist with one character which is bewildering and wasted. The scenes at the hospital are intended to be digetic rather than filtered through a character's warped point of view and are a throwback to the worst excesses of mental illness = evil. Loomis in the original talks about Michael like a priest about a demon because Michael scared him beyond objective treatment which was the point of his odd dialogue. The "new Loomis" (Jaime Lee gets that line) attempts a kind of scientific curiosity about it but, by contrast, it just comes across as hokey and ill-conceived by the writers.

Am I being harsh? Well, I did enjoy it and appreciated that it brought a few new things to the table (and a lot of references to earlier entries which I just find tiresome these days). It is streets ahead of the Rob Zombie movies with their always mistaken attempt to provide back story to what is essentially a bad guy chasing kids. That's the thing, though: Halloween is blank enough, like its monster's mask, to have been claimed by every political or cultural agenda out there and it's still, at heart, a lean and solid effort that feels by turns featherlight and heavier than granite. To do as well at being that anything with the title needs to do as well and then better or just knuckle under and trot out the kills like Friday the 13th from its original onwards. This version doesn't quite get to as well but it doesn't just crank everything down to routine either.

Do we still need slasher films? A character in this one wonders at the fuss of the original murder spree when it has been so grotesquely trumped by mass shootings and terrorism since. Even in the movies where the '90s swung between self-aware postmodernism like Scream and the increasing sleaze of serial killer movies (which eventually even threw the token morality aside - or altered it to a new sociopathic one - to become torture porn) the scene seemed to squeeze out the old knife-wielders. But, of course, the point is in the selection and the stealth and the suspense, the hunt and the reality-defying indestructibility of the monster. They are the bits that this movie does well. At least you won't hear your own popcorn crunching over a lot of it.

Review: BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE

A single shot prologue shows a man coming into a motel room moving the furniture, the carpet and the floorboards and then hiding a bag under them. The 50s classic 26 Miles plays on the track. This ends badly.

Ten years later, as a title card tells us, the motel is visited by four people who are strangers to each other and we learn that the area of the motel is divided between the states of Nevada and California. There's a thick red line on the ground and the motel floor with each state written on its side of the line. When the guests rouse the clerk he tells them that rooms in California cost a dollar more but gambling is allowed on the Nevada side (and drinking only on the California side). After some picketty persnickety choosing of rooms they retire to them.

Here we learn who each one really is, every one has a story that doesn't show up at first look. This leads to a discovery which I'll leave to the viewer. A series of snap-to causes and effects transform this into a kind of Petrified Forest deal with a charismatic bad guy holding the characters and grinding them through sadistic games to get information of the strange scene he has burst into. Sorry, no spoilers.

This outing from Drew Godard piles on the visual style with a trowel and it is never less than stunning to watch. As a kind of '90s meta-nostalgia we also get a series of hi-cal pop songs from the days of yore (there's even a juke box on set to facililtate this) to juice up proceedings. And after a chunky showdown that will also remind you of a lot of movies you saw in the '90s we're done. Coda, credits, end.

The cast carry themselves well through this. Veteran Jeff Bridges dominates as the priest with a past sliding into dementia. John Hamm works as a kind of amped up Don Draper. Dakota Johnson does what she can with the slighter role she gets and relative newcomers Cynthia Erivo and Cailee Spaeny are standouts. It's Chris Hemsworth who gets the most fun out of his Charles Manson type character (perhaps a little more David Koresh but both are in there) and in the moment when Darlene lets him know why she's not afraid of him with a perfectly sculpted line shows both vulnerability and self awareness which soon will turn to violence. It's a standout performance.

But the problem is that it's well over two hours long and feels like it should have been about ninety minutes. While it is never slow it is repetitious and we get a strong sense of revisited information as the third act tightens up. A sudden revelation that answers an only mildly interesting character thread lets us in on a game changing development towards the end and by that time you might be thinking didn't Tarantino wear this one bare two decades ago? Well, no, as formulaic and self-parodic as he got Tarantino could still deliver a lean loaded gun in both senses. This will pass the time but I bet you won't remember much about it a week after you see it.

 

Review: LADIES IN BLACK

Teenaged Lisa starts work on the cocktail frock floor of a big department store in Sydney at the end of the '50s. She quickly proves more capable than the slave status normally accorded a fresh school leaver and is soon head hunted by the even ritzier section of model gowns, presided over by the mysterious mittel European Magda (a superb Julia Ormond) whose quotable savoir faire promise much more and tastier wisdom than the Anglos at the cocktail dress counter. Things look good.

At home Lisa is Leslie, girl from the suburbs whose mum (Susie Porter) makes her clothes for her using the same patterns she used when Leslie was ten. Dad is a burly lug (Shane Jacobsen) who needs a little schooling if he is to survive the decade to come. Leslie eventually must decloset herself about her name change but for the nonce she lives a double life.

Elsewhere at the counter Myra is having trouble getting her husband interested in her and we will hear the gamut of the euphemisms for homosexuality suitable for mixed company until matters get crucial. Her counter mate Fay is bored with the oafs she encounters but doesn't quite know what she wants. Magda's homelife is a pleasantly managed continental European series of fine breakfasts and soirees. The 2018 audience knows the reffo tag for racism and the story will negate the power of it through love of various kinds.

Even the darkest of these themes is blended like the ingredients of mock chicken in an old Home Ec text but lest I give the impression that this is a twee piece I should point out that veteran Bruce Beresford keeps a firm hand on the helm and takes what is essentially a feelgood tale of a girl watching the times around her change and smuggles in a fair amount of contemporary observation to allow some harder corners to poke through.

The xenophobia is not surprising of itself but its casualness might remind an Australian audience of recent speeches on the floor of the Senate that might well have been made during the film's setting. The scenes of mother and daughter negotiation feel natural and pointed clarifying the kind of sexual politics to come. The sexuality of Myra's Frank has a bizarre conclusion, all the more considering that the source novel was not written in the '50s but he '90s. The subplot's wrap-up could have come out of a British grim-oop-north family saga. Source material or hasty writing? It's hard to tell.

Beresford stitches a lot of post war Sydney on film into the palette and we're allowed to see enough of the work to mentally comment. It's a pleasant way of letting us join the real past with the detailed construction of it for most of the screen time.

I kept wincing at the score, though. The mallet approach to emotive orchestral scoring with a piano tinkling in cutely came so close to being embarrassing I wondered if it were irony. But, no, I suspect that the '70s chick flick tweets on the 1001 strings of Bartholemew Cubbins were paid for and delivered without a smirk. I can't fault it for not sounding like John Carpenter but couldn't help feeling that most of the intimate and weighty moments between characters would have meant more if the music was ditched. This kind of jobbing film music neither serves the period of the setting nor this one.

However, I wonder how many people will care about that. Why should they? What they get is a radiant cast performing a frequently amusing and engaging story about a society on the turn that ends, as it must, on a note of naive optimism. Cynicism need not apply here. It's just the adaptation at work. I wasted neither my time nor money on this ticket. I just kept thinking of the similar and more exhilarating earlier Beresford film The Getting of Wisdom. I guess I missed the struggle.

Review: BEAST

Moll is a young tour guide on the Isle of Jersey, bored but boxed into mundanity by a mother who treats her like hired help while the other daughter is showered with favour. Even Moll's birthday party is deflated by sis who announces a pregnancy. Moll strays to a dance, stays all night and is saved from date rape by a man who seems to have appeared from under the soil. His name is Pascal and he is everything Moll's mother hates and fears with an equal fury. Pascal is nature. Moll is in love.

Oh, and there's a murderer on the loose, abducting teenaged girls, raping and killing them and leaving them in shallow graves for later discovery. When they're not betting on the Portuguese farm worker their money's on Pascal. Pascal is golden blonde, sweaty and as dangerous as all freedom but understands he must earn Moll's trust. Both of the pair have a past and it's violent and guilty. But ... is he the killer?

Michael Pearce's intense debut feature is a study in contrasts. It's not just the wild nature vs corsetted civilisation on either side of the love story. It's also in the stiff and brutal motion of the fearful villagers and the strange balletic movement of the lovers when they are alone. And, while Pearce strives for a balance between these elements he seems to have found a need to prefer to write the symbols large. This never feels clumsy, though, it gives more of a sense of these things, images and actions, needing to be stated with strength. When you see the scene with the rabbit you know you'll see it again with higher stakes in allegory. This is not the self-conscious severity of a Bruno Dumont but neither is it subtle. It assumes you recognise it plainly. The gleeful shaky cam moment on the golf lawn with the roaring nocturnal beach punched in does what a lazy film leaves to an orchestral score. The nuance is elsewhere.

Most of it is in performance. Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn in the lead roles stun with their range and can be at their most menacing or eerie in the quietest exchanges. Geraldine James as Moll's mother is the embodiment of interpersonal domination, changing course on a five cent piece to control the mood and output of everything living within every cubic centimetre she surveys. Her interactions with Moll are sobering in their efficacy. In one of those unsubtle but strong touches mentioned above Moll's mother has another incarnation in the form of a flown-in police officer whose gothic interrogation scene comes from an even deeper nightmare. Yes, Moll is seeing and hearing her mother in the interrogator. We know. But we are still compelled.

When I see any film I look for its statements. Sometimes these can be and remain obscure but now and then they are so certain that the next task of seeing how the film expresses them is part of a more unconscious process. And then at the third act I wake this up and prepare to relish the taste of it. An '80s horror movie ends with the wink that that monster is still with us. A good rom com gives us a sting that the reconciled lovers have issues they haven't even dreamed of. But here, following each unfolding revelation I honestly had no idea of where it was going. It did. I didn't. Because of that alone it will be among my best of this year. But there's so much more. It's beautiful. It's ugly. It's good.

Review: THE WIFE

Melodrama is too much maligned, dismissed as cheaply emotive but without it we don't get the great American films of master Douglas Sirk, a lot of '50s Hollywood, the British kitchen sink realism of the '60s, that's before you get to silent cinema which required an appreciation of melodrama on the part of its audiences to work at all. As I see it, melodrama in cinema is a moral setting against which the emotional conflicts are given licence to bloom. The Wife is a story in which the secret of a marriage and literary career burns slowly and then quickly and brightly until you almost hold your breath for the explosion you know is coming. It's a good example of a contemporary melodrama.

Glenn Close is the wife of the title. Her husband, narcissistic and wayward, has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. They trampoline on the mattress, hand in hand, singing:"I won the Nobel. I won the Nobel" until she trails off and leaves the room on a pretext of something familial. Thereafter, through the first two acts, each time he speaks about the prize publicly the camera's gaze shifts from his anodyne glow to his wife's increasingly strained loyalty smile. We get many indicators that he, Joe (Jonathon Pryce) is a monstrous father, having a history of affairs, making a clear and humiliating preference for his daughter over his son in the presence of both, and carrying the secret that is telescoped in a very early scene: did she, Joan (Glenn Close) sacrifice her own writing career to support his or does it go deeper into ghost writing of his works which have delivered him the apex of literary recognition?

Most of the story is set outside the comfort of their home in America, in the salubrious surrounds of ceremonial buildings and five star hotels in Stockholm so they are on notice to perform for the public as the private shaking resentment festers in Joan's bosom. She must sit beside Swedish royalty as her husband pays her the kind of tribute given the long suffering rather than reveal the truth. How will this end?

I first remember Glenn Close as the self sacrificing earth mother in The Big Chill where she quietly commanded the self-licencing gaggle of old friends until giving up her husband for a single night to another woman. She did a lot of those. But the turn she made of her role in the retro-ethical Fatal Attraction or the end title sequence of Dangerous Liaisons where she scrapes away the powder and makeup of her doomed aristocracy are what I recall her for most of all and they are the ancestors of this one. This is a melodrama so it is allowed to emote beyond the bounds of naturalism but that doesn't mean overacting here, it means clarity. Close's wise and durable beauty is stretched to breaking with anger but restrained by her sense of the order of things. Pressed to a detonating fury in the third act, she knows the effect she has been fearing this will have is happening before her eyes and, after an extraordinary circular parallel track on her face against the gaudy coloured wall as it moves in sickly patterns behind her, she knows how she must end it. So do you and, whether you'll admit it or not, that's why you like melodrama.

Review: THE BREAKER UPPERERS

Jen and Mel run the titular service by which they are hired to decisively break couples up. Already the premise will strike anyone who has been in a relationship. They start and they end and when they end one always wants to hang on and the other always wants a clear rupture. When you think about it even the "let's stay friends" line is always from the dropper and can do more damage to the communication that the worst outright rejection. If you could just get someone else to step in and do it for you .... what you wouldn't pay.

This means that the pair are hired by the worst of the ones in the relationship and their measures traverse the waterfront of dump from the gentle to the brutal. What could go wrong? Just one moment of line-crossing kindness that opens a world of chaos as Mel starts showing sympathy. This feeling and the swelling problems gestating from its spark are the basis of the plot of this film as Jen and Mel are forced to question their own motives and see the friendship beneath them.

Sounds too warm n fuzzy? Well, as Mel says to a former mark when the latter has assured her that they will never see each other later: "this is New Zealand". If you've ever had a friend from New Zealand ("this is Australia!") you will know the routine of deadpan gallows humour, bursting understatement and the kind of sweetness that you always suspect is what poison tastes like. Like them, this film loudly and joyfully treads on sexual mores, race politics, ageism, consumerism, self loathing and narcissism and it does all that because it must. As a result this is one of the most effortlessly funny films you'll see this year.

Writers/leads Jackie Van Beek and Madeleine Sami keep things on a constant boil and provide a studied Jack Sprat pairing. Moments of competitive professionalism are a joy. James Rolleston as the sperm canon footballer who is impossible not to love owns his every shot (so to speak). Celia Pacquola is the perfect choice for the disastrous Annie.

If you see a trailer for this and go in expecting something satirical and dark you will have to do your own panning for it. The approach here is far more understated and does beg some indulgence.Take it easy and you get the lot. Ask for classic black comedy and you will leave poor.

Review: C'EST LA VIE

Super caterer Max is dealing again with a couple who want to skimp on the costs of their wedding reception. The venue has a massive view of the Eiffel Tower and they're talking about saving on the petit fours. With deadly precision Max takes it further in an increasingly withering display barely restrained contempt until the parsimonious pair are forced to retreat, perhaps forever. He's not displeased. He heads off to the baroque chateau for his next job, juggling an over disciplined assistant, the wrong band, a depressive waiter who once dated the bride, a host of workers who have their own problems and an overbearing narcissist who thinks he is a natural orator and balloon performer. What could go wrong?

Well, this is the kind of film that telescopes each disaster of varying magnitude and tests the characters to bring it through. If there's too much tension about this it must veer towards satire but this gentle and charming ensemble piece keeps the brittleness at bay but does forage for some deeper laughs. You know what's going to happen (the massive quantities of what must be the sponsor champagne label would have seen to that) but the fun of it is in the performances and they fit together here perfectly.

Really? That's it? Hey you get a good, fast paced event comedy in sumptuous surrounds and performed by a mix of old stagers and hot young newcomers delivered with all the charm of the French (when they are trying to please). What more do you want?

MIFF roundup 2018

MIFF 2018 arrived and found me fully prepared with booked pass and readiness to exchange any session that was getting too full at venues where that's bad (the only one where it's indifferent is Hoyts) and fairly high hopes of seeing some fine flickeroonies. Oh, and hand sanitiser to ward off the lurgies.

But maybe I was too ready. Despite sharing a few screenings with cronies (one of them a date) I feel now I over organised it to avoid the social aspects almost entirely so what was left was some movies in fine places. So, while I got around and caught up with friends on non-screening nights the experience of the festival itself was oddly quite lonesome. I think this is largely due to how much of an intolerant old grump I've become. I've got all frowny at the sight of people taking the best spots in the front row of the Forum (as they are perfectly entitled). I've mentally grumbled at having to stand in a queue because the person who has been nice enough to want to see a movie with me can sit somewhere less geeky than the front three rows. And then I've felt the frozen palm of injustice at how some of the sessions I've chosen go into "selling fast" or "standby" status. I even exchanged a screening of festival favourite Hong Sang Soo as it was getting full at the Kino and that would mean having to queue for half an hour.

The worst was saved to last through, as I timed the four pm session of Asako I & II so I could just stroll in and take my front row vista but still had to wait in a queue. I was near the top of the stairs, true enough so close to realising my dream. But it had gone four and there were still people strolling out of the cinema. None of the staff seemed stressed by this and by ten past I was getting irked. I was about to collar one of the ticket inspectors when a thought occured and I checked the starting time. I'd got here half an hour early, exactly what I used to do and had congratulated myself that I did no more. That's how bad it got.

Apart from that I had no symptoms of a cold ... until today, the Monday after (which means I got it from a Friday screening and probably the non-festival one). Having read about the importance of hand health I packed a sanitiser for generous application after every screening. It probably did nothing (viruses wouldn't even notice it, after all) but it felt thorough.

Finally, this will be the last MIFF helmed by Michelle Carey who has steered the great ship well clear of reefs of mediocrity. Under her reign we have seen a much heightened professionalism in the volunteer staff (who don't need to be professional so it's more impressive when they are). If her successor is half as good future fests will still be joyous. Farewell!

So, lonesome and lately bugged by disease, how was it?

THE MOVIES

HIGH

Our House

As lean as prize sashimi this story of either a haunting, time travel or perhaps collision of dimensions makes everything it tries work






Thoroughbreds

A new member at the cool table at Heathers High this deadpan folie a deux wins its every last scene








Nico 1988

Kept cold and video-ugly, this story of the last ditch of someone famous for a past she'd rather erase embarrasses the likes of The Doors, Stoned, Sid and Nancy etc by leaving the mythology in the bin. Rock icons have kitchens, too.





Tigers Are Not Afraid

Unsettling and heart rending account of displaced kids orphaned by the cartel gangs needs every frame of magical realism it can muster to keep us from screaming at the scenes it dishes up.






Here to be Heard: The Story of The Slits

Fat free rockumentary keeps its accounts plain and participants separated for a neat and hard history of a band made icons after their time. Take note all who think they can do Julian Temple's signature cheek, you might just try this approach, it's simpler and more effective.



MIDDLE

Cold War

Love and indecision in a time of hate and scission: this love across borders tale works well for most part but unlike the same team's luminous Ida this one ends up feeling too light







The Eyes of Orson Welles
Mark Cousins makes film personal like no other but this started feeling overlong when it should have been constantly engaging. Next time?






Good Manners
A sagging middle act prevented this from being the Angela Carterian fable it almost was.






Los Silencios

A hair more of the magic and a hair less of the realism might have left a deeper impression





The Insult

The characterisation of the principle combatants was good enough to have more of them and their complicating encounters and less of the swell building around them which grew repetitious and draggy







Happy as Lazzaro
Despite a beautiful realisation of the title character and intriguing treatment of the strange world of the first act this one lagged a little too much in its journey to the finale which felt rushed.





Asako I&II

Common gripe of the slow or saggy middle act also applies here as an otherwise fresh and engaging tale of love and identity beckons us in. Could survive the removal of about twenty minutes. Like The Insult the third act would only to open on a new scene (really? there's more?)





LOW
The Green Fog
Some inspired loony mechanisms were highlights but it grew repetitive and tiring









Wildlife
Good performances all round couldn't lift this above its own softly waving surface






The King

Nice idea to use an enduring public figure to make a moral map of his nation but it ends up too self confused to mean a great deal.






That Summer
An 80 minute admission that the filmmaker was more interesting than interested in a subject that master documentarians would fashion into gold soon after





NAVIGATION
App downloaded stealthily and in good time (I can remember the terrible days of waiting on the post for the credit card passes), ready to rock from the word go. If anything it's a touch more reliable and slicker to use (maybe I'm just better at using it). I wish the login would allow access to tickets on startup rather than having to thumb a few taps to get there. Not a big deal and maybe one only related to persons with passes but still... Otherwise, exchanges and additional tickets were easy to arrange with the app.

Website is much improved with very easy and rapid navigation through the mass of information presented. The Calendar is the best way of shortlisting with a pass and allows immediate information on venue vs time grid for making those difficult session choices.

VENUES

REGENT
A little Regent is better than no Regent at all. My first two sessions were in this splendour and I only wished the use of the venue stretched further than the opening weekend. Still ...

FORUM
The old favourite. I managed to get a good swag o' screenings in there. Other people continue to prefer the front and when your session is annoyingly sold out at 1.30 pm on a weekday that can get annoying.

COMEDY THEATRE
I don't have the same gripe with this venue that others do. Then again, I sit on the front row when I can so I wouldn't be bothered. I love the old style theatre ambience and the wine and choctop kiosk open until curtain up.

ACMI
It's a well appointed modern cinema but I still find it a little too sanitised. That gets forgotten when the movie starts, of course, but I'll still steer away from sessions there if I can. Only saw one at ACMI this time.

KINO
My least favourite MIFF venue as it doesn't cope well with larger crowds. Even the front seats get taken early and if you're too far to either side the image will be warped. Only had one session there and it was fine but I still veer from it when choosing.


HOYTS
The only cinema that even standby sessions can't faze me with. I have never failed to get a good seat in that first three-row block where you are at the front but no one is sitting behind you. Even when seeing a film with a friend who won't sit at the front we got good seats.


STAFF
It's worth repeating year after year that the staff in the past five to ten years have been good to deal with, being both well informed and courteous. I have clear memories of when they were a necessary feature the festival that you just had to put up with.

CROWDS
I hate standby sessions. I know they can convey a sense of really being in the festival vibe but considering how crap the average punter had got with cinema etiquette they can also be a nightmare of mobile light pollution, seat kickers or folk who fail to understand that the seat in front of them is not a good place to jam their shoes. Had someone two seats away who jostled past "sorry, I have to be in the middle" and then had to be told to turn her light polluting phone off as the film was starting.

Latecomers still frustrate me as they disrupt the screenings. It's an event to go to a festival film; you really can't calculate the likelihood of getting to a venue on time, factoring in your trains or parking? Why are you only getting here half an hour into the movie?


MISSED
The new Hong Sang Soo film, Grass, went into standby rapidly. Rather than battle the grots at Kino I exchanged it for another film. This director's films have so long been popular at MIFF that it's crazy that none of the marginal mainstream or arthouse, if you will, cinemas have picked up on it. If he can fill the Forum or the Kino at one in the afternoon he'd good for a release for a month or two in the wild, surely. His fans' reverence approaches that of David Lynch's or Wes Anderson's. Release his movies normally! Kino! Nova! Westgarth! Freezers of choctop sales guaranteed.

Otherwise, the same thing got me out of The Kindergarten Teacher and Behind the Curve (which, unlike Grass, will quite likely turn up at the cinema if not on streaming). Kore-eda's Shoplifters and The Third Murder would be good to see. I wasn't going to bother trying for a session of the new Terry Gilliam film as it's unlikely not to get a general release. See also Mandy and The Cured. Tower: A Bright Day might conceivably turn up on SBS on Demand as might The Night Eats the World or Fugue. Looking forward to local releases of Now Sound and Bad Reputation.

As usual I wanted to see almost everything on the program. I knew I'd be adding sessions to the thirteen I'd already picked. Maybe next year I get membership for the passport and really do it.

FIN
I got up from my seat at Asako I&II with feelings described in my intro, that it had been a quiet and solitary affair, regardless of the company I had kept throughout. While the top titles provided real delight I have felt very little of the experience of seeing Wisconsin Death Trip at eleven in the morning at the Forum all those years ago that sold me on getting a pass and committing to ten or more movies. Wisconsin Death Trip is not a great film but the whole experience got me hooked. I'd been to MIFF before but now I had a way of approaching it that promised riches by avoiding the big tickets and looking in the shadows. I made my way down to the club and had a glass of shiraz, taking a few pictures. It's not the same without either company or the expectation of something really strong on screen coming up or bidding recovery from. So, yeah, I gotta plan it better.

Roll on August 2019.