My Teens: 2010 - 2019 in Cinema

Some Thoughts:

'Nother decade, huh? I'll have to confess that the last one changed without my really noticing. I was reminded earlier this year that I'd started the film night that created this blog ten years ago. As 2009 ended I'd spent the best part of  a year programming screening sequences by the half season, writing up the selections and even editing trailers for them. I'd turn up every Friday evening, shamble up Smith St and into Milos' place, checking the projector and av receiver, run a little of the feature and support and then wait with a coffee and noodle at the piano until people turned up, if they did. Things were different then but they were already changing.

The arthouses, whose demise had happened in the mid-00s, had not come back and there were only a few of us trying to address the gap in the inner city. We didn't yet have streaming video and the few US cable shows that were easily available on free to air tv were being shunted to difficult timeslots that meant we saw them as recordings rather than at the same time. Blu-ray was available but wasn't going to take DVD over as it meant getting a new machine and possibly replacing a whole collection. I was still sourcing the selections through a lot of international online retailers and even other means.

Few remain now and all power to them but cinema ain't what it used to be as far as how you get in front of it goes. Plenty of style changes, too, but that distribution disruption has done the most, and it's not all damage. Social media expanded with the continued monetisation of arenas like YouTube. Wince all we like, it has meant more content available of new voices with instant access and the resurfacing of obscurities worth our attention. This is almost the same as the local introduction of video on demand streaming which has brought the same kind of thing as YouTube but at a guaranteed audiovisual quality and often surprising creative tone. The adoption of it by rising names in cinema as well as old stagers like Scorsese will keep this going.

That has meant, though, that free to air tv which long abandoned movie marathons and strong new programming is all but unwatchable and on the death spiral. We're still waiting for Shudder (and Ozflix only works with Chromecast) but Disney, Amazon Prime and other interests have either moved in or are soon to. Too much choice? Probably, considering that none of these is free outside of the tv channels demand viewing resources and oddities like TubiTV.

Arthouse cinemas starved to death in the 2000s and much of their content went into streaming but this still means that there is a potential ocean of it that is even harder to discover without going off the map, now. Parasite has proved a stayer at Melbourne cinema Nova and maybe, just maybe, something like a swell of interest in filmmakers like Takeshi Miike or Hong Sang-Soo could be organised. Then again, Hoyts in Melbourne at least is screening good presentations of Chinese and Indian films in response to the local market so who knows?

And there are new names to watch. Ari Aster for his own brand of strong psycho drama that can spin off into outright horror or remain within the realm of fable while still appearing to be naturalistic (after a fashion). Jordan Peele brings his comedy scholarship to social commentary in movies that inform but forget not to entertain. Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead are building a kind of shadow Lovecraftian universe quietly in Mumblecore Corner and it's taking. Jennifer Kent stunned us with The Babadook and proved there was more in there with The Nightingale.

An unannounced wave of magical realism from south of the US border began making itself felt in the festival circuit with titles like the extraordinary and devastating Tigers are Not Afraid. A wave of meanspirited horror remakes dragged the genre down to the gutter, missing the point of the originals and going for big reveals. The Conjurverse gave us the jumpscare fests and bled into nearby galaxies to create likeminded rubbish like Sinister or the 2012 version of The Woman in Black. I hated every one of these violations but had to admit that their success led to funding for more genre output. I had no interest in the Marvel Comic Universe but also had to admit its clout and shook my head when Scorsese and Coppola both declared the films uncinematic. Of those old masters I had to admit I preferred the Scorsese exhibition to any of his output in the decade, being unable to muster interest in seeing a story about Christian missionaries in medieval Japan.

I enjoyed the transition of found footage as an aesthetic to a broader lo-fi field with some intriguing results like Yellow Brick Road, Banshee Chapter, the Creep movies, Unfriended, until productions like the surprisingly sombre and effective Satanic managed to make a fair tilt at mainstream clean light with some genuine original horror. The unsung hero of low-means film production was the drone, allowing for aerial shots on a budget. Elsewhere, the creation of online folkore through Reddits and video platforms bore intriguing fruit with creepypastas and the like which had a shivery homemade authenticity. On the outer verges, yes, but this, too, is cinema at least by intention.

Strangely, we also saw the revival of stable film production like Val Lewton in the '40s or Roger Corman in the '60s. A24 gave us a number of intriguing pieces that used genre as a tone or colour but provided solid social commentary like MidSommar, It Comes at Night or A Quiet Place. This gave rise for the silly description of elevated horror but that didn't harm the films themselves. Blumhouse seemed to take a throw it out there and see if it works approach resulting in a mixed bag that was interesting rather than tiresome.

Before my final ten, here's a grab bag of wondermints from the era just going:
Satanic, Sorry to Bother You, Tigers Are Not Afraid, Evolution, The Artist, Tabu, Climax, anything by Hong Sang Soo, The Invitation, The Reef, Banshee Chapter, Beasts of the Southern Wild, End of Animal, Spring Breakers, Why Don't You Play in Hell, The Sound of My Voice, Planet of Snail, Blue is the Warmest Colour, Snowtown, Amy, Son of Saul, Fear Itself, Kedi, Hereditary, The Nightingale, What We Do in the Shadows, Wounds, Unfriended, Under the Skin, Snowpiercer, Blue Valentine, In Fabric, A quiet Place, The Shape of Water, Thoroughbreds, Tragedy Girls, Tully, Lucky, Excision, The Hole in the Ground, Borderlands, A Gentle Creature, Mother!, A Ghost Story, Hard to be a God, Moonlight, Raw, Ingrid Goes West, It Comes at Night, Ich Sehe Ich Sehe, The Unknown Girl, I, Daniel Blake, The Forbidden Room, Birdman, Ex Machina, The Lobster, Wadjda, Predestination, Nightcrawler, The Bling Ring, Rhino Season, Martha Macy May Marlene, Chronicle, The Master, Uncle Boonmee who Can Remember His Past Lives, The Woman, Killing Ground.

And all this is still just surface scratching. I probably went to the cinema more regularly in the last ten years than any other decade and that was supplemented by streaming services. We're doing ok. I declare the 2010's to be a great decade of cinema.

The following, one from each year, are not necessarily what I might consider the best but all of them have stayed with me. I won't include lowlights except to say that Noah Baumbach, Wes Anderson and James Wan and cronies should stop making films.

2010

Black Swan - Darren Aranofsky makes a muscular paranoia fantasy out of ballet. Can't want more than that. Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis? Ok, maybe that much more.








2011

The Turin Horse - Bela Tarr bows out of cinema with an apocalyptic piece so patient and intense it's difficult to return to but so impressive that it never leaves your mind anyway.







2012

Berberian Sound Studio - The first Peter Strickland film I saw and it made me what I believe will be a lifelong fan. Start in an imagined genre world and then mix it up with razors on your fingers. Beautiful. Powerful.





2013

Blancanieves - Who says silent cinema can't engage? This extraordinary late entry doesn't just engage, it enchants.









2014

The Babadook - A marvellous if brutal exploration of grief, exhaustion and guilt and the monsters they create.








2015

It Follows - Not as claimed at the time a regression to the teenage sex=death equation, this retro-toned horror brought us a far scarier protean threat borne of responsibility.







2016

Under the Shadow - A kind of porting of Dark Water to an even more oppressive cultural situation as a mother and daughter struggle in the theocratic dictatorship of the Ayatolla's Iran. Inside is danger but outside is hatred.






2017

Get Out - social satire woven deep into science-horror from the mind that successfully rebooted the Twilight Zone. He did it again this year with US. He will do it again. I will be in the queue.










2018

The Favourite - From Greek Weirdcore to the edge of the mainstream, Yorgos Lanthimos has beat a steady path. With this tale of ambition and shifting empathy he shows us why all that struggle was worth it.









2019

Portrait of a Lady on Fire - Sublime, deep and heavily affecting, this tale of love on a clock and the importance of moments could not be a better means to round off ten years of great cinematic change.









That's it. Time for a nap. See youse next decade,

PJ

HiMidLo 2019

A rich year at the dark house where even the middling and low points had something to offer (well most of them). MIFF was fun (if its overengineered series of daytime solo screenings bordered on misanthropy) but the best, pleasantly, were from the normal schedules. The last time a year at the cinema was so rich was twenty years ago.

The High

The Nightingale - for having the courage to introduce difficult themes and then to follow through with complicated responses. Far more than a revenge movie.





Portrait of a Lady on Fire - a love story that yet manages to comment on the process of portraiture, make poignant use of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and so strongly insist on the importance of moments that its final shot is of a face changing by the second as it relives each one.

Parasite - Sociopolitical fable of wise down and outers gaming the system with a mix of comedy and dark drama that only the likes of Bong Joon-Ho can provide.

Midsommar - a break-up story set in an allegorical explosion that involves paganism, dance, ritual, extraordinary violence and wondrous hallucination to achieve its final, hard-won smile.





In Fabric - Peter Strickland takes swatches from everything he has encountered and quilts them together in a tighter knit than all the post-modern popsters of the '90s put together. Adding warmth to technique he presents something very funny and often genuinely eerie.

Border - so intense that this is a once only view (currently viewable on SBS on Demand, at the mo) this powerful piece about identity and self-acceptance is like nothing else you have seen this year (and chuck in next year and any other bloody year)

US - Get Out was not a fluke. It was a well-crafted first step into cinema by an accomplished comedian and storyteller. Jordan Peele's reboot of The Twilight Zone had its issues but US avoids them in a show of profound WOW.




Pain & Glory - I prefer Almodovar when he is self-reflexive to his giddy sex comedies. Does that sound obvious? Well, it shouldn't: the latter formed a solid bridge from the lightless oppression of the Franco years and work perfectly well as funny movies. But every time he gets more seriously autobiographical he seems to hone his skills' blade.

Something Else - mumblecore breakup story complicated by what might be a monster of imagination or something far more real. Same universe as that of the rising talents Benson and Morehead



Mrs Lowry & Son - Tim Spall and Vanessa Redgrave shine in a tale of a complex mother and son bond that compresses yet allows for strong personal vision.

The Swallows of Kabul - like a folktale but in the reality of Taliban Afghanistan lifted by entrancing animation and a breezy pace and no shyness from showing atrocity

Jojo Rabbit - improves massively in retrospect as the whole picture has formed and the expectations of the misleading trailer are dispelled. Wonderful fable of ethics from Taika Waititi






Middle

The Day Shall Come - Chris Morris comes through with more subtlety than his last feature (Four Lions) and the ending kills but maybe too much meandering in the second act.

Ready or Not - unsubtle and mostly two dimensional, this us vs them black comedy is lifted into glory by its dizzying central performance.






Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood - too long but continuously enjoyable.







Stan and Ollie - Dug deeper than the average biopic but retained a little too much of what bothers me about them.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote - instead of "is that all there is?" after all this time we might rather say "well, that works fine". So it does. As well as Brazil or Fear and Loathing did.




The Long Shot - potentially subversive rom com never quite breaks out of pleasant

The Realm - fine political thriller of manners from Spain takes us effectively from sympathy to a fascinated antipathy as a bad guy is shunned and then threatened by worse guys but needed trimming

Rocketman - music biopic makes one good decision to be a musical first and biography second so that the famous songs match the life lesson rather than the timeline. Some thrilling setpieces but eventually falls into serving the timeline rather than the idea

The Keeper - efficient tale of a struggle for acceptance in the face of mass hostility could have afforded to be a lot harder than it was.

Animals - joys and infuriations of friendship well served by good casting and writing but felt overlong







Low

Knives Out - decent whodunnit promises extras that it doesn't quite deliver






Judy & Punch - great idea shoots itself in the foot at the end of the first act and never quite recovers

Joker - like an efficient cover version of '70s Scorsese with a startling lead vocal








Marriage Story - Noah Baumbach almost breaks through the quirk barrier with some well-nurtured performances from Scarlett Johanson and Adam Driver and doesn't return to the atrocity levels of Frances Ha but it almost feels like this screen divorce is happening in real time. Not for me.



Palm Beach - constantly embarrassing reunion tale of privileged Australians misses every single mark





Brightburn - a dark anti superman tale with surprising gore doesn't exceed its routine approach








The Lodge - horror by numbers constantly annoys with obvious revelations and unremarkable twists. Couldn't care less.

Review: PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE

A young art teacher is holding a life class for her students with herself as the model. She spies a painting in the back of the room which one of the students has brought out of storage. It's one of hers, a eeries picture of a woman on a beach at night with the hem of her dress in flames. It shares its title with the film itself.

So far we have the opening of a gothic tale and indeed as we ride the waves with her younger self to the island estate of an aristocratic family to paint the portrait of the daughter and heiress we feel that very vibe which persists throughout the next couple of hours on screen. But this is not a horror tale despite the dark and mysterious mansion and recent family tragedy which is variously reported as an accident or suicide.

And that's not all. The daughter, Heloise, has a rich suitor she has never met. Portraitist Marianne is there to seal the deal with the picture that will raise the interest of the man from Milan. All well. No. Heloise has been educated and virtually brought up in a convent, typical enough for girls of her standing, and doesn't want to get married. Of convent life she says she liked the equality. So she won't pose for the portrait. Marianne must do her own posing as a hired companion for Heloise and sneak in any sketching she can to finish the nuptial advert.

Their early encounters are charged as Marianne's gaze goes steadily from that of an artist learning the contours of her subject's face and body to that of a lover as their dialogues deepen into the importance of the pieces of life. I use the term gaze advisedly. A heteronormative painter/subject story would crank into male gaze gear without thinking and within a very few scenes but we're concerned with something more than the skin deep in this ocean deep tale. We are concerned with time. Heloise resists her marriage but knows it or something like it is inevitable. Marianne as a female painter has limited prospects in the greater world back in Paris. Oh, didn't I say? This story is set in pre-revolutionary France, L'ancien Regime, the 18th century. When their attraction heats to love their physical relationship is on a clock. The better Marianne does her job the sooner she will lose Heloise and that will be forever.

This extraordinary film of art and its capacity for memory, of music and its power (in a film without a non-diegetic score) and of great intimacy is above all about the moment. The delay in revealing Heloise's beauty is long and continues in a tease right to the last as the camera follows behind her as she rushes to the beach. The flame at the hem of the skirt once seen is left to burn beneath a dangerous smile. A pair of profiles plays as an avoidance game as Marianne in the foreground studies her subject's profile until Heloise turns in accusation, sending the artist's gaze spinning away.

Finally, we have a face. In the candlelit auditorium she sits and at last hears the music promised her by her lover. It is Vivaldi's "summer storm" allegro from the Four Seasons and at first she is overwhelmed by its power. This soon bring torrents of those moments back and stretches the face into rueful pain. At last, the beauty of them allows her a warm smile. That's in one long take. It's intimacy, it's a moment of many moments, it is music and portraiture and, above all, it is cinema and among the finest of the year.

Review: JOJO RABBIT

Jojo, 10, is dressing up for his first day at boot camp. As he is going through a self-administered pep talk the spectre of his imaginary friend passes between himself and the mirror and then behind, describing a circle of influence. His imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler. Boot camp is at the Hitler Youth.

He is ridiculed at training (an incident that gives him the nickname of the title) and his attempted comeback results in injury and permanent scarring. His supportive mother has a few things to say about that and he is reinstated at the training facility as a kind of intern, outspoken as a good, freshfaced Nazi. But there are complications and those I'll leave for your screening.

Taika Waititi plays a delicate game here. On the one hand he must steer short of empathising Nazi characters (he appears himself as the imaginary Hitler) and on the other must avoid too heavy a hand in allowing the deliverance from that mindset back into humaneness. 

Cleverly, his Hitler can be both boisterously supportive of Jojo when in need but monstrously childish in moments of stress, but then bumblingly ineffectual when faced with difficult issues. He is, after all, the invention of a child seeking a hero and with a child's limitations he is a consistent source of comedy as well as emotional violence. It's a strong turn by Waititi let down only by his more cutomary deadpan moments. Then again, this is a delicate balance.

Most of the story is given to us through the vision of Jojo himself and, while it could easily have been a kind of slapstick version of The Tin Drum, the film pulls well back from a more adult horror (remembering that Oscar was an adult in a boy's body). But this is still Nazi Germany so while the Hitler Youth training (with a hilariously off-hand Sam Rockwell in charge) is mostly goofy there are public hangings. A lot of the middle made obvious by this is filled with Scarlett Johanson as Jojo's mother who brings a strained brightness and whimsy to her son's life with good humour laced with graver life lessons. While her superb performance in the otherwise plodding Marriage Story will eclipse this one her commitment to this character takes us with her.

Roman Griffin Davies is luminous in the title role, constantly puzzled by a world ruled by easy answers to difficult problems from one corner and complications from every other. He is, refreshingly, a kid, not a wisecracking adult in leder shorts. The dialogue is deliberately modern for a comic frisson with its setting but even then his delivery of it feels natural. That's important as, however closely this piece sparks against magical realism it would implode if it banged its way in there. The other major relationship that must work is with Elsa (a wickedly arch but deep performance from Thomasin McKenzie) and it is there where the magic meets the real gets a lot tougher to carve.

This will sound facetious but isn't: the main lesson of this film for cinema goers is in the trailer which not only reveals too much but also steers prospective audiences to expect something that it isn't. It is not, not, not the Third Reich in Wellington, nor Mel Brooks does The Tin Drum. Don't expect a big laugh every few minutes. Jojo Rabbit holds a lot of comedy but it is steadfastly a fable about ethics, the kind of ethics that can bring their bearers to face death for their sake. The final moments that show the reward for this are highly manipulative but also life affirming and beautiful. See if you don't have something in your eye when the song starts.

Review: MRS LOWRY & SON

Biopics are mostly stillborn. Whether we already know the lifestory or not we can guess that at some point we are in for a kind of cinematic pageant, a roll out of great moments in the life of. In those cases (i.e. most of them) what began as cinema in the opening credits turns into an expensive slide show. Others mine the biography for life lessons and can acquit themselves as movies. And then there are others still that find universality beneath the peculiar and give us a story we didn't know but feel better for knowing. Mrs Lowry & Son is such a film.

This two-hander about the bond of mother and son frequently strains at the vulnerable points and willingly tests the patience of the characters and we their witnesses. That is effectively what it is about. Mrs Lowry, abandoned while still young with a small boy has forgone an imagined career as a concert pianist and has reached old age as an invalid, bedridden and bitter. Her son Laurie, a rent collector, is her sole carer (it's the 1930s and there is no National Health). He is also a painter. His motif, from the get go is that he is a man who paints, nothing more, nothing less.

Laurie goes about his days struck with wonder at the sight of the life around him. Be it ever so dowdy and breathlessly industrial he can see its beauty and quietly puts that on canvas by night in the attic of the two-up two-down she shares with his mother. His mother feels she has sunken below her station and her son's art with its emphasis on commoner-filled streets, smokestacks and miners, fills her with dread that others might see it. It takes a visit by a better-off neighbour to see one of the works for the beauty it holds. She is unimpressed by the attention of a London gallery owner whose letter, she says, could be filled with lies.

If you're thinking a kind of Beckett dialogue you're getting the idea. This might well have been a play for its confinement to a few rooms but the cinema comes from deft handling of this, its contrast with the world of stone grey and colour outside and the sense that there is a kind of quirkiness that can bleed from ancient wallpaper and seep into the light. What stops it from Becketting like a boss is warmth.

Vanessa Redgrave is both weary and tireless in her snidery and outright attacks on her son and his art. Her mouth when closed forms a kind of bleached family-sized anus of tight wrinkles that might open disastrously at any turn. Her eyes burn like dry ice. But this is a continuum, her levity, too, is sincere. Indeed, when she falls into moments of happiness it seems almost unintended. In receipt of this constant chipping is the great Timothy Spall whose aged Mad Hatter face wears the weight of his job's misery but lights on sight of the extraordinary in a day. And at moments of great stress, the screams almost tear through him.

Performances like these are crucial to a film like this. There are dramatic phases to it but they are not cut like the usual acts. Like the Lowrys' shared sentence of a life the moments come as they will, needing no further agency than a word of kindness here or bleakness there. Given the subtlety of Adrian Noble's direction, two lesser lights would see this film implode (it might by itself if Craig Armstong's soporific score had its way).

Mrs Lowry & Son is not a long film at ninety-one minutes but it is demanding. If you have a care you will be guided in by a masterful cast and see if you don't go googling LS Lowry's paintings afterwards. That, finally, is the beauty of this film: you meet the force of the people and their impact without ever asking if this or that happened quite that way. This is not a slideshow but an immersion and what better way than that to share a life?

Review: KNIVES OUT

Celebrated whodunnit novelist Harlan Thrombey is discovered dead in his study the morning after a party for his family. All of them have benefitted from the patriarch's position and wealth and all are about to reveal that they had a motive for doing him in. Not only is this like the plot of one of his novels but the police investigation includes a private detective in the form of a southern savant Benoit Blanc who also seems cut from the pages of a Thrombey book. So, rich family, a mass of motives and opportunity and a cluey sleuth on the case: who did dun it?

Well, that is the point but every whodunnit worth its salt offers scope for social commentary, satire and even just some old fashioned morality mining. That's what this one does and, a smattering of moderne narrative compression techniques, makes for a very entertaining couple of hours. End of story? Not quite.

There is an engaging fluidity here that lets the film move between arch and basely funny moments and more genuine thrills. It's hard to pin it down as a thriller or a comedy. The problem here, for me, is that this approach has encouraged a lot of belt-loosening in the screenplay and final edit. What feels like a constant thread of narrative is more like a meandering tour of the film's cleverness. While performances are never pushed to parody and the flashbacks in characters' recollections are more efficient (especially when the account is at odds with the memory) we are neither victims of self-conscious artistry nor routine genre service. Knives Out is a whodunnit for today but did we need it? I was left wondering if the bash-it-out approach of Ready or Not might not serve both its times and audiences better (also, it's shorter and funnier).

That said we do have some engaging performances. Daniel Craig is having a ball with his hand-rolled southern drawl and classic sleuth persona. His counterpart Ana de Armas owns the screen as the hapless accused from the illegal end of the immigrant family spectrum (and as cheap as the joke is the fact that every uppercrust Thrombey thinks she comes from a different part of Latin America it is a funny one). Michael Shannon, normally a go to galeforce presence clearly engages with the controlled rage of his family loser character. Christopher Plummer does what he says on his tin. Chris Evans is funny and edgy as the loose canon grandson Ransom. However, Toni Collette and Jamie Lee Curtis seem underwritten. Speaking of that, why bother casting the wonder LaKeith Stanfield in a role that makes absolutely nothing of him? Had the filmmakers not seen Atlanta, Get Out or Sorry to Bother You? As soon as you see him you think extra-dimension but what you get is 1st Detective. Such a waste.

At over two hours Knives Out ends up feeling hollower than it should. So what, aren't whodunnits fun piffly puzzles? Well, no. As they generically play out among the higher echelons the motives for the murders they depict are themselves a mix of the base passions of anger or jealousy etc. and troubling deeper moral currents. Super sleuths philosophise and comment. I don't know that I care so much about the reflexive architecture of a whodunnit about a master of whodunnits in a house that one character describes as looking like a Cluedo board. It's tidy, perhaps too much so. It's clever but perhaps not enough.

Summer: Will You Get To Heaven?

Trailer

Ave!

As we brace ourselves for what might be a cataclysm of fire in the new Australian summer we might spare a thought for those who sought and found a kind of salvation. These tales might not always be obviously heavenly but that just goes with the time. From a living hell of the imagination through to a desire given a difficult birth I have some treats for you here. Why only four? Aren't seasons more like twelve weeks long? Well, the anniversary was only for 2009 and I never went very far into December with them and the earliest I ever started was late Feb 2011. So, four. But welcome ye and see below and ponder the chorus as I sing with Girls at Our Best: "Will you get to heaven with advance publicity?"

ERASERHEAD (USA 1977)

I never showed this at Shadows. It almost felt like showing my own work. I'm not saying that I'm remotely capable of creating such a thing but Eraserhead has become such a part of the way I view things and even how I think that it would have felt like projecting pages from a diary. Now, that the screenings are dispersed I don't have to front up and feel embarrassed.

So, here it is: Henry who lives in a troubling world that might have once been America but is now a series of claustrophobic streets and machinery shown in deepest black and white. He finally goes for dinner with his girlfriend's parents only to learn (after the mechanical self-saucing mini chickens on the table have ruined the occasion) that he and Mary are pregnant and, according to Mary, "they're not even sure it is a baby!" Then there's married life in Henry's grimy flat feeding a thing that looks and sounds like a newborn lamb except still foetal. David Lynch's feature debut came directly from his experiences as a young parent trying to start an art career and when I say directly I mean in raw uncensored form moulded by one of the most creative imaginations cinema has ever known. "In Heaven everything is fine. You've got your good things and you've got mine."

TAG (Japan 2018)

Mitsuko gets on her bus to school as always but as she bends to pick up the pen that's fallen to the floor a force bashes through the vehicle and severs not just the roof but the upper halves of everyone on board except for her. She escapes into the nearby woods, cleans herself of the blood of her dead school mates and finds some cleaner clothes. Suddenly she's walking into school with her friend Aki who goes to a different school which Mitsuko now also goes to. Somethng very strange is about to happen all over again and after the shock of the opening we can't stop asking questions. What is turning everything into weird violence? Is she really still Mitsuko despite a new body and name? Why are there only female characters? In this hyperspace Battle Royale of manners Mitsuko might have to take the teen rebellion of her friends as something more like a life manual. From the never predictable Sion Sono who gave us Suicide Club and Why Don't You Play in Hell?

GINGER SNAPS (Canada 2000)

Brigitte and her sister Ginger are so emo that they are each other's only friend but this actually works so well that the situation is more like the most exclusive club at school. One night, while organising a prank on one of the alpha girls Ginger is attacked by something savage and powerful. Back home, her cuts heal before their eyes. What just happened? In a world (yes, please imagine that spoken by a dusty voiced voiceover artiste) where puberty is marked as much by menstrual as ejaculative onset a new field of bloodletting is about to open. From the death scene videos under the credits to the final genuinely tragic end we are taken through some of the funniest teen sass since Joss Whedon and subversive humour as teen movies collide with werewolf movies. "I get this ache... And I, I thought it was for sex, but it's to tear everything to fucking pieces."

SECONDS (USA 1966)

Mr Wilson, an ageing white collar is given a second chance at youth which comes as a freaky phone call one night. Proving it isn't a prank, the caller gives him the time and place. He turns up to find it's completely different to expectations but everybody working there seems to know who he is and why he's there. He soon learns that he is to become a younger man through surgery and socio-financial magic and there will be no turning back. He recovers to find he is a young painter in a Californian bohemian colony, at the canvas by day and the Martinis by night. And there is an alluringly mysterious woman enticing him out to the wild crashing waves. Paradise? How would you do? John Frankenheimer in the mid sixties was on a roll, from the serious and stylish thrillers like Seven Days in May and The Manchurian Candidate to this intriguing take on the clash of silent generation and the emerging hippies as the third act of the American Dream goes wrong. Rock Hudson's casting is poignant, allowing him a kind of abstract declaration of the double life he still had to lead. I think of this as the real Twilight Zone movie. It was the one I started with back in 2009 and here provides confident if bracing landing.

Vale!
Well, it certainly has been fun doing all this again. I have missed the curation of the lists and editing the trailers. I hope, if you've been following this, that you've sampled some of these wares. There's so much of cinema to discover from its various prodigious eras and there's no sign at all that we're sick of it yet. I'm certainly not. So, it's another farewell from me as I send this off to the blog and check the spelling. I'll still find myself striding along Smith Street of a Friday evening with a pleasant sense of panic that I've forgotten a subtitle file or just couldn't find that pesto dip everyone loves.

Bye.