10th Anniversary Autumn Program

So, I was referring to some old blog entries and noticed that I hadn't for a long time done any of the lists I used to do about how I'd like to see some remakes done or simple top tens. This meant I had to come face to face with the timeline and realised that this blog and the film night it supported were begun ten years ago. In fact the month o' March is the anniversary.

So, I thought, instead of a nostalgic post, how about I think up screening seasons the way I used to. I'll think of themes for the sets of titles and even cobble a trailer together if time and materials permit. Here's the first one I did: https://pj-shadow.blogspot.com/2009/02/

It'll be like that. I don't have a venue and won't be doing any screenings the way I used to but I can make some recommendations and you can do the rest. We're almost out of the beginning of autumn (when the original one began) but I'll start with that and go until summer at the end of the year.

Autumn 2019: THE MAGIC REEL
Magical realism began as a literary term and covered Jorge Luis Borges and a number of South American novelists in his wake and thence to Europe (Gunther Grass, Patrick Susskind) and even our own shores (Peter Carey). To say cinema was slow to adopt this is to miss how magical realist it has been from the time of Melies films onward. There are films that took their cue from the literature and others that, by dint of their own intense individuality, stumble into it. Here are some for the most magical realist season: Autumn.


TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID (Issa Lopez Mexico 2017)

My favourite of the 2018 Melbourne International Film Festival this mix of grimness and airy whimsy can create a frantic fear one moment and a great warmth the next. A girl in Mexico City has her life disintegrated by gang violence and, left with nothing else, she must find and join the underworld of drug war orphans who are gathering in the city. Blood streams from corpses on the footpaths and slithers along walls and follows her into her house. An embossed dragon on a phone case takes life and flies through the darkness. And then there are the tigers of the title, sometimes figurative and legendary, sometimes all too real.

SPECIAL (Hal Haberman/Jeremy Passmore USA 2006)

This is a superhero origins story unlike any other. Les is a young parking officer who volunteers for a pharmaceutical experiment for his depression. It doesn't just ease his condition it gives him superpowers. He can go through walls and levitate. When other people see him demonstrate them, though, he's just running into walls or sitting in chairs. Two big pharma guys are after him for his signature on a non-disclosure about the failed drug trial but they increasingly take on the vibe of super villains. Les, alone, faces a world of crime that only he can meet. Coming across like something from the realm of the cult movie heyday of Repo Man or Love and Human Remains, Special wears its indy badge with pride and digs in despite the budget constraints to offer some real heart along with the action and the comedy.

SAUNA (Antti-Jussi Annila Finland 2008)

As an exhausted conflict ends in the 16th century two brothers travel to a remote region of Russia to map the new border. The intensely withdrawn inhabitants of the village they stop in do little to assuage their fears of potential fresh conflict. Oh and there's a strange building in the swamp that has no doors ... sometimes. This thickly atmospheric folk horror will feel like home to both fans of Tarkovsky and Clive Barker.

THE ENDLESS (Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead USA 2017)

Benson and Moorehead are emerging as the keepers of Lovecraftian mythology in independent cinema with outings like the fabulous Spring, the mumblecore weirdness of Resolution and now this setting in one of the creepiest cults you could imagine. Two brothers who escaped the cult as children are sent a tape encouraging them to return. The younger is eager for one last look. The elder is wary but agrees to go along with the condition that they stay for a day and leave again, this time for real. Nothing ever goes to plan.

TIMECRIMES (Nacho Vigalondo Spain 2007)

My favourite time travel story deals with the paradox of doubling head on as an alarming crime seen by chance through binoculars reveals ever more bizarre persectives once the witness begins his investigation. Only as long as it needs to be, this break neck sci-fi will leave you tracing the events backwards looking for the seam.




GOD TOLD ME TO (Larry Cohen USA 1977)

In honour of Larry Cohen who died this year is this strange piece from the seventies that won't sit still and accept a genre label, having liberal doses of police procedural, cultism, supernatural horror and some truly buzzy sci-fi. Cohen had a cosmic imagination and plied it on a shoestring budget. A series of murders is taking place in New York. The perpetrators are unconnected save for one detail: they all claim that God told them to do it.

MAN FACING SOUTHEAST (Eliseo Subiela Argentina 1986)

A new patient appears in a mental hospital without official admission. He claims to be from another planet. He warns anyone who will listen that earthlings are doomed if they continue to live so violently. His psychiatrist, who must listen, is surprised out of his own flattened morale to accept the newcomer's charm. Who, in the long run, will be treating whom? This '80s arthouse favourite form Argentina takes its time to build its world but does so with a lightness that never drags and suggests much beneath its currents. A quiet classic that begs a revisit down the line.

THE CABINET OF DR CALIGARI (Robert Weine Germany 1919)

Early horror cinema that didn't come from theatre looked only like itself. Nosferatu and Vampyr played by new rules, having more to do with fine art than books or the stage. This expressionist nightmare of the sleepwalker from a travelling sideshow plays out with a deadly dream logic made solid in its zigzag sets and misshapen city scapes. If you haven't seen it you need to. This is one of the originals.

If watching a silent film bothers you, know that its 67 minute running time shouldn't break the attention bank of the least legacy-tolerant.


PHANTASM (Don Coscarelli USA 1979)

Mike is noticing some strange stuff around town. His older brother Jody doesn't believe him but soon has to as he starts seeing them, too. Shadowy munchkins in the trees, a funeral director who lifts occupied coffins like rolls of carpet and severed fingers in foam cups that ... well, you'll see. One of the oddest sci-horror films ever takes an imaginative ride from a sense of the other into a deep well of WTF. Too adult for a kid's adventure but too kid-led to be quite grown up it would have been a nightmare to market and that's before you get to some very strange concepts and a great flair for necessity-driven invention. There's only one of these (I know there are sequels but even counting them).

THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (Victor Erice Spain 1973)

Little Ana and her sister go to see Frankenstein when a travelling cinema show comes through their village. Ana is haunted by it, believing her sister who tells her the monster lives nearby. It is Spain as the civil war is drawing to a close and the bad guys are winning. Ana goes roaming and does find something. It's kind of like what she's expecting but every day is a new volume of information when you're that young and all sorts of lessons wait in the dark to take shape at sunrise. Victor Erice's haunting tale of childhood discovery uses stillness and solitude to create an increasingly compelling narrative of the emotional extremity of childhood with the spectre of the worst of adulthood whispering in the fascist symbols on the walls and in the distance.

BLISS (Ray Lawrence Australia 1985)

I was already a fan of Peter Carey's strange Australia which was openly a renewed colony. Bliss in the novel is set on the edge of the American empire. The film doesn't need to do that. All it needs to do is show an Australian family whose survival depends on advertising. The rest is toward or away from this reference point. This was the first film I went to at a cinema after I moved to Melbourne. Ray Lawrence, in the middle of his own career in advertising, brought Carey's absurdist fable to full rich car ad colour. It immediately stood out in Australian cinema for its strong characters and meaty performances to go with the strong vision. It also came into the cinemas with a reputation for having disgusted the audiences at Cannes into walkouts. I sat in a half full cinema at a mid morning screening and heard two women talking behind me as the production badges came up. "I hope it's not too revolting," one said. It took Lawrence decades to return to the cinema with the intense, brooding Lantana. Until then, this carried his name as the director of one of the strongest Australian films ever made.

BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (Spike Jonze USA 1999)

This might seem a mainstream choice but it's a way of celebrating a great year in cinema where mainstream and arthouse briefly became indistinguishable. Spike Jonze's bizarre fantasy moves with an increasing clip stuffing our heads with concepts that are hard to cope with but served up with delicious sauce.





Some of these are a lot easier to find than others. Few, if any, are likely to appear on the video on demand services but the hunt can be fun. Enjoy!

Review: US

In a prologue set in 1986 young Adelaide wanders from her inattentive father's care at the Santa Cruz fun park, makes her way down to the nocturnal beach and enters a hall of mirrors. There she finds her double who smiles as though to prove she is not a reflection. Adelaide is so traumatised that she loses her power of speech and begins years of therapy.

A title sequence moves back from a rabbit in a cage to show a wall of them is what looks like a classroom as an unsettling choral piece that mixes modal melodies with dissonance and electronic percussion.

In the present, the adult Adelaide is driving with her young family to their holiday home Santa Cruz. The family loads in for the holiday, they bicker at the dinner table but settle in to their vacation. Adelaide keeps noticing coincidental moments happening around them and feels increasingly off. And then their son comes in to tell them there's a family standing in the driveway. Going down to look they see a group of four, a mother and a father and a daughter and her brother. Apart from their strange red uniforms they seem the exact doubles of Adelaide's family.

There is too much to spoil beyond that point but I can say that the second act is a deftly controlled quilt of Adelaide's childhood memories and the weird home/life/identity invasion story that cracks and bangs like a string of penny bungers. And while it gets busy with the middle act struggle new themes emerge which at first feel like enrichment but are all foreshadows. Which is to say that the machine is a little more evident in this serious horror piece than you might expect. We are being informed as clearly as we were with the same team's Get Out that this horror of the Other across the divide (of stratification, privilege, culture and knowledge) wants you to reconsider the title itself as one character says: "We are Americans."

Jordan Peele has gone even further than his debut in approaching the horror movie as sociology lecture. But when it's delivered with such style and compulsion I'm not going to complain and call it preachy. While the denouement takes longer than it has to and starts dragging it does bear a payoff that seals the queasiness of the ideas of the film and sets in to haunt you after the credits have finished rolling.

If your thang is spotting cultural references you'll have a library of them in these frames. There is a Kubrickian sense of un-submersible units with the prologue and each act having its own distinct pallet (which makes things easy when the memory/current action montages really get swinging) and the cast led by the powerful Lupita Nyong'o is solid. I cannot fault the score that takes its job seriously and blends well with sourced music.

I was sold on the premise and the pedigree. I'm a lifelong horror nerd and appreciate any genre piece that gets down to work as hard as this does. If there's anything I wince at in a horror film it's moments where pact is broken with a situational laugh here or a flatly routine approach to what constitutes a scare (a trailer at my screening for the new James Wan guff was almost all jumps). Instead of sudden jolts or an over reliance on convention Us goes for our mental satisfaction, planting seeds of distaste and self-recognition there which we cultivate whether we want to or not. If this is what Jordan Peel can do then I can't think of anyone I'd rather at the helm of a ressurected Twilight Zone. Submitted for your approval....


PS. There are some massive plot holes in this film. I didn't mention this as it's an allegory rather than a realistic drama and I tend not to care too much about plot holes anyway. I understand why some people can't get past them I just tend not to share the concern.