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.