Review: LICORICE PIZZA

Fifteen year old Gary meets twenty-five year old Alanah while he's at high school and she's assisting the photographer taking photos for the yearbook. He chats her up persistently until she relents but lukewarmly. He's a screen actor. Not that unusual. Its '70s Los Angeles but it still means he's beaten the odds. They meet at a local restaurant. He's at the bar ordering Coke but the staff all know him. There's still those ten years between them but something is simmering. Soon enough, his ideas of going into business draw her in and she becomes a business but not life partner. Then there's an extension to the business and she peels off to join local politics. And ... doesn't sound like much, does it? Well, it is and it isn't.

This rom com in the lowest profile of show-biz, business and politics feels like a nostalgic love letter to an era. But it can't be. Paul Thomas Anderson, mainstream auteur since the late '90s, was born in 1970. He might well have observed much of the culture in the first ten years of his life but the depth of this retroversion cannot be his. The point is, as the publicity has it, a navigation of first love and that is a fitting description. However confident Gary gets he's still a teenager and doesn't always get it right. The age gap being ten rather than sixty years disqualifies this tale as a take on Harold and Maude unless you look aroung at everything else the film is presenting and scale it down to point of view. Gary does call Alanah old at one point. He savours it but ackowledges it. It's actually in line for him to consider her unreachably old on the scale he's living. His waterbed business is a success but he's not going to be a millionaire from it. The extension into pinball parlours is the same. Alanah's journey into politics is as a volunteer for a local councillor's campaign. These characters see only that they have started in on these things and to them they stand as tall as name-brand entrepreneurs and senators. Their encroachment on the edges of Hollywood is also small time when we look at it but the stuff of stardom when they do. Ten years is an age.

I'll let this go in a minute but the '70s setting is really getting to me, lately. It's persistent. I recently revisited the long cut of Almost Famous and it reminded me of Twentieth Century Women, Dazed and Confused, andthe tv shows I'm Dying Up Here and Vinyl. Some of these were made by people who could really wear a badge from the era but, increasingly, that is less important than using the era for other ends. 

If I get nostalgic it's very localised. I don't just mean the town I grew up in but a series of experiences and sensual memory joggers like the smell of lawns or the hardness of chlorinated pool water. It's never about how we wrote better songs in them days or that's when they could really make a movie. The persistent return of American movies to this decade does evoke a lot of Altman, Scorsese and Coppola. In Anderson's case (he's already been there with Boogie Nights) it's far less a longing for the Los Angeles he knew when you could buy records from Licorice Pizza shops in the shopping strips than it is a way of saying that this is before social media, internet, mobile phones, Trumpism, 911 and punk, a world not so much innocent as one berfore collapse. It's a way of saying once upon a time.

Once upon a time it was goofy and cool to start your own business as a teenager. Once upon a time, pinball tables could fill a shop at night. Once upon a time a William Holden type aging movie star might try an Evil Kneivel jump over a bonfire for a dare. Once upon a time a big star's boyfriend could act like Charles Manson just to get his way and still be associated with the star. This is the cultural battleground that Gary must navigate to get to Alanah, knowing that she might just infally reject him once he's done. Put the features of 2021, even pre-plague 2021, in there and it's like seeing all the telegraph poles and stop signs in a comic book. Try that and you'll be clamouring to get back to 1973, whether or not you started there.

There are, mind you, some hard edged (and spoilery) plot points that make the era important to the film. Then again, you could still lose them and tell this story. That's the next thing: do we need over two hours to tell this story? There is no industry timeline to follow as with Boogie Nights, nor a massive crowded canvas of slowly converging stories as in Magnolia, it's really just a rom com. Just as Punch Drunk Love did it all in ninety-five minutes, this one could, too. What we're getting with that extra forty minutes is world building. It's never boring but if you really just want to say it, keep it to the earlier movie's guidelines. As to the filmmaking, it's a treat: effortless moving camera (some of the most beautiful shots of people running) the telltale grain of celluloid (and lighting for celluloid), shooting and editing that can range from the fetishistic to white-knucle action. PT Anderson is a cine-master.

Anyway, one of the reasons why it's never boring is Anderson's usual brilliant casting and handling of his players. Having done more than his bit to establish Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Anderson offered a passed baton to Hoffman's son Cooper. Cooper Hoffman, centre screen as Gary is the image of his father with the same natural magnetism and a grin that could sell you your own toenail clippings. Alana Haim and her entire family play Alana and her entire family. Like Hoffman, his is her feature debut and she exudes a mean charisma of her own. The might-be couple hold the screen together or apart, making them the focal point and centre of gravity and they never falter. Big claps, too, to Bradley Cooper in an edgy role and a chin-stroking "yes, actually" to Sean Penn for being spookily like the William Holden of the '70s when he only-just passed himself off as middle aged when wooing a much younger Faye Dunaway in Network back in '76.

So, do we allow someone like Anderson to make a brief rom com but give it the scale of a star studded war epic? We indulge Christopher Nolan for making action movies that last longer than afternoons under the plea that they are intellectually rich (rather than just long). Perhaps the key lies in knowing that a film like this does not feel like it's taking that long. Do you need that Taxi Driver reference in there? Sure, it justifies the career choice of one of the two leads and anchors itself in political history but if you took it out and put something else there ...? What can I say? I enjoyed every moment but was nagged by how tight and deep Punch Drunk Love was. Maybe I just miss the noughties ;) 

1971@50: HAROLD AND MAUDE

Young American aristocrat Harold tries to sieze his mother's attention through staged suicides. The opening sequence under the credits is an elaborate ritualised hanging. For recreation, he goes to the funerals of people unknown to him. There he meets Maude, almost four times his age but with an infectious zest for life that Harold's thawing starts almost the moment she gets his attention. This meet cute happens during a funeral eulogy. This rom com will be unusual.

(NB: there will be spoilers in this article, almost from the off. If you haven't seen this film yet, do so now and stop wasting the time of the rest of the world. Then come back.)

As the romance progresses the satirical image of the world that envelops it remains. Harold's mother continues to overbear and tyrannise with her restrictive responses, delivered with the smarm of the upper crust. Like L'ancient regime itself, she still dresses young but is unaware how dated this makes her look. Her ideas of parenthood are more akin to a headmistress than a mum. The motorcycle cop's strict training has made his drills for human interaction vulnerable to the unexpected which Maude delivers in an unending stream (these scenes are so funny I've had people demand a rewind and rewatch on the spot). Harold's whispering Californian psychiatrist (often in a suit that matches Harold's) coos shaping questions impotently at his patient, receiving either too much or barely anything (at one point Harold on the couch, arms crossed over his chest like a corpse, falls into a gentle sleep during the consult). The absurd military uncle with his uniform's empty sleeve rigged for a salute is the stuff of a Playboy cartoon. The priest delivers his disgust at the age gap between the couple with an ugly unselfconscious relevation of his own lusts. This is a line-up of its era's satirical targets and, on paper, they are as thin and cliche as the ones in more farcical offerings like Cold Turkey and more strident than those in the much bleaker Little Murders. They shouldn't work, at least not across five decades.

But it does and for a few reasons. First the obvious ones that have to do with putting a movie together. The casting throughout is for fit. Ruth Gordon is a blend of her nightmare neighbour in Rosemary's Baby and the dementia-stricken miasma mama in Where's Poppa? with added hippy pontificator. Her sweeping declamations could easily have worn out the hardiest of viewers but her delivery in a kind of singsong stream that suggests both a lifelong confidence in the truth of what she is saying as well as a dark conviction that it had better be. Her moment of vulnerability when stumbling on a memory of a lost love does not ocme out of nowhere but feels part of her personal continuum. Bud Cort is almost in whiteface as the cadaverous Harold. We see his invention and delight at subverting his mother's shoehorning attempts to conform him through a pall of ice. Maude's thawing of him begins with his incredulity at her actions and attitudes. She makes him curious. The last time he was curious is delivered in a monologue which leads to his comparable moment of vulnerability in front of Maude. His character journey is the longest and continues beyond the film's credits, as he walks into them the sole character in the tale who was learned anything. From his whispered responses to the screaming of the word"what?!" near the end span riches of performance.

Hal Ashby organises a San Fransico of natural beauty and artificial opulence, continuing his lead characters' polarity. You can smell the fragrance of the forest and also admire the french polished furnishings of Harold's family home which resembles nothing so much as an extended funeral home. Maude's abode is cluttered with trinkets, gymcracks, trash and treasure. There are many jokes delivered in introductory shots and much of the film's wit lives there but the one that isn't a joke is the cut to the post-coital Harold and Maude in the bed of her rail car as she sleeps contentedly while Harold blows shining bubbles with a toy pipe. The visual energy of this film is constant but also constantly maintained. It is flawlessly paced.

Colin Higgins script was his UCLA master's thesis and it's what brought him (while working as a studio head's pool boy, no shit!) to the attention of Hollywood money. His sale of the script was on the understanding that he would also direct but the studio passed and preferred Ashby, young and hip enough to get it but also a proven orchestrator of image, sound and performances from the successful The Landlord. Ashby, to his eternal credit, insisted on Higgins being with him on set to observe for his future in the industry. Higgins wrote a fable of life and death as a rom com and pushed contemporary satire into each last corner like Polyfilla. Most of that made it to the screen and of that, only the most burdensome of Maude's pontifications were cut. Ashby concentrated on making the continuous wit of the dialogue timed to feel natural here but enjoyably set up there. Mostly, he directed the central performances to be increasingly naturalistic even as the whimsy mounted. But there's more at play here.

And this is the thing that this film's copyists never get right. For all the debt that the quirk in American independent movies of the last twenty-five years owe to Harold and Maude most of them miss its most important instuction: if death is a character in your black comedy you need to keep it centre screen. The age gap that Harold and Maude uses for its most obvious tension is quite swiftly dissipated by their easy interweaving. Death and Life dance well together. But we are given funerals (alive with japes, yes, but they are still sombre occasions), neglected city trees, smothering in carbon monoxide, Harold's own "suicides" which can be very gruesome, Uncle Victor's entire career has been done in close proxity to the reaper on a military scale and even the crumbing veterans, and then there is Maude's concentration camp tattoo and then there is her birthday confession that she has set up her own suicide and the sense that she has earned the right to stop when she wants (whether we agree with that or not, it is what she thinks). This is where Harold as a portrait of Death as a young man has to change his being. There is no possibilty of his staging another suicide after this story ends. Everything about this story, the comedy, the satire and the gut punch of the climax has been worked for and hard.

So, for all the admiration this movie gets, all the warm tributes given by the bright young things of independent quirk, few of its lessons are taken up. It's true that they are hard to achieve; you do need strong skill and real vision to apply them. I have lost count of lazy writing that is plugged by the whackiness of characters, reliance on sudden reversals of character or tacked on moments of gravity dropboxed in from other movies. For your benefit I have tabled a number of examples with helpful snap judgements:

200 Days of Summer - no. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind- yes. Frances Ha - not even close. Punch Drunk Love - big yes. Little Miss Sunshine - no. Nebraska - yes. Garden State - no. Ghost World - yes. Igby Goes Down - yech, no. Donnie Darko - yes, but only the original cut. I Heart Huckabees - nope. Juno - yes. Buffalo 66 - thy name is inept, no. Being John Malkovich - big classic yes. The Future - no. American Splendor - uh huh. Anything at all by Wes Anderson - no, simply, no ... ever.

See, I managed to find among the many qualifying titles a pretty even result. Then again the continued career of Wes Anderson means that the yesses will probably never catch up. Choose from this list anything you have seen and see if you agree and for those you dispute ask why someone might think as they do about them.

Is Harold and Maude so perfect, then? No, nothing is. There are moments of cuteness that belong back in '70s sitcoms like Maude's exaggerated reckless driving. Some of Harold's "suicides" would be impossible for one person to so quickly set up. He makes a Jaguar E-type into a hearse, presumably with a blowtorch. The matching doctor and patient suits are funny but, however unfairly, they make me think of The Royal Tenenbaums. The prank with the colonel would not work in the real world. The Odorific recording is pure fantasy. However, none of these are pivots for the plot or characters but points at which the film stretches into a kind of magical realism. And sometimes they are just old hat and long ineffective.

It's hard to gauge how well known Harold and Maude has become in the age of the tappable classic and remastered physical copy for the home. I can recall showing it to a small group of millennials who left the experience with a new entry in their top ten films of all time. This film still works with anyone but I just don't know how many have sat through it in the past twenty years. The importance of this question has to do with its influence on the makers of those quirky films listed o'erhead and the audiences who, unaware of what they were starting, made Rushmore a hit movie. At that time Harold and Maude was a rarity, lucky to be caught at one in the morning on a commerical channel. People seemed to think Wes Anderson had created his breakthrough from whole cloth.  To give him credit, there are more influences on show that Hal Asby's classic but that's the one that dominates and that's the one that still leads the derivation list in every single film Anderson has released. I don't hate Wes Anderson because he copied Harold and Maude, I hate that so few seem to know it. Sigh. Anyway...

Sorry for ranting; this is one of my favourite films. I've owned a copy of it on every home video medium since VHS and the Criterion Blu-Ray I watched again last night proved that it still works, perhaps now in my maturity even more than it did when I was more like Harold. Before those home versions I would see it on late night tv when late night tv allowed that kind of unofficial film studies education. Before that I had only my sister's account of it, seen at a Townsville arthouse I have red-facedly forgotten. It was made at a time when movies were huge and wonderful to me if I saw them, as a child at a cinema. I was too young to see this when new and it never seem to make it to any of the arthouses in Brisbane or Melbourne that I went to. But the name was strong and its utterance in conversation drew smiles from the others.

(Edit: I can't believe I forgot to mention the sourced score. Ashby had wanted the then emerging Elton John to provide songs but John was touring and couldn't do it so he recommended Cat Stevens. Cat Stevens' songs used in this film come from two albums but include two written for the film (so it's not strictly a sourced job. This is a film with an essential musical association. Stevens' gentle melancholy and pain, mostly folky, acoustic arrangements fill the experience of Harold's delayed entry into the human race and Maude's departure from it. Mostly plaintive (and downright tear-producing in the "Trouble" scene) but also light and life affirming like the film itself, they are essential. The opening ritual scene played to the song Don't Be Shy is a moment of mutual momentum between music and filmmaking. If you become a fan of the film you will probably want more of the music. There is a soundtrack album available quite accessibly. Go fot it.)

It is untrue to suggest that they dont make 'em like this anymore or that our times are beyond such cinema when this one still works so very well and I see many strong movies every year, defying even global pandemics and cinema closures. My recdent viewings of Titane and Lamb remind me of how I love to be ambushed by cinema and, as I've gone through these anniversary revisits this year I've noted the power of the strongest of them. I've had to miss out on a few due to lack of availability or time but from the dodginess of Pretty Maids All in a Row to this classic of macabre romantic comedy I'm already thinking about what came out in 1972....

Hope everyone who reads this enjoys the turn of the year and can have some relief from the microbes in 2022. I know what I want different about the next twelve months but I won't say for fear of jinxing. See you on the flip side. (Oh, there will probably be a few more reviews here but I thought the end of this series was the best place for a seasonal call.) bye till then.

Review: TITANE

Little Alexia is driving her dad so hard to distraction that the moment he turns from the steering wheel to control her backseat infuriations the car skids into a row of painful looking bollards. Surgery later she gets a titanium plate to fill in where her skull can no longer and is released, her head shaved and the surgical scar looking like brain matter, into her parents' protection. She runs ahead of them and slams against the family car, flattening herself on the passenger window and kissing the glass. 

Cut to the grown young woman Alexia, wading through the crowd at a car show and taking her place as one of the fetish dancers the all male con goers gahter around. Gyrating and insinuating around the bonnet of a masterpiece flame finish of a sleek Cadillac, she elicits the pleas from the crowd for autographs. After the show she is pursued by another fan who takes things so far over the line that she dispatches him with sudden and decisive violence. After that her cleansing shower is interrupted by a banging at the door. Investigating, naked, she sees that the Cadillac from the show has also followed her out and is bucking like a stallion. She gets in and what follows might make you think of David Cronenberg's adaptation of Crash but should remind you more of sculptor Matthew Barney's excursions into film and body horror. Concealing this from everyone in her life, she goes to a party where a woman she is attracted to resists her foreplay for its painful violence. What happens next drives Alexia into fugitive life, and eventually, after some serious appearance alterations, is claimed by a fire chief as his long lost son.

Yep, all that in the first act and I'm leaving lots out. But that is where I'm leaving most of the details out as too much of this film is too easily spoiled. If you recall Raw, the film about a student vet whose veganism is torn from her in a self-surprising hazing ceremony, you might recall the name of its writer/director, Julia Ducournau. Well, she's back. And if you thought that such an audacious piece could only be a one off like Donnie Darko recall that many considered Eraserhead the same way.

Alexia's trek takes her from a sexualised subculture, through her experiences revealing her own liminal sexuality and into the strange realm of the fire station, its crew of high-machismo men, where she is accepted as one of them, secreting the oil around the bulging metal uterus that her pregnancy to the Cadillac has left her. Through undeclared rites and shows of muscle, protected by the fire chief himself, Alexia's life becomes a rerun not only of Beau Travail but Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (as Gaspar Noe might have imagined them). The continued violence is not the kind where an A-Lister dives off a skyscraper as played by a stunt double, it is intimate, grinding and in more than one sense stunning. Maybe add a pinch of Tetsuo the Iron Man here. Extreme cinema as magical realism (you can confidently reverse that, in this case, btw)

As soon as you might be thinking, just go with it, the themes so appear and start to weave. Just as notions of predetermination and culture consolidated in Raw to give us a weirdly uplifting finale, so too Titane conjures gravity from its absurdist premise. This time, though the gravity smacks of genuine tragedy.

Ducournau dresses this in the neon of the car show and the sweat-coated bleach of the fire station and fills us with music from speaker-rattling EDM to '60s oldies (there is a scene that makes great use of The Zombies' She's Not There) and the sense that what we are seeing and hearing have been designed to the last pixel. That said there is nothing but organic movement at the centre of this bizarre tale and it might have collapsed under its own specialness but for the committed central performance by Agathe Rouselle whose initial contained wildness must combat an intensification at industrial levels. 

Most of her performance is physical (she might have as few as twenty lines) and much of it after her character has violently changed her look. It is impossible not to feel for her, regardless of what she has already done. As the fire crew breathe around every corner, through every door jamb her protection is only guaranteed by her nominal father whose own repsonse to her real identity if revealed feels dangerously like an x, y or z. Vincent Lindon as the chief is himself on a tightrope of control and dependancy. He plays a strong man but one whose worldliness offers promise. That we don't know until the last moment what this will add up to is testament to Ducournau's mastery and singularity of vision.

Titane is already in my 2021 top ten for its boldness and newness. It is a difficult film to approach and there are scenes that some viewers might justly find unbearable. I can get squeamish myself (for all my deacdes of horror fandom) but I emerged from this one with the same kind of relief that I did after Blue Velvet, Irreversible or Cremaster 3, the sense that I had just consumed something cleansing and baptismal. It's no coincidence that Ducournau uses the motif of fire for its appearance of being alive and its cleansing threat to life; that kind of acceptance is central in the end. Exquisite. Terrifying and confronting but exquisite.

1971@50: 10 RILLINGTON PLACE

A middleaged man with a soft voice is making a woman feel comfortable with a cup of tea in advance of a procedure of some kind. A home made kit of rubber hoses, jars and such are on the table and he is explaining how he will use them, taking care to reassure her that the process is safe. Soon she puts down the tea and tells him she's ready. He moves in, covers her face with a homemade mask attached to a hose which will be feeding her gas from the mains. She struggles but he forces her and soon she is unconscious.  He had promised her an abortion but is about to sexually assault and strangle her. Next scene she's buried in the back garden. It's post war London, a grimy part of it, he's John Reginald Christie and he's part of history.

When a young couple with a newborn take his sublet upstairs rooms, Christie can't stop thinking about them and, small incident by small incident, they are embroiled in his next scheme which he plays by opportunity and involves more detail of his M.O. It's rough and it only gets rougher. By that I do mean towards some grisly images but more to grisly gaslighting and manipulation as Christie steers everyone around him into compliance.

Richard Attenborough in the title role stood back from the authority figures and farcical conspirators to adopt a role from living memory and present one of the scariest serial killers ever to own a screen. Yes, that includes the '90s rash of them which I'll get to. Why? Because, apart from a scant few moments when his menacing expression is overplayed, he looks at everything and everyone as either a target for the rages inside him or an accessory to escape its actions. When he brings a shouting match between his tenants to a halt it is with the quietest of whispers. If he smiles here or jokes there it's as though he is lifting them from a stockpot. While his accounts of himself are concealing fabrications he himself is not prey to his own fantasies. He is deliberation and control, id and ice. And he reaches out over the decades to deliver his horror just as he once did.

Judy Geeson stepped down from her young woman in progress in To Sir With Love and landed as a much more worldly thing, born and raised in the sooty terraces of the London blitz. She doesn't like what her life has dealt her but her street smarts guide her through. Her husband, John Hurt's Tim Evans, is crushingly self-deluding. Illiterate and clueless and possessed of far less native wisdom than his wife, he is a fallguy waiting to be approached with a quiet solution. The brittle tension between the two, their bickering and outright fighting have a anxiety-producing bluntness which makes their scenes in the cramped sub-let feel imprisoned and hopeless.

Richard Fleischer and his screenplay writer used the Ludovic Kennedy book of the same title as their source and a title card clearly claims that the dialogue is derived from official sources where possible. This is always a ploy when anything is presented as fiction but there are ploys and ploys. If you see any film that uses phrases like "real events" or "true story" you might well be getting a feast of researched substance or just Conjuring 3. In this case, however, you get a sober replay of the timeline tightened and finished with muscular skill. Fleischer was an allrounder in cinema but he had been here before when he delivered the impressive Boston Strangler. That had mixed procedural with an attempt at a psychological p.o.v. of  the killer and, while it plays more as a thriller, did its job with deadly focus. Rillington Place gives you the day to day of domestic atrocity and enough mounting atmospheric suffocation to lodge it permanently in your mind. It's not just the violent scenes; the courtroom cross examinations are serious and exacting, the scenes of officialdom are worrying and intimidating.

The 1990s saw a flood of serial killer films that flowed from the Oscar winning Silence of the Lambs and kept the pressure up for a whole decade. Each year there was a new one and an arms race ensued which saw the killers go from methodical criminals to humanoid aliens made of CGI and the filthiest ideas from the writers' rooms. Despite exceptions (Seven, The Ugly) these movies traded in the kind of sleaze that both encouraged and dissed their welcoming audiences. The monster is evil but you do like seeing his victims get it all the same but when the FBI bash through the door it's all, "finally!"Between the few peaks there are probably none that deserve your revisit (including Lambs - sorry, I just think it's over-manipulative garbage). And none of them have a gram of the power of this disturbing and exhausting film. If you want to see it (I hired it from Google Movies) either add an intermission at half time or have an oxygen tank handy. But you'll ultimately be glad you saw it. 

1971@50: A NEW LEAF

Aging playboy Henry Graham, finds himself broke and contrives to marry well and then dispose of his bride and keep living as he has. He meets clumsy and dowdy Henrietta Lowell at a high society tea and recognises his target immediately. Their courtship is brief but effective and soon they are wed and he prepares immediately for the final act. But then things start happening that give him pause. Will a newly developed conscious override his native cold sarcasm and change him? You might be surprised at how this resolves.

In an era of kooky romcoms like Little Murders or Where's Poppa, A New Leaf takes a step further into the realm of the brightly lit end of the street and, looking every inch the '60s meet cute, starts out as a tought, kicking satire with an unexpected heart. This is down to good casting (more later) and the mind of its adapter and director Elaine May. May was known to American audiences for her partnered satirical dialogues on current events on radio and tv. Her partner was Mike Nicholls who also went on to a career in film as a director. The black humour of this early success is threaded all through this fable of conscience as its central antihero is continually tested with opportunities for power or good. That makes it sound like a cardboard pageant but A New Leaf is a constantly engaging  and laugh out loud funny trek through the conflict between intelligence and virtue.

Walter Matthau is far too old to be the playboy that he is. His push through to make us believe that he still considers himself one impresses us and we let him in. His strong and nasty wit make him welcome and, for all its vileness, his scheme to improve himself strikes us as funny and we respond easily to its tension. The brilliant George Rose stands in for Henry's conscience as his man servant, his own bullet-dodging wit delivered and both character and actor are up for the task when Henry's own conscience appears to slowly wake (though as what we won't know until the very end). However, it is Elaine May herself (too beautiful to conceal behind dowdy costuming and klutziness) who carries her creative input to the centre of the screen. Her phsyical humour (the nightgown scene is far more effective that you would imagine at this age: I'm laughing as I type this) plays a committed sense slapstick against her character's unawareness of her clumsiness. The remainder of the cast will be recognisable to anyone who has seen and treasured US comedy cinema from the era with one exception. May roped her old comedy partner Mike Nicholls in for an extraordinary scene as Henry's accountant struggles to convince Henry that the well has run dry while Henry circles back to his demand that one of his cheques be paid.

The story behind the production and release of this infectious comedy is that May attempted to publicly disown it after the studio Paramount cut it down from an intended three hours to just over a hundred minutes. As the original long edit has never been released we can only surmise. I will say that the excesses that made Mikey and Nicky feel like a stretched cover version of a John Cassavettes movie and the (studio-assisted) public ridicule of her later comedy Ishtar might indicate that she's a less is more director, even if that snipping comes from above. It's too hard to say with such a little rap sheet. May is more frequently credited as a writer or script doctor than as a director or actor. I could do with a few more New Leafs but then the longer I've seen comedies stretch their running time the more they fall into dullness. At fifty A New Leaf works and at one hundred and two minutes it seems to work fine. I wonder if we could have this shown to everyone who makes a romcom now to show them the power of stars who are willing to simply clown it over consolidating their brand.

1971@50: WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

Reclusive Willy Wonka decides to open his chocolate works for the winners of five golden tickets and award the winners a lifetime supply of chocolate. Charlie Bucket dreams of this and buys as many Wonka bars as he can to see if there's a ticket in one. Charlie's family is so poor that this totals at two, both duds. Meanwhile the tickets are being found the world over in a global wildfire of FOMO. The winners go to the undeserving rich and the overindulged. But nothing for deserving poor Charlie. It's not really a spoiler to reveal that he does find one and joins the other winners on the day of the event. Wonka appears before the eager crowd with a prank that pretty much sets his character key as a mischevious wit and the factory tour begins.

I'm going to be spare with the details as this film is worth watching clean the first time or with ready surprise the next. The Chocolate Factory is a magical place where a kind of dream logic seems to have designed the attractions and features like lickable wallpaper, or a chocolate river. Despite the psychedelic colours and Heath Robinson contraptions and the whimsy of their host the children are being put through tests and those who fail are eliminated in ways that might please both the readers of Lewis Carroll and Dante. The fact that keeps this movie from just being a sunny honey bunny kid's fest is the thread of darkness woven through it. Greed, entitlement etc. most of the children meet punishments that fit the sin (however secular that sin is).

Gene Wilder is perfect casting for the flamboyant Wonka, one minute PT Barnum the next a kind of snide Mad Hatter, grounding the surface lightness. His voice, almost always on the verge of a scream is well known to comedy fans of a certain age and the edge it provides is deep from every utterance of callousness coming from the children and parents of the children. There is a kind of unreconstructed Grimm's cruelty about him that reminds us that fairy tales were meant as warnings.

The rest of the cast also shines. Julie Dawn Cole as Veruca Salt is infuriatingly spoiled. Paris Themmen's Mike Teevee is almost disturbingly given over to tv/media. Jack Albertson is a flawed but warm and supportive grandpa to Peter Ostrum's Charlie who convinces us of his troubled goodness.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory remains a warm and wicked warning to the spendy first world. The technology and effects on show are kept to an era-spanning credibility. In fact, if a remake were to be made I could think of no one better to update it than ... Oh, he did. Well, he tried. Tim Burton made the scenes and loopiness slicker but completely forgot to strengthen any of the characters. Willy Wonka becomes a kind of simpering Michael Jackson whose slinky coldness alienates everyone on the screen and everyone in front of it. We love Gene Wilder's creation but cautiously, knowing his pranking nature. We are only spooked by Johnny Depp's. The coda that offers an explanation for Wonka's darker side is an implosion of cuteness. It tells the difference between using darkness as an undercurrent and giving things a dark look. Willy Wonka at fifty is as strong as it was at conception, a sturdy fable of conscience.

I saw the 4K restoration and marvelled. If you're starting a UHD collection, add it.

GET BACK: The Fabs get the run of The Shire.

More baggage than the Titanic for this one. The original project famously went sloppy and kept shrinking in scope from a desert amphitheatre to the roof of the building they were in, from raw and natural to basic but polished. The biggest musical act in the world were voluntarily recorded on film as well as tape trying to finish songs for a project that followed everything they'd done from Revolver to then with newness. Only a few months from their mammoth self-titled set they set out to get even closer to their own origins and then celebrate that with a live performance, a kind of Ninja White Album. The rest is history.

I first saw Let it Be in my mid teens at the end of the '70s. I kind of knew that what I was seeing happened before the Abbey Road album but definitely knew it had been released after so I could never quite dislodge the idea that I was watching The Beatles disintegrate in front of me. I saw this in cinemas in Townsville a few times so the effect of this documentary of demise was profound.

Since then, the bootleg industry has surfed on tides of rarity (some of it genuine) and threads of revision have been woven into the story, creating many different narratives. However diverse these could get they persistently rested on the legend of the dying rock band. The Anthology series and CDs offered the gems of the jams at unprecedented quality and then there was the revisionist Let it Be Naked CD which was resolutely not bad. The fuss that was later made for the releases of Pepper, White, Abbey Road seemed overgrown when it came to this project with its thin sound set in Franco Cozzo cushions of gold lurex by Phil Spector. But there it was, a big CD/Blu-Ray set, a book and now this new film presentation which, itself, is borne on years of hype. Haven't we had enough?

When is the world going to have enough of The Beatles? They are sold to every new generation who buy them up like disaster necessities. Yes, of course I ponied up for the Super Deluxe record with its Dolby Atmos mix (wrote about that here). And, yes, of course, I watched every last second of the three installment Peter Jackson recut, too. Spoiler alert: Twickenham is boring because they're bored, Saville Row is much better because Billy Preston and the rooftop is completely bloody glorious. Worth the wait and the viewing time? Definitely. Would I get the super uber ultra 4K box set? Depends what's on it and how much it is. While my honorary suburban dad's delight at high-res audio made the BD of Let it Be a no brainer the prospect of getting physical copies of Get Back as drab as the thought of buying the book dedicated to it. Why?

Well, just as travel documentaries really ought to stress the importance of waiting (as it's the single largest element) prospective fans should approach Get Back with some awareness that Peter Jackson represents this so well that, despite knowing how much more he could have included (he had days of footage to choose from), you are frequently grinding your teeth at how much failed action you are witnessing. Someone starts a jam on a song idea and someone else takes it up but it rolls over and gets back under the sheets for a few more minutes. This is the kind of thing that happens in a band as a matter of course. Songs might come from a divine visitation in the night but arranging them and teaching them to the others takes a lot of time spent going over the same things for whole afternoons. When I did this I used to do the arrangements in my head and practice was when I'd test what worked and what didn't. But getting the whole band in on it always took hours. And it should. 

But watching even the most watchable of rock bands do this is only marginally superior an experience to watching anyone else do it. Yoko Ono, sitting by John Lennon, eyes downcast and quietly breathing, clearly would rather be outside skipping a rope or chasing Jehova's Witnesses down the street with a meat cleaver. This is the Beatles as Tarkovsky might have imagined them. Jean Luc Godard still gets flack for his political interventions in the movie about The Stones coming up with Sympathy for the Devil but, apart from their function as comparison to the effectiveness of the rock band (working something through and getting it fiery and magnificent vs repeating dogma and performing meaningless weapons drills) he keeps it under two hours on screen and shows a clear through-line. Jackson's quest for truth here will frustrate the most firmly rusted-on fan. And it should.

It should because there is no better way to humanise culturally forged legends than to show the process and for real. People have been referring to McCartney coming up with Get Back while chugging along on his bass as pulling it out of thin air but to me it looks like he's running through something that he's been thinking about for days and is now just putting playable form on it. Lennon isn't there. Ringo likes what he's hearing. Harrison can't stop yawning. Soon after it's sounding almost exactly like part of the canon. Paul jamming it into a sketch is not the marvel, the band forming it into a rock song is, and that would apply to anyone else, as well. And that is the beauty of this series. We don't need them vomiting from a shot of smack or hustling groupies to humanise them but if we see them at work, doing their jobs the way we do every day we clock in we begin to understand. Rock bands, even the most revered, are work.

My own highlights do include Paul sketching out Get Back but also the moment we see Billy Preston find his keyboard part for I've Got a Feeling which lifts it into joy. Lennon and McCartney singing the harmonies of Two of Us at each other through grimaces is funny enough to sustain what might have felt like too much screen time. Paul holding back tears as the inevitability of the oncoming breakup becomes clear. The extended sequence from the orginal Let it Be film in which George is helping Ringo write Octopus's Garden shows him much more nurturing than before where he seemed to be mocking Ringo. George working out Old Brown Shoe at the piano and asking Billy what chord he'd stumbled on. And so much more.

But the star of the many hours of the series is the rooftop concert. Shown in full 4x3 and often in wide split screen we not only get all the repeated goes at a few of the songs and all the banter in the right place but the vox pops of the passers by down on the street are extended to really give a sense of the moment, the fashions, the values, look and feel of London on a freezing January day. And the threaded comedy of the two constables sent to turn the noise down is frequently side splitting as they get stuck in a purgatory of stalling by Apple staff and then ... well, that would be a spoiler (not a big dramatic one but one worth seeing fresh once). Some of the takes are ragged but you are watching what a decent rock band can sound like with practice and crafted arrangements. In the end they sound good, really good.

I'm glad Jackson was asked to do this and then went to the extent he did. If there are moments where the mismatch between audio and video make it look like he's contriving conversations that didn't happen quite that way it deos eventually feel like he's using either element to fill in the other as the point gets made. But if you go in go in prepared to live through the stifling ennui of inertia and repetition that creative workers have to go through to get to their works. If you accept that you will be rewarded with this vision of the reward at the end of concentrated and concerted effort by a group of friends who, tried as they have become of each other, knuckled under and got it done. And they're The Beatles.

ALMOST FAMOUS @ 20

Young William Miller defies the expectations of his youth and the warnings of his mother to take his sister's advice and free himself through the power of rock music. It's 1973 and things like that happened, at least on concept albums. Assigned a piece on Black Sabbath by enfant terrible of rock journalism Lester Bangs he comes to a halt backstage when the mountainous doorman won't let him in. Luckily a sparkle of fairies appear and promise to get him admission as they flood in. Then, a band of journeymen appears and allow him, through his use of magic phrases, admitance under their protection. And, just like that William Miller at fifteen, passing as eighteen, becomes a rock journalist. Well, not quite, but whatever happens is going to change his life from the law career path his mother has been building for him like Lego to meetings with demi-gods and angels. 

Before I wrote that paragraph I hadn't made the connections between this movie's plot and the kind of Tolkeinesque narrative logic it uses. That might be why this film, which to a very susbstanial degree is a standard coming of age story playing dress up, transcends its own stated purpose and becomes something far richer than a plot synopsis could manage. It also comes from the experience of its writer/director Cameron Crowe who really did tour with high profile rock bands in the early seventies when he was well under age, which adds gravitas. So, while the forays into cuteness and cliches from the age of stadium rock make it into this piece the way they get into so many other films like this, it is never overwhelmed by them and there is always something in the writing, the filmmaking and the performances to redress the balance.

The film was produced and released with perfect timing, coming at the end of a revival of '70s pop culture and attempts by new rock stars to be indulged like the old ones were. Crowe's nostalgia is less on show here then his understanding of the longing in the decade's revivalism. When Almost Famous is set there was a similar revival of '50s pop, making it on the charts with Sha Na Na and into the cinemas with American Graffiti and into the lounge rooms with Happy Days. Twenty something years later, the flares and long hairs were back and rock festivals were on the scale of Old Testament conflicts. In a film about a fictional band that name checks real acts like Bowie or Led Zepellin (and gets a former member of Humble Pie to play Humble Pie's road manager) and includes characters from the journalism of the time like Lester Bangs and Jan Wenner, he is giving more than a few hints that his own experience of the rock glamour of the '70s cannot be reproduced in anything but cover versions.

Lest that should land me in a solemn mire I should point out that this is an extraordinarily entertaining movie whose life lessons go down like dessert and whose sheen of fable allows sight of enough grit to keep it flowing and charging. Patrick Fugit shines as William, variously blessed and cursed with intelligence beyond his years yet still a kid when circumstances demand he remember that. Frances McDormand's mother is perhaps the closest the film comes to a persistent stereotype but the veteran actor does lift the role into humanity with a kind of hard-arsed comic turn. Kate Hudson's gliterring Penny Lane also has wisdom but hers has been forged by pain and abuse. Billy Crudup is exactly the kind of charismatic and capricious miasma of someone who doesn't know he is still young and unschooled by his life choices (hello, rock stars). As his foil in the band Jason Lee plays his conscience beneath his would-be rock god persona, controlling the kind of smartarsed character he'd come to be known as from Kevin Smith movies. His performance is in the shadow of Crudup's, reflecting their characters but it is worth your attention. But the cast in this epic memoir-faux, whether one-line bits or starring roles keep the momentum rolling, testifying by deed to their director's skills with them.

I was a crucial few years younger than William in the '70s and didn't know I was just waiting for punk to happen to feel I had a place in the culture. Even though I had good sibling influences that opened doors to the best of early '70s rock music I never quite felt it was mine. When I went to see The Song Remains the Same I dug it but I was watching a band rather than a legend. Punk defined my view of rockstars as stadium gods and I preferred the notion of the musicians and the punters appearing to be the same thing. This why I felt none of the nostalgia that poured from the screen but eagerly followed the wonder and the joy of these people who at their own levels lived on the edge of fame and might well need to accept that as best. All the warmth this film can muster is tempered by that sobering notion.

So, I shouldn't like this film as much as I do. But I like it so much that I chose to watch the much longer cut Crowe produced a few years later for home video. Tellingly, he didn't give it the kiss of death and call it the Director's Cut (that had been released to cinemas) but the Bootleg Version. The title in the opening sequence is given as Untitled. Not just a fun joke on the culture of completist fandom but an admission that if you  liked the original you are going to like having a lot more of it here. Against the tide of negative examples in director's cuts (almost all of them are bloated and obscure the orginals' value) this one actually works better. There is no drag just to have a cute period reference in or the sense that something made it in because a self-styled cinematic genius needed to bare his soul more clearly. The flow of the longer cut is as fleet as the first version. There's just more. 

I had the bootleg version on DVD and even though I upgraded to the recent 4K release (which is utterly stunning) I will be keeping the old disc for the packaging alone. So, yeah, this one still works twenty years later just as it worked twenty years after Cameron Crowe lived it. And for all the hokey cameos, goofy humour and unquestioned rock cliches this remains a triumph of youth and the intensity of its fandom, and something that anyone who sees it will understand: joy.

Review: LAMB

A young farming couple are kept busy during lambing season, seeing to the safe delivery of the new breed when one of the births stops them dead. We don't see what it is. The lamb fresh from its mother seems normal but the pair are spooked by it. The woman wraps the animal in swaddling and takes her to the house. Before anyone knows it man, woman and lamb are now a family. We don't quite know if we are seeing this as they are but when ne'erdowell brother Petur visits from the city he doesn't. He demands to know what the situation is and is told by his  brother that it's happiness.

This film is not difficult to describe as much as its description beyond this point would spoil not only plot points but the direction that this strange fable of grief and longing takes to full tell its singular tale. I can spoil this much: if you are the kind of movie viewer who tells you why certain acts on screen couldn't happen you will not be able to watch this film quietly and so should either see it by yourself or never see it. If, on the other hand, you are blessed with an imagination that maturity has not battered you might well be delighted and intrigued by it.

Noomi Rapace, who broke through in the original film of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and has since been in high profile work around the globe, will go to the extent of learning a language for a role. She learned English for Prometheus (so, something good did come out of that mess). Here she teeters so convincingly between hard rationality and the scary seriousness of the insane that she sometimes appears to shimmer from both. While I didn't really believe that Christopher Reeve could fly but put up with some good effects, I had no trouble believing that Rapace's Maria believes.

The vistas of the rolling green hills and distant primeval mountains and the sounds of isolation bear down upon us and a score so spare it's hardly audible bid us into a weird Eden. Rapace co-produced with the great Bela Tarr. Between her clear drive to tell this magical realist folksong and Tarr's legendary light touch on the accelerator and his openness to find the wonderful in the mud of the day have fashioned something closer to itself than any comparable film. There won't be an American remake of this but if there were (and it wasn't a goofy comedy) there would be a mounting clash between her love of the lamb Ada and the stiff authority of the greater society. You watch this and know that such a thought never occured to these people. Because of that and like Stalker, Eraserhead or The Werckmeister Harmonies when you see this the only things like it will be copies.

Review: LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

Ellie is dancing to Peter and Gordon in a puffy paper dress of her own design when her nan calls her downstairs. The post has just come. She's got into fashion school in London. London looks and feels just as she imagined, lights, life and colour (and creepy cabbies) but when she gets to the dorm it's all bitchface girls thankful for a non volunteer leper. So, she gets a job and moves into a bedsit and all is well. Well, she starts having dreams that she is back in her beloved sixties, strolling in a hoodie through streets of Aston Martins, dolly birds and black tie clubs. 

At one of the latter something strange happens. The attendant takes her hoodie, referring to it as a cloak and she's in. But when she looks in the mirror a blonde stunner in the haute couture is staring back. When that girl, introducing herself as Sandy to one of the megasleazy tuxedo oldies in the club, moves about her mission to start her shobiz career at the top, we see Ellie in mirrors. When Sandy starts getting too deep into Soho's Babylonian underworld things get darker and nastier as Ellie first observes but increasingly gets involved.

That's much more plot than I usually give but the setup is fairly complicated at first so the rest can flow with ease. Writer/director Edgar Wright speaks of the1960s as the decade he just missed out on and invests a lot of this longing for a former era into Ellie. So, whether it's on an old portable record player in the bedroom or bluetooth headphones in the train we get a wall to wall '60s jukebox. No complaints from me, there. But the other nostalgia on show here is for the tough thrillers like Repulsion and Don't Look Now (which Wright himself cites as influences) but the whole raft of Italian Giallo thrillers with its hallucinatory dreamscapes, lysergic colour, violence with blades rather than bullets, and transported Hitchcockian paranoia.

That nostalgia is going to keep returning to centre screen the way real nostalgia does to each of us, but not just in design or sourced music but in the characters themselves. Ellie missed the '60s by about four decades and to her it is a vision whose life is one of unattainable longing. When she enters Sandy's world the logic of what Sandy is trying to do bumps up grossly against her own vision. She doesn't get to go on stage after Cilla Black in the first '60s scene but she does get to audition at a lesser club. Her sultry rendition of Downtown (Anya Taylor Joy's own unaccompanied rendition, and it's sensational) is squashed into a caryard cube when we see the part she really gets. 

In a striking scene a performer costumed as a marionette mimes Sandy Shaw's Puppet on a String in an outfit so oldie it's gold. Around her, a line of dancers with chairs perform robotic burlesque moves, gyrations, leg spreads, with doll-like expressionless faces. They are clapped on by a group of men done to the nines for a night on the town, all blue suits (you can almost smell the cocktail of cologne and sweat). Sandy is not even the lead mime, she's one of the dancers, looking, as they do, like she's coping with shock. This scene is pure Kubrick. It's not a copy of any of his scenes, mind you (although you could think of it as a reversal of the end of Paths of Glory) it's just that the collision of Sandy's ambition and what her world prefers her to be have a visibly brutalising effect. The detail and icy precision of it hammer that in. This is a bridge between Swinging London and the Soho of the Krays and holding on to nostalgia is going to feel druggy in the ugly sense, loss of control and amped-up threat.

While these themes are given rich time on screen by Wright 'n' the gang he curiously falls short in the thriller department. Halfway through the middle act there is a drag as the action that tightens the bonds between now and then, Ellie and Sandy starts to get repetitious. The film starts to feel long rather than deep. I wish the trope of the ghostly figures (not that much of a spoiler) had more eeriness to it. A case of less is more on that one.

But I wonder if I'm on the wrong track there. Part of what is going on here is another mix of old and new that reinforces all the themes around it: the casting. Thomasin MacKenzie as Ellie and Anya Taylor Joy as Sandy give plenty of evidence that the art of screen acting is far from lost, both delivering well crafted physical and vocal performances throughout as they have to compliment each other as characters but also remain distinct (and Wright really does push the physical resemblance hard). Terrence Stamp as a tough old Cockney is a natural. He gives only as much as he needs to keep us guessing his identity in the '60s world. 

But it is Diana Rigg who really shines. She was required viewing in the '60s as half of the team in The Avengers, the groovy spy-fi X-Files precursor. Her character name in that was Emma Peel and it was a construction: m(an) appeal. If anyone knew what both being in control of their career involved and the strength needed to keep herself out of the downward pull of the culture felt like it was she. It's a strong performance that contains the poignancy, pathos and comedy she was always so strongly capable of. If that started sounding like a eulogy then it should. This film was her swansong, she died last year (not of Covid).

So, while more middle-heavy than it should be Last Night in Soho leaves a good impression. A fable about the dangers of nostalgia (especially when it isn't your own) folded into a trippy urban thriller, it is one of the better fates that await the unwary ticket buyer now that cinemas are open again. Bring a little patience to the screen and it will do pretty well by you. The lush to gaudy pallet will dazzle, the music will spark interest in one of pop's greatest decades, you get two of the most promising young talents in cinema to watch and also get to say farewell to Diana Rigg in style. Good value right there.

Review: IN THE EARTH

Martin, a young botanist, travels to a remote scientific station near a large wood in order to perform some checks in the forest. After a COVID-like series of health checks (there is a pandemic in the cities) he takes in some of the local folk art still evident in the ex-lodge and takes in some of the legends. All very colourful but he does have a job to do. He packs up with fellow scientist Alma and they set off into the woods on foot. Coming across an unoccupied tent, they note more examples of the local wood spirit seen in the art at the lodge. That night they are attacked in their own tents and wake to find their equipment trashed and their shoes stolen. City-bod Martin gashes his foot almost immediately and has to limp with a branch for a crutch through the bush until they both stop at the sight of the wild looking Zac whose tent is huge and houses enough room for them, some druggy fruit wine and shoes, glorious shoes. But if the relief of any of this is sending alarm bells it might already be too late to run.

There is so much spoilable plot after this that I'm going to stop it right here. There's still a fair bit to say despite that, though, and this new Ben Wheatley film is the kind that might take a few viewings to get quite right. This, will be a first impression.

Bearing immediate resemblance to earlier Wheatley films Kill List and A Field in England, In the Earth steers its own course towards an older tradition of sci-fi horror. Unlike the bait and switch of Kill List that goes from severe geezer gangster to folkhorror or Field that adds trippiness to its costume horror, In the Earth with its use of rainy day woods and the thing at their centre (a standing stone with an eye-like hole gouged from its head) plugging into something ancient and powerful, reminds anyone with a special interest or just memory of old BBC sci-horror like The Stone Tape or Children of the Stones. There are scenes where the expository dialogue approaches self awareness and it's a reminder of the days of Nigel Kneale and the need for clear statement of ideas driven by their density and weight. And there is the durable spookiness of those old shows that pervades here. Wherever you step, on the path or away from it, you are going to encounter something you hadn't bargained for.

But Wheatley is not playing a cover version. The pandemic surrounding the location like a force field is the reason for the scientists to be in the woods in the first place. The notion of the forest giving up a treasure of immunity is so close to pharmeceutical history as to be assumed by the viewer, but the link between asprin from bark and penecillin from mould and this complex living thing is well to the fore. But this is a horror tale and what starts as a simple expedition will have to become a nightmare trek as the science gets sidetracked and the anti-science plays for mystique and ritual. That's the thing that appeals to a world burdened by almost two years of pandemic, the craving for a treatment and the wildly ignorant myth creation on the fringes. This film was conceived and produced in time of COVID-19. Wheatley appears to have finally created an allegory that is almost indistinguishable from its model.

As I say, I probably need to see this again.

I missed it at the protean MIFF this year and it hasn't made it to cinemas so I rented it last night through Prime.

DONNIE DARKO @ 20

One of the 2000's definitive films was a one hit wonder. Stepping up for the under-thirties, Richard Kelly gave us a film of strong ideas, great compassion, perfect casting, was easy on the eye, whose CGI effects still work effortlessly, broke a future A-lister and balanced on a tightrope of genre tropes that do not always knot easily: teen movies, psychiatric condition stories, Tim Burton style candy gothic, accents of sci-fi and more all form part of a smooth pattern that brings in a three act story on time and with great craft. Since then there have been a quirky epic that was universally reviled, and a retelling of an old Twilight Zone episode which was ok. Ok.

Then there was the director's cut, a bloated reprise that lengthened the screen time, messed with the sourced song list and all but fatally extracted the organ that made the original so robust: ambiguity. The swinging door that took the viewer from a time travel movie to a suburban gothic Beautiful Mind was barely noticeable the first time around. Kelly nailed it shut on the sci-fi side and made it feel ordinary. It left me and many others wondering if he knew what he'd done in the first place.

Teenaged Donnie Darko is woken by a weird voice that draws him into one of his sleepwalking episodes. The voice belongs to a human-sized rabbit with an evil grin, who tells him in precise language that Donnie's world will end in less than a month. Weird enough, but when he wakes on the golf course the next day he finds that his house took a hit from the falling engine of a jet airliner, his room is now several flavours of dust. When he tells his psychiatrist that he made a new friend she asks him if it's a real or imaginary one, he says flatly, "imaginary". At this point you know that you are in for a peculiar ride.

But it's peculiar in the best way. From the snapping table talk by the family at dinner to the conversation with Frank the Bunny, to the expansion and compression of time as the kids at school speed up or slow down in their movements, we are looking at a world through the eyes of someone whose every glance or stare is one of wonder. It's not all whimsy and fairy floss, though. Donnie knows that Frank drawing him out of the house that night saved his life. He finds it hard to connect to a world that feels like it's always going at the wrong speed and punishes any attempt to stop it (as his gym teacher does when he opposes the cringeworthy inspirational training she's brought in). If the surrealism of his dreams and day visions introduce a kind of epic beauty his encounter and courtship of Gretchen the new girl has all the awkwardness of genuine adolescent life. This and the stranger territories this film enters are navigated with such a confidently delicate helm that we really only notice after the credits that we've travelled so far.

And two decades have not wearied it. While in Australia it was a good performer for the art house circuit its true entry into the culture was on home video, particularly the then new and wondrous DVD which could offer alternative soundtracks (like a director's commentary), making-ofs or anything that could fit to give a feature film some extra context. An internet that had already fashioned meta-verses from tv shows (The X-Files had rewarded its Usenet fans by mentions or adoptions many times over) met the richness and promise of Donnie Darko with open arms and clinging embraces. This film is as much a part of the popular cinema canon as any classic you want to mention (I'm not going to as it will always leads to life-draining disputes) and will be there as long as we acknowledge the cinema of this century. The presentation I watched to write this article was the extended edition from Arrow in 4K, featuring both cuts and a host of swag. When it was announced I marked the calendar.

Watching it last night for the first time in many years I was again rivetted, watching it without interruption for the whole running time. The jokes work, the tragedy works, the performances impress and the movie bids me welcome the same way it did when I saw it at the Nova those decades ago (it wasn't released in Australia outside of Festivals until 2002, though). While I watched I couldn't help noticing something I didn't give much thought to at first watch. 

This film was made in 2001 but set in 1988. At the time I thought of this as a writer/director simply falling back on his own adolescence. Most of the post punk songs sourced as score extenders are from the other end of the decade (from memory only Under the Milky Way would have been recent) but good songs have a way of hanging around. Nevertheless, it comes across to me as more time stretching, not so alien to its setting as to be hauntological but still out of time. The contemporary presidential election between Dukakis and Bush has play in the family discourse and might serve as a reminder of more recent difficult elections like 2000's between the high profile Al Gore and Bush Jnr and how it was down to workers going cross-eyed to work out who the vote was for. It's release and conception put it way out of the loop of fictional commentaries on 911 but if it appeals to any era it's the close of the cacophanous '90s with its grunge and its Gulf War I and its Contragate and mass character assassination by internet post to a time when two rivals had to fall back on public discourse to run their campaigns. The aching wish for time travel to go back and stop it from going wrong was no less potent a thought then than it was when the towers fell and the wars were declared. No one who has lived on Earth for the past two and a bit years would need nudging on what they'd do if they could get in a Tardis.

And then there are the performances: Mary McDonnell brings a range from sharp intelligence, to pain to a crushing acceptance of what the world doles out as Donnie's mother Rose (she would be the centre of gravity in her every scene in the Battlestar Galactica reboot); Drew Barrymore brings the understanding that her acting royalty status and child stardom had given her to the teacher who might never make a difference to the minds she faces daily and the worse ones in school administration; Patrick Swayze's magnanimity in playing the glitzy lifestyle coach after a decade and a half of A-listing turned colourless is impressive; Maggie Gyllenhaal has fewer scenes than her screen and real life brother Jake but owns her young adulthood, holding it somewhere between diehard brattyness and  brash incipient growed-up-ness (it's her announcement that she'll vote for Dukakis that starts the family argument at the beginning). 

But, of course this film runs on its title character. This was not Jake Gyllenhall's screen debut but it was the role that broke his career so that he has not only never been out of work or the gossip magazines since but he's also a highly regarded member of the craft. He carries Donnie Darko because his intensity leads him to both inspiration and shattered communications and it feels authentic. The scene that really made me take note was Donnie's first real dialogue with Gretchen. He fights back his glee at getting the attention of a beautiful young girl but his enthusiasm keeps chest-bursting, the language variously rolls around his mouth or takes wing. He reminded me of Travis Bickle's early scenes with Betsy in Taxi Driver, the ones where he's too confident to notice how awkward he is being and the way this registers as a weird kind of charm in Betsy's eyes. Travis didn't have the benefit of psychiatry, though, and Donnie's dialogue's with Katherine Ross's Dr Thurman give him the opportunity to discuss the darkness that he fears is his fate. Ross's gentle gravitas contrasts with Gyllenhaal's unmasked pain and the scenes are electrified by the contrast between the pair. It's to Gyllenhaal's credit that lines that might have rested on the adequate shelf by a lesser player are elevated to unforgettable by his delivery and fluid physicality. His keynote is intensity and if  this means just plays himself each time it also has allowed him access to big mainstream Oscar bait like Brokeback Mountain, bizarro fable movies like Enemy, a Marvel Comic Universe character and the unforgettably creepy sociopathic human eel in Nightcrawler. All that started here.

So, did Richard Kelly just stumble on to a cult classic only to ruin it by changing his mind? That's a lot of confident and sensitive direction of actors and accomplished visual skill for a stumble. Maybe he just got sick of people coming up to him and telling him the "truth" of what his movie was about. His commentary on the director's cut includes a straight up claim that he only ever wanted to make a sci-fi movie. Maybe, but then why all the philosophy, why the real tragedy in the last act if you just want to do a time travel tale? Although I didn't rewatch the later cut for this article I wasn't inclined to as my memory of it was that the extra material either contributed nothing of genuine interest or only added more mysticism. What happens when you remove the ambiguity from a story like this is the removal of the audience's reason for staying. This happens too often with extended edits. Amadeus is rendered interminable with its extra scenes. Apocalypse Now Redux was worth seeing once (the "Final Cut" isn't much better). The 2000 cut of The Exorcist is still subtitled with "The Version You've Never Seen" even though it's practically the only version anyone can see now, despite the extra material making it drag and the added CGI just makes it look idiotic. 

But that's the thing, I guess. The best thing is to offer the choice. Almost every release of Donnie Darko since the Director's Cut has included both. For me this is just a reminder of a movie that was right the first time, one whose continued freshness and power make a new friend of its viewers every time. One hit wonder? So what? I don't have to be in the fan club to like Pop Muzik when I hear it. Same with this.

Review: ANTLERS

Twelve year old Lucas all but witnesses his father attacked by a wild animal in an abandoned mine. His teacher doesn't know this but picks up symptoms of abuse in the violent fairy tale Lucas presents as homework. It sounds less like a kid's story than a screen memory. A victim of her father's monstrous dominance she bristles and worries until she follows him from school one afternoon and, over a shouted ice cream learns the strange order the boy has made of his home life. We've already seen that there is a monster in the basement. Soon we are seeing Teacher Julia voice her concerns to her brother (town sherriff) and the school principal to little effect and we also see her fight her own stress by saying no to the alcohol at the local grocer. 

A few loaded guns right there and all this movie had to do was discharge them in act three as Uncle Anton commanded. But this Del Toro production of Scott Cooper's film (of Nick Antosca's story in the court of King Caracticus) has other plans. On the surface of it Antlers is the Stephen King style tale of a lonely outlier boy, bullied by a thickhead for his difference while monsters who might just bet on Lucas in a fight are roaming the Oregonian woods. We get the generic classroom lesson that makes the theme plain early on and we are apprised of how folklore however fantastic, has its origins in human misdeeds. 

Ok, all is well in horror movie land but Scott Cooper wants us to feel some of the humanity of the people he pushes into the room with us. Julia's PTSD is triggered but her strength is keeping it at bay for long enough to see it in reason. She knows she's one of the lucky ones as her brother Paul intimates later. Lucas is a believable twelve year old, meeting his extraordinary situation with a blend of fear and wonder, not entirely sure what he should be feeling at points of stress. And then you get the monster and the monster is not just a thing from the woods but has an origin and it's none too wholesome. A welling dread builds in the cold and dripping forests and mossy old houses and we know that when the action happens we will need to know that our tongues are tucked away form our incisors.

The very best horror is heavily flavoured with tragedy or at least sadness which can serve to stretch the violence and the mayhem into often unbearable extents. The mother/daughter bond is horribly racked in Dark Water. Even in 1941's The Wolf Man with its reluctant monster touches with melancholy. This is where Del Toro's influence is clearly felt. This is not to take away from Scott Cooper for fashioning a modern folkoric nightmare for these times of folklore in the breath of everyone outside. I put that bit in because I'm just back from seeing this at a morning session at Hoyts in Melbourne, the first real cinema screening since Supernova in April. It felt so calming and relieving being in a beautiful big movie palace with a massive screen and immersive sound. It's a testament to this film that my relaxation was shortlived. Perhaps it was this sense of relieving normality that influenced me away from some quite harsh review of this one but, dammit, I enjoyed it.

PULSE@20

Computer wiz stares at his screen in his murky green Tokyo apartment. He gets up and exits, stage style, into another room. A group of twenty-something friends are talking about how they've lost contact with the computer wiz who has been doing some work for their startup business. Michi volunteers to pay him a visit and finds the apartment apparently empty until he appears, gives her the disc and goes into another room. She follows after an awkward pause to find him hanging by a noose against the wall. There had been a big oily stain there before. Now she knows it was shaped like his body. 

Across town young Kawashima, an ecomonics student, realises he has to learn to use computers to get through university unpacks and sets up his PC, clicking through the internet connection and huffing like a newbie at all the clicking and admin he has to do just to get started. He connects but the early 2000's OS does not look like Mac or Windows. On a black screen he sees the words emerge: "Would you like to meet a ghost?" What the hell, why not? It's probably the ISP doing some marketing. What he gets is a split screen of several web cams of people in blobby silhouette moving slowly around their apartments or just sitting at their computers staring at the screen.

Through a process of elimination the six degrees separating Michi from Kawashima vanish like all their friends and they find each other in a city turning into stains on walls, haunted rooms, driving through air that is filled with what look like uncrushed cremation ashes. To where? Wherever.

Kyoshi Kurosawa's apocalypse of loneliness (Kairo in the original Japanese which means circuit which is more appropriate) suggests a world to come will sound like the beeping and popping of billions of old modems as the people slowly harden on the walls and then dry to dust. Unlike other films from the '90s which showed the weaponising of the internet just as people were letting it into the lounge and bedrooms, the internet in Pulse has no malignance of its own, acting only as a conduit between worlds. There is no direct explanation for the ghostification of the world that appears to be coming through the screen, no imagined hyper-corporation or Bond villain, it's more of a phenomenon of a new nature.

Helpdesk woman Harue at the University cannot help newbie Kawashima very much but the computer lab she works in has a strange app running that models human connectedness. It was created by a grad student and she warns Kawashima not to look at it for too long. It looks like a screensaver of the night sky where the constellations move around in the dark. The lab, filled with students in an early scene gets progressively empty in later ones. The pair's own connection seems to be off to a great start until they both go to his apartment and she is compelled to climb the nearby stairs, returning to him minus a lot of her vitality. 

One of Michi's friends can't best his curiosity about seeing apartment doors sealed with red gaffer tape so he untapes one and explores the place. In one room there is a vague human shaped stain on the wall which on second look is a woman. As he begins to retreat she walks toward him in a slow but malevolent fashion. And then she stuimbles (but it could be a kind of dance) and keeps advancing. He is backed to the wall and crawls behind a couch but the thing keeps coming. He screams for us. 

This scene, often referred to as the stumbling ghost, makes it to a high spot on every scariest scene list that is made from the margins of the genre. It doesn't sound like much but the look, the operatic music and grimy hopelessness of it combine with the sheer lack of control over it we have as its viewers get into our spines. There are several more like it, each with their own special device of terror and they give this mostly quiet film a reputation for singular achievement. Nothing is like it, barring other films by the same director but even they don't approach it for the intensity of its dread. Michi's rescue of Junko actually feels demoralising.

What's the point? Well, as already argued, Kurosawa does not have a beef with information technology or even how it might be exploited by the usual suspects of government or capitalism. This apocalypse is about connection and its decay, the breaking of circuits. While there were forms of proto social media in 2001 like irc and usenet which were heavily populated and in constant use they had nothing of the cultural penetration found later in the decade and onward. But I doubt if Kurosawa has seen a great deal of social improvement from this thing that is so present with us now. 2021's Pulse would simply find the point of entry different only in appearance and more insidious. Then again, why bother when it was both the connection of it and the knowledge that everyone else was depending on it the same way as whole nations became shut-ins. Pulse in 2001 meant more. Kawashima in 2021 is too young to be anything but a native-born citizen of the internet and would never have gone through the frustrations that brought him to Harue. 

But that's not to say it doesn't work as well as it did. The notion of the teasing invitation to enter ghosts rooms and the energy draining webcam footage (in one a character starts to walk across a room but the image glitches and starts again creating a loop, it feels crushingly futile or even more crushingly might serve as the last evidence of the person who once was there. If anything, these moments look a lot like the kind of folklore that has grown around the notion itself of the dark web. Hell, why stop there? Youtube is bursting with channels passing home made horror as found footage. It's enough to make Pulse look tame. But it doesn't. Because Pulse is not about the computers but the people who use them and all else beyond whose connection to each other is being ironically deteriorated by communication.

The characters in Pulse are almost all young. The boss at the plant nursery, Michi's mother and the newsreader are the only prominent ones who come to mind and their presence is brief (the newsreader even gets glitched so that half his face is cut off by video noise. The youth of the principal characters is poignant as it is drawn from the hikkmori, the Japanese adolescents and young adults reported to whitdraw not just from the outside world but the space outside their rooms. Various causes have been suggested including a relation to autism spectrum disorder and PTSD but at the time the numbers of hikkimori were reportedly in the millions and looked to commentators like a social phenomenon. Kurosawa was imagining what an epidemic of it might look like. Any number of trival causes might add up to such a withdrawal without the person suffering noticing. Kurosawa adds the notion of ghosts escaping from their existential inertia into the living world as a kind of narrative diesel which he can use to avoid a lot of exposition. The inevitable U.S. remake has characters explain about the red tape as:"It just seems to work somehow." In Pulse someone imagines a situation where the tape used just happened to be a red the first time. The imagined scene suggests the colour took on a significance the same way that people wear lucky socks when they go to the pokies.

I said before that Pulse was unique but that's not quite true. It might seem extraordinary to suggest that the age range of its characters, its release date and location do not admit it into the canon of J-Horror but it really just doesn't behave like Ringu or One Missed Call. While there are three clearly discernable acts to the plot the tension is deliberately scrubbed bare to allow these people space and light enough to wonder at their continued life. One reviewer at the time memorably found it so difficult to describe the style of this film that he called it The Omega Man as directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. He was being funny but he meant it. The only films that this one resembles are its imitators. Those fail the same way that copies of Eraserhead or Possession fail as they don't come from the same compelled statement as the original. That's why Pulse still works, it's still there, sitting by itself, apparently the kind of horror movie ready to get up and dance like all the others but keeping quietly to itself until someone like you approaches it and an act of social charity becomes a meeting you will never forget.

Review: THE DARK AND THE WICKED

An elderly woman tends to her bedridden husband as she goes about the daily demands of farm life. Strange sounds at night as the wolf alarm (clinking things on a string) goes off in the barn containg the goat herd. Among the animals is a vaguely human shape with glowing green eyes. The woman isn't quite the same after investigating which brings her two grown up children back from their lives to help out. The woman cuts her own fingers off and wanders off into the night. She is found dead the next day. Then, in a series of horror effects setups the remainder of the household, some of their friends and the nurse tending the old man are beset by dark and violent forces ... for the next hour and a bit and then it ends.

High production values, good acting and some impressive effects and even a commitment to strong atmosphere cannot save this film from its own pointlessness. Why were the old couple targetted by the evil? It's made clear they weren't churchgoers which would point to the devil (whose warm embrace has chilled a little over the years) or god (who seems to have become even more of a bitch since he got away with his pranks on Job) but it doesn't really make much sense as it then attacks everyone who comes within a cooee of the farm. Is it like Hellraiser where you go to hell regardless of why you started playing with the Rubik's cube of the damned? Trying allegory, is it a grim statement on the withering fortunes of people on the land? I have to guess about all of these because all I get from the movie itself is that there's evil in the neighbourhood and ... don't step in it. There is an approach to a lot of the horror scenes that tie them that has to do with perception but nothing is made of that beyond the fact itself; it can't even say  beware of doing this thing because it feels written rather than thought about the thing to beware appears to have been assumed (beat the hell out of me, though).

I have long railed against the cattle prod approach to horror in films like Insidious or The Conjuring where 90% of all the horror scenes are unearned jump scares which work on surprise rather than suspense. There's not even a lot of suspense on show here: a bad thing is about to happen and it happens. Next!

I chose this as an expendable school night extended Halloween movie, thinking from the title and the tile art that it would be, at worst, a campy extension of The Exorcist. That it then goes on in an apparent campaign of letting its audience know that it's a serious horror movie only makes its lack of substance worse like a Shakespearean actor stage whispering with thunderous projection: "This is scary!"

Currently on Shudder.

DRACULA @ 90

Last night I watched the 1931 Dracula. I can't recall how many times I've watched it and wouldn't ever try to number how often I've just seen the first half hour. I keep coming back to it and probably always will.

Why? Actually, yes, why, when I know that after Renfield comes crawling up the steps of the Vesta's hold with an insane grin and a honking laugh the movie changes gear, gets talky and then kind of ends. Would I be proud to serve this chicken to my family? 

Yes, yes I would. But with resevations. If you have no idea that there were films made before The Matrix you will not get why a rubber bat on wires representing a vampire could scare at least the characters on screen then you will never get this movie. If you think black and white movies are inferior to colour movies you will never get this movie. But if you care to bring your imagination to a viewing the same way you imagine the events of a story someone tells you from their life this movie will touch you.

Ok, so the villagers at the start seem to go into anaphylaxis at the mention of Castle Dracula. The bat that sometimes replaces the carriage driver never looks like more than a bat shaped puppet. Bela Lugosi's line delivery, stretching out the vowels as though he's trying to remember his lines is in every hokey old vampire movie. Same with the tux and the urbane manners. All done. Well, yes and no. Dracula was a tale well known to bothe readers and theatre goers for many decades before this film. This film wasn't the first horror film, the first sound horror film or even the first sound horror film made in Hollywood. But what you are watching when you see it is the forming of the code for Horror Cinema 2.0

Horror was a natural for moving pictures as was any imaginative genre. The first were little more than setups or brief spectacles a la Melies. When committed narrative was added they got stronger and then when sound promised the benefits of both cinema and theatre it was both an exciting and terrifying prospect. Dracula wasn't the first to try this but it was the first to start getting it right. If you want to see an extended nightmare parade of images you have to dig down and find something like Begotten. If you just want to go and watch a horror movie you will have something in mind that shares its essentials with Dracula. From medieval ruins to elegant drawing rooms, chemical smelling surgeries to the leafy grounds of mental hospitals, Dracula builds a world that its audiences could instantly recognise and still be surprised by. The two virginal young ladies at the centre of the second act are not corsetted Victorian vestals but jazz age flappers who playfully talk about Dracula's sexiness. The movie had all the mist and gothic decor of the Stoker novel but it felt like 1931.

Does Lugosi come across as a ham? Maybe. He had played the Count on the stage where his battles with English compelled him to use his physical presence more prominently than his lines. And there's another thing I haven't got to yet which really does make all the diference. The director Todd Browning was a carny; he came from the side shows and big tops where the allure could range from shows of great skill to the sight of disfigurement. He was a veteran filmmaker by the time he got to Dracula and had worked with the great Lon Chaney. If anyone knew how to build and sell the performance of an urbane vampire t'was he. And under his guidance Lugosi brought his best from the stage but pared down because the camera always spots bullshit if it's pushed and his Dracula was a man who could effortlessly charm one minute and go into spasms of self-restraint like an addict the next. Even the accent worked. It might sound goofy and cliche now but at that first cinematic outing it sounded other, alien, weary. When Bela says, "there are far worse things awaiting man than death" Dracula means every syllable.

By contrast the always welcome character maestro Dwight Frye brings an ethereal craziness to Renfield. At first he is a personable city slicker among the villagers but his transformation into servitude to Dracula renders him eerie, in pain from his devotion to the Count but possessed of knowledge beyond the ken of all the normal sluggards around him in the boring old world. His luminous grin is not just crazy it's knowing and what it knows is mystical, terrifying and forever. A late scene where he is crawling across the floor of Van Helsing's study has a genuine eerieness that calls across the near century of its first appearance. His performance is a feat and takes him to the level of Lugosi with all the others, however fine they can be, short of the competition.

Other characters get a more or less functional treatment. David Manners' Jonathon Harker is a '30s handsome lead but in a side role. Frances Dade as Lucy gives us a socialite of her time. Helen Chandler as Mina is a standout, showing us the pleasure and danger of being in thrall to the Count. Edward van Sloan is solid as Van Helsing. No one is bad but they have strong forces to beat. 

But I've put something important off here and it's a detail that cannot go unnoted. Dracula has no music score. There is a theme from Swan Lake over the titles but that became a generic mark. Other than that there is the diegetic music of the scenes at the opera. This is the thing more than rubber bats or cape flinging that gives the film what creakiness it has. While it is effective by its absence in the storm at sea, Renfield's crawling on the ship and then in the study and all of the vampiric scenes the silence under the Foley effects (done here, as it happens by the original Jack Foley) and dialogue renders exposition and action and philosophical exchanges uncomfortably equal. It was left out through budgetary squeezes, not artistic choice and the film does ultimately suffer for it. 

A score was prepared in the '90s by composer Phillip Glass. If you know his minimalist, repetitive style you can imagine this. It's all strings, subjects and strettos but for all that it does add atmosphere, if perhaps over applied. Universal (who have retained rights to this film since it was new) have put it into every release of Dracula in physical media from DVD onwards as an optional track. I would recommend against adding for a first viewing. Keep it simple and you'll do fine.

Last night's viewing was of the newly minted 4K presentation at HDR10 with a DTS doubled mono for the front speakers both of which are appropriate for a film of this vintage. The Glass score is presented in surround. As more picky reviewers have found the new UHD image restores the blacks and darker greys allowing for not just clarity of image but depth. This is the least flat this film has ever looked to me. The disc is one of four released in a box set that includes other high profile Universal horrors Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and the Wolf Man. For physical library nerds like me I opted for the UK release as I already have the very rich Blu-Ray box of the Universal horrors which is housed in a coffin shaped outer case. the US version of the 4K box has a book form with discs lodged into pockets that can be difficult to manage and the blu-rays I already have as well as artwork from the period. What I got was a smaller box with four 4K discs. The lack of waste appeals to me.

So, Dracula at 90, eh? Yes, the marriage of horror and Hollywood money that ushered in the genre in its conventional form and bears the traits of what we still consider horror movies. And these are not blown over hands of the walls of ancient caves as first signs of art, they arrive in a disciplined package of form and function, beauty and industruy. That's the version 2.0 of it, before Dracula there were horror movies. After it there was a horror movie industry, an entity that, as old as it has got, as different as the masks its worn, as reactionary or revolutionary, yet boasts the sinew of a young athlete and the wisdom of antiquity. I will always have a good copy of Dracula, a sdeathless film that utters this line of crushing futility that has been to the benefit of all cinephiles, fans or not:

"To die, to be really dead. That must be glorious."