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.