1972@50: DELIVERANCE

Macho Lewis picks a few of his friends to join him canoeing on a river doomed to be dammed. It's not immediately obvious why he's chosen those friends but in the first act it's clear he's picked people he can lead. Bobby's overweight, Drew's an insurance guy and Ed who's kinda nuthin much beyond being a young family man. Lewis is the "kind of man who reads Playboy" who wears his ribbed life jacket over his bare torso and prefers his deluxe bow and arrow over guns.

On the way to the river the crew stop for petrol and to organise some local drivers to transport their cars to the other end of the canoe trip. The city folk make light of the ramshackle houses but one of them, softly strumming his guitar, attracts the attention of a boy with a banjo and together they kick up a storm of bluegrass which became a brick in the culture and remains a moment of cinema more famous than the film it's part of. When Drew the guitarist goes to shake the boy's hand the latter turns away with a strange suddenness. The vibe ain't warm. With the drivers sorted the party makes its way to the river and the guys set to and soon are soaring o'er the water in their canoes. At one point two of them get to the bank and are met by two locals and things get very ugly very quickly, turn violent and then messy, very, very messy. What was a holiday adventure is now a survival story.

John Boorman's career was established by 1972 with a swathe of tv credits and a few feature films including one of the oddest rock movies of the British Invasion (Catch Us if  You Can). Point Blank was a spooky crime movie with leads taken form the likes of Antonioni and Nicholas Roeg. He would go on to the bizarre sci-fi of Zardoz, the watchable but overlong Excalibur and one of the more ridiculed sequels in history (Exorcist II The Heretic). Eclectic doesn't cover it. But early on in that string came this lean adventure in ethics which pitted civilisation against nature without a clear winner in mind.

This is pretty much the only time you will see Burt Reynolds this vulnerable. In his breakthrough role and before his trademark tache he looks every centimetre the action hero but as the scenes progress he's clearly only marginally more equipped than the others at what they are trying to do. He's just another city slicker. Jon Voigt was building his career with some early peaking highlights like Midnight Cowboy and as the unforgettable warzone capitalist Milo in Catch 22. Here he steps back and immerses himself in the film's most lengthy character arc from beige bloke to enforced action hero to bottled up citizen. Ned Beatty has yet to adopt his bellowing bluster in the authority figures he would progress to (like Network's astonishing single scene movie stealer as Mr Jensen) and gives us poignant depiction of post trauma. And then there's Ed Cox as Drew the moral centre, social conscience and dissenting voice whose dispatch is both elegant and eerie.

It's the casting of the locals that might cause the concern of the new viewer of the 2020s. These actors were found among the real locals of the location shoot but you could choose this type or that depending on what you wanted to create. Boorman's team chose the toothless, mumbling and disfigured, the suggestively inbred and savage. Deliverance deals its narrative in the spaces between the archetypes (Lewis' vulnerability, Bobby's courage etc.) and while the lokels are afforded some sympathy at the wrong end of the cheap quips of the city folk they present as arcane throwbacks. Are they like this because they are closer to the nature that the sophisticates are pretending to conquer? I don't get the idea that the film is telling us that this is what life in the woods does to you or that everyone who lives outside the city limits is a hawg-molestin' bad ol' boy, but I do get the intensity of the othering. Does a turn at Duelling Banjos fix that? No, but it doesn't promote it, either. I'll leave this one unresolved in the naive wish that those who watch it now will add the context of 1972 and allow the caricatures and distortions into the way of the world as it was. If you are new to the film you might consider this just as confronting as the atrocity at the heart of the conflict.

This essay in masculinity against and with nature remains a potent one and the lean touch in its execution educative. If we can accept the notion of the alienation as being part of the persuasion of the story we might see a clear way to adding some understanding to the art before our time and find even the difficult bits instructive. Personally, I think they add potency to Deliverance and from a director whose grandest epic statements could leave him awkwardly naked this one's minimalism impresses. Deliverance was a massive hit at the time and has come down to us without need of even the mild coddling I've supplied here. It's one of those instances, though, that gives us pause to wonder at its great success. I dont' mean it's a bad film (it's a great one) I mean it's hard to know why millions love it.

PRINCE OF DARKNESS@35

In an extended title sequence we see disparate events coalesce as a grunting synthesiser motif plays over electronic choirs and flourishes. An old priest dies and a middle aged one takes a key from among the deceased's effects. A class of postgrad phsyics students receive a lecture about quantum from their professor. The latter visits the middle aged priest at a convent. Later they meet at an old church in Los Angeles, descend into well beneath it and find a strange elaborate bottle that contains a flourescent green substance. It has started moving in the container. The students meet at a noticeboard where they find they have all been pressed into a weekend of testing at the church. Bunk beds and technology are moved in as the students arrive and variously whinge about their cancelled weekends and puzzle over what they are doing there.

There are too many things to spoil in this film and if you were tempted to seek it out (I hope I can help that motivation) you will appreciate discovering them for yourself. I can say they involve a pop understanding of quantum science (made very accessible for the likes of me) an ingenious use of the notion of time travel, remote mind control, shared dreams, and an audacious weaving of those with some grand and strange concepts from religion. All of that with a large cast in a single location performing a talky screenplay and it still moves at a clip.

John Carpenter's mid '80s form a middling period. After stunning audiences with the likes of Halloween and The Thing his genius for lean horror cinema found less adaptability with the more sc-fi Starman and the Stephen King Christine. Because of this even Carpenter fans can overlook some treasure among the work that the mainstream productions toned down and Prince of Darkness, outside of a small subset of this, finds itself on skid row. But anyone adventurous with their movies enough to know the joys of finding the low budget/big ideas gems like Videodrome, Society or Cube with take to this one.

The action genre performances might stick out here and there and the horror effects were eclipsed by even mainstream genre films soon after this one but nothing can beat the immediate value of atmosphere from the first frame that happens here and is sustained the whole running time. Is Donald Pleasance's priest too starkly melodramatic? His counterpart in Victor Wong provides a sharp balance. Is the jokey character funny? No, but he's meant to be annoying which he is.  Is the central romance between Lisa Blount and Jameson Parker a little flavourless? Yes, unless you pay attention and know that he's going slow in respecting the pain of her past. Are some characters so obviously created for getting knocked off? It's a horror movie. Yes.

The sense of brooding and approaching cataclysm start even before the credits as the initial synthbass figure stutters over the Universal production badge. This is one of my favourite Carpenter scores and for sustained dread with a sense of epic it is matchless in his compositional work. The use of video for the dream sequences is such a stark contrast it brings a new element in that, while liberally used now, remains unnerving after many viewings. Practical effects as well, still impress like cockroach man and the bizarrely blistered skin of the possessed team member, the contrast between the red of her flesh and the crystal blue of her eyes still makes me squirm. 

The effectiveness of the atmosphere makes the film survive its own cliche. Another possessed character, fresh from having his neck bandaged after he tried to cut it open with a splintered chair leg, stands at the top of a staircase laughing. It should be corny but it's scary. The student staring at the computer screen and typing "I Live" over and over is eerie enough but then this turns into a message that kicks that out the door. The distressed audio of the voice in the communal dream. The death by bike frame scene should be funny but it's horrible. Too many to mention. If The Exorcist still works because of its intense gravity Prince of Darkness finds tonal success in embracing the generic traits it's found on the shelves and committing to them. They do, after all, bear the parade of big ideas and allow the film as a whole to work consistently, however odd that consistency is.

The big ideas here have a special context. Carpenter had wanted the Halloween franchise to develop beyond a single figure and explore more territory associated with the spirit of Halloween. The third entry dispenses with the slasher and takes up a plot that combines corporate amorality with supernatural maleficence and suggests an ancient connection. If that reminds you of things like The Stone Tape (and if it does, we're friends for life) then it's because master of the big idea melange Nigel Kneale was commissioned to write it. Call it a culture clash but the collaboration ended in acrimony (should point out that Carpenter was a producer, not director of this one) and the result was, while pretty good, far more conventional than Kneale would have written. Prince of Darkness with its big collision and then coherance of religion and science and the ghostly thought that we humans might not be nearly as important as we'd like to believe, is a tribute to Kneale. Carpenter's writer credit is under the nom de plume of Martin Quatermass, a clear bow to Kneale's proto Dr Who character and Kneale's work in general. It's a kind of apology by deed.

This film has a big significance for me and my cinephilia. After university I affected a ridicule of genre cinema and an annoyance at anyone who watched it to bolster their undergrad seminar papers. All through that I still had a love of the atmosphere it created. I didn't bother seeing Prince of Darkness at the cinema but a little over a decade later, out of curiosity more than anything, I set the VCR after seeing the title in the overnight listings in the Green Guide (couple of things there that seem to only exist in nostalgia). I watched it the following night and was completely wowed. Later, I woke at about three in the morning with a full understanding of the final dream and couldn't get back to sleep. If I'd been a closetted horror fan before that I burst through the doors armed with a lifelong committment. Oh, and Alice Cooper's in it.

Review: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2022)

A group of young influencer hipsters roll into a ghost town ahead of a busload of potential investors. They want to make a big vintage retail paradise. One house is still occupied by a woman who seems to be about four hundred years old and her big bubba of a son who seems to be immensely younger. The new blood tell her she's trespassing in her own house which soon gives her a cardiac incident, gettin' this slasher party kickstarted.

The rest is slasher basic but done with a lot of flair. In the manner of recent revisits like Halloween (2018) or Scream (2022) this TCM pretends that there is nothing between it and the distant original. This simplifies the backstory malarky, allows a nice free ride on the reputation of a genre classic and serves as a short cut to make yet another slasher, anyway. That's what happens here.

What is there left to say? A lot of creative kills, genuine suspense and some real work done on character motivation with some fluid interaction between unlikely matches. While it is impossible to feel much for the Insta-crowd in the bus we are still given a decent familial relationship to feel for. The direct links to the 1974 film are Leatherface (no TCM without him) and Sally the final girl, now a wizened ranger in dogged pursuit of the white whale in the skin mask. Production values are through the ceiling and if you have opportunity you should see it in 4K with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos sound. I put that there as it really is just as important to this production as the grainy 16mm look of the first one from the '70s. And that's the thing.

This was made as a slasher full stop. The shoehorned Sally Hardesty thread is entertaining but you know where it's going and where it's come from as soon as it's introduced. That and the retooled introduction are here for their brand power. Why can't they just make a contemporary slasher? Why should they? The brand is right there and a little lip service later you've got both.

I'm not precious about reimagined classics as most of them fall on their faces without my help. The only danger there is that new audiences might affect them in ignorance of the source. Remember though, that, for all the theses written and all the reverent DVD commentaries spoken about films like the 1974 TCM they are still talking about films that were made to exploit markets and start or boost careers. TCM is a well made film as it plunges right into the core where the horror is located and doesn't let up. It should survive any failure to see the subtext or reference or irony or metathing. That doesn't rule those interpretations out because the thing is there to inform and intrigue as much as to delight but it is the delight that must remain.

TCM 2022 does delight. It feels like the airest choctop by the time the credits roll but that's all it needs to do. Can it compete against Tobe Hooper's mighty original? Well, he pretty much slobbered over that himself in the first sequel (which is good but softened by goofiness) This one appears on your Netflix feed for a click and a ride. If anything the decisions that leave this light and effective put it above similar redos like the lacklustre Friday the 13th, Evil Dead and Blair Witch and so on as they have frequently lost themselves in earnestness and would have done much better to haven been inspired by than remade. I will never bother watching TCM 2022 again but it really was fun while it lasted. 

1982@40: THE KING OF COMEDY

Obssessed fan Rupert Pupkin wrests an opportunity to talk directly with his idol, chatshow host Jerry Langford and the contact turns an already unhinged fandom into denialism. Rupert's fandom works in tandem with his self-belief in his powers as a comedian and fantasises constantly of the two strands of his life twining into an unbreakable weave. 

It's not just the daydream scenarios where he and Jerry are showbiz friends, it's also the basement of his home which is decorated as a mockup of a talk show set, complete with canned applause and laughter and cardboard cutouts of Jerry and other celebrities. And it's also how Rupert keeps turning up to Jerry's offices with audition tapes and waits despite industry standard hints that his quest is futile. He teams up with equally deranged Langford fan Masha for a practical solution involving kidnapping. Will he get his routine to the show?

Undersung in the canon of the Scorsese/De Niro partnership to the point where it is frequently forgotten, The King of Comedy is as energetic and intensely cinematic as any of the others. It's just that it's difficult to reconcile its strange comedy with grave megaliths like Taxi Driver or Raging Bull before and Goodfellas after. Like David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone, fans will on being reminded of it say something like: "of COURSE, completely slipped my mind." But when King is revisited and again proves itself more than worthy and it is because of the comedy.

Comedy? It's about a psycho fan teetering on the edge of ultraviolence. Well, yes, but to get why it is a comedy can take a little switch of focus. There are moments in this film that play more conventionally as comedy but all of them fail, feeling try hard or cute. Mostly, this is a comedy of cringe. Rupert doesn't know that he isn't funny. He has the conviction of a self-help book and the consequent unnerving confidence of the wrong person making up their mind about something for the remainder of their life. 

Rupert's socially disastrous behaviour, his incapability to recognise embarrasment in others or feel it himself, and his impulsiveness give him the feel of a Dostoyevsky character, the underground man or Mr Godyalkin from The Double. De Niro's performance shows an unexpected commitment to a character pushing a fantasy version of himself so far forward that his natural self is annihilated. Mr Godyalkin while on one of his self-destructive shopping sprees makes eye contact with his boss as their carriages pass in the street. Godyalkin says words to the effect of: "It's not me. It's someone strikingly like me." If anyone had been hanging out for Scorsese to make an official adaptation of Crime and Punishment or The Gambler they only need to watch King of Comedy for the closest they'll ever get. The comedy is cringe. It is white knuckle and almost entirely unrelieved. When he is making a tape for Jerry in the basement studio his mother, offscreen, yells out for him to be quiet and in the second or two when he has to deal with it the viewer might well let out a loud laugh. Mostly, though, they would be more inclined to watch through their fingers.

Counterbalancing De Niro's force are the dual opposites of Masha the crazy fan (a snakey and effective Sandra Bernhardt) and the post comedy career Jerry Lewis as Langford. Only two years prior to this Lewis had tried to resurrect his gawky clown persona in the repellent, like-punk-never-happened Hardly Working (find the trailer on YouTube and see if you can make it all the way through). While Lewis persisted with similar attempts these eventually faded and he turned his skills to whimsical cinematic landfill like Funny Bones and Arizona Dream. 

In the middle of that was King of Comedy is which he plays a man whose tv persona is constantly confused with his offscreen demeanour so much that all he seems left with when encountering his public is anger. A very funny moment in which a fan who pushes her luck in getting an autograph and is refused a further favour turns instantly vitriolic puts Langford's position in a clear capsule. Lewis brings an intensity unknown in any role prior to this and never reprised. As a public figure who hates his public and recognises that his fame forces an endless repetition of the cycle of adoration and hatred, he is a celebrity who has come to understand his own futility. In his one shot, he took the face of the mugging clown with the cartoon voice and showed us the grimace beneath. His every appearance in the film carries tension which was a revelation then and now.

Sandra Bernhardt's Masha is an edgy variable and demonstrates that to take an already volatile film further she needs to be even more unpredictable. This is not in a cute or goofy way but one that grinds up against violence that could take any form. That it's indistinguishable from her sexualised adoration gives it further power and in the two hander scenes with Lewis she suggests the kind of Manhattanite horror figure to be seen later in Wall Street or American Psycho. It was her first screen role with dialogue.

At Griffith Uni in the early '80s, if you took as many cinema courses as they'd let you, you could like any filmmakers you wanted but you had to have an opinion on Godard and Scorsese. Godard's heyday or the years that could be written as seminar papers or assignments were long gone but Scorsese still had decades of forceful auteurism. We happy few who had watched Taxi Driver for the first time on a Steenbeck editing desk (all of us too young to have seen it at a cinema) and Raging Bull on a U-Matic video tape saw The King of Comedy as the next chapter in the canon. We would have been blitzed by the sheer virtuosity of Goodfellas or the depth of feeling in Last Temptation of Christ. Until then, we had some mighty movies from Marty. We couldn't know that his future would be solidly mainstream and have decreasingly sharp edges, that he would become scholarly, respected and dull. 

The King of Comedy, meanwhile, did not play like Tootsie or Night Shift (both probably future parts of this series), it played Taxi Driver in pastels and was all the punchier for it. It just wasn't friendly enough to be invited in to the 1982 movie experience, even languishing on the shelves of video shops. I wonder what fans of 2019's Joker would make of a first viewing of King which forms part of the blend used in the later film. Joker's mash of Taxi Driver's proto-incel nightmare and King of Comedy's dangerous delusional fan removed the depth of those and replaced it (knowingly, deliberately) with super villain blockiness. Has that further obscured the source films from contemporary audiences? My hope is that those fans I was just imagining could see King of Comedy just once, knowing when it was made, they might at least admit that it gives Joker some needed context. But I have no idea about that. I can just go back to a banger from an old master and settle in again. Maybe it doesn't matter. No .. it has to. 

Review: BELFAST

After an slideshow to a Van Morrison tune that sjhows how lovely Belfast has become we go over a garden wall to join neighbourhood kids at the end of the black and white 1960s at noisy play. Soon one of them notices a pack of men gathering at the end of the street. They are wielding blunt intstruments and yelling. Someone makes a car into a massive Molotov cocktail with a rag and the petrol tank. When it ignites it bucks like an injured horse before exploding into a mass of fire. Local lads, just come to see to that Catholic neighbour infestation. These are not the troubles you pack up in an ol' kit bag, they are the bloody, blazing, bastard troubles in Norn Irn, fought in the streets and lanes and hearts and minds and eyes and limbs and spines.

And then it kind of calms down as we meet the family. No names but they do feel like a family with Da who comes home every other weekend from his tradie job in England, Ma who has to manage everything and the two boys who find that childhood is no barrier to the attentions of the local gangsters who think they are freedom fighters. The family forms the arc of this quite gentle recollection of writer/director Kenneth Branagh and the point of contention needed for any story to progress is, in this case, whether to stay home or flee this violence they don't buy into.

That seems a slight precis of a full length feature but Belfast is not about plot but character and episode. A very fine cast take us through the question of uprooting from tradition and history while the old council estate streets tighten with hatred. Branagh, like many actors turned director, like to dazzle and demonstrate just how cinematic he can be but here this is almost entirely kept to the device of black and white that can admit glorious colour when it needs to.

The result is that this film never drags once, doesn't outstay its welcome, and offers a continuous stream of charm broken now and then by some grim reality. The sense of the impossibility of normality continuing through such determined hostility is clear and will make you wonder about your own street broken by conflict. We live in times when restraint at seeing parallels between such conflict and that being so cacophanous in our own homes. Think fighting over which version of an imaginary friend is crazy? Talk to an anti-vaxxer.

I recently rewatched Fellini's Roma for a project of this blog. It's stretch and depth and whimsy are peerless as it wards off nostalgia in preference for recalling how it really felt. It's a marvel but I can't help feeling that I'll always prefer to see its far more sentimental follow up Amarcord. That's close to where Belfast lives. Branagh keeps a heartrending and family-severing issue at the centre but insists on the perspective of a child growing a little more wise than he should be. If that's the worst I can say about this its work is done.

Review: NIGHTMARE ALLEY

Stan Carlisle physically and symbolically ignites his past, house, dead father and all, and sets off on a bus to nowhere. At the terminus he follows a little man to a carnival and, walking around in the colour and the hustle, gets a taste for it. He is struck by the sideshow of the geek, a debased man who performs acts of abjection for clean straw and alcohol. Stan, able and noticeable, gets work just by being there and sets off on a journey to an ethical hell.

Guillermo Del Toro gives us a world as robustly realised as the cold war city of The Shape of Water. But while that tale lightened its ideological horrors with the beauty of a fairytale, Nightmare Alley gives us cynical punch after punch, promising an exhausting two hours plus of screen time. From the cheap grift of the sideshows to the elevation of the coded mentalist act in the elegant clubs of the big city, this journey is one of life by angle and deception. And it's not just the carnies. The urbane psychologist who challenges Stan into a withering extended putdown promises to be a player with terrifying skill. Teaming up, they form a duo whose willingness to scrape the maximum out of those at the top is not hampered by the morality that might smother it with a pillow at the first thought. By that stage, the perrennial gaudy lie of the carnival starts to look honest by comparison and the notion of the world beyond them, plugged by news of the U.S. entry into World War II, leaves nothing but the search for more grift.

While the dependably enticing visuals Del Toro serves us might just get us through his casting carries everything. Bradley Cooper who can play sleazy as easily as solid and authoritative, is the vessel that the world he encounters for the first time after the dominance of his father fills him to the brim with a zest for moral sleight of hand and the pursuit of manipulation. His fast learner effectively disappoints us at the attainment of every new level of the game. He makes that compelling. Cate Blanchett as psychologist Dr Ritter is a gilded snake, mostly seen in the dark enclosure of her rigged office, too slippery to handle with a pair of eyes that can spot a kill on first entrance. Richard Jenkins impresses as the kind of midwest sawdust and porridge aristocrat whose weakness when found renders him into a creepy emotional addict. The carnies enjoy the opportunity to be carnies. Willem Dafoe is all gruff sleaze as the boss. Toni Collette is both hard and vulnerable as half of the first act Stan attaches himself to, David Strathairn is her partner, rummy and nearing death, the holder of the wisdom of the con, given a quiet dignity by the actor. Rooney Mara is the closest we get to a moral centre, willing to go along for Stan's dark ride but torn by conscience. Her freshness and corruption are never quite resolved.

That's the problem of this film. Del Toro has pursued the darkness of his characters and their times so stridently, their world so concrete and their success so depressing that there is little left but to marvel at the cinematic bravado. But as fine as that is and as superb as the performances are, we are left with so little that a story might give us. I don't mean that we need a title card with a moral about being nicer to each other. For two and a half hours we get a universe narrowed to a pitting of hucksters against suckers. Whether it's nice or not it is exhausting. But there's something else. This film is haunted.

Edmund Golding's 1947 film tells this same story with forty minutes less screen time, under heavier cultural restrictions and pretty much says everything that Del Toro's says. Actually, it says more as it allows Stan more self awareness and pathos. Some might frown at the Hollywood ending but I'll let that one through as it allows for a needed moment of contrition, richer by its pain and circumstance. It's not a happy ending but the stark cynicism of most of what preceeds it (putting the cynicism of most other noirs to shame) gives it just the right amount of cool breeze at the end of the heat.

Maybe it's a film better told after a decade of depression or the years of darkest hours that built the Second World War. In this age of hustlers getting voted to the highest offices and more localised governmental gaslighting I wonder if we are really in the mood for more grifting. Del Toro is clear about the vileness of the actions on show here, he's not inviting us to laugh along, but he's just not giving us any world beyond it nor suggesting a reason for thinking we might long for one. As someone whose eczema stopped itching the morning that Joe Biden's victory was called, the best I will say is that I might well revisit this a few years down the track. That's gotta be worth something.

1982@40: TRON

Three people variously cast out or blocked by computing giant ENCOM band together to bring the corporation. The corporation head has been acquiring his way to the top, hiring and firing wizkids by the dozen and reaping the profits. What Mr Big doesn't quite grasp is that his central digital entity is not only learning fast but is becoming a bigger, badder paranoid control freak than he his, out gaming him to the point where he has the boss over a barrel of blackmail.

While all this is going on we see the world of a video game from the inside and at the level where those little 8 bit figures look like real people in active wear who talk to each other off script and are aware that they are units in a game, referring to the people who control them as their users. Their world is a combination of a police state and a wonderland under an intense neon glow which renders everything both brighter and darker than it should be. Their faces and hands are in black and white.

During a raid that the trio makes on the ENCOM building, the lead hacker falls victim to the experimental laser that the aforesaid A.I. (called the Master Control Program or MCP which used to stand for Male Chauvinist Pig and would stand for Microsoft Certified Professional) uses to render him into a digital entity and drops him into the game as a unit.

There is a mass more of plot. There has to be: the pile on of concepts forms a complex meta world that is left for later entertainment as the story flashes along at a blur. The notion of artificial intelligence has been a sci fi plot since Frankenstein. Its chief descendant, machine learning was routine in tv shows like The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits and Star Trek. What Tron did was to take the threat of it and merge it with the theme of megalomania as corporate greed and plug that into a neato tale set in one of the new video games. 

Those are just the basic building blocks of what's happening here but they'll do for a start. What's more compelling to me is where the merger puts this film in its time. There is a notion that Star Wars brought sci-fi into the A-Movie realm, made it respectable and popular. But the success of Star Wars really only popularised action adventure in space, engendered non-sci-fi clones of itself and drove the darker, more troubling material undergorund. For every Videodrome or Liquid Sky there were a dozen Battle Beyond the Stars. But now and then there were anomalies, mainstream flicks that stuck to their concepts and dressed them up like jumbo popcorn buckets. For all the space opera blaring out of the screens and speakers there was the occasional Blade Runner, Brainstorm and Tron.

Tron doesn't just apply a Wizard of Oz template to its two worlds and make the jargoned speech of the software engineers sound like '40s noir characters, it places itself between the big strong money of the information industry to come and the youngest kid in the house who, plugging away with an Atari in their room, had the house's best if not only computer and was already treating it like culture. When Flynn says, "let's use the wayback machine," he's quoting Mr Peabody and, unknowingly, giving a future Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat the name of their web archiving retrieval system. That prety much sums up a good deal of what Tron has to say: whether you know you're in a game or not, whether you're the boss or a unit, the competition you are part of simply by existing is without date. That's more poignant now than in 1982 as the mix of antique digital graphics and hard sets might have been cutting edge technology then but would be a cultural cutting edge now as retro future. And money grubbing empire building is with us forever and ever. And it plays like a great adventure movie, anyway.

The cast is perfectly adequate but any performances necessarily remain under the veil of the warpo look of the game world and action. That said, the central counterparts of Jeff Bridges as Flynn and the dependable David Warner in his usual ice cold authority figure role ground everything. I noted that South Park had lifted the image of the stylised David Warner as the MCP and used it for the manifestation of Moses in the Jewbilee episode.

All that and you get one of Wendy Carlos' best scores, appropriately old and new in its mix of synthesis and orchestra. On that and the audio mix I'll note here that I watched this through Disney Plus and it had been upgraded to a very busy and boomy 5.1 which made me kill a lot of the bass as it was making my subwoofer rattle louder than the music and effects.

Tron flopped at the cinema. Then again, so did Blade Runner. Both, appropriately, found their fan bases in the emergent home video market that allowed a generation an undeclared film scholarship. But there's something else, going on with Tron's audience that wasn't quite expected. While grown ups found it hard to follow the game levels which can make the plot seem episodic, the kids who knew their Pac Man and Donkey Kong had less trouble. The teens and tertiary students into their online games, MUDs, MUCKs and MOOs, that required the direct injection of player creativity, also got it. The game in Tron doesn't look like Pac Man but what it does look like fired the imaginations of anyone thinking beyond the arcades and consoles and would soon be demanding more from their screen lives.

What Tron didn't anticipate is how movies in the future based on games behaved less like games than movies with three act structures rather than levels. This is not so bad (it's what still happens to novels) but it's interesting when you consider that Predator, made only a few years later, behaved much more like a video game than a sci-fi film which had less influence on game to movie adaptations than perhaps it should. Tron's themes of computer hacking and the figurative digitisation of a game player were solid refinements rather than innovations but the MCP's threat of extending its control and the reasons it gives presages cyber terrorism and probably for the first time. These now routine exploits cause terror at the level of personal identity on a mass scale. What might have been a spoken whim in the writer's room became a future modus operandi. Tron is like that, though, it's creaky and vintage but it can still drive. So, watch it.

1972@50: ROMA

Roma is, on the surface, an exercise in nostalgia but a closer examination reveals a warning. Revisitation stories usually do this and end up just joining the chorus: you can't go home again. But this isn't really one of those. Federico Fellini was a country boy and it's his awe at the Eternal City we are watching. This is less a revisitation than a series of reintroductions and whether it's the Etruscans or the Fascists or the Holy See we will be repeatedly informed of the fleeting nature of eternity. It's like a view from the other end of the microscope he used to make 8 1/2 but instead of Marcello Mastroianni and a delirium he plays himself and the figures onscreen are either real or Breughelian exaggerations. The version of the title with his name on it becomes increasingly more accurate.

The first of several entrances to the city is made in the opening shot as two figures with bicycles move through a moonlit landscape with grotesque trees and a ruined ancient roadsign that says Roma 4K. One of the figures carries a scythe. The next entrance is by a teacher who is talking his class through the crossing of the Rubicon. He fords the stream barefoot and the boys remove their shoes and follow him across as he repeats Julius Caesar's quote about the die being cast. A monstage of school life in the fascist years. Then we see the young Fellini as played by an actor arriving by train to a boarding house which seems to contain all forms of human life, up to the gigantic bedridden and godlike Matriarch. The next entrance is a massive traffic jam around the Colusseum with cars as far as the eye can see and the rained in drivers and passengers functionally indistinguishable. And so on. All roads might lead here but some are a lot tougher to negotiate than others.

We are taken to a music hall with a rowdy crowd, chaotic dinner in the piazza, brothels for soldiers and other ones for officers. We follow an archeological team called in when the underground rail project breaks into a sealed ancient chamber with frescos on the walls. The crew marvel at the paintings and the statues before the air that's been rushing in from the broken wall attacks and erases all of it. An aging princess hosts a futuristic fashion parade of styles for nuns, monks, priests and above which starts quaint turns silly and then horrific. All the circular motion might be dizzying but Fellini keeps a firm hand on the tiller, ensuring the constant threat to his audience's stability is kept the right side of chundering over the side. And through all the blurring, the seventies haircuts over forties suits, the ancient and contemporary in the same frame state and restate Fellini's tireless awe at the city of his choice. It blurs, the nostalgia doesn't get a chance against the sense memories of ugliness and brutality. You get a lot of everything because Rome is everything. By the time you are gliding along with the dreamlike motion of the motorcycles in the final sequence as they roll around the curves and create a lightshow between headlights and architecture you might have already forgotten the moment that Anna Magniani begs off being in the film as she tells Fellini she doesn't trust him (nor should she as she wouldn't be there if he was trustworthy).

So, his ranging happy youth was lived in a police state and the hippies that take up every square millimetre of the mansion and the fountain could look like an occupation or an infestation. Flamboyant author has almost the literal last word when he is discovered among the diners at another piazza. He says he lives in Rome because he is nothing to the Romans and like them he might as well be an illusion.

I saw this and the more directly nostalgic Amarcord on late night tv in Brisbane when I was an undergrad. The tv was an op shop special, an old black and white piece of furniture from PYE or AWA or whoever put their wood with gold trim pieces into the showrooms of the sixties. My brother Michael, like all my family, was a film buff and would alert me to anything worth my time that came up on tv and this was one of the first. It was certainly the first Fellini film I saw. The next year I saw it at Griffith University's cinema, big screen and in colour. I became a fan for life but only much later did I find the earlier films, the ones you're meant to revere like La Dolce Vita or La Strada. Wonderful stuff but none of them carried the thrill of that first touch. I had done the same thing with Beatles albums as a teenager, going backwards until the reissues allowed further exploration. Roma, like the White Album, has felt fresh to me over decades. What better can be said of a retrospective?