MIFF Play #9: WHETHER THE WEATHER IS FINE

A weather report animation of a typhoon gives way to a satellite image of it which gives way to a scene of the devastation it left. A teenaged boy is sleeping on the splinters and rubble of a house. Around him are corpses already going grey. He rouses and gets his bearings, visibly disgusted by some prayers droning nearby. He wanders to his old place where his girlfriend catches up to him before they both wander off, he's concerned about his mother and Andrea, girlfriend, just wants to get one of the evacuation ships that will take them to safety in Manila. They track down Norma, Miguel's mother, and find she's happy to get to the boat but must first connect with her estranged husband. Together then very much apart, the trio wends its way through a landscape of natural disaster, beset by thieving children, religious groups whose worship ranges from the quietly dignified to the crassly showbiz, and masses of screaming pain and need.

Writer/director Carlo Francisco Manatad lived through the super typhoon Yolanda when it hit Tacloban where this story is set. He had wanted to make a film about his experience immediately but circumstances forbade the production until 2021. I would bet that the time in between gave him hourly opportunities to think about what he had lived through and how he might best paint it on to a cinema screen. What we see here is a strangely mellow surface given to the cataclysm's aftermath in which the people act almost as they might if it hadn't happened but are making their way around its damage. It also suggests Manatad had the time to develop an approach that remained light enough to allow tints of satire here, magical realism there, and an overall compassion for the people who lived through the same.

Daniel Padilla as Miguel gives us an everyman who understands the extremity of the situation and the measures that survival might demand but stops short of Andrea's impulsive violence and self entitlement. He sees her amorality and eventual bizarre elevation with equal bewilderment. Charo Santos-Concio brings the weight of the world to Norma whose determination to mend the breach between her and her husband transcends thoughts of her own survival and even present wellbeing, the results of which are quietly poignant. Around them, this film plays and rolls like a gentle, warm dream where the violence hurts but the will to live levitates. An odd and oddly moving piece. 

MIFF play #8: DOMINGO AND THE MIST

Domingo wanders through his days in his small Costa Rican village, tending to his dairy cows and talking to the others about whether they will sell their land to the developers who are building a highway through the district. One by one, the villagers succumb, taking the money and leaving, persuaded by a gang of thugs hired to help negotiations with nocturnal violence. Domingo plans to stand his ground, regardless of the apparent futility of it, and turns to his own firepower for help. Throughout these events, he is visited at night by a mist that crawls through the door or seeps between the wooden slats of his house which he talks to as his deceased wife and who sometimes talks herself.

This solid example of slow cinema takes more than a leaf out of the book of retired Hungarian master Bela Tarr in using long takes of characters walking, sitting or working as the audience is implicitly invited to project thoughts on to them. Domingo knows his reckoning will come and hears the gunshots and explosions happen around him like footfalls coming his way. Through an insistence on the limits of this enclosed small world with its fresh green jungles and plain but clean houses we are left with the choice the characters face as the sole question of their lives and that the world beyond this one will be a step downward. Domingo's wife, her voice increasingly dour as the mist, offers no comfort beyond the invitation for him to join her.

If you were to expect a raging plot of David vs a corporate Goliath with a big final showdown, this approach would drag but this film is all about the days that stretch and the approach of their end, whether it be through taking the package or giving into an accelerated mortality. And if we feel frustration at Domingo's stubborn stance, if we think it's the nightly spirits he barters from the local moonshiner, or more plainly, the life he has made his own here in the mountains, spare, simple, arduous but satisfying his situation has proven impossible to resolve without force. This is how the even pacing works so well, here, the days, the work and the natural beauty offer no acceptable alternative. The movie, beautiful to see and terrible to contemplate, is the message.

CANDYMAN @ 30

Helen, a postgrad on a thesis about urban myths, goes in search of the origin story of a local supernatural figure, the Candyman. She and her academic partner discover that her prestigious Chicago apartment block was originally intended as a housing project, like the one at Cabrini Green which has become shrouded in the Candyman mythology. Helen will cross the race class divide built in to the city's plan to find herself fatally enthralled to the charismatic figure as her comfortable bourgeoise life cracks, crumbles and collapses.

This adaptation of Clive Barker's The Forbidden was transplanted from the original setting of Liverpool to Chicago as the latter offered a genuine history of class and race town planning. Because of this, what might have been a perfectly acceptable late period slasher became a robust classic that provided a kind of apotheosis of the sub genre and overshadowed all comers until Scream changed the game. The lurking worry of the reach of the sinister public history of the city gives the sense of a cursed place, perfect for the rise of a predator who targets the underclasses in dingy lightless settings. Add a robust and practical visual style, fluid pacing, muscular performances and an expert Phillip Glass score, and that classic label just sticks itself on.

Virginia Madsen has to carry this film, despite the presence of a genuinely menacing counterpart. Her character finds herself easing into the kind of action forward player that women are still seldom offered as roles. By the time she is knee deep in the bloodshed of her obsession, her imploding marriage feels trivial. As she passes into the fog of whether she is psychotic or really moved by Candyman, she takes us with her whether we want to go or not. And that's against the presence and performance of Tony Todd. Todd's height and chiselled beauty make his stillness weigh a ton but his earth's core voice (assisted, frequently, by audio effects) embrace Helen and all viewers. When you add what becomes his troubling M.O. when "seen" by his pursuer, those qualities inform our dread. And never was a slasher so gracefully heavy.

The urban mythology at the heart of this story was already finding a fertile ground on the broadening internet. This would only spread, develop and grow on Usenet and in popular culture with efforts like The X Files. A whole movie concentrating on a single thread but beginning with the notion that urban legends were the stuff of academic pursuit was irresistible to an audience that was soon to prove insatiable, whether buying tickets or shelling out for VHS hire.

Candyman has the honour of being the finest adaptation of a Clive Barker property and that includes Barker's own direction of his Hellraiser. This is really saying something when compared to the adaptations of fellow horror literature figure Stephan King. Film versions of Kings books have a very inconsistent reputation overall, including Stanley Kubrick's take on The Shining. Barker's cinematic legacy suffers worse, outside of Hellraiser (the original, not the franchise). Candyman is oddly absent from lists of Barker's output even though it is one of the most successful and durable. It's not just the hook and the chocolates with razor fillings that keep us coming back to it but the social address, the have and have not divide, the solid world building, and the great struggle between a scientific Helen and her ethereal but murderous quarry that keep Candyman engaging and riveting, viewing after viewing after viewing. Worked then, works now. 

Review: BLAZE

As twelve year old Blaze is walking home from school she witnesses a brutal rape that ends with the victim's death. Back home she withdraws into shock under her doona until her father tries, unsuccessfully, to get her up for dinner. Eventually, she approaches him and tells him what she saw. A police and then medical examination later push her further into a tangle of rage in which she blames herself for not trying to stop or at least report the crime. A heavily intimidating pre-trail examination seals the deal and, however loving and supportive her father is, nothing can wrest her from the inner life that has brought the dragon into her room and the grotesque nightmare world that appears as soon as she closes her eyes. "Long is the way and hard the path that leads up to the light."

Most of this film is a visual show of what Blaze is going through, difficult flashes of memory, grasping attempts by a child to normalise her world and the effects of the failure of that to heal. Puppet dragons, stop motion figurines, psychotropic journeys inward are told in a dazzling array of colour and form that tell quite accurately the child's creative reaction against what feels like betrayal by the entire world. This is not a film mostly composed of nor even reliant upon fantasy sequences. The very earthly official and legal procedures have the sick feeling gravity to them and even the relatively safe haven of Blaze chatting to her friend suffers some dark shading. I write that and realise I might be giving the impression that this is a grim film. Its central subject is certainly grim but it is so deftly engineered as to deliver the moments that horrify or sadden with poignancy as the peaks of action, not the troughs which allows relief and a sense of assurance that we are not be pummelled by didactic sermons. It is this kind of trust that appears to have bonded Julia Savage with director Del Kathryn Barton. For all its apparent minimalism, Savage's performance is one of palpable commitment.

Del Kathryn Barton is a high profile Australian artist and this is her first feature film. She has incorporated her aesthetic heavily into it, creating variously a charming and artless vision of a child to the fiery nightmarish visions of Blaze's pain to the means of her way to strength. By keeping the emotive force high we are spared an artist's showreel and get, instead, something powerful enough to grasp and keep after the credits roll. I had to miss this one at MIFF but was glad it appeared straight away after the festival in cinemas. I didn't know how glad I would be, though, which made seeing it at a normal ol' choctop cinema a treat that will push it into my top titles  of the year. If you were skeptical about how an art-heavy movie can also be a good conventional narrative, AND make you well up in the best way, go and see Blaze.

Review: CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

One block on the timeline after the near future. Performance art team Saul Tenser and his wife Caprice stage the removal of growths that might be either new organs or tumours with a remote autopsy pod. Body modification and near cannibalistic fetishism are dripping from the avant garde to the edge of the mainstream. An undercurrent group is swelling in numbers and influence in response to the new technology of accelerated mutation and they want to stage their own demonstration with proof of concept that has to do with the unsettling scenes in the prologue where a plastic eating child is murdered by its mother. A strange one to begin with a choc top at the cinema.

David Cronenberg's heralded return to his trademark body horror has been foreshadowed by intimations of extermity, of gore, violence and disruption. I didn't feel much in the way of confrontation watching it and regard the hype as marketing only. The body-mod scenes in this film are not offered for shock value. Most of the biotech design will already be warmly familiar to Cronenberg fans already from his classics like Videodrome. The real power on screen here is the discussion of the distinction between the proffered art, the suggestion that "old sex" has passed its use-by and that now "surgery is the new sex". This is an imagined era of "desktop surgery" where the greater population celebrates the opening of previously qualified practice to all. Cronenberg, while not exactly, trifling with his own legacy, is yet asking us to get used to its testimony and dig beneath it to hear its real voices.

If you go along expecting a bigger, better Videodrome or Dead Ringers think more along the lines of the more studiously subdued fare of the '90s: M. Butterfly or Crash that made less of the other and the marginal than the othering by the greater society. Crimes of the Future looks more like Existenz but it plays far more like Dead Ringers; the notion of the human transition (and its relation to the way we live and what we expect of our lives) is by far the greater burden here.

That said, Cronenberg takes obvious delight in dusting off some old tropes. A business with the ultra-modern name of The National Organ Registry is housed in a run down office that looks like it was old in the 1950s. Eroticism from the invasion of the torso cavity could be from any '70s to '80s Cronenberg shocker. Howard Shore is back in the composer chair, providing a skintight accompaniment for his old friend's film. The underground activist Dotrice's declamations would sit well in Scanners or Naked Lunch.   Then again, this film does not feel like fan service or stylistic nostalgia (despite the recycled title), its underlying gravity is telling us to lift the curtain of the sensational soundbite dialogue and visual grotesquery. One of its most potent themes, pushing at the surface tension is the choice of what we do about this future we have in front of us. Resist, conform, innovate?

If you see this where you cannot pause or rewind, enjoy the dazzle but take care to listen as well as look. That's always been the case with Cronenberg and so it is again.

MIFF Play #7: HIT THE ROAD

A small family goes on a cross country drive. Middle aged parents, the man with a leg in a cast in the back, a young adult brother and a pre-teen one, and a dog making his way through his last days. It's Iran so when the wife turns around to her husband and says, "I think we're being followed," it might be something more than a road trip. So, while each one of them has different ideas about what they are doing they are more or less united but that doesn't mean it is going to run smooth. Each relationship within the four has its quirks and when numbers are added to cross each of those lines there are more nuances, rules to break or maintain, and communication to celebrate. The occasion is a sobering one but there's a lot of life just in this care to get in the way of that.

Road movies are dialogue and character and, though a series of pared back mini two-handers we are given the narrative arc and the family history. The mother has a photo album of her eldest son's urine stains from his infancy but the attempt at jollity by her only has him quietly weep at the wheel. The manic little boy's imagination is explosive but he has to be restrained from kissing the ground at each stop. Has the father's time in a leg cast gone beyond its real usefulness? The opening shot is of the younger boy playing the little keyboard someone has drawn on the cast, the correct notes of the piano piece that is playing on the score. There are frequent sudden songs, deliberately mimed in appearance a la Pennies from Heaven. What there isn't, to any dangerous degree, is the kind of sentimentalist whimsy of something like Little Miss Sunshine, even though the film does get very quirky. There is the sense that it has what it needs.

By no means a simple or simplistic tale, Hit the Road's leanness shines brightest when it does attempt something closer to cosmic like the father and son dialogue that morphs into a spacewalk. We know that most of it has stayed closer to a verite style family outing in the dust of the road or the mist of the mountains. And when loss and mortality take the stage it feels quietly inevitable rather than sudden and grasping. This was taken off the menu from last year's festival so it was wonderful to see it appear here. As it happens, it's out in select cinemas this week. Do yourself a favour.

MIFF Play #6: Petrol

Eva, a film student, is recording some seaside sound at a rocky beach and comes across a group of young folk performing a vampiric looking ritual. Unseen, she retreats, intrigued by the central figure, a woman, who utters something that might be profound. Eva encounters the mystery woman again, back in town and has opportunity to introduce herself (via returning a dropped necklace) to Mia and the two start a friendship. Eva's life is happy enough but she craves the intrigue of Mia's demi-monde and infiltrates it, encountering a number of carboard bohemians moving around in a quantum vortex of the finest hooey.

The problem this film faces has less to do with its attempt at introducing a lot of ideas about coincidence and attraction than it has to do with the fact that the centre of narrative gravity is played by such a black hole of charisma. Mia, intended to be darkly intriguing, occasionally looks interesting but mostly murmurs deepities as though she's trying to remember what was on a lost shopping list. Eva is played with conviction but it only exposes how little it must take to fascinate her.

The film is beautifully shot and gives Melbourne a gorgeous turn but when you're noticing that more than caring about the tale you're probably also checking the time on your phone. The title, I think, refers to how petroleum looks like multicoloured shimmers when seen in a puddle. If that's the way Eva sees Mia we don't get to share the vision. There is a twist that is deliberately telescoped but, as low as I regard this film, I will not spoil it. That's it. Not for me.

MIFF Play #5: THE LONELY SPIRITS VARIETY HOUR

Neville Umbrellaman is starting his cool vibe home broadcast show, playing all the cues himself and cooing smooth DJ style into a microphone, introducing guests and philosophising. Then we see in an early scene that he is actually in a coma. The rest is more of both.

There is very little in the way of universal humour. You could point to the natural humour of the real world where ironic mistakes are made or physical falls taken. When it comes to more conceptual fare, one person's gold is the next person's grind. We might know perfectly well it's meant to be funny but we simply don't laugh, at or with. That's the case here; it took minutes for me to fear that I was in for a feature length movie of try-hard grind. Spoiler: I was right.

I kept thinking, even for a whimsical style like this there has to be a moment of conflict, something to prevent it from levitating out the window in a waft of invisible vapour. Then came the scenes at the hospital which are well played. Two other well performed moments happen with the radio show guests who talk about bread (works because, despite the goofy accent it's delivered seriously) and the dance with signing (works because its motive feels sincere). Everything else depends on how well you get along with the protagonist who is on screen for over 90% of the running time, relaying a never ending series of piffling cutesy drivel. If you could wrest a speck of charm from his performance you would like this movie. For my part I have seldom experienced seventy-seven minutes as three hours as I did with this.

Then, at some point, I realised as all this repeatedly fell flat on its face on screen, it probably would work really well live on stage. The energy of the performers and the shifting bubble between them and the audience would lift this immensely. That is the origin of this piece. But on film it just feels contrived and indulgence-begging and the physicality of the performances is marred constantly by overperformance. You won't see mugging and gurning like this outside of an old I Love Lucy episode. I do imagine there are people out there who would warm and even thrill to this but for me it ground into my wince.

MIFF Session #10: ENYS MEN

Her days are made from routine. In the morning, she ventures out to a remote cliff of the island to take the soil temperature and observe the state of a small clump of white flowers with red filaments. On the way back she drops a stone into the well and listens for the sound of the fall. She goes back to her cottage and fills the columns of a notebook: April 22 1973. 14.2 degrees. No change. She zip starts the generator and makes a pot of tea and listens to the radio. The other radio, the two-way, occasionally stirs in a burst of static with a barely comprehensible voice from afar. At close of day she bathes and sleeps. Repeat.

This film is told as a series of disruptions to the rolling motion of this routine, from memories of other people (she is, on the surface at least, the only one on the island), reveries of its past as a strict religious community or a mine, to outgrowths of lichen on the flowers and then on her skin. Increasingly, her isolation is having a fundamental impact on her consciousness. She directly addresses the younger woman who appears in the house now and then but a later scene suggests that it is her younger self. At the centre of this strangeness stands a tall rock which might as easily be phallic as humanoid. Is it exercising its powers or are the powers those of an insular seclusion she projects to warm her days into definition, however nightmarish that is?

This film has been described as a folk horror and, given the protean boundaries of that sub-genre, I'll go along with it. However, I'm more reminded of a scene from The Mind Benders (1963) where a man, isolated by weather for a long time is interviewed and tells them he wasn't lonely as he had a companion. They ask him where the man went and he says, "it wasn't a man, it was an angel". I saw that on tv when I was about ten and it drilled into me and found my horror receptor. The routine day and the idea of something rupturing the routine with no sense of the world's assistance or care also reminded me strongly of life in the stricter of the lockdowns: grinding days, simple pleasures, same again.

Mary Woodvine as the woman (there are no named characters in this film) gives us all we need to understand the basics of this often abstract film. The lines of dialogue might account for about five of the ninety-one minutes of screen time; she must work with her face and physique. We get to know that she does like where she has landed, the plain task and its setting until the setting starts to include her body and then mind. If that surname rings a bell then you get a point. She is the daughter of the great John Woodvine (whose intense intelligence constructed his Inspector Kingdom in the great '70s UK procedural how New Scotland Yard) who, himself, appears as the psalms and sawdust preacher, bellowing homilies and singing hymns.

Finally of note is Mark Jenkin, writer, director and auteur of this film. His recent feature Bait was a loud and proud home made tale of the troubles of a village fisherman in stark black and white which he processed himself and added post synch dialogue. Because of this the uncorrected glitches and stains on the vision and audio became part of the cottage-built feel of the film. This time it's in such rich colour that it's almost saturated. The audio is clean and clear except where it is presented as intrusive distortion like the radio signal or the clipped synthesis of the electronic score. As with the previously reviewed Lola, there is no attempt at camping any of this up as a kind of Guy Maddin cover version; the aesthetic bears more of the look and feel of '70s and '80s BBC outings like Ghost Story for Christmas or The Appointment. That informs the deliberately disjointed progress, as well (though the intensity of it is more Jenkin's own touch). 

I felt restlessness in the audience at the screening (Forum, final night of MIFF) which I took to be disappointment. This might have been at Jenkin for making something a lot less friendly than Bait or those who might have been attracted by the term folk horror inserted into the program notes as a recently faddish hook. I was happy to struggle with its frenetic motion. Apart from anything else, it did give me the building blocks of a story I could use for my own construction. And, really, if Ben Wheatly can get away with throwing whole third acts into psychedelic slideshows (twice!) I think we can give Jenkin a go. At least he plays fair.

MIFF Session #10: DUAL

After a prologue showing a young man duelling his clone to death we meet young Sarah whose career and relationship are floundering. She eats junk food and drinks too much and now she's vomiting blood. Diagnosis cancer with 2% margin for error. Prognosis certain death within a year. But why doesn't she do what everyone else in her situation does and get a clone to train to be her for her loved ones afterwards? Um, didn't you say there was a margin for error? Forget it, you're dead, do this. So, she does.

The clone, known as Sarah's Double, is identical but for a mistake in the process that made her eyes blue, not brown like Sarah's. She emerges at Sarah's age, can speak but needs training in Sarah's life experience. What could go wrong? Well, her partner and mother like Sarah's double better and then Sarah finds out that she has gone into remission. The law states there can only be one so we're back to the prologue setup whereby the Sarahs will have to duel to the death.

Riley Stearns' satire begins with a premise in speculative fiction that, while not unknown, is not unfamiliar, what he adds is the training. Do I make my future self better or will I just create an intolerable rival while I'm still alive? So, should I make her a mediocrity who might improve herself after I'm gone. What does either say about me? As Sarah is training to kill her double (with the superbly cast Aaron Paul) she is driven by an anger from every unfair thing that has led her to this and channels it into Sarah's Double. 

Karen Gillan's performance is studiously deadpan, to the point of sounding robotic. This allows her clone to sound like her from the off but also means that differences between them need to be played subtly. That said, they have an exchange about how each speaks the name of their partner Peter. This serves the concept, the writing and the narrative but forms a block to our empathy which did bother me. This issue was handled by showing more of Sarah than her clone to keep the timeline focussed on her but it increasingly lost power when the pair shared the screen. It reminded me of the corporate ad for the cloning service which played a step too far for consistent satire. A similar moment in Being John Malkovich worked as if fit perfectly in with the whimsy of the whole film. This just feels ill-judged.

It is such choices that hamper this film from feeling as committed as it might be. Gillan seems to struggle to bring her flat voice character through to us. There are inconsistencies in the scheme that are left untended like the question of why the law has met the problem the way it has. A little work on the greater social response might have fixed this. Nevertheless, if you can buy into the premise, just keep your eye on Sarah's side of the story and you should enjoy this idea-driven tale. 

MIFF Play #4: 2000 WEEKS

Will is thirty, married with child, and a professional writer. He's doing ok except the twenty-something woman he's having an affair with, his berating father, and the old university chum back from success in the U.K. are all reminding him that he really only has about two thousand weeks left of his life to do something more than exist. Time to do some thinking. For the next ninety or so Chabrol-like monochrome minutes we tag along with him and discover the difference between what is important to him and what he just claims is important while challenges from those quarters mentioned earlier move in.

Tim Burstall's debut feature has long been considered a lost gem of Australian cinema, a late sixties personal, urban story surrounded by a scattered few backward-looking moving postcards. I only knew it as a couple of stills in a film history book back at Griffith Uni. I encountered a very few others who were aware of it and the question of whether any of us had actually clapped eyes on it was one of those queries that you'd try like randomly buying a scratch lotto ticket (and always drew a blank). In the early eighties when the first stirrings of Australian movies with contemporary urban settings were appearing as a standard after half a decade of period dramas, and classic novel adaptations, the notion of an Ur film was enticing. But it was nowhere to be found.

And now, finally part of a MIFF lineup, how does it stand up? The first thing to note is its dating. The shooting style of high contrast black and white, post synched dialogue spoken with plummy accents and overstated drama put it one notch above the tv drama of the time. The Don Burrows flutey jazz score could be from any melancholy late swinging London tale of soft disillusionment. However, the central notion of realising one's youth before its gone is always with us and as an account of that it works a treat.

Mark McManus as Will gives us a character delighted and disturbed by his privileges and challenges. David Turnbull as the overbearing Noel Oakshot is a type Burstall would have known well, back from mighty Blighty to lord it over all the colonial commoners with a little success and borrowed sophistication. He's here to disrupt for fun and appears later in Burstall's career in the form of a chiding by a working class figure to the aging lefties in Don's Party where his type and ambitions are exposed as vanity. Jeanie Dryan as Jackie Lewis, Will's extra marital love interest plays a woman looking further than the void of being the affair of a man with only a few promises galloping toward a grey midlife. Eileen Chapman as Will's wife gives a tolerant but wising up middle class woman. Michael Duffield as Will's father overacts his angry patriarch from his hospital bed and from fraught flashbacks, but even this does the job.

At other moments we can see where the sympathy for the aging angry young man is given one too many breaks by his creator when in more recent fare he would more rightly be left ashamed. But that is key to understanding this character piece; it is of its time and unapologetically so. You'll find the same in the early plays of David Williamson (who collaborated serially with Burstall in the seventies. If it is a young urbanite's story then at least it admits it. The glimpses into the freedom of others that the central figure's selfishness would stifle prevent this from being the kind of rallying cry for young men that was still in the offing on stages and screens at the time. So, while not the great Ur text the younger version of me hoped for but neither the washout it might have been. Glad to have finally seen it. 

MIFF Play #3: THE LOST CITY OF MELBOURNE

Melbourne was built up from its rustic start to a gold rush opulence with city streets that buzzed with life overseen by magnificent architecture that matched ornate Victorian style with the best stone of the local quarries. The city boasted a thriving theatre scene that was housed in splendour and then extended it to the early and enthusiastic adoption of cinema (a map has them dotting the landscape like 7/11s do now). But everything changes all the time. At the approach of major events like the 1956 Olympics the Victorian era look was considered cringeworthy against the kind of steel and glass towered metropolises of the U.S.A. and elsewhere. By contrast ol' Marvellous was getting daggy. Enter the nemesis of dag that was the wrecking industry and money to pour into skyscrapers and decades of destruction were gone before the thought of preservation sparked up. From then the path was trod with care between two screaming forces.

This love letter to the history of a city is rich with archival imagery and anecdotes. Ken Burns slides share the screen with animated sketches, talking head experts and moments from the film record. If you live in Melbourne (as I do) you will marvel and perhaps be virtually slapped by what was and what was lost. And there are the characters like E.W. Cole (of the funny picture book fame whose mission was the spread of literacy, not just making a pound) the Whelan wrecking business whose workers put on shows of bravura high rise risk for lunchtime oglers. A sobering interview between Whelan Jr. and a young Barry Humphries gives way to the gradual momentum of the notion of preservation which seems to be the only reason why we still have landmarks like The Astor or The Windsor.

The pace is maintained and the tone kept light but there is a real depth being delivered here. By the final montage of the old and new with some bow-tying narration we feel we have peered into daily lives, witnessed visions in stone, gasped at their demolition and thought about the toll of time. And that's from a documentary about buildings. The cinema screenings for this were sold out and I wasn't going to risk going into a viral wonderland so saw it at home. But, boy would this be a treat at one of the remaining Melburnian picture palaces.

MIFF Play #2: THE HUMANS

A family gathers for Thanksgiving at the New York apartment of one of their number. The evening is plagued by loud sounds from the upstairs neighbours and big boomy noises from the family members as they find things to fight about (mostly success or failure). Performances are finely turned in this psychodrama the like of which I have seen too often and which offers nothing of substance to the subgenre. The visual approach is pleasant, highlighting the darkness at the edge of all lighted areas, until you lose count of how many shots of the characters captured in frames of doorways. While it is necessary to make family groups like these explosive or snide or bitchy there should also be a balance struck to give at least some of them enough empathy or even development for viewers to chew on. This was adapted for the screen by its author and director from his Broadway play. I can imagine the play having some impact just from that extra charge of live performance. It feels as though we are being promised something for the end and there is something that happens but it's so inconsequential (I will not call it subtle) that it happens, passes and the whole thing finds a place to end. And, sorry, while I hate the term pretentious used as derision but anyone who calls their play The Humans is just asking for it.

MIFF Session #9: LOLA

Flashes of film running out of sprocket or brief broken images. A woman narrates a wish for someone to find the film she is recording. Credits and then we're in London during the blitz. Two posh young sisters operate an invention that can see into the future. It's like a huge bakelite console eith globe glowing at its centre. Through the misty noise of the screen we see David Bowie sining Space Oddity. The women put the machine (the Lola of the title) to use averting civilian deaths by leaking details if future air raids. They become known as The Angel of Portabello.

When the army catches up with them they share the technology for the war effort. All fine until someone puts out an eye ... or plays the phenomenon and subverts it like them dem Jerries. The war now looks lost. Instead of David Bowie there's now a soundalike who sings about marching and public executions. Twists of fate are dealt at dizzying speed. Is there a way out?

I was expecting and would have been happy with a Guy Maddin tribute. But this is something else, again. Andrew Legge (whose rap sheet I am now determined to investigate) has fashioned a kind of elevated hobbyist film with real acting, more than passable writing with some fine concepts. However arch some of the humour or goofy the concepts this is a serious period sci-fi whose tone lies somewhere between retro-found-footage and the kind of what if already established by Mollo and Browlow with their extraordinary It Happened Here. Oh, and there's lovely opportunity taken with the distressed old film stock look: the air invasion CGI looks as real as anything else on screen and ends up epic and terrifying.

If it gets loose in the second act when it should be tight and some stretches need trimming to avoid repetition of information, Lola yet makes it through as a diverting progression for a film maker who has struck his own invention of a retrograde cinema that has a genuine reason to exist. Guy Maddin is unassailable for camp loopiness that creates a parallel cosmos. Legge might well be ready to show us more earnest adventure. The world is still large enough for both.

MIFF Play #1: MASS

Two couples meet at a church hall to sit down and talk. The theme of the day: your son killed mine. throughout the discussion, blame is laid and deflected, positions shift, the obvious confronted or dismissed, and all the things that might be uttered in this situation find voice. As they leave the awkward safe harbour and speak their hearts and minds the defences are lowered and searing truths leap out. This is the whole film (plus a tough final testimony) but that also means it's a gruelling near two hours of poignant dialogue and magisterial performances which is why you're watching.

The themes of parenthood and responsibility as well as the flaws in an educational system that tolerates bullying fall and land on an America numb from increasingly frequent school shootings and the culture that allows them to continue (though the film is careful to avoid the kid buying guns online theme as it would muddy already difficult waters) Instead of the screaming fest you might expect from this you get a lot of dynamics in pace, emotion and intensity from the central quartet of character actors. The mighty Ann Dowd, constantly dealing with a stone of guilt as she tries to plead understand for the child who became a mass murderer. Her husband, clinging to a few strands of mitigating details, struggles with his own denial. Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton, as the parents of one of the victims, hold in tempests of rage behind fragile social observances.

The setting in a room on church premises is also poignant but in an unexpected way. None of these people declare themselves affined to religion and the sect itself (Episcopalian/Anglican) is chosen as a kind of neutral territory while retaining the sense of sanctuary. While there is use of church music at one point to suggest healing it is the music rather than its religious setting that has the effect. That's indicative of the thoughtfulness and seriousness of this film whose title combines the notion of a sacred ceremony and the unimaginable violence of a school shooting. See it if it appears in cinemas or on streamers. Don't be daunted by the gravity of it, it's so well turned you'll more guided than manipulated.

MIFF Session #8: SOMETHING IN THE DIRT

A pair of down and out-ers find themselves in the same run down apartment block in L.A. and get to talking. The newcomer Levi goes off with the promise of furniture for his new place until he goes into the country to live. While both are helping with the couches and chairs they notice that a bizarrely shaped glass or crystal that Levi has found in the flat has levitated and cast strange patterns on the wall. As both are out of luck but intrigued they decide to record it and see if they can make a documentary about it for a streaming giant. It does happen again and they arm themselves with recording equipment as more weirdness starts taking place. As we see this we are also informed, through a series of talking head interviews that the documentary they have been making has not gone to plan and involved tragedy. Someone among the original duo and the expanding cast and crew has died.

Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead have made a career making big concept movies on tiny budgets. Instead of going along Roger Corman lines of fashioning miniature mainstream outings they've followed the more arthouse or mumblecore style by which a flat video look or strained visual effect is played for real and takes gravitas from its humble circumstances. Resolution was mostly a dialogue but expanded to include a well described spiral of phenomena around a plain story of one friend detoxing another. Spring was like Splash for fans of H.P. Lovecraft. The Endless notched everything up with a more complicated universe that accommodated something of the debut in its expansion. While this was progressing, the duo was assisting other film makers with like minds to add to the universe with small but impressive outings like She Dies Tomorrow or After Midnight. Then Benson and Morehead made the more mainstream Synchronic with a higher profile cast and a more focussed time travel plot. It was not received with the joy from the fanbase that all the others and the offshoots had been. My take on that is that it was considered an overreach, too much budget but not enough for the look and feel to lift them into the mainstream celestium, a kind of unintended sellout. I liked the film but understood why fans of the duo didn't. 

Something in the Dirt feels like a way of rebooting the style to include the rich enthusiasm of the earlier films with the pleasure of higher production values. The catch is that it's their most claustrophobic piece yet, caging us in with the two characters (played by Benson and Morehead themselves as they did in The Endless). It's like a one for them/on for us deal except you get both of those at once. In a way, it's a little like an autobiographical sketch of the partnership itself as it has to do with the ambition to create extraordinary things with scant means with the slick to-camera interviews serving as a reminder of what it might look like on Netflix or Shudder.

While we're dealing with that we are watching the constant threat to the project through each character's vulnerability. John is part of an evangelical Christian apocalyptic sect with eyes on a coming apocalypse. He keeps unearthing new details about Levi's police record and institutional life. There are tough reckoning moments for both at the hands of the other while a general passive area is maintained by both new friends. While John sees a new face of electro-magnetism, Levi thinks the phenomena are making him defy gravity. All this is fuelled by a series of discoveries that might as easily be coincidences as connections. Perhaps it's a kind of lockdown story where simple and reasonable complaints fermented into big stinky conspiracy theories and bizarre redrafts of concepts like freedom. We are in there with them almost exclusively for nearly two hours. 

 I recently saw Jordan Peele's Nope, a large scale seamlessly produced epic of sci-horror. It had a good-sized pot of concepts which it fulfilled impeccably in a self-aware blockbuster fashion. It was clever and huge and had a lot to say about the pursuit of spectacle and the way that's done in movies. In the narrowest of justifications for the comparison, Id put it up against the far more ragged Something in the Dirt with its breathless trialling of pattern vs coincidence any day. Peele marshalled massive resources for his piece and deserves the accolades he's raking in. But for me, I left the cinema for the Benson and Morehead movie with the sense of it expanding as I let it settle into form. Between the two, give me the punky take over the slick one every time. But that's just me.

MIFF Session #7: DECISION TO LEAVE

A sage detective and his goofy underling investigate the death of a wealthy local who either fell or was pushed from a steep climb. When it's called murder the departed's wife becomes a suspect. The stunningly beautiful but not entirely legal Busan resident recently from China at first seems to have been spun from pure virtue, sinned against, not sinning. But is she just a clever femme fatale? The detective is falling for her at a rate thirty-two feet per second per second and his intellectual cogs are getting gritty. Will this end well?

Master of the dark and violent, Park Chan-wook, brings us his his glossiest neo noir yet and shifts the focus on to the romance between two people, each of whom might be closing in on the other. This time the violence is pulled way back so this interplay can tighten. And it's a treat. I grew fond of the trope of bringing characters into the same set who were at two ends of a phone call or where one, observing from a distance, imagines himself in the room he's staking out to the extent where he lifts an ashtray to catch the ash from a cigarette of his surveillance object. Obsession and its by-product, imagined mutuality are thus told by a trope that allows both the severity of it and the supposed care. At other times, shots from future or past events slice into current action for a moment to herald the scene to come. And Park's feel for visual dazzle and strong scoring is still hearty. 

And then it ends, very neatly, and then goes on for another hour. The story does take an interesting turn but we are fed so much that we've already consumed that it soon feels listless and bloating. I've seen Park films that were long before but not one that didn't warrant the extra length or feel as long as it felt sturdy. They also felt cinematic. When Decision to Leave decides to replay itself for the encore of the third act it starts feeling more like an over literal novel adaptation. While he delivers a stunning finale it is at the end of a patience-trying hour of what feels like idling. This won't prevent me from seeking out future Park works but for now but hopefully he will strip it back and relish in the power and the vision that produced the Vengeance Trilogy or Thirst. Next time.

MIFF Session #6: YOU WON'T BE ALONE

A village woman makes a pact with folkloric witch figure whereby the latter won't kill the woman's child, Nevena, in infancy but take her after the girl has had a chance at life. The witch, Old Maid Maria, who looks like one of the damned in the Hellraiser movies, agrees but scratches the baby anyway, removing her voice. The mother hides her daughter in a cave for years but to no avail. The child is claimed by the Maria and taken. She is then inducted into the life of a body jumping demon known by the locals as a wolf-eatress. Told to go and fend for herself, she does, going from body to body, learning, each time, about the ways of humans that she witnesses for the first time since leaving seclusion. These transitions are not always smooth and some are near disastrous as one life is taken, another is assumed. Now and then a wolf-eatress is discovered and dealt with by fire. That's always on the cards.

This cinema verite folk horror tale feels like it has been told to you from childhood and you are only now seeing it unfold in visual form. There is very little expository guidance and you are essentially in the same position as Nevena learns with each transition, about marriage, sex, social order and so on and the Breughelian expression of them that we, too, will find alien. Of particular note is Noomi Rapace's turn as a young village mother who learns of domestic violence, narrated by the initial actor playing Nevena. She must mime her way through each local ritual or custom like gossip or female servitude in marriage (Nevena's lack of voice applies to everyone whose body she assumes). Other incarnations variously amuse or confront. Since we're talking about performances here, I can't leave until I've mentioned how magnetic and edgy turn by Annamaria Marinca in the role of the demonic Maria who offers a command so gently confident it renders her intimidating every time we see her.

Shot in a claustrophobic 4X3 ratio, the colours and life of the Balkan countryside are brought vividly and claustrophobically to life, illustrated from a sourced score of mostly classical pieces. While the beauty of the land and nature might remind of a Terrence Malik, the violence and hard superstition might more recall a Red Psalms or Wicker Man. this leads to a problem: just after the halfway mark, we have seen so much of the procedure of the wolf-eatress escape through body jumping or educate herself by it and old Maria turn up for check-ins the overall arc starts grinding down. The finale offers strong and definite action but we are exhausted by then and wish we had seen the end about twenty minutes earlier.

That said, there is so much promise and creativity on screen that I'll be looking out for the further films of Goran Stolevski whose next project (according to himself at the Q&A) will be a contemporary comedy. I'll be in the queue.

MIFF Session #5: THE NOVELIST'S FILM

An elegant novelist, Jun-hee, waits outside a bookshop, finishing her vape before she goes in. The manager emerges, greeting Jun-hee as an old friend. They have a conversation about how they've drifted and their careers. The manager invites her in for tea and the assistant shows the writer some of the sign language she's learned before the writer repeats the phrase she's asked for several times until she has it. Afterwards, they stroll to the new building and take their leave. Jun-hee rides the lift of the building and uses the pay telescope until someone who recognises her approaches her, they have a chat until the newcomer's husband, a film director (who has been hiding at the sight of Jun-hee) and the conversation is pleasantly awkward. They have coffee and ....

This is a Hong Sang-soo film, and like all of his others, is a kind of Kurbickian comedy of manners in which a few insubmersible units are set in a sequence that ends with a hint. The chance encounters keep coming, there's makgeolli by the bottle and takeaway on the table and everyone gets drunk. Jun-hee berates the film director (who had rejected her screenplay the last time they had anything to do with each other: that's why he was hiding) for shaming the film actor they meet in the park for wasting her youth. Jun Hee decides she wants to make a film herself with the actor, Gill-soo which happens and which we partially see.

Jun-hee's idea for the film is very like a Hong film; a beautiful young woman in the park talking about beauty and nature. What's missing is the arch dialogue and humour of awkwardness played in static setups that might be from silent cinema. We might take a moment to notice it, with the dialogue ramping up, but Director Park's wife is so annoyed and restless by the conversation in which her husband is been slammed that she slowly twists away from it until she resembles an op shop mannequin. When Jun-hee are talking over food at a diner a young girl arrives at the window and stares at Gill-soo, clearly a fan. They notice her but she moves on. Then, she's back with the same possessed stare. Gill-soo gets up and exits to talk to her. We don't hear a word of their conversation but we can make it up for ourselves. Finally, after the probable only screening of the titular novelist's film everyone is a little numb and alone. But we aren't.

Hong's extraordinary output has him release about two feature films per year (MIFF usually has the latest two) and I try to make each one. While the above might suggest there is a sameness  to them it is due more to the difficulty of explaining their qualities rather than any genuine uniformity. Hong is fascinated by what happens in spoken communication, its bright declarations and veiled purposes and all in between and beyond. Most are delivered in his native Korean but when he has the opportunity to add languages he takes the opportunity for ever more rarefied fun. With this he returns to the basics and provides more of why we who are fans locked on to him in the first place. It doesn't feel like treading old ground as much as finding more detail in it.

MIFF Session #4: MILLIE LIES LOW

Millie has a panic attack on the plane that would be taking her to New York and a opportunity of a lifetime in her future career as an architect. After a struggle, she is allowed to disembark. After stabilising, she tries to get another flight but they don't come with the massive discount she's just squandered so she has to think. The local loan shark back in Wellington requires collateral and time. She has to think again and then, step by step, she finds a way of pretending she's living it up in New York while evading the attentions of her friends and family until she can solve the problems her plans keep dishing up. She is driven but she's also about to learn what life looks like without her.

This fable of denial and redemption works a treat. Someone, somewhere along the creative timeline made a wise decision to keep the signature crisp deadpan of Kiwi humour to the background. I love the banter and plotting of Wellington Paranormal and What We Do in the Shadows that have the extraordinary obey the shrivelling laws of the mundane but the focus here is on Millie and it can't be all laughs. Karen O'Leary does appear as a security guard (effectively the same as Officer O'Leary in Paranormal) but her appearance does add a plot point about how Millie got her New York scholarship. The rest is played for progress of the fable as Millie has some lessons in store.

Ana Scotney, front and centre as Millie, gives us the lot as she variously implodes with anxiety, judges, gets drunk, rages or falls into crushing acceptance. That decision to play the comedy expectations down at the start allows her performance to stretch and we need to be able to simultaneously cringe from her and hope she gets through even the worst of her deceptions and manipulations. Two moments of this turn stand out for me and both of them are quiet. Still at the airport we get a commercial for her University in which she stars, talking about her opportunity, business suited with straightened hair. Cut to reveal she is watching herself on her laptop. Self conscious, she closes the computer lid but we've cut to a wide shot which reveals the same ad is playing behind her on the giant display. She notices and, bound by the attention overload, sinks into her seat and pulls her hood tighter around her head. The second moment feels so natural it could be a happy mistake. Millie is driving with her mother as they talk about the situation and Millie's predicament. Her mother speaks a malapropism, thinking appointment is the antonym of disappointment. The error hangs in the air as Millie's smirk turns into something with a lot more sadness. The difference between the scrubbed corporate action doll of the ad and the wild-haired survivalist she's become is expressed exactly in that instance.

The rest of the cast, mostly young (student friends of Millie's) are written with more depth and joy than you might expect with such a solidly solo story and the sense of the camaraderie and bitchiness of student culture (which Millie herself has played ruthlessly) feels real. Sam Cotton's popular young lecturer is the comedy standout outside of Scotney herself. While he initially plays the Kiwi comedy style to start with he is given scenes later that carry more weight and even gets to be a little icky and weird. The score is electronic and effective in supplying the swelling low frequency rush of anxiety and another motive using a rhythmic buzz that suggests a phone ring set to vibrate, adding urgency. 

While there are clear comparisons to be made with Catcher in the Rye or It's a Winderful Life this film reminds me more of the kind of thing that New Hollywood film makers were churning out in the early '70s, character-forward slices of life like Five Easy Pieces or Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. I would have liked a touch more of the pretty city of Wellington but as with the quirky humour this story is not about that but Millie and the low lies that bade her to lie low. The final moment that really only uses lighting and exposure to suggest to us what has happened to Millie and the characters tightest around her is testament to the message: keep it low and let it grow.

MIFF Session #3: SISSY

Two kids, Sissy and Emma, pledge enternal friendship on a home video. Years later, Sissy looks into our eyes and speaks words of comfort. She's become an influencer, preaching wellbeing to hundreds and thousands of fans worldwide. As she checks the pings of love responses her pupils expand from all the seratonin. Later at the chemist, she meets grown up Emma whose bright, wide staring close up sends far more enthusiasm than it receives. After starting with such devotion from the video we can fathom Sissy's (sorry, it's now Cecilia's) standoffishness. Maybe it's just the passage of time. Undaunted, Emma invites Cecilia to her engagement party and that's it. Well, no. 

As everyone is getting drunk and emboldened to wrestle each other for the karaoke mic, Emma and Cecilia find the old warmth and Emma extends an invitation to her hens retreat that weekend. Cecilia breaks and agrees. Then, step by step, Cecilia manages to wrong foot everyone else, and retreats to the background, unnoticed, having gone from great massive online love to this. There's also an old score which we've glimpsed in flashbacks; Alex, scarred from an childhood incident involving Cecilia, freaks at Cecilia's appearance at the chalet and doesn't let up. Flight or fight, Cissy?

Horror comedy usually falls on one side of the divide and stays there. Exceptions include Arsenic and Old Lace and Scream, separated by about fifty years. Capra's film works because he starts where he lives, in comedy and adds the spiky horror moods and references as the plot accelerates. Craven starts in his home territory of convincing horror and folds the comedy in until it's hard to tell the difference. Most attempts at the mix fail, usually giving it up for laughs. That's not a bad thing, American Werewolf in London and Whacko are still enjoyable movies, it's just that it shows how hard it is to sustain the balancing act. Both jokes and scares depend on tension and while the payoff of one differs from the other, they both need that clench to keep it fresh.

Sissy does a few things right here by using the social awkwardness as a fuel for suspense and some convincing and very funny social interactions which can turn sharply into discomfort. Then, when it's time for blood and gore, delivers gleefully on those. Themes of narcissism, true friendship or fame are clearly drawn and appropriately for a comedy writ large, the one thing we don't quite get when we need it most is horror movie tension. The first kill comes easily from the situation but others feel too drawn out to put all the dialogue in rather than complete the gag. One kill has no apparent motive, which robs it of stakes, and while the action of it works, feels included for the effect.

Too picky? Maybe. Perhaps I should just recall that this film's ancestors include the Scorsesean Ingrid Goes West, the post Trump Tragedy Girls which added genre shocks to what began and ended as satire. My screening included a Q&A with one of the directors, the producer and, very satisfyingly, the composer (a figure lamentably missing from most such festival occasions) who was very eloquent and accurate in describing his range from Giallo to Disney in scoring the film. One point that the producer made, and poignantly, was that to keep the film from becoming dated too quickly, they held back on representing social media technology as. And that's really the point. Regardless of how Sissy became Cecilia, she did, and the childhood she had was bound to bring its own issues to a reunion. At that level, Sissy is a stunner of a debut.

MIFF Session #2: LYNCH/OZ

Film makers and critics provide their thoughts on the link between the work of David Lynch and The Wizard of Oz? Eh? Well, when you consider that Wild at Heart is practically decorated with Oz references, brick my yellow brick, and quotes and nods abound in the back catalogue from Eraserhead, through Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, there's a lot to deal with.

Whether it's the concept of wind which triggers the story of Wizard of Oz, to the wind of influence once the cinematic flop found a massive audience with the advent of tv, including a young and receptive David Lynch. It might be the notion of the membranes between parallel universes, nudging or even rupturing and pouring into each other, the personal story of Lynch's friendship with fellow odd bod John Waters, or the convoluted but fascinating journey back to the notion of home, the traveller weathered but wonderstruck.

Depending on the deal struck between the contributors and the ringmaster Alexandre O. Phillipe, these contributions are prevented from becoming talking head interviews by a restless montage illustrating convergence or collision with whatever could be found to throw at the screen. The results vary - John Waters sound like he's genuinely reminiscing, whereas Karyn Kusama's written piece feels carefully constructed to keep some wild concepts under rein, undercurrent neo-horror team Benson and Morehead sound the most formal and the rhapsodic David Lowery's final word gives us the home we've started to dearly crave after so much bombardment.

Film essays can vary from the worthy to the inspiring but they don't always make it back to port. Mark Cousins dazzled with his mammoth Story of Film but faltered with The Eyes of Orson Welles. The Real Charlie Chaplin made it in by keeping things spare and inviting to digest. Lynch/Oz, by contrast, shouldn't work at all. While I'll admit to feeling fatigued after the hour mark I let it charge on and felt rewarded by the final chapter's warmth. I remember thinking that it might take a second viewing just to keep hold of some of the chief concepts and then thinking that I wonder if I would do that? One of my screening companions suggested he would if it turned up on streaming. There's the solution.

Phillipe has made a career of films about film. 17/52 is about the shower scene from Psycho (17 setups in 52 seconds of screen time) Others include examinations of the Star Wars phenomenon, Ridley Scott's Alien, the interview feature Leap of Faith about William Friedkin's The Exorcist, and so on. From this you might expect an approach given to over density but there is significant variation in the results. This subject was born dense and each of the participants accepted their homework assignment with evident glee. It is that glee that keeps us listening as the notions gush past, a reminder that film makers like Lynch, Kubrick or Welles all but beg for such mature age student style study through their innovation and teetering mix of persona and style. One it brought to mind, though: I have a copy of Wizard of Oz on 4K that I haven't yet watched. Itching, now.

Seen at Hoyts. Perfect sound and picture. QA with director did not go wayward.

MIFF Session #1: THE REAL CHARLIE CHAPLIN

As the subject of this documentary has had a slow but genuine rethink in the past decade or so, thanks to YouTube and scrubbed up remasters of his classic works, I wondered if I would be in for archaeology or hagiography. I got a serve of both, ranging from platitudes that had the sheen of packaged depth but also genuinely thought provoking musings on the uses that the famous and well loved can put to their celebrity.

Using a blend of film loops, re-enacted interviews and press conferences, film distortion and manipulation, and a constantly hand-holding narration, The Real Charlie Chaplin first takes us through the expected streams: rags to riches, film tinkerer to innovative auteur before settling into a number of phases highlighting both the celebrated and controversial aspects of Chaplin's life and work.

A sequence on the straining trouble he took to find the joke in the flower girl scene in City Lights illustrates the kind of obsession we more readily associate with Stanley Kubrick. What at first feels like an overstretched comparison between Chaplin and Hitler does finally land with a focussed examination of the Great Dictator and its powerful final speech (I welled up all over again, even though it was clearly an illustration of creative power rather than a purely celebratory moment). And then there is the elephant in the room that has to do with the age differences between Chaplin and his wives which only grew as he aged and bore more than a few hints at his darker side. This adds depth rather than sensation and is the better for it. After that sequence we are compelled to view the man through both public and private selves, such as we can know them.

This is a feature documentary that extends well beyond the worthy toward the essential. Early cinema remains one of the swiftest timelines of an art forming and innovating in service and defiance of its public. And the comics like Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd worked like Trojans to match the galloping possibilities of cinema with its value as amusement. Any time you see a current comedy that winks at you with its high concept, whether it's an Adam Sandler vehicle or Being John Malkovich, the basic tools that the pioneers found in the early 20th century remain in place. This film seeks the mind and conscience behind the pratfalls and majestic set pieces in an idiom that cheekily joins in the fun it's describing. Can't ask more than that in a movie about Charlie Chaplin, now can ya?

Seen at the Forum. Oh, to everyone who seemed to gleefully cough without the courtesy of wearing a mask in this third plague year, put it on when in a confined place like a cinema, you monster-flapping barbary geese! I've a good mind to get Monique Ryan back down here to deal with you.