1983 @ 40: VIDEODROME (Long and with spoilers)

Max Renn's life is about to change but it was already pretty nifty. As one of the heads of an alternative tv station he gets to seek and choose all the stuff the boring outlets won't. When we meet him he's off to talk to some Japanese soft porn pedlars. As he and his fellow execs um and ah about it he agrees, saying they need something tough after all the soft core they've been casting. Then he's off to his video pirate friend Harlan who has snagged something special from the airwaves. It's a few seconds of sexual torture. It looks real. Max, who has seen things best left barely imaginable that are too much for him, is hooked. The source of the footage is an entity called Videodrome. He puts one of his contacts on the trail. She comes back with a hard caution to stay away, saying, spookily, that they have what Max does not, a philosophy. 

Max appears on a tv talk show with a media guru, Brian O'Blivion, and tough love radio host Nicki Brand. Max makes a successful move on Nicki while O'Blivion (who will only appear on a small television in the studio) gasses off about tv being the retina of the mind's eye. Later, in his apartment, Nicki picks out a video marked Videodrome, thinking it's porn. Their sex that night includes some home sterilised piercing and a massive hallucination that they are in the Videodrome torture room, writhing on what looks like a giant ribbed hotplate. The next time she's around she tells him she's going to Pittsburg, where Videodrome is made, so she can audition. He fails to convince her to stay, or stay away, and she goes off into the night, never to return.

There are other pieces on the board but the last one I'll include as plot has to do with the media guru. He runs an outreach centre on skid row, welcoming the dispossessed in for some tv and a soup kitchen meal. He doesn't get to meet Brian but O'Blivion's daughter Bianca who deftly keeps him from getting too close, promising to send him a cassette of her father to explain things. The tape arrives that night. O'Blivion begins with his usual academic provocation before his voice enters the room for real and begins a two way conversation with Max before getting strangled to death by an executioner who, after a quick self unmasking, turns out to be Nicki. The itch that's been irritating Max's belly expands from a rash to a large vulval slit. He's been scratching the irritation with his pistol and, compelled, he plunges it into the orifice. He struggles to wrench his hand back out but the gun is still lost in there. This is a David Cronenberg film.

Not just any David Cronenberg film. Having challenged audiences from the mid '70s onward with the likes of the plague of sexual parasites in Shivers, the mutated vampiric armpit spike in Rabid, murderous children generated by pure rage in The Brood, and explosive telepathy in Scanners (yes, I know, Fast Company, but it's just not convenient here) Cronenberg had emerged as one of the most original thinkers in world cinema. Having used the Canadian tax dodge to make Shivers, he'd smuggled some compelling thought about society, sex and science into what was sold to the American drive-ins as a big schlocky monster movie.

The smuggling approach served him well until he stepped beyond need for it with Scanners which pushed the thinking forward and let the threat for part of the plot rather than the other way around. By the time he got to Videodrome the power of the concept was far too strong to just lie on top and needed to be woven more tightly into the fabric of the film. Cronenberg was no longer convincingly borrowing from the world around him but building his own that just resembled the real one. If Toronto looked like a modern metropolis by day it felt like the real city lay dormant, stirring after sunset to envelope at the individual level, all who roamed it with a thick night illuminated mainly by tv screens. It was a night whose reality behaved like dreams, leaving all who lived it scrambling around looking for explanations, anything, to tame it through rationalisation. As strong as his thinking had already got, Cronenberg had never achieved this level of complexity. Nor had he rendered it so enjoyably.

That's the thing about Videodrome. If you keep at making movies with sophisticated concepts you're apt to get more sophisticated but with this one Cronenberg was able to use his experience as a film director to add one last goody into the mix: warmth.

If there is one thing that holds earlier Cronenberg features back from higher celebration it's the shortfall in performance. It's not about small budgets equalling lower tier actors. It's not even about beginner writing. The good performances in early Cronenberg films happen despite his direction of lack of it that leaves the others wooden and amateurish. We're talking the likes of Samantha Eggar, Oliver Reed and Patrick McGoohan along with a small number of locals who were picking up craft during these experiences and outside them. While it took baby steps, by the time he was able to cast the dynamic talent of James Woods for Max Renn, Cronenberg's people were like the cattle that Hitchcock had smirked about in an earlier decade.

Woods comes on with a interpersonal assault plan that swings rapidly between disarming candour and outright sleaze. His come on to Nicki on the tv show is meant to make us cringe but it also shows that his tolerance of mainstream order has limits. Add to that Woods's readiness to show his character failing even on a tiny scale which prevents us from turning off an arrogant self-entitled player. Mainly, he's all flaws; he needs experience to find his decency which Woods demonstrates through a credible filter of impatience.

If Debbie Harry as Nicki feels a little wooden it's more down to inexperience. There is a long line of rockstars who fail to convince cinecameras, already long by then, but Harry brought from her schooling from fame and performance the power of contrasts. She was acutely aware of her beauty and its global celebration but her punk roots had shown her the value of looking like Aphrodite and sounding like a Bowery bum. Nicki Brand gets a slightly more cool jazz take on this but the roughness remains and, when blended with the character's transgressive sense of adventure the performance blooms. It shocks Mr Sin himself, Max Renn, into timidity. 

The pair of them anchor their respective sides of the Videodrome screen that allows the extraordinary moment at which her ballooning image from the screen opens its mouth to accept his penetrating head. There is more than a little trade on what audiences at the time would have made of the frontwoman of Blondie in this context but Debbie Harry meets it and even lifts the relatively unknown James Woods to her podium. The actor James Woods jovially complained about the heavy reliance on practical effects, particularly the abdominal orifice, saying, "sometimes I just feel like the bearer of the slit." Debbie Harry responded with, "now you know how it feels."

If you delve into disc extras or just read about this movie you'll find quite a rocky developmental road. If you sift through the history of various cuts, rethinks in credits sequences, deleted scenes you'll see a few different movies coming through. The "soup or veg" moment I knew from a tv version in the '80s, finally seen again in the Arrow 4K, is not missed. There is a scene between Max and Nicki in the back of a limo which shows Debbie Harry in impressive form that was long excised. All of the deleted scenes I saw deserved deletion. What is left is a wonder of economic storytelling where one scene closes in on the same thing that another opens outward from, hallucinations become indistinguishable from reality and the descent of Max into the befogged state in which he achieves clarity is seamless and thrilling.

Necessary mention here of longtime collaborator Howard Shore's score. Combining synthesis with orchestral sounds he provides a grinding liquidity. I used to think the main instrument was a harmonium. If you've ever played one you'll know how hard you have to work just to keep the airflow with the bellows pedals and how that precludes almost everything beyond plain chording.

If it had been another Scanners we would celebrate it as coolly. The warmth of Videodrome gives way to the emotional integrity of The Fly. Videodrome is the source point for Cronenberg's survival as a film maker. From this we can see the branch off from the body horror to relatively straight drama and then recombination with titles like Dead Ringers. With this proof of concept for creating fluidity between states lets us accept the two-places-at-once scenes of the hitherto unfilmable Naked Lunch. All of David Cronenberg's strengths come from this knotting of the early experiments into his enviable fruition as an artist.

In the '90s Videodrome was hailed for predicting reality tv. Well, maybe, although the earlier Network does that a lot better. What Videodrome does is suggest the kind of internet that emerged after the split between the navigable surface that the graphical world wide web gave us and the continued unchecked development of the submarine mass of the dark web. I don't just mean that there are some nasty currents running beyond the light of Google but that when the mainstream web was corporatised it behaved exactly as all such absorptions do and rendered the worst of us acceptable. No need for conspiracy thinking, it's all right there on our screens. Not all of it is nefarious it's just that it can be and that can be very hard to tell.

Early scenes that show the cheerful Harlan showing Max the torture scenes include poignant cutaways to Harlan avoiding sight of the screen himself. Bianca O'Blivion's assertion that the signal could just be delivered over a test pattern contextualises the brain damage that her father called the New Flesh could grow like worldwide crops every time someone looked at a screen. She has already infected Max with a tape of a much more powerful dose than he'd previously had. Her admission that she thought he was to be her assassin is followed by a moment of audible regret that might be the very second between the director's cold presentation and his discovery of warmth. Then, later, Max is shattered when Harlan and corporate exec Barry Convex tell him the Videodrome works on everyone who sees it, as they insert a tape into his abdomen that sends him off to murder his colleagues.

There is no happy ending here. Max, beyond retrieval, finds a kind of safe haven in a condemned ship, talks to an image of Nicki on a tv in the hold before blowing his brains out with the whispered slogan: "Long live the New Flesh." Brian O'Blivion had theorised earlier that television was reality and reality less than television. Don't watch television, anymore? Ok substitute "the screen" and it works again. Our contemporary videodrome is not the sci-fi nightmare of the one in this movie but that might be because it doesn't have to be. We don't need a subliminal signal telling us what to think as we'll get to the thinking in our own time. You shouldn't panic about this as long as you still can discern all the old standard contrasts, even when the screen is normalised as it is now. We don't need to opt out violently like Max but we will need to keep on the right side of the illusion on the wrong side of the screen. Videodrome still works and will work again.

Viewing notes: I have had copies of this film from the DVD era onwards, including Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray editions. It's always been quite well served on digital video by contemporary standards with good extras and strong audio visual transfers. The version I watched for this blog article was Arrow's 4K box that comes with a raft of extras, two versions of the feature cut and a packed booklet. The Dolby Vision enhanced 4K video takes the image to a clarity level that I was constantly marvelling at. Whether it was pores in skin or the depth of the image. While much of the film's evident technology places it in time, the quality of the presentation is so stellar that it looks freshly minted.

THEY LIVE @ 35

Nada the drifter gets to L.A. and the local shanty town for the dispossessed and immediately notices things are getting strange. The people watch broadcast signal intrusions which give them headaches and which the local blind preacher can mouth in perfect synch. The church hall choir is a tape concealing secret meetings and there are boxes upon boxes of sunglasses stored in the backrooms. Without a breath to figure any of this out, the camp is raided by an outsized police operation and everyone skedaddles. Nada does, too, but with a box of those sunnies. Who knows, he might be able to sell them. 

Strolling in the city, he tries a pair on and the world changes. Everything is in black and white. All the billboards with bikini women and suited men are really commands like OBEY, CONSUME, SLEEP. It's on the money, the newspapers, everything. Not bad enough? There are monstrous looking bug eyed entities walking about. When the glass come off these figures are cops, white collar workers, bosses. He goes into a shop which is full of them, one of whom reports into her watch, "I've got one that can SEE!" He does a little damage and flees the scene, pursued by cops which he dispatches, grabbing an assault weapon. Going into a bank he proclaims: "I'm here to chew gum and kick some ass. And I'm all out of gum!"

John  Carpenter's most overtly political film mixes satire with a beefy sci-fi paranoia story as we witness a stealthy alien invasion that looks worryingly like normal life. Commercials and talk shows glimpsed on tv depict a society for the privileged and complaining rich while the remaining human population is either bought off or pushed out of their jobs, houses and security. 

This film is famous for a fight scene that goes for an absurd stretch of running time as Nada tries to get his new friend to put the glasses on and see the truth. While the scene is affectionately mocked it bears poignancy for our time as well as its own. It's poignant because it's reversed now. The blue collar worker who voted against their own interests, buying into the lie of trickle-down is the one who resists the revelation, preferring the doublethink that allows him a life of apparent ease. He needs the glasses to see the oppressor. Nada's epic alley fight with Frank demonstrates Frank's obstinate belief in the fantasy. It's not just that putting the specs on against his will feels like losing but that his acceptance of his life amounts to the sacred values addressed by contemporary sociology. The notions offer comfort and are supported by a community and consolidate to form beliefs beyond debate. Roddy Piper's character is Nada which is Spanish for "nothing" and suggests that he is a clean slate. He's never called that in dialogue, it just appears by Piper's name in the credits. It's not a reach to consider it Carpenter's comment.

Post COVID, the rise in profile of the conspiracy fantasists has changed the lenses to adopt whichever theory that their undeclared leisure industry can come up with. They are the ones seeing the monsters, the state paedophile networks in pizza shops, the nanobots in the vaccines, the brain frying damage of the 5G towers, adrenochrome, veterinarian medicine as the real cure, sovereign citizenship and whatever other fictions that escapes the screaming void of bullshit that convinces the dispossessed that they have power because they have found the truth. If it was remotely close to the truth they might have had a point. If we had some polaroids that could let them see with their own eyes that a virus is just a virus and a vaccine an attempt at combatting it. If wishes were horses.

I'm not just ranting (well, not really, however fun it feels), there are generations beyond the one in the film that still subscribe to trickle-down economics as though it was established reality. You needn't even lump it all on the anti-vaxxers today, go and read some of the placards at the ragged end of the cooker marches and try to find some cohesion among the wildly varying slogans; you'll find everything from the 5G bores to thinly veiled nazis. These are the people who think they are wearing the sunglasses. 

Nada and Frank going each other to bruised and bloody effect is the kind of fight Carpenter might have longed to see but was resigned to leave on the screen. Yes, this is about concealed alien overlords using a massive global signal to control everyone but, also, this is science fiction, satire, paranoia horror, allegory, not documentary. The irony of it is that the message here should be aimed at the Trump voters under the poverty line or the "exposers" of the lizard elite who would only receive it as truth in fiction. Movies really can seem too clever for their own good, even the good ones.

Viewing notes: I watched the locally available Studio Canal 4K special edition which has an undeclared Dolby Vision enhancement which belies the movie's humble production origins. While there is no corresponding Dolby Atmos audio the DTS hi def 5.1 ensures a good booming ride. This, and a handful of other UHD Carpenter releases are very pleasantly available affordably and get some fine treatment from the French SC label. Worth it.

JURASSIC PARK @ 30 (Spoilers)

A botanist, a palentologist and a chaos mathematician go into a bar ... or fly to an island (well, it probably has sandbars). A very rich bloke wants them there to spread their highly respected words about his theme park. It's a wildlife number only with resurrected dinosaurs. Oh, hell, this is a Spielberg movie, let's chuck in a couple of kids, as well. They go on a little jaunt to have a look at the beasties after a couple of no shows the automated vehicles stop dead just at the point where a peckish T-Rex wanders by. There's a mother storm on the way and the dodgy IT guy is about to shut half of the security down so he can deliver dino embryos to the very rich bloke's rival. All good.

So, yes, the trap, tightly set for plot development snaps in programmed fashion the way it's meant to. All performances pass and we buy into it from the word go. Spielberg, entering his two and a halfth decade of his colonisation of world cinema, was still upping his last foray to higher heights and more gaspingly huge spectacles. He would diversify in the decade to come but for now he was still happily dishing out supersized family meals. This meant that by the early '90s he had to outdo mega movies like E.T. and all the subsidiary projects from the Spielberg stable like Gremlins, Poltergeist and so on. He had to do in cinematic terms what the Moghul Hammond had done with the dinosaurs, produce a wonder of the modern world.

Michael Crichton's source novel is about the abuse of science, encapsulated in Malcolm's thought about scientists going with what they could do without stopping to ask if they should. That it is personal greed that starts the chain of disaster rather than technical failure only adds in that all the hi-tech security in the world can't keep out human frailty. If it had been a failure of science Spielberg would have been on shakier ground considering how dependent his cinema had become on technology. The Mecha/Boy tension is not resolved in his takeup of the Kubrick project A.I. at the other end of the decade (or just beyond it) in any way that Kurbick would have insisted. The corrupt Nedry is in both the novel and the film and his misdeeds are effectively the same but he is an IT nerd (so identified by the anagram of his name) and only a servant of the tech rather than a scientific creative. Crichton's worries about scientism (unquestioning adoption of things said and done in the name of science) are not shared by Spielberg who plugs that awkward hole with Sam Neill's Dr Allan Grant's conquest of his fear of children.

But the star is the spectacle and that is had in the dinosaurs themselves which I can report that even in slicked up 4K look stupendous. There is nothing fake or shaky to them, they look and move as though they are alive. With access to the brightest and the best, Spielberg found in the decade that crossed over from practical effects to computer generated ones that the legacy was as important as the moment of the event and made damn sure that his prehistoric monsters would look as good as E.T. had already proved to be at the age of eleven. The uncanny-valley crossing realm of CG is with us today and, while always improving, has a much shorter shelf life than what was done here. When your creative ambition becomes indistinguishable from your reputation as a movie god you will not settle for less. 

So, Jurassic Park still works. Even the Unix interface of the computers was possible at the time and didn't have to be pushed too far into animation to work on screen for an audience who still could be persuaded that computers could do anything we could imagine. If I can fault the output at all it is in the continued relation between Spielberg and his composer of choice John Williams who here rolls out yet another score that as Leon Garfield once observed of a character's dress sense that it never went out of fashion because it had never been in. The last bit isn't true of Williams' orchestrations but most of the grinding autofit emotion of them could be for almost anything. I know you're not meant to take notice of the music in a film but I do and I wince at the sound of John Williams' music whenever it was written with the sole exception of Jaws which is mostly masterful (but outside of the shark theme is cringing). 

While this film works in all the ways it's meant to I still don't rate it highly beyond that. I turned off Spielberg early on. I found his tendency toward schmaltz and cuteness calculating and distasteful. Through the '80s and '90s I began to see the difference in what happened between his spectacles and serious films and softened on him as a master of spectacle but an overpleaser when the subject was dark or closer to the workaday world. Over and again in the likes of Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad or even the genre-spanning Minority Report, he seems to be continuously assuring us that he can do dark, serious, he can do earnest and meaningful and it seldom convinces me. Whereas with the likes Jurassic Park we witness a master of his form too busy keeping our attention with the same kind of wonder as his characters' faces famously display. As much as I wince at most of his output there is no serious claim I can make that his place in cinema history is among the supreme and is unshakeable. If only he'd stick to being impossibly grand.

Review: M3GAN

When young Cady's parents are killed in a headon collision (which she witnesses) her aunt Gemma takes care of her and learns that she's better at being a visiting aunt from the toy factory than a substitute parent. The irony that she designs companion style toys for children escapes her until Cady shows an interest in an old robot project of Gemma's and says, after a demonstration, that if she had a toy like that she would never want another one. Enter the resurrection of M3GAN, a child size android with an AI learning system. Cady loves M3GAN at first encounter and the pair become a tight unit of mutual development, letting Gemma off the hook. Nothing to see here.

Of course, what you think will go wrong does and the plot is not twisty because of this. As Cady and M3GAN wall themselves off from the rest of the troubling world of life and other kids it becomes increasingly clear that the closed system will generate a disaster of machine ethics on one hand and heart rending dependency on the other. Nevertheless, the film does have a few turns in store that extend this old dependable.

Stories of robots going wrong or humans learning how bad they are through interaction with automatons go back before the movies (E.T.A. Hoffmann, anyone?), the trope is used to expose ethical dilemmas, human intolerance to itself, responsibility and an ocean of other possibilities that approach the notion that things too much like ourselves will eventually frighten us. There are a fair few good Twilight Zone episodes about his, see also Outer Limits, and the world of '60s speculative fiction is a garden of them. Ridley Scott's double take in the Alien and Blade Runner films remain touchstones. Alex Garland's Ex Machina goes into the eerie territory of the Turing test used to determine human and robotic communication.  Spielberg's baton-pass from Kubrick in A.I. retold Pinocchio. All of them, however, must explore the junction of familiarity and function and where the breaking point lies.

We get early clues to the way M3GAN will be going from the opening commercial for the fuzzy talking dolls to her mother imposing screen time restrictions on Cady and Gemma forbidding Cady to play with the still-packaged vintage toys in her home. If this theme of the need for real love and care were not so present we would just have another robot gone wrong tale. The meeting point happens during a corporate demonstration which begins as a flop as Cady doesn't feel like it. The moment is rescued by M3GAN's self-researched solution which feels human but is dependent on her machinery to work. It's that extra pairing that seals the danger ahead which is masked by the sheer success of the moment. So, there's a lot of corporate thinking baggage in the soup along with manipulation both human and machine as well as good old human failure.

Once the Stephen King beat the bully moment has passed we expect and get improvements on it which lead to the inevitable showdowns we also expect. But this is not to call M3GAN a flop of an idea or that it doesn't do more than mechanically play its sub-genre. As a Blumhouse film this could have gone either way and have ended either schmaltzy or cheesy but we get just enough performance and writing to clear both hurdles of cliche while getting a simultaneous feast of it. Yes, there is even a hint at a sequel but it's a good one.

Alison Williams convinces us that she finds the tasks of parenting repugnant and her inspiration for the way out of them problem-solving rather than wise. Violet McGraw has a lot harder a task as Cady whose smothered grief is credibly masked by the delights of her new companion and her way out of that makes her much more of a kid again. 

But it's Amie Donald, the human under the M3GAN CGI and animatronics, who brings her competitive gymnastic training to the stunts, action and the pursuit of the uncanny valley effect that renders M3GAN by turns endearingly strange to quietly terrifying. Her grotesque flailing dance (YouTube it, it's everywhere) was Donald's own idea and her all-fours running a matter of physical practice. The eleven year old's medal-winning skill brings weight and an unpredictability to the android that wouldn't have been possible with either puppetry or CGI. The decision to keep M3GAN free of smiles and persistently doll like against this animalistic and mechanical monsterism and warm it all up with human performance is why the figure works and by extension the whole movie.

That said, the film does feel longer than it should be, treading water at plot points rather than packing them into a more solid momentum. Then again, at a hair under an hour and three quarters, that's not much to complain about. While I find the need for an acronymed robot (Model 3 Generative Android) more nostalgic than helpful (they might have learned from Get Smart's Hymie, also pleasantly retro) it works if they go with a franchise. At the end of a long ancestry of rogue robot stories, M3GAN does its job and even adds a little of its own commentary on top. Can't ask much more.

Review: TAR

Over a montage of vignettes that demonstrate how busy and scheduled her life is we hear the presenter of a live interview give us the condensed biography of Lydia Tar. We get the tail end of this as we watch Lydia keep herself from fidgeting until the interview starts. Once under way we witness a small marvel of self control as she delivers, in perfectly modulated tones and exact hand gestures, the role of the conductor as a controller of time as well as emotion. While this continues we are shown a head of thick auburn hair from behind, at the back of the auditorium, motionless, ready to take its place among the movements of the plot.

Lydia Tar is an American conductor, leading the Berlin Philharmonic, preparing for a performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. We also see her teaching, living life with her wife and child, being magnetised by a new Russian cellist on the scene, and dealing with administrative problems that are sometimes also people. Her life, indistinguishable from her career, is as tight a fit as her conductor's tuxedo (one of which we see being crafted on her body, bespoke and deluxe). But this is a parable of control and, once established, Tar's attempts at professional flexes set her up for the post-hubris plummet.

Writer/director Todd Field knows his classical music. More finely, he knows his twentieth century masters (it's no accident that the piece in balance is one of Mahler's biggies, apart from how it lets him get a Visconti/Death in Venice crack in). This film is formally symphonic. Clear movements that refer to each other and themes stated early and kept to a minimum. The red bouffant in the first scene returns in tiny haunting moments but grows into personal cataclysm. Tar's attraction to the new cellist is a kind of descant on the same line and adopts dissonance eventually. All of the musical thinking of the statement of theme in the interview, all of that assurance and fine honing of the notion of control spreads into detail only to regroup as roaring drama. Really, makes you want to go and bother Malher all over again (well, it does me).

None of this is told in the abstract. If anything we are given a very slight heightening of drama to the everyday (and most of that is due to Tar's position and privilege). Where the film takes its chances is in the theme of haunting. The distant screams Tar hears while jogging, the nagging major third from a neighbouring flat's carer's alarm which she incorporates into her composition, some quietly eerie moments in the dim light of the apartment and what her daughter seems to see build their own connecting phrases to add to the crescendo of crisis. 

Carte Blanchett has been speaking publicly of her intention to retire. This film, written for her and placing her first among favourites for the big gong from The Academy, would be going out in style ... in style. The film is too long for its tale but Blanchett's lead is always there to offer a quick refresher towel between moments of crisis or intensity so that the two and a half plus hours are rendered manageable. 

If you read the trivia at the film's IMDB page you will learn much of her prep for the role and you'll be left agape: all those tales of De Niro fattening up for Raging Bull or driving taxis, Dustin Hoffmann getting beaten up for Marathon Man and so on, have their modern equivalent here. Blanchett learned conducting enough to lead the Dresden Orchestra to the extent that all music performed within a scene (i.e. not scored for the film) is performed live, including the Bach she plays on piano in the extraordinary single-take teaching scene. Her instructions to the orchestra fall in and out of the German she learned for the part and speaks, in character, with a chiselled flintiness. Her affected posh American accent was finished through hours of listening to the speech of Susan Sontag. That's nothing like all of it.

But if you don't know any of that, you will still be awed by the complexity she brings to the character who would control every last cell of her body if she could. This can be played against our sympathies as the plot unfolds and we see more results of her drives and desires. There is a theme of cancellation in the plot that has taken up some public discourse but happily it is treated with an even hand and must be as the point of it has to do with the classically determined fall from grace of the narrative drive. The final shot might make you laugh or gasp but if it saddens you, ask yourself why.

KURONEKO @ 55

A cottage by a grove. A stream runs alongside. One by one, out of the bushes, comes a small hord of filthy exhausted soldiers. They drink thirstily at the stream and enter the cottage to find two women eating a meal. First the intruders rush to attack the food, gorging on the rice and dried meats and vegetables hanging in the room. This turns to rape and it's more graphic than you might imagine for 1968. Outside, the soldiers finally leave and disappear back into the grove. Slowly, a plume of white smoke emerges from the building. After the fire the two women lie dead in the wreckage. A black cat appears, moving around the bodies, inspecting them, glowering out of the screen at us.

Later, at the Rajomon Gate, a samurai trots by and stops at the sight of a young noblewoman. It's the middle of the night and she would appreciate an escort to her house. The samurai complies. They chat as they walk and when they reach her house she asks him in for a rest. Her mother welcomes him with sake and food which he enjoys but his eyes are on the younger woman. She is not resistant to his advances. After all, they help her get within fang distance of his neck which she tears at until he is dead. Just prior we have seen the mother from the rear and how a length of her hair moves like a long black tail. We have entered a strange chamber of the night, ethereal enough to vanish in a moment, real enough to kill.

More samurai meet the same fate until the local warlord orders lethal action against the threat without success until a rawly formed hero, dubbed Gintoki of the Grove, returns from the war and presents himself. Cleaned of the mud and filth he picked up in the campaign, he is dashing and ready to have at the cat spirits. Problem, he went home first and saw the cottage by the grove (well, its remains) where his mother and his wife lived. Asking a local about the missing bodies he gets worryingly vague answer. Riding up to the gate at midnight, following the lady home and meeting her mother he sees, if not quite comprehending, his wife and his mother rendered aristocratic and a little strange. This mission has just got tough.

Japanese cinema expanded so rapidly after the occupation and grew so rich and self-challenging that it never needed a new wave to ignite it into innovation. Whether it was Kurosawa applying a supernova to the samurai tale, Teshigahara and his magical realism, monster movies that were really about nuclear warfare or Ozu's refinement of the melodrama into aching family portraits, the late fifties to the late sixties in the national cinema remain a wonder of invention. Kaneto Shindo, whose military service in the war took him away from his hometown the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on it, grew hybrid fictions from his neo-realist tales of survival and identity into the likes of Human of the durable masterpiece Onibaba.

By the time he got to Kuroneko in 1968 he was ready to hurl everything he knew at the screen and did just that. Theatricality bumps shoulders with cinematic realism, folkloric magic tears at the local realpolitik, martial arts wirework jolts against the ugly violence of the day to day. The Ballad of Narayama had flaunted its theatrical roots with set building and transitions laid bare. Kwaidan folded this into its fabric but happily let the mixing show. In Kuroneko when Shige somersaults incredibly through the air behind the samurai on horseback it is all part of the supernature of the midnight realm of the cat spirits. The warlord's account of his skepticism extends to the current case. He thinks it's probably just bandits but makes a public show of hiring a hitman to get rid of the ghosts.

But it is the individual performances that really cover the seams of the artifice, here. Nobuko Otowa plays a similar role to the one in Onibaba except that here she is far more maternal and then torn at the situation with her son. She transits from ghost to demon with voice and expression, going from a parental softness to a wily sharpness from line to line in some scenes (particularly the final showdown). As her daughter in law, Kiwako Taichi takes a lot on, going from cozening spirit, to savage feline demon to a kind of ethereal echo of the lover she had been with Gintoki. Kichiemon Nakamura as Gintoki is introduced to us as a brute from the swamps (which remind us powerfully of the marshes in Onibaba). When he is cleansed to civil standards in a heavily satisfying scene of the caked mud on his skin being wiped away, the intense survivalist glare in his eyes remains. You can't take the swamp out of the boy. But then when the enormity of the situation with the demonic duo confronts him he breaks back into innocence before having to forage for his strength. There is just no opportunity for any of these three turns to fall back on cruise control.

And then there is Shindo's vision itself which renders the potentially silly wirework fights rivetting and the bamboo forest into a profoundly eerie setting by lighting it naturally and letting it present itself as is. Shindo's career, a kind of vow of life against nearly disintegrating in seconds when younger, is one of earnest work that ranged from the fantastical through returns to unadorned social realism and back. He made it to a month over one hundred years old, only two years out from his final film as director (Postcard). A late entry Fukuro (Owl) is a kind of replay of Onibaba for contemporary Japan but funnier and more starkly unconventional. Still young, he made Kuroneko (The Black Cat) which looked like an exact recounting of a nightmare unearthed after centuries of burial. Kuroneko feels older than the earlier Onibaba, with its incorporation of ancient theatrics and folkiness. While that freakier vision sticks stronger in the mind, this later entry beguiles all over again with each viewing as though magic had hidden its treasure.

Review: THE MENU

A yachtload of one percenters travel to an island to dine at the most exclusive restaurant on earth. As they take the tour and then their seats they reveal which of the seven deadly sins each represents in the course of casual conversation. When the big chef appears and announces each course which go from an absurd abstraction of real food to dishes related to actions that take on darker and darker meanings. The chef reveals his purpose and it is clear that the guests are captives and the main dish on the menu is retribution.

That much is in the trailer. What is also in the trailer is a kind of deadpan tv comedy style where characters might say something affected before correcting it with a plainer statement ("I'm sure it's all theatre. It's actually real"). That alone kept me from front up for this one but I kept on hearing, among the conflict of responses that this movie has generated, that it held substance beyond the one-liners. So, I punted on it.

In the interests of full disclosure I'll state that I'm not a foodie. I neither care about those who are nor consider them worth ridicule, it's just another enthusiasm. I have been to degustations and have found only that they are wasted on me. Whether I have overindulged or kept away, food and I are generally not a romantic item. So, I approached the initial premise of this as though it were fans of religious relics or the snake-oil addicts of hifi analogue audio: I noted the McGuffin of the experience without caring too much about it. There is a line about the digestive ephemerality of food as art but like the sentiment, once that's gone it's either down to self-reflection or cheap shooting ridicule. I don't care enough for the former and dislike the latter. So, I was at least left with a satirical black comedy.

But there's too much disconnection for that to convince. There are big, violent stunts but the compulsion between action and actor appear so slight (even unto death) that I can only think that if they don't care I surely don't. There is a ricochet off The Decameron  whereby an elite group dine and wine and entertain each other while the rest of the world crawls through the black plague. There is a clear statement using the term plague, lest we should let it slip by. But the sins as contemporised from the likes of Dante to me-first capitalism and obsessive consumerism don't really warrant the judgement. And then, when they come up for punishment it is variously trivial or so joltingly extreme that it tears the net of comedy while not quite breaking through to horror.

What is the point of the race and chase? No one is the worse for it nor ever really threatened. A public execution happens to an astonishment that lasts until the next course. I'm not describing comedy from a jaded character response, here, but a failure of the screenplay and direction to follow through. An earlier incident which plays on the hell is as real as a toothache idea is given far more emotional and thematic weight. Of that notion, weight, the supposedly heavy judgement and punishments feel weightless. I would bet a silk pyjama that a performance of a medieval passion play would pack more of a punch, even dismissing the confident assumption that the audience was with the performance on the religious front. For a story of an imposed life and death the lack of a sense of stakes is annoying. Sudden violence doesn't cut it if it doesn't change the tale.

The sense that these characters are simply so detached from the stakes of life for the rest of us that they be driven to extremes over such trivia is just no backed up by anything more than an assumed what-if on the part of the screenplay. The revelation of why the movie star has been included is an attempt at suggesting the danger of the fickleness of the evil genius but the irony it depends on is charmless. Argh! I think I'm just repeating myself now.

Ok, so you have a single sympathetic character (Margot played by Anya Taylor-Joy) in a stew of hateful ones. They are all performing well in a poorly written screenplay under the direction of someone who just keeps trying and trying and just ends up being trying. There are passages of subtlety that I'll admit but wait a few seconds and they'll be shattered by the heavy hand of this local Ozymandias while the lone and level sands stretch far away.

The Menu is still in cinemas but if you subscribe to Disney+ it's now on there. 

1973 @ 50: THE PAPER CHASE (Some mild spoilers)

A lecture theatre, Harvard University law school. Students file in in real time, taking about three minutes to fill all the seats. A fastidiously tidy grey man emerges and consults his student chart, names and faces. He picks James Hart, first year student, cocky at having being selected to the prestigious institution, who flunks his first question and admits he didn't do the reading. Professor Kingsfield, with loud Bostonian aristocracy, takes him down, peg by peg. After the lecture, Hart rushes to the loo and vomits from the experience. He will imagine himself in a struggle with Kingsfield for the rest of the year.

Apart from that, Hart settles into college life, happy enough in the dorm. He gets recruited into a high cal study group of varying skill levels. They divvy up the areas of law to specialise in to ease the burden of facing all of it at once. But the cracks are already appearing. Bell bullies his way into choosing his speciality and Brooks whose photographic memory leaves him without analytical talent, signalling how dependent on the others he will be. All that and the pressure to excel from one of the most gruelling tertiary schools in the world are going to make first year a learning experience in the worst way. Then Hart gets involved with a woman who is related to the source of his anxiety.

This makes it almost sound like a comedy but The Paper Chase, for all its effortless charm, is every centimetre a drama. It is, at fifty years old, still one of the strongest and most accurate depictions of undergraduate life. While the hallowed halls are rendered with reverent light and the autumnal New England exteriors make you want to throw a thick scarf around your neck and walk into them, this is a film about competition. Hart is a decent enough person until you understand how much of his drive is being sublimated into his imaginary struggle with Kingsfield. When Brooks falls behind the others almost physically recoil from the smear of the loser. His final scene is more than heartrending, it's profoundly depressing.

Hart's troubled relationship with Susan brings us closest to a calming external wisdom as we are going to get. As Kingsfield's daughter (learned after the relationship has started) she knows the grind of the law school and its effects on students as the teachers at the top hurl thunderbolts without consequence. More, she curbs Hart's self-destructive tendency with a firm reminder of what the world offers outside of the academic tunnel. Lindsay Wagner adds a gravitas beyond her youth as Susan, delivering lines with a cool, flinty assurance. Not a "girlfriend" role, her boundaries are set to be crossed only by one whose proof of worth begins with the shedding of pettifogging adolescence. Hart isn't always up to the task.

Timothy Bottoms with his chiselled beauty actually welcoming the '70s aftershave ad moustache on his lip, holds all that dark energy of the struggle beneath a credible nice-guy face. The other shows despite his best efforts at moments of hubris. It takes him the whole story to gain the kind of perspective that allows him sight of effective combat that is based on intelligence as well as personal force.

At the peak of the mountain, John Houseman as Kingsfield deals tough hands to the students and offers an unforgiving stoicism when mercy might make him popular. Houseman's upper crust accent reinforced by a middle-heavy voice render him unreachably superior. In odd moments like the one in the lift when he struggles to recall Hart's name (deflating a year's worth of fantasy on Hart's part) he adds fathoms of character depth in minutes. No backstory needed (though we do get some through Hart's commando tactics). He took that indefatigable presence, honed in English public schools and consolidated by knocking around with Orson Welles in their youth, all the way to the best supporting actor oscar. It's a performance that, fleshed with a bare few scenes, dominates its films. He had almost done the same trick in John Frankenheimer's muscular Seven Days in May but was simply outnumbered.

The tawny, pallet of The Paper Chase is very comfortably of its time. Deep grainy colour and astute lighting give every interior the seductive look of a Playboy full page ad. Add a few contemporary orchestrations of Bach (the "Little" Fugue in G minor is used very effectively) or original arrangements of Italian baroque pieces and you can smell the cigar smoke and taste the single malt whisky.

I saw this back in the early '80s when I was an arts undergraduate. My brother had alerted me to it being on tv. He was a law undergrad and felt the punch of the film personally. He liked to quote Kingsfield in a bullseye impersonation of Houseman's plummy drawl. While this kind of late night movie watching as a student often ended with me dissecting the focal length, cutting style etc as a show off parlour trick for this one I shut up and watched, aware that someone who was communing heavily with the screen was himself, uncharacteristically silent. When the commercials came up he was all bluster but the title card's fade in had him back in his seat and rivetted.

It's a sad note to realise how little university life is put on screen. High school is overcatered and never about the study but the social distractions as the kids do a lot of developing. But the next level reverses this. The pressure is real and can leave a lot of casualties. Sure, I did arts, not law or medicine, and the stakes were a lot lower but as soon as you go in and look intimately at the microindustry that is a university student you'll quickly forget to ask what they're studying. The Paper Chase celebrates this without a moment of nostalgia but sill manages warmth and magnetism. 

MATANGO @ 60

A man in a hospital gown looks out at a neon Tokyo and tells us that we might think he's crazy but what he's about to say is true. Suddenly, we're on the high seas on a yacht on a three hours tour, with Etsuro, the skipper, too, a millionaire and his wife, a cabaret star, the professor and Akiko. They are caught in a storm which almost sinks the boat and disables it, setting them adrift. Eventually, through the pervasive fog, an island is spotted. Yay! But there's something wrong. It's completely silent, even seagulls shun it and over there is an old grounded sailing ship which is coated in mould. They work out it was a research ship and find a sealed chest containing a massive multicoloured mushroom and some notes on the strangeness of the fungus. All the mirrors on the ship have been broken. This is the weirdest Marie Celeste story ever. It gets odder to the extent that, even though it was made before the emergence of both, this is Gilligan's Island as imagined by David Cronenberg.

While the party does find some fresh water and are wary of eating the mushrooms all around the island, (they find a small stock of tinned foods and some edible roots) there is an undercurrent of dissension among them about how they should proceed. They've already heard a news report on radio about the search for them being called off. There is movement in the jungle and strange bipedal figures are lurking, coming closer to the ship, braving the humans and then menacing them. As the ship's log continues to be investigated it's clear that the area has been affected by nuclear weapons testing.

Now, you might be putting post-war Japanese cinema, Toho Studios, the dangers of nuclear power and mutation together and you'd be right. Ishiro Honda who adapted and directed this was already a veteran of Japanese monster movies, having made the king of them in 1954 with Gojira which you might know better as Godzilla. If that sends you into visions of actors in rubber suits destroying model railway stations then you haven't seen the film, only those made in its image. Gojira is a story of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dire, earth-threatening consequences of fucking with the fabric of the universe (and killing masses of people and mutating even more). In a radius of about twenty years every Japanese movie that wasn't a neo-realist character piece or a Yakuza epic made mention, however obtusely, to the atom bombs.

Here, the nature-bending forces of nuclear fission have created mushrooms that consume humans, changing them, patch of skin by patch of skin, into big spooring monsters. One of them actually resembles a mushroom cloud on legs. It's not just that, you can turn just by eating them and they are instantly addictive. The more you eat, the more you become what you eat. 

This metaphor is not entirely Honda's doing. When I first saw the film (at the Time Capsules microcinema in the 2000s) I recognised the source material immediately. When I was a child I took possession of a large volume of weird tales from our home library. It had an embossed cover and some of the stories had thrilling illustrations. One story (not illustrated but it didn't need to be) was A Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson. An old timey sailing ship heaves to in a fog. The watch is disturbed by a cry from the water. A man in a row boat tells a tale of a ship that went through a similar fog and was overcome by a fungus ... I'll let you find the story yourself. It's a great yarn and available to read free online. Matango is the origin story of A Voice in the Night.

While the middle act drags from the shifting allegiances and some repetition, the opening is arresting as the shipwrecked party live through the strange situation on board and discover the stranger one on the island, and the final act is warpo scene after warpo scene as the ugly consequences of ignoring nature's warnings play out in a proto body horror orgy of doom. Back at the hospital, we understand the opening statement and see the pervasion of the perversion.

Honda shoots in deep colour, going from studio, set-based scenes (most of them) to extraordinary world building exteriors where the press of the grey overcast leaves only the rough black rocky sand below. The island is a rich tropical green but we know it's all poison. There is a remarkable lack of saturation, that postcard look of mid century colour films. It's odd matt finish made me question its vintage. All I could say for certain was that it was not of the then recent J-Horror canon as it had none of the studied green-grey pallet and deep shadow or unsettling oozing electronic music. There is electronic music in the jungle but it is more incorporated into the atmospherics and largely confined to the use of a metallic delay effect to suggest a kind of communication between the matango mushrooms. 

This is the kind of film that goes under many titles for international release, usually lurid misinterpretations to go with increasingly sensationalist poster art. Attack of the Mushroom People, Fungus of Terror, and so on. Matango is the name of the virus and you have to follow the dialogue and details of the tale to pick that up. Just as Gojira has as much do to with science out of control and guilt as it does a monster, Matango touches effortlessly on the responsibility of doomsday weapons and their reach, addiction, the worrying ease of people with moving on before examining the path ahead and the doom of accepting the worst. The second time we see the bright lights of Tokyo (a brilliant piece of set design, not intended for a second to lull anyone into thinking they are seeing the real thing) we are looking at a different world.

1983 @ 40: RISKY BUSINESS (Spoilers)

Joel Goodsen at seventeen is at the top of the heap. He's a white, upper class, American teenager on the way to a pretty assured bright future as part of the eternal march of alpha citizens into unbound glory. His comic flaw, essential for this story, is that he is decent. At lunch with his fellow seniors, talking about their future plans he stops them by asking them if wealth is all they care about. They laugh as though he's joking but when one of them asks what he wants to achieve he almost stumbles over the words that he wants to help humanity. They laugh harder.

On weekend while his parents are away for the weekend and leave the running of the opulent family home to him a friend of his pranks him by ordering a call girl to his address. She knocks revealing herself to be black and trans. In a disarming exchange, he sends her off with care fare and money for her time and she gives him the number of someone more like what he was thinking. This is the young and golden Lana. All fine 'n' dandy with a montage of initiation sex deluxe. He's still young and callow, though, so when, the next morning she bills him for $300 he has to think quickly and get to the bank to plunder his bonds. When he gets back she's gone with a conspicuously expensive art piece. Getting that back is the cause of a series of misadventures, traps, cons big and small, and life lessons that in a few days supply more practical education that he is going to get at Princeton. If something realistically comparable to this story was told in the 40s it would end with Joel being made a man. But this is the early '80s and what it suggests is that, in learning the elemental skill of negotiation with the worst life can hurl, Joel becomes a better person. This is complicated, though. read on.

The thing to get out of the way first is that this is the film that broke Tom Cruise who acquired Hollywood stardom by it which he retains to this day. Hindsight would suggest he was implanted in his own future by this part (not his first but close enough) as this story of wresting control from hostile forces describes most of his roles hereafter. Here, not knowing what is to become of him, just like his character, he is a good looking teenager and that's almost all he has to be. The nuance comes with how he injects the decency flaw into scenes that will escalate to it becoming a strength. When gangster pimp Guido is at the passenger window with a pistol trying to get Lana out of the car, Joel recognises that falling apart like his friend in the back seat is only going to worsen the situation so he expresses a fragile resolve that seems to surprise himself until he can get them out of the immediate situation safely. But he's left a signature which turns up later. It's a good turn.

The other thing that Cruise does here, inadvertently, is to establish one of the decade's hero templates. Whether it's him or Ferris Bueller '80s teens were lifting off to localised greatness to fulfil the great pitch of the time as the reign of Reagan trickled down (or said it did). These don't always travel well through time and the decades have left Ferris looking like a bully (or even a figment of Campbell's psychosis) but Joel still comes across as, more or less, ok.

Circumstances see to his failing some of the high achievement aspects of his senior high school record but his acceptance of Lana's suggestion that they team up and use their resources. By this, he is not just being pragmatic but bucking the stolid system of tokenism that his formal schooling imposes. He has lost touch with the societal handrail and embraces the path that proves his prowess at business to exponentially greater degree. He has learned the advice his toxic friend gave him at the beginning to just say, "what the fuck?" and keep driving on. Cleverly, a scene where that friend, Miles, is confronted with the effects of that advice, he calls it bullshit that he just said in the moment, his shallowness is exposed by Joel's successful employment of the line. It's just occurred to me that Miles with his bravado and Hectoring ridicule and pranking of Joel is a clear prototype of Ferris; take the whimsical charm away and he's just an entitled, bourgeois oaf.

Night Shift from the previous year treated sex work similarly as a business that could be done along the same lines as any other service industry with the workers getting a much better deal out of it. The peak scene of this is the massive house party managed by Tom as a roving spruiker and Lana on personnel and PR management. You could write this entire scene off as an ad for underage tricking; there is no resolution of the issue offered (one client looks about 12 and his having to get home early is even joked about). There's a joke about how many sex workers present for duty but there is also the complaint of exhaustion by one of them afterwards. They might well be making more dosh than normal but haven't they just been in the service economy's version of a sweatshop? And aren't the bosses still the ones really raking it in?

At the end, Joel having impressed the Princeton recruiter who was sorted during the house brothel party ("Princeton could use a guy like Joel"), and having bargained his new fortune for the return of the goods in the ransacked house, having kept his mouth shut through his mother's chiding of him for damaging an ornament (happened during the bargaining scene), and having seemingly smoothed the business side of his relationship with Lana is left with a joke that if she wants a relationship with him it is gonna cost her. She didn't reply when he asked if the sex on a train jaunt was to distract him from the burglary of the house. Was she noncommittal or offended by the question? Unclear.

What is clear is that, in their final moments with each other, strolling around the greenery of a Chicago park, she is not deemed good enough for him now. He might well step up to the years of study and specialisation as an MBA and grow up to fight Gordon Gekko on the seas of high finance but he cannot be dragging a call girl around on his arm. Chuck is happy to walk off into the sunset with Belinda at the end of Night Shift but he's a grownup, Joel is probably a future Republican donor. He was probably instrumental, come to think of it, in getting his chum Brett Kavanaugh off the hook for the Supreme Court spot.

I've said so little about this film as a film and I should say something as it's worth it. There is a kind of tradeoff arrangement here between fantasy and reality which in turn plays on the audience's covetous relationship with the lifestyle on the screen. We begin with shots of a working city by night and there is a bookending sequence to suggest that, whatever happens between those two points, the grand old town and the cogs and wheels that keep it running endure. Then we are plunged into an inky blackness and find an eyeball turning as though checking for threats. We roll out to see that it's Tom Cruise's eye behind the screen of his Ray Bans. As the synthesised score by Tangerine Dream bubbles on, he speaks to camera: "the dream is always the same." Before relating an anxiety nightmare in which his distraction by a beautiful woman makes him impossibly late for an exam.

There is a lot of dream/reality tension in Lana, as well. She first appears as a young woman entering the house as a sex worker, courteous within the bounds of professional caution. She continues to tease, taunt and play Joel until circumstances throw their interests together. Rebecca De Mornay brings a lot of detail to her turn, stepping up to the depth of the screenplay to give us a young but heavily experienced survivor belying, by our assumption, the fragility of her beauty. Are the scenes in the sex montage at the beginning real, though, or Joel's art directed memories? I would lean to the latter. The famous scene (not a montage) on the train is intended as sex plus love in a risky setting, a coming of age prize, and it's served up with a lot more grit.

And then, it's only a little personal because it is still just business.

The world building of the rich and influential is consummate (I remember being dazzled by the massive graphic equalizer the Goodsens had as part of their stereo system) even to the social distance between the opulence and the grimy rust coloured night world of greater Chicago. We see a lot of the textural cheek of the '80s mainstream which had incorporated the French New Wave traits of the movie brats in the '70s but added a lot more comedy. This, like Splash or Ferris Bueller or even The Breakfast Club could never have been '70s movies. That's not because the '80s drove mainstream cinema further into gritty realism but further away from it. The tropes, tricks on the eye, casual satire and clean sheen image were part of the consumables of the movies, along with soundtrack albums with neon cover art.

Tom Cruise still peers over the frames of his Ray Bans the way that Ferris would and so many other teen movies and those that promised a kind of rock and roll adventure. But the Ray Bans were expensive and the rock 'n' roll more likely to be Huey Lewis than Suicidal Tendencies. The only real rebellion in these tales of growing up fast was against personal timidity, the social organisation was never in any danger of so much as a few questions and they shook it off like dandruff. This was the same time as the look of punk was being absorbed by cereal commercials and the spirit of it scraped off and discarded. This and its like gave every kid in the audience the promise of riches and power through saying, "what the fuck" and all their parents the assurance that they need only let the wild oats be sown and they would fall where they landed without further growth. Too heavy for a fun movie? Well, the movie is fun. It's even more fun now watching a future megastar begin his stardom with iconic status as he slides in socks jocks and shirt to the strains of Bob Seeger singing about old time rock 'n' roll. Well, the old time rock 'n' roll wears the new clean line movie style as well as ever. But it's still old time rock 'n' roll.

1973 @ 50: THE STING

Grifter Johnny Hooker cons the wrong guy and starts a mob hunt for him. He quits town after his partner, on the verge of going straight, gets hit. Cornered by the cops, Johnny hands over a big wad of funny money and runs so now the cop is after him, too. Johnny lands in Chicago, finding out that a silent boss Lonergan is responsible for his partner's slaughter and vows to avenge him with a big sting. To do this he drags long con master out of his hangover and they set to work on the biggest operation they've ever done.

It can take a lot of unravelling but the convolutions of the plot of this story of underworld justice is most of the fun in this movie. The major pull for contemporary audiences, though, was the re-teaming of Robert Redford and Paul Newman who'd had such celebrated success as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Also, this was an entry in the fad at the time of setting movies in the jazz age like The Great Gatsby, Paper Moon, Day of the Locust, a strange overreach of nostalgia that might have simply been the choice of film makers to allow behaviour long dropped in the bad bin. In the context of The Sting, with a little white washing and rough justice, was rendered cheeky rather than ugly. 

Made at a time when Redford as a bipedal men's grooming ad allowed him to look desirable rather than period correct, the clothes and cars look right, and the constant tinkly ragtime music works, but no one wanted to get their hair cut to early 20th century severity. This might seem like eye-rolling pedantry but it does testify to the glamour-first approach that is also borne by the soft beige pallet that pervades the frame. The grownup Norman Rockwell paintings that announce the chapters of the story act as a kind of mask to the anachronisms but also as a tip to disregard them. Hey, it's Redford and Newman again, lighten up.

That out of the way, the durability of this film largely rests on it reining in the loveable rogue or winking naughtiness that might have tainted every single scene: there is genuine danger of life and limb, however goofy the lower rung bad guys might be. Redford and Newman's nemesis Lonergan is played by Robert Shaw whose careful menace is constant and solid.

But it's early '70s star power that dominates here as we are invited to see the central duo as Redford and Newman more readily than Hooker and Gondorff. This can be used as its own advantage, considering some of the twisty corners they find themselves crammed into but as long as we know we are running with the big boys, sipping on prohibition martinis and packin' pieces, we're fine.

It's possible that the drama impedes a little too much on the comedy and the comedy never quite takes flight but that the film is meant to be taken in whole rather than as peaks between transitions like those early '70s albums without big singles or classic tracks but swathes of feel (e.g. Exile on Main Street). Not to say it isn't tightly plotted but that really only kicks in in the last ten minutes where it finally rises above the glittering duet. 

Faint praise for it's year's Oscar winner? Well it was up against The Exorcist which, even though I had no dog in that fight at the time, have since forever found scarcely credible. It feels so lightweight beside Friedkin's masterpiece. Friedkin was on a mighty roll at the time and would produce in 1978 The Brink's Job, not a con story but a heist and its aftermath more like the later Goodfellas than The Sting or The Thomas Crown Affair, sold absurdly as a jolly caper on its poster art. The Sting, with its art deco poster and buddied up success team feel antique now. It works but it works best if you let it roll and forget the comedy is inviting you to laugh with it. Sit back and enjoy the interplay of stars, careful plotting and big third act. Expect no more and you won't go short.

Review: THE FABELMANS

Young Sammy Fabelman is being persuaded by his parents to go into the cinema to show him his first movie. He's worried about a range of things including the size of the people. His scientific father tries appealing to his sense of wonder at the persistance of vision. His artsy mother tries to entice him into an adventure. He goes in and is both awestruck and disturbed by the massive train crash on screen. He can't shake it. When he gets a train set for Hannukah he quickly sets up a recreation of the crash from the movie. A future movie god is born.

This is how The Fabelmans starts and it's a good indication of how it progresses. There are two strains. The first which (thankfully) takes up most of the screen time, is what plays as a frank if ficitonalised memoir of  Steven Spielberg's upbringing in a family that steadily grew unstuck and unstable. Young Sammy Fabelman goes through childhood and adolescence hooked on the moving image, making tiny 8mm backyard epics with friends, family and anyone he can rope in. He learns to strive for the real and stumbles on to the notion of coaching performances out of actors and so on, learning with increasingly encouraging feedback that he is good at making movies. The second strain is that we are asked to indulge a fair amount of schmaltz because we know it's really about Steven Spielberg and he turned out somewhat ok.

Meanwhile his parents are drifting apart as his mother's mental health takes a submarine dive while his father pretends not to notice. A new school means new bullies and the anti-semitism only worsens as the perps get older but not wiser. Family and life stuff and it's told with real charm. Then again, this film is given a family name. The mother has a serious arc, the father a constant presence but Sammy has three sisters and we hardly get a peep out of them. I grew up with brothers and sisters and never heard the end of them. If it's really The Fabelmans rather than Sammy and his parents, couldn't we have had more of a sense of the others?

Is this a vanity project? To some degree yes, of course it is. This is one of cinema's Olympians and you just have to give that surrender to temptation a pass, unless you're Elem Klimov with Come and See or Andre Tarkovsky with Ivan's Childhood (you dig the gig, it's rare). Even Fellini's determinedly earthy Amarcord or Roma let his stand-in character come off well. What Spielberg is striving for here, though, is a point beyond even the gravest of his fiction features like Schindler's List, something to suggest his future career was taken as a means of imposing order on a universe that kept crumbling around him. He gets an early lesson in the power of editing to reshape reality, not just glue the best bits together and its use as an emotional movement in the narrative is impressive.

There is, as you might expect in a Hollywood telling of an origins story, a lot of meta here. At its best, Sammy giving us the Spielberg wonder face as he is overcome by the effect of his own creativity (genuinely observational rather than vain) or the cosmos-as-details of the death scene where the Spielberg capacity to comment on the human as a machine to express transparency rather than sardonic commentary (more of a Kubrick thing). The scene where Sammy is confronted by a bully confused into impotent fury by Sammy's positive portrayal in a school film (and Sammy's straw-grabbing defence that suggests it was right for the movie) is probably made of years of experience that the director has endured over the decades.

But then the extended theme of the high school girlfriend failing to reconcile her twin desire to bed him and/or convert him to Christianity just does not work well, ending in a formless moment that reminds us of the epic running time. Aspects of Sammy's mother's struggle with mental illness come across as novelistic quirks (mainly the monkey). The sisters are moved out of the picture (on to a photograph) and it's finally just Sammy and his dad and the path to stardom. Again, Sammy would appear to have always been all the Fabelman you'll ever need.

We get some good casting, here. Michelle Williams was supposedly cast after Spielberg saw her in Blue Valentine which you can understand. If you cast Williams for crisis then well begun is half done. Go-to weirdo Paul Dano plays the dad but sensitively downbeat under Spielberg's direction. Seth Rogan curbs his comic persona enough to claim some characterisation. A lot rests on Gabriel LaBelle's shoulders as the bearer of Spielberg's own stand-in, Sammy. It is very difficult to separate his performance from our familiarity with the real life Steven Spielberg but his one for one resemblance with the director and assured and rangy turn give us no obstacles in following him.

Overlong with its strongest moments undercut by schmaltz, The Fabelmans is a consummate Spielberg film. It just happens to be about himself. Motivation? Well, I can see anyone wanting to tell the story of their parents when it involves some confrontation and offers some lessons. As a literary tradition, the bildungsroman of itself bats nary an eyelid but on film because of the immediacy and associations with life writ large, scored with orchestras (hello, John Williamson) we approach with caution: are they going to overinflate themselves or surprise us with humility? In recent times Paul Thomas Anderson gave us a less than flattering youth memoir with Licorice Pizza (I'm aware of the life/period warping) and the  self-consciously out there David Lynch narrated his childhood to youth memoir The Art Life with a quiet and pithy sincerity. Spielberg doing it was never going to feel like it was made in a shed and it is longer than it needs to be but I can say that this person who dislikes most of the director's movies, sat very happily through almost all of this one.

The final scene is getting spoiled all over the online world but I won't join that. I will, however, say that it's from a purportedly real anecdote of when a movie god to-be met a movie god in situ who is played by a movie god from the underground. It's a pure delight.

ROSEMARY'S BABY @ 55 (Spoilers)

Newlyweds Guy and Rosemary move into a Manhattan apartment that is just a reach beyond their means. Guy is a struggling actor who needs a break. Rosemary is, in the parlance of the time, a housewife who looks to tend the house and raise the children they are planning. A couple of encounters bring them to the attention of their common wall neighbours, the Castavets, a rich and worldly old couple who invite them to dinner. It's a passably enjoyable occasion that changes everything about their lives and will send Rosemary on a rocky descent into a personal hell and a relationship with the real hell.

Roman Polanksi's adaptation of Ira Levin's novel cast a shadow of deep influence over mainstream horror cinema thereafter. The trope of the poisoned familiar already existed but Polanski's genius for pushing both sides just enough to create dread in his audiences by appealing to their imagination. While we easily follow Rosemary through this course of industrial strength gaslighting there are moments in which we ourselves cannot easily tell if she is a genuine victim of conspiracy or her own paranoia.

We have already seen how easily we can enter a dream state in this film by the time when we wonder if we're just seeing another. It's milder than what's happening to Rosemary on screen but we in the audience are also being gaslighted by the film. Anyone who had followed his career to that point would bear witness to a frightening readiness (from at least Repulsion on) by the director to delve into the point of view of someone suffering from a chaotic vision of reality. Add a genuine destructive collusion and you have a world that looks as good as a retail catalogue but will kill you if you look too long.

Take the casting. An early suggestion when the film was in development was to have the treacherous Guy played by America's sweetheart Robert Redford. This works a treat for the poisoned familiar effect until you see what John Cassavetes does with the role, showing us all the unctuous charm of the seducer that barely covers the narcissism beneath. Redford would have started acceptable and then just turned. Cassavetes shows us someone who doesn't need to turn but keep others from noticing. A film maker himself, Cassavetes knew how far his own practice took him from the Hollywood artifice and appreciated what he could bring to a conventional narrative like this one; his performance is twice menacing, by character as written and by practitioner as skilled.  

Mia Farrow, fresh from years of Peyton Place brings an American aristocratic lightness which, when tested as fundamentally as it is here, rises to a survivalist fury. That transition from her shoulder length sunlit shampoo ad hair to the close cropped severity she has it cut to which makes one of her friends describe her as Mis Concentration Camp 1966, is a deceptively simple one, led by physical appearance but fleshed through a subtly graded performance. Even in the walk; from the effortless grace of the high born young society girl to the awkward balancing act of a spindly, middle heavy pregnant woman, Farrow's performance for her first starring role on the cinema screen is committed.

Roman Castavet is an aging alpha sophisticate who can insinuate his way anywhere with a piercing stare and the kind of charm that leaves enough words out for the glamoured victim to fill them in for him. Sidney Blackmer embodies this effortlessly. But it's Mrs Castavet, Minnie, who steals the couple's show with her constant manipulation delivered through the guise of a gaudily fashionable harmless old busybody. Ruth Gordon presents the evil version of the great earth mother Maude to come. She injects a constant edgy comedy as when, removing the knife that might have been used to kill the baby, she quickly wipes the floor finish around the mark left by the blade.

One concordance of performance that always thrills me in this film is gestural. Early on, Roman Castavets flatters Guy the actor with a cold reading suggestion that Guy's performance in a small stage role impressed him. Guy fills him in, as intended, elaborating on a move he made on stage. Later, Rosemary rejoices in the baby's movement and asks Guy to feel her belly. He tries but tears his hand away with a wince, knowing what's in there. After we get over being creeped out by it we might recall that, diegetically, this moment was the actor playing the actor not acting.

Polanski at his best shows his understanding of the similarity of horror and comedy which is why the two forces often share the screen. Rosemary locks herself in her apartment believes she is temporarily safe but fails to see the people who will soon swarm in on her through the open door behind her, tiptoeing cartoonishly. Minnie Castavet's appearance as seen through the spyhole in Rosemary's apartment door looks gross and threatening long before she proves to be both. This both brings horror to real life and real life to horror. "Oh, God, it's the neighbours again," turns into, "my neighbours are going to eat my baby!" and they are the same neighbours.

1968 was a bumper year for innovation at the cinema. Night of the Living Dead showed how much could be made with how little and, removing the magic from a normally supernatural story, changed the genre. 2001: A Space Odyssey, changed science fiction by expanding the conceptual range and adding a kind of epic documentary realism to it that felt like real time. The Boston Strangler gave us the serial killer procedural. And Rosemary's Baby showed us how close our dread can be to us, how day by day, even masked by the glamour of Manhattan uptown life, how thin the veil of life that looks like a home beautiful catalogue, how vicious the monster under the skin of worldliness.

I had a conversation once with someone who liked to encapsulate his cultural experiences, form them into tiny cameos to be brought out for display when in company. Of Rosemary's Baby he reported that it was not credible because of how quickly she turns in the end. This person was (probably still is) a medical professional yet had no concept that a mother might want to take care of a child she has been defending for the entire term. If you are as incapable of seeing beyond the surface of actions, take all statements you hear as admissions of fact without motivation, then you might want to choose a profession other than medicine for starters but you need definitely to stay well clear of things that model real life like fiction. Fiction is what Rosemary's Baby is crucially about, the relaying of circumstances through invention, daily life through imagination, human experience not as falsehood but as acceptably exaggerated truth.

Is it wrong to defend Roman Polanski and his works? Is the second the same as the first? This issue keeps arising and needs to. I have never known an easy answer to it. I understand anyone's objection to consuming the works of people who have acted criminally. Do the works extend the person or is it that the person might continue to benefit from the works in the marketplace? The conception of Rosemary's baby in the story is a result of rape. She has experienced it in delirium but calls it what it is to her husband the next morning. He deflects it with a boyish swagger, laddishly bringing up the scratches on his back. It's a question she can't shake, though, however much the manipulative assuagement of the others proves effective. This is in Ira Levin's novel and made it through to Polanski's film where it is clearly stated. The worst that Guy has to endure is Rosemary spitting in his face. If it was the Devil, who let him in? The suggestion is clear that he is headed for the life of a future movie star. When Polanski won the Oscar for the best movie he'd made in decades (The Pianist) he didn't front up for it, fearing arrest, but didn't reject it either. This has gone well beyond the scope of this review for a film released about a decade before the offence. It does need stating, though, even if my conclusion is so far short of comfort.

Review: THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

Colm has gone off his lifelong friend Padraic. He gives no better reason than that he finds the younger man dull. Padraic is astonished before he is hurt and then when he is hurt he is possessed of the need to at least discover the real reason or to find a path of reconciliation. The small island of the coast of Ireland makes it impossible for the pair to avoid each other without unthinkable personal engineering and they are frequently at the same pub spreading the awkwardness like tar. Colm's enigmatic revulsion for Padraic takes him to the extent of a threat to cut off his own fingers until Padraic leaves him alone. At first this seems like the kind of joke these hard joking people might play on one another.

But then before we have registered it, the mood darkens and the possibility of the joke vaporises, joining the mists that constantly hang overhead and dissipates while those below find life more troubling than they ever have. Across the water on the mainland the islanders are frequently shocked from their bucolic peace by the flashes and explosions of the civil war. Parable much? Well, why not? One character does point out the apparent absurdity that Irish are fighting Irish even after the English have buggered off. There's certainly a point in drawing the analogy, regardless of the lateness of the hour but this fable of despair digs further down than that. 

I read an article about troubled couples in which they came to a point when disgust turns up between them leading to irreconcilability. It was called the ick factor or moment. I can't remember which so I'll just call it the ick confabulatory progression toward contempt incident (or I would if that wasn't such torture to type). It sounds trivial to characterise a civil war as ick but scale it down to the personal and you can see without assistance, the break from acceptance of normality into a need for resistance and liberation. It carries a few problems: one is that once ick-ed no one recovers and get un-ick-ed and; contrarianism is a bullshit stance on anything and suggests an eventually meaningless protest. But that's the situation we have here, and I'll just suggest that if you've never been in a relationship that didn't at least approach the disgust of one for the other (regardless of whether it was acted upon or smoothed out before the danger point) then you probably lie convincingly to yourself. If you are a child, this kind of thing can be dismissed the next time you meet. By the time you are getting on and facing mortality you might well feel Colm's violent-minded erasure of the niceness of Padraic or Padraic's emptying bewilderment at finding it imposed.

Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell have worked together before in the wonderful In Bruges in which the former had to keep the latter out of trouble, a task that also led to a bleak despair. Here Gleeson's ungiving refusal plays increasingly disturbed until all we can see in his weighty silence is chaos. Farrell's Padraic gives us something like the seven stages of grief as we might express for those only on their eventual way to death. His brute beauty distorting into pain as his confidence in his own decency (he only ever goes as far as calling it niceness). Between them are the others on the island who variously seek an end to this disruption or nurture it. Padraic's sister Siobhan finds herself the sole voice of reason and healthy dissent for the situation's gravity. Kerry Condon's performance gives us someone fed up with insular life and its banshee like old women, corrupt cops, and nightmarish prying shopkeepers. Of course, she cares about her brother's troubles but is drawn to the mainland with its bombs, executions and street battles over this slowly collapsing rock life.

And that's where writer/director Martin McDonagh expertly helms us from our own potential despair at watching yet another epic of colourful yokel ways. We might start there but as the situation takes on water all that quirk takes its proper place as the idiom of dialogue. There are hard actions and bad results but none are the sudden left turns of poor film making. Everything that happens happens because these people are living in this situation. There is comedy as there always is with this film maker and he and his cast can flick it in and wipe it off with great deftness. If you were looking for a fun romp somewhere between Under Milk Wood and Whiskey Galore go back to those, this is a story of great human pain. That it is told with consummate skill and charm are actually incidental.