Review: BROKER

A woman leaves a baby outside an orphanage. It's wrapped in swaddling but the night is cold and wet. She has not used the pull out baby box in the wall. She leaves a note and flees the scene. She is being watched by two women police officers, one of whom puts the baby in the box where it is a lot safer, while the other follows the woman who left the infant. On the other side of this, and later, an employee of the orphanage and an older friend decide to sell the baby to a worthy couple and catch up with the mother to pay her the money. The mother, wracked by guilt returns to the orphanage the next day, sees what's going on and insists on tagging along to ensure the match is a good one. As the best buyer candidate is out of town this transaction turns into a road trip with those cops in pursuit and a local mafia murder investigation under way. The term road trip might have done it for most of you, of course everyone will get philosophical on the way and the hardest heart will soften and the most resistant spirit will grow. Are you right? Well, yes and no.

There is a scene toward the end that should be sculpted from the finest cheese. Two of these characters are on a Ferris Wheel. As they ascend, one of them waxes romantic with pledges of self sacrifice and acceptance while the other sadly absorbs. Then on the way back down to earth, the language is plainer and outlook more realistic as the consequences are talked over. But the scene's placing is perfect, the characters have developed so much, their friction tempered by having to think about the tiny life at the centre of the drama, the pressure surrounding them from the law, the mob and their own inadequacies. The high-minded pleas are more like full formed wishes, finished with a poet's eye for leanness. The return of earthly concerns as plain but no less poetic. It is essential that we know that the dreaming has been in earnest and is now something as tangible as the rail of the wheel's cabin, limiting but protecting.

This is a Kore-eda film. Hirokazu Kore-eda has been plugging away at cinema audiences with his natural feeling blends of warmth, humour and dark themes for decades. He has uprooted himself in this case from his native Japan to shoot in South Korea with a cast led by Parasite's Song Kang-ho and a small treasure trove of local acting prowess. He brings his pallet colliding pastels and candlelight, a spare orchestral score and an atmosphere that binds the many delicate stations of the story to each other. If you aren't familiar with Kore-eda's films, think Ken Loach but with a lot more heart.

Beginning as a modern urban fable about abandonment and responsibility Broker (Ha Sang-hyun and Dong-soo are cynically dubbed brokers by the returning mother) becomes an epic transformation through acceptance and belonging. But the shackles of the law and the tightly knotted ethical questions never get smoothed over. That they are expressed in what mostly sound like everyday conversation belies the craft applied to them. The child has a number of metaphorical hooks and lines in him from a sphere of influences, all of whom want him for widely varying motives and we are at no time permitted to forget the act that set this tale in motion and how it can never quite resolve. Each character has a take on what has happened and what might and that ranges from poignant to ugly and it reminded me of how Hieronymous Bosch's painting of Christ Carrying the Cross is composed of faces in space, crowding around the central figure, each bearing an individual expression from the snaggle toothed monk's glee to the peace of St Veronica holding her cloth with Christ's image. You don't have to be slightly religious (I'm not even slightly religious) to be slapped in the face by the picture and the power it derives from the multiplicity of characters. All you have to do is look. That's the way Kore-eda works, too.

THE CRAZIES @ 50

Two kids are playing in their house past their bedtime. The brother teases his sister in a cute callback to Night of the Living Dead but they both stop when they hear crashing from the kitchen. Cautiously, they approach and peep around the corner to see their father growling and destroying the shelves in a frenzy. The boy runs to his parents' room and tries to wake his mother who he finds murdered in her bed. The kids try to flee but not before they get caught in the fire their father has lit. 

The fire crew have never seen the like of it but soon similar incidents happen throughout the small Pennsylvanian town, people falling into sudden violent rages with lethal results. When the wife of one of the firefighters reports for duty at the hospital where she works as a nurse she finds it taken over by the army who are all wearing extreme hazard gear including gas masks. The town perimeter is closed and guarded. It gets worse: this is all happening because a military bioweapon leaked and got into the local population. As the army keep the line to the White House open, a B-52 is circling overhead with a nuclear payload, ready to render the area a memory.

Sounds like a nifty action thriller, doesn't it? Well, that doesn't carry a guarantee. George Romero whose redefined zombies changed that genre forever, can do his most effective work when he is pressed against the wall without a budget. He removed religion from the creation of zombies and left the resulting blank there as a troublingly unresolved puzzle. Later, he made a vampire movie about a boy who was condemned to live out eternity as a mixed up teenager. The rule is that when he is given a comfortable budget the originality wanes and he goes for things far more conventional. But even this rule has its exceptions and The Crazies is one. 

This arresting premise, plucked ripe from the time of a war or dirty weapons in Vietnam, corruption from the top with the Watergate scandal, and continued civil unrest, might have really fuelled something but Romero, atypically with meagre means, produced a dragging us and them story which features both parties trudging in circles for most of its hundred screen minutes. 

There are standout scenes and moments of poignant comment where bands of civilians charing on soldiers might equally be Crazies or just angry townfolk. The death of one character who in delusion welcomes the solders around her as angels before she is gunned down. There are skilful montages intercutting action with stock shots of military hardware mobilizing and, at its best, the film conveys the sense of an America run by its army as a nightmare worse than the director's own zombie hordes. As I saw this again I wondered if it wasn't just a lack in the drawing of the male characters. Romero would perfect this a few years later in Dawn of the Dead where the machismo was offered with depth and vulnerability which provided a roundness to the kind of pragmatic masculinity suggested in Night and Jack's Wife. Here it doesn't get the examination despite so much plodding in the pacing that might have been spent on development.

But this film's motion towards mediocrity cannot diminish it's creator's work even if it must skulk in the shadows of his achievements. It's frustrating to watch the promise of the stronger moments get stodged down with the dragging action of the main narrative. But Romero is a largely frustrating genre auteur. For every Dawn of the Dead or Martin there are annoying numbers of things like Creepshow, Bruiser, The Dark Half or most of the Dead films beyond Day. His power is inconsistent throughout his career timeline and the eloquence which he speaks of its markers will sound increasingly post factum the more a viewer investigates. David Cronenberg who was to emerge only two years after The Crazies did hold on to the dazzling concepts at the heart of his pioneering body horrors (and he would have made The Crazies a banger) which diminished only when he broke from this in a quest for the respectability of elevated themes. We don't like admitting it as Romero fans but his inconsistency is wide ranging and The Crazies just one of his movies that even big fans forget to mention. Well, to steal an early title for my own purposes, There's Always Vanilla. It's just that we like Rocky Road a lot better.

Review: PEARL

Pearl dances gracefully in the dark until her mother comes in and tells her to go and feed the animals. It's November 1918. There's war in Europe and pandemic everywhere. Sent to town to fetch more medicine for her paralysed father she sneaks in a movie (along with a dollop of Dad's liquid morphine) and gets a frame of the film from the hunky young projectionist who meets her in the alley. Soon after, she learns of auditions at the local church for dancers for a chorus line for America and her daydreams are now an action plan. Keep off that path of hers, you won't survive.

The story of how Pearl is the child of Ti West's 2021 horror X is a good one and worth your time finding it on YouTube. Short version goes that Mia Goth and West felt that an origin story for the character of Pearl was not only doable (with A24 bankrolling) but necessary. So, if you saw X and were turned off by the dodgy age-shaming of the old Pearl (played by Goth under trowels of makeup) there was an opportunity to really open something up. Well that's what they did and, in the process, made a much better movie than the original.

X is a perfectly decent contemporary slasher that makes canny nods to classic fare like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and bundling it up with the hive of concepts you get when you mix anything with pornography production. But where X is fuelled by cynicism as a film, in Pearl it's only occurant in the minds of individual characters. When, in a significant foreshadow of the first film, the projectionist gives Pearl a private showing of an early porno she watches wonderstruck. He tells her it's the future and there will come a time when the movies will show people for real. Her reply is that she doesn't like reality. It's a moment that puts her into bed with Norma Desmond and Norman Bates. From that instant Pearl's drive will be to make everything and everyone part of the movie she's living.

That movie is an odd one. She frolics for the barn animals as though they are the perfect audience. Her relationship with the local swamp alligator is straight out of the Disney princess playbook. She performs a romantic waltz scene with a nasty looking scarecrow (one of many Wizard of Oz callbacks). A strange encounter with a goose foreshadows a scene with her father that will have you on edge. Her audition for the chorus line judges takes us from observing her exaggerated silent movie moves to a grotesque setpiece that, while we know is in her imagination, takes us beyond any judgement of her skills. Her imagination is so powerful by that stage that we just sit back and marvel.

You might think this is a doddle when you know the actor wrote her own part but the writing is challenging. Pearl's neurological maelstrom is partially known to her but is mostly dominating and subjugating. If no one is looking she dances through her day as though performing it. When forced into dealing with the reality she is unimpressed by, she slumps into a twanging mundanity. And then there is the tour de force monologue in which she confesses all her deeds and feelings to her absent husband, going from a resentment at being constantly abandoned to thoughts and works of abject horror. The scene has a few cutaways to the character who is actually present but it is mostly a tight closeup on her face in what I would bet was a single take. Mia Goth transforms Pearl from a screeching child to a monster to something with a raw subservience that will give you the creeps. Of course she is writing to her strengths, anyone would, but they are real strengths.

There is a promised sequel to round the trilogy in which Goth will resume the other role in X as Maxine. If the quality surge between X and Pearl is any indication, I can't wait. But what a boon in this age of such high hit rates of genre cinema that can contain both a plotty Barbarian and plotless Skinamarink that something more conventional but also more organic can still be noticed. A case where the old curse of living in interesting times is processed into satisfaction.

Pearl is on general release in cinemas but it's still under the radar so might need some digging to find it showing near you. Please do.

1983@40: THE BIG CHILL

A group of old friends gather for the funeral. They're there for Alex, the hero of the group whose act of defiance against the establishment meant that he chose freedom against the rat race. That was in the days of rising activism on campus in the mighty '60s. This burial is in the '80s when all the friends have moved on, compelled by the cold world to abandon their ideals and find ways of living. But Alex's ghost still haunts them and he remains the central figure of the story beyond the grave: the friends measure themselves and each other by the ideals he is seen to have embodied and might well have died with him. But how real was the stance?

This eulogy for boomer idealism is to test it against the hard fact of Alex's suicide. The title sequence is a montage of the friends travelling to the funeral while a body is being dressed for the coffin. There's a strange slyness to this. At first we see trousers pulled over legs, neckties fastened as though the person is dressing himself. A few shots later we understand that it is a corpse and the last shot in the sequence is of a shirt cuff being pulled over three stitched slashes on the wrist. Over this is played Marvin Gaye's magnificent version of Heard it Through the Grapevine which adds a solemn and spooky ambience to visuals that are often cheeky or humorous. I said it was strange.

As we meet them at the funeral service we get used to dialogue packed with one-liners from a small number of sharp minded thirty-somethings and a sense of how far they have diverged from their glory days in the good fight. Meg the lawyer quit legal-aid to represent corporate interests as "they were only raping the land". Karen who could never make up her mind about Nick or Sam landed in a flavourless marriage to a man she would have called square at twenty. Hunky Sam got into acting and is now a TV star in a Magnum PI style show. Nick, the druggy one, now deals and the beaten up state of his Porsche speaks volumes. Michael ditched his great American novel to write articles that have to be no longer "than it takes your average person to take the average crap." Harold and Sarah got married. He's in business (a shoe shop called Running Dog!) and she's a doctor. The house everyone's staying at is theirs and its big enough to accommodate them all. 

Care was taken to prevent this becoming a kind of pageant of sins or virtues, taking more the flow of the differences wrought by the decade between the '60s and the '80s. Nixon then but Reagan now, from the MC5 to Billy Joel (American mainstream culture always felt awkward around punk), from Easy Rider to Kramer vs Kramer, some progress and some stagnation. When Michael who struggles with the reality of his aging complains about the oldies Harold keeps putting on the turntable he gets rebuffed immediately. They all still dig the big football game and play in the yard at half time and the old days anecdotes flow as freely as the Chardonay, but this is not a story about old cronies singing the great numbers, it's a story about the effects of enforced self-reflection. All of these people have grown accustomed to their choices and are happy enough until wrenched out of their tanks and exposed. The results of this and their flow on effects form the drivers of the narrative.

The one character I haven't mentioned yet is Chloe. Chloe is the twenty something girlfriend of Alex. She's more hippy dippy than you'd expect if you were stereotyping an early '80s kid but her attraction to Alex makes more sense if she's like that. While Meg Tilly's committed performance takes the character into the kind of spacey entitlement more typical of characterisations of millennials if provides a strong push back to all the nostalgia guilt around her. She is at the other end of Alex's pendulum, a sprite of the current day, unweighed by sentimentality, and it is she who delivers the truth in a single line that unravels the idolatry of Alex practiced by the others. She provides the point of departure by which they must stay or fly free. The results are sobering. 

On nostalgia, one of the features of this film that got people talking as much as the story and performances is the needle drop score. Late '60s hits burst out of the speakers like a golden oldies station. They might set a scene, garnish a montage, render a line of dialogue ironic; it is one of the most energetic and hard working examples of a trope begun in the '60s with the likes of Easy Rider. From The Stones requiem for the decade You Can't Always Get Want You Want at the funeral, to the Temptations' Aint Too Proud to Beg over the washing up scene that was copied in everything in the '80s from feature films to softdrink commercials, every song is chosen for lyrical content, tone, mood etc in a way that both points to the sentimentality and indulges in it. There's even a cover version in the prologue scene as Harold and Sarah's toddler is singing a Three Dog Night song in the bath. It works so well in this film that it dominated mainstream cinema for over a decade.

The cast includes names that came to dominate the '80s and in some cases go well beyond them. Glen Close brings her intimidating Earth Mother powers. Kevin Kline charms the way he would in everything, playing a polished version of himself. William Hurt's Nick travels the largest arc from directionless but loveable neerdowell to Alex's effective replacement. Tom Berenger could not have been better cast as Sam, the Tom Selleck style TV hero who, here, has a ball undercutting the Hollywood overconfidence when Sam finds himself overwhelmed by the words and deeds of everyday people. Jeff Goldblum is having a ball as the constantly horny Michael with the million deadpan quips (as well he might as that's exactly how he's been acting ever since). As noted previously, Meg Tilly as Chloe seems to have fallen from the ether as the razorsharp naif. She would continue to be cast as wide-eyed psychos for the balance of her career. The most central character of Alex was cast and included in scenes, played by a young Kevin Costner. All we see of him is the corpse being dressed at the beginning (which doesn't include a single shot of his face). Writer/director Lawrence Kasdan has wisely never released Costner's scenes as extras nor included them in any altered cut of the film, knowing to leave well enough alone. Here's to him.

This was a credible hit on release but I first really knew it as a peculiarly localised cult film. When I moved down to Melbourne from Brisbane my flatmate (and uni friend) moved among student politics circles and one house among them played this movie like a favourite album and could quote it line by line. It was like a pastel toned Rocky Horror Picture Show interactive screening except it was on VHS. It wasn't hard to see the appeal. This was the mid '80s and the last big push of student activism in Australia before Universities became harder to go to and increasingly squeezed out any but the most career orientated courses, producing a kind of sausage factory of corporate fast talking goofballs (can you guess my politics?) and these lawyers, doctors and senators to be were looking down the barrel of their own thirties (never mind middle age) and silently vowing never to turn out like that. The big idealist of the story is, after all, being suited up for a funeral at the beginning. 

Should this be attempted for generations beyond? A Gen X one to carry on directly from this which would cede the floor to a millennial one etc? I wonder if the principles would be all that different to warrant it? I'm trying to think of a cute kitchen scene in the early '80s with Throbbing Gristle's Slug Bait bashing out of the sound system. Yeah, bad idea.

I am now of an age I cold not imagine being when I was a twenty year old university student. While it was and is a chore to imagine the angst of '60s warriors growing into their sellout lives, it's not hard to care for them. I still feel the problem here of the movie itself suggesting that lifelong care about politics, environment and anything that fires up youth must inevitably be discarded as youthful naivete. I don't think the film is forcing that read but it is there for the reading. Indulging in some black and white thinking, I can't see an alternative involving these people suddenly taking up the old banners after the revelations of this weekend. Their responses are subtle and, realistically, not of even effect.

Few I knew from my student days have done what they dreamed of. Almost none, self included. By the same token I don't know of any who have changed their politics in the way these characters did. If anything, I stand further left of the leftism that I started developing while at university and don't expect to change that at all for the remainder of my years. So, it's not a feat to forgive these characters in a fiction for lives reversed for the purposes of growing up and keeping the chill out. However, I still want to throttle some of them at least for apologies that involve disowning their ideals. I know, it's fiction and it just works better if they do that but, crikey, those ideals aren't like old lego, they can help you make the good choices. So, ok, maybe The Big Chill does have more to say to us now than it did to its lightly aged boomers in the first place. For that, I'll rate it. And it's fun.

DARK CITY @ 25

A man wakes in the bath of his digs with a punctured forehead and the corpse of a girl by the bed. Spirals have been carved into her torso. He can't recall his name but, as he's skipping out on his rent, the concierge reminds him his rent's due and he can pick up his wallet at the laundromat. Ah ha, ID. Fast. News of the killer of sex workers is on the front page everywhere he looks. A wonky-eyed doctor with a breathy way of talking tries to catch up with him. Oh, and there's a gang of bloodlessly white tough guys on his tail, as well. They belong to a whole invasion force who gather in a cave and order the city to rearrange itself which it does, as buildings change shape or corkscrew up out of the earth. When they say the city changes after midnight they mean it. So is our guy a killer? He is finding that he has a kind psycho kinesis but doesn't know if he can control it. That wonky doctor is not going to let up and now there's a melancholic detective on his case, as well. Gonna be a long night.

Alex Proyas' Bakelite-punk tale came four years after his heavily enjoyable The Crow and eleven after his post-apocalyptic fantasy Spirits of the Air: Gremlins of the Clouds and, despite the time gaps between them there is a clearly discernible lineage. The gaps can also be credibly filled with the music videos he made in the '80s and '90s. No slouch with the power of hard-edged imagery and some eager learning from German and Soviet early cinema, he dishes up some of the tastiest noir-horror-industrialist sets and machinery that anyone could serve. The extra trick is that he's working with a script that means something and a cast that makes that mean something. And all this movie had to do was stand there and look pretty.

But Dark City has a point and carries it to the end. If you look at it now and it reminds you of the world building of Blade Runner or the grimy darkness of The Element of Crime, you might think it's either too much of its time or way behind it. However, for all the '80s post punk exuberance, the noirishness is settled faithfully and the mix with what might be an alien overlord subplot establish between them a solid setting. Like all that black the post-punks wore, this goes with anything. Jennifer Connelly's nightclub singer covering a Dean Martin standard has a very musique du jour feel by nudging at trip hop. William Hurt's Inspector with his triggering accordion clue us (and him) in to the possibilities of what is really going on with time and memory. And, though I didn't try it, as rich as the colour pallet is (at the darker end of the spectrum but still rich) it probably looks as good in black and white.

As for being late to the speculative fiction shindig, Dark City actually works better as a predecessor to The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor and so on which would follow straight after. Those fables of the dangers of online life pour directly from this vessel, whatever else their derivations. Dark City is about memory and its power in giving us place and purpose and the possibility that our memory is threatened by culture that for all its apparent chaos moves, like all culture, into homogeneity. You're welcome to your own memories as long as they fit the rest of us. Also, it begins with the same premise as Hal Hartley's failed attempt in Amateur (are you still a bad guy if you can't remember that you're a bad guy) which might have scotched the theme forever. This is a fine repair job.

I should point out here that I chose the director's cut over the theatrical as I hadn't seen it before. While that does compromise the @25 status of this blog entry I can report that this is a director's cut that only goes for about ten minutes over the original length and clarifies and improves pacing by extending some scenes (including the haste of the finale which robbed it of power) and erasing the over-opening narration which undercuts the superb twisty reveal in the middle act.

Young and chiselled Rufus Sewell leads us through the memory maze solidly with a blend of fear and wonderment constantly trading time on his face. Jennifer Connelly, now grown up from her childhood roles, gives us the squeaky voiced gravity that would serve her through a few big-roled years (Requiem for a Dream and The House of Sand and Fog), Kiefer Sutherland's intensity and limit on five syllables per line before a new breath delivers a variable urgency, William Hurt plays his '80s feeling new agey bloke with a little extra noir, and Richard O'Brien happily dresses Riff Raff up in Jack the Ripper black. It's a good cast.

This film is a marker in my own memory. I recall how long it seemed to take to get a release even though it was in the first half of the year. The trailer, with its wall to wall richness was enticing and I was happy if it turned out to be style over substance. That trailer was also the reason for a brief embarrassment at my then new job as I clicked on it and it blasted my computer speakers until I scrambled around for the pause button. I claimed tech-savviness at the time and still tell myself I got away with it. But that figures into it as, with a new full time career job that I liked I felt like I'd got a break that was going smoothly and a good stylish slice of culture would serve as a fine treat. We piled into town and went to whichever one of the two cinema chain venues that wasn't showing it and then ran to the right one, sat back and luxuriated. Afterwards, we couldn't stop talking about it and went to Del Whatsis on Brunswick St and kept yapping. I was into liqueurs at the time and had a few Fra Angelicos. There was something distinct playing on the sound system which we asked about. I bought the Air album the next working day.

It is still their best record and Dark City is still Alex Proyas' best film. Air went on to make a series of success-drunk blandings (though I'll except the Virgin Suicides score which was dreamy). Proyas has gone on to more music videos, other features and makes a living. Straight after Dark City, his fable of fame at the edges Garage Days, might have been saved by its genuinely funny climactic joke if it hadn't been so embarrassingly bad for the rest of it. But we'll always have Paris, or Shell Beach, or whatever we'll always have, and this, even if it does lack a little roundness and plot-knot-tying, is one for the timeline.

Review: SCREAM VI

A young woman waits for her app date at the bar of a restaurant. He's late but he texts her about it and then she calls. He can't quite make it. Keeping the call going she goes to investigate. This is a Scream movie. What do you think happens? After an extended and-service-heavy prologue we join the gang from the previous entry (called Scream in convention with other requels like Halloween and Texas Chainsaw except that it was really a sequel and .....). Right, so everyone's now at uni and having fun at parties and studying when they can and then Ghostface drops by and mayhem.

Where there are plenty of cute moments in earnest slashers from the '80s that do it, 1996's Scream was the one that consolidated the notion that the teen victims of slasher movies might be more than literate in those teen-targeted movies. Scream and all the sequels that sailed in her have made a point of this. This time we get a mega meta lecture about franchises that also serves as a count-keeping scene on who is and isn't suspect. It's so peppy and energetic that it means that we had better be in for something exactly like the character is describing or we'll have a deflating failed attempt at cute. So, how'd we go?

The characters are drawn knowing the audience knows that they were struck from stock. They are, however, well written and well cast and benefit from their appearances in the previous entry. From Courtney Cox to Jenna Ortega we get a good spread of lineage and everyone does enough more to lift their characters a notch over Victim-in-Alley. This needs to be the case because they are representing their team in cinema history.

The Scream franchise has fared better than most in reception and reappraisal. It was one of Wes Craven's numerous game-changers and worked because it blended black comedy with genuine suspense and violence so deftly that it usually gets left off lists of horror-comedies that work and placed in the legit slasher column. That means new entries have to do both as well and as well. So Scream II had a scene where a class of kids talk about sequels and so on until this one's big thing about franchises and why they figure and scenes and dialogue which seriously blur the worlds of Scream and Stab (the film series within Scream). This later supplies the film's funniest line.

But self-reflexivity can only go so far in making one of these. There are a lot of Scream fans to serve and they are well assumed to get someone with an Argento title on his T-shirt (in Italian) and the depiction of cast members from Scream movies appear as exhibits in the museum of Stab until the whole film feels like it's going to implode unless someone bounds in with a hunting knife. Well, that keeps happening. And the cute keeps happening. It's a clever wink to have Samara Weaving as the prologue girl speak in her normal Australian accent as she really might not be around the whole time and there won't need to be a single line of dialogue to explain why she isn't American. Later, in a train filled with people decked out for Halloween we see someone dressed as her armed bride from Ready or Not (speaking of fun horror-comedies).

Now that I've mentioned that scene, it's worth pondering where VI falters. The trailer for the movie was a boil-down of the subway sequence and was white knuckle tense. The scene itself is superbly staged but suffers from anti-climax. The suspense in an early scene that mixes pursuit by Ghostface and a shaky ladder is sweatingly tight. Then, in a crowded subway carriage filled with people who look like they are from real horror movies (including many Ghostfaces and a nice Midsommar reference) and flickering light, the action seems curiously subdued. It lifts, and well, but most of it has felt like waiting rather than tension. The talky confession scene (not a spoiler, they're at the end of every one) feels like it goes forever and only when the action starts again and we freely acknowledge (silently, of course, in the cinema) that we didn't care at all about most of the details that the cast deliver with near-pantomime glee.

But then the action bursts back in and we remember why we like Scream movies. It made me think two things: yeah, but it's still not the first one, and, I only think that because I saw the first one fresh, before it had any sequels so its impression is never likely to be eclipsed by a sequel. For people as young as most of the cast (and intended audience) Scream VI is another tile in the streaming service screen that might as well be episodes of a brand-produced show. If you binged all the Screams you'd finish this one happily enough (happier, I'd bet, than if you went through all the Friday the 13ths or Halloweens). As the default position for these movies is heightened (I don't mean elevated!) thrillers, all they have to do is deliver. It's easy to forget that among the references that so pleased those of us who saw the first one first. But Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson (who wrote that and so much else in the '90s self-reflexive teen horror of the time) were not hacks but master crafters of their corner of the genre. So, rather than ask if this is as good as the first we might more helpfully wonder if it at least ticks the boxes. Given the smarts of the franchise that means a world more than usual. Wink!

Review: A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR

Millicent is taking a break from her tertiary studies to gain some work experience and let her therapy catch up with her trauma. Orphaned early in life she has grown up through the foster system which she tells her therapist was about nice women and men who might as well have been the same one. Under supervision, she microdoses on LSD which seems to get her through the days, showing an acceptable front (though she does have some heavily sexual hallucinations on a daily basis). She gets a job nannying a boy whose play astronaut suit is only slightly removed from the crazy rollcall of allergies he is alleged to have. While he is self-enclosed and chooses not to speak he can write and draw. His mother has gone through a lot of nannies who have failed her. Her husband is a hunky carpenter. Millicent gets the gig and makes a lot of progress with young Johnny and every day returns home to her current foster father who all but drools over her. Where's that industrial strength acid?

Once established, the atmosphere of this dark tale gets thick and stays that way until the credit roll. It takes its time and takes pains to let you know that you will not be expected to empathise with any of the characters you will encounter, including the protagonist. This is a deliberate choice on the part of writer Leah Saint Marie and director Mercedes Bryce Morgan. They want to keep their audiences engaged at a distance, witnesses to a life where the sexual pulses louder than heartbeats and when someone gets paranoid about others' motivations along those lines they might well be bang on.

This is a world of polished oak panelling, magic hour light through windows and rainy day exteriors, a kind of X-Files episode of Autumn temperatures and growling horror movie scoring. While that might sound appealing it is at odds with the development of a story that involves no chance to feel for anyone you meet in it. If you think Johnny's biting and scratching and screaming are like the horror of a child at the sight of the ways of the world the way they were in Oskar Mazerath's Nazi Germany in The Tin Drum, his violence feels more feral than self defensive. I'd argue that this, too, is intentional. The problem is that if you are going to have a crack at subverting the expectations of a thriller you'd better have a payoff that says something you care about. That's where this beautifully produced and performed piece flunks. It's not that we are easy with the conclusions we come to it's more that they might as well have happened.

Is it Morgan Saylor's fault that she overacts until what charisma she began with has eroded buy the middle act? Is Kat Foster starting on 10 as the crazy jealous mother, telescoping the rest of the film, too richly baked? It's writing and direction that fail to provide the texture that might make us doubt our own judgement and shift our loyalties that prevent us from staying on our side of the cordon. Pity.

Currently on Shudder.

HENRY FOOL @ 25

Garbage worker Simon Grim doesn't think much about his place in the universe. He does think, though, and when dark stranger Henry Fool comes into his life, moving unopposed into the basement of Simon's family home, those thoughts are stirred and he is guided to write them down in a pad. When Henry reads it he is stunned by the power of it and promotes it by every means he has (posting it at the local shop, putting it into the student magazine of a local high school and finally sending it to a publisher that Henry knows personally. 

Meanwhile life in the Grim house gets busy and steamy with restless Fay bringing home loser after loser to her bed until Henry's appearance consumes her. First resisting his rough hewn charm she falls for his charismatic force. Outside the house, local bullyboy Warren, after continual attempts at humiliating the heavily withdrawn Simon gets roped into activism for an ultra right political figure which mindset makes its sinuous way into a third act plot point (no spoilers) but is for the moment both funny and pathetic. This and further plot threads appear and entwine until the finale which, typical of the film's writer/director, is fraught and moving.

At the end of the '90s Hal Hartley was in a strange position. Having begun the decade with celebrated arthouse hits like The Unbelievable Truth and the breakthrough Trust. Quirky characters, deadpan humour with sharp one-liners and whimsical plot turns, his style was instantly recognisable and beloved. Then, having established himself with three features of equal quality he turned sharply with the messy Amateur (a kind of action film that also wanted to be cute) and the impenetrable Flirt (an anthology with every story beginning with the same dialogue).

With brash new kid on the block Quentin Tarrantino taking the breath out of almost everyone else on the indy circuit on one side and the emergence of beloved merchant of the prissy side of quirk Wes Anderson coming up on the other, Hartley would have felt both eclipsed and pushed out of his own niche. He could go on churning them out for the fanbase or change. When he changed the word of mouth turned sour. This choice appears to any artist with a clear style. There were jokes on sitcoms when Harry Connick Jr switched from old timey swing to funk.

Hartley never quite recovered from that lapse but when he returned to an old project in the late '90s he found a way to return to his glory style in older and wiser form. Henry Fool is his longest film but it also feels like his deepest. There are still brittle and quirky moments but these are delivered more smoothly than the flat toned quips of Trust etc. Most of the wit is kept to the title character rather than have most of the cast deliver on the droll which feels truer to life. There is a more deft use of rhythm and balance that allows Simon and Fay what feels like equal time on a screen dominated by Henry.

Hartley made a astute decision to avoid revealing Simon's poetry and Henry's extended written confession. It is almost always a mistake to show things like this. Woody Allen has frequently shown intellectuals whose tiresome cynicism or naïve philosophy renders them into levitated dunces. Max's overstaged theatrical productions in Rushmore only ever look like bullshit. On the other side, the paintings everyone is wowed by in the small but beautiful '80s indy I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing, are shown as squares of bright light. If we don't see the greatness we are free to imagine it unable to judge it which is best because it is never the point. Henry's poetry (he writes unconsciously in iambic pentameter) is variously deemed scatological, obscene as well as brilliant. That the sleazy publisher who at first humiliates Henry for a complete lack of talent swings on his heel as soon as he sees money in it. None of that can happen if the film would have to do a lot of work justifying writing that we might inevitably judge mediocre. A major theme throughout the film is the indisputability of taste served beautifully by this decision.

The power of Simon's verse gives Henry an opportunity to redeem a life of trouble. This last is like the poetry in that we get to know very little of it, have little faith that it might not just be Henry's fantasy about himself. But some of the things we do learn that no one would boast of are very dark. Henry's prose in counterpoint to Simon's poetry is deemed uninspired and unpublishable. This of course troubles him about what he presents as his life's work but he rises beyond the pride of that to recognise and promote Simon's writing. This leads to a third act action which by the time it happens doesn't surprise us about a character who might well have missed the mark and fallen into our disfavour as a self-important windbag. His genuinely funny spelling lesson on the uses of there/their/they're at the piano tells us both of the rawness of Simon's talent and genuineness of Henry's humility. The balance is beguiling.

Fay Grim with her self-punishing life uses Henry's entrance into her life as an opportunity to claim some form to it. Until then (and this is her doing it, not Henry guiding her) she had the example of her atrophying mother whose dressing gown days are kept quiet under a fog of prescription drugs and can now only screech against whatever the world puts before her. Her arc is one of the most eventful and meaningful of all the characters. Played by the then queen of indy Parker Posey, she injects a fragile strength in contrast to the male double act at the centre.

Thomas Jay Ryan was recruited well after the character was created but arrived as a perfect fit. Hairy, ursine, and frowningly intelligent, Ryan delivers words like "trouble" as though he's remembering the best sex he's ever had. He would later play Satan the exact same way in Hartley's millennial The Book of Life, by which time it felt cloying but here the match of actor to character gives the movie most of its memorability. In cast of players he's the sax that turns everything into a solo.

Preventing that from becoming fulsome is James Urbaniak's Simon. A thanklessly withdrawn performance that the film needs to keep things earthbound between Ryan and Posey. His idiot savant character won't raise a finger in his own defence. Even his own body revolts against this when, at a point of sickening bullying it does the talking for him. Hartley writes him a little too inconsistently with some outbursts feeling out of scope and has him understand a Latin saw and argue beyond his supposed level at times. Urbaniak smooths this with an impatient anger and it feels like an actor's call. As with Ryan this was his feature film debut.

Henry Fool was both a return to form for Hartley and a progression. Two flops with the arthouse crowd can kill the darlingest of auteurs but Henry Fool cut the spikes of the quirk and added a lot of warmth the earlier films lacked. He also quite nakedly examined his own relationship with creative success and how it affects everyone within touching distance. Hartley would return to the story twice more in Fay Grim and Ned Rifle, extending threads of two characters and still centring on Ryan's character and persona. They are both worth a view if you liked Henry Fool and don't feel like cash-ins but they don't approach the indy epic might of Hartley's most mature film. You'll thrill to the dizzying speed and feeling of Trust but Henry (both the film and the character) will make you think ... for longer.

Review: EMILY THE CRIMINAL

Emily can't get a break. Compressed by a massive student loan she fails to get anything like the job she's qualified for (graphic design) because of an assault charge in her history which rises to the surface at every job interview. Her friend who did break through tries but fails to help her. Her catering job will take her nowhere further than staving off the interest of the loan. When a co worker gives her the number to call she takes it up, knowing it will be illegal. How illegal? Credit card fraud on an industrial scale. The first taste is easy. It will be followed by jobs with higher payouts and greater risks with worse possible outcomes. Hey, beats working.

This fable of desperation and risk-thrill doesn't let up for many breaths, pausing only to allow the central characters a little growth to allow us to care or at least understand their bad choices. The title doesn't just refer to Emily's life of crime as a fraudster but points to the difficulties of having that blot on your life story that blocks you from easy access to the mainstream world to get a foothold on a life-build. In Emily's case it's a minor assault charge but it could be a state premier's bad call when young in dressing up in nazi gear for a party (not that kind of party) or anything that can rise up to the surface and bite. She's considered a criminal before she can get that one job that might begin to turn the economic prison key.

This is why we have little trouble watching her envelope herself in that most detested of crimes, scamming. Instead of disgust we feel fascination at the process, the thinking and the everyday actions of the carriage. Once established, she looks less awkward beside her successful friend at parties but springs back when the means she has built is under attack. This will lead to an action that will either shock us or have us nodding: is it a surrender to criminality or grasping control?

This is made workable by the casting of Aubrey Plaza. Plaza has long shaken the deadpan awkwardness schtick that got her noticed on Parks and Recreation and, even though that still pursues her, has proved time and again to be a strong lead with depth. I first noticed this in Ingrid Goes West. The movie is a dark and aching satire on loneliness and social media but the poster winks out a message of quirky comedy; she was still being sold as April from Parks and Rec. If nothing shook that properly before this one has a fighting chance. Plaza has reached in and found grit and grimness to add to the quirk she was given to fill (and had already broken with real pathos in Ingrid).

This was a MIFF pick that I decided against as I assumed it would get a cinema release on Plaza's name alone. I watched it on Netflix. I passed as I looked at the casting and the synopsis and thought it was probably a quirky indy rather than the tough crime tale it is, which was me doing the same thing as the Ingrid Goes West poster. but then I did see Dual which proved to be the opposite case ... almost. This is less a revelation than, say, Adam Sandler was in Punch Drunk Love as Plaza has already jettisoned the cuteness in her film roles (if you YouTube her she still plays up to the old persona in interviews but by now it just looks like self-protection). No, it's more like proof of concept, a clear indication of a career to come. If I'm right, I'm in the queue.

Emily the Criminal is currently streaming on Netflix.

Review: TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

Young successful models go off on a luxury yacht cruise to find themselves in a purgatorial nightmare in which rich people are surprisingly proved to be self-entitled monsters. Will they get their just desserts? Almost literally and yes, of course.

This is a Ruben Ostlund film and it's a satire and it does not let you forget either of those things as it goes from setpiece to setpiece driven by a very few ideas and repeats them until you are well past the point where you have got it. Then you just have to live through the screen time, mentally checking your watch as it just goes on. Without spoilers I will say that the third part (there's no real act structure) actually lifts the game and plays like a well constructed black comedy and all but leaves the puerility of the approach behind.

Ostlund began his feature film career with Play, a frustration story of teenagers being bullied into a kind of abduction nightmare. It was heavily influenced by Michael Hanneke's audience-abusing bleakness, owing particularly to that director's Funny Games. Despite that, it did work and presented a serious pass at social commentary with a punch. Since then Ostlund discovered satire and stayed within it, liking it so much that his films' running times have just kept stretching. In the cast of Triangle of Sadness you feel the stretch without the benefit of the exercise.

Here's a cause of that: Ostlund puts something intentionally annoying into the background which frustrates the audience, the characters or both. He likes doing that so much that it becomes as predictable a feature as an unearned jumpscare in a James Wan film. As Carl and Yaya are arguing in the taxi there is a loud scrubbing noise from the windscreen wipers. Later at the hotel when the argument resumes, it's Carl preventing the lift door from closing. Toward the end it's a bashing sound from an undisclosed source that keeps interrupting a couple having sex. There are more and the thought is inevitable that if he'd kept it to just one of those instances it would be recalled as astute, a keen observation of the way the things of real life can interrupt us at our most serious. But he didn't restrain himself and just keeps using it. It goes from an effective use of elements to a tiresome replayed joke.

The Captain's dinner scene is an elongated debasement in which the elite passengers are overcome with nausea from stormy weather and diarrhoea from the food (spoiled by a clunking joke about a passenger's whim). All the rich people in their finery vomit into gtheir dinnerplates or on each other or simultaneously vomit and splat out their running faeces into overflowing toilets and so on and so on and so on and so on .... Hey, I guess that for all the heights they've scaled above the common folk they really are still people. If you've seen the Mr Creosote sketch in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life you already seen this done in far more punchy fashion where it really did look like dark absurdism rather than a child swearing to get shocked reactions out of grownups.

And then we get the final phase which plays out like a move that you'd care about. And earlier on there's a scene where the cruise manager leads a pep session for the serving crew which turns into a genuinely funny chant and dance number. The opening scene is a models' cattle call as a room filled with beautiful young men is organised before their going into individual auditions and then being put through exercises. Until the childish end of that scene where they're instructed to smile and frown in rapid alternation (which would only be funny if it related to anything from real experience) it is an impressively well managed crowd scene. Ostlund really can make movies when he wants.

There are some directors who grow out of their youthful impulses or develop them into genuinely useful tools of cinema. Ostlund reminds me of film makers like Wes Anderson who seems to have taken the indulgence granted him by fans to keep churning out the same tropes that scream, "see? it's me!" I don't give Ostlund a break the way I do to Ken Russell who went way over the top in the '70s with his proofs that classical composers were just like modern rockstars or that gutter comedy could mix with sophistication. Russell always had a point beyond the shock and managed to finish it and present it as value for his audiences. Ostlund by comparison feels around the same chord sequence, looking for a strong pattern or rhythm only to abandon it before doing the same with the next. And now and then he'll play something inspired and masterful. Triangle of Sadness is so heavily weighed toward the formless noodling that it's as if he keeps everything in while his films run hours longer than they should for what always feels like a slight reward. After that you just feel like finding a favourite song and blasting it into your ears until you forget the one you've just been played.