EYES WIDE SHUT @ 25

Well-heeled Manhattanite couple Bill and Alice go to a Christmas party thrown by their uber one-percenter friend Victor and there, in the boozy, soft light wooze, both are sexually tempted but both decline. Afterwards, sharing a post party joint, they get into an argument about potential infidelity which ends in Alice confessing that she was struck by the sight of a naval officer at a recent holiday they'd been on. Not just struck but after a single glance from him, she says she was ready to abandon her marriage for the stranger. Bill is so slammed by this that he sets off into the night looking for an opportunity to slake his jealousy by any means possible and ends up infiltrating a secret orgy of the great and famous where his life is threatened. He is saved by an interloper whose fate appears dreadfully sealed. Freed, he flees, determined to discover what happened.

Stanley Kubrick was by the time of this film's completion producing so few new films that each was given greater hype than the previous on their approach. Among the rumours sticking to this one was that it was a box office time server before the one he really wanted to make, A.I. Such rumours served to diminish Eyes Wide Shut as a secondary work made to finance a primary one. However, Kubrick had wanted to make an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (Dream-Story) since the 1960s. It had gone through many different imaginings and castings until finally made in the 1990s. It was a primary work that Kubrick was highly pleased with. 

On the ground around me, people who professed to be lifelong fans of the director mostly expressed distaste for the movie, often exaggerating the lameness of the hyped orgy scene and considering the film a waste or their time as well as the effort it took to make. I was reminded of a lot of backlashes previously, against all kinds of things, other movies, music artists' new albums, novels and so on: Kubrick didn't make the movie they wanted so whatever this one was was angrily flushed. For my part I had been unconvinced of Kubrick's unquestioned genius but had seen something in this last one that fascinated me. To this day, I consider it one of his best and most rewatchable. This is not, I swear, my own contrariness, the film's themes of responses to jealousy feel hauntingly genuine to me, heightened by the high sheen of the visuals and gravity of the music. If I had to choose, I'd rather have this than Lolita, Barry Lyndon, or Full Metal Jacket.

Why? Well, expanding on my reason given just then, I think it's one of the most accurate treatments of sexual jealousy committed to screen. Not only does it hit the disproportionate responses between the couple but neither consummates their extra marital desire. It plays and feels more like a fable than the erotic thriller it's often touted to be.  Alice, however drunk she is, resists the charms of the Hungarian lecher at the party. Bill seems on the edge of following the two models who appear like a masturbatory fantasy from the golden light of the glitz. The couple's post-event discussion about each other's moments of temptation leads to the argument and Alice's confession. That confession, while it still haunts Alice, becomes a motif for Bill, recurring throughout his adulterous trek in a series of black and white vignettes, a scene that never happened for real but is what he imagines his wife imagined and desired. He is revenging himself against a passing thought (a resonant one but still just a thought). 

I don't think that this expresses male jealousy vs female, just the likelihood of a lack of balance between people intimately involved. This story invites you to revisit the often brutal ugliness of a moment of your own jealousy and, honest viewers who were more interested in what the film before them asked of them than in what temporary approval they might find by trashing the movie in front of others, will take away a confronting candour.

Is the orgy scene lame? Compare it to the New French Extremity and the daunting boundary pushing of erotic thrillers since and, sure, it seems very slight for the participants to care too much who knew about it. That point is better expressed in the conversation Bill has toward the end with Zigler which is more about class exclusion. The suggestion that any given modern city might be by powerful narcissists might not be news to anyone but the thought of it, when given a second or two, remains a shivery horror. As to Bill, wandering the rainbow coloured sets of a very clean Greenwich Village crawling with dirty minds, he for the moment can only see opportunities that he feels the force of his will alone bestow entitlements upon him. It's as powerful an allegory for the concentration of sexual arousal as any.

While the casting of the two leads had changed greatly over the decades as Kubrick returned to the thought of this adaptation, he really knocked it out of the park by choosing alpha celebrity couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Young, talented and beautiful, Cruise and Kidman were on screens as much as they were on the covers of celebrity mags at supermarket checkouts. They were characterised as a power couple without controversy. The opening scene depicting the pair getting ready to go to the party feels completely natural and, once established, we feel we are in the company of people we know at the same time as unreachable movie stars. Cruise plays up to his walking grin persona but is also put through such strain that this appears increasingly shallow. Kidman speaks mostly in hushed tones with elongated vowels takes Alice to a point of unquestionable authority. The film's final line is hers and she delivers it with the quiet but abrupt confidence that the whole film has begged: "fuck!"

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT @ 25

Heather, Josh and Mike, three film students head out to the country to win big in their coursework by making a documentary about a local legend. Picking up some local intel and colour with some interviews about the Blair witch and mass murderer Rustin Parr, they shoot some introductory footage in the town and then head into the woods for some more folkloric landmarks. The woods are a bigger deal than they expected and they are soon disorientated with night encroaching. "This is America," say Heather, "how lost can you actually be?" The implicit answer from the woods is, "hold my beer".

So begins the cultural moment that resounds these decades on and will only continue. Yes, the film makers really only planned on making a nifty little campfire tale that might light up a few festival screens and maybe have an afterlife on VHS. The formula is still applied; make a low budge horror and kick the door down to a film career. After Blair Witch, though, the starting point could be a lot closer to the earth. The technology that was less than a decade away used it as a source point. 

I have a clear memory of  a post to the newsgroup alt.horror in 1999 where I first saw this title. It was from someone who had been creeped out by the trailer. Just a post among many (it's probably still there) but, while we ol' stagers were used to thinly veiled spam, this just read as normal. Everyone who stopped by it in the feed searched for the title and found the trailer (pre-YouTube and embedding links). And we all brought back our impressions to the newsgroup as trusted posters. And we mentioned it to anyone we could interest. When the website appeared with its images of film cans as menu links and limited though excitingly usable video, it looked like the slick end of urban myth creation.

There is a persistent idea that the Haxan Films team designed the proto-viral campaign through their own punky resourcefulness but the real story is far more satisfying. There are millions of words written about the circumstances of this film's marketing alone and it gets too intricate for me to detail here but a summary should do. After the groundswell of whispers, electronic and actual, blew the title like a gale to its midnight screenings at the Sundance Film Festival where it showed to packed houses, the property was picked up by Artisan for many times more than its production costs and that astute corporate entity elected to pour money into the guerrilla style infiltration for the marketing. This included the extraordinary measure of wilfully distributing "bootleg" copies of an incomplete cut. The vapourware movie bled out of the modem and into the living room in the VHS haunted world of the late '90s. This is how I saw it. A friend of a friend who knew a bloke passed on an unlabelled cassette and we watched it, feeling part of the forbidden elite.

If you want to know about people thinking it was real by the time it was released in Australia in December 1999, the answer is few, if any. U.S. general release preceded it by five months and the internet had long been the e-land of the spoiler. But the flavour of it allowed a tinge of excitement, especially when getting into the cinema and passing the photocopied sign about the dangers of motion sickness.

Hype will always have antihype and people who complained of it being boring, uneventful, a ripoff or plain unscary flooded from the woodwork. For all their complaints about the way horror movies should look and play, the box office here extended the story in the rest of the world. It was a massive and persistent success. At a time when studios were pouring money into increasingly defanged horror movies, this tiny thing beat the lot of them. TS Eliot wasn't always right but he was when he suggested that any artistic revolution needs to be a return to the banal. There, amid the smellable mud and palpable exhaustion was a banality that felt like a nightmare.

That success was transformed from dollar returns to cultural absorption. While what came to be known as the Found Footage genre was slow to launch, the example of its marketing was heeded thereafter, with the ever more normalised internet open to a seemingly infinite spectrum of claims to veracity or more plainly effectiveness. As video recording and reproduction improved in quality, price and distribution, the no-budget feature became such an established norm that its aesthetics were adopted by the mainstream the same way that post punk eventually made it into Heinz soup commercials. Features shot on digital video and projected in cinemas warranted as little comment as anything shot on celluloid. The sense of video's veracity and immediacy became a trope. Now we are at the point where blockbusters are shot on the highest resolution video and look cleaner than film to the extent that some titles get algorithmic film grain imposed on to the digital image the same way that some dance CDs had sampled vinyl surface noise added.

When Found Footage did find its foothold in the late 2000s with Paranormal Activity, the sporadic titles that had appeared between that time and Blair Witch took on a pioneering status. Now, Found Footage is so routinely acceptable that it's just another kind of movie. Still, things penetrate: Rob Savage's lockdown/screenlife horror Host, presented as a single Zoom meeting made it to the screens of those living under the same conditions as the characters. It was a little over the twentieth anniversary but no one who had seen Blair Witch wasn't reminded of it.

So, after all this time and motion, does the Blair Witch Project still work? Yes, and to the same extent. Cut away the hype of real events, you can now watch it in the current climate of routine Found Footage cinema and it feels the same. Feels? For the most recent 312 Nights of Horror challenge (a horror movie per night for all of October) I decided to up the tally of FF titles from all sources. The Blair Witch phenotypes do not need description, they present themselves as markers to an audience that could count them off a list if they weren't so thoroughly expected.

It is scary. If you go into it with the intention of resisting it, ask yourself why you are borthering. If you are going to rate it for jump scares or the appearance of the title character, you should have paid more attention to the first ten minutes that told you in the plainest terms that this was not going to go that way (though many more recent FF films do). If you have ever been lost or felt powerless against distressing circumstances, you will understand this film and why it still scares its audiences. It was my delight to show it as a twentieth anniversary screening to a pair of friends around my vintage who just had not got around to seeing it. Winter 1999, I lit a fire in the hearth, put on comfy foods and wine and we watched, rendered silent when the end credits rolled. One of my guests turned to me and only had to say, "that was good."

Viewing notes: I waited months to do this one as that's how long it took for Second Sight's extraordinary restoration of the film to appear on Blu-Ray. Removing the incidentally imposed film grain on to the video footage rendered it flawed for its directors. Now, the video looks like video and the film like film. The cut is unchanged (though there is the slightly longer festival cut available). There is also a wealth of supplemental material. I know I sound like a shill but this is how a favourite movie should be treated, whatever it is. However, the film is available by subscription on both Stan and Netflix and rentable through pretty much all the others. Get ya some Found Footage.

Review: LEE

Lee Miller, transitioning from fashion model to photographer among the avantistas of Paris, keeps at the shutter bugging until she finds her level as a war correspondent going to the darker shadows of the human state. She narrates this from age to an interviewer and we have our frame. This can be done well like in Amadeus or woefully like in Chaplin. Lee does it with a difference.

The film is given the stellar performance of one of the contemporary greats in Kate Winslet's lead role and is supported by some serious skill in the surrounding cast. But then, the test of how reliant on the historical record the film should prove to be against how cinematic it prefers to be. There is a persistent evenness of pace here which allows the film as a whole to drag and it begins to feel like a dull movie made of good scenes, too reverent. The reverence hazards audience empathy as Miller as a character tests patience with capriciousness and frowning disapproval. It's not until a good halfway through that she, facing the spectacle of the liberated death camps, that her enforced humility allows us in.

This applies to the interview format. At first it plays like Chaplin with the enquirer feeding lines for quotable quotes. Amadeus solved this by having the narrator aggressively toy with the young priest to the point where Salieri's twisted memories become a weird version of the real story and implicate the priest as a witness, making the problem of veracity unsolvable. Lee plays it more like that and leaves the sting till last at which point what felt tired and generic biopic material becomes active narrative weight.

I'm getting all fustian here and not really describing the film itself as that's how the movie made me think as I was watching it. I felt like I was filing scenes away rather than enjoying them gather and take form. Throughout the running time there are moments of commentary on the status of women in art, in public life, in war, in history, and they are all worth our attention and are handled without condescension. It is not until, like everything else in this story, we hit the forcefulness of the war that they really find their power. The girl in the death camp who can only trust her fellow victims moves like a maltreated kitten. The woman publicly humiliated in a French village gives a piercing stare to Miller's lens which is shame incarnate.

So, yes, we are talking a timeline of moments more than a cohesive whole life and its big lesson. That, in the end, might well be the way of a better biopic. If you're not going to wildly fling a biography to the wall for fun and life lessons, maybe this is it: roll it out until you find the riff and then just play the riff. Doesn't sound like I liked it, does it? But I did.

HALLOWEEN

Halloween is once again upon us. Yes, the celebration of the spooky that folk of my vintage knew only from American kids tv shows has made it almost intact o'er the great black ocean and seems happy with its new surrounds and we it. I used to resist this but it's grown on me as it has coincided with my annual 31 nights of horror movies rituals which I do enjoy. At first this was one of the many diversions from lockdown in the terrible spring of '20 but I liked it well enough to look forward to in the second half of each year.

My personal list from this year can be found here. It changes every year but always ends with John Carpenter's 1978 classic for the ages, Halloween. As this is approaching I thought I might resurrect an older tradition with this here blog whereby I'd recommend movies for a marathon. This time, I'll pick a smaller range with the idea of watching just one on the night to whomever might be in the mood. All of these are available to streaming for free (though some have ads).

FOUND FOOTAGE 

SAVAGELAND: One of my favourite approaches to horror cinema of the current century for its edgy mix of veracity and the fantastic. The one I was most impressed with this year was Savageland. It's a mockumentary with a new trope for the found footage weaponry: photographs. It is the story of the accused in a case of mass murder whose photographs from the night the entire border hamlet he lived in were slaughtered. There is an extra layer of tension between the true crime format evoked and the photographs themselves which range from the eerie to the out and out horrifying. Compelling.

Tubitv.com (free with ads)

POSSESSION

LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL: one of my favourites from last year's MIFF, this is a mocked up talk show from the '70s where the host tries to boost his ratings by including a real life exorcism for his audience. What emerges about his character is equal of the frights his possessed guest and might even exceed them. A well managed mix of satire, comedy and straight up horror.

Kanopy (free through a public library membership)

FOLK HORROR

LAMB: A bizarre magical realist tale involves a childless couple in a remote location adopting a strange lamb/human hybrid. You will not expect the ending.

SBS on Demand (free with ads)

SCI-FI HORROR

EVENT HORIZON: A crew takes a propulsion engineer out to Neptune where the spacecraft he designed has mysteriously reappeared after being lost for years. A great mix of pop Kubrick with a dash of Hellraiser and some nifty concepts and art direction.

SBS on Demand (free with ads)

OCCULT

TALK TO ME: One of the freshest horror movies to appear so far in the 21st is this home grown talismanic fable of grief and taken temptation. Teenage Sophie stretches a séance style game involving an embalmed hand that kicks the door between this life and the one beyond. Very slick but also grounded in verity as the teen characters act and sound their age. Miranda Otto has some great lines as the mum.

Kanopy (free through a public library membership)

There are many more but these are free to see and worth your time. Keep 'em screaming!

ALISON'S BIRTHDAY @ 45

Three private schoolgirls hold a seance. It's all fun and games until someone actually gets possessed, in this case by the deceased father of Alison who freaks out not a little. Things start flying off the wall, the window frames burst into the room and a big bookcase falls on the possessed girl, but not before she conveys Alison's father's warning about her nineteenth birthday. Cut to the eighteen plus Alison, working in a shop just before knockoff when she goes to meet her DJ boyfriend at the local radio station. They have a date with a thriller on tv and drinks at her place. While that's happening, her aunt calls and invites her, with more than a little emotional extortion, to have her impending nineteenth with them. She goes. Within two scenes, things are going strange and this birthday business is looking all dodge.

This home grown supernatural tale surprises from the off with dialogue that swings between witty and naturalistic. For the most part this goes for the performances, though they are less even across the cast. These do their best to make up for the soggy pacing and parts of the dialogue that are awkwardly expository. Local acting veterans Bunney Brooke and John Bluthal put in some real weight as the aunt and uncle which helps keep things based. The beautiful Joanne Samuels puts in a good turn as the titular Alison, an urbane mix of skepticism and curiosity and Lou Brown as boyfriend Peter fights well against some lines that should have been erased (usually because too obvious). 

As this is part of my 31 nights of horror and I only realised during the credits that it was made at an anniverary year, this write up will need to be speedy and brief. This was part of my folk horror box set All the Haunts be Ours and completes a generous Australian section. Movie like this don't get shown free to air anymore but some streamers might include it. Put it on if you still have the vim after the main movie at home. It's light but it has a serious and craftsmanly heart.

Viewing notes: Alison's Biirthday is on Stan and Prime with a subscription and sometimes appears on SBS on Demand. I wouldn't fork out the hundreds that my box set costs just for this one movie but it is a great set.

PHANTASM @ 45

Tommy gets lucky and takes his belle de jour to the graveyard for sex one night. When its her turn to penetrate she chooses a long sharp knife into the chest. Not quite the pillow talk he had in mind but he's beyond caring about that. Also, the woman has transformed in the space of a cut into a tall frowning man. When Tommy's brother Jody goes to the funeral with his friend Reggie, they talk about how weird Tommy's apparent suicide was before Jody goes into the bizarre black and white mausoleum where he's slammed on the shoulder by the tall man in the prologue. Younger-still brother Michael, who's been following Jody around, turns up on his trail bike and watches through binoculars as the Tall Man (as the figure came to be known in the franchise) effortlessly lifts a full casket into the back of a hearse. Ok that's all in the first ten minutes and I haven't mentioned the strange creatures who seem to be darting behind headstones or the Dune-like box o' ordeals that Michael is tested with at a local medium business.

This is the world of Phantasm built of strange details that seem left over from last night's whiskey flavoured writing session. It's also one of the most refreshingly original genre-bending films ever made. I said original and just above I also said that one of the details was like something from Dune. Writer/director Don Coscarelli knows you know that (and this is five years before Lynch's feature film made a big thing of it). Jody goes to a watering hole in the town called Dune Cantina. You might find some resemblance between the flying ball and the flying syringes in Dune but the similarity is slight and diverges as soon as the ball meets a head and drains the blood which it spits out a hole in its rear. That's the kind of thing Coscarelli was thinking up when he conceived of this film. He was on a phone call and played around with a Styrofoam cup, pushing through the bottom with a finger and watching as it moved apparently by itself. That's what I mean by original. A lot of what you see on screen here feels invented on the spot, spontaneous, regardless of how screenplays happen.

Apart from the impressive practical effects and atmospheres, the human story of the younger brother's sadness at Jody's intended departure for further adventures is an affecting one. The scene of Michael running after Jody as he rides a bike around the streets feels less literal than figurative, it's how Jody sees it and how Michael feels. And there is a suggestion that the weird happenings in the town that only this family appear to see, rise directly from this melancholy state. When you see what becomes of the brother from the prologue, the sting of the absence is made clear.

That aside, Phantasm is a fresh adventure with plenty of sci-fi ideas and horror scenes and a bad guy who joined the Jasons and Freddies of mainstream horror from the off. The fact that the blending of ambience between the green suburban streets and the stark gothic of the mausoleum feels so smooth is testament to why this film continues to work. This is an unofficial extension of the homely suburban leafiness of Halloween and a precursor of the Spielberg look of the decade to come but while the sex on show is not even mainstream explicit it is too clearly suggested to allow a G rating. This puts Phantasm in that strange margin where adult and young adult blend uneasily. Michael's grin at spying the sight of exposed breasts is knowing (just like Coscarelli's inclusion of it).

The other group I'd put Phantasm into is the margin of early home video and arthouse titles like Evil Dead or Tourist Trap, held together with gaffer tape but holding real originality. These travelled under even the parade of slashers and cheaper sci-fi and emerged decades later for delighted discovery. Phantasm, as aforesaid, found itself a franchise but it is this first think-it-and-throw-it-against-the-wall outing that still packs the punch.

Viewing notes: I watched this on the Well Go region A Blu-Ray which is very fine. If you are tempted to explore, you are currently limited to buying overseas or trying ebay. To my knowledge this film has not been released locally since the days of VHS (which is how I first saw it). 

Review: BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Lydia Deetz has grown up to host a successful ghost hunting tv show but is starting to see her old foe appear in crowds like a stalker. Her mother Delia, not quite grown up but older, is a performance artist. Lydia's daughter Astrid is in the polar position that Lydia was with her mother so goth mum and straight daughter, now. The dad from the first one dies in a stop motion plane crash and the family heads back to Winter River where the old house is shrouded in black for the performative memorial. Lydia's modern fragile manager and close companion, sweet talks her into getting married on Halloween. Astrid quietly rides away on a bike and crashes through the fence of the introverted boy in town and they start talks. Meanwhile in the netherworld, Beetlejuice, now an afterlife bureaucrat, hears tell of his soul sucking ex ressurecting and coming after him. There's a lot of intertwining dependencies that will lead pretty much where you expect.

I wanted to spend some weighty time on that premise to convey how long it feels to sit through it before this film gets into gear, and that's leaving a lot out. The elongated first act plays like the first half hours of episodes one and two of this as a streaming mini series. It's not boring but you get the feeling that you'll be kept waiting. But there are rewards.

Catherine O'Hara turns on the quirk dependably. Wynona Ryder is believably an older Lydia. Justin Theroux enjoyably overplays his new age balderdash character. Tim Burton's magic shop aesthetic is turned on to gush and when the narrative begins to crank into action the movie feels a lot more like home. But you also start noticing things you probably shouldn't. While the original spent time on earning character empathy, this one does more toward recognition humour and leaves things at that depth. Then you get to Astrid's subplot which would make a better Tim Burton movie that this or most of his output since the '80s. At the centre of that is the increasingly magnetic Jenna Ortega who stands in for the audience's skepticism through her sassy adolescence. As in Wednesday, X (where she really gave charismatic Mia Goth a run for her money), Scream VI or Sabrina Carpenter's Taste video (please watch that) she owns the screen.

Otherwise, this is a rerun with less of the charm that came from the then novelty of Burton's goofy gothic style. There are many self referential moments to highlight the passage of time but there are too few new inventions to allow a claim of something more than nostalgia. This is Beetlejuice in the era of YouTube ghost hunters and experiencing live events through phone screens but the crowding of the canvas between these and the callbacks just make you realise you could have thought all this yourself from one viewing of the trailer. When the big song at the climax happens you think, "wow!" and then you think, "ok". So, Tim, good to see some updates but I heard you the first time.

RHINOCEROS @ 50

John, an aging bon vivant, chastises his younger friend Stanley for surrendering to a bad life that has driven him to drink. He is about to entice Stanley to grasp his own life when a cacophony outside drives everyone in the restaurant to the window to see a rhinoceros charging down the street. Later, at work, the wife of an absent staff member reports that the animals have not escaped from a zoo but that people, like her husband, are transforming into them. As she rides away on her newly pachydermal husband's back, life choices are being reassessed.

Eugene Ionesco's absurdist fable freedom from conformity and resistance to both is presented with big performances and a lot of stagey overreach. This would have rendered it unwatchable but for the casting of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in the second of only two pairings on screen. The first was in the deathless Mel Brooks debut The Producers. The relation between their characters in Rhinoceros is immediately reminiscent of that film, with Mostel's John bullying Wilder's Stanley about his life choices. After that opening, though, the dynamic differs when John faces his own transformation and the mood shifts quickly to panic and then pathos. It's worth noting that Mostel was repeating his role from the play's Broadway debut over a decade earlier. But that, while interesting, does not explain the staginess that can drag this film away from compulsion.

It wasn't a standalone production but part of a series of films commissioned by the short lived American Film Theatre project in an attempt to bring the media of film and theatre together by presenting cinematic versions of modern classic plays. I remember this coming to far off Townsville in the mid '70s as a subscription package which was expensive and gave off exclusivist vapours. I thought it sounded stuck up but I also loved the idea of it. Harold Pinter's The Homecoming was one of them and Pinter himself directed Simon Gray's Butley. This was not something I could easily convince my parents to invest in so I let it slide. Later, I saw Butley at Uni and the ABC played most of the titles in late night spots. I was gratified to discover how good they had been. The project was doomed as it tried to reinvent cinema into a more theatre-like deal with the subscriptions and came across as snobbish bullshit. Pity, though.

This is important in considering Rhinoceros as it goes a way toward explaining the staginess of a lot of the action and how most of it is done in sets with little of the freedom of movement that cinema production allows. While it doesn't feel like a filmed stage production the sets, particularly the apartment interiors are exploited for their claustrophobic pokiness. Director Tom O'Horgan came to the gig from his work on Broadway. While he does allow some breakout and is clever in his use of sound to suggest the rhinos on the streets, he does fall back on the kind of blocking that emphasises physical engineering over cinematic setups when bodies have to move together; we're seeing a movie but we're also seeing the cooking while we watch approach of live theatre. I imagine this was intentional but it can lower the tone even of this broadbrush satire.

But then we can easily fall back on the performances. Mostel and Wilder in the leads but also a bright Karen Black with her heyday energy, the character stalwart Joe Silver and the instant comedy figure of Don Calfa as the waiter. But these are the kind of things that while adding to the enjoyment of the film can also date it. I wonder if the final defiance would be done with such anger and futility as it is here. Is Ionesco's proposition about resistance readable in the post-truth realm? Maybe more than ever. Just, don't remake it, watch it, for all its antiquity, the way it is here. It's from when the truth about misdeeds at the top of American society could bring a Nixon down. It's worth the watch for that thought alone.

Rhinoceros is available through Kanopy which you should join now. Free, and through your local public library system(which you should also join now).

ONIBABA @ 60

Marsh reeds, shift in the wind. Somewhere in the whispering mass is a pit too deep to see all the way to the bottom. Soldiers are fighting in the reeds, a pair struggles to escape from the skirmish but the effort is so exhausting they collapse. Just as they seem to revive both are killed by spears. Two women appear and strip the soldiers of their armour and weapons, put the cache aside and drag the bodies to the pit and kick them in. Then they return to their slightly upgraded lean to, stuff rice into their mouths and fall to exhausted sleep. Another day.

This is the world of the story of the Onibaba, an expansion of an ancient Bhuddist cautionary fable about a mother trying to control her daughter by wearing a demonic disguise. Writer/director Kaneto Shindo starts well before that brief story and works to establish the mother and daughter (in law) and their rough subsistence life in the realm of the marsh. 

Into this carefully balanced life, coursing across the river like a crocodile, comes Hachi, heading home from the war he's deserted but without his friend Kichi, son to the older woman and husband to the younger (neither woman is named). He explains the savage chaos of the war and how he and Kichi were both trying to escape but Kichi didn't make it. The older woman judges him but the younger cannot shake Hachi's charm. 

A little wooing later and she's sneaking off at night for the first relief from her strained existence she's known for too long. Her mother in law twigs to this and approaches Hachi, even offering herself in the young woman's place. Hachi has, meanwhile, swapped his opportunistic lust for something more like love and wants to marry the younger (this doesn't play awkwardly on film and wouldn't here if the characters had been graced with names).

A little while later, something comes up and the mother in law comes upon the makings of a deterrent, a demonic mask, which she wears and appears as a terrifying spectre in the marshes, forcing her daughter in law to turn back in horror. This works until it doesn't: she can't take the mask off.

Kaneto Shindo was born and raised in Hiroshima. His military service ironically saved him from suffering the unimaginable hell of the atomic bomb. Not enough irony? Well, this old Hiroshiman died in 2012, making it to a month over a hundred years old. Whether it was a sense of the greatest luck in history or simply a life force energised by his own war experience, Shindo threw himself into the fashioning of fables for cinema, directing forty-eight of his own stories and writing two hundred and thirty-eight films for other directors. With masterpieces of the strange like Human, Ditch, Kuroneko up his sleeve, he easily joins the pantheon of post-occupation Japanese filmmaking. Onibaba is the central gem in his timeline.

Of that generation of  Japanese filmmakers, there is barely an example within a ten year radius that does not mention, however metaphorically, the spectacle and effect of the bombs. In Onibaba this is in Hachi's description of the war in open country and in Kyoto itself, hub of civilisation rendered chaotic and desperate. There is also the spectre of a distant cloud of smoke as though a whole city was on fire. The setting is medieval but the solemnity of the witnesses to this is profound and clearly indicating recent history.

What leads to this moment is the world-building of the endless tall grass in constant motion in the wind and the naturalistic performances and dialogue of the players. These people really seem to live there. Shindo took his crew to the marshes at Chiba where they lived and worked for almost the whole production. Even knowing how difficult this process was and seeing the depiction of the hand-to-mouth inhabitants, I still want to live there.

None of this makes it into the source fable. This was Shindo's solid imagination that gave his public, weary of tradition and authority, a version based on life-affirming sex in place of the piety of the temple of the original. The cool jazz tones of the score that burst into thunderous taiko drumming for the night sequences would have felt like a bow to liberation from the generation of militarism the culture had endured. The nudity and convincing sex scenes work to this end; less titillating than candid. Like a number of films by this Methuselah of the medium, Onibaba is a blend of its times and timelessness and a testament to the need to climb from the pits of history into the kind of light useful for making a living. Few knew that better than Kaneto Shindo.

Viewing notes: I saw this on Criterion's stunning Blu-Ray but that, or the U.K. Eureka edition (also fine). Otherwise, it might be up to finding it second hand, locally. It's one of those essential films from history that are very difficult to get to see.

Review: THE SUBSTANCE

You're in a fairy tale. You get magic a power.  It's yours to keep AS LONG AS YOU DO THIS ONE THING. You've heard the story. You knew it before you could read and it flowed into your ears through your mother's voice. You know that the story only works if you do that one thing. Inj later life it keeps you from walking in front of speeding cars but, who knows, for a chance at opioid bliss or a fortune from the pokies, that one risk might solve your problem. So, when faded Hollywood star Elizabeth Sprinkle gets a chance at a second youth, she jumps at it.

Writer/director Coralie Fargeat knows you know this about fables. Expects you to know it as you will be straining with everything you have to tell someone on the screen not to do that one thing. The point is not what happens up there but in how much she can play around with the elements and give us something to think about. Play she does and makes us live through some grimace-inducing squirmy and squelchy body horror until we are compelled to consider what her story is about beyond the template.

Fargeat is happy to be plain with her messaging. Perhaps that should be bold, not happy. The opening sequence shows a raw egg yolk producing another after an injection. Then we get a montage of Elizabeth celebrating her star on the walk of fame (after an intriguing scene of how they are constructed) which progresses through the years with signifiers like autumn leaves, snowfalls, tourists walking over it, murmuring guesses as to who she was, and some slob slipping his mega burger on to it. Cut to Elizabeth now, leading a troupe of tv dancers in her workout show. 

Afterwards, being forced into using the gents, she overhears the tv tycoon screaming into his phone about someone like her, past prime and past prime time. Soon after, he seems on the pop of firing her over lunch (never have prawns been less appetising) but, getting to an awkward bit, he flees the scene and kicks it down the road. Soon after (I'm leaving a lot out) she recovers from an auto crash and, during a creepy examination by a ethereally beautiful young male nurse, she is left with a usb stick upon which is branded The Substance. This leads to the situation you can get from watching the trailer in which her younger self seems to have taken over her gig with the workout show.

As this film does keep to its fairy tale lane, it might seem pointless to avoid spoilers but there are many on screen which I will not detail. The glee of this testing film lies in the articulated anger that Fargeat hurls at cultural standards of beauty that both recoil in disgust at women aging and harshly judge any attempt to reverse the process. The woman who brought us the searing Revenge has learned, like the heroine of that story, how to fashion assault weapons from the pieces of beauty culture. There are many white knuckle suspensions and even more eye popping body horror showcases. Before you cry Cronenberg, they all learn from that experience that each, even the most showy, must take its place in a storyline. The scenes can go longer than they should but nothing you see here does not advance the tale.

On Cronenberg, if you have seen a few of his early ones in order of their release you'll notice the improvement in them when he starts hiring stronger actors. Demi Moore's performance as Elizabeth will be called brave for her permission to be shown old. We do get closeups of porous cheeks, wrinkles and sags but the bravery we see is not in this candour (pushed by make up and prosthetics, btw) but in the acutely observed and expressed sustained rage of her character as she comes to understand the resonance of her decision and how the regime that made it feel necessary remains unmoved in the face of her disaster. It is brave because it is strong. 

Margaret Qualley gets the nepo baby taunt as the daughter of Andie McDowell but I've not known her to appear anything but committed to her roles (even when, in Poor Things, this is reduced to her getting hit in the head by basketballs). She emerges as Sue an apparent clone of the younger Elizabeth, a reset, ditching all the waste and keeping the good stuff. However, Qualley plays her for all the shallowness allowed her by her youth and beauty and a burgeoning rage from Elizabeth's experience to remind us where she's from.

Is Dennis Quaid's disgusting tv boss with his crassness and misogyny, a feminist's stereotype? He's more of a caricatured industry mover, holding nothing of value for longer than it sells, knowing that even his ugliness can be thrown around to herald his power. Quaid is having a ball with him. 

Finally, Fargeat is happy to pay tribute to the influences that led her to this point. These are not nudges and winks (as in the constant barrage of them in Alien Romulus) but marks of tribute. 2001 gets a moment in the climax as do The Elephant Man, Eraserhead and Society, among others. None of these distract even if you do recognise them, the power of the story roaring to its close overwhelms them as cute moments and we're carried along. One thing I found interesting about the score, now I think about it, is how strong the electronics were for almost the whole running time before it changed to an orchestral pallet towards the end. Just another detail on a ride that might make us scream while we're on it but will keep us thinking after the credits.

The Substance is currently on general release.

Review: MAXXXINE

Maxine Minx auditions for a horror movie role to exit the world of pornography. It's 1986 and Hollywood is discovering teenagers and what makes them buy tickets as Richard Ramirez is terrorising the city as The Night Stalker. Maxine gets the horror part about the same time as she proves she can handle herself in the nasty neighbourhoods. A pair of detectives trace connections between new murder victims and Maxine and approach her. They are worried because the new victims seem staged to look like The Night Stalker but differ too much, meaning there's another killer on the block. Maxine rebuffs them and sets about her rebirth as a legit actor. This leads to some enticing invitations from her colleagues but they keep coming back in pieces stuffed into luggage. Maybe she should have taken that cop's card, after all.

This is the third and final of a trilogy that became identified with roles played by Mia Goth in the first one, X. It was Goth who approached writer/director Ti West to flesh the Pearl character out while they were filming X in New Zealand under lockdown conditions. This led to her not only starring in Pearl but getting a co-writing credit for it. After this, it would have felt tidy to do as much for Maxine and maybe say a few things about Hollywood's odd 1980s.

After a bold and engaging opening act the middle progresses toward an expansion of Maxine's world and its relation to the murders and how they relate to her. But then, as the B plot about the murders rises in the mix it starts dragging, feeling complicated rather than intriguing. Then, while the finale is well staged and its significance clear, I was almost checking the time.

West is hit and miss for me. I do not share the admiration that his feature debut House of the Devil gets and while, The Innkeepers had a great premise it was let down by the conventionality of the ending. The Sacrament felt too literal in its treatment of a fictionalised historical event. X put me off with its sleazy phobia of age. Pearl, though, was a marvel, extending far beyond a vanity project for Mia Goth, it explored themes of frustration, isolation and delusion through the force of its star's performance and shaped up with a profound sense of completion. It's why I bothered with Maxxxine.

Goth plays Maxine faintly. It's underacting rather than stiffness and I wonder if that is to contrast with her wide ranging turn as Pearl. Maxine has survived the trauma of X and, while not a shut-in, is showing a hardened mien to a culture defined by its murderers and cinema of murderers. But Goth might be doing this too well as she can come across as flat in scenes where she might afford an emotion of two (as in the scene where she tells her friend she got the part). It does work in scenes of stress where it resembles personal armour. If there'd been more of those ...

While I appreciated seeing Maxine's further adventures, my favourite of the trio remains Pearl and while I'll always give Ti West a chance with a new title, this most recent of his gives me pause. There's an urgent comparison with another 21st century treatment of Hollywood's destruction of its human units but I refuse to name it. I only mention it here as its own complications of plot and character never overwhelm that theme. In Maxxxine The theme is so effectively buried that it must be stated out loud at the crucial exchange of the climax rather than left for the audience to mentally intone.  Maybe he should write with Mia again.

Viewing Notes: Maxxine is probably out of the cinemas now but can be hired through your favourite streamer (Prime has it as a 4K)

Review: IN A VIOLENT NATURE

A structure of some kind, too close to identify. Two young men talk about the massacre that the area is famous for. One of them notices that a pendant has been left on a pole and lifts it as they leave the scene. The pole begins to move. At first it's a slight irregular shake but soon it's swaying until a figure emerges from the deep leafy bed below, climbing out of a damp grave. Seen from behind, the man with clear head injuries walks through the woods without apparent aim. This is Johnny. We are soon to hear his backstory and witness how efficient and creative a killer he is.

This is generically slasher movie stuff with the exception that our focus is almost entirely on the killer. We follow him from kill to kill by night and day, moving through the terrain as the sounds of nature swell and the light falls pleasingly on the woods. We do see a standard campfire scene where the young adults learn Johnny's backstory and they are soon after attacked one by one.

What's different here is the point of view. While it's not literal, we mostly see Johnny from behind as he's trudging through the thicket, not what his eyes would be taking in, it is engaging. The device of following the killer instead of observing the machinery of the social play between the young folk the story boils the generic traits down to danger and process. Attention to process always engages me. David Hemmings darkroom techniques in Blow Up as he closes in on the terrifying detail of his photograph. Alain Delon forging his identification papers in Purple Noon. Matilda Lutz fashioning objects around her into weapons in Revenge. We see Johnny pause to listen and follow the sound to the victims. Our heavily limited acquaintance with them frees us of empathy and the kills are delivered with enough preface to allow a much more efficient context, affording them an incidental emotional punch. Johnny doesn't leap from the shadows, his victims move into focus.

The kills are inventive. The assumption of the mask is tidy. The ending adds a pause and gently steered dread. There is a final girl and she has one of the most compelling last scenes in all slasherdom. It has to do with the uncertainty of what her view might become. We get our answer but it is denied her. It is a moment suggesting the lack of closure that can intensify trauma and it is done in the confines of a 4X3 frame and the sounds of the forest. I cannot predict from this that a new wave of slashers is upon us, nor even that sequels from this one are on the cards, but here in tried old 2024 this movie offers refreshment for the genre fan and that's not something to take lightly.

Viewing notes: There was a very brief cinema life locally for this film but, as a Shudder original production it was posted on that streamer last night (Friday the 13th) which is where it will be hanging around for the foreseeable.

OFFICE SPACE @ 25

Peter hates his tech job but feels it is absorbing him into a future of pointless time serving. One day he is taken to a therapist who hypnotises him into relaxation and dies of a heart attack before he can snap Peter out of it. Peter gets up out of his chair and walks into a new life as the most dangerous figure in all workplaces, a person who doesn't put up with his boss's bullshit.

Mike Judge's hymn of hatred for white collar work's dehumanisation is an expansion of his Liquid Television cartoon series Milton, a compressed and bullied clerical worker who has been reduced to a constant stream of mumbles about burning the building down. Milton remains a character but could not carry a whole feature film. This might have been a parade of sketches about the ironies and absurdities of this smothered area of employment and, given Judge's wit, might have got a away with that. But there's just too much more to talk about, here.

The film begins showing Peter and his two friends at work, Samir and Michael, in separate vehicles in a traffic jam on the way to work. When Peter swing into the free moving lane beside his static one the new lane stops. This happens continuously. At one point he looks to the side of the road to see an old man using a Zimmer frame going faster than the traffic. That is pure adult cartoon material but it works because adult cartoon material at its best does not need the superpowers of animation to make a joke work. Judge also created Beavis and Butthead but, most substantially King of the Hill which I enjoyed for its realistic satire and courage in including warmth.

The office is a hive of cubicles, clicking with keyboards. A receptionist has a cloying melodic phone greeting that sounds like a recording. The boss, played with sickening smoothness by go-to screen creep Gary Cole, prefaces everything he says with phrases like "I'm going to go ahead and" which end with work day sentences like unpaid overtime or even just the word disagree. When the consultants come in to tidy up the spending (mostly by cutting staff) their language is a step beyond this, acts of gravity evened out by evasive, unctuous linguistic mutation. They are charmed by Peter's candour and lack of deference and mark him for promotion at the expense of Samir and Michael.

It is to Judge's credit that when the trio hatch a plot to eke a living through a money skimming software someone points out that it was the plot of Superman III. This isn't just a nerd badge, it testifies to the vanity of the scheme and the pride its authors feel. This is counterweighted by Peter's neighbour whose a big macho oaf who does come on strong and bullish but also has credible insights. The flair issue at the restaurant where Peter's love interest (Jennifer Aniston) works is straight out of King of the Hill b ut Judge is careful to show that even the service zombies that run the place also have a non work side. They've just figured it out even if Joanna is too aloof to notice.

If anything, Office Space suffers from a deflated third act. It's written well enough but like his other live action feature Idiocracy, the satirical statements and recognition humour are so well packed into the front end that the character arcs pale. There is a clear focus on the machinery of plotting and the conclusion is a satisfying one that includes both surprise and a hint of sadness that give it the feel of a well earned ending. While a rewatch will remind you of some mid point lagging (the romance is fine if not quite compelling) you will come away from the viewing thinking very well of it.

What does work is the capture of the treadmill of office work. The salaries are higher than on assembly lines and the staff often have an idea that their education has equipped them for a deserved smart casual life while in service to minor despots who get their ideas from management seminars and speak in stiflingly evasive language. The staff singing Happy Birthday to the boss as though it's a Russian funeral dirge and the petty-crime-style assault on the never-working printer at a remote location are still hilarious. But there lies the problem. Judge's later long running series Silicon Valley about software engineers in the tech business is an exercise in sustained satire that approaches genius. It is perfectly honed and strongly observed. It's also at the end of a lot more experience and shows. That said, Office Space gives enough for what it is, a fable of the world of work with massive relatability. Not bad for an early attempt.

BLACK CHRISTMAS @ 50 (some spoilers)

Some spoilers below. These are kept sparse but proved helpful in putting this film in context for the 

post-slasher audience.

A sorority house in a small university town is the target of a homicidal maniac who makes phone calls that swing between obscene and bone chilling. The women are in party mode, about to disperse for the festive season but the killer makes an early start, turning their fun uni years into a big bloody mess. In other news, Claire's father comes to town to meet her but has to declare her missing (there is another case of abduction and possible murder in the town). Jess is pregnant to music student Peter who wants a family at the same time that Jess wants a termination (of the relationship as well as the zygote). Carol singers are roaming the streets. It's gonna be a night.

Bob Clark's Ur slasher has had its profile raised since the '90s. DVD blew the film of dust from a wealth of retro titles and Black Christmas was rediscovered and heralded as a source point for the sub-genre. Clark had a couple of things on his side from the get go: he was  very good at atmospherics and he had no idea he was inventing the teen slasher so had no rules to observe. It's that last one that really gets the new fans engaged because it makes this old movie feel fresher than any of the '80s copycats of Halloween. You won't see any masks or signature weapons here and there are no teen sex scenes to mistake a killer's morality for a movie's. 

This can also work against it for a modern audience as it will feel a lot slower than expectations. The kills are there but not piled on. That the kill scenes are left undiscovered for considerable screen time and there is, at first, an unclear connection between the acts and the bizarre phone calls adds to the overall sense of dread in a slowburn rather than a crescendo of action. The citizen search party and what it finds blends into the dark winter atmosphere, itself thickened by the weariness of the scenes at the police station (John Saxon delivering a solid performance as a burdened sheriff). It's not a murder fest, more of a plagued house where youth has gone to be slaughtered.

The killer identifies himself as Billy (often whispering his name in the third person and often that in a voice like Mrs Bates from Psycho) but we see very little of him, unlike the gleefully visible baddies of Halloween and Friday the 13th sequels. He emerges from hiding places to kill with whatever is to hand, a plastic sheet, a glass figurine, a hook. Although you can piece one together from the phone calls, he appears without a backstory, he is just, in the old money, crazy and homicidal (remember, too, that not only slasher as a cinematic term had yet to be coined but "serial killer" wouldn't be in the common parlance for another decade) death bringer. His in-house phone usage (subject of some engaging practical exchange scenes) predates the big line from 1980's When a Stranger Calls and forms a terrifying plot development. The monster is in the house.

It was only in the last viewing for this blog that I realised where the brooding music came from. There's a kind of growling resonance to many of the scenes and at first it sounds electronic or at least electronically manipulated. The film itself tells you what it is in a scene in which Peter, after a tense and failed practical exam, attacks a grand piano with a stool. Every time he hits it the strings resonate with that very growl. Turn the volume down, remove the identifying transients (i.e. beginning of the notes) and bury it in reverb and you have an effect of atmosphere building that is both music and non-music. The only other music comes from the carol singers in the streets. There is no formal music score at all. As the forerunner of a genre that gloried in its effective music, this is a fascinating detail. Again, Clark had few rules to follow and worked, like his killer character, with what he found.

The cast of mostly young women are given an almost documentary naturalism to work with and it heightens the dread as they come across as real rather than eminently killable brats. The closest to that later stereotype is Margot Kidder's Barb, the sassy wisecracking drunk among the sorority who, alone, confronts the caller in an early scene, pranks the desk cop with a saucy alpha numeric phone number, and dies, unironically, in an ugly attack while sleeping. Mention must be made of Kier Dullea here. The star of 2001: A Space Odyssey plays Peter with an intensity rapidly burning out. He is so frighteningly convincing as the soon to be problematic ex that his role should come with a content warning. The final girl is the luminous Olivia Hussey, British, petite and happily sexually experienced to the point of getting pregnant and deciding against going to term. If there was ever a final girl who defied the stereotype it is she. Again, this was before the genre rules imposed by the Committee for Slasher Movies came into effect but it does illustrate something that I will again say in the words of podcaster Alex West (Faculty of Horror): the film is rad, it's the killer who's conservative!

Black Christmas joins Clark's best (along with Deathdream, Murder by Decree and A Christmas Story) in that it adds fresh features to established story types. It was not considered a slasher at the time but a dark and brooding murder mystery with a troublingly unhinged perp. Where precursors Peeping Tom's Mark and Psycho's Norman had the kind of definition that allowed them to be scary but kept that within bounds, Billy has nothing like that. The appearance of his eye seen in the gap between a door and its jamb strikes real fear: he might kill you just for looking. 

While the film's legacy is complicated by the birth of the generic slasher a few years later with Halloween, so that when stories of similar setting like The House on Sorority Row and Slumber Party Massacre (and even later with Scream 2) they took more from their immediate genre-mates than this origin tale. Nevertheless, the wood panelling and natural fibre mise en scene that seems to recreate the ads from glossy magazines of the time containing such brutality works effectively in a way that has not been achieved by its descendants. It sits best as its own thing, something to reach for after all the things it engendered are finished with, as an innovation of opportunity.

Viewing notes: I most recently watched this on the Shout Factory 4K edition which presents the grainy old photography in sumptuous Dolby Vision splendour. There are no local physical media versions. However, it's free (with ads) on Tubi.

Review: I SAW THE TV GLOW

Detached teenagers, Owen and Maddy, bond over the young adult tv show The Pink Opaque. It's the mid-'90s when you could buy attractively presented episode guides for things like The X-Files or Friends. The Pink Opaque is so close to Buffy that even the use of the Joss Whedon credits font feels like it's dancing on the edge of a lawsuit. The two are drawn closer together when Owen begs off his too early bedtime by claiming a sleepover date with a friend before turning up at Maddy's to watch it for the first time. The rest is a fragile slowburn about loneliness, identification and youth and the fragments of culture we keep pocketed in later life.

But it's more than that. Both friends are holding back forces within themselves which, if exposed might lead to disaster in their community. Maddy is the older and more determined of the two and when she asks Owen to join her in escaping the town, he demurs and stays behind to years of not knowing Maddy's fate. He retreats into his life, getting a job that neither demands much from him nor bothers him enough for him to make a similar break, though still haunted by Maddy's disappearance. The life ahead looks long, dark and safe and he is nagged by its softness.

Jane Schoenbrun's follow up to the quietly disturbing We're All Going to the World's Fair forms the second instalment of a projected trilogy about the dark and damaging aspects of early life and its complications. So far these two films only look and feel like each other but progress in parallel rather than join to a timeline. They both choose a gentle lurking abstraction beneath a spare narrative and could not be further from the teen fare of the '80s and '90s. Schoenbrun makes the magical weave with the confrontingly real seem effortless. She is helped in this by a dreamy pallet of purples and pinks and nightscapes but also the magnetic performance of Brigette Lundy-Paine as Maddy whose intensity holds back oceans, and Justice Smith as Owen who must convey the lack and longing of most of the screen time with his Thoreau-like quiet desperation.

This film reminds me of two things and both are good. Seeing at the cinema brought back the thrill of going to see new independent films at places like the Valhalla in the'80s with it's bold colours and message of expression. And it made me think of the best of those short stories that are only about ten pages but feel as heavy as whole novels. This film is hard to describe justly and it will not be for everyone, but if you were one of those readers who finished one of those stories with a sigh and a need to go and stare at the sky for a while, you might well fall in love with it.

CHINATOWN @ 50

Private eye Jake Gittes gets a routine extra-marital gig. Bit of shadowing and al fresco photography and enjoy the expense money. It's 1930s Los Angeles and a guy can really clean up. But nothing's that easy. In pursuit of the unfaithful beau, he begins to notice details that don't add up. The story takes a turn or two before blowing up epically. And then just when you think it's got as bad as it can, it quiets down for something that will send you to the shower for a cleanse.

Roman Polanski's mid-70s noir did what that decade's neo-noirs were doing except he kept it in Raymond Chandler time. The high style fashions of young Hollywood come out and play while the tale dives into depravity and darkness. The push through a scenario of monstrous capitalism to something more Old Testament and disturbing allows viewers to wonder which is being tarred by which as it all will inevitably be absorbed in the name of business. And it's still a compelling thriller.

Jack Nicholson had yet to commit to his Jack persona and was still preferring a more naturalistic acting style. Nevertheless, the Jack we'd know from Cuckoo's Nest onward is clearly forming. His Jake Gittes is a wise guy who knows a scam when he sees it, for his own preservation as much as for the protection of his clients. But he's willing to take the beatings that all good gumshoes need to give them the victim's wash to get clear of the cynicism. By the time the story is half done, there is no longer any need for the sarcastic Chandler tone.

Faye Dunaway, also destined for mid-career breakthrough in Network, presents a vulnerable L.A. aristo who is a few conversations shy of crumbling. She's got a lot of life to confront. Dunaway takes us from an eerie confidence to someone attempting to stop shaking to death. This role with its sustained denial of panic before disaster clearly informed her big scenes with William Holden in Network.

Veteran director John Huston takes over his every scene as the patriarch Noah Cross. Huston had begun his directorial career with seminal noirs like The Maltese Falcon in a career that saw him blurring the lines between cinema and true life adventure. As Cross, he exudes an intimidating urbanity, roughed up by his consumption of the best of anything he wanted in his loud and privileged life. Huston has acted throughout his career with varying results but give him a director of actors as astute as Polanski and he seems to wear the character like a favourite shirt.

Polanski, also steps back from the kind of dazzle he had put into almost everything he'd done till then. He let the story tell itself. Fans of his (we'll get to the elephant) might find this film one of his more subdued or even dull but his management of the action as storyteller here is the stuff of mastery. A confession conducted with a series of slaps allows the horror of its subject to feel equal to the pain of the violence. It's not a forties-style slap her around and find the truth, it's tearing the pretence away to see the worst. We're not invited into the action but kept at a cold arm's length; it feels as desperate as it looks.

Chinatown is a moment of greatness from a cinema artist at his peak.

Now ... Roman Polanski is problem figure. He pleaded guilty to the charge of sexual assault of a minor before absconding with his freedom, never to face the consequences. If he was a fingernail's thickness less of a master filmmaker this would dominate all mention of him since. Fans of his early work can plead that his misdeeds were without precedent. I know of none such. For my money he had one last great film (The Tenant) in him for the rest of his career and even that was released before the crime. 

Should that make a difference? I don't know. I cannot solve this problem here any better than I can those of Michael Jackson or Woody Allen. Polanski is also difficult because some of his early films are powerfully aligned to the plight of women as victims of men (including this one) or whole societies. There's nothing tokenistic about the assaults in Repulsion or Rosemary's Baby: it's not simply that he makes a good film, he has made them deep and confronting. Does it matter that he had Hitler in his face as a child and Charles Manson as an adult? Probably, but I don't know how. All I can surely say is that if you are to see his strong early career films there is plenty to take away and that none of them condone the kind of actions that brought him before the law. I think the choice is a personal one but it is one to make with serious consideration.

Viewing notes: I most recently rewatched Chinatown on the recent 4K that scrubs up like it was made last week. It's having a minor revival to go along with the 4K and is widely available on streaming.

Review: MIDAS MAN

So, this bloke runs a record shop and gets a request for an obscure record. He goes to see them as they're a local band (whatever it says on the label) and they turn out to be The Beatles. The rest is hysteria.

Well, sort of. Really, only kinda. This is less the story of the biggest entertainment act in history than their manager. How good can that be? Well, Brian Epstein is not just a guy who struck it lucky with a choice, his short life and career has enough tough stuff to warrant a compelling narrative. Pity they left most of that out, here. 

I'm going to go against my own grain in this review and hold some other works up for comparison. This is not just to say this is good and that's bad nor the mediocrity's way out which is to labour a similarity as though it's more than a shared detail.

First, Backbeat. This is one of the most accurate studies of any young band, let alone a pre-fame Beatles; it shows the conflicts and bonds that play so gravely in young adults. Second, Nowhere Boy. Young John Lennon and friends form a band whose eventual name is never mentioned, concentrating on a trauma from Lennon's childhood. Third, the graphic novel The Fifth Beatle which is about Epstein and depicts a young business man making hasty decisions, having a dangerous sex life and growing alienated from his most famous clients as they drift into the stratosphere of invention.

What we get here is a pageant of great moments in history, told with knuckle-dragging reverence here and soap opera intimacy there. A few scenes that depict stolen trysts of opportunity hold promise of more to come with the sense that they will develop throughout the tale as Epstein's fortunes rise. Instead, they disappear and dissolve into a longer term relationship that ends in betrayal that is neither punished nor strongly exposed for the social ill that might prevent retribution. Brian Epstein was gay when that was illegal in the U.K. He was still alive when the Sexual Offences Act 1967 was passed. Before then, being who you were could get you a jail sentence. The law lifted fear from millions of people but it doesn't rate a mention.

And that's the story with everything else. According to this, Brian Epstein coursed through his life pushing confrontations down like lumps in the gravy. When he must sack drummer Pete Best, the scene has so very little of the operatic turmoil that a young adult being rejected would have expressed. Extortion threats just get dropped by the story, the dread that Epstein surely felt when the band decided against any more touring in 1966, and so much more that might have help  build an interesting story get ironed out into a kind of caramel smoothie. 

Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People told the career of Tony Wilson, mixing cheeky to-camera asides with scenes that rolled like the best after dinner stories. Steve Coogan declares that he, as Wilson, is a minor character in his own biography. Aside from some well staged monologues about things like the U.S. tours that have Epstein telling us what they involved as he walks toward us against a moving projected backdrop is the right idea but there is so little flavour to it that it passes into the rest of the caramel like everything else. By the time he is confronted with his own mortality it is far too late for anyone in the audience to feel much.

What's good? The casting of The Beatles works well. They look, sound and move like the band they're meant to be and whenever we see them in a scene we want the film to switch and say, "just kidding, this is the story of The Fab Four."

The fault is in the writing. It feels as though everything that might have been too daring in the life story of a man who packed up his conflicts until they outweighed him, has been diluted or discarded. Why? Are Beatles fans now really going to be offended or hurt in some way if something more like Brian Epstein's life were to be told in fiction? As it is we cannot get close to the story because it resists its own audience with its blandness. Last comparison: The Hours and Times is a tough little film that speculates on what happened when Epstein took John Lennon to Spain on a holiday at the onset of Beatlemania. It states clearly at the outset that it is making it all up but when it does get into what moments of intimacy and questions of fame, it delivers. For all its creaky old indy look, it breaks through. Midas Man is more like the previously-on sequence of a mini-series that never quite starts before the end credits.

Midas Man is currently on general release.

MIFF 2024 Round Up

HAIL AND FAREWELL!

This might be my last one. I've made MIFF a winter holiday for the past twenty-one years. I've been going since the late '80s but it wasn't until 2003 that I could afford both money and time to take at least a week off and just go to the movies. From that time this was the part of the year that felt like an adventure holiday for the mind and nerves as everything from big thrills to quiet puzzling experiments would blend together in a magic lantern otherworld. And I sat in the dark with strangers and let the work world leave my body like a sigh.

I eventually took a fortnight off each year and then, having the time banked, an extra week to decompress and watch movies at normal cinemas without the queues and seating crush. I learned, after queueing around the corner at the Forum one frosty afternoon, that if I could relax and wait for the whole crowd to go in, I'd get something like the front row seat I preferred. Also, the snickering sneak of getting all ten and then an extra three sessions out of my minipass by grabbing as many daytime sessions as I could find. That led to at least one MIFF that I'd planned so efficiently, daytime obscurities and horror in the evening, that I didn't see a single film with a friend. That was a wake up.

MIFF was an escape from the press of the normal, just as the school holidays were an escape into play, books, and all the good things the ABC used to put on for us from the U.K. in May and August. Currents and undercurrents of the flow of the moving image which moved like a whole year of cinema going in a fortnight. Every year as late July approached, I felt the magnetism resonating around the corner.

But this year was one of those where that didn't happen. It's not the first but it might well be an indicator of the future. The style of the Nugent Report that recommended the outsourcing of funding and management for arts organisations has, since its publishing in 1999, leaked into arts events and institutions in the time since. MIFF has been low in this way but it recovered with some inspired leadership. Whenever the best of that has ended, the screaming void of cost cutting and overselling. It might just sound like names but whenever the head of an arts festival goes from a director to a CEO you know someone has come in to sort things out. I miss Richard Moore and Michelle Carey and their gleeful exploratory guidance. That's gone.

And then they do make it elitist. One cheap pass was introduced but the one I usually get was hiked by fifty dollars. I could see all twelve from that just by getting four of the cheap ones and still pay less. But, really, what they wanted was to sell more memberships. These stayed about the same. A fair few perks, to be fair, but at over six hundred dollars, they were well out of range for most punters. But when you continue to reduce the value of the festival bars and meeting places, limit one of the beloved venue's use, introduce reserved seating, cut the total of new contemporary cinema titles by close to a hundred and hype up a swag of revivalist screenings in the manner of premieres, I'll admit getting a membership might well seem like buying myself out of bothering with the great unwashed. So, next year, there will need to be some really special things in the program for me to bother. I'll be spending less time and money on that aspect of my winter holiday.

THE PROGRAM

I saw some good stuff but, boy, did I have to do a lot of sifting through a line up that seemed painstakingly chosen to feel like a prestige festival without teeth. Mainstream fare rubbed shoulders with indies destined for local cinemas before the last warmth had left the Forum seats. The sold out audience members for I Saw the TV Glow would be a lot more comfortable going to the Nova to see it less than a week after the festival ended. Of the twelve I saw, I'd rate about four to recommend. Most of the others were disappointments or bland, and not arthouse bland but plain and unaffecting. Very little of it seemed to want to take any chances and put pressure on audiences to touch the challenge of living cinema. 

It wasn't quite the nadir of 2000 which was so stuffed with mainstream fare and big dollar sponsor money that it felt like eighteen Saturdays in Sadder Plenty. When the stream goes main, the genre goes south. A page's worth of horror movies was all we got. There have been more in normal cinema schedules in the first quarter of this year. The streaming section was a shrunken grab from the main program. Great idea with good intentions but dull. If it's as flavourless next year, I'll be lucky to go to two I'm interested in.

Should also point out that I went to four normal cinema screenings which I enjoyed far more than the MIFF fare and had better experiences with audiences who weren't so entitled and rude.

THE VENUES

What happened to The Forum for the first week? We've already had to put up with losing the ground floor which was the most beautiful and atmospheric meeting place and chill room of any festival. Now, it's a cordoned off strip in ACMI with a bank of Campari behind the bar. The hub is the old restaurant that was there and it seemed ok but I wasn't inclined to luxuriate in its dentist chair ambience.

ACMI is an operating theatre of a cinema. It does, however, have excellent appointments and you are guaranteed a perfect screening. This and the Forum were the cinemas that had reserved seating imposed on them. Reserved seating in the wild has become a relic of COVID's aftermath with distancing and capacity ruling the notion. It existed before then but it has since become de rigeur. It's done for people who want to sit in the middle. What it means at MIFF is that all of those who get in first everywhere, take everything they can and everyone else goes to the sides, the very back, or the front, where I am, usually with a few other deviants. This year, every seething one of them that had neglected to see that you could choose your seat for yourself ended up in the outer ring and these were the Neanderthals that spread every microbe on the soles of their footwear on to the armrests of the seats in front of them. None of this was policed to the slightest degree (not that I would expect the hapless volunteers, who hold the damn event on their shoulders every year, to be trained in this).

On ticketing: a very good feature was added that reduced the clicks and fol de rol if you wanted to exchange one session for another. It only cost a buck but that's also what you had to do if you wanted to change your seats in the same session. Not. Thought. Through.

Hoyts I love as a MIFF venue as I can sit in that raft at the front where the longest legged seat kickers can never reach. Also, very good projection and audio. Ditto, Kino but their capacity cannot compete with Hoyts so a sold out session there can be a trial. 

Didn't go to the Capitol. The one session I'd booked there sold out. I've done that before and never will again. I went to the new Cronenberg instead and had a better time at Hoyts.

I didn't see any streaming titles. I was exhausted from the main program, the choice was way down on previous years and wasn't tempting. One good thing. The decision to start it at the same time as the main one was welcome. Beginning streaming almost as the cinema festival was ending was idiotic.

The Program:

It was down compared to recent years. MIFF has varied in overall quality in the decades I've been going. One of the worst featured opening and closing films of such shamelessly mainstream character that not only were they both in cinemas before the festival was over but reflected the dullest of approaches from the goose who was directing at the time. It was late '90s early '00s and made it look like MIFF was sinking into flavourless tourism.

This year the title count was down by about a hundred (but still advertised as though the number was impressive). 

The App:

Updated in good time. Normal first use glitches aside, it was all go. I made one exchange and it was reflected immediately. Also, the sales status was kept up instantly. That exchange went to Standby rapidly and I was able to swap it for another on the site. This has become one of the pleasantest features of the festival. It's where you store your bookings and wishlists and manage your experience as well as check on how full something will be (I avoid sold out sessions). A consistent winner.

Staff:

They remain personable and helpful. Didn't have a single problem (one thing that has consistently improved since the "good old days"). This festival depends on the work of volunteers. No shade on the people I dealt with. However, I don't know what the margins are these days but I bet this could improve (i.e. they could start paying them).

THE MOVIES

HIGH

ODDITY

Real horror with atmosphere, scares and quirk that works. The single most enjoyable film of the festival.

MADE IN ENGLAND: the Films of Powell and Pressburger

Martin Scorsese celebrating the works of the Anglo-Hungarian duo as they made masterpiece after masterpiece. Depth of commentary and a poignant placing of his own life story and the films' effect on him. 

A TRAVELER'S NEEDS

Hong Sang-soo only needs to keep making films like these to make me feel happy about living in the world. This despite some of the darker revelations about the human way that come out in conversations. Exposure without judgement.

TOLL

Kitchen sink melodrama from Brazil that works without resorting to anything more than committed performances of a deceptively simple screenplay. This got the fest off to a great start.

MIDDLE

THE HYPERBOREANS

I used to jump at films like this that based their approach on Brecht's ideas to tell historical stories. While this example had its charms, its coldness prevented me from looking deeper into it than I did. It shames me to admit that the Guy Maddin style denouement was the only thing that really got me engaged. Should it shame me, though, when the Guy Maddin entry in the program was so flat? 

BLACKOUT

Great idea about an alcoholic's blackouts being directly analogous to his blackouts when he becomes a werewolf. This is allowed to get sidetracked (despite some great kills) by a little man vs big man in a small town story that happens during the day. The two threads are left unsatisfyingly unresolved.

THE DEMON DISORDER

Wastes screen time  going in circles until things firm up for a fun second half that also delivers the poignant notes about the family condition.

RUMOURS

Guy Maddin has been blanding out since the wonderful The Forbidden Room a few years back. Is it collaboration with the Johnson brothers? We must all develop but, boy I miss, that misty old world cinema with the contemporary sass.

THE SHROUDS

Yes, this long term Cronenberg fan is putting a D.C. movie in the middling section. Everything about the film works but I didn't get what I was expecting.

LOW

THE MOOGAI

In which a highly effective short film is expanded with a bigger budget and bungled all the way through. Little to no empathy possible for the persistently unlovable lead character, the good idea of equivalence between the folkloric monster and the government snatching children left in a  gooey mess, and a showdown with an impressively realised creature fizzles. 

THE DAMNED

The conceit of putting Civil War soldiers in for the many conflicts and dodgy incursions performed by the U.S.A. is a good one but ends up as a Malik style mood piece. It's not terrible but nor is it particularly engaging.

EPILOGUE

Farewell to what will I think be my last full festival. With so many other such institutions flinging their caps out to dominating donors and philanthropy and CEOs where curatorial directors once stood, and pricing for elite tickets and reserved seating for people who can't organise themselves to arrive on time and behave considerately to others, and a raft of other unpleasant things and moments, my favourite time of year has become tokenistic movies for people who think that that's what Netflix is, and gab loudly through it as though a parliamentary decree has allowed them. From now on, I'll just go to the movies.