LIFE OF BRIAN @ 45

Brian Cohen is born to Mandy in Bethlehem around year one AD. They are visited by three wise men bearing gifts who worship Brian until one of them finds the real nativity scene a few doors down. As a young adult, Brian and his mum come across the other one delivering the beatitudes from the mount. But they're at the back where all the "blessed are-s" are getting mangled by the listeners. Later, Brian is hawking Roman snacks at the local colosseum and runs into a group of would-be terrorists and is particularly struck by Judith of their number. Suddenly inspired with Judean patriotism he joins them, setting him on a parallel to the more famous one that leads all the way to Golgotha.

Along the way we get a dizzying ride through the Jerusalem of Pilate and Christ, a time of complicated imperial flexes and violent religious extremism. A public stoning goes horribly wrong after its terms of reference get impossibly knotted, Brian, literally falls into the place of a market preacher and the impromptu nonsense he has to come up with, at first ridiculed by the crowd, wins him a cult like following in minutes. A leper cured by Christ, now without legitimate cause to beg for his living has to convince people he is an ex-leper. Pontius Pilate's r-lisp has his guards strain to keep from laughing as they see him punish anyone who breaks with life or death penalties. The twisted logic of the student collective style terror group meetings often leads them to forget the motions they were debating. If the previous outing Holy Grail satirised legend-making and the idea of Merrye Englande, Life of Brian pushed back against religious politics and its justifications from the Roman Eagles to the barefoot faithful on the streets (and in the same geographical neighbourhood, just quietly).

Brian remains the most coherently written narrative of all the Python movies and is the one whose production values and performances most closely resemble a mainstream blockbuster. You do this when you really have a thing to say, and this is the most focussed of the team's efforts. That its attack on religious convention is still potent today testifies to that concentration. That it is still funny is a reward to its creators for the commitment. But here, we hit a snag or two. 

The controversy on its release from religious groups was the same as those that inadvertently aided the causes of Godard's Haily Mary and Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ. The famous debate on the BBC (moderated by Tim Rice, lyricist for the also-beleaguered Jesus Christ Superstar) has two leading Christian figures attempting to browbeat John Cleese and Michael Palin of the Pythons into submission with some heavy-head-in-the-sandedness even for forty five years ago, bypassing the message of independent thought and insisting it was a lampoon of Christ. Really, they had nothing. They actually had less than the nun on U.S. television who predicted California would fall into the sea as a result of Last Temptation (well, it is on a fault line). This broadcast is all over YouTube and I'd recommend it. But this as a debate has long passed.

The contentious moments of Life of Brian have to do with cultural shifts in the decades since its release. There are many points of any generations-old cultural artefact that might appear problematic after decades of social change but for this case, I'm going to pick only two. Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam play (apart from a number of other roles) a pair of prison lowlifes. Gilliam is made up as a Boschian grotesque and might well be a torturer. He is portrayed as deaf and insane. Idle is given a grinding stutter. The joke of it is that this slows down scenes in which characters need information quickly. On the surface of it, it looks like the stutter is the butt of the joke, but it's really the frustration of the delay. Also, there is a very strong and brief payoff that completely reverses our impressions of the characters, adds a layer of absurdism, and acquits the team of cheap shooting. It's risky but it wins.

In greater contention, though, is the early scene in which Eric Idle's character as one of the People's Front of Judea declares himself a woman and wants to have babies. When that is shouted down, another member suggests the compromise that he ought to at least have the right to have babies. Now, the machinery of the joke still works fine, it just has not made it through to now without scar tissue. I don't primarily  write that with the notion that someone might feel hurt to see the scene (though that is important) but that the concept of trans people is no longer presented as an absurdity. The idea in 1979 was not unknown, and certainly not new but its passage into mainstream society feels so natural that joking about it sounds old. Old in the way a comedy bit about a drunk, cross-eyed and staggering, no longer works. It's just not funny now.

For those who blitheringly use the term woke to dismiss anyone with a social conscience, the scene might even serve as a kind of badge of defiance. I'll leave them, and anyone who considers contrarianism anything but self-consuming bullshit, to their own songs. I watched the scene in company (same age range and very similar sensibilities) and we all kind of distanced ourselves from it, not in some haughty, righteous manner, or even sadness, more noting that it no longer worked. As, someone who finds himself further left leaning than he was decades ago as an undergraduate, I, by contrast, found the depiction of the terrorist meetings as minefields of ideological soundness hilarious, I yet have perspective on this other issue. Like the loping comedy drunk or the wisecracking woman-hater of yore, my response to the transphobia is closer to embarrassment than censure.

Can we get past that to the rest of the film and find it funny? I think so but I understand if someone directly affected by the joke would write all of it off. Hey, it's a great comedy but, really, it's also only a movie. My case for it has to do with its concentrated push against prescribed thinking, and its broadsides against the brutality of military occupation. At the risk of cheapening my own argument here I will say that any movie that saves a character from a fatal situation by having him suddenly abducted by an alien warship, will always get my attention. Like any strong comedy, Life of Brian must be prepared to dig at its own times. That that can mean it errs against future community feeling is an impossible point of judgement. And guess what, almost all of it is completely bloody funny.

Review: LOVE LIES BLEEDING

Lou works at a gym into which one day strides Jacqueline who is built for power. Instant mutuality bound with some shared violence, a hot night at home and they're an item. Lou's never been outside of her one-mule New Mexico town but Jack has drifted from Oklahoma, on her way to the bodybuilding championships in Vegas. Play it by ear, maybe. Lou's sister is married to a assaultive man who all but puts her in a coma with a face like a granite formation. Lou's anger transports to Jack who pays a visit on fisty JJ. Well, you know what they say, love's all fun and games until someone puts an eye out. It's more than an eye but you get my drift.

On the one hand, I could never have predicted that the writer/director of Saint Maud would have offered something like this as a follow up. On the other hand, the theme of dependence and its power plays is a pretty direct port to this neo-noir. Also Rose Glass's strong use of sudden absurdism is in great shape with some eyepopping moments on screen. As I like to avoid the laziness and mediocrity of criticism by comparison it is my happy duty to report that this outing is so confidently its own film that suggesting the influence of other filmmakers would be unhelpful.

That said, as enjoyable as recognising this style is there is a tension that becomes counterproductive. It lies between the cool (love story) and the cruel (violence). The threads do weave but they are at such odds that the small town slow can dominate over the slowburn by which the story is better served. This is corrected in the third act but it does make the middle drag. When we want someone to get up and do something, we wish the protocol of the underworld were less politely observed.

That said, if you let the romance take centre screen and only notice the build of the other characters and story you should do ok with this steamy, sensual girl noir. Kristen Stewart again proves the substance in her powers of performance (how many times does she have to, seriously?) with a detailed portrayal of a woman surprised to discover her own potential. It's also pleasant to find a director who opts out of fetishising her delicate urbane beauty in favour of giving it some more mortal sweat and sunlight. We get a lot of close up skin, most of it either stretched over solidly built muscle or moving with neural expertise and the effect is beautifully sculptural.

Katy O'Brien as Jackie adds to her ripped muscularity a commitment to exploring the loss of control vs growing power from a reliance on performance enhancers. A scene where she seems to absorb Lou's powerless rage is extraordinary. Ed Harris, looking like Rocky Horror's Riff Raff in his third age, delivers a gruffness he and his character have earned over decades as well as a surprising tenderness which reveals his sophistication. It's a well judged approach.

So, having seen Rose Glass emerge as a whole artist with the creeping horror of Saint Maud (see for free on SBS on Demand) and then hone her art with this noir it occurred to me that I want to see her have a crack at a dark sci-fi (preferably in space). Then she can do what she likes (I've sent word to her of this and I'm sure she'll be relieved). Want to see a bold new original voice in contemporary cinema  sing out? Go and see Love Lies Bleeding. And stay through the credits for a brief but beautiful shadow play.

Love Lies Bleeding is currently on general release. Rose Glass's debut feature Saint Maud can be found at SBS on Demand or hired from the usual online providers.

1984 @ 40: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM ST

Teen Tina, wakes from a nightmare in which she was pursued by a man with a burnt face and a glove with razor fingers. It felt so real that before she dares sleep again, she asks friends Nancy and Glen over for support. Nancy has no trouble believing Tina's story as she's seen the same figure in her own dreams. There is another dream attack, ending in Tina being torn to shreds for real and her big goofy boyfriend the main suspect. Who's for coffee?

Pop cinema visionary Wes Craven had developed a name on the wrong side of the movie tracks with intense exploitation epics like The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. He burst into the '80s teen wave with Nightmare, adding a new iconic villain to the Jasons and Michael Myers's. But what he added was depth. Halloween didn't need to be much more than a vehicle for a final girl to find her courage. Friday the 13th kept the final girl and added gore. Freddy Kruger, like Jason and Michael, had a violent backstory but his influence over his prospective victims seeped into their unconscious, not just at night but in sleep debt moments in class where a monster who can look like anyone or anything as well as his terrifying self came to life. You carried Freddy around and were likely to meet him again at any time of the day. The psychological torture of that was compounded by the physical threat as that razor glove did real damage. Keep a stone wall between yourself and Jason and you're fine but Freddy is wherever you are.

As the teenagers who spend this film's middle act working out how to combat Freddy, they uncover his origin story and the concealment that implicates their parents in vigilante murder (this includes the current town sheriff). This follows Nancy's institutionalisation for sleep disorder where she comes out of a dream with Freddy, hanging on to his hat now in the real world. As we step back from this, look at all the fractured marriages and dysfunctional families in the neighbourhood, see if you're not torn as a viewer between fearing Freddy and understanding that he has a point. Then, the next scene he's in, his violence is so committed he's back on the terror list. What Craven does to ensure this is to add cruelty to Kruger's M.O., he doesn't just chase his victims and trap them, he taunts them, even as they are closing in on their own deaths.

All this and it still plays like a candy coloured pop movie with teenaged detectives. Before Tim Burtons bubblegum gothic put down roots, Nightmare on Elm St pumped its sets with the pallet of musk sticks and lemon drops in far more solid tones than even Spielberg was doing with his dirty-space version of suburbia. The dollhouse décor that holds alcoholic parents or the memory of absent ones is ripe for invasion by the toadlike monster of the kids' nightmares as he chases them down back alleys and boiler rooms. 

Heather Langenkamp as Nancy has been held up for the awkwardness of the performance but, every time I revisit this one I just see more naturalism in it. Her odd grimaces and facial twisting are exactly the kind of unrehearsed personal grotesquery of the teenager. The teenagers in Nightmare are on the side of those in Christine rather than the quipping bratpack of John Hughes. This is complicated by the goofy homemade booby traps that Heather sets for Freddy which are straight out of cartoons but by that stage, she is fighting a phantom and the school science project feel to the gags do fit into a kind of appropriate logic. Then, when the complications with her overall scheme appear to rupture her imagined outcome, there is a realism to it that also satisfies. 

A Nightmare on Elm Street has the honour to be among that rarest of horror franchises with creditable sequels. Craven himself returned to it for the meta New Nightmare. #2 is commonly held up as a queer cinema take. #3 is lauded to the point of being considered superior to the original. Yes, there is dreck in the lineage where the elements were just swished around in the mix again and served to the same people. While it can easily fit into the slasher sub-genre, Nightmare made it more of a challenge, adding parents to the cast who had to confront their generation's mistakes while the kids worked it out for themselves. You could still have (and did) teen knifing galleries but the smarter money was on establishing trust with the young audience the way that those John Hughes movies did. Of course, Craven gleefully went against this with his next game-changer, Scream, in which a cine-literate group of teens quipped their way through a slasher gauntlet. By then, though, he'd earned that decision.

DR STRANGELOVE @ 60

A rogue air force general orders a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. As the president and military brass, along with the Soviet ambassador, try to stop and then control the impending holocaust, it is revealed that the rogue male general had a very personal motive: he thought tampered water had made him impotent. His name is Jack D. Ripper, the president is Merkin Muffley, another general is Turgidson, and so on. This is not Fail Safe, it's the story of failed machismo in a system where sexuality and violence on a global scale have become indistinguishable and it is one of the bleakest satires ever devised. 

Stanley Kubrick began with a serious source novel and intended to make a political thriller. He began working with the novel's author Peter George but soon came to see the possibilities of comedy in the dizzying cold-war notion of mutually assured destruction. Add touches by Terry Southern and Red Alert becomes Dr Strangelove or How I stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb. What this meant was that however comedic the resulting film became it was also based on meticulous research that gave its settings a  authentic look. Compared to the oft compared Fail Safe (same year) with its necessity-driven patchwork of technology, Strangelove looks and feels darker.

That said, the obvious question about this film is how it travels over the decades to generations who were raised without the threat of nuclear war. In no small way the rival Fail Safe delivers an ending that anyone can be sobered by as it involves massive sacrifice following a mistake. Strangelove gives us an ironic fulfilment which didn't take place when the going got tough. What we are left with is more like an elaborate and bitchy comedy of manners that slips into documentary mode here and there. While I think that's true if the film is to be taken as given, there is still too much on offer to withstand such easy dismissal.

The major underlying theme is sex and anxiety about sex. The opening sequence of a plane refuelling mid-air is an act of penetration between two war machines that would not tax the dullest imagination. The fuel pump is phallic but it's the scrotal bulge in the mechanism that seals it and when it withdraws, the open flaps beside the circular entry point are a relaxed vulva. The muzak strings on the audio play an arrangement of Try a Little Tenderness. Jack D. Ripper's monologue about how he discovered his impotence is given in disturbing denial of his own failing physiology. He thinks it inconceivable (nyuck nyuck) that he should come to this; it has to be the commies and their collectivist syndicalist fluoridation of the water supply. His "precious bodily fluids" failure to appear have been enough to start World War III. Buck Turgidson is having an affair with his secretary who is also Playmate of the Month in the copy of Playboy in their bedroom. In a move that doesn't travel well through time, the President's name of Merkin Muffley is intended to write him off as a pussy. The Soviet Premier on the phone is partying hard and probably privately. It's not the sex that's bad, it's the sublimation of it into politics. Disarm the horny!

Once that's out of the way (although it never really exits) there is the decaying matter of ethics as humanity's time is racing to a big finish. The magnificently imagined Pentagon War Room is a mid-century paring down of German Expressionism with its blocky map of the world, metal columns and massive up-lit conference table. Amid the flatly delivered data about the plummeting chances of recalling the plane, and Turgidson's cocky outbursts, there is Peter Sellars in one of three roles as the President who must limit his activity to receipt until he is engorged with intel by which time there is so very little he can do beyond looking for a humane solution. It is to Sellars' credit that he plays Muffley straight and reserved. Against George C. Scott's tempest (Kubrick effectively tricked a bombastic turn out of Scott and it's worth reading about) we are increasingly led to trust at least the motives of the chief, if despairing of his efficacy. 

Sellars turn as the R.A.F. officer who tries to control the chaos at Ripper's base, involving containing Ripper himself, while it offers more of the actor's talent for comedy, is still more of a moral centre. He might speak in the tones that Sellars as a Goon would have ridiculed but he insists on the character's core goodness. He must; Sterling Hayden's rigid (and, yes, toxic) masculinity admits no room for variance. Hayden, an actor cast for his physical power, commanding voice and hard presence in westerns and crime dramas, expresses Ripper's obsession as though speaking through a trance. He is so wholly seduced by his own crank logic that it has become quasi religious. His unblinking gaze when talking of his impotence and its supposed cause (in almost every one of his lines) will be familiar to anyone who has witnessed a party conspiracy goof all but physically shrink back into the shadows of their refurbished unreality. All of Ripper's scenes are played for laughs (however black) but the bleakness at their core makes them increasingly eerie.

And then there is the title character, the one Sellars uses to steal the show from himself. Dr Strangelove is twisted in his wheelchair, part designer of WMDs for the American Way, part never-quite-ex-Nazi, he holds the floor with scenarios of the post apocalyptic realm in which the very male-domination of the world would not just be repeated but intensified. Sellars, in hoch show-off mode, manages to impose himself from his mangled form, even doing battle with his own sieg-heiling right arm. His calculating psychopathy is overdone and stunning all at once, from his first gentle voiced statements to the Hitlerian screaming he adopts to the final line which manages to be both pathetic and horrifying at once.

As for Kubrick, beyond the exactness of the performances he drew from his cast (of which I've only scratched the surface) he remains in the black and white of most of his previous films but it's for the last time. But this is a black and white of riches. Whether it's the noir chiaroscuro of the Ripper scenes, the faux stock footage of the attack on the air base, the grainy real footage of B52s at rest and in flight, the cathedral-like muted greyscale of the War Room or the back projected endless vistas of the Russian country, it's a showcase of what may be made of monochrome. After this came the cosmic colour of 2001: A Space Odyssey, workaday Britain of A Clockwork Orange, the landscape and courtly painting of Barry Lyndon and so on, exploring the possibilities of the infinite pallet. For now, though, the sobering look of the daily news.

It's wroth noting that the score, when it isn't smirking at the mating aircraft, centres our attention on the progress of the bomber as it heads into mass destruction. The theme is an old American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home which is loud with hurrahs but really mostly celebrating the return of the warrior rather than his exploits. (It's worth noting, also, that both sides of that conflict adopted the song.) It starts as a tune for a single trumpet but, when we return to the bomber, the arrangement grows until it is a deafening orchestral blare with brittle snare drums sounding the march. This was done by Laurie Johnson, a U.K. composer with a  long and distinguished career whose theme for The Avengers won him a lifelong admiration in my heart.

I was twelve when I first saw this. It was on tv and I was helped through it by the laughter and appreciation of older siblings who got the political humour where I wouldn't have. If I knew irony from any ingested culture up to that point I now could name it and recognise it on sight. My '70s in Townsville, which was and remains a significant military centre, was overcast with nuclear threat. I also saw Fail Safe around the same time and thrillers with a World War III theme were effectively worrying. I recall that, while being delighted by the comedy of Dr Strangelove, I was also bluntly reminded of the stakes of its story. It was also easy to see that bad guys could wear good guy uniforms and that the worst things might come out of tiny gripes. I saw that in the movie but it was also evident in the playground at school. It's also in the news as I write this. For the worst and best reasons, this is a film that does endure, even if its intended laughs seem scarcer than they used to be.

Viewing notes: I saw this on the splendid locally available 4K but, really, it has always looked pretty good on home formats so you can't go far wrong. Also available for hire through a few online sources. 

Review: IMAGINARY

Jessica writes and illustrates popular children's books with a kiddy gothic slant. She persuades her new family to move into her childhood home where a sketchy trauma left her in care and her father in intensive care. She's having trouble getting her stepkids to like her but is making some progress with the younger one who shows signs of trauma of her own. The teen bitch older one is not letting her in at all. So, during a bonding game of hide and seek, young Alice goes down to the creepy basement where she finds an old teddy bear and makes a new imaginary friend. Cool and normal.

I can say in this film's defence that its persistent pursuit of the theme of trauma-enforced imagination keeps it coherent and logical. Beyond that it's a matter of a string of convincing practical effects, some deft ol' fashioned film technique and a score that continually says, "FEEL THIS!". These characters and events feel standard, copied from the training manual. If that has set you on an ironic thought that a film called imaginary has been made without imagination, it should. 

Acting is fine but rendered hollow by a screenplay that tells rather than shows (the character of Gloria becomes an on-set narration sidebar at one point), so it doesn't matter how well these actors perform, they are at the mercy of material that forbids escape. Also, while there are slivers of creativity in some scenes, effects, moments of eeriness, the movie wrenches its audience back from the brink lest it should ... scare you, or summin'.

As I left the cinema and began my short trek home, having bade ta ta to my similarly unmoved companions, and the experience of this movie was crumbling to tiny crystals which fell to numb space around them, I wondered what I could think to write about this title. The answer is before you and it's, "not much."