NIGHTMARE ON ELM ST 2: FREDDY'S REVENGE @ 40

Jesse Walsh wakes from a nightmare that features the blade-gloved Freddy Kruger. His family has moved into the ol' Thompson house on Elm St and the bad one has been dropping into his dreams on the regular. When his little sister at breakfast hears his blood curdling screams from his room she asks her mother why he can't wake up like everyone else. It won't be the last joke in this film but it's the best. That's not to say that the Elm St's first sequel is poorly made, it's just that the nature of the gag is at odds with the rest of this film which, itself, is at odds with its own franchise. Elm St 2 is like Halloween 3.

Elm St movies generally go like this: a group of teens gets together and vanquishes Freddy Kruger. This one the victim and perpetrator are the same as Freddy possesses Jesse, forcing him to repeatedly commit murder: the protagonist is the slasher. It's significant that such an isolating approach should be applied to a character who, though new to his school, pretty much fits right in with the types who would mark him for bullying. They try but he pushes back and fits among them without a real struggle. He and the king of the jocks unite in adversity against their PE teacher which binds them.

That's the other thing about this film that needs a note. It's been outed for so long that it doesn't count as an elephant in the room. Nightmare on Elm St is a gay. From the dacked wrestling to the leather bar to Freddy's facial caress to his failed makeout with Lisa ending with his refuge with Grady to a near numberless other instances, the theme leaves subtext and becomes text progressively. If Tom Cruise a few years earlier thrilled audiences by dancing in his parent-free house to a rock classic, Jesse unpacks his things in his room to perky electro disco, bumping and grinding with an array of increasingly flamboyant specs.

These aren't the controversial aspects; those have to do with casting, writing and production. I won't cover the whole story here (it's not my community and I can't speak for them) but it's worth pursuit with some wrong-headed sleaze by writers and producers and a history of self-contradicting statements. If you've heard that this is the gay '80s horror you should know that wasn't conceived in inclusive spirit but more exploitatively. That it has become a cult hit with the community is, however, inclusive which serves as an example of cultural redemption that the horror genre seldom knows.

The story itself moves at a clip as Jesse makes his way through high school and Freddy makes his way through him, leaving a trail of corpses and a subplot of queasy manipulation. The fantasy sequences are darker in lighting and mood than in the first and Freddy's seduction of Jesse has the uncomfortable feel of predation. The mid-'80s forced pastel pallet of waking life is a strange relief after that. The finale is strong and, given the progress of the story preceding, has a persistent sexuality to it that leads to a coda of ambiguous experience (who is doing the dreaming?).

That this outlier in its franchise has been adopted by the culture it was once intended to exploit is a kind of happy ending. As an Elm St movie it is overshadowed heavily by the original and the third installment which is often pegged as the best in the best of the bunch. Later entries suffered the same dilution, boiling it down to a series of scenes and locations in a decreasingly purposeful loop. Freddy becomes a wiseacre and loses a lot of his power and the movies often muddle between quick-buck horror and teen comedy, finding an easy home in movie nights on VHS and TV movie marathons. The first three parts, however, stand as strong as a continuous unit as the first four Friday the 13th titles, each bringing something of themselves to the table other than regurgitation. If you've never bothered with it, hearing that one and three are the ones to see, press play on it and find riches.

Viewing notes: I watched my copy from the very well presented Elm St box set on DVD. While the original benefits massively from a 4K upgrade (bought separately) these discs are at the top of the game as far as the earlier tech goes and are often very pleasantly discounted by retail outlets. Otherwise, it's a cheap rent from one of the online sources.

Review: FLOW

A black cat ambles through a forest, avoiding a pack of dogs, and notices a rumbling coming from the earth. Animals speed through the scene, escaping what the cat sees is a huge, violent tide. Soon, the entire land is underwater and the cat is perched increasingly on the ear of a massive cat sculpture as a sailboat drifts its way. Scrambling aboard, it finds a capybara already there. The cat goes aft to the shelter to sleep after its exhausting progress. Eventually, they are joined by a ring tailed lemur and a stork, all of whom go through distrust and conflict until it really looks like it's them and the endless ocean. This is a story of survival.

The unavoidable eco theme of the climate disaster is clearly linked to the complete absence of the creatures that caused it, the humans. Their cities and monuments have become dry spaces for the animals. As we follow the crew of the sailboat we notice that they pick up skills along the way like the tiller of the boat, gathering treasures, the cat overcoming its antipathy to water and fishing for the rest of them. These are portrayed as being developmental but always within the limitations of physiology. Analogies to culture and politics are also clear, testifying to the adoption of a kind of compassion. That said, there is an incident in the stork flock that puts the exclusion and aggression to the fore.

But the animals don't just turn into cute human substitutes. The cat moves like a cat, coughs up hairballs and cleans itself like a real one. There is no spoken dialogue but the meaning of vocalisations (taken from real life animal sounds) is always clear. The animation style might take some folk a spell to adjust to. The backgrounds and settings lean toward photorealism but the animals are more blocky, like children's book illustrations. I think this was to allow more agility to the action of the characters in preference for a more dodgy ultra real style. Once you accept the animals, you will be lost in the story and will stop wondering about the method and start worrying if the cat is going to survive this time overboard.

And that's the thing. Flow does the lot, humour, drama, suspense and a stinging sadness when it needs to. If you leave this film not on the point of tears (or past it) you should worry. If it doesn't give you pause to consider the fragility of the state of the Earth then you might want to start considering. This is a short review because I know that, if I let myself, I might never stop writing about it. There were an expected high number of kids in the audience and I was almost looking forward to the sounds of their engagement. Then the film really kicked in, the powerful score and sound design lifting the already muscular visual feast, and the silence was the sound of awe. This will be one of the best films I will see this year.

Review: MICKEY 17

Mickey falls into a crevasse while on a mission for his colony and can't believe he's still alive after the fall. It's the future and he volunteered to become an Expendable in the interstellar expedition led by a populist politician. What that means is that he gets to be tested for anything injurious or lethal like exposure to space or newly discovered viruses. If he dies he gets reprinted with all his memories. The one we meet is the seventeenth iteration, Mickey 17. When he survives the situation, enough time has passed to assume his death and a new Mickey has been printed. Unlike his nerdy awkward self, this one is aggressive and forthright, claiming 17's life and girlfriend. But Mickey 17 is haunted by how he survived and what the strange local creatures are that almost consumed him.

Bong Joon Ho's epic length sci-fi satire dives deep and long but, as usual, brings everything home and then some. There is a lot of plot to deal with and the political examination of the microcosm on the ship gives opportunity for some banging jibes at demagogues and the lower depths of human curiosity. Also characteristic is the immersive world building on screen. That said, it could lose almost an hour of runtime before anyone would notice.

Because the third act and coda are so engaging, it's easy to let slip the disproportionately massive beginning and middle which runs so much repetition that it can feel like a loop. Scenes that should whiz by feel agonisingly elongated. This is an enemy to the comedic side of things and a lot of the setups feel exhausted by the punchline. With all that you wouldn't expect so very much expository narration but you do get a lot of it. There are passages of this film where you just wish you could hit fast forward. Bong does like to loosen his belt when making his features but something like Parasite plugs so much in without it ever feeling laboured or slow. He just let this one go on.

This is a pity because this superb cast which includes Robert Pattinson in dual roles, Mark Ruffalo in high bombast, Toni Collette in bizarre one-percenter sleaze mode, Naomi Ackie enjoying an action role, and Steven Yuen being everyone's slippery ne'er do well, is a corker of an ensemble. But you could also make a cast of the themes from colonisation, economic oppression, political populism, science minus ethics, fragile tenets regarding civilisation, unethical cuisine, and the overall oafish devastation that humans are so given to. The stretched canvas can at times allow breathing room for all of these but it's when the stakes clarify the conflict  in the finale that we really feel as though we find the depth.

Bong is a contemporary master of cinema and has given his audiences many hours of thought-provoking enjoyment. While this must rank among his best, I can't help feeling for the tightness of Host, the heartrending intrigue of Mother, the thrill of Snowpiercer and so on. I just wish that, along with Luca Guadagnino and Coralie Fargeat, someone would in kindly fashion shake him out of these interminable screen times. If this had been a lean ninety minutes it would be a pop out instant classic instead of the new film from the old master. That said, you really could do a lot worse than this at the moment.

Review: A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

1961 and a young Bob Dylan hits New York, guitar and handwritten songbook in hand. He visits the ailing legend Woody Guthrie in hospital where he also meets another living legend, Pete Seeger. Bob asks to play Woody a song written for him. It impresses both of them. He's on his way. Back in New York he meets a student who takes an equal shine to him and they shack up long enough for Bob's eyes to wander over to the rising Joan Baez who also thaws before him. A break here and a push there, and he's playing the Newport Folk Festival to an adoring crowd. There's just one problem. He's young and heavily creative and needs to keep moving forward. It's just before rock music spread out into its own traditionalism and the folk scene that Bob was ruling was feeling tight around his neck.

If you've seen any fictionalised movies about The Beatles you'll know how much of a risk this one was. If the guy playing him doesn't look exactly like him, he'd better play him to perfection. Any straying from the minutely rendered timeline of facts is up for the punishment of the greater world. Dylan is still alive and so is even the oldest of his fanbase. The recent biopic of Brian Epstein Midas Man had the Beatles community raging, not because of the muddled execution of Epstein but that the actor playing John Lennon was too short!

This Dylan is clearly intended for the Millennials and Gen Alpha rather than anyone who went to Newport. It's a linear take on fame, progress within a popular culture determined to keep it in stasis, and the value of contrarianism in the face of that. As such, it works a treat. I've never been able to get into Dylan to any real depth, despite the encouragement of friends and siblings who anything but Dylan bores. They tried and I honour the effort. It's just not for me. What is for me is the spectre of an artist who goes where he will, logs his bad decisions in an ever expanding repertoire of expression.

Timothee Chalamet doesn't quite resemble Dylan but he gets busy with studiously observed physicality, solid blue-eye acting and the commitment to do his own playing and singing. What he conveys might look a little too like the result of a lot of '60s interviews but Chalamet does appear to be crafting character for the purposes of cinema rather than the approval of the experts. As such, he comes across as a person before he's a famous person. Add to this the general persona he has already cultivated publicly with turns in Dune or Call Me By Your Name. He has a career duty to appear also as himself. If this seems a cheat consider that he is playing the kind of figure who needed to blend persona with self skilfully as a matter of occupational mental health. Chalamet works.

Apart from knowing already that the infamous "Judas" heckle happened on a U.K. tour and not at Newport, I couldn't easily tell you how much is got wrong here. I determined to relax what little I do know to see if it works as a film. All biopics, particularly of music stars, commit the great moments sin whereby a portent of greatness to come is heralded as part of normal life. People who might have good parts to play as characters are named in full the way they never would be in reality. There are a lot of these (as there were in the same director's Walk the Line) and they do annoy me as a concentration on such moments as genuinely quotidian would be more impressive. But it's not a big flaw, being so ubiquitous and when the cast that includes Ed Norton, Elle Fanning and a terrific turn as Joan Baez by Monica Barbaro is so consistently engaging. Is the electrified gig at Newport overplayed? Not as much as every concert scene in The Doors and the most sensational myth (Seeger axing the electricty) is curtailed. I liked it .It made me want to listen to Dylan and Baez and Pete Seeger. It did that job, if nothing else.

ROLLERBALL @ 50

A darkened velodrome slowly wakes as staff prepare it for use. The heavy grind of Bach's Toccata and Fugue blares. Teams assemble in uniforms that borrow from gridiron and hockey except that the players are wearing rollerskates while others are on motorcycles. The audience is restless behind Perspex barriers and a group of the suited privileged make themselves comfortable at an elevated viewing room. A hush descends for the announced corporate anthem. As it plays, the captain of the Houston team Jonathon E.  impatiently thumps a metal ball against his leg. The siren sounds and the ball is fired from a cannon. There are goals and rules but fatality is penalised only by time out. This is the future where there are no wars but there is Rollerball.

Norman Jewison's realisation of William Harrison's source novel and then screenplay ticks all the boxes of '70s dystopian sci-fi: a global government, a cultural distraction for a docile public, a take on computers of the future, and a strident anti-individualistic oppression. Details like the corporate anthem and the slick brutality of the game of the title wrench us out of the present day by depicting such as normality. So, why, out of a field that includes Logan's Run and ZPG, would I put this among the peaks of the sub-genre? Because it commits to all of those tropes and pushes character further forward than any of them.

Jonathon E. is a superstar. Between games and the adulation of crowds, his teammates and the corporate overlords, he relaxes at his ranch with his latest assigned spouse. What could go wrong? He could. He's aging and has been at the top of the game's culture for too long in the minds of the bosses. He has become greater than the game. The game's purpose is not the promotion of human endeavour, it's bread and circuses and is the only thing standing between the status quo and a repeat of the fabled corporate wars. Heroes are fine for the continuation but they, like all the products made by the corporations, have shelf life. Jonathon resists, knowing he has many years left in him on the rink. The corporation knows that he can be squeezed out and begin to loosen the rules until there is only the mechanism and the players and a game played to the death.

But the thing about this story is the result of the inevitable showdown between the people as represented by Jonathon and the company as represented by Mr Bartholomew: what will it mean if an act of defiance against the corporate order is successful, the breaking of the order, mass rebellion, more oppression? Jonathon himself doesn't know and Bartholomew is confident that the point is moot as he's on the real power team. Jonathon's development has to do with his initial discomfort at the squeeze to a position of awareness. Friends and trusted colleagues are of little help and then even the mighty electronic brain he visits in Geneva breaks down at his query. He's in this alone and has no way to predict his future if he doesn't conform and retire. As concrete as the conclusion is, we are left with a quiet dread.

James Caan as Jonathon starts as someone who barely questions his lot, being so privileged. His resistance begins with the assignment of wives; he misses one more than any and the suggestion that she was stolen by a suit has a sour resonance. But then, as he watches the game get harder as the constraints are progressively removed, he understands that he won't be allowed to continue. This is a clever twist on the usual dystopian scenarios by applying the costs of a command society to one at the top rather than a Winston Smith foraging around the lower depths. That the rule of the capitalists has become an invisible tyranny is also a switch from the more typical military totalitarianism or hard collectivism: there is a constant illusion of personal liberty for the consumer who is entirely bound by the goods and services from above. Caan's macho strong silence is progressively rendered vulnerable with  increased awareness, even to the point of being aware of the trap he has entered.

At the other end of the table John Houseman, everyone's go-to posh intimidator, slimes everyone around him with his unctuous powersleaze. When it is time to render this dark and even sadistic, Houseman brings it and embodies every vocable of his threat. This had already served him in memorable turns like his admiral in Seven Days in May and would again in the film and TV series The Paper Chase. There could have been no better casting.

And Jewison for his part also brings it. He ensured that there would be no glossing over depictions of the game which are white knuckle, constantly engaging and set within a spectacle of brightly uniformed colour, bloodthirsty crowds and a thunderous cacophony of constant threat of injury and death. These scenes thrill today. Back in the designer homes of the players and the boardrooms it's all '70s futurism with trapezoidal screens embedded in walls, primary colours and burnt tones for the suggestion of classiness that the status hungry always chase. 

The massive allnighter parties that end in the fiery destruction of trees for the hell of it show the waste and nervous-system-numbing hedonism the new one percent get to live by. These scenes are like old Playboy ads for whiskey or cigarettes come to life and only need slight pushing to work as visions of the world to come. It's where Jonathon attempts to find guidance and sense in the libraries and computer monoliths that the corporate style simplifies into mammoth clean-lined weirdness of design. Many remarkable public buildings from the time were used for this and the suggestion is that we are looking at the near future, not some fancied one far beyond our mortal grasp. Add some rich classical source music for the scoring and you've got what often feels like a cheekily produced bubblegum Kubrick. The fashioner of the busy anachronistic clashing of Jesus Christ Superstar would have been flattered by the recognition.

At school we all had to find a way to get to see this boy's movie to be in the gang. It was an M but one that cinemas were tight about. You could go with parents but the way to do it was as normal paying customers of the claim thereof. No one felt tipped a moustache or strode in with platform heels but if you went offpeak, in the afternoons when they were most in need of bums on seats, you'd get past, especially if you threw them a couple of bucks for softdrink and popcorn. I went to the drive in with my sister and her friend Penny and no one batted an eyelid. By that time, all the kids were talked out about it but I went on about bread and circuses as I'd been through an ancient Rome phase. That stirred a few chats. 

You were supposed to go on about the percussive violence, and I did, too, but the figure of the hero struck me more. Always having to dodge around what most of the kids liked and how little I cared for it, I treasured the hero as outsider and, while it wasn't a central text for me, it pushed me rightly away from mass muck. The spectres of things like Star Wars and Grease were to come and I did see and at least partially enjoy some of that, I was able to drop it without any pangs. The one commercial channel in Townsville was showing things like Zabriskie Point and Husbands as midweek movies; cute space and cuter '50s were not going to cut it.

I still like Rollerball. It's not timeless so much as still relevant. It's not just about sport (that would never endear it to me) but it makes a story with sport at its centre rivetting. Had a lot of career ahead of him and all of it is worth your time but for me the trio of Fiddler on the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar and this form his strongest output, ending with the tale of frightening familiar gone rogue, the billionaire who acts like a king, and more, and worse.

Viewing notes: I watched my Scream Factory 4K with a faultless vibrant transfer not shy with the grain structure. Not locally available anymore but rentable through the usual online outlets.

CITY OF LOST CHILDREN @ 30

Krank, a craggy grotesque, taps the dreams of captive children because he can't dream himself. In an abandoned oil rig fitted out like a steampunk lair, his efforts, through a machine made to purpose, keep failing. The inventor of the device has long absconded in disgust, leaving half a dozen clones of himself. Krank elicits the aid of a cult of machine men to abduct children from the harbour town on shore. One night they take little Grub, brother of the massive One, circus strongman. Now ... um ... and a gang of children thieves is run by a pair of conjoined twins who are building up to steal a big payday safe and ... 

The problem with this film is that describing the plot will only make it seem pretentious or fatally cutesy. It does get cute quite frequently but never without something grim injected for balance. It is never pretentious; it delivers on all its promises of dark fairytale worlds, grounded unreality and spectacle. City belongs to a loosely aligned series of whimsical cinema stretching from the early '80s to the '00s (say, from Diva to Amelie) by the likes of Besson, Beineix and the team that brought you this one, Jeunet and Caro. These films, whether they were set in elaborate waking nightmares or pushed versions of the more familiar worlds of criminal life, were known for flamboyant design, cranked music scores, and a kind of bruised whimsy that reminded its audiences of the pain at the receiving end of a slap in the face.

City of Lost Children is the peak of these. The commitment to world building, from the brass and glass machinery to the soot encrusted brick walls of the city to the stunning interiors, is total. The careful use of CGI is made with futureproofing subtlety. While much of the casting emphasises the peculiar physical features to distortion, every face and body seems to be a part of this solidly imagined place and time. Add to all of that the fact that it works, for all its convolutions of plot, as an achingly beautiful tale of  redemption.

Ron Perlman, initially cast for height and bestial visage, has shown, role after role, that he's a strong performer, here again demonstrates his magnetism, tending toward his physical skills but convincing in the truncated dialogue he is given, a professional muscle learning speech. Judith Vittet as young Miette presents as tough as an eleven year old can. That this is done without older-than-her-years cuteness is a boon; her life so far has led to it and she has earned it. French cinema's goofy faced stalwart Dominique Pinon gets to play seven roles as the clones and their progenitor, each distinguishable from the others. Daniel Emilfork as Krank pushes his battleaxe face into his every scene but takes opportunity to show vulnerability along with threat without seam.

Music is by David Lynch regular Angelo Badalamenti and it's one of his most appealing. Ranging from organ grinder gothic to lush orchestral blooming, the music shoulders the extraordinary visuals, adding its own grandeur here and grit there. It sounds like he was enjoying his vacation from Lynchville.

I said that I thought this was a peak among the French whimsy but maybe I should have clarified that to mean it is the most timelessly presented one. When you are in front of this, you are not thinking of the underworld or dystopian futures or even political points about the fate of Earth's environment; this story exists within the imagination of its writers and creators, it transcends the few indicators of twentieth century technology and history to show a world both repurposed and dark. To its credit, while it can be grim it is never without heart and humour. If you seek it out, don't be put off by some of the abstruse plot complications, let the arc take you from peril and chaos to redemption and freedom. Above all, this is a fable of freedom and it feels like it even more than it did.

Viewing notes: I watched this from my 4K disc on a friend's new, enormous tv in Dolby Vision and 5.1. The transfer looks like film with no noticeable noise reduction but plenty of olde worlde grain. Splendid! The 4K is a local release at medium pricing. It's also rentable through Prime for cheap.

I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER @ 55

Gene, a teacher, meets his aging parents at the airport and drives them back home. It's not a long car ride but by the time they're in the driveway we've got a bumpy prologue that lets us know that this film is going to be an examination of a continued control by the father over everyone else. Scenes are like testimonies to this manipulation and there's almost no letup. Old Tom is at the wheel and there's only one way he'll let go. It's a quietly searing experience.

Gilbert Cates autopsy of family life makes it hard for its audience by keeping things middle class. The stereotyping does suggest that the alternative is a physically violent working class tribe but the vintage of this exercise place it more in the realm of Edward Albee, as the notion of Tom effectively freezing his son in place as Gene intends to embark on a second marriage at a long distance. 

The dialogue is taken almost unchanged from its theatrical source and it shows with long speeches and lengthy single set scenes. Rather than feeling stagey, though, Cates's approach is to let the text speak for itself through some robust performances. The cinema comes from a near television style motion. Again, this has more to do with pushing the ideas in the interactions forward rather than a lack of creativity. Cates made a career out of this arms length domestic drama and felt that a flurry of cinematic interventions would be distracting.

This has the effect on the viewer o' today of having to adjust to what can feel staid and staged. The adjustment is swift, though when the cast is this good. Melvyn Douglas still had a decade left on screen and judges his irascible old man front perfectly, allowing for the deflated humanity visible beneath, asleep in front of the TV or almost physically  struggling to remember the name of the person he's addressing. Against this power, Gene Hackman's struggle is to prevent his own fury from manifesting in an act of patricide. Hackman proved a talent for great intensity (starting  from his next film The French Connection) but here he centres the stress around his mouth, as his eyes sharpen to razors. Dorothy Stickney in her last role makes what she can of the saintly mother. Estelle Parsons gets out of her goofy TV comedy personae as the ostracised daughter to provide an intense punch of her own.

When I heard the news of Gene Hackman's recent death and then the details of what was the supposed sequence of the events, I wanted to avoid the usual suspect titles like French Connection or The Conversation. This painful and poignant piece suited the memory better for me. The scenes where Gene is inspecting old folks' homes as a possible solution to his situation are discomforting. You can read the details for yourself but the end of life resonance this has with the younger Hackman playing witness to his father's dementia is heartrending. Life and art imitate each other.

Viewing notes: I watched this a hire through Prime (also available through a few online shops) as an HD remaster. I don't know of its availability on physical media.

HARDWARE @ 35

A professional scavenger finds a broken robot in the desert and brings it to a scrap dealer. While the dealer is out of the shop for a few minutes, a similar scavenger Mo buys the wreckage and then sells it at a profit to the returned dealer. Except for the head. That will make a pacifying gift for the girlfriend he's neglected on his own journeys. Getting through the wrecked streets in the near future world ravaged by war and climate disaster, he struggles to get into his own flat but he is let in and the robot head does make a good gift for his sculptor girlfriend Jill. They are ok for a while but have another barney and he splits. Meanwhile, Jill paints the head with stars and stripes and puts it at the centre of a big nasty looking installation. That's when we find out the head is still active, part of a M.A.R.K. 13 killer model and is stealthily reconstructing a body out of the machine parts Jill likes to use. Ummmm....

The rest of Richard Stanley's bleak action sci-fi is about stopping the robot as it takes over the apartment with a view to expansion and continued self-expression. Into this is woven a host of comments of the imagined future on the time of release including climate awareness, overpopulation and the possibility of administrative solutions for it that involve mass fatality and an overall sense of how the smartest things to emerge on the planet are compelling its ruin.

Stanley's film career has always been a bumpy one. He has been big on ideas and low on tolerance for besuited limitations. Hardware shows this in its mix of well lensed cinematic moments and the more typical use of scant means to create maximum effect. If this means that scenes that need constant tension get a little deflated by repetitive action with the puppetry of the robot then so be it. But there's a tiem bound consideration, here, that's easy to miss.

Hardware, though it had the rising Miramax stamp on it, was destined for the arthouse and the video shop. That's not a comment on its overall quality but its character as a dark and often cobbled together piece. It more than made its money back in the cinemas where it did screen and had a healthy afterlife on VHS and remains in print for home video to this day. Its reputation is mixed among the sci-fi community swinging between tawdry ripoff and above-weight vision. In its prime day, though, there was a persistent appreciation for the aesthetic of the DIY production values of indy cinema that resonated from punk. Hardware only intermittently resembles the Terminators or Blade Runners it wants to share a bed with and will never present a complete record of support in its community, forever living in the realm of cult cinema.

But that's no bad thing. It was decades of getting used to the figure of David Lynch and his popular second act movie Mulholland Drive that might just allow Eraserhead into a mainstream cinema season (and then in deference to his passing). Richard Stanley does not have Lynch's cache, having never been popular or at least well enough known to get his name into dictionaries, but that says nothing about his ideas. The projection of the M.A.R.K. 13, its purpose and the final statement about it at the film's close is a clearly anti-fascist statement. That it was put into a diegetic context of art service without an obvious pointer in a politico-cultural direction is clever. Jill's solution to the problem of the robot's detection is as strong as anything in the dark sci-fi of the era. The saviour/voyeur figure of Lincoln is intentionally troubling as is his corner on the technical expertise the situation needs: it's not just M.A.R.K. 13 that threatens.

So, even now, decades beyond it first getting cache as a hot new title in the groovy movie houses, Hardware still needs a little love from viewers to warm to it. It does stand in the retro shelf beside War Games and Demon Seed instead of living in constant praise like Blade Runner but I have no problem with that. This might well be due to my age as I lived through that punk attitude from adolescence and will easily look around the sight of virtual gaffer tape on the special effects (I mean, I did have to do more of that when I watched the 4K of Terminator which begins with a scene that only looks like a plastic model hovering over a mini set).  What I do see, the more I watch this one, is the cry against tyranny and the misappropriation of technology. If that isn't a message for now I don't know what can be.

Viewing notes: I watched Umbrella's superb new 4K presentation of this one. It might make the glue and tape of the effects a little more evident than an old hire VHS but that's just a trademark from when sci-fi was arthouse and remembered what punk felt like.

Review: QUEER

Bill Lee, an expat drinking his days long in Mexico City. There aren't a lot of spots in town to pick up the guys he wants but he kind of gets by. Then, when a flawless beautiful young man Gene appears on the scene Bill is not only struck but confused by the guy's sexuality. This will take some courting. Even after his breakthrough, the situation does not clear up and they continue on with a love that is nothing if not conditional. It might be time to see about that shared experience everyone says is good for that.

Luca Guadagnino's film of William Burroughs' novella is largely faithful to the source, evoking the sense of ex-patriot life and Lee's yearning for everything he thought his opiate dependency would bring him: love. "Love," wrote Burroughs, "is the most natural painkiller ..." Lee, running from deeds and events from his recent life in the U.S. is in constant pain. Gene is both a bridge to analgesia and a fulfilment of his suffering. When he finds it, it is hot and cold and needs constant nurture, just like every other dissapointing thing he has known.

Guadagnino lays is on with a trowel, offering us glimpses of the romance of vintage do it yourself travel in locations of strong but flawed beauty all the way to a massive hallucinatory communion. His choices of sourced music (or music makers as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross take over, there) and a master cinematographer serve him well again. My problem is at base level: the writing.

As usual, you could lose about forty minutes of this film and not know it. More, you would emerge with a refreshing character study and things to take away about the numberless facets of love. Burroughs himself did that in a book that was less than two hundred pages. You might think that a film that takes almost two and a half hours to say this must have further cinematic material to explore this but it doesn't, really. While repetition and behavioural looping can be read as valid expressions of the ennui and frustration of navigating love, there is so much on screen here as to appear oppressive to the point where it becomes boring.

This despite the efforts of Daniel Craig as Lee who shows with strength and great skill how such a mean minded monster can appear attractive (and thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, he doesn't attempt a Burroughs impersonation). Drew Starkey is clearly more than his looks. Jason Schwartzman has learned real acting. And so on. But the slow roll and roll flattens all the good grace the film began with.

Queer is an early work by Burroughs. It was published in the '80s but finished in the '50s, held back by Burroughs himself. The prose, while highly seasoned with Burroughs' characteristic sharpness of observation, black humour and genuine emotion, is startlingly conventional. It is not the borderless blend of satire and dream sequences that the much later Naked Lunch is; it reads very easily and does its work as well as any airport novel (like its predecessor Junkie). There is a dream sequence at the end but it is heartrending rather than confronting. 

Guadagnino has made no bones about how much he has lifted from Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch. Towards the end it feels like a cover version. Yes, yes, postmodernism and all that, but Cronenberg earned his take on a difficult book by making a creditable companion piece that allows both book and film to co-exist without sparks. Queer's plundering of this feels bitchy and undermines its own originality.

There is a lot to enjoy here but like every other Guadagnino film I've seen, it would benefit from tightness and focus. By now the lack of both are entrenched in his style and it would take a massively successful contrary case to change that.

FRIGHT NIGHT @ 40

Charley is still in his teens but he's already a wreck. Amy is ready to take things to the next level which should be electrifying his teenage raison d'etre but there's a vampire moving in next door. Amy leaves, the school horror nerd Evil Ed takes his money for some pat advice and the host of the late night horror show Peter Vincent brushes him off as a crazy fan. Well, who would believe him?

Tom Holland's mid-'80s horror-teen-comedy doesn't have the future-star appeal of the Lost Boys or the genre-expansion of Near Dark from later in the decade but what it does have is an early take on self-reflexivity in genre. This is generally supposed to bloom in the next decade with Scream but Charley's knowledge that both holds him back from action and pushes the plot further places him firmly on the timeline of characters who know the rules of the movies they're in. But then, instead of making this the pivot of the plot Holland throws in the realism of the barriers. Charley knows what is happening but everyone else he knows is just in the normal world. Cackling Evil Ed, the long suffering Amy, his tv idol and his latchkey mum, think he's nuts.

While the struggle to gain credibility is a plot driver in any supernatural movie, this one wears its era on its sleeve. The teens aren't just incredulous, they're cynical. Peter Vincent bemoans the plummeting popularity of supernatural horror in favour of the current oafish teen slashers. Amy's offer toward the sexual development of her and Charley's partnership is matter of fact, not the thing of giggling or smirking, it's something more John Hughes. Vampire Jerry also knows his movies and after kissing the hand of Amy and saying, "Charmed" he asks, "isn't that what I'm meant to say?" and it plays as a joke among the characters.

But then, when it gets down to the horror threads of the weave, Fright Night plays fair. Amy is revealed to be identical to Jerry's long lost love and he pursues her. Their serpentine dance in the nightclub is genuinely sensual, playing the creepiness of the mature Jerry against Amy's youth. (This is also the moment of the film's best mirror trick.) Her erotic fealty to the vampire is rendered even more worrisome by her acquiescence. When her physical form begins distorting, there is a sadness to the horror as we see the effects of her addiction to the maleficence. This also goes for Evil Ed and his own trajectory is a tragic one.

As for Charley, himself, his task is to grow up and take a real stand. This is done through bringing his team together and doing the hard work to convince them to join him in what will be a hard fight. To do this, he has to martial Peter's vanity after his urge to quit town has taken over. Charley's values now centre on the unity of opposites, centred in Amy who is transforming into a vampire but who is still saveable if Jerry can be vanquished. He has to shed his suburban teen skin with all its dependency, take up arms, such as they are, and do battle.

The cast works well with this. William Ragsdale does look about ten years older than he should but he makes up for it with the confusion of the younger character and his distracted nature. His change has to convince if the movie is to work. The dependably dark and unctuous Chris Sarandon revisits his ghastly role in Lipstick, but adds a skin of urbanity, emanating an intimidating confidence. He is a scarier vampire than Robert Eggers' recent Nosferatu, a successful seducer of the young. Amber Bearse might seem to have little to do but look middle  '80s pop star androgenous (kind of) until she is clad in prosthetics but her Amy does feel real and unaffected in contrast to the overwrought young women of the screen at the time. Stephen Geoffreys' Evil Ed is hard to take but has to be, a kind of teenage id-engine that works its one note into the centre of the Earth. Floating above it all, of course, is Roddy McDowall, whose decades-long career by then brought him well into the core of horror cinema. He plays camp at first but through a prolonged and credible vulnerability, finds his character's essence and strength. As goofy as it can get, this is one of Roddy's best turns.

While Fright Night's reputation leaves it on a lower rung than the hits of the later '80s, it remains one of the most engaging evocations of suburban gothic available. As a comedy it goes for amiability rather than belly laughs. As a horror it is more successful, building a dread between Jerry's palpable malevolance and Charley's isolation. That Jerry can pick him off, even in the sanctuary of his own home, works solidly. As a fable of accepting the things of adulthood I think it does better than the big John Hughes teen epics by keeping the themes streamlined into allegory instead of spraypainting them all over the dialogue in dated hues. It feels like it has less to prove while offering more. That's why I can keep returning to its warm dangers. 

Viewing notes: I watched my squeaky clean and beautiful sounding 4K steelbook edition which I can only recommend. However, Fright Night is rentable through most of the usual outlets like Prime or Apple, for a small fee. Beware of the remake. If it has Colin Farrell in it, it's the wrong one. 

DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN @ 40 (spoilers on the milder side)

Bored yuppie Roberta follows the ongoing communication between two lovers through newspaper ads. When the pair set up a meeting there in New York, she has to go and see it happen. But Susan pinches a pair of priceless earrings and Jim has to go on tour and gets a friend to meet Susan who gets carted off before he, Dez, mistakes Roberta for Susan who has been knocked over and has lost her memory and -- There is so much that I have to leave out just to say this much. For the plot, you're best getting in front of it, yourself.

Desperately Seeking Susan was an instant hit. It had the quirkiness of the comedies of the '80s, a magnetic lead player in the young Rosanna Arquette and the who-cares-if-she-can-act-or-not star power of Madonna, riding the first wave of her superstardom. It won its opening weekend and went on to a very healthy first run cinema life. And if you see it, you will not wonder why.

The assumption in the leadup was that it was a star vehicle for Madonna who would be in the lead role. That might have promised great box office but didn't bode well for the film itself which at first sounded like a vanity project. It might have been the star power that gave it that initial rush but it was the movie itself that kept it going.

First, it's not Madonna/Susan in the lead but Arquette whose Roberta whose marriage to the dully narcissistic hot tub king Gary seems doomed to evaporation and for whom the intrigue of Susan and Jim seems more like life. While Gary interrupts his own cocktail parties for all his guests to see his home made ads on late night TV, Roberta cannot keep fading into the decor. This is another entry into the Yuppie Nightmare Cycle, also inhabited by Arquette in the recently reviewed After Hours. Susan is by far the better film.

Why? Susan Seidelman. The young director had already impressed with her Smithereens which got her into  competition for the Palme D'Or at Cannes for its handling of a central character that only a mother could love such that audiences were rivetted rather than revolted. Here, she tones down the whackiness in fashion at the time for comedies and pushes forward Roberta's plight. For all the frenetic zaniness of Susan and Jim's chaos we see a steadily developing character, one who witnesses her own development as her recollection returns. She places herself in the kind of life that she probably wanted before she signed on to yuppiedom.

Arquette's career trajectory has kept her in work before and since Desperately Seeking Susan but this is her sole lead. That's a shame as the strength of her turn here carries the film. At a time when Reaganomics was creating tribes of self-entitled greed monsters, Arquette's farewell to the insubstantial Gary is quiet and poignant. And in scenes where the screwball comedy is given pause, she gives us strength.

Madonna, for her part, does not disgrace herself in the title role and emerges as perfectly engaging, possibly glad that the film was not an extension of her MTV career. Along with Richard Hell (also in Smithereens) she hits her marks and says her lines, conveying real personality. Aidan Quinn as Dez comes through as someone you'd want to know. There is moment early on when he notes that someone is carrying speakers down the stairs that look familiar and, getting to the next landing, shoots a rapid glance of concern which tells us everything about the scene to come. It's a small but naturalistic joke. 

Mark Blum has the most thankless task in the role of the icky Gary, the husband who seems to think he has bought his way into a magazine lifestyle including his wife, he's all smiles and slime, saved by his unawareness of that from self destruction. Oh, something that doesn't carry well through time is the club scene where he is weirded out by the kerayzee dancers. Sorry folks, I know it's a tie in with Madonna 'n' all, but no club in 1985 that played Into the Groove would be anything but mainstream. Maybe it's a comment on how bubble-bound Gary is, but nah. It suffers from the same try hard flopping as the similar one in After Hours. 

Desperately Seeking Susan deserves its place among the highpoints of '80s mainstream cinema. Seidelman's wise choice of avoiding the pitfalls of fashion allow it endurance as the story of a search by Roberta for herself. The comedy also undermines the solemnisation of this so that the point of Roberta's scission can have its moment strongly. Thus, in the best way, this is a great '80s movie because it does and doesn't give in.

Review: THE LAST SHOWGIRL

Shelly is in the blue glare of a spotlight. A punishing close up. She nervously answers questions and under declares her age twice. This is not going to go anywhere but she persists with a smile growing increasingly tighter. How did she get here?

Back at work, she and the dancers flurry to get ready for their cue in a long running show off the Vegas A-strip. Everyone, young to Jessie's vintage, is clearly part of a warmly functioning team. That night they are told, at an informal dinner, that the show will close in a few weeks. The younger ones at least have their youth to move on. Shelly doesn't even have a pension plan.

This is a tale of that pause, the barely creditable stretch between comfort and the gutter. Friend Annette, a little older, found a way, waiting cocktails at a casino and playing the tables. Shelly has danced for a living for decades. What's she meant to do, competitive shed building? 

This is a character study, shot cinema verite style and was not written for plot but for the examination of a person under pressure. It's not the pressure of Wall St high flyers but it does concern the effective denial of a woman's life and career after decades of reasonable success. The audition we see at the start just looks like more of the same. Shelly understands this and knows that a bigger decision is on the way but what she cannot do at any cost is allow the fear or the despair to show through.

Jamie Leigh Curtis (very strong as friend Annette) signed on to this film when she learned that Pamela Anderson was to play Shelly. To Leigh Curtis, it was a vindication of Anderson's own career and Anderson's boldness in stepping up was impressive. The casting is inspired. Anderson plays a woman under constant attack, whether the snidery of her fellow dancers, the ugly home truths of the casting director at the audition, her daughter's rejection and distancing, and more, and with a clear understanding of this she has Shelly keep the flag flying, offering insights and platitudes alike in her Monroe purring voice that sounds like musk Lifesavers. If you're not watching closely, you might dismiss this as ditziness but that voice and living doll demeanour have kept her going through decades of abuse and judgement, a battering marriage and this latest turn of the screw. Being the sexy voiced Vegas dancer with the Pollyanna take on everything keeps the claws of the universe at bay and her life has been spent mastering it.

Also in the cast are the aforementioned Jamie Leigh Curtis whose Vegas tan and white lipstick and constant margaritas are heralded by a voice like Autumn leaves and a bitterness that keep her armed. It's miles away from not just Laurie Strode in Halloween but the severe Deirdre in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Her dance towards the end, done in spite of the jaded ignorance of the passers by, is breathtaking. Kiernan Shipka, whom I first noted in Mad Men as the Draper daughter, has been quietly rising through the indy ranks and forging a dependability. Her response to the reception she gets when she turns to Shelly for help is a stark pointer to the kind of toughness she will need on this career path. Wrestling star turned actor Dave Bautista continues to demonstrate that he is more impressive when playing the scenes with worldly tenderness than with power.

And then there is Gia Coppola. Last year, Coralie Fargeat headbutted us for over two hours with The Substance until we understood that it was the film of the year. The new Coppola on the block chooses something more like John Cassavettes, shooting on gritty, blown up 16mm and keeping the lighting thick and grimy for the interiors and only slightly fresher for the outside. Her take on the expected deterioration of these women asks us to follow and observe the beginning and the end of this process. There is a moment during one of Shelly's dances where she uses one hand wrapped around her back to grasp her waist. In the light of the stage it looks malevolent, like the claw of a roulette table monster making free with the staff. The best scenes in Paolo Alto were not flukes. This new one works, quietly, but it works.

THE CHANGELING @ 45

After losing his wife and daughter in a horror crash, composer John Russell must find his way to living through massive grief. He emerges from mourning, moving to a new city and job teaching composition at the local Conservatory. He lands well, finding an isolated mansion to move into for the kind of quiet that allows concentration. But that's not how these stories play out. Things move by themselves. Sounds occur when and where they shouldn't. Curious, and almost glad of the distraction, John goes exploring and finds a walled up room with a lot of dust and webs and a child's wheelchair. There's work to be done.

This was an original screenplay, based on a claimed genuine haunting. Off centre U.K. directors Tony Richardson and Donald Cammell were early choices but both bailed for creative differences. By the time Peter Medak got the megaphone, the script had been through rewrites and he added some of his own. In a very real sense, this tale of failed adoptions might have to do with the film being counterproductively uneven. While it's a favourite to put on on a rainy afternoon for its engaging eeriness, it always gets to a point where I feel like getting up for a break.

That's not to say it ever really drags. The Changeling feels draggy over the course of its reasonable hundred minutes because, as good as he is to watch, George C. Scott's John Russell is so blustery and pragmatic that he never seems to be under threat. Add a plot convolution that plods when it should accelerate and you have something that does actually feel like a story fixed with patches rather than drafted anew as a fluent single treatment.

Medak is no slouch when it comes to effective film making, the chills here as good as you'll find in anything of its era, but he can appear to lose sight of the aerial view of his projects. If you read up on The Ruling Class and that is stars a young and feisty Peter O'Toole you might hurry to it but by the second of its two and half hours you might start cherry picking the good bits of what should have been a  ninety minute satire at the most. Similarly frustrating is the '90s entry Romeo is Bleeding which should have been a sure fire bad cop story in the era of Pulp Fiction and Bad Lieutenant but ends up as cinematic porridge. The Changeling is not as bungled as either of those as it does deliver on its promises as a complicated ghost story, it's just that we could lose about fifteen minutes of transitional or lifestyle scenes (they date it stylistically, anyway, and give it the feel of being a filmed Playboy ad for pipe tobacco). 

It is also not helped by its orchestral score which begins with an enjoyable uncanny piano and strings theme but soon blands out into aural treacle. This is after the likes of Jerry Goldsmith's terrifying score for the Omen and John Carpenter's unsettling piano and synth music for Halloween. It gives the film the feel of a luxury budget production but that's really not always what you want in a horror movie.

But horror movie it is and is quite readily regarded as a classic of its kind. I might question that last point but I do have to admit that the goods it brings when it needs to (that séance scene!) and those moments of development that suggest that the real darkness is not in the haunted house alone, are gripping. You might notice that the worst of my criticisms here are kind of the opposite of faint praise, that my sticking points are quite likely local to me. Perhaps I should just say that, while I would watch something like The Haunting (1963) at the drop of a hat but think about revisiting The Changeling it might be more indicative of its place in my estimation. I love The Haunting. I respect The Changeling.

Viewing notes: I watched my lovely 4K release of this which came with a BD and a CD soundtrack album. This is not currently available to rent or buy in Australia. If you were to travel back to the days of VHS shops you'd be able to get a copy on a cheaper weekly rate. Not everything had got better.

AFTER HOURS @ 40

Bored office drone Paul strikes it lucky one night ... kinda. A chance conversation with a beautiful woman at a café gets him a number and leads him into the worst night of his life as twists, turns, rug pulls and wrong footing have him run the gauntlet in a New York that has replaced the sleaze of Taxi Driver with an affluent bohemia. Not fun.

Griffin Dunne's pet script (he didn't write it, he just wanted to do it) had been passed around forever and, through a series of acquaintances, landed in the hands of Martin Scorsese. Marty had just seen King of Comedy fall through the earth and his first attempt at Last Temptation kicked out the studio door. This looked like money. It was the mid-'80s and cokey crazy was working as well as the teen empire. Movies for those of voting age and up were popping like mushrooms around the time. These days it's a genre called the yuppie nightmare cycle. Desperately Seeking Susan and Something Wild cast rising stars in comedies that could go south or west as long as they smashed a young urban professional against a loopy femme fatale. Susan had two of them including a major pop star. After Hours had five.

It flopped. After the big no show it was injected into the art houses where it did better over a longer time and was quietly absorbed into the mud of the cinema gutter as forces like The Coens and Stephen Soderberg rose and got to work. So what's wrong with it?

First, Griffin Dunne's empathy card starts fading from the café scene in which we cannot believe that Rosanna Arquette would pick him up. Also, Linda Fiorentino's sassy boho artist feels phoned in and the papier mache piece she's working on looks like a year twelve goth kid's project. The taxi ride from his familiar territory to the wiles of the west end of Manhattan is done cranked so it looks like it was shot as a speeding car in a Jerry Lewis movie. The punk club is pure passe try hard unless it's meant to be a yuppie version of one. Look, there's a lot of good moments and observations and the turns of Terri Garr and Rosanna Arquette shine, but the whole thing feels tone deaf.

Trying to care for Dunne's horny creep who tries to pass as an average guy will never work. We can laugh at the uber cool goof artist or feel sympathy for Arquette, recognise the '60s casualty of Terri Garr's character and find a lot of the frustration scenes anxious. But we are supposed to want Paul to make it back to his flat and lick his wounds and I, through more than a few views, have never been compelled to care about him.

This is from Martin Scorsese whose grip on how to make awkwardness and threat hilarious puts him up with the masters of Russian literature (read some and you'll get the weight of that). He who drew both intense eerieness and clumsy naivete from De Niro in Taxi Driver was surely well suggested as the perfect fit for this feast of such moments. Perhaps it's a problem of concentration. While he's so good at finding the horror of the everyday and the laugh in physical threat, when he's only meant to do black comedy or dark farce, he pushes it so far it only works as over egged.

I'm going to admit something that I don't have to: my first viewing of this was a bad experience. I went with a couple of friends to a screening at the long lamented Trak in Toorak. They were down from Brisbane and we were cramming things in. We trammed from The Quiet Earth at the Valhalla to Toorak for After Hours, Scorsese fans all. The Trak was an arthouse, mainstream second run, classics and contemporary indy. If you went there you knew the director's name and reputation. After Hours had been billed as Marty's whacky fun fest. The audience was plummy and comfy, the very yuppies that the genre was aiming at. They tittered at almost every line, even transitional or expositional moments which didn't try for laughs. Soon, everything was like the funniest moment of comedy any of them had ever witnessed. Imagine a Friday the 13th sequel in which everyone screams at every single kill and every scene, even the sex, for the entire running time. They had paid for a whacky fun fest from Scorsese and by the Lord Harry they were going to get it. I was shrivelling from the embarrassment of it, fearing the judgement of my northern sophisticates. We left in silence, even getting a cab in grasping flight.

Horrible but every time I've seen it since the only improvements I can find are in lines and moments that those screeching laughs and belly thunder had covered. Increasingly, it has played as a failure for me, over earnest in its attempt to be light and sharp. It's why I delayed watching Shutter Island because, as a horror fan, I didn't want him to bugger that up, too (he did). Scorsese still had greatness to come. He finally did make The Last Temptation of Christ and it's a masterpiece. Goodfellas reaches great heights and is still untarnished by its boring younger sibling Casino (or its embarrassing grandchild The Irishman). At some point he might have decided that a good paycheck and a reputation just felt better and was happy enough riding on the legend. 

I'll always look out for him in cinema documentaries but the films since 1990 have mostly been well made and bland (there are exceptions but those are few). He'd been such a god at Uni, we knew his dialogue by heart. From the time I saw Taxi Driver on a Steenbeck editing desk I was completely hooked. We  bent the knee for all of them and felt we'd found a cinemaster for our generation (even though he counts as the previous one) some we loved, others we forgave. After Hours was the first one I forgot.

PSYCHO @ 65 (Lots of spoilers)

When the mild mannered but impatient Marion gets a big pile of cash to deposit for her boss she takes it on holiday to nowhere. Maybe it will persuade her reluctant lover to marry her as he always whingeing about not having the money. Maybe it will fund a new start on an Island off California. Whatever, she's ahead of the chase and, tired after a day's driving, wheels into an off highway motel. The nervous guy who books her in makes her nervous so, after an eerie conversation with him she begs to to take the last shower of her life before bed. She doesn't make it to bed as the shrieking old woman in the house by the motel has beds and flesh and sin on her mind and comes in with a butcher knife and that's that.

That's not the end of the movie. Not only has the murder taken a big number of shots edited into a small number of seconds that feel much longer and accompanied that with a relentless screeching of violins at the top of their range which seem to sound like widened eyes, a sequence which deftly convinces us that we've seen a lot more stabbing and a more nakedness than we have, but we've just witnessed the killing off of a character we've had half a movie engaging with.

Well, it happened in Robert Bloch's novel, Hitchcock must have relished the disruption. His love of gimmickry stretched back to the beginning of his career and would continue to its end. This one allowed the publicity to try the line about cinemas refusing entry to people who tried to come in after a certain point in the run time. But the word was that he killed off his star. The story after this is the investigation by Marion's sister Lila and the reluctant boyfriend Sam, along with private eye hired by Marion's boss. There is plenty of plot to go from that point and it's where the intrigue finds its compulsion in the question of what Norman's game is and what his mother has to do with it.

But as plotty as it gets Psycho is more about that crushed attempt at a family that were the Bates. There is a lot more to this in the novel but most of that is narrated backstory and would have necessitated either an unacceptable narration or flashbacks which might have served to drain tension and pace. Hitchcock's adaptation concentrates on the effect of the family's demise on the rest of the world as it meets it in the form of Marion and the interest in discovering her fate. Norman and his wild mother are the sharp splinter of an old dead tree that yet can tear and kill. 

Anthony Perkins is perfectly cast. His skittish nerves, fragile movements in conversation with strangers remind us of the living relatives of the birds that Norman has stuffed and mounted on the walls. Then, his assured motion in cleaning up after his mother's atrocities give us a different side. We are to learn the most about Norman of all the characters, some of it in a direct lecture by a psychiatrist but as much if not more in these moments of contrast, pragmatism and panic, predation and prey. The shrink at the end sets up the final moment of reconciliation of the facets but it is Tony making the hairs on the back of our neck stand up.

Of the other cast, they are perfectly functional with the exception of Martin Balsam as the detective Arbogast whose worldly face and effortless manipulative powers give him a forbidding strength of his own. I haven't forgotten Janet Leigh as Marion whose intensity belies the good girl grown up. She must stare at us from behind the wheel of her car, emoting as the thoughts of her predicament sound in her head. At one point her face breaks very slightly into something like a wicked smile as she considers one consequence of her theft. I wonder if original audiences thought that this expression made her the Psycho of the title. Her interaction with Norman Bates involves a slight purging for both, a night time conversation that might bond or separate through its awkwardness, it is the closest thing to freedom that anyone in the film gets.

There is a lot to discover about the production of Psycho and I'd recommend you pursue any extras on physical media that you find, or other sources. I won't go over it too much here but to mention a few things. First, Hitchcock effectively paid for it himself. This is why, between Vertigo and The Birds, Psycho is in black and white. The fact that he determined it to be a kind of modern gothic black and white with cinematographer John Russell, is down to his ingenuity. I cannot happily imagine this film in colour. The lower budget allowed for the casting of a few names lower on the pecking order of Hollywood but who came through strongly. It allowed him the shower scene as the original backers Paramount retreated and Hitchcock had to get creative with studio affiliation. It also allowed him to call in the talents of composer Bernard Herrmann whose extraordinary strings-only ride through frenzied violence earned him a doubling of his fee from Hitchcock. Psycho is almost an independent film and features the best of the limitations that suggests.

I first saw this at school. Mr Bowman, an English teacher who took us for an elective on film writing in year eleven, was delighted to screen it against the screen in one of the chemistry classrooms which had tiered seating where we also saw our anti-drug and anti-sex instructional films. At sixteen, it was the most violent film I'd ever seen. Sonny, a darkly narcissistic bully, was sobered by it and blamed the screaming music for its effect. By that stage the local commercial tv station was playing movies like Zabriskie Point and Husbands with the swearing left in. My Nana had spoken of how subtle Hitchcock had been in suggesting rather than showing his violence. She must have seen Psycho but it would have been too inconvenient an example for her lesson. Then again, she was the one who bought me the novel.

Psycho didn't quite change my life, though I was heavily affected by it, but it opened doors that held confrontations soon to become riches. The decade to follow featured a revival of Hitchcock's mid and late period movies as they went back into cinemas, on tv and into home video. We discovered his black comedy The Trouble With Harry, the might of Rear Window and the bizarreness of Spellbound. Psycho wasn't there. It remained a byword for the extreme mainstream. Anthony Perkins presented an Oscar, standing beside Janet Leigh, and joked about taking the rap for the shower scene killing. A vocalisation of the screeching strings still signifies imagined psychosis. But for me, to see it again, I cannot look away from its sadness, that sense of bad paths chosen or compelled that can only lead to great destruction. Marion turns off the main highway to her final stop. Norman lets his mother in to deal with the crisis he cannot confront. In psycho we acknowledge the broken and the bruised of us, their silencing force and their comforting masks. For me, it is Hitchcock's masterpiece.

Review: COMPANION ( first act spoilers)

Caution: The publicity material for this film includes spoilers, not just the trailer but the poster. If you want to go into the movie uninfluenced, read this review after you have seen it.

A prologue signalling The Stepford Wives' influence leads to a meet cute between Iris and Josh. Cut to Josh driving Iris to a country cabin to introduce her to his friends. The cabin is a mansion and her friends are one percenters which makes Iris nervous. Once in, the house owner, a Russian wealthmonster, and others greet Iris variously with warmth or sniffy sarcasm; she was right to be anxious. Nevertheless, she does engage in conversation with the others, eloquently speaking of love at first sight over dinner and, later, draws out the sarcy one to reveal the control in her relationship with the house owner. 

The next morning, Iris prepares to go as planned out to the nearby lake to spend time with Josh but he demurs and she goes on solo. The owner appears, escalating a seduction routine into sexual assault which ends in his violent death at her hands. She rejoins the others, coated in blood, holding a knife. Josh gets up and yells, "Iris, go to sleep!" Her eyes roll back instantly until they are white blanks and she freezes. Iris is a robot.

This Gen Z thriller which the publicity took pains to point out was from the folk that brought you the likes of Barbarian. If that made you expect some narrative rug pulls you were right. The revelation of Iris being a cyborg is the least of what follows but it itself follows her opening narration as she glides a trolley down the aisle of a supermarket that the two times she felt truly happy were when she met Josh and when she killed him. That happens within the first five minutes of the film. When the writing is like that the decision about what to reveal in the run up to release must be intense. Robert Eggers had over a year between the announcement of Nosferatu and it hitting the screen. Then again, whatever alterations he made to that well trodden story were only ever going to be at the indy level. Companion's high concept sci fi premise could not afford to risk audience apathy by making it just look like a social drama for the young folks.

That over with, what does Companion offer? The Stepford Wives cornered the market in the notion of male fantasy manifest as magic with the theme of control riding high in the age of second wave feminism. Blade Runner blurred the effect of self awareness in the fabricated human, showing both its power and vulnerability. What's left? Updating the concept from mechanical robots to lifelike hardware controlled by a phone app is good and drives effective plot triggers but it's not much more than cosmetic. Of course, a 21C upgrade was going to be a phone app. What the creative team have done here is dress things up to look like the near future but have reached right back to grasp the essentials: control and its nemesis self awareness.

Queen bitch Kat is frank about the control she and her equally human consort put at the active centre of their relationship. Her conversation with Iris about this involves Kat joking about needing to become a human before she can begin to confront her situation. This is key. Iris doesn't know she's a robot and deflects Kat's innuendos about self-control. As soon as that breach is made, the breakdown of order begins and the rest is spoilable plot.

The fabrication of controlled humans is an ancient one and persists because control is an everpresent issue in human interaction. Iris' naturalness disturbs the couple Kat and Sergei whose relationship is founded on coercion. Their response to Iris doesn't puzzle us and we are more inclined to judge Josh for maintaining an association with a cybernetic sex slave. Kat's comparison between Iris and a sock Josh might jerk off into lands with him. The Jurassic Park question of we can but should we hits straight away.

That this is maintained while the narrative has switched to a sruvivalist thriller until the two thread merge is testament to writing and creative nurture that puts this film a notch above the already impressive It's What's Inside. There is space in the writing that allows for compelling action, more questions of sentience and some very funny dialogue. Add some strong digital cinematography (sorry, I don't miss film grain) and sharp music scoring and you have one of the most vibrant social thrillers you'll see this year.

Jack Quaid tightropes the barrier of average young guy with an emerging selfishness and the thing he becomes quite effortlessly. However, if Yellowjackets, The Boogieman and Heretic didn't convince you, Sophie Thatcher is the current young star of genre stories. Her range of glassy fragility and bad girl toughness makes her characters the ones you'll fix on. This is her film.

JAWS @ 50

After a teenager gets killed by a shark off Amity Island, the chief of police closes the beach. It's almost the 4th of July and the Mayor knows that the loss of tourist dollars will cost him his position and reopens the beach. Ol' Bitey comes back. So, salty Quint, oceanographer Hooper and Chief Brody set out in a boat that could be bigger to land the shark.

There's more to it but that basic plot created the summer blockbuster, cut the decade of New Hollywood in half and gave us the word Spielbergian. Mainstream cinema was already a love match with unfettered capitalism but Spielberg, starting here, dragged it so far beyond the event horizon of art as business that it's no longer possible to consider film completely divorced from commerce, from satire scale profits and an endless river of merch.

The big thing about that and Jaws is that Jaws is an exploitation plot with a New Hollywood depth and a spotlessly clean lens on enriching the concession stands forever with popcorn epics like it. The big thing is that Jaws is a much greater film than it needed to be. When an exhausted Chief Brody is thawed at the dinner table by his young son mirroring his movements and demands a kiss on the cheek because he needs it, it doesn't contain a moment's cuteness because the warmth of it invites us in. We are the Chief, his son and his wife who is looking on like we are. This is from the era of gigantic disaster movies and identikit genre pieces for the drive-in. Roger Corman could have made Jaws but Spielberg made it future proof and dazzlingly polished: it's like it was made last week but without mobile phones.

The '70s was also the era of the movie brats. Scorseses and Coppolas who had grown up in the cinema as though it were a Sunday School for artists. From them came epics like the Godfather and small but deep studies of crime life like Mean Streets. The Exorcist played like a medical drama rather than a generic horror. Depth was in. The realm that Jaws unleashed went the other way and, for all the Networks and Taxi Drivers that came in its wake, changed mainstream cinema into a big dumb down. I don't mean to suggest that Jaws is a dumb movie, on the contrary, but everyone who suddenly wanted to be Spielberg (and then George Lucas) had less trouble than before selling their dreck for its dollar value.

Jaws plays like a movie brat version of an exploitation film but one made by someone without a degree from Corman University. Spielberg had come through television. He made an effective TV movie in Duel and then a feature film Sugarland Express that even his fans have to struggle to recall (it's a good movie, just not Jaws). So, while he was used to working with tight budgets he'd not made commercial films on next to nothing and Corman's make-the-poster approach. The film is normalised now but it ram raided film culture at the time and has never been out of accessible reach to cinephiles and beer and pizza night entertainment alike.

So by the time Hooper, Quint and Brody board the Orca and chugalug off to sharkville, we know a lot about why they're doing it because in a way that never feels too expository we have lived with the residents of Amity Island that summer, heard their East Coast Yankee accents opine on the situation. If it weren't for the Great White Shark circling around at the beach, we'd all move there tomorrow. Spielberg builds this without the grit of an Arthur Penn or Richard Fleischer, the photography itself squeaks with sponge finish but the sight of the kids behind the news reporter making faces and bunny ears brings real daily life home to the screen. We've walked into the cinema to see ourselves. It felt so much better than getting punched by mafia thugs in an alleyway.

But there's something else, here. Spielberg loves his bad guys and gives them so much screen love that we can forget what the movie is about if only for seconds. A shark fin breaks the surface and glides in a smooth and sexy motion in the foreground as the distant background shows a mass of ant sized humans scurrying from the water. This can be self-destructive (Schindler's List gave the head Nazi glamour and  charisma that the title character could never rival) but here it is pitch perfect. In the third act, when its movements are heralded by the motion of the yellow cannisters pinned to its body, the shark appears malevolent and vengeful. It would not be the last time that a non human character would assume a persona in movie by Spielberg or one of his clones.

And then there is Spielberg Face, the reaction shots that sidebar time itself as characters register things beyond their power and comprehension. Mostly this is wonder, close-ups of awestruck faces, like our own gazing at the screen, rendering our own awe as beautiful as the faces of the movie stars. In Jaws the Face is horror. Brody on the beach locked in a glare of shock as the Hitchcock trick of reverse motion between a zoom and a tracking shot appears to make him and us queasy with panic. The equally famous bigger-boat moment comes later as he comes face to face with the shark itself. In Sugarland Express this even went meta as a movie reflection in a window appears to be projected on a fascinated face. 

This, along with Spielberg's confidence that we will be engaged with mechanics and processes, mark him out for future moments in the cinema with titles that are talked about like news stories. Spielberg takes the manipulative force of cinema to the next level with this, sucking us in to believe that our purchasing power gives us a sense of agency over the film while making us cogs in the process itself. All effective art does this but Spielberg's movies make it a business model.

Personally, I believe Jaws is on the same level as any film considered canon. Fifty years have done nothing to reduce it and it stands equally with anything you can name a classic. It's the rest of Spielberg I have a problem with. After a number of equally effective movies he turned his crowd pleasing power to more serious fare, chasing the respectability dollar and critical approval and maybe, just maybe that best director Oscar that would elude him for decades.

It's not just the cuteness of so much of it that repels me. He didn't just infect his own movies with it but all but contractually mandated it for those pressed into service like Joe Dante or Tobe Hooper to the point that if a movie wasn't a teen slasher or high school romp it was a Spielbergian festival of adorability and the adorability always felt pressed out of machine tubes like sludge in fast food joints. His movies became the most beautiful tacky get well cards on screen. But he ceded the throne of cute to the execrable Wes Anderson who is lauded now for the same bullshit.

(Similarly, I have beef with John Williams as a film composer. He's perfectly adept at scoring movies and his grunting bowed strings for Jaws is a masterpiece but Spielberg used him again and again to slather the speakers in schmaltz. Not his fault? maybe not but if he was told to sludge it up on purpose, couldn't he have done something more than he did? For all his skill and orchestral talent most of his scores sound phoned in.)

The assault on respectability is another issue. Whether it's The Color Purple, Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List, Spielberg feels lost among all the heavy messaging and just wants to get back among the gadgets and how stuff works so what we end up with is epics made of a few setpieces and a lot of meandering. It's like someone who never smiled trying it out from a YouTube video; there is a creepiness to Spielberg's pursuit of gravity. 

The truth is he was already doing it in his action adventures where the dysfunctional families and dark authority were just part of the plot and crunched along like popcorn. Jaws with its humane treatment of communities, shared fear, belly laughing irony and pure white knuckle suspense gave us the whole meal. I can't feel nostalgia for Jaws as it's never been out of reach. Seeing it again doesn't feel like putting on a golden oldie because it will sweep you up in minutes every time. To be fair, most of his movies do this, regardless of what I think of them, but this is the best of them all.

Viewing notes: I watched my 4K Universal copy of this. It is presented with Dolby Vision and Atmos and could only be bettered by a screening of a good print at a cinema. Jaws is locally available on a dual disc 4K/Blu-Ray pack and is average price. You could pick it up in a sale for a lot less than thirty dollars. It's worth it.

THE FOG @ 45

An old salt tells a group of kids around a beach campfire about a ship that wrecked from a false light during a sudden fog which lifted as soon as the damage was done. At the stroke of midnight, things in the nearby Antonio Bay township go haywire, alarms go off, things move by themselves and, over the horizon, a luminous fog is rolling towards the coast. Things could be better.

John Carpenter's third feature followed on the heels of his first hit, the monster Halloween which started the following decade's strain of teen slashers. The Fog was intended as a kind of fame rider: it didn't have to reinvent, it just had to draw them in. Drawn in they were with a huge margin of the production cost tenfold, even more and for longer on the new home video market. Carpenter was unconvinced by his own work in this case, thinking it muddled and unclear. He reshot scenes and added others. From this you might expect a mess but you'd be wrong.

The various threads of character driven arcs slowly converge as the plot progresses and one of the emergent properties of the whole thing is a more definite sense of setting than Carpenter had ever achieved (and his first one was in space!). Antonio Bay with its haunted servos, lighthouse radio station, antique church and small town seaside houses, feels like a place the way that the LA of Assault or the Haddonfield of Halloween don't quite get to.

Is it unrealistic that a lug like Tom Atkins could bed the barely in her twenties Jamie Leigh Curtis? How come all those bids in the prologue are out at midnight listening to an old man spin yarns? What's stopping the ghosts at the physical doors? Aren't they ghosts? Well, do you want it realistic or atmospheric? Sometimes you can't have both. What sticks through those holes in the upholstery are the setpieces like the attack on the fishing boat, the various single attacks on homes, heralded by ominous knocks at the door. And under all of this is the slow revelation that the tale told in the prologue left out some very dark details.

Antonio Bay, about to celebrate its centenary, was founded on mass murder and theft. It's not just the locals who are coming along to the statue unveiling. The familiar American story of an official telling of sins of the fathers presented after bleaching is familiar to Australians, as well. If Carpenter treats it lightly, having established it, it at least has been brought to the fore for the viewer and compels the final act of retribution. The film might not have the terrifying force of Halloween, the slowburn siege of Assault on Precinct 13, or the dizzy black comedy of Dark Star, but it does have a door to open: what's on the other side might well be someone who doesn't think you deserve a home.

The cast list is like a roll call of Carpenter collaborators past and future. Jamie Leigh Curtis plays to one side of the main narrative but is welcome for that. Her real life mother, Janet Leigh, is in running cope mode throughout and kept barely in the safe zone by assistant the wonderful Nancy Loomis. Assault's bad guy, Darwin Joston is a coroner. Tom Atkins breaks his Carpenter affiliation cherry with the roughnecked but gold hearted truckie. And so it widens. Everyone does a good turn.

The locations are stellar and if you get a local release of the 4K, you will be rewarded. A few process and matte shots are given a little too much clarity which would have been invisible on VHS but the shots of the bay to the horizon and the winding seaside roads are breathtaking. Antonio Bay doesn't just feel real, you want to live there.

Crowning this is another John Carpenter electronic score. Few elements of the movies of the late '70s and early '80s got closer to the intersection of the times in music and the times in the cinema than these. The score for the Fog with its underplayed piano theme, builds dread with a quiet assurance. It's the kind of thing that still gets a mention if a recent film goes out on a limb and uses synthesis. And that goes for the film itself. No, it doesn't quite have the chops of the great moments around it, but it holds its own and improves a little with each viewing, reminding that Carpenter's name was one like Cronenberg or Lynch, that made the ears of moviegoers prick up. I say moviegoers rather than cinephiles because Carpenter served this up to mass audiences in a way that few others could and still maintain such a solid cool.

Viewing notes: I watched my local Studio Canal 4K release from 1999 and it remains a stellar transfer which does justice to the source. At one point a pack of four '80s Carpenter titles was made available in 4K (without the Blu-Ray discs or extras) which went on sale for $19! Never seen it since and would've bought it just for back up discs. But the individual double discs are still available retail in Australia. Fun fact, I'm writing this on the anniversary (local time) of the premier screening of the film.