2025 at the Cinema

In a year already beset by worldwide crap news and cultural strain I made a few decisions. I wouldn't go to anything I knew I wouldn't like unless it was free and I went with someone happy to disagree with me. If MIFF kept playing corporation I would break decades of tradition and ignore it. This was easier than I expected as the prices went up again for what was effectively two weeks of MUBI for several years' worth of subscription. I took a week off and went to the movies and caught up with friends. The festival has fallen to enshitificaiton. I'd get more serious about 31 nights of horror in October and make sure to dig around for unfamiliar material. I'd continue doing anniversary reviews. These became more enticing than seeking out new stuff at the cinema. I missed out on so many but it's just a hobby blog in the first place. If you're still with me, let's try and mix it up a bit more with looking back and forward. Happy new, folks!

HIGH

BRING HER BACK    In which the bros Philippou show that adding depth and warmth to a severe story can be done without sacrificing scares or horror action. Not the pop song package of Talk to Me but has its own strength.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER    Paul Thomas Anderson makes his own film in light of what he has watched his nation become. It's too long but it's solid, constantly engaging and features one of the best car chases in decades. One of his good ones.

ANORA    Roots in gritty New Hollywood and the best of 90s indy with a powerhouse central performance.

SINNERS    Intimidatingly accomplished spectacle of culture and horror. So exciting and committed, it grabs its audience by the collar and doesn't let go. Feels a lot briefer than its over two hour running time.

FLOW    So heartening and warm it dares you to care about the cracks in the animation style. A reward of a film.

MIDDLE

WEAPONS    Perfectly adequate horror fable from Zach Barbarian Cregger. Aided by a mounting sadness and good performances.

DANGEROUS ANIMALS    Does what it says on the tin and constantly engaging for all that. Just didn't feel like anything afterwards.

FRIENDSHIP    Very smart and muscular comedy of edge. Didn't change my world but better than most new comedies I've seen this decade.

TOGETHER    Worthy sci-horror with relationships in its sights. Didn't quite pop.

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE    The best kind of bait and switch is when you start with high concept cute whimsy and end with profundity. Won me.

MICKEY 17    When Bong Joon Ho wins he wins big. When he wanders he wanders big. It's very hard to keep in touch with this epic sci fi that beat me down rather than engaged me.

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN    A notch above most rock biopics. World heart throb Timothee Chalamee channels Bob Dyanto better effect than the script which does not resist the temptation to telescope great moments of history in otherwise casual scenes. 

THE LAST SHOWGIRL    This was hurt by comparisons, however clueless, with the previous year's The Substance. Pamela Anderson was given the condescending accolade brave despite how brave her performance actually was. The film does not attempt to outgrow its intimacy which is more than I can say of too many.

WOLF MAN    Everyone who'd seen Leigh Whannell's Invisible Man wanted more exciting hot takes. Instead, he went intimate and tragic which disappointed many.

CAUGHT STEALING    Intentionally difficult auteur surfaces to deliver a solid, muscular crime thriller with heart. Nice to see.

EDDINGTON    Ari Aster's credit has all but drained for me. When he can make a ninety minute movie (as this should have been) I'll come back.

40 ACRES    Serviceable post apocalyptic thriller with strong action and morality themes. Does its job.

FRANKENSTEIN    Classic sci-horror scrubbed for Netflix but perfectly watchable for that. Jacob Elordi is a revelation.

LOW

THE MONKEY    Humour so arch it tries to make its audience feel stupid for not laughing. Expected a lot better from the make of The Blackcoat's Daughter and Longlegs.

IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU    Misery fests can work even if they're unrelenting as long as the character has any will to break through and put a dent in the suffering. A final shot almost redeems this but it's far too late to work. You just keep remembering what you've lived through watching it.

CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD    In which a film squarely targetted at its YA audience left me feeling detached. This was made as a gateway to genre. It works but not everyone's invited.

QUEER    Luca Guardagnino makes a film of a thin novella last all afternoon. He has clear talent just insufficient self-restraint. Very fine turn by Daniel Craig as Burroughs' alter ego Bill Lee.

28 YEARS LATER    I liked the first two thirds of the original. This one didn't surpass that one.

NOSFERATU    1922 original still scarier. No point in making this.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST @ 50

R.P. McMurphy engineers himself out of a prison stay for what he thinks is an easier way of doing his time, in psychiatric custody. He spends the first few days sussing out the navigation but comes up against Nurse Ratched who leads the troubled therapy circles. A little testing and error later he pits himself against the nurse to the point where things just have to bend or break. Who's going to win?

Milos Forman's first Anglophone and Hollywood feature after his defection from then Czechoslovakia (how's that for exposition stuffing) is an adaptation of a popular novel of the same title by Ken Kesey. The 1962 book of authority and dissent, of institutionalism and individuality appealed to a generation waking to the controls and state paranoia of their parents' generation. Kesey avoids overcooking his characters' fealty to these sides to provide a more difficult story for deeper reading. Between the book and the film, Cuckoo's Nest also succeeded as a play. This took Broadway with its star powered Kirk Douglas as McMurphy and visionary casting of the young Gene Wilder as chronically twisted Billy Bibbit.

Forman's adaptation of the book and play was the end of a decades long attempt by rights owner Kirk Douglas to bring it to the screen. This is a good story and worth your time. It involves Douglas' son Michael taking the production reins and Forman's defection to get a movie made (not that simple but you get the idea). The thing that Forman brought to the table was his life experience of Soviet oppression that allowed him to not just pit but understand the authority of Nurse Ratched. That made the difference. Even the once touted Hal Ashby as a director could not provide such comprehension.

With this, we don't just get the breakthrough of Jack Nicholson as JACK but a counterpart that is not only solid but rounded and more difficult to battle. This won Louise Fletcher her Oscar and the film its reputation. Without it, the film would have collapsed into the kind of schmalz of Dead Poet's Society in the next decade (which thinly veiled populist authoritarianism). The daily constraint in the beige world of the hospital, the paternalism of its bosses and the intimidating gentleness of Nurse Ratched create a quietly terrifying world that, with a very few tweaks, had been Forman's. I know that most commentary about this film centres on the performances and their impressive dynamics from warmth to violence but my most recent viewing brought out so clearly what Forman added.

One such is the meticulous feed of the score. The diegetic Mantovani strings music intended to calm the patients (but really to mask their sound) rolls out like the whitewash of the walls. Glass panels might add sunlight to the ward but they also promote observation. And then when rebellion and violence break the score tap gets suddenly shut off and we mostly hear a documentary cacophony. It's unsettling. 

Oh, of course I have to talk about the central opposing performances. 

Jack Nicholson had already found the screen persona that he moved into permanently. There are hints in his Roger Corman roles but Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces in 1970 saw the finishing touches applied to the agent of danger he became. Cuckoo's Nest was where that emerged for the biggest audience he ever had. To criticise him for adopting a single career-long performance is to criticise Christopher Walken or Laura Dern. When Nicholson works as JACK it's because he's in a role that exploits that (as opposed to an absorber like De Niro). The difference here is that the Jack role is given more than its usual two dimensions. It's not the constant crazy on 11 that we get in The Shining (which works there, to be honest) but a constant, restless self-restraint that is sure to disintegrate into explosion. It works as a complex role because we know (even if retrospectively) that he's making JACK! Jack.

In the blue corner, Louise Fletcher is what Americans call a character actor and what all other cultures call a good actor. She gives Nurse Ratched the deceptively pleasant control mania that serves middle managers the world over, a kind of fragile benignity that masks incurable contempt. Fletcher said that she based her performance on the way white matriachs treated black people in her native Alabama. There is an extra chill that comes from this knowledge but it's gravy when you see it play out in this film. She pegs MacMurphy as a disruptor and, as scenes progress, she learns to play the others against him, recognising that his success is entirely dependent on their approval. By the time chaos pushes this strategem off the screen she is left unmasked and cruel, her drive to control in command despite herself. It is a performance which you temporarily bypass your apathy to industry awards and start cheering with the rest. It wasn't just an Oscar; she got a BAFTA and a Golden Globe to boot. (I had the same reaction to F. Murray Abraham's big win for Forman's Amadeus a decade later). 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a cuckoo's egg of a film, one that, amidst a decade of disruption during the New Hollywood of Scorsese and Coppola etc., it quietly reset a Young Turk bravado through values like dignity and individuality. These qualities frame Forman's big canvas The Fireman's Ball but even there he exercised restraint this time, knowing it was more important than making a loud entrance. It did more than just forge a good movie, it made his career.

Viewing notes: For this watch I gladly put my recently bought Warner's steelbook of the film and watched it is splendid 4K. Don't want to pay that much? It's streaming for rent on four services. You need this one among your notches.

TOMMY @ 50

All of The Who mime to the audio of Elton John's band in the
Pinball Wizard scene. That's Elton in the background.

Tommy suffers a childhood trauma so profound that his senses shut down. Doesn't end there. He's bullied by his cousin and molested by his uncle. None of the gurus, psychedelic shamen or medical experts can draw him from his sensory isolation. Then again, he's developed an inner life that none of them could dream of. He travels and plays inside his head, past all the abuse, and finds that his skill at pinball can connect him to the world. Is there hope for him to find his way back? What will happen if he meets the world again, strengthened by his inner vision but seeing and hearing the world of his abusers?

Pete Townshend's rock opera changed The Who's career from its place as a second tier British rock players to the heroes of festivals and stadium tours. They toted the song cycle for years of touring. There were theatrical adaptations with casts and music rearranged rearranged for orchestra and the mystique of the opera, aided by the trend that entered similarly esoteric territory like Jesus Christ Superstar or Godspell. The original album and the adaptations sold by the million. The next step of putting it on the big screen was not only inevitable, it had already been written and rewritten by co-manager Kit Lambert but relations between him and the band had deteriorated and his screenplays were adjudged failures.

Enter Ken Russell, enfant terrible of British Filmmaking, whose biographies of great composers could turn geefully anachronistic or vulgar and whose adaptations of literature like Women in Love pushed the by-then D.H. Lawrence back into the public imagination. And that's before you get to The Devils. Russell liked the messianic story of the second half and imported ideas from his own unproduced Poppy Day into the adaptation. He also plugged the many holes in the narrative that Townshend had left in the too hard box to keep the narrative flowing. 

Russell did not like rock music but threw himself into what he did understand which was opera. And just as Wagner or Verdi did, he stuffed this opera full of pop and classical references and as much colour as he could throw at the screen. From Frankenstein to Teddy Boys, from Warners cartoons to sombre animation, from mimed rock performance to proto music videos, all he knew and much he didn't made it, brick by brick into this extravaganza. If Jesus Christ Superstar had Roman soldiers in U.S. issue helmets, Russell put Tommy in a hang glider in a scene of ascension. If King Herod could sing a ragtime number, the pinball champion could play a small keyboard at his machine while wearing gigantic Doc Martens lace-ups. TV commercials, dream sequences, hallucinatory set pieces and even, poignantly, a minutes-long cut to black as Tommy is sexually assaulted by his uncle. If Townshend wanted justice for his brainchild he could not have chosen better.

But does it, reaching through five decades, still appeal the way it did as a mega hit at the cinema on first release? In parts admirably with use of physical effects like the Cousin Kevin sequence or (more simply and affectingly) the image of the boy Tommy swirling playfully in the shallows with his head literally boxed in. The iron maiden drug injection machine that the Acid Queen confines him to is saved from a contemporary drugs-are-bad tone because of its clear ritualistic purpose. The Healer's church of Marylin is as creepy as that sounds. Ok, it's time to talk about the cast.

The Acid Queen is played by a possessed Tina Turner either dominating the attic room or her trade or spasming with a decidedly non-sexual energy. Elton John's turn as the pinball champ shows him shining in the role, in a costume that constains him to standing still (one wrong move in those boots would have ended in hospital for months). Even Eric Clapton whose impassive delivery as the Healer (with the Gibson guitar and The Who playing around him) gives him a duplicitous sincerity. Arthur Brow's screaming assistant at least seems to believe in the garbage he's spewing. As for Uncle Ernie, Keith Moon was form fit for the role of the leering reprobate, being disgusting and funny. And that's just the rock stars!

Oliver Reed struggles with his pitch but provides us with a modern Neanderthal Man whose brutality is more than masked by an innate sexiness. Anne Margaret is, against type, the providor of gravitas, adding pathos and fury to her torchy vocals. Of all of them, she is probably the one we get closest to. Paul Nicholas, at the time an actor with aspirations to pop stardom, overplays Cousin Kevin to perfection as an overgrown school bully.

And it is Roger Daltrey, the central and title role, who does manage to make the mostly impassive Tommy emote from within his closed self. He had described the character and his performance of the music as being the point at which he stopped just being the singer in the band and proceeded to build characters from a solid stage persona. His vocal performance throughout is, of course, stellar and goads his on screen incarnation to something like real acting. His is a poignant presence, placed fragilely at the peak of the story and its operatic claims. There might well have been singing actors who could take the role into more lofty places but Daltrey as the one who embodied the role in front of the Woodstock crowd and the masses at American mega venues, feels right and ready.

Ken Russell brought cinema to serve to fans and curious cinemagoers but was held aloft with great rock music, reimagined by Townshend to the kind of synthesiser-rich mid '70s rock without a note of nostalgia. It was a triumph and remains so. The band's second continuous narrative was realised a few years later when Quadrophenia came out. It was a different film more interested in the social drama of subculture than Townshend's grand scheme (more puzzling that Tommy). No one sang on screen and the sound of the tracks chosen for the score underlined rather than wove. Tommy, Townshend and Russell had probably already said as much as could be said for the collision of rock and opera. What was left to say? Grease? I'll take Tommy.

Oh, yes, I am aware that Cousin Kevin and Fiddle About were written by John Entwistle, not Pete Townshend. 

Viewing notes: I watched my Umbrella Blu-Ray of the film with a surround audio (not the quadrophonic original that had appeared on the old Superbit DVD). I think it's still available. Not available on local streaming, though. 

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW @ 50

After an opening when a pair of red lips against a black background sings Science Fiction Double Feature we jump straight into Brad and Janet who introduce themselves in song. A friend's wedding has inspired Brad to propose and she accepts. They then set off on a trip to visit their old high school science teacher (in whose class they met). The night is stormy and the road screams with motorcycles speeding past. Brad's car tyre bursts and they get out to find a phone. But where? Well, there is a light over at the Frankenstein place which is where they head to be changed irrevocably from the clean cut, Nixon voting suburbanites they are to .... Now, that would be telling.

Richard O'Brien's brainchild stage musical ran with sustained success for seven years on the London stage with continued performances from significant cast members. And that was the state of the cast and director (also from the original production) when the time to turn it into a movie came around. This was after the show flopped on Broadway and while the original run galloped on. Considering the fragile state of those circumstances, the production went ahead. Maybe, just maybe, a movie would do better in the land of movies than a stage play with roots in London glam rock.

Because of the glam kitsch and camp of the science fiction/horror approach (the opening song namechecks the stars of the '50s B-movie-verse freely) the setting is an ambiguous 50s/70s middle America but one where a character can casually mention a castle they passed while driving on a stormy night. Most of the stage cast were British but Brad and Janet needed to convince as American. Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon fronted up and the casting was done. The production was entirely U.K. based. The manor house was real (but constantly hazardous) and in two months of shooting, they had the makings of one of the most durable cult hits in cinema history.

With Bowie's Ziggy persona still in memory and the arrival of Queen, the Brit rock culture diaspora (which included Australia) was ready to peep around the curtain at something like this. The music fits perfectly into the era with its clear glam derivations flaunted and then dangerous gender notions front and centre. And, strangest thing, it worked. It took its time but, by the next two years, were getting requested on local radio. There was a series of display cards I remember from record shops that played on the eras megahits with slogans like "A Different Kind of Jaws" and "Another Kind of Rocky". This solidly flamboyant taunt of a flim had penetrated the "no p**fters!" epoque of Australian culture (heavily distilled in my native North Queensland) and it was here to stay.

I saw it at the drive-in toward the end of 1976 when my sister and her Uni friend Penny thought I'd like to come along. This was about a year after the initial release (strictly arthouse) muletrained its slow way up north to where we were but we knew of it from Penny's original cast recording from the London Show. A small disparate group also went along to the Norline to witness and we raved about it at school, with the conversational notes of elder siblings strudied to the syllable. We were months away from punk's horizon. This would feel like a do-what-thou-wilt appetiser for the coming times.

Brad and Janet are a '50s couple who seem airdropped into the '70s. They might have seen Disney but not Taxi Driver. They are more than primed for the shock of Frankenfurter, given all the stage force and more by Tim Curry who remains principally known for this one role. But it's a corker of a performance that gleefully draws from the best of rock frontmen from Jagger to Bowie and further. His corsets and fishnets and raven black bouff as well as his Cleopatra clownface ran a direct current to the future Siousxie Sioux. His vocal performance was modelled on QEII, recognisable as a Regan-like disconnection for all of his audiences. Rock Horror, is of course an ensemble show and we cannot omit kudos for the lilkes of Little Nell, Patricia Quinn, a pre-fame Meatloaf and Richard O'Brien himself whose Riff Raff makes for a meaner kind of Alice Cooper. 

The film shows clear benefit from years of stage success and the transition to the cinema feels effortless. Whether it's the splendour of Frankenfurter's entree in drag that feels more rockstar than stripshow and his gleefully baritone declaration of being a sweet transvesite from transexual Transylvania is so commanding I would bet that any Northerner like the ones that surrounded our car who would have roared off in his panelvan was so captured by Curry's command that the magnetism alone kept them there at the speaker stand, perhaps feeling without registration, a drop of something other than recognition for the art of acting. 

Yes, the farcical scenes inject a bawdy note that the threats of the dinner scene renders vague. The middle act does spread out more than it should to the point where it's hard to tell motivations from identities but by the end credits there are some clear thinking points among the reeds of the comedy and campiness that spoke to their time. Now, we might baulk at terms like transvestite or transexual but they were the ones to use before the dialogue was culture-wide and the syllables to sing for maximum effect.

By the end of the decade the songs and scenes were better known than the ones in Grease and the phenomenon of sing and play along screenings (evenmaking it into a scene in the hit Fame) was a regular event. I didn't go to any of those because by then I was too cool for school and deep into the mire of the post punque demi-monde. But they did happen and might even still happen. There was, I was delighted to observe the other phenomenon of fellow NQ-er boys, who were better known for their turns in the cricket and rugby teams, happily doing the time warp at parties, knowing the identifications in the movie. It might have happened but I don't recall any card carrying bogan storming out of such a sight. A movie won't change any ingrained reaction to difference in culture but the sighs, the preens and sheer force of this one can remind us that it can die trying. If you haven't seen it for awhile, put it on again. Drink something. Nibble something. And yell along.

Viewing notes: I have a DVD of this which features the option of the originally intended first act in black and white (turning to colour for The Time Warp) but I wanted to keep it as original as I could and chose the HD one on Disney (current subscription) but it's available for rent or ownership on a few streamers.There is a 4K available but you'll have to but that one online.

BARRY LYNDON @ 50

Naive Irish boy Redmond Barry is swindled into leaving town so that his rival can claim the woman they both fancy, then he is victim to highwaymen who strip him of all the wealth on his person, so he joins the army, doing well enough in it to desert and impersonate an officer whose meeting with a Prussian counterpart ends in exposure and back to the ranks of the Prussian army and .... you get the idea. It's the 18th century and Stanley Kubrick wants to take you for a holiday there as you watch a figure rise and then fall in such a way that you will feel caressed by the art of it and engaged by its lessons for the late 20th century. How'd that go?

Well, the reason this title is condemned, along with Lolita, to the bottom of the pile, below the early noirs and even his debut which he himself derided, is largely due to his great faithfulness to his source and its era. He added plot points and altered the person of the narrator but the real star was, having convinced us he'd shot a film out near Juptier, the journey back to 18th century Europe. Kubrick was expected to get that right. If wooden cameras with supersonic oil paint masters inside them had been possible that's how he would have done it. But what we get is an intriguing mix of contemporary technology (including from NASA again) and an appreciation of the look of the era as evidenced in the painting of the time, served, as always with music of place and perfection.

It's important to remember (or be informed) that Thackeray's original novel was itself in fancy dress. It was done in the style of a Fielding or Smollet, a beefy mix of fortune soldiery, knavery and gentility for a readership eager for the lot. By setting his story among the high born powdered wigs when he'd never worn one himself allowed him to indulge in a near endless judgement of both noble and humble players after their death. Thackeray wasn't born until the 18th century was dead eleven years. He could thus take literary pot shots at anyone contemporary with the distraction of a wildly unreliable narrator (Barry himself) moving among a costumed cast of characters. Who'd care to sue?

For Kubrick, the themes beckoned of frustrated sons and father figures, self aggrandisement and the old stalwart of fate and opportunism that filled the pages of Tom Jones and Roderick Random back i' the day. Also, he was charged with outdoing the massively successful Tony Richardson adaptation of Tom Jones. He not only did that, he might well have killed it as a setting.

For his vehicle-in-chief Kubrick chose the celebrated fence post Ryan O'Neal, an actor who needed an extraordinary director to draw him out beyond his native beauty. O'Neal's counter in the role of Lady Lyndon was Marissa Berenson, one of the ubermodels of the mid-70s. The rest of the cast is almost entirely every British RADA graduate from the previous decade up to the production year who serve as strongly as the massive paintings in the lofty halls of the rich in many scenes of this film.

The music would be a series of adaptions of the works of the composers of the Late Baroque/Classical period like Handel and the only-just anachronistic Franz Schubert. With the harpsichord piece Sarabande expanded to an orchestral scale for the voice of fate and the aching lilt of Schubert's piano theme from a his trio in E-flat to celebrate love among the syllabubs and candles, as well as a host of less modest blarings of fanfares and symphonic movements, the constant music of the time, blanding with the more poignant bucolic folk for the rustic scenes, the sound stage is set.

And, of course, this film doesn't just look good it is almost constantly as gorgeous as a gallery of period correct landscapes and opulent interiors. The latter are often served by the use of the NASA-developed lenses that offered the widest aperture in film history so that the candlelight is just that, candlelight, not electric lighting  supplemented by a host of pretty wax sticks. It took a moon landing to make the 18th century convince us.

So, pretty scenes and powerful music aside, is it any good? Well, those themes of fatherhood and aggradnisement persist and always work. The scenes of military fighting feel documentary as do scenes of emotional and physical violence. When the peaks are reached, they impress. The problem is that there are too few peaks. There's a lot of ogling of beautiful landscapes and ostentatious houses but so little of anything else to allow us to forget we are in for three hours of this.

Ryan O'Neal's impassivity is deliberate, his face's perfection can allow us to write upon it what we get from a particular scene, remembering, as Barry does, his class predicament. He does allow enough through to show us a performance but he is intended, though the title character, to be one to whom things happen more than driving his own story through his strengths and weaknesses. Kubrick's gamble on our draining empathy with Redmond Barry does not pay off. If we then accept the slog of over half the film watching him scoundrelise his fortunes, knowing full well where he is headed, then it works. But we don't accept it, it's too hard to care. Even his enemies who might at least give us something to emote against, fall into their positions as narrative cogs and we just wait for the credits.

If you are unfamiliar with this film, perhaps making your way through Kubrick's ouvre, I will recommend splitting it up into hour long episodes, a kind of limited event television. This won't drive away its problems but it will serve to bright the highlights into greater focus and allow a richer experience. 

That said, later excursions into similar territory like Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract and Milos Forman's Amadeus are very much the beneficiaries of Barry Lyndon's splendour and Kubrick's determination toward authenticity. The film is also illserved by its place between the incendiary A Clockwork Orange and the solidly creepy The Shining (at least the shorter cut, the longer bores almost as badly as Barry). If you are going film by film this one might well be your last. But if you make it through, its tale of a disintegrating ethical being attaining power despite not deserving a skerrick of it, might have a more contemporary appeal.

Viewing notes: I watched Barry Lyndon in Warner's 4k steelbook package and was rewarded with sumptuous visuals and audio. As aforesaid, I split the experience into managable episodes of about an hour each. This has also been well served on Blu-Ray. Even the initial DVD is a good presentation. The expensive steelbook is the only edition available in Australia. It has both 4K and Blu-Ray copies. There are several online outlets for purchase or rent, but only SBS on Demand offers it for free (with ads).

Review: IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU

Linda is a psycho therapist with problems of her own. Her husband is always away on his job captaining a ship. Their daughter has a condition that requires a high maintenance care routine that involves an intestinal tube and an eating regime that is not working. One of Linda's patients is a depressed mother who abandons her infant during a session and disappears, literally leaving Linda holding the baby. The roof of her rental collapses and floods the place, forcing her and her daughter to a fleabitten hotel. Her own therapy sesions with a colleague are grdinging into difficulty. I could go on like this movie does but my commitement to mercy is vetoing that. It's this and more for almost two hours.

Linda and other characters are almost always shot in closeup and kept to the centre of the widescreen frame, forbidding the visual freedom of the aspect ratio. It creates an unsettling claustrophobia. There are a few jump scares to agitate your popcorn but the film plays without an act structure, rendering the constant series of stressful scenes exhausting to watch. It's not a comment on the pressure being exhausting, it really is draining to sit through. A late moment of a character throwing herself against more powerful waves works as a poignant symbol, or would if we hadn't already sat through almost two hours establishing the same thing in a virtual loop. There is no relief until the final image.

But even that last life affirming shot feels more like an "ok" rather than an "oh right". The onslaught of tightening oppression for the running time is unrelenting. This means that Eraserhead, Come and See and Martyrs offer more relief. Think about that.

It makes me think that this is a writer's film, an exercise in devising a constant series of cruel challenges but little to keep them in a coherent thread. The symbolism - a birth canal hole in the roof that gushes like water breaking, an umbilical scene involving that tube, the tide of the nocturnal beach standing in for an unfeeling nature and all of modern life. Through this, through a multitude of expressions and actions lived and done by Linda, we get to know her only very slightly. She deals with each challenge in turn, some more effectively than others. We get the overall arc of her resiliance but almost nothing of the origin of her drive. In one scene she dirupts a support group by turning its mantra around before fleeing the scene. This plays a little like black comedy but I could only register it as bleakness. Linda should be well enough established to buy her way out of most of this, even if only to dent the pressure. She seems to opt into it with no suggestion of mental damage that might prevent her from it.

What works is an assured helming with effective cinema skills to at least evoke all this in style. Also, this is Rose Byrne's career best performance. However little my regard for the conception of this constant barrage of woes that Linda faces, Byrne provides everything from tempests of fury to a visible struggle against implosion and carries her place at the near constant centre of the screen with solid compulsion. All the cast do well but all are in her shadow.

My exhaustion from seeing this film left me baffled. Did writer/director Mary Bronstein (impressive in a significant role on screen here) have an explosive urge to construct this repetitive torment? I don't expect Pollyanna but some character constructing space would have welcomed me in more and allowed me to travel with it rather than constantly keep from resisting it. If you see it, see it for Rose Byrne. She's a revelation.

Review: FRANKENSTEIN

Frankenstein was written as a horror story for a readership whose fear of gods was as real as taxes. Of all the big stories of the genre, Frankenstein is often the least scary. It needs a push. Boris Karloff taking a child's game too far made my favourite version horror. Later interpretations looked into philosophy, the issues that spring like ballistic missles from the notion of creating sentient life. So, when Guillermo del Toro came up with his I was already in line. But I wasn't expecting a horror tale.

If you want one of those, go back to James Whale's breakthrough, or Terrence Fisher's bold return for Hammer (there are a few but Curse is the OG). Del Toro's aim, if you are familiar with his work, would never be generic horror. And this is not.

After a prelude at the North Pole where Frankenstein and his creature are discovered at the end of the story, we enter into what we might comfortably assume will be most of the rest with Victor's story. This is told by Oscar Isaac in a dependably layered performance and takes him from blustering science hero to one horrified and contemptuous of his own creation. Shorter roles by Charles Dance as his bullying father and Christoph Waltz as his later sponsor fill things credibly. 

But then we follow the creature's tale we find out why most of the acclaim for the performances in this film have gone to Jacob Elordi's turn as the creature. Elordi whose beauty is concealed beneath slabs of prosthetics has just enough of his face and his eyes to use for his emotional responses as they appear and develop. Brutalised as his creator projects his own shame on him, echoing both Baron Frankenstein senior and an imaged god's distaste, he is withdrawn and almost mute. In later scenes where his interacition with the outside world complicates, Elordi feeds us painfully gradual inches forward. He plays it as a survival story.

Spanning both these tales is that of Elizabeth, Victor's frustrated love interest and the one who introduces the creature to kindness and a kind of love. She is played by Mia Goth who steals every single movie she is in. Goth's talent is complexity and here she shows it progressively as, scene by scene, her physicality reveals her to be Frankenstein's superior in avante-science, adding compassion to discovery with the kind of fearlessness that defies her constricting times. It's less than a leading performance but it's one you'll be taking away with you.

So, while Del Toro's Frankenstein is not the shrieking pop piece of James Whale or the near psychedelic showreel of Terrence Fisher, it does allow us room to ponder the spiky issues of the story in deliberate pacing (Del Toro can make two hours plus feel quite breezy) and some of the most beautiful imagery you'll see this year. It might not scare you but you'll have something to think about.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS @ 70 (Spoilers)

Local doctor Miles gets back to town to find a number of people are claiming that family members have been replaced. Mothers, Uncles, children have suddenly changed to strangers. They look and talk the same and even have the right memories but there's an essence lacking. Miles dismisses this at first but is haunted by the number of cases being reported. One night, he is called to a friend's house, the town bohemian, as it happens, and finds an indentical copy of him lying on the billard table. The body is perfect but lacks all the signs of decades of life. When the guy accidentallky cuts his hand, a cut appears on the copy. Phone calls here, hurried drives there, the town is being taken over by people who form in giant pods and takeover their assigned bodies while those are asleep. A quiet and thorough invasion from space.

This, the invasion and evasion, is the plot but the threads are concerned with the loss of that essential humanity. When the pod people have a chance to speak, they appeal to the painlessness of their new form, no love but also no hate, no shame, no guilt. A moment of cornered affection between Miles and his love Becky negates that promise and firms their resolve to resist. 

It's the question of resistance that has driven both ends of the political spectrum to claim Invasion of the Body Snatchers for themselves. In the '50s of its birth, you can easily see how the McCarthyite watchdogs would see this dehumanisation as communism, the collective over the individual. But it's just as easy to see a critique of the apple pie conformity assumed by the anti communists. If you've got sides, it's plain fun to accuse the other one of being pod people.

What is clear is that mobs are mobs and the threat of control by them is terrifying. The scene before the mobs form is one of chilling conformity as the small town seems to move as one organism, appearing from the footpaths and silently swarming to the town square to recieve their new pods from delivery trucks. If you saw this in the mid-'50s in the USA it would have frozen you, either way you looked at it. The idea that the other is yourself is a perfectly hit note for the times. While this film keeps things a lot more grounded than I Married a Monster from Outer Space (a LOT less cheesy than its title) it knows its audience well.

And it had durability. Body Snatchers is one of the few horror movies that is cited as an exception to the rule of the inferiority of remakes. Along with The Thing and The Fly, this one was successfully reinserted into later cultures only it was redone well more than once which gives it the edge. In 1978 the me-generation with its psychobabble gets infiltrated by pod versions of itself that are beyond empathy. 1993's Bodysnatchers put the story into a military context (nuff said).

This original from mid century America with its poster pefect couple (Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter) does carry the first told charm. Miles's lustful banter with Becky feels like old man entitlement now but it does get well batted back by Becky and then the stakes between them are raised as it resolves as love to face the challenge of never feeling that again. A little context tolerance allows that indulgence effortlessly. The incident that breaks the couple's humanity while surrounded by the pod people concerns the safety of a dog. Later, in 1978 (which did not fall back on the love switch) this has become the sight of a monstrosity. A scream will always turn you in.

The original cut of this film (which did not make it to the first release) did not include the framing scenes in a Los Angeles police station where the raving Miles is calmed and tells his tale. There was a home video release without these scenes which starts in normality an ends in panic as Miles screams futilely in the middle of a busy highway that everyone around him will be next, at one point yelling it down the camera to the audience. In the early days o' DVD I bought a cheapo with a terrible transfer which featured this ending. This was my first viewing of it and it played very strongly. There had been a campaign to offer this restored form but it couldn't make it to the people who made the decisions about it, even as an alternative version. That's a pity as, without the reassurance of the good guys in the big city taking control with an early warning, the prospect was nightmarish. My scrubbed up 4K which looks so beautiful might have been presented with the Ur potency. But no.

Lifting the filter of vintage cinema and mores and presenting this version to today's America makes things a lot less tame in light of the apparent shift toward authoritarianism and hive mindedness. Imagine the January 6th insurrection done as a quiet swarm and you'll get the idea.

Viewing notes: I watched Kino Lorber's excellent 4K release, choosing the standard widescreen presentation over the offered 2:1 alternative (both were released originally). I'm calling it a 70th anniversary despite it normally being considered a 1956 release as I noticed it said MCMLV in the credit sequence. I was using it as a pallet cleanser from the excerable V/H/S/Halloween which was mostly tedious garbage. It was good to see the clean lines, solid characters and thoughtful craft of this one after that mess. At time of writing there are no local releases of this on physical media. It can be hired through Prime, Apple and YouTube.

GINGER SNAPS @ 25

Something is ravaging the dogs in the quiet and flavourless suburb of Bailey Downs. Brigitte Fitzgerald emerges from her family garage, laden with lethal equipment, and sees her neighbour screaming about finding the latest victim. She tells the dog on the other side to shutup and returns to the basement bedroom she shares with her sister Ginger. Ginger is wondering about suicide methods, toying with a knife at her wrist. The pair are a pact of two, teenagers in opposition to the world at large. As Ginger says, offering a hand of solidarity, "united against life as we know it. Out by sixteen or dead on the scene. Together forever." They then go about videoing their school project Life in Bailey Downs, a series of staged suicides as the credits roll.

The Fitzgerald sisters keep to themselves at school and are taunted by the other girls and (Ginger, at least) lusted after by the boys. Their secretive dialogue is entirely resistent to the teen-go-round of playing and mating. After a run in with the local alpha chick, Brigitte suggests a prank with alpha's dog. If it works, great, if it goes wrong, they can always blame the Beast of Bailey Downs. While putting the prank together one night, they come across another victim of the Beast and Ginger's first period begins (both girls are years late menstruating) and then the werewolf attacks, leaving Ginger a torn and bloodied mess. At home, after escaping the monster (who gets splattered by a van), Ginger's wounds begin to heal before their eyes. 

Karen Walton's and John Fawcett's upgraded werewolf story drags the mythology of the werewolf from the traditional burden of secreted animalistic violence and even beyond a sexual motive and plonks the condition squarely into adolescence where we all wade through our own tales of  body horror, no exceptions. The voice changes, ball drops, periods and skin explosions and the myriad rest of it have been there for centuries waiting for such recognition. It's only taken a few millennia of tale spinning.

What about Teenwolf? Good point but while this shares a comedic approach with the '80s piece, the underlying darkness remains core. The Fitzgeralds have discovered the futility of fantasising a lifelong pass from doing what the world wants of them but then, when joining it, there is only more futility, more struggle, more life-crushing hosility. Teenwolf did get through a few similar issues but Ginger Snaps concentrates on them: the superpowers of the transformation just accentuate the brutality. Every teenager, apart from the very one percent at the top of the pecking order, would use the nuclear codes at the drop of a hat. Nothing, neither power nor sex changes that. In the end all they have is sibling love but even that gets tested toward tragedy.

If that just sounds like more downers about angst ridden teens, be aware that this is a constantly funny movie. Only at the end, when it has to stand up an be a horror piece, does that change. The dialogue might remind you of the inventiveness of Heathers or the TV version of Buffy. "The fuck, B, this is your idea. If you don't like your ideas, stop having them." But then there are moments of poignancy in the sass. A local buck sees Ginger in pain, buying tampons in the supermarket and suggests that a toke would take the edge off. Ginger quietly rasps, "maybe I like my edge." Thoughts that seem to transcend adolesence are set so strongly within it that they convince.

Ginger is given a stomping performance by Katherine Isabelle who runs through every sudden turn and rip. Her bludgeoning eyes get her through freezeouts and one of the strongest suddenly-hot-dweeb-girl-strolls-down-the-school-hall scenes in cinema history. Her elder sister ptoection of Brigitte is quietly authoritative and her growing wildness never less than convincing. By the end she is the monster she promised to deliver but still the girl who tried to wish it all away. Emily Perkins as Brigitte gets most of the screen time and gives us a constant cringe from acting out of ghastly necessity. It's over for her, as well, as nothing will be like the confident life-denying pacts she made with Ginger. Her negotiations with the local drugster and agent of help see her taking her protective role into a maturity beyond her years. It's a great push-pull turn. Necessary shout to Mimi Rogers as the ditzy parachute mum whose every scene is a belly laugh.

This is a tale of latchkey kids, X to Millennial, who were yet to have their culture conquered by screen time and needed to work things out themselves. It's a story of the pressures of girlhood and coasting "along the way the world works". It's a mini epic of the need for the kind of culture that sneered at cosmetics called Teen Spirit and had just been taken to the entrance to hell in a $2 indy called The Blair Witch Project. This was neither Heathers nor Scream. It was unsafe and its comedy was on the prowl. That it still works is its message.

THE APPARTMENT @ 65

Charlie Baxter is a drone at an insurance company, buzzing away with a crowd of others in a low cieling office that is about as close as you get to a hive on a human scale. He's still young but has ambitions. He often works late, as he says in his narration. Then we find out why. Through a series of small favours that escalated, he lends his appartment to a small group of executives who use it for extra marital sex. They keep him strung with promises of advancement but by this time those are sounding hollow. 

On the way into work each morning he has a smile and banter with the lift girl Fran. He's impressed by her as she handles herself firmly with the handsy execs and seems above the exploitation mill that Charlie enables. Then one day the promises are made good and he gets called upstairs. The mighty Mr Sheldrake wants to see him. There is the prospect of promotion but, really, it's just another suit buying into the appartment rort. He's already been stranded outdoors while his higher ups take their time in his home, his neighbours complain about the noise and he seems to be shrinking into a barely functional stasis. Will having his own office be worth it?

Billy Wilder's 1960 interpersonal epic is hard to call a comedy. As a director of funny films he was no slouch with the likes of The Seven Year Itch or Some Like it Hot behind him. The Appartment plays like a drama with an overlay of warmth rather than a series of payoffs. The concern here is finding the moral centre among the urban hellscape of privilege and advantage. 

Jack Lemmon's Charlie understands the order, however much he resents it but when he benefits from it the sense of freedom overcomes him and he falls into form, another exec. Shirley MacLaine's Fran returns an expression of one who has been through the mill and is witnessing yet more corruption. Care is taken to illustrate Fred MacMurray's Sheldrake's skill at manipulation, his conscience-free lying and emotional pressure. This is a cast responding to the call of elegant writing about a brutal work culture. It cuts very close and the relief is often a sobering pathos rather than a joke.

However, this is a comedy the same way that Network or Boogie Nights are comedies in that they beg of you to reserve your judgement until you have seen everything. The stratification that frames the conflict is the same whether it's a capitalist industry or a remote politburo and it could as easily have been set in Classical Greece as mid century New York. Lemmon's decency begs his pathos. MacLaine's outward incorruptibility (according to Charlie) is amour against experience. And Fred MacMurray's effortless maintenance of his droit de segnieur is chilling. His dismissal of  a previous victim, kept close as a secretary, will have resonance but it probably won't be premanent. The final scene gives us what we want but its lack od sentimentality makes it feel earned.

Wilder's career is a list of bangers and (probably) others that will need seeking. That the same hand at the helm brought us the creepy Hollywood self-portrait of Sunset Boulevard and the durably hilarious Some Like it Hot could make this dark remionder of the world of work and the consequences of unchecked privilege should come as no surprise. It was films like this that broke the stiffness of the Hollywood in the decade to come and made way for the liberation of the '70s. Another debt we owe to Billy Wilder. Pay it in the best way: seek it out and watch it.

Review: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

A couple in the centre of a revolutionary cell Pat and Perfidia join in lots of fun activities like mass releases of border crossers and city wide power failures when Perfidia come across oaken martinet Captain Lockjaw. Perfidia stages a bizarre captor/captive scene with the soldier. He digs it, though or because he's renedered a sub, and pursues an encore. Over time she gets pregnant and has a daughter, ostensibly to Pat. When the gang gets busted Pat is plunged into hiding as Bob with the child. Perfidia makes a deal and flees south. Or did she? Young Willa has been told family legends that her mother died a hero. Others in the greater secret diaspora think she ratted them out. When Lockjaw gets his funny handshake opportunity to join an elite vigilante group, he has to pursue the evidence of his inter-racial failing to present cleanly and ascend to macho right Valhalla. 

Confused? You might be. This is an adaptation of a novel by Thomas Pynchon whose fairy tale named characters tote assault weapons and whose plots wind like medieval ornaments. I haven't read Vineland (nor anything but short stories by Pynchon) but what I do know is that Paul Thomas Anderson has apparently tamed Pynchon's sargasso plotting to deliver a cogent and engaging (if overlong) movie. You might not be able to keep up with all the great crowd of characters but you'll get the centrat quartet and more significant players and enjoy some well turned action and typical wry humour along the way.

The cast is not just on game but at the hands of a warmly capable actor's director and deliver. Leonardo DiCaprio is constantly funny as the punch drunk ex-agitprop operative who almost remembers what it was like three decades ago. Teyana Taylor is intimidatingly solid as a revolutionary who gets everything she wants out of what she encounters. Benicio Del Toro has a lot of fun as a martial arts instructor from the old revolutionary days who turns on a dime without a shift in his pulse. Sean Penn is given a dark, demonic other side to his ambitions to rid the galaxy of everything unAmerican, raging here and icy there. And, at the eventual centre of the quest, Chase Infiniti presents a teenager whose cool conceals a cheated mother's cosmic anger. And so on; in a Paul Thomas Anderson joint, you will end up knowing everyone.

The final act reminded me strangely of Boogie Nights, with important differences. Where Anderson's breakthrough hit used the porn mill to arrive at extended family values, One Battle After Another goes through that to pursue something more like a nature/nurture pride of craft. The culmination of the thrilling car chase along an undulating highway delivers a revelation of an intergenerational exchange. It really is a step forward for Anderson.

This is a film whose slickness masks anger. Because of the timelines of production, it would have been on its way before the Trump victory last year but it feels like a response to it. Perhaps it was more like an imagined worst case scenario. We marvel at the Rube Goldberg like falling into place of the evasive tactics of the networks and the warmth of craft of their organisers and we do begin at the border, such a centre of the worst excesses of the campaign. Anderson might well have chosen his material as a warning but found that it was more like a report.

I find it interesting that both he and the comparable Darren Aranofsky have landed on much more straightforward fare for their releases in the first year of Trump Secundus. We could also add Ari Aster's Eddington. America's social and political woes are benefitting from a surfeit of pummeling pushback from the arts. While that might come across as a big so what in light of the terrifying compliance of the nationwide cult, it can still serve as a beacon. May it glow.

SUNSET BOULEVARD @ 75

Joe Gillis came to Hollywood to make his fortune after dazzling the bosses of the dream factory with his genius. After a few B-movies he's hawking around his latest mediocrity and getting shown the door when his own door thunders with the sound of repo men after his car. He blarneys his way out of it but when he is seen driving the jalopy by those very agents, he takes evasive action and darts into the first ungated driveway he can find, parks the beast in the open garage and starts walking away, calculating his next move. When the woman in the window yells at him that he's late and he'd better get in there, he follows as only the down at heel can, because it's better than the motel room.

But this isn't just some Hollywood broad, an old dowager ordering a pool clean, it's former silent movie superstar Norma Desmond. Once he clears up the misunderstanding that he's not actually there to inter the dead chimpanzee on the slab in a shiny white coffin, and that he's actually a writer for the movies, he's kind of hired. Why? Well, Norma has a notion to break back into the flickers with a script as long as the Bible about Salome with her as the star, of course. Ulp! Well, if it gets the debt guys off his back, he's in. After all, as shes just assured him, she's still big, it's the movies that got small.

This Mad Hatter's tea party scenario from 1950 is one of Hollywood's most damning self portraits. If Singing in the Rain softened the notion of Hollywood hope two years later, Sunset Boulevard gave it a big chore. Its combined noir cynicism and deflating pathos create a kind of ethereal horror by which the favours of tinsel town demand the entirety of their applicants. Billy Wilder and co. even supply a more measured image of honest work with the figures of younger people taking more practical paths to careers but Norma's crazed hunger and Joe's own unquestioned opportunism to be elevated by it are the things that leave that bad taste. The focus is on the freak show, not the bright young things. That is what still makes this film essential viewing for anyone who fancies themself a likely player.

Norma's screenplay is a mass of hopeless narcissism and Joe's attempts at editing it, when discovered, are absorbed into her host's ingestion of him as parasite. Of course, he resists being bought at the beginning but he has neither idea nor defence against someone whose riches flowed in from staged histrionics and interpersonal atrocities. For any of his resistance, Joe knows he's signed the contract and, saving opportunity, is effectively doomed. We also know, from the opening scene and narration, that he didn't make it out. We meet him visually floating face down in the swimming pool. We're finding out how he got there.

The tuned casting of this is essential. William Holden was still young but wise enough in his carriage and demeanour to convince us to get behind him. His narration is the same husky snark of a Phillip Marlowe or Same Spade except it begins with a bitterness that both would avoid. 

The real coup is Gloria Swanson. She was a star of silent cinema. She did know De Mille and all the others. She knew the adoration, the parties and the endless champagne and attention. And her career, though it continued beyond the switch to sound, faded steadily to the point when she was more than ready for this. Among all those stars from the Hollywood firmament, she did know the tragedies and horror tales, the delusional and the heartrending. Though not one of them herself, she is in this role speaking for them, not just like them. If anything, she is more authentic and compassionate than the real life Cecil B. DeMille who appears in an extended cameo. Norma's quiet and stern butler is given a hate-filled gravity by silent auteur Josef von Sternberg. This film ain't kidding around. It is to Swanson's persistent credit that her own grotesque turn raises her to triumph in this sordid fable.

Sunset Boulevard was one of David Lynch's favourite films and it's easy to see why. It is an ornate nightmare of masks and fugue states set in a Hollywood that knows how stinking and cruel it always was. This would play seamlessly with Lynch's own attempt, Mulholland Drive, the pair of them craving deep into the horrors of delusion with the most convincing beauty.

Viewing notes: I saw this as Paramount's stunning 4K presentation. However, this one is always around. Not quite a Casablanca or Wizard of Oz, it's been treated well for home video from the DVD era on. If you don't want to commit to a home 4K you could easily come upon it at an op shop for a few bucks. I first saw it on midday TV and was capitvated but that doesn't happen anymore.

Review: FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES

A young couple in the '60s go to the opening of a new skyscraping landmark in their city. By Rub Goldberg increments, the building explodes and collapses, killing everyone, just after he proposes marriage and she confesses pregnancy. Cut to now and uni student Stephanie is being robbed of her sleep because she keeps getting woken by nightmares about the building disaster. She gets back home mid-semester to track down the truth and exorcise the terrors. A visit to her grandmother clears a lot up, including the horrifying news that she and her current family also are in line for Death's ire because Aunt Iris cheated and lived. So, this is a franchise film and we are in for a series of orchestrated kills and circumventions.

As that is the entire plot, I'm going to leave it there, keep this short and rant a little.

I saw the first Final Destination movie at the cinema when it was a new release. It was fine, some very inventive kills and a cameo by the great horror icon Tony Todd (most famous for Candyman). The franchise kept going, essentially repeating and riffing on audience expectations. What's wrong with that? Nothing at all, that's the way horror franchises are meant to work and it's why I avoid most of them. So, what's my problem with this one?

Well, it's historical. The first one was released in 2000. This was a time when mainstream horror had grown bloated by big budgets which saw them paralysed by massive CG effects but also a smoothing of any scares that might alienate the maximisation of their audiences. From the top dollar blandings of Coppola's Dracula and Branagh's Frankenstein, Blade, the cruddy remake of The Haunting, Darkness and too many others, Hollywood's snatching of the genre meant it got richer and stupider and stopped working. The maverick hit Blair Witch Project white anted this over the next decade and horror once again, aided by accessible technology, had a healthy undercurrent. 

This happens in cycles and we're once again at the peak of one whereby ineffective garbage like this, the Waniverse (Conjuring etc.) and so much else, rules the cinema screens and the streamers with nice and toothless horror. What is different this time is that the undercurrent is not affected by this and remains active and successful. So, again, why should I care about this one, can't I just live and let live?

Well, no. It's always worth calling out how a mighty genre can turn into soft serve and rake it in when stuff much tougher still struggles for clicks in the margins. A string of selfconsciously clever kills of people I cannot care about doesn't cut it. When I can be reassured that folk like the Philippou brothers are here to stay and will keep pushing their own envelope so that the big overstuffed popcorn muck like this can take its rightful place in the family safe section.

Tony Todd's cameo in this was his final screen performance before his death last year. It is the sole poignant moment in this movie and, for all its brevity, outclasses the rest of it. In memoriam.

Review: CAUGHT STEALING

When Hank agrees to look after his neighbour's cat in their Manhattan apartment block he quickly finds out how much trouble that has landed him when a pair of Russian mafia thugs beat him unto death's door and reveal a whole mini cosmos of bad behind them. Hank coulda been a baseball player, he is haunted by nightmares of why that didn't happen. Where others might feel like a failure, he reasons that he likes his job at the bar and loves his girlfriend and has pretty much what he needs. He doesn't want what the bad guys want but they have their ways and he's bargaining over riches he isn't pursuing as the stakes get deadly and real. Maybe he should just given the cat some of the tuna from his bagle and gone to the shop, but circumstances won't have that. It's 1998, before the whole world went off. At least there's trip hop on the radio.

After Black Swan, Noah, Mother, and The Whale, Darren Aranofsky might well have felt the need to make something more straightforward, something with a beginning, middle and end in that order that made hard narrative sense. I actually like his more allegorical work but watching this muscular crime thriller made me glad that he can turn something out like this, still. 

Austin Butler reminds me of a young Brad Pitt without the macho bluster. Ok, maybe not in Dune II but certainly here where his Hank lives with development paralysis that he will probably have for life. I won't spoil why he didn't make it into the baseball league but the reason is deep seated enough to give him painful nightmares many years after the incident. The more we learn of this the better we see that he's keeping his head just above the surface tension. He still hasn't quite confronted the possibility that he is destined to be just like the old characters who are his bar's regulars and owners. If he has a motivation it is to keep everything the same as it is now. He keeps the trouble of his past behind a placid face. It's this story's job to turn that into a rictus of agony.

And as this is an Aranofsky movie, we get all this with a layer of kitchen grease and a sheen of beauty. Yvonne (a luminous Zoe Kravitz) and Hank facing each other after racing to get their kits off is sweaty, smelly and alluring, a workaday erotic. Manhattan's weary old streetscapes are both enlivened through action and loom from the weather as indifferent artefacts. Goose that I am, I didn't look out for sight of the pre-2001 Twin Towers but the scene to scene setting doesn't need them. Portishead on the radio feels more like the time. As the storms of violence enter or converge, it's almost a comfort to think of the era before the crazy quilt we live under now.

The lightness beneath the mounting brutality and suspense is kept low. This is necessary to allow us to persist through some convincingly choreographed violence and very dark morality. It's nothing like the knockabout goofiness in the trailer which makes it look like mid-period Coen brothers, but the lightness is where the warmth resides and its supply is kept to a constant undercurrent. Aranofsky's helming is nothing but confident as he keeps the easier comedy from the extreme characters dangerous rather than comic.

A strange aspect of this movie is the sight of fine grain in a film that was shot on 8K digital. I can't find out why that is beyond assuming it was the same kind of process to make it look like film that other titles have used. The strange thing about that is that it immediately reminded me of how Madonna's 90's single Erotica had a sample of vinyl record noise imposed on its entirely digital soundstage. Portishead, heard on the soundtrack along with a host of other trip hoppers from the era, used samples of their own jams to build their sound. Aranofsky's use of the grain, here, feels like a sneaky kind of nostalgia. The pummeling violence, informed by Asian cinema choreography (but not campily, the way Tarantino uses it) stops the spread of that nostalgia. It's an odd moment of detail.

So, it works. Tim Smith's punk works. The Hassidic gangsters work (though their last line is too cute to work) and the setting of the last of the late nineties before the craved new world of runaway found footage success, mobile phone movies, unbridled internet turned capitalist captors and the mainstreaming of political fantasy. This was a time when a Hank could confront in clear lines, the worst of his faults and seek to rise to invention and success. Is this Darren Aranofsky's own farewell to the era that wtinessed his rise with Pi, another story about a talented nice guy beseiged by violent interests. It is harder to be that now, harder to discern the lines. It's the clarity we miss, even if we know it was also illusory. This is fun, it has grave concerns but it's still fun.

Oh ... stay for the end credits.

Caught Stealing is currently on general release.                                                                                                             

SPECIES @ 30

The yetis from SETI have made the kind of contact that Nigel Kneale thought up in the '60s, invasion by DNA. Their first test case is fused with a female human sequence that grows up rapidly to look like a pre-teen Michelle Williams. The point of making the hybrid a girl was that she'd be less aggressive. Well, that went off the table as soon as Sil the Experiment started acting out her nightmares while asleep. So, they fill her big glass cage with cyanide gas which she breathes like it's strawberry vape and breaks out and escapes with her learning capacity galloping even faster. By the time they have assembled their team of stock characters, Sil's on her way to L.A. with a bag full of stolen cash and emerges from a human coocoon as a twenty-something Natasha Henstridge. In Hollywood, she gets a room, a wardrobe and a tip from the nightman about the club around the corner as she's now in need of a breeding partner. Meanwhile, the anthropologist, macho black ops agent, biologist and special empath, led by the story's Baron Frankenstein, Scientistprofessordoctor Fitch.

Ok, so once we settle into Sil's motivation and the various powers of the pursue crew, the movie plays by numbers. But, really that's not a bad thing. Species arrived in the mid-90s after a decade and a half of seminal sci-horror moments and had to try and either do something new or at least something generic with a lot of style. Ok, so this does neither. The world had seen this kind of pursuit, regardless of motive in things like The Hidden, Terminator, Predator, and their many carbon clones. Hell, they even got H.R. Giger off the ice for the creature design which sent everyone who saw it right back to Alien.

With a cast of strong performers, led by Oscar laureate Ben Kingsley and including U.K. character star Alfred Molina and highly effective heavy Michael Madsen, you'd expect some spark but this is a good example of how passable writing cannot fill gaps in chemistry. Kingsley cannot work out what accent he's going for and frequently sounds unintentionally mechanical which rubs his quality emoting the wrong way. Madsen and Marg Helgenburger form a couple of circumstance who, though credible on paper, act like they really are just doing it for the money. Molina does some day saving, along with Forest Whittaker who lets us believe in his new agey empath claptrap through an effortless sincerity. Henstridge turns up trumps as a genuinely otherworldly creature. When the effects go to work on her, the coldness inherent to her Sil intensifies. That's not faint praise; she's actually pretty good.

All that said, this movie will entertain you from the word go and keep you watching to the credits effortlessly. Why? Because once you realise that it's Sil's movie and the Keystone Boffins don't need too muchof your attention, you'll be fine with what you move with. It's also a good showcase of the state of physical effects which, in this margin between their near perfection and the onset of CGI, render the predatory alien believable. Even in the mating scenes where the film might have gone for team-human body horror, we want the Earthling marks to shut up and lie down for the seeding. Species enjoys a strange glory for this, the first creature horror of its greater era, to steal the support from the good guys and make its audiences want the baddie to triumph over all the population of the Earth, one DNA sequence at a time.

This doesn't make Species a bad film or even a bad alien horror movie, just an unusual one that only looks bad if you treat it as a normal one. If you do let the good guy gang through with too much credit. you'll be missing out on the fun of the story. The sadder side of this is that it was not intended. The decade that was thrilling people at the cinema to an ever sleazier parade of serial killer filler, was also rendering sci-fi and horror into high sheen, over-designed bland plates. There are always exceptions but Species was not one of them, however much fun it is. It was a symptom of the fallacy of the suits throwing more and more money at genre, assuming that that would lead to a golden age of cinema commerce. It would take micro productions like Primer and The Blair Witch Project to burst that bubble (re-inflated by the Waniverse a decade on but not permanently). In the meantime we got Species, too late to make a difference and too lunkheaded to make a mark. Still, it is a ton of fun.

Viewing notes: I watched Species on STAN through a subscription. It's also rentable through a number of outlets but is long out of print on physical media in Australia.

Review: DANGEROUS ANIMALS

Tucker, solid wall of salt beef, shows tourists who take him up on his offer of cage dives that sharks are not the worst things in the water, or on it. After a demo of this, we meet young Zephyr who has come to the Gold Coast from the U.S. to escape bad family and surf it away on the big waves. A few chance encounters later, she's on Tucker's boat, waking up to the sight of another abductee. Things could be better.

From this point, as you might expect, this is a tale of action and survival, the only unknowns how far it's going to be taken. At the heart of comparable contests like The Shallows or Gerald's Game, we also need to follow a character's growth and developing strength.

Jai Courtney gives a Tucker whose only emotion is satisfaction from the torment of others. We see this in the prologue scene and we get nothing further. He needs to be most directly comparable to the sharks that his business promises. They are only making their living but Tucker has the choice that makes him worse. Courtney brings a brick shithouse's phsyical force and animal tirumph to render him easily intimidating even before his shows of violence. 

Hassie Harrison's Zephyr is young and damaged, just enough spark left to try and kick against her past through her skill and the freedom of the waves. She is in stark contrast to her fellow prisoner Heather whose trauma is still too recent to smooth over. She, as we, needs Zephyr's fight and in a dialogue of character reinforcement that gets away with sounding a little too written as it feels like the only spark of hope in a starkly bleak situation.

Director Sean Byrne gives us an extension on his action chops as the scene widens out from his previous work to the open water and Tucker's almost medieval torture devices and the threat of the sea itself. There is little point in revealing more plot detail in what is kept to a lean two-hander with support and a constant feed of deeds. This film works exactly as intended and declared which is a lot more than I can say for a lot of similar outings. Faint praise? Not if you see the movie.

Review: DROP

After a prologue of a woman, Violet, facing an extreme DV situation, we cut to her more ordered and stable life years on. She has decided to brave leaving the house and try the dating scene again. The guy seems perfect, hunky but self-effacing. The restaurant is impossibly swanky with dizzy views of the city from its skyscraper setting. Violet's early but her date is keeping her updated with messages and apologies for lateness. An aging suit mistakes her for his blind date and after laughing about it they clink glasses as fellow explorers of later stage romance search. 

When the guy, Henry, arrives the chemistry is immediate. Then during the small talk, she gets a drop on her phone, a challenge. She ignores it and all the subsequent ones until the sender shows her his hack of her home security system with a balaclava-ed intruder waving a gun in the living room. What do they want? Henry. Dead. Nope, they already thought of the police or her telling Henry. They can see and hear her. She has to kill Henry with a phial of something lethal, planted in the towel dispenser in the loo. She has to think fast and well.

Christopher Landon who has already proved himself a strong director in the thriller and horror corner for the Happy Death Day films and the clever Freaky, gives us a sprightly, Hitchcockian story of invention against threat. This does not bear very close examination, once you take the setups and parade of tension releases along the way, the overall scheme just won't work. But that's situation normal for the genre.

It's also clouded and very pleawsantly by the sheer chemistry between the two leads played by Meghann Fahy and Brendon Sklenar whose interplay and individual actions in the busy setting take our minds well away from the plot holes. The camera is ready to move on call but also assuages us with static setups we need for character. The drops are delivered on screen as large font angled as through projected on to the walls. At one point there is a patchwork of Violet's home security cameras cast around her. These are like freeze frames of her concentrated attention and augment the more typical phone screenshots with a lot more urgency. In showing this kind of flair, we are invited into Violet's anxiety, knowing that, for all the brightness and scale of the notifications they are being read only by her. Add the vertigo of the window-side table and you've got some nice queasy moments of dread.

There's not much more to say about this Blumhouse produciton; it really does what it says on the tin. However, at a time when new genre tales are coming out with bloated running times, this ninety-five minute pacer, wins its slot.

VIewing notes: currently available for hire through Prime

Review: EDDINGTON

Eddington, New Mexico, May 2020. The small western town is in lockdown. The mayor promotes social distancing but doesn't always practice it. The sherrif doesn't believe the virus has made it to the hamlet even though the town drunk is clearly afflicted and roams the streets and bars spreading it to the air around him. Meanwhile, the youth are rising, turning their sort-of distanced keggers into political meetings as the community responds variously to the news, Black Lives Matter and Antifa and calls for defunding the police hit the air. Little Eddington is behaving like big America with protests made of a babel of differing directions and a comgin showdown between the mayor and the sherriff. Don't worry about missing anything, though, everyone's phone is out and it will all be online in varying degrees of truth. 

Ari Aster, one of the wunderkinds of the 2010s, consolidating his early win Hereditary with the epic scaled Midsommar and then confounded most of his fans with the massive fable Beau is Afraid. Now he's back and has his sights on the greater American epic in the manner of Robert Altman's Nashville, Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights or the Coens' No Country for Old Men. The difference, here, is not with approach, they're all of a piece when you look at them, but in how the film suggests not that this is America now but how it happened. The information age that was freeing everyone constrained to remote cultures (or just remote basements) was devoured by capitalism and where once numbers ruled influence usurped democracy. So, instead of an America seen through porn or country music or greed, we see how the invading pandemic appears and then is exploited to transform a flawed but functioning elder democracy into an atomised mess.

While it is clear to see parallels between the characters and the COVID years' public figures, Aster doesn't labour it by being too declaritive. Neither Sherriff Joe nor Mayor Ted evoke a Trump. The conspiracy star Vernon doesn't have to correspond to any particular figure, being so all purpose. Are the terrorist-like groups Antifa, a false flag Klan, or something evern weirder? No idea but they do fire real rounds. But when we see the resulting order, the society that emerges from the rubble of the medical, cultural and political tornado, we know that we are watching types that now walk our earth in positions of authority, having once been lax lawmen, blithering conspiracists or centrist town elders.

Joaquin Phoenix offers a finely tuned and nuanced Joe who's ok at keeping the peace but doesn't handle the confusion of his times well. When one of the rioters assuages a loud protest by manipulating it into silence, Joe walks off, seeing the result is good enough. It's a performance that warns us that he will break, that his voice at the higher end of his register will gun it into a big guitar through a Marshall stack distortion. At the more Zen end of the spectrum, the I'm-in-everything Pablo Pascal as Mayor Ted Garcia, shepherds his consituents into living the right way until he needs to have a fundraiser BBQ and all the regulations loosen. The meeting of these two forces at that occasion is the point where the chaos takes full spark.

Emma Stone has few lines but her torn character takes heart-rending life when she is embraced by Austin Butler's Vernon, a soft spoken rabble rouser. Young Cameron Mann makes one of the biggest transitions from well meaning teenager to the lightlessness of the ultra right.Aster's talent lies in the smoothness of all of this. The film does feel long but also crafted. It's the craft that keeps us there; from the rich digital cinematography and dolby atmos audio mix to the warmth of the performances across the board to the rallying cry to look to as much truth as you can find, it's in the craft

Viewing notes: a small morning session at Kino was blissfully uneventful. Eddington is on gerneral release.

Review: TOGETHER

After a prologue that will remind you of John Carpenter's The Thing, we meet Tim and Millie who are about to move a little out of town to a lushly forrested country house. As partners, they are on a plateau where things have got a little too routine and their youthful hopes are dragging into inertia. At a sendoff, Millie proposes marriage in Millenial fashion and Tim bungles it with hesitation before an anticlimactic acceptance. Their night together features pillow talk that would render anyone in a long term relationship icy. Is it just a dream? Established in their new place, they whimsically go for a hike, find the location of the prologue, enjoy a bonding moment and wake up fused together at the calf muscles. That bit is not a dream.

Michael Shanks's debut feature of his own script (more on that later) wastes no time in establishing the dull pain of this part of a relationship and how the magical fusion the couple is suffering is directly punishing their drift. The central couple is played by real life couple Dave Franco and Allison Brie who immerse themselves into roles that, while they once might have been poignantly close to their real lives, might serve on ly as distant memories as recriminations about their progress as professionals and partners come up as part of daily conversation. The interesting thing about this depiction is that it swerves away from comedy when it might have gloried in it.

As such, it is more like an early '90s indie as directed by David Cronenberg with both flinty candour about coupledom and sex and body morphing ick. We are given a generous ramp of development before we get to the crucial moment when the central conceit is made flesh (so to type) and when the concept prevails and the expected twists and turns take place, the film falls into mechanical efficiency. Thanks to the stars, this works as they work hard to give us cause for empathy despite the writing presenting two entitled ocnsumer grade narcissists.

Also of note is the casting of Damon Herriman. Herriman has already played Charles Manson twice as well as a handful of other edgy nutjobs and he plays them for all they're worth. As fellow teacher Jamie at the school where Millie works, he's instantly offputting, mixing insinuation with a kind of Ikea-assembled charm. His quiet queasy menace sustains to the end.

This film arrives on screens under a cloud, being the subject of a lawsuit for plagiarism from an earlier Australian film called Better Half. I haven't seen that but I can tell you that the case is not just a plain stealing of an idea. I'll leave it to you to harvest the details but it does hamper the reception of this finely wrought film that unusually examines the creepier aspects of long term relationships so candidly. Does Better Half do the same or simliar? Well, I'd like to see it.

Until then, I'll be happy enough recommending this strange tale as an energetic and substantial essaying of the dangers of intimacy and the look of it when it's forced.

Viewing notes: Not only was I up for a free ticket due to my club membership at Kino, I had the whole screening to myself, a kind of reverse experience from the annoyance of Monday's cinema outing. Together is currently on general cinema release.