WAKE IN FRIGHT @ 55

John Grant is in a bind. Young, intelligent and middle class, he signed on for a teaching career as a way of getting to an interesting and fulfilling life through a transformation into journalism. But the Department sent him to Woop Woop to teach the entire schoolage population in a single room as flies buzzed around them and the great arid outback wasteland spread to all horizons. He's in a bind because the only two ways of escaping are through seeing his contract through or buying his way out at a hefty 1971 thousand dollars. Not even the lump he gets for his upcoming holidays would come close to that.

But he is about to flee the scene for the Christmas holidays. His frequent daydreams of his girlfriend in Sydney emerging from crystal waters, gliding over the sand to plant a soft and loving kiss on his mouth keep him going through the rowdy train journey with its deafening drunks and racial exclusion. He has to stop at Bundanyabba overnight to hook up with a Sydney flight the next day. 

The Yabba clings around a mine and its pub is filled with loud, sweating men. John, bumping his way through to the bar gets a beer and retires to the closest thing to a private corner he can find. The cigarette he takes out is lit by Jock the local cop whose avuncular method of interrogation has John blurting out his predicament and sense of superiority over everyone that surrounds them. Jock then proceeds to lock John into the kind of shouting match that, in the Aussie lingo, only ends up with everyone plastered and vomiting beer. 

At the end of the night, at John's pleas, Jock takes to an afterhours diner where he finally gets something to soak up all that beer and hosts a constant two-up game. John looks at the Boschian nightmare of barking men in a room whose odour makes it through to the celluloid it was shot on, and he thinks: one thousand dollars. Soon enough he's shirtless. Bye bye, plane to Sydney and even train back to Tiboonda. He's stuck. If his teaching job was in Purgatory where he might just wait it out before redemption, he's now in Hell, possibly forever like the old Doc Tydon a man whose peace with the Yabba has made him poetically cynical and irretrievably depraved. 

What follows is a journey through that blistering wasteland. There's more ribbing and torment, violence and spooring toxic masculinity and rivers of beer. Kenneth Cook's source novel (same title) is a reference to an old saw: dream of the Devil and wake in fright. Well, that happened

Ted Kotchieff's film of the book from Evan Jones's screenplay is a carefully measured depiction of a steel trap closing on a victim. From the oppressively overheated plains of the opening shots to the inferni both meteorological and human, the crowd choreography that never feels staged, to the insertion of the brutal roo hunt, Kotchieff builds a world of minimally clothed savagery that, substantially exists to this day. The inclusion of period slang customs, aside, Wake in Fright feels as timeless as Hell itself.

The movie was considered lost. I saw it on late night TV in Brisbane in the early '80s but that was from the same kind of crud source that made it onto home video. It wasn't until the 2000s that the original elements were excavated and restored that anyone saw it in anything like its original form. I say this because the lost years created an impression that John Grant plummeted into a world of torture and depravity because of the bad boys in town but a good solid viewing of the film shows an ostensibly civilised man tearing away at the cuts from a few stoushes to find himself as feral as all the others. The early signals of his conversational hubris are punished until his increasing compliance is brought to screaming life as he strives to outdo the worst acts he sees, to make that same claim of superiority. He is not a babe in the woods, he is the sneering, me-first overgrown baby that anyone can be if given a little licence.

When he has a moment of lucidity towards the very end and rails at a local about the nightmare ethics of the culture, it's only partly from moral outrage; the other part is his failure to excel at it. The conclusion, emerging minus his pretensions to accept a fate mundane, humbling and ugly, shows us one changed from baseless arrogance to a life of accepted mediocrity. It's my view that it's this, rather than the obnoxiousness of the Yabbans that audiences in this country really objected to. If we really were that worried about bush machismo we wouldn't have had Crocodile Dundee.

But it's not all extreme fist fights and pub lore and an unforgiving pallet of barren earth that makes Wake in Fright the deserving classic that it is. We also get performances the like of which Australian cinema had never sported and it was a rich mix of bravura playing and sullen natrualism. 

Gary Bond, a British stage actor, gives John Grant a put upon pain that his looks (near identical to Peter O'Toole) and initial confidence render reasonable. His transformation through brutality are all the more striking and even shocking because of this. Australian veteran actor Chips Rafferty was never before not after as sinister as he is here. Typically, the Everystralian, good bloke in every crowd, character, he presents that but with a manipulative edge and a sneering superiority that has seen too many John Grants to care about their formal education and airs. In context, his performance is the most frightening.

Donald Pleasance, another import, is Australian enough to make it through his lines smoothly gives us a brutalised man whose pragmatism suggests far darker bargains and interactions than we see here. Sylvia Kay whose longing eyes show a detachment to her surroundings that has led her to a confusion between escape and oblivion whereby her joyless sexual excursions have become her sole exit. The attempted seduction of John and his response (is it revulsion or just too much beer?) ends with a rebuttoning and a lack of comment. For her the myth of Sisyphus might as well be a kind of lifestyle porn. The young Jack Thompson who was about to have an enviable '70s, bursts in with all the dangerous energy of that bloke at the barbie that you hear before you see, loud, intimidating, unstoppable. Hell of a debut.

Is this film unfair? On release, it was championed by all the John Grants in the community and condemned by all the Jock Crawfords. Did it really take a foreigner to show us ourselves? Ted Kotcheff went on to the satire Fun With Dick and Jane and the tougher First Blood. He knew the importance of details in world building so that the globe is bigger when seen in closeup. The documentary feel to the crowd scenes would have been familiar to local viewers from the likes of 4 Corners on the ABC. That he set a compelling drama within that points forward to the decade of Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman. He wasn't attacking Australia or its stereotypical blokes, they just got in the way via the setting of a novel. Masculinity? Yes, that's most of the bullseye on the target as it is the root cause of almost everything in the general malaise. It's not Australian culture but that of a people who will not break it where it needs breaking. We might have moved on, here, but incidents like the Nazis at populist rallies and deflating referendums (the Voice as well as the republic) and other horrors lead us right back to the room for improvement. Wake in Fright is not a time caspule. It's a clear and present caution.

Viewing notes: For this blog I watched Umbrella's outstanding 4K presentation of the 2000s restoration. Goodbye gluey video, this looks like film. It's available on 4K with a Blu-ray on disc, and streaming for hire on several platforms. A the moment you can see it for free with ads on Brollie and without ads on ABC iView. Go ye!

Review: 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE

Almost no time has passed between the end of the last one and the opening of this one. Young Spike is facing an initiative fight to the death with one of the other Jimmys in the gang. He wins but how you'd reckon it and is then part of the gang of marauders in Jimmy Saville costumes. We also see Dr Ian from the last film, wandering around his bone temple and finding something unusual in the behaviour of the local alpha infected zombie. Then we meet some of the folk from an uninfected settlement who escape an infected encounter and run home only to find that the Jimmys have invaded their house. Times could be better.

Through a series of ultraviolent encounters we learn that the Jimmy's, under the hand of the self appointed Lord Sir Jimmy Crystal, roam the land, dispatching the infected in cartoon but very effective fashion as well as spreading the message of a twisted morality based on his experiences as a child. If you have seen the previous installment, this Jimmy is the boy who tries to take refuge in the church where his father is vicar to permanently scarifying effect. Keeping the kids of the gang, his fingers, in check with the constant threat of violence, his leadership is drawn entirely from fear and the spectre of Satan. Jimmy's conferences with Satan are imaginary but effective in building a culture of dread.

Ian the doctor, tends his memento mori, the columns of bones he has built from the decades since the outbreak. His response to the infected is measured, death in self defence but professional curiosity when observing a pause in the behaviour of some of them. One such, a mountain of an infected man, seems to understand the danger of Ian's blowpipe with its sedating dart. Ian has a project.

I won't reveal more plot. This film measures that out in digestible doses. I will say, however, that this is the most engaged I have felt throughout the whole running time of any of this series, including the original (which I loved up until the final act where it got weirdly cute). The injection of Nia DaCosta into the blend has helped. She has dispensed with the indugence of Danny Boyle's diluting influence, allowed the violence to speak for itself, and let the darkness of the tale take its own energy. It works. It's very violent, and it's scary which is more than I can say of the rest.

Jack O'Connell as Sir Lord Jimmy (the order wanders) is fearsome with his pauses, near reasonable ponderances, and sudden lethal judgements. The suggestion that he doesn't believe his own preaching gives him a danger beyond the average villain, toward a barely contained explosive malevolance. Ralph Fiennes does what he does, making himself wlecome while mumbling through old New Romantic song lyrics or putting on a magnificent cabaret to an old Iron Maiden classic. Alfie Williams as boy Spike holds his own, torn between the conscience he brings from his former life to playing the motions as a Jimmy. Erin Kellyman as the dynamic Jimmy Ink makes us doubt at every turn. 

The cinematography, a pleasing, clean and rich digital video, emphasises the indifference of green, wind blown nature which seems impatient to be done with these violent things running through it. Music, by Hildur Guonadottir is stealthy, squeaking here, roaring there, in step with the look and feel.

I was more captivated by this late entry to this long standing franchise than any other of the entries that I've seen (never bothered with 28 Weeks Later). This is because the guest director seems as though she has worked to make something that is effective whether it is standalone or seen as part of a series. Danny Boyle's 2002 original was a mostly good film, ruined by a hasty conclusion and apparent need to appear cool. I found 28 Years Later self-subverting with its overly comfy presentation of the survivor colony and its laddishness. Did writer Alex Garland feel the same? The absence of those over-warmed tones in Boyle's films is welcome. Perhaps, the mooted final sequel which purports to be about redemption will fulfil the promise of this stylistic detour. I doubt it but doubts are part of wishes.

SOMETHING WILD @ 40

Charlie, white collar on the rise, gets caught out in one of the microrebellions he stages to assure himself he's still vital (skipping out on a lunch bill). His pursuer is a young woman named Lulu with a flamboyant dress sense who recognises his motives and invites him on an adventure. Action by action, his resistance is broken and soon he's cheating on his marriage with her in a motel paid for by the work Christmas Club cash he was bearing. All the corporate heights he was heading for, with their rewards of status and riches in the conventional world are about to be stripped away, leaving him at rock bottom. Is he about to find out that that's exactly where he needs to be?

Jonathan Demme had over a decade's worth of exploitation flicks and thrillers, graduating from Roger Corman University in the '70s to the heights of Oscar nominations by the mid-'80s. By the time Something Wild hit his desk he had the luxury of taking his pick. It read like an old screwball comedy but with a harder more contemporary edge. The director who would launch the formalised serial killer genre in a few years with Silence of the Lambs would have seen that right off.

This is why the whacky looking poster art sent out for this movie is such a bait and switch. Melanie Griffith looks wickedly alluring and Jeff Daniels, upsidedown, is worried. But despite the meet cute outside the restaurant and the initial joyride she takes him on, the comedy steadily cranks down and gets replaced by darker matter. That's before the disruption in the middle act.

The '80s saw the emergence of a new kind of American upwardly moving salary jerk or perhaps just a new name for them. The Yuppie was a figure of fun or malevolance, the notion that the future of western culture would be in the hands of greed driven psychos was a terrifying one and, whether it was comedy like Desperately Seeking Susan or thriller like Fatal Attraction, the Yuppie Nightmare movie appeared to assuage our fear with their disintegration or satisfy our powerless envy through ridicule. This bled into the following decade even more extremely and had already been taken far enough by Martin Scorsese with After Hours that the jokes landed so hard they stopped being funny.

If I say that E. Max Frye's screenplay takes a softer approach, it's not to suggest that Something Wild is a lightweight piece but concerned less with attacking the Yuppie than understanding them. Demme ran with that, adding enough to let the gravity takeover feel natural. Demme keeps his eye on character and nurturing performances that give the extraordinary situation credibility.

Melanie Griffith, if she had started today, would have been called a nepo baby because she was Hitchcock blonde Tippi Hedren's daughter. But that would still be unfair considering she was a child actor and as a teenager played opposite Gene Hackmanin Night Moves, and then in Roar with the lions she grew up with. This role feels like a vindication of her life experience to date. After the whacky update of a Rosalind Russell or Katherine Hepburn screwball agent of chaos has worn out and the wig comes off in her mother's house, she's Audrey with a real life story that involves pain. Griffith assumes the dignity smoothly, risking the audience's resentment at the loss of the sexy flake, and gets away with it. This is her film.

Jeff Daniels as Charlie has a tougher job winning us over from his ginger token rebellion. He's exactly the starched effigy the audience has been warned against, using everyone else's money to make his fortune regardless of everyone else. He is given his own pain and it's fed to us piecemeal but his playing of the turning point is exceptional, winding up the spring that shoots him into his new life he ums and ers and appeals to everything his antagonists should superficially assume about him. All of that suit-deep convention is jettisoned as he physcially leaps toward Audrey. He is careful, after that, to retain Charlie's timidity, tiny tics and casting of his gaze that speak of a life of passive aggression. Daniels was a realitive newcomer to the screen and while he might have been initially chosen for his clean-lined all American look he gave depth to prevent the kind of caricature that would have plunged this film into obscurity.

Ray Liotta, lean and hungry, who would soon hold his own beside De Niro and Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, provides a prototype performance, adding a growling narcissism to his bad boy role. He is unpredictably dangerous. When Charlie stops a train of conversation about Audrey's sexual performance, retaining the better part of his old conventionality, Ray surprisingly relents but then moves on to further violence, a walking hair trigger.

Something Wild does look like the '80s cinema around it with big bright colour and soft light in the dark and a mix of needledrop and scored music. The credits open with a solo David Byrne track that sounds like Talking Heads, the score credits for John Cale and Laurie Anderson cover both arthouse and mid-'80s cache. Those are ticked boxes but there is one moment I noticed in the most recent watch that struck me. In a brief establishing shot of a street, a convertible glides past with a brace of yuppies in it, the song on the car speakers is New Order's Temptation, a song four years old at the time. While the chaos is transforming Charlie inside, the rest of America is still in the Yuppie dream, driving a vintage convertible, consuming the Noo Wave now that it is safe to do so. Such a pleasant alternative to something like About Last Night's constant screaming mainstream pop.

Jonathan Demme chose to quietly subvert the film he was expected to make by finding the sobering core in the screenplay. He might easily have got away with making the movie of the poster, raked in a good opening weekend and moved on but the question of what lay beneath the designer shirts and investment portfolios of his culture proved too compelling. It was an example that the film culture didn't heed, with the likes of Basic Instinct or The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Then again, it was Demme's Silence of the Lambs, showing he was happy to dress up base exploitation in glossy-budgeted finery and start one of the most detestable, convention-guarding genres in recent cinema history, so he wasn't really above anything. Except there was this moment where he went with his gut, plied his craft and made something durable.

Viewing notes: I watched this free with my Prime subscription in an HD presentation. Also available to rent through YouTube and Apple.

DEAD AND BURIED @ 45

A photographer on a road trip stops at a picturesque beach. After a few decent scenes he focuses on a pair of shapely legs. Tilting up, he sees a beautiful young woman. She's fine with having her picture taken, even loosening her top and exposing her breasts. She invites him to take her and he, finding it difficult to believe, goes along until he's knocked on the head, tied to a post with a fishing net as a group of locals advance on him with cameras, a can of petrol and a lighter. He screams as one of them says, "welcome to Potter's Bluff." If you think that's a spoiler, you haven't seen this movie.

Dead and Buried is a strange horror film in that it refuses to declare its hand until it's got you scratching your head. Further victims appear posthumously, taking their places in the population with new identities. The local sheriff emerges as the protagonist as he tries to piece the bizarre events around him. He's aided by the local coroner who loves his classic big band records and waxes lyrical abou the art of the embalmer. Sheriff Dan's wife Janet is a schoolteacher with a performative style and a barely veiled interest in the occult. The deeper Dan gets into the mystery the worse the possibilities get unto a finale with an unexpectedly heartrending conclusion.

When I've shown this movie to friends, even those of my own vintage, they wonder why they had never heard of it. I saw it because I was getting back into horror movies after a decade or two of snobbery from film student days. Also, the VHS cover art intrigued me. A woman's face is partially buried, surrounded by broken earth with a beach and gentle sea stretchingstretching to the horizon. A full moon shines behind chunky clouds. It could have been a lesser surrealist masterpiece for its impossible geography and  eerie moodiness. The loneliness of the image gives out a weird quiet despair. I had to see it.

James Farentino, rocky faced star of detective and action shows on TV, has an appealing bewilderment at the strange events around him. He manages to blend this with the more assertive heroic figure he needs for the sheriff. Melody Anderson as Janet uses her doll-like face to cover sinister motivations in a kind of reverse gaslighting turn. Her's is the most heavily affecting death scene. Lisa Blount's Lisa, the siren of the opening murder scene, doesn't have to be anything more than amoral malevolance which she provides generously. It is Jack Albertson, veteran character actor of westerns, noir and drama, Grandpa in Willy Wonka, who steals the show here as the coroner Dobbs with a gruff poetry and worldly (perhaps otherworldly) pragmatism. It was his final performance. He died weeks after wrapping.

I'd recommend following up information about the FX master Stan Winston's work on this film, it remains extraordinary. Stephen Poster's cinematography made such heavy use of gauze and lace for the daylight scenes that the patterns can be discernable and feel like we are peeping through curtains at a mystery. My copy includes a CD of Joe Renzetti's score which I can listen to by itself, a piano-led melancholic suite.

Dead and Buried covers its plotholes by pushing the unreality of its events enough to impose on our objections but not so much that it's just formless fantasy. Concentrate on motivations as they slowly emerge and you'll get the movie. If you do, you might just want your own copy, especially if you like an uncanny tale on a rainy afternoon and one that pits humans against their own vanity and resonance. Seek!

Viewing Notes: I watched my Blue Underground special edition with 4K, Blu-Ray and CD soundtrack discs. One thing I'll note about this which is worth bearing in mind. My copy appeared in one fo the 2021 lockdowns. It was misdelivered and lay for days beside my neighbour's letterbox until he found it and left it at my doorstep. It was so thoroughly soaked from heavy rainfall that even the plastic covering had been penetrated. I had to throw away the slipcover (kept the lenticular panel, though) and found that the main 4K disc would not play properly. I complained with the courier company who, after some earnest exhanges, dropped the case. Figuring on water damage I left the disc upright in a place where it would get some breeze. Little by little, over a month, it did dry out and eventually played without seizing up. Handy to know.

DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS @ 40

The Whitemans are rich but dysfunctional. Dad's boffing the housemaid while Mum's a shopping zombie. The daughter is anorexic and choosing bad boyfriends. The son is gender curious and irritates the rest of them with his invasive videography. Even the dog is depressed. One day, having lost his own dog to yet another Los Angelene bourgeois, the homeless and also depressed Jerry attempts to drown in the Whitemans' pool. Summoning the liberalism we've already seen in him, Dave rescues him and, feeling guilty, offers him the spare place until he can get on his feet again. One by one the Whiteman's essential issues are variously challenged and alleviated by the oafish but charismatic Jerry.

Jean Renoir's Bodu Saved From Drowning wasn't such a far fetched choice for Paul Mazursky in 1986. At the time, high concept comedies were machine gunning and hitting big. The master of the arch and strong Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice had plenty to broach with the conspicuously wealthy of Los Angeles with their gurus, pet psychiatrists, faux consciences, piling up the bank accounts and buying to be seen to buy at the expense of their humanity. 

All the targets are here and one perfect segue between a meditating Barbara humming and the buzzing of flies around Jerry, sleeping under a tree by the footpath says a lot about the approach. Mazursky is going to take pot shots but they will be coated in warmth and magnanimity. So, for a movie that has a lot of shadowy capitalism, sexual infidelity, risque sexuality and hot topics like dietary disorders, Down and Out is a comfortable satire.

Richard Dreyfus had a scandal to redeem himself from and does so with a complex blend of anxiety and base reason. Bette Midler gives Barbara a visible longing under the purchase-makes-perfect tornado. Nick Nolte plays his lumpen phsyicality and claimed worldliness as a smooth continuum. Evan Richards never allows Max's sexual curiosity to spill into camp. Jerry's cosmetic advice to Max is a touching moment, an encouragement rather than a sneer. Come to that, the Chinese business partners are just business people, nothing like the honking-accented alien in something like the then recent Sixteen Candles. Even the money grubbing pet psychiatrist can offer a word or two of genuine advice.

Mazursky's comedy is a natural inheritor of Renoir's, being worldly and intent on finding the foible and flaw that gives the characters strength. Could Little Richard's neighbour with his call-out of systemic racism have been given more gravitas? Yes, it's the one area that doesn't quite resolve. When he is banging out one of his classics, the party around him is distracted and flees toward a spectacle. Little Richard is playing in your living room; if you're running to look at something, it had better be walking on water. It reminded me of the heavily glossed depiction of the proto-rock star in the Girl Can't Help It when he and all the other early rockers perform in opulent venues they would never have been admitted to. Perhaps it's a subtler caspule of his vocal comments.

But Down and Out in Beverly Hills works because of its heart and the incsision that prevents it from blanding out into feelgood or getting overly caustic. It's a very happy coincidence of a well chosen tale to cover, and a cast at full strength. If you see that it's a mid'80s satirical comedy and you're thinking Splash or Bachelor Party be prepared to be warmed rather than slapped. So, it still works.

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK @ 45

In the distant future of 1997 Manhattan Island has become America's prison. It's a massive Alcatraz surrounded by skyhigh walls all around it and lethal chopper patrols around the clock. That is where the hijacked Airforce One crashes as the president is on his way to avert a nuclear holocaust. Oops! Not to worry, war hero turned career criminal Snake Plissken is on hand to glide in, retreive the pres and his McGuffin cassette tape that will put an end to the simmering conflict. Oh, and just in case he thinks about his own escape, he's injected with a couple of lethal pellets that can only be neutralised by the folks in charge. He has less than twenty-four hours to do this before the pellets dissolve and the summit meeting ends in war. No pressure.

The deal is extortinate. The times are tough and urgent but this deal has the ring of privilege. We see nothing of the world beyond the penal system and the sense that legal presumption has morphed from innocence to guilt. If you're caught, it's the island. What kind of society is being suggested, here?

John Carpenter had already suggested a twisted public responsibility in his previous film The Fog. The possibility that the ancestry could rise in pain against injustice is an enjoyable fable. What Carpenter saw in the America of 1981 was a wave of authoritarianism in the guise of economic rationalism. It was the start of two terms of Reagan and another of Bush. Over a decade of sweeping problems under the carpet and calling it justice. The society outside the prison of Manhattan is only different from the gangster-led rule of force within it by the price of the suits of those calling the shots. I've always imagined it as a kind of rigid '50s utopianism masking runaway capitalism.

Carpenter's first attempts at the screenplay were not in response to Reagan but Nixon and the swelling cynicism that rose in self protection in the community. Who would bother trusting politicians? Donald Pleasance's President John Harker is played with all the tight lipped narcissism that a post-Nixon chief might express. He is a weasel who knows how to be nice and for how long.

Kurt Russell is given Snake Plissken which allowed him a launch pad away from his child star status. His matchstick chewing, eye patched leathery hide feels effortlessly donned. His serpentine hissing intimidating. Remember how Heath Ledger went from nice guy with muscle to the most memorable Joker to date? Same thing. Russell turned up toned to the last millimetre with a lion's mane and way with heavy personal artillery. 

Against him, the grinning villain of countless spaghetti westerns, Lee Van Cleef presides over the operation without a beat's difference from those roles. Nor needs he to, Carpenter is happy to continue his exploration of the western through whatever other genre he chooses. The meeting between his Hauk and Plissken is one of those scenes you can replay like a favourite song.

On the island, The Duke of New York oversees. A granite Isaac Hayes, surrounded by Kinskyish punks and leering rags of humans, his chandelier-toting Cadillac proceeds through the streets like the entourage of a Byzantine monarch. Down at the trash fire street level, the information rich Cabbie and the slippery Brain deal with the day to day, offering essential services or knowledge in exchange for preservation. The world building with bizarre vaudeville shows and iron-age lethal sparring as well as gangs of the darkly insane in streets bright with car fires, is still impressive.

Carpenter, as usual, provides an action packed middle act that will lead to a white knuckle finale, this time careful to further expose the president and deliver a joke that works every time you see it again.

While it might get set up as a schlock bam bam movie, Escape From New York with its committed performances, commentary on the desperate unfairness of a brutal capitalism, ends up a wrenching and sincere gut punch at the worst Carpenter feared. It plays as a grim warning with its brooding score (one of Carpenter's very best) and desolate setting. The great city is a prison, the empire somewhere over there where you aren't allowed. We didn't get any of this by 1997 but we never have to. All we need to do is know that this is something we don't want now or ever. But we have to remember that.

Review: NOUVELLE VAGUE

Paris 1959 and a group of young filmmakers is getting its moves in front of crowds who are lapping it up. All but Jean Luc Godard who has yet to make a feature. The group is called Nouvelle Vague or New Wave (literal translation) and they are already known for stretching the tenets of mainstream cinema. All but Jean Luc who, as a prominent film critic, is now ready to make his own movies. Banging together cast crew, funding and a notebook full of ideas, he makes A bout de souffle or Breathless which becomes one of the most influential films of its time and beyond.

So we get hustling, manipulating, scheming and a lot of philosophising as the project takes shape with rising stars and one bona fide Hollywood actress, a script by established Nouvelle Vaguer Francois Truffaut, and funding enough for a tight  ninety minute thriller. But from Jour Un, Jean Luc has other plans which are a mix of get the basic thing done and do what he feels like at the time. But is the auteurism he's been promoting in his journalism a real thing or just ego? Is his dismissive treatment of the creative input of Jean Seberg just more old guard or genuinely sup par to the genius of Godard?

There are many more talking points and your answers will vary depending on your knowledge of this cine-history and how you consider the portrayal of the characters (particularly Godard and Seberg). This loving and brassy tribute to the film and what it did to the spirit of the Nouvelle Vague will either engage you consistently or leave you wondering why anyone cared, now or then. 

Indy Royalty Richard Linklater, himself the author of audacious films among the more conventional, clearly elevates Godard as a figure. If anything, it's the figure rather than the person flailing at that eminence. So much of Godard's dialogue feels drawn from his writing or interviews. The former is the more fiery and the latter more caged and difficult. Jean Luc Godard really did make a banged-out noir in Breathless and he realy did subvert it with jump cuts and subversions of convention and when you see it for the first time you well might marvel at seeing tropes for the first time they happened on screen. The movie is the work of a concentrated mind who carried his practice with discipline. The whimsical contrarian we see here is more a wich fulfilment than a figure from history.

But that's not a problem when you pit Linklater's own practice against Godard's and understand the strength of the umbillical at play. Linklater's movies don't really resemble Godard's but there is a clear likeness in the certainty behind them. For all the seeming formlessness of films like Slacker or Dazed and Confused, the sprightly invention of the Before series or Waking Life, he is more contemporary and more American. His tribute is not a thanks for technique but pluck and resolve.

I did appreciate the avoidance of a historical story that refused to shoehorn the names of famous people into the dialogue. When depictions appear, the actors characters are subtitled clearly for us to recall or forget according to what we will. I will admit that I thought Suzanne Schiffman was meant to be Anges Varda (the real instigator of the Nouvelle Vague, btw) but it's clear who is meant to be who. Some of the face casting for this is marvelous: the lookalikes for Truffaut, Bresson, and Cocteau are pretty fine. There is a coda about what they did next but this is more subdued than the usual where you might get images of the real people filling the screen, as though you can't Google them yourself. Better than that, I guess.

So, what do we have here? Linklater's celebration of cinema as blank screen for exploration could have chosen few equal or better examples of resroucefulness and innovation than this one. If he lets the notoriously difficult Godard off the hook by making him an agent of chaos as a kind of goofy ancestor he also suggests that the difficulty of making cinema has always been there and the few breaks for freedom are to be treasured then' "Bravo!"  But I wonder.

I wonder, for example, if this conscientiously 35mm film production might not have felt more suversive itself if it had been shot on UHD digital video. Godard sang the praises of the accessibility of the analogue video of the '70s and '80s. Losing the dress-up of film grain (and even black and white) might have made the tribute of it all the more sincere by that observation. 

Do we need more cinephiles praising Breathless? It's like the Unknown Pleasures T-shirt of the cinema world, the universal brand qualifier that those who touch it never need to experience for themselves. You want to really celebrate indy filmmaking and its impact on mainstream cinema? Tell the story of making Night of the Living Dead. A bunch of antsy advertisers cobbling a no budget game changer in defiance of their own lifestyle. It's less comfortable but it could hit home harder.

As an undergrad in the early '80s, I was as wowed as anyone by Godard. I smoked then, and more than I'd like to admit, smoked Gitanes or Gauloises if a shop offered them. I tired my coffee black (too young, didn't work) and foraged around for as much French as I'd forgotten from school. In perparing for seminar papers and essays on Godard, I would test my ideas with flow charts and once, delivering a seminar half joked by leaving out the second syllable of his surname. But Breathless, to me, once seen, felt like a fun first album in a career that, in its first decade, went rapidly from cute art house to violent, radical and anti-conventional. Those are the titles I think of first when thinking of Godard: Weekend, Tou va bien and, at the very top, the extended essay of life in consumerworld Two or Three Things I Know About Her. Breathless feels like a square in an old Valhalla calendar after them. And Godard (as admitted in the coda of this film) did not stop developing and confronting in the decades afterward.

But this is really beside the point. If you want to bring the kids to Shakespeare, find the easiest one and let them have at it. It took a little while after the advent of high quality home video on DVD for the Godard back catalogue to appear but it eventually recieved deluxe treatment and when I bought into that and watched them again I was again exilharated by what I saw and felt. So, ok then, 's a good film.

ABOUT LAST NIGHT @ 40

20 somethings Dan and Debbie hit it off and get serious. They both have complications for this: Dan has an ongoing thing with a married woman and Debbie has been doin' it with her boss. Despite this and each one's best friend warning them off each other, the pair are increasingly drawn and make the leap into moving in together. As candour and indulgent untruth collide we head for the big breakup. Will the breakup take?

Edward Zwick's mid-'80s rom com is, on its surface, one of the most refreshing of its type from its time in that it prefers a more naturalist approach to the high-concept big screen quirk surrounding it. Moonstruck was exuberant, When Harry Met Sally was subversive, but About Last Night plays those traits down in prefence for a play-though of a young relationship, how the youth in it adds volatility, how the hard bits feel alienating and ugly.

And this approach is not suggested by the cast of then-rising young stars. Rob Lowe and Demi Moore in the centre show us constant vulnerability. Is this belied by a physical beauty that makes them magnetic on screen? Now, that's just price on the popcorn, these two are giving real performances. The darker undercurrents throughout are survivors of the adaptation by Tim Kazurinski Denise DeClue of David Mamet's original play. Mamet struck his digestible severity early and while the adaptors do add a lot of '80s sass they are respectful of the mechanics Mamet set up. 

Elizabeth Perkins fits into her constant sass as though it's sprayed on. Jim Belushi as the boistrous Bernie is kept almost entirely at cardboard level. He's the most mid-'80s character of the entire cast with risque dialogue and claims of sexual exploits. He's closer to what a real Ferris Bueller would have been if John Hughes's star hadn't already made him a mainstream guardian. The spiky offsider was a staple and, while he's played down along with the rest of the cast, he's still only a double entendre away from the same role in Weekend at Bernies or Splash. Perkins' more passive and machine-like female counterpart to Moore's alpha girl Debbie fares a little smoother by the actor's own careful balancing.

Possessiveness, notions of pregnancy, total compatibility, double standards and more are inserted into the narrative but, unlike lesser efforts, these feel naturally discovered rather than shoehorned. The expection is the inevitable breaking point which feels, after everything we've seen them go through, the kind of contrivance that one of the other contemporary rom coms would insist on. Here it means that the bolstering of the two's unequal response to the scission must be industrial strength to merely play as narrative rather than emerge from it. The scene and aftermath suffer from anticlimax, as a result.

A bugbear of mine about American '80s representation of youth or young adulthood is the glaring AM radio hits that blare out at every point of silence in the scenes. This is to be expected in a film of its time and clime but it's just a thing I have about how mainstream American culture's lack of a punk period to shake it up, only ever got the vanilla knock off versions of punk and post punk. Think of how painstakingly careful the jukebox choices were made in Donnie Darko, it's almost all UK post punk pop. Then again, it was made in period costume; the times themselves were a lot more dire. I did say it was personal.

While the likes of Harry and Sally and Splash found descendants in the following decades, the kind of concerns of About Last Night morphed into the more serious fare like Blue Valentine. It's not a bad report card and it certainly says more for the heightened seriousness of the relationship movie and its place. About Last Night has a place. You might walk past it but the door is worth a knock.

Viewing notes: I hired this through Prime. You can still get the Blu-Ray for under $20. I'd recommend it for a freshener to any rom com playlist.

Review: NUREMBERG

War's over and all the Nazi high command who haven't killed themselves or themselves been killed, the ones who can't bring themselves to fall on their cyanide capsules are clumped together in a military prison. The question arises about whether to dispatch them with nooses or put them on trial. It's not cut and dried. Hang them and you blow your justice wad, expose them and maybe, just maybe, you avoid another Versailles generation ready for mobilisation for World War III. So they are to go on trial and Major Douglas Kelley, army shrink, is called in to assess them psychiatrically (and also get clued in to the best approach to crush them publicly). He's on it from the off, champing at the bit to meet the seniormost Herman Goering.

Kelley wants to examine evil. If it's something that can be dissected and anatomised, it's something that can be treated if not prevented. Also, it would make for a kickarse pop science book. He's young but seasoned and, to begin with, no match for the manipulative Goering. The plot device is a familiar one whereby the investigator risks seduction by the monster he needs to control. But that's really just mechanics, a little more is on offer here.

Bug eyed Rami Malick appears gives a fragile vulnerability to Kelley, a professional too young to quite get around the lived-in and wily war criminal. As Goering, Russell Crowe turns in an intimidating performance. By that I don't mean that his character is intimidating, that's a given, but his study of the narcissist whose brutality lies hard beneath his charm fills the screen. This is not eerie villain like Hannibal Lecter whose condition allows him a gleeful self awareness, Crowe is showing us someone who either doesn't know or doesn't care about how he appears to anyone else on the planet. This risks audiences writing him off as impenetrable and unworthy of time but Crowe prevents this through personability and an amoured guile. There is a famous image of Goering at the Nuremberg trials. He's sitting in the witenss box, looking to one side and smirking, to himself the sole occupant of the room with the power to drive the proceedings. Crowe has come a long way from his skinhead leader Hando in Romper Stomper but, also, it's as though he's stepped out of Hando's self-image. It's one of the most assured performances I saw on screen in the past year.

The film saves itself from its Netflixy historical drama where writerly scenes parade with cute facts and timeline dialogue. It does this by pushing the central dialogue between Kelley and Goering into pockets of energy that contrast with the more conventional presentation. This brings to the fore some of the ugly irony of the need for a portrait of brutal history at a time so dangerously loud with it. Nuremberg rises above its interest as a period drama because it is made knowing that its audiences are bewildered by the double talk of narcissistic warmongers who get away with eyepoppingly punishing justifications or, worse still, counter accusations (yeah, it's us watching your devastation who have the problem). Horribly, this is one of the most relevant movies on screen at the moment. Go for Crowe's performance and stay for the thinking.          

AMELIE @ 25

Amelie Poulain's father was so hands-off that he didn't touch her until he (as her doctor) ran the annual home checkup. The sensation of the parental touch was so powerful that her heart rate went skyward which concerned her father so much that he insisted she be home schooled. By the time she was in her twenties, her view of the world and how she might enact with life was skewed toward a child's whimsy and driven by a young adult's mischief. Seeing so much sadness around her, she wants to create happiness, preferably by stealth. Also, it would be nice to see if she can feel real love along the way.

She accidentally finds a boy's toys and effects box in her apartment and vows to track him down and return it. She enacts the urban myth of sending one of her father's garden gnomes around the world so that he receives self made postcards from everywhere (that her flight attendant friend goes). She brightens the life of the reclusive invalid painter downstairs who repeatedly copies a Renoir picture which he treats as though he is experiencing the scene for real. Through more accidents she meets a young man who is obsessed with the torn up selfies from a photo booth of a plain looking older man. It's a mystery that unfolds after an extraordinary campaign by Amelie to pursue and land the questing lad. These are just a few strands of the weave. 

Jean-Pierre Jeunet began his directorial career in close collaboration with Marc Caro. Their approach involved giving breathtaking whimsy a solid narrative base and a pallet that would make David Lynch envious and a design sense as rich as the best of the contemporary steampunk graphic novels. the extraordinary Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children wowed everyone who saw them. The spat, when it came, was over whether to take Mammon's shilling and make an Alien sequel and the rift did not mend. 

So that when Jeunet got together with writer Guillaume Laurant to create a multi-threaded celebration of life in Paris that took in nostalgia, desire, love, invention, loneliness, jealousy, cruelty and so on, they put a girl made of purest quirk at the centre, wound her up and pointed her at different characters. And at a time when Oliver Stone was still trying to pass his feature films off as student films and Tarantino was still pretending his ever-longer cinematic karaoke was the most vital cinema could get, Amelie moved at a clip, looking only like itself that used anything they could find to show it all in tones so golden and scenes so fast that you didn't have time to swoon.

If Fellini cast his more extravagant pieces from faces alone to create his beautiful nightmares of Rome, Jeunet did the same with Paris, collecting a multitude that resembled everything between Tintin and Pieter Breughel the Elder. At the centre they put Audrey Tautou whose range at first appears to bang against both ends of the whimsy barrier but soon enough displays depth and gravitas. The light-generating smile and huge-eyed gasp are soon joined by the darkness streaming through the failure at the bottom of every possibility in every thread. 

She is called to show pain and allows us access to it without cloying. Is that a relief after the onslaught of her beauty and cuteness? The scene of her restraint in outing herself to her would be lover in the cafe as they stand, separated by a glass pane on which she pretends to write the day's menu has an ache too familiar to anyone who has hesitated when confronted with a life-heavy opportunity. We remember that she came from loving but undemonstrative parents and was kept away from the world until adulthood. She's not a Snow White, she's a Parisian.

This is, despite the impression I've probably created here, a feast of Gallic twee. Jeunet's handling of the myriad expressions of a few themes and managing to ground it in a sense of real life is a success. This film is joyful because it remembers the alternative to joy, the same way that Harold and Maude never lets its audience forget the dark smoke of Maude's life and how she came to be so life affirming (that happens in a single shot without dialogue). I was going to go on a tirade against the adoration of Wes Anderson by his fans when all he does is turn Pinterest pages into flat kitsch but anyone who knows me on the topic is sick and tired of hearing it and anyone new to it will probably just get annoyed.   

Jeunet still gets work in his industry. There were two other features after this but the sadness of the times to come were not so friendly to paying his expensive visions. My hope is that there is more to come and that, however horrible things become we can be touched by a joy as thrilling, solid and geniune as Amelie.

Viewing notes: I watched my old Blu-Ray of Amelie which presents it as beautifully as it's ever going to be beyond my first viewing at the cinema in 2001 (Jeunet is a grump when it comes to 4K). The only problem with this is that it forces about four trailers for other French movies on you before you get to the main menu,. You can chapter-skip through these but what a horrible hangover from the 2000s! It's available with subscriptions to Prime and Stan and, these days, the BD out of print, only on DVD through retail.