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. 

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.

AMERICAN PSYCHO @ 25

In an early scene, Patrick Bateman takes us through his morning skin routine, a complex series of named products and tasks, that allows his privileged youth to remain vibrant and beautiful. He is also warning us of the implication of the title, ending with, "I simply am not there." As we follow his progress through the culture of 1% Manhattanites, with its multitude of micro-aggressions and abstracted savagery, we see how he responds to this rarefied stress with acts of extreme violence. If Patrick is driven to atrocity by such means what happens when they get too much for him?

Brett Easton Ellis' dark satire on yuppiedom in the '80s was considered unfilmable for the intensity of its graphically described violence. Screenplays, including one by Easton Ellis, came and went until almost a decade after its publication, this adaptation was released. So how did it go?

I recall a conversation in the '90s where a friend proposed Oliver Stone as director and the still young enough Robert Downey Jr as Bateman. It was a thrilling idea, the kind that can take a conversation from fat chewing to the corners of inspiration. We imagined scenes from the book we'd read in annihilating colour on screen. The novel was a must read at the time, a book deemed taboo here but bold there. 

The original cover art gave us a Bateman in a suit. His face was either a mask with darkened eyeholes or his face crowned with a film of bloody red. Out of context, you'd take it as a tribute to Francis Bacon. It looked fearsome. Then, when I read it, I found it to be wincingly violent but also constantly humorous in the same way as his debut novel Less Than Zero. The violence, though, is flavour and emphasis, not purpose. That is what Mary Harron understood.

Easton Ellis' uber privileged are shown as shark-like competitors in bespoke clothing, suggesting that Bateman is only enacting what his friends and colleagues only dream of doing if they weren't already performing an abstracted expression of it in their business dealings. In one of the few passages addressing his childhood in the novel, Bateman is afflicted by rage. We don't need that here and a lot of that has to do with the casting of Christian Bale.

Bale at twenty-six presented an unblemished beauty strengthened by near constant exercise. His blankness is perfected rather than undermined by his narration and has Bateman perform his smile which is free of any genuine joy. If you've ever known someone who engages in conversation in order to pounce on points and finish their ridicule with a weird blurting AI laugh, you will know this characterisation: a life-draining continuous antagonism. When we see him prepare to attack, we don't need to see the results. If anything they would detract from the effect of Bateman's remove (even from his own actions). Harron continues the mystery of the scene with the coathanger from the novel in that neither explains what he used it for, only suggesting its gravity through the results, knowing that we who read and see and fill in blanks are going to supply the worst we can. And when we do, we are, however temporarily, kin to Bateman.

The rest of the cast are also astutely chosen to give us an elite New York that is intimidatingly urbane and dangerous to approach with the likes of Jared Leto, Justin Theroux and Reese Witherspoon. Chloe Sevigny also impresses as the timid but observant Jean. Willem Dafoe turns up in a role that shows he really can do restraint, as the quietly canny detective who understands more than he reveals. I can't finish this without mentioning the work of cinematographer Andrzej Sekula whose compositions go from sumptuous lifestyle brochure perfection to the ugly over lighted moments at venues that are rinsed with discomfort.

American Psycho is the kind of literary adaption that comprehends its source material. The book that might have got its author cancelled if it appeared more recently and the film based on it both prove both funnier and less extreme than feared. The thread of wavering identity, the rupture between a fantasised wish fulfilment and diegetic reality is nauseously blurry. It recalls another supposedly unfilmable novel made a few years before. David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch threw the issues with forming a literal report of Burroughs' eyepopping satirical epic by creating a companion to it. More recently Luca Guardaningno's take on the much shorter Queer managed to overstretch the source and make an unsatisfying thing of it. Guardangnino is currently at work on a remake of American Psycho. I won't be in line for that one, though, as Mary Harron has already made this one.

ALMOST FAMOUS @ 25

William Miller already feels geeky enough when he's told that he was put into school two years in advance by his weird academic mother. His sister launches out of the family nest as soon as she can at which point she leaves her record collection to William. He devours this and his need to discuss music leads to him meeting the legendary Lester Bangs who is generous with advice and gives him an assignment. At the concert that night, he meets the non-groupie bevy of Band Aids and the band Stillwater and gets backstage. They are going on tour and invite him along. So, he goes back home and finishes his stamp collection. Like fuck, he does.

Cameron Crowe's mid-size autobiographical epic came after a number of projects, writing or directorial, that revealed a deep understanding of youth. It was also where he went after his mega-hit Jerry McGuire. Almost Famous feels like an arrived opportunity at which he throws all of his experience hanging around rockstars as a teenager and getting to work the film industry. As with some other projects I can think of, I would much rather this filtration through fiction than the most detailed tell-all book. Crowe's move to make this was the right time: it was way beyond any need to prove himself. It also gave him a dream cast of solid performers and new talent to play with. Add some licencing coups with the source music and you've got a package that presents as 1973 on a plate. Except, it doesn't feel nostalgic.

Why? Crowe does two things to prevent that. First, it feels authentic. The actors playing band members rehearsed as the band, overseen by Peter Frampton who had been a rock star from the period setting. If the stage sound is much more studio-articulate than it would have been, that's in service of the audience: we do need to see the point of the adulation, even if a real group would have sounded like sludge at the time. Second, Crowe, having been there to document it, knows his era. After the explosive rush of innovation and upscaling of rock music in the '60s, the dearly '70s was a time when the top few established their empires in the stadiums that Led Zeppelin called the houses of the holy. Before it was Woodstock and Altamont and to come was the ravaging tear down of punk. For this moment, the monster bands ruled and the culture shrank around them like the plastic wrap of the merch. Crowe is remembering first hand. The coming of age tale is gravy.

Is Frances McDormand too brittle with her early boomer anti-drugs messaging? Maybe, but that does get balanced by the genuinely on-point things she also says. McDormand was half a decade out from her Oscar-winning turn in Fargo and was taking her pick of the roles. By the time you get scenes where swaggering rock stars are instantly brought around when talking to her on the phone, we really don't need both sides of the conversation (the Billy Crudup moment in the trailer remains a favourite).

Phillip Seymour Hoffman chews it up as maverick contrarian Lester Bangs. While I know that he didn't get British punk (his big piece on The Sex Pistols is remarkably off) Bangs was reliably surprising and funny. Seymour Hoffman was in career mode but was still featuring in the kinds of roles that got him noticed in the first place he approaches the fiery writer as a character study that must have felt like a holiday after his eye popping turns in Boogie Nights and Happiness. His opposite numbers are Billy Crudup and Jason Lee as the leading duo in Stillwater whose artistic ambitions struggle with their egos in a solid display. They wouldn't last a round with Bangs but we don't get to see that.

Kate Hudson, Anna Paquin and Fairuza Balk are the Band Aids and throw a patchouli-scented veil over the self-fashioned mystique they adopt. The dialogue about age and the truth and the ones about life choices (Morocco) ring with the funny and saddening poignancy that crushable youth is wont to choose. Zooey Deschanel's bug eyed youth as Anita Miller is played against her character's whimsy as she races toward a more conventional path to independence. 

Finally, it is Patrick Fugit who must shoulder the movie. He does so with the film's key disarmer, wonder. While quick to put a comically unconvincing grown up demeanour, his frequent moments of joyous witness give the film its durable high. One wrong note in his performance and everything gets exposed as fancy dress. When he learns over time to approach the rock stars, stroking vanity and appealing to honesty or at least the concept of it, it feels like his coming of age through his immersion in the music is the story we are enjoying.

But nothing's perfect. What are we to make of the sequence where the Band-Aids initiate William? Their ages as characters are not astronomical but would we cheer along as much if the genders were reversed? The situation is between William as a cute mid-teens writer and a bevy of camp-followers. The numbers alone would make it a gang bang. If it were younger roadies with a young female writer ... I'll admit that I look around this moment. Such junctions abound in coming of age narratives and are usually euphoric if male and hard and "real" if female. In 2000, this had yet to be expressed otherwise. Then again, Crowe is fictionalising an experience from his own life and effectively has dibs on how it's told.

And otherwise, in the scenes where the Band-Aids are variously energising in a kind of symbiosis or getting their shelf life labels pointed out, the women are designated as essential to the process, whether as muse, or fan or both. That Penny Lane is saved from being a casualty and continues in strength and that Sapphire's short, pointed monologue backstage lands with Russell are indications of even handedness and that the only illusions are those best broken by a business that gives fantasy and takes innocence is a kind of moral to the tale. Is the ending happy? It is temporarily resolved.

I bring this up, even though it doesn't form the central core of the film but it is unignorable on subsequent viewings. I personally am resolved to note it and let it weigh against my unceasing enjoyment of this piece. Almost Famous is a rare example of a film that is actually enhanced by a longer cut. Crowe's re-edit Untitled or the bootleg cut just gives us more of what we want and doesn't lag for a second for any of its forty extra minutes. For authenticity, I watched the original cut for this review.

As a punk in the late '70s, I celebrated the destructive critique of the stadium dinosaurs. This was partly due to my enthusiasm for those dinosaurs a little earlier when I completed my collections of Zeppelin, Queen, Bowie, and many more. The shame of the admission was enough but the feeling was the same. I admired from a foggy distance, the tales of barbaric excess on U.S. tours and wished I could be there will all the names and faces. Punk felt more accessible but there was nothing but recognition on my face as I watched how intently and solidly Cameron Crowe guided Patrick Fugit through his own brush with mystique and power. This film exults rock music without embarrassment or irony because it doesn't need to. In the end it is joy, plain joy.

Viewing notes: I watched the original, shorter cut of this for the review here. The 4K presentation is extraordinary (though, what a great asset a Dolby Atmos audio track would have been!) As a modern classic, it's pretty easy to find for rent or free with subscription on Prime and Stan. It's also available on  Blu-Ray (with both cuts) and DVD (original cut). 

RUN LOLA RUN @ 25

 

Lola Jaeger, 20 something and punky, gets a fevered call from her boyfriend Manni. He's a bagman for a local gangster and he's just finished a job. It went perfectly except for the part where he left the bag bursting with cash on the train. As the homeless guy who helped himself to it strides gleefully away, Manni calls Lola for any ideas at all to get 100K marks in twenty minutes to him before he crosses the road and holds up the supermarket. So, without a clear plan, Lola runs.

So begins the film that conquered the world in 1999, the year when little movies with big ideas beat the odds to carpet the cinematic world. Fight Club, The Matrix, South Park, Being John Malkovich, The Blair Witch Project, the list just stretches out, including this outlying comedy of anxiety from Germany whose big idea was an old one but with an execution as hip and up to date as could be had.

The O. Henry story Roads of Destiny tells of a traveller who chooses different directions on coming to a forked intersection that lead him to different fates made of the same elements. Lola's improvisations while physically on the run feature parallel routes where wildly differing fates await herself, Manni, and people she bumps into while running. From winning lotteries to dying lonely and overdosed, the effects of chance rule the universe. But for a single break in the scheme (hint: gun) Lola has no memory of running the course in other circumstances; this isn't the constant self-improvement of Groundhog Day but rather a blocked system whereby every different iteration of the single action is played without cross reference. That exception is thrown in as a cheeky wrong footing. There's another whereby a character Lola keeps meeting seems to be aware of the other run-throughs (sorry, these puns are compelled).

These different plays are, of course, for the benefit of the audience and we both warn Lola through gritted teeth to avoid this corner or not to run down there in gleeful futility. That we also are fed a massive amount of information about Lola's life and that of the people around her further fuels this effect of our feeling godlike in vision but with no control. That element is left with Lola herself and she doesn't always make the decisions she should. The story is punctuated by her own screams of frustration which rip out at different points in the play-throughs, reminding us of every single time that we felt ourselves caught in knots of malfunction or unwelcome surprise.

The young Franka Potente as Lola, whose squeezed out mop of dayglo hair, cargo pants and army boots were rendered iconic with a look that was a gift to poster art across language and cultural boundaries, holds the electric centre of the film. As the mixed media flashes around her from ugly home video grind to gleamingly perfect 35mm cinematography, she either runs at an Olympic pace or is frozen in rapid thought, as still as a figurine as time and the rest of the world move around her. The few moments of apparent calm where flashbacks to post-coital pillow talk are offered in infernal red light and feature trains of conversation that do not conclude. Manni's shocked chaos on the initial phone call reveals the worst that desperation will push forward. By the time Lola notices the casino our hearts sink but we're so invested we almost yell at her to enter. Add the constant pulse of the EDM electronic score which either throbs beneath the action or rises to a gurgling acceleration of it that  crosses over the frequently frenetic editing and you have a film guaranteed to surprise its viewers that it's only eighty minutes long.

In 1999, if your work made it into a scene from the Simpsons you had not only arrived but were probably influencing costume parties. As Lisa ran along the road to the strident gobbles of techno, everyone knew what those few seconds came from. Run Lola Run is remembered for its action rather than its dialogue but it has bucketloads of talk. Most of this is exposition but we're surprised with each new viewing that we forgot it. One thing that occurred to me this time, though, is technological. This film's events would only be hampered by mobile phones. The phones we see are no longer much in evidence anywhere, rotary diallers and booths. But hand-held communicators would remove Lola's invention, her readiness to meet the crises that pop up like a kinetic obstacle course throughout. This is not just about her superhuman sprint but how long a second is in a human brain. It's also about how fresh the contents of time capsules can appear to us. And fresh it remains.