Blind Spots 2: Terry Gilliam part 1 (I know .. parts within parts within parts but I gotta put something up

 When Terry Gilliam began making features in his own right he could do no wrong in my eyes. His animations for Monty Python seemed to open the door to a parallel universe. They were funny by context rather than anything innate. Mostly, they were troubling and angry. Monty Python had me from the get go when the pilot was played back in my childhood. It was like watching psychopaths on hidden cameras, unstable confrontations, inverted banality, and a violent take on British stereotypical characters. In the midst of all that a construction paper gunslinger was shot and buried. Hands grew like flowers from the grave. A girl scissored out of a Victorian picture book came by and cut the hands into a basket. That told me that Monty Python was not going to be some cute BBC half hour but something difficult and fearsome, and that it would probably change all significant comedy that followed it. Ok, I didn't think in those words at ten butit did seem like things were changing.

And we all know the story. The team fought, fragmented and it wasn't the same. Anyone whose tried to make it through all of the box sets knows how gruelling the later Python tv show gets. But if you take the time to watch the movies they were making something very different emerges and it's strange. How could such a cardboard set comedy on video make such a bold transition to the cinema screen? Whenever the tv show had attempted a coherent narrative line through an entire episode it always lost breath early and collapsed. But the grandeur of Holy Grail was what made it funny.  And that came out of the conflicting visions of the Terrys (Gilliam and Jones) which were resolved in the need for sheer pragmatism. Jones veered toward cuteness. Gilliam wanted a cast of thousands. Instead of real horses it was a man clapping two coconut halves together (played by Gilliam himself) not into a microphone in post but on screen in costume. And the film score was all El Cid and Man for All Seasons, tympani and extended brass section. That tension between epic and English whining triviality still makes Monty Python and the Holy Grail feel fresh now. See also Life of Brian and Meaning of Life. Anyway....

So when Terry Gilliam came out with Jabberwocky I loaded myself up with consumer expectations like a suburban dad on a camping holiday ("but why can't we have a spot closer to the shower block if there's one there?") And it went nowhere and took its time doing it. The Python surreality was replaced with whackiness which made it look like a knockoff regardless of how many Pythons were trying to change the lightbulb. What remained was perhaps a look into what Holy Grail might have been given time, money and a free hand to Terry Gilliam. While it's great to see merrye England gone all Ken Loach and the fight sequences with the monster have a genuineness about them what's missing is any cohesion between the authenticity of the period evocation and ... a point. There is nothing to hang the comedy on in this film. The scene, often offered as an example of the film's way, where Michael Palin interrupts an artisan in a workshop with an efficiency suggestion only to have the entire factory collapse around them, outstays its welcome as soon as the big props start to fall.

Then came Time Bandits but before it came Life of Brian which Gilliam didn't direct. He did, however, contribute one of its funniest sequences (Brian saved from plummeting to his death by an alien spaceship) which made the prospect of Time Bandits all the more enticing. And it's a good adventure, taking a child character through the ages and even to the depths of a highly imaginative depiction of hell. For the most part the mix of fantasy fiction and Pythonesque comedy works well, if bumpily right up to the ending which changes the tone of the entire film from adult-leaning adventure to buzzkilling violence. John Cleese is very funny as a Robin Hood more like a Tory politician than a bandit. David Warner is both funny and intimidating as the Evil One. Michael Palin and Shelley Duval as the eternally awkward lovers are very Python, funny or not. And there's Sean Connery who doesn't have to be funny. But a great deal of this and the action are at odds with the tone of the boy being taken on adventure by the dwarf robbers. This is neither a kid's story (even a Roald Dahl one) nor an adult's one. Having the advantage of the Monty Python pedigree it was marketed with that flavour. But it wasn't a Python film. Nor was it so of itself that it could survive the initial confusion of what it was to emerge as a sui generis piece like El Topo or Harold and Maude. The film has its pundits but if you speak to them you'll find a lot of nostalgia in their admiration, a kind of stolen pleasure from their childhood. To its credit the film's delivery on some of its promises and reasonable maintenance of its narrative thread (this isn't Tarkovsky, it needs a constant narrative force) allow return viewings. When I tried to get through it for the second time in two decades I gave up. The imbalance between fantasy and comedy wasn't tension the way it was in Holy Grail, it seemed saggy. It felt try hard. This despite the obvious vision that had conceived it and skill that executed it. I wondered if Terry Gilliam was a technician who had fluked a few good comic moments between bombastic ones.

Then came Brazil and with it an end to the obligatory association with Monty Python. What remained of Python in this film was there in Terry Gilliam to begin with. Mostly, the same kind of troubled anger as I remembered from those animations in the tv show returned.

It was 1984 and journalists were in a frenzy all year playing spot the Orwellian overtone in public events. Michael Radford made a muted but powerful adaptation of the novel. Terry Gilliam threw everything he had (a somewhat considerable stockpile) at contemporary society through an evocation of its past as a reversal of Orwell writing 1984 about 1948. I remember an acquaintance of my flatmate who was roostering himself through local student politics voicing suspicion that Brazil and Nineteen Eighty-Four were released around the same time as they were both obvious attacks on Soviet society. This was a further example of the student pollie phenomenon of treating strong arm politics as though it were the Glass Bead Game and everything outside of that (eg. culture) as remedial reading. When I tried to explain to this fusilier of the SRC that there might be a lot more commentary on the West in those films than he imagined he intoned the mantra so beloved of his tribe: "bullshit." I left it there. It really was only a movie. (He also opined that one thing he liked about Nineteen Eighty-Four was that "the good guys won".)


Anyway....

Brazil deserves the high place given it by Gilliam fans for the sheer force of its argument and the service of every element of the film towards that end. It has his dizzying delight at the confrontation inherent to massive structure, moebius strip logic, and the ugly consequences of a totalitarian enforcement of consumer culture. The tech and fashions are from world war II but the intolerance of dissent by governments applies today. If the film had been released at any time after 2001 no one would be talking about Moscow, they'd be thinking Dubbya's Washington or Blair's London.

And there's still more. Protagonist Sam Lowry's dreams invade the central narrative until the two realms find a strange convergence in the finale. The dreams, initially, are intriguing pieces featuring Sam as a winged figure with a mane of golden curls who increasingly as the dreams progress comes to the rescue of a highly idealised woman. This situation grows enormous in scale to the point where Sam has to do battle with a monster that emerges from the very brickwork of the buildings around him. What a perfect evocation of the fantasies of an oppressed bureaucratic drone. We're reminded by them that Sam is far from the heroic figure he'd like to be. The finale, on a Gilliam-only scale, takes this to its logical conclusion and by that time we are ready to forgive Sam for being the cog in the machine that he was. Where he lands is both better and worse.

Terry Gilliam had arrived in auteur land.

Next ... the other ones....

Blind Spots 1: The Coen Brothers

Ok, first, this series of ruminations is not a list of artists I think are overrated. I think the term overrated is  lazy-minded. Like "pretentious" or  "obscure" it's a term I've heard used when someone wants to dwarf something that has dwarfed them. Giants, puh, overrated.

This series will be me questioning just how much I do admire of some of my professed favourites. Others, I don't admire who yet should warrant some praise. And others still whose garnered praise baffles me (Wes Anderson chief among them but he's for another installment). Today, it's a subject I've almost dreaded typing about as it's one so profoundly beloved among my friends and has been for decades now: the films of Joel and Ethan Coen.

It occurred to me recently that the only Coen Brothers film I'd call great is Blood Simple, their first. I've counted myself a fan since then and am quick to defend them but increasingly I think that rather than enjoying their subsequent work I've excused it. I don't think it's poor. The Coens work hard for their audiences and deserve their applause. It's just that I can never quite like a whole film after that first one.

I mentioned this to a friend recently and he immediately brought up Barton Fink. But here's the thing: he didn't say, "what about Barton Fink?" He said, " what about that one where the playwright is trying to write a screenplay in a hotel --" Until I interrupted him with a slap to my own forehead.  Of course! I always forget that one whenever I pick from the list. Why?

The first Coen film I felt dissatisfied with was The Hudsucker Proxy. I came away from it feeling it was cover without the version, a 30s screwball comedy like something by Frank Capra. But while it hit all the generic traits it forgot that a Capra film's performances, be they ever so hyper are still orchestrated and measured so that they never get exhausting. Between Tim Robbins gawpy ingenuousness and Jennifer Jason Leigh's bludgeoning Hepburn/Russell motor-mouthing there is no room for Charles Durning's ukulele playing angel or Paul Newman's hard-arsed wall-streeter to move or breathe. The tale was also so inconsequential that rather than think of it as a bad film I could only think: why did they bother making that?

Put here also, Burn After Reading, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers (one of the most pointless remakes in history), and The Big Lebowski. Not pointless but unaffecting I'd call The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, O Brother Where Art Thou, Miller's Crossing and Raising Arizona. I haven't seen A Serious Man and probably should but I'm just not inclined to. Anyway, that leaves only Barton Fink which I like almost as much as Blood Simple.

I read an interview with them in which one said that he wished people would stop thinking that they only made spoofs. At first I applauded the appeal but a second thought asked, "who's to blame for that?" With so much evocation of the Ghost of Hollywood Past, so much arch scholarship and winking reference invading every frame of most of their work, what else are we to call it? Like a 90s Britpop band who replayed the chops of British bands of the 60s without the filter of originality that might have made them sound influenced rather than unimaginative, the Coen brothers to me are filmmakers whose films have no centre, no purpose beyond the demonstration of skill. Quentin Tarantino, a filmmaker whose work I generally find enjoyable but forgettable, has to his credit the admission that he's doing little more than emulating movies he likes. The Coens are concerned that people think they only make spoofs. I don't think they just make spoofs but I don't know what they think they're making.

So why do I forget Barton Fink if I think it's so great? I have no idea. I've only seen it once (and Blood Simple only twice) but it has left me with a feeling that none of the others apart from the first one has left, they seem to have believed in it. Barton Fink's tale of Hollywood's corrupting noise and its bizarre effects is told with a strength and depth that none of the others approach and I can't help feeling it's a direct comment on the brothers' own experiences in the belly of the beast. The casting alone is sensational: John Tuturro in the lead, John Goodman, avuncular and terrifying, bug eyed Steve Buscemi and a superbly world weary Judy Davis. You can pick the references to historical figures in the characters if you like but it simply isn't necessary.

Unsungquels : pres and ses that deserve some love Part 1

Sequels 'n' prequels. Let's just call them quels. Yes, those annoying puppies of hit movies that gnaw around your ankles and yap, trying to outdo their progenitors. Sometimes they're better but mostly you just have to say "quel damage."

Here are a few I like.

AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION

 Here's a case of a sequel far outstripping its folks in depth and effectiveness. The Amityville Horror is an adequate  70s piece falling between a ghost story and the still popular demonic possession subgenre. The problem I have with it is that apart from one really good scare (eyes!) it isn't really scary. The best moment for me is when the priest once again has his phone line reduced to buzzing static when speaking to Mrs Lutz. It's a moment charged with a real sense of despair. There's a sadness to its inevitability that lends more weight to the climactic scenes than they deserve.

So if sequels are just good bits of the originals writ large why is Amityville II The Possession such a subtle and creepy film? Well, I say subtle. The thing ends in an excorcism that was conceived of like a shopping list. But the central theme of guilt from the incestuous union of the son and daughter of the house and the forked road each sibling follows afterward does allow for subtlety. The impending doom of this, involving the girl's various overtures to her brother and refuge sought in the church, the brother's spiral downward into what might be possession or psychopathy or just intense controlling guilt, is a richer experience that a lot of higher profile dramas that might add a more acceptable but befogging hysteria to the issue. Here a sensitive subject is made troubling by the casualness of its core act and then channelled into severe allegory. But the allegory remains grounded in the pain of family dysfunction.

Ok, so once you get to the big payoff the movie just tries to outdo every Exorcist cover version that came before it, amping up the latex as though it was stolen from George Lucas' garage. But as with most thrillers and all whodunnits once it's clear that the conclusion will be rushed and put together with gaffer tape I don't really care if it's done well or not. The bulk of Amityville II is the depiction of disturbing behaviour with enough light around it to avoid sensationalism (until the end) and engage the noodles. As such it embarrasses its predecessor and could easily have been retooled to drop the association. But the world doesn't work so.

Oh yeah, and it's much scarier than the Amityville Horror, with a constant sense of otherworldiness pervading. Eerie.

BLAIR WITCH 2: BOOK OF SHADOWS

The really interesting thing about this one is that they hired a documentarian to do a slick fiction film. Joe Berlinger had made a significant feature documentary about some goth teens who were accused of murder: Paradise Lost. I haven't seen it nor its sequel but it was deemed strong enough stuff for the Myrick and Sanchez team of The Blair Witch Project to hire him to direct the sequel. Berlinger's idea was to make the events of the tale a matter of ambiguity that might change with perspective. Artisan, who'd had such a monster success with the first film went all Hollywood on the sequel and turned the risk control down to half a unit and released the film recut with some re shoots to make the events definite.

First, the fun bits. Blair Witch 2 is set in a world that knows about The Blair Witch Project. It's on the media and back at Burkitsville, Maryland, there are stalls selling twigs fashioned into the stick figures from the movie. There are also tours of the woods for the curious. One of them is led by a guy only recently released from a mental health facility. he takes a group of the kind of people you'd expect to go on such a tour and horror ensues. Or does it?

The narrative is framed by a lengthy police interview in which the surviving tourists give their accounts of the events which are variously supported and contradicted by video evidence. As the testimonies proceed we settle into the story's digesis and, apart from necessary returns to the frame, all goes narratively well.

Berlinger's most noted work had been in the depiction of evidence and its manipulation, of witness and testimony. Here, backed by a digetic realm aware of the artifice of a realistic looking feature film (ie the original), Berlinger tries to set up something for the audience to not just think about but enjoy thinking about. The facing mirror approach has a pleasantly intriguing effect and it's wrapped up in the immediate high gloss surface of an American feature film.


Fine, but is it any good? Actually, yes, one thing Blair Witch 2 doesn't forget to do is be a horror film. After you get past all the clever clever intentional stereotypes among the cast and the tricksy references to the original, what you still have is an increasingly eerie supernatural tale delivered with great atmosphere. The cast and their material range from sharp to stock, as though they know they're in a knowing movie featuring knowing characters who know etc etc but that's all to the film's strengths.

I saw this film at the cinema on a blisteringly hot Melbourne afternoon with a fellow horror movie fan (heya Polly!) and enjoyed the afterchill on the walk through the dusty heat. Berlinger says on his dvd commentary that this is not the film he intended and that changes he was involved in were often done under protest. But he also admits that he did make the changes and must live with the results. Bingo! Don't remake a mistake, learn from it and do the next thing with the lesson in mind. And where do you put the protest? In context where everyone can see that you're not just mouthing off at the suits.

When you're on a good thing.... : Serial killer films of the 90s

There's a joke that comedians tell each other, a kind of jazz standard. It goes like this:

A guy goes into a an agent's office and says I've got a family act for you. The agent says, "sure, tell me about it."
And the guy describes a series of increasingly depraved acts perpetrated by family members on each other. The agent is stunned at the end of it but manages to gasp, "that's insane what do you call it?" The guy says, "the Aristocrats."
 
I didn't laugh either but I left something out. The description of the act is where the comedian puts their own schtick on the joke, makes it their own the same as if they were a jazz soloist recreating My Funny Valentine: the structure's all there you just need to walk around in it. If you fail, meh, just another cover version. If you shine, it'll be a version prefaced with your name.

Big Hollywood's 1990s began with Silence of the Lambs. It was an okay effort, pushing buttons and running through the checks until it had everything on the list covered, including a high profile cast. Would have come and gone and been remembered as a step along the road of crime thrillers but for one unfortunate thing: it scooped the oscar pool for 1991. This wasn't as horrible an outcome as 1994 when Mel Gibson won with Braveheart against a field that included Leaving Las Vegas and Casino. Silence of the Lambs isn't such a bad piece of work but that's not the point. The point is that a dark mooded thriller suddenly looked like money and so began the 1990s genre-in-chief.

Film after film of rising mediocrity levels appeared for the rest of the decade, each promising more intensity than the previous one until, as will happen in all genres, they all looked and danced pretty much the same way. Like the comedians outdoing each other with descriptions of intra-familial outrage, the fashioners of serial killer movies wanted the central monster to be less and less human, more untouchably terrifying, his (almost exclusively a male) crimes crueller, his IQ higher, his daring more audacious. On the other side the detective had to be more prone to mistake and human frailty than Clarice in Silence.

So what, all genres are like that, live with it. Well, no they aren't. The central problem I have with this one is that the sleaze, the exploitation, the call to the audience's baseness coupled with a band-aided appeal to its sense of justice was coming not from the grindhouse merchants but from the big suits. They wanted our money as they always do but with serial killer movies they also dug how directly identifiable the monsters were. They knew the audience would get with the strength and however much emotional rallying around the detective hero there was at the end it was really us and the bad guy, slicing up everyone we wanted dead.

Now, if I sound like a grandstander here let me attempt some assuagement by claiming that the resulting danger I mean here is not moral but aesthetic. If the clumsily manipulative Silence of the Lambs hadn't scooped its year's oscars the cinema of a decade might not have been stuffed with the kind of pop hysteria it suffered. So megabudgeted rubbish like Braveheart, The English Patient, Forrest Gump and Titanic didn't just get guernseys they got made. The kind of simplistic pandering to the lynch mob inside every multiplex audience rode high and while it might not have been the fault of Jonathon Demme and Hannibal Lecter, the high sheen garbage that their efforts engendered appears indistinguishable from the award winners of the time. If the 80's was Hollywod's teen decade, the 90s was its freak show era. I hated the serial killer genre not for being a genre but for its rabble rousing carnival cynicism.

Some exceptions you might find enjoyable:


SE7EN

Seven? But you said... I know, it lines up with all the other toes, with the world wise retiring detective and the puppish young rookie and the icecold monster and the relished depravity of his crimes. But it also has some unusually strong performances (I don't think Kevin Spacey has topped his performance in this film) and, best of all, it questions the value of cynicism. Oh, and by omitting the race against time common to all other entries in the genre it broke the mold. Didn't matter to the factory which kept filling and pressing out the same old sausages. I am fond of Se7en and very glad that its director's contribution to the great year of 1999 was Fight Club.

The Ugly

A dark and stormy night. An asylum (not a mental health facility, an asylum) whose filthy corridors are ice blue and haunted by raving, toy clutching spectres and male nurses who look like they've been outcast from the Bouncers Federation for excessive aggression. Into the unstaffed reception comes a beautiful young woman to see one of the inmates. She's a star forensic psychiatrist and is here to see a human monster and test his insanity defence with an examination. So far we're so deep in genre territory it's beginning to look like Walpurgis Nacht. But...

This isn't downtown Chicago it's Auckland and the bad guy isn't a big threatening nasty like Hannibal, he's a shy gaze avoiding wimp with a weedy little voice. Almost immediately, as the examination begins and he begins to talk about his life and crimes we are given a series of clues to suspect the point of view the film is projecting. As in the recent The Fall, as a story is told we see it being imagined by a character. In The Ugly elements conjured by the teller or listener appear in the present reality until Simon, the serial killer, sees his examiner surrounded by his slashed victims demanding that he: "kill the bitch". The Ugly is the closest thing I have seen to stream of consciousness cinema. Add to that its refusal to either condemn or acquit its central criminal figure, preferring to invite its audience to reach beyond these simple pleasures and do a little thinking. There's no avoidance of thinking by the film's conclusion which, with a very simple optical effect, we are being asked to wonder rather than decide.


Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer

A year before Silence walked away with all the statuettes, this little film received six nominations in the Independent Spirit Awards. If its fortunes had switched with those of Silence of the Lambs the 90s might have looked very very different.They might have had the courage of the Taxi Driver 70s and the sheer punch of Sam Fuller's 50s. Henry is loosely based on the crimes of Henry Lee Lucas and his cohort Otis Toole.

What you get is a no budget character study of a pathological murderer. He's not a would be Hitler with an Einstein IQ and the wealth to build elaborate torture chambers in remote woodlands, he's just a bloke. When he gets angry or frustrated he kills someone. More, finding a fellow ex con eking out a living in a blue collar drudge job supplemented with a little pot dealing, Henry creates a fellow murderer in circumstances that are distrubingly believable. There is no long arm of the law in this story. No world weary figure appears to hit one last nail into the coffin of the bad guy. Henry goes from life station to life station, taking it one body at a time.

Strangely, very strangely, the passionless nihilism of this film's central figure does not rub off. There is no call to enjoy a little twist of the knife ourselves. We don't even get invited in as such. We watch Henry from the wall along with all the other flies and hope he doesn't think we're worth a swatting. This is very like witnessing violence in real life, it's ugly and paralysing.

Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer is not above its own exploitation but it's also not shy of being upfront about it. The complete absence of authority outside of Henry himself prevents too much ease in assuming the position (as it were). The result, the resort, is a kind of stunned fascination.

This is the kind of beside manner you only get by paying for.

The '90s serial killer gallery ended in 2000 with Tarsem Singh's The Cell. Having taken the physical depravity as far as bare credibility could stretch, The Cell went further by going into the psyche of the monster, literally. Well known real life forensic psychiatrist J Lo takes a swim in the neurones of a comatose monster to find the real him and effect a cure. This meant that anything at all went. So if the worst thing in 1990 was the sight of a torn fingernail lodged in the wall of the victim's pit, in 2000 it could be a man having his intestines hauled out of his body with a rotiserie. Couldn't happen in real life? Didn't have to. This (for me) final entry in the genre felt like a heightened aesthetic sense bashing the walls to be free of a deservedly long moribund genre. Tarsem was to redeem himself beyond all expectation in his 2006 outing The Fall. For which, see below...

Review: The Fall: tripping the lite fantastic

Tarsem Singh was responsible for the film I put at the end of the 90s serial killer genre. At the time I dismissed it as style over substance and the most desperate final stroke of the cat on the old grey mare. Now that I’ve seen the only feature film he made after it I’m inclined to give The Cell another run. The main problem with The Cell was that the inventiveness and intense richness of the imagery left the generic narrative so far behind that whenever the story surfaced it felt clumsy and unwelcome. There are similar issues with The Fall but to completely different effect: they work this time.

Roy, a stuntman for the early movies, is in hospital after a fall has left him partially paralysed. The woman he loves has rejected him. He’s been better. A simple accident leads little Alexandria, a European émigré girl, to his ward and almost immediately the two begin a rapport which swiftly evolves into an epic tale of adventure. So far this could be any kid’s story but Roy isn’t just relieving his boredom, his mind is on the morphine tablets kept in the hospital’s pharmacy in overdose quantities and he knows that a popular little girl like Alexandria can have free passage through all the gloomy halls of health care. He doesn’t just want to tell a good yarn, he needs to.

The Fall is based on a time-obscured Bulgarian film called Yo Ho Ho which I wish was available. It’s also in the same territory as Terry Gilliam’s Baron Munchausen. So you might want some lightness of touch with the central relationship and a hand as heavy as possible with the more fantastical elements and a strong interplay between them. I’ll get the latter out of the way first.

The Fall is probably the most visually beautiful fiction film I’ve ever seen. If you could animate all of those special report photographs from National Geographic, photography textbooks and computer monitor calibration test cards you might just get something as rich as this film.  Deserts look like powdered ochre. Grassland almost smells of wet earth. A butterfly transmogrifies into a reef bound island in an opalescent sea. Add to this a selection of ancient and renaissance architecture from Europe, the middle and far easts, whether moss mottled ruin or jade green pavilion. Edible colour. But even the opening sequence in black and white features a clarity and depth that could shut the most inveterate movie-talker well up.

But it’s not all sheen. Mixing aesthetics from world history into the colour palette reveals a strange blend of influences; Mayan and Persian, Gothic and Ming, Pacific and Saharan. A wedding is consecrated amid a host of whirling dervishes in a circular building that might be in Florence. A desert landscape gives way to a rich green rainforest. It’s a dizzying cocktail but it has a real point. And that point is the reason The Fall works and The Cell didn’t.

The Cell, a kind of psychiatric Fantastic Voyage, took the audience into the mind of a comatose serial killer as a shrink tried to discover the whereabouts of the perp’s final victim. So we got Tarsem’s showreel of the weird and woeful, going from Hieronymous Bosch through David Lynch to Damien Hirst. Everything looked very pretty (even when it was meant to disgust) but all of it really had one reference point so it didn’t matter how strong the imagery got it could only ever loop what it had already stated.

The Fall has a built-in mechanism preventing this. Roy is telling a story, making it up as he goes along. Sometimes he’s interrupted by Alexandria who points out a logic problem here or voices an emotional objection there. Sometimes Roy’s limitations constrain the story and its scope. Alexandria’s impatience might motivate the characters (as it does when she keeps listening over a nagging bladder). Dig? The tale is naturalistic; it can go where it wants; it can be ruled by its teller or his audience or it can be used to manipulate them: the uncertainty of its character, what happens to its tone is as important as what happens to its players. The base narrative doesn’t drag the fantasy one nor does the fantasy feel too light for the gravity of the initial setting. The balance is achieved by mutual dependence. 

Telling tales is a euphemism for lying. Modified truth or misrepresentation appears in almost every frame of this film. Roy’s career is based on his success at creating illusions and it is his tale that feeds the trust at the centre of the film’s narrative. And cinema is everywhere, not just in the screening of the film that has caused Roy’s despair but in the reversed image of a horse drawn cart that Alexandria sees through an accidental camera oscura of a keyhole. The radiologist in his 1920s lead armour is what she sees when the whinnying violent henchmen of the tale’s Governor Odious appear. Cinema is imagination and imagination is cinema. When the film’s final sequence rolls we hear Alexandria’s own narration fading in and out of what we are seeing. What she has learned from this time is something new, something she has fashioned from her own experience rather than repeated from a delivered message. I can think of no finer suggestion of what cinema might be.

I don’t think that I’ll find something deeper in The Cell a second time. This next effort is made from such different stuff that the sole point of comparison between the two is the richness of the visuals. The difference which is a question of substance sets them far apart. Tarsem did use something he found to create this film rather than start from scratch but he clearly believed in it enough to make the exact film he wanted over a period of four years, sneaking in location work on shoots for his main profession (ads and music videos) eking finance where he could. There’s no need to compare the titles themselves but this aspect reminds me of nothing so much as the story of the production of my favourite film: Eraserhead.

I haven't even mentioned the clear influence of Jodorosky, or the intelligent extension made of a famous piece by Beethhoven, or that one of the characters in Roy's tale is Charles Darwin who gets around in a bowler and an overcoat made of about seventy flamingoes, and carries a bag containing a monkey called Wallace. I'd normally be apologetic about such a gush but I will say that the film quite frequently punches under the weight it has declared and the performances are uneven throughout. But I think such a rare exercise of cinematic muscle and a celebration of storytelling that owns its manipulitive motivations is an impressive thing. Finally,  I think that the difficulty this film must have posed for the marketeers in trying to find a target audience is what I like the most about it. Not perfection, by any means, The Fall is just something that most contemporary cinema isn't: it's interesting.

Review: Amer

Absurdly, considering my devotion to horror cinema, I allowed the recent Hello Darkness festival of horror film that played at the Russell here in ol’ Millsanboon town. I do have an excuse. I got busy with a few projects because my most recent relationship sat quietly deflating in a corner. Actually, that’s no excuse at all, what better means to look the other way from this then with some film-induced survival reactions in the safety of a cinema filled with strangers? A horror-led recovery. Anyway I missed most of it which is a pity as there were a few things in there that I hadn’t seen and wanted to. So when I checked my backlog of e-pidgeons and saw again a suggestion by a Shadows regular to sample some of these screeny wares. So, I made it to Amer, the finale.

All I knew was that this film was heavily influenced by the giallo thrillers made in Italy from the 60s to the 80s, that it had very little dialogue and had a whammio ending. Just the ticket, I thought aloud and took a tram into town.

We start in a troubled house. A little girl runs from the sound of her parents arguing. She takes refuge in her room but a black humanoid shape rises from behind the bed. Before her mother can come in and save her, the shape slinks through a side door. A grandfatherly corpse lies dressed on a bed, the face fixed in a bitter expression. The girl sees the bewildering spectacle of her parents having vigorous huffing sex and passes out. Abandon all hope all ye who enter here expecting anymore dialogue or narrative cohesion.

She’s now an achingly beautiful teen and stands at the edge of a cliff overlooking a rich blue ocean. Her mother walks her along a dirt road to some inappropriately bold music. Her mother gets her hair done and leaves her daughter in a shop where a soccerball flinging boy challenges her to a … something contest. Soon after, she’s back at the cliff eyeing off and being eyed by a gang of mediteraneo bikies. Her mother drags her away in admonition.

Now an adult, she gets off a tram and takes a taxi to her childhood home, now in ruins, and is stalked by a leatherclad killer who favours a straight razor for a weapon. Twisty style ending.

Well it would be twisty except that really there’s no plot. The opening sequence suggests there will be a story emerging from the traumatic scenes the girl has witnessed. But then this film is not about plot and lets you know that quickly and flamboyantly. Much of the screen time is taken up with extreme close-ups, I mean veins in the white of the eye close-ups. Exchanges of stares, wide glaring fear, shrewd suspicion, you name it. Eyes loom large which should clue any echt giallo fan in to what’s happening here. Not enough? Well, how about a fetishistic insistence on the girl’s crotch real estate as it is lovingly caressed by the seabreeze and her own tiny pink dress. Want erect nipples? Done! Lastly and most ghastly you get an extended torture sequence involving exposed body parts and a cut-throat razor with some garooooosome payoffs. Fans of obscure Italian movies, do these things ring bells?

Well, let’s start with the first sequence which is influenced on a scale of one to one by Dario Argento’s Deep Red and Suspiria, right down to the luminous red and blue light that doesn’t make any digetic sense, it just looks good. Ok, it looks great. The music is the kind of harpsichord and picked bass guitar and growling synthesiser with occasional vocal in Venusian that remains one of the true pleasures of the giallo. In fact, it sounds entirely lifted from 60s and 70s originals. The bikies and soccerboy by the sea could be from anything of the golden era o’ gialli and the razor torture is straight as a die out of Lucio Fulci’s New York Ripper.

These refs barely scratch the surface and for awhile I thought I was looking at an expert but pointless celebration of the genre. Then I think I got it. Giallo films are often murder mysteries with some genuine intrigue, atmospherics, high suspense and endurance-testing violence. They are also full of plot holes the size of Italy.

Their least successful moments occur when characters on screen attempt to explain what’s going on. The one in Suspiria where witches are explained by not one but two experts goes on forever and ruins the essential element of the film: nightmare logic. Suspiria’s power lies in action that is so highly irrational and yet so churningly violent that the viewer has no time to conceptually control it. That’s why nightmares are scary, our perception that the dream’s elements are controlling us. Great horror cinema does this every time. In fact the closer you get to reason in a horror movie the further you get from its thrills. 

Well, that’s what Amer is, just the good bits, the high style, the edible colour, the guilty pleasure sleaze, the extraordinary power of a bludgeoning ocular close-up on a cinemascope screen, the sensuality of looks and its proximity to violence, the breath-holding confrontation with extreme cruelty, the trauma of the primal scene, etc etc etc. You want an old time movie? You want plot? You want character motivation and through-lines? Make ‘em up. Look, you’ve got a gigantic elaborate feast of impactful moments rendered emotively despite a near complete absence of context. What can YOU make of it? Amer is a good film because it adds to the bag of tricks. It’s good because it doesn’t just invoke the old it calls to its audience to use their imaginations it does so itself with imagination. Amer is a baroque, cineweariness-killing DIY kit and I'm glad I bought one.

Rock on Film Pt 5: Stones on Film Pt 1: Lo Expectations

The Rolling Stones played it very cannily in the 60s when they rose to stardom. Instead of accepting the shade of the untouchably successful Beatles they went for an alter ego approach. The Beatles do Yesterday, a weepy love song, The Stones come out with As Tears Go By, a very odd song about ageing. The Four of the Law bring out the Staxy brass section of Got to Get You Into My Life about love or weed (depending on the available memory neurones of author Paul) and the Rogues from Richmond produce Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby,  Standing in the Shadow a kind of pre-Zappa freakout about … well, it’s hard to tell. And when the long haired lovers from Liverpool made movies they were (at least the first two) cute and lovable. The Stones were slated to appear in movies with sci fi/dystopian themes (A Clockwork Orange was one of them) but none got beyond amber. So when they did get to the screen it was as themselves, not characters with the same names.

ONE PLUS ONE/SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

 Jean Luc Godard had not so much started the French New Wave as hijacked it with films that swung a wrecking ball at Hollywood conventions yet still offered riches once the dust settled. Breathless was great cheeky fun, A Woman is a Woman was glorious non-musical musical. Les Mepris and Alphaville were more disturbing and took JLG’s journey into increasingly radical territory. He grew increasingly political and as he did he widened the distance between his films and everyone else’s (not just Hollywood’s). After the failure of the revolt in May ’68 his anger turned to rage and his screen output turned violent in form and content, wilfully challenging his audience to stay the distance. They didn’t. The pity of it is that some strong (if admittedly gruelling) works he produced between 1968 and 1972 are often dimissed and fans of the initial period tend to change the subject when Wind from the East or British Sounds come up in conversation. And when this one makes it’s way into the air it’s met with over defence or over denigration. But it really stands by itself.

The One Plus One title is Godard’s and describes what’s seen aptly if cryptically. Sympathy for the Devil was the producer’s title and the one that appeared on the cinema billboard on the film’s release. Why the difference? Well, the content that features the Stones is of them developing the song Sympathy for the Devil in the studio from an acoustic strum to the big pre-roots epic it became. The difference in the titles lies at the heart of the problem of the film’s reception: one requires active thought and the other promises a film that the audience is not going to see.

This is not a musical film and it’s not really about the Stones. It’s about a chasm Godard perceived between the kind of political activism he saw fail in Paris that year and the culture of the people whom he thought should be politically active: youth. The film has three main strains: the Stones in the studio, a group of urban guerrillas in training and spoken excerpts from an imaginary espionage novel in which the characters have names from contemporary political history like Castro or Kruschev. See, if all you wanted to see was Mick ‘n’ co going through the different stages of a rock classic then you are going to be sitting through a lot of information noise. Calling the film by the song title suggests that the focus will be on the band but that’s not the movie’s purpose.

The most common gripe I hear about this film concerns the scenes with the guerrillas. There is a lot of sloganeering and it is easy to characterise the scenes as naive or dated politics. But there’s a point to all the dogma and it ties in with the film perfectly if you think of it being called One Plus One. The young men are assembled in a car scrapyard and go through a kind of weapons training with rifles and some political education. It’s tedious but look closer. The weapons training is not just repetitive, it’s robotic, as meaninglessly ceremonial. The political education consists of flatvoiced dogma delivered by tape recorder and copied down without a single independent thought getting in the way. (There is also a scene in a bookshop where a young man dictates extracts from Nietzsche and Hitler etc to a typist, just to suggest the streetlevel right.)The alphas in the guerrilla group meet with women who at first seem to be journalists but soon seem more like groupies (these women author the sole political acts in the film –

grafitti).

Back at the studio, Mick plays the four chord song to Brian on an acoustic. It sounds like a bedroom songwriter’s effort. Then when the band eventually appear and plug in, it takes on a more late ‘60s tone, a melancholy lament. Something isn’t right, it’s not taking off.  Eventually, they bring in extra percussion, Keith takes over on bass and finds the famous punching pattern. It’s starting to sound like the real thing. Mick does a vocal and flubs it but we’re really getting there. Then, wow, the girlfriends, wives and significant others gather round a mic and do the whoo whoo backing vocals that send this number soaring. Ladies and gentlemen we have a classique!

There’s also a lot of between time, idle cigarette smoking and waiting but the sense of the band warming up from cold and really having an uncontrived sense of purpose is constantly developing on screen. So…

You get a group of young men with nothing to lose getting together, playing at being revolutionaries and even picking up groupies along the way. You get a group of rich young men who can stay in bed all day gathering in concerted effort to pursue greatness. What, Godard asks, is wrong with this picture?

That’s what I think this film is saying. I don’t see a frame of symbolism on the screen. You can take what you see with all the literalism that a Gen-Y-er obedient to the stereotype would demand and still get to the essence of it. It does require more active thought from its viewers than anything at a multiplex (that’s not snobbery, btw, mainstream cinema can no longer afford risking its audience’s attention with complexity). But if it’s Sympathy for the Devil the song is in the way. If it’s One Plus One, you have a fighting chance.

Had enough? Well, it gets lighter.

ROCK AND ROLL CIRCUS

The closest thing to any of the first three Beatles movies that the Stones ever did is still only a concert film … kinda.

The idea was to get together with some friends and new talent on the rise, put it all in the colour and fun of a circus. The Stones appear in circus costume and introduce various musical or circus acts and a splendid time is attempted for all.

It almost works. This era in rock music was given to extra colour and flare. It was just post acid and the idea of mixing extended guitar solos with clown makeup fitted perfectly (Jimi Hendrix was infamously once ignored at a bar because they thought he was from the local circus). But there are two problems: the circus acts are of such different pace and mood to the music that they feel wrong; the music acts’ quality is too various. Jethro Tull and Marianne Faithful each mime their numbers.

John Lennon and Mick Jagger exchange some genuinely funny banter by way of introducing the latter’s piece. Lennon’s song is great. An appropriately nasty sounding Yer Blues fresh from the White Album. Whole Lotta Yoko is less stellar but not because of Yoko. She wails a la mode. The rest of the band (Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell from the Jimi Hendrix Experience) waste some interminable minutes playing some twelve bar garbage (what else do you play with rock musicians you don’t know well?) under the vocal. Worst of all, though, is the participation of Ivry Gitlis, a classical violin virtuoso who tries to get down with the kidz but really only shows that he is incapable of improvising over three endlessly repeated chords. I’ve never been able to watch this entire sequence. I’ve come to believe that one can actually die of embarrassment if one did.

(A dvd extra shows classical pianist Julius Katchen similarly wasting his time in a tux at a piano playing something he probably thinks sounds like the classical equivalent of takenoprisonersballsout roque. He even sweats like a lead guitarist only to lie on the cutting room concrete until someone picked him up and folded him into the bonus features. Puh!)

A top hatted, cigar smoking Keith Richards in an eyepatch says, “dig the Who.” And we do for they provide a non-stop proto pilates work out with an early version of an extended rock narrative, A Quick One While He’s Away. This is not note perfect but gloriously live, punching every second of its welcome running time. Completely bloody wonderful, in fact.

John Lennon introduces the night’s hosts in typically smartarse fashion and here we come to a persistent legend surrounding the decades long non-release of this film. The old guy at the campfire who everyone just assumes is the uncle of one of the others will insist that The Stones suppressed Rock and Roll Circus because the Who blew them off the stage. So peeved were the Jagster and his hood that so electric shadow could be cast through this piece of celluloid so long as they all should live (a fair few of them haven’t but that’s neither here nor there).

The Stones take the stage with a muscular version of Jumping Jack Flash and go through songs from their newest releases and one future classic (You Can’t Always Get What You Want). Do they drag after the Who? Well, considering they started filming at 2pm and only got to play at 5 the following morning, no.

Actually, even without considering that they play well. Jagger’s frontman DNA kicks into survival mode and he keeps the boil hot through the set. They finish with Sympathy for the Devil. It’s vibey and powerful, Jagger peeling off his skin tight top at the end to reveal a mean looking torso-sized tattoo of a demonic figure which would look like the worst drunken decision of his life if it wasn’t just felt-penned on.  But, no, great as they are in this, the Who do not put the Stones to shame. The issue of the delayed release would have had more to do with licencing than anything else (final period Beatles bugbear Allen Klein’s involvement might extend a clue or tue).

It’s these performances that compel the viewing of this film. Circuses strike me as despairing voids as far as entertainment goes and I’ve never sat through any of the circusy offerings here. But the better performances are great rock music from a time when it didn’t just sound like old bloke’s beats (as it does to me now even when played by young blokes).

The finale is also worth it as it is a testament to the personal logistics of the exercise. Audience and acts gather together on the floor in glistering harlequin colours. Jagger and Keith sit beside each other. Mick comes up with some unslept words before the backing track to Salt of the Earth wafts in. Keith takes the mic to deliver the first two lines in his customary Venusianly enunciated singing voice and when Mick takes over for the rest of the tune he sounds like Louis Armstrong during the worst hangover of his life. It’s funny but it’s sad.

The assembled company then get into it and the whole thing ends in a colour and movement extravaganza for the whole family (or part thereof).

The conceiver in chief of this film, Michael Lindsay Hogg, would move on within a month to film the Beatles steadily disintegrating in Let it Be. 

Next in this mini series: Gimme Shelter and Cocksucker Blues