Ten from the VoD Streamers for Halloween

Can't be arsed getting up from the couch to find a disc or try a fun round of spooky charades? Same here and it's not like we really get into Halloween in Australia, anyway. However, I've done the next best thing to a lucky dip and dragged out some things from the local streaming services. Caution: all such lists are folly. They never please all and sometimes please none. But these aren't necessarily from my favourite horror movies, more a mix of classics and new things that have caught my attention and then only from what you can click on from Netflix, Stan and SBS on Demand. I chose against Mubi (as I don't subscribe to it anymore) or TubiTV as while it has a few hard to see antiquities o' merit it can be daunting to navigate for the newbie (newbie? How old did I say I was?)  and Shudder still hasn't arrived here. And there are many I've left out. It was hard keeping it to ten. Anyway, Halloween.

THE EXORCIST (1973) - Netflix

I don't know how this happened but the version on Netflix is the original 1973 cut which is in every way superior to the bloated 2000 re-release. So, yes, this champ among horror flicks can be seen from the comfort of your living room while you hear all the sounds your house makes but normally don't notice. If you are watching with purpose tomorrow night and you haven't seen this cut (which should pinch the subtitle from the later cut as it now applies more accurately: the version you've never seen) choose this one. A great movie of any genre.

RAW (2016) - SBS on Demand

Starts as a kind of coming of age/loss of innocence but soon turns into a tale of newly discovered appetites and has a coda ending that lets its hitherto hidden tragedy into the light. French extremity is good for you.






LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) - SBS on Demand and Stan

Superb fresh take on vampirism also manages to outrank its source material (at least the translation from Swedish that I read). Notes of Stephen King are undeniable but this gets a lot more queasy. Solid tale, also, of the costs and benefits of friendship.







SATANIC (2016) - Netflix

This tale of young adults dabbling in the dark (when they should be going to Lollapalooza as they set out to do) and paying the price is much, much better than that premise or the thumbnail art it gets on Netflix. There's a real mounting sense of sadness in the encroaching dark which does a lot of driving where, in a lesser film, it would just be scares. One character says with the eerie confidence of the self-taught zealot, "Hell is a beautiful confusion." It's poignant and chilling. And she ain't kidding.

SHUTTER (2004) - Netflix

A superb Thai outing in the then burgeoning world of Asian Horror in the 2000s, Shutter is a slowburn personal investigation which keeps its mystery icy and saves its weird and horrible surprise (note: surprise, not jump scare) for the very last. You won't expect it.





HEREDITARY (2018) - Netflix

Justly celebrated horror debut of Ari Aster packs a wallop early and then goes quietly bonkers as a family visited by grief also gets visited by some grievous folk. A pleasing mix of hard edged family drama (just watch Toni Collette go off) and the supernatural.






DUMPLINGS (2004) - Stan

An ageing star seeks a means of arresting the process that plagues us all and finds a wise woman who can help her. There's a price, of course, and it might turn you off Yum Cha for life.








THE THING (1982) - Netflix

Doesn't get much better than John Carpenter's reimagining of the story Who Goes There, pushing the horror into the very cells of the characters. See if you can get through the blood test scene without biting the tip of your tongue off.




THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES (2008) - Stan

Really, really, really not for everybody. This found footage mini-epic goes deep into the dark of a sexual sadist's mind and crimes. I still don't know if it indulges in the sleaze it portrays (like Compliance) or fearlessly examines it.






KILLING GROUND (2016) - Stan

An intentionally scattered timeline begins to find its pieces and we see the ghastliness they build. Significant indications of sexual assault (though almost all of it is shown as aftermath) but the real fight, when it happens proves that this film is not just about violence but our response to it and how that can be both triumphant and ugly.

Review: READY OR NOT

Grace and Alex travel to his family mansion to get married. Grace is treated to various shades of contempt by the American bluebloods she's about to join, feeling judged and excluded. There's a traditional remedy for this as Alex informs her: a ritual game at midnight which will be a kind of initiation ceremony. Not becalmed by this she joins them in a private chamber in the house and draws not chess or chequers as others claim they got but hide and seek. She agrees to it with relieved at the tokenism of it but is not informed of all the details. We have a good idea already from a prologue scene involving a young man being hunted down through the halls by people in hideous masks. How she finds out this particular bent introduces us to both the archness of the film's wit and its readiness for gore.

That's all the plot as this tale is too easily spoiled. But it's also a good place to leave the description as the balance of wit and gore can play for for and against this film. Such an odd juxtaposition is not so odd in satire like this where the rich are shown as ruthless sociopaths as it gives plenty of scope for comment on the brutality that buys privilege. In contrast Grace is well served by her own wit and wile against the tightening grip of the game.

But the balance doesn't always work. Some scenes which should be nail biting are undercut by humour which then feels mild for the sacrifice. Others amp up the gore with so slight a comedic payoff that makes the violence feel squandered. This is less a criticism of the film than a recognition of the difficulty in managing such a thing. Brian Yuzna's Society which partially informs this film, did this by spiralling into mutation, rendering the rich into physical monstrosities. Get Out added a sci-fi weirdness. While there is the suggestion of a supernatural motivation to the events it has to be kept subtle which means the human action needs to feel earthly. It's a tough gig but the film manages to fly above it and deliver real punches in the finale.

A lot of that transcendence has to do with one of the most vigorous and rangy performances you'll see on screen this year. Samara Weaving owns this film, going from an agreeably sassy urbane woman to a hunted animal to an all out warrior, managing a ton of nuance along the way. Take her out of it and it's an ok social comment, with her at the centre you have a battle of dusty status quo against the force of life itself. Actors don't get Oscars for genre movies and seldom for comedy and that's a pity.

Review: JOKER

The publicity fanfare for this one has been with us for so long that we already know the story. Ok, why not: dowdy clown for hire gets bullied by life, finds power in kicking back and becomes the joker. This is Batman's universe so we meet Bruce Wayne as a child and his father as a corporate despot. So, what's left to tell?

The style is stellar, strong colour usage to guide us and a deft hand with action plus a real way with world building as the streets of Gotham City crowd in on us and let us cling to the anti-hero and silently plead with him not to be so mentally ill. Don't get me wrong; this film is superbly crafted and doesn't drag for a frame of its two hours on screen. 

Arthur's condition makes him laugh when he's stressed and this often causes offence. That's ok as he has a card that explains this. That it doesn't mollify anyone who reads it is a major thematic statement. You just can't get away with a joke anymore. Part of the PR blitzkrieg for this film has been writer/director Todd Phillips claim that woke culture made him do it. That had the desired effect and kept everyone talking. Well, it's there on screen, like it or not, and it's presented openly.

But I started getting nagged by something even as I was sitting in a Hoyts plex watching and enjoying this movie: is this movie good because it's a good movie or is it good because it draws from great ones? By this I don't mean it reconstructs moments of mighty cinema because it plays pretty cleanly that way, too. You don't need Robert De Niro in his role ... unless you wanted to remind your audience of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. You do that because you want people to sit up, take notice and nod along with your bullshit about woke culture. The point is so compelling, is the suggeston, that we had to pretend to be Martin Scorsese to put it across. Try it in Hangover IV and who would notice?

I couldn't shake this off once it occurred to me and while I'm no champion of cultural coddling I have only weariness for attacks upon it and anyone who lunges on any figure or movement that, I mean this, just wants us to be a little nicer to each other (there are more complex ways of expressing that but I prefer the plain words). This is a pity. It's a pity because, in the middle of this, Joaquin Phoenix is delivering the performance of his career. It is nuanced and bold, brash here and almost silently subtle there, applying a jeweller's skill to a pond pebble. At major turns he's as thin as Travis Bickle or as cloying as Rupert Pupkin and it just makes me want to see those movies again (oh, and Network, but that's almost a spoiler) and let their higher style and greater depth weave their magic all over again.

I know, Marty himself wasn't above some vigorous cine-quoting even at his finest, but he always had more to say and none of it sounded like some old bastard ranting at a tramstop the way this film does. And this is much better than Wes Anderson busking Hal Ashby movies so violently you start wondering if the originals were any good or - Oops, I am become Ranter. Look, go and see it as a well made and substantial part of the superhero cosmos. It won't turn you into an incel or a social justice warrior but you'll get it (which you will if you see the movie, get it?)

Spring Part 1: Just Like Me

The days grow longer and brighter as the green buds burst and the sneezes splash the air. It's spring and our thoughts turn to attraction ... to the difficult and irresistible ones in our lives, the ones we can neither live with or without, who'll be the death of us and to whom we are always extending one last chance. So, don't get too blithe with the sprigs and puffy eyes: summer's on the way and spring is smirking and saying, "that's just like me."

Season trailer

A New Leaf (USA 1971, Elaine May)

One of the funniest rom coms ever from the dark, satirical mind of Elaine May. Walter Matthau's upper crust bachelor must marry or forego a fortune so plans to find a future victim of a planned honeymoon accident. She is the klutzy Henrietta, played by May herself. For all the toughness of its social satire it yet retains a strange goodness of nature. From the year that brought us the obscure gem Little Murders and the deathless classic Harold and Maude.

Diary (Hong Kong 2006, Pang Brothers)

The Pang brothers output has appeared uneven but really they've just been trying different things and they are to be applauded for straying from the expectation that they should just keep remaking The Eye. Diary is the tale of a young woman grieving from rejection meets the object of her obsession's doppelganger and they start their own romance. But what is really going on? The mystery intensifies so much that the film has to begin all over, the second part having it's own opening credits. Not fun but deep and dark and worth your while.

Dead Ringers  (Canada 1988, David Cronenberg)

As with The Dead Zone David Cronenberg showed he was happy to broaden out from his trademark body horror into terror more psychological. Dead Ringers' tale of the intimidating intimacy of a pair of twins who use their societal clout to get what they want and their knowledge of each other to keep things interesting ... and disturbing. Jeremy Irons thanked David Cronenberg in his Oscar victory speech years after this film, adding that some of us would know why. "Why" was being lifted from the talent-obscuring aristocrat roles that he had been getting that promised a career of blandness. Cronenberg clearly saw much more in him and the results are anything but bland.

The Innocents (U.K. 1960, Jack Clayton)

Spooky go at the oft adapted Turn of the Screw has proven the most durable due to casting and some very canny depictions of the weird. You want ghosts? Ditch the mist and bedsheet look and show them how the were in life. There are scenes in this film that can still go right through you. And that's before you get to the brooding psychological undercurrent which, depending on how you flip it, can lead to even more disturbing images. A must.

The Ugly (New Zealand, 1997, Scott Reynolds)

A nightmarish mental hospital on a dark and stormy night. A young hot shot psyche visits a troubling patient, a serial killer with the demeanour of a quiet young bloke who doesn't always understand his crimes. The shrink wants a career-making triumph, an expose and cure of the monster's disorder. But it just isn't going to go that way. That goes for us. We think we have this film pegged from the urban gothic opening but we're going to need some presence of mind as those on screen seem destined for perdition. An extraordinary genre-warping entry into the 1990's fascination with serial killers on screen The Ugly is unjustly little seen. Let's change that.

Eyes Wide Shut (U.K./U.S.A, 1999, Stanley Kubrick)

Often dismissed as a transitional effort for Kubrick on his way to A.I., his final film has both substance and depth. The cinemaster is having some winking fun with the casting of the golden couple of Cruise and Kidman but his examination of the double standard at the centre of the story is rigorous. The ad campaign led to expectations of debauchery when Kubrick had made elegance. And eloquence: the final word of the film and his screen career might well have been his own last words.

Apologies for the lateness of this season. Life catches up and gets in the way. But it's here. Have fun finding some of these and enjoy everyone. Sooner than I would have wanted, spring part 2 will be up. So, take your antihistamines and buckle in.

Review: ANIMALS

Laura and Tyler are BFFs. They party all night, every night and crawl by day through hangovers to jobs they don't care about. As Tyler says, all days are the same forever which is why we need nights to divide them. Laura has been failing to write a novel for ten years which is as long as she's known Tyler. Family and friends ask her about it but by now it's as earnest a query as "how are you?" One night she picks up hunky young pianist Jim who is perfect. Things are about to change.

This is a film about friendship, real friendship, solid intimacy, the kind of friendship where memories of it are created every day. The film begins with Tyler asking Laura how they met. The dialogue is constructed of impressions without context; the speakers know what they mean and we can imagine. That kind of friendship. But it's also about the kind of friendship where the closeness means knowledge of weakness and temptation and what happens when its triggers are left untouched, even for a moment.

Under the images and the words and the music and the fun there runs a current which proves (without spoilers) to be the central journey. It does have to do with friendship but it also has to do with the recognition of its boundaries, how a lifestyle of fun as an expression of life has become a yolk. Laura really might have that novel in her but it won't get written until the present stops looking so much like the past. That dialogue about their first meeting appears twice in the film but never in real time; we hear the conversation but see the women who spoke it or are yet to speak it in vignettes of their shared experience. The arc is Laura's. These are her memories. For all the bracing declamation Tyler performs, the more stagy the more pertinent, it is the novelist Laura tuning her memory into prose.

There are many montages of the women partying and at first it feels repetitive. But there are so many the it soon becomes recognisable as part of the film's weave. With a lot of the sequences we hear dialogue between them in voice over. It's not just economical filmmaking it's quite accurate in that it indicates the difference between the words we use to construct memories and the images that appear to us more immediately are distinct. And we begin to understand that this is Laura's experience replaying, from the first frenetic and boisterous montage early on to the magnificent celebration towards the end. It is a cinematic realisation of a writer playing her capital of experience and eventually discovering her own voice.

Holliday Grainger gives us a Laura who is struggling against the wasting time but still resentful of what is expected of her as a young, bright woman. What we see most in her is doubt and even in the most gut chugging scenes of interminable boozing and snorting she brings a barely controlled self-loathing at yet another occasion where she has buckled rather than take control. One moment is told with intimidating truth: she surmises infidelity and flees the scene to privacy in a cubicle as her insides seem to be dissolving; she knows the worst is true and has no power to reverse it. It's exactly how that feels.

Alia Shawkat, whose team has included me since Search Party, takes a little more effort to fit into the more showy and declaiming Tyler. To be fair some of her rants (lifted by the source novelist) are more fashioned than natural but she does smooth it out and adds depth with some subtle pathos. If anything, her role is driven by denial and its friction with inevitability. A little stagy? Sure but she's just like that. Laura begins with a foundation whereas Tyler is on 11 from the start. It's a hard gig but Shawkat gives enough self-realisation to let us in before she turns into a pillar of caricature.

Fra Fee shows more than meets the eye and adds presence by (this will read like faint praise) being believably nice. Dermot Murphy as as the dark 'n' charismatic poet Marty has fun with his seducer-in-chief, offering clear allure and queasy danger.

This film has been called Withnail and I for girls. Hmm. Couple of things. Withnail and I was released in the '80s but set in the '60s. The two men face the prospect of having to grow up while the "greatest decade in the history of mankind" comes to a shambling, exhausted close. It's not entirely nostalgia; the '70s await with hard times and if these boys are actors they are going to have to start acting. That theme of youth's shelf life is common to both films but Laura and Tyler are lodged deeply into a social environment that is not about to reject them, those own-bootstraps are going to take a lot more pulling. Absent from the friendship of Tyler and Laura is the male reserve that prevents declaration of it: they love each other enough never to need to utter the "as friends" qualification. This, tellingly, is clearest when they are bickering which they do increasingly and with increasing stakes. Withnail and I is a deserved modern classic, effortlessly quotable and always enjoyable on a re-watch. Animals is a different case, using the language of cinema more delicately and getting in closer. The comparison doesn't hurt either film but is unhelpful.

I was hungover at the Nova (rhyme! well, in an Australian accent) and the sight of all that drinking was making me wince so perhaps I was well placed to sweep the infection of the fun from the slide and look more closely at the story of the women and how they were going to cope with that scission that must affect every relationship that starts in youth and continues to maturity. Also, I had a guilty recognition watching Laura tinker at her writing and frequently feeling like an impostor. Did that for a little over a decade with about the same to show for it. It was really meant to be something to start with  but in time it turned into a social introduction. And I was younger and rallying around with the same kind of fun folk. A drink always sounded better than editing. It had a painful resonance.

Pain and resonance are real flavours in the mix here but so are so much else. Animals is neither the jolly japes of young bohemians larking about as laddish ladies but nor is it a chick flick. Just as the greatest children's cinema works because everyone who watches it is or has been a child, everyone who knows the fear of leaving youth will find something here. I personally maintain that we are far better able to deal with accounts of our own lives if we dispense with nostalgia and recall the instruction of the years, for good and ill (this can be easier said than done, though). This story involves a lot of weakness but it is a tale of strength.

Review: THE NIGHTINGALE

Clare, a young wife, mother and ex-convict in Van Diemen's Land is legally bound to a young psycho in a uniform who delays letting her go with a ticket of leave. Lieutenant Hawkins likes to show her off to the mess hall as a singer ("our little nightingale") and later violate her as a rapist of an evening. After her husband in a rage breaches the line by assaulting Hawkins the latter seeks drunken revenge which escalates into murder, even more rape and then infanticide. The next day, Lt. Hawkins decamps for Launceston (pronounced Lonston, as well it might have been) cutting through the wilderness with a small expedition. He's not escaping guilt, he feels none and his position puts him outside of retribution anyway. He's chasing a promotion and a ticket out of the backwater he oversees. Clare, lone survivor of an atrocity that will leave you shaking to watch, swears revenge, picks up a local tracker and goes in pursuit.

So far this is a revenge western (or southern). The constant stand off between Clare and Billy will inevitably soften or be forced into trust and a bond will ensue. The baddy toy soldier will get some bullets for lunch and the credits will roll. But the best revenge plots put their enraged protagonists through an ethical wringer and end unpredictably. Even John Wayne's Ethan in The Searchers had to stand back from his primeval hatred and take some serious stock. After the opening of this story we have no greater wish than for nasty, lingering deaths for Hawkins and his crew. Until a big and almost eerie spoil-able moment, we expect that very thing will be happening if we just sit tight and wait.

But this is a Jennifer Kent film. Her first feature, The Babadook, showed us grief, survivor guilt and depression as a monster movie where the monster was just a thought made manifest but grew into terrifying power. It remains one of my favourite films of the decade and one of the best ever made in this country. When I heard that her second would not be horror but revenge I was nothing but intrigued. She'd only made one feature film but I was eager to see her take on the subject. It was worth the wait.

There's a lot going on here. First, the setting. Van Diemen's Land, the most brutal of the Australian penal colonies. While there is little direct depiction of convict life Clare and her family are convict caste and we are in no doubt as to where they sit in the social order. They are also Irish which puts them into near untouchable status: it wasn't just bodies that got transported to the southern colonies.

Billy, an indigenous man living where the most complete exercise of Australian genocide was enacted. During the second act he learns that all of his people have been exterminated by the British. So, it's not just the rape, the murder and the child killing, but the violation of most of the people on the island. From the off, we are looking at a hunt we know to be bigger than its parts and one that we, against ourselves, want to end in retributive violence ... in some of the most breathtakingly beautiful country on the planet.

This is shot in 4 x 3 which keeps us all close together in the bush which looks tall rather than scenic and gives a strong sense of lowered visibility. It's this rather than an affectation for the classic cinema shot before widescreen formats that its plot might suggest. That's another thing, there is no cuteness in this film. Even in The Babadook we got quite a lot of winks from classic and obscure horror movies showing on tvs in the house. It wasn't intrusive but it gave the film a slight distraction it suffered from. Here, we are in a place at a time and that's it. Well, of course it isn't, it does have a great deal to say to any time but within that tight 1.37:1 frame it's 1825.

And then there's reconciliation. Clare's lower caste state and Billy's even lower one fuel the beginnings of an understanding between them. But Kent knows, as do we, that she cannot deliver what hasn't happened unless it is through fantasy. Never say never, perhaps, but it won't be happening here where the violence is so easy to get away with and where few, if any, care to change that. That is the world we are in right up to the end credits.

And then there's the central driver which at first just looked like revenge but increasingly just looks like damage. Both Clare and Billy are bound by their trauma and whether it has been administered personally or through military invasion it can be hard for them to discern the difference between retribution and relief. We have been asking exactly what she has in mind in chasing seasoned soldiers through difficult terrain, outnumbered and outskilled. A pivotal moment sees Clare confronted with the very question of what she should do and it is life or death. She is fresh from an act of like-for-like brutality which tells us she is capable but when we see her in this (no spoilers) moment her and our most frantic thought is for survival, not justice. Billy couldn't just say a thing or two about that he has been. What was a serviceable vengeance plot now has a scary depth to it.

Irish actor Ainsling Franciosi holds the centre of the screen, in fury here and shivering vulnerability there bearing almost visible weight in her every move. Baykali Ganambarr keeps his gravity against Clare's tempest with a passivity that feels practised from the experience of pummelling authority. When he breaks from it the sense of his freedom can draw tears. Surrounded by bush that can variously soothe the eye but scream like a lost soul at night and settlers and cruelty-driven convicts on the way a kind of balance is struck but it's delicate and ready at the slightest touch to topple and kill.

Jennifer Kent has made another film of great depth that stretches out from its closest genre to shock us into thought. Reports of walkouts during early festival screenings are understandable but create their own questions. The violence is rough and hard to watch but its real ugliness comes from motivation rather than gore (though there is some of that). If what you've heard worries you I wish I knew how to assure you that the tougher parts of this ride are part of something transcendent that is worth every minute of screen time. Mind you, I sat through the entire end credits if only to feel soothed by the Irish lament that played over them. If you do see this film and don't feel an overwhelming urge to go forth and do something good for someone then you really have some hard questions for yourself.

Review: ONCE UPON A TIME ... IN HOLLYWOOD

Ageing actor Rick Dalton spends down time with his stunt double Cliff Booth and as they smoke leisurely cigarettes, drive around, plough into Margaritas and watch their old movies, time soaks in letting them know, through the gentle anaesthetic that their time has past on this path. There are other paths but they feel like admissions. Meanwhile a young solar beauty Sharon Tate strolls through a day off and happens on a cinema showing her latest goofy action comedy, introduces herself and watches, absorbing the appreciation of the audience in the anonymous dark. Meanwhile, a group of hippy teenagers roam the sunlit streets and dive the dumpsters for food singing is clear girlish voices chants like, "all is one." It's Los Angeles, 1969. They might as well be singing Helter Skelter.

Rick gets a get-out-of-obscurity card from a well placed admirer but it's so radically different to his path that he considers is a kind of resignation. A later scene has him receive wisdom from an eight year old colleague who learns of his plight through fiction: he summarises the Western novel he's reading and realises it's about himself. His stunt double plays out a Western for real which takes him into the heart of darkness and violence. Margot Robbie watches rapt as her character takes pratfalls on screen, played by the real Sharon Tate as the people around her fill her ears with the joy of cinema and flashbacks to her martial arts training with someone playing Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee as a character has already had his arse handed to him by Cliff in a needlessly controversial scene in a backlot. This is a Quentin Tarantino film and all of this forms the same cosmos. But an indication of why I think this is the first Tarantino film I've cared much about since Jackie Brown is that as part of the Manson murder timeline we see Charlie once and very briefly. That's not a spoiler but saying more would be. My point is that, despite the sensory overload of imagery and the near three hour running time, this film feels tight and restrained in all the right places. That's not something I'd say of anything from Kill Bill to The Hateful 8.

Some authorial marks appear early (Rick's old tv show will be mentioned and you live through a few sequences of it that could easily have been referred to in dialogue, a character mentions seeing a film at home on 35 mm and we see the projector loaded and working) and made me shift in my seat. Has QT gone so far as to provide self-parody as part of his auteurism? These do settle down, though. Later iterations are meaningful as they do fill narrative gaps with massive style. Otherwise, we get some of his better traits. Process, as in Rick learning his lines with a reel to reel tape machine, Cliff driving smoothly through the streets or Roman Polanski as a character driving his hot MG like he's in a race. Cliff picks up a hitchhiker and its playful progress is undercut by a mounting dread. Sharon picks up a woman hitcher who could be a Manson girl but its friendly and fits with her Disney princess exploration of the streets and lanes. Rick might call for lines during a scene but he learns them and works on his performance. Cliff gets home to his trailer, behind a drive-in screen and beside an oil derrick, feeds his well-trained dog, makes up some instant mac and cheese, and lounges in front of the tv. If we didn't understand they were Manson's followers, the dumpster diving girls play at their tasks like teenagers, laughing and larking. Around all of this day to day the gentle sunlight of an old time reminds us that it's about to be bruised by crime, shattered by industrial cataclysm and drawn irrevocably away from its Beach Boys harmony pleasure. This is not the love letter to old genre cinema that Kill Bill was, there are real things happening on screen, I mean real emotionally and culturally and historically. There really is a purpose in what we are shown.

On that, the contested fight scene between Cliff and Bruce Lee does have resonance in later moments as we see him instruct others professionally. Does it misrepresent Lee as an arrogant windbag who could be beaten by a much older man? Maybe, but that's a charge for a documentary (I know how tired that is as a joke but I'm not joking). The scene has far more to do with the passing of batons and the hubris of an older hand not ready to give up his place. The man he doubles for is going through his own career comeuppance, it's just one that feels the effects of alcohol and personal perdition rather than fists and throws. This is at the thematic centre of the film and expresses it variously with blunt force and subtlety but does express it. The content that I had trouble with was the flashback to Cliff's past which features an incident left open. Personally, I think it's up to your ethics whether you indulge the wink from the film itself or assume the lack of definition is supported by the potential redemptive violence later. It's troubling either way.

Troubling in a warmer way is Tarantino's fluid presentation of film production. We've already seen him digitally replace Steve McQueen with Leonardo DiCaprio in a scene from The Great Escape and mock up a 60s style war movie for Rick Dalton (though it's far more stylish than it would have been if genuine). But in scenes of Rick performing in his bad guy role in the tv show we are given the kind of cheat that used to be standard in movies about movies from the days o' yore. As Rick plays the scene in the saloon it is presented as assembled from different takes with seamless audio right up to the point where he calls for his line. I wasn't counting setups but that isn't how it's done. A later scene involving a stand-off does the same. The most annoying case of this is in the 1980 film The Stunt Man where a fugitive turned film actor is put through a kind of performance rollercoaster made of hundreds of shots as though he's playing it and getting roughed up for real in one pass. In this film there is no apology for the conceit, we're meant to believe it and empathise with how rattled the actor is. It's done that way for the plot but it still feels contemptuous. When Tarantino does it here it's because he knows you know (and it speeds the plot point and it is more fun to watch); it's a point of celebration for the film's title with its cross of Disney and cynical studio industry.

This reminds me not so much of the retrograde art direction that helped make Tarantino famous, a kind of perennial cool mixed with nostalgia, as it does a more recent outing by another standalone figure in contemporary cinema, Sion Sonno. Sonno's Why Don't You Play in Hell is a kind of farewell to the cinema of film stock, attended projection, and plucky filmmakers. In a plot Tarantino would love, a gang of aspirant moviemakers inadvertently get caught up in a Yakuza war and solve it by making both sides finance a movie made which will feature both in the ascendant. There is a mass of Japanese cinema history on the screen but also an increasing sad smile at its passing. Tarantino celebrates what we now call (but no longer watch) appointment tv as well as the movies of money men with a chapter close both satisfying in its violence and heavy-hearted in its signature.

I was worried about the length of this movie as the past month's film festival had given me lower back pain (retro cinema seating, indeed! ... argh it's something I've had since my twenties) and the thought of sitting still for two hours forty-five was bidding me wait until I felt better. But as the movie took flight I recalled something. When I was a kid I used to love going down to the Strand, having a lime milkshake and a burger at the Ozone Cafe, and going and playing with the old train engine and canon on the lawn by the beach. There was a stretch of parking shaded permanently by big shaggy banyan trees and, for a while, weekend after weekend, I would marvel at the sight of a jet black E-Type Jaguar parked there among the dowdy Holdens and Fords. There was such alluring mystery to it. I imagined a James Bond or The Saint (the stick figure from that title sequence was graffiti-ed on the side of nearby Castle Hill). The big sleek shark-like car really got into me, so much that I knew that seeing the owner would just be another Townsvillite plonker like me. I never found out and never will. The thing is that now I leave the warmth of that in the childhood file and only get it back out of the dust when something as exciting happens, something like this movie. Both of these are memories with falsehood (i.e. nostalgia) and it's what we can read in the space between the plain event and the fantasy. It can rend your heart. It can exhilarate you. It didn't last but I got out of my seat as the lights came up without any pain at all.