Review: PIG

Rob forages for truffles with his pig in the forest where he lives and trades them for groceries. Nights are cold and lonely, broken only by the recording left him by his departed wife. He can never listen all the way through. One night he is knocked to the floor by a pair of intruders who make off with the pig. But the pig is not just a truffle hunter, she is a companion. Rising, caked with blood, he hunts for and finds leads then ropes the young guy who collects his truffles into driving into the city on a quest.

So begins one of the quietest yet most intense transposed revenge westerns imaginable. Nicholas Cage brings his zen game to the role, receiving the worst of blows from bouncers and waiters alike and imparting precise wisdom gleaned from his former life at the top of the pile of the city's chefs. His presence alone is enough to get a seat at a table of a grimace-inducingly rarefied restaurant as part of his information trail blazing. In a bizarre underground fight scene where the down and out try to win money by standing up as off duty waiters beat the tar out of them he holds as best he can, returning no violence. Yet he is driven by his rage. This casting is poignant, allowing the champion of the giant performance to express his power with only the slightest action and a heavy silence. This is (and not for the first time) minimalist Nic Cage.

As an urban western it plays like an arthouse indy that you might choose because it was showing that night at the Valhalla. That's not a slight. This was once a routine decision based on a fridge calendar and the scarcity of marginal cinema (and marginal cinemas, for that matter) It bore a promise of reward for curiosity. You might see something anodyne, trifling or profound but the excursion so often returned riches that you did it again and again. Pig reminds me of that for its stripped narrative and refusal to play like a mainstream vehicle. Even the soft lighting of the night scenes recalls the higher end of the arthouse indies of the '80s. Adam Arkin's boss baddy is offered with an intensity of performance alone. Alex Wolff as Amir, the apprentice figure, a kind of Sancho Panza whose arc is dependably more dynamic than the hero's, fills the action and wonder that we need around the hero. It's a thankless role but given with real craft.

But do I believe the bad guys motivation for his crime? Not really. It's possible but unlikely. Is the waiters' fight club preposterous and pointless? Both, we get a little more character building from it but nothing that we wouldn't already expect. Weirdly, it is the pig herself, that serves as both McGuffin and catharsis and it's that odd extra step that I like and pushed that sense of going to the Valhalla on a cold and rainy night. If I'd come home on a tram from this (instead of clicking on it among the Netflix tiles) I'd have been feeling it settle and nourish. There's only a little nostalgia to this: we will probably never have an active arthouse cinema scene in Melbourne again, but we can still find films that remind us of why we miss it.

Still at some cinemas but I watched it on Netflix.

Review: THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD

Julie hasn't worked out what she wants to do. Her twenties are ticking over and she still can't quite land in a pursuit she loves. Her mother gives her blessing to Julie whenever she changes course, be it medicine, psychology, photography or just the bookshop where she gets a job. It's the same with men. Her psych lecturer offers his class the hypothesis that he and Julie meet at a partyand four Instagram photos later, they've had an affair. She falls for the hunky photographic model on an assignment but then ditches him for a comic book artist she meets at a bar. And so on. She likes being in a couple but not joining the other's family. When that and the question of children comes up she pursues someone she has met at a party she crashes. When that gets too complicated.... you get the idea.

We follow Julie through a series of decisions both beneficial and quietly disastrous as she moves through a life in which she feels she is a self spectator rather than an actor. Conversations, even those had with significant partners about deeply significant things can feel as though she can't decide which of the sincere and contradictory statements she should make. She is the antihero without the machismo. If she were on the beach in Algiers instead of Mersault she might have turned the gun to the waves to see how the bullets sounded when they hit the water. 

If we baulk at affording her some sympathy (assuming empathy is impossible) we might ask ourselves why we tolerate so much of Camus' square peg. Does Julie need to be put on trial for her caprices for us to take her seriously? There's a sequence where the narrator (possibly her mother or older self, it's not stated) takes us on a tour of the matrilineal line of Julie's ancestry from her staunchly single mother, her theatre star grandmother, and so on back to the early 19th century where the family portrait shows us a woman paralysed by unhappiness. 

I was wondering why I was letting her off easily but now recall friends of mine who have done very similar things for real. If they have severed themselves from partners or abandoned domestic situations I can recall that I am quicker to try to understand why it's happened than I am to judge. Time after time I have seen relief rather than happiness on their faces or heard it in their voices as almost all of them are aware of the sadness, anger or grief fomenting in their wakes. In such situations you really just have to ask how you can help and keep your pontificating to yourself. That's very close to how I began to treat this fictional character. And then, in the final scene, the reward is a subtle one, containing no bellows of triumph nor whines of self-pathos. She might have wasted her youth (many do) but it's not without a few lessons that stick.

This reaction would have been impossible without the screen presence of Renate Reinsve, who gives Julie the nuance we need to keep up with her. If you don't feel fondness for her in this energetic and powerful turn then this will be a very long two hours in a cinema seat. But to look at the lengthy sex-free seduction at the party between her and Eivind or the later and equally unconsummated stolen encounter with him in a moment of frozen time you should be feeling your values pecked at by both your conscience and your id. A scene of frenzied breakup sex takes a turn well away from convention and illustrates the devotion her then partner feels for them as a pair, giving us surprises of candour rather than violence. A later scene where Julie witnesses the video of an interview with that ex that goes wildly off the rails as the latter insists on a position he's fallen into with the same kind of force he knew from fighting with Julie, as though he's channeling her.

This highly committed film will not be for everybody and even those it does suit might not meet it as a comedy. In the sense that comedy is the workings of the universe laid bare this does qualify but it doesn't play like The Philadelphia Story or Pretty Woman. It does end in warmth but it's the warmth of your pockets on a cold day, not a hearth fire.

1982@40: THE WALL

A rock star sits in his hotel room as his grim past visits. Losing his father while young, a brutal education system, a scarring marriage and much more that his success cannot obscure. By the time his entourage come to collect him he is virtually comatose from depression and self-horror. This turns him to visions of fascism which then bring him to a break. He imagines being put on trial with everyone who tormented him in some way as the witnesses and a giant worm for a judge who orders that the wall the rock star has built between himself and the wall be torn down. We end with hopeful images of children cleaning up the debris.

The story behind the production of this film is complicated and dramatic and is worth your pursuit. I won't cover it here, concentrating on what Alan Parker did with it. The source album of the same name was one of the band's milestones and causes of its disintegration. But it was massively successful, played as a rock opera with a more coherent narrative line than something like Tommy and criticised its society with a grim determination. Perfect for a downer film at a time when even the newer pop music was also on a years long downer. What Parker had to do was as much logistics as cinematic style. He used the by then advanced state of Gerald Scarfe's animation (an extension of his cover art for the record, used by the band's shows for the tour) and added as much British dourness as he could muster.

The main character Pink was played by rock star Bob Geldof whose lanky frame and intensity came prefabricated from his punk days. This is not a film where many characters crack a smile so Geldof's jaded pallor or dirstorted screams blend well with the hysterical animation style of Scarfe. The major point of contrast lies in Kevin McKeon's performance of Pink as a boy. His seriousness feels wrong on such a young child but that is the intended effect; he's had to grow up young. A scene in which he tries to attach himself to a stranger's father is so worrying we don't have time to feel sadness. Then, later, during the album's great classic Comfortably Numb his act of compassion for a sick animal and then his own illness is as haunting as it is heartrending. The rest of the film is more violent in its imagery of factory processing children, hands reaching from death camp trains, an animation of Pink's marriage running from a beautiful dance of flowers to mental cruetly and violence and far too much more to detail from this many layered movie.

Is it just an extended rock video? No, but you could play extracts that way. Mainly Parker has kept his focus on the narrative that was already there and stitched together a rich quilt of emotive visuals, wisely trusting the music to do much of the work.

The Wall was one of the very few old guard rock albums that broke through to teenagers more inclined to the alternative of punk. The Punk Rock Board of Review, cleared the record for use by persons under twenty and we got into it without the help of midnight headphones. It was a wrenching experience, alleviated here and there by some magnificent music and it had the all important critique of institutions that any teenager felt. It felt weird to be buying it back in 1979 from the same shop I'd bought Never Mind the Bollocks two years earlier but there it was, its perfect playing, arrangements and clean production blaring out: "Hey, teacher leave those kids alone!" 

When the movie was announced years later, we lifted our heads, noted it, and stood in the queue at the cinema. In the very last year of my teens I watched with joy and admiration as the adolescent images of relentless cruelty and unfairness rolled out and nodded approval as one of my own generation's heroes played the boomer rock star turned teen Hitler and tiny screaming victim. Parker had marshalled his pieces perfectly. It was cleanly drawn but as emotive as a school kid and, because of that, it felt more complete than the record. The boomer rock epic of alienation and terror really did have a heart. A warm one. That was so good to know.

Review: EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

Evelyn thinks her life is a chaos of busy task juggling and temporal bandaids but when she and her family go into the IRS for a tax audit her world explodes into countless universes which she is meant to defend against her nemesis who had possessed her own daughter. So, normal day at the office.

Well, that's poignant in this case (rather than just a wisecrack) as this complicated story plays fair in a few ways to help you through a rapid timeline of identities and conflicts, starting with keeping the locations sparse. They might be in a distant universe's version of the tax office or the laundry business Evelyn runs or the opera house/cinema where she meets a suave version of her dadbod husband but they are all controllably recognisable. Also, we're given enough indicators and instructions early on to get the hang of the restless shifting that will occupy almost all of the two plus hours of run time.

Things to keep in mind from the off are that Evelyn and her many failed ambitions at middle age still thinks of herself as potential. Her nemesis, sometimes in the form of her daughter in a series of increasingly bizarre personae, is the circle, a thing of completion, destruction and repetition (also a giant bagel as the event horizon of a black hole). These are just starting points but they are active influences in every action and conflict on screen. This might sound like hard wank (not a typo) but if you're not on board with this and keep waiting for the zippy plot to settle down and get on with it you'll be waiting way past the end credits. Stroll up the gangway and you're in for a ride that tackles a lot of profundity about the choices we make in life that is as touching as it is massively entertaining.

At the centre of the cast and all the universes is Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn, put upon and still expecting to make something of herself as a creative performer. Alone among the main cast her core persona remains intact throughout as the others switch character traits and personal force. We need this if only as an anchor for the multiverse miasma this story gives us. Ke Huy Kwan as her husband does the most to switch between whoever it is possessing him at the time with a base character recognisable through palpable subtlety. Stephanie Hsu has the most fun as the enemy of all the universes as well as a young adult trying to establish her own identity in her family. And one of the most startling turns comes from Jamie Lee Curtis as Dierdre the tax agent/interdimensional monster/etc, in a frump wig and prosthetic boady padding.

If a universe where the inhabitants all have hotdogs for fingers and have to use their feet to play the piano, or jumping between universes by doing irrational actions makes you think of the cuter end of whimsy and the movies of Michel Gondry or Spike Jonez be aware that the humour of this one is kept shy of all out comedy, trusting more in the appeal of concepts which helps to keep focussed on the graver aspects of the overall situation. When the Kubrickian scene of prehistoric primates with hotdog fingers defeating the ones with five more human like digits per hand starts funny, the sight of one of the vanquished lifeless and bloody hands is not. A late revelation by one of the central characters's alter egos leads to a fight scene with one of the most surprising outcomes I've ever witnessed. It's profound but it's light.

I could keep going but the scope and complexity forbid it. Don't see this movie if you doubt your alertness or feel remotely drowsy, you will miss it. However, if you like the idea of a life examined through an ingenious creative filter you should see it now.

CAPRICORN ONE @ 45

As three astronauts prepare to take off on their way to Mars a secret service suit gets them out of the rocket and choofs them away to a secluded desert locale. The rocket takes off empty and the spacemen are told they will have to fake it in a movie studio. In a magnificently written speech the boffin behind the project explains that due to the voting public's indifference to the space program and the failure of a contracted life support system the mission would go ahead as a fake. Three highly trained team players with their lifes' dream ripped away. Not happy. The blackmail measures in place for their cooperation compel them but, as one journalist notices, one of them has relayed a coded message to his wife during a video call that exposes the scheme. The chase is on.

A good cast of up and comers, contemporary A-listers and character actors, sturdy score by the great Jerry Goldsmith and some fine writing and stunning action sequences make this one a winner. Odd, because this was only my second viewing and I was left with the impression that it barely edged ok. That notion of public disengagement in the scientist's speech is at the heart here, suggesting a people who need ever more extravagant stimulation to interest themselves can be manipulated as long as the show looks good. While it doesn't attempt the profundity of the similarly-themed Network from the previous year, the concern about a numbing of an America jaded from Vietnam and Watergate drives home. And that in what might have been left as a decent thriller.

Elliot Gould as the newshound on the case plays it like an updated Front Page. His sassy rapid-fire exchanges with Karen Black are like a Playboy generation Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. The shouting matches between him and his editor take this further with knowing quotes from '40s classics (expertly funny performance from David Doyle in a meagre two scenes). In contrast, the more paranoid scenes with the young conscientious control room staffer and the issues-bound astronauts play more seriously.

That keeps things going for the central interest but director Peter Hyams, towards the start of a distinguished career in neo-noirs and political thrillers, throws in a white knuckle sequence of an unstoppable sabotaged car racing through city streets, a gruelling hillside  climb and an utterly thrilling air chase between two helicopters and a cropduster bi-plane. A lesser film would have been built around these scenes but here they take their place in a drama, emerging from the narrative line with a natural feel. Oh, those choppers, there are a few moments where they hover and turn toward each other like a pair of massive alien wasps conferring. It's unlikely but so effectively unnerving that you don't care.

The annoying Mendez (did I ever know his first name, everyone just called him Mendez) at high school said he thought that this was how the moon shots were done. The fact that his claimed belief in this was itself rubbery means that this film might both excite and disappoint him. I never found out nor cared to but recollecting it as I watched made me curious as to the age of the moon landing conspiracy bullshit. A quick wiki (so take that on board) led me to Bill Kaysing's succinctly titled We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle was published only the year before this film's release. To my mind that suggests this idle nonsense was under the ether from Apollo 11 on. That it inspired a pacy and compelling thriller that also took a breath to take stock of its own culture bears witness to the value of even the worst books. While I find the meme post-truth world irritating and defeatist, this fable of it reaches through decades to burn us a little more. Seldom is a sting so winsome.

Capricorn One is available through SBS on Demand.

Review: OLD

Guy and Priscia are taking their kids to a beach resort. They are working through some marital problems and, because life is complicated, they plan to separate before Priscia's cancer gets too debilitating. All that and it's still not the whole movie. As they settle into some luxury at the hotel they meet a few more couples, all of whom seem to have some sticky problems of their own. Then the maitre d' takes them aside with an offer of an afternoon at a completely unspoiled beach close by. Hard to get to but worth it. They jump at the chance and pile into the van, go through the jungle and get to the place. The driver helps them unload but not carry anything. He has a familiar face which brings me to lesson 1: when you're driven to a special place by M. Night Shyamalan perhaps just turn back as fast as you can. You just won't know where that bus is going to take you. Anyway...

The beach is beautiful and they've been stocked up with masses of supplies. A few more telescoping moments (e.g. the aging doctor's possessiveness of his wife gets creepier the more you see it) and everyone's having a great time, sunbaking, strolling, chilling, and swimming in the water and getting hit by a floating corpse. Huh? The boy screams at the people on the shore and they bring the dead woman back to the beach. She was the rapper's girlfriend. After some mildly paranoid moments from the Doctor they settle, cover the corpse and work out what to do. Meanwhile, Guy and Priscia's kids stand up from their fascination with the dead body and, even seen from behind, have changed. Maddox and Trent, 11 and 6, are now Maddox and Trent, teenagers. Priscia's tumor is getting bigger everytime someone checks it. Time is moving like a jet fighter. Trying to go out the way they came in ends in physical collapse. What to do?

I put off seeing this one as I'd heard it gave in to its own silliness and had the inevitable Shyamalan twist. Also, cinemas weren't the safest places when it was showing. Now I wish I had seen it there. The combination of the intriguing scenario and stunning location along with some very deft audio mixing make it perfect for big screen viewing. Ah well. It was burning a hole in my attention every time the tile appeared in my Prime screen. So, it was already paid for and I dived in.

And the water was fine. Shyamalan makes elegant use of an effectively single-location setting, using it like a large stage and blocks his action with a lithe coreography. Is one character's psychosis too obviously foreshadowed? Are some of the accelerated developments out os synch with others? Is some dialogue absurdly expository? Yes to all but if you catch yourself thinking about any of this while you're watching it you have lost engagement. 

This is not a straight drama or even a heavy science fiction, it's a fable about aging and its effects of self and life's witnesses. As such it runs the range in smooth rhythm to deliver, anxiety, fear, joy, freakish surprise and body horror, love and some of the smidges of wisdom that lie at the end of a long life, especially one that has run for decades into a very few hours. At no point, if you have engaged, is this assumed reality dropped. It's only when the big Shyamalanian twist happens and takes more scenes than you'd expect that you break out of it and have to deal with an intruder. This closes tidily but I had the feeling that it was a few bows too many; I could have done with a little of the lingering doubt and darkness that the rest of the film worked so hard for. So, great reception, let's just watch the cleaners fix it all up before we go home.

This overcatering is typical of Shyamalan but not limited to him. Spielberg is another over-explainer (take the last twenty minutes out of Minority Report and I'm there)  and if this is a result of listening to the wrong public messages or taking test screenings too seriously it's only for me to guess, not know. Whatever it is, it takes the mystery from the tale and has the effect that this is a one-off movie. The reason I return to Eraserhead, Suspiria, The Haunting or Apocalypse Now is that the chaos and violence of the ideas that ensue when I immerse myself in someone else's vision provides a strange comfort, a comfort of unease which allows me to seek resolution within my own mind: that's a conversation between me and screen. 

I'm not so keen on Speilberg but I have loved the best of Shyamalan and am disappointed too often with his extensions beyond what feels like the natural end of the films. It feels like an apology for imagination when I want that very intoxicant to flow freely and virulently into my own. M. Night, old bean, you have (or adapt, in this case) some startling thoughts, leave them loose, and frayed and sticking out. The beauty's in the flaws.

Oh ... the question repeatedly asked by the doctor that never gets answered. The answer is The Missouri Breaks. Didn't hvae to look it up and kept murmuring it to the screen as I watched.

Review: BROADCAST SIGNAL INSTRUSION

There's so much that this one got right ... in the writers' room. A mystery from the early web that draws on real phenomena and a neo noir murder path with a young hotshot widower on the case. Sound good? Need more detail? Ok: it's 1999 and young James moonlights in the archives of a local Chicago tv station putting the backroom mess in order. It's boring but one of them has a glitch. It's as though another program is tearing its way into the recorded one. I say program but really it's a couple of people or mannequins in a low lit room with a murmuring voice that seems to be trying to say something. Then - flash! - it's back to normal. Don't people ever check these things? Looking into it he finds that there have been others, going back decades and each one follows the disappearance of a woman. One of the women was his wife. He's on the trail.

He's already pretty well connected online as a hotshot gamer and in the era when snopes was a newsgroup moderator, sorting law from lore for real. Soon, he's meeting digital sages, freaky phreakers, and his very own stalker who joins him in the hunt which gets darker the closer he gets to paydirt. So far, so intriguing. So, why didn't I care at all about any of this?

I'ts not in the subject matter. Broadcast signal instrusions did happen and the weirder of them are easily found on YouTube (start with Max Headroom hijacking or just search on the general term) and they are intriguing; someone with a well above average technical skill breaks into normal programming with content so odd it's unsettling, as though you are witnessing the workings of a deranged mind's daydreams. 

The other major influence on this which drove the look and feel of the instrusions in the movie is the I Feel Fantastic videos. These are searchable on that string and show dressed mechanical dolls who move slightly and "sing" in what sounds like a synthesised voice. This is in an otherwise normal looking room in a house. A sizeable portion of the video is taken by static shots of woodlands. This doesn't mean anything until a YouTube channel provides an "In Search of" style commentary imposing a template of creepy suggestions of what the video is showing. Is it, for example, showing a murderer's lair where he makes automatons who are dressed in the clothes of his victims and sing weirdly through the night. And is the exterior in the woods the surrounds of his house for the adventurous to discover? Probably not, but it sends a tingle down the spine when you see it first.

The trouble starts when you recognise the elements and know the real thing was creepier than this fiction, that it, as a kind of participatory fiction, has been accessible for decades and needs no embelishment. As one of the comments on one of the iterations of the video puts it: 2009 - this is so scary. turn it off. 2022 - guys leave her alone, she's just vibing. See also the Max Headroom intrusion which still intrigues but is better left the enigma it remains. Surgically attaching a neo noir murder plot to it just feels too late.

The trouble continues when you see that the lead has no charisma and very little emotive power beyond expressing slight annoyance at his circumstances. None of the situations he finds himself in feel as dangerous as they are depicted. The shady figures who provide pieces of the puzzle in alleyways and darkened hotel rooms feel too contrived in a film later than about 1985. The intrusions themselves are well executed but they really had such a short way to go to get slotted into the timeline of a movie like this. In fact, if this film has a central sin it is not that it's try hard but needs to try harder. The very last sequence provides more genuine chills and mystery than the entirety of the rest of the film. If it had been the opening sequence perhaps the writers might have really put some thought into how to live up to it.