1983 @ 40: VIDEODROME (Long and with spoilers)

Max Renn's life is about to change but it was already pretty nifty. As one of the heads of an alternative tv station he gets to seek and choose all the stuff the boring outlets won't. When we meet him he's off to talk to some Japanese soft porn pedlars. As he and his fellow execs um and ah about it he agrees, saying they need something tough after all the soft core they've been casting. Then he's off to his video pirate friend Harlan who has snagged something special from the airwaves. It's a few seconds of sexual torture. It looks real. Max, who has seen things best left barely imaginable that are too much for him, is hooked. The source of the footage is an entity called Videodrome. He puts one of his contacts on the trail. She comes back with a hard caution to stay away, saying, spookily, that they have what Max does not, a philosophy. 

Max appears on a tv talk show with a media guru, Brian O'Blivion, and tough love radio host Nicki Brand. Max makes a successful move on Nicki while O'Blivion (who will only appear on a small television in the studio) gasses off about tv being the retina of the mind's eye. Later, in his apartment, Nicki picks out a video marked Videodrome, thinking it's porn. Their sex that night includes some home sterilised piercing and a massive hallucination that they are in the Videodrome torture room, writhing on what looks like a giant ribbed hotplate. The next time she's around she tells him she's going to Pittsburg, where Videodrome is made, so she can audition. He fails to convince her to stay, or stay away, and she goes off into the night, never to return.

There are other pieces on the board but the last one I'll include as plot has to do with the media guru. He runs an outreach centre on skid row, welcoming the dispossessed in for some tv and a soup kitchen meal. He doesn't get to meet Brian but O'Blivion's daughter Bianca who deftly keeps him from getting too close, promising to send him a cassette of her father to explain things. The tape arrives that night. O'Blivion begins with his usual academic provocation before his voice enters the room for real and begins a two way conversation with Max before getting strangled to death by an executioner who, after a quick self unmasking, turns out to be Nicki. The itch that's been irritating Max's belly expands from a rash to a large vulval slit. He's been scratching the irritation with his pistol and, compelled, he plunges it into the orifice. He struggles to wrench his hand back out but the gun is still lost in there. This is a David Cronenberg film.

Not just any David Cronenberg film. Having challenged audiences from the mid '70s onward with the likes of the plague of sexual parasites in Shivers, the mutated vampiric armpit spike in Rabid, murderous children generated by pure rage in The Brood, and explosive telepathy in Scanners (yes, I know, Fast Company, but it's just not convenient here) Cronenberg had emerged as one of the most original thinkers in world cinema. Having used the Canadian tax dodge to make Shivers, he'd smuggled some compelling thought about society, sex and science into what was sold to the American drive-ins as a big schlocky monster movie.

The smuggling approach served him well until he stepped beyond need for it with Scanners which pushed the thinking forward and let the threat for part of the plot rather than the other way around. By the time he got to Videodrome the power of the concept was far too strong to just lie on top and needed to be woven more tightly into the fabric of the film. Cronenberg was no longer convincingly borrowing from the world around him but building his own that just resembled the real one. If Toronto looked like a modern metropolis by day it felt like the real city lay dormant, stirring after sunset to envelope at the individual level, all who roamed it with a thick night illuminated mainly by tv screens. It was a night whose reality behaved like dreams, leaving all who lived it scrambling around looking for explanations, anything, to tame it through rationalisation. As strong as his thinking had already got, Cronenberg had never achieved this level of complexity. Nor had he rendered it so enjoyably.

That's the thing about Videodrome. If you keep at making movies with sophisticated concepts you're apt to get more sophisticated but with this one Cronenberg was able to use his experience as a film director to add one last goody into the mix: warmth.

If there is one thing that holds earlier Cronenberg features back from higher celebration it's the shortfall in performance. It's not about small budgets equalling lower tier actors. It's not even about beginner writing. The good performances in early Cronenberg films happen despite his direction of lack of it that leaves the others wooden and amateurish. We're talking the likes of Samantha Eggar, Oliver Reed and Patrick McGoohan along with a small number of locals who were picking up craft during these experiences and outside them. While it took baby steps, by the time he was able to cast the dynamic talent of James Woods for Max Renn, Cronenberg's people were like the cattle that Hitchcock had smirked about in an earlier decade.

Woods comes on with a interpersonal assault plan that swings rapidly between disarming candour and outright sleaze. His come on to Nicki on the tv show is meant to make us cringe but it also shows that his tolerance of mainstream order has limits. Add to that Woods's readiness to show his character failing even on a tiny scale which prevents us from turning off an arrogant self-entitled player. Mainly, he's all flaws; he needs experience to find his decency which Woods demonstrates through a credible filter of impatience.

If Debbie Harry as Nicki feels a little wooden it's more down to inexperience. There is a long line of rockstars who fail to convince cinecameras, already long by then, but Harry brought from her schooling from fame and performance the power of contrasts. She was acutely aware of her beauty and its global celebration but her punk roots had shown her the value of looking like Aphrodite and sounding like a Bowery bum. Nicki Brand gets a slightly more cool jazz take on this but the roughness remains and, when blended with the character's transgressive sense of adventure the performance blooms. It shocks Mr Sin himself, Max Renn, into timidity. 

The pair of them anchor their respective sides of the Videodrome screen that allows the extraordinary moment at which her ballooning image from the screen opens its mouth to accept his penetrating head. There is more than a little trade on what audiences at the time would have made of the frontwoman of Blondie in this context but Debbie Harry meets it and even lifts the relatively unknown James Woods to her podium. The actor James Woods jovially complained about the heavy reliance on practical effects, particularly the abdominal orifice, saying, "sometimes I just feel like the bearer of the slit." Debbie Harry responded with, "now you know how it feels."

If you delve into disc extras or just read about this movie you'll find quite a rocky developmental road. If you sift through the history of various cuts, rethinks in credits sequences, deleted scenes you'll see a few different movies coming through. The "soup or veg" moment I knew from a tv version in the '80s, finally seen again in the Arrow 4K, is not missed. There is a scene between Max and Nicki in the back of a limo which shows Debbie Harry in impressive form that was long excised. All of the deleted scenes I saw deserved deletion. What is left is a wonder of economic storytelling where one scene closes in on the same thing that another opens outward from, hallucinations become indistinguishable from reality and the descent of Max into the befogged state in which he achieves clarity is seamless and thrilling.

Necessary mention here of longtime collaborator Howard Shore's score. Combining synthesis with orchestral sounds he provides a grinding liquidity. I used to think the main instrument was a harmonium. If you've ever played one you'll know how hard you have to work just to keep the airflow with the bellows pedals and how that precludes almost everything beyond plain chording.

If it had been another Scanners we would celebrate it as coolly. The warmth of Videodrome gives way to the emotional integrity of The Fly. Videodrome is the source point for Cronenberg's survival as a film maker. From this we can see the branch off from the body horror to relatively straight drama and then recombination with titles like Dead Ringers. With this proof of concept for creating fluidity between states lets us accept the two-places-at-once scenes of the hitherto unfilmable Naked Lunch. All of David Cronenberg's strengths come from this knotting of the early experiments into his enviable fruition as an artist.

In the '90s Videodrome was hailed for predicting reality tv. Well, maybe, although the earlier Network does that a lot better. What Videodrome does is suggest the kind of internet that emerged after the split between the navigable surface that the graphical world wide web gave us and the continued unchecked development of the submarine mass of the dark web. I don't just mean that there are some nasty currents running beyond the light of Google but that when the mainstream web was corporatised it behaved exactly as all such absorptions do and rendered the worst of us acceptable. No need for conspiracy thinking, it's all right there on our screens. Not all of it is nefarious it's just that it can be and that can be very hard to tell.

Early scenes that show the cheerful Harlan showing Max the torture scenes include poignant cutaways to Harlan avoiding sight of the screen himself. Bianca O'Blivion's assertion that the signal could just be delivered over a test pattern contextualises the brain damage that her father called the New Flesh could grow like worldwide crops every time someone looked at a screen. She has already infected Max with a tape of a much more powerful dose than he'd previously had. Her admission that she thought he was to be her assassin is followed by a moment of audible regret that might be the very second between the director's cold presentation and his discovery of warmth. Then, later, Max is shattered when Harlan and corporate exec Barry Convex tell him the Videodrome works on everyone who sees it, as they insert a tape into his abdomen that sends him off to murder his colleagues.

There is no happy ending here. Max, beyond retrieval, finds a kind of safe haven in a condemned ship, talks to an image of Nicki on a tv in the hold before blowing his brains out with the whispered slogan: "Long live the New Flesh." Brian O'Blivion had theorised earlier that television was reality and reality less than television. Don't watch television, anymore? Ok substitute "the screen" and it works again. Our contemporary videodrome is not the sci-fi nightmare of the one in this movie but that might be because it doesn't have to be. We don't need a subliminal signal telling us what to think as we'll get to the thinking in our own time. You shouldn't panic about this as long as you still can discern all the old standard contrasts, even when the screen is normalised as it is now. We don't need to opt out violently like Max but we will need to keep on the right side of the illusion on the wrong side of the screen. Videodrome still works and will work again.

Viewing notes: I have had copies of this film from the DVD era onwards, including Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray editions. It's always been quite well served on digital video by contemporary standards with good extras and strong audio visual transfers. The version I watched for this blog article was Arrow's 4K box that comes with a raft of extras, two versions of the feature cut and a packed booklet. The Dolby Vision enhanced 4K video takes the image to a clarity level that I was constantly marvelling at. Whether it was pores in skin or the depth of the image. While much of the film's evident technology places it in time, the quality of the presentation is so stellar that it looks freshly minted.

THEY LIVE @ 35

Nada the drifter gets to L.A. and the local shanty town for the dispossessed and immediately notices things are getting strange. The people watch broadcast signal intrusions which give them headaches and which the local blind preacher can mouth in perfect synch. The church hall choir is a tape concealing secret meetings and there are boxes upon boxes of sunglasses stored in the backrooms. Without a breath to figure any of this out, the camp is raided by an outsized police operation and everyone skedaddles. Nada does, too, but with a box of those sunnies. Who knows, he might be able to sell them. 

Strolling in the city, he tries a pair on and the world changes. Everything is in black and white. All the billboards with bikini women and suited men are really commands like OBEY, CONSUME, SLEEP. It's on the money, the newspapers, everything. Not bad enough? There are monstrous looking bug eyed entities walking about. When the glass come off these figures are cops, white collar workers, bosses. He goes into a shop which is full of them, one of whom reports into her watch, "I've got one that can SEE!" He does a little damage and flees the scene, pursued by cops which he dispatches, grabbing an assault weapon. Going into a bank he proclaims: "I'm here to chew gum and kick some ass. And I'm all out of gum!"

John  Carpenter's most overtly political film mixes satire with a beefy sci-fi paranoia story as we witness a stealthy alien invasion that looks worryingly like normal life. Commercials and talk shows glimpsed on tv depict a society for the privileged and complaining rich while the remaining human population is either bought off or pushed out of their jobs, houses and security. 

This film is famous for a fight scene that goes for an absurd stretch of running time as Nada tries to get his new friend to put the glasses on and see the truth. While the scene is affectionately mocked it bears poignancy for our time as well as its own. It's poignant because it's reversed now. The blue collar worker who voted against their own interests, buying into the lie of trickle-down is the one who resists the revelation, preferring the doublethink that allows him a life of apparent ease. He needs the glasses to see the oppressor. Nada's epic alley fight with Frank demonstrates Frank's obstinate belief in the fantasy. It's not just that putting the specs on against his will feels like losing but that his acceptance of his life amounts to the sacred values addressed by contemporary sociology. The notions offer comfort and are supported by a community and consolidate to form beliefs beyond debate. Roddy Piper's character is Nada which is Spanish for "nothing" and suggests that he is a clean slate. He's never called that in dialogue, it just appears by Piper's name in the credits. It's not a reach to consider it Carpenter's comment.

Post COVID, the rise in profile of the conspiracy fantasists has changed the lenses to adopt whichever theory that their undeclared leisure industry can come up with. They are the ones seeing the monsters, the state paedophile networks in pizza shops, the nanobots in the vaccines, the brain frying damage of the 5G towers, adrenochrome, veterinarian medicine as the real cure, sovereign citizenship and whatever other fictions that escapes the screaming void of bullshit that convinces the dispossessed that they have power because they have found the truth. If it was remotely close to the truth they might have had a point. If we had some polaroids that could let them see with their own eyes that a virus is just a virus and a vaccine an attempt at combatting it. If wishes were horses.

I'm not just ranting (well, not really, however fun it feels), there are generations beyond the one in the film that still subscribe to trickle-down economics as though it was established reality. You needn't even lump it all on the anti-vaxxers today, go and read some of the placards at the ragged end of the cooker marches and try to find some cohesion among the wildly varying slogans; you'll find everything from the 5G bores to thinly veiled nazis. These are the people who think they are wearing the sunglasses. 

Nada and Frank going each other to bruised and bloody effect is the kind of fight Carpenter might have longed to see but was resigned to leave on the screen. Yes, this is about concealed alien overlords using a massive global signal to control everyone but, also, this is science fiction, satire, paranoia horror, allegory, not documentary. The irony of it is that the message here should be aimed at the Trump voters under the poverty line or the "exposers" of the lizard elite who would only receive it as truth in fiction. Movies really can seem too clever for their own good, even the good ones.

Viewing notes: I watched the locally available Studio Canal 4K special edition which has an undeclared Dolby Vision enhancement which belies the movie's humble production origins. While there is no corresponding Dolby Atmos audio the DTS hi def 5.1 ensures a good booming ride. This, and a handful of other UHD Carpenter releases are very pleasantly available affordably and get some fine treatment from the French SC label. Worth it.

JURASSIC PARK @ 30 (Spoilers)

A botanist, a palentologist and a chaos mathematician go into a bar ... or fly to an island (well, it probably has sandbars). A very rich bloke wants them there to spread their highly respected words about his theme park. It's a wildlife number only with resurrected dinosaurs. Oh, hell, this is a Spielberg movie, let's chuck in a couple of kids, as well. They go on a little jaunt to have a look at the beasties after a couple of no shows the automated vehicles stop dead just at the point where a peckish T-Rex wanders by. There's a mother storm on the way and the dodgy IT guy is about to shut half of the security down so he can deliver dino embryos to the very rich bloke's rival. All good.

So, yes, the trap, tightly set for plot development snaps in programmed fashion the way it's meant to. All performances pass and we buy into it from the word go. Spielberg, entering his two and a halfth decade of his colonisation of world cinema, was still upping his last foray to higher heights and more gaspingly huge spectacles. He would diversify in the decade to come but for now he was still happily dishing out supersized family meals. This meant that by the early '90s he had to outdo mega movies like E.T. and all the subsidiary projects from the Spielberg stable like Gremlins, Poltergeist and so on. He had to do in cinematic terms what the Moghul Hammond had done with the dinosaurs, produce a wonder of the modern world.

Michael Crichton's source novel is about the abuse of science, encapsulated in Malcolm's thought about scientists going with what they could do without stopping to ask if they should. That it is personal greed that starts the chain of disaster rather than technical failure only adds in that all the hi-tech security in the world can't keep out human frailty. If it had been a failure of science Spielberg would have been on shakier ground considering how dependent his cinema had become on technology. The Mecha/Boy tension is not resolved in his takeup of the Kubrick project A.I. at the other end of the decade (or just beyond it) in any way that Kurbick would have insisted. The corrupt Nedry is in both the novel and the film and his misdeeds are effectively the same but he is an IT nerd (so identified by the anagram of his name) and only a servant of the tech rather than a scientific creative. Crichton's worries about scientism (unquestioning adoption of things said and done in the name of science) are not shared by Spielberg who plugs that awkward hole with Sam Neill's Dr Allan Grant's conquest of his fear of children.

But the star is the spectacle and that is had in the dinosaurs themselves which I can report that even in slicked up 4K look stupendous. There is nothing fake or shaky to them, they look and move as though they are alive. With access to the brightest and the best, Spielberg found in the decade that crossed over from practical effects to computer generated ones that the legacy was as important as the moment of the event and made damn sure that his prehistoric monsters would look as good as E.T. had already proved to be at the age of eleven. The uncanny-valley crossing realm of CG is with us today and, while always improving, has a much shorter shelf life than what was done here. When your creative ambition becomes indistinguishable from your reputation as a movie god you will not settle for less. 

So, Jurassic Park still works. Even the Unix interface of the computers was possible at the time and didn't have to be pushed too far into animation to work on screen for an audience who still could be persuaded that computers could do anything we could imagine. If I can fault the output at all it is in the continued relation between Spielberg and his composer of choice John Williams who here rolls out yet another score that as Leon Garfield once observed of a character's dress sense that it never went out of fashion because it had never been in. The last bit isn't true of Williams' orchestrations but most of the grinding autofit emotion of them could be for almost anything. I know you're not meant to take notice of the music in a film but I do and I wince at the sound of John Williams' music whenever it was written with the sole exception of Jaws which is mostly masterful (but outside of the shark theme is cringing). 

While this film works in all the ways it's meant to I still don't rate it highly beyond that. I turned off Spielberg early on. I found his tendency toward schmaltz and cuteness calculating and distasteful. Through the '80s and '90s I began to see the difference in what happened between his spectacles and serious films and softened on him as a master of spectacle but an overpleaser when the subject was dark or closer to the workaday world. Over and again in the likes of Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad or even the genre-spanning Minority Report, he seems to be continuously assuring us that he can do dark, serious, he can do earnest and meaningful and it seldom convinces me. Whereas with the likes Jurassic Park we witness a master of his form too busy keeping our attention with the same kind of wonder as his characters' faces famously display. As much as I wince at most of his output there is no serious claim I can make that his place in cinema history is among the supreme and is unshakeable. If only he'd stick to being impossibly grand.

Review: M3GAN

When young Cady's parents are killed in a headon collision (which she witnesses) her aunt Gemma takes care of her and learns that she's better at being a visiting aunt from the toy factory than a substitute parent. The irony that she designs companion style toys for children escapes her until Cady shows an interest in an old robot project of Gemma's and says, after a demonstration, that if she had a toy like that she would never want another one. Enter the resurrection of M3GAN, a child size android with an AI learning system. Cady loves M3GAN at first encounter and the pair become a tight unit of mutual development, letting Gemma off the hook. Nothing to see here.

Of course, what you think will go wrong does and the plot is not twisty because of this. As Cady and M3GAN wall themselves off from the rest of the troubling world of life and other kids it becomes increasingly clear that the closed system will generate a disaster of machine ethics on one hand and heart rending dependency on the other. Nevertheless, the film does have a few turns in store that extend this old dependable.

Stories of robots going wrong or humans learning how bad they are through interaction with automatons go back before the movies (E.T.A. Hoffmann, anyone?), the trope is used to expose ethical dilemmas, human intolerance to itself, responsibility and an ocean of other possibilities that approach the notion that things too much like ourselves will eventually frighten us. There are a fair few good Twilight Zone episodes about his, see also Outer Limits, and the world of '60s speculative fiction is a garden of them. Ridley Scott's double take in the Alien and Blade Runner films remain touchstones. Alex Garland's Ex Machina goes into the eerie territory of the Turing test used to determine human and robotic communication.  Spielberg's baton-pass from Kubrick in A.I. retold Pinocchio. All of them, however, must explore the junction of familiarity and function and where the breaking point lies.

We get early clues to the way M3GAN will be going from the opening commercial for the fuzzy talking dolls to her mother imposing screen time restrictions on Cady and Gemma forbidding Cady to play with the still-packaged vintage toys in her home. If this theme of the need for real love and care were not so present we would just have another robot gone wrong tale. The meeting point happens during a corporate demonstration which begins as a flop as Cady doesn't feel like it. The moment is rescued by M3GAN's self-researched solution which feels human but is dependent on her machinery to work. It's that extra pairing that seals the danger ahead which is masked by the sheer success of the moment. So, there's a lot of corporate thinking baggage in the soup along with manipulation both human and machine as well as good old human failure.

Once the Stephen King beat the bully moment has passed we expect and get improvements on it which lead to the inevitable showdowns we also expect. But this is not to call M3GAN a flop of an idea or that it doesn't do more than mechanically play its sub-genre. As a Blumhouse film this could have gone either way and have ended either schmaltzy or cheesy but we get just enough performance and writing to clear both hurdles of cliche while getting a simultaneous feast of it. Yes, there is even a hint at a sequel but it's a good one.

Alison Williams convinces us that she finds the tasks of parenting repugnant and her inspiration for the way out of them problem-solving rather than wise. Violet McGraw has a lot harder a task as Cady whose smothered grief is credibly masked by the delights of her new companion and her way out of that makes her much more of a kid again. 

But it's Amie Donald, the human under the M3GAN CGI and animatronics, who brings her competitive gymnastic training to the stunts, action and the pursuit of the uncanny valley effect that renders M3GAN by turns endearingly strange to quietly terrifying. Her grotesque flailing dance (YouTube it, it's everywhere) was Donald's own idea and her all-fours running a matter of physical practice. The eleven year old's medal-winning skill brings weight and an unpredictability to the android that wouldn't have been possible with either puppetry or CGI. The decision to keep M3GAN free of smiles and persistently doll like against this animalistic and mechanical monsterism and warm it all up with human performance is why the figure works and by extension the whole movie.

That said, the film does feel longer than it should be, treading water at plot points rather than packing them into a more solid momentum. Then again, at a hair under an hour and three quarters, that's not much to complain about. While I find the need for an acronymed robot (Model 3 Generative Android) more nostalgic than helpful (they might have learned from Get Smart's Hymie, also pleasantly retro) it works if they go with a franchise. At the end of a long ancestry of rogue robot stories, M3GAN does its job and even adds a little of its own commentary on top. Can't ask much more.

Review: TAR

Over a montage of vignettes that demonstrate how busy and scheduled her life is we hear the presenter of a live interview give us the condensed biography of Lydia Tar. We get the tail end of this as we watch Lydia keep herself from fidgeting until the interview starts. Once under way we witness a small marvel of self control as she delivers, in perfectly modulated tones and exact hand gestures, the role of the conductor as a controller of time as well as emotion. While this continues we are shown a head of thick auburn hair from behind, at the back of the auditorium, motionless, ready to take its place among the movements of the plot.

Lydia Tar is an American conductor, leading the Berlin Philharmonic, preparing for a performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. We also see her teaching, living life with her wife and child, being magnetised by a new Russian cellist on the scene, and dealing with administrative problems that are sometimes also people. Her life, indistinguishable from her career, is as tight a fit as her conductor's tuxedo (one of which we see being crafted on her body, bespoke and deluxe). But this is a parable of control and, once established, Tar's attempts at professional flexes set her up for the post-hubris plummet.

Writer/director Todd Field knows his classical music. More finely, he knows his twentieth century masters (it's no accident that the piece in balance is one of Mahler's biggies, apart from how it lets him get a Visconti/Death in Venice crack in). This film is formally symphonic. Clear movements that refer to each other and themes stated early and kept to a minimum. The red bouffant in the first scene returns in tiny haunting moments but grows into personal cataclysm. Tar's attraction to the new cellist is a kind of descant on the same line and adopts dissonance eventually. All of the musical thinking of the statement of theme in the interview, all of that assurance and fine honing of the notion of control spreads into detail only to regroup as roaring drama. Really, makes you want to go and bother Malher all over again (well, it does me).

None of this is told in the abstract. If anything we are given a very slight heightening of drama to the everyday (and most of that is due to Tar's position and privilege). Where the film takes its chances is in the theme of haunting. The distant screams Tar hears while jogging, the nagging major third from a neighbouring flat's carer's alarm which she incorporates into her composition, some quietly eerie moments in the dim light of the apartment and what her daughter seems to see build their own connecting phrases to add to the crescendo of crisis. 

Carte Blanchett has been speaking publicly of her intention to retire. This film, written for her and placing her first among favourites for the big gong from The Academy, would be going out in style ... in style. The film is too long for its tale but Blanchett's lead is always there to offer a quick refresher towel between moments of crisis or intensity so that the two and a half plus hours are rendered manageable. 

If you read the trivia at the film's IMDB page you will learn much of her prep for the role and you'll be left agape: all those tales of De Niro fattening up for Raging Bull or driving taxis, Dustin Hoffmann getting beaten up for Marathon Man and so on, have their modern equivalent here. Blanchett learned conducting enough to lead the Dresden Orchestra to the extent that all music performed within a scene (i.e. not scored for the film) is performed live, including the Bach she plays on piano in the extraordinary single-take teaching scene. Her instructions to the orchestra fall in and out of the German she learned for the part and speaks, in character, with a chiselled flintiness. Her affected posh American accent was finished through hours of listening to the speech of Susan Sontag. That's nothing like all of it.

But if you don't know any of that, you will still be awed by the complexity she brings to the character who would control every last cell of her body if she could. This can be played against our sympathies as the plot unfolds and we see more results of her drives and desires. There is a theme of cancellation in the plot that has taken up some public discourse but happily it is treated with an even hand and must be as the point of it has to do with the classically determined fall from grace of the narrative drive. The final shot might make you laugh or gasp but if it saddens you, ask yourself why.

KURONEKO @ 55

A cottage by a grove. A stream runs alongside. One by one, out of the bushes, comes a small hord of filthy exhausted soldiers. They drink thirstily at the stream and enter the cottage to find two women eating a meal. First the intruders rush to attack the food, gorging on the rice and dried meats and vegetables hanging in the room. This turns to rape and it's more graphic than you might imagine for 1968. Outside, the soldiers finally leave and disappear back into the grove. Slowly, a plume of white smoke emerges from the building. After the fire the two women lie dead in the wreckage. A black cat appears, moving around the bodies, inspecting them, glowering out of the screen at us.

Later, at the Rajomon Gate, a samurai trots by and stops at the sight of a young noblewoman. It's the middle of the night and she would appreciate an escort to her house. The samurai complies. They chat as they walk and when they reach her house she asks him in for a rest. Her mother welcomes him with sake and food which he enjoys but his eyes are on the younger woman. She is not resistant to his advances. After all, they help her get within fang distance of his neck which she tears at until he is dead. Just prior we have seen the mother from the rear and how a length of her hair moves like a long black tail. We have entered a strange chamber of the night, ethereal enough to vanish in a moment, real enough to kill.

More samurai meet the same fate until the local warlord orders lethal action against the threat without success until a rawly formed hero, dubbed Gintoki of the Grove, returns from the war and presents himself. Cleaned of the mud and filth he picked up in the campaign, he is dashing and ready to have at the cat spirits. Problem, he went home first and saw the cottage by the grove (well, its remains) where his mother and his wife lived. Asking a local about the missing bodies he gets worryingly vague answer. Riding up to the gate at midnight, following the lady home and meeting her mother he sees, if not quite comprehending, his wife and his mother rendered aristocratic and a little strange. This mission has just got tough.

Japanese cinema expanded so rapidly after the occupation and grew so rich and self-challenging that it never needed a new wave to ignite it into innovation. Whether it was Kurosawa applying a supernova to the samurai tale, Teshigahara and his magical realism, monster movies that were really about nuclear warfare or Ozu's refinement of the melodrama into aching family portraits, the late fifties to the late sixties in the national cinema remain a wonder of invention. Kaneto Shindo, whose military service in the war took him away from his hometown the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on it, grew hybrid fictions from his neo-realist tales of survival and identity into the likes of Human of the durable masterpiece Onibaba.

By the time he got to Kuroneko in 1968 he was ready to hurl everything he knew at the screen and did just that. Theatricality bumps shoulders with cinematic realism, folkloric magic tears at the local realpolitik, martial arts wirework jolts against the ugly violence of the day to day. The Ballad of Narayama had flaunted its theatrical roots with set building and transitions laid bare. Kwaidan folded this into its fabric but happily let the mixing show. In Kuroneko when Shige somersaults incredibly through the air behind the samurai on horseback it is all part of the supernature of the midnight realm of the cat spirits. The warlord's account of his skepticism extends to the current case. He thinks it's probably just bandits but makes a public show of hiring a hitman to get rid of the ghosts.

But it is the individual performances that really cover the seams of the artifice, here. Nobuko Otowa plays a similar role to the one in Onibaba except that here she is far more maternal and then torn at the situation with her son. She transits from ghost to demon with voice and expression, going from a parental softness to a wily sharpness from line to line in some scenes (particularly the final showdown). As her daughter in law, Kiwako Taichi takes a lot on, going from cozening spirit, to savage feline demon to a kind of ethereal echo of the lover she had been with Gintoki. Kichiemon Nakamura as Gintoki is introduced to us as a brute from the swamps (which remind us powerfully of the marshes in Onibaba). When he is cleansed to civil standards in a heavily satisfying scene of the caked mud on his skin being wiped away, the intense survivalist glare in his eyes remains. You can't take the swamp out of the boy. But then when the enormity of the situation with the demonic duo confronts him he breaks back into innocence before having to forage for his strength. There is just no opportunity for any of these three turns to fall back on cruise control.

And then there is Shindo's vision itself which renders the potentially silly wirework fights rivetting and the bamboo forest into a profoundly eerie setting by lighting it naturally and letting it present itself as is. Shindo's career, a kind of vow of life against nearly disintegrating in seconds when younger, is one of earnest work that ranged from the fantastical through returns to unadorned social realism and back. He made it to a month over one hundred years old, only two years out from his final film as director (Postcard). A late entry Fukuro (Owl) is a kind of replay of Onibaba for contemporary Japan but funnier and more starkly unconventional. Still young, he made Kuroneko (The Black Cat) which looked like an exact recounting of a nightmare unearthed after centuries of burial. Kuroneko feels older than the earlier Onibaba, with its incorporation of ancient theatrics and folkiness. While that freakier vision sticks stronger in the mind, this later entry beguiles all over again with each viewing as though magic had hidden its treasure.

Review: THE MENU

A yachtload of one percenters travel to an island to dine at the most exclusive restaurant on earth. As they take the tour and then their seats they reveal which of the seven deadly sins each represents in the course of casual conversation. When the big chef appears and announces each course which go from an absurd abstraction of real food to dishes related to actions that take on darker and darker meanings. The chef reveals his purpose and it is clear that the guests are captives and the main dish on the menu is retribution.

That much is in the trailer. What is also in the trailer is a kind of deadpan tv comedy style where characters might say something affected before correcting it with a plainer statement ("I'm sure it's all theatre. It's actually real"). That alone kept me from front up for this one but I kept on hearing, among the conflict of responses that this movie has generated, that it held substance beyond the one-liners. So, I punted on it.

In the interests of full disclosure I'll state that I'm not a foodie. I neither care about those who are nor consider them worth ridicule, it's just another enthusiasm. I have been to degustations and have found only that they are wasted on me. Whether I have overindulged or kept away, food and I are generally not a romantic item. So, I approached the initial premise of this as though it were fans of religious relics or the snake-oil addicts of hifi analogue audio: I noted the McGuffin of the experience without caring too much about it. There is a line about the digestive ephemerality of food as art but like the sentiment, once that's gone it's either down to self-reflection or cheap shooting ridicule. I don't care enough for the former and dislike the latter. So, I was at least left with a satirical black comedy.

But there's too much disconnection for that to convince. There are big, violent stunts but the compulsion between action and actor appear so slight (even unto death) that I can only think that if they don't care I surely don't. There is a ricochet off The Decameron  whereby an elite group dine and wine and entertain each other while the rest of the world crawls through the black plague. There is a clear statement using the term plague, lest we should let it slip by. But the sins as contemporised from the likes of Dante to me-first capitalism and obsessive consumerism don't really warrant the judgement. And then, when they come up for punishment it is variously trivial or so joltingly extreme that it tears the net of comedy while not quite breaking through to horror.

What is the point of the race and chase? No one is the worse for it nor ever really threatened. A public execution happens to an astonishment that lasts until the next course. I'm not describing comedy from a jaded character response, here, but a failure of the screenplay and direction to follow through. An earlier incident which plays on the hell is as real as a toothache idea is given far more emotional and thematic weight. Of that notion, weight, the supposedly heavy judgement and punishments feel weightless. I would bet a silk pyjama that a performance of a medieval passion play would pack more of a punch, even dismissing the confident assumption that the audience was with the performance on the religious front. For a story of an imposed life and death the lack of a sense of stakes is annoying. Sudden violence doesn't cut it if it doesn't change the tale.

The sense that these characters are simply so detached from the stakes of life for the rest of us that they be driven to extremes over such trivia is just no backed up by anything more than an assumed what-if on the part of the screenplay. The revelation of why the movie star has been included is an attempt at suggesting the danger of the fickleness of the evil genius but the irony it depends on is charmless. Argh! I think I'm just repeating myself now.

Ok, so you have a single sympathetic character (Margot played by Anya Taylor-Joy) in a stew of hateful ones. They are all performing well in a poorly written screenplay under the direction of someone who just keeps trying and trying and just ends up being trying. There are passages of subtlety that I'll admit but wait a few seconds and they'll be shattered by the heavy hand of this local Ozymandias while the lone and level sands stretch far away.

The Menu is still in cinemas but if you subscribe to Disney+ it's now on there.