I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER @ 55

Gene, a teacher, meets his aging parents at the airport and drives them back home. It's not a long car ride but by the time they're in the driveway we've got a bumpy prologue that lets us know that this film is going to be an examination of a continued control by the father over everyone else. Scenes are like testimonies to this manipulation and there's almost no letup. Old Tom is at the wheel and there's only one way he'll let go. It's a quietly searing experience.

Gilbert Cates autopsy of family life makes it hard for its audience by keeping things middle class. The stereotyping does suggest that the alternative is a physically violent working class tribe but the vintage of this exercise place it more in the realm of Edward Albee, as the notion of Tom effectively freezing his son in place as Gene intends to embark on a second marriage at a long distance. 

The dialogue is taken almost unchanged from its theatrical source and it shows with long speeches and lengthy single set scenes. Rather than feeling stagey, though, Cates's approach is to let the text speak for itself through some robust performances. The cinema comes from a near television style motion. Again, this has more to do with pushing the ideas in the interactions forward rather than a lack of creativity. Cates made a career out of this arms length domestic drama and felt that a flurry of cinematic interventions would be distracting.

This has the effect on the viewer o' today of having to adjust to what can feel staid and staged. The adjustment is swift, though when the cast is this good. Melvyn Douglas still had a decade left on screen and judges his irascible old man front perfectly, allowing for the deflated humanity visible beneath, asleep in front of the TV or almost physically  struggling to remember the name of the person he's addressing. Against this power, Gene Hackman's struggle is to prevent his own fury from manifesting in an act of patricide. Hackman proved a talent for great intensity (starting  from his next film The French Connection) but here he centres the stress around his mouth, as his eyes sharpen to razors. Dorothy Stickney in her last role makes what she can of the saintly mother. Estelle Parsons gets out of her goofy TV comedy personae as the ostracised daughter to provide an intense punch of her own.

When I heard the news of Gene Hackman's recent death and then the details of what was the supposed sequence of the events, I wanted to avoid the usual suspect titles like French Connection or The Conversation. This painful and poignant piece suited the memory better for me. The scenes where Gene is inspecting old folks' homes as a possible solution to his situation are discomforting. You can read the details for yourself but the end of life resonance this has with the younger Hackman playing witness to his father's dementia is heartrending. Life and art imitate each other.

Viewing notes: I watched this a hire through Prime (also available through a few online shops) as an HD remaster. I don't know of its availability on physical media.

HARDWARE @ 35

A professional scavenger finds a broken robot in the desert and brings it to a scrap dealer. While the dealer is out of the shop for a few minutes, a similar scavenger Mo buys the wreckage and then sells it at a profit to the returned dealer. Except for the head. That will make a pacifying gift for the girlfriend he's neglected on his own journeys. Getting through the wrecked streets in the near future world ravaged by war and climate disaster, he struggles to get into his own flat but he is let in and the robot head does make a good gift for his sculptor girlfriend Jill. They are ok for a while but have another barney and he splits. Meanwhile, Jill paints the head with stars and stripes and puts it at the centre of a big nasty looking installation. That's when we find out the head is still active, part of a M.A.R.K. 13 killer model and is stealthily reconstructing a body out of the machine parts Jill likes to use. Ummmm....

The rest of Richard Stanley's bleak action sci-fi is about stopping the robot as it takes over the apartment with a view to expansion and continued self-expression. Into this is woven a host of comments of the imagined future on the time of release including climate awareness, overpopulation and the possibility of administrative solutions for it that involve mass fatality and an overall sense of how the smartest things to emerge on the planet are compelling its ruin.

Stanley's film career has always been a bumpy one. He has been big on ideas and low on tolerance for besuited limitations. Hardware shows this in its mix of well lensed cinematic moments and the more typical use of scant means to create maximum effect. If this means that scenes that need constant tension get a little deflated by repetitive action with the puppetry of the robot then so be it. But there's a tiem bound consideration, here, that's easy to miss.

Hardware, though it had the rising Miramax stamp on it, was destined for the arthouse and the video shop. That's not a comment on its overall quality but its character as a dark and often cobbled together piece. It more than made its money back in the cinemas where it did screen and had a healthy afterlife on VHS and remains in print for home video to this day. Its reputation is mixed among the sci-fi community swinging between tawdry ripoff and above-weight vision. In its prime day, though, there was a persistent appreciation for the aesthetic of the DIY production values of indy cinema that resonated from punk. Hardware only intermittently resembles the Terminators or Blade Runners it wants to share a bed with and will never present a complete record of support in its community, forever living in the realm of cult cinema.

But that's no bad thing. It was decades of getting used to the figure of David Lynch and his popular second act movie Mulholland Drive that might just allow Eraserhead into a mainstream cinema season (and then in deference to his passing). Richard Stanley does not have Lynch's cache, having never been popular or at least well enough known to get his name into dictionaries, but that says nothing about his ideas. The projection of the M.A.R.K. 13, its purpose and the final statement about it at the film's close is a clearly anti-fascist statement. That it was put into a diegetic context of art service without an obvious pointer in a politico-cultural direction is clever. Jill's solution to the problem of the robot's detection is as strong as anything in the dark sci-fi of the era. The saviour/voyeur figure of Lincoln is intentionally troubling as is his corner on the technical expertise the situation needs: it's not just M.A.R.K. 13 that threatens.

So, even now, decades beyond it first getting cache as a hot new title in the groovy movie houses, Hardware still needs a little love from viewers to warm to it. It does stand in the retro shelf beside War Games and Demon Seed instead of living in constant praise like Blade Runner but I have no problem with that. This might well be due to my age as I lived through that punk attitude from adolescence and will easily look around the sight of virtual gaffer tape on the special effects (I mean, I did have to do more of that when I watched the 4K of Terminator which begins with a scene that only looks like a plastic model hovering over a mini set).  What I do see, the more I watch this one, is the cry against tyranny and the misappropriation of technology. If that isn't a message for now I don't know what can be.

Viewing notes: I watched Umbrella's superb new 4K presentation of this one. It might make the glue and tape of the effects a little more evident than an old hire VHS but that's just a trademark from when sci-fi was arthouse and remembered what punk felt like.

Review: QUEER

Bill Lee, an expat drinking his days long in Mexico City. There aren't a lot of spots in town to pick up the guys he wants but he kind of gets by. Then, when a flawless beautiful young man Gene appears on the scene Bill is not only struck but confused by the guy's sexuality. This will take some courting. Even after his breakthrough, the situation does not clear up and they continue on with a love that is nothing if not conditional. It might be time to see about that shared experience everyone says is good for that.

Luca Guadagnino's film of William Burroughs' novella is largely faithful to the source, evoking the sense of ex-patriot life and Lee's yearning for everything he thought his opiate dependency would bring him: love. "Love," wrote Burroughs, "is the most natural painkiller ..." Lee, running from deeds and events from his recent life in the U.S. is in constant pain. Gene is both a bridge to analgesia and a fulfilment of his suffering. When he finds it, it is hot and cold and needs constant nurture, just like every other dissapointing thing he has known.

Guadagnino lays is on with a trowel, offering us glimpses of the romance of vintage do it yourself travel in locations of strong but flawed beauty all the way to a massive hallucinatory communion. His choices of sourced music (or music makers as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross take over, there) and a master cinematographer serve him well again. My problem is at base level: the writing.

As usual, you could lose about forty minutes of this film and not know it. More, you would emerge with a refreshing character study and things to take away about the numberless facets of love. Burroughs himself did that in a book that was less than two hundred pages. You might think that a film that takes almost two and a half hours to say this must have further cinematic material to explore this but it doesn't, really. While repetition and behavioural looping can be read as valid expressions of the ennui and frustration of navigating love, there is so much on screen here as to appear oppressive to the point where it becomes boring.

This despite the efforts of Daniel Craig as Lee who shows with strength and great skill how such a mean minded monster can appear attractive (and thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, he doesn't attempt a Burroughs impersonation). Drew Starkey is clearly more than his looks. Jason Schwartzman has learned real acting. And so on. But the slow roll and roll flattens all the good grace the film began with.

Queer is an early work by Burroughs. It was published in the '80s but finished in the '50s, held back by Burroughs himself. The prose, while highly seasoned with Burroughs' characteristic sharpness of observation, black humour and genuine emotion, is startlingly conventional. It is not the borderless blend of satire and dream sequences that the much later Naked Lunch is; it reads very easily and does its work as well as any airport novel (like its predecessor Junkie). There is a dream sequence at the end but it is heartrending rather than confronting. 

Guadagnino has made no bones about how much he has lifted from Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch. Towards the end it feels like a cover version. Yes, yes, postmodernism and all that, but Cronenberg earned his take on a difficult book by making a creditable companion piece that allows both book and film to co-exist without sparks. Queer's plundering of this feels bitchy and undermines its own originality.

There is a lot to enjoy here but like every other Guadagnino film I've seen, it would benefit from tightness and focus. By now the lack of both are entrenched in his style and it would take a massively successful contrary case to change that.

FRIGHT NIGHT @ 40

Charley is still in his teens but he's already a wreck. Amy is ready to take things to the next level which should be electrifying his teenage raison d'etre but there's a vampire moving in next door. Amy leaves, the school horror nerd Evil Ed takes his money for some pat advice and the host of the late night horror show Peter Vincent brushes him off as a crazy fan. Well, who would believe him?

Tom Holland's mid-'80s horror-teen-comedy doesn't have the future-star appeal of the Lost Boys or the genre-expansion of Near Dark from later in the decade but what it does have is an early take on self-reflexivity in genre. This is generally supposed to bloom in the next decade with Scream but Charley's knowledge that both holds him back from action and pushes the plot further places him firmly on the timeline of characters who know the rules of the movies they're in. But then, instead of making this the pivot of the plot Holland throws in the realism of the barriers. Charley knows what is happening but everyone else he knows is just in the normal world. Cackling Evil Ed, the long suffering Amy, his tv idol and his latchkey mum, think he's nuts.

While the struggle to gain credibility is a plot driver in any supernatural movie, this one wears its era on its sleeve. The teens aren't just incredulous, they're cynical. Peter Vincent bemoans the plummeting popularity of supernatural horror in favour of the current oafish teen slashers. Amy's offer toward the sexual development of her and Charley's partnership is matter of fact, not the thing of giggling or smirking, it's something more John Hughes. Vampire Jerry also knows his movies and after kissing the hand of Amy and saying, "Charmed" he asks, "isn't that what I'm meant to say?" and it plays as a joke among the characters.

But then, when it gets down to the horror threads of the weave, Fright Night plays fair. Amy is revealed to be identical to Jerry's long lost love and he pursues her. Their serpentine dance in the nightclub is genuinely sensual, playing the creepiness of the mature Jerry against Amy's youth. (This is also the moment of the film's best mirror trick.) Her erotic fealty to the vampire is rendered even more worrisome by her acquiescence. When her physical form begins distorting, there is a sadness to the horror as we see the effects of her addiction to the maleficence. This also goes for Evil Ed and his own trajectory is a tragic one.

As for Charley, himself, his task is to grow up and take a real stand. This is done through bringing his team together and doing the hard work to convince them to join him in what will be a hard fight. To do this, he has to martial Peter's vanity after his urge to quit town has taken over. Charley's values now centre on the unity of opposites, centred in Amy who is transforming into a vampire but who is still saveable if Jerry can be vanquished. He has to shed his suburban teen skin with all its dependency, take up arms, such as they are, and do battle.

The cast works well with this. William Ragsdale does look about ten years older than he should but he makes up for it with the confusion of the younger character and his distracted nature. His change has to convince if the movie is to work. The dependably dark and unctuous Chris Sarandon revisits his ghastly role in Lipstick, but adds a skin of urbanity, emanating an intimidating confidence. He is a scarier vampire than Robert Eggers' recent Nosferatu, a successful seducer of the young. Amber Bearse might seem to have little to do but look middle  '80s pop star androgenous (kind of) until she is clad in prosthetics but her Amy does feel real and unaffected in contrast to the overwrought young women of the screen at the time. Stephen Geoffreys' Evil Ed is hard to take but has to be, a kind of teenage id-engine that works its one note into the centre of the Earth. Floating above it all, of course, is Roddy McDowall, whose decades-long career by then brought him well into the core of horror cinema. He plays camp at first but through a prolonged and credible vulnerability, finds his character's essence and strength. As goofy as it can get, this is one of Roddy's best turns.

While Fright Night's reputation leaves it on a lower rung than the hits of the later '80s, it remains one of the most engaging evocations of suburban gothic available. As a comedy it goes for amiability rather than belly laughs. As a horror it is more successful, building a dread between Jerry's palpable malevolance and Charley's isolation. That Jerry can pick him off, even in the sanctuary of his own home, works solidly. As a fable of accepting the things of adulthood I think it does better than the big John Hughes teen epics by keeping the themes streamlined into allegory instead of spraypainting them all over the dialogue in dated hues. It feels like it has less to prove while offering more. That's why I can keep returning to its warm dangers. 

Viewing notes: I watched my squeaky clean and beautiful sounding 4K steelbook edition which I can only recommend. However, Fright Night is rentable through most of the usual outlets like Prime or Apple, for a small fee. Beware of the remake. If it has Colin Farrell in it, it's the wrong one. 

DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN @ 40 (spoilers on the milder side)

Bored yuppie Roberta follows the ongoing communication between two lovers through newspaper ads. When the pair set up a meeting there in New York, she has to go and see it happen. But Susan pinches a pair of priceless earrings and Jim has to go on tour and gets a friend to meet Susan who gets carted off before he, Dez, mistakes Roberta for Susan who has been knocked over and has lost her memory and -- There is so much that I have to leave out just to say this much. For the plot, you're best getting in front of it, yourself.

Desperately Seeking Susan was an instant hit. It had the quirkiness of the comedies of the '80s, a magnetic lead player in the young Rosanna Arquette and the who-cares-if-she-can-act-or-not star power of Madonna, riding the first wave of her superstardom. It won its opening weekend and went on to a very healthy first run cinema life. And if you see it, you will not wonder why.

The assumption in the leadup was that it was a star vehicle for Madonna who would be in the lead role. That might have promised great box office but didn't bode well for the film itself which at first sounded like a vanity project. It might have been the star power that gave it that initial rush but it was the movie itself that kept it going.

First, it's not Madonna/Susan in the lead but Arquette whose Roberta whose marriage to the dully narcissistic hot tub king Gary seems doomed to evaporation and for whom the intrigue of Susan and Jim seems more like life. While Gary interrupts his own cocktail parties for all his guests to see his home made ads on late night TV, Roberta cannot keep fading into the decor. This is another entry into the Yuppie Nightmare Cycle, also inhabited by Arquette in the recently reviewed After Hours. Susan is by far the better film.

Why? Susan Seidelman. The young director had already impressed with her Smithereens which got her into  competition for the Palme D'Or at Cannes for its handling of a central character that only a mother could love such that audiences were rivetted rather than revolted. Here, she tones down the whackiness in fashion at the time for comedies and pushes forward Roberta's plight. For all the frenetic zaniness of Susan and Jim's chaos we see a steadily developing character, one who witnesses her own development as her recollection returns. She places herself in the kind of life that she probably wanted before she signed on to yuppiedom.

Arquette's career trajectory has kept her in work before and since Desperately Seeking Susan but this is her sole lead. That's a shame as the strength of her turn here carries the film. At a time when Reaganomics was creating tribes of self-entitled greed monsters, Arquette's farewell to the insubstantial Gary is quiet and poignant. And in scenes where the screwball comedy is given pause, she gives us strength.

Madonna, for her part, does not disgrace herself in the title role and emerges as perfectly engaging, possibly glad that the film was not an extension of her MTV career. Along with Richard Hell (also in Smithereens) she hits her marks and says her lines, conveying real personality. Aidan Quinn as Dez comes through as someone you'd want to know. There is moment early on when he notes that someone is carrying speakers down the stairs that look familiar and, getting to the next landing, shoots a rapid glance of concern which tells us everything about the scene to come. It's a small but naturalistic joke. 

Mark Blum has the most thankless task in the role of the icky Gary, the husband who seems to think he has bought his way into a magazine lifestyle including his wife, he's all smiles and slime, saved by his unawareness of that from self destruction. Oh, something that doesn't carry well through time is the club scene where he is weirded out by the kerayzee dancers. Sorry folks, I know it's a tie in with Madonna 'n' all, but no club in 1985 that played Into the Groove would be anything but mainstream. Maybe it's a comment on how bubble-bound Gary is, but nah. It suffers from the same try hard flopping as the similar one in After Hours. 

Desperately Seeking Susan deserves its place among the highpoints of '80s mainstream cinema. Seidelman's wise choice of avoiding the pitfalls of fashion allow it endurance as the story of a search by Roberta for herself. The comedy also undermines the solemnisation of this so that the point of Roberta's scission can have its moment strongly. Thus, in the best way, this is a great '80s movie because it does and doesn't give in.

Review: THE LAST SHOWGIRL

Shelly is in the blue glare of a spotlight. A punishing close up. She nervously answers questions and under declares her age twice. This is not going to go anywhere but she persists with a smile growing increasingly tighter. How did she get here?

Back at work, she and the dancers flurry to get ready for their cue in a long running show off the Vegas A-strip. Everyone, young to Jessie's vintage, is clearly part of a warmly functioning team. That night they are told, at an informal dinner, that the show will close in a few weeks. The younger ones at least have their youth to move on. Shelly doesn't even have a pension plan.

This is a tale of that pause, the barely creditable stretch between comfort and the gutter. Friend Annette, a little older, found a way, waiting cocktails at a casino and playing the tables. Shelly has danced for a living for decades. What's she meant to do, competitive shed building? 

This is a character study, shot cinema verite style and was not written for plot but for the examination of a person under pressure. It's not the pressure of Wall St high flyers but it does concern the effective denial of a woman's life and career after decades of reasonable success. The audition we see at the start just looks like more of the same. Shelly understands this and knows that a bigger decision is on the way but what she cannot do at any cost is allow the fear or the despair to show through.

Jamie Leigh Curtis (very strong as friend Annette) signed on to this film when she learned that Pamela Anderson was to play Shelly. To Leigh Curtis, it was a vindication of Anderson's own career and Anderson's boldness in stepping up was impressive. The casting is inspired. Anderson plays a woman under constant attack, whether the snidery of her fellow dancers, the ugly home truths of the casting director at the audition, her daughter's rejection and distancing, and more, and with a clear understanding of this she has Shelly keep the flag flying, offering insights and platitudes alike in her Monroe purring voice that sounds like musk Lifesavers. If you're not watching closely, you might dismiss this as ditziness but that voice and living doll demeanour have kept her going through decades of abuse and judgement, a battering marriage and this latest turn of the screw. Being the sexy voiced Vegas dancer with the Pollyanna take on everything keeps the claws of the universe at bay and her life has been spent mastering it.

Also in the cast are the aforementioned Jamie Leigh Curtis whose Vegas tan and white lipstick and constant margaritas are heralded by a voice like Autumn leaves and a bitterness that keep her armed. It's miles away from not just Laurie Strode in Halloween but the severe Deirdre in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Her dance towards the end, done in spite of the jaded ignorance of the passers by, is breathtaking. Kiernan Shipka, whom I first noted in Mad Men as the Draper daughter, has been quietly rising through the indy ranks and forging a dependability. Her response to the reception she gets when she turns to Shelly for help is a stark pointer to the kind of toughness she will need on this career path. Wrestling star turned actor Dave Bautista continues to demonstrate that he is more impressive when playing the scenes with worldly tenderness than with power.

And then there is Gia Coppola. Last year, Coralie Fargeat headbutted us for over two hours with The Substance until we understood that it was the film of the year. The new Coppola on the block chooses something more like John Cassavettes, shooting on gritty, blown up 16mm and keeping the lighting thick and grimy for the interiors and only slightly fresher for the outside. Her take on the expected deterioration of these women asks us to follow and observe the beginning and the end of this process. There is a moment during one of Shelly's dances where she uses one hand wrapped around her back to grasp her waist. In the light of the stage it looks malevolent, like the claw of a roulette table monster making free with the staff. The best scenes in Paolo Alto were not flukes. This new one works, quietly, but it works.

THE CHANGELING @ 45

After losing his wife and daughter in a horror crash, composer John Russell must find his way to living through massive grief. He emerges from mourning, moving to a new city and job teaching composition at the local Conservatory. He lands well, finding an isolated mansion to move into for the kind of quiet that allows concentration. But that's not how these stories play out. Things move by themselves. Sounds occur when and where they shouldn't. Curious, and almost glad of the distraction, John goes exploring and finds a walled up room with a lot of dust and webs and a child's wheelchair. There's work to be done.

This was an original screenplay, based on a claimed genuine haunting. Off centre U.K. directors Tony Richardson and Donald Cammell were early choices but both bailed for creative differences. By the time Peter Medak got the megaphone, the script had been through rewrites and he added some of his own. In a very real sense, this tale of failed adoptions might have to do with the film being counterproductively uneven. While it's a favourite to put on on a rainy afternoon for its engaging eeriness, it always gets to a point where I feel like getting up for a break.

That's not to say it ever really drags. The Changeling feels draggy over the course of its reasonable hundred minutes because, as good as he is to watch, George C. Scott's John Russell is so blustery and pragmatic that he never seems to be under threat. Add a plot convolution that plods when it should accelerate and you have something that does actually feel like a story fixed with patches rather than drafted anew as a fluent single treatment.

Medak is no slouch when it comes to effective film making, the chills here as good as you'll find in anything of its era, but he can appear to lose sight of the aerial view of his projects. If you read up on The Ruling Class and that is stars a young and feisty Peter O'Toole you might hurry to it but by the second of its two and half hours you might start cherry picking the good bits of what should have been a  ninety minute satire at the most. Similarly frustrating is the '90s entry Romeo is Bleeding which should have been a sure fire bad cop story in the era of Pulp Fiction and Bad Lieutenant but ends up as cinematic porridge. The Changeling is not as bungled as either of those as it does deliver on its promises as a complicated ghost story, it's just that we could lose about fifteen minutes of transitional or lifestyle scenes (they date it stylistically, anyway, and give it the feel of being a filmed Playboy ad for pipe tobacco). 

It is also not helped by its orchestral score which begins with an enjoyable uncanny piano and strings theme but soon blands out into aural treacle. This is after the likes of Jerry Goldsmith's terrifying score for the Omen and John Carpenter's unsettling piano and synth music for Halloween. It gives the film the feel of a luxury budget production but that's really not always what you want in a horror movie.

But horror movie it is and is quite readily regarded as a classic of its kind. I might question that last point but I do have to admit that the goods it brings when it needs to (that séance scene!) and those moments of development that suggest that the real darkness is not in the haunted house alone, are gripping. You might notice that the worst of my criticisms here are kind of the opposite of faint praise, that my sticking points are quite likely local to me. Perhaps I should just say that, while I would watch something like The Haunting (1963) at the drop of a hat but think about revisiting The Changeling it might be more indicative of its place in my estimation. I love The Haunting. I respect The Changeling.

Viewing notes: I watched my lovely 4K release of this which came with a BD and a CD soundtrack album. This is not currently available to rent or buy in Australia. If you were to travel back to the days of VHS shops you'd be able to get a copy on a cheaper weekly rate. Not everything had got better.