EYES WIDE SHUT @ 25

Well-heeled Manhattanite couple Bill and Alice go to a Christmas party thrown by their uber one-percenter friend Victor and there, in the boozy, soft light wooze, both are sexually tempted but both decline. Afterwards, sharing a post party joint, they get into an argument about potential infidelity which ends in Alice confessing that she was struck by the sight of a naval officer at a recent holiday they'd been on. Not just struck but after a single glance from him, she says she was ready to abandon her marriage for the stranger. Bill is so slammed by this that he sets off into the night looking for an opportunity to slake his jealousy by any means possible and ends up infiltrating a secret orgy of the great and famous where his life is threatened. He is saved by an interloper whose fate appears dreadfully sealed. Freed, he flees, determined to discover what happened.

Stanley Kubrick was by the time of this film's completion producing so few new films that each was given greater hype than the previous on their approach. Among the rumours sticking to this one was that it was a box office time server before the one he really wanted to make, A.I. Such rumours served to diminish Eyes Wide Shut as a secondary work made to finance a primary one. However, Kubrick had wanted to make an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (Dream-Story) since the 1960s. It had gone through many different imaginings and castings until finally made in the 1990s. It was a primary work that Kubrick was highly pleased with. 

On the ground around me, people who professed to be lifelong fans of the director mostly expressed distaste for the movie, often exaggerating the lameness of the hyped orgy scene and considering the film a waste or their time as well as the effort it took to make. I was reminded of a lot of backlashes previously, against all kinds of things, other movies, music artists' new albums, novels and so on: Kubrick didn't make the movie they wanted so whatever this one was was angrily flushed. For my part I had been unconvinced of Kubrick's unquestioned genius but had seen something in this last one that fascinated me. To this day, I consider it one of his best and most rewatchable. This is not, I swear, my own contrariness, the film's themes of responses to jealousy feel hauntingly genuine to me, heightened by the high sheen of the visuals and gravity of the music. If I had to choose, I'd rather have this than Lolita, Barry Lyndon, or Full Metal Jacket.

Why? Well, expanding on my reason given just then, I think it's one of the most accurate treatments of sexual jealousy committed to screen. Not only does it hit the disproportionate responses between the couple but neither consummates their extra marital desire. It plays and feels more like a fable than the erotic thriller it's often touted to be.  Alice, however drunk she is, resists the charms of the Hungarian lecher at the party. Bill seems on the edge of following the two models who appear like a masturbatory fantasy from the golden light of the glitz. The couple's post-event discussion about each other's moments of temptation leads to the argument and Alice's confession. That confession, while it still haunts Alice, becomes a motif for Bill, recurring throughout his adulterous trek in a series of black and white vignettes, a scene that never happened for real but is what he imagines his wife imagined and desired. He is revenging himself against a passing thought (a resonant one but still just a thought). 

I don't think that this expresses male jealousy vs female, just the likelihood of a lack of balance between people intimately involved. This story invites you to revisit the often brutal ugliness of a moment of your own jealousy and, honest viewers who were more interested in what the film before them asked of them than in what temporary approval they might find by trashing the movie in front of others, will take away a confronting candour.

Is the orgy scene lame? Compare it to the New French Extremity and the daunting boundary pushing of erotic thrillers since and, sure, it seems very slight for the participants to care too much who knew about it. That point is better expressed in the conversation Bill has toward the end with Zigler which is more about class exclusion. The suggestion that any given modern city might be by powerful narcissists might not be news to anyone but the thought of it, when given a second or two, remains a shivery horror. As to Bill, wandering the rainbow coloured sets of a very clean Greenwich Village crawling with dirty minds, he for the moment can only see opportunities that he feels the force of his will alone bestow entitlements upon him. It's as powerful an allegory for the concentration of sexual arousal as any.

While the casting of the two leads had changed greatly over the decades as Kubrick returned to the thought of this adaptation, he really knocked it out of the park by choosing alpha celebrity couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Young, talented and beautiful, Cruise and Kidman were on screens as much as they were on the covers of celebrity mags at supermarket checkouts. They were characterised as a power couple without controversy. The opening scene depicting the pair getting ready to go to the party feels completely natural and, once established, we feel we are in the company of people we know at the same time as unreachable movie stars. Cruise plays up to his walking grin persona but is also put through such strain that this appears increasingly shallow. Kidman speaks mostly in hushed tones with elongated vowels takes Alice to a point of unquestionable authority. The film's final line is hers and she delivers it with the quiet but abrupt confidence that the whole film has begged: "fuck!"

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT @ 25

Heather, Josh and Mike, three film students head out to the country to win big in their coursework by making a documentary about a local legend. Picking up some local intel and colour with some interviews about the Blair witch and mass murderer Rustin Parr, they shoot some introductory footage in the town and then head into the woods for some more folkloric landmarks. The woods are a bigger deal than they expected and they are soon disorientated with night encroaching. "This is America," say Heather, "how lost can you actually be?" The implicit answer from the woods is, "hold my beer".

So begins the cultural moment that resounds these decades on and will only continue. Yes, the film makers really only planned on making a nifty little campfire tale that might light up a few festival screens and maybe have an afterlife on VHS. The formula is still applied; make a low budge horror and kick the door down to a film career. After Blair Witch, though, the starting point could be a lot closer to the earth. The technology that was less than a decade away used it as a source point. 

I have a clear memory of  a post to the newsgroup alt.horror in 1999 where I first saw this title. It was from someone who had been creeped out by the trailer. Just a post among many (it's probably still there) but, while we ol' stagers were used to thinly veiled spam, this just read as normal. Everyone who stopped by it in the feed searched for the title and found the trailer (pre-YouTube and embedding links). And we all brought back our impressions to the newsgroup as trusted posters. And we mentioned it to anyone we could interest. When the website appeared with its images of film cans as menu links and limited though excitingly usable video, it looked like the slick end of urban myth creation.

There is a persistent idea that the Haxan Films team designed the proto-viral campaign through their own punky resourcefulness but the real story is far more satisfying. There are millions of words written about the circumstances of this film's marketing alone and it gets too intricate for me to detail here but a summary should do. After the groundswell of whispers, electronic and actual, blew the title like a gale to its midnight screenings at the Sundance Film Festival where it showed to packed houses, the property was picked up by Artisan for many times more than its production costs and that astute corporate entity elected to pour money into the guerrilla style infiltration for the marketing. This included the extraordinary measure of wilfully distributing "bootleg" copies of an incomplete cut. The vapourware movie bled out of the modem and into the living room in the VHS haunted world of the late '90s. This is how I saw it. A friend of a friend who knew a bloke passed on an unlabelled cassette and we watched it, feeling part of the forbidden elite.

If you want to know about people thinking it was real by the time it was released in Australia in December 1999, the answer is few, if any. U.S. general release preceded it by five months and the internet had long been the e-land of the spoiler. But the flavour of it allowed a tinge of excitement, especially when getting into the cinema and passing the photocopied sign about the dangers of motion sickness.

Hype will always have antihype and people who complained of it being boring, uneventful, a ripoff or plain unscary flooded from the woodwork. For all their complaints about the way horror movies should look and play, the box office here extended the story in the rest of the world. It was a massive and persistent success. At a time when studios were pouring money into increasingly defanged horror movies, this tiny thing beat the lot of them. TS Eliot wasn't always right but he was when he suggested that any artistic revolution needs to be a return to the banal. There, amid the smellable mud and palpable exhaustion was a banality that felt like a nightmare.

That success was transformed from dollar returns to cultural absorption. While what came to be known as the Found Footage genre was slow to launch, the example of its marketing was heeded thereafter, with the ever more normalised internet open to a seemingly infinite spectrum of claims to veracity or more plainly effectiveness. As video recording and reproduction improved in quality, price and distribution, the no-budget feature became such an established norm that its aesthetics were adopted by the mainstream the same way that post punk eventually made it into Heinz soup commercials. Features shot on digital video and projected in cinemas warranted as little comment as anything shot on celluloid. The sense of video's veracity and immediacy became a trope. Now we are at the point where blockbusters are shot on the highest resolution video and look cleaner than film to the extent that some titles get algorithmic film grain imposed on to the digital image the same way that some dance CDs had sampled vinyl surface noise added.

When Found Footage did find its foothold in the late 2000s with Paranormal Activity, the sporadic titles that had appeared between that time and Blair Witch took on a pioneering status. Now, Found Footage is so routinely acceptable that it's just another kind of movie. Still, things penetrate: Rob Savage's lockdown/screenlife horror Host, presented as a single Zoom meeting made it to the screens of those living under the same conditions as the characters. It was a little over the twentieth anniversary but no one who had seen Blair Witch wasn't reminded of it.

So, after all this time and motion, does the Blair Witch Project still work? Yes, and to the same extent. Cut away the hype of real events, you can now watch it in the current climate of routine Found Footage cinema and it feels the same. Feels? For the most recent 312 Nights of Horror challenge (a horror movie per night for all of October) I decided to up the tally of FF titles from all sources. The Blair Witch phenotypes do not need description, they present themselves as markers to an audience that could count them off a list if they weren't so thoroughly expected.

It is scary. If you go into it with the intention of resisting it, ask yourself why you are borthering. If you are going to rate it for jump scares or the appearance of the title character, you should have paid more attention to the first ten minutes that told you in the plainest terms that this was not going to go that way (though many more recent FF films do). If you have ever been lost or felt powerless against distressing circumstances, you will understand this film and why it still scares its audiences. It was my delight to show it as a twentieth anniversary screening to a pair of friends around my vintage who just had not got around to seeing it. Winter 1999, I lit a fire in the hearth, put on comfy foods and wine and we watched, rendered silent when the end credits rolled. One of my guests turned to me and only had to say, "that was good."

Viewing notes: I waited months to do this one as that's how long it took for Second Sight's extraordinary restoration of the film to appear on Blu-Ray. Removing the incidentally imposed film grain on to the video footage rendered it flawed for its directors. Now, the video looks like video and the film like film. The cut is unchanged (though there is the slightly longer festival cut available). There is also a wealth of supplemental material. I know I sound like a shill but this is how a favourite movie should be treated, whatever it is. However, the film is available by subscription on both Stan and Netflix and rentable through pretty much all the others. Get ya some Found Footage.

Review: LEE

Lee Miller, transitioning from fashion model to photographer among the avantistas of Paris, keeps at the shutter bugging until she finds her level as a war correspondent going to the darker shadows of the human state. She narrates this from age to an interviewer and we have our frame. This can be done well like in Amadeus or woefully like in Chaplin. Lee does it with a difference.

The film is given the stellar performance of one of the contemporary greats in Kate Winslet's lead role and is supported by some serious skill in the surrounding cast. But then, the test of how reliant on the historical record the film should prove to be against how cinematic it prefers to be. There is a persistent evenness of pace here which allows the film as a whole to drag and it begins to feel like a dull movie made of good scenes, too reverent. The reverence hazards audience empathy as Miller as a character tests patience with capriciousness and frowning disapproval. It's not until a good halfway through that she, facing the spectacle of the liberated death camps, that her enforced humility allows us in.

This applies to the interview format. At first it plays like Chaplin with the enquirer feeding lines for quotable quotes. Amadeus solved this by having the narrator aggressively toy with the young priest to the point where Salieri's twisted memories become a weird version of the real story and implicate the priest as a witness, making the problem of veracity unsolvable. Lee plays it more like that and leaves the sting till last at which point what felt tired and generic biopic material becomes active narrative weight.

I'm getting all fustian here and not really describing the film itself as that's how the movie made me think as I was watching it. I felt like I was filing scenes away rather than enjoying them gather and take form. Throughout the running time there are moments of commentary on the status of women in art, in public life, in war, in history, and they are all worth our attention and are handled without condescension. It is not until, like everything else in this story, we hit the forcefulness of the war that they really find their power. The girl in the death camp who can only trust her fellow victims moves like a maltreated kitten. The woman publicly humiliated in a French village gives a piercing stare to Miller's lens which is shame incarnate.

So, yes, we are talking a timeline of moments more than a cohesive whole life and its big lesson. That, in the end, might well be the way of a better biopic. If you're not going to wildly fling a biography to the wall for fun and life lessons, maybe this is it: roll it out until you find the riff and then just play the riff. Doesn't sound like I liked it, does it? But I did.

HALLOWEEN

Halloween is once again upon us. Yes, the celebration of the spooky that folk of my vintage knew only from American kids tv shows has made it almost intact o'er the great black ocean and seems happy with its new surrounds and we it. I used to resist this but it's grown on me as it has coincided with my annual 31 nights of horror movies rituals which I do enjoy. At first this was one of the many diversions from lockdown in the terrible spring of '20 but I liked it well enough to look forward to in the second half of each year.

My personal list from this year can be found here. It changes every year but always ends with John Carpenter's 1978 classic for the ages, Halloween. As this is approaching I thought I might resurrect an older tradition with this here blog whereby I'd recommend movies for a marathon. This time, I'll pick a smaller range with the idea of watching just one on the night to whomever might be in the mood. All of these are available to streaming for free (though some have ads).

FOUND FOOTAGE 

SAVAGELAND: One of my favourite approaches to horror cinema of the current century for its edgy mix of veracity and the fantastic. The one I was most impressed with this year was Savageland. It's a mockumentary with a new trope for the found footage weaponry: photographs. It is the story of the accused in a case of mass murder whose photographs from the night the entire border hamlet he lived in were slaughtered. There is an extra layer of tension between the true crime format evoked and the photographs themselves which range from the eerie to the out and out horrifying. Compelling.

Tubitv.com (free with ads)

POSSESSION

LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL: one of my favourites from last year's MIFF, this is a mocked up talk show from the '70s where the host tries to boost his ratings by including a real life exorcism for his audience. What emerges about his character is equal of the frights his possessed guest and might even exceed them. A well managed mix of satire, comedy and straight up horror.

Kanopy (free through a public library membership)

FOLK HORROR

LAMB: A bizarre magical realist tale involves a childless couple in a remote location adopting a strange lamb/human hybrid. You will not expect the ending.

SBS on Demand (free with ads)

SCI-FI HORROR

EVENT HORIZON: A crew takes a propulsion engineer out to Neptune where the spacecraft he designed has mysteriously reappeared after being lost for years. A great mix of pop Kubrick with a dash of Hellraiser and some nifty concepts and art direction.

SBS on Demand (free with ads)

OCCULT

TALK TO ME: One of the freshest horror movies to appear so far in the 21st is this home grown talismanic fable of grief and taken temptation. Teenage Sophie stretches a séance style game involving an embalmed hand that kicks the door between this life and the one beyond. Very slick but also grounded in verity as the teen characters act and sound their age. Miranda Otto has some great lines as the mum.

Kanopy (free through a public library membership)

There are many more but these are free to see and worth your time. Keep 'em screaming!

ALISON'S BIRTHDAY @ 45

Three private schoolgirls hold a seance. It's all fun and games until someone actually gets possessed, in this case by the deceased father of Alison who freaks out not a little. Things start flying off the wall, the window frames burst into the room and a big bookcase falls on the possessed girl, but not before she conveys Alison's father's warning about her nineteenth birthday. Cut to the eighteen plus Alison, working in a shop just before knockoff when she goes to meet her DJ boyfriend at the local radio station. They have a date with a thriller on tv and drinks at her place. While that's happening, her aunt calls and invites her, with more than a little emotional extortion, to have her impending nineteenth with them. She goes. Within two scenes, things are going strange and this birthday business is looking all dodge.

This home grown supernatural tale surprises from the off with dialogue that swings between witty and naturalistic. For the most part this goes for the performances, though they are less even across the cast. These do their best to make up for the soggy pacing and parts of the dialogue that are awkwardly expository. Local acting veterans Bunney Brooke and John Bluthal put in some real weight as the aunt and uncle which helps keep things based. The beautiful Joanne Samuels puts in a good turn as the titular Alison, an urbane mix of skepticism and curiosity and Lou Brown as boyfriend Peter fights well against some lines that should have been erased (usually because too obvious). 

As this is part of my 31 nights of horror and I only realised during the credits that it was made at an anniverary year, this write up will need to be speedy and brief. This was part of my folk horror box set All the Haunts be Ours and completes a generous Australian section. Movie like this don't get shown free to air anymore but some streamers might include it. Put it on if you still have the vim after the main movie at home. It's light but it has a serious and craftsmanly heart.

Viewing notes: Alison's Biirthday is on Stan and Prime with a subscription and sometimes appears on SBS on Demand. I wouldn't fork out the hundreds that my box set costs just for this one movie but it is a great set.

PHANTASM @ 45

Tommy gets lucky and takes his belle de jour to the graveyard for sex one night. When its her turn to penetrate she chooses a long sharp knife into the chest. Not quite the pillow talk he had in mind but he's beyond caring about that. Also, the woman has transformed in the space of a cut into a tall frowning man. When Tommy's brother Jody goes to the funeral with his friend Reggie, they talk about how weird Tommy's apparent suicide was before Jody goes into the bizarre black and white mausoleum where he's slammed on the shoulder by the tall man in the prologue. Younger-still brother Michael, who's been following Jody around, turns up on his trail bike and watches through binoculars as the Tall Man (as the figure came to be known in the franchise) effortlessly lifts a full casket into the back of a hearse. Ok that's all in the first ten minutes and I haven't mentioned the strange creatures who seem to be darting behind headstones or the Dune-like box o' ordeals that Michael is tested with at a local medium business.

This is the world of Phantasm built of strange details that seem left over from last night's whiskey flavoured writing session. It's also one of the most refreshingly original genre-bending films ever made. I said original and just above I also said that one of the details was like something from Dune. Writer/director Don Coscarelli knows you know that (and this is five years before Lynch's feature film made a big thing of it). Jody goes to a watering hole in the town called Dune Cantina. You might find some resemblance between the flying ball and the flying syringes in Dune but the similarity is slight and diverges as soon as the ball meets a head and drains the blood which it spits out a hole in its rear. That's the kind of thing Coscarelli was thinking up when he conceived of this film. He was on a phone call and played around with a Styrofoam cup, pushing through the bottom with a finger and watching as it moved apparently by itself. That's what I mean by original. A lot of what you see on screen here feels invented on the spot, spontaneous, regardless of how screenplays happen.

Apart from the impressive practical effects and atmospheres, the human story of the younger brother's sadness at Jody's intended departure for further adventures is an affecting one. The scene of Michael running after Jody as he rides a bike around the streets feels less literal than figurative, it's how Jody sees it and how Michael feels. And there is a suggestion that the weird happenings in the town that only this family appear to see, rise directly from this melancholy state. When you see what becomes of the brother from the prologue, the sting of the absence is made clear.

That aside, Phantasm is a fresh adventure with plenty of sci-fi ideas and horror scenes and a bad guy who joined the Jasons and Freddies of mainstream horror from the off. The fact that the blending of ambience between the green suburban streets and the stark gothic of the mausoleum feels so smooth is testament to why this film continues to work. This is an unofficial extension of the homely suburban leafiness of Halloween and a precursor of the Spielberg look of the decade to come but while the sex on show is not even mainstream explicit it is too clearly suggested to allow a G rating. This puts Phantasm in that strange margin where adult and young adult blend uneasily. Michael's grin at spying the sight of exposed breasts is knowing (just like Coscarelli's inclusion of it).

The other group I'd put Phantasm into is the margin of early home video and arthouse titles like Evil Dead or Tourist Trap, held together with gaffer tape but holding real originality. These travelled under even the parade of slashers and cheaper sci-fi and emerged decades later for delighted discovery. Phantasm, as aforesaid, found itself a franchise but it is this first think-it-and-throw-it-against-the-wall outing that still packs the punch.

Viewing notes: I watched this on the Well Go region A Blu-Ray which is very fine. If you are tempted to explore, you are currently limited to buying overseas or trying ebay. To my knowledge this film has not been released locally since the days of VHS (which is how I first saw it). 

Review: BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Lydia Deetz has grown up to host a successful ghost hunting tv show but is starting to see her old foe appear in crowds like a stalker. Her mother Delia, not quite grown up but older, is a performance artist. Lydia's daughter Astrid is in the polar position that Lydia was with her mother so goth mum and straight daughter, now. The dad from the first one dies in a stop motion plane crash and the family heads back to Winter River where the old house is shrouded in black for the performative memorial. Lydia's modern fragile manager and close companion, sweet talks her into getting married on Halloween. Astrid quietly rides away on a bike and crashes through the fence of the introverted boy in town and they start talks. Meanwhile in the netherworld, Beetlejuice, now an afterlife bureaucrat, hears tell of his soul sucking ex ressurecting and coming after him. There's a lot of intertwining dependencies that will lead pretty much where you expect.

I wanted to spend some weighty time on that premise to convey how long it feels to sit through it before this film gets into gear, and that's leaving a lot out. The elongated first act plays like the first half hours of episodes one and two of this as a streaming mini series. It's not boring but you get the feeling that you'll be kept waiting. But there are rewards.

Catherine O'Hara turns on the quirk dependably. Wynona Ryder is believably an older Lydia. Justin Theroux enjoyably overplays his new age balderdash character. Tim Burton's magic shop aesthetic is turned on to gush and when the narrative begins to crank into action the movie feels a lot more like home. But you also start noticing things you probably shouldn't. While the original spent time on earning character empathy, this one does more toward recognition humour and leaves things at that depth. Then you get to Astrid's subplot which would make a better Tim Burton movie that this or most of his output since the '80s. At the centre of that is the increasingly magnetic Jenna Ortega who stands in for the audience's skepticism through her sassy adolescence. As in Wednesday, X (where she really gave charismatic Mia Goth a run for her money), Scream VI or Sabrina Carpenter's Taste video (please watch that) she owns the screen.

Otherwise, this is a rerun with less of the charm that came from the then novelty of Burton's goofy gothic style. There are many self referential moments to highlight the passage of time but there are too few new inventions to allow a claim of something more than nostalgia. This is Beetlejuice in the era of YouTube ghost hunters and experiencing live events through phone screens but the crowding of the canvas between these and the callbacks just make you realise you could have thought all this yourself from one viewing of the trailer. When the big song at the climax happens you think, "wow!" and then you think, "ok". So, Tim, good to see some updates but I heard you the first time.