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.

RHINOCEROS @ 50

John, an aging bon vivant, chastises his younger friend Stanley for surrendering to a bad life that has driven him to drink. He is about to entice Stanley to grasp his own life when a cacophony outside drives everyone in the restaurant to the window to see a rhinoceros charging down the street. Later, at work, the wife of an absent staff member reports that the animals have not escaped from a zoo but that people, like her husband, are transforming into them. As she rides away on her newly pachydermal husband's back, life choices are being reassessed.

Eugene Ionesco's absurdist fable freedom from conformity and resistance to both is presented with big performances and a lot of stagey overreach. This would have rendered it unwatchable but for the casting of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in the second of only two pairings on screen. The first was in the deathless Mel Brooks debut The Producers. The relation between their characters in Rhinoceros is immediately reminiscent of that film, with Mostel's John bullying Wilder's Stanley about his life choices. After that opening, though, the dynamic differs when John faces his own transformation and the mood shifts quickly to panic and then pathos. It's worth noting that Mostel was repeating his role from the play's Broadway debut over a decade earlier. But that, while interesting, does not explain the staginess that can drag this film away from compulsion.

It wasn't a standalone production but part of a series of films commissioned by the short lived American Film Theatre project in an attempt to bring the media of film and theatre together by presenting cinematic versions of modern classic plays. I remember this coming to far off Townsville in the mid '70s as a subscription package which was expensive and gave off exclusivist vapours. I thought it sounded stuck up but I also loved the idea of it. Harold Pinter's The Homecoming was one of them and Pinter himself directed Simon Gray's Butley. This was not something I could easily convince my parents to invest in so I let it slide. Later, I saw Butley at Uni and the ABC played most of the titles in late night spots. I was gratified to discover how good they had been. The project was doomed as it tried to reinvent cinema into a more theatre-like deal with the subscriptions and came across as snobbish bullshit. Pity, though.

This is important in considering Rhinoceros as it goes a way toward explaining the staginess of a lot of the action and how most of it is done in sets with little of the freedom of movement that cinema production allows. While it doesn't feel like a filmed stage production the sets, particularly the apartment interiors are exploited for their claustrophobic pokiness. Director Tom O'Horgan came to the gig from his work on Broadway. While he does allow some breakout and is clever in his use of sound to suggest the rhinos on the streets, he does fall back on the kind of blocking that emphasises physical engineering over cinematic setups when bodies have to move together; we're seeing a movie but we're also seeing the cooking while we watch approach of live theatre. I imagine this was intentional but it can lower the tone even of this broadbrush satire.

But then we can easily fall back on the performances. Mostel and Wilder in the leads but also a bright Karen Black with her heyday energy, the character stalwart Joe Silver and the instant comedy figure of Don Calfa as the waiter. But these are the kind of things that while adding to the enjoyment of the film can also date it. I wonder if the final defiance would be done with such anger and futility as it is here. Is Ionesco's proposition about resistance readable in the post-truth realm? Maybe more than ever. Just, don't remake it, watch it, for all its antiquity, the way it is here. It's from when the truth about misdeeds at the top of American society could bring a Nixon down. It's worth the watch for that thought alone.

Rhinoceros is available through Kanopy which you should join now. Free, and through your local public library system(which you should also join now).

ONIBABA @ 60

Marsh reeds, shift in the wind. Somewhere in the whispering mass is a pit too deep to see all the way to the bottom. Soldiers are fighting in the reeds, a pair struggles to escape from the skirmish but the effort is so exhausting they collapse. Just as they seem to revive both are killed by spears. Two women appear and strip the soldiers of their armour and weapons, put the cache aside and drag the bodies to the pit and kick them in. Then they return to their slightly upgraded lean to, stuff rice into their mouths and fall to exhausted sleep. Another day.

This is the world of the story of the Onibaba, an expansion of an ancient Bhuddist cautionary fable about a mother trying to control her daughter by wearing a demonic disguise. Writer/director Kaneto Shindo starts well before that brief story and works to establish the mother and daughter (in law) and their rough subsistence life in the realm of the marsh. 

Into this carefully balanced life, coursing across the river like a crocodile, comes Hachi, heading home from the war he's deserted but without his friend Kichi, son to the older woman and husband to the younger (neither woman is named). He explains the savage chaos of the war and how he and Kichi were both trying to escape but Kichi didn't make it. The older woman judges him but the younger cannot shake Hachi's charm. 

A little wooing later and she's sneaking off at night for the first relief from her strained existence she's known for too long. Her mother in law twigs to this and approaches Hachi, even offering herself in the young woman's place. Hachi has, meanwhile, swapped his opportunistic lust for something more like love and wants to marry the younger (this doesn't play awkwardly on film and wouldn't here if the characters had been graced with names).

A little while later, something comes up and the mother in law comes upon the makings of a deterrent, a demonic mask, which she wears and appears as a terrifying spectre in the marshes, forcing her daughter in law to turn back in horror. This works until it doesn't: she can't take the mask off.

Kaneto Shindo was born and raised in Hiroshima. His military service ironically saved him from suffering the unimaginable hell of the atomic bomb. Not enough irony? Well, this old Hiroshiman died in 2012, making it to a month over a hundred years old. Whether it was a sense of the greatest luck in history or simply a life force energised by his own war experience, Shindo threw himself into the fashioning of fables for cinema, directing forty-eight of his own stories and writing two hundred and thirty-eight films for other directors. With masterpieces of the strange like Human, Ditch, Kuroneko up his sleeve, he easily joins the pantheon of post-occupation Japanese filmmaking. Onibaba is the central gem in his timeline.

Of that generation of  Japanese filmmakers, there is barely an example within a ten year radius that does not mention, however metaphorically, the spectacle and effect of the bombs. In Onibaba this is in Hachi's description of the war in open country and in Kyoto itself, hub of civilisation rendered chaotic and desperate. There is also the spectre of a distant cloud of smoke as though a whole city was on fire. The setting is medieval but the solemnity of the witnesses to this is profound and clearly indicating recent history.

What leads to this moment is the world-building of the endless tall grass in constant motion in the wind and the naturalistic performances and dialogue of the players. These people really seem to live there. Shindo took his crew to the marshes at Chiba where they lived and worked for almost the whole production. Even knowing how difficult this process was and seeing the depiction of the hand-to-mouth inhabitants, I still want to live there.

None of this makes it into the source fable. This was Shindo's solid imagination that gave his public, weary of tradition and authority, a version based on life-affirming sex in place of the piety of the temple of the original. The cool jazz tones of the score that burst into thunderous taiko drumming for the night sequences would have felt like a bow to liberation from the generation of militarism the culture had endured. The nudity and convincing sex scenes work to this end; less titillating than candid. Like a number of films by this Methuselah of the medium, Onibaba is a blend of its times and timelessness and a testament to the need to climb from the pits of history into the kind of light useful for making a living. Few knew that better than Kaneto Shindo.

Viewing notes: I saw this on Criterion's stunning Blu-Ray but that, or the U.K. Eureka edition (also fine). Otherwise, it might be up to finding it second hand, locally. It's one of those essential films from history that are very difficult to get to see.