HELP @ 60

Ok, so The Beatles were having a very big second conquest of the world and the idea of the second movie came up. It was contractual like the first one but the plans were off the charts. Colour, massive cast, worldwide locations and a whacky plot that brought them somewhere between James Bond spoofing and pop art. The world was waiting. So, what went wrong?

Well, to start with, it was all of those things listed above and more, but also a far cry from the enhanced documentary that made A Hard Day's Night work across decades. This is before you get to the now unacceptable racial comic stereotypes and highly uneven whimsy that add up to a mess with good songs.

There is a plot. A sacrificial candidate to a Kaliesque Indian cult cannot be executed because she sent the ritual ruby ring to Ringo as a fan gift. This sets the ersatz Thugees on the trail of the Beatle to either retrieve the ring or sacrifice him by a deadline. The Beatles seek assistance from several sources like Indian mystics, jewellers, Scotland Yard and some rogue scientists who discover the ring's potential for weaponry and join the chase. The chase takes them to the Austrian Alps and The Bahamas among other locales and everything kind of romps home to the end credits.

While there are Anglo-Indian cast members, the main roles of the Thugee cult are played by a sub-cast drawn from British talent at the time like Leo McKern, John Bluthal, Eleanor Bron etc. They are in various stages of blackface and affect the kind of accents that even the canonical Goons sported when a quick laugh was needed. There's really no pedalling back from this, although there is a meta commentary in the Indian restaurant scene where all the staff are played by Cockney's who mention union regulations. 

That reminded me of something much later, the Yiddish speaking Native Americans of Blazing Saddles and, later still, the tribal characters in Cannibal The Musical who are played by Koreans who protest their Native American authenticity. Both of these examples stand spotless in the frequently dodgy comedy of both those film makers. The restaurant staff almost redeem things but once that scene has played we're back to the goodness-gracious-me bad guys. The only reason they are Indian at all is because of the deadly cult of the scary Asian climes. I've just imagined the cult as West Country Druids and it's immediately funnier. This is spilt milk, of course. I would oppose revisionism to wield an AI brush to this one. If you sit in front of it you are going to get some tidbits from the playbook of The British Raj by way of end-of- pier comedians and panto.

A cleverer counterpoint to this is the scientist constantly complaining about the build quality of British supervillain weapons. His use of and disgust for the various lasers and mismatches of international power connections plays like a smart parody of Bond movies' catalogues of spy weapons and would have sat comfortably in an episode of the spy-fi show The Avengers and certainly found regular appearances in the soon to appear Get Smart. Could The Fabs have squared off against the boffins as main baddies with music technology forces like guitar feedback? They'd already done I Feel Fine, by then. Ok, that is the kind of embarrassingly goofy thing that a groovy minded senior of the time might have thought up, but it's the end of my holidays and I'm overheating.

And where are The Beatles themselves in all this? On the sidelines with dialogue wisecracks more zany than funny, action-mannequins in their own movie. It's important to remember that initial screenings of this film were to the demographic who screamed like Boeing jets every time one of the guys had a close up. Almost all the humour is aimed at that bullseye and, where it had been percussive and genuinely funny in the first film, doesn't really have to do much in this one as the comedy focus is aimed away from the stars and on to the cast of clowny others.

What you do get, though, is the songs of the first side of the album of the same name which have them at the peak before Rubber Soul pushed them irrevocably into the critical stratosphere. All of them play like contemporary music videos (the title track actually is an old timey performance clip). All the song writers, teamed or individual, are approaching heights of craft.

As you watch these performances and witness the sidelining of the stars it might well occur to you that you are looking at celebrities in a bubble. They are both too well known and approaching unknowable at this stage. The gigs keep getting bigger and the hits keep coming. The interviews get more guarded and the blackened windows of their limos are wound all the way up. They can't make another Hard Day's Night, it, oddly, would now appear too contrived, too fake. This precursor to the Batman and Monkees TV shows is about as candid as they can allow themselves. The members of the band were a lot less enthused about this film than the first one. They'd grown creatively restless and the I-love-she-loves-we-love assembly line had already frayed beyond repair. They'd seen the mightiest adoration that any small collective of their species could and the only thing new to them was lurking in the shadows. And they'd adopted slower drugs, getting through each pincushion day in a haze of cannabis coughs. 

I wonder what a third film might have been like in this series, a movie after the adventurous and darker corners of the Revolver album were known to their fans and the general public. A psychedelic pioneer? Ninety minutes of solipsistic twaddle? The closest we get is Lennon's role in Richard Lester's How I Won the War, colourful, absurdist and edgy but destined for the bargain bin. The year after that, when the bubble developed a leak with Magical Mystery Tour, the effort to embrace the weirder times was eclipsed by the more genuinely psychedelic Yellow Submarine cartoon, the year after that. Maybe that's as futile as the single disc White Album that fans persist with, beyond the point where it is either healthy or useful. But that this was the second and last statement of Beatles movie as PR exercise, we were left with what feels like a second episode you watch just to get to the third. Then again, we are talking about a music group.

Help is a film best watched lightly. It doesn't have the quaint pretensions of John Boorman's Catch Us if You Can but is unhampered by the cuteness (however more engaging) Herman's Hermits vehicle Mrs Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter. The Rolling Stones were not a fit for loveable fiction features, being far better suited to documentaries (and what documentaries). The Kinks might have done something intriguing, if they'd been asked. And Cliff was a distant recollection, destined to follow the St. Trinians movie after Christmas lunch. 

But that's the thing. Movies built around musical acts have never quite convinced Hard Day's Night does because it was a one off, a fictional documentary made with funny people. The recent The Nowhere Inn with St Vincent playing herself is cushioned with fictive invention and acquits itself as an oddity. More celebrated are the legend makers that blithely pursue the real with gleeful fabrication like Almost Famous. And there are too many like Eddie and the Cruisers or The Doors which lie as embarrassing stains in the carpet that resist cleaning. Help is of its time, offering a high def colour record of how a PR engine overheated, never to start again.

WILD AT HEART @ 35

Sailor and Lula are lovers. For reasons drizzled over the course of the plot, Lula's mother wants Sailor the hall away from Lula. At a ball Sailor is approached by a hitman whom Sailor despatches until the guy's brains are decorating the staircase. When Sailor gets out of prison, Lula meets him at the gate and they speed off. First a gig, then break parole going interstate drawing a growing force of interested parties in hot (even deadly) pursuit. By the end of the story they will have been stretched to snapping. Jeeze, they were only in love.

David Lynch was riding high in 1990. Blue Velvet had been hauled up out of obscurity by sage champion Pauline Kael and his collaboration with Mark Frost on the initial hit series Twin Peaks had made him such a household name that the term Lynchian became part of what you said. Something, anything, odd or just not immediately comprehensible, Lynchian. Then he did something ... Lynchian. Instead of producing something along the lines that had given him his celebrity, he made a conventional movie.

It's my contention that Blue Velvet is a conventional thriller. It's frequently extreme in its violence and challenging with its sex but it makes narrative sense from beginning to end. The early episodes of the TV show have more outright weirdness to them. But Wild at Heart plays like a lot of movies from the decade just ended; young adult, neo noir flavoured and wall to wall needledrop music. The '90s would continue this. If you baulk at the witches of Oz in Wild at Heart, God knows what you'd make of the ghost of Elvis in the slightly later True Romance. Moreover, if you have ever seen the deleted scenes from the movie, you will know by their conventional tone, how mainstream Lynch was thinking for this one. 

There is, all said, plenty of Lynchian stuff on screen, though. Freddie Jones's walk-on at a bar with his voice all heliumed, going on about pigeons and Willem Dafoe's art directed teeth serve that end. Sherilyn Fenn's accident victim and her heartrending monologue and Harry Dean Stanton's exit, also. You could probably find at least one Lynchian touch per scene but they stick out in Wild at Heart where they seem at home in Blue Velvet. Eraserhead is constructed wholly from them and there are many in Dune. Even The Elephant Man has them (albeit woven more seamlessly in). Because the narrative is kept close to Barry Gifford's source novel (he co wrote the screenplay with Lynch), the timeline is central and the Lynchian bits more like seasoning.

What is Lynchian is the overall insistence on the central romance. For all his trips beyond the Scorpio nebula in visual style and performance direction, Lynch is as sentimental as a Christmas tree when it comes to things like love or hope. This is why the Wizard of Oz references don't feel out of place, however superficially fantastic. Laura Dern's Lula shares a moment of damaged hope with her character in Blue Velvet when she pleads for order in her universe which has been battered by shock. Sailor's serenade to her at the gig with a big goofy Elvis number as the girls around them scream as though everything suddenly transported back to the '50s and he really was Elvis is played for laughs but incompletely, the gesture of it is dressed to impress. See also, though more soberly, the performance at the end. These moments weave into the picture without notice as, whether we want to own it or not, they are part of every Lynch film.

Sailor and Lula are depicted as rock 'n' rollers, bad kids with pure hearts but they only barely keep from pushing through to being garish trash. Lula is less like a riot grrl than Sandy at the end of Grease. Nicholas Cage trips over himself channelling Elvis but only really gets as far as a Vegas tribute. They are campy rather than dangerous. To be fair, this has more to do with the characters own ideas of their image and we aren't meant to swallow it whole, even if David Lynch seems to. If you want rock 'n' roll bad you need to turn to Willem Dafoe's Bobby Peru with his pencil thin physique, stumpy metal teeth, sleaze moustache, and slinky, evil sliding gait. A kind of distillation of Blue Velvet's Frank that could take the mic at a gig and flatten a whole audience.

Wild at Heart is a road movie where the fugitives are fleeing from the previous generation which is gathering strength every time you see them. The extremity of the effort is explained as the plot develops and it has to do with the sins of the father, and uncle, and rival of father, and almost anyone on the ancestral tier of Lula's crazy mother (played by Dern's real mother). The sins of the past are invested on the future generation. A few mentions of the depleting ozone layer are enough to give this credence. Sailor and Lula want to get to California with the intention of severing all ties and as the vistas west open up to the extent that we see a lens distorted horizon to suggest the world's curve is welcoming them from its edge. For all their naivete and puerility, they do have a point and whether it's the magic of New Orleans to the open road, they are living what they set out to live. And then, when the world catches up and tears them from each other and they approach the grown up task of repair, the depiction of difficulty of the job is refreshing as it feels earned.

The film had quite an advance campaign. I recall reading frustratingly small tidbits about its content and eagerly pored over the few production stills seeded to the media. If the public was temporarily infatuated with David Lynch, my own fandom was reaching fever pitch. I imagined barely discernible darkness within shadows, black smoke and old black grease on machinery, biological anomalies and shocking violence. I imagined watching something I dreaded seeing. 

This is from the experience of seeing Eraserhead repeatedly at the local Valhalla from the midpoint of the '80s. Every time, whether I could rope someone else in or had to go on my own, I would sit there, watching the credits fade in and panic. The Baron Harkonnen's rape of the servant boy in Dune left a scar and all of Frank's antic's are with me still from Blue Velvet. There was a lot of rich cinema around then, aimed squarely at my demographic but Lynch was in the lead as he wasn't like any of the others and could build worlds from whims that stayed with his audiences. That year, while the USA and UK got to see the first season of Twin Peaks, the extended pilot was released to Australian home video. I watched it many times, fearing and being wowed by the end scene in the red room, knowing only that it was twenty-five years later, not a dream sequence but a sequel scene. It freaked me out and I had to keep watching it. To know that a whole new movie was coming at the end of the year felt like a gift.

I saw it three times in one week, roping any number of people in to join me. We'd quote it at gatherings, parties, the pub, anywhere. That flowed through to the second season of Twin Peaks the following year when so much of it started fading and looking tacky. After that point, anyone who'd jumped on to the wagon reacted as though they'd been cheated and the response was predictably childish. When a friend approaches you to inform you that they made a positive decision not to try one of your favourite things, you start learning a little more about them.

What can I say, the film flows like a well told story of the highway. It burst with colour and magic, even if some of that was just veneer. It made a sleeper hit of Chris Isaak's Wicked Game and was one of the first mainstream movies to feature a significant remix of an established song. It consolidated the career of Nicholas Cage, allowing him a leap into quirky action roles for the coming decade. Dern fared less well but has had more than a few decent highlights and to this day walks with the respect of her peers and public. I would dress in the mornings before work listening to the soundtrack CD and mentally move around in the space it suggested. For all its reputation as the choc top Lynch movie, it still has its own power. Never again was he so fun but never again so light (if you are thinking of The Straight Story, you need a rewatch). For me it's of its time, it's time in my life.

ANORA: Review

Anora, who goes by Ani, works at a strip joint, doing laps. One night the boss comes in and asks for her to work a customer as she speaks Russian. He, Vanya, is young and cute and ready to party. He asks for her again and soon it becomes a habit. It's all sex, beats, Gameboys and drugs and then in a Vegas hotel room, in the depths of multi-faceted intoxication, he proposes marriage and after knocking it back as a joke she accepts. Their walk-in marriage ceremony reaches the outer protective human shell of Vanya's family who are billionaire oligarchs back home. Annie is not their idea of marriage material. When their operatives barge in, Vanya flees. They take Annie as collateral in their hunt for him, not quite getting how strong she really is.

Sean Baker's film is the New World Order as an urban road movie. After the Russians swapped dogma for a chaotic version of neo-liberalism and became harder to define, the notion of oligarchs as local warlords with global reach arose. Anora doesn't wipe that notion from the table (on the contrary) but does make gleeful use of it to tell a tale of the pursuit of personal integrity. Ani doesn't have qualms about her profession, she does fine by it, it's when it's weaponised by the thugs that it becomes a problem. While her union to Vanya wasn't as naïve as it looks to the family minders, her growing understanding of what they see as the stakes adds to a compelling complexity. She drives around in their car over a night on the Brooklyn streets knowing that she might not like what she finds at the end of the quest.

If you've seen the trailer you might think this is the kind of high calorie romp that the '90s made famous and, while it runs on some of that energy, it plays for smiles rather than laughs and keeps its eye firmly on the issues. Actually, if you've seen the trailer I'll offer the strange spoiler that the exciting remix of Blondie's Dreaming does not appear in the film. Baker is again, more interested in the themes of that song, as he was in the extraordinary The Florida Project: poverty and urban subsistence across the road from Disney World. And again, it works a treat.

Mikey Madison owns every frame of this film in the title role, even when off screen. She is the sober counterpart to the chaotic party monster Vanya, fearless when she knows the stakes are soaring, and fun as hell. Mark Eydelshteyn's Vanya is a beautiful young endorphin receptor who might either explode from a break in the constant hedonism or find a higher plain of existence by it. The more we know him the better we know which of those is more likely.  Karren Karagulian as the chief Armenian mobster has the most to do to redeem himself from monstrosity to humanity and it takes more than dialogue to do it. It's a ceaselessly energetic turn. More quietly but with funnier highlights is Yura Borisov as Igor, roped into the operation and increasingly aloof from it. His part in the moment of Ani's catharsis is profoundly moving.

Baker holds the whirlwind of plot and emotion he has created on a need to be firm basis. The film does drag a little here and there (I could have lived with a much shorter plane ride toward the end) but there is so much heart and humanity injected into the film that it feels part of the colour scheme. While it doesn't resemble either, I was emotively engaged the same way that I was when I first saw the Tarantinoesque multi-thread movies of the 2000s and the stronger films of Hal Hartley. If nostalgia, it's that: the longing for the feeling that decades old indy cinema used to warm us up by. I've missed it. Well, now it's here again and not a sly movie quote in sight.

BRAZIL @ 40

A fly in an office causes a misprint (Tuttle becomes Buttle) that sends an assault team to an apartment.  The woman in the flat above witnesses the false arrest. Across town, young and unambitious clerk solves the administrative problem by delivering a refund cheque to the arrested man's widow (he was interrogated with extreme prejudice). He catches sight of the woman in the upstairs flat and can't believe that she is the one he has been seeing in his weird heroic dreams. He gives pursuit but she evades him. He has to find her. She has to subvert him. A rom com in dystopia.

Terry Gilliam's 1985 satirical comedy shows him in greater control of his material than he ever had been. That said, the film is a wall to wall show of comic excess. City scapes are endless blocks of light and shadow, gigantic stacks and silos dominate, peaks on uniform caps are huge, the depictions of age-defying plastic surgery are bizarre, and nightmare ducting is stuffed into walls and between floors. The score swings between many versions of the title song and a stern orchestral pallet that most strongly resembles Wagner.

What Gilliam does not have under firm control is encouraging empathy for his central character, Sam. Sam is a staid bureaucrat whose motivations away from his his professionally immobile mediocrity are erotic dreams in which he is a winged superhero who battles giants to save a woman as fantastical as his self-image. When he's not a pen pusher, he's a Wagnerian superman. It is comedy that when he meets the woman in real life and she is not a long haired cloud maiden but a truck driver who might also be a terrorist and that the only weapons he has to "save" her are either clerical or pointlessly reckless. The ungenerically delayed meet cute is a perfectly timed slapstick. Their first kiss is similarly fumbled.

Out in the streets, the scene is a kind of what really might have been answer to Orwell; a capitalist totalitarianism. A little girl is overheard to tell Santa that all she wants for Christmas is a credit card. The Salvation Army band had been rebranded as Consumers for Christ. The women of influence past a certain age are having their features stretched like plasticine or remodelled to death by cosmetic reconstruction. The chief terror figure is a rogue plumber whose life was saved at the beginning by a fly whose mission is to curtail delays in repair calls. When the regime collides with irregularity it eradicates it rather than bends with it toward social harmony. We who have witnessed pubic bodies sold to private interests in the past few decades know this all too well. Dollars over service business means a ready ditching of service and localised cartels, not healthy competition.

If Sam is impossible to empathise with before he, too, is a victim, his counterpart, Jill, we're with from the first. Her anti-authority stance, sassiness and ready action make us wish that we were following her. Then, though, Sam would be a pest rather than a slowly learning saviour. The problem is in the writing, here, rather than the casting. Jonathon Pryce's Sam plays his character as written, showing intelligence above others but repressing it, he is also drab. He's meant to be but when he sees Jill for real his driving pursuit of her feels like unlovable lust rather than liberating desire. Until she gets the opportunity to pushback and deal with the consequences, there is no path to Sam's redemption. Kim Greist's playing a touch higher than the word demanded is the one of the pair who makes the difference.

The rest of the cast is stellar. Robert De Niro relishes playing funny. Michael Palin shows comfort in a serious role. Ian Holm is a kind of human Ash from Alien. Katherine Helmond as Sam's interfering mother plays it deliriously bourgeois beneath walls of prosthetics. There are so many more but Gilliam's show of skill with a large cast is clearly more developed than he demonstrated in Time Bandits or Jabberwocky.

Gilliam had intended to call this, among a few other things, 1984 1/2. This was ruined by Michael Radford's sombre adaptation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The choice of Brazil, referring to a song of idyllic escape into fantasy, travels far better through time than the Pythonesque joke of the original title. Moreover, that Gilliam built a very different world to Orwell (and Radford's adaptation), suggesting a different choice that led to a very similar outcome. Orwell was concerned with a Britain ruled by totalitarians who had long abandoned their socialist principles. Gilliam examined the effect on a starting point of capitalism to the extent that consumerism was the doctrine. 

An interesting aesthetic choice was not so much the use of technology to oppress the populace but that it was struggling to keep up with the job. Wires stick out, tiny computer screens need large magnifiers to be read and, while there is an online world it is mechanical and past it's shelf date. This is partially done for laughs but the '80s was a time of great technological grandstanding with shrinking computers promising a miniaturised future of boundless public engagement. With the likes of War Games, Brainstorm and Tron delivering cautionary tales that also indulged in the fun possibilities, Brazil's buzzing id. checkers and faulty auto alarm clock systems suggest more the jokes about Soviet technology. The low res dot matrix print-outs depended upon in the film were actually better than in real life is an odd art department anomaly, considering the intent.

The same guy who was suspicious of Radford's film at the time was the same who thought this was another anti-Soviet taunt. When I asked him if there was a depiction of Soviet life he did like he advanced Gorky Park. Nothing from the actual USSR, a Hollywood thriller. Perfectly intelligent bloke but with the film evaluation of an apparatchik. Brazil also came under attack for adopting fascist ideology. This is mostly from Sam's dream sequences which play like Duran Duran videos if they covered The Ring Cycle. Hitler's moviemaker Leni Riefenstahl was evoked more than once by writers who didn't get that the dreams of a functionary clerk might well be epic and ironically on the scale of fascist art. Gilliam adds a real pathos to these passages. You would really have to struggle to find a sincere fascist moment in them.

Terry Gilliam was still wresting his way out of his association with Monty Python and would continue until he stopped using members of the group in his casts. His 1990s are justly celebrated with entries like 12 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing. Unfortunately, the troubles he had with the suits of the business are a plague to this day and he still struggles to get projects off the ground and then to release in cinemas. The only good thing about that is that, when he does, at the end of adversity, he brings a full vision to the world, it's massive and enjoyable. For all of Brazil's infrequent heights, its awkwardness and missteps, it is one of those exceptions. That it has had such a profound effect on the look and feel of so much of the imaginative cinema that followed it eases its imperfections smooth. It's still funny. It's still profound. It still works.

Viewing Notes: I watched the HD presentation on Disney +. This is the longer cut, approved by Gilliam and even though it's only ten minutes longer, it does drag. Unfortunately, the only way to see the original cinema release is to get an overseas release which includes it among the other cuts (happy to be wrong about this).

Review: NOSFERATU: 2025 begins

Young newlywed Ellen is racked by nightmares. While on one of her somnambulistic strolls she is attacked by a monstrous figure. But was this a dream or a memory?? She seems to be in psychic contact with a dark force. Her husband, upwardly mobile lawyer, is sent on a job to ride over from Germany to Transylvania to get a frail old client to sign the deeds to the local ruin. He starts on horseback, because it's still the nineteenth century there, and sees some ghastly stuff before, on a moonlit road he is met by a driverless black carriage which takes him to Castle Orlok where he meets the decrepit Count Orlok and - 

Wait a minute, wait a minute, isn't this just Dracula? Yes it is: when F.W. Murnau his Nosferatu he was prevented by Bram Stoker's estate from using the names and a lot of the details of Stoker's novel Dracula. The pursuit of this case all but outlawed the film and most extant copies were destroyed, leaving a kind of Van Allen belt of prints in various states of completion. This is why we have archiving standards but also, had it not been for the incomplete state of investigation that allowed some of the prints to escape the fires, we would be lucky to have production stills today. Murnau's Nostferatu is a marvel of cinema that can still teach us much (and it's still scary).

The thing about all of that, though, is that it formed a very different aesthetic to the depiction of the vampire in film. The later Universal Studios Dracula offered the high style of Bela Lugosi who innntonnnned hees liiiiiiiiines in a parteeeecular manner from the comfort of a tux. Stoker's Dracula, at least the first you see of him, is a flick away from dust. Murnau made him someone whose moral void and centuries of longevity had grown distorted beyond recognition as a former human. His white dome head, bug eyes and rat like teeth put him irretrievably outside the world of people. His approach, helped by some expert editing, is unnerving. Bela's later take added a façade of aristocracy and intensity which earns him a big star on the timeline. When Werner Herzog made his vampire movie in the late '70s he harked back to Murnau rather than Dracula, wanting to return to what Murnau had seen when he thought of the monster. Scrape away the eroticism of Stoker's figure (well, enough of it to make what was left troubling) and tone down the over-egged recipes of the previous two decades. I'll recommend his Nosferatu, here, as well.

So, why do it again? Enter Robert Eggers, indy hero whose TheWitch and The Lighthouse endeared him to all who either live in or can see the margins from their backyards. He is a young filmmaker with a solid output and a strong aesthetic forward look and feel to his works. His movies are the type that while you might not instantly pick as you would a Lynch or Fellini joint it would never surprise you to learn that this scene or still was from one of his. Eggers works truest when he establishes a world and then lets things happen in it. At no time is he non or anti-narrative but he will sooner offer depth of character or outburst of bizarreness to take things a little further out (everything with a mermaid in The Lighthouse). You don't know what you're going to get with one of his but you can rest assured he wants you to remember it.

I won't add more plot here as it's an overfamiliar pattern: threat, race against time, confrontation, end. But how's Eggers world? Happy to report that it is as rich as largely desaturated 35 mm film can look without falling into monochrome. Nothing looks campily olde cinema-e the way Coppola's Dracula did but there is a nod to the claustrophobic look of Murnau's original (might as well point out what looks like a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, as well). I am not a sentimentalist when it comes to the look of celluloid vs digital. Cinematographers have had twenty years to get digital right and they really have. It is nice to see scenes with visible grain (I can remember when 35 mm was the norm and noticing grain in the image and considering it an acceptable flaw). 

It's the performances that really start me asking about the point, though. There's a variation of approaches that cannot mesh without trouble. Willem Defoe's vampire hunter swings from naturalism to histrionics within a line. Nicholas Hoult is phoning it in. Aaron Taylor Johnson is enjoying showing real range. Bill Skarsgard, under Elephant Man levels of prsothetics, is limited to the four-balled bass rasp he spent months developing with an opera singer (but it is really impressive!). Then there's Lily- Rose Depp. Severely corsetted with Victorian tugged back hair, she throws herself into the tormented Ellen as though physically possessed. Shaking, falling into icky spasms, using a wide ranging voice and gymnastic physicality. This is not overacting, it is performative commitment beyond the call of most actors' capability. It is so specialised that it would be hard to consider another turn like it out of this context. When she is face to face with Orlok in scenes that blur sex and animalistic violence, it is unsettlingly difficult to distinguish pleasure from terror.

If there's any general fault I see in this film is that it doesn't quite throw its hand behind being a more fluid telling of the Murnau and Herzog versions. It only occasionally has the courage to depict the supernatural as realism (e.g. the brilliant use of shadow and curtains with the Orlok's silhouette) or as a more firmly drawn romantic work. This prevents tension so that, while there are effective horror moments throughout, the film only edges at horror, never breaking into it.

So, why remake a horror classic that, for all its crunchy condition, is still scary? Well, Herzog wanted to look at its social aspects, the plague-bearing vampire as a force for change. Eggers adds some extra work on the rat plague that Murnau introduced. His re-jig of Orlok's look is out of middle-European folklore, studied and unlike either of the other two films. Is that enough? I don't know. I do know that it feels like there's so much atmospheric glue to wade through to get to the next narrative point while being aware that this one is not meant to be all about the story. Perhaps, it's just operator error: I've seen the other two and countless vampire films that each one that might pop up has so much riding on it that it can't just be a well-made addition, it has to be a wonder. Nosferatu (2024) is not a wonder, it is an achingly beautiful container for a performance that borders on magic. You could do worse. I just wish Eggers had done better.

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR @ 40

The clocks have just struck thirteen in London, the capital of Airstrip One and aging Winston Smith outer party operative is grinding through another day at work. It's not all bad, though, as he exchanged a look with that nice inner party O'Brien man and you can never underrate that. Then again, it balanced out with a poisonous glance from that young anti-sex horror who is probably thought police. It's the mid-eighties and what used to be Britain has become a nightmare of oppression under a totalitarian regime waging eternal warfare with Eurasia ... or is it Eastasia? Whatever, if it were just the paranoia, made worse by the two way tele screens in every room that, unlike everything else, never seem to break down, he might have a chance at getting through a day without almost collapsing.

Michael Radford's adaptation for the cinema was produced and released in the year itself. He presents a London of Orwell's imagination that looks like the 40s if they'd never been repaired. Apart from inner party dwellings and the ministry buildings, the city is dirty and in constant slow decay. When the sense of self-fulfilling power is clarified, it is evident that none of this will improve. That which stands to fall shall fall and the Party will maintain. An anaemic colour pallet and dour score (more on that later) make the claustrophobic daily life we see feel interminable. Winston frequents old shops in the prole quarter, buying things from a past he wasn't part of like an unused plain paper bound diary. He knows this itself could doom him but considers his life past the point of struggle. The liaison with Julia (not counting that as a spoiler when it's an earl plot point) is similarly flavoured with the nostalgia of the long dead.

John Hurt as Winston was already progressing to a status as a craggy master of his art, always bringing (even to Caligula in I Claudius) a puzzled sadness to his characters who, even at the top of their game knew at moments the great ruling futility of sentient life. Suzanna Hamilton, on the other hand brings a fire to Julia. She makes her blue-grey boiler suit sexy, especially when showing how much restraint she needs to keep herself from napalming everyone around her. She shows intelligence and cheek behind an expression calculated to look party-first. And then there's Richard Burton as the inner party O'Brien who brings a quiet control to the oppressor in chief. It is his voice that, after decades of alcohol and more recently developing illness, delivers the line: "If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." It's almost a whisper but there is such solid bass below it that the strength of the sound alone would kill the fight in the strongest of us. Hurt's agonised, degraded Winston on the torture table can only respond in whimpers. If you only heard the audio of these scenes, you wouldn't sleep for days.

George Orwell's nightmare scenario became a synonym for governmental smothering and as the year approached, media pundits played spot the overtone, using terms like newspeak to augur democracy's close of play. Orwell tells the story from the perspective of the lowest of the middle stratum who can observe the elite inner party as well as the self-defeating consumers of the proletariat. By day he alters public memory when a citizen becomes an unperson or an economic prediction falls short, changing media reports in news archives. Sometimes he creates war heroes to cover public disgraces. In case you thought that all you had to do was get better at your job there in the Ministry of Truth, consider Winston's colleague Syme whose fevered enthusiasm for shrinking the English language in the Newspeak Dictionary is only singling him out for erasure. Don't slack off. Don't be too eager.

Radford's script wisely avoids the clumsier of Orwell's imagined future. Anyone who composes a story for the future will invent terms that sound too contrived to ever be uttered by people. Partially, this is intentional alienation, to press the point of a future setting. While the scarier terms like Artsem (artificial insemination) and  Ingsoc (English socialism) make it through, awkward formations like rocket bombs or telescreens don't. All terms get shortened with use (fridge, bike, TV) with very few exceptions. Radford just leaves them out as their function is already clear.

If you haven't read Orwell's novel, I'd recommend it. Not only is it an effortless task, however severe its events, it is one of the most articulately formed and interwoven warnings against totalitarianism ever written. This film is not the only one made of it but, of those I've seen, I prefer it. The intention was source fealty and, within reason, that happened. 

Oh, I need to interrupt for a second. This film was largely funded by Virgin a corporate entity that commissioned a electropop score from duo The Eurythmics. While it's serviceable, it does none of the harder work that Dominic Muldowney's already finished music does. I clearly recall the song Sexcrime being played between the last cinema ad and the start of the film and friend Sarah's look of crushed embarrassment. It sounds like a Eurythmics song but in that context also sounds like someone trying way too hard. The Muldowney score is generally the one you'll hear if you see this film but for a while there, the broadcast version had the other one, as though a few bars of contemporary pop would lift, um, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The story is claimed by each end of politics as a warning against the other. Yes, the original intent of the movement that began Ingsoc is along Marxist lines but the criticism of Marxism through this is shallow and point-missing. No one getting the hell beaten out of them by political prison staff takes a moment to think, "well, at least they're lefties". The funniest response to this film that I heard at the time was of a student council pollie who joked that the only thing he liked about it was that the good guys win. 

Anyway, by the point of the setting, whatever principles drove the initial motion have long been abandoned and hold no visionaries nor thinkers. O'Brien is a ruler of reality. He and his inner party are doing what they must because they are able. There is no point beyond retaining power over a confused population. If that isn't a lesson that this bastard of a year needs I don't know what can be.

Then again, we live at a time when a film like Civil War can get ridiculed for suggesting an alliance between California and Texas without anyone stopping to consider that the point might be that conditions had become so dire that these two odd bedfellows would need each other. O'Brien's tests of Winston's compliance, demanding that his responses be genuine, just kept reminding me that the approach of the past decade where the phrase fill the zone with shit can win elections. Freedom is slavery. War is Peace. Ignorance is bliss. Orwell's tale is a powerful one but I wonder if, now, it might not just feel more like a celebration. The good guys win, they just aren't who you thought they were. Well, that's what they're telling you.

APOCALYPSE NOW @ 45

A beach lined with coconut palms shimmers in the heat. Helicopters drift across, circling, as the mesmeric stirring of the Doors' epic The End lifts. When Jim Morrison comes in with his stern croon, "this is the end, beautiful friend," a flood of napalm swipes across the view which is now made of sticky fire. Lap dissolve to Captain Benjamin Willard naked on his hotel bed in Saigon, floating on cognac as his voice tells his story. Everyone gets what he wants. He wanted a mission and for his sins they gave him one.

In a scene that I find creepier every time I see it, he is briefed by senior officers over lunch. He is to take a patrol boat up river and assassinate a U.S. officer, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz for unsound methods. Shocked, he accepts and gets on the boat. After this mission, he would never want another.

Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam opus was considered a massive folly at the time, its then forty million dollar budget and interminable production time were considered part of the bloated decadence of the New Hollywood decade of star directors. It seemed destined for the jokes of history folder (to perish in the last paper office fire of the '90s). Not only did it defy expectations by handing Coppola his next timeless classic but has travelled down the decades with a quietly persistent reputation for cinematic power and awe-inspiring scope. That its creator keeps fiddling with it does nothing to damage the basic text of the thing which remains robust. 

Oh, that's important: if you see this for the first time, it shouldn't go for more than two and a half hours. Avoid the Redux and Final Cut versions until after you see the 1979. As with The Exorcist, Amadeus and a host of others, the original, while it can be costly to find, remains the definitive one, regardless of what Coppola himself says.

Willard's journey up river knocks him into the American war effort in Vietnam with its gigantically wasteful devastation and self-indulgence. Colonel Kilgore runs his helicopter unit like a posse of surfing cowboys, destroying a beach with napalm so he can watch his men surf. A huge fairy lit entertainment event in the middle of the jungle goes nightmarishly out of control while trying to bring a little Las Vegas to the boys. A bridge, kept open despite constant successful enemy destruction, is maintained in a Boschian hellscape just so the generals can tell their bosses that the road is open. And then there's Kurtz, rogue military muscle with a mind heated by delirium. These really aren't spoilers. They add to Willard's weird and damaging journey to the war and America's heart of darkness.

Oh, you can also read about it. This film is quite closely based on Joseph Conrad's forbidding short novel Heart of Darkness, based on his sobering experiences in the Belgian Congo under the new imperialism of the late  nineteenth century. That tale's hero, Marlow, is sent on a similar mission to control an administrative loose canon and comes into contact with the worst excesses of a darkness visited on native peoples. Change a steamboat for a patrol boat, ivory harvesting for cold war aggression and you're there.

I'll say little more of the plot here, or of the great rumbling monster of the production. You can see the movie yourself and read any of the masses of content about how it was made. My more pressing concern here is the film's resonance. 

But we'll need to say something of the resonance of the Vietnam War. The U.S. withdrew from the conflict in 1975 and it was popularly considered a defeat. Unlike the returning veterans from previous wars, Vietnam vets were yoked with the guilt of American hegemony in Asia and were despised. In film culture, the gung ho attempts from the '60s like John Wayne's own Ballad of the Green Berets gave way to far more cynical efforts like The Boys in Company C or Go Tell the Spartans. By the later years of the decade there was a sense of a need to tell the story rather than keep it repressed. Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter was celebrated for its approach of showing the soldiers as ordinary citizens first, emphasising the trauma they suffered with a more thorough examination.

When Apocalypse Now appeared it changed the game of depicting war from a representation of history to something more like a grotesque or grand guignol. Everything on screen looked as expected, uniforms, hardware the movement of  conflict but things were odd from the off. The helicopters of the prelude scene move more like birds of prey than military hardware. The spinning ceiling fan and gravel voiced narration of the opening suggest an intense film noir. We get glimpses of Willard's life back home but one of them is a photo of his wife which he burns through with a cigarette. The drop needle music that had haunted New Hollywood since Easy Rider was also different. The Rolling Stones sequence is diegetic but the closest the film will come to jukeboxing the soundtrack. The opening swirl and whispers and drones and croons of The End are offered almost as sounds rising from the glare and humidity. Apocalypse Now wasn't interested in humanising the stigmatised vets, that's a given, he wanted to show the trip of it.

At some point in the epic preproduction, Michael Herr's compounded journalistic account of the war, Despatches, was absorbed into the thinking and it was he who wrote Willard's voiceover. This travels from the hard boiled detective cynicism of the hotel room to the musings on his dark and bizarre mission where it takes a flavour more like an Americanised Marlowe from Conrad's novel. This does flow from Herr's own prose style in which his observations of military life in-country read like a Lewis Carroll story with napalm.

And that's a major point of resonance: this film is supremely quotable. Decades on, saying you love the smell of napalm in the morning could refer to burnt toast or even something pleasant, the value is napalm and the joke, if it's a one-off, is always good. See also "terminate with extreme prejudice" when you need to be firm or "Charley dont surf!" when an objection is trivial. When I found myself in the blinding glare and heat of the family home on a holiday, I'd peer through the louvres in the morning and rasp: "Townsville, shit, still only in Townsville." The lot of us who saw it at the time, and especially at Uni, knew the movie line by line and, until, we got sick of it ourselves, that's how we'd watch it.

Ok, so, lefty students in the early '80s, you must have really dug the history of it. Nope, Apocalypse Now doesn't even state its setting year. There are no mentions of Tet or Rolling Thunder. The canvas is crammed with the reality of the war as an inescapable claustrophobia of noise, colour, lethal air, smoke and constant danger. Even if you had no idea that the Americans were involved in a war in Vietnam, even if you thought it was fabricated for the movie, you would still register it as war and war for no good reason. So, no history lessons beyond a chance to hone our young adult cynicism. 

The point is that any major power does this, puts the hooks in lesser geopolitical entities to gain influence, flex or plunder the way they always have. Coppola wanted to show this latest iteration with newer hardware and rock and roll attitudes. It's as much a shopping war, a series of skirmishes and war crimes of opportunity whose chaos could not but engender the kind of transgressive monster of Colonel Kurtz. The casting comes in handy here.

Willard is our tour guide and Martin Sheen gives him an unerring intensity, never smiling once, His narration keeps you in the centre, whether you agree with him or not. His power brought up the joke that he was heading up river to despatch the former king of The Method, Marlon Brando whose Kurtz keeps to the shadows displaying the sole humane trait he has kept is the shame for all he has done. He fought and ranted at the head of his devoted band until even they, extreme as they became, ended up looking like rat race white collars. Brando uses his Buddha-like physicality to dominate his scenes and keeps his mumbling lines special enough that we don't notice that we're bending our own ears toward him.

This was my first encounter with the music of the Doors. There's just that one song of theirs on the soundtrack of the film but it's the one that hooked on to everyone under thirty who saw the movie. There was a rerelease campaign for the band, all the Morrison albums. We got into them because there was no hippydom to them. It was wordsalad mysticism, sure, but there was nothing Summer of Love about the monologue in The End. The playing could get daggily bluesy at times but mostly kept to that '60s compaction. The Doors were perfect for a post punk revival.

Martin Sheen made it into one of the new Cronenberg movies a year or so later, playing a ruthless, self promoting presidential candidate which suited fans of Apocalypse fine, especially as young adults indulging in the wish that their favourite people share all their views.

And the movie hung around the art houses, getting several screenings a year. It was one of the big hits on home video, managing to survive the crop from panavision to 4x3 visual molasses. By the time I took a friend to see it at the newly established Northcote Valhalla, I had seen it twenty times, mostly at cinemas. I'd written something like ten thousand words of undergraduate analysis on it and considered Coppola a bona fide genius of cinema.

And that's the last big point I'll make here: Coppola had an outstanding 1970s after which it all just flattened out or got embarrassing. That's why I'm writing an anniversary blog about it now instead of tomorrow onwards, as it wasn't released in Australia until the following year. I know there many who count the zero year of any decade the end of the last one (boy, they were fun at Y2K New Year's) but I still prefer starting with them. This keeps Francis and his best in the '70s.

I saw two versions in 1980 when it was released in Australia. I was later to learn that the 35 mm cut was identical to the 70 mm one but for the end credits air strike credits. I quite enjoyed these but will admit that the way the film ends without them allows for a punchy silence that they can only over egg.

As I say, I saw it twice. First at a cinema with friends in Brisbane and then at the end of the year with my father, while I was at home for the holidays between finishing high school and getting into Uni. We went to the drive-in as he was more comfortable there than at a cinema. We spoke very little which was normal. I wanted to show him this movie as, even with the dawning home video market at the time, there was little for the adventurous movie goer in Townsville outside of student film club screenings or rickety 16 mm prints. This was a mainstream film I thought he'd take something away from.

After the usual ads for the fast food kiosk and the trailers (can't remember one that was shown) the screen darkened and then the slow threatening choppers faded in against the beach that looked like so many around that part of Queensland. There were the usual flyovers of army helicopters which we'd almost tune out because we were so used to the sound. Halfway through, the monsoonal drizzle fell and kept falling until well after midnight. I had seen it in Hoyts in Brisbane with surround audio which was such a blast but there and then, with the normal military sounds rising in the air around us and the creeping humidity of the tropical night, we had happened on perfect conditions.

Viewing notes: I watched my now out of print Lionsgate anniversary 4K bought from the U.S. It's a crazy beautiful package. If you can find the original cut in 4K with dolby vision and atmos, get that, it's the closest it looks and feels to the original screened at a cinema. If you can't afford that, it is my pleasant duty to relate that there is a Blu-Ray release of the 1979 and redux versions that you can pick up for under twenty dollars in Australia. This movie has always looked great on home video, so if you haven't leaped to 4K the Blu-Ray will bring the goods.