Review: PENNY LANE IS DEAD

Penny has just got into Uni after all that schooling and gets two best and oldest friends down to her family's beach house for a weekend of celebration. Just the girls, Toni and Amy. Then Kat turns up. The wild girl who, as Penny's cousin, demands to join them, offering a commemoration of a cup cake for each. We've already seen her making these and we know that the icing isn't just vanilla. Penny crashes and the others put her to bed in her own room. Then there's a knock at the door. It's Kat's loose canon boyfriend, his worryingly older companion Merrick and the unknown quantity Rodowsky. Maybe they do just want to use the phone. It's 1986 and they don't have their own. 

This is Mia Kate Russell's debut feature and feels like it. High production values, solid performances and good action choreography cannot turn messy writing into cinema. As a home invasion story, we need establishment of characters, some inner conflict and then the hold off as the invaders negotiate with their captives before the big showdowns. Don't look at me, this is genre cinema and I don't make the rules. 

Here, we have Penny and Toni finally admitting their attraction to each other is deeper than classmate, Amy's probaby lifelong trauma recovery, and Kat's chaotic anger at everyone she's ever known. We also get the hazardously unstable trio of bad boys balanced by a pair of good boys who are kind of off screen until the story needs them. You get the issue? It's less a stressful standoff than a writer's chessboard in a game against herself.

The first half hour contains almost everything in the plot and the rest is just elongation of that: the bad guys enter and then variously argue with each other or act impulsively with either no consequence or major plot shifting violence. But then we know so little of these people that it's hard to care for them even at the point of death. By the hour mark the film feels more like one and a half hours old and the final half hour is stretched to snapping until some very ill-advised plotting suddenly appears. 

Home-invasioners need careful tension to be played with an expert bow. If there is anything to be had from ennui in the process it should add to the plot's frustration, not transferred to the viewer as a waning care. I will, give props to Tahlee Fereday for her Toni. Toni is the best written and has most agency out of the original trio and her Joan Jett tough girl offering keeps what remains workable of the movie ... working.

Of less importance but annoying to one of my vintage is the parade of anachronisms. It's 1986 because no one has mobile phones. Apart form one or two instances, the needledrops are more like 1976. By 1986, The Angels track that opens the film had already garnered its cheeky audience response which would have played much better than the seventies original. Then again, that might have been a permission that didn't land. No one exchanged a low five with anyone else and (though this might have been for a potential US market) people didn't apply for college now or then in Australia, but Uni. Of the girls only Kat looks like she gets her fashion sense from mid-80s magazines, the others could be, as they are, from now. (I did say this was of less importance.)

I think there's enough here to form a promise of what Russell can deliver. The market has changed and the new barbarians of cinema are charging in from years of YouTube training, literate, cheeky and effective. It's not just the old guard that has to mind that.

Review: WHISTLE

A group of school friends come across an ancient artefact, a Mayan battle whistle that suggests it can summon the dead. One of them, at her boyfriend's goading, blows it. At this stage we've already seen people die horribly after doing this and now it's up to the chums to work it out and do something about it. The closest thing to a spoiler I'll give is the second act revelation that the inscription on the side of the grim object doesn't mean summon the dead but summon your own death. People who blow this whistle meet their deaths but accelerated. If they die of heart failure at seventy that's how they are going to go at seventeen, with their future selves delivering the bads.

I didn't go to the cinema to see this as it looked like yet another late '90s style teen horror with a decent budget and low level scares. Between Scream and its clones that had a good three years before The Blair Witch Project made them irrelevant. While there has been a return to this format with outings like Thanksgiving and Clown in a Cornfield, I just didn't want to sit through another. Add online movie hire and a quick argument-settling choice, we landed on Whistle, come what may. So, how does it do?

As for new themes or tints, a little queerness minus judgement is a welcome addition but by now long established in the genre. Mostly, it's tropes added for a purpose-built unit. However, if you consider how the heyday of the slasher movie was composed of a continual loop of tropes and is now evaluated as a good old day, what fault this film for doing the same. It's greatest debt is to the Final Destination series in which, title by title, a group of friends was stalked by death having cheated it in some way. What Whistle adds is a personal touch where the future death visits the young, leaving the question of fate against potential of the youth. It's not much but it does work.

The cast is up to scratch, led by the charismatic Dafne Keen who binds all behavioural and narrative gaps with promise. The cast is typically more solid than the writing and the direction. We meet the weirdo religious psycho who is also a drug dealer and his persona goes from kindly alpha to bad guy in a few lines of dialogue and believably but we have already clocked him singling out heroine Chrys in the opening school morning scene. His character, eventually, little more than a plot device for the final act, providing stakes that it doesn't really need. But what are we expecting, Ingmar Bergman?

What really brings this one up beyond the level of serviceable is some solid art direction and well crafted kills and, really, if you can't sail through a genre piece on those two features what are you doing in front of this one? It works. You will forget it the next day but it helped the pizza and beer go down and ended under two hours later.

Viewing notes: Whistle is no longer in cinemas but can be hired online or watched as part of a Prime subscription.  

Review: I WANT YOUR SEX

Artist and gallery owner Erika hires generationally timid Eliot on the spot and soon reveals it's because she wants him for sex, dom and sub BDSM. This is framed by Erika as a kind of job perk and Eliot, wading sluggishly through a loveless and near sexless relationship, acquiesces. This only gets more complicated until the big third act showdown which changes everything  ... or does it.

What feels like an early '70s sex comedy produced by High Hefner but dragged ragged into the twenty-first century could easily look like a cake (with too much icing) of workplace assault and exploitation to the Eliots in the audience but that's the point. Director Greg Araki, like, me has no skin in this inter-generational gundown. He's an X (I'm a Jones) which is also part of the fun. And fun there is with Millennial Erika morphing from Ice Empress to sourmouthed dominatrix in her journey of terraforming Eliot's low social-skilled Zed boy who is by necessity as comfortable admitting his masturbation while in a relationship as he is pretending that the relationsihp itself has any substance. 

If you cannot see beyond the depiction of an abusive power game and that your recognition of that aspect is essential to your seeing the comedy, then this film is not for you. Araki doesn't shy from the darker side of the situation by trowelling on the wit: Eliot is fully aware of the unethical imbalance and calls the abuse what it is; he just likes the perks of it when they do come. Would this work if the genders were reversed? This is tested, in a way, by the threesome scene towards the end of the second act in which roles and points of atraction are so dizzily confused that it threatens a few disintegrations. You are, in other words, invited to speculate about gender roles while within this specific reversal. This is so well served by the pace and performances that you can enjoy the counterpoint of thinking what-ifs along with following some fast paced storytelling.

Performances? Olivia Wilde's always-on screen is dizzying in its caprices, declaring a loud paradox one minute and then crumpling it into the bin as nonsense the next. Her energy constrasts with Cooper Hoffman's listless timidity that masks fists of frustration. Araki is clever enough to mete this out so that it doesn't just lead to a climactic explosion in the finale. He has a more complex plan in mind which you'll get to.

Araki fills his screen with thick neon swatches and neo-pop art cheek. Interventions of other genres trade screen time with sudden breakouts of animation which look like the kind of thing that is leading YouTubers to cinema auteurism. Araki doesn't have to do any of this but in this more conventional narrative style that he must adopt to bring off this central conceit, it also feels like a little nod to the auteurs of his own generation, Natural Born Killers-era Oliver Stone or Wes Anderson: it doesn't feel like he's claiming the interventions for himself.

The satire Velvet Buzzsaw from a few years back did something similar using the contemporary art world and, while it had some genuinely funny ironic scenes, never quite outran its own quest for cleverness. I Want Your Sex does work because the cleverness is split between the affectations of the characters and the overall wit of the tale: it's made funny to be funny, all else is collateral. That means that the willing audience shall be the winner.

PS - if you're reviewing this for anything online and need a picture, DO NOT search for the title, even if you add every qualifier from cast crew, date, production company etc. I finally found the image I used by removing the title. 

ARTHUR @ 45 (SPOILERS)

Arthur Bach is the son of the American aristocracy and is drinking himself into oblivion. He is on course to wed in an arranged marriage to a woman he has no love for. One day he sees Linda shoplifting and saves her from arrest by playing his public persona card. Finally meeting a woman after his own quirky heart, he starts seeing the possibility of happiness. When he tells his father, the cranky old one percenter threatens to cut off from the family fortune if he doesn't go ahead as planned. With no employability, knowing only the constant recourse to alcohol, he agrees. He is haunted by Linda. Hmm, how to play this?

Steve Gordon's comedy from the days where a song could be commissioned for a movie and top the charts, is one of those cases where you see the point in historical context but struggle to keep with it now. Now? Even the '90s with things like the depressing Leaving Las Vegas, would can the idea. While it's clear that the people around Arthur find him embarrassing or outright disgusting, there is still a lot of wiggle room for Dudley Moore's performance to keep his character from sinking. A fraction of his wisecracks still land, most come across and smug and downpunching. Though the latter are more authentically the product of intoxication, they are delivered to feel identical to the better lines (which seem written). 

This is the thing about the film overall that would make it feel uneasy to anyone who hadn't seen it back in the '80s. Alcoholism just does not fly as a comedy trope now, let alone the most immediate feature of the titular character. The statement I began with might have sounded like I was describing a severe and brutal film. The progress of this one, predictably has Arthur find his way out of trouble with the guide of true love. The detail that he is zonkered when he makes his stand for independence at the end provides a necessary closure to his character. We've seen him care sincerely for his long suffering manservant Hobson, while sober and qualifying as OK. To then damn the torpedos at the showdown suggests that, if he hasn't got the drink under control, he now has reason to get it there. A lot depends on Moore's affability and continued run of bankability at the time. I think of how this failed the similarly positioned Johnny Depp in The Rum Diaries and how that one was made by the director that made the last stand in drunken charm decades before in Withnail and I. By the time of The Rum Diaries it felt as dry as a hangover headache.

As his centre of gravity, Linda, Liza Minelli shines, providing a solid proletarian bolster against Arthur's miasma. All of her lines, written to perfection, land hard. Her scenes feel too few. John Gielgud as Hobson is the wit whose lines never fail. He is having a ball as the misanthropic servant whose main service has been as Arthur's truer father figure. Against the energy of Minelli and the constant chaos of Moore, his is the turn most viewers will recall. And then they report his death without giving it its own scene. Did they shoot it but cut it? 

One performance that probably did get obscured by its surrounds is one that really struck me this time. Arthur proposes to his arranged fiance amid a game of slow conversational tennis in which one player is serving with a bouncing ball and the other with bricks. Jill Eikenberry's turn as a devoted future society wife playing out this essential ritual of it, the popping of the question is done with what increasingly appears to be a chilling determination, delivered with a flinty, unbroken assurance. Arhtur can joke all he wants, once she and the family ecosystem get him, his breeding mechanism will suffice. It could be from a Cronenberg movie.

Does it work today? Are you prepared to look around the drunk act or consider it loveable for its time, and watch as Arthur is forced to commit to showing decency when it's important? Anyone who has been that embarrassing drunk or has known at least one will struggle with this. It's what makes this movie feel like something from the '60s and did back then. With alcohol related atrocities in the news and Gen Zed reputedly drifting away from the drug, I can only wonder if this is a title that can only ever be nostalgic to an vanishing viewership. Arthur does still carry charm, it's just that feels like it needs a filter that completely undercuts it.

Viewing notes: Arthur is available on Kanopy (four points for some reason) and is out of print as physical media in Australia.

FARGO @ 30

Terminal weasel, Jerry is over his head through a series of schemes bound for failure. His latest is to get his wife kidnapped so he can get a ransom through his father in law that would make everything alright. He hires two thugs, a smartarse and a silent psycho to do the work. That can't and doesn't end well. Meanwhile, local yokel police chief, the heavily pregnant Marge Gunderson picks up some of the deadly duo's leavings on the roadside and is on their case.

This is a Coen brothers movie which means that it's nowehere as simple as that synopsis, rifling through the quirks and chaos in a Minnesota accent as characters from beige to weird pass through with information, disinformation and misinformation as the bizarre crime slowly develops. And that's before you get to Marge's husband who is waiting on the results of a competition to design a stamp with a depiction of American birdlife. Oh, and there's the old flame from Marge's schooldays who wants to hook up and gives grimy stalker vibes. All that and this movie almost never gets twee with it. The accent gets more of a workout than it probably should but the situations and performances lift the film well above that.

Fargo was the one that brought the Coens into Oscarworthy respect in the industry. Before it, they were considered niche, they could ony make spoofs. Never mind the intensity of Barton Fink or the scope of Miller's Crossing before it, they were the team behind the arthouse thriller Blood simple, the live action cartoon of Raising Arizona and, assuming they remembered it, the baffling Hudsucker Proxy. Fargo, though, appeared committed, quirks flew across the screen like highway bugs but the central gravity of the crime and the prusuit of its perpetrators was serious, the snowy setting provided a constant visual backdrop and the exquisitely crafted music kept things centred. The Coens had either arrived at the point where their idiosyncrasies were finally absorbed by a mainstream approach or the mainstream had caught up with them and they didn't feel threateningly quirky anymore. Either way, the gongs to Frances McDormand for best actress and the Coens for best original screenplay were from seven nominations. It had taken a few movies but they got there.

For my money, Fargo worked on a mass scale because the quirk was played as local colour rather than the more typical plastering by the team. The pacy screenplay, adaptable dialogue and heavy centre all worked toward paydirt. It was the Coens' most accessible film to date. All that hellfire and weirdness of Barton Fink and the breathless cover version of Frank Capra of The Hudscucker Proxy counted for nothing against the reduced complexity and the commitment of the cast.

Frances McDormand who had brought her best to the debut Blood Simple a decade before, proved how magnetic she coud be even behind what always sounded like a party trick accent. Her pregnant cop on the trail kept the eyes on her all the way through. It was the first time we'd seen William H. Macy and it was lucky that this break led to a good career in characer acting as he outran the vileness of this character in subsequent roles to take something like his current reverence at an early stage (I think of Dylan Baker who, though always impressive, was  premanently damaged by his role in Happiness). Steve Buscemi's career long perfection of the smartarse brought him to his deepest role to date. Peter Stormare's solid psycho makes him scary in every scene he's in. Even when he's safely in the barred backseat of a cop car he seems ugly dangerous.

Fargo also works for the sheen of folkiness that stretches from the hymn-based score to the craft poster to the village like twangs and stretches of the local accent. The Coens brought the spark that earned them arthouse glory to the Academy stage because they understood that even the pushed parochial would kick this one well into the spotlightf and stay there. 

I was an early fan of the team, recalling the thrill of the muscularity of Blood Simple. By the time Fargo appeared, I considered them good in every other film, having been unimpressed by Arizona, Hudsucker, and Miller's crossing which struck me as clever at best. And then I was suckered into thinking that Fargo was the apotheosis of their efforts. That Oscar zing rings loud when it hits an indy team and the prior claim cheer feels so very good in the throat when it happens. 

But I recall leaving the cinema thinking they'd finally broken through but feeling we'd never see a Blood Simple again. Well, we haven't. At their worst it's a Burn After Reading or Inreconcilable Differences and at their best it's O Brother Where Art Thou. Once they found their cable at the back of the mainstream wagon they remained there and all of the incisive cheek could do nothing to change the course. They didn't become blandf, far from it, just reliable.

Review COLOURS OF TIME

Young Adele is leaving her idyllic country home to seek her mother in Paris. Her mother has kept Adele afloat with a regular monthly payment for her twenty years, leaving no personal memory in her daughter. On the way, this is late 19th century, she meets a couple o' young bohos on the river cruiser headed to the city de lights for fame 'n' fortune as a painter and photographer. They're a little edge but seem fine at heart. When Adele does meet her mother it's in the Monmartre brothel where she's a star. Ok, so where did those two boys say they were staying?

Meanwhile in the present the descendants of Adele filter a quartet of interested parties to inspect the near forgotten family home in the provinces. They find a trove of photographs, a few paintings but think little of them. They differ on what the greater clan should do with the property which is being touted by the real estate brigands as the site of a supermarket to be. 

Meanwhile, Adele makes up with her mum and starts to free herself up from her rustic roots and swan into a golden gaslight venue to meet the great and famous of La Belle Epoque. In the present, the canvas is borne to an expert in a specialist museum as it really does look kinda ... impressionist. A voyage on the good ship ayahuasca has consequences both funny and aching. 

I seem to be skimming with faint appraisal but this is less a film of plot and revelation (though it does contain both) than one of personified themes. The four cousins range from the Gen Zed fashion photographer whose profession's shallowness saddens him to the bon vivant apiarist who wants the world to slow down, the industrial disruptor who wants it to speed up, and the gentle French teacher who wants it to be more aware of itself and everything it has already been. In the past we are cleft by personal magnetism to Suzanne Lindon whose Adele aborbs the shocks of Parisian life with an increasing strength that is tempered by a sadness, seeing her own innocence pale and fade. 

This is a layered tale of discovering the importance of experience, of treasuring the moment while savouring the riches of the past. It does this heartily, without a twee second of screen time. One review called it Paris porn. Do NOT Google that! If you've seen Amelie, you'll get the idea. Is this Paris porn? Oh my worthy wombat yes. If you've ever had a fix on the deliciousness of the city you will luxuriate in this film. But it is also aware of the weight of its themes. At one point, the centennials run to a high spot to look upon the first street in town to have electric light. In this film about painting vs photography we are well reminded of their relation to the beginnings of the very thing we are watching. Paris wasn't just home to great art and photography but offered the world some heavy early milestones. Put the potential twee out of your mind, go and sit back and feast. You'll love the taste.

Viewing notes: a lovely morning session on a pleasant rainy day. It was interrupted by a fire alarm. The last time that happened was during Beasts of the Southern Wild in 2012. The beeps were in time with the movie's music and I just thought it was a nice incursion of electronica. This one had someone with a great Mark E. Smith voice telling us to stand by. It kept going so I went out and was told by the harried staffer on the phone that they'd pause the film if they didn't have to evacuate the cinema (Kino in the Sofitel complex). I had a loo break and told the few others in the audience when I got back in. A shorter tempered staffer came in and explained what I just had and an older bloke started insisting rudely on an answer which the staffer couldn't give. I politely advised him to cool down, we were all pissed off and they should get an answer to us soon. I had just said that when the film resumed, just before the point of the alarm. Well done, Kino!

Review: PASSENGER

After a prologue that gives away the monster but not the exact summoning, we meet couple Maddie and Tyler who have quit their job-bound lives to stay on the road in a well appointed van. Of course, they are going to meet the big bad but not until we get to know them a little. When they do, it's on until the big end and then the credits. 

Movies like this need a few things to work: a scary monster, appealing leads and a compelling legend. Well, we get the appealing leads. Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell are very easy to like and the writers are careful to bring a little friction into the relationship. In the course of a few scenes, we learn that Maddie is less enthusiastic than Tyler about life on the road but he accomodates this with a few cheeky motel bookings to help ease the way and suggest that Tyler does value the relationship over the big project.

The scene comes along when they inevitably break the lore and invite the big bad along with them. Then it's pursuit, weird incidents and outright violence and end.The reason the big bad is that he is just bad. No great motivation behind his torment of the couple beyond them allowing him in by their breach. Ok, doesn't Hellraiser not care whether the earthlings are good or not, as long as they summon the Cenobites? Yes, but that is complicated by several line-crossings in the characters and familial relationships and makes for an unpredictable tale. This one starts, goes, keeps going, and ends pretty much exactly as you expect after the first couple of scenes.

That said, I'm sure director Andre Ovredal wouldn't be bothered by the criticism. Like the stable of filmmakers behind the Conjuring and Insidious franchises, it's all about the formula. I can choose not to pick the formula but, after the linear Troll Hunter, Autopsy of Jane Doe and the boring The Last Voyage of the Demeter, this one seemed to offer a kind of urban myth creep to it. But it's just jumpscares. Oh, one exception. There is a genuinely creepy sequence in a car park, the power of which completely transcends the rest of the film which, after its moved on, just flattens out again into cruise control. Seems trivialising but I did appreciate how wounds received in the action were attended to and dressed.

I could probably watch any number of two cent found footage movies on Tubi and find at least three that unnerve me in some way. The thing I didn't list above that this film didn't supply is suspense. There's none. Big bad turns up, seems to have supernatural powers, and does his stuff. Next.