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.

Review: PRIMAVERA

The girls of the orphanage are watching a young stray mother cat suckle her kittens. When the matron finds them, she teubars the kittens from the mother, bags them along with a hefty rock which she drops into the canal outside. The girls get back to their business, rehearsing for their concert where they will be either masked or hidden from their aristocratic audiences or married off to the men of the group as breeding machines. It's Venice in the 18th century and if you're a woman your choices are limited.

When the composer the orphanage is using proves a duller drawcard for patronage then the one with the more famous composer a few blocks down the canal, the board agrees to get the one they let go a few years back. He's good at tunes but even better at underselling himself. He himself was sold into the priesthood as a child when his mother made a foolish vow to her god to send him off there after reading a coincidence as a miracle. So, he has been less than stellar away from the orphanage but his reputation as a composer has improved and, through his incessant asthmatic coughing, manages to whip the players into a shape concordant with his fiery music. His name is Antonio Vivaldi. Yes, that Antonio.

When I saw that this film with this subject matter was on offer I resolved to see it. I'll put up with a lot of cuteness in the name of celebrating a favourite composer, twee as it can get, and Vivaldi's story is a good one. In this case, it's also a very well told one. The centre is not on the composer but one of the violinists in the orchestra, Cecilia. She is chosen as the soloist by Vivaldi as she played without regard for approval but what the music demanded. We follow her musical progress but also her arranged attachment to a war hero officer. Those two things will prove contradictory in this scheme.

While we haven't had an inundation of composer biopics lately, there is a tradition among them that the composers be treated as a mix of gods and rock stars, rude and explosive and beloved for the greatness of their art. This stretches well before Amadeus crowned the approach and is partly what I expected. Vivaldi wrote the hit song of virtuoso violinists in his series of concertos called The Four Seasons. His enlivening music that set a flashing violin performance against a string ensemble can win non-classical listeners the way that Kind of Blue wins jazz skeptics. His evocation of the forces of nature expresses a boldness and power that sets it apart from its baroque contemporaries; we hear the summer storms, feel the snowfall, and even the oppressive asthma-hostile breathless heat of summer in the sound without ever needing to be fanciful. It's there.

This film scores big points for doing little more than suggesting that the composer turn his attention to nature as an inspiration. In the performance moments, there are a very few subtle hints at this epochal work. Mostly, we see the effect of Vivaldi as a mentor to a developing musician, the limitations of a society that forbid both artistic heights and human fulfilment in the same person. Apart from the crowned heads and local worthies our pallett is as beige and ascetic as the uniform dresses that the orphans must wear and the plain lower cleric garb of the composer's priestly garb. The walls of the cultural prison might well have been the inspiraiton for the sense of dress in a Venice that has been so richly celebrated for its colour, fashion and art. When the music takes flight it almost lifts us from our seats. 

As the post credit note (no, not a spoiler) reminds or informs, Vivaldi was a local unknown in his life and the wonders of his music were not uncovered until two centuries after his death. His life was as cloistered as it is suggested here. Cecilia's tale might seem more fanciful and free-thinking that would have been the case at the time. She is named after the patron saint of music which spirit is let free to roam her otherwise cloistered mind. But that is just the effect we encounter while listening to Vivaldi's music in the knowledge of how he lived and died. A sober portrait of genius but very welcome for all that.

Viewing notes: Primavera is still hanging on at cinemas like Melbourne's Nova but is also available through Prime for rent or purchase. .

Review: THE END OF OAK ST

We open on a community barbeque and the narrative telescoping of every plot point we'll see along the timeline of this movie. The main family is stressed to collapse. Dad's still delivering pizzas, Son sees the coming scission and regrets and brings his dog to the party against Mum's wishes, Daughter wants to go to Cornell to be taught by Carl Sagan but it's too expensive, and Mum's writing a bitter novel about all of it. Then, the whole neighbourhood gets yanked out of the present by unseen forces and now they're in the land of the dinosaur.

Then, for the remainder of the running time, they have to workshop their troubles and fighting for their lives so they get a forced perspective on things while they try to figure out what has happened and how to get back to where they once belonged. That's it.

This is David Cameron Mitchell's third feature after the brilliant teen horror It Follows and the (can't comment, haven't seen) Under the Silver Lake and I'm getting reminder notes from the legacy of Richard Kelly who, so far, really only had one great movie in him. (Kelly did crap on his own legacy with a hasty new cut of Donnie Darko which lowered its IQ but we can talk about that another time.) People got It Follows wrong, thinking it was punishment for teen sex (it was more about knowledge and responsibility) and it looks like he never wanted that to happen again. Well, it won't with this one. It's even set in the '80s, as though that's going to protect it from people who find it too literal and pointless.

As an example of that, I'll cite this movie's use of the dioptre (diopter for those of US spelling bent). There is a scene of the family discussing the situation. We see tight two-shots where both characters (mother and son, daughter and father for e.g.) are in sharp focus but couldn't be. They are in focus but the lens is focused on two points with an attachment that looks like a halved lens. It's almost as old as cinema itself but I'll give a very famous example: when Chief Brody is talking to Bad Hat Harry on the beach in Jaws, the beach behind Harry should be a blur but it's sharp. When dioptres are used there's usually a telltale seam, often with noisy subjects like hair but sometimes it's right along a seam in the set design like a doorway or darkness. As this is a technique I notice on sight, I was distracted in locating the seam. There's one in which the corduroy couch in the middle distance goes suddenly from sharp lines to a blur. Have you noticed how long this paragraph has gone explaining this? Well, watch that scene and try to explain to me how it served the narrative even slightly. It's there because someone watned to do it. That's all. And there are a few more. Anyway...

The thing about it is not that it doesn't cut it as an action adventure, that works a treat, it's just that you have seen this action adventure more times than you can count. Anne Hathaway leads the cast with dependable skill and the whole thing goes at a clip before it ends. I didn't stay through the end credits but it wouldn't surprise me to discover that there was a post credit scene.

Apart from some slightly new takes at the detail level there is really little more I can say. If you want popcorn with a zero-challenge movie, this is it.

Viewing notes: the Shogoth behind me in the cinema murmured something at one point but I let it pass. Then, when a cataclysmic event happened, he groaned out loud: "was that really necessary?" I swung round and met his Friday-night-with-beer-pizza-and-the-boys grin with the hiss: "Please be QUIET!" regetting the "please" instantly. He was silent for the rest of it.

Review: TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Chris, a young filmmaker, gets a gig as the director to resurrect an old slasher franchise. As a young and queer and independent director she's demographically perfect to reboot a genre long characterised as anti-sex. If she's doing it, it's gotta be right for now, right? Let the wokies take that. But then, after a meet and greet with the original final girl that's straight out of an '80s horror flick, she is entranced and pleasurably fearful of the older Billy Presley who has been living in voluntary obscurity since the first Camp Miasma movie. All the plans Chris had for the origin story fade to invisibility as she tries to get Billy to tell her what her crucial look in the eye was about all those years ago. The suits won't be thrilled (you'll meet them) but Chris is about to go for a career igniting ride.

Jane Shoenbrun's third feature sees the production values catch up with her ideas. Those sprites of the mind are flying in the light like fireflies and make this characteristically slower paced outing rich and strange (which, Schoenbrun herself will soon be). First, there might be a reference to every single '80s slasher that ever was (as well as a host of them from before). Second, her themes of untreated pain and alienation in the nooks of lives, are here more concentrated than in We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. The discipline is palpable and makes the whole busy movie rush by.

Apart from those themes we have a lot of notes about cult movie fandom, video culture and seeing grown up things too young. It's about the slasher genre and why it keeps coming back for new crops of teenagers before and behind the screen and it addresses the misconception of the subgenre that it is a conservative warning about having sex too young. I sing again with the hosts of The Faculty of Horror podcast: The movie's rad, the killer is the puritain. And it is about the monster of the Camp Miasma franchise, a box headed blade-wielder known as Little Death. I think I knew that little death was a euphemism not long after I knew I could have my own and that was from reading (and almost  all that that implies). Keep you eye on that concept and you'll find the slow focus of the central mechanism of this movie roll into clarity.

Schoenbrun brings her multi-media montage to a frenzy. When the time comes to evoke gthe '80s style in quote from the film within the film, she gleefully overstates the geysers of blood but goes on to gtakea more considered look at a massacre scene and the look in the eye of the then teenaged Billy as life events converge on her during the shoot all those decades ago. This is a rich mix.

Hannah Einbinder shows us depth from the word go as an ambitious but still timid young artistwith big issues; her trek is a constant development. However, it is Gillian Anderson who takes and keeps centre screen with an updated Norma Desmond of the slasher movie. She is clearly relishing this role, by turns monstrous and nurturing.

If this is what Schoenbrun can do with only two feature films notched up, I can only wait for the next. I don't care if she is accused of ghettoising her sexuality the way others are charged with doing that with their ethnicity, aren't artists meant to express what they know? Let's be fair about this. Then again, her next project is aa series adaptation of Cherles Burns' eerie coming of age graphic novel Black Hole. Some carry over themes in that and she uses the stark black and white of the comic I think we're in for a treat. Meantime, try this flavoursome third album from an artist worth your attention. Oh, she usually gets compared to Lynch. Sure, but I'm going to add Luis Bunuel.

LOGAN'S RUN @ 50

In this future you get blown up at the age of thirty. You can try lying about your age but the little jewel light on your palm will start blinking and it's off to the carousel of  "renewal" for thee. Some try to flee, and get called runners, but are hunted down and killed by the Sandmen. So, that's it for choices. One day, one of the Sandmen, Logan, gets a mission to find Sanctuary, the mythological home of successful escapees, it's a tad thankless as his own use by is brought forward and the command will deny all knowledge. Ok, that cute girl from the Transmat Tinder seemed a little out of joint with the society. She's probably part of the underground. They run. Sandmen in pursuit.

Logan's Run is an adaptation of a co-written novel from 1967. If you're seeing hippie happenings in the renewal ceremony, that's why.  Even with the reference being out of date in an America soured by the Vietnam War and Watergate, the juxtaposition of kaleidoscope colours and ritual adult termination works well. The softening of one renders the violence of the other clear. The runners aren't just going for their lives, they are the ones who walk away from this Omelas (please read Ursula Le Guin's short fable), opting out of the paradise that depends on mass murder for its continuation. 

Dystopian cinema was having a moment in the early to mid '70s with outings like ZPG and Rollerball. Popular science books like Future Shock foretold a society of detachment and alienation. THX 1138's culture includes counselling booths where a bland picture of Christ spies on the locals and advises them to buy more. Hollywood could sell tickets to bummer premises, regardless of the ending and the sharper of the directors could go to town on design and poignancy. Logan's Run feels like a feature film but looks like a contemporary TV show. Someone only just seeing it now might find that offputting but it's intentional. The slick new city looks like the Brady Bunch in a nightwear-only shopping centre.

The lightness of the dialogue feels cultivated, suggesting a cultural imperative to the naivete of its sound. That goes with the climate controlled skimpiness of the costume and the sex and hedonism on delivery. This state of things is a designed culture. Everything is beautiful, even the official lie that renewal meets what it says rather than violent population control. A later scene, outside the city shows a kind of AI that has gone from gathering seafood to something ghastly as a logical extension. Could Sanctuary itself, the promised home of the escapees, be different bullshit from the same source? Who said the future's shock had to be hard and all at once? Modern audiences of this film might not easily see its darker shades and what that might say about them as consumers.

Everyone in the city is beautiful. They're bred that way and no one's older than thirty. To that end the perfect Micheal York and Jenny Agutter as Logan and his partner in escape Jessica are machine perfect humans being apex male and female as the 1970s would have them. Both British actors in a cast of Americans, they keep their accents but for a few vowel shifts and both provide solid reinforcement of the assembly line smile to the extent that it looks more like fancy dress. York was often considered a self-player, a handsome fencepost but he's shouldering the role as well as he did in Cabaret, here. Is it that or had he finally found his perfect part? Agutter, always an alert presence on screen, effortlessly displays the resistance under the skin. By the time we get to Peter Ustinov's doddery sage, we can see the purpose beyond the sheen.

I revisited this thinking that I would be in for an exercise in ridicule, a taste of where dystopia met Disney but really, this is an example of why it can be good to be wrong.

Viewing and reading notes: I hired this through Prime but you can also get it on HBO and Apple. You could try for an old DVD at an op shop or online but you won't get a new copy on physical, hereabouts. Oh, and again, please seek out and read the four page wonder that is Ursula Le Guin's Those Who Walk Away from Omelas. It's an extension of the trolley problem that will keep you thinking which (like Guinness) is good for you.