Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Review: ONCE UPON A TIME ... IN HOLLYWOOD

Ageing actor Rick Dalton spends down time with his stunt double Cliff Booth and as they smoke leisurely cigarettes, drive around, plough into Margaritas and watch their old movies, time soaks in letting them know, through the gentle anaesthetic that their time has past on this path. There are other paths but they feel like admissions. Meanwhile a young solar beauty Sharon Tate strolls through a day off and happens on a cinema showing her latest goofy action comedy, introduces herself and watches, absorbing the appreciation of the audience in the anonymous dark. Meanwhile, a group of hippy teenagers roam the sunlit streets and dive the dumpsters for food singing is clear girlish voices chants like, "all is one." It's Los Angeles, 1969. They might as well be singing Helter Skelter.

Rick gets a get-out-of-obscurity card from a well placed admirer but it's so radically different to his path that he considers is a kind of resignation. A later scene has him receive wisdom from an eight year old colleague who learns of his plight through fiction: he summarises the Western novel he's reading and realises it's about himself. His stunt double plays out a Western for real which takes him into the heart of darkness and violence. Margot Robbie watches rapt as her character takes pratfalls on screen, played by the real Sharon Tate as the people around her fill her ears with the joy of cinema and flashbacks to her martial arts training with someone playing Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee as a character has already had his arse handed to him by Cliff in a needlessly controversial scene in a backlot. This is a Quentin Tarantino film and all of this forms the same cosmos. But an indication of why I think this is the first Tarantino film I've cared much about since Jackie Brown is that as part of the Manson murder timeline we see Charlie once and very briefly. That's not a spoiler but saying more would be. My point is that, despite the sensory overload of imagery and the near three hour running time, this film feels tight and restrained in all the right places. That's not something I'd say of anything from Kill Bill to The Hateful 8.

Some authorial marks appear early (Rick's old tv show will be mentioned and you live through a few sequences of it that could easily have been referred to in dialogue, a character mentions seeing a film at home on 35 mm and we see the projector loaded and working) and made me shift in my seat. Has QT gone so far as to provide self-parody as part of his auteurism? These do settle down, though. Later iterations are meaningful as they do fill narrative gaps with massive style. Otherwise, we get some of his better traits. Process, as in Rick learning his lines with a reel to reel tape machine, Cliff driving smoothly through the streets or Roman Polanski as a character driving his hot MG like he's in a race. Cliff picks up a hitchhiker and its playful progress is undercut by a mounting dread. Sharon picks up a woman hitcher who could be a Manson girl but its friendly and fits with her Disney princess exploration of the streets and lanes. Rick might call for lines during a scene but he learns them and works on his performance. Cliff gets home to his trailer, behind a drive-in screen and beside an oil derrick, feeds his well-trained dog, makes up some instant mac and cheese, and lounges in front of the tv. If we didn't understand they were Manson's followers, the dumpster diving girls play at their tasks like teenagers, laughing and larking. Around all of this day to day the gentle sunlight of an old time reminds us that it's about to be bruised by crime, shattered by industrial cataclysm and drawn irrevocably away from its Beach Boys harmony pleasure. This is not the love letter to old genre cinema that Kill Bill was, there are real things happening on screen, I mean real emotionally and culturally and historically. There really is a purpose in what we are shown.

On that, the contested fight scene between Cliff and Bruce Lee does have resonance in later moments as we see him instruct others professionally. Does it misrepresent Lee as an arrogant windbag who could be beaten by a much older man? Maybe, but that's a charge for a documentary (I know how tired that is as a joke but I'm not joking). The scene has far more to do with the passing of batons and the hubris of an older hand not ready to give up his place. The man he doubles for is going through his own career comeuppance, it's just one that feels the effects of alcohol and personal perdition rather than fists and throws. This is at the thematic centre of the film and expresses it variously with blunt force and subtlety but does express it. The content that I had trouble with was the flashback to Cliff's past which features an incident left open. Personally, I think it's up to your ethics whether you indulge the wink from the film itself or assume the lack of definition is supported by the potential redemptive violence later. It's troubling either way.

Troubling in a warmer way is Tarantino's fluid presentation of film production. We've already seen him digitally replace Steve McQueen with Leonardo DiCaprio in a scene from The Great Escape and mock up a 60s style war movie for Rick Dalton (though it's far more stylish than it would have been if genuine). But in scenes of Rick performing in his bad guy role in the tv show we are given the kind of cheat that used to be standard in movies about movies from the days o' yore. As Rick plays the scene in the saloon it is presented as assembled from different takes with seamless audio right up to the point where he calls for his line. I wasn't counting setups but that isn't how it's done. A later scene involving a stand-off does the same. The most annoying case of this is in the 1980 film The Stunt Man where a fugitive turned film actor is put through a kind of performance rollercoaster made of hundreds of shots as though he's playing it and getting roughed up for real in one pass. In this film there is no apology for the conceit, we're meant to believe it and empathise with how rattled the actor is. It's done that way for the plot but it still feels contemptuous. When Tarantino does it here it's because he knows you know (and it speeds the plot point and it is more fun to watch); it's a point of celebration for the film's title with its cross of Disney and cynical studio industry.

This reminds me not so much of the retrograde art direction that helped make Tarantino famous, a kind of perennial cool mixed with nostalgia, as it does a more recent outing by another standalone figure in contemporary cinema, Sion Sonno. Sonno's Why Don't You Play in Hell is a kind of farewell to the cinema of film stock, attended projection, and plucky filmmakers. In a plot Tarantino would love, a gang of aspirant moviemakers inadvertently get caught up in a Yakuza war and solve it by making both sides finance a movie made which will feature both in the ascendant. There is a mass of Japanese cinema history on the screen but also an increasing sad smile at its passing. Tarantino celebrates what we now call (but no longer watch) appointment tv as well as the movies of money men with a chapter close both satisfying in its violence and heavy-hearted in its signature.

I was worried about the length of this movie as the past month's film festival had given me lower back pain (retro cinema seating, indeed! ... argh it's something I've had since my twenties) and the thought of sitting still for two hours forty-five was bidding me wait until I felt better. But as the movie took flight I recalled something. When I was a kid I used to love going down to the Strand, having a lime milkshake and a burger at the Ozone Cafe, and going and playing with the old train engine and canon on the lawn by the beach. There was a stretch of parking shaded permanently by big shaggy banyan trees and, for a while, weekend after weekend, I would marvel at the sight of a jet black E-Type Jaguar parked there among the dowdy Holdens and Fords. There was such alluring mystery to it. I imagined a James Bond or The Saint (the stick figure from that title sequence was graffiti-ed on the side of nearby Castle Hill). The big sleek shark-like car really got into me, so much that I knew that seeing the owner would just be another Townsvillite plonker like me. I never found out and never will. The thing is that now I leave the warmth of that in the childhood file and only get it back out of the dust when something as exciting happens, something like this movie. Both of these are memories with falsehood (i.e. nostalgia) and it's what we can read in the space between the plain event and the fantasy. It can rend your heart. It can exhilarate you. It didn't last but I got out of my seat as the lights came up without any pain at all.

Friday, August 23, 2019

Review: PALM BEACH

Members of a one hit wonder band from the '70s who have kept in touch gather for the birthday of their old manager. Everyone's married, had kids, known big highs and lows, and moved on. Or have they? This is a reunion comedy like The Big Chill or Peter's Friends and it does what it says on the tin. Buried emotional corpses are exhumed, young adult children are compared with parents who are having a very hard time coping with being older then they were when they were famous. You need to laugh and you need to cry and finally you need to feel the warm 'n' fuzzies wrap around you like the finest fake fur coat.

Well, all of that happens and is enacted by a cast of mighty actors from home and away like Bryan Brown, Greta Scacchi, Richard E. Grant, Sam Neill and fine newcomers like Claire Van Der Boom among many others. Everyone gets a scene to themselves and their defining issue and everyone does well with what they get. That is the problem: most of the trouble that emerges is given so little weight by the progress of the film that reactions to it almost always feel overdone. They appear suddenly by people who seem too well prepared to supply a turn. I don't mean that the truth of the situation is so strong that we're witnessing people who know each other too well. I mean that the writing seems too often to play placeholder scenes as final drafts. The actors are a lot better than their material.

There is one scene towards the end involving a taxi and it's perfectly written, performed and directed, going from bitterness and pathos to effortless comedy. It sticks out and shows up pretty much every other scene. There's a lot on show as far as performance goes, the delivery of wit, physical comedy, youth vs age but when one character's taunt to the birthday boy about a blot on the otherwise magnificent view, the last straw seems like nothing so the latter's acting makes him look like a drama queen having a coronary. There are some serious issues but they're so smoothed over that nothing really seems to be at stake. Even the physical comedy scenes lack power as they are of acts that might be funny if they happened in real life but not on screen. Again, the actors feel like they're over-reacting as though they're in a drama class.

It's not the fault of this film alone but of the genre that the darker aspects of ageing never get a look in. Mortality and personal power drain, resentment of youth could be worth exploring over fart jokes and wistful musings on what they used to be. There is just nothing unpredictable about these people. Reunions should be fraught with danger. There should be envy, ridicule, repeat bullying, pecking order reinstatement; all sorts of massive bullshit. If they were just nice no one would go to them.

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Review: THE KEEPER

Bert Trautmann is a German soldier captured at the end of WWII and imprisoned in a British camp. It's not quite a meet cute (it's not a rom com) but Margaret, the daughter of a local grocer supplying the camp, sees Bert showing expert skills as a goal keeper as the prisoners play soccer. He is considered trustworthy enough to work at the grocery while the grocer keeps an eye on his skills with a mind to enriching the local soccer team. After some stark resistance, Bert goes to the net and wins  the day and before we know it is playing for Man City to massive crowds. But not all is well.

After a tastefully handled romance between Bert and Margaret we see them married and we are aware that there is an event in Bert's military past that is beginning to fester in him as he struggles with the prejudice of football fans who see him as a scapegoat for Nazism. An initial division between Bert and Margaret ends with an intriguing question posed by his that we strongly suspect has the wartime incident at its centre.

There are the two themes of this film and their convergence into conflict drives a tale of reconciliation and its difficulties. So as Bert's career courses into triumph this grain of conscience grows until present day tragedy forces it into confession. The good thing about this film is that that moment does not end up with smiles or hugs and the thousand and one strings of the Lancashire Fiddlers. There is a heart rending emptiness that does far more to convey the gravity.

David Kross keeps Bert's cards close to his chest with a face like a Christmas elf, all baby blues, golden fringe and wide lipped smile. This is important because we are just as ready to reject him as the Brits. When it comes to the revelation of his wartime moment the elf is, like the reports of many soldiers faced with atrocity, screamingly out of his depth. It also gives him a passport to charm in the warmer moments. Freya Mavor finds her way to the moral centre, going from cheeky northern girl to barely restrained victim of grief, carrying time and deed on her shoulders. The cast at large will be recognisable to anyone who has been enjoying recent U.K. cinema of the last decade as it's quiet rise has taken place.

The sport scenes move with a solid muscularity but the action on the stadium lawn really lifts when the responses from fans and narrative players activate and take wing. The moment when Bert insists on closing the gap Margaret has challenged him with about the merits of sport vs dance. It is genuinely charming.

This film could have given in to the numerous opportunities for cuteness that peppered its early scenes (and there are a few) but kept to the seriousness of its later weightier moments so that they do not feel forced (calling Wes Anderson and his irritating  tacked-on 3rd act crises!) and instead give us much to ponder and a pallet both evocative of era and easy on the eye to help. There are a few what-happened-to titles but they are left as text over action and not allowed to descend into the photo gallery of the real life characters.

Monday, August 19, 2019

MIFF 2019 Roundup


Intro
This year I did something unlike me and went back through the old programs to make lists of what I'd seen in MIFFs going back as far as I could. My real job came in handy here as it gave me immediate access to MIFF websites going back to 1998. While it was a chore going through the entire program for each year it did let me pick up a lot of movies that had been on short lists that I still haven't got around to. Another thing was that for each screening that I could remember (most of them) I added a few notes which included whether I saw it alone or with friends. The overall picture was that some fests were very social and others were almost solo. Then, when I thought about it a little deeper, I came away from the solo (or mostly solo) fests with much more intense and profound impressions. So, this year, while I did let a few friends in on my schedule I did nothing to chase anyone up and let it happen as it would. I even exchanged sessions that had orange dots by them (selling fast) red ones (sold out) or red triangles (standby)  for more obscure and less buzzy choices. These included films I knew I wouldn't be able to interest many others in seeing. Also, I sit at the front by preference which means that I almost never have to queue as that area is the least preferred. I am the only one of the people I know with this preference so if I'm meeting someone there it means standing in queues to get a middle-of-the-road seat. Oh, and out of preference, almost all my sessions were morning or early afternoon on week days which might tell you where I was leaning.  The result was that while I don't recall the joy and the fun and the seasons in the sun of some of them the movie experience feels richer. I might well be telling myself a few things there but I can say that at this stage they are not unpleasant ones. So, while it felt more like work than fun I really enjoyed the hell out of this year's MIFF. First, the movies ...

High


In Fabric in which Peter Strickland delivers the best of everything he's already given and pumps it up and out even further. A curious and wonderful mix of absurdist comedy, kitchen sink realism and genuine eeriness. Rare.

Something Else gave us a credible relationship study turned monster movie turned rom com in a piece that proudly bore its indy cred but fought its way well out of that paper bag with depth and real surprise.

The Day Shall Come showed that Chris Morris could develop from his uneasy blend of goofy knockabout humour with dark politics to deliver a sublime weave of light satirical political humour to a hard gut punch of a conclusion.

The Swallows of Kabul might have dealt its social criticism with a heavy hand but its sheer conviction won through, supported by a winsome animation style.

Friedkin Uncut is how you do an interview movie. A great raconteur supported by a gallery of peers and clips lift it above the dvd extra that a lot of these feel like.

Middle


Happy New Year, Colin Burstead delighted with Ben Wheatley in Mike Leigh territory and loving it. I love how in the explosive family environment the climactic moment is so slight and yet decisive. I just don't know how much I enjoyed it.

The Unknown Saint was a very appealing folky fable of cunning and greed. Never felt like more but didn't really need to.

The Orphanage expressed a bitter wish from decades past, a kind of if only rather than what if. Almost perfectly realised.

Vivarium had the courage to keep going with its severe absurdism but kept losing its way and then delivered what felt like an undercooked finish.

I wanted to like Monos more than I did but it never broke free of feeling like a short film left out in the rain. The breathtaking cinematography and audio + score did a lot of work and made me wish for more at the centre.

Share stood up to sexual assault in the social media maelstrom and made some strong points about the social microcosm and added some frightening thoughts about apparent virtue as manipulation but kept falling too short of the mark.

Low


The Tomorrow Man might well have done something worthy of its great ending if it had wound back the normality it was using to throw us off with the cute old people in a rom com hijinks. A missed opportunity and near waste of a great cast.

The Lodge showed that the makers of a contemporary classic horror film (Ich Sehe Ich Sehe) can bungle their next for the same reason that made their first work: icy aloofness that bred dread there only alienates us from people we need to care about here.

Website and App

Again, I didn't need the paper guide at all as I was able to fill up a minipass over a couple of sessions using the website alone. The calendar view of the wishlist is really invaluable here. The app updated itself smoothly and was ready to use straight away. I didn't notice any new features but all the thing has to do is work which it does.

One gripe is that when you're checking on the selling fast/standby lists it opens on day one. Considering how many sessions per day for over a fortnight you have to scroll through to check something in the second week renders the feature all but useless. I prefer avoiding overcrowded sessions and exchanged tickets several times this festival to avoid them (in some cases the substitutes were better than I was expecting the original choice would be. Happily, the normal schedule opens  with the current day so it's better to check that way.

The site had some glitchy navigation in the calendar view by which if you chose a date from the dropdown you could return to the default (Friday Aug 2) but then it stopped working until you refreshed the page. If you exchanged tickets the old bookings stayed on your wishlist, crowding it up with abandoned entries. Not so bad on a browser but annoying on a phone.

For some reason drilling down to your ticket on the (at least Android) app while waiting to show it to the ushers for scanning it could shift from portrait to landscape (even if you had this turned off on your phone) and the QR code vanished, even when returning to portrait view. You had to back out of it and choose it again. Not a major glitch and easily fixed each time but it probably caused staff more than a few winces as they explained it to the punters. Why not fix the view to portrait. Who's really going to need landscape on a phone or even tablet to go through the guide?

The Venues



The Forum
The central experience of the festival for me and always feels like a great return home. Pity the festival club wasn't there this year. That last bit was one of the reasons why I didn't bother seeking out session mates this year. You had to travel to the Capitol to get a festival congregation/vibe after movie drink. I saw the Forum downstairs being used with lantern jawed security staff at the doors a few times. Folks, re-open the Forum as a bar, cafe. It's a beautiful space and feels special. I didn't even bother to try the one at the Capitol.

The Capitol
Welcome return of a beautiful cinema but for one thing: the seats (apparently refurbished) are among the most spine damaging I've tried. They are far worse than the antiques in the Comedy Theatre. Despite the beauty of the interior I will  choose against going to screenings at the Cap at future events and will not go to any ACMI-associated ones until they're back at ACMI next year (unless they get the same lunkhead who designed the seating at the Capitol).

Sofitel
I've been to this one only once before and a while ago. It's small and functional, about the same as going to a Kino auditorium. The sound system was deafening for the ads and pre-screening music but settled easily for the screening itself.

Exhibition Centre
Massive auditorium allows for an easy second from front seat for In Fabric and a pleasantly strange entrance through the endless hallway which itself is quite cinematic.

Hoyts
Guaranteed preferred seating and comfortable at this well set up cinema which always has good projection and audio. There is a triple row at the front which backs onto a walkway meaning that no one who sits like a squid out of water can reach the back of your seat with their feet.

I didn't end up going to any Kino sessions.

Audiences
People are getting worse. Well, they probably aren't. I never saw anyone keep their phone on while the movie was playing. The worst thing is still people who think their voices are inaudible or don't care if they aren't. They are followed by the physio patients of the future who don't understand that if you sit in chairs as designed it is much better for your back (except at the Capitol whose seats seem designed for those very squid monsters) and knee or kick the back of your seat. YOU SHOULD NEVER HAVE TO COME IN CONTACT WITH THE SEAT IN FRONT OF YOU AT A CINEMA. That includes putting your footpath soiled shoes in the vicinity of anyone breathing close by. Your personal sovereignty ends when you start affecting that of other people. There is no exception to that. There was an adult family group at Monos who did take hints given to them and eventually shut up. In that case I just beamed at how punishing that film would have been to a drunkard's attention span. Knowing the contemporary cinemagoer's arrogance, I exchanged tickets from every standby session I'd booked: one or two entitled Neanderthals can be dealt with but a whole auditorium. Also, latecomers who extend their contempt for their fellow humans by talking or using what have to be prosthetic leg extensions  to make life hell for hours at a time tend to join me at the front. Not fun.

ADs
I mention these mainly because they are on before every screening so the dull ones are lived through and the irritating ones just get worse. There was a trailer this year and it was fine, simply stringing memorable images from the movies to music which gave it a sense of event. This wasn't one before screenings but put on YouTube and perhaps tv (no longer watch commercial tv so I wouldn't know). And then there was the put-your-phone-away one set in a bar in the after life. Shakespeare asks everyone how they died and among the famous and infamous there's an ordinary bloke who confesses he was texting while driving which brings the activity to a sudden halt. Most of this was actually quite funny. I won't go into the mangling of Elizabethan English as it was so bad it felt like part of the joke. The Ned Kelly confession made me wince every time as it went for too long and didn't observe its own rules. He mimes a shootout and hanging with vocal sound effects and then says Kelly's last words ("such is life") eloquently. And then in the final scene when they are at a cinema they repeat an earlier joke about his helmet which defuses the first one because when you see it again (and you will be seeing it again) the first one reminds you that the second one is coming. The first four confessions, though, are genuinely funny. But then over the end card we get Shakespeare quoting famous Brando line and feel like he does when he says it.

Eiplogue
When a low key senior rom com with a great ending and a competent if unremarkable horror movie are the worst things I can say about a whole festival then it must rate pretty highly. For reasons mentioned o'erhead this was a very comfortable fortnight o' films in good venues with mostly tolerable audiences and some real standout movies. I wouldn't want to take my misanthropic method into strict practice and might well loosen up next year and go in more groups but for this year at least going to movies by myself socialising outside the cinema was a far pleasanter experience than having to do all that organising. Anyway, for now, this is your happily exhausted correspondent from the shadows signing off MIFF for 2019.


One of the many snaps I took from the extraordinary sunset
following my final screening, heading off to a little treat
shopping and then a nice hot bath with some smoked salmon
and a Manhattan. Bye bye MIFF.

Sunday, August 18, 2019

MIFF Session 13: THE DAY SHALL COME

Moses, leader of a sect so heavily blended it seems ready to explode from its own contradicitons has a congregation of four. He daydreams of overthrowing European descended Americans to establish a black utopia in their place. Meanwhile, an anti-terrorist sting fizzles out and the team is left looking for a threat to neutralise. They and Moses' "army" are drawn together. The rest is spoiler world as a mass of casual and serious statements collide, twine and tighten into a massive ball of political hyper gravity.

Chris Morris played a strange game in his debut feature Four Lions, mixing jihadist zeal with goofy physical comedy. In the end it worked but had to do a lot of work to form itself. Here, the veteran satirist allows the broader comedy to reach a surprising refinement as the stakes rise and the darker subplots support it. This film is almost never shy in going for a laugh (and they're good laughs) but intricate plot allows us to rest when it demands our ethical attention. So, while some scenes might recall the MASH episodes with Colonel Flagg and his unsolvable paradoxes these are needed for later when the contradictions start to impact. This is an extraordinary piece.

Marchant Davis puts both a naive appeal and edgy self-delusion into Moses and Anna Kendrick as the young FBI agent brings her angular hardness and intelligence against each other. Both are caught in the same web, apparently by the same forces (you'll have to see it to see why) and a happy ending is not looking likely. For emphasis, end titles telling the characters' fate flash over the closing song. When this was done in American Graffiti it worked as no one expected it in a fiction film but it has become the bane of biopics and satires alike ever since, a kind of slap on the face in case we missed the point (the worst are the ones at the end of the otherwise excellent Nowhere Boy: really, that John Lennon got famous with that band?) But here they give information that lets us mull over what we've just been laughing at and provide the last motion of the gut punch.

Friday, August 16, 2019

MIFF Session 12: THE ORPHANAGE

Kabul 1989. Things are tough. The long Soviet occupation is grinding to a close and it looks like something even worse is coming. A boy wakes in a wrecked car and goes to the cinema for a Bollywood actioner, picking up a few scammed roupees before surrendering himself to the local Orphanage. Things are tough at the interpersonal level as the bullies at the top of the pecking order get their way but overall the kids get by. There's a school attached and they do get a kind of education. The better chess players even get a trip to Moscow out of it but the time for Soviet goodwill gestures is coming to an end as the Mujahideen move in to impose a little hell on earth.

There is little else in terms of plotting in this verite account as the boys and girls work out their various ways of getting through. Whether fighting back bullies with chess or falling into reveries from Bollywood musicals, they forge a kind of life with wizened old Anwar the caretaker keeping a vague order. When the insurgents show up and visit atrocity upon the institution it's time for another Bollywood fantasy but this time we know better.

This is a kind of wish sent back to the present from the time of a defeat to the present. It has a grainy small gauge look to it but the colour pallet is kept vital and warm. The interactions between the kids might well make us wince from the unfairness but we can clearly clap along with them, knowing that only the very worst are that bad and that most will find a kind of triumph. But then we also know that while bad people are apt to do bad things it takes a mindset like religion to make good ones do the same. The finale of this begins as a lament, lifts to a clearly fantastic display of resistance and ends ... well, that's the wish I mentioned. An unassuming but deceptively light neo-realist daydream.

MIFF Session 11: THE LODGE

  Richard is divorcing Laura who is still in such denial about it that when he insists they move forward with it kills herself. At an unspecified time later, Richard takes his two kids and stepmother to be, Grace, out to the winter wonderland of the family lodge. The kids Google the usurping Grace and find that she was the only survivor of a suicide cult. Grace seems ok now and pops masses of pills to keep herself in okville. So the happy new family settles in for homely white Christmas. But wait, Richard is such a high flyer that he has to go back to the city for a couple of days while his edgy bride to be gets cosy with the two kids who feel a righteous vengeance a-brewin' in a house that is going to be completely snowed in. You have a gun.

This tale of horror by manipulation progresses from its creative team of Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz who brought us the finely crafted and powerful Ich Sehe Ich Sehe (Goodnight Mommie). Now they've gone America and the dialogue is in English. And they have a good idea: what can be done with co-dependent credulity that is usually given the label of virtue (religion, in this case)? The answer is plenty and the answer is obvious so there must be something else to justify this story being told at all, mustn't there? I mean, most horror is a means to smuggle depth of thinking into a universal dread. So why does that not work here when the earlier outing worked a treat? It can't just be the language change.

It isn't. What has happened along the way between a good premise for a horror tale and what appears on the screen is that empathy loses. In Ich Sehe we were easily drawn into the opposing viewpoints of the boys and their mother as the stakes rose ever higher and the dread swelled up and got to a heart-sinking conclusion. The Lodge, despite an evocative setting and decent performances keeps its cards so tightly to its chest that all we see is the ploy at work, rolling on without jeopardy until it ends. If you've felt for any character you see on screen I'd love to sit down and talk over a coffee or a cognac as to what I was missing.

The screening began with the customary dimming of the lights and the MIFF logo slide appearing on the screen as the hubbub lowered to silence. Then the stage lights went up and someone announced that there would be security staff with nightvision goggles would be roaming the auditorium ready to sever the hands of anyone pirating the movie with a mobile phone (ok, the bit about the severing of hands is my contribution). I have never witnessed such bullshit at a MIFF screening. Two things about that: it made the entire audience restless enough that they had to settle down all over again which cut into the screening time and everyone babbled about it and anyone who wanted a crappy phone copy of a piece of cinematic rubbish like this should be welcome to it or at least explain why by way of payment.

At one point the stepmother and the kids watch John Carpenter's The Thing because, you know, it's just as icy and tight with suspicion and othering in a familiar setting. If only. The iciness of the approach cost this film its raison d'etre. Same thing when the contemporary Japanese master Kyoshi Kurosawa made a self-avowed non-scary ghost story in Retribution (of course it was scary, he was just saying that). This film comes to us with the label of the great Hammer studio name. But as low on scares as the classic Hammer horrors were they never neglected empathy. This is just mishandled and it worries me as to why as it seems so deliberate. Here we have a situation where a few moments of severe violence (and the pitifully telescoped fate of a cute animal) fail to brace us for suspense to come. We see the final scene which is more of the same of what we've already witnessed, the credits roll and we shrug. Right, now we can go. It worries me because this is what it looks like when filmmakers who disdain horror make horror movies; they want to rise above the genre vulgarity and show how clever they are. Well, they've already made a clever horror movie. Was it just time to do a stupid one?

Oh, there are no real spoilers in the above. Most of those plot points are made in the first fifteen minutes of the film and you'll get the point about the animal as soon as you see it.

Thursday, August 15, 2019

MIFF Session 10: SOMETHING ELSE

Hank and Abby are a great couple. He has a goofy manliness and she seems to be made out of sunlight. Both are clearly intelligent which might be the problem as, when she leaves a note on the fridge and disappears he collapses into the slough of despond that a sudden drop in information leads to. He leaves her too many voicemails as though he's throwing bottle messages into the dark. 

And there's something else. Something is attacking the house. In fact, every time he looks through his camera or just daydreams of her the sharp clawed thing attacks the front door. He's in a small southern U.S. town and his friend, the sheriff assures him it's just a bear, another friend suggests it's a wildcat. Even though he has only heard it and seen nothing more than the claw marks on his front door he is convinced it's out there, however much he sees the sense of his friends' caution. He's in an emotional abyss where the slightest things can look like hell. So, has he created his own monster? Will the love of his life come back and, even if she does, will things ever be the same? Only the last part seems impossible.

Co-lead, writer and co-director Jeremy Gardner has already delighted the adventurous movie hunter with his no-budget wonder The Battery which did the near impossible by refreshing the zombie movie, here he is looking at the monster in the dark and, once again, his audience is the winner. As a nearly meta touch this film is adjacent to the universe that indy champions Benson and Moorhead (Spring, The Endless) and involves them as producers and even put Benson in a main role as Shane the Sheriff. This strain of sci-horror that has been developing in shadows of the already shadowy A24 label of "elevated horror" (I hate that term but it's useful here). This one allows for deep character development, gathering the indy feel from Hal Hartley in the '90s all the way up to contemporary mumblecore, but delivering on the crises and the scares. The humour and the scares come from well wrought stories and easy self-parody does not make it to the screen.

That means you need good dialogue and casting to match and, in this case, strong ensemble direction. The gang's all here. There are a few monologues as characters talk to each other candidly and they feel natural. The show don't tell envelope does get pushed but its set in such poignant dialogue that it manages to feel natural. We've come a long way in the twenty years since the Blair Witch Project which was shot and improvised by its actors under remote direction and the big bad was a constant unseen threat. Now anyone with a shop-bought computer can make a monster worth the name but it still takes cinematic skill to stop an audience from laughing in derision. The laughs I heard at striking points in this film were not derisive, they were shock. The shocks are thrills and the thrills give this life. 

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

MIFF Session 9: HAPPY NEW YEAR, COLIN BURSTEAD

Colin, his wife and daughter are getting ready for a family event, a New Years Eve party at a country manor. He's on the phone to his sister who's invited the family ne'erdowell David and is already regretting the upset this will cause, particularly with their mum whose worried about her husband's financial chaos ... And on. Everyone gets to the venue and the chemistry experiment gets fizzy, explosive and chaotic as elements do battle. You've seen this before. Of course you have and writer/director Ben Wheatley depends on it. Ah, the strange vision behind films as diverse as Sightseers, Kill List, A Field in England and High Rise is having a crack at a Mike Leigh ensemble piece. What could go wrong?

Well, plenty and all of it is good. Do we really need another Abigail's Party? Maybe not but if Wheatley is trying it on it's like Led Zeppelin trying Reggae on Houses of the Holy: everyone's having a go at that but why are THEY doing it? Well, while this piece with its self-avowed cast improvisations might seem like an exercise in coasting I think we're looking at a very assured filmmaker edging towards something that is both homage to signature British filmmaking and the kind of radical move T.S. Eliot wrote of when he suggested that revolutions in poetry should start with a return to the banal. On a limb, I'm going to compare this not just with Bleak Moments or High Hopes but with The Blair Witch Project. That guerilla style movie (twenty years old this year) drilled back to the origins of horror and forged a new campfire tale. Colin Burstead is a kind of base touch; not so much proof that he can do it but that it needs doing.

With a cast that boasts the heights of Charles Dance and Bill Paterson along with faces you will know from The Office and a score of other U.K. tv (including the wonderful Haley Squires, also in In Fabric at this year's fest but broke through in Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake), you know you are in for a mass of naturalistic comedy and tight emotional venting. All of that is here. Also, a film that suggests intra-familial cataclysm takes delicate care to deliver a climax that involves the delivery of documents and you understand that this cold and often severe moviemaker wants you to also feel the warmth. By the time we got to Auld Lang Syne I felt like clapping.

MIFF Session 8: FRIEDKIN UNCUT

Interview movies with film directors typically struggle to rise above the level of dvd extras. What you need is a raconteur but one whose filmography also compels. I can listen to John Landis talk about anything but don't care that much about any movie he's made. The best film about David Lynch wasn't about his film career but his life as a young artist and so avoided the self-caricature everything else made about him suffers from. But if it's William Friedkin who not only helped make Hollywood's 1970s centrally important in history but can talk about it with great style the documentarian's job is really that of not stuffing up.

In loosely thematic passages about particular films, working with writers and actors, and general thoughts on filmmaking, Friedkin takes us through a career of eye popping cinema with the ease of that rare party guest who has a lot of good stories that don't sound like lies. He's strangely modest the closer the talk gets to his own vision for particular projects, retreating more into the comfort of production stories, appreciation of other directors and actors. This is not exhaustive and the most hagiographic this film gets is the avoidance of things like the Sonny and Cher movie, The Guardian  or Jade. However, we're here for The Exorcist, French Connection and the repatriated Sorcerer and Cruising which get delivered to our door.

Supplementing Friedkin's own accounts are a host of peers from the ubiquitous Quentin Tarantino (always worth listening to), cast members of Friedkin's films (Willem Dafoe and Matthew McConaughey have some fine moments) to the surprisingly interesting Wes Anderson. This allows a break from the artist as character and clip heavy threads but dos also add momentum in the timeline.

Cineastes who were in their teens in the '90s will recall how exciting they found Tarantino's films. With good reason. QT stuffed his pieces with astutely chosen retro and cool in for a generation obsessed with both. It meant that a mass of Tarantino clones emerged in the following decade. Friedkin didn't have that kind of influence. He describes seeing the likes of Citizen Kane and being inspired by the notion that film could do such a thing and, rather than make Wellesian epics of his own, plunged into an on-the-job trained career exploring what he could make of the elements. This is why the French Connection and The Exorcist didn't resemble any film that had preceded them. If anything the crime movie and horror film both looked like the supercharged documentaries that might well have come from the documentarian that Friedkin started out being. This exhilarating portrait of a great filmmaker didn't make me want to go and remake the Exorcist, it made me want to watch every film I'd ever seen all at once.

Sunday, August 11, 2019

MIFF Session 7: MONOS

A group of teenage guerrillas are put in charge of an American hostage in the mountains of an unnamed South American country. When their trainer leaves them to it their paramilitary prep gets scrapped and they turn back into teenagers, firing off rounds for the fun of it, fighting with each other. Their hostage, named Doctora, must navigate a narrow and rocky channel.

This film is less a narrative than the development of a situation. There are moments that read like a political thriller but the overall purpose is closer to the story the writer/director openly attributed: Lord of the Flies (there's even a shot of a fly riddled pig's head on a stake at one point). While we are given little plot there is much to follow as internal tensions or crises arise. Rather than acts we are presented with passages that better resemble musical movements that begin with the atonality of the initial chaos and gradually form into a more terrifying discipline.

This often severe scenario is set in breathtaking natural splendour, providing a constant juxtaposition of what nature we are witnessing. As the human side of that falls into cruelty or violence its creative side also blooms and the cast of local stars and unknowns create a disturbing tension that frequently breaks into sudden explosive action. Around it, greater nature, that of the endless jungle and the power of the river, dispassionately metes its various hazards and bounty as a human leader might punish or reward.

More than one voice has made a comparison to Apocalypse Now and what I'm about to write might sound strange: I felt more than once a kind of homesickness for that film, as though it was a place I'd lived. In a stretched sense I did as I wrote reams on it as an undergraduate and saw it at the cinema more times than I'm comfortable admitting. But my point is that Monos both made me long for Coppola's great epic and the weight of its grim story to guide us through its eye popping setpieces and wonder that it didn't do something more like this recent film and just present the setpieces like a massive living tableaux.

Here, I'll put a word in for the increasingly powerful music of Mica Levi whose groaning scores for Under the Skin and Jackie have been searing highlights of recent mainstream cinema. There is a little strings glissando at times which feels a little too signature but mostly we are given flutes and drums which often blur between film music and the sounds the monos themselves cultivate.

Perhaps the best way to zip this up is to share what I learned about the title. Mono in Spanish can mean child or monkey with a sense of cuteness. It's a term the kids use for themselves without further elucidation. They have nicknames from popular culture like Smurf, Rambo and Bigfoot but whether they style themselves after the tricksters of the jungle or boast that their youth has allowed them warrior status is kept ambiguous as though examining it by the coloured light of the forest might reveal far too much.

Saturday, August 10, 2019

MIFF Session 6: THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL

Atiq is a guard at a prison for condemned women. At home his wife is wasting from cancer. Elsewhere in the same neighbourhood of Kabul the beautiful young Zunaria is drawing on the wall listening to hiphop. Her husband Mosheen wanders the streets and comes across a stoning of one of Atiq's prisoners in a market. In a moment of confusion he enters the crowd, picks up a rock and throws it at the woman who collapses, pools of blood forming around her burka. Coming out of his mental haze he is overcome by guilt. When he returns home to the joyous Zunaria he cannot bring himself to tell her what he has done.

This animation from a novel by Yasmina Khadra is heavy on the smothering stasis of life in Kabul under the Taliban. Armed thugs patrol the streets watchful for what seem inconsequential acts which engender explosive violence. Personal freedom is a thing for the veiled fragility indoors but even there anyone might be listening.

This film is animated with what looks like a moving watercolour. Stunning use of chiaroscuro, the muted pallet of the location and an elegant evocation of character. Do you ever remember a film in another language as though it had been in English. I'm almost recalling scenes of this as live action. That's important as the single strongest impression I have of the emotional movement of this extraordinary film as well as its aesthetic is that of Italian neorealism. The search for and discovery of those moments of uplifting humanity in those bare but complex films of Rosselini and DeSica are in the blood here. The horrifying climax of the story held the entire auditorium of The Forum in a thick silence before a quiet almost unified release of breath. I was in tears.

This screened with the short Son of the Sea, a beautiful blend of animation and live action about a couple coping with their grief. Good to see shorts now and then. I feared they'd been policy-ed away. Then again, the feature was only 80 minutes.

This was an exchange for me as I had again to avoid a standby session and pick two others. This was a whimsical choice but I'm glad I made it.

Friday, August 9, 2019

MIFF Session 5: SHARE

Sixteen year old Mandy wakes up the worse for wear on her front lawn. Someone shares a video with her from the previous night. It looks like the beginning of a sexual assault. She has no recollection. While she tries to keep control of the process and make her own enquiries the video is discovered by her parents and it becomes a police matter and then a legal case. Meanwhile, she is dismissed from her basketball team and suspended from school. She has entered the aftermath of a rape survivor. She can't face her friends but can't live without them. The law hangs overhead but seems to grind to a halt.

Because of the explosive nature of the subject the treatment by writer/director Pippa Bianco is kept sober and observational. While there are significant revelations that appear throughout they are met with the stunned acknowledgement of Many and a family that is immediately supportive but increasingly powerless to move the forces she needs. Meanwhile, she goes through her days, trying to make sense of what happened and how it is affecting her life so profoundly and there is a crushing sense that the law is drifting from her as effortlessly as it does in a Kafka story, far beyond her control.

Bianco's suburban normal is concrete in contrast to the thick ethereal cloud of the law and at its centre young Rhianne Baretto as Mandy cuts holes into the light with her wonder and anger, constrained to continue living the same way despite everything changing. Early scenes with her friends and teammates feel natural, both joyous and contemplative. Encounters with them after the case has begun (including the accused) have an unnerving truth to them as they can swing from shunning and meaningless pranks to flashes of genuine affection. Everyone's living in the same place and getting their cherry slushies from the same 711 and the way those pockets of memory can open with riches or stay zipped up on a caprice gives an uneasy memory. And then there is the near constant pealing pings of the phone messages that might be salvation or just more uploadable, sharable violence.

There is a hint of Bresson's Mouchette in the deceptive plainness on show here which leads up to Mandy's final action which involves a potent choice. We see her make it but still feel strange. That's it, the best a narrative like this can do when it insists against mainstream histrionics, is to plant a question in us which must linger.

Thursday, August 8, 2019

Review: MIDSOMMAR

Christian and his uni friends are excited about going to Sweden to witness a seldom-performed ceremony. They're would-be anthropologists so, while it's a great holiday idea, it's also pretty compelling field work. Christian's girlfriend Dani is recovering from a traumatic grief and, while the others don't want her there to bum them out, she joins them. Who knows, there might even be an opportunity to end a draggy relationship. So, they get to Sweden, go remote and take some mushroom tea just before entering the eyebrow-free zone of happy rustic Norsefolk. It's charming and fun but then ...

Ok, there's an issue with this film that is bothersome. I've seen it spoiled by people who could not have seen it (before local release date and not the kind to grab a torrent), who have spoiled it because someone else did it to them or they might borrow some clunking worldliness by it. But that's a strange one because this is not a film that depends on twists and turns but rather a growing realisation on the part of the audience as to what is really happening (it is NOT obvious). It's funny, too as the director's previous film Hereditary played a fun game of anti spoilers with an intentionally misleading trailer. The trailer for Midsommar doesn't really do a lot of beating around the bush but it's not plot points that stand or fall, here, it's your own emotional response. However, in deference to any who want to go in fresh and in contempt for the Troglodytes who think they're being sophisticated by spoiling with material already in the trailer. There are significant moments of real shock in this film but they serve more as transition than motivation (but there really is some bad stuff, the kind of which you think: oh, they wouldn't do that would th-? Before containing a big scream).

So, what's left to say? Plenty, really, and this feeds back into plot management. Dani's family tragedy is clearly telescoped in the earliest scenes so, while its details are best kept cloaked, it doesn't shock or surprise as much as leave a gut punch. Already fearing she has become too fulsome with her boyfriend, she is at a loss as to how to proceed to keep what might be her one handhold on personal control. So, while the news about the Swedish trip surprises her she all but invites herself. Who knows, there might even be an opportunity to share some fruitful bonding.

Aster did something similar to this with Hereditary, whereby a means of emerging from grief is suggested and tried before something far worse than a few tricks with ouija boards could ever be. So with Midsommar a series of disorientating and divisive incidents that put the friends under others' control tell us little about where they might be placed, narratively and physically, by the time  of the final scene. In the end it's a little like the alignment of the planets at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (but that still won't give you the impact of the end).

A second, quasi-spoiler, is that this film is just an update or even remake of The Wicker Man. Beyond both fitting easily into the sub-genre of folk horror there isn't much to this. The earlier film's grounded skepticism of its final act is what produces the horror. We can't stop it, despite our disbelief as we know they believe and consider it unstoppable. The rich and Wagnerian fall of the ending of Midsommar is not about belief but an acknowledgement of ritual in support of some very earthly nature. There is real intention and poignancy in the setting of this tale sharing its general location with the home of the Nobel Prize.

Aster again has responded to the aesthetic needs of his tale and instead of Hereditary's gloomy dark interiors we have the warm open spaces of a summer under the midnight sun. Tootling and groaning folk music and costumes could only ever smell of the lightest perspiration, worn under head dresses made of wildflowers and straw. You want to be there. And when things get trippy he uses CG both subtly and showily as flowers that seem to swallow and food that seems to breathe in the distance and in closeup with the same absence of effort. The fragrance of gardens and sex are only window decoration to these revellers (and this is the point to stick in a bit about some lazy othering of Scandinavians, peasants and the notion of the cursed appearance of the inbred none of which are resolved nor challenged) as their rites evoke both and seem to undress the most ardent of urbanite inhibitions. We close on a facial expression and we feel both at home and less trusting of home.

Wednesday, August 7, 2019

MIFF Session 4: THE UNKNOWN SAINT

A bank robber buries his loot and makes it look like a grave. When he gets out he finds that a mausoleum has been built around the grave as a shrine to the unknown saint. An aging man attempts to pray for rain in the barren landscape. A new doctor takes up his position in the village and is faced with a life crushing boredom. The villagers hang around the barbershop and the dispensary because where else. The mausoleum guard, one of the few responsible office holders in the area, takes his job very seriously. The bank robber, musing, calls in some help. What could go wrong?

This fable of wishes, faith and futility is kept very deliberately pedestrian as the tension felt by the characters must be kept under the surface. The spectre of religion is centre screen but handled without mockery; characters who turn to it are desperate rather than deluded. This film is more about coping with difficult hands of cards and turning to imagination and inventiveness in a barren world of rocks, dust and misguided worship.

The vistas of unending dunes and distant mountains, of cloudbanks that seem to be for someone else, nurture the gentle play of people who are content with their plain means having known no other kind. SOme hard thinking has gone into the world building here, even though it's familiar to anyone who has an idea of the lunar landscape of North Africa; it's wide open but constrained. A deceptively plain story told with great delicacy.

Monday, August 5, 2019

MIFF Session 3: THE TOMORROW MAN

Retiree Ed spends his days preaching a secular apocalypse to online forums, stocking up his survivalist garage and frowning at a new commentator who he imagines talks directly to him. One day at the supermarket he spies an age appropriate woman, Ronnie, who pays, like a survivalist, in cash. From lifelong can-do habit he sets up his own meet cute. From that point the main business is the thawing of rom com partners and the unsteady road to compromise and the admission of mutual need.

This plays out very conventionally and the comedy is kept light. Actually, it's kept just short of the point where potential audiences might not tolerate a senior sexual union. As soon as you notice this you begin to twig that there will be something that will emerge from under the carpet of gentle string sections and quaint winter years discoveries. When that appears it is both alarming and heartwarming and, finally, this seemingly anodyne picture of hope in later years becomes one of real preparedness. The ending of this film is extraordinary.

John Lithgow and Blythe Danner as the central duo shine as a couple of colliding forces: he's hoarding for the future and she fills her house with the past and both will need to let go of these things. This can edge towards poignancy but a very fine game of balance is being played here. Perhaps too fine as the resulting smoothness does not lull so much as drag at its worst. Gentle indications of youth fleeing or advising with their own fresher wisdom feel too gentle where they might do better erupting. Still, a pleasant and thoughtful meditation on the need to recognise what's important, even if that's arranging deckchairs on a Titanic.

Sunday, August 4, 2019

MIFF Session 2: IN FABRIC

A divorcee re-enters the dating scene in a dress that kills. I'm not being figurative, the garment attacks people and you should see what it does to washing machines. Through a series of spoilable events it ends up in the possession of a washing machine repairman whose droning technical summaries send the people he's talking to into subsexual trances. The sales staff speak like vocal installation art. One says, when sensing a customer's reluctance: "The hesitation in your voice is soon to be an echo in the recesses of the sphere of retail."

Peter Strickland's new film is a clear progressive step on from the creepy world of Berberian Sound Studio and the severe one of The Duke of Burgundy. It's a progressive step because there's more and stranger. Just as we might think we have his M.O. down he gives us something else set in a familiar bed of absurdity and sensuality. Sometimes the dress's malevolence is funny but at other times, suspended in the dark above a sleeper, it's genuinely eerie. The coven-like sales women seem to animate the shop's mannequins (in one instance with functioning organs) but can also freeze into inanimate stupors themselves. Blended into this are many moments of perfectly credible workaday moments like the closeted meetings with the duo of middle managers and -- and far too much else. Oh, one thing I need to report is the ASMR aspect. The scenes in the boutique have an extraordinary sound mix or murmuring shoppers that is only just loud enough to be noticeable. At first I thought it was people in the audience.

After all that cramming the screen with big artsy worthiness, is there much else? Well, that's it but it's also one of the most thoroughly entertaining films I've seen for years. One thing Strickland never forgets is the spoonful of sugar. It's necessary. One aspect of this is the beautiful partially electronic score by Cavern of Antimatter which recalls Morricone's '70s thriller music. Another is the mix of performance styles from kitchen sink to stylised. And somehow it all works.

Strickland introduced the screening which began with a short film he had made as part of an anthology. Cobbler's Lot is an adaptation of a Hungarian folktale which, while not silent, has intertitled dialogue and a look somewhere between Powell and Pressburger's early technicolor and Guy Maddin's antique cinema that never was.

I also went along to an interview/Q&A session with him in which he managed to illuminate a few shadows. While the interviewer (an esteemed Melbourne cinema academic) often obstructed the flow of his responses, the questions from the audience seemed to animate him and his replies took on a lot more warmth and enthusiasm and without the audience members interrupting him his accounts of things like actor preparation and stylistic choices were at last lucid and rounded. A lovely appendix to what might well be my pick of the Fest.


Saturday, August 3, 2019

Winter Part 2: Matchstick Men


Aye, the chill thickens outside. The wind howls and the fire crackles. Let's make it though to spring with these warming (some chilling) treats about walking with the unknown. As always, some of these will pose a challenge for you to access but you will be glad of the trouble when you see them. On!






Phase IV (Saul Bass, USA, 1974)
A sci-horror about an organised army of ants might make you think schlock. Saul Bass's mid-70s tale is far closer to the kind of rethink of humanity that was just around the corner in David Cronenberg's mind. A biologist and a mathematician find themselves besieged in their research station by a horde of the social insects who take to building human-like structures that look somewhere between temple pillars and watchtowers. The world is about to change.

Catch Us If You Can (John Boorman, U.K., 1965)
What starts as a pardonable ripoff of Hard Day's Night soon starts developing a social conscience as Dave Clark makes off with a poster girl and their exploits are absorbed by the ad campaign she's supposed to have fled. Travelling through the ad industry, futile military destruction, proto hippies who ask the beat group leader if he has any heroin for them, a bickering middleaged couple into kinkiness and collection toward a final dejecting illusion, this just doesn't play out like the big loud shouting pop that the band were famous for. A clue might be found in the directorship of one John Boorman whose strange existential thriller Point Blank was less than two years away. Possibly the only British Invasion promo feature that felt like a U.K. film from the time. Not as complex as Billy Liar or as wrenching as A Kind of Loving it's still more grey-skied and kitchen sink than the usual fare. A Harder Day's Night? Maybe not but nor is it the Zardoz of beat-group movies.

Scanners (David Cronenberg, Canada, 1981)
David Cronenberg's fifth film continues his fascination with society and science and the individuals who get caught between the two. Cameron Vale is a scanner which means he can read minds. His skill has left him dejected on skid row. Taken up by a scientist who wants to develop his skill but also pursued by a corporation that wants to exploit it, Cameron has to learn on the lam, knowing he must stop running, turn and face the strange. Cronenberg went from strength to strength in this initial phase of his career, keeping an eye on the body horror sub-genre he invented but with a mind to find greater depth in the telling of the tale and the characters that populate it.

Blancanieves (Pablo Berger, Spain, 2012)
Pablo Berger's retelling of Snow White rips the carpet from under our feet. It plays soundly on a daughter's distance from her father and grief for the mother who died as she was born. Her flight from the house dominated by her wicked stepmother lands her in a company of a novelty act of travelling bullfight clowns (seven, in fact, guess the average stature) and shows a great talent for the bullring herself. Before you worry about supporting bullfighting by watching this film stop now and just watch it (my reason would be a spoiler). The meltingly beautiful Macarena Garcia brings both a feisty youth and tragic gravity to the title role while her counterpart Maribel Verdu as the wicked Encarna finds the sexiness in her dark role but is not above its comedy. Oh, didn't I say? This 2012 film is a silent movie. There's a score but the dialogue and narration are entirely on intertitles. But the film barely needs them as Berger's scholarly hand knows its way around silent cinema. He was worried by cash-in accusations in light of the high profile The Artist but needn't have been. Blancanieves is every frame it's own film (closer, if anything, to something by Guy Maddin but even then ...) Please seek and watch. Light the fireplace if you have one but maybe pass on the apple bobbing.

The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, USA, 1999)
Three students head out to the woods on an assignment to make a documentary about a local legend. Whether it's forces beyond their ken or that they get as psychologically lost as they are physically is kept deliberately ambiguous. That is why this horror tale would work regardless of its production values. On that it added two things that put it right in the middle of hitsville in a year of strong imaginative cinema on big budgets. BWP was made on a couple of maxed credit cards and a lot of favours. This film didn't invent the form it took but it became a source point for what would soon be known as found footage movies. It was also backed up by an early viral marketing campaign which worked because we weren't familiar with the concept on newsgroups and the web. Multimedia was a slight thing online in 1999 but that lent a kind of stolen authenticity to the campaign theme that this was real footage. That worked even if you didn't believe it because the film (unlike most of its descendants) works like an origins episode of a campfire tale. Take this one on a 20th birthday spin for the end of winter.

Friday, August 2, 2019

MIFF Session 1: VIVARIUM

Young and upwardly mobile Tom and Gemma are househunting when they come upon a strange real estate office promoting a new housing estate. They drive out with the realtor to inspect the place and find that it is just one of an apparently boundless cluster of identical green houses. The realtor vanishes during the house inspection and the couple discover that they can't leave, the estate is so labyrinthine and circular that they are bound to return to the house they were shown, number 9. Out of petrol and irritated they enter the house and stay the night. The next morning they find a box of groceries and another containing a baby. The message on that box reads: Raise the child and you will be released.

That's as much plot as I'll give here as there are many twists and turns that are best discovered fresh. We have already seen a cuckoo chick in action, ousting the egg and chicks of a nest. We take little time to see that something very similar is happening here. This is in great part due to the sheer intentional artificiality of the setting with its painted clouds and CG aerial shots. The audacity alone would sell it to a point but it needs our engagement as it grows ever stranger.

This comes largely in the performances of a pair of instantly appealing actors, Jessie Eisenberg and Imogen Poots. Without the warmth of these turns this film might well have made the mistake of misstepped absurdism that starts at ten and just retreads whimsy, becoming exhausting. This film, though it outstays its welcome by about twenty minutes, is not allowed to make that mistake because this cast responds to strengths in the writing that allow for dynamics that keep us guessing. That's a pretty fine feat for a film that declares itself to be outside reality. So much of that is that it starts rooted in a very appealing realism. When we go beyond that we do so with the same kind of memories that the couple have.

The screening featured a Q&A with director Lorcan Finnegan who crucially mentioned Woman in the Dunes as an influence. Amid all the Magritte and Terry Gilliam aesthetic, it was this very film that I recalled with its characters who begin by resisting life responsibilities to find how much easier it is to resign to them and the saddening resonance that has. A good start to a MIFF I think I'll enjoy.

Lorcan Finnegan (R) Q&A with MIFF
programmer Thomas Caldwell

Review: YESTERDAY

You've seen the trailer or the poster. What it says on the tin is that after a worldwide glitch no one remembers The Beatles except for one struggling singer/songwriter. This fable about the importance of telling the truth makes no attempt to explain why what looks like a worldwide power outage could remove vinyl LPs from a record collection but what it does try is to convince us that The Beatles left the world a better place. So, if no one remembers the songs that improved life on earth why does it look the same as if they did? I'm beginning with what look like closing remarks because this is a film that begs a lot of indulgence from its viewers. It does say that on the tin as well but can it sustain a running time that pushes the two hour mark: will love be all you need?

Well, this is a Richard Curtis screenplay so if you liked the Four Weddings, Love Actually etc. juggernauts then you'll demand a kind of measured light and dark comedy in the dialogue and scheme. Danny Boyle as director is going to provide plenty of extra visual goodies to keep you amused if the romantic subplot doesn't quite work. But, really, what carries this kind of film more than anything else is the casting and that, at the very least, comes right through. Himesh Patel is a kind of rabbit-in-the-headlights Russell Brand (which means he's more likeable than the real thing) as Jack and he is countered by the energetic and rangy Lily James as Ellie and the pair do compel when they share the screen. My favourite choice, though, is the always welcome sass and sharps of Katie McKinnon whose megamouthed moneygrubbing cynicism feels fresh and (mostly) short of caricature. All the stock, aren't-we-lovely Brits characters do everything they need and even the real pop star as himself Ed Sheeran doesn't embarrass.

OK, so it looks good, flows with light laughs and a feelgood message, does the elephant get a feed? If you presented Beatles hit songs to a public that had never heard them, would they still be hits? There is evident work put into fitting these songs into a more contemporary presentation that allows something like Help as an electric rocker or I Want to Hold Your Hand as a perky acoustic number sound genuinely fresh. But there's also a kind of fall back approach that has most of the songs sounding like Beatles night on Idol or X-Factor. If you've ever seen one of those where twenty-nothing contestants unfamiliar with the back catalogue try filtering them through contemporary stock vocal gymnastics it can be as wincing as a YouTube of Star Spangled Banner fails at football games. The problem is that if you are to carry a concept like this through you really have to include that approach as one of the few graspable handles of veracity. As superbly crafted as the best Beatles melodies are some can easily get smothered. And what are we to make of the song-off scene where Sheeran's fine sounding acoustic pop number is trounced by a schmaltzy Beatles standard? Does the reverence here lie in the notion of great songcraft or great songcrafters?

I don't think that's overthinking things in a film whose what-if concept is dependent upon its audiences sharing its assumption that The Beatles are so unassailable. I'm a massive Beatles fan but a second generation one. I found my way back to the '60s from what I felt was a largely barren '70s. While my ardour was temporarily dampened by punk it returned and is in rude health as I type. It makes me wonder that if the chief targets of this fable are the same millennials as its lead characters, is it only a bold attempt to lure them into the values of their grandparents without the context of the generational conflict that fed the transformative culture of the '60s? Is it a way to push through the infinity of streaming in pursuit of quality or unsubstantiated reverence?

I enjoyed Yesterday (yes, I know there is a clue to my last question in that title alone) but hesitate to recommended it without reservation. In being less about The Beatles than an idea of them how deeply felt can the message of truthfulness really go?