1971@50: COLD TURKEY

Big tobacco takes a risk for a better profile by challenging any town in America to give up smoking for thirty days. If they do it they get a very cool twenty-five million in 1971 dollars. If they don't, smoking wins. The pastor at the small town of Eagle Rock, Iowa leads the local campaign and his charismatic ways prevail but will everyone go the distance? The air force is also knocking on their door for a use of the town that will expand the community and bring the government contracts.

This enemble satire comes at the end of a decade packed with social revision and a newly feisty protest culture faced off against a digging-in conservatism. It's 1971 and everyone, right or left, smoked. Remove the gaspers and you have a community going through a kind of Lord of the Flies series of transformations, from cranky, to violent, to horny to anything else that was kept under control with the hit of nicotine. Things thicken up as the media gets its foot in the door and parodic versions of figures like Walter Cronkite appear. There's even a kind of representation of Richard Nixon. In the town itself the local radical right are given the jackbooted role of policing the abstinence as the packets and cartons fill the collection pen to be taken away forever. The young left leaners stage a kind of generalised protest for the sake of it and the new normal emerges as a kind of short-fused control is achieved. The pirze money is counted pre-hatch and everything starts tightening up again. This is the USA of the future as it looked in the past: no jet packs or ray guns, just amped up versions of everything already on the ground.

Norman Lear's only feature film was held up for two years post production and perhaps had more to say about the America or Woodstock and My Lai. The year after its release was Watergate and everything changed after that, even the movies. In this corridor of time you could not only still have the kind of Frank Capra poke set among the common folk but you could make it more grown up. Lear was a career tv writer and director with work on the Alf Garnett clone All in the Family at around this film's production time, and the bizarre Mary Hartman Mary Hartman from the mid '70s. He also worked pretty closely with the Parker and Stone team who gave us South Park. The gags of acceptable addiction are constant, the media circus has an almost psychedelic zing to it, the baring of the extremities of human good and evil are paraded with what starts to feel like pageantry. While it's kept to the better side of cute but just short of alienating earnestness, the control over this massive allegory is impressive and reliable. By the time the final image takes its place in the landscape we're allowed to feel a little crushed under our laughter.

While the writing and performance is consistently ensemble Dick Van Dyke at the centre of operations gives us a fallible good man. Careful to add some grown-up stress to his small town preacher he brings what might have the Jimmy Stewart role in the 1930s version he's also not above shoehorning this concept or sweeping this incorrigible character out of town for a "vacation", and is clearly interested in his church's brass promising a cushier position. Everyone is needy and greedy just like the whole nation clamouring to get out of the '60s. While he's in no danger of assassinating his musical comedy roles here he seems grateful to get the chance to expand on them.

From the Randy Newman theme song to the full page magazine cartoon image at the end this one works. Big cast satires weren't as much on the way out as heading for the change that the likes of Robert Altman would render. The Mad Mad Mad Mad .... World era could no longer squeeze American life after Manson. If you wanted your satire more sharply focused you hunted it down among things like Network, Smile or Shampoo which could get very tough; no one wanted to see Magic Town take another beating and the post Watergate nation was readier for the shadows of The Parallax View and the outright horror of The Exorcist. If Cold Turkey's machinations feel on the gentle side it's worth recalling any time you had to keep your cool when you felt like exploding. That's what's on screen here.

This is currently on available on Stan.

MIFF 2021 Wrap Up

THE TIMES

July. Hey great news! MIFF's going to be in cinemas this year. And look at this program, everything good from the plague year is here, Cannes, Asia, Europe, you name it.

August. Lockdown. Sorry, it's only half cinema, the rest of it will be streamed. Oh, and we're swapping the weeks around so all your cinema sessions will be transferred to the following week. Well not ALL but anyway ... enjoy the online program.

August. Lockdown still. Nope, all online now. We know it's not the same program but we'll be adding more. When? Yes, when. Enjoy. Everyone who wants a refund can ask for it at the box office, yes the one you can't get through to. Enjoy the festival.

August lockdown still and maybe forever. Ok, everyone's getting a refund minus the booking fee because. Oh, here are some more titles on the streaming program. 

Ok, so ... The times are still too volatile to try something like this and MIFF was brave to try. The idea of staving off the cinema sessions by changing the week they were on felt a little reckless and indeed the massive confusion from punters as the total sessions on their passes shrank daily (mine was down to five out of an original twelve by Wednesday. I guessed that tougher limits on seating were the cause of this and preference was given to first-ins. But I had to guess that. MIFF only made a statement about the change, not the fallout. They could have done that without having to commit to anything more detailed than to say they were sorry if some bookings were removed but the regs are the regs. But nothing. This created the fatberg in the box office communications. People had spent their money (and it wasn't cheap) and the people who'd taken it weren't talking. Advising us to contact the box office sounded like that dick from the coalition who went on Q&A last year and innocently asked a questioner why she didn't just call Centrelink.

But then by the middle of the first week this had been dealt with and I'd settled in to the online program, not cancelling my leave as I needed to defray as much stress as I could. Bugger it, lockdown holiday it was. And once I'd settled and everything was in order I did take time to marvel at how rapidly MIFF had regrouped and solved the crisis. I have clear memories from the days of physical passes of much worse stuff ups at the box office (days which also allowed idiots to make their choices when they were buying their passes with hours of queues standing behind them).

THE PROGRAM

Considering the ambitions of this year's fest it was a surprisingly rangey lineup. New Ben Wheatley, celebrated UK horror Censor, a swathe of European and Asian titles and some very enticing doccos. 

High 

La Veronica: Works because we not only get eased into the high concept but become part of it. Magnetic performance from lead. Rises above its own cleverness. My favourite of the festival.

Sisters With Transistors: Does what good documentaries should do, interests its audience from the first moments and probably gets them searching for more after the credits have rolled. I've already ordered music first heard in this film.

Dear Comrades: Lean and mean tale of political difficulty as hard ethics confronts political allegiance. seldom has a two hour running time felt so swift. Delayed heart rending from the closing lines.

The Nowhere Inn: Metamockumentary might falter here and there but is brought off with such pizzaz and blunt commitment that it really can't lose. What happens when you add magnetic talent in your leads to a good, sparky idea.

Poly Styrene I Am a Cliche: Several lengths above the usual rock doc as the personal angle of the co-director, the star's daughter adds a compelling context. Not just a glorified powerpoint. 

Middle

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: Frequently birlliant celebration with gorgeous packaging of examples and interviewees but suffered from having to pack too much in past the halfway mark. I'd prefer it as a series (hint hint, Shudder) 

Queen of Glory: Warmth doesn't have to mean soft as this strong and personable comedy proves. Even at only one and quarter hours it did feel too long, though.

Ninjababy: The quirky comedy worked well and the tansition did, too, just might have needed to be a little earlier or a longer crossfade. Impressive at the end for some risks taken with character that paid off. See Playlist for how to really get this wrong. Liked this a lot but its competition was fierce.

In My Own Time: A Portrait of Karen Dalton: Solid attempt at telling the tale of an under recorded musician who influenced everyone she met but whose personal demons kept her from the spotlight. Poignant but undercooked. 

Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time: Stalkercom lifts itself above the '90s thriller promised in the premise and treads a fine line well. I think I just needed a little more sharpness in the protagonist's focus.

Freaskscene: Competent rockumentary about noise melodists Dinosaur Jr works as well (and the same way) all of them have since the early 2000s when the subjects lives were well covered by home video, recording etc. This is the way they appear now. This is a notch above many but does only what it needs to.

The Night: Lean and effective redemption horror in compelling setting might have turned up the eeriness.

Hopper/Welles: Enjoyable but non-essential record of the meeting of two cinematic mavericks exceeded low expectations.

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky: Romcom meets magical realism in post war Georgia with pleasing results but what a slog. The film suggests its own intermission which I took it up on.

Wife of a Spy: Too long innured to the softer, post-horror KYoshi Kurosawa to mind that he still hasn't gone back there but this drawing room intrigue did suggest some of the old parallel universe the best of his horrors featured.

Low

Playlist: If you really expect us to empathise with sociopaths like this one you really need to do more work or people will just wish the movie was about her friends. Pointless cover version of Noah Baumbach, Wes Anderson and that lot.

Coming Home in the Dark: If you are going to learn from people like Hanneke, Noe or Miike you really need to go the extra kilometre and offer a reason to sit through your extremity horror. 

Rose: A Love Story: If you are going to go for an iconoclastic depiction of a classic horror monster look at a few others and note how hard it is to get working. Fell over itself trying to avoid genre until a too sudden finale risked everything it had worked for.

THE APP ... s

The standard app updated as soon as I fired up the old one in July. Easy to use, if you didn't mind exploring the program on a small screen that was all you'd need. For almost ten years this aspect of MIFF has added a lot of ease to proceedings. While I haven't bothered with the printed one for ages I still prefer having a larger screen and multiple windows to organise my sessions. The calendar view of the wishlist on the website does this really well. I can see at a glance if one day is too busy or there is too big a gap between screening days etc and I can also use it to maximise my favourite venues (I like to start and end at The Forum)

The MIFF Play app could not be used to buy tickets but your selections appeared instantly in there once you'd paid. As this was the only way of getting to the festival it had to work. Work it did and how. I hasten to add here that my home setup includes a new smart TV plugged directly into the ethernet and has a built-in chromecast. Last year I lugged a laptop into the lounge and connected via HDMI to a TV with wifi. If I closed the laptop the screen shut down (that's a laptop setting but I have to have it that way most of the time) and if I wanted to pause it took some buggerising around. This time I turned the TV which activated the soundbar, opened my phone, tapped the app, tapped casting, tapped the thumbnail of the movie I wanted and it started with the best quality I was likely to get as the TV and its connection took over from that point. Completely trouble free. If these two apps could be integrated in the future it would be a dream.

EPILOGUE

Well, that's it. A bunch o' good MIFF at home films and the inevitable handful o' stinkers. No queues to worry about but also no Forum or Capitol, no meeting friends for coffee on freezing afternoons or wine-quaffing after movie pub sessions. Despite my whingeing I did appreciate how quickly and effectively MIFF dealt with the crisis that threatened to shut it down but will still whinge about the poor communication in that crucial period when the really drastic changes were effected which might have been explained quite simply and openly, assuaging the stress that the punters were also feeling. Anyway, a good time was had by me. Now if we could stop those Neanderthals marching in protest at lockdowns their plague-spreading demonstrations are extending we might get to see next year's MIFF in real cinemas where it needs to be. 

MIFF Session 18: QUEEN OF GLORY

Sarah is getting through her PhD in Oncology and excited to move states to Ohio with her married lover when her mother dies, leaving her a Christian bookshop and a house. She has to organise the "white people's" funeral and then the Ghanaian one before she can uproot and leave and some of this is proving difficult. Harder still, she goes to the bookshop to look around before listing it on the market and meets the mountain-sized and face tattooed ex con her mother hired to help out. It's just easier to keep the shop open until everyone has paid their respects and the mourning is over. Her estranged father arrives from Ghana and moves into the house until the funeral is done. They have one of the subtlest awkward hugs I've seen.

Subtly awkward is a good description for this whole film, actually. Comedian, writer and director (and star) Nana Mensah takes us through her observational  tale at a gentle pace, allowing all of her characters breathing space where even those with few lines (like her father) can develop until they feel lived in. Sarah's struggle with her circumstances, including the increasingly hopeless plans of moving away, are played quietly but that is not to say they are under-attended: she has clear trouble coping with both the intimacy she craves from her closest and the demands of her extended family and cultural community which she fears might consume her. She'd rather be American as it's easier but easier starts looking shallower.

To call this film warm might also undersell it but its determination to make its viewers feel welcome inside it is unmistakable and never cloying. Warm might also not account for the constantly funny observation gags that leave a treat in almost every scene: this is a very funny film but it's also a very personable one. It reminded me in tone of Smoke or one of those gentle reconciliation movies from the '60s that I'd see on tv of an afternoon off Uni back in the '80s. The control and assurance to produce moods like this is massive as is the talent to make it appear easy. The scene where Sarah can do nothing but finally accept her mother's death is told largely in one long closeup as she is dancing at the Ghanaian funeral and the wisdom of playing it warm rather than quirky is obvious as it means there is less of a reach between the comedy and the poignancy so when the latter happens it feels all the more powerful. That is the way of this film and it is a joy because of it.

MIFF Session 17: WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED

The term folk horror goes back to the nineteenth century. More recently, it has been applied to cinema and exemplified by a trio of films known as the Unholy Trinity: The Blood on Satan's Claw, The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General. But, as this documentary is here to tell you, it goes well beyond those titles and their time ('60s-'70s) and is indeed alive and well in the already creaky feeling twenty-first century. I am a fan of this sub-genre and was eager to see this vaunted showcase. I was, however, concerned about its running time, a bum numbing three and a quarter hours. Sitting in a Forum seat for that long was not my idea of fun so it was after weeks of umming and erring that I chose it as it might be the only chance to see it. Then the lockdown took the pain from that decision and I was happy to rent it as a streaming feature.

We get right on it with some spooky sounding folk music and virtuoso montage and collage (the latter courtesy of outrider auteur Guy Maddin) and a mix of murmuring soundbites and a final introductory image of little Thomasin from the witch floating naked in the night among the wintry trees. I was in! This documentary is niche enough that it doesn't care that much in conversion, it's made by people who love their subject and are eager to talk about it. It felt like meeting strangers who sounded like life long friends and as the montage kept coming and the discussion kept rolling along with new titles to pursue and old obscurities to celebrate in an extended screening of mighty orgiastic joy.

So what happens then? What happens has to do with the problem of the running time. While great service is given to the Unholy Trinity and a good grab bag of context and theorising it just keeps going and starts (a little after the halfway mark) feeling crushed. It's like those people who begin writing signs without realising they won't have room for all the letters at that size. This is such a bold and sincere effort it pains me to pick at it but I would happily sit through ten hours if the kind of depth of the early chapters were given to the later ones. This would be a perfect mini series for the likes of Shudder. But as it is the later chapters that touch on intriguing issues like race and class in folk horror that are left mentioned more than examined. On the other hand ninety minutes of depth on a declared limited scope might turn the specialised audience off lest they pay to see something they already know. The superb American Nightmare (2000) kept to a decade but its point had to do with the times as much as the content but the material in Woodlands Dark is so far ranging that it wouldn't work so well in the first place. So, break it up, folk, let's have a series.

That said, this will still be hanging around the top of my best of the fest list for the expertise it offers and the luxuriant presentation. And if it does end up on Shudder I'll take it in bits, copying down titles and allowing more time for full absorption. And it will keep me going for years. Celebrations as refulgent as this come seldom and feel like great occasions. If you like your Wicker Man or The Witch you'll dig this like a prize garden.

MIFF Session 16: COMING HOME IN THE DARK

A small family enjoys a picnic in some breathtaking New Zealand scenery until two men stroll up and take over. Then it's a road trip at gun point and things are revealed. This film is spoilable from about the fifteen minute mark so that's as detailed a synopsis as I'll give here. But you will recognise that opening as being a hijack story, albeit on a skirmish scale. What is expected is character development which will inform plot development but neither will need to be particularly deep if the action is there to balance it or some deep revelations. This film doesn't quite do what is expected of it, though, and not necessarily in a good way.

What it does well is build the world it lives in, a constant view of the gigantic freedom outside the windows of a car that has become a prison which closes in claustrophobically as night sets in. Some moments of suspense are also deftly handled and the playing by all the cast doesn't falter for a breath. If you've seen any of Michael Hanneke's or Gaspar Noe's films you will recognise a lot about this one and what this movie also does well is learn rather than lift from them. There are a number of direct references in some scenes (I'll let slip mention of a fire extinguisher for anyone familiar with Irreversible) but they do serve the plot rather than distract from it.

What it does poorly is keep our interest. Partly this is due to a mishandling of the transitional scenes during which the victims must deal with their rage and allow things to develop (in a practical sense: to look for opporunties). The most effective way of doing this is to maintain their fear of the heavy. While Daniel Gillies as Mandrake is a very convincing bad guy whose violence is always just under the surface of his control, the stretches of inaction drain the situation of threat and we all but forget the atrocities that have made us fear him. What is attempted here is that a different kind of threat, that of revelation, should overtake the physical one but it takes far too long to establish and is so water-treading that further acts of violence feel like a relief. When that happens we're really just waiting for the credits in hope that something will come up and wow the b'crikey out of us. Well things do happen but by that stage we're really just recognising them as they pass by.

The point about Hanneke and Noe and all them durn New French Extremity films is that they, each and all, have a point. It is almost never apparent until the end, not in plot twists but in the detail of a gradually forming picture and the journey is typically so gruelling that you never forget nor ever wish to watch them again. If it's the notion of violence begetting violence or the easy acceleration of violence into constant torment this film feels like it expects you to make a lot of assumptions. You do a lot of that in Funny Games or Irreversible but every last one of them is crushed as the purpose is revealed. If I could at least get away with calling this film nihilistic it might make me feel better but then I wouldn't let myself sleep tonight. Then again, for a story that blows its load so early and then spends the rest of the night telling us how it really loves us we should at least get a box of chocolates or something.

MIFF Session 15: FREAKSCENE - THE STORY OF DINOSAUR JR.

Dinosaur Jr emerged at a time when American rock bands seemed to be getting interesting where, for so long, they'd almost entirely been point missing and unengaging. The newer ones coming through from the mid '80s combined noise with songcraft. By the mid-'90s this kind of genuine cleverness had become so muleishly copied that it was over (even if the imitators dragged it across gravel into the next decade). Seriously, if you went to an indy gig in the '90s and watched (AGAIN) band members switching instruments so the drummer could get to the mic with a guitar and the singer could play the drums and you didn't just walk out you were very tolerant, very young or just hadn't been out much. Everyone took the freedoms of bands like this and showed how different they could be by doing things in exactly the same way as everyone else.

Before that, though, the likes of Sonic Youth, The Pixies, My Bloody Valentine etc were showing that rock wasn't quite dead even if they were all present at its death as a base of innovation. After them, the notion of forward thinking was more or less abandoned or at least propped up by unexamined assumption. They led the pullback on the glamour that had grown back after punk chopped it off back in the '70s and gigged close to their audiences. They also recorded everythign they did which is why we have highly watchable doccos like the ones on Slint, the No Wave scene, and this one.

The band started like they all do but it's worth hearing the origin story from different voices. J. Mascis barely gets the words out and sounds like Stephen Wright talking in his sleep but what he says is pithy and not a syllable too long. The other two original members are more forthcoming but he band's history is served well by a wealth of witnesses, many of whom will be familiar to anyone who sees this (Henry Rollins, Thruston Moore, Frank Black, Kim Gordon etc). And there is a trove of home and live video to add moment to the recollections. While the gluey colour-bleeding look of old VHS has become THE LOOK of these documentaries this one works because of the lackadaisical image the band seems to insist on. 

But then all bands are alike in other ways, as well. Kim Gordon speaks of being in a band as being part of a psychotic family. That gets it. Every band is composed of a god and others who want to be in bands. Sometimes the latter will also include one who would prefer to be a god. That might make them compete and enhance creativity or it might lead to the more usual implosion as it did here. Dinosaur Jr became Mascis and others for many years before reforming sufficiently grown up to play cooperatively together.

And it's that as well as the refusal to portray Mascis as a misunderstood genius for the ages. He's a bloke who writes songs and plays music that revels in its quirks and delights its listeners. And after all the testimony of fans who liked it so much they bought the company we get an oddly moving montage of roads seen from the front of a tour bus as an instrumental section plays us to the fade and the credits which roll under an early take of the title track. A refreshingly pleasant, well crafted and informative rock doc.

MIFF Session 14: DEAR COMRADES

Cold war USSR. Kruschev's in the Kremlin and Kennedy's in the White House. Lyuda, careworn from war and struggle has reached a position of comfort as a Party official in her Don district factory town. The Soviet Union is suffering shortages and the price of everything has just gone up. This fills the stores with people clamouring for basics. Lyuda rises from her adulterous bed goes to the shop and walks right past the crowds to get first pick at the new supplies in a backroom. The store manager lets slip a complaint about the conditions and gets a verbal slap from Lyuda about the need to keep faith in the Party and wear these hard times for better things ahead. There is no irony in her face. She goes home, chastises her father for keeping his old Bolshevik uniform and warns her daughter to keep away from the threatened strike action at the factory. Teenage Svetka storms out. Lyuda goes off to work in the offices of the factory as the workers amass in the quad below the window.

The massacre at Novocherkassk in 1962 remains a governmental atrocity on the scale of Bloody Sunday. The army was called in but more as a presence. KGB snipers on the rooftops ensured panic and rioting. The army was ordered to lock and load and fired on its own people. Twenty-two dead and many, many wounded. The cover up was much swifter than the military action and by its close, with all the bodies buried anywhere they could be and all witnesses leaving their signatures on secrecy statements. Lyuda does that but has no idea of where her daughter is, assuming she's still alive.

The search for Svetka is a progress through totalitarian officialdom (and around it) as it is trying to plaster over a bungled action that would embarrass it internationally. What's one more young troublemaker to them? Increasingly, what's the value of hollow Party rhetoric to her? This transformation isn't what it might have been in a lesser telling. Lyuda, clearly hypocritical in her actions from the beginning of the story, is confronted with the effects of her own zeal. She had stood at a Party meeting that was to decide on miltary involvement and demanded the instigators and all rioters be punished to the extent of the law. Svetka, missing and likely buried, was one of the victims of her eagerness to please the Party. Somewhere in all of that the maternal anguish exploding within her is screaming. Letting too much of that out in the open at the wrong time could get her thrown to the corpse pile or at best in a prison where she will never have a name again. Does she still, as she has said more than once, wish Stalin were still alive?

Russian films about the Soviet era cannot afford to make missteps. Like any totalitarianism this one's propagandist culture is easily depicted as either risible or deadly. The temptation to produce statements from the other extreme and rewrite history to villify past generations must be enormous. It's not as though there hasn't been Russian cinema that sidestepped or challenged the status quo from within it. Tarkovsky always works as an example but if you really want problematic try Ellem Klimov's Come and See, a devastating portrayal of warfare set in the Nazi occupation of Belarus in which no one escapes the stain of inhumanity and even images of Hitler become problematic (you'll have to see it to find out why). Here, one of the Party faithful appears to be forced into opposition to the workings of the Party. You are not going to care about that until the stakes have less to do with Apparatchik s A, B or C being nasty pasties than the life and death of the sole reason why you struggle through. Lyuda is not confronted with the flaws of the Soviet system but her own.

Dear Comrades is shot in the ol' Academy near-square ratio and in rich black and white and is one of those instances where digital video gets to look almost exactly like film. I always wonder at this decision. The black and white of a film like Playlist is hipster like its chief source of derivation. The choice here seems guided by the tradition from the 1970s onward to depict former eras the way they would look if shot at the time. Dear Comrades is in black and white to draw the theme of its tough times close to the plainness of the treatment. Personal principles look bigger in black and white and when they are delivered in directed contradiction to the assumption of privilege that looks bigger, too.

MIFF Session 13: Hopper/Welles

In 1970 Orson Welles interviewed Dennis Hopper. Hopper was still flush with the fame of his runaway no-budget hit Easy Rider and Welles was scrounging for money and ideas to get his final project The Other Side of the Wind off the ground. They gathered with friends and others around a table laden with drinks to see what would happen. One further limitation was that Welles would be addressed in his film's lead role, a film director named Jake. There are almost no shots of Orson Welles. Almost all the shots are of Dennis Hopper. It says and is a collaboration between the two iconic figures but you need to know going in that it will be less a rich exchange of concepts than a veteran maverick filmmaker grilling an emerging one.

The topics range widely but generally stay within the realm of cinema. Favourite directors, recent films and the practice of filmmaking. As the talk broadens, contemporary politics enters and Hopper is increasingly urged to state a position that might typify his demographic and the focus increasingly becomes that of Hopper as an American citizen and an artist with the potential to change what is around him. If this sounds like two hours of rambling Welles does a subtle but sturdy job of keeping the helm steady. Considering the frequent visual upsets of clapper boards and crew, this isn't easy but once the form of it settles the dialogue is easy to follow and interplay between the two men enjoyable.

One moment has Hopper saying that he doesn't believe in fractions (preferring whole quantities of anything) and he draws it out until it sounds identical to a monologue he delivered in Apocalypse Now at the other end of the decade. In fact, if you know that fiml and recall his performance you can work out what to expect of much of this conversation (as long as you turn the craziness down).

Dennis Hopper was engaged in making the long suppressed Last Movie which invovled a lot of improvisation. He was heading into a decade of cinema that Easy Rider had helped into identity for the toughness of films like Taxi Driver, Network or Nashville. His own carreer would dwindle steadily next to the Coppolas and Scorseses and it wouldn't be until the '80s when he returned to terrify them in the aisles as Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. Here, he doesn't know that yet and as he talks lucidly and often passionately to one of his own idols it feels like, however much he is struggling, he is looking forward to the world to come. Welles, persistently if faintly behind his persona, does not know that his patchwork film will only barely survive him, appearing decades after his death in a kind of estimated patchwork quilt of a film. The joy of this film is that those things are easily forgotten as this pair of voices build something beyond even the interrogation style Welles has set up. It's a Kodak moment.

 

MIFF Session 12: LA VERONICA

Veronica is shown in a little over 50 single take shots of a wide 2.35:1 ratio. From the moment the producer cards and credits are over she will be the centre of your screen for the next hundred minutes. Most of this time she will be talking, often rapidly and mostly narcissitically. Veronica, already famous as a model and social media star has become even more famous with her marriage to her native Chile's top footballer, the godlike Javier. They have one baby. Veronica needs two million followers to win the contract for the new cosmetics line that's currently being fought over in the Instaverse. When she tells her beautiful cohorts, often seen in expensive swimwear by the pool to put on a vacuous face for the selfie shot she is being ironic and deadpan serious at the same time. Word has leaked about a police investigation into the death of her previous child. Things have just got tricky.

So we move through each Veronica centred portrait, listening to her talk to an increasingly manipulated biographer, seeing her coldly distance herself from her new child, lash out at staff, friends or whoever comes into close proximity, and so on. With one exception this is not like the screen films of recent years, Host or Unfriended say, where we are following the story from a single point but one which contains many screens with their own character; here, we are looking at Veronica in a cinematic frame. In some cases this is presented as the work of a tv crew but mostly, it is the strident, instisting composition. Veronica, front and centre. The film's title La Veronica or The Veronica suggests the kind of casual idolatry long in use in the online-enhanced public area. Her name is shortened by those close to her to Vero, suggesting truth.

How does this work? First, it works by using its own mechanism with the casting of the narcotically beautiful Mariana Di Girolamo in the title role. Whether her face is stretched in rage or stress and even without the customary perfect makeup she still looks out through the frame, knowing that none of us are the fairest in the land. Di Giralamo is so breathtakingly committed to the role that she seems only to take strength from this constant close scrutiny, no longer able to distinguish it from nature. 

The cleverest shot among these is taken higher than it needs to go (as a gimmick) by her preformance. For once it's not Veronica at the centre of the frame but within the frame of a laptop that plays a parodic video of her. The biographer discusses it with her and eventually the video is paused in mid sneer bringing her face closest to ugly it will get here, we get to look at the still frame with its bratty contortion as Veronica protests at the unfairness of it. The screen goes into saver mode and for a moment all we see is the dots of the screensaver but in only seconds Veronica's reflection, there all the time, puts her right back in the centre, facing away from us but really facing us yet again.

In films so high concept we can forgive simplistic plotting as long as the concept is sustained. Do The Invention of Lying or Twins work until the credits roll? The first does but you need to look away from some glaring paradoxes. The second, well, Danny Devito and Arnold Schwarzenegger are twins so what do you care? Here we need to believe not that Veronica is incapable of murdering a child from narcissistic motives but that she might be innocent. This makes the scenes of police interrogation seem more like psychotherapy and can get unsettling close to seduction (and not how you might imagine). When she adopts a cause to boost her profile and has to meet one of the burns victims she is as smiling and inclusive as she is with anyone closer to her status. There is no wink to the moment, it's played as straight as anything else by the character but whether it is because the injured woman bears no threat and only kudos or that Veronica no longer needs to play this as a role is intentionally unclear. Even to the moment where the woman asks for the inevitable selfie with Veronica ("make a vaccuous face") the encounter feels both fresh and honest and chilling all at once.

And we, of course, admit as we are gazing that we too are playing. The blend of extreme intimacy and alienating glamour keep us fascinated. It isn't just because she is pretty. We seem to lose the ability to look away. As the finale calms to normal breathing and we smile at the use of screen interactivity we might well compare it to the failure of the ambitious but self-mutilating A Classic Horror Story which bent over backwards to be arch (nyuck nyuck). Maybe it just missed out on the power of sincerity on show here. 

MIFF Session 11: PLAYLIST

Sophie, an aspiring graphic novellist, in that worrying corridor between twenty-five and thirty, feels life is speeding away from her. She's pregnant to the chef at the cafe where she works but he reminds her that it isn't love, now or then. She quits waiting at the cafe and gets a shit kicker job at a comics publisher with a boss who describes himself as an arsehole at her job interview (and puts his present colleagues through a densely awkward moment in the process). Sophie goes from guy to guy, endures the humiliating opinions of artists who look at her work and it all goes on with a stunning decade-spanning jukebox sourced score until the credits end very coolly with the sound of a stylus clicking at the end of the runout groove of an LP. I dislike this film and think it's generational. Don't get too happy about that because it's complicated, not just a cheap shot at my ageing self.

As this film is so happily derivative I have no compunction in pointing out at least two films from the past two and a hair decades that it plunders. When I say plunders I don't mean Playlist openly quotes any film before it but that it sucks up the style and all important indulgence for narcissistic central characters that the worst of cinema can get away with. They've done it so why can't this? Well, to some it probably does. I'm too old for it in that sense.

Then again, I'm also too old for it in that I can recall seeing the kind of nouvelle vague pieces from a generation and a half before mine when I was a young adult undergrad and revelled in the whimsy, the blasting youthful arrogance, and the wit of the filmmakers. The bright things' antics and opinions of Masculin/Feminin thrilled me as had Daniel in 400 Blows. There was a wealth of it and I wondered that it could ever be topped. Partly, this is because as I saw the vintage youth on screen they still felt older and the things they said and did rang with sincerity that suggested future wisdom. But then I was the right age for Ferris Bueller and I hate him, too. 

So I wondered that I wasn't quite hating this film as much as I hated the charmless sociopaths at the heart of Rushmore and Frances Ha because it was not only in black and white but in French. Was I giving it a couple of sous because of the old times of watching older times even if it didn't go as far as any character snoking a thick tarry Gauloise? I started becoming aware of this the more I watched Sophie make stupid decisions in a world that indulged her. No adverse result of her egocentric idiocy seems to matter and so none of it can teach her a thing. 

The two films I mentioned at the start of the last paragraph suffer from the same thing, an inflammation of the self-importance gland. Rushmore's Max terrifies me for what even his thinly presented redemption cannot assuage: that he will again rise as a danger to everyone around him, only stealthier and more woodenly destructive. Frances will always be an abusive friend (a kind of cool New York Belle Gibson). Sophie will always be Sophie but I do get the sense she will eventually find a place, even if she must be forced into it (her friends are much better humans and I would rather see a film about them). But if you really want your snappy young quirk to work you must do it like Harold and Maude:  you must be "much possessed by death" and see "the skull beneath the skin". All Sophie seems to see when she looks at the world is a gigantic mirror. And you know what: Maude could get away with her antics and pontifications because she went to one of the worst places in history as a girl and can only love the life left to her and Harold, having finally met his Maude, will never fake another suicide to get attention.

Argh! Anyway, this example of current French cinema for the young consumer is not for me. Thinking of everything I just wrote, I can't blame it for wanting to be the next Frances Ha. Being irritating worked for that and might even be the new ironic. But don't listen to me, I saw Star Wars when I was bang in the middle of its demographic and found it embarrassing. A friend of my vintage overhead me saying something like that and shot back, "why, because it wasn't Breathless?" "No," I said, "because it wanted me to think it was cute." So, why don't I shut up and go and watch a Gaspar Noe movie? Because I wanted this one to be better.

MIFF Session 10: THE NIGHT

Babak and Neda leave a dinner party with another couple but get lost on the drive home. When they seem to run over an animal (and then find nothing under or around the car) they decide to sleep it off at a hotel. There's the baby to think of, after all. The place they find is close by but a little dead at this predawn hour and the urbane old receptionist gives them the creeps along with the necessary stay advice. Babak, already a little stoned and drunk from dinner, gets about a second's rest before the baby wakes him and then Neda wakes him again to go down and get some hot water for the formula which he does when he's interrupted by Neda who tells him to go back to the room while she takes the baby for a stroll and he does and once back at the room tells Neda all about it. Sorry, where's the baby?

So, stories on time loops or that involve visitations from unresolved pasts can fail if they reveal themselves too early (so they mark time for most of it) or too late (so they make you scream with frustration at all those minutes you'll never know again) but if they combine this idea of redemptive punishment with an elegant approach they can be good movies. Is The Night a good movie? Yes, pretty much. The likeable couple at its centre are going to be by turns deeply confused, horrified and more by the bizarre sights and events that they come across but, as the inevitable revelations progress, they will at least understand why this is happening to them and have an idea what to do about it. What I liked especially about the plotting is that one of the backstories is never explicity explained, only suggested and, as with its central figure's response to it, left riskily to the imagination of the viewer. That's how I'll take my psychological horror, thanks.

The film is bookended by two scenes that are almost identical (but, aren't: I checked) in which Babak is at a bathroom sink wondering what to do about his toothache and what is in the mirror should not be in the mirror. While this is developing we hear a woman's voice give soft and strange commands like: "Doctor will reveal it. Mafia will kill someone." They are from a parlour game that I can barely imagine but the juxtaposition of the disembodied voice, the dark room and the visible if slight pain is unsettling. Similarly, the way the old hotel interiors are constantly eerie. This story reminded me of another time loop tale from the early twentieth century that I found in a book of vintage horror in the library at home which was just the kind of thing I liked to chill down a tropical summer. In it a pair of doomed lovers must return to their worst day. It got into my eleven year old's zapping brain and settled in for life. So, maybe I have a predilection but I thoroughly enjoyed The Night's take on it.

MIFF Session 9: THE WIFE OF A SPY

Yusaku, a merchant from Kobe, travels to Manchuria in 1940 on business and returns a little strange. His wife suspects an affair which seems borne out in the weave of details she picks up. A childhood friend of both of them has militarised himself into martinet stiffness. A well liked employee of Yusaku announces at a business lunch that he is quitting to write a novel of the times before embarking on a personal adventure. The woman Satoko suspects is Yasuku's mistress is fished out of the harbour. At an interrogatve dinner between Satoko and Yasuku the latter is caught in a lie. It's Hitchcock world.

Kyoshi Kurosawa has long abandoned the strange horror movies he was so good at. Any genre fan who lucked on to Kairo or Cure was spellbound by their navigation into uncharted territory where they looked alien to even the oddest J-horror that was then being created around them. And then at some point in the mid-2000s he stopped. Not filmmaking, he stopped horror. It's as though he knew he'd not only made effective scares but scares unlike any before or since. The job had been done. But the movies he started making instead were troubling. Bright Future was an odd youth culture story. Retribution was a successful if bewildering attempt at a non-scary ghost story. Loft was an all out parody of J-horror that didn't quite get when it had to be scary and when to be funny. Doppelganger started like one of his horrors but soon clunked down into an embarrassing attempt at satire. And so on. I've had the blu-ray of Real for years but have never finished it. So, why this one?

I wanted to be able to push myself into the experience, to use the quasi formality of a home screening of his new film just to see if there was anything in it. Well, there is.

Japanese cinema's relations with Japan's wartime past have been varied. From aftershock fables like Shindo's Children of Hiroshima to gritty and grim war films like Fires on the Plain among a swathe of cinema that referred to the effects of war or the imagery of atomic bomb clouds and catastrophes. Very few have used the war crimes committed in the Manchurian occupation which in the public eye plunged the Japanese war effort into the depths of inhumanity alongside the Holocaust in the west. This is the cloud that hangs over the tale of Wife of a Spy and Kurosawa has brought all of the strengths from his horror movie to what mostly looks like a drawing room drama. While there is some dread on screen this influence is in the constant unease in the relationship between husband and wife and the loyalties each might have to the circles of concern around them (nation, expansion, business, war effort etc.). This might seem over dramatised until you see the stakes each character is playing with. A scene of torture shown only from behind but clear from the actions of the torturers and sounds and its resonance does a lot of work.

The rest is nuance: glances, gestures, a chess board with an unfinished game. You won't find car chases or explosions here but the threat to life, the devauling of life as the war machine hums up to full roar and the final chances to act as normal people diminish into the dark spread in plain sight. Kyoshi Kurosawa never left and didn't always win when he tried but this is a pleasant treat for the patient among us. Is it Hitchcock? No but it doesn't need to be.

MIFF Session 8: WHAT DO WE SEE WHEN WE LOOK AT THE SKY?

With a title like that and a running time of two and a half hours you will be forgiven for thinking that this will be an invitation to take some time out and smell the roses as well as watch them grow in real time. I was in and unironically. And this one does play fair by telling you what kind of pace it will be insisting on and the quality of the beauty that will fill the screen. But there's more and better. After some establishing shots we see a meet cute at shoe level. A man and woman walk by each other. He indavertently bumps her and her book falls to the ground. He retrieves and returns it with an apology. They then walk off in the opposite directions to their original paths. They correct the mistake but reproduce the bump and down goes the book again. This happens just enough to be charming but not enough to be grating. We see them at the end of the day, arranging to meet the next day and they part ways, in love.

Then, as Lisa is making her way home things around her intervene with her life. A seedling tree, a drainpipe and a security camera tells her that she has been cursed. She will wake the next morning physically different. The wind doesn't get the chance to tell her what the narrator does, so will the young man Giorgi. If they still keep their date they will not know each other. They don't. Giorgi wakes without his skill at soccer. Lisa has none of her medical knowledge. They have to start again at almost everything. Getting them back together is this film's job.

This kind of magical realism can elbow its way into cuteness rapidly and might here except that Aleksandre Koberidze begs our patience and let's us look at the consequences of the curse that has befallen his two leads. All of this is composed of relevant aspects of life in the small Georgian city of Kuteisi. Giorgi can't play soccer anymore but is happy to let the local kids have his old black and white ball. He finds a job as a kind of micro carny act where passers by are invited to see how long they can hang by their hands from a metal frame or if they can eat three dry biscuits in under a minute. This is one of the many schemes of drumming business by a local beer garden owner. Lisa ends up with him as well, mixing and preparing soft serve ice cream. And around them the life of the town goes on.

Why is this so captivating? The exotic location and culture? The director's painterly eye? Hard to say but I can attest that the more we see of the quietly magnetic leads the more time we want to spend with them. Or is might be the lo-cal cuteness of the dog who waits on the bridge for his friend so they can go and watch the World Cup together at the beer garden. A group of children led by a wise before her time teenaged girl weaves its way through the mini tales and observations. Now and then we get a big poignant moment of symbolism (particularly a soccer ball rolling on the rapids of the river that courses through the town) but for the most part the pace and observation are as gentle as the title of the film. And then in the last fifteen minutes every single thing we've seen falls into place as the slow and peaceful pace of the town and its people are put into context of the still warm memory of the brutal war with Russia. The joy of the normal and the easy is suddenly made rich and breathtaking. Everyone watching it for the past two years will have their own tale to tell and longing to describe for a return to the plain and predictable. That's why this film is so very beautiful.

MIFF Session 7: PREPARATIONS TO BE TOGETHER FOR AN UNKNOWN PERIOD OF TIME

Hot shot neurosurgeon Marta quits her plum job in the USA after a fellow Hungarian she met at a conference suggested they reunite on the Liberty Bridge in Budapest, on the Pest side. She gets off the plane and heads into town and there's Janos just heading home for the day. Yay! But when he turns around and sees her excited smile he blanks. Marta faints and is revived by a group of passers by, one of whom is an earnest young man who seems to have fallen instantly in love with her. Well, the only thing on her mind is Janos. Crushed, she heads back to the airport but can't shake it and runs back to Budapest because she cannot leave things this way. She gets a job at a hospital many rungs below what she got used to in America, but over the road from Janos' hospital. She works and waits. But it's not that simple.

She performs a successful brain surgery procedureon the father of the young man who helped her earlier who is a medical student (not that coincidental when you consider she fainted in the middle of the hospital dirstrict). If he was besotted at first sight he's obssessed now. Also, the big Janos himself attended her operation and congratulated her afterwards. A series of psychiatric consults reveal her outlook on the situation which is strange and apparently consolidating with every new encounter with both men. She asks the shrink for an advance on his opinion and he blunty says he thinks she has a personality disorder.

The thing is that on the one hand, the increased attention from the younger man Alex is on the verge of uncontrol and on the other, ever othertime she sees Janos in the street his hot and cold responses make things bizarre. I'd have a personality disorder at that rate. She treats Janos the way she is being treated by Alex and after one spectacular encounter Marta is both pleasantly exhausted and burdened by anxiety.

This film addresses stalking in a way I've not seen before, allowing the horror of it but also demonstrating how it might be done without the stalker's confident knowledge of their own behaviour. Now blend this in with day to day life, professional conduct and preparedness for conflict and you have something unnerving. All of this is happening (when we can say it is happening at all) in the light of day, the adversary (when there is one) is someone you can easily chat to at the same time as treat warily. You might wonder if the notion of fulfilled love is worth it, given the strain it is causing (much of it self-inflicted) but questions like that are long gone, leaving only the pursuit and that is fraught with unreality. It's not just the lack of a meet cute that prevents this from ever becoming a rom com. But then it doesn't quite try to be a thriller, either. Instead it holds a grinding middle path where whimsy and trauma are indistinguishable from each other.

Natasa Stork brings a professionalist stoicism to Marta but it's one that barely contains a storm of anxiety. She allows to see how plainly likeable Marta probably is normally but now carries a parasite of emotional poison. Viktor Bodo's Janos, is no angel in this (I won't spoil why) and brings his own peculiarities, desire and fearful hesitation lightly his bruiser features but you see it all there around his gaze which shows why he was attractive in the first place. Benet Vilmanyi has the thankless role as the unloveable, hormonal Alex who is getting unsettlingly close to acting out. 

This film's patience might make the casual viewer baulk. It makes a little over ninety minutes feel longer but the depth it navigates aided by these performances and the magnetism of Natasa Sork kept me compelled. The question of this story always sounds simpler thatn it is: what will you accept? Not just tolerate, what, finally, will you accept?

MIFF Session 6: ROSE: A LOVE STORY

A man emerges from a cabin in snowbound woods. He locks the door from the outside to keep whatever is inside in. He checks rabbit traps he's laid and returns with a pair of them. Back home, his wife Rose is trying to write a novel but she's blocked. She prepares the rabbit for dinner in a mask as he goes off to another room, applies leeches to his legs and puts a bowl of blood on the table for his wife. That's why they live in isolation. Not long after, he goes to investigate a cry in the night. It is a young woman who has been caught in one of the traps. Even out there in the wilderness, far from servos and town life, life is complicated.

Vampires have it tough in fiction. No one takes them seriously anymore so the only way they can find work is as a parable driver. It might be addiction or illness but it's there to coagulate a point. This one is about the illness that is always on the pop of undoing a marriage. It takes massive labour and skill to get people to buy tickets to see a marriage under strain of MS or dementia but chuck in vampirism, call it elevated horror and you're there.

It sounds like I'm down on this film but I'm not, really. Performances, visual style, story and dialogue are all well above the norm and the subdued central issue is kept under firm control. My problem is that it puts so much work into that that when the genre aspects kick in (as they must for the story to work) the risk is one of unintentional comedy. The indications of blood addiction and the consequences of leaving it unsatisfied are made with a circularity that suggests mundanity. While there are foreshadowing hints of violence they are so undercut by the effectiveness of the day-to-day that the climax has been drained of power.

Yes, the story of a doomed marriage is a powerful one and the thematic boost from an investment in genre fiction is done with confidence but this has become expected of a contemporary vampire tale. George Romero's film Martin did this brilliantly by making the immortal figure stuck in his teen years and only slightly playing the comedy of that and then only after introducing the character's ruthlessness and violence. That was in 1977. The struggle Rose faces is that there is really nothing engaging anymore about making the mythical plain. The reason running zombies aren't as scary as unstoppably shuffling ones is the same as vampires who don't live for the kill, you make them too much like people and you need to make their monstrosity frightening. That just doesn't happen here.

It might be unfair to damn this film with the term elevated horror but it does seem to be trying for it. The phrase is more likely the resort of those who wish to elevate themselves ... above a genre that is one of cinema's oldest and longest lasting. If not, what is the point of introducing a horror trope to begin with? Why not have a serious condition from the real world? Because you want to come in with an elevated horror credit and be the life of the party? Ok, that is doing a disservice but the sheer quality of the parts of this sum to be let down by the trope of its promise all but begs it. Pity.

MIFF Session 5: IN MY OWN TIME - A PORTRAIT OF KAREN DALTON

Young and country, Karen Dalton walked out on her family in Oklahoma and landed in Greenwich Village in New York to sing and play the kind of folk music that was starting to swell and populate the culture in the early '60s. Bob Dylan was an early admirer. He wasn't alone, many heard her treatments of cover songs and traditional ballads, with the jangle of her Gibson 12 string providing a golden bed for her Bessie Smith plaintive voice. Her charisma is reported by the most casual of acquantainces and the power of her music is never questioned. So why haven't you heard of her? That's what this film is about.

An assembly of contemporary friends, spouses, and colleagues tell their stories about her as we see and hear excerpts from her diaries and letters and a small range of photographs and film. Nick Cave (always more impressive when he's talking about someone else) appears in two bookending segments with genuinely poignant anecdotes of the discovery of her music and how it has passed on to his own son. The pace is gentle and the agenda plain and lean; we know a lot about her before we've heard a note and by the time we do hear her we're with her. The sole real departure from this straight up form is a kind of hippy era animation which looks like it began as a child's painting plays to illustrate Dalton's daughter's story. Even this intervention with its home-sewn look fits rather than jars (like the animated photos in the Bill Hicks docco).

Why Dalton didn't make it in the era where almost everyone did, talented or not, would seem a mystery until we get to the expected moment of diagnosis. She lived a druggy lifestyle but it wasn't drugs. She knew she sang well and projected  her music strongly so it wasn't that. Her initial reluctance to deal with the suits and under assistant west coast promo men, the tv appearances, fans, she continued with the fame of scale in Greenwich Village while those around her went on tours and got menitoned in despatches. I say continued rather than chose because, as happened at every big break that came her way the closest thing to fulfillment was the first album which was really just her and the 12 string. After that, support spots for Woodstock level acts appeared with some patronage but she kept collapsing through an increasingly evident and crippling depression.

She wasn't a Janis or a Jimi who burned and then burned out, she made it well past 27. She wasn't an Ian Curtis who couldn't get through to the next day before he was 24. She wasn't a Leonard Cohen, the late bloomer who sunk after initial fame only to return with honours and credibility in his last years. She just couldn't connect and grit her teeth through the bullshit long enough. There's a vintage video of a song from the second album with a rock band behind her. They are playing that polished anodyne late '60s blues rock that I am incapable of connecting with. They are srrounded by a primitive effect that looks like a distorted video signal. Dalton sounds like she always did but her smile is embarrassed and she seems to shrink from the mic stand. The second album, In My Own Time, is not all like that but it's telling that that was the number chosen for broadcast.

We want our artists to succeed but more than that we want them to crave success and as long as they're on the treadmill of content production and we can tell ourselves they are suffering for their art. But what happens when they really want to opt out? Syd Barrett's death hit me hard for that reason until I read about how the others in the band made sure his legacy remained and that he got a cut of earnings from it and, really, he seemed to have chosen to do what he wanted in the end and if there was pain in that as well its not the kind that can be erased permanently by knowing 16 year olds hung on his every word. Why shouldn't Karen Dalton have lived for her music making and entertained whomever found themselves in front of her? Didn't her talent merit fame? Can't answer that, might never have happened and even if it did it might well have consumed her in its first dose. What this film does well is to let us mourn a person instead of a wasted opportunity.

MIFF Session 4:The Nowhere Inn

"This is how actors play rockstars." Annie Clark says in her St Vincent persona, pretending to smoke a cigarette while in her dayglo bondage stage outfit. She is, of course, a rock star playing an actor. We've already seen her as Annie explaining her real name vs stage name in a brittle and funny opening sequence when the driver of her white stretch limo tells her he's never heard of her. Soon after that she meets up with Carrie Brownstein who will make the documentary that we have been told remains unfinished, letting us know that the film we are watching is a layer outside of that. After we have seen some concert footage of the strident theatre rock she has continued from associations with the likes of Polyphonic Spree and Sufian Stevens, we see Carrie  trailing after her backstage, trying through gritted teeth to suggest that she be ... interesting. Annie resists this pleasantly to her real life friend but starts to wonder if she should be more like St Vincent offstage as well as on. Well, it's either that or a straight concert film and who wants that so, Annie, after stumbling on a few scenes which teach her a thing or two about others' preception of her, throws it in and becomes St Vincent all the time. This becomes a campaign of ruthless personality suppression and persona promotion that, with the increasingly troubled response from Carrie, makes this film what it is. And what is that?

It's an expression of fame's seduction and corruption, from dizzying satire to white knuckle thriller and trippy freak out does attempts at similar fictionalised attempts on Bowie, Freddy and Elton by country kilometres. The reason is not just in the self-reflexivity that can pre-apologise for indulgent tricks but keeping the tension between the depicted filmmaking and the actual filmmaking tight. This is made clear from the off but my favourite moment of it is a lot simpler than many of the devices it tries. In an effort to humanise St Vincent Carrie grabs a fan from the queue and takes her in to meet the idol. It's still Annie so she is nice to the young fan. The fan tearfully recounts the tragedy in her life that led her to cling to St Vincent's music which prevented the fan's suicide. Annie morphs facially into St Vincent, collapses in a chair at first genuinely affected but then obviously plaing to the camera. In a reverse shot we see the camera taking the close up we've just seen. The meta camera then registers Carrie's dismay at this show. It's plain, performance-forward and a great deal subtler than the film gets at its most flamboyant but it's all the more powerful for that.

This can only work with the committment by Annie Clark to match Carrie Brownstein's deadpan front. If that isn't done it's already the vanity vehicle it seeks to lampoon. This can be a little like a trick of a good singer singing poorly for a role and only works if you forget the talent chosen against the talent to get it wrong right. To her credit, the more Clark gets earnest the funnier she is, that goes for the whacked out extremes towards the end with her family show as well as the more poignant scene of her family reality which really does border on the painful (publicly at least). It's as good as the power of her stage performances and that's more than you can say of many. This is how rock stars should play actors.

Director Phil Benz keeps a firm hand on the tiller through the excess, never letting it escape into whimsy or indulgent cuteness. He and Brownstein are veterans of the deadpan, awkward humour that has dominated American comedy from the 2000s on (their work on Portlandia alone secures their place). It's as though he thought of the much bigger budget as a means to sharpen the tools rather than get a warehouse full of them. This meta satire plays fair from the start, never tries to be more difficult or profound that its material allows, gives Annie nothing she can't do and mixes the rock star and the film about her to a level where it's deliciously hard to tell the difference. And it's bloody funny. And comparisons be damned: first one to compare it to Spinal Tap is a rotten egg.

MIFF Session 3: NINJABABY

Rakel is a working on a graphic novel or trying to as her life of casual bumming around can get demanding. Her flatmate notices her changing, her behaviour and body and throws her a pregnancy test. It's positive. As she's not showing to any obvious degree she figures when it might be and who might have co-authored it and he, an easy mooded fitness instructor is the one who takes her for her abortion. The doctor at the clinic frowns and performs an ultrasound that shows a healthy foetus at the end of its second trimester. You know the deal with that, three mesters and yer out. No abortion for Rakel today.

She traces the timeline back six months and realises that the massive root rat (I really did type that then and for the first time ever) from out of town that she flung with once, has to be the father. He's tall, passably sexy and utterly self-centred. Not for him but since she's there, anyway... Back in Oslo her sister, a record producer is heading off to LA on a career making job and can't take the bairn once born even though she and her partner have been losing the race against father time to father children. Fitness instructor steps in to offer a relationship, come what may. It's like choosing a banking solution on the phone. Meanwhile a cartoon version of the foetus is appearing on surfaces wherever she looks, wisecracking and sowing guilt intentionally or not.

Early on in this film I wondered what it would be like if it were Australian film. This own-voice syndrome test can render films trading on local charm try hard in a few lines. Use it on things like The Obvious Child and you get cinge instead of cute. See also anything by Wes Anderson. That applied to this until the more serious aspects of the situation emerged and the quirky mood stretched so tightly around the story that it became transparent, a thin protective layer rather than a way of working. Rakel begins to ask very serious questions of herself as the world that has gathered around her begins to adapt and cope much better than she does at its centre. The story has set this up so well that it feels like it hasn't changed at all.

A lot of that is due to the commitment of Kristina Kujath Thorp to what might easily have become a frustrating and alienating character. Her caprices and quirks feel natural and can frequently create winces in the viewer but without the balance she discovers in her performance it might have been too hard to follow her. Doubly so when you consider that the pleasantness of the people around her is never beige but credibly ... nice. Nader Khademi brings a quiet gravitas to Mos, the fitness instructor, rounding out his patience with Rakel with some quirks of his own. Are some of his decisions that believable, though? I think they might be but I just didn't want it so. Even Arthur Berning's "Dick Jesus" is played against his character's over confidence and provides a surprise or two in the final act.

So, I'll reccomend this one for its gift at the end. It takes a while to unwrap it but its poignancy is sobering and valuable. For a film that only needed to be lightly quirky to find its gravity AND keep all that quirk intact AND never to rely on cuteness, it kicks more goals than it started with.

MIFF Session 2: POLY STYRENE - I AM A CLICHE

Mixed race and facing down the late '70s British ultra right Marion Elliot changed her name to Poly Styrene and formed a band called X Ray Spex whose blasting style barged into the London punk scene. They recorded one of the seminal albums of the movement and collapsed shortly after when Poly left. That is part of the story of this film. The other part is her daughter's quest to connect with her deceased mother. This part is the point of the film but it can't be told without the first.

Celeste Bell, Marion/Poly's daughter and co-director of this film, did know her mother while she lived and had made the beginnings of peace after years of alt.religion and bipolar disorder which saw Celeste willingly taken from her mother's care. The film timeline cinematically recreates the process of discovery that Celeste went through as she encountered the pieces of evidence her mother left behind. Punk rock left a lot of casualties. Not having the support of the mainstream industry whose destruction it sought, many of these were sentenced to cultural obscurity. Celeste finds that her mother was one of its heroes, one of the few to bear a genuine socio-political motivation and successfully so, but one whose fragile mental state could not cope with such pressures and prizes that her career brought.

So after we are treated to a rich and well composed, thrilling biography of that career the film holds its breath and proceeds to the harder part. Celeste is frank about the effects of her upbringing on her own mental state and the sense of healing or at least treatment the emerges from her telling this story is poignant and (more than once) chilling. The film takes the risk that this longer part might lose its audience but I wonder about that. It's certainly slower and more meditative but it's also deeper. Poly Styrene followed a brief explosive career with what to her fans felt like obscurity. I was a fan in the late '70s and I knew almost nothing of what had become of her. This is an opportunity to fill in that larger volume of her biography that has been so ill served.

While a few of the friends, family and colleagues are shown on screen they are mostly heard in voiceover and the string of them makes for easy absorption as the story progresses. U.K. film star Ruth Negga reads Poly's diary and interview excerpts as a role. I wondered about this at first but then, given Negga's performance and the performative nature of interview (especially rock music interviews) and diary writing it becomes a welcome feature, standing in for what we won't be able to hear otherwise. I was amused to see a few cuts from Molly Meldrum's lengthy interview with her from '78 or '79. Meldrum reliably won RAM's klutz of the year award and his interviews were often chaotic and anti-informative through no fault of their own. I have seen this full interview on Youtube and might again as the bits of it on screen reveal that the two seemed to be having a natural sounding conversation and some real thinking is coming out of it. (For contrast in the extreme, Youtube Meldrum's attempted interview with Prince Charles for some perpective.)

I do recall the Molly interview but more than that the British tv documentary about the legacy of the hippies in which Caroline Coon talked of the punks as being the hippies' revenge. The docco featured the now well known footage of X Ray Spex in a practice playing the gleefully ironic song that gives this film it extended title. Also there was a swell of representation in the NME and other organs of the time. And it struck me that everything Johnny Rotten (poignantly absent from this film) said about the spirit of punk being self expression despite all was far more potently expressed by Poly. Her general's peaked cap or solider's helmet were as comic book as they were anti-militarism. She didn't take the hair glue, garbage bag skirts, or nasal safety pins. But her unignorable dental braces were real and served as gleeful reminders that she was who she was. And when she sang Oh Bondage Up Yours she was having a laugh as well as being gravely serious. I might be old but the solid fury of that song has not been softened by the deacdes and can still slap you across the face. Same with the poignancy of Germ Free Adolescents with its surprisingly gentle arrangement contrasting with the power of the vocal. 

There's a photo set from the time featuring Poly Styrene, Siouxsie Sioux, Debbie Harry, Pauline Black (who does appear in voiceover), Viv Albertine and Chrissie Hynde. There are a few goes at it and the women are doing what young people do when having their photo taken in a group, going from smiles to contorted mugging (never with them all doing anything like the same thing) to the light weariness that sets in after a few have been taken. It's a reminder of the youth of these pioneers but also how durable the legacy of women in the punk years. Poly Styrene's place is set for as long as anyone can remember.

This film begins with Celeste Bell gazing at a wall of tvs playing an old video of her mother's band. Bell seems numbed by the sight. The video has been distressed to one step short of outright pixelation, only the vague madly coloured shape of the woman in the military cap tells us who it is. If we didn't know that this film is here to tell us and we will learn more than we might want but we'll also pick up a thing or two about fame and stress in the darker margins of the industry. Celeste makes her peace but it is left open. I appreciated how in the final act of reconcilation shown on screen there remains a sense of overhang, that some wounds can never quite heal, some deeds will always haunt, some ghosts will always roam.

MIFF Session 1: SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS

Delia Derbyshire recounts the cacophony of air raids on her native Coventary. Her then child's mind recieved the tritonal sirens and explosions and the mass of human voices and movement as a kind of music; not a lullaby but music all the same. Later in this absorbing documentary we hear Pauline Oliveros describe lying on the back seat of the family car on a long drive, listening to the motor and how it changed the sound of her parents' voices. That's why this film works so well: it goes to the source idea and demonstrates in organised footage how to construct a history the same way these composers started with field recordings of the world around them or built from basic waveforms to produce music that, until it was aired, was as new as your next breath. And if think that adds up to a lot of squeaks and drones you're right but only partly as the emotional core of these women's compositions is as substantial as a Mozart trio or Wagner opera. It's made with circuit boards but they might as well be frets or keys when you hear the results.

But this film avoids the over-validation that its title might suggest and, having established the male domination of music throughout history, it allows the composers to speak for themselves. Keeping almost entirely to a blend of sourced film from the matching era and archival footage of the composers themselves Sisters with Transistors keeps everything firmly centred and linear. For a parade of artists who might well be unknown to you the structure of this film plays fair by covering each major composer in a named section before allowing them to interweave for its final statements.

While I knew of Delia Derbyshire and Suzanne Ciani I had no idea of Daphne Oram or Pauline Oliveros whose work and thinking are solid pioneering. I'm spending this afternoon seeking their music out. After seeing Oram create a polyphonic composition using hand drawn squiggles on clear cinemfilm and the choral results or listening to her talk about racing the clock to deliver a score for television by grabbing every reel to reel tape recorder she could locate in the greater London area and brainstorming music where there had only been neurones and synapses. As one voice over put it, this work is synthesised from nothing ... but that's not true at all. What you are hearing, whether it's the screams of dying circuit boards (like the score of Forbidden Planet when Morbius dies) boundless drones or the reinterpreted whispers of distant machines you are hearing inspiration and, sometimes, you are hearing genius.

I am delighted to report that the MIFF Play app works perfectly well with a Chromecast (my smart tv has one built in) but (from last year's experience) a laptop plugged into a tv with an HDMI cable does a fine job as well. Working that out might well determine your enjoyment of MIFF this year as it's probably going to be entirely online. 

Review: VICIOUS FUN

A nerdy but acerbic critic and editor of a horror magazine blunders his way into a support group for serial killers. Without spoilers that's all you need to know about this one. Actually, there's one more thing. This film honours its joke. There is no back pedalling for irony's sake nor any genuine disrespect to the genre that burdens most horror/comedies and renders them neither scary nor funny. That is what keeps the good examples list small. Now it's stronger by one.

It's 1983 and the video shops are bursting with independent horror movies. Whether it's teen slashers, Cronenberbian body nightmares, supernatural forces, the shelves are heavy with cinematic murder and mayhem. Joel has coped with his lonely fascination with the genre by starting his own magazine Vicious Fanatics. We meet him as he watches a Wes Craven like director going over the editing of the new masked killer movie. Joel is tut tutting about the lack of originality instead of doing the interview he's there for. The director stops him with a question of what  Joel would do instead. Joel's response is well rehearsed and has at least the ring of deep thought to it. He is shown the door.

Later, languishing at home, he gets drunk while waiting for his flatmate. She comes in and all but evicts him for the evening as a girlfriend comes around for movies and pizza. He has already seen her getting dropped off and pashed by some blocky alpha boy and is developing a sense of rejection that only the self deluded can create when imagining connections between themselves and the objects of their affection. But it's not happening tonight (again) so he drunkenly resolves to follow the guy in a vague hope of finding some way of discrediting him to her. 

He ends up at a bar, sidles up to the bad guy who turns out to be quite friendly. Joel then all but drowns in drink and disappointment as he tries to work the bar for himself. He crashes in a broom closet and wakes to find the bar closed and bursts in on what seems like a self help group who welcome him. After fumbling a few vague confessions which could be about any addiction he finds out they are talking about how hooked they are on murder. Enter the missing group member who with a hilarious debunking of Joel's pet horror movie project exposes him as a fraud. Then it's on.

There are the expectable nods to the horror hall of fame in character names and some subversions of old tropes but where this film gets it right is that it leaves these incidental and concentrates on the tension and comedy of the central situations. In lulls it reveals how thin is the divide between its ambitions and the cheaper aspects of fulfilling them. These happen at junctions where the writing has been left undercooked and the pace has slackened for some character development. This is not an unknown flaw (entire third acts of Wes Anderson movies depend on it as a feature) but it can edge towards cuteness in a film so bent on keeping momentum high to work properly. While this does happen more than once it never drags the whole down with it. A flatly functional cop at the station has been reading Joel's magazine and has a highly articulate speech about why horror is a respectable genre of cinema. It only just works because the delivery renders it a stoner in a police uniform gives us such a funny juxtaposition that we let it through.

Vicious Fun is all up what its title claims for it. As an invitation to revel in the baseness of human behaviour that the legacy of '80s horror supplies it is a chorus of pure glee. If you were inclined against horror as a vulgar interest this film has a lesson for you that you might not mind taking. If you are already in there with the rest of us, it's still fun.

Vicious Fun is on Shudder.

Review: THE BOY BEHIND THE DOOR

 

A car drives slowly through a living wasteland of a suburb with small oil derricks blackly nodding by every other house. The car stops at a house and the driver opens the boot to reveal two boys of about ten years old boudn and gagged. A flashback bursts to life in a golden field in complete contrast to the steel blue hell of the opening. The two boys run through the grass, playing catch with a baseball. One of them runs to the nearby forest to get the ball and doesn't come back. The other one goes in search and has his head whacked into a tree for his troubles. Then they are in the boot on the way to hell house. One of the boys, Bobby, has been left in the boot but manages to kick his way out. Getting his bearings he leaves the garage and goes into the house where he finds his friend Kevin, imprisoned in one of the rooms and shackled to the floor. There is a man downstairs who seems to be waiting for something to happen. He's watching tv and boiling the jug. There's a stopwatch on his wrist. Bobby almost gets by him. For the next eighty or so minutes there will be almost nothing but tension.

Too many twists and turns for more plot than that but if you were after a tight thriller that works well enough to keep your interest and tell an involved story with probably kless than ten minutes of dialogue then give this one a go. There are plot holes galore but I'll keep it to one. Bobby has to get rid of a lot of blood on the floor as a threat is making its way toward him. He seems to do this almost completely in minutes with a couple of tea towels. Could anyone really do anything like that? No but I couldn't care less as the pace of the action was so firmly helmed and the payoffs and underlying creepiness just took me away. Committed performances, especially by the two friends, a lean and mean aesthetic and a willingness to risk losing its audience through some bad character decisions make this one worth the time. It's not a gamechanging genre buster but it works. Oh, and watch out for the MAGA sticker. Funny.

The Boy Behind the Door is on Shudder.

Review: SWEET RIVER

A woman returns to goes to a cane farming town for answers about the murder and resting place of her son. She is befriended by the neighbours and starts asking around about what happened to her son who is considered a victim of a homicidal predator long gone presumed dead (or shown to be dead). There is also the story of a school bus crash. So while all this is happening there are shady things in everyone's past that our heroine Hanna finds out, often by accident rather than investigation. And weaving their way through this near static tale are the ghosts, or something, of a host of children who are a mix of bus crash and murder victims who appear in the cane fields or clodhop on the corrugated iron roofs of the auld Queenslander houses. This all kind of coalesces and then the credits roll, leaving me frowning at the waste of opportunity.

Before that, though, I should note that every frame of this film is not only National Geographic worthy beautiful but keeps promising to tell a compelling story only to be let down by a typically Australian undercooked screenplay. It's not just the look. All the performances are good and feature fine moments of screen acting, either pushing character envelopes with a gesture or expression or holding right back and letting the context do the talking. The score is a magnificent synthesised tide of mood enhancement and mystery building. This really should have been a winner.

Ok, so how come Hanna's son Tommy died here when the place seems so new to her? Wasn't she there at the time? If she was why doesn't anyone know who she is? If there was an explanation for that I missed it. In this script where important things are said or done because they probably should go in that bit it gets pretty easy to miss things. Also, for all the emotion aired on screen there seems such an energy vaccum behind the camera as scenes succeed others with such little substance. It feels like they were reading off a draft put together as a scrapbook and just went along with it.

What does work is the world building. This community is walled in by its own guilt and the physical barriers of the towering cane. The cane is where the figures of the dead appear most and the rapidly changing visibility of the setting renders scenes with them shiveringly creepy. One moment involving this is so gently unsettling I wondered if I'd really seen it at all. At it strong moments this film really does deliver eerieness. There is a sound, a shriek that lies somewhere between a human scream and an alarm that appears in the distance throughout and when you know (or, more accurately, suspect you know) what it is it, too, sends chills. It's just a pity about the undercooked mystery plot that wraps around it which goes from a good slowburn start to a dish that never quite feels ready.

Here's why I care about this and won't simply let this go as a nice try. I'm from North Queensland. My paternal grandparents were cane farmers. There were cane farmers on my mother's side, too, and we holidayed at their place once when I was about eight. I remember the wonder of the cane burning at night and the newness of staying in a different place (Bundaberg). Anyway, there was a milk bar a short walk away that sold these peanut shaped caramels coated in chocolate (like Fantales, apart from the shape). These might have been made locally as I've never seen them anywhere else and you got them in a paper bag. They were enticement enough for me to brave walking through what felt like two kilometres of jagged edge road through three metre high canefields either side, whispering and hissing away, hiding untold numbers of snakes, monsters or killers. I just kept thinking of the caramels and I wouldn't touch them until I got back to the house. That memory has long made me wish for a horror story to be set in canefields. Now there finally is one it ends up being this film with a baffling choice title, a film whose success is completely undermined by the indecision of its storytelling and a director who can get an incredible looking scene that leaks interest the longer we sit through it. So, I'm still waiting.

Sweet River is on Netflix.