RHINOCEROS @ 50

John, an aging bon vivant, chastises his younger friend Stanley for surrendering to a bad life that has driven him to drink. He is about to entice Stanley to grasp his own life when a cacophony outside drives everyone in the restaurant to the window to see a rhinoceros charging down the street. Later, at work, the wife of an absent staff member reports that the animals have not escaped from a zoo but that people, like her husband, are transforming into them. As she rides away on her newly pachydermal husband's back, life choices are being reassessed.

Eugene Ionesco's absurdist fable freedom from conformity and resistance to both is presented with big performances and a lot of stagey overreach. This would have rendered it unwatchable but for the casting of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in the second of only two pairings on screen. The first was in the deathless Mel Brooks debut The Producers. The relation between their characters in Rhinoceros is immediately reminiscent of that film, with Mostel's John bullying Wilder's Stanley about his life choices. After that opening, though, the dynamic differs when John faces his own transformation and the mood shifts quickly to panic and then pathos. It's worth noting that Mostel was repeating his role from the play's Broadway debut over a decade earlier. But that, while interesting, does not explain the staginess that can drag this film away from compulsion.

It wasn't a standalone production but part of a series of films commissioned by the short lived American Film Theatre project in an attempt to bring the media of film and theatre together by presenting cinematic versions of modern classic plays. I remember this coming to far off Townsville in the mid '70s as a subscription package which was expensive and gave off exclusivist vapours. I thought it sounded stuck up but I also loved the idea of it. Harold Pinter's The Homecoming was one of them and Pinter himself directed Simon Gray's Butley. This was not something I could easily convince my parents to invest in so I let it slide. Later, I saw Butley at Uni and the ABC played most of the titles in late night spots. I was gratified to discover how good they had been. The project was doomed as it tried to reinvent cinema into a more theatre-like deal with the subscriptions and came across as snobbish bullshit. Pity, though.

This is important in considering Rhinoceros as it goes a way toward explaining the staginess of a lot of the action and how most of it is done in sets with little of the freedom of movement that cinema production allows. While it doesn't feel like a filmed stage production the sets, particularly the apartment interiors are exploited for their claustrophobic pokiness. Director Tom O'Horgan came to the gig from his work on Broadway. While he does allow some breakout and is clever in his use of sound to suggest the rhinos on the streets, he does fall back on the kind of blocking that emphasises physical engineering over cinematic setups when bodies have to move together; we're seeing a movie but we're also seeing the cooking while we watch approach of live theatre. I imagine this was intentional but it can lower the tone even of this broadbrush satire.

But then we can easily fall back on the performances. Mostel and Wilder in the leads but also a bright Karen Black with her heyday energy, the character stalwart Joe Silver and the instant comedy figure of Don Calfa as the waiter. But these are the kind of things that while adding to the enjoyment of the film can also date it. I wonder if the final defiance would be done with such anger and futility as it is here. Is Ionesco's proposition about resistance readable in the post-truth realm? Maybe more than ever. Just, don't remake it, watch it, for all its antiquity, the way it is here. It's from when the truth about misdeeds at the top of American society could bring a Nixon down. It's worth the watch for that thought alone.

Rhinoceros is available through Kanopy which you should join now. Free, and through your local public library system(which you should also join now).

ONIBABA @ 60

Marsh reeds, shift in the wind. Somewhere in the whispering mass is a pit too deep to see all the way to the bottom. Soldiers are fighting in the reeds, a pair struggles to escape from the skirmish but the effort is so exhausting they collapse. Just as they seem to revive both are killed by spears. Two women appear and strip the soldiers of their armour and weapons, put the cache aside and drag the bodies to the pit and kick them in. Then they return to their slightly upgraded lean to, stuff rice into their mouths and fall to exhausted sleep. Another day.

This is the world of the story of the Onibaba, an expansion of an ancient Bhuddist cautionary fable about a mother trying to control her daughter by wearing a demonic disguise. Writer/director Kaneto Shindo starts well before that brief story and works to establish the mother and daughter (in law) and their rough subsistence life in the realm of the marsh. 

Into this carefully balanced life, coursing across the river like a crocodile, comes Hachi, heading home from the war he's deserted but without his friend Kichi, son to the older woman and husband to the younger (neither woman is named). He explains the savage chaos of the war and how he and Kichi were both trying to escape but Kichi didn't make it. The older woman judges him but the younger cannot shake Hachi's charm. 

A little wooing later and she's sneaking off at night for the first relief from her strained existence she's known for too long. Her mother in law twigs to this and approaches Hachi, even offering herself in the young woman's place. Hachi has, meanwhile, swapped his opportunistic lust for something more like love and wants to marry the younger (this doesn't play awkwardly on film and wouldn't here if the characters had been graced with names).

A little while later, something comes up and the mother in law comes upon the makings of a deterrent, a demonic mask, which she wears and appears as a terrifying spectre in the marshes, forcing her daughter in law to turn back in horror. This works until it doesn't: she can't take the mask off.

Kaneto Shindo was born and raised in Hiroshima. His military service ironically saved him from suffering the unimaginable hell of the atomic bomb. Not enough irony? Well, this old Hiroshiman died in 2012, making it to a month over a hundred years old. Whether it was a sense of the greatest luck in history or simply a life force energised by his own war experience, Shindo threw himself into the fashioning of fables for cinema, directing forty-eight of his own stories and writing two hundred and thirty-eight films for other directors. With masterpieces of the strange like Human, Ditch, Kuroneko up his sleeve, he easily joins the pantheon of post-occupation Japanese filmmaking. Onibaba is the central gem in his timeline.

Of that generation of  Japanese filmmakers, there is barely an example within a ten year radius that does not mention, however metaphorically, the spectacle and effect of the bombs. In Onibaba this is in Hachi's description of the war in open country and in Kyoto itself, hub of civilisation rendered chaotic and desperate. There is also the spectre of a distant cloud of smoke as though a whole city was on fire. The setting is medieval but the solemnity of the witnesses to this is profound and clearly indicating recent history.

What leads to this moment is the world-building of the endless tall grass in constant motion in the wind and the naturalistic performances and dialogue of the players. These people really seem to live there. Shindo took his crew to the marshes at Chiba where they lived and worked for almost the whole production. Even knowing how difficult this process was and seeing the depiction of the hand-to-mouth inhabitants, I still want to live there.

None of this makes it into the source fable. This was Shindo's solid imagination that gave his public, weary of tradition and authority, a version based on life-affirming sex in place of the piety of the temple of the original. The cool jazz tones of the score that burst into thunderous taiko drumming for the night sequences would have felt like a bow to liberation from the generation of militarism the culture had endured. The nudity and convincing sex scenes work to this end; less titillating than candid. Like a number of films by this Methuselah of the medium, Onibaba is a blend of its times and timelessness and a testament to the need to climb from the pits of history into the kind of light useful for making a living. Few knew that better than Kaneto Shindo.

Viewing notes: I saw this on Criterion's stunning Blu-Ray but that, or the U.K. Eureka edition (also fine). Otherwise, it might be up to finding it second hand, locally. It's one of those essential films from history that are very difficult to get to see.

Review: THE SUBSTANCE

You're in a fairy tale. You get magic a power.  It's yours to keep AS LONG AS YOU DO THIS ONE THING. You've heard the story. You knew it before you could read and it flowed into your ears through your mother's voice. You know that the story only works if you do that one thing. Inj later life it keeps you from walking in front of speeding cars but, who knows, for a chance at opioid bliss or a fortune from the pokies, that one risk might solve your problem. So, when faded Hollywood star Elizabeth Sprinkle gets a chance at a second youth, she jumps at it.

Writer/director Coralie Fargeat knows you know this about fables. Expects you to know it as you will be straining with everything you have to tell someone on the screen not to do that one thing. The point is not what happens up there but in how much she can play around with the elements and give us something to think about. Play she does and makes us live through some grimace-inducing squirmy and squelchy body horror until we are compelled to consider what her story is about beyond the template.

Fargeat is happy to be plain with her messaging. Perhaps that should be bold, not happy. The opening sequence shows a raw egg yolk producing another after an injection. Then we get a montage of Elizabeth celebrating her star on the walk of fame (after an intriguing scene of how they are constructed) which progresses through the years with signifiers like autumn leaves, snowfalls, tourists walking over it, murmuring guesses as to who she was, and some slob slipping his mega burger on to it. Cut to Elizabeth now, leading a troupe of tv dancers in her workout show. 

Afterwards, being forced into using the gents, she overhears the tv tycoon screaming into his phone about someone like her, past prime and past prime time. Soon after, he seems on the pop of firing her over lunch (never have prawns been less appetising) but, getting to an awkward bit, he flees the scene and kicks it down the road. Soon after (I'm leaving a lot out) she recovers from an auto crash and, during a creepy examination by a ethereally beautiful young male nurse, she is left with a usb stick upon which is branded The Substance. This leads to the situation you can get from watching the trailer in which her younger self seems to have taken over her gig with the workout show.

As this film does keep to its fairy tale lane, it might seem pointless to avoid spoilers but there are many on screen which I will not detail. The glee of this testing film lies in the articulated anger that Fargeat hurls at cultural standards of beauty that both recoil in disgust at women aging and harshly judge any attempt to reverse the process. The woman who brought us the searing Revenge has learned, like the heroine of that story, how to fashion assault weapons from the pieces of beauty culture. There are many white knuckle suspensions and even more eye popping body horror showcases. Before you cry Cronenberg, they all learn from that experience that each, even the most showy, must take its place in a storyline. The scenes can go longer than they should but nothing you see here does not advance the tale.

On Cronenberg, if you have seen a few of his early ones in order of their release you'll notice the improvement in them when he starts hiring stronger actors. Demi Moore's performance as Elizabeth will be called brave for her permission to be shown old. We do get closeups of porous cheeks, wrinkles and sags but the bravery we see is not in this candour (pushed by make up and prosthetics, btw) but in the acutely observed and expressed sustained rage of her character as she comes to understand the resonance of her decision and how the regime that made it feel necessary remains unmoved in the face of her disaster. It is brave because it is strong. 

Margaret Qualley gets the nepo baby taunt as the daughter of Andie McDowell but I've not known her to appear anything but committed to her roles (even when, in Poor Things, this is reduced to her getting hit in the head by basketballs). She emerges as Sue an apparent clone of the younger Elizabeth, a reset, ditching all the waste and keeping the good stuff. However, Qualley plays her for all the shallowness allowed her by her youth and beauty and a burgeoning rage from Elizabeth's experience to remind us where she's from.

Is Dennis Quaid's disgusting tv boss with his crassness and misogyny, a feminist's stereotype? He's more of a caricatured industry mover, holding nothing of value for longer than it sells, knowing that even his ugliness can be thrown around to herald his power. Quaid is having a ball with him. 

Finally, Fargeat is happy to pay tribute to the influences that led her to this point. These are not nudges and winks (as in the constant barrage of them in Alien Romulus) but marks of tribute. 2001 gets a moment in the climax as do The Elephant Man, Eraserhead and Society, among others. None of these distract even if you do recognise them, the power of the story roaring to its close overwhelms them as cute moments and we're carried along. One thing I found interesting about the score, now I think about it, is how strong the electronics were for almost the whole running time before it changed to an orchestral pallet towards the end. Just another detail on a ride that might make us scream while we're on it but will keep us thinking after the credits.

The Substance is currently on general release.

Review: MAXXXINE

Maxine Minx auditions for a horror movie role to exit the world of pornography. It's 1986 and Hollywood is discovering teenagers and what makes them buy tickets as Richard Ramirez is terrorising the city as The Night Stalker. Maxine gets the horror part about the same time as she proves she can handle herself in the nasty neighbourhoods. A pair of detectives trace connections between new murder victims and Maxine and approach her. They are worried because the new victims seem staged to look like The Night Stalker but differ too much, meaning there's another killer on the block. Maxine rebuffs them and sets about her rebirth as a legit actor. This leads to some enticing invitations from her colleagues but they keep coming back in pieces stuffed into luggage. Maybe she should have taken that cop's card, after all.

This is the third and final of a trilogy that became identified with roles played by Mia Goth in the first one, X. It was Goth who approached writer/director Ti West to flesh the Pearl character out while they were filming X in New Zealand under lockdown conditions. This led to her not only starring in Pearl but getting a co-writing credit for it. After this, it would have felt tidy to do as much for Maxine and maybe say a few things about Hollywood's odd 1980s.

After a bold and engaging opening act the middle progresses toward an expansion of Maxine's world and its relation to the murders and how they relate to her. But then, as the B plot about the murders rises in the mix it starts dragging, feeling complicated rather than intriguing. Then, while the finale is well staged and its significance clear, I was almost checking the time.

West is hit and miss for me. I do not share the admiration that his feature debut House of the Devil gets and while, The Innkeepers had a great premise it was let down by the conventionality of the ending. The Sacrament felt too literal in its treatment of a fictionalised historical event. X put me off with its sleazy phobia of age. Pearl, though, was a marvel, extending far beyond a vanity project for Mia Goth, it explored themes of frustration, isolation and delusion through the force of its star's performance and shaped up with a profound sense of completion. It's why I bothered with Maxxxine.

Goth plays Maxine faintly. It's underacting rather than stiffness and I wonder if that is to contrast with her wide ranging turn as Pearl. Maxine has survived the trauma of X and, while not a shut-in, is showing a hardened mien to a culture defined by its murderers and cinema of murderers. But Goth might be doing this too well as she can come across as flat in scenes where she might afford an emotion of two (as in the scene where she tells her friend she got the part). It does work in scenes of stress where it resembles personal armour. If there'd been more of those ...

While I appreciated seeing Maxine's further adventures, my favourite of the trio remains Pearl and while I'll always give Ti West a chance with a new title, this most recent of his gives me pause. There's an urgent comparison with another 21st century treatment of Hollywood's destruction of its human units but I refuse to name it. I only mention it here as its own complications of plot and character never overwhelm that theme. In Maxxxine The theme is so effectively buried that it must be stated out loud at the crucial exchange of the climax rather than left for the audience to mentally intone.  Maybe he should write with Mia again.

Viewing Notes: Maxxine is probably out of the cinemas now but can be hired through your favourite streamer (Prime has it as a 4K)

Review: IN A VIOLENT NATURE

A structure of some kind, too close to identify. Two young men talk about the massacre that the area is famous for. One of them notices that a pendant has been left on a pole and lifts it as they leave the scene. The pole begins to move. At first it's a slight irregular shake but soon it's swaying until a figure emerges from the deep leafy bed below, climbing out of a damp grave. Seen from behind, the man with clear head injuries walks through the woods without apparent aim. This is Johnny. We are soon to hear his backstory and witness how efficient and creative a killer he is.

This is generically slasher movie stuff with the exception that our focus is almost entirely on the killer. We follow him from kill to kill by night and day, moving through the terrain as the sounds of nature swell and the light falls pleasingly on the woods. We do see a standard campfire scene where the young adults learn Johnny's backstory and they are soon after attacked one by one.

What's different here is the point of view. While it's not literal, we mostly see Johnny from behind as he's trudging through the thicket, not what his eyes would be taking in, it is engaging. The device of following the killer instead of observing the machinery of the social play between the young folk the story boils the generic traits down to danger and process. Attention to process always engages me. David Hemmings darkroom techniques in Blow Up as he closes in on the terrifying detail of his photograph. Alain Delon forging his identification papers in Purple Noon. Matilda Lutz fashioning objects around her into weapons in Revenge. We see Johnny pause to listen and follow the sound to the victims. Our heavily limited acquaintance with them frees us of empathy and the kills are delivered with enough preface to allow a much more efficient context, affording them an incidental emotional punch. Johnny doesn't leap from the shadows, his victims move into focus.

The kills are inventive. The assumption of the mask is tidy. The ending adds a pause and gently steered dread. There is a final girl and she has one of the most compelling last scenes in all slasherdom. It has to do with the uncertainty of what her view might become. We get our answer but it is denied her. It is a moment suggesting the lack of closure that can intensify trauma and it is done in the confines of a 4X3 frame and the sounds of the forest. I cannot predict from this that a new wave of slashers is upon us, nor even that sequels from this one are on the cards, but here in tried old 2024 this movie offers refreshment for the genre fan and that's not something to take lightly.

Viewing notes: There was a very brief cinema life locally for this film but, as a Shudder original production it was posted on that streamer last night (Friday the 13th) which is where it will be hanging around for the foreseeable.

OFFICE SPACE @ 25

Peter hates his tech job but feels it is absorbing him into a future of pointless time serving. One day he is taken to a therapist who hypnotises him into relaxation and dies of a heart attack before he can snap Peter out of it. Peter gets up out of his chair and walks into a new life as the most dangerous figure in all workplaces, a person who doesn't put up with his boss's bullshit.

Mike Judge's hymn of hatred for white collar work's dehumanisation is an expansion of his Liquid Television cartoon series Milton, a compressed and bullied clerical worker who has been reduced to a constant stream of mumbles about burning the building down. Milton remains a character but could not carry a whole feature film. This might have been a parade of sketches about the ironies and absurdities of this smothered area of employment and, given Judge's wit, might have got a away with that. But there's just too much more to talk about, here.

The film begins showing Peter and his two friends at work, Samir and Michael, in separate vehicles in a traffic jam on the way to work. When Peter swing into the free moving lane beside his static one the new lane stops. This happens continuously. At one point he looks to the side of the road to see an old man using a Zimmer frame going faster than the traffic. That is pure adult cartoon material but it works because adult cartoon material at its best does not need the superpowers of animation to make a joke work. Judge also created Beavis and Butthead but, most substantially King of the Hill which I enjoyed for its realistic satire and courage in including warmth.

The office is a hive of cubicles, clicking with keyboards. A receptionist has a cloying melodic phone greeting that sounds like a recording. The boss, played with sickening smoothness by go-to screen creep Gary Cole, prefaces everything he says with phrases like "I'm going to go ahead and" which end with work day sentences like unpaid overtime or even just the word disagree. When the consultants come in to tidy up the spending (mostly by cutting staff) their language is a step beyond this, acts of gravity evened out by evasive, unctuous linguistic mutation. They are charmed by Peter's candour and lack of deference and mark him for promotion at the expense of Samir and Michael.

It is to Judge's credit that when the trio hatch a plot to eke a living through a money skimming software someone points out that it was the plot of Superman III. This isn't just a nerd badge, it testifies to the vanity of the scheme and the pride its authors feel. This is counterweighted by Peter's neighbour whose a big macho oaf who does come on strong and bullish but also has credible insights. The flair issue at the restaurant where Peter's love interest (Jennifer Aniston) works is straight out of King of the Hill b ut Judge is careful to show that even the service zombies that run the place also have a non work side. They've just figured it out even if Joanna is too aloof to notice.

If anything, Office Space suffers from a deflated third act. It's written well enough but like his other live action feature Idiocracy, the satirical statements and recognition humour are so well packed into the front end that the character arcs pale. There is a clear focus on the machinery of plotting and the conclusion is a satisfying one that includes both surprise and a hint of sadness that give it the feel of a well earned ending. While a rewatch will remind you of some mid point lagging (the romance is fine if not quite compelling) you will come away from the viewing thinking very well of it.

What does work is the capture of the treadmill of office work. The salaries are higher than on assembly lines and the staff often have an idea that their education has equipped them for a deserved smart casual life while in service to minor despots who get their ideas from management seminars and speak in stiflingly evasive language. The staff singing Happy Birthday to the boss as though it's a Russian funeral dirge and the petty-crime-style assault on the never-working printer at a remote location are still hilarious. But there lies the problem. Judge's later long running series Silicon Valley about software engineers in the tech business is an exercise in sustained satire that approaches genius. It is perfectly honed and strongly observed. It's also at the end of a lot more experience and shows. That said, Office Space gives enough for what it is, a fable of the world of work with massive relatability. Not bad for an early attempt.

BLACK CHRISTMAS @ 50 (some spoilers)

Some spoilers below. These are kept sparse but proved helpful in putting this film in context for the 

post-slasher audience.

A sorority house in a small university town is the target of a homicidal maniac who makes phone calls that swing between obscene and bone chilling. The women are in party mode, about to disperse for the festive season but the killer makes an early start, turning their fun uni years into a big bloody mess. In other news, Claire's father comes to town to meet her but has to declare her missing (there is another case of abduction and possible murder in the town). Jess is pregnant to music student Peter who wants a family at the same time that Jess wants a termination (of the relationship as well as the zygote). Carol singers are roaming the streets. It's gonna be a night.

Bob Clark's Ur slasher has had its profile raised since the '90s. DVD blew the film of dust from a wealth of retro titles and Black Christmas was rediscovered and heralded as a source point for the sub-genre. Clark had a couple of things on his side from the get go: he was  very good at atmospherics and he had no idea he was inventing the teen slasher so had no rules to observe. It's that last one that really gets the new fans engaged because it makes this old movie feel fresher than any of the '80s copycats of Halloween. You won't see any masks or signature weapons here and there are no teen sex scenes to mistake a killer's morality for a movie's. 

This can also work against it for a modern audience as it will feel a lot slower than expectations. The kills are there but not piled on. That the kill scenes are left undiscovered for considerable screen time and there is, at first, an unclear connection between the acts and the bizarre phone calls adds to the overall sense of dread in a slowburn rather than a crescendo of action. The citizen search party and what it finds blends into the dark winter atmosphere, itself thickened by the weariness of the scenes at the police station (John Saxon delivering a solid performance as a burdened sheriff). It's not a murder fest, more of a plagued house where youth has gone to be slaughtered.

The killer identifies himself as Billy (often whispering his name in the third person and often that in a voice like Mrs Bates from Psycho) but we see very little of him, unlike the gleefully visible baddies of Halloween and Friday the 13th sequels. He emerges from hiding places to kill with whatever is to hand, a plastic sheet, a glass figurine, a hook. Although you can piece one together from the phone calls, he appears without a backstory, he is just, in the old money, crazy and homicidal (remember, too, that not only slasher as a cinematic term had yet to be coined but "serial killer" wouldn't be in the common parlance for another decade) death bringer. His in-house phone usage (subject of some engaging practical exchange scenes) predates the big line from 1980's When a Stranger Calls and forms a terrifying plot development. The monster is in the house.

It was only in the last viewing for this blog that I realised where the brooding music came from. There's a kind of growling resonance to many of the scenes and at first it sounds electronic or at least electronically manipulated. The film itself tells you what it is in a scene in which Peter, after a tense and failed practical exam, attacks a grand piano with a stool. Every time he hits it the strings resonate with that very growl. Turn the volume down, remove the identifying transients (i.e. beginning of the notes) and bury it in reverb and you have an effect of atmosphere building that is both music and non-music. The only other music comes from the carol singers in the streets. There is no formal music score at all. As the forerunner of a genre that gloried in its effective music, this is a fascinating detail. Again, Clark had few rules to follow and worked, like his killer character, with what he found.

The cast of mostly young women are given an almost documentary naturalism to work with and it heightens the dread as they come across as real rather than eminently killable brats. The closest to that later stereotype is Margot Kidder's Barb, the sassy wisecracking drunk among the sorority who, alone, confronts the caller in an early scene, pranks the desk cop with a saucy alpha numeric phone number, and dies, unironically, in an ugly attack while sleeping. Mention must be made of Kier Dullea here. The star of 2001: A Space Odyssey plays Peter with an intensity rapidly burning out. He is so frighteningly convincing as the soon to be problematic ex that his role should come with a content warning. The final girl is the luminous Olivia Hussey, British, petite and happily sexually experienced to the point of getting pregnant and deciding against going to term. If there was ever a final girl who defied the stereotype it is she. Again, this was before the genre rules imposed by the Committee for Slasher Movies came into effect but it does illustrate something that I will again say in the words of podcaster Alex West (Faculty of Horror): the film is rad, it's the killer who's conservative!

Black Christmas joins Clark's best (along with Deathdream, Murder by Decree and A Christmas Story) in that it adds fresh features to established story types. It was not considered a slasher at the time but a dark and brooding murder mystery with a troublingly unhinged perp. Where precursors Peeping Tom's Mark and Psycho's Norman had the kind of definition that allowed them to be scary but kept that within bounds, Billy has nothing like that. The appearance of his eye seen in the gap between a door and its jamb strikes real fear: he might kill you just for looking. 

While the film's legacy is complicated by the birth of the generic slasher a few years later with Halloween, so that when stories of similar setting like The House on Sorority Row and Slumber Party Massacre (and even later with Scream 2) they took more from their immediate genre-mates than this origin tale. Nevertheless, the wood panelling and natural fibre mise en scene that seems to recreate the ads from glossy magazines of the time containing such brutality works effectively in a way that has not been achieved by its descendants. It sits best as its own thing, something to reach for after all the things it engendered are finished with, as an innovation of opportunity.

Viewing notes: I most recently watched this on the Shout Factory 4K edition which presents the grainy old photography in sumptuous Dolby Vision splendour. There are no local physical media versions. However, it's free (with ads) on Tubi.

Review: I SAW THE TV GLOW

Detached teenagers, Owen and Maddy, bond over the young adult tv show The Pink Opaque. It's the mid-'90s when you could buy attractively presented episode guides for things like The X-Files or Friends. The Pink Opaque is so close to Buffy that even the use of the Joss Whedon credits font feels like it's dancing on the edge of a lawsuit. The two are drawn closer together when Owen begs off his too early bedtime by claiming a sleepover date with a friend before turning up at Maddy's to watch it for the first time. The rest is a fragile slowburn about loneliness, identification and youth and the fragments of culture we keep pocketed in later life.

But it's more than that. Both friends are holding back forces within themselves which, if exposed might lead to disaster in their community. Maddy is the older and more determined of the two and when she asks Owen to join her in escaping the town, he demurs and stays behind to years of not knowing Maddy's fate. He retreats into his life, getting a job that neither demands much from him nor bothers him enough for him to make a similar break, though still haunted by Maddy's disappearance. The life ahead looks long, dark and safe and he is nagged by its softness.

Jane Schoenbrun's follow up to the quietly disturbing We're All Going to the World's Fair forms the second instalment of a projected trilogy about the dark and damaging aspects of early life and its complications. So far these two films only look and feel like each other but progress in parallel rather than join to a timeline. They both choose a gentle lurking abstraction beneath a spare narrative and could not be further from the teen fare of the '80s and '90s. Schoenbrun makes the magical weave with the confrontingly real seem effortless. She is helped in this by a dreamy pallet of purples and pinks and nightscapes but also the magnetic performance of Brigette Lundy-Paine as Maddy whose intensity holds back oceans, and Justice Smith as Owen who must convey the lack and longing of most of the screen time with his Thoreau-like quiet desperation.

This film reminds me of two things and both are good. Seeing at the cinema brought back the thrill of going to see new independent films at places like the Valhalla in the'80s with it's bold colours and message of expression. And it made me think of the best of those short stories that are only about ten pages but feel as heavy as whole novels. This film is hard to describe justly and it will not be for everyone, but if you were one of those readers who finished one of those stories with a sigh and a need to go and stare at the sky for a while, you might well fall in love with it.

CHINATOWN @ 50

Private eye Jake Gittes gets a routine extra-marital gig. Bit of shadowing and al fresco photography and enjoy the expense money. It's 1930s Los Angeles and a guy can really clean up. But nothing's that easy. In pursuit of the unfaithful beau, he begins to notice details that don't add up. The story takes a turn or two before blowing up epically. And then just when you think it's got as bad as it can, it quiets down for something that will send you to the shower for a cleanse.

Roman Polanski's mid-70s noir did what that decade's neo-noirs were doing except he kept it in Raymond Chandler time. The high style fashions of young Hollywood come out and play while the tale dives into depravity and darkness. The push through a scenario of monstrous capitalism to something more Old Testament and disturbing allows viewers to wonder which is being tarred by which as it all will inevitably be absorbed in the name of business. And it's still a compelling thriller.

Jack Nicholson had yet to commit to his Jack persona and was still preferring a more naturalistic acting style. Nevertheless, the Jack we'd know from Cuckoo's Nest onward is clearly forming. His Jake Gittes is a wise guy who knows a scam when he sees it, for his own preservation as much as for the protection of his clients. But he's willing to take the beatings that all good gumshoes need to give them the victim's wash to get clear of the cynicism. By the time the story is half done, there is no longer any need for the sarcastic Chandler tone.

Faye Dunaway, also destined for mid-career breakthrough in Network, presents a vulnerable L.A. aristo who is a few conversations shy of crumbling. She's got a lot of life to confront. Dunaway takes us from an eerie confidence to someone attempting to stop shaking to death. This role with its sustained denial of panic before disaster clearly informed her big scenes with William Holden in Network.

Veteran director John Huston takes over his every scene as the patriarch Noah Cross. Huston had begun his directorial career with seminal noirs like The Maltese Falcon in a career that saw him blurring the lines between cinema and true life adventure. As Cross, he exudes an intimidating urbanity, roughed up by his consumption of the best of anything he wanted in his loud and privileged life. Huston has acted throughout his career with varying results but give him a director of actors as astute as Polanski and he seems to wear the character like a favourite shirt.

Polanski, also steps back from the kind of dazzle he had put into almost everything he'd done till then. He let the story tell itself. Fans of his (we'll get to the elephant) might find this film one of his more subdued or even dull but his management of the action as storyteller here is the stuff of mastery. A confession conducted with a series of slaps allows the horror of its subject to feel equal to the pain of the violence. It's not a forties-style slap her around and find the truth, it's tearing the pretence away to see the worst. We're not invited into the action but kept at a cold arm's length; it feels as desperate as it looks.

Chinatown is a moment of greatness from a cinema artist at his peak.

Now ... Roman Polanski is problem figure. He pleaded guilty to the charge of sexual assault of a minor before absconding with his freedom, never to face the consequences. If he was a fingernail's thickness less of a master filmmaker this would dominate all mention of him since. Fans of his early work can plead that his misdeeds were without precedent. I know of none such. For my money he had one last great film (The Tenant) in him for the rest of his career and even that was released before the crime. 

Should that make a difference? I don't know. I cannot solve this problem here any better than I can those of Michael Jackson or Woody Allen. Polanski is also difficult because some of his early films are powerfully aligned to the plight of women as victims of men (including this one) or whole societies. There's nothing tokenistic about the assaults in Repulsion or Rosemary's Baby: it's not simply that he makes a good film, he has made them deep and confronting. Does it matter that he had Hitler in his face as a child and Charles Manson as an adult? Probably, but I don't know how. All I can surely say is that if you are to see his strong early career films there is plenty to take away and that none of them condone the kind of actions that brought him before the law. I think the choice is a personal one but it is one to make with serious consideration.

Viewing notes: I most recently rewatched Chinatown on the recent 4K that scrubs up like it was made last week. It's having a minor revival to go along with the 4K and is widely available on streaming.

Review: MIDAS MAN

So, this bloke runs a record shop and gets a request for an obscure record. He goes to see them as they're a local band (whatever it says on the label) and they turn out to be The Beatles. The rest is hysteria.

Well, sort of. Really, only kinda. This is less the story of the biggest entertainment act in history than their manager. How good can that be? Well, Brian Epstein is not just a guy who struck it lucky with a choice, his short life and career has enough tough stuff to warrant a compelling narrative. Pity they left most of that out, here. 

I'm going to go against my own grain in this review and hold some other works up for comparison. This is not just to say this is good and that's bad nor the mediocrity's way out which is to labour a similarity as though it's more than a shared detail.

First, Backbeat. This is one of the most accurate studies of any young band, let alone a pre-fame Beatles; it shows the conflicts and bonds that play so gravely in young adults. Second, Nowhere Boy. Young John Lennon and friends form a band whose eventual name is never mentioned, concentrating on a trauma from Lennon's childhood. Third, the graphic novel The Fifth Beatle which is about Epstein and depicts a young business man making hasty decisions, having a dangerous sex life and growing alienated from his most famous clients as they drift into the stratosphere of invention.

What we get here is a pageant of great moments in history, told with knuckle-dragging reverence here and soap opera intimacy there. A few scenes that depict stolen trysts of opportunity hold promise of more to come with the sense that they will develop throughout the tale as Epstein's fortunes rise. Instead, they disappear and dissolve into a longer term relationship that ends in betrayal that is neither punished nor strongly exposed for the social ill that might prevent retribution. Brian Epstein was gay when that was illegal in the U.K. He was still alive when the Sexual Offences Act 1967 was passed. Before then, being who you were could get you a jail sentence. The law lifted fear from millions of people but it doesn't rate a mention.

And that's the story with everything else. According to this, Brian Epstein coursed through his life pushing confrontations down like lumps in the gravy. When he must sack drummer Pete Best, the scene has so very little of the operatic turmoil that a young adult being rejected would have expressed. Extortion threats just get dropped by the story, the dread that Epstein surely felt when the band decided against any more touring in 1966, and so much more that might have help  build an interesting story get ironed out into a kind of caramel smoothie. 

Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People told the career of Tony Wilson, mixing cheeky to-camera asides with scenes that rolled like the best after dinner stories. Steve Coogan declares that he, as Wilson, is a minor character in his own biography. Aside from some well staged monologues about things like the U.S. tours that have Epstein telling us what they involved as he walks toward us against a moving projected backdrop is the right idea but there is so little flavour to it that it passes into the rest of the caramel like everything else. By the time he is confronted with his own mortality it is far too late for anyone in the audience to feel much.

What's good? The casting of The Beatles works well. They look, sound and move like the band they're meant to be and whenever we see them in a scene we want the film to switch and say, "just kidding, this is the story of The Fab Four."

The fault is in the writing. It feels as though everything that might have been too daring in the life story of a man who packed up his conflicts until they outweighed him, has been diluted or discarded. Why? Are Beatles fans now really going to be offended or hurt in some way if something more like Brian Epstein's life were to be told in fiction? As it is we cannot get close to the story because it resists its own audience with its blandness. Last comparison: The Hours and Times is a tough little film that speculates on what happened when Epstein took John Lennon to Spain on a holiday at the onset of Beatlemania. It states clearly at the outset that it is making it all up but when it does get into what moments of intimacy and questions of fame, it delivers. For all its creaky old indy look, it breaks through. Midas Man is more like the previously-on sequence of a mini-series that never quite starts before the end credits.

Midas Man is currently on general release.