Review: THE INVITE

Music teacher Joe grinds his way home and collapses on the floor of his apartment to find out that his frantically tidying partner Angela has invited the loud-sex couple from upstairs over for nibbles and drinks. The ensuing argument is interrupted by the appearance of the other couple who take the sounds of argument in their stride. Two couples, one almost estranged and the other open and engaged. There's a lot of working out to do. That's the film. 

No, I'm not being dismissive. The awkwardness of the beginning gets ironed smooth by candid talk and the spirit of sharing which replace it with a constant tension. This needs nuanced performance to work as its sheer verbosity will need a lot of care. Director and actor Olivia Wilde steps up and mostly succeeds in giving us an ensemble piece that charges along. The actor in the director knew, also, that the way to making a talkfest work is a lot of physical action; not big, just supportive.

Where this gets strained is in an uneven hand with techniques like overlapping dialogue. While this can suggest confusion and add tension it can also be frustrating to view and distracting. From His Girl Friday to The Thing From Another World, contrapuntal speech should compact information and suggest urgency. Here, it enhances awkwardness risks vagueness and alienating chaos. The other factor is the score. Apart from some needledrops, the music in this film consists of harsh stabbing bowed solo strings that spike up as a kind of dialogue helper. The effect is disruptive, informationally noisy. It is never welcome.

What keeps saving The Invite is performance. It's a quartet that responds to an expert handling by a quarter of it. Seth Rogan's bitter Joe is ready to flee the scene for life until he hears what Pina and Hawk are into, the hard nut of his resentment of his life takes a lot of battery until the promise of responsibility-free hedonism appears. Pina, a sultry and sullen Penelope Cruz, and Hawk a masking Ed Norton who seems forever on the point of breaking, think of their activity with more of a new age leaning. Finally, there is conductor Olivia Wilde herself, frenetic, alert, hankering to trust something beyond the slow plunge into formlessness that her life has become. 

In earlier outings like Booksmart and Don't Worry Darling, Wilde had a tendency to overplay the comedy, pushing it toward a kind of Ken Russell psychocamp. That is mostly done here through the score and her own performance as Angela but what happens is that it fits perfectly into The Invite. Soon after, she would present a more tempered and naturalistic expression of it in I Want Your Sex under Greg Araki's direction. In place, among the other three distinct personae, her Angela provides a square-completing corner.

From the off, this reminded me of the kind of late 'sixties sex comedy. Taking its cues from recent French and Italian cinema, Hollywood affected a controlled explosion of risque issues-based movies, cleansed with the likes of the previous decade's aging stars like Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. If one pops up on a streamer, give it a spin. Wilde's cinephilia makes this stagey fare a movie rather than a theatre piece as the various spaces in the house are used to strong effect.

The Invite works despite its moments of overplay like the score and counterpoint dialogue and it works because the cast make it work. The issues harboured by the couples might seem spare but their handling that reveals vulnerability and fear through fine acting craft brings the whole thing home. I have not seen the Spanish original but will now hunt it down. This is a comedy that works best if you do some work but it will be work well done.

Review: PENNY LANE IS DEAD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: WHISTLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: I WANT YOUR SEX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARTHUR @ 45 (SPOILERS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FARGO @ 30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review COLOURS OF TIME

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: PASSENGER

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

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

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

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

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

Review: PRIMAVERA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: THE END OF OAK ST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOGAN'S RUN @ 50

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: THE BLUE TRAIL

Brazil in the near future. The old get their houses marked with alloy laurel wreaths. Then they get sihpped off to "colonies". No one comes back from a colony. Tereza, seventy-seven, is doing fine, thanks all the same, is put into the custody of her daughter who is less than pleased to accept the burden. One thing Tereza wants to do before death is fly in a plane. As her documents card just leads her back to her daughter's blocking, she goes off grid, bribes a riverboat man to take her where she can bribe a local to take her in an Ultra Light. This story, even if she does get up in the air, is not about the destination.

This satire on what the future of the aging population might look like is happy to take things slowly and let the lessons fall gently. Tereza discovers much that her shrinking life in the village was keeping hidden about life in the greater world. The title refers to a rare snail that secretes a blue liquid as its trail. Folklorically, a drop of that into each eye will produce visions of the future. It only ever seems to give people bitter trips of bad things that happened in the past. That's funny both times we see it and it's not hard to plug it into the story's overarching theme of the hazards of escape.

What we see of the colony is the reduction of the old to cattle. They are required to wear incontinence nappies whether they need them or not. They are strapped into their transport seats with what look like restraints rather than safety devices. Tereza used to work in a crocodile butchery. At the start of the film we see the baby crocs flowing down water slides before we see their caracasses on hooks getting trimmed with circular saws. The recalcitrant old are trussed up in cage-backed vehicles for forced transport to local police stations.

Then again, while her featurelessly routine life in the village is reduced to existing through each day and year without event, as soon a Tereza's adventures begin on the river and she variously finds contentment and disappointment, we are compelled to wonder why she couldn't have just done something comparable before the threat of incarceration. I know, plots drive on conflict and crisis, but perhaps the easy inclines of the story's timeline points might have benefitted from a few more peaks. 

I say this mainly from my admiration of Denise Weinberg's charismatic performance at the centre as Tereza. Nothing gets past her and when she is placed in front of the hurdles and failures along the journey you know the cogs and sparks are flashing behind those strong eyes. This is not a film of intense dialogue, it is far more a visual feast, but then she might have been given more licence to act without words. 

This is hard to say for sure as the film has good performances that feel independent of the director. That is my problem, if any, with this modestly eight-six minute fable, we feel like more fable. Funnily enough, I am, for the second year in a row, avoiding my usual winter holiday with MIFF and just taking a week off. This movie felt exaclty like the kind of thing I would have chosen to get in another movie at the Forum. Glad I saw it but wouldn't have missed it.

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS @ 55

Judge Justin Playfair's nerves have been pushed to snapping. The years of seeing the worst of humanity and the law being abused have cast him into a fantasy: he thinks he's Sherlock Holmes. His brother is using this leverage to get the family's fortune signed over to himself. There is also a troubling blackmail attempt looming against Justin. He agrees to an assesment by a psychiatrist, confident he'll sail through it  but an incident at the hospital makes everyone who has seen it doubt Justin's supposed mental illness, particularly the doctor intended as his assessor, a Dr Mildred Watson.

If you're still with me, you might be thinking how cute this sounds, an early '70s goofy comedy where the crazy man turns out to be a sage. Not so fast. Early scenes where Justin does answer to his real name complicate that scenario. His first dialogues with Mildred suggest that there is a kind of crushing sadness to his fugue state. The ethics of his pantomime name that failed his own strength and had him running to idealism are flattened against the wall in a world he insists is built only of fact. A middle-act musing on the principles in Western movies compound this. Justin Playfair is screaming under his clipped adopted accent and deerstalker hat. Dr Mildred Watson does assume a journey of her own in following her patient's hard won whimsy and armour but, despite early signs, it won't be leading to a big song of hope before the credits.

The opening years of the 1970s in American mainstream cinema boasts a number of durable fables of eccentricity against the system, joyful whimsy against the staidness of the world. Harold and Maude, Catch-22, Little Murders, Where's Poppa, A New Leaf and more stood up to the crewcut authority that saw students gunned down on campuses and the repression of anti-war protests. It was a time of reckoning for a film industry that had passed over more Doris Day for more Easy Rider and for a brief period the films that emerged in this spirit were given decent budgets and backed by the studios. After all, there really might have been a dollar to be made in this hippy shit.

Not all of it works, sometimes it's more shit than hippy, but when it does it holds principles that sing out to the decades beyond it. I showed Harold and Maude to a small group of Millennials back at the end of the 2000s and each one left the experience with a new favourite movie. At one point (traffic cop scene) the machine glitched and they cried out for me to repeat it from the start of the scene. I did and had never heard such laughter as it played. A very similar experience was had with Little Murders. If they Might Be Giants was available at the time, it would have joined them.

There's an important link between these films that has to do with their times as well as any optimism for their future. In Harold and Maude, it's the memento mori: the love story is overcast with the spectre of death, from the camps in Europe to the inevitable end of their relationship through death (not a spoiler, btw). In Little Murders the swelling tide of social rage spills into widespread homicide that weighs down any possible skidding off into the whimsy that began the film. In They Might Be Giants, Justin's loopy pursuit of an imagined Moriarity points increasingly toward a darkness at the end of the tunnel. 

If anything, it's Giants' presentation of a frightening ambiguity that might keep it from discovery as a cult movie. Some cuts omit a late scene at an all night supermarket. I remember seeing this as a late night movie and laughed loudly at the chaos of it, how the authority was caught up in the whirl and drawn to its own version of madness. If you see the cut without this, the film ends on a dour note with the final image promising a kind of doom for the characters in their personae or for the personae themselves.

The limited edition blu-ray from UK label Indicator provides both cuts. Having seen the shorter one in a local release, I opted for the longer one. The supermarket scene doesn't travel well across the years as its cuteness is not supported by its execution. It's still a good idea, just no longer a hilarious one. However, the shorter version that cuts it out leaves the film hanging heavily, swinging sluggishly towards an ending that only feels like a massive bummer.

What saves the film from its frequent skids from substance is a cast that enliven its uneven writing through commitment. George C. Scott as Justin brings his scenery gnashers out from the trophy room but keeps it warm as well. It's almost an apology for his publicly regretted (and Oscar winning) performance in Patton. Through the bluster he does allow us to see the screaming void that lies between Judge Playfair and the fictional sleuth role that feels so much better. Joanne Woodward as Watson gives us a professional whose own struggles with her profession stem from a frustration with its ethical slides. Her acquiesence of Justin's persona carries her own denied melancholy.

I don't think They Might Be Giants will be much cited in the same statement as Harold and Maude. It's still hard to get a hold of and the accretion disc of senior cinematic gems has been steadily fading with the fade of arthouse venues, the oaf-handed wash of the streamers masking off anything that takes engagement that might draw eyeballs from the phone screen to the viewing screen. I'll do some waving right here. We need more Don Quixotes to tilt at windmills. They really might be giants.

Viewing Notes: I watched my imported Indicator Blu-Ray of this film which allows it to scrub up well with clean video and audio, a good booklet and some worthy extras. The cut without the supermarket scene was available on Blu-Ray locally through Cinema Cult but I suspect it's out of print. I couldn't find it on the streamers but was not surprised about that. Find if you can. You'll be glad of it.

Review: THE MUSICIANS

To honour her father (and as a flex to her brother) Astrid demands that her company (roadwork equipment) fulfil dad's wish to hear an unplayed string quartet played for the first time. To honour the music, she wants it played on Stradivarius instruments. Eye watering amounts at auction later, she assembles the fiddles and then the players, applying interpersonal patches where needed, and sets them all at a country mansion to rehearse for a broadcast and recording that might well see her business back in black. The players either hate or disrespect each other and can't get it together to finish practicing a single movement. Time for the big guns. She persuades the composer who would as soon forget his own work, to come along and pep everyone up. This should go a lot more smoothly than it does. 

Gregory Magne's film of contemporary manners plays things easily with a series of increasingly important waves of conflict and resolution, piecing together the shards of dischord and arhythmia until, obstacle by obstacle, the greater problem is unavoidably clear. This is a film thatr understands music.

Hotshot young bowslinger George springs in, ready to take over while Peter is worried that his blindness will prevent him from an effective performance. Young influencer Appolline on the viola never went to music school but has played Carnegie Hall and Peter's ex squeeze Lise on cello turns to animate ice when they are in the same room. They are all daunted by the entrance of the composer Charlie Beaumont who is uneasy with the errant youthfulness of his forgotten music.

This is a film about ensemble, cooperation and concetration on the part as an essential to the whole. Music is not the magic that lesser attempts make it, something that only godlike people produce. It is work and it is acceptance of place in service of skill. 

When I chose this today, I wanted something far from the horror and violence and darkness I might normally go for that now only reminds me of the darkness in the news. I got it. This is a quiet lesson in banding for good instead of the screaming entitled narcisism deafening the globe. But if I'm suggesting it is a kind of soft feelgood piece in a French accent, I should also state that, for all its apparent gentleness, The Musicians packs a punch; it just takes its time to get to your gut. 

There is a moment that an American movie would put in the centre to prove the concept and show that everyone has learned and is ready for the world. Here, when Peter starts a folky version of the standard In The Pines and the others add their own parts, it's not a mounting cresendo of the righteousness of the buddy system, it's low key and through a natural sounding arrangement that really could have taken place. And it will melt your heart. Thetitle sequence of the film opens with what looks like a huge dank room in a monestary that soon proves to be the interior of a cello. In its first minutes you are told the type of movie you are going to get and assured that it is under way. Just what I needed. 

Viewing notes: went to a morning session and realised that this is the kind of movie that attracts seniors who can be even more entitled that teenagers about opining audibly. There was a contingent at the back and they are blithely gasbagging through the ads. But then they ceased and watched the movie all the way through quietly. Bliss.

Review: COLONY

A bio-terrorist stages an outbreak of a manufactured virus in a big building in down town Seoul. Clear nods to Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later and REC are made but this one does have this to bring to the table. It's not a living death that would result from the spread, the rage virus symptoms are only the beginning. The developer of the virus who begins the film by injecting himself with the sole dose of the antidote, has a strange new communication in mind. His act is a proof of concept. He has in the opposite corner a bio-scientist among the crew of survivors and another outside with the military team who are most interested in containment via masses of weaponry. There must be a brainy way out.

At some point, all Romero-style zombie outbreak movies turn into action movies, using suspense as the driving force of the narrative. The horde in Colony develop their cognition and behaviour through a hive like mass sharing of information. Add this to thte danger of being torn apart, anyway, and you've got a pretty good entry into the sub-genre. Writer/director Yeon Sang-ho has already been in the sub-genre with the extraordinary Train to Busan. We're in good hands.

As this review will be spoiler free, I'll leave the plot there. I can say, though, that the horde and their actions make for a spectacle both yucky and suspenseful. This story is about communication, though, and pits the hi-tek s;lime 'n' grime against more conventional intelligence and teamwork in a gratifyingly tense fashion. An enigmatic message on an invitation, when connected to the events later in the story is about communication failure. It's not too much of a stretch to see the link to the pandemic and the unknown horror of AI.

The casting, aside from the standard gathering of types for justly violent ends, is very good. Jun Ji-hyun as biologist locked into the situation balances with her clear compassion a solid intellect which brings a face almost constantly tight with thought. As her would be nemesis, Koo Kyo-hwan as Seo Young-cheol, the young, vengeful genius who invented the virus, displays a nonchalance of real creepiness, especially when among his seething creations.

If the ground is imperfectly broken and the innovation of the newer ideas in this one do not impress, the choreography of the horde's movements is strong and the blending of practical action and CG effects is seamless (except when it is used with the monkeys: they might just be too difficult to model). There are moral dillemas and mini tragedies on the stage and more than enough for the two hours of screen time to feel like a lot less. A largely electronic score keeps things growling and eerie by turns which will always get my vote. Fancy a fresh take on an old zombie tale? Spin it!

Viewing notes: I saw this at a surprisingly well attended screening for a 10 am show. The film is so involving and speedilly paced that audience talk wasn't a problem. Currently in cinemas.

THE RAPTURE @ 35 - SPOLIERS!

Sharon works in a call centre retrieving phone numbers for other people. Her workday is repeating that five second script for hours. By night she rides the passenger seat of her mate Vic's convertable as they cruise the L.A. strips for play pals. Then at all hours, they re-enact the juicy bits from Sodom and Gomorrah. Then it's back to "please hold for the number". Then, one of her noctural escapades she sees an extraordinary tattoo on a woman's back. It's a vivid pearl by a stream. The woman tells Sharon that its meaning has to do with the second coming of Jesus Christ. 

This loads Sharon up for closer listening to the mini cabal of apocalyptic Christians in the canteen at work. They see through her attempts at infiltration but then she does have the dream, that they all talk of sharing, about the pearl. Scene by scene, Sharon goes from restless frustration to high-charge spiritual wealth. Following a disaster in her life, some years on, she travels to the desert with her young daughter to meet the Apocalypse.

This fable is told so straight it derails into the bizarre. The redemption story of the first act is plain enough sailing but as soon as Sharon's religious awakening sets in and her zeal alters her life completely we start wondering what kind of movie we're watching. Is it an exercise in extended irony? Is it a genuine religious essa    y? It is to Mimi Rogers' credit that Sharon's transition feels less like a claimed miracle than a redirection of her energy from one way of life to another. Her initial cynicism becomes a determined hopefulness. Without this committed performance this story would be a rancid conversion story. We need to follow her from that self retooling into the great test of the middle act without being overwhelmed by our own cynicism. Does it work? I think that depends on the viewer's won religiosity.

Spoilers follow!

This was screenwriter Michael Tolkin's directorial debut. Between the hits of Gleaming the Cube and the 1992's massive The Player, he chose this modestly budgeted tale of gigantic deeds. It was impossible to sell to mainstream audiences and barely made it through the festival circuit and arthouse avenues. Woman gets religion, kills own daughter and faces God. Oh, and throw in a literal rendition of the Book of Revelation. Tough enough without Sharon's final decision which would set the least religious (like me) audiences into a slough of horror.

And as abrupt as her final defiance feels and how that makes it seem rushed, it has a very effective telescoping in the opening scene in which a glacial tracking camera passes by steel grey partitions of people in headsets constantly repeating a short script. It's as though Matthew Barney wanted to express the notion of Purgatory. Purgatory or Limbo (my familiarity with this nonsense is barely extant) is where she finally stands, having denied love of a God that drove her to atrocity. We don't need the final shot before the credits to linger, we've already seen how it plays. If Tolkin had written her returning to the call centre we would come to the same conclusion. 

But that is where this film defies its audience to stay with it. If the conversion was hard to witness, this self-sentencing is both an act of integrity and one of utter futiliy. When I showed this at a movie night, one of thesemi-regular crew, an Anglican priest in training, approached me afterwards and called it a very honest story. I'm still unsure of what she meant by that, but the film's refusal to punch down the way that some of its characters do does lend its plainness of touch a sense of sincere interest. (The same person came to see REC and through a grin said, "that was wicked!")

Tolkin imbues the pallet with a kind of magic hour gold, whether in Californian motel rooms or the dry wilderness of Sharon's sacrifice, giving the whole running time a kind of base comfort. When we start to see angels and apocalyptic horsemen across the horizon or standing on bitumen highways it gives us pause to recall how much of a horror fiction the Bible is (read the last book and see).

An acquaintance of mine worked at the Valhalla in Northcote and reported that when some creepy Christian types came to buy tickets for the Rapture he had to tell them that they'd just missed it. True story, but it only makes me wonder how this film would be received in the America of Christian Nationalism, by which the tenets of the religion are subordinate to the branding that nourishes mass bigotry and oppression. The movie wasn't made for people who think that the Bible was written in English or anyone who would comprehend Sharon murdering her child as virtuous. This movie was not made for people who do not know their own holy book. It wasn't made for anyone who would simply dismiss the very end as a moment of  "serves her right". It was made for anyone who would witness and question themselves. That's the hardest sell of all when it comes to a night at the movies. That's why The Rapture is one of my favourite films of the '90s.

Viewing notes: I watched my ancient DVD of this one in absence of anything better quality (though it's pretty swish for a DVD). It's long out of print on physical media but can be rented online at sources like Prime.

APRIL FOOL'S DAY @ 40: Spoilers

Muffy walks through her parents' mansion, preparing for guests. She finds a Jack in the box that first looses a mild scare but then, in a haze of childhood memories, shoots a monster out. Meanwhile, her guests gather at a jetty to take them to the mansion on the island across the lake. Like Muffy, they're all teritary students preparing for Spring Break. The first you see of them is the hot young Nikki who appears in the 4x3 frame of a camcorder like a found footage movie from the next decade. The rest reveal their character keynotes and when a knife fight starts among them that escalates into an overboard conflict it's soon revealed as a prank. It's the first of April, like the title says. Everyone's happy but then the ferry deckhand Buck falls off as the boat is docking and gets between the hull and the jetty on the island. Half his face crushed and bloody, he gets taken back to the mainland for hospitalisation. Not a prank.

Muffy meets and greets and treats them to a champagne dinner where everyone reveals a little about themselves and gets well pissed. There are already some ructions that we note as telescope views before everyone turns in and finds a world of pranks like lights behaving oddly, bathroom sinks spraying the wrong way and so on. But there is Nan's room whose wardrobe houses a cassette of a baby crying. We aren't told but we know she either miscarried or had an abortion. Another of the good eggs finds smack paraphenalia in his medicine cabinet. Some pranks have claws.

Into the night and the next day the gang find themselves in a kind of whodunnit rollcall that takes a leaf or two out of the then new slasher playbook. We discover various ambitions, frustrations, shared secrets and denials and wait for the corpses to pile and the elimination to lead to the killer. 

Already, the pacing and the more social concerns are diverging from the average '80s teen thriller. The killer doesn't seem to mind if the victims are having sex or not. There's sexual fluidity that is stated but never judged and not offered as a motive. There is a world of mid-'80s middle class concern of young adults going through their education and initial steps into the grown up world and, while it doesn't play like a 20-something Big Chill, the focus on the notion that Reganomics might not be the answer. The cigar stealing walking sales pitch who is clearly heading for yuppiedom gets a slapstick prank and then a serious hit. Wits are a better armour here.

SPOILERS

And then when the crew are reduced to a couple (one of whom is played by Amy Steel, the champion final girl of F13 Part II) who have discovered Muffy's terrible family secret, they break through and find that everyone is fine and waiting for them. Muffy announces over a trolley of champagne that they all been part of a test for her plan to use the house as a proto escape room scenario. Everyone laughs. Then there's a coda scene which I won't spoil.

April Fool's Day is a lot less like Terror Train or Friday the 13th than the meta teen horrors of the following decade. While the cast are not listing the genre traits of teen horrors while watching one in the living room, there is a sense of play and a wink between the screen and the audience as to what is happening. If the big reveal feels a little smug, Muffy's business plan provides a knowing cynicism that shades the ambitions of the crew of chums with a clear contempt. And then the coda takes this a step further, suggesting that the franchise will have some serious extra spice to it when it starts working.

The other thing this film reminds me of is American Psycho, also in its future. While it goes nowhere near the core of that novel and later adaptation, the hint that a class and business based entertainment franchise that appeals to ruthlessness and grand guignol violence might be just the thing for the times paves the way. This film will not work if you approach it as a mid-level slasher. It doesn't quite work as a satire, either. Considering the likes of Something Wild which wasn't the comedy its poster tried to sell, it might well serve as a retrospective warning to the culture it was part of, that times soon to come would take some careful navigation. As that, it works.

Review: TUNER

Niki is assistant to piano tuner Harry. Nikki not only has perfect pitch which makes him a natural but his hearing is so acute that he needs to wear solid earbuds and, outside, noise cancelling headphones as he describes himself as allergic to sound. When Harry goes to hospital, Nikki keeps the rounds going and one day, after proving that he can, he saves a security crew a job by opening a safe that they need (legitimately) to drill into. Impressed, the security boss leaves Nikki a wad of thank you notes with the tip to get in touch with him. Money problems. Nikki gets in touch and becomes the security gang's safe cracker. A meet cute along the way gives Nikki yet another reason to advance himself and their relationship is as volatile as their youth dictates. All good? You can already hear the sour notes.

Nikki has grasped life for the first time since he felt excluded from it by his condition. As a robust adult, he finds the rewards and hazards of connection can get serious in the worst ways. The film tells this with economy and a firm hand on the tension, leaving most of the weight to the perfomances. That's not to say that the dialogue is a problem. Nikki's condition and its history is completed slowly, through several dialogue scenes that show that Nikki has told this story all his life but no longer minds telling it again. He knows what happens when people aren't aware of his condition. The criminal code is laid out similarly, piecmeal, as needed, until the climactic dillema puts it to an arm wrestle. 

As Nikki, Leo Woodall is solid, showing a strong restraint behind his typical cultured blank. A late scene in which he smiles feels like the sun coming out from behind cloud. Havana Rose Liu's Ruthie is all nerves and self doubt beneath a sassy exterior. Dustin Hoffman knows it's not his film and gives us enough of the senior larrikan to tell us he's been places. Lior Raz as badass boss Uri is all paternal charm until he's a monster of wrath. 

A telescoped object appears like a Chekov rifle in the middle act and we clock it and wait for it to come into play. When it does, it has the cornered instensity of a novel rather than a film. This needs to happen but the gigantic stakes and vice grip coincidence bothered me. This is not an adaptation but an original screenplay. To its credit the film does take this thread into deeper waters and leaves an interesting question about a particular decision. Does that balance things? Not when I can't get the forced convergence out of my head but it's easy enough to follow the tale to its enjoyable final scene. That's a scene we have seen many times and can predict easily. Happily we can rely on Woodall's performance to get us through it.

A thriller/romance/ethical drama with heart and wit is not to be sneezed at. This is a film that says its lines and hits its marks but finds it gravity in some compelling performances. It's always good to see Dustin Hoffman on screen. A younger image of him as a dashboard bobble head in the trade van reminds of him and what his character means. No, we don't need it, but it's on the warm side of fun, just like this movie is on the warm side of crime thrillers. 

Review: LEVITICUS

Naim and Ryan lark about with rough play until they break through the show and admit their mutual attraction. This is not the stuff of their small town that is gripped by the kind of psycho religion that appears warm and friendly until it doesn't. One day Naim goes over to Ryan's place and finds him involved in the same kind of rough and tumble with another boy. Without too much detail, following a ghastly ritual by a creepy travelling religious figure, Naim witnesses an act of violence against Ryan that appears to be committed by an invisible force. This makes sense of the weird prologue and will surface as an explanation in the middle act. Things are turning grim.

Part queer coming of age story and part supernatural horror tale, Adrian Chiarella's feature debut exhibits a clever idea of religious "conversion therapy". Rather than praying the gay away, the idea is to have the object of love become monstrously violent. This can involve doppelgangers who bring their own persuasion to the table.

It's too cold for satire but too loose for outright horror but its spell holds and works all the way through the running time. The one moment of deadpa humour towards the end feels like it's from another movie and is memorable for that reason alone. Mostly it's a slow pendulum swinging between the credible warmth between the lovers and the unforgiving punsihment the rest of the town wishes upon them. Mostly, though, it feels personal the same way that the Book of Revelation feels personal. That is an ultraviolent revenge fantasy but Leviticus is Moses' report of his god's dictation of law and conduct to avoid damnation. Remembering this adds great weight to this film's title. 

Chiarella makes great use of the locale, building on breathless nocturnal night streets, mills that smoke and spew flame and a muted pallet for a place that even nearby nature's beauty shudders to colour. This is strong world building, the way it always is when a setting that might seem to write itself is reconstructed  for atmoshere. Part of this is Jed Kerzel's electronic score with its groaning and wailing, hissing and growling as though the land and wind themselves are straining from the culture they surround.

There have been comparisions with It Follows but they are too shallow, missing the point of the entity and its way of being. It Follows played on a kind of penalty for wisdom, expressed like a sexually transmitted disease. This is something more hideous for its origins, the product of jealously guarded ignorance.

The leads, Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen offer the warm centre of the film, both very natural with each other. But they must also express the horror of its conceit, and it feels painful to witness the turn of the familiar faces from love to hard antagonism. A grown up Mia Wasikowska as Naim's mum provides a maternal support that degrades into its own creepiness.

If I felt a certain lacking while watching Leviticus, I think it's probably from the film's refusal to fall into the cliche that besets horror stories with teens. There is a information scene but even that is kept fragmentary. Recent horrors like It Follows and the Philipou's magnificent Talk to Me have dispensed with such scenes of authority and it furthers the sense of hopelessness necessary for stories like this to work: the traditional authority figures are absent, untrustworthy or even atagonistic. Leviticus uses this to blend a sense of despair that the final image sets in ancient stone.

Viewing notes: I went to a 10 am screening at the Kino in Melbourne. Sparsely attended and mostly by men about my age (who still seem to be a lot older to me) and a few much younger huddles. If there was talking or any cruddy behavious I didn't notice it. Mind you, this intense film could probably silence a Saturday night crowd.

DIRTY HARRY @ 55

A sniper is murdering people across San Fransisco. Detective Harry Callahan is on the case, grumpily accepting his new partner, but finds it a lot harder than expected. The killer, self-dubbed Scorpio, is fame hungry, communicating through notes left at the scene and in the papers, extorting money from the Mayoralty. Harry, who isn't called Dirty for nothing, is uncomfortable in the public eye.

The first of five Dirty Harry films, this Don Siegel helmed movie draws from the true crime case (still unsolved) of Zodiac. Fictionalising it allowed more swing to the narrative as the psychology of the killer was woven into the action procedural. When you watch this film you are looking at crime thriller as a transitional form. It's a visible leap from the recent Boston Strangler from Richard Fleischer which kept to a near-documentary approach until the extraordinary final scene. Dirty Harry's documentary stylings are kept to the location shooting, showing Frisco as a modern metropolis by day and a neon-lit warren by night whose streets wind and dive like burrows. 

Add to that some authentic politics (a Mayor who won't speak a racial slur in one of the killer's notes) and a maverick detective who might just have to adjust with the times to do the job as he needs to. This is at the end of a long developmental stage and a casting circus that proved a bumpy road. By the beginning of the '70s, the villain was a psycho based on a recognised figure and his nemesis was the sexy magnum force of Clint Eastwood. When you look at the turns in decades as cultural signposts you often need to do some shifting to get it right. Hollywood's '70s, though, began ahead of time with films like Bullit punching above weight. By this film's appearance in 1971, it feels at home in its time.

Harry's openly racist comments in context come across as tests rather than the convictions of a petrified veteran. His first interactions with his new Mexican-descended partner offer a give and take that Harry knows he won't win. This vulnerability proves to be one of the film's strengths for, however it strays in later installments to the franchise, this one enforces a cultural challenge. After that, his moments of anger are reduced to cries of natural justice that anyone could sing along to. The famous monologue about counting bullets and feeling lucky gets two airings: the first is effectively sadistic but the second is controlled rage.

Against him, Andrew Robinson's Scorpio is a baddie whose psycho origins are not examined as they would be two decades on in the serial killer bandwagon. He's a nasty pasty from the first shot (the film opens with his first sniper killing) and blithely extorts money and gets more murder in with increasing boldness. His lair has the scrap book decor that would be obligatory in a '90s serial killer flick (even in the deviating Seven) and his smiles and grins when plying his trade are disturbing. The film's extraordinary cinematography takes him from a gleaming close up to an insect-sized scale against the grass of a football stadium, as much an idea as a human figure, a boogeyman in a modern city.

Lalo Schiffrin's score takes a few leaves from Morricone's music for Gialli and floats gently through violence and picturesque daytime cityscapes.

Dirty Harry surprised me on rewatch. Its machismo is subject to question, not just assumed to be right. Harry and his partner make mistakes which doesn't just expose their fallibility but the scary puzzle of fighting such a figure as Scorpio. Audience's in San Francisco must have felt conflicted to see this version of what they lived through resolved with the perp punished at the same time as worrying if the movie might draw Zodiac back out to get some more work done.

The film's leanness and breezy pace call across time, beyond those '90s exploitative serial killer clones, and show how it could be and can still be done. 

Viewing notes: I watched my splendid 4K remaster of thiswhich kicks out the jams. You can get it on disc and right now, it's also on ABC iView for freeeee.