Top 10: 17/06/2012

Eraserhead: To get it out of the way, still my favourite film.

Suspiria: Nightmare logic should not be easy to control. It's beyond control here. The only time it's under control, the film starts flatlining. Then it picks up and goes back to Suspiriaville.

Freud: Written by Satre, boiled down by John Huston and starring a post-accident Monty Clift and in-bloom Susanna York. Hard black and white with dream sequences and memories to rival the Dali scenes in Spellbound.

Burn: Pontecorvo's epic of colonisation and revolution presents a Marxist attack without dogma. Strong preformances by a maturing Marlon Brando and Evaristo Marquez as the admiring enemies. One of Morricone's most glorious scores.

The Blair Witch Project: Even when the triumph of the production and marketing stories surounding this film clear you are still left with a great campfire tale, a  steady descent into panic and despair. It's not just a great ending.

Apocalypse Now: This still works and sometimes for reasons different from those that used to make it work. That reason is enough for me to consider the concept of the perfect film bullshit. Top marks for that alone.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari: So engaging it obliterated my youthful intolerance of silent movies. Incredible piece.

Greetings from Wollongong: Half feature length but persistent in my memory for its style, wit and conviction. Feels like a feature. Not because it drags but because it contains so much. Misery porn? More like misery erotica. Love to see this again.

Citizen Kane: An epic I could watch on any day.

The Draughtsman's Contract: Property and inheritance and expert drawing manage to mix with a witty intrigue. First I saw of Peter Greenaway and still the one I like the best.

Ten films I dislike: 11/06/2012

The Stunt Man: Supposedly profound power struggle between a tyrannical movie director and the fugitive stunt man. Reminds me of those theatre pieces that don't want to commit to being plays or dances and one character turns to the audience, points and dramatically intones: Alright, this is YOUR PERFORMANCE. WE ARE YOUR NERVES!

Reservoir Dogs: I didn't buy into Tarrantino the way a lot of my friends did because of this film which had wit, strong, well-coreographed action and real cinephilic skill. So do all my favourite Scorsese films and this was like a cover version of them. Well, I used to think that. Then I saw a few Hong Kong actioners which filled in the blanks. It felt flat and calculated even though it was made with obvious love of the form. I found that a little creepy.

A Room for Romeo Brass: Shane Meadows is one of those UK directors we're all meant to admire for his mix of warmth and kitchen sink realism. I just see actors with too much freedom to express their characters and plots crowbarred into the final acts. I think you're meant to forgive the wincable contrivances of this film in the light of Paddy Considine's fiery performance as a psycho. See also This is England which I also think is not better than two of its central performances.

Casino: Goodfellas with pokies. Linear and plodding despite the cast and creative team. A series of strong character sketches which add up to an endless length of knotted string. Scorsese's been dead to me from Cape Fear on. This seemed like the old gunslinger twirling his Colt just like in the old days and then missing the barn door with every shot.

Don't Look Now: At uni I sang the praises of this one along with all my friends after it was on late night tv once. The tragedy of the lost child stirred through the thick atmosphere like an insoluble wine, never blending, always visible. I showed the blu-ray recently to some friends and was apologising for it from the halfway mark. An utterly wasted opportunity, given strong material and all the ambience you could ever want for a thriller. This brings my score for Nicholas Roeg films to a perfect zero (yes, Performance included).

Defending Your Life: Albert Brooks is a good presence in most of the movies he's in that he doesn't write or direct. His improv turn in Taxi Driver lifts that already celestial piece even higher. Whenever he does write and direct there's always a problem and it's not something that suggests itself immediately. His own films are usually whacky comedies and they are almost universally unfunny. This one starts out really well. Brooks dies and goes to limbo where he must make a case to go to the good place. After about twenty minutes in all the jokes about this have decomposed into dust and it becomes a great ugly, clunking rom com. Why? Brooks is smug. He's not only a smug character feeding himself one liners, he directs other actors in the scene to laugh at them. Nothing kills a joke like self-congratulation. There is a worse example (The Muse) but that is irredeemable from the word go. This one could have been saved.

The Hudsucker Proxy: My first sign that the Coen's were fallible. This attempt at a Capra screwball social comedy ends up more of a self-indulgent Sturges washout. If someone had told Jennifer Jason Leigh she was allowed to loosen up her suffocating impersonation of Katherine Hepburn she might still have a career today.

Twilight Zone: The Movie: Grue and grossness kept within industrial safety standards made sure that these retreads from the original tv series just looked newer than the real ones. If it was creepy by suggestion in 1963 it became dayglo and unsubtle in 1983. I hate Steven Spielberg.

Immortal Beloved: Amadeus got away with being historically innacurate because the history was less important than the theme of mediocrity vs genius. It also got away with it because the cast and director were clicking like card in a bicycle wheel spoke. This one fails despite people like Jeroen Krabbe, Gary Oldman and Isabella Rosellini in the cast and Bernard Rose in the chair. Rose had previously made the superb urban myth horror Candyman and the intriguing and absorbing Paperhouse. Having some great music and the gift of a great historical character played by his generation's actor's actor didn't help for some reason. It's silly when it isn't boring.

Flashback: I hate buddy movies and I hate them more when they are road movies with a cloying nostalgia. Dennis Hopper is an aging hippy activist being transported across the US by FBI agent Keifer Sutherland. Dennis subverts Keifer in all sorts of ways until Keifer finally loosens up and goes on Dennis' wild ride through the standard checklist of buddy movies. "The nineties are going to make the eighties look like the fifties," says Dennis. Actually, that came true. He just forgot to add,"...in a good way." Fifties and Eighties = fresh new approaches with a lot of originality. Nineties = repackaging of the three previous decades but sold as fresh.

Top 10: 11/06/2012

Taxi Driver: A chronicle of loneliness and its effect on its professors' sense of justice. Still fresh. Still extraordinary.

The Tin Drum: Best literal adaptation of a novel for the screen ever. Casting of David Bennent in the lead seems like a once-off.

Eraserhead: With its depth of imagination and creation of unique world, this is my favourite film.










The Changeling: Great subtle ghost story with wonderfully blustery lead performance by George C. Scott.







The Innocents: Another great ghost tale that uses a simple technique to create shivers: the ghosts look like people who should not be where they are.

Peeping Tom: Film about fear and its uses in child rearing. Almost killed it's director's career.

Picnic at Hanging Rock: Little happens. Little needs to happen. Ethereal Euro girls meet the big mysterious wild and get swallowed up by it. Beautiful atmosphere and genuinely creepy.

Halloween: Like a manual for boogieman movies. Almost bloodless it still manages to create a mounting dread. One of the most evocative music scores for the suggestion of menace ever.

Trust: Because of my avowed hatred of Wes Anderson's movies I get called out if I mention this as a favourite. I can see apparent contradiction; both have quirky characters who say weighty things in monotone and a big helping of whimsy. I just think that Hal Hartley at his best cares more about his characters than Wes Anderson. Anyway, I love this strange nonromcom with its wounded characters and motion against the grain.

Woman in the Dunes: Insect collector gets collected. The development of his relationship with his new circumstances and the forces that put him there is both banal and absorbing.

Review: PROMETHEUS: Big doin's in Toy Town

What are you DOING, Dave?

Here's my problem with Prometheus: a character I'll call Victor does something very nasty to another character I'll call Victim. Victim started out in the film as a confident and likeable figure but soon undercuts his own appeal, largely through his constant baiting of Victor. At the climax of their antipathy there is only one person who emotes for Victim and they are not sitting in the auditorium.

This lack of empathy between the screen and its audience isn't always a problem; an action movie really only needs a drop of this so that the stress of the action can reach out. It is a problem here because the film sets out to show big questions pursued by small people. This isn't irony. They're serious. But put it all together and you get a quest for meaning carried out by spoiled brats.

My lack of religion does not prevent me from comprehending religious feeling in characters. I don't need to believe in demons to enjoy The Exorcist. When Michael Fassbender's character David is verbally separated from the rest of the team on the good spaceship Prometheus on the grounds that he does not have a soul he is visibly affected. The others note the difference, too. That's all fine for the narrative if it's used to make something. The most it amounts to at the end is a question of a single character's state of belief. The answer given is unsurprising and by that stage all but irrelevant to the promise of a new quest. It's not as though the religion is affirmed nor even seriously questioned. It's just there as it would be in a Mormon cooking program.

The reason I'm going on about this rather than talking about the plot or the performances is that I don't think either of those elements are given much weight against the confused scioreligion rendered so half-arsed by the always impressive action sequences and great CGI.  Michael Fassbender continues to demonstrate why he is on our big screens so much of late. Noomi Rapace is as good here as she was in the Dragon Tattoo films, if less interesting. Charlize Theron impresses in a tighly drawn and thankless role. Everyone else is all but monster fodder. Some early attempts at imputing life into them are good but dispensed with early and summarily. Game over. Well, that's what it feels like.

I'm not really a fanboy of anything anymore. I haven't needed to replace that with some blustery old notion of qualitah cinema, either. But watching the splendid blu-ray of Alien just after seeing this at the cinema brought something forward: after seeing Alien for the first time in 1980 I had a dark and stressful nightmare which included my guarding of a haunted house whose windows opened up like the alien's mouths; after seeing Prometheus I went and had a drink with my cinecompanion, chatted a little about the movie and moved on to other conversation.

This is Ridley Scott's world and he can do what he likes with it. He's planning a number of sequels to close the gap between this and Alien (oh, one thing: why does this story, set decades before Alien, feature superior technology?) which will either fulfil the promise made at the end of Prometheus (and render Alien nonsensical) or will fail at its quest and render itself pointless. I find this idea interesting while I type this sentence but probably won't as I start my next one.

Again, that's my beef with this piece: great action with beautifully imagined new toys and ingrained with a big question but I just couldn't care less about it.

Ten Films I Dislike: 05/06/12

This is not a bottom 10. Don't see the point in that. It's just a list of films I don't like. As I'm a tad too busy to go and see films to review and with Shadows all but a faded memory, most of what will appear here for a few weeks at least will be these lists. If I can think of an essay I'll put one here. Anyway, until then I'll supplement the top tens with these. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

Lost Highway: Yes, that's right, a big David Lynch fan dislikes a David Lynch movie. Well, I do. I watched this again recently to see if my wince at recalling it was still justified. The local blu-ray is superbly presented, great sound and vision but the big sagging blech in the middle (ie most) of this piece manages to snatch boredom from a potentially gripping neo-noir movie. There are some great ideas here. While they are held up by some impressive Lynchian visuals and sound mixing, it just doesn't warm up. I'll quote a fan from an old Usenet post (he was speaking in admiration): "It's a cold film about a bad man." So it is.

Anything by Wes Anderson. Sorry, I've tried but every time I try to watch something by this director all I get is how studiously contrived it is. Each one is a waste of good set design and stellar casts. It's as though he saw a few quirky 60s and 70s movies like Harold and Maude or  Barefoot in the Park and created a series of formulae on how they work and then ... applied the formulae with the precision of the autistic. None of it feels like someone's genuine vision.

M.A.S.H. When I was a kid and this was fresh I remembered loving it for the larks and the cynicism that my older siblings laughed at. When I was in my twenties I felt affronted by the misogyny and couldn't look past that. More recently I could look past that and see it as part of the satire but hated the unquestioned laddishness of it. I love a lot of Robert Altman films, probably most of them. But this one broke my feeling that I liked all of them. See also Lost Highway, above, it made me admit what I didn't like about one of my favourite directors.

Sexy Beast: Celebrated for Ben Kingsley's overboard guttermouthed psycho gangster and less so for Ray Winstone's more measured ex-gangster. I found it irksomely calculated and uninvolving.

Satantango: Bela Tarr's seven hour epic of post communist Hungarian life has some extraordinary passages, truly individual and spellbinding. It also includes passages which stretch a loooooooong time past their point. I tell new girlfriends early on in the piece that I like a lot of boring movies. It's true. I don't need thrill a minute narrative or even any narrative to keep me compelled but this one fails with me. By contrast the same director's Werckmeister Harmonies, which is over a third of the length of this and uses all the tropes that I find tiresome in this, I think of as a masterpiece.

Somersault: No wonder Abbie Cornish fled the country when she was getting sentenced to roles like this or the one in Candy. Heidi is cast out of home because her mother's boyfriend tries his luck with her (and she complies). Then she goes on a series of pointless adventures and then it ends.




The House of Sand and Fog: Are we to find Jennifer Connelly's imbecilic stubbornness as strength of character? Are we to assume that Ben Kingsley's character is so improved by the new humility of his circumstances that he forgives Jennifer Connelly for her interpersonal atrocities? Are we to care about the carelessly stacked disasters that clog the final act like a drain attached to a few houses of bricks and mortar whose plumbing has failed all at once?

Sullivan's Travels: I feel like appending "and anything else by Preston Sturges" but I've seen too few of his movies to cast that blanket. This film about a young buck movie director out to prove a point really ought to go off like a box of roman candles but it just turns cute and never turns back. I'd call this the Wes Anderson of its day except that too many fans would call that a compliment.

Broadcast News: Almost a cheat as I reviewed it unfavourably earlier here. A film of cutesy garbage masquerading as satire. Horrible.

Dead Poets Society: What was clearly intended to be an ode to individuality and personal freedom somehow ended up as support your local demagogue. Robin Williams typically cloying in a role that while initially dramatic allows him too much freedom so he pushes it out of proportion. I hate this movie. Wanna see a good film about the power of teaching? Try The Paper Chase, it doesn't even try to make the old master likeable. 

Top 10: 03/06/2012

Apocalypse Now. I think out of all the films I've watched more than once this one has had the most repeated viewings. Mythmaking like most war movies but took it on its own path. No Vietnam movie made after it lives up, IMHO, regardless of it being more historically accurate. Apocalypse is about truths other than literal history. That's why I can never tire of it.

The Eye. Begins as a cover version of the Sixth Sense but outclasses it and drives well beyond its initial premise to reveal a tale of punished difference. Some of the creepiest ghosts on film.

Network. Unbelievably witty dialogue only enhances this satirical fable from the 70s. Every gag still works.

Yojimbo. Gun for hire samurai film is the mid point between Kurosawa's John Ford influences which led to Sergio Leone's Kurosawa influences which then led to the new Western back in America. The samurai film was changed forever with this one.

Masculin/Feminin: Godard mid-turn from cine revolutionary to revolutionary cineaste. His Revolver album (released same year): before it it was fun, after it it was war.

Werckmeister Harmonies: Bela Tarr's masterpiece towers over the rest of his output for its break into warmth and humour to add to the usual closely studied misery.  Like a cinema verite folk tale in modern dress.

Eraserhead: When someone makes a film that gets to me more than this one I'll put that title in place of this one. Doubt it'll happen, though.

Martin: Is Martin a vampire or just playing? If he is a vampire, however old he is, he's still a mixed up teen. Extraordinary idea kept under Romero's tough grip. Works.

Suicide Circle/Suicide Club: First it's a J horror. Then it's a police procedural. Then it's a kind of creepy teen film. Suddenly it's a Ken Russell musical. Then it's like Kubrick on acid.

Audition: Masterpiece from one of the most prolific filmmakers on the planet, Takeshi Miike. Extraordinary tale of what might lie beneath beauty, poise and appeal. The twist keeps twisting. No one is innocent. No one gets off lightly.