Top 10 21/01/2013

Billy Liar: Because all small towns share one thing for any nineteen year old: they are not good enough.

Rear Window: Alright, so I'm getting through my Hitchcock Blu-ray set. But this still compels and shines. The vouyeurism of the protagonist might be obscured by the crime he seeks to expose but it is left disturbingly bare. The initial screen kiss between James Stewart and Grace Kelly was done with deliberate camera shake, giving it an extraordinary alien feel, as though for his audiences that's what kissing Grace Kelly was like.

Eraserhead: Because I never of the completeness of its world. I feel I could walk into it and I'd try if I knew I could get back.

Isle of the Dead: I love films of people waiting. With skill they become deep and troubling observations of human behaviour (see also Key Largo and Beat the Devil). Here the force keeping the people in one place is pestilence but there is another force preying upon them. The neat and Lewtonian touch is that there is no guarantee that the purported monster is real. At-mos-phere!

Dracula: Veteran carny Todd Browning, fresh from edgy/dodgy fare like Freaks or his Lon Chaney movies, gave the Stoker tale a real sense of dread in brilliant use of mise en scene. It's too slow and dragged further by its lack of music score but this early (not first, mind you) venture into vampire mythology still wins. "Leeesssen to dem .... what mewsik they mike."

Fight Club: Because it's as funny and poignant and relevant as it was in 1999 and probably will be in the future. Not long after its first run expired there were late night screenings of this one at a few arthouse and marginal mainstream cinemas giving it the feel of an old fashioned cult movie.

The Turin Horse: Bela Tarr uses such long takes that he leaves himself open to effortless ridicule but just as James Joyce is good at long sentences Tarr is great with ten minute long shots, lighting and choregraphing them to the extent that the impression they leave can be as wildly diverse as to appear like paint drying or busily edited. Here he examines a lonely windswept apocalypse where a father and daughter team live as they must until such time as they don't. Sounds like porridge but is deep, flavoursome and sobering. This is Tarr's farewell. What a beautiful way to go.

Citizen Kane: Because it's good even if some snobs like it and other snobs hate it.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her: Godard's midpoint between a mounting politicisation in his subject matter to increasingly political ways to make cinema. This non-narrative fiction is also an essay on prostitution and consumerism in everyday life is weighty in material but feels light as a feather. This vies with Masculin/Feminin as my favourite Jean Luc piece. This week it's this one.

Onibaba: I could just watch the atmosphere of this one but the sense of it being a cinema verite record of a folk tale is too compelling. Wins me over every time and I've never known anyone to dislike it when I've shown it.

Top 10 15/01/2013

 
Ginger Snaps: Rejigged a largely forgotten horror subgenre with a brave and fascinating angle, managing to be funny, effortlessly clever and, when it needed to be, scary. Remembers, too, that the best horror stories harbour real tragedy.

Peeping Tom: "All this filming can't be healthy." No it isn't. It's unsettling and leads to one of the most poignant finales of any horror movie ever.


 





Groundhog Day: Skillfully extended Twilight Zone style fable of learning to carpe that diem runs dizzingly on the power of its leads and a chemistry you'd never expect. If they make 'em like this any more I haven't seen 'em.







Eraserhead: Because it is what it is and evermore shall be so.

Berberian Sound Studio: Along with Peeping Tom, one of the most sobering expeditions into the treasures and horrors of the lightless caves of the violent imagination.

Apocalypse Now: A war story. A horror story. Neither generic. This means good.

The Birds: Ridiculed this as a kid when I saw it on tv. Didn't when I saw it on blu-ray.

Being John Malkovich: The cleverness that had me laughing even on hearing the synopsis of this one cannot hide the poignant and eerie love story beneath. 

 






Laura: Mid-Noir with cast at top of their game in this whodunnit of manners as society upstart of the title (a luminous Gene Tierney) appears in the testimonies of the suspects in her murder. High Manhattan was never so low.

Juliet of the Spirits: When Acid Met La Dolce Vita. This failed half of the audience I screened it to a few years back but also delighted half. There was a large late walk-in followed by a walk-out the same size. I think Fellini had directed the audience as well as the movie.

Review: HITCHCOCK

Ok, so Scarlett Johansen doesn't look like Janet Leigh, Helen Mirren doesn't look like Alma Hitchcock and Anthony Hopkins, despite make-up costing the budget of seveal independent features, doesn't look like Hitch. All the reviews I've heard about this movie start out this way and it seems to colour the tone of them.

We accept far more of a gap in resemblance when we see it on stage because we expect film to give us a more note perfect illusion. But how can that form part of any valid criticism of a film that plays the cinema as artifice card so crucially? To be fair, it's probably because there is an inconsistency across the cast of the level of the attempt. Tony's in the fat suit and prosthetic double chin whereas Scarlett and Hel end at the wigs.

The Tony Perkins, however, is really convincing but his nervy performance reminds me of what Chopper Read said about the Heath Franklin's impersonation of him that it was based not on himself but on Eric Bana's performance in Chopper. James D'Arcy's creation is offered in imitation of Norman Bates rather than Anthony Perkins. Bad thing or good thing? Moot: his role is a lot smaller than it is in Psycho and is almost there for some perfunctory padding. Worth a thought by comparison with the others, though.

Still, this isn't a documentary, it's a fiction film and we should be concentrating on how well the themes of adultery (real or imaginary), sharing credit and how mainstream art can be pushed. How does it do on those scores? Pretty well ... if in a digestibly mainstream way.

If I were true to my claim of finding the above criticism objectionably irrelevant I would have begun this way: I love movies about movies, deep or shallow, glorious or grimy, and this is a good one.

It's 1960 and Alfred Hitchcock is a world-renowned film director known as the master of suspense. He's getting a lot of insinuation about ageing and losing his touch so he choses a risky horror story as his next project against the advice of everyone he knows or works with. Striking a risky deal with a studio the film, Psycho, gets under way and the real drama begins on set and off as Hitch pushes his players with a sadistic intensity and grows smoulderingly angry about his suspicions of his wife's infidelity. Blend with this the theme of ingratitude held by his wife Alma whose work for his has been essential and decades long and her sense of betrayal at her husband's uneasy relationships with his famous blonde leading ladies.

Resentment, betrayal, adultery, public expectations, self-doubt, exploitation, abuse of position, career frustrations etc are on the boil ... So there is a point to all the dress-ups. But for me it's still the bits that keep me nourished rather than the whole table: Hitch playing conductor and grotesque ballet dancer in the cinema foyeur as Psycho's first audiences find out what they paid for; the invisible weapons that take the air between director and star. There's a lot a fine turns on screen here.

Another thing that has bothered some reviewers but I emjoyed was the presence of Ed Gein. Gein's crimes of grave robbing, serial murder and human taxidermy inspired Robert Bloch to write the novel Psycho and Gein provides a continual touch point for Hitchcock who appears in scenes with him as a troublingly unaffected observer. What might well have been an easy-come-by trick served for me as a solid expression of the extent to which an artist might long to go but is saved from doing so by his art. It's not Bergman but it doesn't pretend to be. This is Hitchcock who saw himself primarily as a commercial filmmaker, regardless of how much art Truffaut got him admitting to.

So, I liked the obvious shortfalls in resemblance, the tropes and forced dramatics of Hitchcock because they blend so pleasantly into a great big choctop of a movie. I think it's likely that something will soon pass before my eyes which will erase this film from my memory but before that happens I'd like to compare it favourably against a film which attempts something similar but fails at every step (here, for some I know I am committing sacrilege): The Stuntman. That film pontificates with great leaden bowling balls of cynicism about the moral imperatives of the filmmaker, lurching with thundr'ous steps t'ward a goofy little line at the end. Hitchcock does some fine work but still is happy enough selling popcorn. Try some.

2012 top ten and more

The old curse of living in interesting times befell me this year with a leg injury making me miss out MIFF MUFF and a few other smaller scale festivals. I managed to catch up with most of my MIFF choices through subsequent cinema and blu-ray releases and really grimace at having to miss it at the time as it would have been outstanding. Otherwise it was the year of not cult cinema but the cinema of cults with no less than three movies focussing on the effect of cult membership. In the era of CGI-heavy action, constantly enhanced 3D screening and ever soaring budgets a black and white, mostly silent comedy in 4X3 won the Oscar and the best superhero film was a found footage piece. The auteur stakes were spare with Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master competing (from what I was able to see) only with Sion Sonno's Himizu. Left this late as I need to see a few late release titles before making this list.

My top cinematic moment of the year, though, included one of the worst projected images I've seen for many a year (and at ACMI!) but I was happy going along with it as it was Goblin playing their score to Suspiria live. Sublime! Now they need to come back and do the same for Deep Red. And John Carpenter needs to come and play to Halloween and Prince of Darkness (I know I'm meant to say The Thing but I don't like that music as much  as those two. Sorry, I know it's Morricone...)








My top ten for this year is, I think, stronger than it has been for a fair whack of years. Here it is:

The Artist: Because it's clever, knows it but also knows it's meant to be fun. Not a history of silent cinema as much as a reminder of why it worked. Best seen with a full cinema.

Martha Marcy May Marlene: For starting as a severe indy piece and developing into a new kind of horror film. Like a current Eurohorror without the extreme violence.

Safety Not Guaranteed: Because it mashed a quirky indy with a buddy and a sci-fi and made them all work together. More non-schtick Aubrey Plaza, please.

Planet of Snail: A love story, an against-odds epic, a poetic film that works as poetry and it's also a documentary. Brilliant work. Still haunts me.

Chronicle: I forgave the tired found footage approach because this is the best superhero film outside of the best that embrace the comic aesthetic. Well played and well told.

The Master: New P.T. Anderson almost guaranteed to make the cut but this one shows why he's still going and going against the grain. He's an original who doesn't mind showing where he's come from. I like this one the more I think about it.

The Hunger Games: Suprised me completely. Thought it would be a soft centred copy of Battle Royale but it transcended its derivations to claim itself. Very good work.

Sound of My Voice: A cold and creepy indie that looks a million bucks but plays down where Cronenberg started. As with Martha Marcy May Marlene, this is a team to watch. There are three movies about cults and dark charisma in this list. Strange year for that....

Sightseers: Delicate balance between funny and humourlessly bleak. The teetering is a plus. Almost thinking of this as a savage parody of the Mike Leighs of the world.








Beberian Sound Studio: For being original about the power of cinema, choosing a fascinating era of it to do so and having the courage to plummet into territory usually only walked by David Lynch without once giving in to obvious Lynchian influence. Haunting.





Honourable mentions:

Beasts of the Southern Wild, Robot and Frank, Himizu, Shadow Dancer, Shame, Cosmopolis, A Separation, The Island President, Beer is Cheaper than Therapy, No, Searching for Sugar Man.

Review: BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO

A tale of resistance to absorption told ingeniously through the process of adding post-synch sound to a film.

Gilderoy (Toby Jones) is an English film sound expert whose main work has been in nature documentaries. His first sizeable job internationally, as he is to find out to his surprise, is an ultra violent horror movie in Italy. It's the 1970s, home to the gut wrenching giallo genre of crime thrillers and the surgical candour of ghastly tales with medieval settings. It's Deep Red, Suspiria and The Devil's Nightmare, and everyone in the cinema is on the edge of their seat. 

Gilderoy has not expected this. He is also unprepared for the getting on with the pugnacious world of Italian film production. He is feted as a rare find by the production team who also know he has no idea of larger scale movie making and its world of hype, dodge and sleaze. If this is the ocean he's a guppy washed down from the drain of a nice place in the Home Counties.

The world of Italian horror is still a rich garden to work in and I'd have happily just watch it evoked for the running time but there's a lot more here than nostalgia. In the setting of this film the production is made in two major passes: the visual and the aural; separate entities (and no question of a third pass with the contemporary process of CGI effects). Here, the timid Gilderoy is in command and as scene after sordid or alarmingly visceral scene is announced before playback and he sets to work, recording dialogue, bashing into vegetables by the cartload, screams by the abandoned-convent-load. We have to imagine the images he's enhancing this way as we never see them. We are treated to a fetishistic motion gallery of the details of the mechanisms bulky and tiny as they spin, flash to light or grind into movement. The emotional content of the images they carry are being blended with sound that will double their power.

The other reason for not showing any of the footage Gilderoy must add sound to is that through descriptions and the audio that consolidates them give us far worse pictures than Peter Strickland (director of the meta-film) could ever have supplied to universal satisfaction. Mind you, we do get a joyously authentic title sequence for the digetic film complete with the kind compelling prog rock score that has won this type of movie a lot of fans

But this isn't just economy. We are watching the effect of the production, the range of interpersonal atrocities necessitated by it and the flow of mental unease flowing from the screen to Gilderoy as he increasingly feels culpable by his involvement in it. I'll stop here from saying too much.

Berberian Sound Studio is a masterful weave of the joys and cruelties of cinema at its conception and execution. There is a little of both contained in the effect cinema has on its viewers and their self image. However temporary, the profundity of the identification between image and viewer can be transforming. Gilderoy isn't just watching, he's moving through its ether. After one incident where he takes some advice on handling the Kafaesque admin changing from his native politeness to something more rude and Italianate he is left worse off than before. His mother's letters from home take a genuinely disturbing turn. He is left more vulnerable than the eventual audience of the film he's completing.

This is where this movie comes into its own and offers an originality that climbs troublingly from the comfort of a familiar genre of cinema. While it isn't quite like Mulholland Drive or INLAND EMPIRE it becomes cousin to those films' unflinching drive into personal transformation, the shock of self-knowledge and its potential for severe irrevocable self perdition. This film is haunting me.

Review: SIGHTSEERS

Tina lives with a mother who keeps her subdued with guilt. "You're not a friend," she says to Tina, "you're a relative." Tina at thirty-five is bound to this (made extra guilty by facilitating the accidental death of their terrier, Poppy) and her life looks as numbingly drab as a British kitchen sink  film. Into this stagnation rides Chris, not a knight in shining armour but a ginger with interests in pencils and trams. He is about to whisk Tina away on the holiday of a lifetime.

This goes well until they accidentally kill a fatheaded arrogant fellow tourist with their caravan. It's manslaughter not murder but it sends them into a sexual frenzy, incidentally enjoyed by the gang of roadworkers they've parked beside. One by one as opportunities emerge from England's green and pleasant mire the pair learn love and the art of spontaneous murder.

The central pair are played by Steve Oram and Alice Lowe, UK tv comedy veterans who also co-wrote the screenplay. The director's chair was filled by Ben Wheatley whose arresting genre-jumping Kill List has to be seen twice to get right.

This is film has been marketed, however subhorizontally, as Mike Leigh doing Natural Born Killers. That's not a bad start but something happens in this piece that Mike Leigh would never do in the face of temptation and Oliver Stone would never even think of: the couple's violence is driven entirely by the fury of their punishing inferiority. These are people who find the personal power to act beyond the supermarket clothes hues of their smothering lives but when they do it is in futile acts of rage. But this is not the rage of drunken yobbos or soccer hooligans but the infernal seething resentment of the middling.

Chris cannot create a humorous shell around the sniffiness of the middle class campers, even after he aggressively raced them for the better camping spot and spitefully broke a plate in their vintage minimalist caravan. He can only plan vengeance. Tina, similarly, cannot let the fun of a bridal party slide as good fun. These are people impossible to identify with and the sin of this lies in the fact of the film's nationality: a UK film that dares to hate its proletarian central figures. This is pretty much the reverse of the carboard middle class villains that mar whatever is salvageable from Mike Leigh's world of the blameless dispossessed. And there is none of the dodgy glamour of Natural Born Killers, either. When Chris and Tina kill they just kill and it is extremely ugly. This film hates its central characters and doesn't mind if you hate them, too.

So what's the point? A pair of leads you can't join in with doing things that a little comedy might cleanse. I don't know beyond the simple desire to shine a torch into the face of subjugated inferiority and look upon the mania of its constant resentment. Basil Fawlty works because his anger always backfires. But Fawlty Towers is a comedy, self-avowed and fulfilled. Sightseers has erroneously been depicted as a knockabout black laugh but there is too much hatred from the creative team even to claim the kind of offputting humour that Chris Morris or Julia Davis trade in.

At the same time I felt there was nothing try-hard about it and given the elements listed above there probably should have been. So why is this going in my top ten for the year? Because I loved it and I don't know why.

PS - this was a MIFF pick from this year's missed festival. I was picking pretty danged well.

Review: SOUND OF MY VOICE

Peter and Lorna are would be investigative documentarians who have infiltrated a cult headed by a woman who claims to be from the future. We first see the couple undergoing the strident security measures that take them from the controllable world into the controlled environment of Maggie and her followers, a journey that takes them from the familiar colour palette of the cityscape at night to a golden germ-free intimacy.

The first point of establishment here is that of the pair's skepticism. The good thing here is that it is shown to be shaky from the word go. Not shaken yet, but sufficiently touched by Maggie's charisma to have enjoyed the experience. From there it's a question of who will break. We are given sudden psychological histories of both Peter and Lorna in what looks like old super 8 and narrated by a voice we can't quite identify. Both people are candidates for cracking under the weight of personal force and Maggie proves to be a powerful one. Is she faking it or is this how someone from the future would act? In a series of very strong moments where Maggie's claim might become indelible or disintegrate in a breath. Is she a very good manipulator who can ad lib with genius or are her frequent pauses in the face of difficulty just a natural personal regrouping?

There is a moment in the climax that might answer your questions either way.

That's all the plot I'm going to give because there isn't much more than that. But then it doesn't need heavy plotting. The situation is so intriguing that just being there in it is compelling enough. This is supported by two things which raise it above its indie origins: performance and mise en scene.

The performances in this piece are set like gems in metal. There is nothing acting school or awkward about them. At the centre Britt Marling (co-writer of the screenplay and destined for greatness in indieville and probably in a higher profile realm as well) has an intimidating confidence which when challenged, though it betrays strain, returns fire. She is a golden idol with a voice that would probably feel amplified in person. She makes Maggie a quietly terrifying figure, using her natural beauty as a kind of carrier wave.

The elements of the frame, particularly in Maggie's house are put to curious effect being (by tight framing on characters) almost breathlessly intimate but also warm and parental. This is not claustrophobic but comforting. I mean to the viewer; bugger the cult members. It is very easy to imagine the opioid fall into trust and surrender here.

My ideas for independent cinema were informed by the force that guided my generation's culture: punk. Under that aesthetic the more ragged the better as long as sincerity was maintained. This made for over a decade of tatty good intentions among which were small handfuls of treasure. But with video technology that looks richer than the celluloid that felt the light of Liquid Sky or Down by Law the game has both changed (because of the quality it reaches) and developed on its own line (like the French New Wave and the affordable Arriflex cameras and gleeful use of non standard film formats). And with an 85 minute running time and others like Martha Marcy May Marlene's 102 minutes, could we be seeing a return to a Goldilocks era of just right films from an indie scene that now provides a sheen as marketable as its multimillion dollar big business cousin? Hope so.

I missed Sound of My Voice at the cinema because I only heard about it after its run had finished. Like Martha .. I wish I had seen it in the dark with an audience. As good as was the blu-ray that I watched it on this is another that would feel best seen with the minds of nearby strangers. See also Beasts of the Southern Wild, Safety Not Guaranteed and Robot and Frank. Things are looking up again and they're happening at a cinema near you. At least that's what it feels like. And for the moment that might well be good enough.