Top ten 21022013

Ghost World: For offering an almost completely different story to the source material that fitted perfectly into the world of the original with the characters achingly well realised. A great adaptation.

Eraserhead: Recently watched the new blu-ray of this. I doesn't matter that I know every industrial thump or nameless screech on the soundtrack, every one of its small basket of dialogue lines, every shot, this is still my favourite film.

Crumb: Documentary that transcends its character study to embrace the dark psychological swell of its subject's family. Seldom has the gap between a perceived artist and the art been so intimidatingly closed.

Tintin and I: Story of Herge whose chief creation grew and learned with him but who left the most troubling real world demons far from the pages of his comics. Central material is an audio interview which founds an archival treasure house. Might but never feels padded.

My Winnipeg: Guy Maddin's personal history of his hometown contains all the now+then look of his best work but adds his own voice to it telling a tale both factual and absurdist in a mesmerising continual montage. At once familiar and alien. He's made more spectacular fare but this is my favourite.

 



Johnny Guitar: Never quite worked out my lifelong antipathy to westerns but it still takes a lot to drag me in front of one. There's a gothic element to this that leads me to my seat like an old fashioned usher. I'm meant to revel in the hysteria and gender politics of it but that initial note is what I always remember.

Happiness: The apex of Todd Solondz' output, containing everything he was good at in just the right serves. While he hasn't gone all Neil La Bute on us the conceit of all that's come since seems more important than the themes it serves. But this is magnificence.

In the Company of Men: One of the most confronting explorations of the male psyche I've ever seen in fiction. Good thing he didn't go all Todd Solondz on us but his output since has been suprisingly goofy. But this is magnificence.

King of Comedy: When Marty walked the earth he made this extraordinary piece about the culture of fame. Given some thought, De Niro's unselfconscious central character manages to be more terrifying than both Travis and Jake before him. Some of the behaviour in these scenes is so torturously cringing you'd think Dostoyevsky had penned them.

 
Kairo: An apocalypse of loneliness that haunts me to this day. Still my favourite Kyoshi Kurosawa film even though everyone else who knows about him always loudly prefers the earlier Cure.

Fallen II: five more directors I no longer follow

Tim Burton: Pee Wee Herman? Yessiree. Beeltejuice? ... ok. Edward Scissorhands? Oh yes. Ed Wood? Bloody hell, yes! Sleepy Hollow? Looks nice. Anything else? Everything else. It took a few outings to take Tim Burton from promise to visually talented hack to directionless style-loop. The rot for me is there in Beetlejuice as soon as it gets cute. No, not the football team at the end doing Banana Boat Song. That is cringey enough. No, the bit in Limbo when Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis have to show how scary they can look and distort their faces into goofy joke shop masks which even in a comedy should have been stronger images. That almost ruined it for me. Casting Michael Keaton as Batman was a good idea because he was a superhero who visibly thought. But to me that was being fifteen all over again and wondering at the rust on the spaceships in Star Wars only to have to live through the rest of it right up until the cute awww bit when Chewbacca roars at the medal ceremony (only fifteen but cringed). I don't think Burton has lost any of the talent he had at the beginning but there's only so much apparent lack of self-awareness on the emperor's part that I can take. You're starkers, Tim. Get inside!

Hal Hartley: Having recently taken delighted delivery of the new blu-ray of Trust and had a good success showing The Unbelievable Truth and Henry Fool at Shadows, I wonder at my own choice here. But Hartley must make this list as the only films of his I've been interested enough to pursue sight of since the noughties have been exceptions in an increasingly meagre field. No Such Thing commits suicide half way through and Fay Grim plays like an apology for Amateur. But there's a problem with Hal Hartley as a stylist. It's the kind of problem I'll usually refer to as one of fairweather cultists who lose their champions as quickly as assume them. Hartley's style of deadpan delivery and brainy one-liners and well orchestrated quirk ran for his early features enough that his fans wanted more and awaited any development of the style they so loved. When Hartley gave them the latter in Amateur and Flirt they kicked him into the oubliette and left him there. They liked his newness but wanted it to stay the same. I'll have to sheepishly put my hand up to doing this very thing with this filmmaker and chide myself for being both fanlike and shallow. But, Mum, every time he tries something new, it's crap!

Peter Greenaway: The Draughtsman's Contract knocked us all for a six by looking like a costume drama and acting like the Glass Bead Game. And it only got tastier with Zed and Two Noughts. After a very few more titles appeared that showed different stories with the exact same obsessive approach we settled in comfortably and put him in the auteur box. Arthouse retrospectives of his earlier works like Revolution and The Falls only cemented this. After falling a little into disuse he was able to come back with succcesses de scandale like The Cook The Thief His Wife and her Lover and The Baby of Macon, all splendid with the same grand canvas tableaux methods he put on all the others. So, what went wrong? It's hard to say beyond simply stating that I got bored with it. I'm one who likes to see a defiantly obsessive artist at work, having championed even Bela Tarr's seven hour epic Satantango which is stylistically identical to everything else he's done or David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE which proved indigestible even for fans. So why single out Greenaway whose skills at doing what he does well seem in no ill health? Dunno. Just doesn't grab me anymore. The point I think this occured was the Pillow Book. I think...

Atom Egoyan: A friend back in the early 90s handed me a vhs copy of Next of Kin an extraordinary tale of a withdrawn youth who escapes from a small family frozen in therapy and into a world of explosive emotions and open dysfunction in an Armenian family also in Toronto. He has infiltrated them by pretending to be the long lost son and brother they sought through a personal ad. He, Peter, is all Canadian English and doesn't resemble his assumptive parents or sister in the slightest but he is such a calming and appealing presence that they quickly accept him. A lot of this is recorded with his video camera.

Roll on Family Viewing (which did the mix sitcom laugh track with serious dialogue years before Oliver Stone did it in Natural Born Killers), Speaking Parts, The Adjuster and Exotica. All strong, fresh, penetrating and disturbing outings which pointed to what appeared to be an effortlessly auteurist director. Then came The Sweet Hereafter which, despite strong themes of parental guilt, incest and liability for a mass fatality, could not reach a peak nor conclude convincingly. Felicia's Journey similarly let serial murder and an Irish woman's guilt over her decision to abort turn into something soggy and unengaging. All have had great moments but these have been features in a barely textured landscape. By the time of Where the Truth Lies I gave up, defeated by the conventionality that fairly smothered the Egoyanian ethical minefields of the early material. It was plausible where Next of Kin was preposterous but Next of Kin remains the better film. I would have to check the imdb to tell you what he's done since and have no idea if he's still making films.

Woody Allen: Ok, I'll admit this is like pointing at a barn door. Allen has had so many falsely-called returns to form recently that it's a wonder anyone still recognises him in the street (assuming they do). That "recently" by the way covers the lion's share of almost three decades. I may as well admit here that the concept of a return to form is something that has fallen from my sensibility when it comes to film directors. It has gone from being a respectful smile of a phrase to a shrieking Pollyannaish grimace. Woody Allen is a good case for dropping the phrase for everyone else for evermore.

But there's also something strange going on here. While I have winced through the labour or frowned at the slightness of Allen's offerings from the mid 80s onward I have wondered if I am witnessing a fall from grace or if it is I who have changed and now can no more ingest a Woody Allen film than tuck into a teething rusk.

In 2011 while planning the program for what was to be the final spring season of Shadows I sought out Annie Hall on dvd. I couldn't find a copy to save my life so I hired a swag of 70s Allen movies from the local vid shop and tried them out to find a substitute. Big mistake. The one title I had been calling immutably funny, the indestructible gem was Bananas. I put that in and stopped it after twenty minutes due to cringe. I had either cleared my memory of the laboured gags and strained wit or they just no longer appealed to me. See also Manhattan. Nothing. I stopped it before the hour mark. The ABC played Sleeper. I watched to the end but without enthusiasm. A later purchase of Annie Hall on blu-ray turned this around. It's a great piece of work.

I do have a lingering fondness for Stardust Memories as it entered more serious territory to strong effect and the wit when it appeared felt deadly. This is the film where the phrase "earlier, funnier films" comes from which is now used for anyone whose output has altered over time from Spielberg to Cronenberg. I won't look for a copy of Stardust Memories, though, the ones I have will do fine.

PS -- forgot to add before: Stardust Memories was touted at the time by Allen himself as his last film. That was in 1980. When Ellem Klimov said the same after Come and See and Bela Tarr after The Turin Horse they meant it.

Review: SAUNA

Flowing crystal water. It's somewhere cold. Just as that thought is occuring the water turns red. a bundled animal skin bag rides the flow down to a branch sticking out from the water and lodges there. Parchment sheets lift in the wind. One tears free and is lifted by a human hand. It is covered in a mess of scrawl. The letters are blood red. One of the inscriptions reads: Can we be forgiven?

A candlelit cottage. It could be today or five hundred years ago. A bald man in a formless coat is stabbing a man to death on the floor. Another much younger man comes in and watches in horror. Fade to black.

A meeting at a campsite between the two men we've just seen and a group of military looking Russians. The younger man from the previous scene is a cartographer. After decades of warfare Russia and Sweden have called a truce and it's time to draw a new border. Everywhere. Where they are is a huge silvery swamp where it seems that no human has ever lived. The line needs drawing. Off they go.

The swamp seems like a life-free intensification of the wasteland around it and as the party moves through it they seem to be retreating irrevocably from the world beyond it, the one they soldiered in, the one they were born into. And at the centre of the swamp there is a building set into a dirty pond. The construction is almost featureless, a large white concrete box, but for a lightless doorway with a flash of what looks like fire damage extending from one of its corners. And then, really only a few metres from this unsettling thing there is a village peopled but for one member by folk over fifty years old. I said almost: the sole person under middle age is a child of around ten, a boy who is curious to learn about the newcomers. A tour of a kind of hospital area reveals a number of people at such an advanced state of living decay it is a wonder that they still live. And then comes the real creeper: they are afraid to live, a guide explains, and afraid to die.

I'll stop with the plot details here as I'm approaching spoiler territory but I thought it was necessary to include this build up because one of this film's strengths is its atmosphere. As I've said heaps o' times on this blog give me atmosphere and you can keep your plot. Sauna is all Stalker and Satantango, the world it lives in feels like it was grown within it, its colours paid for by the pixel. Once in there we exist there. I'm happy.

"So, does that mean there's only atmosphere, that I, Lady Mondegreen of  forty-one Thuglett Avenue Dorchamstogue, must endure style o'er substance?" I hear you ask.  Well, this is where it gets interesting. I invoked the feel of some glacial cinema above, the work of cinemasters whose films do not resemble anything but their own imitators (as in this film, in fact), who build their own worlds. Now add to this a more conventional sense of narrative motive and flow and you have Sauna. Continuing the fun but ultimately unhelpful strain of comparison you could get away with saying that this is the film John Carpenter might have made after seeing Stalker. And in a way wholly distinct from the compacted vehicle Stephen Soderberg made of Solaris. Sauna feels like Andrei Rublev but plays like Prince of Darkness.

This is not a perfect system, though, much as I'd like it to be. Some of the pacing of this already sub-ninety minute feature is not high Tarkovsky but low Carpenter. These slumps are small and very few but they are noticeable and can lessen the power of crucial scenes and that all important atmosphere.

And then there's the score. The music here begins with a kind of icy string section turning the temperature down. This all too soon degenerates into a by-the-numbers strings =  emotion vat of treacle. As I was thinking of Tarkovsky when I saw it I remembered how unsettling, eerie and quietly powerful was his use of Scandinavian folk song appearing in the audio distance. There is an extraordinary scene early on involving a figure in a landscape which carries a great thematic and narrative weight which would have gone through me like x-rays had it not been for those first violins sawing away. In this layered cinema presentation age, couldn't we have an option to ditch the score? Well, we can and should. I'd dislike The Road a lot less and might be among its fans if I could click off that overblown orchestral blag telling me how I should be emoting. Anyway...

Sauna plays out with a satisfying darkness that doesn't let its strong beginnings down in the slightest. It is derivative from the roots upward but uses rather than merely displays its influences, finding its own voice and colour as it weaves. I love films that defy easy categorisation. Suicide Circle, Hierro, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Juliet of the Spirits, Werckmeister Harmonies and so wider and so wider .... All of these (and there are so many more) only need stumble upon some path fresh or antique and overgrown to find something enticing to bring back. Sauna, hampered though it is by the stasis between two contrary traditions, has at least caught sight of such a path.

PS - seen on DVD as no local release outside of MIFF 2009.

The Fallen: some musings on directors I no longer follow

 

Sometime in the last twenty years I phased out fandom and replaced it with a more incidental enthusiasm. This meant that fewer and fewer names appealed to me as essential among the musicians and filmmakers I'd once called heroes. This is not just a list but a series of suggestions as to why and when some of them have fallen off the roll. Here are the first five I thought of. More to follow, over...

Martin Scorsese: I first saw Taxi driver from the halfway mark on a Steenbeck editing desk at Griffith University. The picture was smaller than a tv screen but I forgot all about that as I was abosrbed and joined its biocine nervous system. Saw Raging Bull not long after. Same place but on a larger tv. Same. And on .... The only one in the eighties I didn't see was The Colour of Money. Still haven't. Then came the brilliantly ok Cape Fear and then Age of Innocence. I'm aware of its subtleties but it just looked like a Merchant Ivory cover version. Casino? Goodfellas II What was the point? It was telling when Marty appeared briefly in the pilot episode of The Sopranos and Chris calls out to him: "Hey, I loved Kundun." A mafioso loved Kundun. Yes, an intentional joke.

I persisted until The Aviator and then gave up. Has  Martin Scorsese, once the try-anything whizz-kid with an encyclopedia of cinema in his brain, finally been outrun by the filmmakers o' today? Not that they are too modern or even post-modern (he's already beaten the futurists of nostalgia by decades) he just seems to have taken Babylon's shilling and promised to make inoffensive movies until he lies below what he was grazing on. Purely subjectively, it seems to me that he has opted for comfort o'er individual force. Can't blame him but does he have to keep churning out greatness-corroding mediocrity?

Jean Luc Godard: Was it the cigar like strength and chocolatey flavour of those Gauloise cigarettes I used to smoke after becoming a Godard fan? Or was it poncey affectation? History will decide but I'll nominate both. Godard is great and it's fun to be an affected lattelectual in your late teens (unforgivable in later decades but a hoot at the time). Godard's 60s output still inspires me. I can happily sit in front of anti-narratives like Wind from the East or La Chinoise as readily as I can the "earlier funnier" ones. Whenever I see something more recent it's not hard to find the point in it or just sit back and enjoy what has caught his aesthete's eye. But these almost always leave me flat and unaffected. His lessons and declarations have stayed with me and to this day I do not begin from the assumption that cinema needs to tick all the classic narrative boxes to be engaging or effective. Unlike Marty, Jean Luc has not changed his method much (he certainly hasn't become bland) but maybe what I want from him has.

John Carpenter: The run from Dark Star to They Live is an almost unbroken trail of imaginative power. Then it weakens progressively until his latest (The Ward) seems to lose breath while getting up to move. Although he has had some courtship with the major labels it doesn't seem to have got him into any A-lists. You get the feeling that he still has to struggle to get movies made. So why not  keep making things as sharp and tight as he used to if they are that difficult to get flying? Why not stop altogether? Does he think The Ward has any of the power of Halloween? I don't know what happened here but something did. Now I don't care that much if I hear of a new JC flicker and that bothers me.

Dario Argento: Nothing since Stendahl Syndrome has interested me (but that one really did!) and the latest one (Giallo) was a poor self cover version. Having begun so stridently individualistic with Bird With the Crystal Plumage he made a chain of horrors and thrillers of such greatness that any one of them could secure him cineimmortality. But then in the 80s it sogs down to routine and what used to be generous running times become interminable drags as the over obvious conclusions approach with great honking fanfares. My take is that he has lost touch with the trust he seems to have begun with which allowed him to go with narrative nonsequiturs the way that people having nightmares do. The worst and most tiresome scene in Suspiria is the one with the explanations. Now whole movies are like those scenes. Dario, we don't need to know.

The Coens: The poster for Blood Simple called it: The thriller is alive and well and living in Texas. That excited me at the time as it smacked of a kind of punky cinephilia. The movie didn't disappoint. It was both cheekily noir and resolutely modern. I stuck to them thereafter, seeing pretty much everything at the cinema. Until Hudsucker Proxy. I did see that at the cinema but it left me so flat that I couldn't say a single good thing about it. It made me think of all the ones I'd seen before it and I found a lot of style and energy but more pastiche and homage. From then I decided that I liked roughly every other one but as they appeared not even this limitation fit and I had to admit to myself that I generally didn't care about them as filmmakers. There are exceptions to this. They are exceptions. And it's not as though it's a about a few missteps. I can see the hands that made Blood Simple, Fargo and Barton Fink  clearly in dreck like Intolerable Cruelty, Burn After Reading or The Ladykillers remake. They are as much Coen movies as the good ones. I was left unimpressed by No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski and I actively hated The Hudsucker Proxy. Maybe it's the exceptions that I do like.

Top 10 11/02/2013

Timecrimes: You're caught in a time loop. Can you think fast enough to cope with it (let alone correct mistakes you've probably already made)? Would you have the discipline to calmly wait until everything caught up and you rejoined yourself when the anxiety about that not happening would be so overpowering? This drags you into some brain hurting whirlpools of of the mind and barely a breath's worth of respite to gather your thoughts (there's a reason for that, of course ;)  Being remade in American. As with Rec, see it in the original Spanish first and only and you'll do ok.  This would have been a SHADOWS selection. for sure.

Eraserhead: Best movie ever.

 Shadow of a Doubt: Hitch in Norman Rockwell country. Joseph Cotton's urbane Uncle Charlie grows increasingly sinister as his namesake niece begins to see through the smoothness and finds darkness. I can forgive the abrupt ending for the real gaze at a teenager's rising disenchantment at the centre of the film. But growing up has seldom been so unsettlingly stylish.

Queimada/Burn: Genuinely Marxist film of a slave revolt in the Carribean might have been very wrong but manages to stay focussed, engaging and powerful all the way through. Brando in his second heyday reigns in the method to offer Sir William Walker, a pragmatic hammer for hire with aristocratic reserve and clear intelligence. Against him, Jose Delores (Evaristo Marquez) is fierce but also aware of the lessons Walker's initial tutelage has left him. Fresh from The Battle of Algiers Gillo Pontecorvo once again proves that committed political cinema doesn't have to be dry. No chance of that anyway when you have Morricone's most glorious film score to that point in time.

Seconds: Second-chance fable with a Twilight Zone feel is part of the roll John Frankenheimer found himself on when he jumped ship from tv to the big screen. Contemporary insiders and current audiences will find a spooky harmonic ringing through as Rock Hudson's double life as a public hunky leading man and private gay man is given a veiled airing. Star lensman James Wong Howe throws everything he has at the screen including a stunning fisheye opening sequence and unsettling almost Lynchian pov tracking shot through a train station. Hard to locate a copy of this so jump on it if you see it second hand or auctioned.

Spirit of the Beehive: Painterly look is so gorgeous it's easy to miss the oceanic depth of this tale of growing up and witnessing reality uncloak itself in the warmth of childhood's fancy. The five year old Ana Torrent compels the viewer. Her dialogue is sparse but her physical acting is strong and emotive. She is our centre as we look at a family disturbingly drifting from each other as the unackowledged spectre of Franco floats above every scene. When the effect of the latter manifests is it devastating. Manages to be about childhood without ever being sentimental.

Diary: Screen grief never felt so authentic because it never felt so personal. And yet this story is told as a kind of grimy fantasy. At one point the cripplingly obsessed Winnie seems to shrink as a small black cloud oozes with slow certain threat into her living room. And once we see this gruelling portrait of pain the film starts again with a new title sequence and we learn what appears to be the real story. Made by the wonderful Thai/Hong Kong Pang brothers who have enthralled their audiences with genre bending pieces like The Eye and Ab-Normal Beauty, Diary feels like an Asian horror but progresses to the same territory as Bergman or Kieslowsky without straying from its own aesthetic. Imagine Fatal Attraction as remade by David Cronenberg and without the Hollywood ending.

Matador: Almodovar's melodramas and campy comedies have always diverted me but when I saw this hymn of hate for the Franco legacy I rewrote my impression of him completely. This multi-stranded thriller of guilt and a kind of maniacal necrophilia transcends the tone that those words would suggest and springs into it's own film and further consolidated Almodovar's authorial reputation at this early stage without affecting his comedies or later melodramas. Seldom has the facade of social respectability felt so nauseatingly and contempuously false.

Come and See: With about ten percent of the violence of Saving Private Ryan this film does many times more than the Spielberg film could hope to by keeping the same distance from the action as we might be watching it really happen remotely. Alexsey Kravchenko as Florya is still a teenager at the end of the film but his experiences have aged him to what looks like over a hundred. The final showdown between him and a picture of Hitler is unlike anything you've seen in a war movie before or since. Terrifying and mesmerising. My favourite war film. Ever.

Arsenic and Old Lace: Bloody funny and almost too fast and feverish even for a black comedy this is best enjoyed going in calm as it takes a few steps too many to heat up but when it does it takes the credit sequence to stop it. A great ensemble cast conducted with a hand a little too close to chaos this wartime Halloween comedy from Frank Capra won't let even Cary Grant's attempt to cute it up get in his way as he plunges into a corridor between reality and image and lets every element he can find collide.

Review: GRAPHIC NOVELS! MELBOURNE!

Disclosure: I create comics and have had a shimmery involvement with the indy Melbourne comics scene since the late 1990s. I know some of the team behind this film and am acquainted with almost everybody on screen (ok not the crowd scenes but then again ....).

Bernard Caleo is our tour guide. Not only a fan of the form and its local living patron saint, he also produces his own comics AND is currently working on a long form comics narrative of his own. As clarity begins in Rome he has avoided conflict here and elected to focus on four figures from the Melbourne scene to talk about their life, art and books. Along the way we pick up much about the local scene but also about what it is to work in this form.

Right, so a bunch of talking heads in a figurative circle jerk, then. Well, no. Directors Caleo and Daniel Hayward have clearly thought about this. There is a lot of talk. There has to be. This is neither sport nor concepts so weighty that they must be all talk (eg politics or environment) but here there must be more and is.

Straight up we get photography morphing into comic drawing as the principal subjects and interviewees are introduced. This happens throughout has more functionality than its gimmickry would suggest. The moments of comparison of real scene to drawn panel from Bruce Mutard's The Sacrifice tell of real industry in the artist's approach. Not only do the drawings look like their inspiration they are clearly interpreted rather than traced. The difference is the artist.

The artists are interviewed in their workspaces also relieves the talk as our eyes roam the walls of the studios blutac-ed to the last millimetre with pictures. There is no difficulty taking in the flow of the relaxed conversation while also absorbing the sketches, first tries, notes and one-offs. I just characterised the talk as feeling on the easy side but in fact the tenor of the questions allows for a lot of autobiography and the sight of clear lines of convergence. Showing the artists drawing lines is a must and also included here.

Bruce Mutard's scripting and scene sourcing are fascinating. Nicki Greenberg's tale of the conception and execution of her Great Gatsby adaptation is compelling and instructive (she toiled away knowing that her complicated and taxing efforts might well be supressed and rendered null by the Fitzgerald estate). Mandy Ord's development around rather than through the traditional comics upbringing (ie Footrot Flats rather than superheroes) provides a refreshing prespective. Pat Grant's first hand account of the Cronulla riots and subsequent observations about his own culture render his book Blue inevitable rather than creative.

We meet these people. There were a lot of fellow practitioners in the audience of this screening and their thoughts were all but audible: why wasn't I asked? I've been working on what is perhaps the finest rival-anihilating work of sequential graphic narrative on the face of the earth and it all its history and prehistorical period. Yes it is I who will genuinely lead this despis-ed form from the captivity of general spite through the wastes of indifference to the land of milk, honey and collegiate worship that shall after all be my promised and deserv-ed land. Ok, that was just me thinking that but the question was asked and answered well by Bernard in the Q&A. Limiting the coverage to four artists allowed more depth and focus. I'll take that one step further and add that these four are of such easily distinguishable individuality that it is impossible to confuse them. The sense that if there is a comics community in Melbourne it doesn't suffer from the conformity of the clique.

But the clarity and flow don't last all the way through. The film shifts gear to cover the Caravan of Comics tour by a number of Melbourne-based comics artists to The U.S. and Canada. As the crew (which includes two of the four we've been following) move through various conventions and public events talking and selling Melbourne comics we are dropped into home video shaky cam and Blair Witch editing and what now feels like too many interviews which involve too much similarity to each other. This does pick up and we get back to a smoother surface but it feels busy rather than expanding and when it appeared my first thought was: what's that doing here? Relevant as it is it jarred.

While I was easily engaged by the profiles of the four principals I was less taken at some points. I know Bruce Mutard and admire his work and I know that his moving house after decades in the same situation was a major life point, the footage of it, as a viewer of a documentary, made me wonder what the time was.

While Bernard, who at comics events can incite large groups of friends and strangers alike to shout themselves hoarse cheering like Her Majesty's 39th Bristol Fusiliers, starts too stagey he does take his presentation down to acceptable cinematic levels. His effortless enthusiasm is infectious and provides a current of constant energy whenever he is on screen or driving what's happening there. Less so is the occasional hasty edit between soundbites, particularly early on which can feel breathless rather than energetic.

That aside, I can happily inform you that this film made me want to draw and write comics. It made me edgy to do so and indeed when I got home I fired up the ol' Cintiq and sketched out two pages of part 3 of Fibula that were giving me trouble. Last time anything like that happened was after I saw Crumb for the first time.

So, yes, worth the ticket and the choctop. I was expecting gluey video of a lot of backslapping. What I got was cinema.

Dislikes for Remakes

The Rum Diary: This attempt to squeeze the yet unformed Hunter S. Thompson's youthful reflections into the crowded room of his more famous ones seemed like an attempt by Bruce Robinson to reclaim the triumph of his glory in chief, Withnail and I. The reason that worked and this doesn't is that the earlier film had the sting of autobiography whereas this is a mishandling of someone else's. Anytime something serious or intriguing happens something goofy falls arse backwards on to the stage with a big sheepish grin. The balance is wrong and no one wins.

Instead of a Martial riffing on the fall of Rome how about a bloody minded Seneca coolly observing a dodgy patrician at the rise of the Cold War empire? All the makings are there and Aaron Eckhart makes a great greedy lizard-of-influence. Play it well and there's plenty of room for Thompson's daggers and foolery. Terry Gilliam has already shown how even as evenhanded a depiction as Fear and Loathing (seriously, look again if you don't believe me) can allow Thompson's anger through and still serve cinema. Plus, he still has to struggle to make his movies, and can still make great ones. I'd see it.

The Road: Mostly good and faithful to the novel but it so cornily overplays the religious imagery that it shames the source's own deflatingly disappointing theism. Then again, it's not much of a stretch to read the novel's relgious passages (and there aren't many obvious ones) ironically to show that even at the end of the world humans can still be so nightmarishly dependent on mythology. The film really only needs an edit, IMHO, as most of it works well. Oh, and ditch the giant Hollywood music score that threatens a Michael Bay moment every ten minutes or so. Remove it or replace it with something sourced from the environment of the film. The big orchestral swell is like a subtitle saying YOUSE ARE SO STUPID YUZ WOULDN'T KNOW THIS IS DRAMATIC OTHERWISE!

What's Eating Gilbert Grape? The title alone might have done it but the director credit of Lasse Hallstrom sealed it. This really could have been interesting with a young Johnny Depp coping with being at the centre of a rambling mess of a family, a messy Graduate style affair and the seductive prospects of a young Juliet Lewis while she still had a career. And then there was the real wow of seeing the then unknown Leonardo DiCaprio who seemed at first look to really be a boy with something like cerebral palsy. But nothing works. For stretches there is a creditable tale of Gilbert learning to take control of his life and follow his own inklings while still coping with his responsibilities. But this is too frequently interrupted by crises so thunderously played and sudden that you can smell the glue of the old scotchtape used for their inclusion into the screenplay. This film made me think that if My Life as a Dog had been in English and set in the U.S. I would have winced at it as much as I did here.

Remake as magical realist as you want but do it with an eye to the narrative timeline that will allow your audiences to care about the crises when they happen. Let the newly conventional Sion Sonno make this in Japan. He will find things in the treacley warmth that will rightly chill your central nervous system ... and turn this bowl of porridge into an adventurous eel miso.

Also, recalling this movie brought to mind other Depp vehicles from the time: Don Juan de Marco, Arizona Dream, Benny and Joon (which almost made it into this list and might well into the next), Sleepy Hollow ..... And that's not counting all the suspected horrors I avoided at the time like Chocolat or The Man Who Cried. He's an impressive screen presence, Johnny Depp but god he's made some rubbish.

The Stunt Man: A tale of cinema and cynicism unfolds as a fugitive runs into the protection of a film production making a war movie. Everyone's favourite Charlie Manson, Steve Railsback, as the runaway is almost immediately pitted agin the might of the director, Peter O'Toole who wields an icreasingly tyrannical power o'er all beneath him. This falls from an enticing premise quite quickly into such ponderous self importance that it becomes impossible to take seriously. Who will win the war of wills? Who will be left to care? You know those people who laugh so much at their own jokes that they put you off joining in? This movie is like that.

But since it does have some good points and is only ruined by the execution it might be yet another candidate for a found footage/faux docco style that can actually justify itself. Get Michael Winterbottom on the phone. He'd work it.

Man on the Moon: Milos Foreman, who took Amadeus from a strong theatre piece and made a huge sprawling epic that yet remembered it was at heart a simple fable here trowels on a string of scenes from the life of a singular comedian like any biopic you could stumble on between the ads for phonesex and the paid religious hours. A little playing around with some of the points of Andy Kaufman ideas including an end that can't quite work out if it's buying into a myth or just displaying it. Jim Carrey provides a turn that feels like an actor's exercise. People from Kaufman's life appear both as themselves and as other characters. All fine and dandy but it feels too smug. It just doesn't go far enough. Want to really serve the idea of an Andy Kaufman? Make a real documentary and invade it with such smooth falsehood that it will be impossible to tell fact from myth. Then invite the audience to debate it online and seed that with trolls. Director? Who cares? Find someone on Youtube. Actually, put it exclusively on Youtube. Done!