THE PARALLAX VIEW @ 50

A political assassination. A committee who look like angels of death declare it to be free of conspiracy. We already know better, having seen the professional looking choreography in the opening scene. Three years later, Lee Carter, journalist and witness to the crime visits fellow reporter Joe Frady (also at the assassination) in fear for her life. She shows Frady the list of high profile attendees who have since met violent deaths. Frady dismisses it and sends her on her way. He's looking at her corpse on a slab in the morgue the next day. Begging an advance from his long suffering editor, he goes to a small town in pursuit of another figure under threat, finds him gone. A spoilable scene later and Frady is back on the road with a bundle of documents from an organisation that seems to be recruiting fall guys for political and industrial assassinations. The only way to get into this one is to ... get into it. It's going to be a dark trek.

Alan J. Pakula's paranoia thriller came just after Watergate and the assassinations of the '60s in the U.S. What might have otherwise come across as a tale of political sci-fi now appeared a plausible  scenario. As with his previous Klute, Pakula keeps the histrionics at arm's length and allows the horror of the situation to develop with a workaday pallet and performances that are stronger for their underplaying. By this, he created a genuinely unnerving image of an organisation for hire in quiet control of the government.

This needs good casting if it is to rise above the kind of adolescent conspiracy thinking it suggests and the film's coup was to put Warren Beatty at its centre. Beatty was not only very hot property by the early '70s as the hunque de jour of Hollywood, he was politically active and leaned left: easy on the eye and believable in the field. The star power and the checkout tabloid appeal could keep the most politically apathetic voter rivetted to the story. Beatty even got the character's profession changed from cop to reporter, however grimy the glamour upgrade might have been, it was a better fit. To his credit, Beatty does play this earnestly to the extent that the deeper he gets the more he resembles his cover story characters. The self-isolation he is heading for is clear midpoint and he begins shedding glamour by the scene.

This film is famous for the psyche test scene. Frady sends the creepy questionnaire into the Parallax Corporation and is summoned to their impressive space in a downtown office where he enters a viewing room with a single chair. There are sensors on the arms. A gentle male voice instructs him to sit, keep his hands on the sensors and watch the show. The lights go down and then we see what he is seeing. To call it a slideshow is to under sell it. The Parallax View psyche test is a nightmare of emotional coercion. A series of stills plays out with intertitles suggesting themes like love, mother, me, home, enemy and so on. This is played over a score that goes from the most wholesome country rock imaginable. But this starts changing, the titles and images stop matching, often taking on the opposite of their first iterations. A famous shot of a mother and son goes from the intended warmth to a disturbing smirk at a child's torment. The enemy might start with images of Hitler or Castro but it comes back as a superhero or a group of affectionate friends. If you had thought the written test was disturbing this show will have you white knuckled.

I have encountered a theory that Parallax are not looking for high emotion in the test results but the impassivity of  the truly dangerous. This is pretty scary and might still work but, considering the opening scenes of assassination and the chase of the perpetrator, the recruitment program might well have a built-in disposal system.

I mentioned the score just then and need to address it. Michael Small's music for The Parallax View is extraordinary. Two contrary motifs weave into each other. The first uses the major thirds and drops to a fourth of military or patriotic music like the bugle tune Taps or The Last Post. The second is a series of dissonant tight intervals played high on a piano keyboard. They have the troubling, unresolved feel of mystery movies. Small introduces both at once in the opening shot of the Congressional committee as the camera tracks closer to them. A pedal note or drone, if you will, holds as the second motif plinks above it. As the leader of the committee reads the final statement, French horns quietly begin the first motif but with a more sinister harmony in the lower strings. The two are woven effortlessly, patriotism and intrigue until, by the time the credits have run they feel like one piece of music. The remainder of the score allows for expansion but retains its character. At one moment the strings playing the dissonant motif threaten to turn into a hoedown but it's just a very brief signalling moment. At another, a sombre scene is filled with the patriotic motif where another composer of this era would have put something more jarring. By keeping in close touch with his material, Small maintains integrity with a film score many have sought to evoke but few come close. Small never bettered it.

As he had done with intrigue in Klute, Pakula brought the political thriller into the new decade and did so at a point where it's really only the differing technology that distinguishes it from recent cinema. John Frankenheimer's earlier Manchurian Candidate covered similar territory but it responded to paranoia in the system. The Parallax View plugs into the community's unease at finding itself at a time when the best were murdered and the worst celebrated while the crooked presided and a bad war seemed to go on forever. Parallax was a service and the question of who was using it remains unanswered. 

While we see the intimidating office complexes and feel our flesh creep at the recruiter Younger gently croon reassurance to his potentially explosive candidate, and the wowing deep focus shots of the finale, we also move through the look and feel of the everyday. Coppola had done this for organised crime with the Godfather, Friedkin for horror in The Exorcist, and Scorsese with Mean Streets, Sidney Lumet would manage it for broadcasting in Network despite a wildly over-literate screenplay. The decade by 1974 had already proved this approach appealed to a community who hungered for the truth of an experience at the cinema. This one gave them the heebie jeebies. It's still scary.

Viewing notes: I watched my Criterion blu-ray of this but the local release on Imprint is more affordable (and might well be the same transfer) with more extras.

FAIL SAFE @ 60

General Black wakes from another dream of bullfighters. He rises and prepares himself for a conference, tending to his sleeping children and having a conversation with his wife that goes from sleepy small talk to a serious plea for him to retire from military service. The conference stars an academic whose anti-communist fervour has led him to embrace the notion of a contained nuclear war. Meanwhile, some corporate visitors to a monitoring facility witness a near thing when a struggling airliner is temporarily misidentified as a Soviet weapon. Then, a few mishaps and perhaps one deliberate moment of international sabotage later, it's on and it's real. Bombers are sent to Moscow. They are beyond recall. If they can't be stopped, it's war, the kind of war that only needs a day or two to wipe out the only known life in the universe.

Fail Safe, at this distance, is often assumed to be the grim older brother of Dr Strangelove. However, this is down to the times. Cold War tensions were at frightening levels in the early '60s and the two novels that served as the source for the two films might have treated the subject differently but both played to the fear of annihilation. The better known Kubrick film is regarded as a satire classic. Fail Safe is better known as a title than a whole film and that's a pity as the pair are worth companionship in your cinematic consciousness. I won't be doing too much comparison here (best left for when I cover Strangelove) but a significant difference is worth a mention.

The heart of the problem in Strangelove is human. General Jack D. Ripper has a very personal reason for sending the nukes to Russia. The more sober Fail Safe also comments on human folly but expresses it with a look at advanced technology run by brains that haven't caught up to it. The tech on display in Fail Safe is by and large imagined (Kubrick's gets as close to reality as he can) but that means it can look a lot more effective and functional than the available hardware. Dialogue about practical tactics using technology in this film take it into the realm of science fiction which adds a sting. Add to that the warmth of the likes of Henry Fonda's unnamed president and what might have been a stark and unwatchable two hours becomes compelling.

Also, Sidney Lumet. Lumet had form in off-Broadway theatre as well as the fruitful years of tv in the '50s when some pretty chewy social drama was being fashioned. By the time of his cinema debut with 12 Angry Men, he could bring a natural way with actors and a familiarity with the tightness of television shooting whereby close ups on faces are crucial and the blocking is tighter than the most choreographed play. Here he makes the breathless control rooms look by turns as wide as landscapes or as close as broom closets. When the president and his translator are in the tiny room with the big phone, moving toward decisions that will affect life on the planet, their faces can fill the wide frame to a the extent that the close ups are outright rude. The sense is urgency. Lumet had, by this film, an already intimidating rap sheet as a movie maker. 

Lumet is one of the greats who never gets picked out as an auteur the way that even a tv-starting contemporary like John Frankenheimer does. However, if your tastes run to post-war Hollywood through to the end of the century, your favourites will include a few of his titles. He was mainly known for the commitment to tough stories and, as with Fail Safe, his skill at rendering them palatable. When the irony stretches to breaking and the operators in the control room cheer at the destruction of their own war machines we are surprised to share their relief (not a spoiler, btw, there is a lot more to come after that moment) and then agree with the dressing down given by their commander. The stakes are so high here that we have to grasp warmth even in the anger. Strangelove's joke about fighting in the War Room cannot work here. The collapse of control in the control room is left to us as though we are witnesses rather than audience members.

Henry Fonda's President is a fulfilment of casting. He brings a signature blend of down home hickory and gravitas that compels us to graspingly wish his increasingly futile earnestness would just crash through and the world around him would listen and comply. As the body temperature core of the film we want to be in that poley room with him and Larry Hagman when the phone call to the Kremlin gets terrifyingly plain. At the other end of the spectrum there is Walter Matthau's hawkish professor, a brash kill-em-all type with a dangerous confidence in the power of the doomsday weapons and an even more dangerous charisma that has won him popularity.

Lumet did not get the co-operation from the US military and had to improvise. The Vindicator bombers were an invention from the source novel. Rather than work around depicting B52s as Kubrick did, Lumet used footage of smaller range and capacity jets as well as fighters for the aircraft. One approach which shows the planes in negative is effectively eerie. A thought to no great depth will consider this, the refusal by the military to cooperate (echoed joltingly in an on screen disclaimer about the likelihood of the events' probability), to be testament to the closeness to reality: not to the hardware, though, to the thinking. That is what brings Fail Safe from a drama to the stranger territory of a documentary of the imagination.  

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH @ 60

Prince Prospero stops at a local village on the way to his castle. After a scene of verbal revolt from two of the villagers, he orders Francesca, daughter of one and wife of the other, to choose which should be put to death. She refuses. He orders the village burned, ostensibly due to signs that the Red Death plague is there, and he takes Francesca and the two men for his sport to the castle. If he can corrupt her to his avowed Satanic ways, all this might turn to his advantage as entertainment for the crowd of aristocrats he's invited over to wait out the plague in high style.

While Francesca is given the run of the place, her father and husband are locked up in the dungeon and the decadent frolics of the well-born who dance with seemingly interminable energy in a display of bright moving colour. Here happen some telescoping moments like the paedophilic Alfredo striking the dancer Esmerelda in front of Prospero's jester and more than a few allusions to Prospero's master Satan. And, hey, it's not a party without the Red Death himself, who'll be along later.

The Masque of the Red Death is Roger Corman's most complex and ambitious Poe adaptations and plays as the most grown up. Vincent Price's Prospero gives us a believable aristocrat, one eye on his administrative duties and the other on his pleasures. He's urbane and assured of his place but adolescently gleeful to share his Satanism as though it's his own personal discovery he can use to shock the straight world. When it comes to respecting persons, learning that a fellow noble has journeyed through infected territory, he has no problem thwanging the whole family with a crossbow. He might like the darkness and the chaos but he's no dummy.

Patrick Magee as Alfredo is a rounded sinister, expressing his lust for the dwarf dancer Esmerelda as arising from her resemblance to a child. He's a notch under Prospero in that his gleeful receipt of licence the situation gives him takes him beyond his aristocracy into the realm of the workaday depraved. Magee's seriousness in this is intentionally disturbing. The role of Hop Toad (oddly renamed from Hop Frog, another Poe story borrowed here) is taken by Skip Martin in a characteristically non-exploitative depiction. Corman was careful to distinguish characters' othering from offering it to his audiences. Here, we see a performer take to his character, seriously and skilfully. Hop Toad's and Alfredo's binding as characters adds a poignancy to this. 

Jane Asher came from formal theatrical training as well as child roles in British cinema and would have a fun '60s with significant and very cool film roles as well as being part of the Beatles' gangalang, partnering up with Paul. Here she breaks through the woodenness Corman often gave to his leading women by taking the central conflict of good and evil upon herself. Her avowed weapon against the ethical ravages of Prospero is that of hope, something he can scoff at but not fully vanquish. Her modesty at being seen in the bath by the prince is ingenuous enough to see him recoil a little from his own brashness. The worry on her face is confused and it gives the scene depth. She is Price's match in their every shared scene.

Hazel Court is a disruptive influence in the story as without Francesca, her Julia might have been the female lead. She is the humiliated and shunned consort of Prospero. Her anger is admitted but kept repressed until her attempt to escalate her position through ritual and its consequences which are horrifying. It's a performance that can evade memory, surrounded by such a cast, but she meets the complexity of her character's role industriously.

Corman's pallet is bright in the safety of the castle and mud and mist for the wastelands and villages. There is even less concession to realism in the mis en scene than in similar gothic fantasies like Fall of the House of Usher. The more human the vices and entitlement, the more colourful the look. This might be dismissed as old school pictorialism or cheap irony but there's a distinct sense that this itself is just dressing, that the genuine horror is that of the illusion of control that Prospero and his foppish hedonists exhibit. There is a clear sense of the nakedness beneath the finery that will be rendered unto dust. It's not the inevitability of this that bothers the film as much as attempts to intellectualise oneself out of it. 

Corman was notably pessimistic about humanity, declaring more than once that he though war to be the natural state of humanity. Prospero is not far from this, except for his overt Satanism (but this is explained as being less evil than intellectual), but Francesca is its opposite. She is not a Panglossian blind optimist, she acknowledges the delights of the court dances with them easily enough, but her note of hope survives the sensuality where shallow optimism would be eroded. Corman appears to be testing the worst of his excesses with this plain wish. He is sincere enough about it to push it forward at the expense of the audience-pleasing horror he was famous for.

This is the one horror tale that does not end in fire with the same stock shots re-sequenced yet again to show the flames of damnation licking at the hapless figures. The ending which tastes a little too much of cheese today, is a kind evocation of the final image of Bergman's Sixth Seal. but it's a serious proposition for all that. The mini conference of personified plagues walking in line through the waste ground suggests the inevitability of mortality but this is after we see the value of hope against its ravages. We can take home what we want from this but on the eve of Vietnam, the violence against the civil rights movement, assassinations that went beyond the one just before this production, and the ghost of politics future in Watergate. Is a walk on the moon balance enough for us? This time, Corman refuses to say, and his film is by far the better for it.

Currently available on Shudder.

THE PRODUCERS @ 55

Max Bialystock's days as a hot shot Broadway producer are long gone. These days, he seduces little old dowagers, puts on shows that flop off Broadway and pockets the difference. One day Leo the accountant comes to do the books and is bullied into getting creative with the numbers but realises that more could be made from a guaranteed flop than a hit, as long as the investment campaign was ambitious/crooked enough. Max flashes dollar signs and seduces Leo into partnership. At the end of a caffeinated slog they find the perfect flop, a romping musical called Springtime for Hitler. The fact that I just laughed when I typed that title is why this movie works today.

The basic story of its development was that Mel Brooks thought The Producers up as a Broadway show, then more realistically plotted it as a novel and then finally as a movie. More recently, it has become a Broadway show again which is a hit wherever it goes and in a magical realist turn became a second movie. This story holds fast through all of its incarnations and is never not funny. For me, though, nothing has outdone this 1968 film.

That has to do with writing that's sharp as a tack, bold ideas and characters that might almost play themselves were it not for the explosive talents on screen. Zero Mostel thunders as Max, using his girthy physicality and ear splitting bellow. He is a pirate of Manhattan, ruled by his senses and insatiable appetites. And this was the film that turned up and coming dramatic actor into the Gene Wilder of sudden screaming hysterics which served him for the rest of his career. That might seem to sell him short but the Gene Wilder persona gave him a passport to audiences who could not tire of his terrifying comic chops. This brought the darkness essential to the colourful Willy Wonka and got him through the cute pairings with Richard Pryor later in the '70s. Mostel and Wilder teamed up again for the American Film Theatre's Rhinoceros to great effect.

But no subsequent outing ever quite topped the opening of The Producers where the nebbish Leo is driven to inconsolable hysterics by the roaring bear of Max. Wilder takes Leo's breathless agony so close to breaking into fantasy that our own anxiety in the viewing of it has no recourse but to laugh even louder. There's a scene in You Can't Take it With You where Jimmy Stewart is explaining to Jean Arthur how his scream travels through his body, getting tighter and tighter until she's the one who screams. That's as close as I can get to a precedent to Wilder's megaton of panic. Nothing else in film comedy comes close. And this is before we get to its cause.

Zero Mostel's Max needs only seconds to understand how to play Leo. While it does take a lot f trial and error to turn it off, by the time he tries a smile and finds it effective you know he's sorted the deal with the accountant. There are two phases of this. First, he pleas with Leo to cook the books, tightening the tension until he moves right into Leo's ear and screams, "HELP!" And then the more extended seduction of the professional in the office and beyond it to greater Manhattan, infecting Leo with his moreish lust for the good life. It's hard to imagine why this twin assault of character realisations could work until you see it happen. It's in the experience itself which is why the opening twenty minutes of this film always feels fresh.

But then the gags keep coming. Kenneth Mars' Franz Liebkind, author of Springtime for Hitler, shows his ineptitude in concealing his loyalty to the crushed Nazi legacy. ("He's wearing a German helmet!" Leo scream-whispers to Max on seeing Franz for the first time.)  He knows he shouldn't be open about it in his adopted New York but the slightest of triggers take him right back to the Swastika beer steins. Can we still laugh at a joke Nazi? We have seen the neo version hook themselves on to protests about anything in the past few years, raising their profile as they lift their hands in the armpit inspection salute. Their public violence seems only to have been encouraged by the attention. However, Brooks knew well that few things are funnier in politics than powerless tyrants, the roaring mice of history. He's not defusing the gravity of Nazism, more saying, "Yeah, well who won?"

Roger De Bris is the flamboyant disaster of directors is played with glee by Christopher Hewitt. His personal assistant, Carmen Ghia (yes, just like the car), is more openly gay and this is the source of humour. De Bris enters his first scene in a tight fitting ball gown which he completes with a permy looking wig. The banter between the two is brittle camp, bitchy and intimidating. While we are clearly meant to identify with Max and Leo's discomfort, I feel that the portrayals survive well, not as definitive examples of gay men but two bound companions in the theatre world who know each other just a little too well, gay or not. What stereotyping there was in 1968 can be safely disposed of today. The scene will still be funny.

How about Ulla, then, the Swedish P.A. apparently hired from the yellow pages of the sex trade? Fresh out of Uni when my humour bypass was still in effect, this was a stumbling block for me. The point here is not that she's an archetypical dumb blonde but that Max's grasping response to his ill gotten wealth is to expose his pitiable vanity by all but buying a beautiful, young woman he doesn't even have to speak to. She's a trophy and, if that was ever a point of audience to Max empathy that moment is long past.

Where the creaks really show and persistently, though, is in the actor chosen by the team to play Hitler. He wanders in, expecting to audition for a hippy musical. After hours of show songs (delivered in a dizzying montage) Laurence St Dubois, or LSD, brings his band on to do something more up to date. The song is so good it could be a Doors parody, escalating from love power to, "hey world, you stink!" The problem is not the datedness of the music or even attitude; any Zillenial groover could do as much and in and add some tasty ambiguity. It's the reactions from the crew whose wide eyed gapes are shown in still shots (this also happens in the production scenes and I still don't quite get it). It's scarcely credible that theatre types in the Age of Aquarius would be so gobsmacked (of course, it's the imagined audience's response that's being evoked but still). Today, you might have someone make self harm a feature of the audition piece but then the further you go along that way the harder you'd have to work to bring it back to comedy.

The shocks work better when the curtain goes up and we see the opening number. This is still incredible, from the Nazi dancing, the Miss Pretzel and Miss Beer, the ship guns puffing off toward the audience to the big finish where the chorus line circles in formation as a  huge swastika. "Springtime for Hitler and Germany. Winter for Poland and France." The twist this leads to (no spoilers, I don't care how old it is) is a surprisingly relaxing one but then we get the real finale which carries us back to the opening punch.

Mel Brooks didn't always reach this standard afterwards. Everything that followed had its moments and Young Frankenstein approaches equity as a whole film. But if none of those other titles made it out of the gate The Producers would stand as a moment of genius whose electric punch of an opening is maintained continually and reinforced with charges of equal power right through to the risky success of actually showing the stage show and pushing it repeatedly. If it hadn't done that we might have seen it if we set the auld VCR for a 3a.m. appearance back when they did that. It bothers me that the more recent musical might block people from discovering this shorter, deeper and funnier original but I'm confident that any who do make the journey past will find its treasure.

Review: POOR THINGS

Godwin Baxter, in a way both Dr Frankenstein and his creature, lives in his London mansion surrounded by a herd of hybrid animals like a goose dog and a dog chicken. Also, present, and learning slightly by the day is Bella, a young woman resurrected to become both herself and her child (not spoiling how). Into this odd arrangement comes the spark of the first act in the form of Duncan Wederburn who spirits Bella away from her cloistered realm and into a kind of Grand Tour of Europe. If you're thinking fairytale keep thinking it but maybe ramp up the R rating to include scenes of a sexual nature, lots of them. Duncan is a kind of prince but he is a prince from magical realism so he has both educative intentions and the libido of a rabbit. But as we see Bella's enlightenment emerge in bursts and starts we can only count the scenes until all of this explodes.

Yorgos Lanthimos' apparent whimsy is a tightly woven tapestry. In a version of the world that stands somewhere between steampunk and Dr Seuss but has real cities like London or Lisbon in it, the master of Greek Weirdcore has pushed his already rich and strange vision into one that recalls Universal horror of the 30s (with fisheye lenses) and the startling colour of the touring scenes. That said, he's not just throwing everything he's already done at the screen. 

This feels as studied and deliberate as The Favourite with its Vermeer pallet and the switch between sex and violence between characters. As we travel with Bella through her self discovery, only peripherally aided by Duncan, Godwin (mostly referred to by her as God) and fellow travellers, we get a strong sense of Voltaire's story Candide in which an innocent is dealt blow after blow of learning experiences except that instead of the constant optimist Pangloss we get the raging narcissistic cynic. But Bella's development, from puerile ego driven by id toward wholeness, is textured and frequently worrisome.

This film lands on the shoulders of Emma Stone. She presents a convincing human monster with her emerging posh accent sounding nurtured rather than cultured and a halting walk that is somewhere between a wind-up toy and Elsa Lanchester's birdlike flitting in Bride of Frankenstein. Under her lengthening mane of void-black hair her bug eyes absorb universes. It's feat of performance, allowing her staggered speech development credibility to the point where the first few complete sentences feel weighted by danger as they are uttered, allowing us to both worry and marvel at her at once.

Mark Ruffalo struggles with his accent but so comically that it might as well be the results of his character's own affectations. His journey is toward entropy, disintegrating steadily and shows a similar commitment to Stone's (but hers blows everyone offscreen). Willem Dafoe, under stitches and prosthetics, yet delivers a decaying sagacity that doesn't quite understand the cruelty he has inflicted with his wonders. He adopts a soft Celtic burr which gives him a paternal presence with a creepy edge. Margaret Qualley's role is a brief one but she demonstrates a flair for silent comedy. Her Sanctuary partner Christopher Abbot has a lot less trouble with his accent than Ruffalo but his must be right for the sadistic Alfie to work. It's a hell of a cast.

Lanthimos is using a commissioned music score for the first time and it makes strong use of motif to suggest Bella's increasing sophistication as well as quirky stabs of instruments electronically detuning. Considering previous outings like the sourced cues in The Favourite, I wonder how heavily he leaned on Jerskin Fendrix.

This is one of those films where the auteur calling the shots has long been comfortable with his sense of adventure he no longer cares if it's boundary pushing or not as long as it works. It does tell a story in linear fashion but it will still sit wrong with a lot of people who might be expecting a quirk-fest or a star vehicle. It is a supercharged fable, continually entertaining but thought provoking and it is a hell of a way to end my cinema year with a bang. Like your flavours on the rich side? Get a ticket to this and don't wait for streaming; sit down in the dark with people you don't know and let it flow in.

Review: DREAM SCENARIO

Paul Matthews, a flubby, aging academic who has been promising the world and himself that he'll write that book, begins appearing in people's dreams. It could be a family member (like the first scene of the film) or a total stranger. He keeps getting accosted by people who tell him of the dreams but one detail is increasingly disturbing him: he just appears, playing no part, neither saving nor antagonising the dreamer. Even in other peoples' dreams, he's flavourless and ineffectual. At first, this turns into a benign fame. His students want selfies with him and an online publishing/advertising firm are very keen. But this is an extended fable and that fame must turn into infamy which it does, quickly and punitively.

The apparently effortless fame of the online world and the post-truth culture hauls Paul so swiftly that he has no time to adjust to it let alone use it to his advantage. Even when his relative innocence is tested the occasion is ruined with a kind of sexual whiplash. When this is followed by a moment of fury (unrelated) the shift happens. This is where it might have got sidetracked into settling for a cheap shot at cancel culture and stayed where it was (after all, those who seek to cancel him have nothing but hallucinated actions to base their condemnation). But the film's insistence on developing Paul's predicament and character mercifully take us well beyond this.

I thought of a few things while watching this film. The first is how much more eloquent the thoughts on the influence of dream states this tale is than Christopher Nolan's Inception. Where that movie really only ends up being a  multilevel labyrinth game, this feels more solid and consequential. I also kept thinking of the short satire Muskrat Fun for Everyone by Stan Dryer. This short fiction which appeared in Playboy begins as a man's curiosity over a shady personal ad leads him into eventual public execration despite his having done nothing he is accused of. The cancel culture notes here seem clever at first as the case against Paul is due entirely to acts others have dreamed, hallucinations. However, the jokes about getting him in line with the likes of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson are much funnier. The cancellation is just a tool here, not the basis of the story. That rests with Paul and his relation to the crazy world around him and his own lifelong acquiescence. (I also need to mention, here, the direct sourcing of an old piece of internet folklore.)

There are many riches of contemporary satire on display here like the company offering a technology that allows them to enter dreams (with appropriate safeguards) to advertise and the notion of "dreamfluencers" as well as young entrepreneurs who blend genuine enthusiasm with conscience-free greed. But Dream Scenario sheds its satirical skin by the third act and heads for something more profound and IRL. After the tribulation, Paul has a way back to discover and what it will cost. The warmth to this journey (wherever it leads) lifts this story well above those whose motivations fall more to base ridicule (e.g The Menu, The Hunt, the irredeemable Triangle of Sadness). I won't spoil the ending of this film but can say that the telescoping of some of its elements is textbook but heavily satisfying. And that's before the very last moment.

A strong cast plays well but in this story the shoulders that bear it are those of Nicholas Cage. Cage began in his uncle Francis' movies and travelled to arthouse roles before establishing himself as a buff action hero ready to compromise any reputation he had already won with image-busting weirdness. He has come to publicly acknowledge this and have fun with it. However, he has still a few hard pebbles set aside like his unlovely portrayal of the alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas, studied neurosis of a ficitonalised real author Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation, the smellable feral revenger in Pig and now the dowdy no-one here. He's already done his WTF performances and can star in movies that only require he show fury with a grin. Then there's this. He fits into the vision of a cinematic world of a young (i.e. not yet forty) auteur who continues to explore the strange thing that truth has become. Cage gives us a solid core so that Dream Scenario never gets twee or cute, that its laughs are loud and its appeals to the heart are strong.

MY 2023

A year of contrasts with a statistically correct big middle section. The ones I put in the middle are not films I necessarily dislike, I enjoyed most of them. It's just that they didn't have that extra element that took them higher. Similarly, the ones in the top list are not necessarily impeccable: they just all had that element, whatever it was. And the ones at the bottom are more likely disappointments than outright stinkers. This is because, as an amateur critic, I pay for my cinema tickets and tend not to pay to hate watch anything. It's most likely that I'll outright rail against things I've taken a chance on at MIFF as there's usually less or no hype about them and it's hard to tell in advance whether they're worth my time (this is an acceptable gamble with festivals, though). These aren't all the movies I saw this year, just the ones I wanted to comment on.

TOP

TALK TO ME - Now this is how you get away with a possession story after decades of Exorcist knockoffs (which continue into the new century). Making the danger of it drug-like was inspired and it still gives beyond that innovation. Outstanding. Film of the year.

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN -  Takes the cute Irish tale and turns it into an eviscerating fable of friendship. Extraordinary.

WOMEN TALKING -  Women who have been barred from education have to establish the language to use in order to make one of three cases in response to a local crime. Does what it says on the tin but what it says on the tin is extraordinary.

EMILY THE CRIMINAL - In which deadpan comic champ Aubrey Plaza loses herself in a thankless character role and comes out intact and more. 

PEARL - If Mia Goth was the one to watch in several small roles she bursts through the screen in this afterthought sequel that outdoes its original. Can't wait for Maxxxine.

INFINITY POOL - Oops, Mia Goth again, this time in a thrill kill cult (or are they?) finding a violence high in a fable like magical arrangement. Cronenberg Jr fell close to the tree.

LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL -  Australian made but with American sensibility, this works a treat in pushing the post Nixon America into the post Exorcist culture. A delight.

BOTTOMS -  Funniest film of the year as gay teens start a fight club to lure their cheerleader crushes. It works but that's only the beginning. Funniest film of the year.

GODZILLA MINUS ONE -  From the gleaming Toho logo to the end credits, this proves that only a drop of originality is needed to lift a remake into the lofty realm of its original. Thrilling in its execution and sobering in its anti-war message.

PAST LIVES - Minimalist tale that takes a little too long to get to its quietly devastating final zinger but that is so strong that the dragginess in the middle feels like waiting rather than boredom.

WALK UP - Another Hong Sang-soo mini wonder of personal histories and the effects of impulsive decisions.

DREAM SCENARIO - A fable of fame for the social media aeon that fleshes out its satire with real warmth. A kind of Being John Malkovich for next week. Stellar turn by Nic Cage.

POOR THINGS - Lanthimos extends his already rich psychosocial pallet with this magical realist trek. Outstanding performance by Emma Stone.

MIDDLE

BARBIE - Great fun with satirical punch and a warm hearted message. I kept wanting more cultural pushback in Barbie's trek to self-actualisation but then, the satire and big numbers kept me laughing too hard to care much. Maybe a trim here and there.

OPPENHEIMER - First hour of three wasted in a needless "previously on Buffy" sequence and then an overlong vindication sequence with a spectacular story of the atomic bomb retelling in the middle. Nolan makes the package bigger than the product again.

SANCTUARY - Clever powerplay two hander gets bogged in its own process in the second act. The final moments redeem this but the drag lingers in the memory after the credits roll.

BROKER - Heart rending but satisfying road movie about how the idea of family can transcend blood ties.

EGO: THE MICHAEL GUDINSKY STORY - A decent enough document of a cultural giant that tends to glide over the more troubling aspects and deeds. That said I'd watch it again if it came up on streaming.

FOE  - Black Mirror episode stretched too far but redeemed by good performances.

THE ROYAL HOTEL - Well wrought scenes of toxic masculinity served positively with nuance but lacks a second act to render the finale as powerful as it should feel.  

YOU'LL NEVER FIND ME - Overlong reveal of the situation drags a good tight and atmospheric two hander.

MONOLITH - Thoroughly enjoyable fable of who gets to control the narrative with clever use of humanity's darker urges accelerated by communication technology.

FORBIDDEN PLAY - By the numbers J-horror revisit by the genre's inventor is perhaps one notch above okay.

IMMERSION - A coodabeen from another J-horror master moves too sluggishly to fulfil its promises.

BEAU IS AFRAID -  I liked this a lot better than everyone I talked to who saw it. It is self-indulgent and overlong but does make sense for anyone with the patience to think it through.

OF AN AGE - Decorous love story doesn't outstay its welcome. Perhaps a little overserious.

TAR - Great star turn by Cate Blanchett in a tale that works well but lacks power in the delivery of its narrative cataclysm.

M3GAN - Fun but feels too slight, even for its more general rating.

KNOCK AT THE CABIN - The twist is there's no twist. It's ok.

SCREAM VI - Some good sequences but the adherence to the rules is long overstretched by now. 

TOTALLY KILLER - Back to Friday the 13th. 

GODLESS: THE EASTFIELD EXORCISM - Kept wanting this one to explore the differences between the supernatural and scientific side. It does come down on one over the other but by that time it feels less powerful than it might have. That said, very good performances and production.

BOTTOM

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS - Hot shot Swedish auteur seeks to dazzle with a diminishing stock of tricks which amount to the insertion of disruptive motifs. It's a windscreen wiper, it's a lift door closing, it's a cleaner's trolley bashing against a wall, it's a wave bashing against the beached lifeboat, it's ... it's any other damned thing available that distracts an audience from the low substance count on screen. Bullshit from start to finish.

THE BOOGEYMAN - By the numbers conventional Stephen King adaptation from the guy who innovatively used the zoom meeting as a horror setting during COVID. I hope he gets trusted to do something more original next.

EVIL DEAD RISE - Great effects showreel with a few bones thrown to the franchise. It's ok.

IT LIVES INSIDE - Potentially strong monster entry dilutes its cultural assimilation theme until it's just a boogeyman figure scaring people.

THE MENU - If you're going for satire, try respecting your audience's intelligence. Could done iwth a massive edit of every obvious statement in it. Then again, you might not have a movie left. Smug rubbish.

THANKSGIVING - By the numbers '80s-style slasher set in the present does what it says on the tin. I will struggle to remember it.

DRACULA THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER - Over-conventional and unscary waste of a good idea.

IT'S A WONDERFUL KNIFE - Soft and over-conventional waste of a good title.

ASTEROID CITY - Didn't bother but put it here, anyway.