New Movies Round-up # 1: Big Movies.

Looking back, it seems I began 2023 with a rare round-up of ‘new’ movies I’d seen recently, and… things seem to be going that way for 2024 too, so why don’t we make a Jan/Feb tradition of it? The first of two planned posts, this one will be looking at a few recent releases your friends, co-habitants and co-workers might actually have heard of, including the latest iterations of two of Japan’s (and my own) favourite cinematic franchises.

 

Godzilla Minus One 

(Takashi Yamazaki, 2023)

Just before Christmas, my wife & I took an afternoon off work to go and watch Toho’s attempt to expand upon the domestic success of 2016’s ‘Shin Godzilla’, at an ‘old folks’ screening at our nearest cinema. (I’d question how many - cough - ‘old folks’ really want to see a subtitled CGI monster movie, but hey, we’re all getting there, right?)

Truth be told, I didn’t emerge with particularly strong feelings either way, but I enjoyed it - which in blockbuster terms, seems about as good a definition of ‘success’ as any.

Rowing waa-aa-aa-ay back from the sophisticated political satire of ‘Shin Godzilla’ (which often felt more like being dropped into a Japanese equivalent of The Thick Of It than watching a monster movie), Yamazaki’s film is a far more conventional/commercial proposition, mixing state-of-the-art kaiju chops with a hefty dose of tear-jerking melodrama, a sheen of the kind of progressive/pacifist we’re-all-in-this-together patriotism that 21st century Japan (to its credit) does so well… and I suspect, more than half an eye on the overseas market, which has been richly rewarded by the movie’s success in the USA.

Leaving all that aside for a minute, it must first be acknowledged that the monster stuff here is all really good. Though perhaps not quite up to the level of that seen in the 2017 American Godzilla, the quality of the CG work has improved immeasurably since ‘Shin Godzilla’ (which I personally found conspicuously lacking in this regard).

The Big G’s appearances here are always dramatic and cool, he is sufficiently huge, weighty and terrifying to invoke comparisons to the gold standard of Honda’s ’54 original. Both his destruction of a battleship and his obligatory rampage through a painstakingly assembled facsimile of post-war Ginza prove to be incredibly effective set-pieces, giving us punters what we paid for in no uncertain terms, whilst reconfiguring his bursts of heat ray breath as individual nuclear detonations proves an especially frightening and powerful touch.

Unfortunately however, the accompanying human storyline (which comprises a somewhat higher percentage of the overall run time than it really should) proves ridiculously melodramatic, heartstring-tugging stuff, weighed down with coincidences and unlikelihoods which border on total absurdity in places. Even as a gaijin, I feel like I’ve seen these familiar historical narratives (survivor’s guilt experienced by a former kamikaze pilot, new family units being reconstituted out of the ruins of war, the desperation and gradual reconstruction of post-war Tokyo) done so much better, with so much more nuance and honesty, so many times in Japanese cinema and literature, that Yamazaki’s latest attempt to rinse my emotions just didn’t wash.

It’s always watchable mind you (much in the same way that we in the UK could probably spend the rest of eternity watching tales of dashing spitfire pilots romancing pretty young code-breakers on sepia-tinted bicycle rides to the NAAFI), but despite some strong performances from the supporting cast, both my wife and I basically found ourselves sniggering and whispering sarcy comments to each other whilst the the film was clearly trying to get us to weep and beat our chests. So… less of a success on that score, I reckon.

Somehow, based on advance publicity, I’d gotten the mistaken impression that ‘Godzilla Minus One’ was going to look at the events of the original '54 Godzilla, as experienced from the POV of ordinary folks on the street - an approach which, personally, I would have found that a lot more interesting than yet another tale in which our central characters get to enjoy multiple up-close-and-personal encounters with the Big G, before their sense of individual exceptionalism drives them to single-handedly save Japan and resolve their respective existential life crises at the same time. Oh well.

Beneath the Big Themes of national togetherness and reconstruction, there are a few bits of political sub-text bubbling away somewhere in the background which I found interesting, although they never really add up to much. As per ‘Shin Godzilla’, I liked the way that the occupying American forces are basically like, “eh, no - sort it out yourself please” once the kaiju threat emerges, leaving war-ravaged Japan to try to pull together a solution to the Godzilla problem using a few old fishing boats and bits of wire.

And, I also found it note-worthy that the coalition of ex-military/scientific expertise which eventually comes together to defeat Godzilla is a privately funded enterprise, operating independently of the (assumed to be useless) state apparatus - certainly a very different approach from anything seen back in the old days, and one whose implications quite possibly feel even more sinister than that of the big, quasi-utopian global super-organisations who used to call the shots in so many of Ishiro Honda’s SF movies. 

 

Saltburn 

(Emerald Fennell, 2023)

An odd choice for a New Years Eve movie, but hey - I didn't make it.

Still, I’d rather see in the new year whilst watching a contemporary ‘cuckoo in the nest’ type takedown of the moribund British class system than I would catching a throat infection whilst queuing endlessly for drinks in a catastrophically over-crammed pub, listening to somebody’s idea of ‘party music’ blaring from a shit-fi PA, so - result.

But anyway! The problem with getting old as a fan of movies/culture in general is - you’ve see it all before.

This, for instance, is a perfectly well-made, compelling film, and had I watched it when I was within the same age group as the central characters, I may have found it all terribly thought-provoking and subversive and so on.

As it is though, by the halfway mark I already had this tale of a proletarian scholarship boy at Oxford (Barry Keoghan) inveigling himself into the stately home-based family life of disgustingly posh classmate Jacob Elordi pegged as 50% ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’, 40% ‘The Servant’, and 10% some random TV drama about the lives of the rich and privileged which I didn’t bother to watch - and thus simply spent the remaining run-time contemplating the potential of re-watching / re-reading the first two of those again instead. (Actually, I think there’s a fair bit of Ken Russell’s adaption of ‘Women in Love’ in here too… but this is only meant to be a short review, so I shouldn’t get carried away.)

As per Fennell’s previous film as writer/director (2020’s ‘Promising Young Woman’, which I liked quite a lot, for the record), innovation here largely stems from the unconventional and kind of knowingly ‘unfair’ games played with the audience’s sympathies, and the deliberate holding back of certain key pieces of narrative information - a technique which holds up well here, but feels pretty precarious also. I’d be wary about the prospect of Fennell pushing it further in film # 3, but let’s see, eh?

There are a few nods to classic gothic imagery here - most notably, a startling scene of sexualised vampirism which put me in mind of Theodore Sturgeon’s novel ‘Some of Your Blood’ (you see what I mean about getting old?)

For the most part though, realism predominates in spite of the dream-like grandeur of the setting, and the particular ‘vibe’ of a landed, upper class household adapting to the more open and inclusive norms of late 20th century life - studiedly casual, lethargic and welcoming on the surface, yet still hidebound by a bottomless cauldron of prejudices, petty cruelties and labyrinthine rules of conduct bubbling just beneath - is both beautifully captured and entirely convincing.

Sadly for good ol’ Richard E. Grant - perfectly, if obviously, cast as the clan’s pained patriarch - however, the whole affair also feels aggressively contemporary, in the sense that there's lots of pervy, uncomfortable sex stuff going on, but nobody actually enjoys any of it, and the characters all swear and say nasty things about each other incessantly.

All the malignancy and kink which Joseph Losey and Patricia Highsmith were obliged to deal with through allusion and smoke signals in their earlier iterations of this tale are dragged up to the surface of the murky bathwater and beaten black n’ blue here by Fennell… which is not necessarily a criticism, merely an indication that I can sometimes feel the generation gap yawning wide when I watch stuff like this. (Although, mercifully, it’s at least set in 2006, so they’re not all banging on about each others ‘socials’ and covertly videoing everything all the time once the inter-personal skulduggery gets underway.)

Barry Keoghan is certainly a very striking central presence - an old man’s face on young man’s body, with a weirdly disconcerting muscular torso, he’s like the genetically engineered mutant grandson of Dirk Bogarde’s character from 'The Servant' or something. Difficult to say whether the recognition he will inevitably gain from this role will totally make his career, or whether he'll be forever cursed by Anthony Perkins-esque type-casting, but either way - he definitely makes an impression.

As mentioned above in fact, the main thing which allows ‘Saltburn’ to live on in the memory is an uneasy ambiguity over the extent to which we’re invited to feel implicit in / sympathetic toward his character’s machinations.

As much as ‘The Servant’ may have caused controversy back in 1963, watched today, what seems most remarkable is that, despite his socialist convictions, Losey declined to re-tool Robin Maugham’s source novel as a take of class revolt. Instead, for all its many qualities, his film primarily still just reads as a warning to louche aristos that perhaps their Northern-accented man-servants should not be trusted.

Much as we might wish we could side with him, Bogarde’s character is unambiguously presented as an evil, depraved man (his implied Jewishness and homosexuality making this characterisation feel even more questionable to modern eyes), whilst James Fox remains his hapless victim, and Sarah Miles the rival predator whose position he usurps (a role assigned to Archie Madekwe’s Farleigh in ‘Saltburn’s expanded cast list).

It is unsurprisingly therefore that, six decades later, ‘Saltburn’ takes a rather more ambivalent position. Going in, Keoghan is our identity figure, front and centre; we feel sorry for him, and accept what we learn about his inner life at face value. An uncomfortable sense of disjuncture thus occurs when we subsequently become distanced from him, as he begins doing things which do not square with the character whose thoughts we felt we were privy to, and as the film is forced to adopt a colder, more objective perspective as a result.

But, nonetheless, the notion of an (admittedly sociopathic) member of the lower orders using the illusion of an ‘open’ society to gain the foothold be needs to bloodily claw back the privilege and luxury traditionally denied him will still be read by most 21st century viewers as a necessary corrective to historical injustice, rather than as the horrifying upending of the natural order envisaged by Maugham. 

At the same time though, few of us are likely to applaud the character’s conduct on a personal level - thus creating an interesting ethical tension which is likely to go back-and-forth across the nation’s (world’s?) dinner tables and office spaces for months to come, like nothing this side of Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Parasite’ (yet another noteworthy precursor, now that I think about it).

 

The Boy and The Heron 

[‘Kimitachi Wa Dô Ikiru Ka’] 

(Hayao Miyazaki, 2023)

Just over twelve hours later, and we began 2024 the right way, by going to see this at a lunch time screening [the Japanese language release, of course].

And what can I say? It’s bloody magnificent.

It’s probably a redundant observation to make about a Miyazaki film by this point, but this is such an aesthetically beautiful film - the mere act of looking at it feels like bearing witness to a expertly curated exhibition of natural/cultural wonders. The attention to detail evident in the background of nearly every frame speaks to a lifetime of dedicated craftsmanship and visual research, whilst the compositions and the gentle, gliding pace of the cel animation are - of course - relentlessly exquisite.

I confess I’ve found many post-‘Spirited Away’ Studio Ghibli projects a bit too frenetic and whimsical for my tastes, and my attention to their output has lapsed as a result - but the more sombre, more reflective tone adopted here suited me perfectly.

The film’s fantasy aspects are mysterious and intriguing, carrying a persistent undertow of physical menace and flat-out scariness which prevents them from veering too far toward the twee, and, as in all of Miyazaki’s best films, the accompanying human drama takes a potentially sentimental subject, but steadfastly refuses to dumb it down for a ‘family’ audience or to engage in manipulative heart-string tugging, meaning that (whilst not exactly an original concept within either cinema or fantasy literature), the core tale of a boy processing trauma and grief through a retreat into imagination remains incredibly moving, in a way that almost defies verbal explanation.

Likewise, during the film’s ‘real world’ segment, Miyazaki’s eerily surreal image of factory workers laying out the insect-like glass carapaces of fighter planes amid the beatific environs of a provincial shinto shrine said more to me about the effect of war upon Japan than two whole hours of ‘Godzilla Minus One’s sepia-tinted historical bombast. A small moment in a long and densely-packed film, but one which will stick with me.

Admittedly, the film does lose focus at times - I fear the opening act may prove too slow for a mainstream  audience to latch onto (although I liked it just fine), and later on, once we’re embroiled in the calamitous fate of the trans-dimensional fantasy kingdoms through which our young protagonist has travelled, sense does get a bit lost for a while in an endless cavalcade of stuff exploding and collapsing, brightly coloured creatures flying/flapping around and the weird details of the script’s fantasy-land logic etc, etc.

Perhaps a tighter edit might have helped mitigate this a bit, but - a minor criticism, in the face of great wealth of things within this film which feel good, and right, and true. There is so much good here in fact, so much spirit and compassion and visual/conceptual inspiration, it almost makes me feel that, so long as the human race can knock out something like this once in a while to pass on to future generations/civilisations, all the shit and pain that comprises life on earth will have been worth it.

I’m unsure how things stand with Miyazaki at present (I thought he had retired, until this one popped up as a new release), but if ‘The Boy and the Heron’ does turn out to be his final film, he’ll be going out on a high. For my money, it stands as one of his finest achievements… and in fact, as one of the finest pieces of human artistry I’ve seen from this sorry century for quite a while, to be perfectly honest.

3:00pm on 1st January, but if I see a better film than this during 2024, I’ll be surprised.

TOP TEN DISCOVERIES: 2023 (Part # 2 of 2)

With apologies for the delay…

5. Je t’aime moi non plus 

(Serge Gainsbourg, 1976)

Venturing out to a cinema screening of this one, in honour of the late Jane Birkin, mid-way through 2023, my first reaction to the opening scenes was simply to marvel at what a confident, technically accomplished and beautifully composed movie this is, given that it was Gainsbourg’s debut as director.

A world away from the pop-art outrages and wacky satires in which he participated as an actor/composer through the ‘60s, ‘Je T’aime..’ feels closer to the aesthetic of the ‘New German Cinema’ of the ‘70s - specifically, the romantic/minimalist style which Wim Wenders would introduce to America in the ‘80s, and the emotionally wrought, outré subject matter of Fassbinder - as Gainsbourg painstakingly delineates a self-contained, somewhat unreal desert world which is not quite France, but never quite the American West either, in which taciturn, musclebound queer characters bestride heaps of mouldering garbage, their minds seemingly attuned to higher things than the brutish squalor which surrounds them.

With Serge at the controls though, story-telling remains direct and concise, and the film never veers into pretention, its somewhat meditative tone interwoven with fart jokes, overweight strippers, slabs of bloody horse meat, a mountain of abandoned toilets and a central narrative concern with the best way to undertake anal sex without upsetting neighbours/co-habitants, exhibiting a mixture of earnest, doomed romanticism and grotesque vulgarity which is frankly exactly what we’d hope for from a Gainsbourg joint.

As our leads in this strange and tragic love story, Jane Birkin and Joe Dallesandro are… well, I don’t know if there’s a way to put the effect of their screen presence into words without resorting to cliché, but both are simply stunning, let’s leave it at that; every moment they’re together on screen feels charged with an enervating, dangerous power.

It’s certainly by far the best, least wooden work I’ve ever seen from Dallesandro, whilst Hugues Quester (best known around these parts as the uncooperative male lead in Jean Rollin’s ‘La Rose de Fer’) also makes a strong impression as his cuckolded partner. Star of the show though is definitely Birkin, who - again, a million miles away from her usual, glamourous public persona - delivers one of those performances for which critics tend to use “fully committed” as a euphemism for frequently naked, cold, brutalised and involved in intensely awkward/uncomfortable situations, all whilst remaining fully in control of her character, and of the almost Zulawski-level intensity she manages to dish out to co-stars and audience alike. An incredible portrayal of a kind of lonely, displaced feminine anger which has never quite been given a name.

In its matter-of-fact portrayal of the relationship between a straight woman and a gay man, the film’s fluid and non-judgemental approach to sexuality feels startlingly ahead of its time. Unfairly overlooked and dogged by censorship upon its release, I think it’s fair to assume that ‘Je T’aime..’ would probably have swept the board at every festival across the globe had it been made in the 2020s, and justifiably so.

Certainly, viewed today, as the famous title song finally rises on the soundtrack during the pivotal scene in which an act of sodomy in the back of a garbage truck becomes a transcendent moment of divine love, it feels like the apotheosis of everything Gainsbourg was trying to communicate through his art across the decades; the sacred and profane singing in filthy unison. 

 

4. RRR 

(S.S. Rajamouli, 2022)

So, a year or two late, I finally got to see this one whilst staying at a Netflix-equipped b’n’b in early 2023, and, I mean, what can I say? It’s pretty incredible, right?

Of course there’s very little I can find to say about it which has not been better expressed elsewhere, but, given the frequency with which I champion an ideal of “pop(ular) cinema” on this blog, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge such an exhaustively epic expression of that ideal, existing on a plain which feels much closer to the exuberant, two-fisted spectacles of 60s/70s global genre movies than to the cynical, middle-brow self-awareness which suffocates most contemporary Hollywood product.

Naturally there are a few oddities here which feel rather uncomfortable when encountered in a mainstream/blockbuster context (such as the 20+ minute public torture sequence, and the excessive outburst of literal flag-waving nationalism at the end), but these are the kind of things I’ve learned to roll with during my limited forays into the realm of vintage Indian cinema, so they didn’t put me off unduly.

In fact, despite it being a long-time bugbear of mine re: Hollywood output, I even found myself coping ok with the super-human level of historically questionable individual exceptionalism around which much of the film’s action resolves, simply because, well… I dunno - N.T. Rama Rao and Ram Charan are just so darn loveable, I’ll allow those guys a bit of individual exceptionalism. I mean, talk about ‘star power’, jeez. Just the smiles on their faces in that big dance sequence, I can’t even…

ANYWAY. A few other quick notes;

1. Given that I’m the kind of viewer who tends to spit and leave the room when presented with a CG car chase, and finds all that Marvel crap unwatchable, how was I able to both embrace and enjoy the ludicrous, gravity-defying digitally rendered mayhem which comprises at least 50% of ‘RRR’s 3+ hour run-time, you ask?

The answer is - I really don’t know, but I can only assume that, when watching both this film and director S.S. Rajamouli’s previous works, I can latch on to the excitement of a filmmaker totally abandoning any pretence of ‘realism’ and just going hog-wild with the insane new possibilities of his multi-billion rupee digital playpen.

Since time immemorial for instance, filmmakers have clearly needed to be careful and considerate in their use of animals on-screen. But NO MORE, a film like ‘RRR’ tells us. Here in India in the 2020s, we can launch antelopes through the air, we can punch tigers in the face, fire them out of catapults or swing elephants around by their goddamn trunks, and no one in the audience is going to be stupid enough to believe that a real animal was anywhere near the film set, let alone being mistreated. Such freedom! [NB: I don't think any elephants were actually swung around by their trunks in ‘RRR’, I just put that in because I thought it would be funny.]

It’s the same kind of spirit you can see in the ‘70s/’80s Indonesian and Taiwanese fantasy films I love so much, in which imaginative ambitio proudly tramples any thought of realistic execution, yanked forward four decades and ripped through vast quantities of investment and processing power.

2. Doing for the enforcers of British colonial rule what ‘Raider of the Lost Ark’ did for Nazis? Yes please! Speaking as a suitably contrite British person, I’ve got to say, I was down with that, and that it’s about bloody time. An effective and long overdue bit of script-flipping for those of us who were somehow still allowed to grow up spending our Sunday afternoons watching heroic pith-helmeted Victorians strut around foreign climes in one televisual context or another, and props to the late Ray Stevenson for stepping up to portray one of the best moustache-twirling villains since Tod Slaughter trod the boards. 

 

3. The Iceman Cometh 

(Clarence Fok, 1989)

Liberally borrowing from Nicholas Meyer’s 1979 time travel comedy ‘Time After Time’ (and with no connection whatsoever to the Eugene O’Neill stage play, obvs), the high concept plot underpinning this ‘imperial phase’ Hong Kong belter finds morally upstanding Ming Dynasty-era swordsman Yuen Biao rudely awakened in ‘80s Hong Kong after he plunges into the depths of an icy ravine whilst engaged in a life-or-death struggle with maniacal rapist-murderer Yuen Wah - who, of course, also finds himself defrosted in the 20th century, ready to begin his rampage anew.

I went into this one cold (no pun intended), having never really encountered much enthusiasm for it amongst old school Hong Kong film fans/commentators, but, I needn’t have worried. Rather than the over-blown, headache-inducing farrago I was half expecting, ‘Iceman..’ is a blast in the best possible way, easily crashing straight into my hypothetical top five ‘80s HK action movies.

As per the template laid down by Meyer’s film, the psychotic Wah takes to the chaotic, over-stimulated environment of the modern day metropolis like a duck to water, installing himself as the machine gun-toting supremo of a violent criminal syndicate and wreaking shocking, Category III-worthy sadism upon anyone who crosses his path, whilst the chivalrous Biao meanwhile bumbles around in a state of fish-out-of-water confusion, eventually finding himself ‘adopted’ as a live-in man-servant / human curio by high end sex worker Maggie Cheung.

It would probably be an exaggeration to claim that ‘hilarity ensues’, but, this is still one of those rare HK action-comedies in which the comedic elements do frequently hit the right notes for me - largely thanks to the fact that all three leads are so relentlessly, almost preternaturally, charismatic.

Cheung in particular is a veritable human dynamo here, giving every impression of having a whale of a time with character whose wardrobe and behaviour seems cvlosely modelled on Madonna circa ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’, whilst the details of her perilous and hap-hazard lifestyle as a prostitute/hustler are depicted in an interesting and unconventional fashion, even before the complication of a defrosted medieval swordsman gets thrown into the mix.

Meanwhile, those who recall Yuen Wah for his scene-stealing bad guy roles in films like ‘Eastern Condors’ and ‘Dragons Forever’ will be fully aware of how much ass this guy can kick, and in ‘Iceman..’ he turns it up to 11, transforming himself into one of the most gleefully terrifying villains in movie history - a lithe, hyper-athletic engine of omni-directional destruction who still somehow manages to look like the coolest motherfucker in SE Asia, resembling some kind of insane, Shaolin master version of Warren Oates in ‘..Alfredo Garcia’.

And, completing the central trio, good ol’ Yeun Biao just kind of does what he always does, which is to say - being absolutely fucking brilliant.

Amidst all the carnage, ‘Iceman..’ is also a beautifully directed film, shot with a rich, dark colour palette, slickly edited and betraying none of the ad-hoc choppiness which sometimes afflicts HK movies. One of the things I loved most about it though is the way director Clarence Fok manages to maintain a frantic, light-hearted action/comedy tone without downplaying the darker elements of the movie’s subject matter.

Although Maggie’s antics in the worlds of crime and prostitution are on one level presented as being pretty, uh... kooky?, her character is still constantly faced with threats of violence or abuse, maintaining a rough edge of realism and danger, especially when, inevitably, she crosses paths with Wah - who, as mentioned above, reinforces his full spectrum evilness by indulging in some jaw-dropping excesses of perverse brutality.

By rights, this should all feel completely out of place in a movie that’s liable to have you chuckling over some screwball shenanigans five minutes later… yet somehow, with typically mad HK movie magic, it all comes together just so.

Which is all well and good, but what about the action, right? Well, ok, I mean… oh man, it is so good. A central chase/fight set piece here involving a horse, a jeep and a shipping container swinging perilously from a dockside crane is absolutely one of the most astounding / unbelievable stunt sequences in HK cinema (which is saying something), and the extended final showdown between Biao and Wah - involving swords, gunplay, blasts of hair-frazzling electricity and (of course) a ‘power powder’-suffused hand-to-hand throw down of nigh-on superhuman agility - is as intense and imaginative as any fight fan could hope for.

In one moment during the climax, we see a long shot of Biao and Wah facing off in profile, ‘Street Fighter’-style, on a rooftop, as immediately behind them, a jumbo jet glides in to land at Hong Kong’s notoriously perilous urban airport… at which point, I felt like pausing the movie, falling to my knees, and simply giving thanks to the gods for the particular time and place in culture which brought us insane masterpieces like this one -- just a few decades behind us, one day’s flight away, but somehow feeling like an outburst of joyful mania from a completely different universe. 

 

2. Miami Blues 

(George Armitage, 1990)

Probably one of the best entries in the cycle of late ‘80s/early ‘90s American neo-noirs I’ve seen to date - and hands down the funniest - this adaptation of Charles Willeford’s 1984 book begins as Junior (Alec Baldwin), an impulsive, sociopathic criminal, touches down in Miami, casually bends back the fingers of an intrusive Hare Krishna on his way through the exit lounge, and promptly finds himself falling into a why-the-hell-not romantic relationship with naïve local prostitute Suzi (Jennifer Jason Leigh), in the midst of the non-stop crime spree which comprises his regular day-to-day.

Unfortunately for the newly inseparable couple however, that Hare Krishna guy ended up defying medical science by inexplicably dying of shock following the finger-bending incident, meaning that grizzled and toothless homicide detective Hoke Mosely (Fred Ward) is now on Junior’s trail, instigating a ramshackle cat-and-mouse between the two men which can’t possibly end well, least of all for Suzi.

Attempting to make a whimsical film noir takes some balls, but that’s exactly what Armitage and producer Jonathan Demme seem to have been going for here, and against the odds, they succeeded brilliantly, creating a world in which toe-curling brutality, systemic corruption and random, meaningless death exist side-by-side with impromptu pork chop dinners, misplaced dentures and recipes for ‘vinegar pie’ (whatever that is).

It helps that Armitage proves adept in staging long, intense inter-character scenes which seem capable of turning on a dime between good-natured bonhomie and psychotic violence, and Willeford’s complex and morally ambivalent characters are lent an additional spark by career-best level performances from Baldwin, Leigh and Ward.

As with ‘The Iceman Cometh’ discussed above, this is one of these films in which all three leads are basically right up in our face, all the time - but it doesn’t matter, because they’re all such captivating, horribly loveable human disaster areas, we could happily watch their antics for weeks, and still never really know what’s coming next.

Meanwhile, DP Tak Fujimoto coolly resists the temptation to riff on the visual style of a certain other Miami-based ‘80s crime franchise, instead turning the city into a candy-coloured pastel wonderland which actually looks like it might be quite a nice place to live, aside from all the blood.

Inspired use is made of Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit in the Sky’ during the opening and closing credits (a perfect musical shrug-of-the-shoulders to sign off a nihilistic crime movie, now that I think about it, and you’ve got to love the irony of “..gonna go to the place that’s the best” playing over an aerial shot of the smog-choked city), and the always welcome appearance of faces like Charles Napier and Martine Beswick in the supporting cast feels like a thinly veiled high five to the cult film fans who have followed Armitage and Demme from their days on the grindhouse/exploitation circuit.

I confess, I’m not familiar with Willeford’s series of Hoke Mosely novels, but on the expectation that they might nail something akin to the uniquely schizophrenic tone of this wonderful movie, I’m clearing space on my bookshelves as we speak. 

 

1. Light Sleeper 

(Paul Schrader, 1992)

Another year, another reclaimed masterpiece dredged up from the vast and treacherous back catalogue of Paul Schrader - and of all of his films, this is possibly the one that has hit me hardest, although I’d have difficult trying to tell you precisely why that is.

At the time of its release, ‘Light Sleeper’ often seems to have been dismissed as a middle-aged rehash of ‘Taxi Driver’, and on one level it is easy to see why. But, if you can manage to approach it without reference to the structure and plot beats it shares with its more famous predecessor, this tale of former addict John LeTour (William Defoe) attempting to break out of his emotionally neutered existence as a bagman/delivery boy for high class coke dealer Ann (Susan Sarandon) carries a singular power which transcends its time, place and subject matter.

Shot very much as it would have been a few years earlier, at the very apex of high gloss, ‘80s cinematic style, Defoe’s slow glide through the reflecting, desaturated surfaces of nocturnal Manhattan conveys an icy, uncanny emptiness which barely even needs to be elaborated upon by Schrader’s script. For all the surface level composure required by his trade though, LeTour’s faltering attempts to rekindle his relationship with ex-girlfriend Dana Delaney emerge just as desperate and cack-handed as Travis Bickle’s attempts to make human contact, in spite of two whole extra decades of hard-won life experience.

Denied permission to use the Bob Dylan songs he had written the script around, Schrader - in a brilliant example of makin’ lemonade - hired Christian rock singer Michael Been to record original music for ‘Light Sleeper’ instead, and, whilst the moody vistas of overwrought, sub-Springsteenian pomp which resulted might well have been unbearable on record, in the context of the film, the songs work superbly, their tides of smouldering passion effectively acting as LeTour’s inner voice, providing a soaring, white-hot emotional contrast to the cold, clean surroundings and transactional relationships of his material existence.

Schrader is on record as saying that he regrets turning the latter half of the film into a thriller, complete with an all-too-familiar violent bloodbath at the finale. Presumably he sees this as a concession to commercialism which detracted from the more existential core themes he was trying to address here. For my own purposes though, the plunge into genre proved very welcome, adding a vicious (neo)noir hook to the guts of a story which might otherwise have floundered into aimless introspection, reeling us in via a spiral of loss and collapse which could only reasonably conclude with an explosion of violent self-definition / self-immolation.

More than anything, I love the pace of this film - the slow glide, almost menacing simply in its constancy. Even when the characters are static, the camera prowls, like time creeping away at a consistent, doom metal tempo, taking us on a journey which has got to end somewhere, irrespective of the director’s more nebulous Sartre-via-Antonioni type intentions. And, when it does finally arrive at its destination - fragmented, hand-held footage documenting the blood-splattered walls of a modern art-bedecked penthouse hotel suite - the film achieves a moment of transcendence whose weird, spiritual power speaks to the religious angst and search for grace at the core of all of Schrader’s work more effectively than anything he’s ever managed to get across on paper.

As I say, it’s difficult for me to explain why ‘Light Sleeper’ had such an impact on me. I suppose that, like LeTour, I’m mid-way through my adult life at this point, dealing with the choices I’ve made. But - thankfully - the similarities end there, so there’s very little direct character identification going on here.

Could it be that, in the final analysis, this is simply an excellent movie, and that, by their very nature, the best movies become more than the sum of their parts - more than their creators intended or understood, even? And, they do not always give up their secrets so easily.

TOP TEN DISCOVERIES: 2023 (Part # 1 of 2)

Well, cards on the table - 2023 was not exactly a great year, on either a personal level, a global level, or I daresay on many of the myriad levels found somewhere in-between.

But, mustn’t grumble, right? Even as my (our?) quality of life takes a (personal / collective?) battering, we’re all (mostly?) still here, still reading things and watching movies, and still (occasionally) updating blogs.

In fact, I’ve found myself thinking recently about exactly why watching movies has become my primary form of recreation in recent years, and, in the end, I think what it comes down to is cinemas ability to transport me to a different time and place, and to do so more efficiently and immediately than most other entertainment media.

This doesn’t always even need to involve ‘escapism’ as such (although that’s nice too), but (at the risk of descending into utter pretention, given that I largely gravitate toward movies concerned with the travails of lesbian vampires, psychotic killers, girl gangs or flesh-eating monsters of one kind or another), even the most absurd and poorly realised examples of global genre cinema can offer instant, full strength access to different perspectives, different cultures, different problems and different solutions - no supporting reading or conceptual re-adjustment required (tho this can always follow later).

Case in point: unexpectedly, two of the films on last year’s ‘top ten’ list below concern the experiences of indigenous peoples in Canada. This is not a subject I had previously paid much attention to, or taken an active interest in, to be perfectly honest - but now it’s very much on my radar. Thanks, movies!

As per last year, the following is definitely not a list of the best films I saw in 2023, or even necessarily a ljst of the best films I saw for the first time in 2023. Rather, it’s just a list of movies that surprised me, or made an impression on me, or that I just feel like telling people about and encouraging them to watch, for whatever reason. If you take my advice on any of ‘em, I hope you enjoy the experience.

 

10. Slash / Back 

(Nyla Innuksuk, 2022)

Though it may be weak tea as a horror movie, Nyla Innuksuk’s debut feature (which I wrote about here back in January 2023) absolutely smashes it as a character drama, as an insight into a remote and culturally unique community, and as a “girls on the scene” survival-through-teamwork movie in the lineage of ‘The Thing From Another World’.

It has a modest, gutsy DIY spirit which I absolutely loved, and a rare sense of inter-generational appeal. If you’ve got kids, try watching it with ‘em - see what happens.

 

9. The Day of the Dolphin 

(Mike Nichols, 1973)

Long story short: this one is pretty weak as a political thriller, but if want to see George C. Scott developing a father/son relationship with a talking dolphin (and who wouldn't?) - essential viewing.

The tone is totally all over the place, to the extent that we’re never quite sure whether we’re watching a serious, Watergate-era thriller or a heart-warming talking animal movie (a confusion of genres perhaps unique in the history of cinema), initially leading me to assume the film must have been subject to a long and torturous back story of behind-the-scenes monkey business.

But no - aside from a few expected grumbles about Scott being difficult on-set, the version of ‘Day of the Dolphin’ which ended up on screen was written by one guy (Buck Henry, no less), directed by one guy, and released by AVCO Embassy, no questions asked. And yet, it still turned out like this? Mind-boggling.

Apparently the script has very little in common with the more sensational source novel, with hearsay suggesting that the filmmakers instead took inspiration from the real life work of Dr John Lilly. But, aside from featuring a research scientist working with dolphins who has a contentious relationship with government intelligence agencies, the story has very little in common with anything he did either, so, what are we watching here, exactly?

Well, whatever it is, the narrative is under-developed in several key areas and the vibe of meditative earnestness which Nichols seems to be going for is undercut by a cheesy, Lassie-defeats-the-bad-guys resolution which feels like a total joke… but for all its faults, ‘Day of the Dolphin’ remains weirdly fascinating, beautifully shot (the dolphin footage alone is stunning), and packs a massive emotional punch, becoming more affecting than it really has any right to be during its startlingly bleak final minutes.

Sitting comfortably next to ‘Silent Running’ in the limited canon of first wave / post-hippie environmental tearjerkers, Nichols and Henry hit those “man is the only real monster” buttons more effectively than much of what followed once these kind of themes began to filter into the mainstream during the 80s and 90s. A uniquely weird, “only in the ‘70s” proposition which I’m very glad I made time for last year.

 

8. Un Témoin dans la Ville 

[Witness in the City] 

(Édouard Molinaro, 1959)

Of all the movies I watched during 2023 which fall within the broad category of ‘film noir’ (and there were quite a few), I think this one - which I wrote about at length here - made the biggest impression on me. 

Despite clear nods to Lang, Hitchcock and goodness knows who else, it still feels like a highly original entry in the genre, replete with dense, shadow-haunted photography, a great sense of visual storytelling, sickening suspense and an unsettling mixture of humanism and bleakest nihilism, all anchored by a desperate, almost monstrously menacing, performance from Lino Ventura.

Now available on blu-ray on both sides of the Atlantic (thanks respectively to Kino Lorber’s French Film Noir collection and Radiance’s World Noir set), it would be great to see this overlooked minor classic picking up a bit more of a following in the English-speaking world.

 

7. The Swimmer 

(Frank Perry, 1968)

If ever there were a film which proves difficult to discuss with / sell to those who have not yet seen it, Frank and Eleanor Perry’s uniquely troubling (and troubled) studio-financed cult oddity is it.

For the first half hour of your first viewing, you’ll be apt to wonder quite why you’re watching this seemingly aimless drift through a garishly-lit world of conceited mid-century WASP contentment and dreary socialite gossip, watching struggling alpha male Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster) attempt to find his way home by traversing the swimming pools of his privileged neighbours in up-market Connecticut on a balmy summer day.

But, as Merrill’s quest continues, becoming increasingly fraught and uncertain, things will gradually begin to make more sense. Then, suitably crushed by its conclusion, you will be drawn to watch the film again - at which point it will REALLY start to make sense.

Taken out of the Perrys’ hands prior to editing, additional / replacement scenes shot at the behest of producer Sam Spiegel initially feel mystifying and out of place, but eventually add a queasy, proto-psychedelic beauty to proceedings which makes the ground beneath our feet feel even more uncertain, lending the film an even more fascinating sense of outside-the-box strangeness.

You’re always guaranteed the real deal from a Lancaster perfromance however, and he holds together one of the most formally challenging films ever to have emerged from the Hollywood system with what I can only describe as a sense of tormented, masculine ease, confidently navigating a role which I’m sure no other male lead of his generation would have touched with a barge pole, driving us ever onward toward a harrowing, almost Poe-like gothic conclusion which feels like a tombstone raised above the aspirations of the USA’s entire post-war culture.

So, I mean, no wonder it didn’t really go over big at the box office, right? But, now that we’re less personally caught up in those generational aspirations and can give the film the attention (and repeat viewing) it deserves in the comfort of our own homes, it’s really quite the thing. 

 

6. Clearcut 

(Ryszard Bugajski, 1991)

An enraged, uncompromising attempt to probe the limits of a liberal pacifist mind-set and posit the necessity of more radical alternatives, this adaptation of a novel by Canadian author M.T. Kelly from Polish ex-pat director Bugajski seems on one level to address a highly specific regional concern (the disenfranchisement and loss of land suffered by indigenous communities in North Western Ontario), yet still feels frighteningly relevant to the precarious assumptions underpinning all of our lives in the 21st century. Indeed, it was difficult to view it in close proximity to the clusterfuck of events taking place in the Middle East during the last quarter of 2023 without drawing some very uncomfortable parallels.

But, before we get too dour, I should clarify that ‘Clearcut’ (its title referring to the process of intensive logging which leaves areas of land looking like “the dark side of the moon”) also stands tall as an engrossing and violent quasi-supernatural / metaphysical thriller, shot through with a welcome vein of pitch black humour, largely emerging from a brilliantly mannered, scene stealing performance from Oneida actor Graham Greene.

Long story short then: Ron Lea plays activist-lawyer Peter Maguire, who has just lost a case, attempting to defend indigenous lands from exploitation by a logging conglomerate. Despite ineffectual protests and civil unrest, tribal elders (as represented by Floyd ‘Red Crow’ Westerman) seem resigned to their fate, but, as Maguire plans his return to Toronto to mount an appeal, he notices a new “Indian” with a fierce intellect and unnerving, passive-aggressive attitude on the scene - Arthur, played by Greene.

Before long, both Maguire and belligerent mill owner Bud Ricketts (Michael Hogan) have been taken hostage by Arthur, and, with the tacit approval of Westerman’s tribe, transported to the unmapped depths of the river valley threatened by Ricketts’ logging operations, where, we must assume, the two white men are about to be subjected to some seriously harrowing rites of passage.

Due to its intense concentration on indigenous mythology and ritual, its occasional moments of savage violence, and its eventual blurring of consensus reality, ‘Clearcut’ has recently found itself re-evaluated (primarily by critic Kier-La Janisse in her documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched and its accompanying blu-ray box set) as an exemplar of ‘folk-horror’. And, given the crucial ambiguity which is maintained re: the story’s interpretation, I think that this dubious prescription more or less holds up.

What, after all, is Arthur, in the end? A violent native rights activist? An externalised personification of Maguire’s unrealised anger? Or, simply a spirit of the violated land, summoned to extract vengeance? Naturally, Bugajski’s film is far too canny to give the nod to either a material, psychological or spiritual interpretation of events, and is all the stronger for it.

And likewise, though ‘Clearcut’s occasional pigeonholing as “the Canadian ‘Deliverance’” initially seems trite, the comparison persists, not as a reflection of any shared setting or story elements, but simply because both films eventually concern ‘civilised’ men encountering something atavistic and nameless within the landscape, and finding themselves forever changed by it.

Like both Boorman’s film and the best entries in Janisse’s beloved sub-genre, ‘Clearcut’ carries a power which is impossible to fully explain, impossible to reduce to its constituent parts, and impossible to forget. It is recommended to appropriately brave viewers in the strongest possible terms.

-- 

To be continued…

Lovecraft on Film Appendum: The Evil Clergyman (Charles Band, 1987 / 2012)

As anyone familiar with his work will be aware, H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Evil Clergyman’ is a brief, half-formed fragment, obviously written in haste, perhaps extrapolated from a bad dream, and presumably never intended for publication in its extant form. Nonetheless, it saw print several years after Lovecraft’s death, in the April 1939 edition of ‘Weird Tales’, and - rather irksomely - it has formed part of his accepted canon ever since, seemingly more by accident than design.

As such, it seems appropriate that the story’s movie adaptation should take the form of an orphaned, 28 minute short, originally intended for inclusion in a 1988 Empire Pictures anthology flick named ‘Pulse Pounders’ which never saw the light of a projector at the time, remaining unreleased due to (it says here) circumstances arising from the company’s bankruptcy.

Furthermore, it appears that the original film elements for ‘The Evil Clergyman’ were subsequently misplaced or destroyed, leaving the footage presumed lost until, a quarter century later, Charlie Band found a VHS work print knocking about in his attic and smelled a quick buck to be made.

A bit of a clean up, a new credits sequence and a newly commissioned score from brother Richard later, and ‘The Evil Clergyman’ finally premiered, streaming on Band’s Full Moon Features website, in 2012.

I’m unfamiliar with the back story re: how exactly those film elements ended up disappearing, but I can only assume it must have been the result of some terrible and unprecedented freak accident, as any other explanation would frankly beggar belief given the breadth of talent involved in creating this segment, and the relatively lavish budget obviously invested in this thing.

With the exception of an AWOL Stuart Gordon in fact, ‘..Clergyman’ is effectively a ‘Reanimator’  reunion, with Dennis Paoli providing the script, photography by Mac Ahlberg, effects by John Carl Buechler, and a cast comprising Barbara Crampton, Jeffrey Combs and David Gale, with the ever wonderful David Warner (R.I.P.) thrown in for good measure.

In the grand tradition of Poe/Lovecraft adaptations through the ages, the film’s narrative has pretty much nothing in common with the supposed source story whatsoever. Instead, Paoli’s script sees Crampton taking centre stage, playing a woman returning to the attic chamber of a medieval castle which she had previously shared with her lover (Combs), a lapsed priest and alleged black magician who has recently taken his own life, prompting her to flee and leave the room vacant.

This ill-stared chamber is apparently still up for rent from the castle’s acid-tongued landlady (Una Brandon-Jones) however, and, once ensconced within it (ostensibly to “collect her things,” although the room looks bare), Crampton begins to experience a series of increasingly hair-raising manifestations related to her deceased partner, and reflective of the unholy depredations the pair apparently got up to prior to Combs’ decision to sling a noose slung over the high beams, and depart this mortal coil… temporarily, at least.

Along the way, Warner pops up as the revenant spirit of another dead priest, who pops up to warn Crampton of the error of her ways, whilst Gale is in full effect as Combs’ familiar, a chittering, man-faced rat-thing straight out of ‘Dreams in the Witch House’.

And... it actually all works really well. Paoli’s story is weird, memorable and unnerving, leaving plenty to the imagination, whilst the production design and performances are excellent.

Though she’s not really called upon to do much more than act terrified, confused and distraught here, Crampton achieves this quite brilliantly. Always a good few rungs up the ladder from yr average ‘80s ‘scream queen’, the sheer intensity scruff of the neck and drags us through this compressed ghost train ride of a viewing experience very effectively.

By contrast, we get a relatively low-key turn from Combs, but there is still a hell of a lot to enjoy in his sleazily sinister presence. His introductory “hi” at the moment his character first takes on corporeal form is a delight in itself, and the spectral love scenes he shares with Crampton take on an appropriately fevered quality, drawing us further into the odd story being told here.

Warner meanwhile seems a bit surplus to requirements here in terms of the narrative, but it’s great to have him along for the ride, and he’s clearly having a fine time regardless. In the midst of a seemingly endless series of rent-a-villain / mad scientist roles at this point in his career, the old boy knows exactly how to pitch a high-handed spectral priest, managing to deliver lines like “I’m a bishop, from Canterbury, sent to expel your lover from our church” entirely straight, without eliciting laughs from the peanut gallery.

As for the long-suffering David Gale meanwhile, one shudders to imagine the indignities he must have been subjected to in the process of realising Buechler’s man-faced rat effects - an inspired mixture of puppetry and facial prosthetics which is actually extremely effective, allowing Gale’s face and voice remain present, even when seemingly attached to a repulsive, ankle-high critter capering about on the castle floor.

Essentially functioning as a foul-mouthed, perpetually enraged manifestation of the Combs character’s id, Gale manages to deliver a memorable performance under what we might reasonably assuming were challenging circumstances; his spittle-flecked delivery of words like “WHORE” and “SLUT” in particular are imbued with an old world, puritan gusto which I very much enjoyed.

Shot, inevitably, amid the imposing environs of the swanky Italian castle which Charles Band inexplicably ended up owning in the late ‘80s (also see: ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1991), ‘Castle Freak’ (1995)), ‘..Clergyman’ benefits greatly from the location’s in-built atmosphere, adopting an almost abstract / fairy tale-like vibe which slips further into delirium as Crampton’s visions take told, and the world outside her lofty chamber effectively ceases to exist.

Moodily lit by Ahlberg in a none-more-80s manner, with deep shadows and shocks of blue-tinged moon light drifting in across the ancient brick-work, this is certainly one of the more accomplished efforts I’ve seen bearing Charles Band’s name as director. As is often the case, it’s perhaps questionable to what extent creative decisions here were actually taken by Band, but for what it’s worth, everything here is very solidly done. (I particularly liked the striking use of vertiginous high and low angles, reflecting the constant presence of both the swinging noose above, and the skittering rat-thing below.)

Even Richard Band’s retrospectively recorded orchestral score goes over gangbusters, really classing up this murky VHS-sourced work-print, much like his similarly bombastic/melodic work on Gordon’s ‘80s films, hovering just on the precipice of Elfman-esque parody, but never quite taking the plunge, or overpowering the action on-screen.

Given how strong this short is overall, it’s easy to see why a few elements ended up being recycled in other productions during the years in which the material shot for ‘Pulse Pounders’ remained unreleased.

Most notably, the effects used to create the human-faced rat creature were repurposed pretty much in their entirety for the creation of Brown Jenkin in Gordon’s 2005 TV adaptation of Lovecraft’s ‘Dreams in the Witch House’, whilst the “erotically charged predatory haunting” conceit of Paoli’s script also strongly reminded me of another Gordon-adjacent film, Danny Draven’s 2002 ‘Deathbed’ (not to be confused with the late George Barry’s outsider masterpiece of the same name), an interesting obscurity, also shot by Ahlberg and executive produced by Band, which saw release on DVD under the rather niche banner of “Stuart Gordon presents…”. (Were there any other entries in that series, I wonder? I don’t recall ever seeing any...)

In summary then, ‘The Evil Clergyman’ stands as something of an unexpected minor miracle for fans of the Empire/Full Moon/Stuart Gordon milieu. Alongside this year’s Suitable Flesh, it offers encouraging proof that the spirit of Gordon’s Lovecraft movies could live on and flourish, even in circumstances in which the man himself was unable to call the shots. Well worth making a small amount of time for if (as is understandable) it passed you by upon its belated release in 2012.

New Movies Round-up.

So, for no particular reason, last weekend was a “new movie special” in my house. A rare occurrence, to say the least. Here then are some notes on the post-2020 releases we covered. 

 

New Order 

(Michel Franco, 2021)

Well, you'd have to go a long way to find a commercially released fictional film more thoroughly depressing than this one.

It kicks off like Mexico’s subtlety-free answer to ‘Parasite’, as a swanky wedding party full of head-in-the-sand rich people is crashed by the feral, green paint-splattered rioters that the media has been warning everybody about for days, prompting their own security staff to also turn against them, with predictably harrowing results.

Meanwhile, the apparently well-intentioned bride-to-be is out swerving roadblocks, trying to obtain urgent medical care for the wife of a former domestic servant. Long story short, she is captured by a cartel of rogue soldiers, who are taking advantage of the new martial law regime to orchestrate their own mass kidnapping operation, based out of a disused prison building.

Rape, torture and general dehumanisation ensues, until the bride’s brother and fiancé- fresh from burying their dead after the wedding massacre - take the ransom demands to the family’s high level military-industrial connections, who proceed to close down the embarrassing rogue element within their ranks the only way they know how: by killing absolutely everyone involved, including the prisoners, and framing the poor, long-suffering working class family whom the bride was initially trying to help for her kidnap and murder. They are executed. The End.

Jesus. I perhaps should have put in a spoiler warning before the above paragraphs, but to be honest, it’s clear within the first five minutes that nothing nice is going to happen to anyone here; the remaining screen time is just an exercise in delineating the precise detail of how their lives are going to be destroyed.

Basically comprising a blandly restaged mega-mix of assorted terrible situations which have occurred in different regions of the world in recent years, liberally spiced with older visual references to the Mexican and French revolutions, Michel Franco’s film offers little thematic nuance, no glimmer of hope, no trace of human warmth - just a relentless parade of middle class nightmare fuel and craven injustice.

Normally, I’m inclined to at least give these kind of short-sharp-shock dystopian atrocity films props for their ability to shake viewers out of their complacency and so forth, but in this case… well, let’s just say, if you want to find out about the distressing consequences of the growing disparity between rich and poor or the dangerous slide toward corrupt authoritarianism across the globe, there are a wealth of documentaries and activist films out there which can give you the skinny on that. Given that you’ll emerge feeling like crap either way, I daresay they would constitute a more useful viewing experience than Franco’s rather slick and emotionally detached outburst of one-note rage.

At least he has the decency to cram it all into less than ninety minutes, but that’s still longer than I really wished to spend being battered with the “LIFE IS SHIT” stick. 

 

Slash/Back 

(Nyla Innuksuk, 2022)

Now this one on the other hand, I really liked!

Basically, what we've got here is ‘Over the Edge’ meets ‘The Thing’, shot in an Inuit fishing village just south of the Artic Circle, where a gang of bored teenage girls are forced to defend their community against body-hopping alien monsters whilst their parents are off getting drunk at a square dance.

Things are very nearly ruined by some absolutely terrible CGI animals, mixed with scarcely-much-better, “guy in a Halloween mask” level practical effects... but, given that the horror aspect of the film is soft-pedalled throughout, none of this really matters too much.

Really, the alien/monster stuff is just an excuse to get the girls into tense and scary situations, allowing their characters and relationships to morph and reshape themselves under pressure, and allowing them to use their combined ‘ancient hunting culture + modern digital teen’ style moxie to fight back against the invaders. All of which is handled just beautifully by first-time director Innuksuk and the teenage cast, and is really where the film excels.

The remote setting is an unusual and compelling one for an action/adventure story, giving us a lot of casual insight into 21st century life as experienced by indigenous peoples in Canada’s far north along the way, and all four of the central characters are just awesome. They speak and behave like real teenagers, but are also hugely likeable and super-cool - a very difficult balance to pull off, but ‘Slash/Back’ nails it 100%. (Again, I'm reminded of Jonathan Kaplan’s classic ‘Over The Edge’ (1979) in this regard.)

I guess this is more-or-less teen-friendly viewing, but its approach to the material is in no way condescending or juvenile, and it’s easy to imagine that viewers in the girls’ own age group would get a real kick out of seeing them band together to kick ass with hunting rifles and giant choppers whilst protecting their younger sublings from harm, making this a solid “family movie night” recommendation for anyone out there with kids.

Fun, heart-warming low key stuff,  this certainly made for a perfect palate-cleanser after the joyless slog of ‘New Order’. I mean, if kids like this are growing up out there in the frozen North (and aspiring filmmakers presumably a mere couple of the generations older are casting them in cool movies), maybe there’s hope for the human race after all, y’know?

 

Enys Men

(Mark Jenkin, 2023)

Ostensibly the latest self-proclaimed “folk horror” / hauntological hang-out movie to receive a big push from the BFI and big hype from the hipper end of the media here in the UK, it’s probably fair to say that filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s second feature as director takes a rather different approach to this kind of genre-adjacent territory to the Stricklands and Wheatleys of this world.

I haven’t seen Jenkin’s previous film ‘Bait’, but I became interested in checking this one out after reading that he still shoots using a 16mm bolex without sync sound, processing the resulting footage in his kitchen sink and single-handedly foleying the entire soundtrack - a statement of DIY intent which I find both appealing and intriguing, given that I’m sure he could have easily wrangled professional level production values off the back of his first film’s success, had he wished to.

And indeed, this notion of filmmaking reinvented as a kind of rural handicraft can be strongly felt throughout ‘Enys Men’, with the director’s focus often seeming to dwell less on the elliptical tale of a woman (Jenkin’s partner Mary Woodvine) residing alone on a fictional Cornish island observing a copse of rare flowers (in 1973, natch), and more on the windswept vistas of the oppressive, rocky coastline, or the richly textured detail Jenkin wrings out of the man-made elements within the frame. (His obsessive concentration on radio apparatus, petrol generators, kettles and the like suggests a sense of bone-deep analogue fetishism which I suspect it will be difficult for any of us pre-digital relics to fully begrudge.)

All of this looks absolutely beautiful, needless to say, rendered uncanny and weirdly subjective by heavy layers of grain, flashes of over-saturation and other assorted artefacts of Jenkins’ determinedly lo-fi technique, whilst the director’s own score - seemingly conjured up from a bunch of found sounds and radio static filtered through some pedals - furthers the homemade vibe.

I also enjoyed the way in which Jenkin maps out the topography of his imaginary island using carefully framed bits of mainland - a process which put me in mind of certain ‘70s Jess Franco films - whilst the film’s ominous use of abandoned mine workings allowed me to loosely place it within the canon of earlier “Cornish horror”, alongside Doctor Blood’s Coffin, ‘Plague of the Zombies’ and Mike Raven's ‘Crucible of Terror’, which pleased me no end.

Not that there’s a great deal of explicit horror stuff here, it must be said… or indeed much in the way of a clearly delineated series of events at all, really. Though the film is densely packed with images and movement (the inability of the bolex to extend shots beyond thirty seconds probably helps in that regard), the narrative information we are given eventually becomes so oblique, contradictory and chronologically disjointed that each viewer will probably emerge with their own interpretation of exactly what the hell is going on here… which is probably just as it should be.

In fact, ‘Enys Men’ fulfils its function as a kind of ‘mystery film’ with a rare intelligence and lack of pretention, allowing images and sounds to function like pieces of a cursed jigsaw puzzle, never quite fitting together into a satisfying, coherent whole, but suggesting a wealth of strange and intriguing patterns along the way.

As such, I suspect many viewers lured in by the hype surrounding the film’s release will find themselves left cold and irritated by the whole experience, and I certainly wouldn't blame them for that. It’s not exactly what you’d call a ‘film for everyone’, that’s for sure.

Personally speaking though, whilst it didn’t have a huge emotional impact on me, I still really enjoyed it on a meditative/aesthetic level, simply because the stuff it’s made out of (grainy 16mm footage of craggy headlands, deconstructed fragments of M.R. James-esque ghost stories, eerie coastal ruins, retro-‘70s lo-fi experimentalism) always really appeals to me. After all, I’m only a few years younger than Jenkin, I grew up in a broadly similar environment, and I suspect that some of the same bone-deep connection he clearly feels to this material must carry over to some extent. Your own ability to tune into the same wavelength may vary, but that’s just fine.

BEST FIRST TIME VIEWINGS: 2021 (part # 3 of 3)

Yes, I know - this took forever. I’m sorry. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back onto a regular(ish) posting schedule soon, fingers crossed, but in the meantime, please enjoy the superlative gushing which follows.

10. The Curious Dr Humpp 

(Emilio Vieyra / Jerald Intrator, 1969)

During the late 1960s, Argentinian director Emilio Vieyra made a number of striking (yet also curiously boring) low budget films mixing horror tropes with nudity and sexploitation elements. Vieyra’s strangest effort was probably ‘La Venganza del Sexo’, a sort of warped reimagining of Jess Franco’s ‘The Awful Dr Orlof’ (amongst other things) which sees a mad scientist dispatching a paper mache-faced monster to kidnap young people, whom he subsequently hypnotises and forces to have sex with each other as part of his rather vaguely defined experiments - the nature of which appears to be dictated to him by a sentient brain he keeps in a jar in his lab.

In and of itself, ‘La Venganza del Sexo’ certainly makes for an intriguing oddity in the history of global horror cinema, but it really only achieved infamy / immortality [delete as applicable] after a print was acquired by a New York-based hustler named Jerald Intrator, who haphazardly chopped about and reshaped the film, largely to allow for the inclusion of additional, extraneous sex scenes. A wilder and more tightly paced experience all round, Intrator’s reworking also benefits from a staggeringly knuckleheaded / inspired English language dub, written with scant reference to the original Spanish dialogue and featuring several of the most extraordinarily unlikely pronouncements ever to be formed by human lips (let alone minds).

Given a brief run on the NY grindhouse circuit as - yes, I’m afraid so - ‘The Curious Dr Humpp’, the result is an inexplicable, indigestible hodge-podge of relentless, theremin-drenched psychotronic dementia capable of blowing minds at 200 yards. Suffice to say however, the owners of any minds blown during the film’s original release seem to have kept the matter to themselves, leaving the depredations of Dr Humpp entirely forgotten for several decaes, until Frank Henenlotter and the late Mike Vraney of Something Weird Video acquired a print at some point in the ‘90s, cued it up, and - I can only imagine - performed some cult-movie-nerd equivalent of that “we struck gold” dance Walter Huston does in ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ before promptly retreating to the bathroom to soak their heads in cold water for a few hours.

Honestly, if I started unpacking this thing to pick out particular highlights, we’d be here all night, so, by way of exemplifying the general off-kilter vibe of the whole thing, I’ll simply leave you with the zen-like question solemnly posed at one point by the film’s pipe-chewing police detective; “why would a man who needs drugs send a monster to the pharmacy?” Well, quite. 

 

9. Snowpiercer 

(Bong Joon Ho, 2013)

Along with much of the rest of the Western world, watching ‘Parasite’ early in 2020 inspired me to belatedly catch up on the rest of Bong Joon Ho’s filmography - the first stop being this train-bound, post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic, which immediately scores bonus points for having seemingly caused such consternation for financiers Miramax that (as I understand it) they initially did everything in their power to bury the damned thing.

Based on a long-running bande dessinée created by the revered Jacque Lob and shot in English with a multinational, all-star cast, ‘Snowpiercer’ - for which I’ll spare you an easily google-able plot synopsis - is the kind of movie which really, honestly SHOULD NOT WORK. For all its grandiose ambition, the story’s core premise becomes increasingly preposterous the longer you spend thinking about it, and presenting the comic’s world with the kind of nuts-and-bolts verisimilitude it demands would have required a budget and duration far beyond that available to any feature filmmaker.*

And yet… if we leave such concerns aside and simply view ‘Snowpiercer’ as a blunt allegory for the same socio-political concerns its director seems to wish to address in all his films, well, it actually works rather brilliantly.

The same story ‘Parasite’ frames as a contemporary thriller, ‘Snowpiercer’ essentially tells through the lens of a CG-slathered SF blockbuster, and the challenges and conclusions it dares to confront its audience with are bold indeed for a film in this general genre/budgetary realm, mercilessly pricking the balloons of us-vs-them dualism and individual exceptionalism which generally keep such pulpy action/adventure narratives afloat. I’m pretty sure in fact that the harrowing succession of revelations and script flips which comprise during the story’s final act would never in a million years have seen the light of day in a common or garden multiplex clogger (much to the studio’s chagrin, I’m assuming).

As the stubbornness he seems to have demonstrated in preserving his film’s content and tone in the face of full spectrum interference clearly demonstrates though, Joon Ho is a strong enough director to keep even a project this sprawling and ridiculous tightly focused, and the result is, in its own weird way, just as effective as his later Oscar-winner.

* It’s worth noting that, as much as the ‘Snowpiercer’ concept may seem preposterous in strictly logical/utilitarian terms, given that we now find ourselves living in a world in obscenely wealthy celebrity plutocrats are routinely blasting themselves into space and planning gigantic underground highway networks… well, perhaps the idea of a monomaniacal Ed Harris chuntering across the dead globe in a giant train set powered by the blood of his serfs isn’t quite as far-fetched as may have seemed a decade ago…?

8. Rollerball (Norman Jewison, 1975)

Sticking with dystopian nightmares, here we have one of the very best - and, I would suggest, most widely misunderstood - of the many such visions which emerged from Hollywood in the 1970s. Misleadingly promoted as a violent future-sports action movie upon release, Jewison’s film is a more foreboding and cerebral work than audiences (then or now) may have anticipated, feeling almost like a distant cousin to John Boorman’s ‘Zardoz’ or the late Douglas Trumbull’s ‘Silent Running’ vis-a-vis pushing the ‘anything goes’ philosophy of ‘70s Hollywood to the point of commercial suicide in an attempt to bring the aesthetic of the era’s new wave literary SF to the masses.

The film’s actual rollerball sequences are indeed as hard-hitting as the violence-in-the-movies blather which accompanied the film’s release may have implied, but they are more frightening and confusing than conventionally exciting, and by the time we reach the film’s ugly, desultory climax, the monolithic fascist pomp of the arena spectacle has become genuinely nightmarish, the callousness of the game’s brutality leaving us as tired and nauseated as a public execution or a Nazi pep rally.

Outside of the arena meanwhile, the rest of the film is unsettlingly inert. Pacing is glacial and the atmosphere hangs heavy, like an unseen weight on the audience’s shoulders, mirroring that hefted by James Caan’s lost, lonely, test tube-bred athlete, groping around the edges of his world for an exit he can’t even begin to envisage.

‘Rollerball’s masterstroke I think is the way that (with the exception of one or two brief scenes) it keeps us trapped within Caan’s heavily blinkered perspective, refusing to allow us beyond the walls of the placid, self-contained environment within which our protagonist, as an elite Olympian within a corporate/totalitarian global state, is allowed to exist. He has no reliable sources of information, no context for his existence, no friends whose word he can rely upon - and as a result, neither do we.

In a conventional dystopian / earth-future SF tale, we would expect to zoom out and get The Big Picture at some point. We’d get some omnipotent narrator filling us in on the exact nature of the ‘corporate wars’ which seem to have turned North America (and by extension, the rest of the world) into a vast, homogenous monoculture. We would cut away to the huddled masses at whom the spectacle of rollerball is presumably aimed - be they toiling, subterranean morlocks, impoverished, inner-city TV zombies, or whatever. But, there is none of that here, and the absence of this context feels deeply troubling.

Caan’s corporate handlers keep him in a land of plenty, in which a sparse population seem to shuttle between ranch houses, sports arenas and gleaming corporate palaces. But we know that this can’t really be the full story, don't we…?

The icy, transactional manner in which Jonathan E is expected to conduct his interpersonal relationships, the way that decisions are made on his behalf, the complete lack of culture, history, knowledge or education accessible to him - all of this is telling. Meanwhile, the occasional hints we do receive of the Big Bad underlying ‘Rollerball’s world (such as the haunting sight of a group of executive parygoers, high on synthetic drugs, destroying a copse of trees with some kind of flame pistol) feel queasy and inexplicable.

Viewed from an era in which dystopian sci-fi and post-apocalyptic survival fantasies have become a familiar part of the tapestry of popular escapist entertainment, ‘Rollerball’ provides a stridently NOT FUN reminder of just how existentially terrifying it must actually feel to subsist within the calm heart of a vast Orwellian machine, with any notion of truth or understanding kept far beyond your reach.

7. Alphabet City   

(Amos Poe, 1984)

Seemingly an attempt to break into the commercial mainstream from NY underground filmmaker/punk scenester Amos Poe, ‘Alphabet City’ may not have exactly made his Hollywood dreams come true, but, newly scrubbed up by Fun City Editions after decades of neglect, it still stands out both as a beautiful, hyper-stylised exemplar of neon-drenched ‘80s psychedelia and a fiendishly gripping, straight-down-the-line crime drama.

The film’s basic plot is as old as the steam rising from Manhattan’s subways. Ambitious young drug dealer Vincent Spano cruises the streets and alleys of the Lower East Side in his sweet white Trans-Am, paying the rent on the swanky penthouse loft he shares with his artist girlfriend and baby son. When his mafia paymasters order him one night to firebomb the housing project where his mother and sister live though, that’s a step too far. Ya don't say ‘no’ to the mob though of course, so by dawn he and his young family are on the run from the mob, with a violent showdown fast approaching.

Simple as this tale may be, it’s brought to life with admirably fevered intensity by a wildly varied cast of character players (ranging from ‘Let’s Scare Jessica To Death’s Zohra Lampert to ‘Police Academy’s Michael Winslow), generating some real, edge-of-seat investment in the story’s outcome. Beyond that though, it is ‘Alphabet City’s stunning visuals and period detail which seem really set to blow 21st century minds.

Real downtown locations are transformed into phantasmagorical wonderlands by Poe and DP Oliver Wood’s inspired lighting and tracked to a characteristically slinky/superb Nile Rodgers score, meaning that, if you’re into that very particular cinematic aesthetic found only in early ‘80s New York, you just found the motherlode.

From glimmering reflections of headlights on washed down streets and incessant, blinding neon, to infernal gel red lighting cascading down towerblocks as trashcan fires blaze in the foreground, from smoke-filled, candlelit subterranean shooting galleries to swank, art-filled loft spaces and handheld crawls through genuine Manhattan nightclubs…. it’s almost too much, man. Like some flickering fever dream of Michael Mann’s ‘Thief’ mashed up with every Abel Ferrara movie you’ve ever seen, cut with a manageable dose of ‘Liquid Sky’ and whizzed up in a blender for easy mass consumption; just incredible.

(It’s no surprise to learn that, after a screening of this film, Mann himself is rumoured to have demanded that Oliver Wood be immediately tracked down and offered a job on ‘Miami Vice’; no such luck for Mr Poe sadly, but he abides.)

 

6. Drunken Master II 

(Lau Kar-Leung & Jackie Chan, 1994)

Marred by well-publicised behind the scenes clashes between Jackie Chan and director Lau Kar-Leung, and long available to viewers in the West only via a cut/dubbed Miramax version [thank you to Hong Kong Rescue for fixing me up with the real deal - now no longer on sale, sadly], ‘Drunken Master II’ hasn’t exactly had an easy time of it over the years.

Nonetheless, it remains a staggering high water mark of Jackie’s late 80s/early 90s “imperial” phase (and of late period HK martial arts cinema in general), applying epic, no-expense-spared production values to a frankly exhausting compendium of super-human physical/martial prowess, resulting in a film which, for sheer spectacle and entertainment value, arguably tops even the revered 1978 original.

At which point I should probably just give up and resort to asking “need I say more?”, but, I can’t help also taking the time to point out that this is one of the rare kung fu comedies in which the script’s broad comic chops actually worked very well for me, cutting the expected screwball farce with a welcome dose of full-on surrealism - particularly when embodied by Anita Mui, who is absolutely fantastic here as Jackie’s strong-willed step-mother; surely one of the funniest, coolest female characters HK popular cinema ever produced.

Meanwhile, the film’s ending - during which it seems to have suddenly occurred to the filmmakers that encouraging their audience to drink excessively and fight in the streets was maybe just a little bit irresponsible - presents a tonally jarring, bad taste WTF moment which few cult film fans will be able to find it in themselves not to adore.

 

5. Memories of Murder 

(Bong Joon Ho, 2003)

Back on the Bong Joon Ho trail, this riveting, technically impeccable police procedural details the travails of a pair of incompetent / borderline corrupt small town cops and an in-above-his-head rookie detective from the city as they - spoiler alert - completely fail to solve an on-going series of sex murders in rural South Korea during the dreary, mid 1980s tail-end of the nation’s period of military dictatorship.

Arguably rivalling ‘Parasite’ as the director’s best film to date, ‘Memories of Murder’ is less bleak than its unsavoury subject matter and grey, muted colour scheme would tend to suggest. Essentially playing as a down-at-heel black comedy for much of its running time, it takes an admirably non-judgemental attitude toward its morally equivocal protagonists, as each apparent breakthrough in their case soon dissolves into a sticky morass of bungling, botched evidence, interpersonal bitterness and base level stupidity.

Though the stark social commentary which went on to define much of Ho’s later work remains very much on the back burner here, there is nonetheless a strong sense that no sensibly ordered society would leave an active serial murder investigation in the hands of people so clearly incapable of dealing with it, whilst the low level poverty and emotional emptiness of the characters’ surroundings meanwhile speak for themselves.

Amidst the grimness though, the director’s obvious talent for commercial / genre-based cinema still shines through strongly, with superb editing and photography contributing to a series of painstakingly choreographed chase and suspense sequences which feel as exhilarating as anything in a more conventional action picture. Defined by a lingering sense of irresolvable complexity and human frailty which matches up to any of cinema (or literature)’s finest hard-boiled procedural fiction, what we have here is in fact something of a slow-burn masterpiece of 21st century crime cinema, I feel.

4. Notorious 

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

Straight from the “can you believe I’ve never seen this one before?” file. Hitch’s entry in the short-lived post-war “those pesky Nazis are out there somewhere, we’ve got to find ‘em” sub-genre (also see ‘The Stranger’ (1946), ‘Cornered’ (1945) amongst others) finds him at the absolute peak of his powers, delivering an elegant, engrossing and (needless to say) nail-bitingly suspenseful thriller which measures up to any of his more frequently screened classics.

Alongside the expected technical mastery and inspired visual storytelling, the photography and production design also deserve a shout-out here, with the gleaming, high noir style of DP Ted Tetzlaff’s nocturnal Rio De Janeiro exteriors looking so rich you almost want to step into them and lose yourself, whilst the labyrinthine geometry of Claude Rains’ luxurious rented townhouse meanwhile assumes a foreboding, paranoid gothic atmosphere, reminiscent not just of Hitchcock’s earlier smash hit ‘Rebecca’, but also of the kind of digs in which Rains’ aristocratic Nazi business magnate was presumably ensconced shortly before he and his domineering mother were forced to skedaddle across the Atlantic.

Beyond all this though, ‘Notorious’ is, surprisingly perhaps, more an actor’s movie than anything else. it’s no exaggeration to say that Ingrid Bergman proves an absolute revelation here, hitting a wild palette of complex emotional states in a far more demanding and multi-faceted ‘heroine’ role than Hollywood’s leading ladies usually had to contend with (then or now), whilst Ben Hecht’s admirably hard-boiled script skirts into dangerously ambiguous terrain by allowing Rains’ urbane Third Reich-apologist to often seem like a more appealing presence than Cary Grant’s hectoring and duplicitous, jobs-worth FBI man.

Like many of the finest ‘40s American films, ‘Notorious’ seems to offer the viewer a choice between skimming the surface of a masterfully crafted, beautifully rendered entertainment, or plumbing the bottomless depths of psychological motivation and socio-political significance which bubble beneath it. Whichever level you choose to engage with it on though, it’s difficult not to reach the conclusion that we’re looking at a stone-cold classic right here.

3. Ceremonia Sangrienta [‘Blood Ceremony’]  

(Jorge Grau, 1973)

This one is perhaps not strictly speaking a 2021 first-time viewing, as I believe I battled through an iffy bootleg of the U.S. ‘Legend of Blood Castle’ version of this film at some point in distant past, but to be honest I barely remember anything of that sleep-and-alcohol fogged misadventure, and besides, watching the film as its intended form via Mondo Macabro’s revelatory blu-ray release - and actually paying attention to it, more to the point - proves a whole other goblet of gore.

In fact, I’d now go so far as to place ‘Ceremonia Sangrienta’s within the very top tier of European gothic horror - a status rarely acknowledged in the past perhaps simply because director Jorge Grau largely rejects the kind of campiness and exploitational thrills we fans tend to expect of ‘70s Spanish gothic, instead treating this loose extrapolation of the Countess Bathory mythos with a straight-faced artistic seriousness which leads one to suspect he saw himself competing against Buñuel and Pasolini (or at the very least, Michael Reeves and Harry Kumel) rather than Amando de Ossorio or Paul Naschy.

Thankfully however, Grau and his collaborators match these lofty ambitions with a level of imagination and technical accomplishment which ensure the film never slide into pretention or tedium, employing rich, shadow-haunted photography, fascinating and impeccably detailed historical production design, and a far stronger set of performances than one would generally expect to encounter in a horror film of this era.

Of course it’s not my intention here to in any way denigrate the purveyors of pulpier, more down-to-earth Spanish horror (as regular readers will be aware, I love them dearly), but Grau is working on another level here, laying down a sombre, engrossing atmosphere - half lice-ridden realism, half oneiric fairy tale - through which to explore the weird hinterlands separating psychological dysfunction from the supernatural, and the fevered, libidinous effect which such ambiguities tend to inspire within the medieval mind-set which predominates in the film, in spite of its ostensible 19th century setting.

Folk-horror - as we’re now obliged to call it - plays a significant role in the drama here, as do the more prosaic horrors of the feudal class system, with authentic-seeming details of folk magic(k) customs extensively detailed and contrasted with the grander, more blood-thirsty satanic pomp and sexual predation practiced by The Countess (Lucia Bosè) and her dark-eyed consort (played with memorable menace by playboy/producer Espartaco Santoni).

What I appreciated most of all about ‘Ceremonia Sangrienta’ in fact is the way it pulls you so deeply into the beliefs which underpin the film’s world that, after spending 90 minutes convinced you’re watching a a tale filled to the brim with witches, vampirism, demonic possession and corpses rising from the grave, you find yourself reviewing the events you’ve just witnessed and realising that, when reassessed from a “rational” 20th/21st century perspective, nothing objectively supernatural actually happens here at all. A neat trick which I don’t think I have ever seen pulled off this successfully in a period horror film.

And, just for the record, there’s also lots of gushing blood and naked neck-biting, and candle-lit processions through fog-drenched wilderness and wild, reality-shredding delirious editing, so c’mon horror fans - give it a try. The pace may seem a little ponderous at first, but trust me, once you get into it, the restored ‘Blood Ceremony’ really is a WIN-WIN proposition.

 

2. The Lineup 

(Don Siegel, 1958)

It’s difficult to express how much I enjoyed Don Siegel’s psychotic, perverse, action-packed late period hitmen-on-the-rampage noir…. but hopefully I had a pretty good bash at it when I reviewed the film in July last year.

1. Blue Collar 

(Paul Schrader, 1978)

Going into Paul Schrader’s directorial debut, I was expecting, I suppose, a downbeat, neorealist character drama; and heaven knows, I sure got one. Simply put, Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel deliver extraordinary performances in ‘Blue Collar’, each of them pretty much tearing out yr heart n’ soul and giving them a good kicking across the parking lot at various points in the picture, whilst the late, great Yaphet Kotto isn't far behind as their somewhat more canny and laidback cohort Smokey.

Although I daresay the closest Schrader likely ever got to “working the line” was turning in copy for Pauline Kael at the New Yorker, he is, as ever, a phenomenally gifted screenwriter, and the words and scenarios he throws at his volatile cast into here feel entirely authentic. Splitting the weight of the story’s drama between several characters works extremely well, allowing the film to breath somewhat without sacrificing the intensity of each performance, whilst the necessity of concentrating on the essential ordinariness and gut level relatability of our characters’ quandaries meanwhile offers a compelling alternative to the obsessive, lone wolf male martyrs who usually tend to populate Schrader’s universe.

Likewise, I don’t know if there is an aspect of modern life which has been subject to such a weight of fatuous, factional bombast in its fictional portrayals as labour relations, but Schrader, as he is apt to do, cuts straight to the heart of the matter here, rejecting both the chest-beating, all-for-one sentimentality of the left and the poisonous, Social Darwinist bullshit of the right. Instead, he depicts trade unions for what they (in my experience at least) really are. Which is to say, a necessary evil; a leaky cushion of hot air and graft shielding workers from the faceless, instinctual divide-and-conquer tyranny of their employers. The frustration and paranoia which results from being caught in the grind between these two tectonic plates, whilst attempting to remain beholden to neither is, I would contend, perfectly captured here.

Beyond any of this though, what really got me about ‘Blue Collar’ is the unexpected discovery of what a great crime movie it is. It is instructive to hear Schrader speaking about how, nervous about directing for the first time, he wanted to ensure that this movie was “plotted to within an inch of its life” in the manner of a ‘40s thriller, leaving no holes in which the pacing could sag or the actors could lose the narrative thread, because that is indeed very much how the finished movie plays out.

From the painstaking (often hilarious) detail built up around our protagonists’ botched heist attempt to the intractable hell which proceeds to engulf each of them in its aftermath, and the excruciatingly yet totally inevitable manner in which they each willingly deliver themselves up to their own destruction, ‘Blue Collar’ is, surprisingly, one of the best anti-capitalist noirs ever made, be it neo- or otherwise.

It is rare for me to urge readers to watch the conclusion of a film outside of the context which preceded it, but anytime you feel in need of a refresher re: the straight dope on the forces that govern our lives, you could do a lot worse than consult the last two minutes of ‘Blue Collar’ prior to your next encounter with an interview panel / line manager / union rep / tax assessor / polling station.