Vérité Review: Combat Shock (1984)

Combat Shock (American Nightmares)

(1984)

Dir. Buddy Giovinasso

Starring: Rick Giovinasso, Veronica Stork

   You can find the article in full at Verité Film Magazine online. 

Top 10 Films of 2013

 Okay, cue the grumbling: I have a love/hate relationship with movie lists. I read them, I enjoy writing them, and I've spent endless amusing hours reading up the Top 10 lists of various filmmakers, writers, actors, etc. It just so happens that when it comes to end-of-year lists, I struggle. This is the first year I've genuinely worked on making one, and I ended up inevitably frustrated. Without the power of hindsight that a larger survey (like the 2012 BFI Sight & Sound Poll) provides, any yearly round-up is bound to painfully arbitrary and subjective. Critics are called upon to think back on everything they've seen that calendar year; but that largely depends on: a) geographical location, for differences in release dates, b) whatever organisations or publications one is attached to, as some will be privy to early screenings, etc, that others will not be c) the difficulty of tracking down and viewing as many of the standouts in world cinema from that year, as to feel (in some impossible way) qualified for the task of making a list.

 In short, for an American critic living in the UK, without having seen the Palme D'Or winner (Blue is the Warmest Color) or any of the American releases unavailable on this side of the pond (Wolf of Wall Street, 12 Years a Slave)  I must go forth and make whatever Top 10 I can reasonably make. Here goes:

10. Stoker, Dir. Chan-Wook Park

 South Korean director Chan-Wook Park's English language debut is rife with operatic gothicism and baroque visual patterns; it's the stuff of twisted fairy tales. It concerns the story of a grieving teenage girl (Mia Wasikowska) who has recently lost her father in a terrible accident. She lives in an austere country home, existing in a strangely otherworldly margin on the outskirts of town. When her distant mother invites a handsome interloper to come and stay, (her long-absent young uncle, played by Mathew Goode) family secrets, the distorted loyalty of blood ties, masochism, murder, and sexual blossoming await. It is decidedly overripe; with its ramped-up archetypes, it can even be predictable, at times. Somehow his never dampens the serpentine pleasure of watching the horror unfurl. Stoker embraces the languorous, dark urges within, and whatever excesses it contains, its carefully framed and patterned structure make its indulgences seem justified.

9. Gravity, Dir. Alfonso Cuaron

  Despite the traditionalism of its survival/escape narrative, the extraordinary spectacle of Gravity make it one of the most enjoyable experiences of the year. Its sheer ambition and scope make it an overwhelmingly impressive film, to say nothing of its technical prowess. Experienced in IMAX and 3D, it genuinely feels like a return to the spectacle and thrill of another era, or perhaps more saliently it isn't a return at all - merely the logical offspring of the 80's high concept movie, a period we've been living in ever since. Regardless, it remains a forceful example of the early aims of American movies: to entertain, to frighten, to make the audience dodge and flinch away from flying space debris as it once famously did in 1903 at the sight of an oncoming train. It has that wonderful, purely cinematic capacity.

8. Lore, Dir. Cate Shortland

Lore follows the journey of 14-year-old Hannalore and her wayward young siblings as they attempt to cross the German countryside on their way to their Grandmother's. A folkloric reminiscence of Little Red Riding Hood, perhaps; except that the year is 1945, and Lore's parents are high-ranking SS, arrested for war crimes by the Allied Forces. Left to fend for herself and what remains of her family, Lore crosses the rural sections of the crumbling Fatherland, the pastoral serenity belying the moral rot of its inhabitants. A privileged, sheltered girl, Lore adjusts to a countryside littered with American troops, breadlines and bloodied corpses, reacting to the new savagery of her environment with surprising resourcefulness. Raised with pride in her family's Fascist ideology, she shows no signs of relinquishing her beliefs; not until she is shaken by a prolonged run-in with a young Jewish boy, Thomas. Filmed with lyrical, doting attention to the natural beauty of Germanic forests and fields, the film evokes an almost Malick-esque consideration of inherited moral decay and the silent, ancient impassivity of nature. The Nazi fixation upon Germany as bastion of Bavarian history and Aryan purity, along with its ties to Paganism, seem referenced obliquely here -- the picturesque, idealised elements of the setting giving way to Lore's ugly adolescent pangs of realisation (in extremis) that her parents are not perhaps as virtuous as she might have assumed.

7. Mud, Dir. Jeff Nichols

Jeff Nichols has proven to be one of the outstanding talents of a new generation of stateside auteurs. His thoroughly and allusively American aesthetic is both warmly familiar and indirect in its references, feeling like the inheritor of mythic American tropes without ever seeming derivative. The sun-dappled realism of this down-to-earth brand of Southern Gothic softens the genre's more lurid impulses in favor of a poignant emotional honesty - particularly from its young star, Tye Sheridan. Based on Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the plot involves two young boys in the backwoods of Arkansas who one day stumble upon a fugitive known as Mud (Matthew McConaughey) hiding in the woods along the Mississippi. The boys must mature quickly to help Mud reunite with his vacillating girlfriend, endangering themselves and their families in the meantime. The kids idolise Mud for his outlaw romanticism; he offers them an adventurous escape from the grim realities and hard graft of their parents' blue-collar lives. What results is a perilous, thrilling, bittersweet coming-of-age tale; a good old-fashioned storytelling mode. It brings to mind a sweetly melancholy, boyish Americana, stories where certain summers change us irrevocably and our childhood heroes seem never to die. 

6. Django Unchained, Dir. Quentin Tarantino

Self-indulgence, controversial portrayals, and embarrassing cameos aside, Tarantino made one of the most entertaining, grotesque, and utterly debate-worthy films of the year. With his typical panache, from the Corbucci-style snap zooms to the exceptionally catchy original soundtrack, he depicts the horrors of slavery with hyperbole and a penchant for B-movie revenge. DiCaprio's brief turn as a bone-chillingly vicious slave owner is memorable, as is the hilarious skit where some hillbilly precursors to the Ku Klux Klan bicker about the practicalities of seeing through their white hoods.  Django has inspired endless debate about the potential for exploitation around such a sensitive subject, and while certainly flawed, it is a hugely satisfying revenge fantasy, cathartic in its wrath against a shameful past we are helpless to change.

  5. Blue Jasmine, Dir. Woody Allen

 Woody Allen conjures up something less frothy than his last effort (Midnight in Paris) but still lithe and tragic; it is an aching, slight sort of film, like a slender 20^th century novel that nonetheless lingers. Jasmine, in a perfectly brittle, fractured performance from Cate Blanchett, is the wife of a disgraced, jailed banker. An ex-Park Avenue princess still swathed in Chanel pearls and tones of taupe and cream, she takes her bankrupt and fragile self to bunk with what is clearly a poor relation, her adopted sister (Sally Hawkins). There, she chafes against her sister's modest lifestyle, apartment, and choices in men. The adept role and Allen's faultless writing manage to make this utterly phony, thoroughly unlikable woman as intensely watchable as her now oft-mentioned predecessor, Vivien Leigh's Blanche DuBois. Many critics have called Blue Jasmine something of a modern re-telling of the Tennessee Williams play, which isn't far wrong. Despite its moments of humour, and its bright, airy, bohemian setting of San Francisco, it is a sleekly miserable film that captures the terrible haute-bourgeois milieu that Jasmine clings to, in all her glorious, wincing self-delusion.

4. The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, Dir. Bruno Forzani + Helene Cattet

Certainly the most avant-garde of the choices on this list, it is also the only choice of mine which has not had a UK release as of yet; it has been doing the rounds at the London Film Festival and my local cinema's Mayhem Horror Festival, where I had the good fortune to see it. A remarkably strange, violent, and beautiful experience, the giallo-influenced French horror is a freak show, a visual and aural feast, and something that you may not even realise you've enjoyed until it's had some time to sink in. I reviewed it in full a few months ago, here.











3. Spring Breakers, Dir. Harmony Korine

This brash, expressionistic, candy-coloured satire is beautifully rendered and utterly original; I wrote an in-depth review of it when I first saw it, which you can read here. 

2. The Act of Killing, Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer

A remarkable documentary made over the course of a decade, Oppenheimer's film follows several Indonesian war criminals, men who openly admit to having committed a litany of hideous crimes in the 1960's. The filmmaker aides them in creating their own film adaptations of their experiences, producing works of disturbing and magical realism. The film is striking in its seeming complicity with these men, privy to their most private ruminations and discussions; the act of turning reality into lurid fiction gets straight to the dark heart of the matter. It is a breathtaking, bizarre, and contemplative exploration of mass murder, collective memory, and the ways in which evil is perpetrated, excused, and most importantly, lived with.You can find my full review here, published with Periodical.

1. The Great Beauty, Dir. Paolo Sorrentino

Paolo Sorrentino's ambitious, grandoise La Grande Bellezza explores, disdains, and relishes in the dazzling decay of Roman high life. It combines the referential cinematic history of the Eternal City with the modern, Botoxed Eurotrash nightclubbers of the wealthy artistic elite. Fellini comparisons are no stretch when Sorrentino evokes the same carnival-esque sublimity; the same biting corruption and emptiness lies at the soul of Sorrentino's mecca as it did Fellini's. Toni Servillo is beguiling as aged novelist (and 'king of the socialites') Jep Gambardella, a man who has reached 65 years of age and is staggered by the shallowness of his life. He initially seems cynical and sharp-tongued, a grouchy intellectual with an impeccable sartorial eye. Jep begins to search for some kind of earnest humanity, some reprieve from the stylish nothingness of his existence.  By turns, melancholy, cutting, funny, moving, and sublime, the camera pans and tracks through some of Rome's most beautiful vistas and architecture. It caresses the faces and figures of the people in Jep's life, be they enchantresses, strippers, intelligentsia, or grotesques. The Great Beauty is an enigmatic, multi-layered piece of work that expounds on Italy's continuing presence as a giant of world cinema.

Screen Women: Barbara Stanwyck's Protofeminism in Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve

      Regularly appearing on critics and filmmakers’ roll call of great movies (including Paul Schrader’s in the 2012 Sight & Sound Poll) The Lady Eve remains an enduring classic. Made by Preston Sturges in 1941, at the low ebb of the screwball comedy era and the opening rumblings of film noir, the film stars Barbara Stanwyck as Jean Harrington, a slinky card shark who cynically shakes down naive rich men with help from her conman father.

   When Henry Fonda’s Charles ‘Hopsy’ Pike boards the same ocean liner after spending a year in the Amazon studying snakes, Jean and company find themselves rubbing their hands together with glee; Hopsy is particularly wealthy, and particularly clueless. Things inevitably grow complicated when Hopsy falls utterly in love with Jean – and in spite of herself – she with him. When Hopsy discovers her dishonesty, Jean is forced to use her cunning to find a way of winning him back. Sparkling with eloquent wit and well-timed slapstick, Sturges found himself with a critical and commercial success on his hands. Indeed, Sturges was one of the most prominent comedy directors of the 1940s, and remains today a well-respected figure, famous for the good-natured  progressivism of his writing (Sturges, after all, began work in 30’s Hollywood as a screenwriter).

  The screwball comedy has  always been a gender-bending genre, its light-hearted ‘battle of the sexes’ trope allowing filmmakers like Sturges and George Cukor to broadly satirise widely-held notions about love, relationships, and gender. Actresses like Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell popularised the chatty, bright, educated career woman in the movies, often challenging masculine roles and positively usurping their male counterparts in spirit, wit, and joie de vivre. As one critic notes, such films are an ‘embodiment of some of the precepts of the feminist movement […] reflecting the screwball comedy’s everlasting insight that women catch on faster than men.’  One only has to witness Bringing Up Baby’s Cary Grant made positively ridiculous in a lady’s feathered dressing gown to recognise the potentially subversive qualities of the screwball genre.

                                     Read the rest HERE at Kubrick on the Guillotine.

The Guardian Clip Joint: '50s Melodrama

     

      I recently had the opportunity to write a little list for Guardian Film Blog's 'Clip Joint', where you use movie clips to illustrate five of the best movie moments in any given category. I chose 1950's melodrama as mine, so you can have a look at the link below:

          http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/dec/04/clip-joint-50s-melodrama

Review: Sleeping Dogs

Sleeping Dogs (2013) 
Dir. Floris Ramaekers
Starring: Liberty Mills, Jon Campling, David L. Rooney, Candis Nergaard

Sleeping Dogs is a £100-budget London crime thriller by writer/director Floris Ramaekers. Many films of similar description are wheeled out on the British independent circuit each year, and yet, Sleeping Dogs remains unique through its slow-fizzling and contemplative approach. The plot revolves around Eve, a young Londoner who is caretaker to her dangerously ill, catatonic boyfriend Tommy - the victim of a savage doping attack which has left him in a vegetative state. Ramaekers captures the hermetically-sealed world of the rough London neighbourhood where Eve wanders, melancholy and ghost-like, searching for answers. It seems that everyone who occupies this milieu is aggressive and suspicious, particularly when Eve seeks money to pay for a life-saving medical treatment for Tommy. The secrecy and bad blood bubbling beneath the surface suggest that Tommy's history is chequered beyond anyone's imagining.

   Liberty Mills, as Eve, gives a quietly affecting, tough-minded performance, remaining tenacious and self-sacrificing until the bitter end. The lurking cast of supporting actors, all relations and associates of Tommy's, make up a fiercely believable rogue's gallery of bloodsuckers and lowlives. In an intimate film like this one, a single miscasting can be jarring, but the ensemble supporting cast of Sleeping Dogs provides no such weaknesses. The unrelentingly grim story remains deeply engaging and watchable, its visual style and quality of performances making it easy to forget the micro-budget. It is also testament to the talents of the director, actors, and crew to create such quality work under such limitations. Its aura of unsettling quietude and lonely malaise, along with its terrible denouement, make Sleeping Dogs an outstanding British independent film, with a thorough aversion to cliché.

 

Review: The Counsellor

The Counsellor (2013) 
Dir. Ridley Scott
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Penelope Cruz, Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz 

  Ridley Scott's follow-up to the divisive Prometheus is considerably at odds with its predecessor; The Counsellor is a godless, sleek, nasty, and thoroughly mean-spirited sort of film. Penned by author Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men and The Road), the story revolves around an unnamed "counsellor" who is a first-time mediator in a major drug deal. Fassbender is predictably right for the role as a well-dressed, wealthy young lawyer, arrogant and decidedly too smooth for his own good. His business partner, a perma-tanned druglord played by Javier Bardem, has a truly reptilian girlfriend in the form of Cameron Diaz, a leopard-print bedecked career criminal with the tacky aesthetic of Donatella Versace. When fatal errors are made, the Mexican drug cartel looks for someone to blame, and that blame lands squarely on the heads of anyone involved.

  As we might expect from McCarthy, the dialogue has a genuine flair for the poetic, the blackly comic, and the philosophical; the film moves through a collection of conversation pieces, each existing unto itself, loosely fashioned into an action thriller's narrative. Much of the critical backlash against the film has been in response to the lack of backstory, characterisation, or extended exposition, but it is often riveting precisely for its ambiguity; it remains involving on a moment-to-moment basis, where explanatory flashbacks would likely feel clumsy. The verbose dialogue is countered by the ramped-up excess of the film; the crass, sleazy, sexually predatory characters who people it; glistening skin, sparklingly modern apartments, fast cars; sheer visual vulgarity. Cheetahs lope gracefully out of smashed-up black Range Rovers; deaths are spectacular and ruthless; beheadings and mutilations leave shivering wrecks of individuals, choking in terror on their own snot. As a weary Mexican barman tells Fassbender, the cartel kill to show that "death has no meaning," - but no one truly believes that, he hastens to add. This is the internal logic of The Counsellor in full - death has no meaning. Nor does life, nor guilt, nor innocence. None have a bearing on the turn of events set into motion by the counsellor's greed and complicity. Such unrepentant nihilism is unusual in a film with stars of this calibre, and it is decidedly untrendy in terms of the box office.

  The Counsellor does hit a few sour notes; it is too grandiose to not feel faintly ridiculous at times. It is understandable that some may find the writing style pompous. Bardem's persona is slightly too determinedly wacky, and Diaz is sometimes cartoonish, played a bit too far against type to always be believable. But Fassbender's lion's share of screen-time, in my view, more than makes up for the others' weaknesses - as does the almost apocalyptic tone. Ultimately, the terrifying, serpentine emptiness at the centre of The Counsellor makes for fascinatingly morbid viewing. To do business with and be left untainted by the vast evil of the faceless Mexican drug cartel is a tall order, indeed - and it's a task that the counsellor himself may or may not be up to handling.

Review: Lee Daniels' The Butler

The Butler (2013)
Dir. Lee Daniels
Starring: Forrest Whittaker, Oprah Winfrey, John Cusack, David Oyelowo

The Butler is the decade-spanning, tearjerking tale of White House butler Cecil Gaines, an African-American man born into abject poverty in the cotton fields of the Deep South, to become one of the longest-serving White House butlers in American history. Its' glowingly expensive production values detail the most turbulent decades of the 20th century, awash in a yellowed, evocative light. It is loosely based on the true story of butler Eugene Allen, who served at the White House from the Eisenhower to the Reagan administrations. In the divisive early years of his work, Cecil is repeatedly told, 'The room should feel empty when you're in it'; not just a butler's instructions but ultimately another encouragement for the silence of Black Americans all over the nation. Many of the strongest points of the film are some of the most vile portions of US history; the humiliation of Civil Rights protestors at lunch counter sit-ins are particularly harrowing, fiercely recalling the shame and disgust of those years.

The family and personal histories of this remarkable man are intertwined with some of the most significant moments of American history; the growing political consciousness of his eldest son peaks along with the headiest days of the Civil Rights movement. A growing rift between father and son's sensibilities reflect the generational struggle of the counterculture years. JFK's assassination is mirrored in a low ebb at home, where Cecil's wife, portrayed fantastically by Oprah Winfrey, has sunken into depressive alcoholism. If any of this seems potentially transparent, this is often the case; at its worst, The Butler has a weepy flair for the melodramatic - and sometimes, the obvious. The superstar cast also is occasionally distracting; while Oprah disappears into her role through sheer talent, the short turns of John Cusack as Richard Nixon and Robin Williams as Dwight D. Eisenhower seem jarringly out-of-place, and closer to caricature. Nonetheless, the inconsistencies of the film are countered by a deeply poignant and colourful tract of the Civil Rights movement; it is effective through its humanism, and through its' demonstratively fascinating subject matter. Cecil does occasionally feel like the Forrest Gump of butlers - witness to too much of the latter half of the 20th century for it not to seem silly.  But such is the nature of the Oscar-baiting melodrama; we can expect a certain amount of bloated self-importance, and in The Butler's case, it becomes easy to overlook. We are almost held hostage to its poignancy, such is the weight and emotional force of the events shown.

 Even with its weaknesses and uneven moments, The Butler's grounding in reality and the strong central performances allow for a compelling historical drama. The victorious, optimistic conclusion- including Barack Obama's 2008 election - may be overstating the positive. Yet a great deal of progress did come, and largely through the achievements of those who fought, and sometimes died, for Civil Rights. Daniels' heartfelt thank you to those who did so, alongside an equally heartfelt, earnest film, may be easy to laugh off or dismiss, for some. But neither trait is worthy of disdain; and while The Butler is heavily flawed, it is redeemable ultimately for its warmth and depth of feeling.

   Currently showing at Nottingham's Broadway Cinema. 

Review: Don Jon (2013)

          Don Jon (2013)
      Dir. Joseph Gordon-Levitt
     Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, Tony Danza


    In Joseph Gordon-Levitt's sex comedy Don Jon, a microscope is taken to the love lives of New Jersey's working-class "guidos"in a way that can't help but to feel a little bit condescending. Levitt plays a young, hair-gelled, muscle-bound Italian kid who has a serious porn addiction. He and his macho buddies divide and rate women out of 10, treating them summarily as a collection of body parts.  On one of his many nightclub forays, he comes across a high-maintenance "dime" by the name of Barbara (a particularly impressive collection of body parts, as we are repeatedly reminded) who baits and switches him into a relationship by withholding sex from him.

 It's clear where Gordon-Levitt has sought to level his critique - these tacky Jersey-Shore dwellers are haplessly beholden to the mass media's image of love, sex, and relationships. Their central problem, he opines, is that the poor fools have based their entire identities and expectations around the mountain of unrealistic shit they've been watching; in Jon's case, hardcore pornography, and in Barbara's case, silly romantic comedies. His treatise on the harmful effects of conflating reality with media fantasy does prove entertaining, at times - but the film ultimately falters due to messily-drawn characters.

 Barbara, we are shown, has a childhood bedroom festooned with pink and crystals, has been taught that she will find her perfect Prince Charming, and that her sexuality is a tool to be used to find and keep a man -- even if it means downright manipulation. Yet she is bothered by no more internal subjective depth than is necessary. All of the women in the film, even Julianne Moore's free-spirited widow, are static, fixed points around which Jon moves; they allow our central male character to make important self-discoveries about sex and love, with no room for their own development. This is the same central male character who charmingly remarks in the opening sequence, '....her face is an 8, but her tits are a 4', which hardly endears him to the audience, and should not make him any more inherently redeemable than his bossy female counterpart.

   As something of a rejoinder to its otherwise careless attitude, the film does make slight references to the media-saturated pressure that women are bombarded with constantly. Nonetheless, with no desire to investigate the notion further, any potential for commentary falls flat. What we are left with is an inoffensively obtuse, clumsy attempt at pithy comedy. It is amusing, shallow, and entirely mediocre.

LeftLion Review: Painless (2013)

Painless (2013)

Dir. Juan Carlos Medina

            ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED WITH LEFTLION NOTTINGHAM.

Painless is a film highly informed by the work of Guillermo Del Toro; it has the same meticulous period detail touched with dark bouts of magical realism; the same interest in the brutality of Fascist regimes, particularly that of Franco's Spain; and it continues the rich Spanish cinematic tradition of a fascination with children and the ghosts of the past. Working backward and forward through time, the film begins in 1931 and returns periodically to the present day. Its central idea revolves around the discovery of a group of young children who appear to be completely impervious to physical pain. Because the children have become dangerous to those around them, replete with horrific burns and broken bones, they are taken from their parents and straitjacketed, put indefinitely into solitary confinement in a godforsaken asylum. A medical team is there to learn more about these children, particularly one young boy who shows a capacity for both serene tenderness and shocking violence. Deeply involving, the film intertwines the past and present with a well-paced dual structure, connecting the desperate search of a modern Spanish doctor, David, to the events of recent history. He is told of the war years: 'Forgetting is what matters today', and he is advised repeatedly against digging into the past.

Of course, the children's 'unknown affliction' has both wonderful and terrifying capacities; under the darkening fog of the late 1930's, the concept of an ubermensch soldier is close to the surface of our thoughts. There is no overt suggestion that the children's powers are to be exploited, but had the experiments gone uninterrupted by the breakout of the Spanish Civil War, one can only guess at the dark purposes they may have been used for. Over the course of Franco's regime and the occupation of the Nazis, the asylum's increasingly wretched conditions and litany of cruelty sees an innocent child make a terrifying transformation. The character Berkano's inability to feel – or understand – pain may seem supernatural, but the true horror lies in a very human complicity with violence and oppression. The past haunts and informs the present day - the perverted genesis of David's family history comes to bear on his life in hideous ways. The corrupted ideologies of Fascism and Nazism breed monstrosity in many forms, and forgetting does not excuse or erase it.

As it transpires, the brooding atmospherics of the opening descend into a hellish finale, something of an unfortunate and overwrought conclusion that feels at odds with the subtlety and mood of most of the film. Be that as it may, it is a truly engaging story; an impressive homage to the tradition of European horror. Painless is alive with political allegory that may not be novel, but is still prescient and intensely watchable.

LeftLion Review: The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears

The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013) 

Dir. Bruno Forzani & Helene Cattet 

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED WITH LEFTLION NOTTINGHAM. 

 Broadway Cinema's Mayhem Film Festival was in full swing this weekend, showing a vast variety of sub-genres and nationalities. The first film to shown on the Friday evening was the giallo-influenced French horror The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears from creative duo Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Let it be said that attempting to make cohesive narrative sense out of such a film will be a fruitless, frustrating task for many. A psychedelic mishmash of the grotesque and the ornamental, the film appears to involve the disappearance of a businessman's wife, and his search for her through the apartment building where they live. This is a fairly arbitrary framework for utter aural and visual insanity, the locus of which is a havoc-wreaking, shape-shifting woman with terrifying sexual prowess and a propensity for straight razors.

Much of the film takes place in the art nouveau interior of the building they occupy. Its turn of the century architecture, painted glass, and ornately patterned wallpapers are seemingly infused with malice and witchery. A particular ‘beneath the wallpaper’ sequence is claustrophobically terrifying; the setting truly becomes a suffocating, maddening nightmare space. The building itself doubles back on itself deceivingly. Any traditional filmic conception of visual space, ellipsis of time, or dream sequences must be forgotten.

The remarkable, avant-garde sound design is almost sensually preoccupied with the sounds of sinew and flesh splitting under blades, vinyl sliding against skin, zips unzipping, glass breaking, sighs, screams, and moans; a cacophony of teeth-clenching noise. There is a fixation on eyes, with parallelism between pupils dilating and camera lenses focusing; the act of looking is deceptive and horrifying. Obsessive visual motifs litter the film; long hair, black, tentacle-like tendrils of it, shown repetitively as well as muscles straining, veins, sutures, leather, breasts, blades, and red vinyl.  As these motifs repeat and meld into one another, they form a sort of internal logic, a pattern singularly unique to the film.

Post-giallo, Post-Godard, Strange Colour pushes the boundaries of radical non-narrative form, welcoming the beautifully rendered chaos of pure sensory experience. 

  

Mayhem Horror Festival - Day 2 (Nov. 1st)

 

   On the second day of Mayhem, my first screening was the highly anticipated Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, directed by French duo Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani and garnering rave reviews at London Film Festival. A review for LeftLion Nottingham is forthwith, so I won't say too much here. What I can say is that the film is one of the most radically styled, daring, and maddening films of the year. By turns ornamental and grotesque, it is dazzlingly unique and psychedelic. Just don't expect to figure out what's going on.


    Delivery (2013, Dir. Brian Netto), centres around a young couple, Rachel and Kyle Massy, who are expecting their first child on national television, for a reality TV show. Purported to be assembled from the unused footage from that show, the producers abandon their original intent when strange, demonic hauntings begin to find a focal point around Rachel's pregnancy. She becomes convinced that something supernatural has latched itself onto her unborn child, and the found footage aspect plays out accordingly. Animals grow frightened and aggressive in her presence; unexpected noises and voices are picked up on sound recording equipment; Rachel grows taciturn and silent. This is all reasonably well done, particularly the opening section; Netto captures the tacky, cheerfully glossy glow of "lifestyle" TV, setting his couple up to watch them fall, so to speak. Unfortunately, it remains largely rote and paint-by-numbers through most of its running time. Certain portions are harrowing, but the saving grace of the film is its final note of ambiguity - has a demonic force torn its way through these ordinary lives, leaving tragedy in its wake? Or has a mentally ill young woman, wracked with primal terror at her body's vast changes, been exploited by a craven reality TV show? This sole complexity lends a final depth to the film that had otherwise remained an entertaining, if derivative, take on the found footage sub-genre.

Mayhem Horror Festival - Day 1 (Oct. 31st)

   

Last night - Halloween - started off Mayhem Horror Festival at the Broadway Cinema. Horror masterpiece Don't Look Now was set to screen in the chillingly gothic atmosphere of St. Mary's Church. There was a real Autumn chill in the air and a sense of anticipation to see one of world cinema's greats, Nic Roeg, speak in person. The man himself, in conversation with Steven Sheil, was modest, funny, and softly-spoken, discussing the motifs and themes of his film as something of a haphazard experiment. He gives the impression of a director who works very intuitively; he expounded his belief that the right actors 'come to the role' and he cites his fascination with chance, fate, and the odd coincidences of life as the working theme that runs through Don't Look Now. When asked about the intimate sex scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, Roeg shied away from discussing any of the more sordid questions involved (The 'was it real?' debate still raging on,) and focused on the 'return of sensuality' to the couple's marriage after the empty grief that had overwhelmed them.  

   As for the movie itself, the print was faultless. Roeg's nerve-shredding cross-cuts and montage sequences create a deeply unsettling, elegiac framework of memory and grief. The small incidences and vaguely demonic iconography is paired with the steady emotional realism of a man and woman on the verge of losing their precarious grasp on sanity. Venice is a city of shadows, a sort of graveyard in itself; its regal beauty is frozen in the relentless flow of history. It remains one of the most disturbing and ideal settings for any film; a 'city under aspic' as the blind woman says, and one with many faces. Of course, the decadent beauty of Renaissance and Gothic art has always been closely aligned with death, and Roeg's vision of Venice perfectly marries the two. The tension - and confusion - between the earthly and supernatural in Don't Look Now disturbs conventions and ultimately leads to a shock the likes of which few audiences ever forget. 

 (Taken from the Mayhem Fest Facebook Page.) 

Review: Paths of Glory (1957)

Paths of Glory (1957) 
Dir. Stanley Kubrick 
Starring: Kirk Douglas, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Meeker


Stanley Kubrick once said, "Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly....I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because that is the true image of him." The tension between this cynicism about mankind, its essential animalism, and our attempts to evade such a truth permeate much of Kubrick's work. Certainly this attitude informs his stunning 1957 anti-war film, Paths of Glory; rarely is mankind's foolish brutality so clearly at play.

 Set during a near impossible offensive by the French military during the First World War, it dedicates itself to the purgatorial idiocy and shocking arrogance of military middle-management. The officers here are self-satisfied, wealthy men belonging to a crumbling imperial age, of the sort who believe that all common soldiers are dispensable and that any slight unwillingness to die like a dog is an act of treasonous cowardice. Truly in the tradition of the "lions led by donkeys" approach to the Great War, Kubrick takes care to capture the officers' absurd near-grotesquerie, their handling with kid gloves of all issues, making such remarks as, "Your men died wonderfully," with utmost preciousness.

  The only man to seemingly see through this repellent charade is Colonel Dax, played with upright, righteous aplomb by Kirk Douglas. He has been asked to lead his men into a suicidal mission; when three of his men are court-martialed for cowardice in the face of the enemy, he takes a stand and attempts to defend them any way he can, knowing they have been made examples of. Kubrick was already showing his capacity for staging actors compellingly against filmic space; several long tracking shots follow Douglas around the trenches, barely flinching as artillery explodes overhead; men huddle to his left and right,  clusters of bayonet-ends poised idly in the air. In another scene, we see the regimented ornament of soldiers and officers standing at attention; they form odd black pockets and quadrangles against the courtyard where they gather, an alienating portrait of the insect uniformity of the military.

 In a scene where a tearful young German woman is shoved onto a stage in front of an audience of raucous French soldiers, we may fear for the worst. Her terror, and their lechery, is palpable. Instead, she begins to sing - in the language of the enemy, nonetheless - and the soldiers' faces slowly slacken from their hardened poses into a collective, cathartic reverie. Kubrick has allowed a small sliver of redemption for the human spirit, after all; decent men and women are crushed by the injustice of indifferent politicking, but also the fundamental absurdity of the war machine.

Periodical - Issues 2+3

 I'm very proud to be a part of Periodical, a quarterly iPad-oriented film publication created by Adam Batty from HopeLies.com. Issue 3, focusing on Children & Film, has just been released as of this week, featuring my article 'Fatalistic Children: Out of the Blue and The Cinema of Dennis Hopper'. The previous Issue (2), on various New Waves, featured my article about Richard Brooks' 1977 film, Looking for Mr. Goodbar. It was an academic piece entitled, 'Freedom to Go to Hell: The Dialectic of Male Rage and Feminine Viewing Pleasure in the Hollywood New Wave'. You can find links to all of these below:

                                           Periodical 2 Online 

                                           Periodical 2 for iPad 

                                               Periodical 3 Online

                                               Periodical 3 for iPad

   

Review: Prisoners (2013)

Prisoners (2013)
Dir. Denis Villeneuve 
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Paul Dano, Terrence Howard 

      Prisoners is the sort of commercial fare that holds up its end of the bargain in the endeavour to thrill, terrify, and entertain -  a draining, grim, and at times, vicious drama. Taking place in the colourless pine barrens of a Northeastern winter, the story centres around the kidnapping of two young girls on Thanksgiving Day, just outside their suburban homes. A mysterious RV has been seen parked nearby, and Jake Gyllenhaal, as black-clad young Detective Loki, is set on the case to arrest soft-spoken local oddball Alex, played by Paul Dano. Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) is the father of one of the girls, a local survivalist-type who is enraged when Dano is released without charge. As the clock ticks away and Dover grows frantic, he decides to imprison Alex himself and take matters into his own hands to find out where his daughter is.

   Sparse and unadorned, with the aid of DP Roger Deakins' subtle, washed-out colour palette, the soundtrack is accompanied by little non-diegetic music, except for the occasional stir of faint strings. A bubbling tension builds as Loki - a prototypical noir cop everyman and a total cipher, emptied of any backstory - hunts for the kidnapper.  In the meantime, Jackman's Dover grows increasingly unstable as he clings to the illusion of control, and the families are put through ongoing trauma as the days stretch on with little hope. Loki's (at times uncanny) intuitive police work wins the day as Dover's brash behaviour becomes unhinged and detrimental. Utterly successful in its first act at twisting the guts of its viewers, it later falls into an over-reaching whodunit of sorts, knocking our willing suspension of disbelief one too many times not to interfere with the believability and cohesion of the story.

   Prisoners is one of those films that is so taken with providing suspense that it never truly addresses the moral dilemma that it plays its action against; revenge and torture as plot device, essentially. The film uses --  exploits, perhaps -- the backdrop of topical American issues, fiddling with its underlying social and political undercurrents, without any desire to interrogate or pass comment on them. Dover's torture of the suspect is never condoned, and a small moment between Loki and Mrs. Dover in a hospital hints at the detective's unspoken feelings where the distraught father is concerned. But in a plot that moves at too breakneck of a speed to consider anything too deeply, one should not expect any very serious contemplation.

Nonetheless, it's a story that is finely performed by its actors, and it sustains its 153-minute running time with a tightly-wound rhythm and faintly oppressive air. Unfortunately, the introduction of so many red herrings and plot twists late in the film leads to a convoluted, beleaguered third act. It feels like a shame for it to dig its claws in so deeply, only to retract them in the last 40 minutes of the film. Ultimately flawed but still a solidly gripping story, Prisoners' tension and miserablism is finely-tuned enough to make it salvageable from its shabby plotting.

        

Review: Los Olividados (1951)

Los Olividados (1951) 
Dir. Luis Buñuel 
Starring: Alfonso Meija, Stella Inda, Miguel Inclan

   Buñuel's first film in 20 years eschews much of his dabbling in Surrealist and Dadaist style; a director who changed approach and aesthetic frequently, he is quite unclassifiable in most respects. His grim realism here anticipates Pier Paolo Pasolini's early 1960's films; the directors share a mutual concern for the slums of mega-cities and and the moral ambiguity of the criminal underworld. Borrowing quite heavily from Italian neorealism, Los Olividados is an unflinching look at the vulgarity, filth, superstition, and illiteracy that these Mexican children have inherited as a result of terrible poverty.

  A group of street kids, including the misguided Pedro, are sucked into the dark orbit of the sociopathic ex-convict teen, El Jaibo - who eventually commits a murder and makes Pedro an accessory. Soon Jaibo is ruining every attempt Pedro makes at improving himself; he steals from Pedro's new employer, and turns up to wreak havoc outside the delinquent centre where Pedro is sent to clean up his act. Children, here, may be victims of their uneducated, indifferent elders and the vicious cycle of the slums, but they, too, are ugly and amoral; they attack the infirm, the crippled, and the blind with no pangs of conscience. In the fight for survival and bread, there is little time to spare for moral quandaries; and the adults they encounter are equally as vicious and petty.

Pedro's mother has no forgiveness or tenderness in her heart for her children; she is cold and bitter with her circumstances. Another hostile-to-change old man is, quite literally, blind to the realities of the street kids' lives and totally lacking in empathy. He is symbolic of the conservative attitude to law and order and juvenile delinquency; a hang-em-high mentality where criminals are seemingly created in a vacuum.

Buñuel, always a left-wing moralist at heart, sketches a bleak portrait of contemporary poverty; but the film's wild originality and bursts of poetic surrealism transform it into much more than a homage to the neorealists. An egg is thrown at the camera and slowly oozes over the lens; Pedro has a dream, closely aligning the maternal and death; a corpse reaches out from under his bed as he pleads for his mother's affections. There is little redemption to be found in the short, brutal lives of these peasants, child and adult alike. Much of the Mexican art community was disgusted with the film's portrayal of their homeland, but it went on to be shown at Cannes in 1951 and win the prize for Best Director. Buñuel cast an unflinching gaze on the moral rot of the slums, unwilling to ennoble the suffering poor or efface their worst qualities. Moralist or not, he maintained the urgency and honesty of neorealism by refusing to shy away from the unromantic conclusions to such dark, burdensome lives.




   

Mayhem Horror Film Festival Preview: What I'm Looking Forward To

    As an American transplanted abroad, it has occurred to me that we take Halloween and its traditions rather more seriously than the British often do. Full trick-or-treat regalia was mandatory in all suburbs, as were outdoor decorations in orange and black, plastic skeletons, big bowls of sweets, and jack o'lanterns brimming with candy. As one might imagine, without all that wonderful nostalgic tradition, I'm left a little bit wanting when it gets to that time of the year. As such, I can't imagine anything more in the proper spirit than spending Halloween weekend scared senseless, watching horror movies.

    This upcoming Halloween weekend in Nottingham - Thursday Oct 31st to Sunday November 3rd -  The Broadway Cinema's annual Mayhem Horror Film Festival is once again in full swing, with a large variety of modern, classic, cult, and exploitation films from the horror genre. They range from Hollywood silents to 70's Ozploitation to the past year's most subversive, original, and terrifying new releases. From the modern giallo The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears to 70's New York slasher homage, the tongue-in-cheek Discopath, this year's flavourings seem to be referential to horror's long, colourful history, while remaining firmly in the present in terms of genre revisionism, sly self-awareness, and occasional camp. I should be covering most of Mayhem this year and below, in summary, are a few of the screenings I'm most looking forward to.

        Nicolas Roeg's Puffball + Don't Look Now with In-Person Director Q+A  [Thurs. Oct. 31]

     If Mayhem had 'gala' screenings, these would fit the bill. The legendary British director Nicolas Roeg, of The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Performance (1970) fame, will be appearing in person to do a Q+A at both films. He will be in attendance for his 2007 film, Puffball, starring Donald Sutherland, Kelly Reilly, and Rita Tushingham. His classic Don't Look Now, a gothic, Venetian-set story of grief and the many monsters it breeds, is being screened, for further dramatic effect, at St. Mary's Church in Nottingham's Lace Market. It should be a fascinating evening, with Roeg discussing both his most recent and his most enduring entries into the horror canon.

     

                           The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013) 

   At its release at Toronto International Film Festival, critics called Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet's second feature a bafflingly surreal, hyper-violent ode to Dario Argento's glory days, and I for one am very much looking forward to seeing it.  Set around the mysterious disappearance of a man's wife and the various histories of the tenants where she last lived, the film is said to be less plot-driven than a series of symbolic impressions - many have called it an impressive homage to Italian giallo.

                 

                                                              Discopath (2013) 

  French director Renaud Gauthier pays sleazy, self-aware tribute to 1970's slasher films via the route of the well-loved disco clubs of seedy New York, perhaps with oblique reference to several nihilistic films from the period, like Looking for Mr. Goodbar. The story centres around a shy young man with severe psychosis who becomes entangled in the joyous underworld of disco; his murderous urges reach frenzied heights as he discovers the bacchanalian nightlife. For me - an enormous lover of '70s New York, its cinema, and with a huge weakness for disco to boot - this is must-see.

               

           

                                                     Wake in Fright (1971) 

      An unmissable opportunity to see on the big screen - one of the foremost films of the Australian New Wave and its associated exploitation genre, known as Ozploitation. For the uninitiated, a guide can be found in the 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation. In it, directors like Quentin Tarantino champion the savagery, the 'poor taste', the joie de vivre and the gruesome horror of Ozploitation. But Wake in Fright is not lurid; it is believable, and deeply human. Taking place in a rural Outback town, a schoolteacher grows increasingly desperate and savage as a series of unhappy incidents befall him. The outcome is a brutal, uniquely Australian, and apparently involves kangaroos.
             
                   

                                                     The Unknown (1927) 

    To wind down the weekend, one of the final Sunday night screenings at Mayhem will be the MGM silent horror, The Unknown. Starring Joan Crawford and horror icon Lon Chaney, the plot revolves around a bizarre cast of carnival folk and a runaway murderer. Excitingly, the film will be shown with a live musical accompaniment from the Nottingham-based 8MM Orchestra. From Tod Browning, director of Freaks (1932) and Dracula (1931), it is sure to be a fascinating pre-sound anticipation of his later, classic works.

    Individual screening tickets along with day passes are available now on The Broadway's website. You'll almost certainly be hearing back from me on the last weekend of October with a full report of the festival and reviews of the films being shown.

KOTG 'Screen Women' Column: Brian De Palma's Carrie

                                    Crossposted here from Kubrick on the Guillotine.

 A soft-core fantasy of a high school girls’ locker room, ripped out of its dreamy sensuality by a sudden stream of menstrual blood running down a thigh in close-up. A plain-faced young girl with strawberry blonde hair, castigated and repressed at every turn. A prom queen in a sparkling tiara drenched in pig’s blood, transformed in a few moments from softly feminine ideal to demonic harpy. Fiery vengeance of mythical proportions raining down indiscriminately on the heads of the cruel tormentors, the evangelical mother, the kindly schoolteacher, all at the same time. A series of baroque, quasi-religious images are called to mind when one thinks of Brian De Palma’s singularly unique brand of horror film,Carrie.

De Palma’s lurid Freudian sensationalism and Hitchcockian grandstanding aside (borrowing wholesale the musical accompaniment and shower scene), his style here seems to be as wracked by hysteria as his characters. Even the visual space is delineated against Carrie; she is frequently pushed to the corners of the screen, physically distanced from the others. Not one to be accused of subtlety, De Palma’s camera leaps and whirls schizophrenically, breaking into split-screen at the moments of Carrie’s undoing. Yet the deliciously sadistic, extended slow-motion of the penultimate prom scene is crafted to suspenseful perfection; in watching the young girl lifted up with feelings of elation and belonging only to be cruelly humiliated.

                                          Read the Rest Here at Kubrick on the Guillotine

       

Kubrick on the Guillotine 'Screen Women' Column: The Male Chauvinist Fantasy of Straw Dogs

Crossposted from Kubrick on the Guillotine's Screen Women Column

  Straw Dogs has been the centre of discussions about misogyny in the movies since its 1971 release. It has prompted outspoken criticism and disgust from a wide swathe of audiences, meeting accusations of  ‘fascism’ from The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. However, the film was also defended by other critics, who championed the film’s skilled deployment of atmospherics and locale. Sam Peckinpah, of course, had a legendary reputation as a hard-drinking tough with a penchant for crafting virile, nihilistic films deeply entrenched in masculine American myth. It’s no surprise, then, that Straw Dogs, while a marvellously well-made film in other regards, provides a neatly and offensively retrograde attitude toward women’s roles. In fact, it is a film that characterises women as weak and untrustworthy  while simultaneously holding them up as sexual beings.

The tale unfolds in a sleepy West Country village, starring Dustin Hoffman as David, a timid mathematician, and Susan George as his childish new wife, Amy. They are taunted, threatened, and eventually attacked by a group of local men who are hired to work on their roof, but set their sights on Amy instead. The film is tense and malevolent, building an oppressive air of dread that culminates in the much-discussed rape and home invasion. If Peckinpah’s interest is in driving the diffident introvert into his most repressed violent urges, asking how far a man should allow himself to be pushed – than his final violent explosion speaks volumes of the film’s positioning on the topic.

                                        Read the rest at Kubrick on the Guillotine. 

Kubrick on the Guillotine 'Screen Women' Column: Abel Ferrara's The Funeral

         Cross-posted from Kubrick on the Guillotine 's Screen Women Column,   HERE. 

Abel Ferrara – the man responsible for the aggressive psychosexual blunt trauma of The Bad Lieutenant – does not initially appear to be a director overly concerned with progressive feminism. Much like James Toback and Martin Scorsese, his seedy New York is a masculine world, rife with criminal denizens racked with Catholic guilt. They are men living with the darker impulses of the soul, struggling with sin, guilt, and retribution. Ferrara’s films are at once both deeply moral and seemingly enthralled by men in the throes of addiction, degradation and violence. Yet, Ferrara’s relationship with women proves increasingly complex in his 1996 genre piece, The Funeral. 

A mid-budget feature shot nearly back-to-back with The Addiction, it is a largely underrated and forgotten exercise in seamless performances and genre subversion. Set in 1930′s New York, it centres around an Italian-American family consisting of three gangster brothers: Ray (Christopher Walken), the coolly detached oldest, Chez (Chris Penn), the hot-headed drunk, and Johnny (Vincent Gallo), the idealistic, rebellious kid brother with strong Communist inclinations. Johnny has been shot to death in a sudden, mysterious murder, and the eponymous funeral, casket being carried back to the family home, comports the opening shots of the film, soundtracked by the hazy, druggy, melancholy torpor of Billie Holliday. The Funeral is one of Ferrara’s mid-90′s ventures received as neither cataclysmically poor nor with any particular fanfare. His frenetic editing style is absent; the narrative is steadily-paced and cohesive, shot with the softly-lit, nicotine stained mise en scene of rooms, bars, and corridors in a period setting.

                           Read the rest at Kubrick on the Guillotine.