New Empress: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (DVD Review)

                                                    Posted Here at New Empress Magazine

New Empress Magazine: Unfaithfully Yours (DVD Review)

                                          Posted Here at New Empress Magazine

Review: Frank

        Initially, it may seem like a cool-kid gimmick - Lenny Abrahamson's tale of an eccentric indie band fronted by Frank, who refuses to take off his papier-mache head. This low-key, anarchic comedy draws from screenwriter Jon Ronson's experience riding the coat-tails of a band to eventual cataclysm. So follows another Jon, played by a mumbling but shrewd Domhnall Gleeson under a flop of ginger curls. A contemptibly poor musician, Jon manages to infiltrate the band - essentially a gang of unfriendly black-clad hipsters, headed by the sweet-natured, enigmatic Frank. Maggie Gyllenhaal is memorably caustic as avant-garde senior band member Clara, who detests Jon with a passion. Upon being asked to make their music more 'likable' to a SXSW audience, she snarls, 'I'm not playing a fucking ukulele!'  

It's something of a turn-around from Abrahamson's last work, What Richard Did, a bleakly-appointed drama about an Irish teenager who accidentally commits a terrible crime. But that, too, was laced with shards of bitter black humour, and Frank's glorious weirdness uses it to full effect. With mannequin fetishists, suicide attempts, gloomy Irish mountains and instruments made of cheese graters, Frank and his band make their way to Texas for the SXSW Festival and their shot at fame. The off-kilter comic element is paired with Frank's growing vulnerability, and the cynical exploitation of his legitimate strangeness.

There is speculation on Frank's facial disfigurements and traumatic childhood, but myth-making often veils the truth. The papier-mache head seems to centralise all of Frank's musical power, and certainly his mystique. Without it, his exhibitionism - in fact, his ability to function - is scuppered. As one might gather with Michael Fassbender obscured beneath, the actor gives an endearing physicality to the role, shoulders drawn forward in painful shyness. Jon is convinced that a terrible past will improve his meagre talent, and learns the hard way that Frank's excruciating brilliance cannot be cultivated, captured, or controlled. Both bizarre and surprisingly moving, the anything-goes spirit of the film is sorely needed in more mainstream cinema.





Now showing at Broadway Cinema and Cineworld Nottingham

KoTG: Containment and Anti-Psychiatry in Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor

 Continuing our Prisons of the Body, Prisons of the Soul series, Christina Newland looks at the idea of containment in Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963).

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?”
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Samuel Fuller’s 1963 cult feature Shock Corridor opens with a foreboding quote: “Whom God wishes to destroy… He first makes mad.” It’s an easily forgotten introduction in a film stuffed with theatrical pulp of the highest order. Certainly, it’s ‘ripped -from- the- headlines’ sensibility make the previous decade’s noirs look tame in comparison. The titular corridor, it turns out, is located in a psychiatric institution where a homicide has occurred. Ambitious journalist Johnnie (Peter Breck), desperate to win a Pulitzer Prize, decides to go ‘undercover’ at the asylum to learn the killer’s identity. Against the better judgement of his stripper girlfriend Cathy (an always memorable Constance Towers), Johnnie convinces her to pose as his put-upon sister, who must then claim he is pursuing her with aggressive sexual advances. Labelled a deviant, Johnnie is placed in the psychiatric ward.

Once inside the institution, a frightening place in heavily stylised chiaroscuro where blank-eyed patients wander the corridor, Johnnie encounters a trio of patients, each representing an ailment in wider American society. One, a veteran of the Korean War, was brainwashed by Communists and branded a traitor; he now believes himself to be a heroic Confederate war hero. Another was once an eminent nuclear physicist, so disturbed by his contribution to the bomb that he has reverted to the mental state of a small child. The third, most unsettlingly, is one of the first black students integrated into a white Southern university. Unable to shoulder this burden, he has become a virulent KKK supporter, driving the other patients into a white supremacist frenzy.

                                                     Read the rest at Kubrick on the Guillotine

Introducing: WATERGATE CINEMATEK

I am very proud to announce that I have - along with my husband and filmmaker Charles, at Notown Productions - have started a new Nottingham-based film club, WATERGATE CINEMATEK, partially under the umbrella of the established film club folk at The Broadway Cinema. The Broadway is a great place for film geekery, as well as a regional BFI hub, so it seemed like the natural place to hold it.

The launch date is the 4th of July. Our first film screening is yet to be announced. We're into - as it says on our website - counterculture road movies, anti-hippie vigilantes, second-wave women’s libbers, paranoid political thrillers, revisionist westerns, Altman’s dreamy weirdness, early Scorsese movies, allegorical Vietnam stories, literal Vietnam stories, sleazy, grimy ’70s New York, nostalgic teen movies, and….white Dodge Challengers.

  Stay updated or visit and like our Facebook page for more information!

The Critical Reappraisal + Restoration of William Friedkin's Sorcerer

 

Adam Batty over at Hope Lies was very gracious in sharing my full-length analysis of William Friedkin's maligned 1977 thriller, Sorcerer, over on his site. You can check it out there - or check out the opening part below: 

In May 2013, I had the great pleasure of seeing a rare 35mm print of William Friedkin’s maligned 70′s flop, Sorcerer. It was a part of a Friedkin retrospective at Brooklyn’s BAMCinematek, where the man himself was appearing to do gracious Q+A’s and book signings. As it turned out, this rolling out of the old print ofSorcerer was the first step in a bid to restore and re-release the film, which premiered in its reincarnated form in August 2013 at Venice Film Festival and is set to be released on Blu-Ray for April of next year. Amid legal struggles with Paramount and Universal Studios over ownership of the film’s copyright, Friedkin finally won his lawsuit and was able to begin colour timing and digitally restoring the print. Sorcerer is a heaving, humid thriller based on Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1951 French classic, The Wages of Fear. It drips with sweat and existential dread, selling itself as a straightforward thriller but containing a great deal in the way of alienation and stretches of unmotivated time. Friedkin poured much of his energies and frustration into his work, and later called it his ‘magnum opus’.[1]

Unfortunately for most any other film of that year, the Summer of 1977 was monopolised by the power of George Lucas’ soap-opera-in-space, Star Wars. It broke all records, reached a domestic gross of nearly $400 million, and remains the second-highest-grossing American film of all time; it has widely been seen as a landmark turning point for New Hollywood. As the late seventies gave way to the rise of Reagan’s New Right and the reinstallation of conservative values, the industry began to shift, as well. High-concept spectacle cinema, with its good v. evil narratives, ancillary markets and record-smashing international profits, had made the self-reflexive, left-leaning, and formally experimental films of the first half of the decade seem like risky, unprofitable ventures. Suddenly, successful auteurist directors from the period – Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and William Friedkin – found their aesthetic out of fashion with financiers and the audiences.

And so audiences voted with their feet, as it were, when Friedkin, fresh from the massive success of The French Connection and The Exorcist, was set to releaseSorcerer. His unfortunate luck would have it that the film ran at the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard – the week after Star Wars. Its’ budget had spiralled out of control to $22 million, with its producers and financiers spread across both Paramount and Universal. The expense was largely due to Friedkin’s insistence on location shooting and documentary-style realism. In hindsight, it seems clear why the film failed – only earning back $9 million overall – considering the fate of Scorsese’s film that same year, or Coppola and Cimino’s later failures with big-budget experimentation. Combined with the rise of later blockbusters like Raiders of the Lost Ark, it seems that Friedkin was fighting against an oncoming tide; times, quite simply, were changing....[Continue]

Dispatches from the Opening Night of Derby Film Festival

Well, the first night at Derby Film Festival (Friday, May 9th) included an eclectic but very enjoyable double-bill.  QUAD is a wonderful cinema with a welcoming atmosphere - and it is home to a BFI Mediatheque, which is a fascinating way to spend some time. Here are some thoughts on the films I saw:

Venus in Fur, Dir. Roman Polanski
Starring: Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Almaric 

Roman Polanski's adaptation of a stage play - which in itself was an adaptation of the titular 19th century erotic novel - is a comedic exploration of gendered power dynamics in sex and in art. Another example of Polanski's psychological self-examination, Venus in Fur deals with masochism and self-punishment in an intriguing, if occasionally heavy-handed manner.

 Mathieu Almaric, seemingly a double for Polanski himself, is Thomas, a theatre director who has adapted Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's infamous story. After holding day-long auditions for the female lead, the frustrated Thomas is about to quit for the evening. Abruptly, an actress called Vanda (Polanski's real-life wife, Emmanuelle Seigner) marches in, running late and dripping wet from a rainstorm outside. She loudly proclaims she knows nothing of the work, (but assures Thomas "I'm really demure and shit,") displaying few of the characteristics of the lady-turned-dominatrix she is meant to play.

Naturally, when she begins to read, she is magical. Dressed in an S&M dog collar and full-length 1870's gown, her innate talent and rough charm steadily draw in the director, who reads for the role of Severin. Severin is an obsessive masochist who asks Vanda to take him on as a sexual slave, degrading and humiliating him. The audition soon extends beyond any practical need, and the director/actress dynamic begins to shift. Vanda orders Thomas around the stage. Identities become fluid as the actors break in and out of the dialogue, inhabiting the characters and just as soon dropping conversation in between their lines. There is little notable camerawork herein; Polanski does seem to be filming a stage play, rather than creating anything truly cinematic.

Nonetheless, the scenes are fraught with sexual tension and claustrophobia. Vanda complains about the Biblical epigram Thomas chooses to open his play with. It goes, 'And the Lord hath smitten him - and delivered him into a woman's hands.' It's blatant sexism, she points out. Thomas defends the validity of his adaptation, arguing for the depth and complexity of the characters' relationship. Perhaps, Polanski suggests, only a man can so lightly appreciate a relationship involving degradation and enslavement - because it is merely play-acting. He can step out of the role easily in his real life, where he is unquestioningly dominant.

The roles of 'important' male director vs 'idiot actress' are reversed and then reversed again, leaving the question to be asked - what happens when a dominant man, play-acting at degradation, cannot step out of the role so easily? On an artistic register, Polanski seems to seek redress for the power imbalance - and looking at his own intractable history, perhaps even some strange form of penance.

    The Smallest Show on Earth, Dir. Basil Dearden
    Starring: Bill Travers, Virginia McKenna, Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford 

  This endearing oddity from 1957 could easily be written off, not wrongly, as being a trifle - though certainly one that cinephiles will appreciate. A middle-class couple, Matt and Jean (Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna) discover they have received an inheritance - in the form of a cinema - from a hitherto unknown great uncle somewhere in the North. They excitedly travel there to learn they have not inherited the enormous contemporary cinema in the middle of the city, but a dilapidated 1920's movie palace nicknamed "the fleapit". Infested with rats and located beneath a precarious train line, the cinema - called The Bijou -  is admittedly creaky. Still, a nostalgic audience might be taken aback to discover that no one is enchanted by the grandiose art deco flourishes of the place.

 As it turns out, the bemused Matt and Jean have also inherited three of the Bijou's strange elderly employees, one a drunken projectionist played by a well-disguised Peter Sellers. In a bid to earn some real cash from the inheritance, the couple decide to attempt to re-open the cinema. Their hope is that the self-satisfied businessman who owns the modern cinema nearby will be threatened, and buy them out.

Dearden's film is rife with funny little moments - particularly the gag where Matt knocks each row of ancient cinema seats backward like dominoes, or when the hapless couple are left to operate the projector, and run the film reel upside down, silent, and fast forward. It's revealing about the culture of film-going in the 1950's, as the rowdy audience giggles along, unfazed and up for anything. And then there's this quip, worthy of the best Hollywood screenwriters: 'I remember when she was pretty as a picture. A B picture, mind you.'

Although there is little space for modernism or precociousness here,  The Smallest Show on Earth does show a smidgen of awareness about the power of cinema over its audiences. A slice of movie magic is contained in a moment when a little boy becomes the first patron of the new Bijou; his coal-smudged face lights up with pleasure as the rickety projector clicks away in the background. Another is found when the elderly employees of the cinema weep over silent films they haven't seen in thirty-odd years; there is a sense that movies were not disposable, but meant something, quite intensely, to the people who loved them.

It is a trifle of a film, but its a deeply charming one, and sure to provoke a smile.

Derby Film Festival Preview: What I'm Looking Forward To

  From May 9th-18th at QUAD Derby, the re-named Derby Film Festival (previously IDFest) kicks off, with this year's theme centred around technology. Whether its the exploration of cinematic innovation or the subject matter of films like Mad Max (a double-bill with Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior will be taking place), the programmers this year selected a truly eclectic mix of modern and repertory films from a variety of nations and genres. Here are my picks:

The Punk Singer: A Film about Kathleen Hanna, Dir. Sini Anderson

The lead singer and founding member of Bikini Kill and later of Le Tigre, Kathleen Hanna is the subject of this in-depth documentary on her life, music, and position as a feminist icon. Focused on her role in the Riot Grrrl movement, the film features talking heads from the likes of Adam Horovitz, Joan Jett, Kim Gordon, and Hanna herself.

Venus in Fur, Dir. Roman Polanski

  Polanski's latest arrives after its screening at Cannes last year; it features his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, in the starring role. Like his previous Carnage, it is an adaptation of a stage play. The story revolves around an actress auditioning for a role in a performance of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's sado-masochistic novel. It looks promisingly postmodern.

  Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, Dir. John Hough 

  This eclectic choice was a pleasure to see on the programme - a real 70's road movie, starring Peter Fonda and Susan George. Fonda dreams of being a NASCAR driver, but can't afford his own car - prompting a robbery and a car chase. Looks like great fun.

                   Illustrated Talk: From Silents to Sound + Singin' in the Rain

 This is the repertory highlight of the festival for me: one of my all-time favourite films on a big screen, where it belongs. Along with film lecturer David Leicester's introductory talk on the industry shift to sound in the late 1920's, it should be great. I can't imagine a better way to revisit the glorious Technicolor confection of this film.

Of course, I'll be there on several days to cover the festival in-depth. You can find Derby Film Festival's full programme here, and the opening night begins tomorrow, May 9th.

Brief Thoughts: The Amazing Spiderman 2 & Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Dir. Anthony and Joe Russo 

Marvel Studios, apparently with another decade's worth of sequels and movies planned ahead, show no signs of letting up with the sequel to Captain America: The First Avenger. I can't split from the consensus where The Avengers and their offshoots are concerned; they are the most anticipated and arguably high-quality of all lighthearted superhero movies. This includes their outsider Marvel Universe cousins, Spiderman and X-Men, neither of whose respective studios, to date, have created a film to truly rival the enjoyment of Thor, Captain America, or Iron Man. Part of this is largely the approach taken in the screenwriting; it is snappier, more self-aware, willing to address its apparent silliness, yet never feels ironic or condescending toward its subject matter. It is happily referential to its roots without feeling overly self-serious.

The Winter Soldier takes place after the events of Loki's foiled Tesseract attack on New York. Steve Rogers is shown in Washington DC, working for SHIELD on various military assignments and attempting to come to terms with the seventy-something years he has lost. Literally a man out of time, Steve also struggles to adjust to the complexities and sliding moral scale that the modern government partakes in. Samuel L. Jackson returns as Nick Fury, and Scarlett Johansson, as Natasha (The Black Widow) provides a more roguish counterpoint to Captain America's earnest righteousness.

The Russo Brothers intelligently blend the shadowy workings of Hydra with a criminal political conspiracy at the heart of SHIELD. As many other critics have mentioned, casting Robert Redford in the film undoubtedly alludes to the 70's political thriller, with his starring roles in All the President's Men and Three Days of the Condor. The Winter Soldier explores topical events, basing its twisty plot – and much of Captain America's indignation - around ideas of freedom vs. security and the questionable morality of pre-emptive military strikes. Most saliently, it seems to address the NSA and a right-wing conspiracy to spy on and eliminate potential political subversives.

Of course, all of this is oblique – but quite clearly there if you choose to scratch the surface. Ultimately The Winter Soldier is a brilliantly entertaining blockbuster, and like many such big-budget films, it toys with liberal ideas before reneging or simply forgetting about them in the excitement of the conclusion. After all, audiences want to see superheroes fight a villain, and it's too difficult to make the lovable, patriotic super-soldier into an emblem of anti-militarism. The Black Widow's speech near the end cleanly assures us, and the world at large, of the essential 'necessary evil' of SHIELD's existence. Politically muddled though it may be, it still manages to engage with some genuine concerns. 

Certainly, Marvel has done well to place Steve Rogers in a modern setting, while addressing the quaintness of his values. All heartfelt decency and loyalty, with straw-blond hair and a square jaw, it would have been easy for Chris Evans to have been a bore – the dated superhero better left on the page. Instead of attempting to modernize or update the character, a stumbling block is worked wonderfully into the plot. He writes lists of things he hears about and doesn't understand (The Berlin Wall? Rocky?) and is constantly the butt of other characters' jokes. The simplicity and essential goodness of his character seems charmingly old-fashioned rather than dull or obtuse, and allowing him to question and tackle his own superiors' decisions makes him more than a yes-man.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is enormously enjoyable, and finely tunes the balance of elements – self-awareness and silliness, vague philosophical notions and genre trappings – which make for an addition to Marvel Studio's list of fine superhero movies.  

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Dir. Marc Webb 

It's a shame to have to immediately mention The Amazing Spiderman 2 in comparison to Marvel Studios' output, but it is almost inevitable; this sequel to Marc Webb's re-boot of the Spiderman franchise really does pale in comparison. Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, as the romantic leads, have an onscreen rapport and warmth that sweetens the film, and gives great flexibility to sometimes overwritten scenes. Nonetheless, Peter Parker's on-again-off-again romance with Gwen Stacy – combined with a revelation about his parents – leaves an otherwise unassuming and affable Garfield sniffling and teary-eyed much too frequently.

Spiderman, of course, is known for his wisecracking, kindly charm. It is something Webb captures in part, but there is simply too little of it, with jokes and antics cut out for an overabundance of villain origin stories. The narrative is weighed down by several unwieldy elements, including the dangerous downward spiral of Peter's old friend Harry Osborn (a reasonably sinister Dane DeHaan) and the freakish creation of Electro (Jamie Foxx) who for somewhat arbitrary reasons becomes hellbent on destroying Spiderman. Combined with the personal and family elements of Peter's life, there are simply too many threads and too few of them that are truly engaging. The best bits are when Spidey is at his witty, skyscraper-swinging finest, saving kids from harm and juggling bottles of uranium in the back of a gangster's speeding lorry.

It must be said that Garfield and Stone provide bolstering performances - they play off one another in such a lovestruck manner that the narrative seems to pause at any point to watch them banter. I just wish the real-life couple could display their charm in a better movie. As a matter of fact, I wish my friendly neighborhood Spiderman would be allowed the same opportunity.

Now showing at Cineworld Nottingham