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Sasquatch Sunset
Do you believe in Bigfoot? Sasquatch Sunset does. It’s a 90-minute would-be nature documentary shot as if the big hairy cryptozoological beasts really did exist (but they do!), and follows them on the daily round – from eating and grooming to mating and dying – over the course of one year. It’s people inside impressive suits, of course, and some of them you will know. The four are Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek (who is a small adult and plays the child), while Nathan Zeller, who also co-directs with his brother David, plays the extra male of the pod. For beasts these sasquatch are quite human. They communicate in grunts, use sticks … Read more
Burnt Offerings
1976’s Burnt Offerings can’t really bear the analysis often heaped on it. Regularly described as either a weighty commentary on materialism or as a metaphorical analysis of the dissolution of the American family, it’s much better seen as a mood piece with not that much to say but an awful lot to give if you give yourself up to it. There is an American family in it, though, and it does get put through its paces after Ben Rolf (Oliver Reed), wife Marian (Karen Black), son David (Lee Montgomery) and Ben’s aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis) take on a vast, palatial house for the summer at a rent that is at the low end … Read more
Gasoline Rainbow
Five kids head for the coast in an old van in Gasoline Rainbow, the Ross brothers’ first feature since Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, their intensely evocative film about the last day in the life of a Las Vegas dive bar. Bloody Nose looked like a documentary but there were suggestions at the edges that everything wasn’t quite as it was being portrayed. Those doubts become a bit more concrete in Gasoline Rainbow, which is what would be called “scripted reality” if it were TV, and if it were more scripted. It’s loose, incredibly so, looks like a documentary and feels like a documentary, with the sort of free, sometimes hesitant performances you get … Read more
Secret Honor
Secret Honor is one of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s favourite films, was loved by late lamented critic Roger Ebert and is one of the select fraction of movies given a home in Criterion’s choice “Collection”. Most people have never heard of it, though they do know its maker, Robert Altman, director of Mash, The Long Goodbye and Nashville, and later The Player, Short Cuts and Gosford Park. Secret Honor came between those two blocks of three, in the period after the relative flop of 1980’s Popeye and the comeback of 1992’s The Player, when no matter what Altman did (film, TV or theatre) nothing really seemed to hit bullseye. Nor, to be frank, … Read more
Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga
If it does nothing else then Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga reminds us what a bolt from the blue Mad Max: Fury Road was. How, after a string of Mad Maxes offering diminishing thrills (I mean Beyond the Thunderdome), writer director George Miller seemed to turn to gentler pursuits – Babe, Happy Feet – before blistering back in 2015 with a sensational action movie that was almost operatic in ambition. Mad Max to the max. Now he’s back again, nine years on from Fury Road, having another go at the same thing, telling the origin story of Furiosa, the one-armed badass then played by Charlize Theron and now played by Alyla Browne (as … Read more
The Glass Key
Watching The Glass Key you wouldn’t think it was the inspiration behind Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which itself inspired Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. But they’re in there if you peel back the 1942 fashions and noirish looks and swap out Alan Ladd for Toshirô Mifune or Clint Eastwood. Ladd plays the cool, smart, tough loner caught between various interacting groups of crooks, politicians, the police and the media, all in various ways in cahoots but falling out as an election swings into view and existing power dynamics are threatened. Ed Beaumont (Ladd) is a fixer for Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy), a man who is himself a fixer, a shady operator trying to swing the … Read more
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
A film of two halves, two time periods and, in fact, two films, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World also tells two stories. In one the everyday travails of a production assistant driving around Bucharest auditioning injured people to appear in a public information film about workplace safety. In the other, snatches of a 1981 movie, Angela Moves On, the adventures of a female taxi driver in the same city 40 years earlier. In the here and now we have Angela Raducanu (Ilinca Manolache), an earthy, forthright woman with a love of a dirty joke. When not charging about the city filming potential (injured) candidates for the film, … Read more
Man Hunt
A film expressly designed to lure the US into the war in Europe, 1941’s Man Hunt is also Fritz Lang’s attempt at a rollicking The 39 Steps-style yarn, with dashing about, derring-do, stiff upper lips, local colour and a man/woman yoking-together that’s got everything Hitchcock had except handcuffs and his exquisite sense of pace. It bogs down, in other words. But only towards the end. Up till then this is a fast-moving story about a tweedy secret agent of some sort, who is caught red-handed while lining up his rifle’s telescopic sight on Adolf Hitler. When interrogated by the Nazis Captain Alan Thorndike’s defence is that he had no intention of actually killing … Read more
Aporia
My dictionary defines “aporia” (from the Greek) as “an irresolvable internal contradiction or internal disjunction in a text, argument or theory”. In sci-fi movies such an internal, irresolvable contradiction – like a man who is his own father – is called a time paradox. Ironically, Aporia, a fascinating attempt to weld one aesthetic to another, bristles with internal disjunctions that are all its own. On one side a familiar, kitchen-sink weepie drama populated with relatable everyday people being put to the test. On the other a machine built by one of them capable of firing “a bullet into the past” to change the course of history. Those people are played by Judy Greer … Read more
The Last Movie
When it came out the critical consensus on Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie was that it was a mess, the result of giving a druggie with questionable talent full creative control of a movie. Nowadays it’s more often seen as a lost cult classic, a bold experiment and an attempt to push the boundaries of what a movie can be. Neither is really true. It’s not a mess, nor is it really that experimental. From this distance it looks like what it is: Hopper’s homage to Godard, with borrowings from Alejandro Jodorowsky and Robert Altman. It does not help the movie – then or now – that it arrives panting from carrying so … Read more
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
You know The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a Guy Ritchie film even without knowing it’s a Guy Ritchie film. That Gentleman bit of the title is the giveaway – whether it’s Holmes and Watson or the Lock, Stock lads, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or The Gentlemen (film and TV versions), Ritchie has repeatedly demonstrated that he’s a guy Guy. Even his most feminine sounding movie, Snatch, is all about the boys. So the real-life story of the dude who became the template for Ian Fleming’s James Bond sounds like a good fit. And with Henry Cavill – regularly proposed as the next 007 – as Gus March-Phillips, what could possibly wrong? Before answering … Read more
The Beach Girls and the Monster
The beach party movie, surfer and monster movies all hang out together in The Beach Girls and the Monster, an oddity from 1965 that often makes it into the “so bad it’s good” category, largely, I suspect, because people just don’t really know what to make of it. It’s Scooby-Doo in plot – fun-loving kids, a string of strange murders carried out by an unconvincing monster, who looks like a human in a bad costume because… well why spoil it. It’s the only film directed by Jon Hall, who also has top billing. Hall had swung from one terrible movie to another in a long Hollywood career and is now most often remembered, if … Read more
