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What About Bob?
Bill Murray made What About Bob? in 1991, two years after Ghostbusters II and two years before Groundhog Day. Richard Dreyfus, his co-star, was one year on from Postcards from the Edge and on a run including Lost in Yonkers (1993) and Mr Holland’s Opus (1995). Director Frank Oz’s previous two movies had been Little Shop of Horrors and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. They’re not all classics but they’re at least all decent movies. And yet What About Bob? didn’t quite get the attention it deserved. A comedy with these names attached might have expected a review in the New York Times, for example. There wasn’t one. Nor did Roger Ebert, the US’s most … Read more
The Wild Robot
A shipwrecked robot adopts an orphaned gosling and learns to be a mother in The Wild Robot, a perky and poignant animation produced by DreamWorks and directed by Chris Sanders of How to Train Your Dragon fame. The bumf says Miyazaki and old Disney informed the look of the finished product, but the DreamWorks hit Ice Age is the dominant vibe – smart, anthropomorphised animals say the darnedest things, which seems to have been enough for most critics to give it the hearty thumbs up. I liked it a lot less, I have to say, though it does get itself together towards the end, when the quips are given a rest and Sanders and … Read more
The Tango Lesson
Sally Potter took quite a chance with her 1997 movie The Tango Lesson, by casting herself as herself in a lightly fictionalised version of her relationship with tango dancer Pablo Verón. Potter does like taking risks, though. Her previous film, Orlando, was an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s story about a character (Tilda Swinton) who travels through history changing gender as he/she goes, and cast a man, Quentin Crisp (the self-confessed “stately homo of England”), as Queen Elizabeth I. After The Tango Lesson came Yes, in which all the dialogue was in iambic pentameter. In comparison The Tango Lesson is a restrained affair, about a film director between projects who is entranced by a … Read more
Things Will Be Different
Michael Felker’s debut movie, Things Will Be Different, is billed as “A Felker Film”, which is ominously grandiose. But things are indeed different here and Felker emerges as a writer/director you might term an auteur, which is what the whole Felker Film thing is suggesting, right? Most movies don’t operate like Felker’s film. They set out a proposition and then work their way through it for us. Here, Felker drops us into something and makes us do the mental lifting for ourselves. After introducing us to two people at a remote diner, both with rifles, both looking hunted, he essentially asks us to ask a whole bunch of questions. Who are these people … Read more
Ecstasy
1933’s Ecstasy is famous for a couple of reasons. It was the first non-porn movie to show a woman having an orgasm, or so its reputation insists. And it was the film that introduced Hedy Lamarr to the world. Ironically, the actress so shockingly beautiful that other Hollywood screen goddesses were wary of being seen with her doesn’t actually look that hot in this infamous but rarely seen Czech drama. Or not always. From certain angles she’s devastating. From others fairly plain. In some she even appears to have the shadow of a moustache. The same thing happened to Marlene Dietrich. On home turf in Germany she looked like a hausfrau, but once … Read more
Immaculate
Sydney Sweeney plays a nun – how about that for an elevator pitch? Immaculate is a film that Sweeney really wanted to play, having first auditioned to play the lead role aged 17. Now, ten years on, with money in the bank and acting as a producer on the movie, she finally gets the project aloft, a touch of a rewrite here, a fave director there and casting herself as a sweet novitiate nun who become the brood mare of… well it must be Satan, though no one ever utters the name. A “devil’s dick” movie then, joining the likes of Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, with the plot remarkably close to The … Read more
The Black Cat
If you’re looking for a slightly leftfield scary movie for Halloween, you could do a lot worse than 1934’s The Black Cat, which not only stars horror titans (veterans division) Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the first of a run of movies they’d do together but is directed by Edgar Ulmer, a largely wasted talent who could put on a real show when he wanted to, and he does here. Freud lurks in the undergrowth of the story of a man back from the Great War facing down the man who stole his wife while he was away. But first let’s meet the teams, as they say. In the vanilla corner, a … Read more
Men
Impressive, the way Alex Garland shifted from being just an incredibly successful author to being an incredibly successful director as well. Men follows his previous two films, Ex Machina (what a debut) and Annihilation plus the TV show Devs, all three of which he also wrote. It’s a superbly conceived film, a folk horror movie with a great cast, fabulous atmosphere, a spooky score and some fabulous imagery. But is it actually scary? Is the sense of threat felt rather than just observed? I’m not convinced, though plenty of rave reviews seem fairly sure it is. Jessie Buckley plays an everywoman, Harper, a successful something or other with a swish apartment overlooking the … Read more
Confirm or Deny
War is hell but also kind of fun in Confirm or Deny, one of a series of movies made by Hollywood when America was still a neutral power using emotional blackmail to counter isolationism and persuade the country to join the fray. Eventually Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s insane decision to declare war on the USA would render films like this redundant, but in 1941 they were turning up regularly, all of them positioning the UK, Britain, England, call it what you like, as the home of a doughty breed, people just like its intended American audiences, who needed all the help they could get in their hour of need. This is a remarkably … Read more
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Raven Jackson used to be a poet and is still a photographer. You can see traces of both in her feature debut, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (a line from a poem), a deeply meditative celebration of rural black life on the Mississippi. The film starts with long, slow, close-ups of a girl and her daddy fishing by a river, the father calmly and quietly instructing his daughter when to pay out a bit more line and when to slowly start winding it in with a fish on the end. From here a series of languid scenes tracking the girl, Mackenzie, through life at home with her sister and parents, forwards in … Read more
The Hop-Pickers
If I tell you that The Hop-Pickers (original Czech title: Starci na Chmelu) is sometimes known as Hop Side Story, that’ll give you a flavour of what’s going on in this quirky film from 1964, often described as Czechoslovakia’s first musical (there are other claimants, also from 1964). Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is also a useful steer, since this is an ensemble piece full of young men and women who, when not picking hops out on a collective farm, are singing and dancing their way through first love, to a soundtrack that’s a wild mix of Soviet choral, jazz, skiffle, pop, twangy guitar and wafts of music influenced by Vyacheslav Mescherin’s space-pop/loungecore … Read more
The End We Start From
It was The End We Start From‘s misfortune to come out not long after The Last of Us, the TV show starring Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal. Mahalia Bello’s film arrived a few months after The Last of Us had finished and covers much of the same ground, though here the focus is really on just one person, Jodie Comer’s Woman (as she’s billed). It’s pretty familiar stuff if you’ve seen The Last of Us, which most of us have. So you know it’s the post-apocalypse, the action kicking off with a woman, or Woman, going into labour. As her waters are breaking torrential rain is pouring out of the sky, and it … Read more
