Month: August 2021

Valley of the Gods

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Josh Hartnett, Bérénice Marlohe and Keir Dullea

Valley of the Gods. What the hell was that? At around an hour in, Lech Majewski’s film starts to look like it’s developing a plot. But until then it’s been a series of scenes/scenarios/situations that don’t seem to be very connected at all. In one we meet John (Josh Hartnett), a would-be writer trying to hash something out in the desert where the spirit of the Navajo are said to roam. In another a mute beggar on the street called Wes Tauros (John Malkovich), that rare thing – a beggar with a butler (Keir Dullea). Tauros is in fact not a beggar but the richest man in the world. In another a man … Read more

Resistance

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Jesse Eisenberg in white face make-up

Heartfelt rather than gut-wrenching, Resistance is an origin story. Not of a superhero, which is what origin stories usually concern themselves with. But of the world’s most famous mime, Marcel Marceau, who died in 2007 aged 84. This seems, at first glance, amazing in itself. After all, who’s interested in that? But it turns out there is more to Marceau, a lot more, than the white face make-up of his most famous character, the silent Bip the Clown. He was born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, France, in 1923, which means Marcel was about 15 in 1938 when Resistance takes up his story. The Nazis are just over the border and Strasbourg is regularly … Read more

Sputnik

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Cosmonaut Veshnyakov on the floor

Sputnik is a movie from 2020 set in the Soviet era. As well as having a fantastic story thick with allegorical possibilities, it also feels like a movie from the Soviet era – as if half inch steel plate had been riveted together. There are touches of pure Hollywood too, not least in the character of its chief protagonist, the smart and businesslike Tatyana Klimova (played by the eye-catching Oksana Akinshina), a feisty shrink we first meet refusing to be made a scapegoat for some misdemeanour or other. Maverick credentials established, she’s soon been drafted in to take a look at a cosmonaut who’s recently arrived back on planet Earth after his mission went … Read more

Bo Burnham: Inside

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Burnham portrayed on a cross

The ceaselessly inventive new Netflix show, Bo Burnham: Inside is a comedy special making the most of the reduced fields of operations available during the pandemic. Burnham’s on his own. No audience. No crew. Just him and all the tech he can muster. If he didn’t inform us repeatedly, we wouldn’t guess. This is a 90 minutes of high production values and smooth edits. If you’re below a certain age you’re more likely to know Burnham. Starting out with a few videos posted on YouTube, he began his rapid rise in 2006 aged only 16. By the time he was 19 he was having his own TV specials, touring, releasing albums and so … Read more

John and the Hole

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John looks into the hole

John and the Hole is a story written by Nicolás Giacobone, so there’s a weird element along with the everyday. He also wrote Birdman, which interspersed familiar scenes of an actor in crisis preparing for a show with moments where he’d be transformed into the superhero he’d played years before. In Biutiful, the 2010 movie starring Javier Bardem, the story of a man dying of cancer is interpolated with moments of magical realism. John and the Hole does the same, but differently. At one level it’s a straightforward story of a 13-year-old boy who might be on the autistic spectrum – he’s certainly very closed off and has a knack for mathematics – who … Read more

Tobruk

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Lieberman and Popsíchal in a dugout

If you love the colour beige or taupe, can’t get enough fawn, dun and khaki, you’ll have an extra affection for Tobruk, the 2008 Czech movie written and directed by Václav Marhoul. It’s his second, after the Philip Marlowe-spoofing Smart Philip (Mazany Filip) of 2003, and has little in common with the 1967 film of the same name directed by Arthur Hiller and starring Rock Hudson and George Peppard. In fact it’s closer to The Red Badge of Courage, the 1951 war movie set during the American Civil War and starring Audie Murphy, since both are to greater (the older film) and lesser (this one) extents adaptations of Stephen Crane’s 1894 novel about … Read more

Mondo Hollywoodland

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Aaron Golden as Caesar

An alien from the fifth dimension lands in Hollywood (with a camera, handily) and takes a fact-finding tour with a skanky seller of psychedelic mushrooms. Mondo Hollywoodland is the result, a weird survey of the territory that makes half-hearted claims towards being a documentary. Bizarre points to note before the tour gets underway: it’s exec-produced by James Cromwell (yes, that one) and Francis Ford Coppola is namechecked in the “special thanks” credits at the end. Bizarre because Mondo Hollywoodland has that “assembled in the garage” feel, almost as if it’s taken a bunch of random footage and attempted to weld it together into a story, as some kind of bet. The old joke … Read more

The Exchange

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Tim and Stéphane

Director Dan Mazer edges further into the mainstream with The Exchange, an update on all those Michael Cera/Jon Heder-flavoured films from about 15/20 years ago – the geek shall inherit the earth. Tim (Ed Oxenbould) is the Canadian nerd and self-styled teen intellectual with a love of films with subtitles, existentialist novels by Camus etc, who signs on to take part in a French exchange program. What he’s hoping for is someone “sophisticated, smart and worldly”… because French. What he gets is Stéphane (Avan Jogia), a jockish guy in bleach-look jeans who wants to talk about sex all the time. Tim wears glasses, is despised for his pretensions by his classmates and can’t … Read more

The Suicide Squad

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Harley Quinn screams

The Suicide Squad, not to be confused with Suicide Squad from five years ago, fixes the mistake made by the 2016 movie, which got bogged down in plot. The Suicide Squad does that by not really having one. Or if it does it treats it as something to be vaguely referred to now and again, like a map by a driver who knows his way. The driver here is James Gunn, who does just about everything right in this super-sequel follow-up to the Dirty Dozen of comicbook movies. The first film was quite simply terrible, though bursting with great things, a kind of satire on Marvel movies, if you wanted to see it … Read more

The Velvet Touch

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Rosalind Russell and Leo Genn

In The Velvet Touch, a Broadway star accidentally kills the impresario who made her a star after arguing with him about whether she should abandon frothy comedy (and him) and pursue a noble career in serious theatre. That’s the opening scene dealt with. The rest of the film concerns itself with the actress’s fate. Will she get caught, confess the crime or get away with it? Whether it indicates her character’s superior opinion of herself or masks her own incipient double chin, Rosalind Russell plays Valerie as a head-held-high kind of gal, an actress who saw herself starring in an upcoming production of Hedda Gabler. But impresario Gordon Dunning (Leon Ames) had other … Read more