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Notre Dame on Fire
On Easter Monday 2019, at 18:17hrs, a smoke alarm goes off in the small room occupied by a security guard working at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris. He calls the relevant functionary, who zips up to the roof to see if anything up there is burning. Nothing. The system’s always doing this, the guard is told, playing up. It’s old, it needs replacing. With the alarm still squawking, the guard calls his superior. Turn off the alarm he’s instructed. He does what he’s told. It’s his first day in a new job. So begins Notre Dame on Fire, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film about the day when Paris’s 850-year-old cathedral caught fire and burned almost to … Read more
Big Deal on Madonna Street
Working a gag a thousand times and in a thousand different ways, Big Deal on Madonna Street, aka Persons Unknown (a translation of its Italian title, I Soliti Ignoti) pours good-natured scorn all over the heist movie. The heist movie traditionally goes like this – a target is identified, a team is assembled and a plot is meticulously masterminded, there’s a dry run and then, finally, in the film’s big centrepiece, the heist itself, which goes like clockwork, apart from one tiny moment, when something freakish happens – a screwdriver slips, a guard varies his routine – and the entire operation is suddenly hanging by a thread. Writers Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli (known … Read more
Soft & Quiet
How to discuss Soft & Quiet without saying too much about Soft & Quiet? There is one left-field blindsiding moment early on that changes the entire complexion of the film and which goes on to drive everything that happens in the increasingly fraught and, dare I say it, hysterical second half. Much screaming, much very bad behaviour. And it all starts so nicely. With Emily (Stefanie Estes), a kindergarten teacher of butter-wouldn’t-melt blandness who has organised a meeting of fellow concerned women in the white-picket US town where she lives. At this inaugural meeting, Emily writes the club name, the Daughters for Aryan Unity, up on the whiteboard, before adding underneath, “Feminine not … Read more
Family Plot
If you were idly flicking through the TV channels on a wet afternoon and hit upon Family Plot, chances are you wouldn’t immediately think it was a Hitchcock movie – it looks more like an episode of Columbo. That bright TV lighting, those mid-range actors who look like they’re trying not to be fingered as this week’s criminal, one who’s once again not as smart as the man in the mac. I’ve looked up Bruce Dern, Karen Black, Barbara Harris and William Devane and not one of them ever did make an appearance on Columbo but they don’t quite fit the standard Hitchcock bill either, or not the bill containing Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, … Read more
Bodies Bodies Bodies
The thing about those murder mysteries full of celebrity names, where Faye Dunaway or Lauren Bacall swan about among fellow stars until they either wind up dead or are revealed as the killer, is that everyone on the train or in the country house deserves what’s coming to them. There’s an uber-entitlement payback thing going on. Bodies Bodies Bodies understands that dynamic and mints it anew, with a privilege-unchecked gang of nicely rich bright young things, who convene at the big old house owned by the absent dad of one of their number, take drugs, drink, cavort and finally decide to play a game. What I’d call Murder in the Dark they call … Read more
Ministry of Fear
A Hitchcock film that Hitchcock didn’t make, Ministry of Fear has the innocent man on the run, the dangerous/vulnerable blonde and a shadowy organisation pulling the levers in the background. Fritz Lang directed it, in mid 1943, but it took until mid 1944 before it was shown in cinemas (and even then it only happened piecemeal). Considering it’s about Nazis, a dangerous conspiracy and life during wartime, that’s a long time for a film to be sitting on the shelf. Fritz Lang didn’t like it, nor did Graham Greene, who wrote the book it was based on, but Lang was forced to work with the adaptation written by Seton Miller, who was the … Read more
The Velvet Underground
A stark, bare-bones title for a documentary about a stark, bare-bones band, The Velvet Underground sees superfan director Todd Haynes using his own celebrity to gain access to talking heads who might not otherwise talk – the film’s coups are having a warm, chatty John Cale and a voluble and twinkly Moe Tucker on board to deliver the “I was there” bona fides from founder members. The Velvet Underground are the template for every art-rock or avant-garde rock band ever since. In their jangling, discordant, off-key, unschooled way they burned bright and short, and the cliché runs that though not many people ever saw them, everyone who did so formed their own band. … Read more
War and Peace Part I
So here’s the most expensive film ever made in the USSR, or a quarter of it. War and Peace Part I finally arrived in 1966 after years in the making, a rebuke to the massive 1956 US version starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda. Here’s how you do Tolstoy, the Soviets are saying, at five and half hours long, with a cast of thousands, no expense spared, big sets, huge battle scenes, and so on. It was released in four big chunks originally, too, and it’s best watched that way, in instalments. It’s impressive, certainly, shot on 70mm film for that widescreen epic look – though on muddy Soviet film stock – but … Read more
The African Desperate
The African Desperate probably set out to give some viewers an attack of the vapours. Job very much done – it’s divided critics right down the middle, with as many one star reviews as raves. How you react to it probably depends on your knowledge of, and attitude to, art school and art students, particularly ones who are way too cool for school and who pepper every sentence with references to post-colonial theoreticians and the like. A life in other people’s words, on other people’s wits. Who doesn’t enjoy a bit of make-believe – I loved it. It’s an acid satire blurring the line between savage takedown and knowing complicity precisely because it … Read more
Short Sharp Shock
In 1998 while Guy Ritchie was making his feature debut, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Fatih Akin was in Germany making his, Short Sharp Shock (Kurz und schmerzlos). There are parallels. Though Akin’s take on the whole “guys out of their league” drama doesn’t have the sheer entertainment sparkle of Ritchie’s, it does have a feeling for life at street level which Ritchie can only conjure up as pastiche. In precisely the way Ritchie (aping Tarantino aping Leone) might do it, Akin introduces the guys in individual vignette dramas, freeze-framing to flash up a name at the end of each – Costa the Greek, Bobby the Serb, Gabriel the Turk. We’re in Hamburg, … Read more
Stay the Night
Boy meets girl in Stay the Night, a story of an antsy girl and an angry boy who meet by accident in downtown Toronto and dance around each other hesitantly while writer/director Renuka Jeyapalan teases the audience with the old will they/won’t they. Grace (Andrea Bang) works in HR but has just got passed over for promotion. Too standoffish for a people-facing position, her boss says. Too picky generally, her sexually adventurous room-mate tells her. Carter (Joe Scarpellino), meanwhile, is an ice hockey player who’s just been canned from his team. Having taken his position for granted, he’s been coasting – till now. Overnight, if he’s very lucky, his agent might find something for … Read more
Penetration Angst
Penetration Angst – a good, eye-catching title for a no-budget black comedy made in 2003 but mainlining the vibe of the 1980s video nasty. It was called just plain old Angst in the USA, which is their loss. It’s the strange and convoluted story of a girl called Helen (Fiona Horsey) who, as well as having all the usual problems associated with newly arriving womanhood also has an unruly vagina, one frequently weaponising itself against aggressively horny guys. And since Helen is an attractive young woman, men are forming an orderly and disorderly queue for her, unaware of what awaits them. Men like Jack (Philip Hayden), a laddish boy racer in the provincial … Read more
