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Flux Gourmet
Peter Strickland goes Greek Weird Wave with Flux Gourmet, a bizarre farce of sorts poking mild fun specifically at experimental theatre groups and more generally at artistic snobbery. The Sonic Catering Institute is an artistic foundation run out of a baronial mansion by Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), an eccentric, persnickety, over-enunciating control freak who routinely gives over her artistic space to itinerant groups to produce spectacular art works featuring food and sound. The current incumbents are a threesome led by the highly strung and forthright Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed). Her assistants, Lamina Propria (Ariane Labed) and Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield), provide the food prep and sonic backgrounds while Elle dances, often naked. … Read more
La Notte
It’s called The Night, the IMDb tells us, though I’ve never heard Antonioni’s 1961 drama called anything but La Notte. So let’s use the original title. It’s pithy. As Italian phrases go this one is not hard to say and it’s distinctive. There are plenty of films called The Night already. The title is as stark as the film’s opening moments. The credits are written in an unfussy sans serif font. The theme music is atonal. The first images we see are of glass and steel buildings shot to emphasise their angularity. La Notte is the mid-century modern movie – sleek, unadorned, made out of good materials and not entirely comfortable. Isn’t life … Read more
Happening
Happening (L’événement) really is a happening, a remarkable film about a subject that seems to demand a certain sort of treatment which goes out of its way not to deliver it. The subject is abortion in a country where it is illegal, France in the early 1960s, where we meet Anne, probably the prettiest of three good-looking young women, certainly the smartest, most studious and level-headed and the one most likely to be about to do something with her life. Anne has her good friends, her university studies, the parents at home who adore her and who she visits at weekends. Director Audrey Diwan paints the picture with a few sunny strokes, the … Read more
I Vitelloni
Federico Fellini’s 1953 breakthrough I Vitelloni is often translated as The Bullocks. The Young Bucks would be better, since it’s the story of a group of young Italian guys – all of them pretty good looking, all of them with a high opinion of themselves – who do very little with their time apart from drink, smoke, play billiards, bet on the horses, chase women and, coming way down the list, occasionally wonder what the future might bring. Scratch that. It’s actually really the story of one of the group, Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), a handsome devil in the Richard Burton mould who, as the film starts, is trying to skip town, having impregnated … Read more
Borgman
Borgman is one of those head-scratching “what what?” movies which would be entirely transformed if the writer/director gave us access to a vital piece of missing information. But Alex van Warmerdam doesn’t, and so we watch and try to piece together what’s going on from clues scattered throughout, like following Hansel and Gretel’s trail through the woods. A Grimm’s fairytale atmosphere, dark and potentially lethal, pervades this Netherlands film from 2013 – and it comes as no real surprise to discover that the director once made a film called Grimm, and then went back and re-worked it some years down the line, so this is clearly more than a passing fascination (note to … Read more
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
By general consent a classic, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre also won three Oscars – best director and screenplay for John Huston and best supporting actor for Walter Huston (his father) – and is one of those films that also get film-makers dewy eyed. Stanley Kubrick named it one of his faves (in 1963 anyway). Robert Redford ditto. Sam Peckinpah was a big fan. Lucas and Spielberg borrowed the look of its star, Humphrey Bogart, as the template for Indiana Jones. The hat, stubble, jacket, pants and boots all probably look better on Harrison Ford, but neither Bogart nor Huston Jr was aiming for matinee appeal with their movie, and that’s the … Read more
Emergency
Emergency is a funny name for a comedy but then it’s a funny sort of film, one that combines warm performances, likeable characters and high anxiety in a way that threatens at every turn to neutralise itself but never quite does. High wire stuff. It’s the “big night out goes wrong” sort of comedy that Harold and Kumar or the two young women from Booksmart once took for a drive around the block but this time out it’s RJ Cyler and Donald Elise Watkins as two familiar black stereotypes. Cyler plays Sean, the streetwise slacker student convinced that “black” and “ghetto” are more or less synonyms. Smart, possibly smarter than his unlikely friend, … Read more
Larks on a String
Production on Larks on a String (Skrivánci na niti) started during the Prague Spring, an eight month period in Czechoslovakia when political liberalisation under the rule of new Communist First Secretary Alexander Dubček looked set to transform the country. It was not to be. By August 1968 the experiment was over, Soviet tanks were rolling in to the Czech capital and Dubček had been deposed. Also kicked into the long grass was any chance of distribution for Jiří Menzel’s now completed film, which wasn’t seen until 1990, after communism collapsed. Menzel is a master of straight-faced satire. In Closely Observed Trains he used a story about Nazis during wartime to comment on the … Read more
The Lost City
Sandra Bullock enters “getting too old for this shit” (© Mel Gibson/Danny Glover) in The Lost City, a knockabout adventure designed to be taken with an ironic pinch of whatever you fancy. Park critical faculties at the door and dive in. Explicit reference is made to Bullock’s antiquity at several points but actually the remarkable thing is that, in spite of the fact that she’s been making films like this for about 30 years, there still seems to be tread left on the tyres. From the very opening seconds of the movie, when Bullock is introduced as a writer of romantic adventure fiction whose sales are slipping as fast as her self-confidence, it’s … Read more
One Minute of Darkness
At first glance One Minute of Darkness, last of the Dreileben trilogy, seems to be the most straightforward of the lot. A honest-to-goodness cat-and-mouser. On the one hand the escaped murderer Molesch, who has been little more than a bad smell in the first two films. On the other a cop on a mission to bring Molesch in, in spite of the fact that he’s ill and on leave. It’s deceptive, though, and the deception starts with the opening shots, of Molesch in custody being driven to a police station. This, it seems obvious, is a continuation of the previous instalment of the series, Don’t Follow Me Around (Komm Mir Nicht Nach), the … Read more
Mad God
The work of a genius though not quite a genius work, Mad God is a crazy phantasmagorical ride into a hellish underworld, a stop-motion encylopaedia of styles, some newly minted, others borrowed, which took 30 years to finally finish by its creator, Phil Tippett. If you don’t know Tippett, he’s an animator who’s won Oscars for both old-school stop-motion work and for computer-generated stuff he did after stop-motion fell out of favour. He was head of animation at Industrial Light and Magic in 1978, aged 27, worked on the original Star Wars movies, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Robocop and Starship Troopers. It was while working on the original Jurassic Park that he … Read more
City Lights
Charlie Chaplin started making his film City Lights in one era and released it in another. In the three years the picture was in production, an epochal shift occurred as Hollywood abandoned the silent movie and went wholesale over to talkies. When Chaplin started shooting what was intended to be his biggest picture to date in 1928 he was the king of the hill – and of the world, its biggest ever star before or since – in a world of silent movies. By the time he finished, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy and Harold Lloyd were all talking and the world was going crazy for the likes of Fredric March snarling his way … Read more
