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Sorry, Wrong Number
Sorry, Wrong Number, made in 1948, is a superbly melodramatic drama taking the brittle, “dangerous dame” image of its star, Barbara Stanwyck, for a protracted ride. Four years earlier Stanwyck had starred in Double Indemnity as the manipulative minx persuading poor schmuck Ed McMurray to kill her husband, and here she is in Sorry, Wrong Number as a victim, a bed-ridden rich woman who, on a crossed line while telephoning, overhears two men discussing a murder they’re going to commit later that night. The servants have been given the night off, her husband is away, but Leona Stevenson (Stanwyck) isn’t initially that worried. But as the night progresses and as she makes and … Read more
Licorice Pizza
Paul Thomas Anderson’s quest to make the perfect 1970s movie continues with Licorice Pizza, a living, breathing simulacrum of the sort of film that stalked the landscape before George Lucas came along with changed/ruined (according to taste) everything with Star Wars. Ironically, another Lucas film, American Graffiti, might have served as a moodboard for his attempt to outdo 2014’s Inherent Vice – itself an attempt to outdo 1999’s Magnolia – along with Robert Altman’s rambling, discursive Nashville, though the storyline deep down is actually A Star Is Born – guy on the way down meets gal on the way up – with a scrappy side order of What’s Up, Doc. The guy is … Read more
Chungking Express
Written on the hoof while shooting on his previous film, Ashes of Time, was paused, Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express is one of the defining films of the 1990s and, thanks to Wong’s remarkable approach to storytelling, one of the great films of all time. It’s two stories in one, or one story told two ways, if you like, as if Wong had assembled all his elements, used them to tell his first story and then given the kaleidoscope a tiny twist. Hey presto, here are the same bits and pieces arranged in an entirely different way. Both are romantic fever dreams and take place in a world that’s not really our own, where … Read more
Mandibles
Mandibles (Mandibules in the original French) is a film by Quentin Dupieux, the guy who in 1999 gave the world Flat Eric, a nodding glove puppet with deadly comic timing originally designed to sell Levi’s Sta-Prest clothing. Aspects of the manic, affectless, idiot-savant spirit of Eric (if you don’t know him, here’s an example) can often be seen in Dupieux’s characters. Dupieux’s people are usually Flat in some way. There’s often something not-quite-there about the storyline too, and Dupieux has an unusual way of framing his shots – deliberately slightly too high, or too low, always just a bit off somehow. All fully evident here. Manu (Grégoire Ludig), a bum who sleeps on … Read more
The Big Clock
The IMDb description of The Big Clock succinctly tells the story of what happens – “A magazine tycoon commits a murder and pins it on an innocent man, who then tries to solve the murder himself” – while remaining silent about the massive irony at the centre of the story. The further the man advances with his investigation, the more he’s going to incriminate himself. It’s also about the fact that the entire story is seen through the eyes of the innocent man. It’s dependable Ray Milland as the “man”. George Stroud is a journalist at the top of his game, who’s made his name on a true crime magazine bringing in the villains … Read more
Dr Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets
Dr Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets starts off in voiceover. “My father, The Brute, said reading Walt Whitman is a waste of time, despite sharing the same name,” says James Whitman (our teenage sad poet, played by Lucas Jade Zumann) lying on his back in a sulk on his lonely bed. He glances over at a poster on his wall of the bearded Walt. And Walt, adjusting his pose, replies mellifluously with lines from his poem All Is Truth – “And henceforth I will go celebrate anything I see or am, And sing and laugh, and deny nothing.” It’s not only a manifesto declaration for the teenage James but an instant way of … Read more
Out of the Past
You can run but you cannot hide is the sentiment driving Out of the Past, Jacques Tourneur’s bleak film noir masterclass from 1947. Just when you think you’ve got clear of something, so the story goes, up it comes from your history and bites you in the ass. Robert Mitchum plays Jeff, a private detective hired by a big “operator” to go and find the woman who’s run off with his $40,000. What Whit (Kirk Douglas) really wants back is the woman rather than the money, and when Jeff tracks her down in Acapulco he discovers why. Jeff, instantly smitten, does the thing a private eye shouldn’t do and, after trading dialogue that’s … Read more
Drunk Bus
“Inspired by real shit,” it says at the beginning of Drunk Bus, a nineties/noughties-style coming-of-age comedy taking its cues from a host of (good) films. The setting actually is “inspired” – the late-night bus on the Campus Loop taking students back to wherever they live – driven invariably by late-20s Michael (Charlie Tahan), a guy locked in the sort of frozen, boy-to-man arrested-development crisis that movies seem to exist to sort out. He drives, mostly impassively, while behind him an early montage reveals the sort of shitshow that is his nightly ordeal. The traffic cone, the drunken staggering, the making out, the rowdiness, the bare butt. Fun to doing, not so much fun … Read more
Mad Doctor of Blood Island
There’s no point pretending that Mad Doctor of Blood Island is any good. It isn’t. It has its moments but on the whole it’s a waste of time unless you watch it as it was meant to be watched – in the car at a drive-in playing tonsil hockey with whoever. The Filipino grind-em-out production house Hemisphere Pictures as good as tells us this in a short preamble before the film proper gets going. Here – against a backdrop of teenage couples wrestling in an approximation of cinemagoers making out – an overly serious voice implores audience members to repeat an oath while drinking the green serum that’s thoughtfully been provided for them … Read more
Keep an Eye Out
Keep an Eye Out (Au Poste! in the original French), from Quentin Dupieux – who gave us the film Rubber, about a sentient car tyre, and Deerskin, about a man who becomes possessed by a suede jacket – looks at first like one of the writer/director’s less weird films, as long as you ignore the guy out in a field in red Speedos conducting a full orchestra as the opening credits roll. From there, at least for a while, it presents itself as a fairly standard policier. A man has been brought in for questioning by the police over the discovery of a dead body outside an apartment block. While he sits in … Read more
The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism
There was a vogue for films like The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism in the 1960s. Lurid shockers that were little more than a vivid title in search of a good idea – Torture Chamber was often shown in a double bill with Mad Doctor of Blood Island, another prime example. Put another way, what you paid for wasn’t necessarily what you got. There’s not much in the way of a torture chamber in this German horror movie, and absolutely no one in it called Dr Sadism. Instead, at the beginning and end, we meet Christopher Lee playing someone called Count Regula (that’s Regula, not Dracula, you understand), a blood-sucking creature who is … Read more
Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road
There are two different versions of the same guy on view in Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, a documentary about the famous Beach Boy that tries to connect the two. And does so, unsurprisingly though nevertheless touchingly, through music. Version 1 is the Wilson of many an old YouTube clip, the maverick genius who turned the recording studio itself into a musical instrument in the mid-1960s and helped give the music of the era its claims to greatness. This Wilson is young, lively, amusing, driven and voluble, clearly the master of his realm, the writer, arranger, producer and musical director of the band he also performed with and a man who could command … Read more
