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Zéro de Conduite
Short but massively influential, Zéro de Conduite is 44 minutes (or so) of prime Jean Vigo. A film deemed “anti-French” when it was released in 1933, it went on to influence that most French of genres, the New Wave. François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows owes it a lot, as does British New Waver Lindsay Anderson’s If…., which borrowed its finale for its famous climax. “Zero for conduct; detention on Sunday” is its refrain, the punishment handed out by the schoolmasters at a French boarding school where unruly lads are kept in check, barely, by a strict system of punishment and reward. Naughty boys is its theme and Vigo wastes no time establishing it … Read more
World of Tomorrow
World of Tomorrow is a brilliant short by American animator Don Hertzfeldt, the latest in a career that stretches back at this point by nearly 30 years and has consisted almost entirely of shorts. Even his one long movie, It’s Such a Beautiful Day, turns out on closer inspection to be a compilation of three shorter ones. World of Tomorrow is also part of a grander work, along with Parts Two (The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts) and Three (The Absent Destinations of David Prime). But it’s this first one that got the Oscar nomination, largely, I suspect, on account of its cuteness, though there’s an iron hand beneath the velvet glove. Cutes … Read more
Love Me Tonight
1932’s Love Me Tonight is one of the best comedy musicals of the 1930s, a light-as-air confection designed to show that the talkies, only four years into the new era of sound, could be as nimble as the silent movies, which could shoot anywhere there was light – background noise, whether from traffic, thousands of extras or the weather, not an issue. Director Rouben Mamoulian lays out this stall with his opening sequence, a “Paris wakes” dawn sequence which shifts from a workman pickaxing the cobbles on a street, to a man snoring asleep against the wall, a woman sweeping her step, a shutter creaking, a baby crying, a woodworker filing, children marching … Read more
Looking
2016’s Looking is also known as Looking: The Movie, for reasons that are obvious if you were a fan of the TV show that suddenly got pulled just as everyone involved was gearing up for a third season. Looking: The Movie is HBO’s sop to the fans who bombarded the company with howling letters of complaint, and a neat way for showrunner Michael Lannan and creative sidekick/writer/director Andrew Haigh to tie off various loose ends. This they do. The original idea for the series was Queer as Folk meets Tales of the City – a look at gay/queer (though “gay” is the word most used here) life as it’s lived by people who … Read more
Desire
1936’s Desire is the sort of film Hollywood has always excelled at. A bit of this, that and the other – some fun, some jeopardy, some romance – parcelled up beautifully and sold by attractive people who are looking their best. Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in this case. The best bit actually comes at the outset, when Dietrich is playing two men off against each other by telling each man she’s married to the other. On one side a jeweller (Ernest Cossart), from whom she’s trying to steal a priceless string of pearls. On the other a shrink (Alan Mowbray), who is apparently supposed to be buying the pearls though he knows … Read more
Afire
The films of Christian Petzold often feature a man thunderstruck by a woman, and so it is with Afire (Roter Himmel), the second of Petzold’s “elements” movies and the second to star Paula Beer as the focus of enchantment. In Undine Beer played a water sprite in human form, though Petzold never explicitly said so. Here she might be a fire sprite in human form. Petzold never tells us that either. But she’s dressed in red throughout, which possibly is a clue, and for the duration of the film, which plays out on the Baltic Coast, there is a fire is raging through the nearby forests and it threatens to engulf the holiday … Read more
Liquid Sky
So it turns out that when the aliens do eventually land on earth they’ll not be making a beeline for military installations or centres of scientific research and they won’t be seeking out hayseeds in remote parts of the USA. They’ll be heading for the metropolis, where their flying saucer just the size of a dinner plate will touch down on top of a skyscraper. The aliens will then immediately start looking for party animals for whom opioids and stimulants are a major part of daily life. Not so much a case of take me to your leader as take me to your dealer. Bum tish. Liquid Sky was released in 1982 and … Read more
The German Lesson
Why did the Germans in the 1930s fall prey to the Nazi ideology? 2019’s The German Lesson (Deutschstunde) is a bracing story both about the Germans and for the Germans, who might not relish what writer Siegfried Lenz has served up, though director Christian Schwochow sugars the pill with images of austere beauty. Told in flashback from a jail cell where the barely adult Siggi is now a problem prisoner in post-War Germany, the story follows Siggi into his own past, growing up on the windswept Baltic coast with a father whose devotion to his policeman’s job came before else. It looks like an everyday German dedication to duty – “Pflicht”, to borrow … Read more
Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea
OK, deep breath for the title alone. Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (or Zítra vstanu a oparím se cajem in the original Czech) is also conceptually the sort of film that requires a super-oxygenation session before diving in. It’s made in the 1970s but set in the 1990s, where time travel is a leisure activity that’s part of everyday life. Here, a bunch of aged Nazis who have been kept relatively youthful by the regular swallowing of anti-ageing pills plan to return to 1944, taking with them a hydrogen bomb that will allow Hitler to win the war. Got that? To that concept another one. Of two twin brothers … Read more
Empire of Light
Margate on the south coast of England is one of many British seaside towns that’s seen better days. So has its cinema, Wonderland, here renamed by Sam Mendes and his team as the Empire, for a story set in 1980 about people who’ve seen better days, a country too, perhaps. Britain once had an empire of its own, of course. Metaphor and symbolism hang heavy in Empire of Light and affect every aspect of it. In the opening sequences cinematographer Roger Deakins’s camera mooches balefully about the interior of this palace of plush. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score weeps. This place isn’t in good shape. Bits are roped off, a whole floor … Read more
It Happened Tomorrow
A journalist is given a fast-track to glory when he starts getting tomorrow’s headlines today in It Happened Tomorrow, a bright and breezy fantasy from 1944. It’s easy to imagine Cary Grant in this movie. He was first choice to be its lead, and Frank Capra was meant to direct. It’s also incredibly easy to imagine Capra being involved too. The corny fantasy It’s a Wonderful Life was only two years in the future. However, both are ably substituted. Grant by Dick Powell, then still en route from being a matinee crooner to his reinvention as a hard-bitten private detective later in the year in Murder, My Sweet (aka Farewell, My Lovely). And … Read more
The Final Girls
Meta-slasher horror, the last refuge of the scoundrel – discuss. If you can’t make a decent straight-up slasher movie, why not put a frame around it and serve it up with an ironic wink, right? Prejudices laid out on the table, The Final Girls actually turns out to be a decent meta-slasher horror movie, with no scoundrels in sight, a good cast, sharp, smart direction and a high concept powerful enough to get it through a tight 90 minutes of jokes, shrieks, gruesomeness and a complete lack of bare breasts. You can’t have everything. Its premise: here in the early decades of the 21st century (the movie’s from 2015 so probably about there), … Read more
