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Beasts Clawing at Straws
Beasts Clawing at Straws also goes by the English-language title of Beasts That Cling to the Straw but Rats in a Sack would also be a useful way of translating its original Korean title. It’s a story about different sets of people, all connected by a Louis Vuitton holdall full of cash, which we first see in the movie’s opening shot. Then, in 1960s heist-movie opening-credit style, the camera follows the holdall at its level while an unidentified someone carries it to a left luggage locker and leaves it there. As the movie ends, the bag is once again picked up and the camera follows it, again at bag height, off out onto … Read more
Ikiru
Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is now old enough – it was released in 1952 – for people to be able to consider it rationally. Almost from the moment it hit the screens it was treated as Kurosawa’s “triumph”, one of the best films ever made, regularly turning up on Sight and Sound magazine’s influential once-a-decade poll of the best movies ever made. Recently, though, it’s slipped a bit. In 1962 it was number 20 on S&S‘s list. By 2012 it’s “only” at number 136, well behind Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (17) and Rashomon (24). A 2016 article in the UK’s Daily Telegraph listing its top 10 most overrated films of all time placed Ikiru at … Read more
Summer Days, Summer Nights
Summer Days, Summer Nights originally went by the title Summertime, as in the song by DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, which is interesting because that’s exactly the vibe it has – beautiful young people all just hanging and chilling and cooling about, enjoying the heat, soaking up the rays and basking in the hotness of youth. Maybe the title changed because Ed Burns’s film is set nine years before Jeff Townes and Will Smith had their hit. Maybe the original title makes too ironic the lack of black faces. Who knows? Whatever the reason, here we are on Long Island in 1982 and following a group of six young people – … Read more
Annette
The formidably talented maverick Leos Carax hasn’t made a feature in nine years, nothing since 2012’s batshit Holy Motors, so that’s one thing to thank the new movie Annette for. Whether Annette actually is a Carax movie at all is the question though. How so, you ask. Because Annette is written by Ron (he of toothbrush moustache) and Russell (he of swooping voice) Mael, the brothers behind Sparks, the US band that bounced into the zeitgeist in 1974 with the song This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us, and has returned, comet-like, every few years since with material ear-catching and interesting enough to win new fans. Originally bracketed with the … Read more
The Magnificent Ambersons
The film that never was, a magnificent mess, Orson Welles’s masterpiece, better even than Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons is all these things and more, or perhaps less, since no one apart from a handful of people in 1942 has ever seen the finished version. Instead there’s just the version we have, which is minus 50 minutes of material Welles had included in the rough cut he’d made with editor Robert Wise (later of The Sound of Music fame). After negative screenings, a general antipathy towards Welles at RKO and a change of public mood on account of Pearl Harbor having just propelled the USA into the Second World War, the studio ordered … Read more
Roadrunner: a Film about Anthony Bourdain
As a film about a person never at ease with himself, Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain sketches a compelling if depressing picture – of a man who at first didn’t have it all and was unhappy, and then did have it all and was still unhappy. Bourdain died in 2018 and had been famous since his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential turned him into a celebrity at a global level. “It was literally overnight,” he remembers in archive footage. Roadrunner begins his story about there, barely touching on his years as a heroin addict, a vital piece of the Bourdain jigsaw. Merely alluding to the bookish child with a rebellious streak who’d wound … Read more
Censor
Censor twists the horror movie into something it usually isn’t – a political satire. It’s set in the 1980s, when a media-confected moral panic about “video nasties” forced the UK government into regulating what had been until then the entirley unregulated market in home videos, kept supplied by thousands of tiny one-man (they usually were men) operations run out of corner shops up and down the country. Until then the “board of film classification”, as it’s coyly known – an organisation funded by the industry and not by government – had dealt with theatrical releases only. There was barely anything else, after all. But as a result of the Video Recordings Act 1984, … Read more
The Man Who Came to Dinner
The Man Who Came to Dinner claims to star Bette Davis, but this is not true. The real star – the person around whom the story revolves, who drives the plot and takes up most of the screen time – is Monty Woolley, as the eponymous “man”. He’s the hoity-toity metropolitan-elite writer who arrives in a nowheresville town along with his personal assistant Maggie (Davis), complaining loudly of having to have dinner with “mid-western barbarians”. The Stanleys (Grant Mitchell, Billie Burke) are middle-class stalwarts – he’s in ball bearings, she’s a fluttery wife – and she’s delighted that Sheridan Whiteside (Woolley) has deigned to grace them with his presence. Until Whiteside slips on the … Read more
Staying Vertical
Structured like a dream, or a nightmare, Staying Vertical (Rester Vertical in the original French) is populated with character types – the writer, the young man, the grandfather, the doctor, the farmer, the farmer’s daughter. And it has wolves in it too, which feature almost as a threat or an element from a fairytale until they make an actual appearance right at the end. Imagine Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon brought up to date. Damien Bonnard is the Lyndon-esque Léo, a young man on the make, a rake, a bullshitter, a fantasist, who we first encounter hitting on a handsome young man. “Do you want to be in the movies?” asks Léo, using the … Read more
Ares
There’s a Marvel character called Ares, and a DC one, strangely enough. A Greek god also goes by the same name, as does the hero of Ares (Arès, originally), a dystopian French actioner mainly remarkable for how unremarkable it is. Reda Arèsilla (Ola Rapace), to give him his full name, lives in Paris in 2035, in a country that’s being propped up by payments from the Chinese. Millions are unemployed, neoliberalism has been taken to its conclusion and the “fuck you” dynamics of a devil-take-the-hindmost logic are triumphant. Ares, as he’s known, is one of the lucky ones. He fights for a living, in a culture that prizes its fighters. The bouts are TV … Read more
Lorelei
People at a decisive moment of their lives is what Lorelei is about. Or, more specifically people who should be at a decisive moment of their lives but whose circumstances are so proscribed that they’re incapable of seeing an opportunity offered, even when one does come along. Wayland is fresh out of jail after 15 years. A former biker with an iron-cross neck tattoo, he alone who took the fall for an armed robbery gone wrong. Now, his old gang are there at the gates to welcome him back to the outside world but can offer him little in the way of support beyond the initial booze and babes party. Instead, a helping … Read more
She Dies Tomorrow
Great title, She Dies Tomorrow, full of “duh duh duuuh” foreboding. It’s directed and written by Amy Seimetz and stars Katy Lyn Sheil as a woman dealing with the aftermath of an emotional break-up. She does this initially by playing Mozart’s Requiem a lot and crushing dry leaves between her fingers, as if to feel the warp and weft of life for the last time, while looking at different styles of cremation urn online and also choosing an outfit for a special occasion… like lying in a casket, maybe? The character Sheil is playing is called Amy and Seimetz herself not too long before setting out to make this movie broke up with … Read more
