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Pig
“John Wick with a Pig” is how Pig, starring Nicolas Cage, is often described. Fair enough, even if that only really works as a shorthand if you’ve got a big bag of “buts” handy. Admittedly, the plot is strangely similiar – loner loses favourite animal and goes on a payback jag. But though Cage and Keanu Reeves are both boomers from 1964, the similarities end there – Cage is a “big” actor embracing the extra texture that age brings, Reeves is more minimalist and doing his best to ignore it. Either way, this is a vastly entertaining odd-couple comedy served straight. And that’s another thing – this is a buddy movie, whereas the … Read more
The Painted Bird
A screen adaptation of Polish-born Jerzy Kosiński’s novel The Painted Bird probably should have been made before 2019. “Of all the remarkable fiction that emerged from World War II, nothing stands higher than Jerzy Kosiński’s The Painted Bird,” wrote Jonathan Yardley in The Miami Herald in a typical rave when the book first appeared in 1965. When it turned out that the book wasn’t based on Kosiński’s own personal experiences, as he had claimed, and that he’d pulled off a remarkable literary hoax, sentiment reversed sharply. Decades later there were claims that other books by Kosiński – like Being There (which was turned into a 1979 film starring Peter Sellers) – were largely … Read more
Eighteen
The fresh and the familiar collide to good effect in Eighteen (or 18, if you like), a coming-of-age tale set on the Bulgarian equivalent of Prom Night, when a near-lifetime of schooling comes to an end and old friends stare at each other and at the future, suddenly seeing both in a different light. Being set in Bulgaria gives the whole undertaking its most obvious injection of freshness, but the foursome we meet, Nick (Martin Dimitrov) and Jeni (Milena Ermenkova), Sonya (Desislava Kasabova) and The Goat (Teodor Hristov) – he alternately acts the goat and gets people’s goat (maybe the expression carries over into Bulgarian?) – are familiar enough. Nick and Jeni belong in … Read more
Deerskin
Deerskin is a film about the film-making process, or a film about a man in the grip of a massive self-delusion, or one about the making of a serial killer, take your pick. It’s a comedy and it made me laugh several times, often simply because it is Jean Dujardin as the man at the centre of it all, an actor with funny bones – at his Oscar acceptance speech for The Artist, he name-checked both Laurence Olivier and Benny Hill. Here’s a bare-bones plot – man buys an elaborately fringed deerskin jacket and finds himself so taken with how he looks in it that it changes his character. He starts “acting” like … Read more
Weathering with You
Charming rather than gripping, Weathering with You is a bizarre mix of the everyday and the fantastical, a story set in a world where it never stops raining, unless you happen to know a “sunshine girl” who can bring the weather to a standstill. That mix – of normal and weird – will be familiar if you’ve seen any of Makoto Shinkai’s animated output, particularly his international breakthrough, Your Name, a boy/girl bodyswap romance that also featured a comet hurtling towards Planet Earth, as if a teenage male and female swapping bodies wasn’t fantastical enough. (Incidentally, thanks to that film, Shinkai now has an asteroid named after him, 55222 Makotoshinkai.) The style is … Read more
Wasteland
In Wasteland (it also goes by the name Undercliffe) a young man wakes up with amnesia, having been badly beaten up on some old waste ground in Bradford, gets taken in a by a kind Muslim family and then, as bits of his memory start to reappear, starts to put together a picture of his old life. What he finds he doesn’t like. Though Stevie (Laurie Kynaston) is kind to Meeba (Mariam Haque) and her brood, and forms a bond of sorts with Khalid (Akhbar Kurtha), whose taxi ferries him all over town in the hope that Stevie will spot somewhere familiar, wherever it takes him Stevie keeps bumping into people who find … Read more
Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands
I mean, a film called Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands, how could you not? And then I learned this 1967 Japanese “pink” movie also goes by the name of Dutch Wife in the Desert, and was originally released as Horror Doll – and was even more intrigued. Having now watched it, as an exercise in curiosity as much as anything else, the surprise is that there’s actually a very good film lurking behind the lurid title(s). This curio turns out to be the second feature by cult director Atsushi Yamatoya, his first solo effort after working on 1966’s Season of Treason with Kôji Wakamatsu, the bruiser and former yakuza member who went … Read more
Tuscaloosa
Tuscaloosa kicks off with an urgent, arresting image laying out what’s at stake, archive footage of George Wallace making his infamous “segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation for ever!” pitch on the campaign stump in 1963, before even more footage shows Wallace in the full glare of the TV cameras blocking the entrance to the University of Alabama to two black students. A flash even further back in time, to 1953, and a car containing a white woman and a black woman, caught in freeze frame, the two having run away together. They ended up, we learn, so badly disfigured in the burnt-out hull of the car that their bodies were unrecognisable. And … Read more
Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
A hell of title and a hell of a film, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is the remarkable second feature by writer/director Lili Horvát, who’s otherwise oddjobbed about the film biz in Hungary for some time – a casting director here, an actor there (you might have seen her in Kornél Mundruczó’s 2014 movie White God, a bizarre amalgam of the Disney kids movie with the post-apocalyptic wasteland drama). With an influence of Claire Denis, Horvát conjures, also in “how is she doing that?” fashion, a complete dramatic universe set in a world of feeling and gesture, where facts as such are not as important as the emotions triggered … Read more
Fear Street: Part One – 1994
A homage to slasher films of yore, of the Friday 13th/Halloween/I Know What You Did Last Summer (70s, 80s and 90s respectively) sort, Fear Street: Part One – 1994 is the first of a trilogy based on the books by RL Stine, directed by Leigh Janiak and retaining some cast members across all three. Divulging which cast members stay the course would be entirely spoilerish but it isn’t too hard to guess. In traditional slasher style there is a gruesome death before the opening credits, in a shopping mall (natch), where we also learn that the unlucky town of Shadyside has suffered at the hands of weird slasher killers before. Not only is this … Read more
Black Widow
“Three’s a trend,” as the saying goes, and with the success of Black Widow, after Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman, it looks like the jinx on female superhero movies (Supergirl, Elektra, Catwoman) can finally be declared broken. It was about time that Black Widow got her own standalone movie in any case, the character having been a bit neglected by the Marvel Cinematic Universe in one Avengers film after another, to the point where it was looking like there was a sexism/patriarchy thing going on. Smartly heading that sort of criticism off at the pass, that’s the plot too, pretty much, with Black Widow swinging into action to neutralise a drug that turns … Read more
Jumbo
The opening shot of the skewed romantic drama Jumbo is of a naked Noémie Merlant putting on her clothes in her bedroom. She’s an attractive young woman with a fine body, as the camera makes clear. An edit later and we’re with Jeanne (Merlant) as she bowls out the door and heads off to work. There’s a noticeable difference in her that goes beyond the clothes. Her indoor, naked, persona was bright and bubbly; outdoors Jeanne is mousy, lacking in self-confidence, withdrawn and nowhere near as attractive. But all this is about to change, when Jeanne falls in love with a ride called Jumbo at her local amusement park. A carousel, to be … Read more
