Latest Posts
Hidden aka Caché
Everyone loves a form/content double whammy, when a film’s story and its method of telling correspond. It’s why Memento succeeds so well, for example, a tale about an amnesiac told in partial and unreliable flashback. How much craftier is Michael Haneke’s psychological thriller Hidden. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are media professionals, members of the Parisian chattering classes, liberal right down in their DNA. What could people of such good intent have to do with the rising tide of Islamism, anti-westernism, terrorism? Why are they being blackmailed by an increasingly incriminating series of videotapes? Are they guilty of something, or innocent, as the film seems to proclaim? Haneke’s double whammy is … Read more
The General
Buster Keaton’s favourite of his own films got off to a poor start in 1927. A flop at the box office and poorly received by critics (“the fun is not exactly plentiful” said the New York Times), it’s now considered to be one of the greatest films ever made. Is this high ranking down more to nostalgia for a simpler time or campaigns mounted by lovers of the hair shirt? Possibly a bit of both. But strip away the nonsense and you’re still left with something remarkable. The gags, for the most part revolve around The General, the steam locomotive of which Keaton is the engineer. The most famous of these is the … Read more
Meet Me in St Louis
“Clang clang clang went the trolley” and ring ring ring went the tills in every box office all over America when Meet Me in St Louis arrived in 1944. Made when the war in the Pacific was at its height, it was a chocolate-boxy feast of nostalgia even then, a story about a decent paterfamilias (Leon Ames) considering uprooting his family and moving them from cosy St Louis to New York. What could be more appropriate in wartime than a film about a lifestyle under threat? Poor Esther (Judy Garland), the second oldest daughter. How is she ever going to croon and spoon with “The Boy Next Door”? Poor Tootie (an Oscar to … Read more
The Wizard of Oz
Made in 1939, Hollywood’s annus mirabilis – yes, it was a long time ago – The Wizard of Oz is one of the highest achievments of “glorious Technicolor”. A finicky, expensive and slow process, Technicolor’s three-strip system, as the name suggests, used three separate, differently filtered, film negatives in its giant cameras to produce a single finished image of exceptional depth of colour, especially at the red end of the spectrum – hence “ruby” slippers. Now, thanks to a new digital print restored from those original three negatives – Technicolor is incredibly durable too – audiences can recreate the moment when Depression-era filmgoers were first transported from dull, sepia-toned Kansas, over the rainbow … Read more
Manhattan
Woody Allen’s 1979 magnum opus starts famously with a long montage which appears to suggest that New York is to the modern world what Paris was in the early half of the 20th century – the home of romance, intellectualism, art, sex and impossible glamour. To the sinuous jazz of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Allen treats us to a sequence of lush black and white images such as Robert Doisneau or Henri Cartier-Bresson might have taken. And then, in the filmic equivalent of dragging the needle off the record, he appears to say ‘Hang on – the French may be mature, worldly and philosophical. But New Yorkers?’ The next 90 minutes play out … Read more
14 January 2013-01-14
Out in the UK This Week Tabu (New Wave, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) From Miguel Gomes, director of the unique, genre-confounding Our Beloved Month of August, another amazingly original work – a story of forbidden love set in colonial Africa that looks and feels like an archive photograph of the “dark continent” come to life. Give it half an hour for its odd magic to start working, and for the strange use of sound (no dialogue, just background atmospherics) to start making sense. Tabu – at Amazon Shadow Dancer (Paramount, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) ITN reporter Tom Bradby adapts his own book for the screen and brings first-hand knowledge to a gripping, dirty, tamped-down drama … Read more
Alice
Jan Svankmajer is hardly a household name, yet he is one of the most influential animators ever. He’s not Walt Disney, maybe, but you can see his stamp in the work of Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and even, through squinted eyes, Nick (Wallace and Gromit) Park. His live-action/stop-frame adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is a prime example of what he does – a darkly surreal, loud, clanking, gothic distillation of Poe, De Sade, Kafka (a fellow Czech). It’s also about the best film adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s much abused work. Uncle Walt chose to play cute with the story, but Svankmajer goes the other way – a white rabbit that bleeds sawdust, for … Read more
La Dolce Vita
More than 50 years old yet curiously contemporary, Federico Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece isn’t just a cynical critique by a conflicted Catholic of “the sweet life”, it’s the film that announces the arrival of the world we now inhabit. It starts with one of cinema’s most famous shots, a lingering view of a huge statue of Christ being airlifted, possibly rescued, from a Rome gone to the bad. God, Fellini appears to be saying, has left us, and in his place we have placed the pursuit of carnal pleasure, the joys of the night, drink and the worship of our new deity – the celebrity. This, after all, is the film that introduced the … Read more
The Consequences of Love
An easy film to recommend but a hard one to write about. That’s mostly because much of the power of The Consequences of Love derives from director Paolo Sorrentino’s playful decision to disguise what the film is all about. In fact it’s not even clear what genre he’s dealing with until a long way in. But a genre film it is, and the eventual realisation just which one director Sorrentino is toying with will either have you throwing hands up to heaven or kicking your legs into the air with joy. It starts as it means to go on – a long establishing shot of an empty moving walkway in an airport. Though … Read more
Together aka Tillsammans
There’s something very funny and fairly tragic about Lukas Moodysson’s 2000 film set on a Swedish commune called Tillsammans (or Together, in English). It’s set in 1975, just as the Spanish dictator Franco has been declared dead and follows what happens when Elisabeth, an abused woman and her children arrive and are taken in, grudgingly, by a gang of virtuous, or so they think, communards on a big experiment in free living outside Stockholm. Liberal idealism is at its peak and nurture has the philosophical upper hand over nature. The lentil-eaters believe that lesbianism is a political choice, not a predisposition, that sexual love should come with no emotional baggage and that washing-up … Read more
The Adventures of Robin Hood
“Only the rainbow can duplicate its brilliance” ran the tagline to the swashbuckler from 1938 which took a young Tasmanian and gave him a movie role that would define him for ever. Errol Flynn may have become a fat roué in later life but here, as Robin Hood, he is every inch the handsome, athletic, cocky, light-hearted and brave hero. The film too is full of that brio, telling a story of good v bad, true love v convenience, rich v poor, idealism v cynicism. That “brilliance”, by the way, comes from the costly and technically demanding Technicolor three-strip process, which produces colours more saturated than any subsequent process has managed. Everything – … Read more
Far from Heaven
Todd Haynes wasn’t the first director to pay homage to Douglas Sirk, creator of teary melodramas such as Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life. Fassbinder had had a go with Fear Eats the Soul, a homage to All That Heaven Allows. And Haynes took the same source material for Far from Heaven, which nods like a demented thing at Sirk’s magnum opus. But why turn to something so apparently unfashionable? Three big reasons immediately suggest themselves – Sirk’s sweetshop colour palette, his unashamedly lip-chewing approach, his blowsy plot lines, they are all the antithesis of arthouse film-making and an ideal starting point for an auteur hoping to stir things up, which is exactly … Read more
