Latest Posts
Femme
Femme has a really powerful premise – a black drag artist in full cross-dressed glory is beaten up one night by a white tattooed thug for being a “faggot”, then months later happens upon the same guy in, of all places, a gay sauna. The angry closeted homophobe clearly doesn’t recognise the meek black guy out of costume and the two of them get into a strange sort of relationship – no-strings, ask-no-questions sex. What’s going on here? Is the black guy a masochist who’s taking his liking for a bit of rough to the next level? Is he seeking revenge and keeping his powder dry? Or is it physical attraction pure and … Read more
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
It’s often said that Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle) has no narrative throughline, that it’s freeform, experimental, avant-garde and so on. This is both true and not true. There is a story, though Godard does his best to hide it, of a young Parisian woman, Juliette (Marina Vlady), who intersperses her roles as wife and mother with a bit of prostitution on the side. This she does, she explains in voiceover, at the request of her husband, who she met while working as a prostitute, and who suggested she go back on the game as a way of making a … Read more
Inside Out 2
It’s been nearly 40 years since Pixar got going in the, yes, garage of one of its founders, and in that time it’s gone from being cult item to monster indie to part of the Disney mega-stable. Inside Out 2 comes at an interesting point in its history. Pixar is now part of the cultural furniture and at this point in its development is well used, to mix metaphors, to having its lunch stolen by younger, nimbler rivals. Gone also are the years when every new release was a banger – Toy Story followed by A Bug’s Life, followed by Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles is a good run … Read more
Three Days of the Condor
The Bourne movies lifted a lot of their MO from Three Days of the Condor, one of the key political conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. Behind the scenes the way the film was financed – sold before it was even made – would change the way the film industry worked in the 1980s, but Sydney Pollack’s loose shooting style and fast edits intercutting action with depictions of slickly professional characters doing what they do, that looks even further into the future. This is also peak Robert Redford, who plays a desk jockey for some branch of the secret service who goes out to lunch one day and comes back to find that everyone … Read more
Nosferatu
The films of Robert Eggers can get a bit overwrought and Nosferatu is no exception. Both The Northman and The Lighthouse (The Witch not so much) overdid it. All well and good if you subscribe to the view that too much gothic is still not enough. And you’ll be doubly re-assured by Eggers’s decision to go back to the sensational source as the inspiration for his turreted gothic assemblage. That’s not entirely true. Eggers does lean narratively and visually on FW Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, but that itself was a blatant steal from Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. Murnau and co hadn’t paid for the rights and hoped that changing character names would be enough … Read more
100 Years of… Go West
Because Go West came out in in the middle of Buster Keaton’s hot run, it’s often bracketed with the rest of them – The Three Ages, Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr, The Navigator and The General. But Go West isn’t conceptually brilliant, like Sherlock Jr is. Nor is the 1925 feature a compendium of brilliant sight gags, like The General. Instead, Keaton settles for making relentless fun of his character, billed only as Friendless, in a story following a hungry and penniless man initially to New York City. New York turns out to be a bad idea – Friendless is literally crushed underfoot by the teeming crowds – and so he decides to heed the advice … Read more
Gladiator II
As if made by the “if you like that you’ll like this” algorithm, Gladiator II takes all the bits you liked in the first film and does them all over again, with a bit more blood, a touch less swagger and far better CGI than Ridley Scott could muster in 2000. Scott is again at the helm, with quite a few members of the same technical team from the first film – DP John Mathieson most notably – a couple of the same actors in the shape of Derek Jacobi and Connie Nielsen, and pretty much the same storyline. The original Gladiator opened with a spectacular battle sequence, and so does this film – flaming fireballs … Read more
The Uninvited
Cosy supernatural horror? There is such a thing and here it is in the shape of 1944’s The Uninvited, a strange mix of the jaunty and the spooky, a dialled-down take on the sort of comic horror that Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard had piloted to box-office glory in The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers. Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey play a brother and sister who happen upon a vast and lovely house on a cliff edge in Cornwall while down from London on holiday. Falling instantly in love with it, they seek out its owner, the starchy Commander Beech, who lets them have it for a song. What’s wrong … Read more
Daddio
The conceit of Daddio is that it’s just two people in a car driving from JFK Airport into New York City. It’s a yellow cab and the driver is played by Sean Penn, the passenger by Dakota Johnson. As the car rolls towards the city they talk. At first Clark makes cab driver smalltalk, kneejerk remarks about the modern world and how everything has gone to the bad. Then he shifts on to giving her the wealth of his wisdom, and eventually, after a cool appraisal, she obviously comes to the conclusion that he’s mostly mouth and starts to respond. This is what the film is about, their wide-ranging conversation, but returning regularly … Read more
Sabotage
Graham Greene didn’t like the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but he did like Sabotage. The novelist was a film critic in his early years and was regularly on Hitchcock’s case for what he described as “inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities.” Tough room. But, as I say, Sabotage got the Greene seal of approval. Which is odd because it’s not top-flight Hitchcock, though it is worth staying around for the film’s famous sequence towards the end, when Hitchcock sacrifices a character in scenes audiences in 1936 found shocking and Hitchcock himself was uneasy about. It’s based on the Conrad novel The Secret Agent, but since Hitchcock’s previous film had been Secret Agent, the original … Read more
Cottontail
Whoosh, Patrick Dickinson’s film Cottontail rushes into the territory generally occupied by Hirokazu Kore-eda. That is, the deceptively simple, beautifully crafted, sensitively acted, tender human drama. He’s even given it a Japanese top coat, since it’s the story of an emotionally inert Tokyo dad whose wife has just died heading to Lake Windermere in the the UK’s Lake District to scatter his wife’s ashes, as per her dying wish. Along for the journey is the son Kenzaburo can barely communicate with, plus son Toshi’s wife and daughter. Kenzaburo didn’t want any of them to come, but those were Toshi’s mother’s dying wishes. Toshi is there for her sake not dad’s. It’s clearly a … Read more
An Actor’s Revenge
“Stagey” is not usually a compliment when it comes to screen works. But it is in the case of 1963’s An Actor’s Revenge, a Japanese film combining the the dynamism of cinema with the intensity of the theatre experience. Before the action kicks off, a little on-screen note tells us that this was the 300th film performance of its star, Kazuo Hasegawa. Remarkably Hasegawa played exactly the same role when this film was first made in 1935. Housekeeping out of the way, enter the plot, which immerses us straight away in the film’s opening shot. Hasegawa plays an onnagato – a male kabuki actor who specialises in female roles – who is mid-performance … Read more
