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Hope aka Håp
“Oh no, no, no, no, not another fucking cancer film,” was Stellan Skarsgård’s response when he was asked to be in Hope (aka Håp in the original Norwegian) by his old friend, its writer/director Maria Sødahl. Skarsgård has a point. The terminal illness weepie can itself be pretty deadly. But Hope is more about love and family life than about sickness. It doesn’t get too hung up on redemption. And it can boast fabulous performances all round, including from Skarsgård, who took the gig. The true-to-lifeness undoubtedly has a lot to do with the fact that it really happened. In 2011 Maria Sødahl learned that the lung cancer she thought she’d recovered from … Read more
Count Yorga, Vampire
Going in to 1970’s Count Yorga, Vampire, the thing to remember – and the reason why it sometimes flies under an alternative title, The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire – is that it was originally destined to be a vampire movie of a softcore persuasion, at least as much about tits as teeth. It explains odd moments when the focus shifts from the matter at hand – an update on Bram Stoker’s Dracula story, in all the key essentials – and on to female flesh. There isn’t that much of it, to be fair to the film, which took its swerve away from the carnal early in the production process, at the point … Read more
The Kill Room
Walking the line between complex and convoluted plotting, The Kill Room is a dark comedy throwback starring Uma Thurman and Samuel L Jackson. It’s the first time these two have appeared together since 2004’s Kill Bill: Vol 2. The time before that was Pulp Fiction and it’s obvious that it’s the Tarantino connection that this movie is really all about. Thurman plays Patrice, a gallery owner on the skids. Jackson is Gordon, the local baker whose store is a front for a crime operation. He comes up with a novel scheme for laundering the vast sums of cash that come his way. He’ll buy worthless tat from her for a vastly inflated sum … Read more
La Chienne
La Chienne. It translates as The Bitch, literally. But if it ever goes by an English title it’s usually Isn’t Life a Bitch?, which kind of misses the point. It was made by Jean Renoir in 1931 in France and then remade by Fritz Lang in Hollywood in 1945 as Scarlet Street, with Edward G Robinson and Joan Bennett in the lead roles. Here it’s Michel Simon who plays the silly old duffer, Maurice, who falls for a prostitute, without realising what she is, and is then systematically cleaned out by her and her pimp. Foolish Maurice on one side, cool, calculating Lulu making the big eyes on the other, with Dédé the … Read more
Greek Pete
Andrew Haigh’s debut feature Greek Pete, a biographical “year in the life” of a London rentboy, takes the documentary form and gives it a good pounding. Pete is an early-20s dark-haired, nice-looking guy who loves to talk. We meet him as if we’re eavesdropping, from a distance, through a doorway. He’s on a sofa with a client chatting. The client’s face is fuzzed out. The two men pull relaxed poses as they make small talk about Pete’s background. Then Haigh’s camera cuts to “later that night”, now less the eavesdropper and more the Peeping Tom, as Pete gives the client a severe anal rogering. Cuts again to a neon-speckled club where Pete is … Read more
Aelita: Queen of Mars
Aelita became a popular name for babies born in the Soviet Union the year after this movie, Aelita: Queen of Mars, came out in 1924. Apart from the devotees of the original novel by Alexei Tolstoy, few had heard the name before, or seen anything like this movie adaptation. It was a sensation, a sci-fi movie about a journey to Mars that also addressed the state of the nation as the USSR sought to consolidate the revolution (only seven years old). There had been sci-fi movies before – 1902’s A Trip to the Moon by George Méliès’s most famously – but this was the first one out of the USSR (please correct me … Read more
Women Talking
Women Talking could have got a lot of dramatic mileage simply by telling the story of what happened rather than what happened next. But it opts for the latter, a daring ploy that eventually yields results, though there are moments on the journey when it looks like it’s not going to make it. Here’s what happened. In a devout, modernity-shunning Mennonite community in Bolivia between 2005 and 2008 a number of women and girls started waking up mornings to discover they’d been raped in their sleep. The youngest of the 151 victims was three, the oldest was 65. The community elders suggested that Satan was responsible, or one of his demons or possibly … Read more
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
