Popular Reviews
I’m Totally Fine
Grief exploited for laughs. It’s not something you see every day but it works in I’m Totally Fine, the sort of film Frank Capra would recognise – funny, big-hearted, soft-centred and focused on a love between two people that’s not got even the tiniest shred of the sexual about it. In fact I’m Totally Fine pauses on two or three occasions, turns (metaphorically) to the audience and says it again, loud and clear – these two are friends. F.R.I.E.N.D.S – got it? It’s a two hander – give or take the odd intrusion by forces off to remind us of the non-sexual nature of their relationship – with Jillian Bell starring as Vanessa, a … Read more
100 Years of… The Adventures of Prince Achmed
You don’t, in the normal run of things, expect a rape scene in old-time animation, but that’s what you get in 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the breakthrough for Lotte Reiniger, a pioneer in her field, artistically and technically. It tells the story of the an eastern prince who steps in to help his sister after an ugly African sorcerer makes a play for her. For his trouble the brother is whisked away on a magic flying horse, to a faraway realm where Princess Pari Banu, ruler of the spirit world of Wak Wak, beguiles him with her naked beauty. And he responds with the aforesaid rape. Unless I am very much … Read more
Point of Order!
1964 documentary Point of Order! is a strange one for a number of reasons. It’s not really a documentary at all, in some respects, but more a recut, a redux, of some blurry, black-and-white live TV footage shot by CBS of a senate hearing that had happened ten years before. Second up, it’s not really about what it purports to be about. Ostensibly it’s a hearing into the strange case of David Schine, a private in the US Army who had become the focus of a baffling tug of war between Senator Joseph McCarthy and his counsel Roy Cohn on one side and the US Army, in the shape of US Secretary of … Read more
Warrior King
Thai martial arts phenomenon Tony Jaa continues his advance into the West with this lively actioner from Prachya Pinkaew, director of the breakthrough Ong-Bak. Originally titled Tom Yung Goong, and also known as The Protector, it’s a two-parter starting off in Thailand, where the atmospherics include shots of young Khan (Jaa) going to school on the back of an elephant and the politics include remarks which westerners might find mildly perplexing (no, we’re not loved the world over), much as you got in Ong-Bak. As for action, the kicking starts about 20 minutes in plus there’s a sequence reminiscent of the speedboat chase in Live and Let Die (ie preposterous yet thrilling). The … Read more
Trainspotting
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 27 September Irvine Welsh born, 1958 On this day in 1958, in Leith, Edinburgh, Irvine Welsh was born. Or was he? After a police arrest in 1996, just after fame had hit him like a heroin rush, the police revealed that he was in fact seven years older, so born in 1951. Or 1961, if the BBC’s Writing Scotland website is to be believed. But 1958 is what the author maintains (I say “maintains” though his own website is silent on the subject), so let’s stick with that. After growing up in nearby Muirhouse, Welsh moved to London in the late … Read more
Sirât
If ringing the changes is the big challenge of genre cinema, Sirât pulls it off brilliantly. Occasionally the workings of writer/director Óliver Laxe’s mind are visible – how can I catch the audience off guard? Mostly they’re not. And that’s probably down to the people and the places – both unusual. It’s two genres in one, really. In one, a father and son are trying to track down a missing daughter/sister in Morocco – a road movie. In the other the father/son brush up against a contingent of old ravers, the ones who didn’t go home when the party finished, and end up hooking up with them, certain that they will lead them to the … Read more
The Wrecking Crew
1968’s The Wrecking Crew was the last of the Matt Helm movies. A series of chintzy James Bond knock-offs – Faux Faux Seven? Junk Bond? – starring Dean Martin as a spy laidback to the point of requiring resuscitation, it had pretty much exhausted the seam by this fourth outing. Box office wasn’t great either so when Martin’s co-star, Sharon Tate, got murdered it made for a handy smokescreen. In public utterances Martin said that her death had taken the fun out of the films and that’s why he was giving up. In reality… who really knows? As for plot: a bullion heist so huge that it needs to be kept quiet otherwise … Read more
Anora
A fable, a thriller, a subdued comedy and a cryptic love story, Anora is also the winner of five Oscars and confirmed the arrival of Sean Baker at the top of the film-making tree. This appeared to have started with his breakthrough, 2015’s Tangerine – the one shot on an iPhone – but in fact got going 15 years, four features, a couple of shorts and several episodes of TV earlier. Note to self, having seen all the post-Tangerine stuff (The Florida Project, Red Rocket and now Anora) isn’t it time to have a look at Baker’s earlier work? One of those Oscars went to Mikey Madison, a firecracker as a lapdancer with … Read more
14 March 2016-03-14
Out This Week The Dressmaker (EV, cert 12) Husband and wife team Jocelyn Moorhouse (director/writer) and PJ Hogan (co-writer) hit us with a curious mix of the comic, the tragic and the romantic, a flawed star vehicle for Kate Winslet, delivering a vaudevillian spin on her latterday Joan Crawford shtick as the troubled Aussie who returns to the Outback to make fabulous dresses for the town that exiled her years before. It’s the sort of town now familiar but once the antithesis of Aussie grunt – of Priscillas and Muriels, camp characters one and all who yearn, how they yearn, to cross-dress and lip-sync to a series of trash hits. Actually, The Dressmaker … Read more
Eiffel
“Librement inspiré de faits réels,” it says at the beginning of Eiffel. Not a mere “inspired by real events”, often used as an apology for serving up historical fact laced with made-up stuff, but “freely inspired”. Turn to Wikipedia if what you want is the actual factual, in other words. That’s what I did, and can tell you that the background to this story is pretty much all true, depending on what you call the background, which Eiffel isn’t entirely sure about either. In opening scenes Gustave Eiffel, engineer extraordinaire, stares out at Paris from the tower he gave his name to – handy if you’ve no idea who he was – before Eiffel cycles … Read more
30 March 2015-03-30
Out in the UK This Week Interstellar (Warner, cert 12) I wasn’t a fan of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films – too long, too much yak, humourless, over-insistent and with a poor grip on action – so I wasn’t exactly warming up a welcome for this much hyped slide sideways into space fantasy. How wrong was I? This is the best “hard sci-fi film” for decades, so grand in scale that it dwarfs Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway. McConaughey is the star, playing the retired Nasa astronaut heading back into space after years kicking his heels on a world heading towards annihilation. There he finds that, out on the edge of a … Read more
Lincoln
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 29 November The Zong Massacre, 1781 On this day in 1781 the Zong massacre took place. A Liverpool slave ship called the Zong got lost on the high seas en route for Jamaica and, running low on water, decided to throw some slaves overboard. On 29 November 54 women were thrown overboard. 42 men were jettisoned on 1 December and over the next few days a further 36 slaves were thrown into the sea. A further ten slaves threw themselves overboard as a protest against the inhumane treatment of their fellows. When it arrived at Black River, Jamaica, the ship had … Read more
