Popular Reviews
Manhattan
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 September George Gershwin born, 1898 On this day in 1898, the writer of Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, Someone to Watch over Me, Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess was born in Brooklyn, New York. A school dropout, Gershwin, born Jacob Gershowitz, was playing piano in clubs at the age of 15, published his first song when he was 16 and was writing shows by his early 20s. His breadth was amazing – Tin Pan Alley songs, entire Broadway and Hollywood musicals and his “folk opera” Porgy & Bess all poured from him, with Gershwin all the time … Read more
South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 November Lady Chatterley Trial verdict, 1960 On this day in 1960, a jury in the trial of Regina versus Penguin Books found the UK publisher not guilt of obscenity. The trial against DH Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was brought under the provision of the Obscene Publications Act, which had only come into force the previous year and was intended to more clearly mark off pornography from works of artistic and scientific merit. And so the trial hinged on whether Lawrence’s 1928 novel did indeed possess artistic merit, or whether its litany of rude words and rude acts would tend … Read more
22 December 2014-12-22
Out in the UK This Week Are You Here (Lionsgate, cert 15) Here’s a strange formless bromance from Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, a midlife crisis dressed up as a movie and sold winningly by its two stars – Owen Wilson giving off gigawatts of charm as the ladies man TV weatherman and stoner escorting his bipolar toking buddy (a typically whacked out performance by Zach Galifianakis) to his dad’s funeral, where he cops an eyeful of the dead man’s grieving, hot wife (Laura Ramsey). Weiner writes to a TV rhythm, and there’s the strong feeling with Are You Here, as all the characters and backstories start bumping into each other and yet … Read more
The Glass Key
Watching The Glass Key you wouldn’t think it was the inspiration behind Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which itself inspired Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. But they’re in there if you peel back the 1942 fashions and noirish looks and swap out Alan Ladd for Toshirô Mifune or Clint Eastwood. Ladd plays the cool, smart, tough loner caught between various interacting groups of crooks, politicians, the police and the media, all in various ways in cahoots but falling out as an election swings into view and existing power dynamics are threatened. Ed Beaumont (Ladd) is a fixer for Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy), a man who is himself a fixer, a shady operator trying to swing the … Read more
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Horror movie, or love story, neither or both? We’re All Going to the World’s Fair exists in a category of its own, in the new territory opened up by online spaces where lives can be lived in atomised seclusion. In a nice cosy attic room, with stars projected on the ceiling, Casey (Anna Cobb) is talking to her laptop, looking straight into the lens as she declares that she’s decided she’s going to take the “World’s Fair challenge”. She’s talking to her followers on her channel, but from Casey’s downbeat attitude, the number of viewers is probably close to zero. The “World’s Fair challenge” is something like the Candyman incantation – kind of a … Read more
Cuba Libre
1996’s Cuba Libre is only Christian Petzold’s second movie, after 1995’s debut, Pilots (Pilotinnen), but already he’s got the formula and the team all in place. It’s a chilly thriller, in other words, with a man who’s losing his head over a woman, a woman who’s so otherworldly she might in fact be more metaphysical than real, and an overarching theme of escape, of existing in liminal space, of people perpetually on the way to somewhere else. Petzold insists that all movies are in a sense about transit, or transition, but he’s got a very particular way of doing it. It’s the sense of yearning he imparts. It suffuses everything, to the point … Read more
Meg 2: the Trench
Meg 2: the Trench, in which a studio tries to turn a good, fun one-off into a franchise and winds up on the beach face down, gasping for air and with gravel in its shorts. Quick recap: a massive prehistoric shark, a Megalodon, escapes the depths where it generally operates and starts menacing the upper reaches and beaches of our planet. Enter Jason Statham. Surely one man cannot be a match for something this big? That was The Meg. In Meg 2: the Trench, the monster shark is back, and so is Statham. And if we’d been served up Meg 1 all over again, I doubt anyone would have complained too loudly. It … Read more
Grave of the Fireflies
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 6 August US drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima, 1945 On this day in 1945, about ten days after the US, UK and USSR had threatened Japan with “prompt and utter destruction”, an American B-29 bomber, Enola Gay, dropped the nuclear bomb “Little Boy” on the port of Hiroshima in Japan. The bomb killed around 80,000 people immediately and a further 10,000-60,000 in the following months, through injury and radiation sickness. It destroyed around 70% of the city’s buildings. Three days later another bomb, “Fat Man”, was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, causing an instant 22,000 to 75,000 deaths. Six days … Read more
Man’s Castle
There’s something a bit mad and a bit magical about Man’s Castle, one of the lesser known of director Frank Borzage’s movies. Expert at delivering dramas with complicated romantic relationships at their core, Borzage’s 1933 movie fits snugly alongside the likes of 1928’s Street Angel, 1932’s A Farewell to Arms and 1936’s Desire. A 1933 release means Man’s Castle arrived just as the Production Code was coming into effect. It was released again in 1938, off the back of the heightened fame of its star Spencer Tracy, by which time the Code was fully operational. If the version you are watching is 75 minutes long, you have the 1933 version. If it’s 66 … Read more
Desert Sands
Desert Sands tells a few stories but the nuanced drama about camaraderie among French Foreign Legionnaires and the salty romance between a white man and a dusky Arab princess are subordinate to a Zulu-like clash of civilisations – the beastlike many against the civilised few. Paul Newman was lined up for the lead role but asked for too much money and so Ralph Meeker took the part, as the newly appointed captain of a remote fort waiting for his men to be relieved by a new platoon. Instead, they get attacked by a band of wild rebel Arabs and are soon overwhelmed. At which point the legionnaires switch from guns to guile in … Read more
Don’t Torture a Duckling
Which witch? That seems to be the question behind Don’t Torture a Duckling (Non Sevizia un Paperino in the original Italian), the film that made Lucio Fulci something of a name in his home country – the sex, the gore. It’s essentially a police procedural and sets off in a very familiar direction. A child is killed and a man has soon been arrested for the crime. But this arrest is too easy, too quick, and when another child is killed while the suspect is behind bars, it is suddenly clear that it cannot be Barra, the town simpleton and peeping tom. It must be someone else and Barra’s story about having buried … Read more
Soul
We’re so used to the phrase Pixar Movie that it’s often easy to forget that they are in fact directed by actual human beings, not rendering algorithms. Soul is co-directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers, says the imdb, but the end credits of the film itself tell us that it’s “Directed by Pete Docter” and “Co-directed by Kemp Powers”, not “Co-directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers”. Kemp was heavily involved in the film, particularly at the conceptual and writing stages, but even so it still feels like a Docter film. His last one was Inside Out, the story of a little girl’s personality in crisis. And before that Up and Monsters, … Read more
