Popular Reviews
Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte
Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte tries to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle that was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And fails. It’s not even a valiant fail, instead director Robert Aldrich and co cynically re-run the same basic idea – two vintage dames doing battle most foul – but this time around one essential ingredient is lakcing. Joan Crawford. Bette Davis is here, though, the other half of the duelling duo who’d made Baby Jane‘s so memorable. Crawford walked off the production of this follow-up claiming to be ill. Eventually the insurers demanded she be let go. Or that’s how the story goes. It’s just as likely that Bette Davis orchestrated her exit. If you remember … Read more
Frankie
Having made films with more than a hint of the French about them – character driven, focused on metropolitan angst, loose, semi-improvised acting style, unafraid to let nothing happen – Ira Sachs finally gets almost all of the way there with Frankie, a drama set in Portugal but with plenty of French speakers in his cast. Patrice Chéreau’s 1998 drama Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (Ceux Qui M’aiment Prendront le Train) is a close analogue, though here the central figure around which everything spins is still alive. She’s played by Isabelle Huppert as Françoise (aka Frankie), a famous actress who has called all her family together in Sintra, Portugal, for … Read more
The Beanie Bubble
The story behind the success of a stuffed-toy phenomenon, The Beanie Bubble is in many ways a template World 2.0 tale of one man, a vision, plus a lot of help from other people, most of whom get left in the dust when it is time to bask in the glory. It could be Jobs, or Musk, or Thiel, or Bezos, but here it’s Ty Warner – in many ways he got there first, building up a company selling understuffed, very soft toys to children. The toys became a thing, a can’t-lose investment. Starting in the 1980s but accelerating to warp speed in the 1990s, Ty Inc. rose and rose on the back … Read more
100 Years of… The Sheikh
Rudolph Valentino had two big films in 1921. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by far the biggest grossing film of the year, was the one that made him a star. But The Sheikh was even more important. It made Valentino so famous that we still talk of him today, long after the auras of fellow stars like Norma Talmadge and Wallace Reid have faded. The Four Horsemen gave Valentino the “Latin lover” tag but The Sheikh made it stick, something that Valentino – striving to have a varied career – struggled against before bowing to the inevitable in 1926 with Son of the Sheikh. In an intense but short time at the … Read more
Degree of Murder
“Starring Anita Pallenberg” and “Music by Brian Jones” are the big sells of Degree of Murder (Mord und Totschlag in the original German), a weird trifle from 1967 seemingly designed to showcase the almost unbearable cuteness of Pallenberg and little more. If you’re steeped in the culture of the times, no further details about these people is necessary, but if not, then Pallenberg was at the time rock chic numero uno – though Marianne Faithfull might have challenged her to the title – being the girlfriend of the founder of the Rolling Stones, Jones. Jones is harder to explain in a nutshell, though Nick Broomfield’s excellent documentary, The Stones and Brian Jones, does … Read more
Daughters of Darkness
Going only off the title, I thought Daughters of Darkness was going to be a typical early 1970s vampire movie, featuring breasty young goths with prosthetic teeth wafting around in chiffon. My prejudices. I was partly right – it is from the early 1970s, and it is about vampires of a sort. There are breasts too. But the tone is not the cartoon gothic of many a Hammer horror film. Instead this Belgian cult item goes in for a sort of chilly giallo – Northern Europe just isn’t as warm-toned as Italy. It’s all set in an out-of-season hotel in the Belgian port of Ostend, where a rich young man and his new … Read more
Nowhere Special
The terminal-illness weepie needs a firm hand or it can run off all over the place. Nowhere Special is a great case in point. Writer and director Uberto Pasolini keeps a tight grip, and James Norton’s impassioned but restrained performance is a thing of wonder. It’s so good that – as happens with proper acting – barely anyone noticed him when it came to awards time. Check it out, though. This is an undeniably simple film, but like a fine meal made from a few good ingredients, it just all comes together. Norton plays John, a window cleaner with some non-specific cancer. The entirety of Nowhere Special consists of John trying to find new … Read more
Shirley
Shirley is your madwoman’s breakfast, a seething mass of dramatic tropes held together by a distinctly 1940s Freudian thriller atmosphere and populated by characters from a hall of mirrors. Elisabeth Moss plays real-life novelist Shirley Jackson (even Moss is cagey about how close her Shirley is to the original), the febrile, blunt-speaking, possibly clairvoyant novelist living on campus with her bumptious professor husband Stanley, played at full dervish by the ever-superb Michael Stuhlbarg. Into their lives come young lecturer Fred (Logan Lerman in another vanilla male role) and his wide-eyed newly pregnant wife Rose (Odessa Young, the actual focus of the film), just for a day or so while the new arrivals get … Read more
Standing in the Shadows of Motown
Thanks to the postmodern turn of our retro-fixated culture, even teenagers today have heard of the great Tamla-Motown label. And playing on nearly every one of the 110 top ten hits coming out of Detroit between 1959 and 1972 were a loose collaboration of crack musicians called the Funk Brothers. They played on The Supremes “Baby Love”, Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”, The Temptations’ “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone” and Smokey Robinson’s “The Tears Of A Clown”. More hits, according to this film’s preamble, than the Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys and Elvis combined. And having done all that for Motown and having turned its owner into a very wealthy man, … Read more
Smoking Causes Coughing
Smoking Causes Coughing. Of course it does. It might be the only bit of sense there is in Quentin Dupieux’s latest film, a drama-free but quirk-heavy work of surreal flippancy centring on a gang of superheroes who call themselves the Tobacco Force. In their tight suits and helmets, this gang look like the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers but as we meet them they appear to be fighting a character who’s escaped from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a gigantic upright Tortoise called Tortusse (the film is in French, which explains the tortoise’s name, and the film’s original one, Fumer Fait Tousser). Struggling, even five to one, the Tobacco Force decide to combine their … Read more
Cordelia
The actor Antonia Campbell-Hughes is worth watching in anything she’s in. She’s particularly good at the externalisation of anxiety and there’s plenty of that in Cordelia, the story of a broken London woman trying to put her life back together after some terrible event. The event was the terrorist bombings of London in July 2005, though all we learn of what happened then is how it’s left Cordelia, an actor now afraid to leave the house, who hasn’t used the Underground ever since (this was made in 2019 and is set then too), and who leans heavily on her twin sister (also played by AC-H), a boozy, fun-lover who is presumably everything Cordelia … Read more
6 January 2014-01-06
Out in the UK This Week Upstream Colour (Metrodome, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Shane Carruth’s belated follow-up to his brilliant 2004 film Primer is a weird mix of body-horror and love story, the story of a woman (a rather good Amy Seimetz) infected by some parasitic worm who is hypnotised and then robbed while under the influence. Well, that’s the first bit anyway. After that she seems to be falling for some guy she’s met (played in a bit of Ben Affleck casting by Carruth himself), the whole thing told in the language not of film but of advertising – overlaps, quick cuts, montages, while a Sigur Ros-style soundtrack (a band advertisers love) bleeps … Read more
