Popular Reviews
12 November 2012-11-12
Out in the UK This Week Margin Call (Paramount, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) JC Chandor’s debut, and what a film, is about a Lehman Brothers’ (ish) bank hitting the skids. It’s the definitive Hollywood entertainment about the financial crash, a cool, glossy, edge-of-seat procedural about a night in the company of two low-level bank employees (Zachary Quinto, Penn Badgley) who are on duty at the point when a gigantic accounting error comes to light. Whereupon the problem is batted further and further up the heirarchy, until it reaches the top (a particularly dry and corrupt Jeremy Irons). The performances are in the ionosphere – Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Simon Baker, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci … Read more
Moonrise
Having worked pretty consistently for 30 years, director Frank Borzage more or less bowed out with Moonrise in 1948. Ten years later he’d return with a couple of afterthoughts, but in the main this was it, his last picture. He’d been one of the big players of the silent era – when the Oscars were invented in 1927 he won the very first one for Best Director – and this goodbye is in a sense a farewell to all that. It’s also partly intended as a bookend to Sunrise, directed by fellow 1920s Fox director FW Murnau, a lament to a certain style of visual lyricism that disappeared with the dawn of the … Read more
Eolomea
Considering it’s sci-fi from behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War, Eolomea is an unexpectedly bright, colourful, even countercultural space adventure. Some of it is still brilliant, some of it pretty dated. But it’s entirely fascinating, top to toe – this is how the East Germans were doing it in 1972. It opens unexpectedly, with a shot of a guy running down a beach. I’ve made it, he says (in so many words), the Galapagos Islands! It’s like the beginning of an episode of TV show The Monkees. The soundtrack is surely about to break out into something bubblegummy and poptastic. Apart from anything else it completely confounds expectations. … Read more
Les Demoiselles de Rochefort
As is often the case with sequels, “the same but different” is the big idea in the musical Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort), the 1967 follow-up to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg). Largely it’s the same production team as on the 1964 movie – writer/director Jacques Demy, composer Michel Legrand, producer Mag Bodard, costume designer Jacqueline Moreau and production designer Bernard Evein. They gussie up this film in much the same way as they did the previous one. Bright lights, bold colours, big sets, grand camera movements, and locations tweaked till they squeak with pastel excess. Catherine Deneuve is the only key cast member to survive … Read more
Mr & Mrs Smith
Here’s a strange thing – a screwball comedy by master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock. Mr and Mrs Smith is the only one he made and, sad to report, it’s not very good. A “comedy of remarriage”, its plot isn’t a thousand miles away from the one that floated The Philadelphia Story to glory, about a husband and wife discovering that a legal technicality means their three-year marriage is void. If they want to be husband and wife for real, they’ll have to “remarry”. But, now that they have the chance to reconsider, will they (re)take the plunge? As a bit of a preamble to all this, some vital character furniture is put in place … Read more
The Gatekeepers
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 13 September Rabin shakes hands with Arafat at the White House, 1993 On this day in 1993, Itzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, shook hands at the White House after signing the Oslo Accords. It was a historic moment. These modest proposals put in writing agreements about mutual recognition, the formation of a provisional Palestinian government, and Israel’s agreement to withdraw from some parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They wisely left thornier issues (the Jewish settlements, the future of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees) off the agenda. … Read more
Pinocchio
To the question: Is there a canonical Pinocchio I can enjoy in movie form, the answer is “Yes, this one by Matteo Garrone”. It takes Carlo Collodi’s story back to its origins – it’s about a lump of magic wood being carved into a talking puppet by poor woodcarver Gepetto, and then the puppet setting out on a string of adventures all the while wishing he could make the next fantastical leap and become a real boy. There is no shortage of competition, from a 1911 silent version, through the Disney’s 1940 version to countless others, like the 1957 one starring Mickey Rooney or the 2002 one directed by and starring Roberto Benigni, … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 22 – The Positive Negative Man
A mad spy-fi story, the sort that made The Avengers the legendary show it is, The Positive Negative Man gets off to a Cybernauts-style start with a big lumbering creature – a man in silver greasepainted face and a metal sleeve on one finger – zapping a scientist (Bill Wallis) as he labours over some boffin-y task. The man has been thrown clean across the room. This being “the Ministry”, Steed and Peel are soon called in, only to become mired in protocol – do they or do they not have enough security clearance to conduct any sort of investigation, sort of thing. Tony Williamson’s script tugs in two directions. One is techy – … Read more
Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 10 February Kanye West releases debut album, 2004 On this day in 2004, multi-instrumentalist, singer and rapper Kanye West released his debut album, The College Dropout, which is precisely what West was, having junked art school after one semester in favour of a career in music. The career in music went well, with West rapidly becoming a sought-after producer – Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, Ludacris – and beatmaker, all the while working on his own solo album, whose release got pushed further and further into the future as West spent his time making music for other people. His sample-based singles Through the … Read more
A Place in the Sun
Based on the appropriately named novel An American Tragedy, A Place in the Sun is a noirish and properly tragic melodrama hailed as a nigh-on perfect movie when it came out in 1951. Since then its stock has fallen somewhat, though the first two thirds still work beautifully, thanks in no small part to the performance of Shelley Winters, though Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor’s scenes together also exert a mesmeric pull. Its tragic hero is George (Clift), the poor relation of the wealthy manufacturing family the Eastmans, who, having tapped his uncle for a job, catches the eye of Alice (Winters), a demure sweetie who works alongside him on his uncle’s production … Read more
The Opening of Misty Beethoven
The openings are both figurative and literal in The Opening of Misty Beethoven, the pornified Pygmalion that’s a key movie from the so-called Golden Age of Porn. The real Pygmalion, you’ll recall, is about two la-di-dah gentlemen betting on whether they can get a Cockney flower girl to pass as a duchess. Here, Henry Higgins, Colonel Pickering and Eliza Dolittle are replaced by Dr Seymour Love (Jamie Gillis), his occasional lover Geraldine Rich (Jacqueline Bedaunt) and Misty Beethoven (Constance Money), a low-rent sex worker Dr Love picks up in a grindhouse cinema pleasuring a guy dressed as Napoleon. In a plot following Pygmalion’s major beats, aficionados of erotica Dr Love and Ms Rich … Read more
Beats Being Dead
The story behind Beats Being Dead (Etwas Besseres als den Tod) is an unusual one. Three hot German film directors belonging to what’s often loosely termed the Berlin School were corresponding together about the upcoming 40th anniversary of the DFFB (Berlin’s film and TV academy), and generally bemoaning the state of German cinema – what was there to celebrate etc? And so they decided to make a trio of loosely linked films to plug what they saw as a few gaps. Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler were the dynamic trio and, following Petzold’s lead, they set their stories in the bleak and romantic forests of Thuringia, in a place called Dreileben, … Read more
