Popular Reviews
Flag Day
Parenting tips with Sean Penn? Flag Day continues the actor/director’s interest in movies circling around the idea of family. In 2001’s The Pledge, childless, edge-of-retirement cop Jack Nicholson sought redemption by bringing in a child murderer, out of a personal sense of duty to the parents. In 2007’s Into the Wild, graduating student Emile Hirsch rejected the fast track to the top enabled by his wealthy parents and headed into the wilderness to… also seek redemption. Even if you didn’t like them, both were full of interesting moments and performances. More tightly focused than either of those on the actual parent/child bond, Flag Day tracks the on/off, up/down journey down the decades of charming … Read more
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 31 May Ramesses II becomes pharaoh of Egypt, 1279BC On this day in 1279BC, the king often called Ramesses (or Rameses, or Ramses) the Great, became pharaoh of Egypt. Known as Ozymandias by the Greeks, the pharaoh most remembered by history was a great military campaigner and a great builder of cities, temples and monuments. He became pharaoh in his late teens and ruled for the following 66 years. The Egyptian army consisted of about 100,000 men, and he used it to wage war against the Hittites and Nubians, routed the Sherden sea pirates who were harrying ships on the Mediterranean … Read more
Percy Vs Goliath
There’s much aggro with agri-business in Percy Vs Goliath, the – surely no surprise – David and Goliath tale of a Sesketchewan farmer taking on the agri-biotech conglomerate Monsanto after the company accused him of patent infringement. It’s a true story. In 1997 a pious, frugal, hard-working 70-ish farmer was suddenly landed with a lawsuit from Monsanto, who accused him of using their Roundup-tolerant genetically modified strain of canola seed (aka rapeseed) without paying for it. The thing is: Percy Schmeiser had never bought seed in his life. Instead he was a “saver”. He’d learnt from his father the practice of keeping seed from the season’s best plants, and he from his father … Read more
Dave Chappelle’s Block Party
Hot off Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, director Michel Gondry takes an abrupt left turn with a documentary about US comedian Dave Chappelle hosting a block party in Brooklyn, where the likes of Kanye West, the Fugees, Jill Scott, Mos Def and Erykah Badu rock the house. Gondry has previous directing music videos so it’s not so much of a stretch but the idea is unusual – we watch as Chappelle organises things, calling in favours from friends, putting the celebrity lock on people too timid to turn him down while a camera is rolling, but most of all he’s handing out tickets to just about anyone he runs across in Dayton, … Read more
The Naked Prey
If there’s an award for services to middle-aged buffness in a 1960s mainstream movie, The Naked Prey would probably win it for Cornel Wilde, the other strong contender being Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer. Wilde got there first, in 1965, three years before Lancaster stripped down to his swimming trunks to swim home through a series of suburban swimming pools. Wilde’s existential crisis is more physical. He plays a guy billed only as “Man”, the organiser of a big-game-shooting safari in colonial Africa whose boorish client – a blowhard boasting of wanting to go into slavery once he’s exhausted ivory – insults a tribe whose territory the hunters have strayed upon. The tribe, … Read more
Fruits of Passion
If you’ve ever wanted to see Klaus Kinski’s hairy anus, Fruits of Passion (Les fruits de la passion) is the movie for you. A sequel of sorts to the infamous/scandalous Story of O, it’s a “life inside the brothel” tale about the sentimental education of an impressionable young beauty at the hands – and other body parts – of a ripe old western roué. Directed and co-adapted from the Anne Declos novel Retour à Roissy by the multi-hyphenate Shūji Terayama, it is both orientalist and a critique of the same, with Kinski the absolute embodiment of the lordly patron. Dressed in white throughout, shock of blond hair, eyeliner, cadaverous as usual, he is … Read more
Oh, Hi!
When is a good time to tell your girlfriend that you’re just not that into her? Oh, Hi! suggests it probably isn’t when you’re in the middle of a light bondage session and you’re handcuffed to a bed. Yup. Stoopid. That’s the scenario that director Sophie Brooks and star Molly Gordon dreamt up while they were also in something of a handcuff situation – locked down during Covid – and they work it for all its worth in this larky, darkish dramedy at its best when it takes risks. Gordon you may know from being the on/off girlfriend of main man Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) in TV show The Bear. She’s playing a … Read more
The Machine Girl
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 25 July Gavrilo Princip born, 1894 On this day in 1894, the man who started the First World War was born, in Obljaj, Bosnia and Herzegovina, to a family of serf farmers, Serbian Orthodox Christians. Gavrilo Princip didn’t go to school till he was nine, but was bright and a quick learner. His brother, sensing a family member who could lift the entire clan out of poverty, encouraged Gavrilo to move to Sarajevo when he was 13, using money earned as a manual labourer to put his younger brother through merchant school. Gavrilo became a passionate campaigner for Yugoslavian unification and … Read more
The Blue Angel
This is the film that made Marlene Dietrich a household scandal back in 1930. It’s the story of how a pompous but respectable schoolteacher is lured on to the rocks by Lola-Lola, the nightclub singer in a Weimar-era club who can’t help “Falling in Love Again” (which Dietrich sings here). Poor Emil Jannings, who played the professor, thought he was the star of the film – as well he might since he’d won the Best Actor Oscar the year before, at the very first Academy Awards. He resisted director Von Sternberg’s choice of Dietrich, then a nobody, as the temptress. Von Sternberg had discovered her acting in a stage play quite by accident. … Read more
Perfect Days
We have Covid to thank for Perfect Days, the best film from Wim Wenders in some time. The original idea was to get Wenders to Tokyo to make a documentary about the toilets built for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (a gig is a gig). But the Olympics first got postponed to 2021 and then eventually took place behind closed doors without any spectators. The toilets barely got used. Wenders, however, did get to make his film. But instead of a documentary, Wenders pushed to make a feature film, incorporating those 17 toilets designed by leading architects, with the action focused not on the toilets themselves – though they do feature prominently – but on … Read more
The Curious Return of Douglas Sirk
What is it about a film-maker who died around 25 years ago in obscurity that fascinates a new generation of directors? The director Douglas Sirk died in 1987 aged 90. Born in Hamburg as Detlef Sierck, he became well known for his string of lush melodramas made in Hollywood in the 1950s. Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1957), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958) and Imitation of Life (1959) are considered his key works. The French “auteurists” were the first to start the re-assessment of Sirk in the late 1950s – the distinctive look of his films marking them out as … Read more
Knights of the Teutonic Order
1960’s Knights of the Teutonic Order is one of the most watched movies in Poland’s history. According to some sources, almost everyone in the country saw it when it was released and it remains popular to this day. What is it about this tale of proud Poles taking arms against an order of corrupt German clerics dominating their country, made less than 15 years after a German invasion had propelled Europe into the Second World War, that caught the attention? The historical parallels are obvious, but there was the added bonus of the film’s anti-clerical theme chiming with the anti-religious agenda of Poland’s communist overlords. There will be no pushback from that direction. … Read more
