Popular Reviews
Bitter Rice
Italian neorealism meets the crime drama in 1949’s Bitter Rice (Ris Amaro), Giuseppe De Santis’s gritty fable about a pair of petty thieves joining a horde of itinerant workers to plant and harvest rice. If drama is life minus the boring bits, De Santis is aware that neorealism at its worst can be a bit like life plus extra boring bits. So he brightens things up with crime thrills and a cast full of good-looking young things. In case we’re still not feeling it, more often than is absolutely necessary he’ll poke his camera into the cleavage of a few of his female stars as well. The thieves are played by Vittorio Gassman … Read more
Summer of 85
Intense, sexy and brooding, Summer of 85 (Été 85 in the original French) is François Ozon’s latest look at human relationships of a particularly febrile sort, all set in a seaside town at a time when Ozon himself would have been a teenager. After a languid and deliberately cinematic tracking shot from the water’s edge right up the beach and onto the promenade, Ozon then gives us a smell of what’s about to play out by introducing us to two friends discussing what they’re going to get up to later that day. Both are handsome lads, and seem to be either standing too close to each other, staring too intently at each other … Read more
Holiday
Screwball but not particularly comedy, in spite of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn’s presence, Holiday is too serious a business to be unserious about, and there aren’t really any jokes in it. But Grant bashes through it as if it were in the key of fun, and he drags everyone and everything along in his wake. He even throws in a backflip or two here in there, to remind us he got his start in showbiz as a tumbler. Grant plays Johnny Case, a normal, everyday guy who’s worked his way up to a decent job in finance. Johnny has met and fallen for Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), unaware that she’s from a … Read more
Blood In, Blood Out
Clearly intending to do for Chicanos what Scorsese and Coppola did for Italian Americans, 1993’s Blood In, Blood Out cannot be accused of a lack of ambition. A big, long, zeitgeist-tasting tale of life in and around the gangs inside and outside prison, it follows three East Los Angeles guys on a journey from callow youth to some sort of maturity, each winding up in a place he might not have expected. Miklo, Cruz and Paco are three streetwise Chicanos. Spanish peppers their streetspeak as they swagger around their rough neighbourhood in cartoon exaggerations of masculinity. Cruz is a street artist with ambitions to be something more. Half-brother Paco is a cock of … Read more
Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould
The title describes it exactly – Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould is 32 short films about the celebrated pianist Glenn Gould, all directed by François Girard, who squeezes his compendium into just over 90 minutes. Which is pretty good going considering he’s covering quite a lot of territory and doing it in a multiplicity of styles. The film came out in 1993, when the cult of Gould was still in full spate. It has since abated a touch, though the Canadian pianist is still the maverick genius to many – a humming cantankerous weirdo to others. Girard takes his cue from the 32 individual pieces in the Goldberg Variations, one of … Read more
Dogs in the Movies
Dogs. Yes, that’s right, dogs. I’ve probably already doubled the amount of traffic to this site just by writing the word “dogs” three times. Four times if you count that mention. Because people just love dogs (five). They can’t help themselves. It’s down to their dependability. A human being might let you down, but a four legged friend probably won’t eat you until you’ve been dead at least four days. A cat would probably tuck in while you were still warm. Trenchant insight aside, a dog’s loyalty and trainability make it a natural for the movies. A dog can be encouraged to do stuff that’s cute. Or, with a sign from off-camera, it … Read more
The House I Live In
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 December Prohibition ends, 1933 On this day in 1933, the USA ended one of its most disastrous experiments. The Volstead Act, or National Prohibition Act, had been passed on 28 October 1919. It banned “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States…” It had required a change in the US Constitution to get the act passed, which the Congress had finally done on 16 January 1919, when it ratified the 18th Amendment. On 17 January 1920, America went dry. Except it didn’t. What happened instead is that … Read more
Mission: Impossible 3
Remember the tagline for True Lies, the Arnie Schwarzenegger actioner in which he plays a secret agent whose wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) is unaware of his job – “When he said I do, he never said what he did”? Pretty much the same thing is going in M:I3, with impossibly happy semi-retired agent Tom Cruise unable to tell his fiancée (Michelle Monaghan) that he’s off on a perilous secret mission. In something of a departure from the previous two films, Tom does actually have more of a Mission Impossible team with him this time – Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q. This is all much more in keeping with the TV original, … Read more
Respect
It would easy to go all hatey on Respect, a biopic of the life of Aretha Franklin, but instead let’s take it for what it is – the authorised version, the Stations of the Cross of a towering talent who even old, sick and with her voice in ruins could yank a tear, if not sobs, from the coldest of hearts. As we can see at the end of the film in actual footage from Aretha’s performance at the 2015 Kennedy Center tribute to Carole King which, perhaps unwisely, is shown over the end credits. Jennifer Hudson never quite manages anything similar, brilliant though she is. Choose your biblical metaphor – she’s Daniel … Read more
The Fabulous Baron Munchausen
Sometimes called The Outrageous Baron Munchausen, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (originally Baron Prásil) is the better title. Karel Zeman’s fantastic and fantastical 1962 adaptation of Rudolf Erich Raspe’s 1785 publishing phenomenon is all about a European baron who can’t stop telling tall tales. He’s Fabulous as in inclined to fabulate – or make shit up, in everyday English. Not Fabulous as in Baker Boys, which was a more ironic use of the word. If you don’t know the work of Zeman but do know the work of Terry Gilliam, you kind of do know the work of Zeman, because Gilliam borrowed extensively from the look of the genius Czech animator, both in his early … Read more
Pygmalion
Pygmalion was the name of a mythological sculptor who made a statue so beautiful that he begged the gods to bring it to life. Which they did. He called it Galatea. The myth has been worked and reworked over the millennia and still has purchase – Trading Places is a version of the basic idea, so is Damien Chazelle’s breakthrough film Whiplash. In all the best updates there’s a conversation going on in the subtext about appropriate behaviour. When does tough love become abuse? When should the sculptor accept that “his” creation now has a life of its own? It’s all here in this film version from 1938, an adaptation of George Bernard … Read more
Blue Giant
Add Blue Giant to that big long list of Japanese animes about jazz. Yes, precisely. It’s a “how we got the band together” story of good-looking Japanese dudes meeting and becoming a tight jazz outfit, but mostly it’s concerned with Dai Miyamoto, a passionate saxophone player who outgrows his small town and so heads for the bright lights of Tokyo once he hits 18. Though everyone tells him that jazz is doomed Dai remains fired up by its possibilities and is on a quest to become “the best jazz musician in the world”. Once in the big city Dai hooks up with Yukinori Sawabe, a talented pianist, and together they recruit Shunji Tamada … Read more
