Popular Reviews
Desire
1936’s Desire is the sort of film Hollywood has always excelled at. A bit of this, that and the other – some fun, some jeopardy, some romance – parcelled up beautifully and sold by attractive people who are looking their best. Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in this case. The best bit actually comes at the outset, when Dietrich is playing two men off against each other by telling each man she’s married to the other. On one side a jeweller (Ernest Cossart), from whom she’s trying to steal a priceless string of pearls. On the other a shrink (Alan Mowbray), who is apparently supposed to be buying the pearls though he knows … Read more
The Band Wagon
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 3 May Betty Comden born, 1917 On this day in 1917, lyricist, librettist and screenwriter Betty Comden was born, as Basya Cohen, in Brooklyn, New York. After finishing high school she studied drama at New York University, where she formed a small revue troupe with Judy Holliday, Leonard Bernstein and Adolph Green. Green would go on to be her lifelong writing partner. Being performers and writers, both Comden and Green liked to write themselves into their works. Which is what they did with On the Town, their first big Broadway success. After a couple of flop shows, the duo headed to … Read more
Hemel
Briskly and directly, much like its heroine, Hemel gets straight down to business with an opening scene of two people naked and rolling around, the woman mocking the man’s penis – you’re no David and it’s hardly Goliath etc – as part of an extended bout of cockteasing foreplay. Hemel – it means Heaven in Dutch – is a woman who likes sex and, being good-looking and young, has no trouble getting it. But, sex in this film being nowhere near as simple as it seems, Hemel wants it with an urgency that seems almost too needy. Later, having had her fun with the partner we met in the opening scene, she’s at … Read more
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The title is a joke, a reference to Marvel history and also an announcement – this, fanfare please, is the opening film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s glorious Phase Six. The joke. The Fantastic Four has taken many first steps before. It’s the failed-to-launch superhero franchise par excellence, with three damp squibs – two with Ioan Gruffudd and Jessica Alba and one with Miles Teller and Kate Mara, not forgetting assorted unremarkable FF walk-ons in other MCU movies. “Damp” may be overdoing it, but those three movies did not sweep all before them, let’s say. And then there was Roger Corman’s run at the material, with a movie … Read more
Primer
Primer is the mumblecore sci-fi movie par excellence, if you can use a high-falutin term like par excellence with a film-making ethos as meat and potatoes as mumblecore. The writer and director Rian Johnson reckons it’s the best time travel movie ever made, and when he was sketching out ideas for Looper sent them to Shane Carruth, Primer’s writer/director/star/composer/producer/editor/production designer/sound designer (and probably a few more roles besides). Carruth reckoned Johnson had got his time paradoxes and causalities all wrong, which he may well have done. Looper is fairly hard to follow in terms of what happened to which version of a certain person in which timescape, but Primer ties Looper’s comparatively simplistic … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 19 – The Golden Eggs
Because The Avengers were not broadcast in production order*, you do get the odd anomaly. Fore example, the getting-to-know-you dialogue between Steed and Mrs Gale in Warlock, the 18th (broadcast order) episode of series 2, makes more sense when you know it was designed as the Series 2 opener, introducing Steed’s new sidekick. There’s another incongruity as a consequence. In The Golden Eggs Peter Arne once again plays a baddie, as he had done the previous week (if you were watching in 1963). Then he was the eponymous warlock. This time he’s playing Redfern, the toff at the peak of a criminal pyramid which has pulled off the feat of stealing a pair … Read more
Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future
In science fact as well as science fiction the Soviet Union often got there first. First into space, first to the Moon, Mars and Venus, all mighty achievements by an empire whose successes have all subsequently been overshadowed by the regime’s ultimate failure. So how about Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future? Did it really boldly go in 1973 where Marty McFly and the Doc wouldn’t venture until 12 years later? No, is the short answer. The longer one is that this film had a different title originally – Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (or Ivan Vasilievich Menyaet Professiyu in the original Russian) – and it was its US distributors who renamed it, in an … Read more
Girl, Interrupted
Girl, Interrupted tells the real-life story of Susanna Kaysen, who wrote the original memoir about her enforced stay at a mental hospital in the 1960s. She was banged up after a pills overdose for what was termed a “borderline personality disorder” but the suspicion remains that she was being incarcerated at least partly because she was young, rebellious and pissing off her parents. Director James Mangold’s film version turns the whole experience slightly into One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest redone as a 1960s Mean Girls drama. Instead of shock therapy there’s the withdrawal of TV privileges, straitjackets have largely been replaced by attentive, pleasant carers. And as for debilitating doses of recreational … Read more
Fast X
The word “family” is uttered 56 times in Fast X, number ten (there’s a clue in the title somewhere) in the series whose focus on interpersonal relations threatens to scupper it. And yet it keeps on going. The latest outing is not so fast, not so furious, maybe, but in a jimjams-and-pizza-and-beer kind of way, it’s a decent enough piece of entertainment – 1950s-melodrama acting with obsessively planned Buster Keaton-style stunts. There is a plot, there really is, of a disavowed, Mission: Impossible flavour, with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and gang being accused of some dreadful atrocity and then being pursued by the Agency it used to work for. The atrocity – a bouncing … Read more
R.M.N.
The state of the Romanian nation is what Cristian Mungiu’s films tend to be about – Occident, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Tales from the Golden Age, Beyond the Hills and Graduation have all dealt in various ways with the country’s escape (or not) from the Communist-era Ceaușescu regime and its progress towards integrating, more or less, with modern Europe. R.M.N. could be a truncated textspeak-y way of writing “Romania” but in fact it’s an acronym standing for Rezonanță Magnetică Nucleară, Magnetic Resonance Imaging in English, and that, in a sense is what the film is – a 360º scan of the nation, where the same grand game is going on as … Read more
Suspiria
Suspiria, the original 1977 one not the 2018 remake (a treat for another day), pulls a version of the same trick on its audience that Orson Welles pulled on his crew while making Citizen Kane. “It’s a dream sequence,” Welles would sometimes shout, when he ran into resistance against whatever novelty he was trying out on any given day. Park your timeserved-craftsman’s logical objections, in other words, and give it a try. Armed with his “dream sequence” rationale Welles was able to experiment away to his heart’s content. If Welles had a dream, Dario Argento has a nightmare to deliver and everything in his film is shaped by it. Park expectations about “good” … Read more
The Woodsman
There are two big default ideas in Hollywood movies and in The Woodsman we have not just a fine film about a paedophile but also a film tackling these two notions head on. The first of Hollywood’s mantras is “be yourself”. The second: “you can have anything if you want it enough” – often expressed as “never give up on your dream”. In The Woodsman Kevin Bacon plays Walter, a fresh-from-prison paedophile who would give anything not to be himself, a man who would love to give up his dream – of having sex with young children. Unfortunately for Walter, his insane bail conditions force him to live over the road from – hollow … Read more
