Popular Reviews
100 Years of… Die Nibelungen: Siegfried
Long before techno or Kraftwerk there was Richard Wagner, and in 1924 director Fritz Lang and his writer wife Thea von Harbou decided to put a story the German headbanger had popularised onto the screen. Die Nibelungen: Siegfried is the first of a two-part phantasmagorical medieval epic “dedicated to the German People”, a Tolkien-before-Tolkien, Game-of-Thrones-before-Game-of-Thrones tale of hair, helmets and hunting horns. Plus invisibility, dragons, fair damsels, derring-do, treachery and death. George Lucas clearly watched this first film (at least) before making Star Wars and the debt owed visually by Game of Thrones is also obvious here and there. What’s remarkable is how technically accomplished it is given given the crudity of the … Read more
Cream: Farewell Concert
You don’t see films about popular music stars of the 21st century on the big screen too often. Recently Katy Perry and Justin Bieber have managed it, and a few years back there was Dig! – about the rivalry between the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols – which almost qualifies. But the back end of the 1960s saw the beginning of a run of them, from 1969’s Monterey Pop film, then on to the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter and Woodstock in 1970, before everyone – Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin – got in on the act. Director Tony Palmer got in early and used his record of rock supergroup Cream’s … Read more
The Decameron
“The dirtiest great book in the Western canon,” is how the New Yorker once described Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Which made it a perfect fit for Pier Paolo Pasolini when he set out on his Trilogy of Life, three films based on old texts. The Decameron came first, in 1970, followed by The Canterbury Tales (1974) and Arabian Nights (1974). All three were popular, especially with sex-starved schoolboys suddenly interested in subtitled arthouse. Whether they are arthouse at all is a question for another day – in some quarters subtitling is enough on its own to consign a movie to the outer reaches. Which is ridiculous in the case of the Trilogy of Life, … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 18 – The Morning After
Peter Barkworth, Joss Ackland and Brian Blessed fortify The Morning After, a decent “abandoned town” caper with an egregious USP – Tara King isn’t in it. It’s insult added to injury, given that the previous week Linda Thorson had been substituted by obvious try-out replacement Jennifer Croxton. This week Clemens has two stand-ins, Peter Barkworth and Jennifer Horner (attractive, blonde, posh), taking the place of King, who spends the entire episode “asleep”, thanks to some knockout gas administered by shifty quadruple agent Merlin (Barkworth) and which he unintentionally also falls victim to, along with Steed and King. If we’re being kind, it’s Clemens returning to an earlier idea of The Avengers – Steed … Read more
15 August 2016-08-15
Out This Week Only Yesterday (StudioCanal, cert 15) It’s 25 years since Isao Takahata directed this touching animation for Studio Ghibli. Only now, thanks to a fresh revoicing by a cast including Daisy Ridley, has it arrived on these shores. The Force etc etc. As with Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies it takes a while to get its hooks in and also goes into slightly darker territory than Takahata’s stablemate Miyazaki would. The focus however remains the same – a girl finding her way, this being the story of Taeko, a woman haunted by memories of her younger self. We see, in flashback, her childhood at school where she isn’t very good, and at … Read more
Hangmen Also Die!
The screamer hanging off the end of Hangmen Also Die! kind of says it all. As if “hangmen” and “die” in the same sentence weren’t enough, the title of Fritz Lang’s 1943 film adds extra emphasis, just in case we hadn’t got it. The scrolling opening prologue continues in much the same vein, informing us that the “thousand year flaming tradition” burning in the hearts of the people of Czechoslovakia was in danger of being extinguished by the Nazis. Czechoslovakia was in fact about 25 years old at the time, having been cobbled together at the end of the First World War (it is now two separate countries again). This insistence is all … Read more
The Untamed
Genre collision is the dish of the day in The Untamed (La Région Salvaje) as the most down-to-earth drama, the soap, meets the most out there – sci-fi. The result probably shouldn’t work but it really does, thanks to writer director Amat Escalante’s decision to keep the sci-fi stuff in the background for most of the film. After an opening shot of a black meteorite in space, followed by one of a pretty young woman apparently pleasuring herself, or being pleasured by, a giant pink tentacle, we’re off into an entirely different realm until, in the film’s last section, the tentacle, and the creature it’s attached to, return for some very out-there cross … Read more
Tuscaloosa
Tuscaloosa kicks off with an urgent, arresting image laying out what’s at stake, archive footage of George Wallace making his infamous “segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation for ever!” pitch on the campaign stump in 1963, before even more footage shows Wallace in the full glare of the TV cameras blocking the entrance to the University of Alabama to two black students. A flash even further back in time, to 1953, and a car containing a white woman and a black woman, caught in freeze frame, the two having run away together. They ended up, we learn, so badly disfigured in the burnt-out hull of the car that their bodies were unrecognisable. And … Read more
Nora Prentiss
“Major picture-making at its worst,” was the New York Times verdict on Nora Prentiss in 1947. Yes, but… It’s also a prime example of the sort of 1940s movie seemingly designed to put women back in their box once war was over. And for that reason alone it deserves a look. It’s a classic “rogue female” movie, and Ann Sheridan is ideally cast as the nightclub singer driving a staid, breadwinning family man to destruction. They called them dangerous dames back then and it must be said that there’s nothing wilful or malevolent in Nora (Sheridan), far from it. But that just makes it worse. The girl can’t help it. Stodgy and slow are … Read more
Exorcist II: The Heretic
Exorcist II: The Heretic aka The Heretic aka The Worst Film Ever Made gets people excited for all the wrong reasons. The sequel to a film that didn’t need one, it was a fool’s errand by John Boorman, who directed it, then cut it about a fair bit after audiences started laughing at it in previews. Today there are three versions. The original amusing version, the shorter theatrical cut Boorman delivered (and which still didn’t work) and then a re-edited version for European markets, which didn’t work all over again. Poor Boorman never quite recovered from the drubbing it got. William Friedkin, who directed the original, said it was “as bad as seeing … Read more
MaXXXine
A collection of great scenes in search of a movie, MaXXXine opens with a quote from Bette Davis – “In this business, until you’re known as a monster you’re not a star” – and ends with the song Bette Davis Eyes. Between those bookends, the story of a porn actress (Mia Goth) trying to go legit in the 1980s United States, where Ronald Reagan is promising “morning in America”, Christians are campaigning against satanism in rock music and filth on the screens, and a serial killer is on a spree butchering young women like Maxine. We first met Maxine in X, this trilogy’s opener, when she was a 1970s burlesque dancer with ambitions … Read more
Theatre of Blood
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 May Sam Jaffe born, 1901 On this day in 1901, one of the great characters of Hollywood was born, in Harlem, New York. Sam Jaffe, not to be confused with the actor of the same name, dropped out of high school and, thanks to his brother-in-law being a producer, got a job as an office boy at Paramount. He rose quickly and by 22 was production manager on films directed by such luminaries as Lubitsch, Von Sternberg and Mamoulian. Having dated Clara Bow and saved Paramount studios financially by inventing the “night for day” system of shooting – which used … Read more
