Popular Reviews
15 April 2013-04-15
Out in the UK This Week She Monkeys (Peccadillo, cert 12, DVD) Vaguely marketed as a lesbian drama, this is in fact an instant classic of the twisted coming-of-age genre, a superbly taut story of a teenager called Emma (Mathilda Paradeiser) who meets a similarly blonde, similarly athletic girl (Linda Molin) while learning equestrian vaulting. Meanwhile, at home, Emma’s five-year-old sister is making her first advances into the world of sexual strategy. Friendship and rivalry, sex and power duke it out for supremacy in this superbly photographed, coolly understated Swedish drama recalling Let the Right One In in look, tone, ambition and effect. A gripper. She Monkeys – at Amazon The Spirit of … Read more
The People’s Joker
The People’s Joker started life as a re-edit of the original Joker movie, then that idea was junked in favour of shooting something that was all new, though leaning heavily on the intellectual property of Batman and his DC adversaries. So much did it lean, in fact, that it got as far as one screening at the Toronto International Film Festival before a shot across its bows from Warner Bros. got it yanked it from the festival. There were no further screenings, and nor were there any clear explanations from either director/star Vera Drew or from Warners whether a full-blown cease-and-desist letter had been sent, or whether something else had gone on in … Read more
Long Live the Republic!
Memory, fantasy and the Second World War make surprisingly comfy bedfellows in Long Live the Republic! (Ať žije republika), Karel Kachyňa’s lyrical and lovely coming-of-ager from 1965. A Czech movie set in Moravia as the German army pulls out and the Soviet army readies itself to take over, it’s far less critical of the communist regime than you might expect from a mid-1960s film. Especially from a film-maker who’d later make The Ear, a film so scathingly anti that it was instantly banned and not seen until communism collapsed. But poke around a bit and there’s a critique of sorts going on, delivered with the maximum of plausible deniability. The non-plot follows a … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 22 – What the Butler Saw
What the Butler Saw is an episode about what the butler did rather than saw, though it does kick off with John Le Mesurier – tongue doing at least half of his acting as usual – handing his employer a gun and looking on as a minion asking for too large a cut of an ill-gotten gain is murdered. What the butler actually saw, in the soft-porn flickerbook images of the Victorian Mutoscope machines, was his mistress disrobing. Appropriately, the reference points in this episode are Victorian – the 1949 Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (set in Victorian times) in particular. Which is why Steed, aiming to find out which of a … Read more
Martin Eden
With a couple of the names changed perhaps because Lizzie and Ruth don’t roll easily enough off the Italian tongue, this is a fairly straightforward adaptation of Jack London’s novel Martin Eden, about a lowly sailor who falls for a high-born girl and decides to become a writer in order to win her heart. Here, Martin is played by Luca Marinelli, and the rich Ruth character, now called Elena, is played by Jessica Cressy. The Lizzie character, the poor girl who loves Martin for what he is rather than his social status, inherited or newly acquired, is now called Margherita and is played by Denise Sardisco. A Bildungsroman, a Künstlerroman, a novel of … 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
Salute
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 4 April Martin Luther King assassinated, 1968 On this day in 1968, the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. He’d gone there to intervene in a strike of black sanitary public works employees, who were employed on zero-hours contracts, while their white counterparts were paid by the day, irrespective of hours worked. There had been a bomb threat against King’s plane en route and he was clearly expecting trouble. On 3 April, at Mason Temple, he delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech – “Like anybody, I would like to live a … Read more
The Girl without Hands aka La Jeune Fille sans Mains
A miller down on his luck meets a man in the woods. The man is the Devil, though the miller doesn’t know it, and after a bit of smalltalk he’s soon offered the miller a deal. Give me what you have behind your mill and I’ll make you rich, offers the Devil. Behind the mill, thinks the man, that’s an apple tree. An apple tree for a crock of gold sounds fair enough to me, he reasons. Obviously never having read any fairy tales, he agrees to the bargain. It turns out that the miller’s daughter was also behind the mill and the miller has now signed her over to the Devil himself. … Read more
Crimes of the Future
David Cronenberg likes the title Crimes of the Future. He’s used it once before, for a film he made in 1970. He’s using it again here, 52 years later, but there’s no other connection between the two, at least on the surface. The 1970 is comedy sci-fi about a world without women, the 2022 recycling is good old-fashioned Cronenbergian body horror like he used to make. FYI, eXistenZ (1999), his last go at the genre he dominated in the 1980s and 90s, also had the working title Crimes of the Future. This Crimes of the Future’s origins go back to four years after eXistenZ, when Cronenberg was trying to put together a film … Read more
The King’s Speech
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 June Wallis Simpson born, 1896 On this day in 1896, Bessie Wallis Warfield was born in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was only a few months old and she was supported by various members of her father’s family, until her mother remarried, though it was her father’s brother who paid for her to attend Maryland’s most expensive girls school. Bright, ambitious and always well dressed, Wallis was popular and in 1916 she married a US Navy aviator, Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. An alcoholic and womaniser, her husband and Wallis had an on-off relationship with … Read more
Love Exposure
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 22 November Premiere of Ravel’s Bolero, 1928 On this day in 1928, Ravel’s Bolero made its debut at the Paris Opera. Ravel was originally going to call the work Fandango but changed his mind to Bolero, keeping his original intention – which he almost apologetically in later years would describe as “orchestral tissue without music… there are no contrasts and practically no invention except the plan and the manner of execution.” Bolero is a long rhythmic crescendo, starting out with a simple rat-tatta-ta-tat-tatta-ta-tattata-tattata-tat snare drum, a sinuous melody over the top, at first with just a few members of the orchestra … Read more
Infested
Infested is Attack the Block with added spiders… and that’s a good thing. A homage to John Carpenter, in other words. Confined space, conflicted characters, churning synths, an invisible foe… until it suddenly isn’t, it’s (mostly) all here. It’s the feature debut of French director Sébastien Vaniček and impressed Sam Raimi enough to get Vaniček a gig directing the next Evil Dead movie – a franchise back from the, er, dead. You can see why Raimi signed him up. Raimi-like, Vaniček wastes no time getting his story going, and then prioritises forward momentum. In disaster-movie style we meet a bunch of characters before following them into a situation full of jeopardy. Some will survive, … Read more
