See This
Onegin
The world has grown wary of the costume drama since the heyday of Room with a View. To put bums of seats these days Stan Lee has to be involved at some level. Put a girl in a crinoline and a universal “meh” goes up. Even back in 1999 audiences weren’t flocking so readily. Which is a great pity because Onegin is an opulent delight. Directed by Martha Fiennes and featuring swathes of Fiennes siblings and in-laws in one capacity or another, it is worth a look because of its beautiful cinematography alone, and its obsessive attention to period detail. Most commendable of all, though, is its plot, based on a Pushkin poem, … Read more
American Perfekt
It’s a good rule of thumb that road movies set out in any American desert and made on a low budget have a knack of turning out OK. There’s often something fairly oddball going on too. Made in 1997, the same year that its star would appear in Tarantino’s career-boosting Jackie Brown, American Perfekt sees Robert Forster playing a psychiatrist driving through the empty desert who stops to pick up a female hitchhiker (Amanda Plummer). She is clearly deranged but no matter how mad she apparently seems, he’s even madder – it’s only thanks to a coin toss that he’s giving her a ride, rather than killing her. Half an hour or so … Read more
Freddy Got Fingered
The ancient Hebrews used to send out a goat into the wilderness, hoping it would take all their sins off with it. Modern Hollywood continues the practice every year with the Razzies, awards handed out to films which supposedly stink but which are in fact often not significantly more terrible than many others. In fact Razzies are often awarded to films which tried hard and failed, rather than to films which cynically set out to be terrible, in the hope of turning a buck, so maybe there’s some honour in getting one. In 2012, was Kristen Stewart really deserving of hers, for Snow White and the Huntsman and the last of the Twilight … Read more
Casablanca
Exhortations to go and see this timeless film are usually based on its treasure chest of quotable lines. “Round up the usual suspects”, “We’ll always have Paris”, “Play it, Sam”, “Here’s looking at you, kid” and so on. But there’s more to it than that. It’s the one where the guy doesn’t get the gal, discovers his soul and wanders off into the gloom with a Nazi-sympathising police chief who may have just had a similar epiphany. Modern Hollywood films often generate a similar tension – can Spider-Man nobly save a cable-car of terrified schoolkids about to hurtle to their death or will he selfishly save his girlfriend instead? And modern Hollywood films … Read more
Life of Brian
It’s no surprise that this film was hotly controversial on its initial release, since it tells the story of Brian, a hapless Messiah of sorts, condemned to live in the shadow of the Other Guy from Galilee. Its debut saw the first stirrings in popular culture of the phenomenon of synthetic outrage – then only practised by the more conservative elements of society; now everyone is at it – with most of the complaints about the film coming from people who hadn’t even seen it. In fact the Monty Python team were nonplussed by the media hoo-hah – true, they had set out to make a film lambasting Christianity but had hit a … Read more
The Gift
Director Sam Raimi is an expert in genre-twisting. Back when he was making The Evil Dead he so overloaded his gore epic that it eventually became funny. With The Gift he takes on a genre even more arcane: the British whodunit. Then he does weird shit with it. First he transports the whole shebang to the Deep South to remove all traces of afternoon tea or warm beer. Then he gives us Cate Blanchett as a clairvoyant detective who can’t quite make out the identity of the murderer – well, it wouldn’t be much of film if she could, would it? And then, as a masterstroke, he takes a raft of famous faces … Read more
The Grace of God
Now this one is a hard sell. It starts with its director, Gérald L’Ecuyer, addressing the confessional camera, telling of the 16 psychiatrists and the one doomed affair he went through to make this film. Then the film proper starts and it turns out it’s all about a young man and his tangles with psychiatrists and doomed love over a ten year period. This is followed by a whole load of shots from out of the window of a moving train. And that – confession, fiction, train window – is pretty much the mix for the whole of the film’s 70 minutes, which build towards an explanation of how and who this gay … Read more
King of New York
I used to work at a magazine and would get a lot of DVDs in for review purposes. King of New York was the one that really got all my co-workers misty eyed. They started quoting lines from the script, remembering the best bit of the film, asking me if I could have the disc after I’d finished with it. No wonder. It’s a hugely influential piece of work and you can see its impact on almost every mob drama since. It was made when Christopher Walken was in his pomp, here he plays the self-styled King, a classically ruthless gang boss with a strangely benevolent streak, a man who tries, in his … Read more
High Fidelity
A film that caught a moment rather well. One of the moments it caught was the high point of Nick Hornby – the chronicler of a generation that was slightly more conservative, slightly more sentimental than the preceeding one, and had come to accept it. Director Stephen Frears’s version of Hornby’s novel about men and their bloody lists also caught hold of the then current notion that men were all, to some extent, on the autistic spectrum. Giving that idea flesh is John Cusack as the obsessive, nerdy, list-driven owner of a second-rate record shop. The action has been moved from London to Chicago but vinyl geeks are a global trope and Cusack’s … Read more
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
If each era has its own horror film, then the lucky 1970s got both The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Tacked on to the end of a Walter Matthau film for its San Francisco debut, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre drove the cheesecloth-wearing crowd to storm the lobby, demanding money back with menaces. Many people have seen the underwhelming 2003 remake, starring a then fairly unknown Jessica Biel as the scream queen in a tight white t shirt. But for sheer economical film-making – and meanness of budget – you can’t beat the original. It’s based on the true story of Ed Gein, the handyman with a penchant for graverobbing, a … Read more
Following
Can you honestly tell from Following, that its first-time director Christopher Nolan is only two years away from making Memento, the film that put him on Hollywood producers’ speed-dials? Shot on weekends and holidays guerrilla-style around London for about $6,000, it is a real “you saw it here first” effort and the acting is strongly redolent of the great days of British film – it’s rank. But when a story is this strong it barely matters. It’s simple too. We follow, in low-budget monochrome, a young, luckless and broke writer (Jeremy Theobald) who thinks it would be fun, “creative” in an artschool way, maybe, to “follow” people and see where it leads him. … Read more
They Nest
We’ve had them all – alligators, piranhas, anacondas, killer bees and most famously birds and sharks. So what’s left? Insects, of course. In 2000’s They Nest (aka Creepy Crawlers), the time is the present, the scene is the island of Maine off America’s east coast, and the action kicks off when a swarm of cliched, unbelievable and laughable B-list actors assemble and draw lots to see who’s going to suffer the first low-budget extermination at the hands, mandibles, whatever, of crazed crawling creatures. Meanwhile a brave, resourceful, wise and intelligent doctor (Thomas Calabro) is battling to get it through the skulls of the locals that they’re in more peril than they can possibly … Read more
