Recently Watched Films 2020

[Dan Warburton]

Michel Hazanavicius, Le redoutable, 2017

That's Louis Garrel (great make-up job!) starring as the man his father idolised, le plus con des suisses prochinois, Jean-Luc Godard, in a film adapted from the second volume of the director's wife (and star of La Chinoise) Anna Wiazemsky's recollections of their life together and eventual break-up. I have no idea how the film's done at the box office, given its subject matter: while most folks who weren't around at the time probably have only a vague notion of what really went on during May 1968, and even fewer will recall the circumstances that led to that year's Cannes festival being abandoned (I had to remind myself who Michel Cournot was), how many punters today have seen the Dziga Vertov-period Godard? Hazanavicius set out to make a "popular film" (nice interview - French only - here https://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2 ... _3476.html) and I think he succeeds. The humour - both verbal (Garrel delivers JLG's vicious putdowns with deadpan virtuosity) and visual (the running gag of him breaking his glasses) - and the exuberance of the performances and lively, colourful sets mean that you don't need to have struggled through Pravda or Lutte en Italie (heaven forfend) to enjoy the show. Makes for a nice comparison with Bertolucci's The Dreamers, also starring Mr Garrel (see reviews passim).

[henriq]

Dennis Potter - Secret Friends (1991)

Alan Bates on a train, desperately trying to assemble his life, memories and obsessions from out of the dissolving landscape. As boy, schooled and terrorised by Linnaean taxonomy - as an adult, meticulously working out said taxonomy in filigreed watercolours. Haunted by an imaginary double and a chaotic and dysfunctional love life, different taxonomies introduced as a thematic thread, mirroring each other, mess and confusion pressed into recognisable shapes by violent fantasies. Reality and imagination expanding and enfolding, vertiginously - characters within the dreams seeming to dream and fantasise about each other.

Or…

Dennis Potter once again feeling sorry for himself to old show tunes. Stale forties pinups/prostitutes teasing and castrating - sorry man, just because you put your obsessions in quotation marks don’t make them any less hackneyed - Alan Bates insufferable in his aristo cheek (oh wait, I liked him in Skolimowski’s The Shout, or did I?) and little school boy titter. Plus, the deregulating coordinates is something we already know from the French, from Resnais, from Deville, or even from compatriot David Hare with Wetherby (see earlier review). And they managed to get it done without the misogyny, however heartfelt or not it is. Great as Potter is with Pennies From Heaven or The Singing Detective, this I’m not at all sure of.

[henriq]

Bob Fosse - Star 80 (1983)

Thanks to Dan for hipping me to this - I had certainly heard of it before but never seen it. The story of Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, played perfectly by Mariel Hemingway, and her relationship and murder by husband Paul Snider, a truly awesome turn from Eric Roberts. The story told in fragments, hopping a bit back and forth in time and between witnesses. I feel that Fosse probably knew the period and culture intimately, the set pieces from Hugh Hefner’s mansion, from the strip shows that Roberts’ Paul Snider organises, are all awesome. Fleshed out by fine performances all around, Cliff Robertson perfect as Hugh Hefner, David Clennon as always slightly disagreeable. But the real revelation is Eric Roberts. Too bad drink and drugs did what they did to his career, he deserves much better. He is like a bad actor that doesn’t know it, believes he is great, pushes on as though he is - but then catches himself, crippling doubt that sets in, maybe he doesn’t belong? A stutter step, then a push through with even more obsession and determination, something actually real that seep through the cracks of character and performance, a real presence at last. Of course totally congenial to the role he plays, a true triumph.

[Antoine]

I have no idea how the film's done at the box office

Not well... Around 130k tickets sold (budget 11M€, profitability: 4%).

[Steve Minkin]

David Byrne, True Stories, 1986

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Stories_(film) Well, it's David Byrne so you can be sure to find dozens of whimsical quotable lines, and plenty of catchy Talking Heads songs, but in my present distinctly anti-American frame of mind, a procession of cheerleaders, yodellers, cattle auctioneers, failed country singers, pathological liars and fast food commercial mashups annoys more than it entertains. But, hey, that's just me.

Never really worked on this side of the pond, either. Saw it in the theater when it came out, memorable for the level of disappointment in the parade of mediocrities.

[Dan Warburton]

Jonas Mekas, A Letter from Greenpoint, 2004

“Once an immigrant, always an immigrant: Mekas’s self-portrait in the 2004 diary film A Letter from Greenpoint instigates a retroactive dialogue with 1972’s Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, the filmmaker’s account of his resettlement (with brother Adolfas) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after leaving Europe following World War II, and his trip back to the humble village of his birth. In Greenpoint, the octogenarian Mekas undergoes another exile - from his high-priced apartment in downtown Manhattan to a cozier abode in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, barely a few blocks from his original home in America. Now shooting on a lightweight digital camera, Mekas documents - and poeticizes - his freshly adopted environment”. - Eric Kohn on Jonas Mekas’s A Letter from Greenpoint. Mekas: "In February 2004, after 30 years of my life in SoHo, I made a decision to leave SoHo and move to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. This video is about what it feels like to leave a place in which one has spent more time than any other place, and which was also the place of my family life. I am somewhere else now. It’s about beginning of growing roots in a new place, new home, with new friends, new thoughts, experiences." Delighted to note that Jonas, despite what seems to be a prodigious capacity for alcohol, kept on trucking until last year. Cheers!

[Dan Warburton]

Peter Chelsom, Funny Bones, 1995

Thanks again Henrik for pointing me in the direction of this one - a real gem in every way. And a special resonance for me, as my parents both ended their days in Blackpool's Victoria Hospital (nowadays the town is a poverty-stricken unemployment blackspot looking more like something from mid-80s Alan Clarke than recent Ken Loach..). But, enough of that - what a well-written, well-acted and superbly paced film. Where's the BluRay?! I'm no great Jerry Lewis fan either, but he's good here. Everyone is. Great stuff. Have a shufti at https://www.denofgeek.com/uk/movies/fun ... unny-bones

[henriq]

Peter Chelsom, Funny Bones, 1995

Thanks again Henrik for pointing me in the direction of this one - a real gem in every way. And a special resonance for me, as my parents both ended their days in Blackpool's Victoria Hospital (nowadays the town is a poverty-stricken unemployment blackspot looking more like something from mid-80s Alan Clarke than recent Ken Loach..). But, enough of that - what a well-written, well-acted and superbly paced film. Where's the BluRay?! I'm no great Jerry Lewis fan either, but he's good here. Everyone is. Great stuff. Have a shufti at https://www.denofgeek.com/uk/movies/fun ... unny-bones

Thought you'd like it, glad you did. And, fyi, I got the bluray rip from the usual place, and it doesn't look much better than the quite good DVD. Maybe I can help you out if you want it?

[Steve Minkin]

PARASITE -- This was such a good movie until it wasn't. Loved the opening, the premise, the visuals, the acting . . . a great dark comedy. The underground turn for the darker began to lose me, I thought the original plot vector was stronger and richer; and then the descent into a Tarantino-like Elizabethan revenge tragedy lost me completely. The anti-climactic follow-up was weak. Hard for me to remember another film that had me so solidly engrossed and delighted in it losing me so completely by the finish.

[Dan Warburton]

Before..



After..



André Cayatte, Le miroir à deux faces, 1958

Bourvil (real name André Raimbourg) was best known as a comic actor, but, damn, he could play a mean son of a bitch better than most professional baddies. That said, the character he plays here doesn't start out as one, but certainly ends up that way. A rather shy schoolteacher in search of matrimony at the outset, he's nudged into marrying Marie-José by her parents. And, yes, that is Michèle Morgan in the picture above marked "Before". I didn't recognise her at first with that nose. Telling you how she ends up as "After", which also explains how her husband ended up a murderer (I'm not revealing anything much there, as we learn that at the outset) would spoil everything. Great script, great performances. Smashing film, strongly recommended.

[Dan Warburton]

Marcel Pagnol, La belle meunière, 1948

I was expecting another one of Pagnol's splendid readings of Jean Giono, but in fact this turns out to be the story of Franz Schubert (very freely adapted by Pagnol from the composer's biography) and his (eventually unrequited) love for die schöne mullerin Brigitte (Pagnol regular Jacqueline Bouvier, looking like an extra from a local repertory company Wagner production). Schubert is played by Tino "Petit Papa Noël" Rossi, who sings the (orchestrated, and not so well) songs in French. If, like me, you can't take much Tino Rossi, be warned. This one of the first French colour films, shot in Rouxcolor, whatever that is, but it's dated badly in every way. I doubt even a smart restoration would do it much good. Nearly gave up on this halfway through, but persevered to the end, goodness knows why.

[Dan Warburton]

Kirk Douglas, Posse, 1975

A post-Watergate Western reflecting a profound mistrust of the motives of politicians, and framing its story within the ironic cry: 'To the polls, ye sons of freedom!' The small township is shown to be as much a prey to Douglas' ambitious, uptight marshal, bucking for the US Senate, as it is to the man he's tracking down, a 'ruthless' outlaw (Dern, being generously allowed to steal the film). With its picture of America in the making (on the make) - early baseball, carefully conspicuous ads for Bulova and Schlitz, and the ubiquitous photographer recording everything for posterity - the film painstakingly attempts to locate the roots of contemporary malaise. That it doesn't work, as such, is a result of the general naiveté of its reversals of the standard good guy/bad guy format. But what emerges is a likeable Western, pleasantly subversive, crisply photographed, and despite some padding, engagingly put together.

Little to add to the above, though you might enjoy Bruce Dern's own recollections here https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... se-1278681

[Dan Warburton]

Alain Cavalier, Mise en sac, 1967

Though it has been restored and shown at the Cinémathèque, there's no DVD/BluRay in sight as far as I know (some legal hassles? who knows), which is a crying shame as this splendid hold-up movie is right up there with Huston's Asphalt Jungle and Dassin's Rififi in my book. Michel Constantin leads a team of heavies who set about robbing a whole town - the local factory payroll, plus half a dozen bank vaults - until, of course, it all goes horribly wrong. Penned by Cavalier and Claude Sautet based on Richard Stark's The Score, it's a tight, wonderfully executed piece of work. Now that Le plein de super has reappeared decently restored, we live in hope. In the meantime, the rough and ready rip over at Karagarga is the best we've got - but go for it, you won't be disappointed.

[Dan Warburton]

Christian-Jaque, Boule de suif, 1945

Christian-Jaque and Henri Jeanson's script combining two Guy de Maupassant short stories Mademoiselle Fifi and Boule de Suif is a splendid if not exactly subtle allegory of the French resistance and eventual liberation of the country at the end of WWII, and makes for an interesting comparison with Robert Wise's 1944 Mademoiselle Fifi (which I saw last year but didn't write up here, as I recall). If you have several hours to spare during your forthcoming COVID-19 self-isolation or whatever, you can read this https://www.fabula.org/lht/2/labbe.html Of course, it's in French, but you'll probably have time to learn the language while the world sinks slowly into coronaviral paranoia

[Dan Warburton]

Fredi M. Murer, Grauzone, 1979

One reviewer online puts it thus: https://letterboxd.com/film/grauzone/ "A nightmare vision of concrete and wires, where the sounds of progress drown out humanity and people only interact with the disembodied voices on television and radio. Murer uses the visual limitations set by the low budget to his advantage, crafting a world drained of colour and contrast, in which everything coalesces into a featureless grey smudge. If his distinctly Swiss emulation of Antonioni no longer disquiets us, then only because modernity has triumphed so thoroughly that any alternative seems unthinkable. On a side note, I love the simple elegance of cutting from the protagonist falling asleep directly into television footage. Even our dreams have become subservient to the media we consume." I'd been waiting for this one for a while, and its theme of panic caused by fake news (a false newspaper ad announcing the arrival of a mysterious new virus) is curiously topical. Alfred is ostensibly employed at a banal desk job, but in fact is a covert "sound hunter" working for the sinister forces of big business. He and his wife Julia live on the 16th floor of a smart but anonymous high-rise in the suburbs of Zürich (thank goodness for subtitles - the local patois is, I suspect, barely comprehensible even to native German speakers) whose occupants amuse themselves by spying on each other through telescopes and binoculars. The remarkable thing about the film is how unremarkable everything is / looks, and yet we know from the outset that something's going on beneath the surface, when Alfred drives out of his garage at work and accidentally comes across some of his fellow employees with a body in the boot of their car. He then proceeds, for reasons that are never made clear, to have his beard shaved off.. Throughout the movie, the blare of radios and televisions broadcasting news about the "event" is omnipresent. It's a fascinating, unsettling film, well worth a look.

[Dan Warburton]

Radu Jude, Everybody in our family, 2012

Good review here https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ever ... amily-2012, but see the film first. If you like tight, feisty kitchen-sink drama, the Romanians seem to be doing it better than other nations these days - and here's a splendid example.

[Dan Warburton]

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Theatre in Trance, 1981

Was thrilled to come across a Fassbinder film I hadn't seen, but am inclined to agree with this blogger: "Theatre in Trance, or to give the documentary its full name, Theatre in Trance: A film in 14 parts by Rainer Werner Fassbinder on the occasion of the Theatre of the World 1981 in Cologne on the Rhine, amounts to little more than Fassbinder reading tracts of text from 'Theatre and its Double' by theorist Antonin Artaud over images of various performances from the festival. But the theory is too dense to take in, even in Fassbinder's bite sized portions, and the performances too decontextualised. The resulting treatise is so hobbled it is ineffective." It's bitty, sure, but with its looped snippets of Kraftwerk, Marianne Faithfull and Janis Joplin and Artaudian undertow it does connect, I suppose, with Berlin Alexanderplatz (especially the last crazy episode) and Querelle. But the shows he samples here from the Cologne festival, with the exception of Pina Bausch's, aren't all that spectacular. Still, Fassbinder completists take note.

[Dan Warburton]

John Llewellyn Moxey, The Night Stalker, 1972

Starts out OK as a straightforward slasher, but when we learn that it's the work of a 100-year old vampire (what on earth he hoped to gain by relocating to Las Vegas isn't at all clear - maybe he had an eye on replacing Paul Anka - and YES there is a poster advertising a Paul Anka show if you look carefully haha).. well, let's say the attention span erm slips umm what was I saying oh yes sorry. Cough cough, anyway - if you like spotting crusty US TV personalities (Charles McGraw, Ralph Meeker, Claude Akins, Simon Oakland..) you might enjoy bits of it. But Darren McGavin as our hero Carl Kolchak tries the patience. Clearly the folks on the other side of the pond disagree, as there was a spin-off TV series of the same name. But one 75-minute film is about all I could take.

[Dan Warburton]

Claude Jutra, A tout prendre, 1963

I know, I know, it's hard to separate the man from the oeuvre, as anyone who wants to say anything objective about the work of Roman Polanski (or for that matter, Céline or Wagner) knows, but try if you will to put aside the affaire Jutra of a few years ago (the revelation that the director was fond of 14 and 15 year-old boys.. was it proved? I know not and care not to be honest) and enjoy the splash of the French New Wave breaking over Canadian shores (François Truffaut has a cameo). It's a splendidly ragged affair, full of jump cuts, odd camera moves, and numerous other tics that Godard and Truffaut probably understood better than their Canadian contemporary, but definitely worth a look for the fresh, unpretentious performances of Jutra's leading ladies, Johanne Harelle, Monique Joly and Monique Mercure.

[Dan Warburton]

Sidney Lumet, The Group, 1966

Now that TV series are all the rage, maybe someone could revisit the Mary McCarthy novel that was adapted for this "juicy, glossy soap opera" about eight Vassar grads emerging into the world in 1933 with high hopes only to see them dashed or browbeaten into dull conformity, ending in death on the day WWII breaks out. There's certainly enough material here for at least a season, but scriptwriter Sidney Buchman manages to compress it into two and a half hours (that sounds long, but it's so dense the time just flies by). Buchman, who was blacklisted in 1950, must have relished the opportunity to rap on about Trotsky, the Spanish Civil War and Roosevelt, not to mention contraception, alcoholism and psychoanalysis, and Lumet evidently had a ball with sets and costumes to match. As for the girls themselves, none of the actresses was well-known at the time, and just as well - a petulant prima donna would have upset the careful balance the script sets up between the women - but several went on to be, including Candice Bergen (making her debut here as a lesbian ice queen), Jessica Walter (whose Libby blows Joan Collins out of the water for acid bitchiness, though you may know her better as Evelyn, the deadly stalker in Play Misty For Me), and others (Shirley Knight, Joan Hackett, Elizabeth Hartman) should have been. The men are, with the possible exception of James Broderick (and even then I'm not sure) and the terminally ineffectual Hal Holbrook, an odious bunch. Larry Hagman - yes - warms up for J.R. by drinking heavily and beating the shit out of his wife, while James Congdon uses flowers and psychological warfare to drive Priss into the dirt (Hartman's perfectly cast as the fragile, wounded idealist), and Richard Mulligan (Custer in Little Big Man) has his wicked way with Dottie and then sends her off to be fitted with a diaphragm (racy stuff for the mid 30s, this). Back to Pauline Kael -again - does anyone have a copy of her essay "The Making Of 'The Group'" in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (it's not in The Age Of The Movies, alas)? Would like to read that. Meanwhile, a decent DVD reissue of this one is long overdue.

The Kael article is still worth a read, the DVD is already (it seems) out of print, but apart from that my 2012 review above seems to have aged rather well, if I say so myself