Recently Watched Films 2018

[walto]

David O. Russell - Flirting with disaster (1996)

To use a cripplingly devalued qualifier - criminally underrated. This is a gem: imagine a remake of Bringing up baby rambling and tumbling through a snow-blighted midwest, toxic deserts, FBI agents on acid, crippling neuroses played for warm and roaring laughter. And the cast: Ben Stiller of course does Ben Stiller, but circling him you have Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin, George Segal, Mary Tyler Moore, Richard Jenkins, Josh Brolin, Patricia Arquette. The fun never stops. And it hurts, too: think a slow burn Fawlty Towers or maybe Pialat on a sunny day. Curse the KG snobbery that keeps this away from that milieu, but it is I think available on DVD from ages ago, and you can rent it on Youtube.

Yes! Very much enjoyed this.

[henriq]

David O. Russell - Flirting with disaster (1996)

To use a cripplingly devalued qualifier - criminally underrated. This is a gem: imagine a remake of Bringing up baby rambling and tumbling through a snow-blighted midwest, toxic deserts, FBI agents on acid, crippling neuroses played for warm and roaring laughter. And the cast: Ben Stiller of course does Ben Stiller, but circling him you have Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin, George Segal, Mary Tyler Moore, Richard Jenkins, Josh Brolin, Patricia Arquette. The fun never stops. And it hurts, too: think a slow burn Fawlty Towers or maybe Pialat on a sunny day. Curse the KG snobbery that keeps this away from that milieu, but it is I think available on DVD from ages ago, and you can rent it on Youtube.

Yes! Very much enjoyed this.

"You left your jacket in the parking lot! ASSHOLE!!!"

[henriq]

David O. Russell - Flirting with disaster (1996)

To use a cripplingly devalued qualifier - criminally underrated. This is a gem: imagine a remake of Bringing up baby rambling and tumbling through a snow-blighted midwest, toxic deserts, FBI agents on acid, crippling neuroses played for warm and roaring laughter. And the cast: Ben Stiller of course does Ben Stiller, but circling him you have Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin, George Segal, Mary Tyler Moore, Richard Jenkins, Josh Brolin, Patricia Arquette. The fun never stops. And it hurts, too: think a slow burn Fawlty Towers or maybe Pialat on a sunny day. Curse the KG snobbery that keeps this away from that milieu, but it is I think available on DVD from ages ago, and you can rent it on Youtube.

Yes! Very much enjoyed this.

"You left your jacket in the parking lot! ASSHOLE!!!"

And dammit, David Patrick Kelly as a hibernated biker! Lovely appearance, that!

[Dan Warburton]

Alan Clarke, Christine, 1987

"The most shocking aspect of Christine is that nothing in it actually shocks. Only when you step back and seriously consider just what you have been watching, the fact that something as ultimately self-destructive as drug addiction has become for the young users here as everyday an activity as making a cup of tea, does it really hit home. In this respect Christine does for drug addiction what Elephant does for the killings in Northern Ireland – its approach may be less obviously confrontational, but its effect is ultimately every bit as devastating."

[Dan Warburton]

Alan Clarke, Sovereign's Company, 1970

Quoting again from http://www.cineoutsider.com/reviews/blu ... html#disc1: "Freed from the studio and shooting on 16mm film, Clarke really makes his mark here as a director, evident early on in his canny camera placement and the timing of edits (let's also give a shout to cameraman Peter Hall and editor Brian Keene here), but most especially in the corridor punch-up between the Blenheim boys and a party of invaders from Dettingen Company, where far from just observing, the camera is in on the action as if taking part in the battle, creating a sequence of claustrophobic energy that was to prove typical of Clarke's approach to violent confrontation. Thoughtful, well cast and convincingly performed (notables include familiar faces James Cosmo as Senior Under Officer Patterson and Clive Francis as Dexter, but in what quickly became a signature of Clarke there's not a wrong note anywhere here), it's a thoroughly involving, refreshingly understated and character-driven work of the sort that seems to have sadly vanished from British TV screens."

[Dan Warburton]

Alan Clarke, Baal, 1982

"In what at the time must have seemed like stunt casting, Baal is played here by David Bowie, but if this prompts you to let out a snort of derision, then you should see what he does with the role. Bowie made his mark in a number of screen roles over the years, but never was he better than he is here. And this is not a case of a singer holding his own in an acting role, but one who invests every inch of himself into the character and it's all up there on screen, in his line delivery, his playful inflection, his body language and his facial expressions, from the looks of amused contempt he throws at visitors to his scraggy abode to the fierce threatening glare he aims at Eckart when he attempts to grab a hat that Baal is sitting on. There's an electrifying truth and magnetism to Bowie's performance here that stands in direct contrast to the more theatrical turns of the other cast members (we'll make an exception of Zoë Wanamaker's captivating performance as prostitute Sophie). On the basis of Clarke's repeatedly demonstrated skill at getting the best from his cast, we can presume this was a deliberate ploy on his part to endear us to an anti-hero whose callous and selfish nature are made oddly tolerable by his rebellious nature and willingness to bite off any hand that feeds."

[Dan Warburton]

Alan Clarke, Funny Farm, 1975

"Clarke's film is a snapshot of a system that begged for some kind of infrastructural reform. The commitment of the people employed is never questioned but the state's resources are woeful and Alan finds himself frequently standing in for others at short-staffed departments. As the disgruntled nurse gets on his bike for his weary six mile ride home, in the rain, we are given some sobering statistics which of course are now way out of date but the logical thrust behind them has probably remained the same all these years later. There will doubtless be a note on the recording medium in the Sound and Vision section but I just wanted to flag the pulsing purple and green highlights that pop up whenever 80s video had to deal with motion and highlights. Film people, for this technical reason, are often dismissive of video, particularly early video, citing the superiority of film's dynamic range but you get a sense from Clarke that the physical medium is utterly unimportant. Whatever medium gave him the scope to do what he wanted to do, how he wanted to do it, was the best choice for him."

[Steve Minkin]

A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM -- I was telling somebody about this documentary at the dance last night, my copy is on VHS so I hadn't seen it in years, glad to see it's on YouTube now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVYZyNBpnGg

Stuff Smith, Monk, Prez, Willie The Lion Smith . . . sheeet

[henriq]

Jerzy Skolimowski - The Shout (1978)

So, let’s follow the fold of this magnificent film and fold Australia over England. The figure that hovers in the background for me is Joseph Losey, the sinister, snakey erotics of the home invasion in The Servant or, at the same time more subterranean and more pronounced, in Accident. Recall the scene in the latter where Stanley Baker sneaks in to Dirk Bogarde’s house to have sex with Jacquleine Sassard without Bogarde knowing it. Also, as in The Shout, there is a cricket pitch and violent sports, but where Losey points to a plus ca change irony connected with upper class mores, Skolimowski sets up the game as a stage of more sinister, volatile energies. Volatile energies embodied by Alan Bates and his shout, utterly terrifying and magnificent as it is (YAY the sound design in this!). Alan Bates returning from Australia, narratively and filmically: anthropology as an undoing and rending of the flesh – see Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright, Weir’s The Last Wave, Hillcoat’s astounding Ghosts…of the Civil Dead. But also, from the English side of things, it points to the bucolic/sinister agglomerations of Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen, released a few years before this, and maybe (flights of association getting away from me a little bit) even towards his marvellous Contact, what with its’ simultaneously militarised and resonant landscapes. More on that later, possibly.

Anyway, great, this one. John Hurt great as usual and for once not playing a drunken sod (or maybe that was only the later ones? I'm probably being unfair...), his studio setup and the for once imaginative music coming from there, the lingering paces of the awesome english landscape, the cricket game... Go see!

[walto]

You mention a lot of movies I love there, though I don't know "The Shout."

But I don't agree that John Hurt is always great. I think his limits were made clear in '1984' which, with all the terrified screaming it required, would have asked a lot of any actor. But Hurt was really bad in every scene in which he had to emote. I think he did his best at being terrified with the octopus-alien thingus over his head, impregnating him, in 'Alien.'

But then he was bad again giving birth.

Anyhow, FWIW, I make him usually OK at best.

[Dan Warburton]

We went to Saunton Sands in Devon last year just because we wanted to see where Skolimowski had shot his film - great film, splendid review Henrik, keep 'em coming.

I don't agree that John Hurt is always great [..] FWIW, I make him usually OK at best.

Talk about damning with faint praise I have a hard time trying to find a performance I'd describe as merely "OK" myself. Depends on who your favourite actors are, I suppose. Horses for courses.. you like Gregory Peck, I don't etc etc. (Start a favourite actors thread, someone?) I agree though that 1984 was no great shakes. I wonder if Hurt's performance as Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (a 1979 BBC mini-series) has ever come out on DVD or elsewhere - that was extraordinary.

[henriq]

[Talk about damning with faint praise I have a hard time trying to find a performance I'd describe as merely "OK" myself. Depends on who your favourite actors are, I suppose. Horses for courses.. you like Gregory Peck, I don't etc etc. (Start a favourite actors thread, someone?) I agree though that 1984 was no great shakes. I wonder if Hurt's performance as Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (a 1979 BBC mini-series) has ever come out on DVD or elsewhere - that was extraordinary.[/quote]

Dan, trawling through the archives here I'm pleased to see that we share a lot of the same views on supposedly great actors. Gregory Peck has only ever been good (and how!) in Cape Fear, and the less said about Shirley MacLaine (HATE her in The Trouble With Harry, HATE her double in Terms of Endearment - the only two instances I've ever seen her in, fortunately), the better.

Re John Hurt, he always seemed to play the same soused, growling old fart anywhere you saw him, at least toward the end. Became monotonous - old age? lazy bastard? - but no matter, I liked him much in The Shout.

Thank you both for the kind words, I'll come back more in depth on Contact, and might even try to write about Ghosts... And more, this is actually a lot of fun!

[henriq]

Alan Clarke - Contact (1985)

Ok, bear with me...

This film just grows in resonance and stature every time I see it. Very little happens in this story of British soldiers patrolling the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and that’s the very point of it. You might see Sean Chapman in the opening of the film, making bloody titular contact with Irish insurgents. Back to the base, and then more of the same ensues, and follows itself, order upon assignment upon patrol upon objective. Conventional narrative sidestepped thus, and what you have in its stead is just the tiniest flicker of an arc where deathly weariness befalls the exhausted soldiers. A weariness and violence that is never openly resolved, and instead forms a dark rumble of energy throughout the film, collapsing back into itself. A great attention to recording suffuses Clarke’s frame, with steadicam, night vision, stealth and silence contouring the very themes of the movie itself, those of surveillance and cognition. The very matter of film itself moves to the foreground, with a marvellous susceptibility to all sorts of energies in the field before it (field as in field recording…).

(This is a lesson learned well by Michael Winterbottom with In this world, and even by someone like Denis Villeneuve for Sicario.)

Clarke’s is a cinema of sibilance, that divides itself thematically into works that examine the often tortured or violent conditions that make speech and expression possible (Funny Farm, Psy-warriors, Road) and those where volubility recedes into silence but the act of, so to speak, listening with one’s eyes is enhanced (Christine, Elephant). Contact is of course squarely in this camp, and is an absolutely exemplary manifestation of this potential in audio-vision. Magnificent!

[Dan Warburton]

Seems we're both on a serious Clarke kick, Henrik (isn't Karagarga wonderful? Or did you shell out for the monster DVD boxset, mad collector that your are?). Contact is on the menu for today, so I'm trying to ignore your review above but yesterday discovered



Alan Clarke, Penda's Fen, 1973

“I am nothing pure. My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man. Light with darkness. Mixed. Mixed. I nothing special. Nothing pure. I am mud and flame.” Not bad for 1973, and resonates in 2018. I imagine my ex-colleagues at The Wire, Toop, Hollings, Penman, Keenan et al., with their love of all things English Esoteric, queered, Coil/UFO-loving, are big fans. It's certainly a most original work, and was for its time (as the second of these fine online reviews makes clear https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/new ... pendas-fen http://thequietus.com/articles/22550-pendas-fen-article), but I get a sense that Clarke didn't really know how to tackle the subject - the dream sequences feel a little clumsy (Russell or Jarman light have pulled off all that pagan angel stuff better), while he excels at more mundane reality. Still, a startling and major work.

[henriq]

Dan, of course i bought the big box - pre-KG days, I've only been on there a year, remember? - and worth every penny it is too. A hefty book with commentary on all the movies, splendid new transfers (have a bit of fun: do a Google image search for Contact, see what was and what is now...) Fun fact about Sean Chapman btw, he is Uncle Frank in Clive Barker's Hellraiser:



but he started out with Alan Clarke, acting in the movie version of Scum (yet to see for me, go KG - it is a wonderful place, as you say!), and a great turn in Contact, as you'll see. You should get the box, anyway.

Penda's Fen, yes. That Wire gaggle would probably have a field day with it, but David Rudkin contends with the whole England's Hidden Reverse thing, sees it as a lot more political (the radical priest, the military). Splendid work, as you say.

[henriq]

Patrice Chéreau - Gabrielle (2005)

I love, love, love this splendid film. Adapted by Chéreau and Anne-Louise Trividic from the Joseph Conrad short story The Return (damned if I can find it in print somewhere, no luck as yet - Dan, do you know?), it tells the story of a bourgeois marriage falling apart when Isabelle Huppert leaves Pascal Greggory, in the opening of the film. Catastrophe ensues but is deferred when Huppert returns after a change of heart. A very classy and complex reversal of the Rohmerian formula from the Contes moraux - rather than lusting after one woman and grasping another, it is the one you think you have that slips away and then comes back, as if nothing, or everything, has happened in the interim. The couple reasserts itself, but now enveloped in the deadly currents of doubt and resentment, decorum and gossip - how to make a place in your life and home for someone who don't want to be there, who loves you but don't? The property relations of the patrician family rendered brittle, déshabillé - a couple of splendid sequences of actual undressing accentuates this. Greggory and Huppert are of course magnificent (Swedish that I am, I have yet to tire of either), and no one does tracking shots quite like Chéreau (Bong Joon-ho comes close in Memories of murder, though). Vraiment un question de morale! At the same time densely physical and complexly verbose, it is absolutely marvellous.

[henriq]

Masahiro Shinoda - Himiko (1974)

What. The. Fuck. Did. I. Just. Watch????

To wit - let's try and do this...

Japanese myth, courtly monotheism against vulgate animism.

Stately whites and reds deforming down the mountainside to the garish lower depths of Tatsumi Hijikata and his butoh-troupe (check the screengrab)

Ritual, cleansing, brandishing, banishment, a banlieu of the forests and the sea.

Policing and amplifying this border through theatrical stratagems, much like the director's Buraikan, Double Suicide, Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees

Awesome modernist darstellung: music by Toru Takemitsu, wondrous as always; set design by Kiyoshi Awazu - check this (unrelated but still cool!)



and choreography and performance by Tatsumi Hijikata.

Scattershot, best I can do on short notice, but a beautiful and confounding experience.

[Steve Minkin]

FIRST MAN (2018)

Excellent film about Neil Armstrong and his landing on the moon! Will deservedly win a number of awards this year.

Must add that my wife – who is a big Ryan Gosling fan – was bored to tears.

The film is a powerful mix of razor's edge intensity coupled with minimal emotional displays and low-affect characters. Stressful to watch, impossible to look away.

The opening sequence is a gripping reenactment of Neil Armstrong piloting an X-15 flight in trouble. It's thrilling, disorienting, and makes plain the paper-thin margins of error these tests had. There follow several similar hair-raising out-of-control sequences involving space vehicles. Couple these with the omnipresent sense of death and funerals (Armstrong's toddler girl, two astronauts on a plane, three astronauts in a Gemini mission), and there is a pervasive darkness to the film that always clouds any celebratory congratulations of successful missions.

The emotional center of the film is Armstrong's wife, Janet, brilliantly played by Claire Foy. Everybody in the film (except Buzz Aldrin) is wrapped way too tight and trying as hard as they can to maintain the appearance of 1950s suburban normalcy. Janet tells a friend – ironically – that she married Neil because he knew what he wanted and she was looking for stability. She tells friends he has never spoken to her about death of their young daughter, although he was clearly profoundly affected by it. She yells at NASA engineers that they're just 'boys playing with balsa wood'. Before the moon mission, she demands that Neil sit down with his two sons and explain to them he might not be coming back. He does so with all the passion of bored car salesman reassuring a customer that he has confidence in the vehicle. The film ends with her touching hands with Neil through the glass of a quarantine room, her look clearly telling him: "Do you have any idea what you've put your family through?"

A couple of cute anti-NASA counters are seen on TV – Kurt Vonnegut complaining that he'd rather see a livable New York City than a man on the moon, and an "illustrated" cover version of Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey On The Moon."

Lots of fascinating mechanical details on the vehicles and engineering the flights -– and it was that and the lack of expressed emotion that lost my wife.

Pretty cool soundtrack, too, which KDFC.com (classical music) has begun playing.

Definitely one of the best films of the year.

[walto]

Alone in Berlin (Perez, 2016)

I have to admit that I gave up on this after a half hour (to watch the incredibly awful Melania "interview"). It's about a working class couple in WWII Germany, who lose their son in the Nazi's defeat of France. The country is elated by this victory--even though the people are getting poorer and becoming more nearly enslaved by the Nazi party each day. But this couple is devastated by their loss and blame Hitler. So they begin to look for little--really hopeless--ways to protest against the Reich, which, of course, is extremely dangerous. They make tiny cards about what a bad guy the fuhrer is and leave them around the city. Pathetic and pointless gesture, but they feel the need to do SOMETHING.

Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson are sympathetic figures as the parents, and Christophe Beaucarne's cinematography is wonderful. The shots of period Berlin streets, stores, homes, cars, clothes, etc. are are all lovely. I don't recall seeing any other pictures about the lives of non-Nazi (non-Jewish) Germans during the war, so the premise appeals to me.

But the movie is a dreadful bore. And so I ditched.



{ETA: Couldn't get through the Melania thing either.}

[Dan Warburton]

Henrik on a roll! Keep the reviews coming, you make my day.. So, finally watched this -

Alan Clarke - Contact (1985)

Ok, bear with me...

This film just grows in resonance and stature every time I see it. Very little happens in this story of British soldiers patrolling the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and that’s the very point of it. You might see Sean Chapman in the opening of the film, making bloody titular contact with Irish insurgents. Back to the base, and then more of the same ensues, and follows itself, order upon assignment upon patrol upon objective. Conventional narrative sidestepped thus, and what you have in its stead is just the tiniest flicker of an arc where deathly weariness befalls the exhausted soldiers. A weariness and violence that is never openly resolved, and instead forms a dark rumble of energy throughout the film, collapsing back into itself. A great attention to recording suffuses Clarke’s frame, with steadicam, night vision, stealth and silence contouring the very themes of the movie itself, those of surveillance and cognition. The very matter of film itself moves to the foreground, with a marvellous susceptibility to all sorts of energies in the field before it (field as in field recording…).

(This is a lesson learned well by Michael Winterbottom with In this world, and even by someone like Denis Villeneuve for Sicario.)

Clarke’s is a cinema of sibilance, that divides itself thematically into works that examine the often tortured or violent conditions that make speech and expression possible (Funny Farm, Psy-warriors, Road) and those where volubility recedes into silence but the act of, so to speak, listening with one’s eyes is enhanced (Christine, Elephant). Contact is of course squarely in this camp, and is an absolutely exemplary manifestation of this potential in audio-vision. Magnificent!

Agree with all the above - what struck me rather forcibly was.. the birdsong... and the gorgeous countryside (I haven't had time to watch all the YouTube bonus docu interview with author A.F.N. Clarke yet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agkue5JQwjQ but apparently the film was shot, for obvious security reasons, in Wales). And as the Irish border is once again in the news, for different reasons, all the more reason for you to check out this terrific work. One wonders what Clarke would have done if he'd lived long enough to make that Hollywood film he was planning when he was diagnosed with cancer.