Recently Watched Films 2021

[Dan Warburton]

Abel Ferrara, Zeros and Ones, 2021

Looks like the title could be reference to the punter ratings out of ten over at IMDb - whoa, 3.4! Looks like Abel's really rubbed some folks up the wrong way. But fwiw I reckon this could the best thing the amazingly prolific Ferrara has put out in the past decade (though I have still to see Tommaso and Siberia, languishing on the hard drive). Anyway, brief plot summary courtesy some bloke in Cambridge: "Abel Ferrara’s pandemic-era psychological thriller is one murky affair, not just in the grainy, hand-held camera footage, but in construct. It’s set sometime in the near future or, more aptly, a parallel, post-apocalyptic alternate reality where St. Peter’s Basilica gets blown up and an American operative named JJ (played by Ethan Hawke) wanders the streets of Rome trying to make sense of it all (as we do too, and too much so). Along the way he gets squeezed between Russian intelligence handlers (mostly through Zoom sessions, with the spies sitting in cushy locales as they gleefully mock and mislead their weary American pawn), Chinese drug lords and religious conspiracy theories that might make Dan Brown smile. Hawke also plays J.J.’s twin brother, whom we see mostly locked away in a dim, subterranean cell and hopped up on smack."
That more or less sums it all up, but I guarantee you won't understand very much, and that's just fine by me. Does the terrorist attack actually take place, or is it all just stage-managed CGI propaganda (Hawke films everything he does, we're constantly confronted by images of images being made, screens abound, GPS, iPhones, drones, tablets, old Baudrillard would have a field day)? What are the Russians doing there? Is JJ working both sides? It really honestly doesn't matter: Ferrara's always been more about creating atmosphere than telling a coherent story. And he does it very well: Sean Price Williams (“How Little Light Do YOU Need To Get An Exposure,” quips Glenn Kenny) delivers some extraordinary images of a deserted nighttime Rome (would love to know how they got to film this, logistically) and Joe Delia's omnipresent (but at a correct volume level: paying attention, Mr Zimmer?) music is the perfect murky backdrop to Ferrara's nocturnal dérive. I think it's well worth a(nother) watch. So does this geezer, I think https://www.thewrap.com/zeros-and-ones- ... l-ferrara/

[Dan Warburton]

Alan J. Pakula, Comes a Horseman, 1978

Dennis puts the boot in https://dennisschwartzreviews.com/comesahorseman/ : "The movie with a misleading title (should be "Comes Three Horsemen") seems bored with itself for most of the film. It desperately tries to become monumental in the manner of a John Ford metaphorical Western. But fails in that attempt. Aside from its homage to the Old West and its stunning showy landscape photography by cinematographer Gordon Willis, it’s pretentious, slow-moving and flatly told despite its A-film production values." Pretty landscapes, jaunty sub-Copland cowboy music and the supposedly dramatic (but utterly unnecessary from a plot point of view) stampede can't dispel the impression that the Western as a genre had run out of steam by the end of the 70s. Where do you go after Peckinpah? Monte Hellman (The Shooting, Ride the Whirlwind, China 9..) and Peter Fonda (The Hired Hand) charted out a direction into more introvert, existential territory - a path followed, at a later date, by Andrew Dominik and Kelly Reichardt - but for some reason Pakula wanted to outdo Ford. Bad idea. So, a tired old story about - yet again - the stubborn solitary rancher widow Jane Fonda standing firm against the big bad neighbour (Jason Robards' character is called Ewing, too: not J.R. but J.W.!) and the even bigger and badder oil barons behind him looking to blast the shit out of the lovely Montana landscape to find the black stuff. Helped out by her old cowhand Dodger (film debut for the great Richard "Straight Story" Farnsworth), and, after he succumbs to an injury, going out with a mouthful of chewing tobacco and awful cowboy clichés like, "mah ridin' and ropin' days are over..", James Caan, with whom she eventually ends up in bed (though the romance is neither prepared or developed, it just appears and then disappears), they eventually get rid of Robards, tying him to a horse and letting him be dragged out into the desert. The only thing I'm likely to remember about this is the fact that the stuntman who played this scene was really killed doing it. How sad to lose one's life for such a forgettable film.

[Dan Warburton]

René Allio, Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère..., 1976

Excellent film, excellent review http://www.frenchfilms.org/review/moi-p ... -1976.html

[Dan Warburton]

Roman Polanski, D'après une histoire vraie, 2017

I wonder if French novelist Delphine Le Vigan was familiar with Patrick Bouchitey's 2005 film Imposture (see reviews passim), because there are several similarities between that and her book, which I won't go into here if you're not familiar with either. Suffice it to say that, whatever you might think of Polanski, he knows how to put together a good thriller. And this, excellently scripted by Olivier Assayas, is one of them. I've never been much of a fan of Mrs P., Emmanuelle Seignier, who like Vera Clouzot tends to come along as part of the package in hubby's films, but she's very good indeed here as the stressed-out author Delphine (yup, looks like there some serious autobiographical backstory here). And Eva Green, as Elle, the adoring fan turned personal assistant turned jailer turned attempted murderer is terrific. Great ending - I suspect the book's is too, must have a look - which I don't feel like spoiling.

[Dan Warburton]

Jean Delannoy, Les jeux sont faits, 1947

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the screenplay in 1943, and we're informed that he incorporated ideas from his philosophical magnum opus (magnum opium, more like) Being and Nothingness, but don't for heaven's sake let that put you off. If you like Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death, you'll find much to enjoy here; our two leading characters, a solid working class leftist union man planning a revolt against the fascist régime (Sartre presumably had Vichy in mind, but the film is nicely unclear about exactly when the action is supposed to be taking place), and an elegant bourgeoise whose husband is in cahoots with the Powers That Be, both meet untimely deaths, he at the hands of a cowardly informer (Marcel Mouloudji gets to play a baddie again), she poisoned by hubby, but are sent back from the After Life to try again. Micheline Presle is gorgeous as Eva, and, though Gabin would have been better, Marcello Pagliero (whom you might recognise from Roma città aperta) is solid as Pierre. The plot wanders a bit towards the end - one senses Sartre was more interested in concept than character - and it doesn't end as well as you might want it to, but it's well worth a look. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chips ... creenplay)

[Dan Warburton]

Ildikó Enyedi, On Body and Soul, 2017

Beautifully filmed - and not only the miraculous forest sequences with the deer - though I see some poor squeamish buggers over in the Guardian comments column moaned about the bits shot in the abbatoir (as if simply showing animals being slaughtered was somehow tantamount to condoning the practice - I didn't hear them complaining about Franju's Le sang des bêtes, but never mind). The silly story about lost "mating powder" - as if the poor bulls needed a shot of Viagra - is a bit daft, but an essential plot point as it allows the two soon-to-be lovers to discover they've been having the same dreams. Anyway, a sensitive and touching tale - like the Laura Marling song too https://hyperallergic.com/429594/on-bod ... ko-enyedi/

[Dan Warburton]

Richard Fleischer, The Don is Dead, 1973

Be careful not to believe everything you read online - here's a typically sloppy example from Wiki: "Frank is the ambitious son of an organized-crime boss. He plans a heroin deal with the help of brothers Tony and Vince, but a snitch tips off the cops [he doesn't just plan it, he does the deal - and it's not the cops who show up but rival gangsters]. After the death of his father, a mob war breaks out between two rival families. One is run by Don Angelo, but he does not get the support of the brothers, Tony and Vince, and must seek power through other means. He begins a romance with Frank's young and beautiful fiancee, Ruby, which sends Frank into a self-destructive rage." No, for fuck's sake, this gives the impression the mob war breaks out before Don Angelo has his one-night stand with Ruby (she's not Frank's fiancée, either, just a gold digger trying to get a record contract); in fact it's all been engineered by the consigliere of a third family (divide and conquer: get families one and two to wipe each other out, and scoop up the business). And the brothers Fargo are freelance hitmen, not members of any family. Whatever. Comparisons with The Godfather abound online (though this is a fair review, imo http://www.cineoutsider.com/reviews/blu ... ad_br.html), and inevitably The Don loses out; the story's interesting enough, but the script lacks memorable lines, the dialogue feels a bit flat and the women's roles are slight and clichéd to say the least. That said, it's a fine cast - Robert Forster plays mad dog very well (a few glitches with the accent, but never mind), and Al Lettieri, Frederic Forrest and Charles Cioffi are solid. Anthony Quinn, otoh, seems to be playing Don Angelo in his sleep, but I think that's more due to a weak script (frustrating that there's no final showdown with Frank) than anything else. Still, the action sequences are impressively shot, the Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack cooks, and Fleischer knows how to pace a movie: it sustains its 115-minute runtime well. Flawed, but fun.

[Dan Warburton]

Ken Russell, Whore, 1991

Hal Hinson, Washington Post: "With Whore, Russell pulls off a rare feat; he manages to be both lurid and tedious at the same time. The film, which was adapted from the play by David Hines, plays like a night school survey study of prostitution -- it's Streetwalking 101. For the most part, the director has taken a day-in-the-life approach to his subject, with Liz delivering long monologues about the travails of her career straight into the camera. The whole affair has a kind of dinner theater air to it. It's hopelessly amateurish and banal. Russell, who put on a few pounds for the role, has a few high-camp comic moments, but it's often hard to tell if she's intentionally bad or just plain blowing it. There's little confusion about the film as a whole, though -- it's flat-out awful." It certainly is - would it have been better had it been shot in London, where the writer of the book on which it's based worked as a taxi driver and collected stories from working girls he drove home in his cab? And with a less glamorous leading actress (I love Theresa Russell, but she doesn't know how to ham it up in the same way an English pantomime actress would, and that's what the part needs)? Doubt it. The whole idea of the film is that prostitution is as tedious and unglamorous job as any other, but Ken's glitzy - no, make that tacky - L.A. location shoots and the forced humour (sorry, the restaurant sketch is just not funny) constantly undercut it. So much so that the pimp getting his just desserts (yo, Antonio Fargas, long time no see) provokes no emotion whatsoever. Dull, deadly dull.

[Dan Warburton]

Jean-Claude Brisseau, A l'Aventure, 2008

Here https://www.culturopoing.com/cinema/ent ... e/20090323 is a long and thoughtful review (in French, so stick it in DeepL), but if you want a brief plot summary to spoil everything, here goes: Sandrine's bored (too young for a midlife crisis though), but after being impressed by the philosophical "it's all a load of bollocks" musing of a balding geezer sitting next to her on a park bench, she chucks job and boyfriend in, meets and falls for/intobedwith [delete where appropriate] Greg (a psychiatrist and hypnotist) in a café, goes along with him and another patient to watch a 1m2w S/M session, ends up herself in a torrid threesome under hypnosis which turns into some kind of mystical flashback to a miracle in a 14th century convent in Flanders which comes as such a shock she ends up drinking cider and admiring the view of the mountains back at the balding geezer's place (turns out he's an ex-physics teacher who spent seven years in India doing whatever one does for seven years in India before returning to France and becoming.. a cab driver). So Zen meets Einstein as we muse on the complete insignificance of human life on a cosmic scale, etc., which I'm sure we've all done from time to time, when we have nothing better to do.

[Dan Warburton]

Cathérine Breillat, Sale comme un ange, 1991

Claude Brasseur is splendid as a balding, middle-aged, grizzly, case-hardened, pastis-chugging, Gitane-smoking cop, though goodness knows how he gets to bed the pretty young wife of his partner (played very well by Vanda Maria Ribeiro Furtado Tavares de Vasconcelos, aka Lio https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lio). Actually, that's wrong, I do know how: he gets to bed her by dispatching her husband to the suburbs on a round-the-clock bodyguard duty protecting the wife and child of his best friend Manoni, a drug dealer who's gone AWOL with a price on his head. Anyway, enough plot: Breillat channels her experience as scriptwriter for Bertolucci (Last Tango) and Pialat (Police) most impressively - a decent HD reissue would be cool.

[Wombatz]

apocalypse now (don't ask me what version, close to 2 and a half hours). i actually hadn't seen this before. i've copy-edited essays on the greatness of the murch sound, though, and finally witnessing the cheapness of that joke soundtracking the ventilator with continued helicopter noises got me off to a bad start. anyway, i thought the film was pretty good as long as war was still portrayed as kind of cool. except martin sheen. i guess you could argue for his impassive stare to be bressonesque, still all his close-ups are dead screen time and there's a lot of them. the film gets worse once war turns out to be a bad trip (and again, the cheapness of rubbing it in by having somebody on the boat who is tripping on drugs all the time is taxing). also there's the impending structural problem that the milksop reading the kurtz files does not really build up marlon brando's entry in any way. it's just paperwork, emotionally the whole thing is hollow. and then it collapses because the director seems to have thought that brando would automatically deliver instant movie magic, make believable every hyperbole this kurtz character supposedly embodies, and even outshine the silly lighting games that are supposed to make him more dramatic. there's utterly no there there (the monster reads poems so he must have a huge soul), just fragments of existential drivel and portentous stares. i still enjoyed the experience because i was watching this with my 79-yo mother, who also hadn't seen it before, and now we're both closer to an education.

[Dan Warburton]

That was the Redux version (with the French stuck upriver - Aurore Clément and Christian Marquand)? "Portentous" is certainly the word for it Did your mum like it?

Meanwhile, saw this again a couple of nights ago



Brian De Palma, Carlito's Way, 1993

Funny how you forget things. I'd completely forgotten Viggo Mortensen was in this. And that Sean Penn haircut. Plenty of backstory here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlito%27s_Way Although I like it more than Scarface (that's not difficult), its creaky script (what's with the voiceovers?) and rather two-dimensional characters grate a bit. I wonder how it will look in twenty years' time, if we're still all here

[Wombatz]

That was the Redux version (with the French stuck upriver - Aurore Clément and Christian Marquand)? "Portentous" is certainly the word for it Did your mum like it?

i liked the first part more (war is hell if you wear hearing aids), she liked the second part more (looking forward to marlon), we agreed on the finale so by the end we were even. btw i don't remember much of the original story (and am not a fan of conrad in general) but i think it had similar problems of lots of fuzzy build-up and then no proper evil.

[Dan Warburton]

Kenneth Branagh, Belfast, 2021

From https://www.npr.org/2021/11/12/10547437 ... 8792535861 :
"It was Federico Fellini who once said that 'All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.' He knew of what he spoke, given his fondness for self-portraiture in films like 8 1/2 and especially Amarcord, his 1973 classic about his own childhood. Cinema history is full of such great memory pieces, like François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, John Boorman's Hope and Glory and Terence Davies' The Long Day Closes, all made by directors looking back with aching tenderness at their early years." He might have added Cuaron's Roma, which I'll guess is probably what Branagh had in mind in staging some of his set piece street battles - and the scenes in the cinema where young Buddy discovers John Wayne, Gary Cooper and, umm, Raquel Welch. So, anyway - it's an enjoyable enough film, not too heavy on the angst of the Troubles (the whole absurdity of which is nicely encapsulated in a scene where Buddy and Moira realise the absurdity of trying to find out whether someone is Catholic of Protestant merely from asking his first name). Favourite line is when Buddy comes home with a packet of Omo looted from a supermarket. When asked by his furious mother why he took it, he answers: "Because it's biological!" Nice one. I hope, despite his recent stupid statements on the pandemic and whatnot, you still like Van Morrison, because his songs are, not surprisingly, all over the place.

[Wombatz]

hey we had another one (and now i'll need to recover from movies a little). 1984 by michael radford, 1984, because my older boy read the book and it floored him (small wonder, it's the first book he's read in a couple of years). the acting is fine here (though with this amount of eye bags no acting is really required), the retro futuristic look adequate. i would think it had aged badly if i didn't remember being underwhelmed already back then (gr?). this is too obviously inspired by show trials etc. (as the book was, though from a different perspective) and doesn't really hit home this long after the wall ... (remember the sting lyric of about the time: what might save us, me and you, is if the russians love their children too ... that offensive if in there which made the message even more intolerable than the music) ... anyway, in the end this must fail because in a movie the physicality of torture will overshadow the workings of the mind. contrary to the book, the breaking of the mind doesn't function as an extension of overall ideology, the bendability of the mind is no extension of its inner workings. so the film is uselessly depressing. (i'm decidedly out of love with the python posse, but terry gilliam would have done it better.)

[Dan Warburton]

Don Haworth, Fred Dibnah Steeplejack, 1979

Couldn't resist a blast from my past - I well remember this when it came out back at the dawn of Thatcher - or rather at the tail-end of the Labour Party as was; Fred became something a star afterwards, and ended up marrying three times and facing various trials and tribulations before succumbing to cancer too soon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Dibn ... d_marriage - but his "did you like that?" line as he felled the chimney is priceless. It probably won't mean much to folks coming from sunnier climes and born long after it was made, but Fred, his gorgeous Bolton accent and his cheese butties are a lovely reminder of a world long gone.

[Dan Warburton]

Adrian Edmondson, Guest House Paradiso, 1999

Much as I love the Comic Strip series and especially The Young Ones (the scene in Bambi where Viv kicks his own severed head across the railway line must be the greatest comedy moment in the 1980s), Mayall and Edmondson never reached the sublime heights - or rather the scuzzy depths - of their early work. Sigh. Despite a good cast - Bill Nighy, Simon Pegg, Fenella Fielding (perhaps the less said of Latin lover Vincent Cassel the better) - it's forced. The slapstick violence and copious vomit doesn't make up for a decent script. Mayall insists that his character's surname Twat is pronounced "Thwaite". But as far as I'm concerned, he's... a twat.

[Dan Warburton]

Claude Autant-Lara, Le mariage de Chiffon, 1942

The director's reputation has taken a battering over the years, firstly when Truffaut singled him out for attack in his fiery auteurist polemics (that despite Truffaut's hero Bazin liking Le diable au corps), and later when he threw his lot in with Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National, even going as far as punning about the Holocaust and getting himself elected, albeit briefly, as an MEP. I have no idea if latent antisemitism prompted him to adapt this 1894 novel by Sibylle Riquetti de Mirabeau (aka Gyp, an insanely prolific and violently antidreyfusarde novelist), or to cast Robert Le Vigan (whose own healthy collaboration with the Nazis in wartime Paris eventually led to his imprisonment and subsequent exile), but it's a harmless enough tale, with light frothy dialogue by Jean Aurenche and a bubbly leading lady in the aptly-named Odette Joyeux.

[Dan Warburton]

Denys de la Patellière, Retour de manivelle, 1957

The word is convoluted, and that applies as much to the James Hadley Chase novel the film's an adaptation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s ... _Price_Tag as it does to the film itself. I won't bother summarising the plot - suffice it to say Daniel Gélin doesn't come across as either the scheming antihero of the novel or the good guy drawn against his will in the web of the femme fatale (few differences here between the book and the movie, if you can be bothered to check them out), and Michèle Morgan, though evidently gorgeous to look at, doesn't have the Stanwyck bitchiness that made Double Indemnity so great. Even when Gélin calls her a "salope" (bitch) she doesn't really seem like one. Or maybe that's just me. Also I don't think dialogue genius Michel Audiard was at his best doing noir.. But see what you think; it ain't shabby but you might end up scratching your head.

[Dan Warburton]

François Ozon, Eté 85, 2020

From https://www.thegate.ca/film/044354/summ ... 20-review/ : "The queer romance-slash-literary minded mystery Summer of 85, the latest from prolific French auteur François Ozon, starts off as a darker and mildly intriguing riff on similar themes explored most recently in Call Me By Your Name, but it crashes and burns mightily heading into its final act." It does, but perhaps that was hardwired into the 1982 novel it was adapted from, written by Aidan Chambers (interesting life too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aidan_Chambers). The morgue scene is particularly clumsy, as are the two trips to the graveyard, but elsewhere the acting is good (not too impressed with Philippine Velge's Kate, though - weren't there any real English girls available?), the beaches of Treport and Mers les Bains inviting (you don't want to go there out of season, however), and the soundtrack cool. So determined was Ozon to use The Cure's "In Between Days" that he changed the name of the film from Summer 84, when Robert Smith pointed out that the song wasn't released until 1985.