OLDIES!
Older films seen in 2025, continued from the 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 editions. Most of these are really quick comments - typically scribbled down in 10-15 minutes without benefit of notes - and any resulting wit or insight should be viewed as an accidental by-product. Slightly more thoughtful capsules may be found on the now-defunct old reviews page.
All films, both from this year and the 22 previous ones, can be accessed alphabetically. Most can be viewed ranked by rating as well, though I'm still not sure what that's all about.
[Addendum, February 2009: I've now stopped doing reviews of new movies, but I'll continue to update this page; however, this is purely for my own benefit - since I can't always remember when I watched an oldie, so it's handy being able to find them here - and I won't be going any deeper or writing any more than I used to (probably the opposite). I am not reinventing this as a classic-movie site, nor do I set myself up as an expert on oldies. Or anything, really...]
A JOLLY BAD FELLOW (50) (Don Chaffey, 1964): Of interest for co-writer Robert Hamer and co-star Dennis Price, both from KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS. This is another conspicuously 'British' comedy of murders, set in academia as opposed to the aristocracy, with an untranslated Latin phrase and a snatch of Gilbert and Sullivan among the gags (also a bit of Carry On-ish innuendo about arriving at "the right end") - though it's not just archness, also unexpected marital drama with a sophisticated wife who accepts her husband's infidelities and said husband (dumpy Leo McKern, of all people) caught between two women. A lot going on but it's all haphazard, starts off casting its hero as a crypto-fascist who believes the weak should be eliminated (then forgets about it), goes on to make him an acerbic high-IQ type who favours death for annoying people (but, again, haphazardly), the plotting is muddy - esp. considering it's adapted from a book - while the comical tweak, that the poison produces euphoria just before death, makes for embarrassingly lame scenes of victims gambolling madly, singing 'Rule Britannia' et al. before expiring. Speaking of which: a dancing lab rat!
OCTOBER 1, 2025
THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY (69) (Michael Roemer, 1971): Maybe the 'plot' is everyday life, constantly bustling and pushing against Harry's attempts to lay low and make a little money. Maybe the 'plot' is the gangster-movie plot that keeps butting in, incongruous among the family issues and character comedy. Talk of Roemer's prescience is a bit overstated, New York Jewish comedy was already going through a boom (BYE BYE BRAVERMAN, WHERE'S POPPA?), but filtering it through a gangster (implicitly Mafia) lens is indeed unusual. Harry moves, stone-faced, through a series of elaborate settings - a bar mitzvah, a lingerie show, a Masonic initiation, a Congressional hearing - Martin Priest's hangdog expression the shrewd despair of a man already thinking about damage limitation, assailed by reminders of death - someone's uncle has cancer, Schleppy Meyer "went off his nut" and offed himself - and his own obsolescence: "The neighbourhood's changed, Harry. What ya gonna do?". Gallows humour, Harry and his bum heart ending up at the 'Have a Heart' telethon, the pitiless judgment of middle-class mores; "You know what I think you are, Mr. Plotnick? A disgrace to the Jewish people!". Undoubtedly one-note (albeit by design), still wryly funny.
HUNTING SCENES FROM BAVARIA (71) (Peter Fleischmann, 1969): Opening scene - Sunday church service in a small Bavarian village - lays out the equation: the priest chants, the burghers reply in unison (the camera picking out thick peasant faces), then the "idiot" boy - a pure soul - looks up at the frescos and sees only violence. A later shot of pigs shuffling and snuffling seems to seal the deal (the villagers, too, stuff their faces every chance they get) - and the news that a small Bavarian village is full of piggish bigots is no news at all, but everything plays unexpectedly here, in the freewheeling style of Fassbinder from around the same time. (There are also Turkish immigrants, like in KATZELMACHER.) The village is evil but oddly not hypocritical, in the sense that bigotry is out in the open - misfits are openly mocked - and the communal vibe is raucous, all pranks and high spirits; a pig is butchered on camera, and the people chat and make jokes (only the watching kids look a little shocked), then methodically set about skinning it. A gay man is openly demeaned, an obvious victim - yet the film also shows him as a predator (which definitely wouldn't be the case today) and he also scorns the town slut who's even lower on the totem pole, Fleischmann and Martin Sperr's bleak worldview holding that people find their sense of self-worth - and sense of community - by hunting and bullying those they consider weaker than themselves. Vivid characters (Michael Strixner as annoying high-school jock grown into moral gatekeeper), mobile camera to bely the stage origins. A toxic society tends to be shown as repressed and miserable, marking the audience's superiority over it - but what if it were shown as hearty and lively? "I care what people say. I want to live with them."
1948 REVISITED: Second viewings after >25 years:
SEPTEMBER 1, 2025
THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (53) (Joel Coen, 1994): Third viewing, first in 30 years. Still recalled most of it, a reminder of what a huge impression it made at the time - the young Coens bringing their trademark quirk to big-budget comic fantasy - but it all seemed very stale this time, from the mechanical recitations around the conference table ("Not counting the mezzanine", etc), to the pointlessly virtuoso staging, to the Sturges/FRONT PAGE-pastiche emphasis on rapid-fire dialogue, character actors and small-town satire. What I didn't recall - and don't think works at all, really - is Norville turning into a "heel" once success goes to his head, which betrays the loopy Eddie Bracken-ness of the character (he's not very well defined anyway). Production design still impresses, but it's as airless as everything else; once you know these things are coming, no real pleasure is derived from rewatching them. Maybe it's just my tastes have changed?
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (68) (John Carpenter, 1981): Unprepared for how downright arty this is, nothing like the badass prison-escape movie I'd always imagined - the pace stately and portentous, the visuals dark to the point of abstraction (at least THE WARRIORS had splashes of neon), the tone determinedly bleak, the system - up to and including the US president - devious and corporate, working remotely and impersonally, Snake Plissken himself cynical and exhausted (his main distinguishing feature is that everyone thinks he was already dead). Feels like Carpenter only added the fight with baseball bats to give it some juice (the action is otherwise sparse), and even then his heart isn't in it. A good film on which to project the 44 years since - a plane on the WTC, open-air prison Gaza - because its own dystopian vibe is so stripped-down and un-dated; the last half-hour is admittedly choppy, too much plot to get through, but then the middle-finger ending is one for the ages. Wasn't sure I'd like it, since I'm mixed on much nerd-boy 80s cult action (e.g. PREDATOR), but in fact this is Carpenter still in deadpan, chilly 70s mode; looks like we only start to part ways with THE THING, and even then it's just the goofy prosthetics.
KUWAIT CONNECTION (57) (Samir A. Khouri, 1973): The bit where our hero unexpectedly cites the Deir Yassin massacre as the cause of his downfall from "journalist-poet" to ruthless killer - cut to actual atrocity footage from Palestine and Vietnam! - shows why it pays to keep watching bad movies. This is hilariously bad in some ways, not least that it starts as an Arab riff on FRENCH CONNECTION-type action and ends up as a murder mystery with a Kuwaiti detective making deductions in sheikh garb - LOL'd when the hideous deformed 'auntie' slips on the soap (and tumbles in wide shot) just as she's raising the knife to stab our heroine in the bath, slasher-style - but closer to so-bad-it's-good in Khouri's obsessive determination to create visual interest in every scene. A love scene is played with our hero's big, um, gun pointing straight up in the foreground, a later love scene has actual doves (!) flying around the bedroom, the villains do their bad stuff at a kind of slaughterhouse surrounded by sheep having their throats slit. The first 20 minutes have no dialogue at all, opening on a sniper with a golden gun (the crosshairs shot recalls James Bond, though THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN wasn't for another year), then a chirpy disco theme song called 'Hey Yaba Hey' over shots of Kuwait, then a very extended car chase, then a close-up of rats (in a grave, where treasure's being buried), then a drug-addled party where the guests seem to be engaged in occult goings-on and the host is accosted by the friendly ghost (?) of his own dead wife... then, 10 minutes later, talk of Deir Yassin and shots of dead kids. Pretty wild.
A HEN IN THE WIND (72) (Yasujiro Ozu, 1948): Underrated Ozu, because he veers into unfamiliar territory (violent melodrama) and has to adjust his usual skill-set. Even the geography is different, the houses - unlike the cosy neighbourhoods of the 50s films - built in the looming shadow of some huge structure (a factory? a fuel tank?), much like the shadow of the war over these lives - both post-war poverty and later, the need to forget what happened ("It's in the past") as the only way for the couple to find happiness. The style is different too, with unusual touches like gratuitous shots of empty rooms, or people glimpsed through giant broken pipes lying on the ground as they're walking, a showy touch which doesn't feel very Ozu - but it's also much more honest about sex than classic Hollywood ever was, even in this post-war moment, and also more honest about the harshness that can seep into a relationship, with a real shock moment in the violence itself. The husband's pitiless interrogation - and Kinuyo Tanaka's crushed look, the pathetic shell of a dying animal - is quite something (Tanaka's presence also invokes Mizoguchi, and the film could of course be double-billed with the same year's WOMEN OF THE NIGHT). Sample line: "I can't take much more". Also: "What can a woman do?".
THE GOLDEN FORTRESS (64) (Satyajit Ray, 1974): Just wish this were cleverer, really - the detective hero's Sherlock Holmes deductions a bit more ingenious and Holmesian (there is one mildly clever touch, the misspelling in the visitors' book), the villains' machinations a mite less implausible, the scorpion they put in his bed disposed of a bit more inventively than just being noticed at the last moment. That scorpion recalls Bond's tarantula in DR. NO, and '007' is indeed unexpectedly name-dropped, but the more pertinent reference is teenage 'Topshe' (played with a boyish delight in adventure by Siddhartha Chatterjee; his namesake Soumitra is equally delightful as the unflappable Sherlock) twice shown reading 'Tintin' books - and Ray is going for exactly that kind of breezy globe-trotting adventure, even if the globe-trotting here is only from Bengal to Rajasthan. (Also delightful: the usual Indian-movie quirk where everyone speaks Bengali but some things - e.g. giving someone your phone number - are randomly in English.) Ray was never the paciest filmmaker but it works in this case, the pace approximating the unhurried, then-this-happened rhythms of classical storytelling - albeit almost too unhurried: we've barely arrived at the Golden Fortress (and the inevitable action climax) with only 10 minutes to go, and even then Ray seems less interested in said action climax than in a child coming out of a trance state and regaining his happiness. Which is to his credit, of course.
LIVE LIKE A COP, DIE LIKE A MAN (52) (Ruggero Deodato, 1976): Special Forces cops as cruel, handsome boys. Actually plays a lot like high-school comedy (an impression reinforced by a cameo by eternal classroom dunce Alvaro Vitali), our heroes being vain, cool, anarchic, given to tasteless jokes, ruled by libido and exasperating the stuffy grown-ups, a.k.a. the fatherly police chief who ultimately has to bail them out when they're too distracted by a girl (earlier, they accidentally burn their own car down while attempting to burn those belonging to the gangsters; they're not very bright). Has its moments - best scene is the female secretary totally one-upping them when they try to do a Miss Moneypenny - but not really witty or exciting enough to make up for the posturing, and Deodato's sadistic sense of humour feels misplaced, e.g. in the opening motorbike chase when the bikes bear down on an oblivious blind man and his dog at a pedestrian crossing; we hope the bikes will miss the poor old man - and they do, but instead they kill the dog (cue bloody close-up) and he just stands there terrified not knowing what happened, desperately calling out the dog's name. Meh.
AUGUST 1, 2025
TARANTULA (55) (Jack Arnold, 1955): Basic, but charming. The antiquated sexism about "lady scientists" is charming, the variable special effects are also charming. The giant spider is more effective when it's lurking (there's a good shot of it watching and waiting next to a house, literally big as a house), not so much when it's rampaging and looks obviously pasted on. The sinister shadow that turns out to be a pet monkey is hilariously bad, not so much because such a big shadow doesn't seem attributable to such a small animal, more because the punchline obviously involved someone just offscreen literally tossing a monkey at Leo G. Carroll. Our heroes are scientists and military men, very 1950s - and their compassionate concern about the future of the world is also charming, not least because the numbers haven't exactly panned out: "There are 2 billion people in the world today. In 1975 there'll be 3 billion. In the year 2000, there'll be 3 billion, 625 million".
THE 10th VICTIM (64) (Elio Petri, 1965): Probably the first of the state-sanctioned hunting-games films (as opposed to Count Zaroff et al.), hence the need to provide a rationale - "a way to vent aggression," says the barker, claiming WW2 might've been averted had Hitler taken part in a 1940 edition. Petri (a man of the Left) views that rationale slightly differently, as a sign of a purely functional capitalist society - one where human life itself becomes part of a program to increase efficiency and make money for advertisers, like the program to get rid of useless eaters (a.k.a. elderly parents) by handing them in to the state. The "sunsetters", who gather in white robes to admire the sunset (a kind of death, of course), are closer to his heart than their enemies, the "vulgar neorealists" - though that too comes with a touch of cynicism, our hero admitting he no longer cares and his tears come from two pills of 'Tearaid' (crocodile tears in a movie with a killer crocodile, though that plan is fortunately aborted). The whole film is breezily cynical, fashionably bored in the 60s way though also buzzing with comic-book visuals and vivid colours - Ursula Andress in shocking pink amid the white robes, she and Marcello in a car backed by a field of yellow cornflowers - plus futuristic designs and startling details like the two-second glimpse of dancing girls in a weird crouching circle after the action moves on. The fact that (spoiler!) each of the lovers does actually shoot the other when they get a chance (we're only fooled because the violence is bloodless) speaks to the overall cynicism.
1957-58 REVISITED: Second viewings after 25-30 years:
THEY HAVE CHANGED THEIR FACE (60) (Corrado Farina, 1971): "You might have changed faces, but you're still sucking people's blood!" Reading any positive review - even, or especially, if it's mostly descriptive - is almost akin to watching the movie here, the existence (more than the execution) of the wonderful gimmick being most of the fun. Nosferatu as a corporate tycoon, vampirism as capitalism - all the more recognisable since it's explicitly techno-capitalism, hence the final Marcuse quote and visual emphasis on machines (even e.g. the coffee maker before we even get to Nosferatu). Killer Fiat 500s, a shower scene and a golf game, target practice on a human-shaped figure that groans when hit, a fear of consumerism as the first step to relinquishing our humanity - "Real civilisation is based on the suppression of human instincts" - that's amazingly prescient. Execution isn't bad either, the giallo music anticipates Goblin here and there (after starting off in 'Pink Panther' mode), all the early scenes in misty glades and/or involving mysterious (and topless) hippy chick Francesca Modigliani are enjoyable - but the horror aspect collapses, the gimmick stalls, and Farina has a lame sense of humour, which becomes a problem when he segues into satire. The Godard and Fellini 'spoofs' are actively terrible.
SLITHER (66) (Howard Zieff, 1973): James Caan is perhaps a bit miscast as the slow-witted ex-con - pausing to take out his chewing gum before leaning in for a kiss - and Sally Kellerman never finds the way to her manic-weirdo character (she's reduced to delivering her lines really fast, screwball-style). Still a pleasure, designed to catch the audience off-guard at every opportunity, the sneaky treasure-hunt plotting full of sudden interruptions - incl. non sequiturs like the jogger who comes out of nowhere, or the guy who rushes into the men's room fleeing what turns out to be an armed robbery - and hints (the mysterious black van that may or may not be of this world) of the homegrown sci-fi surrealism in Richter's later scripts, esp. BUCKAROO BANZAI. The heartland setting leads to increasingly outlandish backdrops - a vegetable stand, a game of bingo - the story is (of course) a shaggy-dog story, "and the cast," as Pauline Kael approvingly noted, "is full of crazies". True.
GO INTO YOUR DANCE (56) (Archie Mayo, 1935): "Boy, is he a honey! The world's greatest entertainer!" Alas, they're referring to Al Jolson, whose shtick is hard to take nowadays - not so much the singing (his voice is rich, in an over-elaborate way; he brought soul e.g. to 'You Are Too Beautiful' in HALLELUJAH I'M A BUM) but the comedy, and indeed the whole persona; he's "a wine-woman-and-song man" in this one, "fickle" and "happy-go-lucky", basically meaning he walks out of shows whenever he feels like it, leaving everyone in the lurch (let's not even mention the scenes with slow-witted black servant 'Snowflake'). Banned from Broadway, his Big Idea for a comeback is "a continental show and a dinner combined" according to the papers - which doesn't sound like much though of course the plot is dopey, leaving only likeable tap-dancing kid Ruby Keeler who seems to relish the opportunity to relax and let Jolson hog the spotlight (their real-life marriage may have worked the same way), plus some lavish numbers like 'A Latin From Manhattan'. Gangster shenanigans take over and even the ending is muddled, seemingly unsure if things have ended well or are about to end badly. Fringe benefits (?): Patsy Kelly doing "the Dance of the Dying Flamingo", and an older actress who you know from the role must be someone famous - and turns out to be the tragic Helen Morgan, of APPLAUSE fame.
JULY 1, 2025
ASHES AND DIAMONDS (73) (Andrzej Wajda, 1958): Watching the first two parts [below] of Wajda's trilogy was just preamble for rewatching this - a film I saw as a teenager, which made such an impression that it's sat atop my (quite weak) 1958 list ever since. Still a fascinating concept (or backdrop), we've had films about the last days of the war (e.g. DOWNFALL) but few about the first days of the peace - which are actually an extension of the war ("The end of the war isn't the end of our fight") with factions vying for power and trying to impose their vision on post-war Poland, even as the traumas of the past few years persist; losing Warsaw - the old Warsaw - is "like losing a limb", sighs the old concierge, and meanwhile our heroes light flames to represent fallen comrades ("Those were good times," they insist to each other; too bad everyone died). Wajda's visual flair has grown exponentially, from the deep-focus opening shot to the upside-down Jesus statue, and the polyphonic structure (even more in the original book, apparently) has all the various characters recurring at some point, even the unfortunate corpses that kick off the plot. The problem is rhythm and momentum, the film purring at a constant wry slow-burn and sagging altogether in the middle third - but it still ends up reasonably high on my (quite weak) 1958 list, with transplanted beatnik Zbigniew Cybulski as its obvious secret weapon. The milquetoast apparatchik who gets drunk and gleefully trashes his career is a bit overdone - but he does have a Gene Wilder vibe, and I'm 48.6% sure Mel Brooks unconsciously had this film in mind in composing that shot of Mostel and Wilder at the bar on opening night in THE PRODUCERS.
KANAL (70) (Andrzej Wajda, 1957): What a leap in ambition and quality! Just the opening helicopter shot outdoes the entire 90 minutes of A GENERATION in visual impact, instantly followed by an impossibly long, hugely impressive dolly shot introducing the company as they pass by (admittedly recalling the cigarette passed from person to person in the earlier film), capped by the voice-over telling us to pay close attention to these people, the heroes of our tragedy: "These are the last hours of their lives". Instant tension, already an improvement. The staging is better in general, the gallows humour more cutting ("They won't take us alive"; "That's right. The Polish way!"), the sense of desperation more pungent, the violence more graphic (a Nazi gets battered to death with a rock) - but the bonds are more intimate too, the company like a family (it includes women and children); "They trusted me," says the CO, gutted to have let 'his' boys down, "You never used to smoke," one soldier chides another, an officer asks a youngster how old he is ("At that age, life is not so precious," he notes sadly, when the young man says he's 23). The celebrated second half, the trek through the sewers, is a bit less rich, if anything, a vision of hell - Dante gets name-dropped - that may have needed a greater DP (or the big screen, or at least a Blu-Ray); the images are a bit too single-minded, too obviously intended to viscerally evoke the horrors of war (cf. the boy wading through the mud in COME AND SEE). Still compelling enough that I mostly forgot - or ignored - the voice-over's warning in those opening five minutes; the ending hit hard..
A GENERATION (51) (Andrzej Wajda, 1955): As expected, a bit of a chore - not bad, just unmemorable. Bets being hedged (or a young director trying to ingratiate himself with the authorities) by equating Marxism with fighting Nazis - Catholicism, on the other hand, is briefly glimpsed and entirely ineffectual - the Resistance man getting our young hero's attention with talk of the workers being exploited. Hero's a bit of a soggy pierogi (pierog?), the initially militant girl also reduced to a thin, soppy presence; characters are dull in general, working-class detail (like the colourful elderly dad) skews phony and waffly - though there's still a hard, bleak core e.g. in the matter-of-fact cut to corpses hanging from poles (not even really explained, because no explanation necessary a mere decade after the events). Wajda comes to life in the action climax, incl. the circular-stairway shots which are probably all I'll remember from this movie. Well, that and Roman Polanski in short pants.
NERVES (49) (Robert Reinert, 1919): Why is everyone in Weimar-era Germany such a nervous wreck? "The progression of civilisation. The struggle for existence. War and its horrors..." Alas, the angst in this case isn't political - despite the long shadow of "the People's will', and riots in the streets - but a case of four people dealing with tortuously contrived personal problems, the 'nervousness' translating to the kind of histrionic acting that gives Silent movies a bad name. The visuals lack something in balls-out Expressionism, nor does it help that Erna Morena, the actress with the most interesting face in the film, is stuck with the least developed role - though large chunks are lost, so it might've made more sense in an early incarnation.
MY FRIENDS (62) (Mario Monicelli, 1975): "I wondered if the idiot was me, who saw life as a game, or if it was him, who saw it as a prison... Or if we were both idiots." Could've used a bit more of that self-deprecation in this middle-aged-men-behaving-badly comedy, our four (sometimes five) heroes singing, carousing, pulling pranks and living like "gypsies" - and treating women badly, of course, the women in this film being alternately spoiled, unreliable, troublesome, hysterical (that would be the one who tries to kill herself because her husband's cheating on her with a hot teenager - and subsequently gets dropped by the film like a bad penny) then, finally, shockingly angry, a last-minute burst of contempt that goes some way to balancing the books. The humour is boisterous, surprisingly earthy, one skit (it's a series of skits, really) revolves around the problem of having to take a dump in a strange house - the punchline is admittedly inspired - another, more surreal one has Philippe Noiret posing as a hunchback for his own obscure reasons. Wavers a bit in the final section with hapless victim Bernard Blier, the longest of the skits and not the funniest, but it's really the weary melancholy of e.g. the previous year's SCENT OF A WOMAN that's missing (or the razor-sharp socio-political edge Monicelli brought to AN AVERAGE LITTLE MAN two years later, a middle-aged-man-behaving-badly comedy with a difference). Still lots of memorable bits, Tognazzi talking nonsense - the supercazzola! - to confuse authority, the whole gang slapping the faces of passengers leaning out of windows as the train is leaving (a gag you can imagine Chaplin using); best seen with an audience, surely.
THE WHOLE TOWN'S TALKING (58) (John Ford, 1935): Easy to see why Edward G. Robinson signed on for this - he's terrific in this double role, the whole shape of his face seeming to change as the simian gangster after the flabbier contours of the timid corporate worm. Possible to see Ford's interest too (unless it was just an assignment), in overseeing the stunningly sophisticated special effects; the mirror scene described in Matt Lynch's LB review is quite something, but the bit where one EGR blows cigar smoke at the other EGR - the smoke going seamlessly across the dividing line between their two sections of the frame - is also startling. The script is the letdown, by a couple of heavyweights who may have gotten in each other's way, the way e.g. that the final showdown is resolved - the clerk simply can't find the envelope and has to turn back, presuming that he "must've left it on the table" - typifying the general lack of clever invention. Incidental pleasures in the 30s lingo (incl. the TIL that people didn't say 'trigger-happy', but 'trigger-conscious'), Jean Arthur as the independent dame - "I'm not into anybody, Sam!" - and the scene where Donald Meek and Etienne Girardot, two of 30s Hollywood's great 'little men' (Girardot's turn in TWENTIETH CENTURY excepted), ask each other for information, both admit they know nothing and, having demonstrated their mutual uselessness, part ways politely.
JUNE 1, 2025
THE FUNHOUSE (68) (Tobe Hooper, 1981): Totally eccentric horror, full of unexpected touches esp. in the first half. The freakshow of animals (a two-headed cow, etc). The magician who talks like Walter Matthau. Our heroine, who comes off very prim and uptight on her first date with the jock-ish but sympathetic boy. (She hates that she's lying to her parents - but her home life is also unexpected, briefly-glimpsed Mom an alcoholic harridan.) The old crone - played for laughs - who keeps cackling "God's watching you". The funhouse itself, a carnival ride with everything from a giant eyeball to Humpty Dumpty. PSYCHO gives way to old Universal monsters, though the main event is a homicidal mutant family out of Hooper's most famous film plus also quite a lot of Joe Dante, that gleeful cartoonish nastiness of the 'childhood spent watching monster movies on TV' generation. (One shot seems to frame the entrance to the funhouse as an actual TV.) Second half sags a bit - having a single murderous monster is boring, as opposed to the whole carnival being malign in general - so it goes instead for pure sensation, all-out musical cues and spectacular Gothic images with rich, vivid colours (DP Andrew Laszlo shot THE WARRIORS, and it shows). Not remotely scary, but so what.
MAY 1, 2025
WHERE IS THE FRIEND'S HOUSE? (70) (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987): Second viewing, first in 34 years - and thereby hangs a tale, since I watched it (at the NFT in London) a few years after it came out, knowing nothing of Kiarostami or Iranian cinema, and didn't understand it or enjoy it much, slightly condescendingly calling it "a small insight... into what another film culture considers funny and/or cute". "Also sometimes very difficult to understand what's going on in terms of motivations," I added - and our hero does behave in ways that must've puzzled my younger self, e.g. asking for his friend at the house with the blue door when we've been told that's the cousin's house. (Also still unclear why he doesn't go in when he finally does (?) find the right house.) Fortunately I'm now able to appreciate things like Kiarostami's deadpan staging of the action on two floors, setting up the people like chess pieces - Ahmed negotiating his mom's instructions, the baby in the corner, Grandma adding yet another irrelevant adult rule ("Take your shoes off before going upstairs"), all while trying to figure out his plight and find an opening to talk about the exercise book - or repeated images like the zig-zag path up barren rock from Koker to Poshteh, or sidelong jokes like the dazed-looking kid who slides under the desk saying "My back hurts, sir" (echoes of Antoine's klutzy classmates in THE 400 BLOWS), or of course the door symbolism. The film opens on an image of a door, later there's the pushy man selling iron doors contrasted with the old craftsman who associates doors with people - the point being perhaps a negation of sturdy, rigid iron (like rigid rules) and a way-in for humanism and delicate beauty, like the door that gets blown open by the wind (not very sturdy!) to reveal an atmospheric image of billowing sheets. Then there's the ending - A Moment of Innocence indeed, like the seemingly throwaway, piercing final seconds of the Makhmalbaf film - which is totally lovely.
SWEPT AWAY (52) (Lina Wertmuller, 1974): Probably more fun (as the cliche goes) to discuss than actually watch - though the only real discussion would involve the 'offensive' sexual politics, and even they (esp. with a female director) are really just a throwback to caveman fantasy given a class-struggle twist (a sheik is briefly mentioned, and Rudolph Valentino as THE SHEIK lurks on the fringes). The psychology is wobbly, the film burying the irony that the woman - being a romantic who sees their love as a "miracle" - walks away in the end precisely as a romantic gesture, to preserve the island idyll (instead it goes for the cheap comic shot of the rich forever screwing you over), and Wertmuller's erratic sensibility doesn't help; there are cheerfully lame jokes - "Wash my underpants"; "Never!", cut to her washing the underpants, that kind of thing - Muzak on the soundtrack, a broad visual style tending to favour very wide and very close shots. Still quite fun, in a slapstick way (proletarian hero slapping rich bitch repeatedly as a form of political protest: "And this is for VAT!..."), shifting audience sympathies in the process. Also quite a year for women getting roughed up and deciding they quite enjoy it, what with this and GOING PLACES.
CITY GIRL (72) (F.W. Murnau, 1930): Vivid prose to SUNRISE's poetry, increasingly un-special when it comes to plot - but Murnau's on peak form here, in the rhythms, the spatial relations, the actors, the bits of business. The first half in the city (with a judicious cut to the folks back home, to establish that Pa is difficult but not entirely a villain) is masterly work, building a sense of material reality both stifling and forever shifting, unstable as the price of wheat, the heroine's apartment with the El passing almost right through it, the frantic choreography (and great urban faces) in the excellent diner scenes - and the country boy associated with freedom and space to breathe, like the breeze of fresh air from the fan (which becomes his "private breeze"), like the flower he brings with its echoes of wide open spaces. The heroine is seduced not just by a "two-fisted man" but also an idea of a rural idyll, vividly expressed in the still-exhilarating run through the fields - and of course both turn out to be disappointing but the film is right to make her strong-willed (Mary Duncan is superbly fiery), steering clear of pathos and making the plot (even) more elemental. Shame the narrative beats get a little stale, even for 1930.
MOVING (62) (Shinji Somai, 1993): Best anarchic little girl since Zazie (of Metro fame) - but the story is a trite thing about a child of divorce (actually separation) acting out before finally accepting her new fate, and the mixture is a bit oil-and-water. Ren (our expressively-played young heroine) carries an air of danger, she moves too fast and acts without thinking, rants at the rain ("I hate rain so much!") then immediately does a headstand before we even get to the opening title. Somai's staging is also expressive, contrasting her open spirit with the adults' sympathetic but narrow approach - made literal in the scene where two couples have a tussle in a narrow corridor, staged so everyone's crammed together in a long space, foreground-to-background (a later shot has a similar narrow axis, when Dad says "I love you" and Ren walks to him - we imagine to hug him - then past him, running straight to the back of frame) - but he can't do much about the arc, nor does he manage Alan Parker's trick in SHOOT THE MOON of keeping the hysteria tightly linked to the main situation. (It's no surprise when Ren finally withdraws altogether, finding her peace by roaming around in a kind of personal dream-space.) Undisciplined, mostly by design but it feels pretty slapdash - but then you start to imagine what a Kore-eda version might be like (it's right in his wheelhouse), and become more forgiving.
FEDORA (56) (Billy Wilder, 1978): Wilder updating SUNSET BOULEVARD for the fall of old Hollywood and the rise of the Movie Brats - "The kids with beards have taken over," and they've brought their zoom lens - and adding a dash of AVANTI!, in the lovely Med locations (specifically Corfu), some voluble comic relief and a general wryness of spirit. An old man's film about the struggle to deny getting old - at least till the halfway twist which, it must be said, makes no sense, neither thematically nor dramatically, upending the dynamic (but to what end?) to make youth the prisoner of old age, instead of vice versa. Fedora's identity is, in the end, a movie (a fake, a production), the film leaning hard on glamour and style, incl. the lush photography; it feels likeable but rickety, with some lame jokes - incl. a couple of gay digs: "Don't let this earring fool you" - and a general air of not-quite-there, right from the melodramatic opening. That said, I'm irrationally taken with the notion that Mike Myers watched this film, thought to himself, 'Michael York seems like such a good sport', and offered him Basil Exposition.
BANDITS OF ORGOSOLO (77) (Vittorio De Seta, 1961): My first De Seta, briefly wondered what his strengths might be - and the answer turns out to be 'Everything'. Performances (by non-pros) are strong, in a gruff implacable peasant register, De Seta's eye (he also did the photography) for landscape, proportion, composition is immaculate, bodies in motion dwarfed by cliffs and ravines, a magical shot of the boy's face quarter-lit by moonlight, the flock of sheep glimmering in darkness like a pool of water; it works as downbeat drama, ethnographic document, outdoor adventure and exciting, fugitive-on-the-run action thriller. Hard to find flaws, maybe it's a bit too mainstream, despite its independent roots (PADRE PADRONE is doubtless a more provocative take on the same milieu), there's some mildly awkward documentary V.O. at the beginning - "The souls of these men are still primitive..." - maybe there's cuteness in the BICYCLE THIEVES-ish relationship and such details as a tense conversation interrupted by the arrival of a toddler. Maybe there's no theme - yet there is, in the end, a theme, in the hopeless reaction of a shepherd asked why his sheep are all dying en masse: "That's their destiny, I guess".
WAIT UNTIL DARK (71) (Terence Young, 1967)
SCENES OF CITY LIFE (69) (Yuan Muzhi, 1935): Finally drifts too far into spottiness and incoherence, leaving mostly the novelty value - but what novelty! The glimpse of a pre-Revolutionary China is one thing, jarringly capitalist with its ads for cars ("If you're not in a car, you're not travelling in style"), wealth inequalities and everyone hustling for money - but it's also a Chinese version of a Rene Clair-ish musical comedy, packed with invention from mobile tracking shots to brief animation. Outfits in a fashion magazine come to life. There's a cut from a word on the page to the same word on a wall (the camera pulls back to show the close-up was achieved by writing it in giant-sized font). Peasants are invited to peek at an image of the city through a peephole, then the image explodes in a frantic montage of neon signs. The vibe is youthful, the humour wacky, thus e.g. shopworkers conversing entirely in gibberish ("Ugh-ah", according to the subtitles) or our hero writing a love letter with the help of a Guide to Writing Love Letters (a small dog gagged with a large handkerchief - looking like he's about to rob a stagecoach - observes the scene), but the plot stutters and the jokes start not working. Echoes Ozu's Western-inflected work (e.g. DRAGNET GIRL) of the early 30s, but also Clair and Weimar musicals; 'Modern Types', as a caption puts it.
APRIL 1, 2025
THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL (68) (Harold Young, 1934): Probably second viewing, though I can't find any record of the first one - and you'd think I'd remember something so perverse, a film that's shockingly bad at what it's ostensibly doing yet so beguiling in other ways. An obvious dud as a swashbuckler, made clear by the scene where the titular hero is about to rescue aristos from the guillotine, a plan is suggested (it apparently involves distracting the guards) - but then the camera soars up to an overhead shot and we cut to the aftermath, the aristos already rescued, the action scene elided as if to say 'Not our department'. Its department is instead drawing-room drama, notes being passed and intrigues laid, a 'meet in the library at midnight'-type movie - and also satirical comedy, buffoonish Brits harrumphing ("Who, sir? You, sir?") while the Pimpernel acts foppish - the same dynamic as Zorro - and talks cravats, which is all quite delightful. Also potent in a whole other way, the French Terror carrying obvious echoes of what was going on in Europe circa 1934, the film lingering on mass executions and our hero musing on what happens "when a country goes mad"; if nothing else, it's poignant to see Leslie Howard already sensing the approach of the war that would eventually kill him. On the one hand, Merle Oberon looking unearthly-exotic and Howard wistfully regretting their estrangement ("So that's why you ceased to love her. What a tragedy.." "'Ceased'? I shall love her till I die. That's the tragedy"), on the other how does the excellent Raymond Massey (as the villain) even find out our hero's true identity, did I miss some connective tissue there? And wtf is going on with that weird accent - almost Yiddish, never mind French - he puts on for one (1) random scene at the climax? An adorable mess.
HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (59) (Alain Resnais, 1959): Third viewing, though I barely remember the second one (in 2019). Didn't work so well this time, maybe because it was on the big screen and I was aware of people growing restless around me - but mostly because (a) it's much more a Duras film than a Resnais film, and both have gone on to more complete iterations of their respective styles (watching INDIA SONG recently didn't help), and above all (b) the film is fundamentally unbalanced in using Hiroshima (Hiroshima!) as a way-in to this one French woman's bad experience during the war, equating two things (personal and political, admittedly) that seem leagues apart in terms of significance, not to mention the Eurocentric aspect of viewing a Japanese tragedy through a Western filter; I basically spent much of the second half thinking 'Enough, we get it, can we get back to Hiroshima now?'. It's even more frustrating since the opening section is precisely about that solipsism, the hollowness of the Frenchwoman's claims to 'understand' Hiroshima - and that opening section is indeed magnificent, in fact quite a lot of it is magnificent, incl. the (very modern) nocturnal wanderings of the final section. Too bad Duras' poetic verbiage keeps getting in the way.
A BRUTAL GAME (66) (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1983): At heart, a deeply romantic tale of how being alone is unhealthy and will turn one into a literal psycho, whereas love - even, or especially, with the heartbreak and suffering that inevitably accompany it - leads one to empathy, whether through appreciating art, stirring "violent and obscure emotions" (see the girl's very different, pre- and post-heartbreak reactions to Prevert's story of the injured horse and Baudelaire's poem about the effect music has), or the beauty of the world, birdsong and placid country landscapes, above all by appreciating suffering - as opposed not (just) to cruelty, but the scientist's coldly objective view of the world. "We're all alone. You have to cope with it," he says, the body itself (like the girl's crippled body) being a kind of prison - why am I me, and not you? the physical limits of the self form a literal barrier to empathy - life and death being "very particular states" of no particular import. (Why come to the funeral? "She's just an object," he says, looking down at his mother's corpse.) Brisseau's tone is unsentimental and un-judgmental, let down by a little too much plotting - there's some flat stuff, like the scenes with the teacher ('Annie', like Annie Sullivan in THE MIRACLE WORKER) - going mostly for Bressonian abruptness, performances built around affect more than dialogue, plus a mise-en-scene that's not meant to be realistic, hence some ridiculous detail like the psycho setting out his entire plan in a chart on the wall - though what seems like the most ridiculous part (the back-story with the dead kids) makes sense with hindsight; it'd be out of character to kill randomly, the point is the madness of perceiving some logical plan to murdering children - the ultimate in logic over empathy. Is the final farewell forgiveness, or an acknowledgment of the bond between them - as if to say 'That was me, before love rescued me'? A potent, if not very flowing movie.
FANTASTIC PLANET (63) (Rene Laloux, 1973): PLANET OF THE APES-ish, but more nuanced - the alien masters are meditative and (among themselves) non-violent; the humans are tribal, aggressive and rat-like - and of course way groovier, the lounge-music score, illustrated look (ranging from Terry Gilliam collage animation to spiny flora and fauna that recalls Dr. Seuss), blue aliens, beautiful costumes, detailed world-building and frequent shots of tiny figures lost in immense vistas adding to a sense of dreamy, lightly trippy otherworldliness. The Draags are Blue Mystics to counter YELLOW SUBMARINE's Blue Meanies but the sense of humour is similarly quirky, with details like the random dino baby hatching from an egg only to get promptly swallowed up by a three-nostrilled hippo creature. (Also some nightmare-fuel, like the corpse-strewn "de-om" sequence.) The ending seems to pluck a happy ending out of nowhere, but I guess a tragic one might've harshed the vibe.
THE FACE OF ANOTHER (55) (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966): Echoes of classic horror, our hero bandaged and embittered - a monster - like the Invisible Man, mad-scientist visuals with a lab and beakers and so on, above all the mask "asserting itself" like e.g. the hands in MAD LOVE. Teshigahara adds more, modern alienation (aren't we all just wearing masks, one way or another?), a burst of Hiroshima imagery, flashy images in general (at one point there's a shot of what looks like a flying bed in the middle of back-projection), extreme close-ups, a crowd of faceless people - but in fact the script is talky and the rhythm bitty, so the flashiness feels like disguising a void (a mask, you might say). Def. a case of 'admired more than loved'; a lot going on, not always productively.
THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (68) (Robert Siodmak, 1946): Second viewing, first in about 30 years, def. appreciate it more now. Talk of 'proto-giallo' is on point - that extreme close-up of the psycho's peeping eye, followed by a Dutch-angle shot of his perverted POV (mute heroine viewed with no mouth), belongs in any history of slasher movies - but the film isn't actually a slasher movie (unsurprisingly, since the genre hadn't been invented yet), going instead for old-dark-house, dark-and-stormy-night whodunit and painting itself into a corner, since the killer is supposedly inside the house and there simply aren't enough male characters around to provide much of a mystery. (Guess it could be a killer in drag, PSYCHO-style; but that hadn't been invented yet either.) Some missteps, e.g. overdoing the wedding fantasy - it just needed a quick shock-cut to McGuire unable to say "I do" - but maybe it just over-explains due to being a little ahead of its time; otherwise rich and atmospheric, with a great kill (MVP Nicholas Musuraca) where the centre of frame goes dark and the victim's arms appear in shafts of light on either side, splayed as if crucified. The rare classic horror where damsel and villain are both severely emotionally traumatised, anyway.
MARCH 1, 2025
VIY (57) (Konstantin Ershov & Georgiy Kropachyov, 1967): Compared to e.g. THE EVE OF IVAN KUPALO, less visually dazzling/demented (except the last 10 minutes), more narratively solid, to the point of being stolid; it does take a long time to deliver its wisp of plot - which seems quite confusing in any case - not to mention being insanely back-loaded (see: the last 10 minutes). Technical skill is actually high, special effects are top-notch, the production is handsome (Kropachyov later became a distinguished production designer); also some Soviet-style digs at corrupt religion and horny seminarians, shots of animals (our animal nature?), some of the best (i.e. bushiest) moustaches in movies, plus a puzzling emphasis on not being scared - is there a suggestion that the demons are all in the mind, a product of fear and un-godliness? But the three-night structure feels like a shaggy-dog joke, given how little happens the first two nights, then the last night (the last 10 minutes) is admittedly a punchline but it's almost too much, an eruption of creatures to rival THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (or 'Night on the Bare Mountain', whatever). When Viy itself - the top monster, the Spirit of Evil - makes its appearance, it's a damp squib, like that one-climax-too-many in MCU movies.
THE SNAKE PIT (64) (Anatole Litvak, 1948): Pipe-smoking doctor Leo Genn is a stereotype, of course - and yes, modern audiences may chuckle at his Freudian diagnosis: "In a sense, that doll was your father" - but this is bold, in that terse post-war way, and also has the sense to be loosely plotted; we open in medias res, taking a while to register that our heroine is entirely mad. Olivia de Havilland is expressive though the character conception has a touch of Blanche du Bois, ladylike and fragile - acutely sensitive to cold, being touched, etc - Litvak walking a tightrope between women-in-prison-type lurid melodrama and responsible primer on a social issue (though the latter gives way to the former when we get to the actual loony ward); also note e.g. that the head nurse only becomes unpleasant when heroine (correctly) surmises that the nurse is secretly in love with Dr. Genn, and tells her so - the script likes to dig into psychology, even beyond the main plot. On the one hand, the overhead shot of the 'snake pit', looking like the Nth circle of hell; on the other, the graceful crane shots as the congregation sings 'Goin' Home', making for a lump-in-throat moment. Pretty good balance of nutso and Oscar-bait, tbh.
BOY (71) (Nagisa Oshima, 1969): Terribly bitty, a restless unsettledness that's perhaps an Oshima hallmark (see e.g. the editing in VIOLENCE AT NOON). The episodic plot never gathers momentum - but the colours are rich, the wide-screen compositions very beautiful (esp. when our hero wanders, eventually curling up on a rock by the sea), and the difference from other Oshimas I've seen is the presence of a fascinating character, the nameless lonely boy playing alone, dreaming of space aliens and something of an alien himself; "I don't feel or think anything," he says (shades of Pialat's L'ENFANCE NUE from the year before). A state-of-the-nation drama, going up and down Japan all the way to snowy Hokkaido (even the opening credits seem designed around a Japanese flag); big fish eat the little fish, small boys are bullied by bigger boys, the family unit is mired in mistrust and dishonesty; "Do what you want," says uncaring war-veteran Dad - his mind and body racked by the war - while making clear he wants Mom to have an abortion, the boy does his self-destructive "job" and finally destroys his own dreams, viz. the snowman. Oshima encases them in coolly magnificent wide-angles, and e.g. the shot with the family and their latest 'victim' all scrunched together in a corner of the frame. Wish the actual physical action (incl. the car accidents) were a bit more convincing, though.
PITFALL (66) (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1962): Odd little fable with a good deal of misdirection, the neo-realist vibe of the first half-hour turning out to be a red herring. Doesn't exactly hang together - the plan to literally pit the union men at each other's throats involves some less-than-plausible behaviour - then again it's supposed to be a bit theatrical, and e.g. the stylised staging of the murder by the lake is a spectacular set-piece, the victim's extravagant death throes seen from a distance ('figures in a landscape' shots are a specialty in general) then cut to the watching kid standing in a thicket of reeds. Some comedy, some ghost story, some upsetting real-life clips of post-war Japan in ruins (it's unclear, at least to me, what our heroes are deserting from); the motif of animal abuse - a frog is skinned; a bored woman picks up ants with chopsticks and drowns them in water - speaks to a steely worldview, ditto a dapper, ice-cool professional killer (a year before THE KILLERS) and the overall air of helpless impotence. "Next time I'd like to be born a devil."
1969 REVISITED: Second or third viewings:
FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES (69) (Toshio Matsumoto, 1969): Random girl, after watching some weird animation: "It's very 'underground', isn't it?". There's a bit of that here, Japanese bohemian life of the late 1960s - lots of Western influence, a guy named Guevara, Beatles poster on the wall, Jonas Mekas actually name-dropped - but any residual smugness is offset by the visual invention (big exception: the cheesy speeded-up action), the meta layer (incl. an interview with the lead actor about the movie we're watching) and the uncompromised, compassionate, almost matter-of-fact depiction of being trans in the 60s, albeit not "transsexual" which is mostly a pejorative; "They tell themselves they're girls," laughs a 'queen', speaking of the guys who go after guys. Lots of energy, shots of the city both staged and verite, an ending to remember (second film where I missed the 'Oedipus Rex' connection, after Schanelec's MUSIC; this one's on me, though) and a totally open take on our troubled protagonist: "I am what I am".
KATZELMACHER (74) (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969): Didn't realise Fassbinder started out doing Jarmusch-like deadpan comedy (I guess, in a way, they were all comedies), before the flamboyance and Queer Factor. Almost entirely static scenes - the one conspicuous moving-camera shot, the dolly-back with the girls walking, feels like it must've influenced the similar one in ATTENBERG - of snippets of brief conversations, a card game, a song, a repeated shot of multiple characters lined up on a bench with way too much head-room. The talk is desultory and cruel, the punchlines don't mind being silly - "So, was I right?" says one guy when his friend returns to where they were sitting; "Yeah... They're real, her boobs," comes the reply - the stasis channels Beckett but e.g. the men's awkward silence when informed that the Greek immigrant outshines them in the penis department could be Bavarian sex comedy. The arrival of the immigrant threatens to tip the whole thing into Message Movie (cf. the opening caption about repeating the mistakes of the past), but in fact there's a mordant aftermath - and where RWF also differs from Jarmusch is in his obsession with love, the masochistic yearning for love (as opposed - or not - to money) and various gradations of love adding heft to the slacker comedy. On the one hand: "Everyone needs a bit of love". On the other: "There's no love without pain". Terrific minor-key filmmaking.
FEBRUARY 1, 2025
MISCHIEF (56) (Mel Damski, 1985): More AMERICAN GRAFFITI than PORKY'S (should've been made five years earlier, probably), clearly autobiographical for writer-producer Noel Black of PRETTY POISON fame. The imperative to turn it into a teen comedy leads to some likeably lame gags - the 'polio shot' slapstick gag, the 'posing store mannequins in sexual positions for a prank' gag - not to mention the opening groaner, Ohio 1956 being "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away", but then the realistic impulse takes over in a candid sex scene that's incongruous, not played for prurience, and the film's undoubted highlight. Chris Nash is slightly miscast as dorky hero Doug McKeon's cool best friend (the actor is five years older, and looks it), though the only real misstep is the treatment of the teen goddess played by Kelly Preston, cast out as a bitch after the sex scene in a careless way that looks like her 'crime' was not having been a virgin - it's implied she was always Too Much for Doug (even kicking his ass at basketball), but not quite established - esp. since he himself behaves badly, 'forgetting' to pull out after promising that he will. (That part gets subsumed in the fumbling push-and-pull of adolescent sex, both parties struggling in vain to control their hormones.) Overall a clunky - but amusing - mix, veering from period-specific reminiscence (Chris opining that "girls don't put out in Studebakers") to 80s teen-comedy silliness, Chris telling Doug to shrink his jeans so he bulges out more: "Girls don't have nuts, so they're fascinated by them".
JANUARY 1, 2025