Terror made me cruel.

Ugetsu Monogatari
Kenji Mizoguchi 1953 Japan
            
Along with Yasujirō Ozu, Akira Kurosawa and Mikio Naruse, Kenji Mizoguchi is well-renowned as one of the greatest of all Japanese filmmakers but I've got to admit that for me he represents a bit of a gap in my knowledge, and I'm not sure quite why. I've been massively into
Ozu in recent years and Kurosawa is Kurosawa (nothing more needs to be said) but somehow Mizoguchi has never really caught my attention. On the evidence of Ugetsu I've been missing out. At first look it appears to be a particularly grim war film complete with desperate, poverty-ridden soldiers raping peasants and robbing children but almost immediately focuses instead on the ambition of two men - fortune seeking potter Genjurô and bumbling wannabe-samurai Tobei - and the effect on their families of their attempts to attain their dreams, a morality play where Tobei's opportunistic murder of a general affects him less emotionally than the realisation of how far his wife has had to sink to survive his absence. Then the wonderful Machiko Kyō arrives as a spectral Lady who just wants to experience love with all its inherent perfection and cruelty and we're launched into a romantic ghost story, one that Genjurô falls into almost effortlessly despite having a wife and child at home but one that still elicits our sympathy in his attempts to escape. If this all sounds uneven it really should be - and with a lesser director certainly would be - but Mizoguchi pulls it off in magnificent style, creating an arresting mix of genres that's as dreamlike as it is harrowing with stunning cinematography to boot. And yet through all the fantastic the element that really strikes is the humanity of the characters even when they are performing deplorable acts, their malevolence almost understandable in a world where survival is all you can aim for.

Men who can't make love make war.

Rocco and his Brothers
Luchino Visconti 1960 Italy

It’s always said that the good, the bad and the unlucky come in threes, I disagree. For me four seems much more suitable. After all there were four members of Pantera, four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, four good Tom Cruise performances, and in Italian neo-realism four of the most beloved directors in all of ‘world cinema’ - Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti. Each had their own quirks (some more than others) but all were supremely talented. Rocco is one of Visconti's best-known works and is arguably his best, although I'm sure many would disagree with me. In it Alain Delon leads an amazing cast but is practically acted off the screen by real-life couple Renato Salvatori and Annie Girardot. Everyone is really, and that's not an insult. Salvatori's raw, towering performance and Girardot's powerful emotion are just that good, even protecting the film when it threatens to descend into melodrama and making the harrowing scene in which Salvatori's Simone beats his brother (Delon) and rapes his former lover a classic. Everyone's quality here, even the debuting 7 year old Rocco Vidolazzi, who never acted again. There's also Nino Rota on music and Suso Cecchi d'Amico screenwriting, both of whom are people whose work should be better known. Rereading this post I feel kind of bad because this is a really poorly written review but I just can't think of a better way to say that this is fucking extraordinary. Apologies.

The Patience Stone
Atiq Rahimi 2012 Afghanistan


A film featuring the actress Golshifteh Farahani getting a cinematic release is always a special occasion as far as I'm concerned, one that I celebrated this time with gin and a near-empty cinema. For anyone who has never heard of her Farahani was previously a leading light of the Iranian film industry but, due to her choice of roles, she has now officially been exiled from her home country. She's also one of my favourite actresses of the moment, having given wonderful performances in Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin and Asghar Farhadi's About Elly amongst others,
but it's not a stretch to say that this is her best ever. It's also almost a one-woman show with Farahani's unnamed wife playing opposite her comatose war hero husband for 90% of the film and using the time to unburden herself of all the things she hasn't been able to say in their 10 years of marriage. For such a minimalist set-up it's a really complex role with 'the woman' desperately trying to keep her silent husband alive in a warzone while simultaneously wishing him dead and covering topics from his distant and unloving behaviour towards her before his accident to traditional Islamic arranged-marriage and treatment of women to revelations about their children yet never for a minute renouncing her love for him. The result is an otherworldly, beguiling atmosphere that only continues with 'the woman's' relationship with a stuttering, abused young soldier, one that graduates from threat to a quiet kinship and that she describes graphically to her husband not as a punishment but because she can now talk to him as she would like to be able to talk to a husband, as a companion, lover and friend. To say that this is the best film I've seen this year is a ludicrous statement considering that it's still January but I'll be genuinely surprised if it isn't in my top 5 come December. It's magnificent.

Big Bad Wolves
Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado 2013 Israel

The words 'blackly comic Israeli horror movie' somehow don't exactly cling together and I think it would be a safe guess to state that, even to hardened cinephiles, that description is not going to be one they've heard very often, so it was with a mixture of interest and trepidation that I bought a ticket this morning for Big Bad Wolves, an ultra-stylish, ultraviolent bullet wound of a film dark enough to have a torturer bake a cake laced with sedatives in time to the tune of Buddy Holly's 'Everyday' while his victim languishes in the basement two toenails short of a full set, and funny enough to have said torturer interrupted mid-maiming by a haranguing phone call from his elderly mother who, in the space of under a minute, regresses him about 40 years. And yet this is relatively serious subject matter, a suspected paedophile being kidnapped by an aggressive policeman and the father of one of the victims, and one that could so easily become torture porn but instead one that is often played for tongue-in-cheek laughs while still being horribly brutal. There's also a scene-stealing performance from Kais Nashif as an unnamed local on a horse who basically saunters into the film for a couple of minutes, gets all the best lines and then buggers off again, altogether unrelated to the story but welcome all the same. Early Tarantino is an obvious reference point even if this isn't quite as wordy. It has however inherited his unfortunate habit of eschewing a proper ending in favour of 'clever' trickery. It's a shame because it really takes the bloom off of what's otherwise a entertaining, fast-talking production that takes in eccentricity, cruelty and idiocy in equal measure.

A pessimist is a guy in possession of the full facts.

Dreams of a Life
Carol Morley 2011 UK
     

Joyce Carol Vincent died in December 2003, probably. She was 38, beautiful, friendly and from a large family, and no-one noticed she was gone. In 2006 bailiffs forced their way into her flat and found her skeleton, the rest of her having melted into the carpet. Her TV was still on. Loneliness and the anonymity of people we encounter every day is a topic Carol Morley has visited before, chiefly in her 1994 short film I'm Not Here, so she would seem a logical choice to investigate Vincent's life. Unfortunately, there's a problem. Not a filmic one as such, or even a personal one; no, the main problem is the frustrating lack of material. Vincent's family refused to take part but former boyfriends, housemates and colleagues were more forthcoming and painted several pictures of the young woman, mostly different. Was she a bubbly party girl who met, amongst others, Isaac Hayes, Gil Scot-Heron and Nelson Mandela? A troubled loner prone to lying? A battered girlfriend? Possibly all three, but no-one's sure. And despite having been her friends or even her lovers some admit that they don't feel that they knew much about her at all. There are no revelations here which is perhaps Morley's intention, a device to point out how little any of us can really know about each other, but that's really the only conclusion she reaches and she chooses to show it via the clichéd (and slightly nauseating) phrase 'we all need to look after each other more'. I'm not saying that this isn't a valid and even a noble sentiment, it's just that if feels a little anaemic a conclusion for a 90 minute documentary. You feel that somehow there should be a slightly more profound and complex result from such a fervent investigation. Visually there are similar problems as for a long-term artist Morley gives us little more than talking heads and minimal reconstruction. Again this may be intentional but, again, it's a bit dull, and you're left thinking is this it? Actually, that would have been a better title for this post. Is this it?

You know what's wrong with your fish, don't you? It's dead.

Nowhere To Go
Seth Holt 1958 UK                         

I've heard it said many times that Harry H. Corbett was a much better actor than he was generally considered, he himself even became quite bitter about it in later life believing that his best-known role Harold Steptoe had blinded the mainstream acting world to his ability and effectively neutered the range of roles he'd be considered for. Watching his performance in this Ealing drama (they didn't just do comedies) it's hard to argue with him. It's only a small part, momentary even, but a memorable one, a single scene in the back of a darkened car - at first I didn't even recognise him. Nowhere To Go is basically a reversal of these fortunes, it's really not as good as you'd imagine it should be. Admittedly it looks an interesting prospect on paper - Maggie Smith (in her debut) as a bored socialite who is attracted to 'lost causes and lame ducks', Bernard Lee and Corbett as criminals, a script by Kenneth Tynan, Dizzy Reece's jazz score, the Ealing connection - but the result is a little uneven, not least because leading man George Nader is so dull and his character so repellent that it's hard to feel any connection with him, even in an anti-hero sense. As such his quest to recover hidden loot and escape the law never elicits our sympathy, at times we can even understand why everyone's against him. It's not only his arrogance or even the fact that he's a thief that's the problem, it's his lack of charisma (essential for a con-man I would have thought) and utter cowardice. For the first half hour he remains remarkably cool under pressure, even commenting on it himself, but the second he sees a policeman he completely loses his shit and later, when he is violently challenged by Lee in one of the best scenes in the film, he is easily subdued and submits to his foe's will. By the time we reach the last half hour he's been outsmarted, hurt by his own incompetence and is just desperate to escape but still not quite grateful for Smith's help, his hope for luck gone completely - if he walked down a dark alley he'd tread in something. The rest of the film is similarly black - everyone is out for what they can get, no-one is trustworthy (with the possible exception of Smith) and certainly no-one is traditionally good. Even a local pet shop owner played by British legend Lionel Jeffries is remarkably cruel. There are a couple of creative set-pieces and the cinematography is nicely understated but honestly, combined with the downright miserable ending, it's hard to imagine a film like this being green-lighted for a director's debut. In fact you get the distinct impression that with a more experienced director it would have been a lot better.

Mary, I think I'm a tad depressed.

This Must Be The Place
Paolo Sorrentino 2011 Italy/Ireland

A few weeks ago, around New Year, I saw Paolo Sorrentino's current film The Great Beauty and, in its two hours of stupendous visuals and troubled human pageantry, it surpassed anything I've seen in the past year. This Must Be The Place is Sorrentino's previous feature and, as yet, his only one in the English language, and it's awful...ok, maybe that's a little harsh but it's pretty bad. At first it seems like an interesting if bizarre idea - Sean Penn dressed up like Robert Smith from The Cure hunting for the Nazi oppressors of his father - but it never really gets going and Penn doesn't do much more than adopt a high-pitched mumble and act like he's on temazepam. Frances McDormand tries hard as his happy-go-lucky wife but ultimately loses the battle with an underwritten part. After a while David Byrne wanders in, playing himself, for no other reason than because he provided the title. Later, a visit to Cheyenne's (Penn) former teacher aims for comedy but falls flat, her "Do you want to kill me?" only making us hope his answer is yes so something will happen. A waitress tries to seduce him despite him being about as alluring as Swarfega, he hallucinates a man with a pencil moustache standing on a trailer, it all makes very little sense; a jumbled plethora of arse that even the wonderful Harry Dean Stanton (87 and still acting) can't save, not least because he disappears after 2 minutes and 40 seconds, in the end rendered as pointless as everything else in a film that's only achievement is that if Cheyenne is depressed at the start we're right there with him by the end.

It's better being with your enemies than being alone.

Last Life In The Universe                                                                                                                    
Pen-Ek Ratanaruang 2003 Thailand                                    


A lizard crawling up a wall as if on fast-forward. A collection of shoes, all highly polished and arranged according to days of the week. A body hanging from a noose above a pile of books and a question: Why did I kill myself? So begins Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's comedy-drama, a film black enough to have a suicide attempt interrupted by the seemingly unstoppable ringing of a doorbell and then to have the (unwanted) guest enter the room and calmly say "Oh, suicide again. So, you're going with hanging this time?" The interrupted man is the Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano, otherwise known as the sadomasochistic enforcer Kakihara in Takashi Miike's Ichi The Killer (cheekily referenced here). The other man is his brother. Anyone who has seen Ichi may not be surprised. Either way this isn't anywhere near as violent as that film but is at least as bizarre and wholly wonderful for its weirdness, its burgeoning relationship between an extremely OCD Japanese man and a Thai woman whose living room resembles a sort of badly-planned large-scale dish rack not nearly as twee and annoying as that description sounds. Actually it's surprisingly beautiful and quite meditative, just the kind of film the US independent scene used to make before it became obsessed with self-degradation, and I don't think I've ever seen a film where the line "Tomorrow we'll do the laundry" is one of the most seductive. But it works, helped along the way by the magical realism of Wong Kar-wai's regular director of photography Christopher Doyle. It's kind of reminiscent of Wong too, if quieter, less visually audacious and, in its repeated reference to a childrens book, a little more fairytale-like; less Days Of Being Wild as Days Of Being Loveably Odd.

The first and the spurious?

Dhoom                                                             
Sanjay Gadhvi 2004 India

                                                                        
I’ve really been getting into Bollywood in recent months and, as such, I’ve seen a lot from the Bachchan acting family consisting of patriarch Amitabh Bachchan, who is the biggest and perhaps best actor in Bollywood history, his wife, the actress Jaya Bhaduri, their son Abhishek and Abhishek’s wife, the exceptional Aishwarya Rai. I’ve seen Abhishek in several roles, among them romantic lead, dancer, thief, con man and even a Michael Corleone-style gangster/businessman in the good if mildly plagiaristic Sarkar and the much better sequel Sarkar Raj. Here he’s a policeman battling a gang of motorbike-riding thieves and is, as ever, good value. Also as ever not everyone agrees with me. When I first heard of this film I read a lot of reviews that said it was really really bad, like Hulk Hogan’s movie career bad, but I’m happy to state that I massively disagree. In fact it’s probably the most entertaining film I’ve seen in several months and that was at least in part due to the fact that, while it was utterly ludicrously ridiculous, it knew it was and it practically gloried in that absurdity and at several points even made fun of action movies, tough guy film stars and Bollywood itself, not least in implanting its own intermission sequence mid-movie, having a villain working under the assumed name Austin Powers and naming the main character’s wife Mrs Sweety Dixit, seemingly an affectionate swipe at 90’s star Madhuri Dixit. You can kind of guess the outlook of the film when you see the two English translations of the title Dhoom, either Blast or ROCK! Glorious. And Dhoom isn’t just an action movie or even just a parody, it takes in buddy comedy, crime, romance and, in its final sequence, even has a martial arts fight on top of a moving truck. It probably won’t win any worldwide awards any time soon but it’s just a lot of fun and, to quote my friend and fellow film blogger Milo Myage (http://hatefilminstantly.wordpress.com/) , “sometimes that’s all a film needs to do”. The only bad point is one that unfortunately seems to affect a lot of Indian DVD releases, poor subtitling, and, as a result, I'm quite literally on the point of starting a Society for the Prevention of Poor Subtitling. Just imagine, all those subtitles trapped there being forced to say the wrong things, poor buggers. Still, I can’t wait to watch the two sequels (apparently better than the original) and the in-production Dhoom 4 and now I wish I could be as cool and menacing as Abhishek simply by taking off my glasses. Usually I just fall over and bang into things. I’m cool.

I behave like a brute but I’m as soft as swan down inside.

Becket
Peter Glenville 1964 UK

Jean Anouilh once said of his play ‘Becket, Or the honour of God’, on which this was based, that he was “writing drama rather than history”. That pretty much describes things here. If you’re looking for historical accuracy then this probably isn’t for you. History was never really my subject but even I know that Becket probably wasn’t King Henry II’s drinking buddy who spent his spare time chasing women and insulting priests. Still, it does feature the holy triumvirate of British theatre Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton and John Gielgud so dramatically it’s pretty amazing. I like drama. It’s also very dialogue driven with an incredible script allowing the three main stars to let loose and ensuring that even in its more frivolous moments, such as Burton hurriedly diving out of a young woman’s bedroom window with one boot on then hopping to his horse or Gielgud’s posh English Louis VII, it’s eminently watchable. I can get quite cantankerous about actors not doing accents so a film really has to be something special for me to be able to ignore it; it’s been four years and I’ve still never forgiven Adrien Brody for playing the famous matador Manolete as if he was from New York. I’ve got to think that this was also one of O’Toole’s greatest performances, his Henry is at once bitter, funny, lecherous, cruel, impatient and vain but still captures our sympathy with his genuine heartbreak over the fact that Becket loves God more than he loves him. And yet the film never judges or blames Henry for his actions, marking him more as a victim of his own unrestricted upbringing. For such a remarkable portrait of non-sexual male love it never seems to get mentioned when the modern fashion for bromance is brought up and I really can’t understand why, I’ve got to admit I’d never even heard of it until recently. It’s a shame, but here’s hoping this makes a difference, however small.


PETER O'TOOLE

Love is a dog from Hell.

Kelly + Victor                        
Kieran Evans 2012 UK

The narrative of boy meets girl and chaos ensues is an overused one and one with a rich, often chequered, history. Nowadays, however, Romeo and Juliet are just as likely to be Juliet and Juliet, their warring families replaced by warring countries, their love destroyed not by duty, revenge or pride but by heroin, domestic abuse and encroaching existential ennui. So it is in Kieran Evans’ Kelly + Victor, in which the elfin yet oddly malevolent Kelly sees the manly but surprisingly hippie-ish Victor in a club. Neither would seem to immediately stand out but the second their eyes meet they’re connected. “I’m coming up”, he tells her. Is it a drug reference or a cocky attempt at seduction? As it turns out both, less boy-meets-girl as boy and girl meet, snort Miaow Miaow, have violent sex and find it isn’t enough. And that’s where the chief theme of the film comes in - yearning. Be it yearning for a better life, an elixir for self-esteem issues or simply a more powerful, all-encompassing orgasm. So it seems to be with all the characters; Victor’s friends are slightly hapless drug dealers who keep their stock at their Nan’s because they can make more at it than on a building site whilst Kelly’s best friend is a dominatrix who will do anything ‘so long as they pay’ (and who provides a small amount of comic and satirical relief with her venomous verbal and physical destruction of a trussed up banker). Even the title - set in the credits as Kelly + Victor, not ‘and’ - has echoes of two hearts beating as one and a need to be connected. Alfred Gilbert’s sculpture Mors Janua Vitae is a constant reference and a timely one with the brilliant two leads repeatedly shown bodies entwined, still but not quite content. And it’s in these quieter, delicate moments that the film really finds its voice, the near silent shots of wind turbines and Kelly’s rapidly enclosed bedsit saying more about the human relationship to nature than the near soap opera scenes involving her abusive ex-boyfriend can. At times these scenes are also almost unbearably frightening with Antonia Campbell-Hughes particularly exceptional in the solo final minutes. It’s just a shame that some of the rest seem no better than padding, conceived so that the film can reach a feature running time. I can’t help but feel that you could shave about 20 minutes and a subplot off without losing much. Still, judging by some of his visual flourishes I’d love to see more from Evans in the future and definitely more fine intensity from Campbell-Hughes and Julian Morris. It’s not an easy watch but, at least momentarily, an affecting one. Broken Britain is a scary place.

An introduction.

Hello.

If you’re reading this this you’ve probably come here with some expectations. If you’re not reading this I don’t know why I’m talking to you. I’ve started this blog for a few reasons but the main one is that I love film…I should clarify that. I watch about 300 films a year and film is a huge part of my life and something that has enriched it no end. Recently I published a list of my top 15 films of 2013 on Twitter and a friend whose opinion I really respect commented that he’d only seen one of my choices and only heard of 3 or 4. Soon after, another friend named Fast Six as the best film of 2013, you may be able to imagine my response. His reply was that I would ‘fucking hate it’ but that he’d really like to read why. I watch films from all manner of genres and all manner of nationalities, from new releases to American independents to Hungarian mini-operas to silent epics. Basically, I watch a wide range and the blog will obviously reflect this. I’m not going to claim for a minute that my opinion is any more important or instructive than anyone else’s, it’s just another voice. So, expect Hollywood, Bollywood and, at times, even Nollywood. Oh, and swearing. Lots and lots of swearing x