The poll closed earlier today and the gizmo that computes the percentages tells me that Jean-Pierre Jeunet is the people’s choice with 22 votes or 33%.
The runners-up are:
Tim Burton: 14 votes (21%)
Chan-wook Park: 13 votes (20%)
Neil Jordan: 11 votes (16%)
Alex de la Igelsia: 2 votes (3%)
F Gary Gray: 2 votes (3%)
Mira Nair: 1 vote (1%)
The Jeunet retrospective will kick-off in the summer.
March was a complete no-hoper with regards to the Personal Faves, Work Sucks and Hellraisers series. Things were a little better on the Operation 101010 front:
Clint Eastwood movies
None yet. The Agitation of the Mind will focus on Eastwood’s career during May, leading up to the icon’s 80th birthday.
Werner Herzog movies
1. Little Dieter Needs to Fly
2. Wings of Hope
Anime
1. My Neighbour Totoro
2. Sky Blue
3. Ponyo
Gialli
1. All the Colours of the Dark
2. Blood Stained Shadow
3. The Black Belly of the Tarantula
Documentaries
1. The Aristocrats
2. An Inconvenient Truth
3. Anvil: The Story of Anvil
4. Iron Maiden: Flight 666
Eurovisions
1. Amarcord
2. Winter Light
3. All About My Mother
Comedies
1. Intolerable Cruelty
2. Kissing Jessica Stein
3. In the Loop
Biopics
1. Sylvia
Impulse buys
1. Rise: Blood Hunter
2. Stoned
Films with numbers in the title
1. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
2. 49th Parallel
Finally, a small announcement:
I started this blog, as I started MovieBuff Redux on Platform 27 before it, as a fun thing to do in the gaps between undertaking proper writing projects (ie. chipping away at my lifetime’s ambition of making it as a novelist). With the exception of a failed attempt in late 2008/early 2009 to drag what was essentially a short story out to novel length, I’ve singularly failed to do any serious work towards this end.
Last month, as an early birthday present, my wife paid for me to attend a creative writing course at the Nottingham Contemporary, hoping it would kick-start my dormant ambitions. Good call on her part. I’ve completed two stories since the course finished mid last week, and I’m now fervently doing research and sketching out some preliminary material for what might (whisper it softly) become a novel. A friend of mine, a talented young artist, has expressed interest in working with me in developing a graphic novel version.
I’m not going to say anything more for fear of jinxing myself, but I need to do a hell of a lot of reading by way of research, then I want to apply myself fully to the project. I can’t maintain the current rate of blogging at the same time, but by the same chalk I don’t want to put The Agitation of the Mind on hold. I’ve invested too much of myself in it and built up a decent readership.
So I’m going to take a fortnight’s break, then re-approach the blog mid-April with the intention of posting at least one (and hopefully two) reviews per week. At this rate, I should still complete Operation 101010 by the end of the year, even if on/off projects like the Personal Faves or Hellraisers might have to take a back seat. (In the interests of new material for Agitation, if anyone would like to submit a guest article, I’d be happy to feature your work; email me: slainte at inbox dot com.)
Likewise, if my proliferation in leaving comments on other sites lapses over the coming months, please don’t think I’m being anti-social. I’ll still be reading your sites in whatever time there may be available when I ought to be working.
Rabu, 31 Maret 2010
Minggu, 28 Maret 2010
Stoned
Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: impulse buys / In category: 2 of 10 / Overall: 23 of 100
Why buy?
It was about £5 ($7.50).
And?
It received decent notices during its (brief) theatrical run.
And?
The soundtrack was guaranteed to be a belter.
The expectation
Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, baby! Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
The actuality
To a degree, it delivers in all three areas.
Let’s take them one at a time:
There’s plenty of nudity and some fairly unsubtle intimations (for a 15-rated movie anyway) of BDSM, sexual violence, statutory rape, group sex and troilism. But for all of this, and despite the throat-tightening beauty of Tuva Novotny and Monet Mazur (both of whom are frequently half-naked if not wholly), there is little in the way of erotic frisson.
There’s plenty of drug use. Fuck’s sake, it’s a biopic of Brian Jones! And if this film and Stephen Davis’s Rolling Stones biog ‘Old Gods Almost Dead’ are anything to go by, the guy had a tendency to the kind of indulgences that make Keith Richards’s hoover-nosed habits look like a life of sobriety by comparison. Yet it never reaches the trippy heights or psychedelic mind-fuckery of Oliver Stone’s ‘The Doors’, Ken Russell’s ‘Tommy’ or Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell’s counter-culture anti-masterpiece ‘Performance’.
Rock ‘n’ roll? Hell, yeah. The Rolling Stones are represented by The Counterfeit Stones (doing a sterling job) and the soundtrack is rounded out with original cuts by Jefferson Airplane, Traffic, The Small Faces and The Bees.
The narrative focuses on the final days of Brian Jones (Leo Gregory), estranged from the Stones and whiling away his time at Cotchford Farm, his sprawling country retreat and formerly the home of children’s author A.A. Milne, as he waits for the inevitable expulsion from the band. (Jones was unable to participate in the Stones’ 1969 tour of America due to his drug convictions; moreover, his attendance at rehearsal/recording sessions had become more often than not characterised by incapacitation and inability to play.) He is attended by his latest girlfriend Anna Wohlin (Novotny) and loyal Stones chauffeur-cum-minder-cum-fixer Tom Keylock (David Morrissey). At Jones’s behest, Keylock engages local builder Frank Thorogood (Paddy Considine) to do some renovation work around Cotchford Farm.
A culture clash ensues between the bullish, defiantly working-class Thorogood and the bohemian, flamboyant and sexually ambiguous Jones, the escalating tension steeped in sexual rivalry as Jones plays off the seductive Wohlin against Thorogood. Jones rubbishes the work of Thorogood and his team, calling for entire walls to be torn down before changing his mind and tasking the workmen with re-erecting them. Pay is promised then withheld, Thorogood taking his grievances to Keylock while Jones blithely shrugs off anything so piffling as monetary concerns.
And yet, somehow, a strange and increasingly unhealthy mutual dependency develops between Jones and Thorogood, events playing out at Cotchford Farm (as Jones heads inexorably towards a date with the swimming pool) in counterpoint to Jones’s recollections of the band’s history, his destructive and abusive relationship with Anita Pallenberg (Mazur) and her eventual cuckolding him with Keith Richards (Ben Wishaw).
There’s dramatic potential aplenty in all of this, but the film has two main problems (and a host of minor ones, but for the sake of brevity I’ll just stick to the biggies). The first is the absolute lack of a sympathetic, likeable or even remotely pleasant character. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some bludgeoning literal philistine who requires everything to be black and white and the good guys and the bad guys to wear hats of the requisite colour. I like to see a bristlingly nasty villain, a morally compromised anti-hero or a vituperatively cynical bastard in the lead role as much as the next man. But I also get the most out of a film or novel if I can identify, root for or moderately give a shit about at least one of the characters. ‘Stoned’ gives us Jones, a woman-beater and possibly a rapist; Thorogood, a human incendiary device with a hair-trigger; Keylock, a leech who exploits his access to the Stones’ inner sanctum in order to shag groupies; Wohlin, an alternately clingy and indifferent bit of set decoration; and Pallenberg, whom the filmmakers portray as complicit in Jones mistreatment of her. Indeed, the depiction of Wohlin and Pallenberg adds a tinge of misogyny to an already seedy and black-hearted aesthetic.
The second is Stephen Wolley’s directorial approach. In the flashback sequences, he achieves an off-kilter aesthetic that evokes (sometimes through explicit plagiarism) ‘The Servant’ and ‘Performance’, both of which deal with unhealthy co-dependent relationships, power games and troilism. However, in the Cotchford Farm scenes, ie. those which define the film’s dynamic and as such could (should?) be expected to engage with the aforementioned psychosexual tropes, he seems ill at ease: the visuals are bland, the pacing uneven, the sexual tension wanting in comparison to the scenes between Jones and Pallenberg. The result is an inconsistency the film is unable to reconcile.
And yet … and yet …
‘Stoned’ is never less than watchable. The performances are searing. Paddy Considine mines a jet-black seam of intensity and coiled violence that matches his unforgettable turn in Shane Meadows’s ‘A Room for Romeo Brass’. Leo Gregory turns up the predatorial charisma, magnetism and sexual androgyny to the max. David Morrissey exudes dodgy-dudeness from every pore. Novotny and Mazur rise above the thanklessness of their roles.
Good buy/bad buy?
Category: impulse buys / In category: 2 of 10 / Overall: 23 of 100
Why buy?It was about £5 ($7.50).
And?
It received decent notices during its (brief) theatrical run.
And?
The soundtrack was guaranteed to be a belter.
The expectation
Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, baby! Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
The actuality
To a degree, it delivers in all three areas.
Let’s take them one at a time:
There’s plenty of nudity and some fairly unsubtle intimations (for a 15-rated movie anyway) of BDSM, sexual violence, statutory rape, group sex and troilism. But for all of this, and despite the throat-tightening beauty of Tuva Novotny and Monet Mazur (both of whom are frequently half-naked if not wholly), there is little in the way of erotic frisson.
There’s plenty of drug use. Fuck’s sake, it’s a biopic of Brian Jones! And if this film and Stephen Davis’s Rolling Stones biog ‘Old Gods Almost Dead’ are anything to go by, the guy had a tendency to the kind of indulgences that make Keith Richards’s hoover-nosed habits look like a life of sobriety by comparison. Yet it never reaches the trippy heights or psychedelic mind-fuckery of Oliver Stone’s ‘The Doors’, Ken Russell’s ‘Tommy’ or Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell’s counter-culture anti-masterpiece ‘Performance’.
Rock ‘n’ roll? Hell, yeah. The Rolling Stones are represented by The Counterfeit Stones (doing a sterling job) and the soundtrack is rounded out with original cuts by Jefferson Airplane, Traffic, The Small Faces and The Bees.
The narrative focuses on the final days of Brian Jones (Leo Gregory), estranged from the Stones and whiling away his time at Cotchford Farm, his sprawling country retreat and formerly the home of children’s author A.A. Milne, as he waits for the inevitable expulsion from the band. (Jones was unable to participate in the Stones’ 1969 tour of America due to his drug convictions; moreover, his attendance at rehearsal/recording sessions had become more often than not characterised by incapacitation and inability to play.) He is attended by his latest girlfriend Anna Wohlin (Novotny) and loyal Stones chauffeur-cum-minder-cum-fixer Tom Keylock (David Morrissey). At Jones’s behest, Keylock engages local builder Frank Thorogood (Paddy Considine) to do some renovation work around Cotchford Farm.
A culture clash ensues between the bullish, defiantly working-class Thorogood and the bohemian, flamboyant and sexually ambiguous Jones, the escalating tension steeped in sexual rivalry as Jones plays off the seductive Wohlin against Thorogood. Jones rubbishes the work of Thorogood and his team, calling for entire walls to be torn down before changing his mind and tasking the workmen with re-erecting them. Pay is promised then withheld, Thorogood taking his grievances to Keylock while Jones blithely shrugs off anything so piffling as monetary concerns.And yet, somehow, a strange and increasingly unhealthy mutual dependency develops between Jones and Thorogood, events playing out at Cotchford Farm (as Jones heads inexorably towards a date with the swimming pool) in counterpoint to Jones’s recollections of the band’s history, his destructive and abusive relationship with Anita Pallenberg (Mazur) and her eventual cuckolding him with Keith Richards (Ben Wishaw).
There’s dramatic potential aplenty in all of this, but the film has two main problems (and a host of minor ones, but for the sake of brevity I’ll just stick to the biggies). The first is the absolute lack of a sympathetic, likeable or even remotely pleasant character. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some bludgeoning literal philistine who requires everything to be black and white and the good guys and the bad guys to wear hats of the requisite colour. I like to see a bristlingly nasty villain, a morally compromised anti-hero or a vituperatively cynical bastard in the lead role as much as the next man. But I also get the most out of a film or novel if I can identify, root for or moderately give a shit about at least one of the characters. ‘Stoned’ gives us Jones, a woman-beater and possibly a rapist; Thorogood, a human incendiary device with a hair-trigger; Keylock, a leech who exploits his access to the Stones’ inner sanctum in order to shag groupies; Wohlin, an alternately clingy and indifferent bit of set decoration; and Pallenberg, whom the filmmakers portray as complicit in Jones mistreatment of her. Indeed, the depiction of Wohlin and Pallenberg adds a tinge of misogyny to an already seedy and black-hearted aesthetic.
The second is Stephen Wolley’s directorial approach. In the flashback sequences, he achieves an off-kilter aesthetic that evokes (sometimes through explicit plagiarism) ‘The Servant’ and ‘Performance’, both of which deal with unhealthy co-dependent relationships, power games and troilism. However, in the Cotchford Farm scenes, ie. those which define the film’s dynamic and as such could (should?) be expected to engage with the aforementioned psychosexual tropes, he seems ill at ease: the visuals are bland, the pacing uneven, the sexual tension wanting in comparison to the scenes between Jones and Pallenberg. The result is an inconsistency the film is unable to reconcile.
And yet … and yet …
‘Stoned’ is never less than watchable. The performances are searing. Paddy Considine mines a jet-black seam of intensity and coiled violence that matches his unforgettable turn in Shane Meadows’s ‘A Room for Romeo Brass’. Leo Gregory turns up the predatorial charisma, magnetism and sexual androgyny to the max. David Morrissey exudes dodgy-dudeness from every pore. Novotny and Mazur rise above the thanklessness of their roles.
Good buy/bad buy?I’m still undecided. There are significant problems and the film, in the final analysis, leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. But performances and soundtrack are excellent. It’s too flawed to merit a recommendation, yet it contains enough that’s commendable to disallow a perfunctory writing off
Fuck it: the Scottish verdict.
Jumat, 26 Maret 2010
49th Parallel
Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 2 of 10 / Overall: 22 of 100
‘49th Parallel’ was the third of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s collaborations, and the last on which they would take separate screen credits. For their next film, ‘One of Our Aircraft is Missing’, they formed their own production company, The Archers, and bequeathed to the history of cinema that idiosyncratic and still inspirational credit “written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger”.
‘49th Parallel’, in short, was the film that sealed the deal. It was epic in its conception and execution, and just a teensy bit controversial as well. And while I chose ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ and ‘I Know Where I’m Going!’ to represent Powell and Pressburger on my personal faves list, ‘49th Parallel’ remains a film that I wholeheartedly love: definitely a standout even among so prestigious a body of work as theirs.
The first eight films P&P made together were all produced during the war years and were all, ostensibly, propaganda films. Each was designed to communicate a specific message and/or celebrate an aspect of Britishness (ie. to reinforce the values under threat from Nazi-ism). Thus, ‘Contraband’ warned against Fifth Columnists, ‘I Know Where I’m Going!’ celebrated national values (a “why we are fighting” movie) and ‘A Canterbury Tale’ focused on Home Front activities.
‘49th Parallel’ was a plea for American involvement. Ian Christie, in his book ‘Arrows of Desire’, recounts the film’s genesis:
“Powell had read an article about how Canada had come into the war on Britain’s side despite internal French-Canadian hostility, and he understood how the forceful presentation of this issue could help win the most important propaganda battle of all: to bring America into the war quickly. With £5,000 from the Ministry of Information [this in 1940, by the way!] Powell and Pressburger embarked for Canada immediately … Back home, Treasury opposition to the idea of financing a film nearly killed the project. France was crumbling and the Luftwaffe threatened, yet ‘some bastard wants £50,000 or £60,000 to go and make a film in Canada’. But … the project proceed[ed] and within six weeks shooting had started in Canada.”
The basic plot, extrapolated by Pressburger from a scenario he and Rodney Ackland cooked up, has a German u-boat bothering shipping off the Canadian coast; when a successful aerial attack destroys it, a small group of survivors led by the borderline fanatical Lieutenant Hirth (Eric Portman) find themselves the sole Nazi invaders of Canada. Setting out from Hudson Bay, they attempt to traverse the country and cross into still-neutral America from where they hope to gain passage back to Germany. En route they encounter a French-Canadian trapper (a bizarrely-cast but enjoying himself Laurence Olivier), a holidaying and potentially draft-dodging Englishman (Leslie Howard) who responds to Hirth’s vituperative accusations of cowardice by staging a one-man resistance campaign, and a soldier gone AWOL (Raymond Massey) who beautifully outwits one of the Germans in a finale, played out above the Niagara Falls, that undercuts its tub-thumping propagandist sentiments with the quirky humour so typical of P&P.
The idea was to film the progress of Hirth and his crew through Canada on location, then wheel in the big-name guest stars (some of them released from military service in order to appear) for some studio work. One of the many achievements of ‘49th Parallel’ is how seamlessly location shooting, studio work and stock footage are cut together. The editor was a guy called David Lean. Dude made a few movies himself.
P&P’s plan was greeted with circumspection in some quarters, their critics suggesting they were whooping it up on a tax-payer-funded lark in Canada while our boys were dying valiantly etc etc etc, but when ‘49th Parallel’ opened the response was almost unanimously positive; it was, again to quote Christie, “greeted as the first considerable fiction film of the war: good propaganda and good entertainment”.
And it’s certainly entertaining. The structure – six vignettes in which Hirth’s crew progress (or devolve, since their numbers are gradually whittled down) through Canada – accounts for a brevity of mise-en-scene that paces the two-hour film faster than most movies of the time. The star names acquit themselves generally well. Olivier chews the scenery like a starving man who’s just been seated in a restaurant and reassured that he doesn’t have to worry about the bill. Howard is lumbered with the most literal bit of proselytising in Pressburger’s otherwise well-crafted script, but his affable charisma sells it. Raymond Massey, rubbery faced and having a whale of a time, steals his last-minute section.
But it’s the actors playing the Germans – and it’s worth pausing to reflect on the quirkiness of a British propaganda film made released in 1941 boasting six Nazi u-boat survivors as its protagonists – who take the honours. Particularly Eric Portman, appearing in the first of three films for P&P. Eric Portman in ‘49th Parallel’ is simply magnificent. A Yorkshireman by birth, you’d swear the man was a Prussian aristocrat. His portrayal of Hirth lays the groundwork for Paul Scofield’s von Waldheim in Frankenheimer’s ‘The Train’, Maximillan von Schell’s Stransky in Peckinpah’s ‘Cross of Iron’ and Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa in Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’.
Daringly, P&P also incorporate the idea of the “good German”, an archetype they would revisit in the character of Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (played by Anton Walbrook) in ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’. I won’t give anything away, but there’s an almost unbearably poignant scene, ending in a moment as chillingly inevitable as the outcome of Landa’s interrogation at the start of ‘Inglourious Basterds’, in which one of the group reveals himself as an honest and decent working man, a man of no political affiliations, a conscript purely because he was drafted, who comes close to embracing a new and gentler life in a foreign place … before the full force of brainwashed, unblinkered, hate-fuelled, jack-booted Nazi doctrine comes crashing down on him. It’s this scene that gives ‘49th Parallel’ its power, that imbues rhetoric with humanitarianism. It’s in this scene that P&P – as they would succeed in doing so many times during those first eight films – take the basest motivation for film-making (propagandism) and turn it into art.
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 2 of 10 / Overall: 22 of 100
‘49th Parallel’ was the third of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s collaborations, and the last on which they would take separate screen credits. For their next film, ‘One of Our Aircraft is Missing’, they formed their own production company, The Archers, and bequeathed to the history of cinema that idiosyncratic and still inspirational credit “written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger”.‘49th Parallel’, in short, was the film that sealed the deal. It was epic in its conception and execution, and just a teensy bit controversial as well. And while I chose ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ and ‘I Know Where I’m Going!’ to represent Powell and Pressburger on my personal faves list, ‘49th Parallel’ remains a film that I wholeheartedly love: definitely a standout even among so prestigious a body of work as theirs.
The first eight films P&P made together were all produced during the war years and were all, ostensibly, propaganda films. Each was designed to communicate a specific message and/or celebrate an aspect of Britishness (ie. to reinforce the values under threat from Nazi-ism). Thus, ‘Contraband’ warned against Fifth Columnists, ‘I Know Where I’m Going!’ celebrated national values (a “why we are fighting” movie) and ‘A Canterbury Tale’ focused on Home Front activities.
‘49th Parallel’ was a plea for American involvement. Ian Christie, in his book ‘Arrows of Desire’, recounts the film’s genesis:
“Powell had read an article about how Canada had come into the war on Britain’s side despite internal French-Canadian hostility, and he understood how the forceful presentation of this issue could help win the most important propaganda battle of all: to bring America into the war quickly. With £5,000 from the Ministry of Information [this in 1940, by the way!] Powell and Pressburger embarked for Canada immediately … Back home, Treasury opposition to the idea of financing a film nearly killed the project. France was crumbling and the Luftwaffe threatened, yet ‘some bastard wants £50,000 or £60,000 to go and make a film in Canada’. But … the project proceed[ed] and within six weeks shooting had started in Canada.”
The basic plot, extrapolated by Pressburger from a scenario he and Rodney Ackland cooked up, has a German u-boat bothering shipping off the Canadian coast; when a successful aerial attack destroys it, a small group of survivors led by the borderline fanatical Lieutenant Hirth (Eric Portman) find themselves the sole Nazi invaders of Canada. Setting out from Hudson Bay, they attempt to traverse the country and cross into still-neutral America from where they hope to gain passage back to Germany. En route they encounter a French-Canadian trapper (a bizarrely-cast but enjoying himself Laurence Olivier), a holidaying and potentially draft-dodging Englishman (Leslie Howard) who responds to Hirth’s vituperative accusations of cowardice by staging a one-man resistance campaign, and a soldier gone AWOL (Raymond Massey) who beautifully outwits one of the Germans in a finale, played out above the Niagara Falls, that undercuts its tub-thumping propagandist sentiments with the quirky humour so typical of P&P.
The idea was to film the progress of Hirth and his crew through Canada on location, then wheel in the big-name guest stars (some of them released from military service in order to appear) for some studio work. One of the many achievements of ‘49th Parallel’ is how seamlessly location shooting, studio work and stock footage are cut together. The editor was a guy called David Lean. Dude made a few movies himself.P&P’s plan was greeted with circumspection in some quarters, their critics suggesting they were whooping it up on a tax-payer-funded lark in Canada while our boys were dying valiantly etc etc etc, but when ‘49th Parallel’ opened the response was almost unanimously positive; it was, again to quote Christie, “greeted as the first considerable fiction film of the war: good propaganda and good entertainment”.
And it’s certainly entertaining. The structure – six vignettes in which Hirth’s crew progress (or devolve, since their numbers are gradually whittled down) through Canada – accounts for a brevity of mise-en-scene that paces the two-hour film faster than most movies of the time. The star names acquit themselves generally well. Olivier chews the scenery like a starving man who’s just been seated in a restaurant and reassured that he doesn’t have to worry about the bill. Howard is lumbered with the most literal bit of proselytising in Pressburger’s otherwise well-crafted script, but his affable charisma sells it. Raymond Massey, rubbery faced and having a whale of a time, steals his last-minute section.
But it’s the actors playing the Germans – and it’s worth pausing to reflect on the quirkiness of a British propaganda film made released in 1941 boasting six Nazi u-boat survivors as its protagonists – who take the honours. Particularly Eric Portman, appearing in the first of three films for P&P. Eric Portman in ‘49th Parallel’ is simply magnificent. A Yorkshireman by birth, you’d swear the man was a Prussian aristocrat. His portrayal of Hirth lays the groundwork for Paul Scofield’s von Waldheim in Frankenheimer’s ‘The Train’, Maximillan von Schell’s Stransky in Peckinpah’s ‘Cross of Iron’ and Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa in Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’.
Daringly, P&P also incorporate the idea of the “good German”, an archetype they would revisit in the character of Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (played by Anton Walbrook) in ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’. I won’t give anything away, but there’s an almost unbearably poignant scene, ending in a moment as chillingly inevitable as the outcome of Landa’s interrogation at the start of ‘Inglourious Basterds’, in which one of the group reveals himself as an honest and decent working man, a man of no political affiliations, a conscript purely because he was drafted, who comes close to embracing a new and gentler life in a foreign place … before the full force of brainwashed, unblinkered, hate-fuelled, jack-booted Nazi doctrine comes crashing down on him. It’s this scene that gives ‘49th Parallel’ its power, that imbues rhetoric with humanitarianism. It’s in this scene that P&P – as they would succeed in doing so many times during those first eight films – take the basest motivation for film-making (propagandism) and turn it into art.Rabu, 24 Maret 2010
The Black Belly of the Tarantula
Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: gialli / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 21 of 100
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Let’s run Paolo Cavara’s 1971 opus against a quick giallo checklist:
A title featuring some combination of a colour, a number or an animal – ‘The Black Belly of the Tarantula’. Two out of three. Check!
A quasi-scientific conceit that gives the film its funky title (in this case, an arachnid-derived nerve serum that permits the killer to … well, I’ll you find that one out for yourselves). Check!
Equally stylish cinematography/compositions and a tendency to architecture porn. Check!
An androgynous killer whose sartorial tastes run to trenchcoat, fedora and gloves. Check!
Bottles of J&B all over the shop. Check!
A roof-top chase. Check!
A scene involving one of those old-fashioned cage-style elevators with a stairwell built around it. Check!
Hyper-stylised death scenes in locations which include a room full of tailor’s dummies and a photographer’s studio. Check!
Eye candy a-go-go. Barbara Bouchet, Claudine Auger, Rosella Falk, Annabella Incontrera, Barbara Bach and Stefania Sandrelli. Check, check, check, giggety-giggety, alriiiiiiight!
An almost arbitrary ending where the killer’s identity and motivation are explained away with a bit of psychological mumbo-jumbo. Check!
Let’s face it, ladies and gentlemen, all ‘The Black Belly of the Tarantula’ lacks is a comically incompetent cop and an appearance by Edwige Fenech. On paper, you can see why the Blue Underground Region 1 DVD release is emblazoned with a quote from Horrorview declaring it “the best giallo ever made”.
A bold claim. There are plenty of contenders for the “best giallo” crown: Mario Bava’s ‘The Girl Who Knew Too Much’ (pretty much the original giallo), ‘A Bay of Blood’ or ‘Five Dolls for an August Moon’; Dario Argento’s ‘Deep Red’, ‘Tenebrae’ or ‘Opera’; any of the Sergio Martino psycho-sexual thrillers starring the aforementioned Ms Fenech; Lucio Fulci’s ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’, ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’ or ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’; Pupi Avati’s ‘The House with the Laughing Windows’ … let’s face it, as a genre (hell, even a sub-genre), the giallo boasts more great examples than not. So: does ‘The Black Belly of the Tarantula’ live up to the hype?
Hmmmmm. Not sure.
Let’s look at the two things missing from that checklist. Ladies first: Edwige Fenech. Ah, well. Can’t be helped. Besides, ‘TBBotT’ does feature – albeit briefly – the knee-weakeningly alluring Barbara Bouchet. We’ll let it slide.
Which leaves us with the absence of that giallo staple, the comically incompetent cop. While our hero Inspector Tellini (Giancarlo Giannini) is an officer of the law, he has more in common with Stanley Baker’s Inspector Corvin in ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ than, say, Inspector Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno) in ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’. Tellini works the case, uncovering a blackmail plot and a highly imaginative cover for drug smuggling as he closes in on the killer, never mind a red herring designed to embarrass him in front of his superiors, an attempt on his life and the exposure to danger of his wife.
Also like Stanley Baker, Giannini is an actor better known for his non-giallo roles than his work within the genre. Probably best known to mainstream audiences as the ill-fated Inspector Pazzi in ‘Hannibal’ and Rene Mathis in ‘Casino Royale’ and ‘Quantum of Solace’, Giannini earned a Best Actor nomination at the 1977 Oscars for his role in Lina Wertmuller’s ‘Seven Beauties’ and has won Cannes, David di Donatello, Silver Ribbon, Flaiano International and any number of other US and European festival awards.
While his performance in ‘TBBotT’ is not quite as awards-worthy as his work elsewhere (although it was only a year later that he won his first David award), Giannini delivers a restrained, understated, brooding characterisation, establishing Tellini as a man who is painfully aware that his job is beginning to define him and is disconcerted by the implications. Having said that, his self-evident conflictions between career and personal life owes as much to the casting of the lovely and effervescent Stefania Sandrelli as Signora Tellini.
And herein lies the essential dichotomy of ‘TBBotT’. For all that it ticks the majority of giallo boxes, the film is atypical in many ways. For all that it delivers some graphic murders with gleefully exploitative relish, its overall aesthetic is low-key and frequently downbeat. For all that the denouement trades on pulpy psychology, the 90 minutes that precede it are a study in slow-burn procedural narrative.
Category: gialli / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 21 of 100
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Let’s run Paolo Cavara’s 1971 opus against a quick giallo checklist:A title featuring some combination of a colour, a number or an animal – ‘The Black Belly of the Tarantula’. Two out of three. Check!
A quasi-scientific conceit that gives the film its funky title (in this case, an arachnid-derived nerve serum that permits the killer to … well, I’ll you find that one out for yourselves). Check!
Equally stylish cinematography/compositions and a tendency to architecture porn. Check!
An androgynous killer whose sartorial tastes run to trenchcoat, fedora and gloves. Check!
Bottles of J&B all over the shop. Check!
A roof-top chase. Check!
A scene involving one of those old-fashioned cage-style elevators with a stairwell built around it. Check!
Hyper-stylised death scenes in locations which include a room full of tailor’s dummies and a photographer’s studio. Check!
Eye candy a-go-go. Barbara Bouchet, Claudine Auger, Rosella Falk, Annabella Incontrera, Barbara Bach and Stefania Sandrelli. Check, check, check, giggety-giggety, alriiiiiiight!An almost arbitrary ending where the killer’s identity and motivation are explained away with a bit of psychological mumbo-jumbo. Check!
Let’s face it, ladies and gentlemen, all ‘The Black Belly of the Tarantula’ lacks is a comically incompetent cop and an appearance by Edwige Fenech. On paper, you can see why the Blue Underground Region 1 DVD release is emblazoned with a quote from Horrorview declaring it “the best giallo ever made”.
A bold claim. There are plenty of contenders for the “best giallo” crown: Mario Bava’s ‘The Girl Who Knew Too Much’ (pretty much the original giallo), ‘A Bay of Blood’ or ‘Five Dolls for an August Moon’; Dario Argento’s ‘Deep Red’, ‘Tenebrae’ or ‘Opera’; any of the Sergio Martino psycho-sexual thrillers starring the aforementioned Ms Fenech; Lucio Fulci’s ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’, ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’ or ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’; Pupi Avati’s ‘The House with the Laughing Windows’ … let’s face it, as a genre (hell, even a sub-genre), the giallo boasts more great examples than not. So: does ‘The Black Belly of the Tarantula’ live up to the hype?
Hmmmmm. Not sure.
Let’s look at the two things missing from that checklist. Ladies first: Edwige Fenech. Ah, well. Can’t be helped. Besides, ‘TBBotT’ does feature – albeit briefly – the knee-weakeningly alluring Barbara Bouchet. We’ll let it slide.
Which leaves us with the absence of that giallo staple, the comically incompetent cop. While our hero Inspector Tellini (Giancarlo Giannini) is an officer of the law, he has more in common with Stanley Baker’s Inspector Corvin in ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ than, say, Inspector Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno) in ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’. Tellini works the case, uncovering a blackmail plot and a highly imaginative cover for drug smuggling as he closes in on the killer, never mind a red herring designed to embarrass him in front of his superiors, an attempt on his life and the exposure to danger of his wife.
Also like Stanley Baker, Giannini is an actor better known for his non-giallo roles than his work within the genre. Probably best known to mainstream audiences as the ill-fated Inspector Pazzi in ‘Hannibal’ and Rene Mathis in ‘Casino Royale’ and ‘Quantum of Solace’, Giannini earned a Best Actor nomination at the 1977 Oscars for his role in Lina Wertmuller’s ‘Seven Beauties’ and has won Cannes, David di Donatello, Silver Ribbon, Flaiano International and any number of other US and European festival awards.
While his performance in ‘TBBotT’ is not quite as awards-worthy as his work elsewhere (although it was only a year later that he won his first David award), Giannini delivers a restrained, understated, brooding characterisation, establishing Tellini as a man who is painfully aware that his job is beginning to define him and is disconcerted by the implications. Having said that, his self-evident conflictions between career and personal life owes as much to the casting of the lovely and effervescent Stefania Sandrelli as Signora Tellini.
And herein lies the essential dichotomy of ‘TBBotT’. For all that it ticks the majority of giallo boxes, the film is atypical in many ways. For all that it delivers some graphic murders with gleefully exploitative relish, its overall aesthetic is low-key and frequently downbeat. For all that the denouement trades on pulpy psychology, the 90 minutes that precede it are a study in slow-burn procedural narrative.For much of its running time, ‘TBBotT’ unfolds in a mannered and rather austere style (short of Tellini demonstrating an affinity for Wagner and real ale, you could almost mistake it for an episode of ‘Inspector Morse’). And yet the sexualised representation of violence, the intermittent lurches into expressionistic camerawork and the omnipresence of giallo touchstones seek to remind the audience what they paid for.
All of which left me confused as to whether I was watching a deliberately-slumming-it art movie or a thinking man’s exploitationer. ‘TBBofT’, entertaining as it is, never fully reconciles these polarities, and although I’d cautiously recommend the film, it falls short of greatness for precisely this reason.
Senin, 22 Maret 2010
Rachel Weisz at the Oliver Awards
Congratulations to Rachel Weisz on receiving the Olivier Award for her performance as Blanche du Bois in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’.
Sabtu, 20 Maret 2010
Terminator Salvation
Public service announcement: in the pub after work last night, a stressful week at the office and a few nights with minimal sleep caught up with me, and I experienced a motivational shut-down that extended to a complete incapacity for social interaction (my apologies to those I was out with) let alone watching and blogging about movies later in the evening. I dragged myself home and slept for 12 hours. Consequently, I’ve only just got round to watching ‘Terminator Salvation’ and, again, what follows is hastily written and the product of first impressions. Normal service (and normal standard of reviews) will be resumed next week.
Okay, I’m wracking my brains how to start this article. Do I get into the semantics of whether ‘Terminator Salvation’ is sequel or prequel, or – given that concept behind the franchise is essentially an ouroborus – just another stepping stone towards (although not quite) completing the circle?
Do I try to get my head around an anomaly …
SPOILER ALERT
… in the Skynet avatar (Helena Bonham Carter)’s conversation with Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) where she/it tells him, “Our best machines failed time and again to complete a mission. You did what Skynet has failed to do for so many years. You killed John Connor.” The events of ‘Terminator Salvation’ play out in 2018 and culminate with John Connor (Christian Bale) meeting Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) for the first time, yet Skynet doesn’t send back the first of the cyborgs, the T-101, until 2029. WTF?!?!
SPOILERS END
Or do I just get down to the bit of business I’d rather not engage with, grit my teeth, spit blood, curse like a trooper and type the five words it fucking pains me to put into a sentence and record for all time on the internet?
Fuck it, let’s get it over with:
McG does an okay job.
Bastard!
For the record: the ‘Charlie’s Angels’ films are still crimes against celluloid and calling yourself McG is as pretentious as it is stupid. But for the most part he crafts a solid and often exciting mainstream movie. Indeed, apart from one ridiculous attempt to craft an iconic moment only to fail miserably and produce the bastard child of ‘E.T.’ and ‘The Great Escape’, McG (I hate to go on about this whole name thing, but I really don’t think the announcements read, “to Mr and Mrs McG, a son, no first name”) succeeds in making this the most un-McG-like McG film yet.
So how does ‘Terminator Salvation’ shape up to the rest of the series? Well, for the first hour or so I was beginning to wonder, with bated breath, if something of a minor miracle was in the process of being pulled off: could this be the second best entry in the cycle?
Turns out not. ‘Terminator Salvation’ gets some things absolutely right, and it’s only fair if we dwell on those things for a little while, but it drops the ball in a few places (and does so with increased regularity as it draws towards its curiously anaemic ending) and the end result is a film that doesn’t quite hang together.
Here’s what it does well. First and foremost, it gives us a John Connor who isn’t a whiny little brat or a bland twenty-something with all the leadership qualities of a particularly nervous dormouse. It gives us, instead, Christian freakin’ Bale. If there’s anyone you can imagine taking the fight to the machines and tearing their fucking lights down (sorry, couldn’t resist), it’s Christian freakin’ Bale. Secondly, it backs up Bale’s screen presence with good performances from Sam Worthington (there are no real surprises in his character arc, but the actor manages to invest Marcus with a palpable sense of enigma) and Anton Yelchin, reverse engineering Michael Biehn’s performance to give us a younger and still vulnerable, but swiftly toughening up, Kyle Reese. Thirdly, the effects piss all over ‘Rise of the Machines’, the Hunter-Killers glimpsed briefly in the earlier films tearing through the fabric of this one. Fourthly, the Mc-to-the-G keeps the aesthetic desaturated, grim and gritty; ‘Salvation’ is a colourless vision of the future shot through with the shaky visceral immediacy of a war movie, most of its battles pitched at the level of street to street combat.
Where it drops the ball is (a) the backgrounding of John Connor for much of the first half (the film’s absolute best scene – a chase featuring a Hunter-Killer, some driverless motorcycles and a wrecking truck – is a showcase for Marcus Wright and Kyle Reese); (b) the wasted opportunity to follow Connor’s development from footsoldier to leader (a title crawl suggests that some resistance fighters already see him as a prophet, others as a fraud, but the script neither establishes why nor explores the dialectic); (c) a handful of anomalies, mainly regarding timeframes (obvious example: Kate, now Connor’s wife, though played by a different actress – Bryce Dallas Howard – seems no older in 2018 than she was in 2003’s contemporarily set ‘Rise of the Machines’); and (d) the lack of a clearly defined antagonist. With Marcus Wright’s agenda kept ambiguous, it is left to actual hunks machinery rather than anthropomorphosized cyborgs to provide the actual threat to the resistance fighters. There’s nothing as memorable as the T-101, the T-1000 or the T-X and ‘Salvation’ suffers as a result.
And then there’s the ending. I haven’t quite figured out how I feel about the ending yet. I have a strong suspicion that something narratively redundant and thematically pointless has been passed off as a moment of great emotional import. I might need to watch the film again. And that’s something I never thought I’d say about a McG flick.
Okay, I’m wracking my brains how to start this article. Do I get into the semantics of whether ‘Terminator Salvation’ is sequel or prequel, or – given that concept behind the franchise is essentially an ouroborus – just another stepping stone towards (although not quite) completing the circle?Do I try to get my head around an anomaly …
SPOILER ALERT
… in the Skynet avatar (Helena Bonham Carter)’s conversation with Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) where she/it tells him, “Our best machines failed time and again to complete a mission. You did what Skynet has failed to do for so many years. You killed John Connor.” The events of ‘Terminator Salvation’ play out in 2018 and culminate with John Connor (Christian Bale) meeting Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) for the first time, yet Skynet doesn’t send back the first of the cyborgs, the T-101, until 2029. WTF?!?!
SPOILERS END
Or do I just get down to the bit of business I’d rather not engage with, grit my teeth, spit blood, curse like a trooper and type the five words it fucking pains me to put into a sentence and record for all time on the internet?
Fuck it, let’s get it over with:
McG does an okay job.
Bastard!
For the record: the ‘Charlie’s Angels’ films are still crimes against celluloid and calling yourself McG is as pretentious as it is stupid. But for the most part he crafts a solid and often exciting mainstream movie. Indeed, apart from one ridiculous attempt to craft an iconic moment only to fail miserably and produce the bastard child of ‘E.T.’ and ‘The Great Escape’, McG (I hate to go on about this whole name thing, but I really don’t think the announcements read, “to Mr and Mrs McG, a son, no first name”) succeeds in making this the most un-McG-like McG film yet.
So how does ‘Terminator Salvation’ shape up to the rest of the series? Well, for the first hour or so I was beginning to wonder, with bated breath, if something of a minor miracle was in the process of being pulled off: could this be the second best entry in the cycle?Turns out not. ‘Terminator Salvation’ gets some things absolutely right, and it’s only fair if we dwell on those things for a little while, but it drops the ball in a few places (and does so with increased regularity as it draws towards its curiously anaemic ending) and the end result is a film that doesn’t quite hang together.
Here’s what it does well. First and foremost, it gives us a John Connor who isn’t a whiny little brat or a bland twenty-something with all the leadership qualities of a particularly nervous dormouse. It gives us, instead, Christian freakin’ Bale. If there’s anyone you can imagine taking the fight to the machines and tearing their fucking lights down (sorry, couldn’t resist), it’s Christian freakin’ Bale. Secondly, it backs up Bale’s screen presence with good performances from Sam Worthington (there are no real surprises in his character arc, but the actor manages to invest Marcus with a palpable sense of enigma) and Anton Yelchin, reverse engineering Michael Biehn’s performance to give us a younger and still vulnerable, but swiftly toughening up, Kyle Reese. Thirdly, the effects piss all over ‘Rise of the Machines’, the Hunter-Killers glimpsed briefly in the earlier films tearing through the fabric of this one. Fourthly, the Mc-to-the-G keeps the aesthetic desaturated, grim and gritty; ‘Salvation’ is a colourless vision of the future shot through with the shaky visceral immediacy of a war movie, most of its battles pitched at the level of street to street combat.
Where it drops the ball is (a) the backgrounding of John Connor for much of the first half (the film’s absolute best scene – a chase featuring a Hunter-Killer, some driverless motorcycles and a wrecking truck – is a showcase for Marcus Wright and Kyle Reese); (b) the wasted opportunity to follow Connor’s development from footsoldier to leader (a title crawl suggests that some resistance fighters already see him as a prophet, others as a fraud, but the script neither establishes why nor explores the dialectic); (c) a handful of anomalies, mainly regarding timeframes (obvious example: Kate, now Connor’s wife, though played by a different actress – Bryce Dallas Howard – seems no older in 2018 than she was in 2003’s contemporarily set ‘Rise of the Machines’); and (d) the lack of a clearly defined antagonist. With Marcus Wright’s agenda kept ambiguous, it is left to actual hunks machinery rather than anthropomorphosized cyborgs to provide the actual threat to the resistance fighters. There’s nothing as memorable as the T-101, the T-1000 or the T-X and ‘Salvation’ suffers as a result.And then there’s the ending. I haven’t quite figured out how I feel about the ending yet. I have a strong suspicion that something narratively redundant and thematically pointless has been passed off as a moment of great emotional import. I might need to watch the film again. And that’s something I never thought I’d say about a McG flick.
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