disappointingyet

[disappointingyet]

Design For Living

Director Ernst Lubitsch Stars Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins, Fredric March USA 1933 Language English, French 1hr 33mins Black & white

Dear boy, you can’t possibly be telling me Gary Cooper is in a Noel Coward picture

Ninotchka

Director Ernst Lubitsch Stars Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas USA 1939 Language English, a tiny bit of Russian and French 1hr 50mins Black & white

Garbo laughs! Stalin doesn’t!

Many of my favourite films are Hollywood comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s. Ernst Lubitsch is regarded by critics as one the best directors of the era* and he specialised in comedies but I haven’t seen many of his films and those I had seen had watched hadn’t sold me on his genius. In particular, The Shop Around The Corner, which I saw on the big screen, left me underwhelmed. But it seemed like time to give him another go…

The attention-grabbing thing about Design For Living is that it is a Noel Coward adaptation starring Gary Cooper. Slow-talking cowboy Gary Cooper? Yeah, that one. Gary Cooper as a Cubist painter living in a Parisian garret and involved in unconventional sexual arrangements? Uh-huh. In a comedy? Yep. 

It’s apparently a very loose Coward adaptation (I’ve never seen the play) but his spirit remains, even if all the characters are now American. George (Cooper) and his playwright chum Tom (Fredric March) meet Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), who does art for an ad agency – ie, unlike them, she has a real income – on a train. Soon, and unknown to George and Tom, she’s carrying on with both men.

Ah, yes, something important to say: this is what is known as a pre-Code movie – one made before Hollywood’s system of self-censorship (which lasted until the 1960s) kicked in. 

Anyway, the guys rumble what’s going on and tell Gilda she has to make a decision: But instead of choosing one of them, she moves in to sort them out on the condition that there will be no sex… What are the odds that that will stick? 

If an Americanised Noel Coward  play sounds like a classic Hollywood monstrosity, it turns out that this film is pretty funny and still a bit daring. And Cooper could do comedy: he’s opposite Barbara Stanwyck in Ball Of Fire, a Howard Hawks screwball classic from 1940 in which he plays a linguistics professor researching slang. My assumption is that Cary Grant must have been first choice for that film but Cooper is good, and he and March and Hopkins are an appealing trio (or maybe throuple?) in Design For Living.

Ninotchka is much more famous movie and one I’m 95% sure** I saw as a kid. The tagline was ‘Garbo laughs!’ – this was a big deal. I feel that Greta Garbo is somewhere between those old-time movie stars who are almost completely forgotten – Sonja Henie, for instance – and those who have endured more clearly, say Marlene Dietrich. Even if you’ve never seen a Dietrich movie – and let’s be honest, most people alive have not seen a Dietrich movie – there's a reasonable chance you have some sense of what she looked and sounded like, if only from parodies and drag queens. Garbo, on the other hand, seems like just a name now. 

Considering she’s playing the title character, Garbo takes a while to turn up in Ninotchka. We’re in Paris again and a trio of Soviet officials are in town to sell some jewels. News of this mission reaches the Russian Grand Duchess (Ina Claire) who was the former (or, in her view, still rightful) owner of the jewels and she sends her boyfriend Leon (Melvyn Douglas), a French count, to try to retrieve the stuff or at least put a spoke in the Soviet plans. Pretty soon, he has the three officials thoroughly seduced by Western decadence. So Moscow sends a much more hardline comrade to sort things out… and that’s of course Ninotchka.

The broad strokes of this kind of hardened yet naive Bolshevik were familiar until at least the 1980s: she’s baffled by fun, she asks the Count’s butler why he subjects himself to the indignity of being a servant and the old man turns out to be far more conservative than the count etc.

 But the film is smarter than that (and Garbo was a huge star known for dramatic roles.) So we get nuance – for instance, we learn that Ninotchka had been a frontline soldier in the wars that followed the revolution, something not possible in the US until this century as far as I can tell. I don’t think the film is disapproving of this. 

The film’s take on the USSR is fascinating. It was claimed by many Western Communists and other apologists for Stalin (so-called fellow travellers) that it was impossible to know how oppressive the regime had become until the death of Stalin (1953) or even the invasion of Hungary (1956) – but this mainstream Hollywood comedy from 1939 has a clear idea. 

‘The latest mass trials were a great success,’ reports Ninotchka. ‘There are going to be fewer but better Russians.’ That’s a pretty brutal joke even now, but kind of astonishing at the time. The working assumption is that anyone who has messed up and has to return to the USSR will be shot. The scene of a Moscow parade shows Stalin’s cult of personality in full effect. The Russians are in Paris as a part of a programme to flog off Tsarist-era treasures to feed a starving people. 

Ah, but this was anti-Communist propaganda, so they would have said all those things, wouldn’t they? But American anti-Communist propaganda, by and large, didn’t work like this. It wanted to show that the USSR was powerful, dangerous, its agents insidious, not (for instance) easy to derail with champagne and cigarette girls. Anti-Communists were constantly warning everyone to be on their guard (and, during the Cold War, waved through absurd defence spending). This film, instead, is suggesting that people like fun and anyone in a position to compare the two will decide that the decadent West is simply a better time than Marxist-Leninism.

There are three writers credited with the screenplay (although apparently Lubitsch also did some of the work): Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch. Reisch I know nothing about, but Brackett and Wilder wrote Ball Of Fire (mentioned earlier) and Sunset Boulevard together, among many other films, before Wilder went on to an even better partnership with IAL Diamond. Pretty much any film Wilder worked on will have some great lines, and this is no exception. (‘A Russian! I love Russians! Comrade, I've been fascinated by your five-year plan for the last fifteen years.’)

Ninotchka is a terrific movie – silly when it needs to be but often extremely smart, funny but also quite tough in its way. It does so many interesting things, like holding off on bringing on its star, and the politics are super-interesting. So, yes, I'm starting to understand why Lubitsch mattered.

*One time and one time only I was invited to the Christmas party of Sight And Sound, the most serious-minded non-academic film magazine there is. My main memory of the evening is lurking uselessly on the edge of an intense conversation about Lubitsch, knowing I had nothing to add. 

**The tiny bit of doubt is because the story was reworked as a Fred Astaire-Cyd Charisse musical called Silk Stockings. I may well have seen that too, but my memory is of a black & white film, not a musical – so Ninotchka. 

#ernst lubitsch #billy wilder #greta garbo #ninotchka

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Buffalo 66

Director Vincent Gallo Stars Vincent Gallo, Christina Ricci, Anjelica Huston, Ben Gazzara, Kevin Corrigan USA 1998 Language English 1hr 50mins Colour

Problematic… yet brilliant

Very brief opening note: Please don’t take this review as signalling approval of anything Vincent Gallo has said or done off-screen. I used to have opinions on to what extent Gallo believed the stuff he says*, but at this point I can’t be bothered.

Very brief opening note 2: In rough outline, this is a film about a creepy guy in his thirties who abducts a young woman in her late teens and is consistently unpleasant to her and yet over the afternoon and night during which the action takes place, she comes to feel strong affection for him. If that sounds unacceptable to you, I understand.

But, but… I think this is a great movie, weird and uncomfortable and everything else, but funny and beautiful and surprising. I was wondering how it would feel watching in 2024 as opposed to when I first saw it, in 1998, but it turns out my take on the work itself hasn’t shifted.

A quick plot intro: Billy Brown (Gallo) is being released from prison. While inside, he’s made an elaborate attempt to hide where he's been from his parents. Now he’s out, he’s going round for lunch - but his mother won’t accept the excuse he’s trying on behalf of his non-existent wife. So he grabs the nearest woman, forces her to take him to her car and tells her she’s coming to lunch with his parents. 

A couple of things worth saying at this point. One is that although Billy is undoubtedly scary at this point, he’s also very obviously pathetic. The other is that to me that Layla (Christina Ricci) decides the best way to cope with this situation is to treat it all as a kind of adventure and by the time we get to the movie’s first showpiece – the meal with Billy’s appalling parents (Anjelica Huston and Ben Gazzara) – she’s going beyond what he’s told her to do and is enjoying improvising.

(It’s also true, though, that we learn absolutely nothing about Layla’s life.)

So why did I argue in a national newspaper that this was the sixth best film of the 1990s? Let’s start with Billy’s somewhat unhinged, repetitive outpourings aimed at Layla or his sidekick Goon (Kevin Corrigan), who is trying to rename himself Rocky. Sometimes these are unconvincing self-justifications, sometimes they are unworkable instructions, like this to Layla in a photobooth: 

‘We're taking pictures like we're a couple. Like we like each other. Like we're husband and wife, and we span time together. We span time together as a couple. Because we're a loving couple, spanning time. These photos are us, in love, spanning time.'

Writing the words doesn't capture Billy's strange whiny insistence, his distinctive tone. These spiels should be hugely tiresome, but I find them mostly extremely funny and always revealing.

Then there are the looks of the film. There’s carefully rationed use of a screen covered in a dozen or so different-sized square images, and of squares that expand, which make me think of Peter Greenaway or the kind of film made for an art gallery rather than a commercial release. 

When it’s not doing that, I feel Buffalo 66 has more in common with magazine photography of the time than other films of 1998. The wintery streets of Buffalo are shown in desaturated greyish tones, while the interiors often have deep reds. Gallo and Ricci are filmed with the loving care of classic Hollywood beauties, say Clark Gable and Ava Gardner, but Corrigan is shot in the manner of… I’m thinking Juergen Teller, maybe?… often all that’s in shot is his bare paunch, his head somewhere off camera. 

I remember there being a story about some super rare film stock and processing technique used, but I don’t know whether that was some more Gallo bullshit. Either way, it’s a film that’s immensely beautiful when it wants to be. The cinematographer is Lance Acord, who a couple of years later shot Lost In Translation, and there’s something in common there.

The cast is maybe a couple of notches up from what you’d expect from the directorial debut of a rentagob indie actor. You’ve Anjelica Huston, you’ve got John Cassavetes’ bestie Ben Gazzara, Rosanna Arquette.. (oh, and Mickey Rourke – sure, getting him is no coup, but getting a good one-scene performance out of him this late in the game, as Gallo does, that’s something.)

Ricci had been a big child star and was busy establishing herself in grown-up movies – at this point there was still a novelty factor in seeing her in this context. 

Buffalo 66 feels a couple of steps to the left of its contemporaries. It would be very wrong to say it has nothing in common with US Indies of the time, not matter how much Gallo would want to claim that. But there is something different, zagging when they’d zig, for instance the prog rock-drenched soundtrack. Don’t get me wrong: give me Yo La Tengo on a Hal Hartley or Kelly Reichardt soundtrack over Yes on a Gallo one any day, but he was certainly making an unusual choice for the late 1990s. 

There’s such an odd mix of elements here: it’s a film about a motormouth that has moments of gentle elegance, there’s ugliness and beauty, its unnerving and funny and yes, even sweet at times – but to me at least, it all slots together wonderfully. 

In conclusion: Vincent Gallo – twat. Buffalo 66 – a film understandably used a signifier for the rubbishness of clueless film bro ex (who boasts he has it on DVD) in Wet Leg’s 2022 song Wet Dreams. But also: Buffalo 66 – still kinda awesome. 

*Briefly (OK, not so briefly): in 1998 I was working at Neon, a film magazine in London. Gallo was a Neon favourite because he gave endlessly quotable interviews, a rare commodity. Then he makes Buffalo 66 and declares – very Gallo this – that he’ll only do interviews for magazines that put him on the cover. Obviously is not famous enough to actually shift copies of a magazine. Neon decides to put Vinny on the cover nonetheless and somehow convinces the publisher. I had no decision-making power but would have been among the group pushing for a Buffalo 66 cover (for reference: the issue before had Godzilla on the cover, the one after was George Clooney for Out Of Sight). I think we sponsored the UK premiere of the film at the Ritzy in Brixton. I assume Gallo was there? Have zero memory if so, certainly never spoke to him.

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Desert Blue

Director Morgan J Freeman Stars Brendan Sexton III, Kate Hudson, Christina Ricci, Ethan Suplee, Casey Affleck USA 1998 Language English 1hr 30mins Colour

Kids kill time in the middle of nowhere, fame looms for a couple of them

[Minor spoilers for this and a Wes Anderson movie]

American Graffiti … Diner …  Dazed And Confused … Desert Blue? … Short Term 12. I mean, no, that’s not actually a sequence, and yet it sort of could have been. Unlike Graffiti, Diner and D&C, this is not a much-loved classic that was also the calling card for a generation of actors. Nor is it Short Term 12, a film that’s maybe more admired than endlessly rewatched but certainly did an astonishing job of talent-spotting. But this low-key comedy-drama about teens in tiny desert town – made for $2 million – does have an impressive collection of young folk on the rise in 1998. 

Alongside the kids, you’ve got recognisable adults in John Heard, Michael Ironside (actually quite bad here) and Daniel van Bargen, whose name you probably don’t know but was the angry cop or army guy in so many things you’ve seen.

And fitting between the two groups in age is Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who plays an FBI agent here but seems to be reaching her peak in her fifties, getting an Oscar nomination in 2021, appearing in the new Color Purple last year – when she was also great in Justified: City Primeval – and starring in Origin, which as out in cinemas as I write this.  (Oh, yeah, and Sara Gilbert's in this too.)

While I was watching Desert Blue again, I had a nagging memory of something I had seen not long ago. A bunch of young people quarantined in tiny place in the desert that only survives because of a tourist attraction… ah! It's Asteroid City, isn't it? Parts of the set-up are quite similar, although everything else isn’t. 

In Desert Blue, the kids are largely locals: Blue (Brendan Sexton III), who is stubbornly working on his late father’s bizarre project of a water park in the arid landscape, Ely (Christina Ricci), who likes blowing stuff up, Kepler (Casey Affleck), who races quad bikes (they all ride them though), Cale (Ethan Suplee), who wants to be a sheriff even though all his mates are the ones the authorities harass, and Haley (Isidra Vega), who works in the town’s only shop. 

Then, one day, into town comes Skye (Kate Hudson), who is apparently a TV star but none of them has heard of her because cable hasn’t reached there yet. She’s reluctantly on a tour of roadside attractions with her dad (John Heard), who is a cultural studies academic.Skye just wants to get out of this dusty nowhere as quickly as possible, but – of course – events will conspire to keep her and her dad there long enough to interact with the locals. 

In my memory, this was a film in which very little happened, in a pleasurable way. Rewatching it, it turns out to be a movie in which it feels like nothing is happening even though there are at least five events that would be extremely dramatic if they took place in your life and which would be played up in most fiction. Here, though, because they seem to have minimal consequences, it’s like they barely happened. And that’s why the lingering memory is kids buzzing around on their quad bikes or sitting around a fire drinking, rather than (eg) committing a felony. 

Kate Hudson is well-cast as the Hollywood princess descending on this grubby place. Christina Ricci is prime 1998 Christina Ricci – her mates all have pretty nondescript looks (apart from Affleck’s occasional headgear) but she’s of course goth. And exploding shit. Sexton is kind of… unobjectionable… but not very interesting as the heart of the story. Casey Affleck and Michael Ironside are surprisingly rubbish. 

So who were these people at this point in history? Let me reiterate Kate Hudson is the female lead in this film, that she plays the character whose appearance is pivotal. And then tell you that this is her first credited role in a movie (she’s apparently a carol singer in Home Alone.) Maybe she’d done some TV? Two episodes of EZ Streets, whatever that was, and one of Party Of Five. On the other hand, of course, her mother and step-father were huge movie stars. Her break-through role in Almost Famous was two years away. 

Ricci, on the other hand, was in some ways at the peak of her career, a veteran at the age of 18. She’d got off to a big start in 1990 Mermaids with Cher and Winona Ryder and then memorably played Wednesday Addams (still, it seems, a star-making role these days)   in The Addams Family and Addams Family Values. Through the 1990s she balanced kids movies (Casper) with not-kids stuff (Bastard Out Of Carolina) until ’97 and Ang Lee’s massively acclaimed The Ice Storm. With the Wednesday Addams attitude intact but now in her late teens when it played differently, she became the embodiment of stroppy youth. 

She was in six movies with 1998 release dates, not including the voice she did for the very enjoyable Small Soldiers. Desert Blue is probably the fifth most high-profile of these – I know nothing about I Woke Up Early The Day I Died, in which she is credited just as ‘Teenage Hooker’. She’s the lead in The Opposite Of Sex, which got some buzz – I hated it. She’s got a small but notable role in Terry Gilliam’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. I can’t remember her particularly in John Waters’ Pecker, but I liked the movie and she was an obvious fit for a Waters film. And she’s in Buffalo ’66, more thoughts on which you can find here. 

And then… well, a long working career but (to use a semi-obsolete way of looking at these things) at no later point would you have put her on the cover of a magazine. A lot  of that, I think, is to do with a persona that Hollywood endorses in teenage girls but judges unappealing in adult women. Rather than working out what next to do with Ricci, they went looking for newer versions of the same thing. Indeed, Thora Birch – two years younger and Ricci’s co-star in Now And Then – seemed to have slotted into being the ‘next Christina Ricci’ as early as 1999! And then gone on to have a similar career – she’s in a bunch of stuff, but mostly I haven’t even heard of it. (Although she was in The Last Black Man In San Francisco, but I guess I didn’t recognise her in that.)

Finally, Casey Affleck – like Hudson, he was more famous for who was related to than for his own work, especially as the film he was in right before Desert Blue was Good Will Hunting. (To non-cinema bores, he probably still is essentially ‘Ben’s brother’ to this day.) Worth pointing out, maybe, that he was the first of the Affleck-Damon clique to work with Gus Van Sant (in To Die For). His rise was more of a slow-burn, though. 

So does Desert Blue deserve to be better remembered? Not necessarily, but it’s a film I remain reasonably fond of – it’s a film about people hanging out, and it lets you hang out with them. It’s very low key, very of its moment and if you like a 1990s teen indie movie where even when stuff blows up it’s no big deal, then this could be for you. 

#1990s indie movies #1998 movies #desert blue

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Bell Book And Candle

Director Richard Quine Stars James Stewart, Kim Novak, Elsa Lanchester, Jack Lemmon, plus the apparently numerous cats who played Pyewacket USA 1958 Language English 1hr 46mins Colour 

Witchy 1950s rom-com

In 1958, James Stewart and Kim Novak starred in Vertigo, which for at couple of decades now has been considered by critics as one of the best five or so movies ever made. In 1958, Stewart and Novak also made Bell Book And Candle, which is not widely thought of one of the greatest works of cinema, but is a film I’ve long been very fond of. 

Stewart plays Shep Henderson, a publisher who’s recently moved into a Greenwich Village apartment. On the ground floor, there’s a shop selling tribal masks and statues from around the world (a bit dubious by 2024 standards?) run by a young woman called Gillian Holroyd (Novak). Gillian lives in the building, along with her brother Nicky (Jack Lemmon), aunt Queenie (Elsa Lanchester) and Siamese cat Pyewacket.  

Gillian decides she rather likes Shep and thus will get Shep. Gillian is, you see, a witch – all the Holroyds have magical powers, in fact, although only hers are powerful enough to be of any practical use. So we’re off on one of those stories where a character wrestles with the idea of whether using magic to kickstart a relationship is unfair. 

There’s a pretty valid reading of ‘magic’ = queerness in this film. It’s adapted from a play by John Van Druten, who was gay, and full of lines like, ‘I have always lived for and by the special. Not the ordinary. Why, I've never even thought of marriage’ and ‘Auntie, don't you ever wish that you weren't – what we are?’ The Holroyds hang out a basement club called The Zodiac with like-minded folk – early on, Shep and his fiancee (Janice Rule) turn up, very much sight-seeing straights. 

But equally, it’s by no means obligatory to watch the film through that lens. Gil, Nicky and Queenie could just be classic Greenwich Village bohemians with rare gifts. 

My impression has long been that Hollywood never quite figured out what do with Kim Novak. She’s a complicated version of a Hitchcock blonde in Vertigo, but that was her only film with him. Likewise, she made one movie for Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Robert Aldrich. (She made three with Richard Quine, director of this one, but that ended badly too and he's not thought of as belonging in the company of the chaps I just listed.)

She played an all-American beauty queen, a gangster’s moll, an unhinged movie star, a sex worker at least twice, Moll Flanders… Seems like execs took a look at her body and decided she was right for raunchy roles and I don't think that was the correct conclusion. Bell Book And Candle seems a better fit: she’s cool, hip, a bit weary, a bit schemey, Very much the kind of woman Don Draper would have been involved with, if you’ll allow me a cross-fictional thought.

Novak was only 25 when BB&C was made but the character feels like she’s in her early thirties, maybe? James Stewart turned 50 during shooting and not a young 50, either. Supposedly, after watching Bell Book And Candle he made the wise decision that he wasn’t going to play a romantic lead in movies with actresses half his age anymore. (Which effectively, at that point, meant not playing the romantic lead in Hollywood movies.) Cary Grant, who was four years older, persisted for another five years and then retired completely soon after. I’m glad Grant made Charade and I’m glad Stewart stars in Bell Book And Candle but think he was wise to acknowledge at this point it was looking a bit off.

So why do I like this film so much? A lot of it, I think, comes from the look – it’s a very classy Hollywood imagining of what Beatniks might be like. To me, Gil is one of the best-dressed characters in the history of film (her hair, short slivery blonde with a hint of lavender is cool too, only the greasepaint eyebrows are an issue.) 

The colours are terrific – lovely work by the veteran cinematographer James Wong Howe. There’s a nice bit of location shooting (without the characters) in Manhattan that makes the sturdy studio sets feel like they could be the real thing and it really might be snowing.

BB&C is a romantic comedy, but like quite a lot of romcoms, it’s light on big laughs. Most of the funnier scenes involve Ernie Kovacs as a writer of non-fiction books about the supernatural who believes he knows what’s going on at the Zodiac Club. Rather, the film relies on charm and atmosphere. And, fortunately, it has more than enough of both.

#bell book and candle #kim novak

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Trust

Director Hal Hartley Stars Adrienne Shelly, Martin Donovan, Edie Falco, Merritt Nelson, John McKay UK/USA 1990 Language English 1hr 47mins Colour

Revisiting my favourite film of 1991

If you were roughly my age and aesthetic ideology in the 1980s, one of the most notorious scenes in the movies was Ally Sheedy getting a makeover from Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club. The general view was  (and the internet suggests still is) that not only was it no business of Ringwald’s character to de-gothify Sheedy, but also that Sheedy more conventional = less attractive. 

More fondly remembered is the scene in The Big Sleep where Marlowe (Bogart) has an hour or so to kill during a stakeout and the manager of the bookshop he’s in (Dorothy Malone) indicates she’s more than willing to help him pass the time. He agrees, but then asks her if she’s OK taking off her glasses: ‘Little things like that make…’ She does, and loosens her hair, and he responds with a gratified, ‘Hello!’ (It’s far from the only movie in which a woman is perceived as becoming more tempting minus the specs, but it’s at least one of the best).

Trust could be seen as containing something of a riposte to both of these scenarios. Maria  (Adrienne Shelly) starts the film with a perm, mall-girl make-up and bright clothes. It’s her choice to let her hair go straight and wear in a messy ponytail, ditch the make-up and stick with the plain shirt-dress she’s nicked out of a closet. It is, admittedly, Matthew (Martin Donovan) who asks why she doesn’t use the glasses she obviously needs. Because they make her look like a librarian. ‘I like librarians,’ he says, and she wears the glasses through most of the rest of the film.

In the prevailing progressive ideology of the 2020s, devaluing the aesthetics of mall girls is just as bad as oppressing goths. But as the 1980s slowly gave way to the 1990s, the mostly self-driven makeunder Maria does in Trust seemed like a good thing. And, yes, within the vibe of the film and that of the people likely to be watching it, it was understood that Maria/Shelly looked better de-permed. And the aesthetics of Hal Hartley movies meant a lot to me in the early 1990s.

(Side note: I saw this film while I was at university, and knew a lot of women who had turned up in their first year with big curls – which had long been banished by their third years but embarrassingly lingered on the photoboards in the departments where they were studying.)

Trust is the second feature film Hartley made, and the first one I saw, having read about it in The Face magazine. My expectations were very high and fully fulfilled – I became a bit obsessed by it, or at least as far as I ever became obsessed by anything (I’m not an obsessive person). 

I’ve written about Hartley’s debut The Unbelievable Truth here. Trust is in some ways very similar. Both are filmed on Hartley’s home patch of Lindenhurst, Long Island (if you’re tracking these things, it’s about 18 miles further out from Brooklyn that Valley Stream, where Steve Buscemi’s Trees Lounge takes place.) Both star Adrienne Shelly paired with a guy who is a bit older* and is somewhat notorious locally. In both films, Gary Sauer plays the doofus Shelly’s character was going out with before she wised up, and much of the rest of the supporting cast is the same.

And yet, rewatching them after all this time, these films felt more different than I had remembered. Trust is (purposefully) less of a comedy, to some extent less stylised (although still very stylised) and maybe more… I both want to say and am reluctant to say: sincere? Heartfelt? 

Maria and Matthew are both floundering when they meet: she’s being kicked out of school, she’s pregnant, she’s having trouble with her parents. Matthew keeps losing jobs because he’s got too many principles/hang-ups but also is violent, and he’s still living with his father (John McKay), who bullies him (which he then takes out on the random people he punches.) It’s not quite an instant connection, but a fairly quick one. Matthew’s room is littered with piles of hardback books, and Maria dives deep into a self-improvement-through-learning kick.

Martin Donovan became a fixture of Hartley’s films – he’s imposing, he’s got good hair, a good voice, looks right stomping around in an overcoat, but there’s enough vulnerability there. But it’s Shelly as Maria who is the heart of this film – it’s her determination, ultimate fearlessness in difficult circumstances that makes this odd melodramatic story hold together. She’s so good in this movie. 

McKay as Matthew’s dad and Merritt Nelson as Maria’s mom are well cast, and Edie Falco is a real treat as Maria’s recently divorced sister.

If you like films with an austere, blue/grey look – and I very much do – this a kind of beautiful, perfectly composed picture. It’s easy to think of low budget films being inherently rough-and-ready, but Hartley’s films are – in look, in movement, in words – always precise. 

Trust, the consensus seems to be, is Hartley’s best film. Have now revisited this, The Unbelievable Truth, Simple Men and Amateur, I’ll go along with that – I like them all a lot, but this one is everything clicks the most.

*Robert John Burke in The Unbelievable Truth was about six years older than Shelly, Donovan nine, although I think Mathew in Trust is meant to read as younger than Josh in TUT. Shelly plays a high schooler in both movies but was in her early/mid twenties at the time.

Hal Hartley’s films are available for rental streaming from halhartley.com

#hal hartley

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American Fiction

Director Cord Jefferson Stars Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K Brown, Leslie Uggams, Tracee Ellis Ross USA 2023 Language English 1hr 57mins Colour

Affectionate portrait of a bourgeois family? Gleeful satire of people desperate to endorse diversity? How about both at once, successfully?

There’s a mixed blessing for the smart film with an attention-grabbing pitch. It simplifies selling the movie, both to distributors and the audience: ‘It’s the one in which…’ ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve heard about that one…’  But it can reduce the movie to something it isn’t really – in this case, you might be surprised to find that American Fiction spends more time on two brothers and a sister dealing with an aged parent than satirising white people’s stupid ideas of what authentic black stories are. I’d say that this movie is closer to The Savages, an excellent but under-seen film with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as middle-aged siblings trying to cope with their difficult father than, say, Spike Lee’s raging satire Bamboozled.

Yet the catchy ‘about’ sticks, and I’m not in a position to criticise that. Watching the film, I was wondering if the family stuff had been added by writer-director Cord Jefferson because I didn’t remember it from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, from which American Fiction is adapted. But no, the blurb on the back of the book describes it ‘as a profoundly moving story of family turmoil’ – so it’s clearly there, but my mind had only held on to pointedly satirical part of the plot.

Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison (played in the movie by Jeffrey Wright) is a curmudgeonly academic and writer whose attitude towards his students is becoming unacceptable to the university in California where he works (for those who like to check on fiction’s relationship to life, Everett teaches at USC.) Meanwhile, his agent (John Ortiz) is struggling to find a publisher for Monk’s latest highbrow novel. And over in Boston, his widowed mother (Leslie Uggams) is acting erratically, and his sister and brother are both feeling the financial and other impacts of divorce. 

American Fiction is, then, effectively two films in one – a comedy-drama about a troubled (but not unloving) upper-middle-class family and a satire about a snobbish novelist who writes a spoof tale from the hood that (of course) is taken for the real thing. That’s an incredibly tricky mix to get right and at least a few people have been wrong-footed by the movie – ‘what’s all this family-reckoning-with-trauma stuff? Where’s the skewering of the white literary scene I was promised?’

I mean, that’s certainly there, it’s just sharing story space with eg, a tour of a care home the mother might move to. But that’s not just OK, it’s a positive, because the family stuff is great, particularly Sterling K Brown as Monk’s brother Clifford, voraciously making up for lost time after coming out in his forties. 

Which is to say, the family scenes are not just ‘funny too’, the biggest laughs we had watching the film came from the interaction between the Clifford and Monk and Monk and Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross). The writing here is so sharp, so precise, so spot-on. Yes, there are also a few moments of emotional realisation, but as with The Holdovers, I’m working on being less prickly about this kind of stuff – it’s good to feel, too. 

This is Cord Jefferson’s debut as a director, but it doesn’t feel like a first film at all. It’s very assured, walks that tonal tightrope perfectly, marshals the cast well. Maybe that Jefferson doesn’t feel like a first-timer is not surprising seeing as he’s not young (he’s 42) and has a ton of experience writing for TV. But he’s not even got any screenplay credits for a movie. So this is extremely impressive. 

Along with Wright, Brown and Ross, there’s good work from Erika Alexander* as the Ellisons’ attractive neighbour plus Adam Brody as a slimy movie director – with this and Fleishman Is In Trouble, he’s finding a groove as a glib sleazeball. 

I was expecting to quite like American Fiction – as it turned out, I loved it.   *I spent too much time watching the movie trying to figure out what I recognised her from – which was playing Rza's mom in Wu-Tang: An American Saga.

#american fiction #jeffrey wright

[disappointingyet]

This is my now traditional list of favourite movies of the year. These are all films that – as far as I can tell – were first commercially available either in cinemas or on streaming in the UK this year. So it doesn’t include eg, Hit Man or The Holdovers. Other than that, these are solely being judged on: did I like them?

As I did last year, I’ve also written about other stuff I have seen that you might be interested in – which this time turned out to be so long I split it into two: Broadly Mainstream & Documentaries and Arthouse & Indie.

2023, then, the year of Barbenheimer (I saw Barbie, didn’t see Oppenheimer). And the year of the great superhero box office crash. Meanwhile, there were two austere French courtroom dramas critics loved, two films about young women born in Korea but raised elsewhere trying to make sense of their identities that also got excited reviews plus an avalanche of movies featuring cast members of Chicago restaurant TV drama The Bear.

I saw plenty of films, and there weren’t many I think I missed out on. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon felt like a film to watch with friends but we couldn’t sort out a time. Eileen and Dream Scenario sounded interesting but non-essential, but BlackBerry I very much did want to see but couldn’t get round to.  Saltburn generated a fair amount of debate, but by most accounts is precisely Ripley x Brideshead set in 2006 with tunes by Flo Rida and MGMT by the director of Promising Young Woman, and that’s a film I don’t need to see. 

Some near misses from this list: The Innocent, Alcarrás and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Oh, yeah, and maybe the most fun I had in a cinema for what was officially a 2023 release was seeing the 4K etc restoration of Stop Making Sense, but a bit of a scrub-up does not equal an actual new movie. And on that note, here’s the list:

1. Kuolleet Lehdet (Fallen Leaves)

This is recommended cautiously – there are other films on this list I would steer most people towards before this one. But it is a movie I absolutely loved. I think it’s the 18th feature film made by director Aki Kaurismäki in a 40-year career, and easily in his five best. If you’ve never seen a Kaurismäki film, the easiest way to describe them is like Jim Jarmusch movies but Finnish. And if you haven’t even seen a Jarmusch film? Well, his movies are slow (but crucially short!). Most of the characters dress like they are living in the late 1950s or early ’60s and drink in bars that seem to come from that time too, but the films are set in the present day. The characters are usually somewhat on the margins of society and often somewhat lonely. There’s not a lot of dialogue. And, this is very important, they are funny as well as melancholy. In short, this is a very distinctive world that you’re likely to find either very appealing or pretty baffling.

Fallen Leaves is a simple story about a woman and a man who meet and have a series of misconnections while other stuff is happening in their lives. It’s very lovely but if you lose patience within the first 10 minutes, I get it, I really do. But I think it’s great. 

Full review here

2. Past Lives

We open with someone speculating about the two men and a woman drinking together in a New York bar at 4am – who are they to each other? Then we are whisked back to Seoul a couple of decades earlier, and gradually make our way to that late night and learn who Na Young/Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Arthur (John Magaro) are. Céline Song’s drama is about friendship and love but also very much about the trauma of (bourgeois) emigration – the sense that not only did you leave a place and its people behind, you left a version of yourself there.

It’s an elegant, restrained yet emotionally raw film. I was going to say it feels in places like a three-hander but would be to forget Hae Sung’s drinking buddies, who provide welcome comic relief. And when your quibbles are as nit-picky as ‘maybe one too many magic-hour shots’, then you’re talking a seriously good movie.

3. Rye Lane

Delightful romantic comedy that manages to both play by the rules of the genre and feel fresh. Girl meets boy at an art show and they spend a day and evening wandering around together and getting into low-stakes misadventures. Set and very tangibly filmed in places I know extremely well* and does so without triggering my ageing South Londoner’s prickly defensiveness.  (*In my review, I say that the geography is all plausible. Recently I had dinner with friends who live locally and have seen the film, and they were not buying into the idea that you would buy hot food at Brixton Market and eat it in Brockwell Park – approx 15 minutes walk away. Which I guess makes them even more South London than me...)

Full review here

(Disney +)

4. Fremont

Afghan interpreter for the US military tries to get to grips with life in California. Gruelling social realist drama about trauma and exile? Uplifting/flag-waving account of the power of living free? Broad culture-clash comedy? No? How about ultra low-key indie, filmed in lovely black & white, in which Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) shuffles between her job making fortune cookies and her sessions with an eccentric psychiatrist (Gregg Turkington). The b&w, the gentle eccentricity of many of the characters, how little Donya says even though she is on-screen in almost every scene, have prompted comparisons with Jim Jarmusch, which I think are fair, although there’s much less of the fetish-of-cool stuff here (also, as it happens, in none of the Jarmusch films with a sole protagonist is that character female.) Very little happens, and I really liked it.

5. Anatomie d’un chute (Anatomy Of A Fall)

Bloke falls to his death out of the window of his house up in the snowy French mountains – question is: accident, suicide, murder? If murder, the only suspect seems to be his widow (Sandra Hüller), a writer who doesn’t much like living in France, especially not in the mountains, and also doesn’t feel confident expressing herself in French (the bulk of her dialogue is in English), attitudes that doesn’t seem likely to endear her to the local media or legal system. Because, yes, this is a courtroom drama, if very much not one in the manner of John Grisham. It’s an intense, relentless film, one almost without a score (what music there is – and it’s important to the plot and the film – is mostly diegetic, but there is a little cheating on that). Hüller is very good as the protagonist we’re not meant to be sure whether to root for (although I’m inherently sympathetic to anyone who would rather be in London than stuck up a mountain, however beautiful that mountain is). A few side thoughts: the kid made me think of The Omen, the prosecutor of reality TV  judge Rob Rinder and I would have sworn blind that the defence lawyer was in some band that had an EP out on Creation Records in 1988, only the actor is about 15 years too young for that. 

(It’s a very good film.)

6. Asteroid City

Wes Anderson’s latest comes with multiple levels of story within story that felt unnecessary the first time I saw it – on rewatch they made more sense. But the main narrative – of parents and their children fetched up in a sun-baked nowhere town in the 1950s – I found effective and very moving both times. Anderson’s films always have at least an undertone of sadness, but this is probably his most directly mournful picture since Moonrise Kingdom. As usual with Anderson, the cast is ridiculously stacked – Tom Hanks fits in surprisingly well – and there are actors (Ed Norton, Adrien Brody) who are vastly better in his films than they generally are in anyone else’s. I laughed, I cried – no, I really did, and I think this was the only film this year that made me do both.

7. Killers Of The Flower Moon

Is Killers Of The Flower Moon a masterful piece of film-making, a supreme example of Martin Scorsese’s novelistic ability to guide a camera to the details that bring a culture to life, featuring a luminous performance from Lily Gladstone and telling an important story? Yes. Is it a sadistically long* movie that runs you through the same incidents three and sometimes four times, one that inflicts on us many scenes of Bob De Niro and Leo DiCaprio doing that terrible Method-bore jutting lip/downturned mouth thing at each other? Yes, that too. 

It tells an ugly tale from American history – we’re in the 1920s and oil is discovered on Osage land in Oklahoma, making that nation’s members all very rich. Inevitably, tragically, a lot of white folk aren’t having that, and start scheming about how they will get their hands on the wealth. What I wasn’t expecting is that along with the murder the film’s title previews, the plot involved lots of white guys marrying Osage women. It’s fascinating and horrible and Scorsese tells it with great images and some humour and there’s great casting. But it’s still unnecessarily long (think of the span of time covered in GoodFellas – and that came in at a respectable 2hrs 26mins).

*In the debate about whether there should be intermissions in this movie, some people were saying. ‘Who are you to presume to know more about films than Scorsese and his legendary editor Thelma Schoonmaker?’ Seems like a fair point… except: these are people who seemed to have thought Polar Expressing De Niro in The Irishman looked OK, so I’m saying their judgement isn’t what it was. 

8. Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse

By and large, the critical response to Across The Spider-Verse was split between those who felt it was even better than Into The Spider-Verse and those who thought it was good but lacked the ‘blimey, look at everything they are managing to do and oh my god it makes so much more sense to do superhero movies as animation than clunky CGI’ shock-of-the-new of the first film. The latter is basically my position: this is a very good film but Into The Spider-Verse was a near-instant classic.* ATSV is not as funny, and suffers (for me) from the fact that much of it happens at a larger scale and there’s more multiverse stuff to get your head around etc, and it ends on a cliffhanger (boo!) But it’s still easily the best big budget/action film of the year for my money.

(*Although somehow only 7th on my films of 2018 list! In retrospect, I’d move it up, but still only to maybe 3rd – 2018 turns out to have been a great year for films I like.)

9. Reality

If you are phobic to excruciating small talk, you should probably avoid this film. The dialogue comes entirely from an FBI transcript, and the agents spend a very long time trying to put their suspect at ease before finally getting to the questions about what she allegedly did. So many awkward attempted bits of connection about pet ownership and going to the gym…

It starts with Reality Winner (yes, that is the name of a real person), played by Sydney Sweeney, driving home. Before she’s out of the car, two FBI agents have come up to her window. Almost all of film is them and her standing outside her bungalow doing the prelims for the questioning and then finally going inside to interrogate her. It feels like real time but it’s not quite that. The look of the film is quite raw, there’s no score, it feels very plain although there are a couple of welcome weird touches. 

It’s an uncomfortable watch, but if you can stay with it, it’s an impressive and rewarding film.

10. All The Beauty And The Bloodshed

This documentary wants to tell you two important stories. One is about the campaign to get artistic institutions to distance themselves from the Sackler family, the generous donors who (alas) made their money from Valium and Oxycontin. The second is a history of assorted art movements and bohemian scenes of the late 20th-century US. The person whose life connects all this is the photographer Nan Goldin (the art world’s most influential figure, apparently). Goldin’s pictures are also a key part of this film’s visual appeal, and the director Laura Poitras is well of aware of that, and happy to give them the space they deserve. Quite a brutal watch, but worth it. 

Full review here

11. Wham!

The angle this documentary takes gives us the story of Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael as a benign version of Single White Female with a touch of All About Eve crossed with Pygmalion. Here, the person who has had their look and career appropriated turns out to have been coaching the impersonator and at the end wishes them well as they soar off into superstardom. 

That’s how I’ve long understood the Wham! story but this fills in the details and adds some ambiguity: Ridgeley enjoyed songwriting and being tagged the ‘talentless one’ clearly hurt him. The image choices that led some to assume George Michael was gay (many years before he came/was forced out) were actually made by his busily straight bandmate – we were right for the wrong reasons, which is to say wrong. But what I found fascinating is that once George* – who had been strong-armed by Andrew into a music career – started to understand how good he could be, he developed a Michael Jordan-esque competitive fury.

The voices of the two Wham! members provide the bulk of the narrative, added to by lots of excellent archive. The short span of Wham!’s career is a huge plus for a pop documentary - it avoids the usual problem of what to do about the later stuff only the subjects of the film care about. Just like the band, the documentary knows how to stop when the going is good.

*I can’t treat ‘Michael’ as a surname in this context.

(Netflix)

#films of the year #2023 movies #films of 2023 #films of the year 2023 #movies of 2023 #movies of the year 2023

[disappointingyet]

More films that didn't quite make my favourites of 2023 list... although some of these got very close.

You Hurt My Feelings

Nicole Holofcener has been making consistently good very talky films for many years now. This one stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a writer whose essentially rather appealing life has just become a little more complicated. Her husband (Tobias Menzies) is (of course) a therapist. If you’re not the kind of person who gets upset at the idea that people with such enviable lives should ever think they have any problems, this is funny and insightful.

(Prime)

Alcarràs

My mother spent part of her childhood in a village in Catalunya (otherwise her family were city people), and her strongest memory was picking fruit from the trees and eating it, and nothing (she told us) could ever approach how delicious it was. I thought of that watching Alcarràs, which takes place on a Catalan tenant farm during the peach harvest. 

It all seems idyllic: the gentle abundance of nature, little kids roaming freely over the land… But of course, it isn’t: the family’s lease on the farm is not a formal one, rather the legacy of a (huge, it should be said) favour done in the 1930s, one that understandably seems pretty distant to the current landowner, born, I’m guessing, in the late ‘80s. He’s busy shifting his fields to the more profitable option of solar energy generation, so this could be the last peach season.   

The cast is largely non-professional, there’s no score and the cameras often stay close to the characters, so the approach is naturalistic. But this is isn’t brutal realism: there’s fun and it is all very pretty if maybe doomed. We see it through the eyes of multiple age groups: the little kids who keep losing their latest fort, the teenagers who are somewhat adrift, the current generation in charge of the farm and the oldies, including the patriarch in decline (Josep Abad, who looks a lot like the great British character actor Peter Vaughan).

Small point: I think it would be useful for non-Iberian audiences if the subtitles pointed out the rare times the characters are speaking (Castilian) Spanish - eg, with west African day workers or with the Romanian woman the film seems to be implying is a mail-order bride.

Anyway, it’s very good.

(MUBI)

L’Innocent

This doesn’t have a promising premise: mother and adult son who interfere too much in each other’s lives, mother runs acting classes at a prison, marries one of the inmates, when he’s released the son doesn’t trust him and starts spying on him. Director-star Louis Garrel has given himself the role of one of those moody, immature blokes we are somehow meant to have some sympathy for despite their dickishness.  (If this were British, it would almost certainly be the year's worst release.)

And yet… I really liked this film. It contains a lot of things that – if done well – endear a film to me: amateurs trying to trail people, scenes in which the characters are acting, heist planning… Also: I’m wondering if I’ve ever seen a film set in Lyon before?  It’s funny, it shifts gear nicely and ties together well. (If you’ve only seen Noémie Merlant in Portrait Of A Lady On Fire and Tár, here’s a chance to watch her having fun.) (MUBI)

Actual People

Super low-budget/ultra-indie/neo-mumblecore movie about a student gradually falling apart in her final year of college – it’s basically a comedy if not a particularly cheery one. Lots of parties in small apartments and shouted conversations in hip bars, that kind of thing. I liked it quite a lot… but also don’t remember it that clearly.

(MUBI)

Broker

After a career making films in Japan, the great director Hirokazu Koreeda ventured abroad for 2019’s La Vérité, just the most French film you’ve ever seen. That was an impressive bit of code switching, but didn’t play to his strengths. For Broker, he’s also working away from home in a foreign language (Korean), but this one has a lot in common with Shoplifters, his excellent film from 2018.

In Broker, a young mother abandons her baby outside a church. She later tries to retrieve him, but he’s been nicked by a couple of guys who sell babies to desperate couples. These are the bad guys, right? Nope. These are our rather sweet protagonists, and the mother joins up with them on a road trip to find a nice couple who are also willing to pay a decent amount for poor little Woo-song. Meanwhile, a pair of exhausted cops are on their trail. 

You can tell it’s a Koreeda film by the sheer amount of time the characters spend eating and, if not eating, talking about food, plus all the stuff about families, biological or chosen. I’ve watched a lot of movies set in Korea, but I think this is the first one I have seen with multiple references to Tottenham Hotspur’s dazzlingly skilful forward Son Heung-Min. On the other hand, like many Korean movies I’ve watched, it stars Song Kang-ho.

It’s touching, it’s funny, the characters are endearing, it’s a very nice film.

Retour a Seoul

French party girl* Freddie (Park Ji-min) sort of accidentally ends up in holiday in Korea, country of her birth. Just as haphazardly, she makes contact with her biological father and has a massively awkward meeting with him and his family, not helped by the fact that she doesn’t speak the language. Freddie, it seems, is not a comfortable fit for Korea. The film then takes some interesting turns, while determinedly not filling in the gaps. If you’re the kind of film watcher who needs to know who/what/why and sometimes when, you’ll get deeply frustrated here. I found it very absorbing even though I was never entirely sure what the film was trying to say – plus there’s some great hair, make-up and costume work going on.

*In the non-euphemistic sense.

Amanda

Super-offbeat Italian indie about a young woman from a privileged family who has no friends and does things like hang out at raves on her own. I guess some points of comparison (if probably not particularly helpful ones to most people) are Todd Solondz and Roy Andersson. Bleak comedy, basically. I’d heard great things about this and it didn’t fully live up to my super-high expectations. (Its director, Carolina Cavalli, co-wrote Fremont, which I liked a whole lot more.)

Tár

How much of the love for this film came from (my fellow) Gen Xers enjoying watching Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár humiliating the kids with their ‘my journey’ self-obsessions? To be sure, there are many other pleasures to be had: Blanchett’s performance, the interior design, the costumes, the music etc… Plus just debating questions like: is this a ghost story/horror movie? But while I was impressed, I’m not sure I really liked it that much. 

May December 

Actor gets cast in a movie about a real-life scandal - grown woman had sex with 13-year-old… and when she gets out of jail and he’s of legal age, they marry. Almost a quarter of a century on, they are still together and they allow the actor to visit for research. Which is surely asking for trouble.

May December is not the only film this year (I’m thinking of Anatomy Of A Fall, for instance) that in summary could sound like it could be a 1991 erotic thriller but very much isn’t.

Natalie Portman plays the TV star, Julianne Moore the suburban mom-turned-sex offender-now again a suburban mom. Both women are terrifying. Charles Melton plays the somewhat hapless husband. 

This is a strange film. It’s directed by Todd Haynes, who is known for wildly adventurous music biz movies (Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There) and retro-set melodramas (Far From Heaven, Carol.) May December is a melodrama but its 2015 setting is not long enough ago to count as a past when things were different*. So it lacks the tension between nostalgic beauty and undisguised bigotry that was crucial to the appeal of FFH and Carol. 

In its place we get… a jarring score borrowed from The Go-Between (1971) and the occasional unsettlingly weird shot. Presumably, by way of reminding us that this is a doubly screwed-up situation: that even if the outcome is seemingly a happy family, what Moore’s character did was unspeakable but also Portman’s actor is a nasty piece of work. 

There are echoes of Single White Female, but few of the trashy thrills that movie had. Some critics have mentioned Bergman’s Persona, and I can see why. I was left wondering whether if I had watched more films by (1970s German master/chemical dustbin) Rainer Werner Fassbinder, May December would make more sense to me. Then again, I have to assume the vast majority of people who catch May December on Sky (in the UK) or Netflix (US) will have seen exactly zero Fassbinder flicks.

All of which is to say that May December is an interesting and sometimes compelling movie, but not one I actively enjoyed.

*I mean, in a number of ways it does feel like a long time ago, but none of those are relevant to this film.

How To Blow Up A Pipeline

There are plenty of films about people setting off bombs. Less common are serious-minded, commercially released films unambiguously endorsing the destruction of corporate assets in the country the film was made. The reference point for critics was Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves – the other relatively recent film about American eco-terrorism – but that film is deeply ambivalent about its characters’ underlying motives and the wisdom of their actions. HTBUAP, at least as I understood it, is firmly onside with its crew of angry Gen Zers. 

But although the message is pretty earnest, the medium is a stripped-down thriller: it’s classic heist movie assemble-the-team, plan, execute and then deal with the messier than planned consequences. It’s pretty effective, and very watchable – I just felt the film requires more of a buy-in on its politics and admiration of its characters than I can manage. (Netflix)

Un Beau Matin (One Fine Morning)

Secretly, the most Brexity film of the year, occasionally seeming like it’s directly aimed at Brits who imagine that the French have figured out how to do things like care homes. Apparently not, according to this film starring Léa Seydoux as a young widow whose writer father has dementia. The ending seems to be trying for something a bit upbeat, but the rest of the film is so bloody miserable it can’t pull that off. I really liked Mia Hansen-Løve’s previous film – Bergman Island – but this is hard work. (MUBI)

Les Cinq Diables (The Five Devils)

This gloomy, spooky French drama starring Adèle Exarchopoulos  is rather like a darker, fucked-up reworking of Petite Maman,  and fulfils my default expectation that ‘x but dark’ = ‘x but worse’. It can’t quite decide whether it wants to be an all-out horror movie – I think it would have been far better if it had been.

(MUBI)

El Conde

Hard to think of anything more off-putting for people of my age and ideology than a film narrated in the voice of Margaret Thatcher – that’s a real fingernails down the blackboard experience. This is a truly bizarre film from the always-interesting Chilean director Pablo Larraín: the idea is that Augusto Pinochet is a vampire and thus didn’t die in 2006 but instead continues in existence in hiding in a vast remote compound. The movie is a baffling mix of horror fantasy (it’s in lush black & white) with characters reading out great lists of how much the Pinochet family have stolen from the Chilean people. And then there’s that narration in English and dialogue largely in Spanish (and some French). Credit to Larraín for looking for new and interesting ways to tell stories about historical figures (this follows films about Pablo Neruda, Jackie Kennedy and Diana Spencer and he’s taking on Maria Callas next), but for me this doesn’t really gel at all.

(Netflix)

Passages

Very big with critics, this one. Tomas (Franz Rogowski) is a diva-ish film director married to long-suffering Martin (Ben Whishaw). Then he gets picked up by Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) at a club and pretty soon is saying he’s in love with her. If you’re thinking this is the familiar tale of a bloke stubbornly insisting he’s straight after all, you’d be wrong – Tomas is still very much the same silk-crop-top-wearing dude whoever he’s shagging on any particular day. I think the film’s success hinges on whether you can understand why either Martin or Agathe tolerates this obvious tosser for more than a few days – I couldn’t, so didn’t really enjoy the film. (Indeed, probably the best scene for me is one with just Whishaw and Exarchopoulos.)

(MUBI)

Women Talking

One of those films I had a very strong idea of what it was going to be like before I saw it, and that idea was not exactly wrong, but not right either. I think the version in my mind was more like 1970s Marxist collectivist theatre – truly just women talking. Don’t get me wrong, there’s an awful lot of debating, but there’s also some pretty Malickian shots of kids running through fields, a bit of romance (misplaced) and some dramatic tension. 

It takes place in one of the religious communities that cosplay living in the 19th century (the news story the book the film is based on was inspired by happened in a Mennonite settlement). Some of the men and boys have been drugging and raping women and girls, and on a day when all but one of the men are away, the women gather in a barn to decide whether to stay or leave. Rooney Mara is very good, Claire Foy I don’t really get, Ben Whishaw is unnecessary (and I’d already see him being perpetually long suffering this year in the couldn’t-be-more-different Passages.) It’s watchable but worthy and a little obvious in places. 

La Amiga De Mi Amiga (Girlfriends And Girlfriends*)

Barcelona-set (but in Castilian Spanish not Catalan) indie movie in two senses – it’s minimal budget and somewhat homemade but also assorted characters are in somewhat twee bands and the soundtrack is on a similar tip. The director, Zaida Carmona, plays Zaida (it’s one of those films where most of the cast use their own names), who has been dumped by her girlfriend and flees to Barcelona. She meets up with old friends; she fancies a woman, that woman fancies another woman’s girlfriend who in turn fancies… You get the vibe. They have dinner parties, they go each other’s rubbish performance art or gigs, watch Eric Rohmer films, hook up and fall out. It’s meant to be kind of funny but also kind of honest, but I found it flimsy and a bit clumsy. Then again, that’s also my take on Rohmer, so maybe Carmona has nailed what she was aiming at.

*This English title is absolutely terrible. Firstly, My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend both sounds so much better and tells you what the film is about. Secondly, the title is a riff on Eric Rohmer’s L’Ami De Mon Amie – the lead character’s fave film – which in the UK came out as My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, in line with the original title. (In the States, it’s true, that was released as Boyfriends And Girlfriends, but why double down on a lousy decision from 36 years ago?) (MUBI)

Saint Omer

Bleak French courtroom drama. A woman is on trial for killing her small child – that she did it is not in question, whether there were any mitigating circumstances is. A writer/academic goes to watch the trial as material. She’s pregnant. Like the accused, she comes from a West African family and seems to feel that they share something. It’s fairly austere in style and intellectually high flown – characters are described as Cartesian (ah, the French, or at least the French in movies). It’s clearly a good film, and there are pertinent points being made about racism and France etc, but it’s a tough watch and I never felt I was in its groove. 

(MUBI)

A Plein Temps (Full Time)

My sister and I were discussing a French film when she asked, ‘Has it got that actress who always gets naked?’ With French actors, that doesn’t narrow it down a lot. But I think she was talking about Laure Calamy from Dix Pour Cent/Call My Agent, who stars in this film but stays dressed. 

This is a very stressy picture – it’s got the fraught vibe of something like Uncut Gems although everything that happens stays within the law. Calamy plays Julie, the divorced mother of two who lives in a village some way out of Paris but works cleaning rooms in a posh hotel in the city. She’s got an educated, bourgeois background so maybe feels the work is beneath her – and her manager certainly assumes that’s the case. During the week or so the film is set, there are escalating strikes bringing Paris to a halt, so each commute is something of an odyssey and she’s late to work, late picking up her kids from the neighbour who reluctantly looks after them, etc. Those commutes get urgent electronic thriller music, and the idea is to make us feel as on edge as Julie. It’s well done, but not much fun… and I suspect it wants us to have more sympathy for Julie because she is a middle-class person in an uncomfortable situation. If true: boo!

[disappointingyet]

A bunch of movies that didn't make my final films of the year – some of them are very good, mind (and one or two really aren't).

Godzilla Minus One

Very much not to be confused with the current US Godzilla movies, this comes from Toho Studios and not only goes back to the start, but the story is all about Japan coming to terms with World War II. Our central (human) character is Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) a guilt-ridden former fighter pilot trying to get by in bomb-flattened Tokyo. He acquires not one but two found families: a young woman and the child she rescued from the rubble, and the crew of the minesweeper he finds work on. The healing for both the material and psychic damage seems underway when a massive, mysterious creature – which Shikishima encountered during the war – reappears, only bigger and with new powers…

G-M1 is a talky film with sombre stretches (there are jokes, too), with lots of grief and guilt and trying to figure out how not to make the same mistakes again*. And, in between all that, we get a big stompy monster (this is mean Godzilla, not saviour Godzilla). The special effects do the job: you’re unlikely to be awestruck, but equally I didn’t spend any time wanting to chuck something at the screen as I often do with (say) Marvel movies. 

Satisfying.

(*I was trying to think of other movies where I successfully guessed what was going to happen not so much because of plot tropes as ideology… the only one that springs to mind is the Robert Aldrich-directed Burt Lancaster & Gary Cooper Mexican-set Western Vera Cruz.)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem 

What were the odds, in the year of full superhero backlash, that there would be a critically endorsed Ninja Turtles movie? But here it is, and yes, it’s good. Essentially, TMNT:MM is (as far as I know) lo the first post-Spider-verse film, embracing the idea that comic-book adaptations can look drawn. This is 3D computer animation, but it’s not trying to look solid or clean, and so you don’t end up with Shrekian chunkiness. It’s weird and colourful and sometimes rather beautiful.

It’s a basic origin story: how did these strange creatures come to be, why do they regard a rat as their father, what other weird animals are lurking in New York? Well, for one, Superfly, a massive insect styled after Ron O’Neal’s Blaxploitation antihero and voiced by Ice Cube.

The movie leans hard into the ‘teenage’ part of the title - these are kids, cocky, confused, bored, trying to fit in and figure themselves out (often contradictory impulses.) The script is by Seth Rogen and chums, so doesn’t take itself too seriously. 

There’s an argument to be had about whether famous faces deserve to be the voice leads in animated movies - surely specialists are better at the job and anyway, much of the time nobody recognises it’s eg, Chris Pratt. But here, I think the star casting works - as well as Cube, we get Jackie Chan being very endearing as Splinter the rat, a brief but perfect turn from Giancarlo Esposito and the ubiquitous Ayo Edebiri as April.

The soundtrack is ace - and maybe gives away who the target audience is: it’s a bunch of late 1980s/90s hip-hop standards.

The storytelling isn’t groundbreaking but the visuals are so good. One of the best surprises of the year.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

Essentially: ‘You know that game the kids in Stranger Things play? The one people used to get beat up for been associated with but now movie stars boast about their expertise at? Let’s do a Guardians Of The Galaxy-style film based on that.’  So they did, and gathered a more-than-decent cast: Chris Pine*, Michelle Rodriguez and Hugh Grant, and send them off on some questing. The jokes do the job, the dialogue largely non-fantasy mode, Rodriguez does all the action and Pine is the Hannibal Smith-esque generator of plans (but w/tragic backstory). As this kind of adventure movie goes, it’s comfortably above average: not as good as the first Guardians, the first Pirates Of The Caribbean or Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, but better than most of the tosh out there. *Brudenell Road’s most famous former resident!

They Cloned Tyrone

Strange things seem to be happening in the hood and a drug dealer (John Boyega), a sex worker (Teyonah Parris) and – reluctantly – a pimp (Jamie Foxx) team up to investigate. This is a comedy with sci-fi elements as well as things that would be horror if this had a different vibe. Maybe think of this as a much broader take on Jordan Peele’s Get Out or Nope or a less way-out Sorry To Bother You. Although it’s set now, there are nods to the Blaxploitation era (Foxx’s hair, various cars.) There’s a nice murky look to the night scenes, a tangible atmosphere and an excellent cast – so plenty to enjoy.

(Netflix)

Theater Camp

Fond and indulgent mockumentary made by a bunch of chums who grew up as theatre kids. Very familiar set-up: much-loved thespian institution (in this case, a summer camp) has its future under threat – will everyone rally round for a big show to save the day?

There are plenty of familiar faces here, particularly if you’ve seen Booksmart and The Bear (Molly Gordon, who is one of the directors, writers and stars of this links that terrific film and that excellent TV show.)  

Ben Platt, who has become even more mocked and reviled in critical and showbiz gossip circles than his Pitch Perfect cast mates, makes the wise decision to write himself a largely dickish character to play. 

Theater Camp mostly manages to be the right kind of silly – I enjoyed it a bunch. (Disney +)

Bottoms

Extremely daft although reasonably fun comedy. Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri (who are both 28 years old and aren’t trying to fool you otherwise) play a pair of unpopular high-school kids who start a female fight club with the hope of hooking up with the cheerleaders they have crushes on. It’s very silly, gets a reasonable amount of mileage out of people punching each other and has plenty of decent jokes. Had me thinking of Rock ’n’ Roll High School more than I expected. 

Three Musketeers: Part 1 - D’Artagnan

Yes, yet another version of the Dumas book. This one has the virtue of being actually French. The vibe is somewhat gritty: the fights include guns and punching rather than only elegant sword work. Many of buildings are actual historic buildings rather something fairly see-through cobbled together on a computer. We get Vincent Cassel and Romain Duris as Athos and Aramis, plus Louis Garrel as the king. I’ve never really got Eva Green but she makes perfect sense as Milady. What’s added (from what I remember of the book) is a conspiracy involving a war-hungry faction at court and the Protestant rebellion.* Anyway, this is a solid and satisfying period action movie.

*To be clear, the siege of La Rochelle is in the book - it’s what leads to that that’s new here.

Maestro

Are you intrigued by the idea of current movie stars attempted many-layered 1940s accents? How about a film half in the lushest of lush black & white and half in fairly authentic-looking late 1960s colour, also rather beautiful? Tidal waves of great, great music? Fully committed performances? Some genuinely extraordinary, including a scene where biopic slips into ballet…

Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic is wildly ambitious, and it succeeds more than I was anticipating. Cooper, as often, gives a better performance than I expect him to. Carey Mulligan is excellent as Felicia Montealegre, Bernstein’s wife, even if the accent escapes her occasionally. It looks and sounds incredible.

But? It’s a big film with a small story at its heart. Firstly, what happens to a marriage between two people in the arts when their careers have very different trajectories? 'Isn’t the only other film Cooper has directed A Star Is Born?', you point out correctly.

Secondly, what happens to that marriage if it begins with the acceptance that one of this pair is going to continue shagging other people, but once there are kids to consider that seems less cool and you don’t feel like trying to explain to your daughter why her middle-aged father is chasing young men around, especially because this is only the 1970s…

I’m certainly not saying a film needs to say big stuff. But Maestro has a scale and sense of importance that seems at odds with what it wants to talk about. We do get some scenes with Bernstein pronouncing about music in grand terms – and those are the worst parts of the movie. But other than hearing the tunes, we don’t really get much of a sense of why Bernstein was such an imposing cultural figure. Credit to Cooper for acknowledging the pivot that most based-on-real-life stories take if they span a fair bit of time: things are fun, and then they are difficult. In Maestro, that fun part is not just in b&w, but the rules of space and time don’t apply. As we’re watching them, that’s clearly the case within scenes, but as we learn in the colour second half, things that you would have guessed took a couple of weeks took several years. All of that first part, it seems but is never stated, was lovely memories that edit all the tricky stuff. 

Not a wholly successful film then, but one I’m really glad I watched and even a little regretful I didn’t see it on the big screen.  (Netflix)

Creed III

Better than Creed II, nowhere near as good as Creed. Michael B Jordan does a decent job as the director and introduces some interesting visual elements. There’s no Stallone, which I’m fine with. The issue is a classic genre film trap: how to get the main character back to doing the thing the franchise needs them to do, even though that’s a terrible choice. Weirdly, for once, if this was hyper-realism, that wouldn’t be a problem – legendary boxers clamber out of retirement and back into the ring the whole time, often repeatedly. But in this movie, Adonis Creed seems to have too much going on – as the beautiful, successful guy with a beautiful, talented family – and to be too smart to get himself clobbered again. True to life, but somehow implausible within this fiction.

(Prime)

Babylon

Damien Chazelle’s massive, noisy discursion on the history of Hollywood is a film I definitely enjoyed talking about – there was so much to debate. But it was probably more fun talking about it than it was watching the last two hours of the movie (maybe watch the two big set pieces at the start and then stop?)

Full review here

Air

Schlubby dudes sit around in dingy offices arguing about the details of a deal for a young athlete to endorse a shoe. Not a painful watch, but nothing that Affleck/Damon manage here convinces me that this is a story worthy of cinema and not a very long Nike ad.

Full review here

Barbie

On the one hand, most of Barbie was fun, and an impressive feat of multi-level storytelling (eg, the very niche joke at the expense of fans of 1990s indie band Pavement.) Could’ve done without the Will Ferrell and Rhea Perlman bits, but a billion-dollar box office movie taking the piss out of the patriarchy is a great thing.

On the other, as much as I want to celebrate popular art, in my heart I know I’d rather Gerwig was making films like Lady Bird or Mistress America. Much as I hope Boden and Fleck’s future work is more like Sugar or Mississippi Grind than Captain Marvel, and that Cate Shortland goes back to films like Somersault and Lore instead of Black Widow.  

Ferrari

In some ways, this could be a companion piece to Maestro – another film about wife who has sort-of-tolerated the chronic infidelity of her giant-of-the-20th-century husband. Although, in this case, he's only cheating with women and by the time the film is set – the late 1950s – only one woman. In Michael Mann's movie, Adam Driver plays Enzo Ferrari, Penélope Cruz Laura Ferrari and Shailene Woodley the mistress. These people, you may have noticed, are not Italian. Yes, this is a film in English in which the actors do accents to indicate they are speaking Italian (the bit players, confusingly, talk actual Italian). I'm generally not in favour of that approach. This isn't a biopic, as such – it seemingly takes place over a few months as Enzo faces simultaneous work and personal crisis, linked by Laura, who was his work partner as well as spouse. Cruz is excellent value as the fuming, grieving Laura. Driver – has his hair ever been this short on film – is good too, and wears excellent suits. It looks lovely, too – whatever issues Mann had during the early digital switchover (Collateral?!) are long past. But the ending just fizzles out, in a way that leaves me wondering (other than Cruz being entertainingly furious) what this was all about. And the big events just before that are handled in a way I found both clunky and kind of distasteful. (I feel you need to be at least somewhat careful portraying real-life tragedies on screen. And also announcing your characters bear no responsibility when with all things taken into account, they do.) One of those films that I was very into when I was watching, but increasingly less so on the walk home.

No Hard Feelings

The sort-of-return of the once weirdly popular older-woman-deflowers-kid ‘raunchy comedy’ genre. This being 2023, the kid is a legal 19 but socially awkward, inexperienced etc (I mean, to be fair, there are a lot of people like that). Jennifer Lawrence plays the desperate-for-cash local who is hired by a Princeton-bound nerd’s parents to make a man of him. The film is well cast, and some of the jokes work… ‘the hey! we’ve all learned something’ stuff maybe less so. Pretty OK.

The Killer

Michael Fassbender plays a stat-bore hitman in David Fincher’s fan-boy-pleasing thriller. Some generally sane critics reckon it’s a blinder. I reckon it’s cliched, obvious and very grating. (Many of the arguments in its favour are based on the idea that it is Fincher taking the piss out of himself – to which I say, who cares?) 

Starts well as Fassbender is patiently doing the tedious prep for a kill in Paris, but goes duff quickly once he’s off on the obligatory revenge kick. Fassbender’s American accent is horrible, the gags are thumpingly obvious and yet triple-underlined in case you didn’t get them the first time. I kept hoping against hope that one of Fassbender’s enemies would finish him off and we’d be done with all of this. Tilda Swinton is good but she only gets one scene. (Fassbender had a supporting role in Fincher’s bestie Steven Soderbergh’s somewhat similar Haywire, which – for my money – is way better.) 

(Netflix)

Love At First Sight

Industry wisdom is the romcom is one of the genres people will no longer pay to see in a cinema but will consume happily on streaming. Netflix is notorious for putting out loads of them with TV-movie production levels. This is maybe one of their higher budget efforts? I saw it because Haley Lu Richardson was great in two of my favourite movies of recent times: Columbus and Support The Girls. 

LAFS* feels like three different ideas chucked together. First, a high-concept romcom with lots of vibrant colours and some bollocks about fate and Jameela Jamil as the narrator who pops up in turn as a flight attendant, immigration officer, bartender, helpful passerby…** Secondly, your contemporary British comedy where the characters are all wearyingly eccentric (so many British films, whether comedies or thrillers, just try far too hard.) Thirdly, a melancholy film about two people in pain who make a connection on a transAtlantic flight. Unsurprisingly, these three ideas constantly undermine each other. (Oh, and the London geography is just distractingly nonsense.)

*The title of the book this is adapted from is The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight, which is a much better match for the theme and tone of the story.

**An idea seemingly nicked, as I’m happy to admit I didn’t know when I watched it, from Max Ophuls’ 1950 classic La Ronde, emphatically not a romcom.

(Netflix)

Documentaries

Squaring The Circle: The Story Of Hipgnosis 

What was Hipgnosis, you ask? Hipgnosis was a little company that designed the covers of long-playing records, most famously for Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Its founders Storm Thorgerson and Po Powell were dope-smoking chums of the future members of (The) Pink Floyd in Cambridge (the city, not the university) who had enough photographic and graphic design nous to turn a favour for mates into a lucrative career.

Everyone in this documentary talks about how grumpy Thorgerson (who died in 2013) was: ‘He was rude to everyone,’ someone says. Now, as it happens, a long, long time ago I used to interview designers and photographers about famous album covers for a rock magazine. Almost all these chats happened over the phone… except for the one with Thorgerson about the Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Thorgerson invited me over to his large, comfortable north-west London home and we sat drinking tea as he told me about how the LP sleeve had come about. As I remember it, he was an excellent host and I sat there feeling guilty about how bloody hideous I thought almost all of his work was and how unbearable his old mates’ music was. Maybe he’d mellowed by then.

Anyway, this documentary was made by Anton Corbijn, legendary rock photographer/terrible feature film director, which accounts for the interviewees being shot in elegant, flattering b&w. Corbijn’s movies are utterly humourless so it’s a pleasant surprise to find plenty of chuckles here. The heart of the film, indeed, is a series of tales from the mid-1970s in which the album shoots involve vast expense, effort, travel time and even danger… and afterwards everyone decides for all the record buyers will notice, it could have been done round the corner or just in the studio…

If you like a rock dinosaur, there’s a bunch here: Planty! Pagey! Macca! Gabriel! And the surviving Floyds, of course. Speaking of which, my big concern watching this was the presence of Roger Waters and Noel Gallagher, both extremely low-quality human beings. Fortunately, restricted to talking about album covers (both) and the early days (Waters) they are non-toxic. Just why Gallagher is here is a different question. He has no connection to Hipgnosis – not as a client nor even (as far as made the cut) as a fan. He just talks about album artwork in general, including his daughter not knowing it was a thing that exists. So he’s effectively the cut-price Bono, here to provide uninformed vibes and enthusiasm – but as the man who shot U2’s most famous images, surely Corbijn could have got the real thing?

There’s a tradition of documentaries – which I think this fits into – that work two ways depending on how you feel about the subjects. If you think the cover of (say) Led Zep’s Houses Of The Holy is a great piece of image-making, here’s the inside story of how it came about. On the other hand, if you find the aesthetics of 1970s rock grotesque or funny, then this is an entertaining account of how completely everyone lost the plot as the cash (and coke) rolled in. (Netflix)

Little Richard: I Am Everything

You can see why people want to make documentaries these days about Little Richard – he was black, he was gay, he did some drag early in his career and certainly had no truck with the 20th-century western version of masculinity. In 2023, if you want to celebrate a rock ’n’ roll pioneer, he’s more appealing than one of those white guys with their child brides. (Before we overtip the balance, it's almost certain that Richard also had sex with teenage girls when he was an adult, even if they weren’t his main area of interest.) 

The big problem I had with this film – which got some rapturous reviews – is not its fault at all. What happened was that earlier in the year I had seen the BBC’s Little Richard: The King And Queen Of Rock’n’Roll, which has some of the same interviewees (plus Keef rather than Mick as their Rolling Stone), much of the same archive and – as the title suggests – the same contemporary take. I Am Everything’s director Lisa Cortes does try to do some things to make this movie-like, including having clouds of glitter and bursts of high-speed nature montages. She also has some current musicians in to a play a few songs, almost always a bad move in a music documentary. There are some good academics etc here, but alas, if you’ve recently heard all this stuff, I Am Everything doesn’t add that much. But if you’re not familiar with this story, this is a great place to start.

[disappointingyet]

Rock ’n’ Roll High School

Director Allan Arkush (plus an uncredited Joe Dante) Stars PJ Soles, Dey Young, Vincent Van Patten, Clint Howard, Ramones USA 1979 Language English 1hr 33mins Colour

‘Oooh baby, fun fun, rock rock rock rock rock ’n’ high school’

This is a cheerfully daft exploitation comedy made under the wing of B-movie king Roger Corman. It’s fun, campy and quick – I don’t think the filmmakers expect you to care about the characters, but do want you to laugh and presumably bop your head along to some songs. It doesn’t have the forensic approach to parody that Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker brought to Airplane!, but more of the gags worked than I expected.

The plot (for what it’s worth) is this: Riff Rendell (PJ Soles) is obsessed with the Ramones, and has written a song she wants to them to play. Her best friend, science nerd Kate Rambeau (Dey Young), has a huge crush on the captain of the football team Tom Roberts (Vincent Van Patten). Tom, despite his notional position at the top of the school social hierarchy, has no luck with girls because of his terrible small talk. Both he and Kate seek the help of Eagleberger (Clint Howard), the school’s entrepreneurial solver of all problems, very much in the lineage of Catch-22’s Milo Minderbinder. And attempting to spoil all the fun is disciplinarian new principal Miss Togar (Mary Woronov). 

I’d always thought of this as ‘the Ramones movie’. You get their songs early on, but they themselves first appear about halfway through to play a gig. By the end (at the gig and elsewhere) they have played at least nine songs by my count, which is a lot (although of course, being the Ramones, the songs are short). They aren’t required to do much acting – I think only Joey has any dialogue. 

Apparently, the producers spent a while trying to get a band to agree to be in the movie, and the Ramones were a far way down the list. That tracks – there’s nothing about Riff’s fandom that feels specific to da brudders and the idea that they would be an easy consensus favourite in any high school seems fairly movie-like. But I’m a fan, so their presence definitely worked for me. 

As does the film as a whole – it was a lot better than I was expecting. Maybe the involvement of Joe Dante, the future director of Gremlins and Small Soldiers, helped. (Character actor Dick Miller, who was in everything Dante directed, pops up here.) For those who like a knowing meta-chuckle, you’ve got Mary Woronov as the anti-rock’n’roll authority figure – back in the 1960s she and Gerard Malanga were the (sometimes whip-wielding) dancers in Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable accompanying the Velvet Underground. 

Surprisingly enjoyable…

(So yes, a 1979 release, but nevertheless part of my Every girl should be given an electric guitar on her 16th birthday series of reviews)

#punk movies #ramones #rock 'n' roll high school

[disappointingyet]

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

Director Paul Mazursky Stars Robert Culp, Natalie Wood, Elliott Gould, Dyan Cannon USA 1969 Language English (with a bit of inept Spanish directed at the maid) 1hr 45mins Colour

Era-capturing comedy-drama about two affluent couples trying to stay hip in late ‘60s Los Angeles

Saying a film is incredibly of its moment is not necessarily a judgement. By which I mean: the movie could be a fascinating time capsule or a pivot in cinema history or simply an unhappy accumulation of the tropes and cliches of the year it was made. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice seems (to me) to fit well in the first category and is maybe a bit the second and (fortunately) not slot into the final one. 

In any case, it certainly screams ‘1969!’. Before we even get to the credits, we’ve seen naked breasts – this is just a year after the final burial of the production code that had restricted what could be shown in Hollywood films since the 1930s. Those breasts aren’t in a sexual context, they are in ‘let’s shake off our old hang-ups’ context. Bob (Robert Culp) has come to The Institute to scout for a documentary, and his wife Carol (Natalie Wood) has tagged along for the ride. 

The Institute seems modelled on Esalen (think the final episode of Mad Men), and Bob and Carol take part in a marathon session where a roomful of participants do a long series of exercises and keep going for 24 hours straight hoping to break down their barriers so they can express their feelings without filter. 

And when they get back to their everyday existence, Bob and Carol do feel changed, and insist on insisting on full openness when talking to each other and other people – not just with their best friends Ted (Elliott Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon) but also with eg, the maitre d’ at their favourite restaurant. It’s all a little much, and becomes pretty disruptive, especially to poor Ted and Alice, who are a little less furiously trying to prove they are moving with the times. 

Culp was in his late thirties when this was made, the others in their early thirties. I was thinking maybe that’s a bit young to be worrying that you are out of touch with what’s happening, but actually I was already sensing my moment had passed when I was about 20, and undoubtably (without buying into boomer self-importance), the mid and late 1960s could be dizzying times.

Each couple has a kid, and Bob and Ted are well established in their well-paid professions, so these are meant to be grown-ups, and in previous generations would have had no urge to chase what young folks were doing. (And despite all Bob’s beads, these four aren’t in full rejection of the taste of their generation – towards the end of the movie, they all head to a concert… not the Dead or Sly And The Family Stone, but Tony Bennett.)

Probably the most notable stylistic choice director Paul Mazursky (who was the same age as Culp, incidentally) makes here is having some very long scenes – that early one at The Institute, a therapy session Alice has (a session that is nevertheless curtailed just as she seems to be reaching a breakthrough), plus the climax to the film. Like the characters, we’re here to really explore what’s going on with these people, just probably with a little more scepticism. And crucially, that approach works (there’s nothing worse than a wilfully extended scene you don’t care about.)

The cast is an interesting one – all at very different points in their careers. The one true movie star of the bunch at the time was Natalie Wood, who had been acting since she was a small kid. This film should have set her up to take a prominent role in the New Hollywood of the 1970s, but sadly didn’t for some reason – there was not a lot of great work ahead in the final decade of her short life. She’s just absurdly beautiful here, but also sharp and expressive.

Culp I first remember seeing in a regular supporting role in a not-very-good early ‘80s TV show called The Greatest American Hero. Mostly if I think of him these days, it’s as one of those reliable and well-connected actors of the time who got to play multiple Columbo villains. Back when this was made, he had just finished the three-season run of I Spy, a hit show in which he starred alongside Bill Cosby as globe-trotting operatives whose cover was they were a tennis player and his coach. 

Meanwhile, Cannon was best known for an unlikely marriage to Cary Grant – she was in her twenties, he was past 60, she was his fourth wife (and there had been always been rumours that he was gay.) That union had ended by the time of B&C&T&A. She was reasonably famous during the 1970s and has worked steadily ever since, although I’m not sure that many people would recognise the name.

And then there’s Elliott Gould, the one who was about be huge. Watching this, it feels like he’s cast against type as the more uptight friend, but this is the year before M*A*S*H, the first of the three movies he made with Robert Altman (the others are The Long Goodbye and California Split*) that defined his star persona. 

Anyway, they are all absolutely perfect for this film, believable as a group of friends, plausible in their power dynamics. And Mazursky and his team immerse us in their world: the big houses, the flashy cars, the hip hang-outs, none of which means they are not fundamentally insecure. 

From the opening aerial shot of the Bob and Carol driving to The Institute to the great closing images, it feels fully liberated by what cameras were able to do by 1969. So I was a little surprised to check who the cinematographer was and find it was not some young dude who had just escaped from Czechoslovakia but instead Charles Lang, who had been working in movies since 1926 and whose extraordinary list of credits includes The Magnificent Seven and Some Like It Hot. 

I was really taken with this film – it’s funny, the cast are immensely charismatic, it captures the vibe of the time brilliantly without bombarding us with tacky faux-psychedelic camera effects or editing, there are some awesome clothes. Very happy I finally watched it.

(I'm always Quentin Tarantino-sceptical, but he's good talking about B&C&T&A here) *He has cameos in Nashville and The Player. 

#bob&carol&ted&alice #natalie wood #elliott gould #Hollywood in the 1960s

[disappointingyet]

Tillsammans 99 (Together 99)

Director Lukas Moodysson Stars Gustaf Hammersten, Shanti Roney, Jessica Liedberg, Anja Lundqvist Sweden/Denmark 2023 Language Swedish (with English subtitles) 1hr 55mins Colour

Somewhat darker reunion for the Swedish (mostly ex) hippies

Lukas Moodysson’s Together, about a very earnest left-wing commune in Sweden in the 1970s, is one of my favourite films ever. It’s funny and joyous and life-affirming, never sappy or lazy. But immediately after that, his work became much bleaker, culminating in A Hole In My Heart, ‘watching which basically felt like someone was throwing shit at you’, I once wrote, and I’ll stick by that description. Then in 2013, long after I’d given up on him, there was We Are The Best!, a wonderful surprise that matched Together in both tone and quality.

And now we have Together 99. With any sequel made long after a much-loved original, the correct procedure is to approach with caution. The rationale for making this now is that we are now the same distance in time from the original as the original was from the year it was set. As the title suggests, this film takes place in 1999, when Together was shot. 

So the question the many people I know who loved Together will want to know is: will Together 99 made me as happy as the original did? And the answer is, probably not, or not in the same way. That’s not to say in any way that this is bad film (it’s absolutely not) but it’s certainly a harsher one (to be clear, there are tough bits in Together, but the overall feel of that film is much more upbeat than this one.) 

I felt at times that Moodysson was trying to get to a synthesis between the warmth of Together/We Are The Best! (and his terrific debut, Fucking Åmål*) and his gloomier films of the 2000s.   

So we’re in the last year of the century, and the commune is down to just two members: the instinctively optimistic Göran (Gustaf Hammersten) and the long-suffering Klasse (Shanti Roney, still looking like John Fogerty from Creedence Clearwater Revival). They’re both lonely and Klasse is clearly a bit fed up with Göran, but they’ve got nowhere much to go. 

Klasse organises a surprise birthday party for Göran, inviting the former members of the collective, plus a couple of the neighbours who they had taken into their circle. Peter (David Dencik) also turns up – he says he remembers all of them, but no one remembers him. There’s some initial awkwardness, but they have a lovely afternoon together. As evening sets in, though, assorted issues that lingered through the decades come to the surface, and there are some pretty gruelling scenes. 

Moodysson makes sure there are always funny moments, even as things get edgy. And two of the characters drift away from the rest and have a little adventure that is pure entertainment.

It’s shot with handheld cameras and feels naturalistic in an unforced way (as opposed to, say, latter-day Ken Loach). We’re right in there with these characters, and the actors all seem at ease with the parts they are playing, have slipped right back into them. It all feels right. The cast are all great, but maybe a special word for Gustaf Hammersten, whose Göran is the heart of both the commune and these films.

This is a very good film. But if you have fond memories of the vibe of the original, maybe you won’t want to see this one because it does add some sour notes, even while ultimately endorsing the underlying humanism that Together embodied. 

*The title it was given in English-speaking countries is Show Me Love, but that sells the film so short. 

#lukas moodysson

[disappointingyet]

Priscilla

Director Sofia Coppola Stars Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Ari Cohen, Tim Post Italy/USA 2023 Language English 1hr 53mins Colour, black & white

Stranded in Graceland

When it was announced that Sofia Coppola was making a film about Priscilla Presley’s relationship with Elvis, there was a general ‘Yeah, makes sense’ vibe. Coppola mostly makes movies about young women (2020’s On The Rocks was a rare sortie into middle age) and her characters are often trapped by their circumstances and operating in constricted (but usually quite grand) spaces. 

All of this is true of Priscilla, which could be seen as a companion piece to Marie Antoinette, with Graceland taking the place of Versailles, showbiz royalty subbing in for the dynastic kind.  

The early part of the movie had me thinking, ‘I know that happened, but I can’t believe it happened…’ Imagine you’re a couple in 1959 on a US military base in Germany, an air force officer and his wife, and your 14-year-old daughter is invited to a party at Elvis Presley’s house. The biggest pop star in the world, very much a grown man. Yes, your daughter/step-daughter is bored and homesick and will be endlessly sulky if she’s not allowed to go – and who could blame her? – but how could you possibly justify saying yes*? 

But of course, they did say yes and Priscilla met Elvis and despite the fact that she was a child and he was in his twenties, a relationship (kissing only at that point, the film seems to be trying to reassure us, as if that would be OK) began. 

Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla from 14 to her mid-20s (Spaeny is 25) and it’s rather unnerving how convincing she is in those early scenes. Jacob Elordi (who is Australian) has worked hard on the Elvis voice – I think he lacks a bit of spark, but maybe that’s what Coppola was going for (I haven’t seen the Baz Luhrmann film, so can’t compare Elordi to Austin Butler). 

What’s interesting – in critical terms – here is how this is and isn’t like a conventional biopic. Is because we can see the span of time and the changing hairstyles etc. Isn’t because even when the protagonist becomes reclusive (The Aviator, say, or Love & Mercy) that’s by contrast with what’s come before. But after Priscilla arrives in the US from Germany, apart from quick jaunts to Vegas and LA, she’s stranded in Graceland. This is all a bit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – the story of what was going on off-stage while the ‘main’ story happened elsewhere.

And yet, there are moments when it does feel a bit TV biopic, especially when we get to the late 1960s and early ’70s and Elvis’ comeback usurps the story from Priscilla for a few scenes. But a great ending pulls it back from the brink. 

The film didn’t have the rights to Elvis’ music, and that might seem like big setback, and has been a big problem for movies in the past. But of course, this isn’t an Elvis movie and Coppola and her musical collaborators, including her husband’s band Phoenix, have assembled a wonderful soundtrack that does the job perfectly. 

I had huge expectations for Priscilla going in – Sofia Coppola is a director whose movies I always make a point of seeing in the cinema, and, like I said at the top, this seemed to be a perfect project for her. And probably because I had those high expectations, I was a bit disappointed. 

The film is too long (even if it is short by today’s standards!) – somewhere in the late ‘60s section I was thinking, ‘Yeah, we get it.’ And for a while, it does become too like other rock biopics – and, in critical circles, if not necessarily audience ones, there’s a strong sense that Bohemian Rhapsody destroyed any remaining patience for these cliches.

Ultimately, Coppola is a far better director than that and she’s made a film that’s far more interesting than most rock movies. But those trad moments  mean it falls short of greatness.

*In case you’re assuming that like Elvis, the Beaulieus came from one of those parts of the American south where very early marriages where still common, nope – he was from Quebec and she was from Brooklyn.

#sofia coppola

[disappointingyet]

Geomijip (Cobweb)

Director Kim Jee-woon Stars Song Kang-Ho, Krystal Jung,  Jeon  Yeo-bin, Oh Jung-se, Lim Soo-jung South Korea 2023 Language Korean (with English subtitles) 2hr 15mins Colour, black & white

Pleasing wild film biz comedy

A key question with art about the artistic process is: how much you do show of the results? If you’re claiming that the painting or record or TV show is great, then it’s best if you keep it off screen. (I was listening to a podcast the other day where they digressed for over 10 minutes just remembering the sheer awfulness of the show within-the-show’s comedy sketches in Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, which, to be clear, were supposed to be cutting-edge good.) If we’re meant to be laughing at it, though, you’ll need it front and centre.

In Cobweb, we end up seeing a lot of the film director Kim Yeol (Song Kang-Ho) is reshooting. That film is in luscious black & white, with the behind-the-scenes stuff in colour. He’s reshooting because he’s had dreams with a better ending that he thinks will turn his film into a masterpiece. 

He feels he needs it to be the best thing he’s ever done because the critics say he’s never escaped the shadow of his late mentor. But the owner of the studio doesn’t see the point of the reshoots and doesn’t want to pay for them. Plus, this is Korea in the 1970s, and tight censorship controls films before, during and after production – the original version was already struggling for approval and the radical rewrite is even less likely to get a pass. 

In the end, Director Kim gets just frantic two days to reassemble the cast and crew (most of whom are busy working on other productions by this point) and rework the main storyline of the movie. Meanwhile, he doesn’t actually have the studio owner’s approval and he’s hoping the censors don’t find out what he’s up to. 

We get filming mishaps, back-stage intrigue, lots of people getting very drunk, emergency cast substitutions… the full chaotic production experience. Woven in with this is the footage from the increasingly unhinged melodrama that Kim is filming, to the bafflement of much of the cast.

A useful selling point for non-Korean audiences is Song Kang-Ho, who starred in Parasite, along with several other Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook movies. He’s excellent value as a director with that familiar mix of intense insecurity and deluded self-belief.

But is it funny? I laughed a lot. I’m sure there are specifically Korean and probably specifically Korean-film-buff gags I’m not getting, but Cobweb can face up to comparisons with film-set-set classics like Living In Oblivion and not be disgraced. And the film-within-a-film is a treat. 

#song kang ho

[disappointingyet]

The Holdovers

Director Alexander Payne Stars Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph USA 2023 Language English 2hrs 13mins Colour

Payne and Giamatti reunite for unhurried snowy comedy-drama

The Holdovers almost sets a challenge for the cynical filmgoer: here’s the irascible teacher, here are the obnoxious private-school kids, here’s the situation that strands them together – and by the end, the characters will have learned something about getting beyond surface judgments. The question is: will the audience, who have seen The Breakfast Club and a dozen other films that do some of the same things, nevertheless get pulled along with this story? And will the humour – this is a movie that is aiming to make us laugh as well as feel stuff – balance out the sentiment?

It’s just before Christmas 1970 and we are in a long-established boarding school in Massachusetts. A handful of students are unable to go home for the holidays and Mr Hunham (Paul Giamatti), who teaches ancient history and is equally unpopular with the boys and his colleagues, is stuck looking after them. Also still on campus is Mary (Da’vine Joy Randolph), the cafeteria manager, whose son has just been killed in Vietnam.

So we’ve got Christmas, a Scroogy teacher, some boys furious at their fate, the older ones shaggy-haired pot smokers who combine their generation’s disdain for authority with a sense of entitlement – what they are missing out isn’t a cosy family Christmas but a ski trip or a week in the Caribbean – and a woman who dealing with trauma. That’s a loaded set-up. 

Alexander Payne is self-consciously trying to make not just a film set in the 1970s but rather a 1970s film. It comes complete with retro film company logos and credits, and some of the shots feel of that time, although it’s visibly on digital not film. (The trailer, meanwhile, goes full pastiche.) Bits and pieces of assorted movies from that decade drifted through my mind: The Paper Chase*, Breaking Away… The director who has been mentioned as an inspiration here is Hal Ashby (Harold And Maude, The Last Detail), whose movies are arguably engaged more with feelings than those of some of his New Hollywood peers.

This is a somewhat sprawling picture – two and a quarter hours for a story that takes place over a couple of weeks. It’s certainly longer than it needs to be. 

I suspect there will be some comments about race in this movie – Mary manoeuvres through a largely white world without experiencing the kind of casual bigotry you would expect in 1970. On the other hand, the film is very clear on the structural racism and classism that meant her son ended up on the frontline of a war and his white classmates did not, and that (ultimately) is the bigger issue. 

Giamatti is easily within his comfort zone (he's played grouches before plus his father and grandfather were academics, his mother taught at private school.) The kids are well-cast. Randolph does her best with a part that’s a bit too at service of the narrative.

I was both looking forward to The Holdovers – it’s the Sideways team of Payne and Giamatti working together again! – and a bit suspicious of it, a suspicion amplified as I started watching it. Re-reading my review of Payne’s Nebraska, I realised that because Election was the first movie of his that I saw and it made a big impression on me, I have been misinterpreting Payne’s world view ever since. But taken on its own terms, The Holdovers works and yes, in the end won me over. 

*In all honesty, I’m not sure I’ve actually seen the 1973 movie - I know I watched some episodes of the TV series that followed. In any case, John Houseman’s character in The Paper Chase is more who Giamatti’s character in The Holdovers hoped he would be, rather than is. 

#the holdovers #alexander payne #paul giamatti

[disappointingyet]

Catching Fire: The Anita Pallenberg Story

Directors Alexis Bloom, Svetlana Zill Stars Marlon Richards, Keith Richards, Angela Richards, Stash Klossowski de Rola, Jake Weber USA 2023 Language English, some French, Italian, German (with subtitles) 1hr 50mins Colour, black & white

Sobering tale of a woman derailed by self-absorbed blokes

If there’s one lesson I took from this film, it’s this: if anyone starts lamenting the loss of danger in rock music, just slap them. And don’t hold back. Because if relatively early in this documentary you’re thinking ‘Wheeeeee! Don’t the ‘60s look glamorous and fun!’ by the final third, it’s become very sobering indeed. Even if Anita Pallenberg’s surviving kids Marlon and Angela Richards seem OK, the fact that they have wildly different accents turns out to be a hint of how deeply screwed-up their childhoods were. 

Pallenberg – if for some strange reason you’re reading this without having heard of her – was a German-Italian model and actress whose promising career* got sidetracked by her successive romantic involvements with Rolling Stones guitarists Brian Jones and Keith ‘Keef’ Richards.

She’s absolutely central to the Stones myth, the late ’60s/early ‘70s period when they helped invent the idea of rock music as something separate from pop, and seemed dark and mysterious and full of ambiguity, as opposed to the sturdy old troupers they’ve been since. 

Keith Richards readily credits Pallenberg for his look – his transition from the poloneck-sweater era to scarves and billowing shirts was accomplished by wearing her clothes. She gave the Stones a lot – what she got in return is more in question.

The film is built around Pallenberg’s unpublished memoir, with her words read by Scarlett Johansson (I spent chunks of the film trying to place the voice.) This is woven in with interviews with her friends and family. I’ve watched a lot of documentaries about the 1960s and the survivors from that time have a tendency to be gratingly self-congratulatory and utterly lacking in perspective or any sense of what’s interesting to the rest of the world rather than to them.

Either the directors have done a very good job keeping their interviewees on track, or they picked them well. Even Stash Klossowski de Rola, a bit of a character who apparently is now big on Tik Tok, stays relevant. 

To me, though, the more valuable – if distressing – part of the film is the part covering the 1970s, when Pallenberg, struggling with addiction, firstly had to play host to the making of Exile On Main St in her house and then was instructed to stay home while Keith embarked on never-ending tours.

This is when we hear from Marlon Richards and also from Jake Weber, these days a reliable character actor but in 1971 a kid whose dealer dad brought him along to hang out in the Exile house. Weber is always excellent value talking about this stuff, while it’s just impressive that Marlon Richards emerged as anything other than a total wreck. 

As a piece of film-making, Catching Fire is a reasonably conventional documentary. It benefits from how much is on film – Pallenberg in her actress days and then the whole Stones circle. It does dabble a bit in a psychedelic feel for some of the 1960s stuff, but then settles down to tell a powerful if deeply depressing story. 

Classic rock stars? Bunch of twats.  *Watching the clips from Barbarella, it's weird to think that Pallenberg was actually three years younger than Jane Fonda.

[disappointingyet]

Kuolleet Lehdet (Fallen Leaves) 

Director Aki Kaurismäki Stars Alma Pöysti, Jussi Vatanen, Janne Hyytiäinen Finland/Germany 2023 Language Finnish (with English subtitles) 1hr 21mins Colour

Laconically moving Finnish film

Ansa (Alma Pöysti) works in a supermarket. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) does something that looks like involves blasting stuff off metal. He lives in a shipping container with three of his co-workers, she has a nice little flat of her own. He drinks too much – and anyone who is considered a problem drinker by the standards of an Aki Kaurismäki film must be doing serious damage to their liver. 

They sort-of meet at a karaoke night, one of series of misconnections. In the meantime, we see them individually as they experience the margins of the Finnish job market.

All of which, I realise, is probably making this film seem incredibly bleak. And yet the word hovering in my mind at the end of it was ‘lovely’. Fallen Leaves is ultimately a sweet film, one that sympathises with its characters and doesn’t patronise them. 

Ansa, especially, is strong and self-reliant. She’s quiet but not the meek and shy person others persistently assume she is going to be.

If you’ve ever seen a Kaurismäki film, you’ll recognise the style. People don’t talk much, a lot of the film happens in bars, not much happens and then there are bursts of highly dramatic events, often off screen. 

And almost everything looks and sounds like it belongs sometime between 1958 and 1962. But the film is resolutely set now – every time the characters turn on their vintage radios, there’s news about the war in Ukraine. But in contrast to recent Kaurismäki films, global events remain in the background. It remains an interesting choice, possibly being a deliberate way of preventing anyone from treating this as a wallow in a nostalgic vibe.

(When Ansa and Holappa go to the cinema, despite all the posters outside being for vintage pictures such as Brief Encounter, they see a film from 2019.)

Kaurismäki has been making films in his own very distinctive style for 40 years now and they require an audience to fully buy in to the mood and approach. But if you do, then Fallen Leaves is one of his best, funny and touching and really rather wonderful.

I saw Fallen Leaves at the BFI London Film Festival 2023

#aki kaurismäki #fallen leaves