Good Time (2017) Trailer
A little delayed but I’ve been reading up on some of the winners and curios from this years Cannes, and alongside the new Lynne Ramsay, Sofia Coppola, Haneke and Yorgos Lanthimos queasy sounding The Killing Of A Sacred Deer this seems to be another ‘must- see’, apparently proving that Pattinson can actually act;
American Made (2017) Trailer
What’s that, the Cruiser has been spotted in a non-franchise picture? Will wonders never cease? Anywho, this could be fun, its tangent to the Cocaine Cowboys story already has me interested;
You Were Never Really Here (2017) Trailer
I’ve not been closely following much of the Cannes coverage this year, but nevertheless a few films have leapt out as ‘must sees’ as the awards are parcelled out this evening. As a big fan of Lynne Ramsay its great to hear she’s back on track with this, after that Jane Got A Gun debacle;
I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore (2017) Trailer
Interesting, timely title, and this has mostly gone down a storm at Sundance – looks good;
London Film Festival 2016 – Blue Velvet Revisited (2016) Trailer
Here’s a trailer for what seems to be a rather different approach to movie making documentaries, naturally I was attracted to the material but I just couldn’t align the screenings with my schedule. Now I’m kicking myself as this looks fascinating, but I guess it will get a VoD release in a few months or so what with the enhanced interest in Lynch in the run-up to next year’s return to Twin Peaks;
Any outtakes of a behind the scenes Dennis Hooper as the truly terrifying Frank Booth could be appropriately distressing, In fact there is another documentary on ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’ screening this year, as you can see here;
Hell Or High Water (2016)
Well heck mister, I do declare we mecay have gone and cracked this here varmint, and broken this trail of mediocre movie musings – or should that be mediocre musings on movies? I’d heard vague rumblings on the social media trail that this new Texas set thriller was a terrific little steal, with another imperious performance from the almost always brilliant Jeff Bridges. As is my mojo these days I didn’t even see the trailer beforehand, simply assuming from the poster and a general aura that this was going to be another rural western-noir hybrid in the vein of Bad Day At Black Rock, High Sierra, U-Turn or No Country For Old Men, the nervous, furtive action supplanted to the prairies of the Lonestar state, leagues and latitudes away from the urban metropoli of East and West coast America. A couple of brothers, Toby Howard (Chris Pine) and recently paroled felon Tanner (Ben Foster) have embarked on a small scale robbery spree, following their mothers recent passing from a punishing bout of resource starving cancer. Although one wouldn’t exactly cite them as hardened, violent criminals there does seem to be a method to their madness, only hitting the smallest and quietest branches of major financial entities, in the tiny, tumbleweed towns that the 21st century seems to have forgot. Carefully the duo only sequester low denomination bills as to avoid the wrath of the federal authorities who only become activated when significant bounties are yielded, offering courtesy and compassion for their victims during the commencement of the crime, but also not afraid to give any uppity citizen a pistol-whupping should he threaten their desperate plight. More curiously the string of robberies is hinted as part of a wider strategy to secure some immediately urgent investment funds, with the promise of more permanent revenue streams being unlocked for persons and placements unknown, driven by a lurking thematic undercurrent which is where Hell Or High Water finds its present-day purchase.
On their trail is the hulking persona of Ranger Marcus Hamilton, Bridges on his best form since 2009’s Oscar winning Crazy Heart. He’s career lawman mere weeks from retirement, engaged in constant banter with his half Cherokee / half Mexican partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham) who absorbs his colleagues gentle barbs with a resigned indifference, returning ethnic slurs with volleys of his comrades imminent retirement and subsequent premature death. The ethnicity becomes more important as the landscape and its denizens slowly become more animated through the films sinuous script. chequering the Mid-West’s suppressed history which swings from the near genocide of the indigenous people to the criminal conquering of the Mexican state in the 19th century, both blood-soaked events casting long shadows that still loom large on America’s modern, shared history. My expectations that this was going to a single note, brooding noirish tale was swiftly struck down by the films occasionally flippant and lightly comedic tone, in fact much of its charm and enjoyment arises from the camaraderie and banter that flows between the two groups of similarly inclined units – the older lawmen and their racial jousting, the younger brothers and their familial affection. That tone is not afraid to carefully switch to the serious when the plot demands it however, as this is a film which takes its violence and its consequences as seriously as it deserves, and if there is a brooding undercurrent it is one driven of despair and futile discontent, as the wider economic forces cause desperate men to resort to desperate measures. I think this is the first film I’ve seen Pine in other than the vaguely entertaining but hardly memorable Star Trek pictures which is even remotely good, he is quite the revelation as a driven but exhausted man who despite his matrimonial separation still burns with that male prerogative of providing for his family, boxed into a criminal corner with no other option than to violate the law. If you like, you could phrase the entire film as being written by Cormac McCarthy the morning after he got laid, with all those familiar locales, masochistic fascinations and generational barbed-wire bonds spun with a humorous and almost frothy sense of humor, gnawing away at the existentialist dread of the vast and uncaring unknown.
Performance wise however this is of course Bridge’s film, director David MacKenzie citing both Thunderbolt & Lightfoot and The Last Picture Show as key films he digested for inspiration, providing Jeff with another canvas on which to project his second secret weapon – it’s sense of place and environment. For me it’s a little like Fat City or Wise Blood, they are two admired films which I’ve never quite warmed to in terms of plot or story, but I can appreciate for their tone which is generated in the locales and ancient canyons and ravines, the wide, lonely badlands of Middle America still slithering with near biblical beasts and righteous wrath. Alongside these performances then the films final ace in the hole is the potent is the economic malaise underpinning the entire endeavor, and who these three conflating forces come together in such a assured mixture of character, place and purpose. Hell Or High Water is a tale of reasonably decent men being pushed by the economic maelstrom, where sheer survival begats any respect for the law when the major crooks – the corporations who are crushing the lives of the disaffected and disenfranchised – remain utterly aloof and impervious to prosecution. At one point Parker soliloquies a lovely speech on how his land and birthrights was stolen a trio of generations ago by the grandparents of the folks who now in turn are having their birthrights stolen by the corporations, in a seemingly endless cycle of suffering, greed and theft. Aside from the thematic thrusts MacKenzie keeps his cross-hairs trained on the genre pyrotechnics, the scattering of robberies aren’t synchronized to some pulsing score or nerve shredding editing techniques, instead they play out with all their own compact and , constrained drama, leading to the inevitable heightened stakes and tragic incidents that usually conflate when you mix frightened people, unforeseen circumstances and lethal firearms. I didn’t find Nick Cave and Warren Ellis honky-tonk influenced score as atmospheric as most which surprised me as a major fan of their work, like the film it was more jaunty than you’d expect from their previous aural efforts, but that didn’t distract from this assured diamond rattlesnake of a movie, a serpentine beast with a lethal, poisonous bite.
MacKenzie and his screenwriter Taylor Sheridan have layered the film with a scattering of subtle touches, which may explain why the film has lingered on the so called black-list for so long. Despite the masculine banter around ethnicity, around professional efficiency cloaking any feminine expression of affection you can see Parker’s face occasionally contort in exasperation as his patience is tested to the limits, when yet another racist epithet is almost carelessly cast. It’s an interesting take on various ethnicities and faiths working in not exactly harmonious but lightly suspicious unity, as the film refreshingly doesn’t go anywhere near any queries over immigration which has so paralyzed the modern body politic on both sides of the Atlantic. Even the side characters add colour and pathos to the illegal endeavor, from a sympathetic waitress who resists the lawmen’s appeal to her better nature after Toby leaves her a lucrative, mortgage supporting tip, to a memorable scene stealing elderly waitress who re-defines the concept of the customer always being right, in perhaps the best customer retail exchange since Jack ordered off the menu in Five Easy Pieces. The final confrontation is a rarity, pivoting on character rather than conflict, charting the assured final steps of a near perfectly paced movie. I’m looking forward to a small screen revisit to tease out some of the finer details buried in its sparse, directorial style which is reminiscent of a Don Siegel, a Robert Aldritch or Raoul Walsh, letting the place and characters tell the story, rather than clinging to intrusive camerawork or aesthetic antics which could deviate away from the films quietly powerful internal engine. Hell Or High Water isn’t a film that is going to change the world, it isn’t destined to perch atop any of the all time great lists, but what it does achieve is sorely remiss from this years American film – the commitment in taking an adult audience through a compelling story, crafting memorable and empathetic characters, varnished with contemporaneous layers and musings which linger long after its fruitful and thoughtful finale;
Split (2017) Trailer
So I see Shyamalan has resorted to remakes now? Well, on paper this is the kind of bait & switch, mess with the audiences expectations kinda movie that I love, but that trailer is not good, and you can see one major twist hurtling down the road from about 30 seconds into this teaser;
Pitbull 2 (2016) Trailer
From this month’s Sight & Sound, a little analysis on the new Polish film Pitbull 2. Apparently a social media campaign persuaded the distributor to release the film in the UK, due to overwhelming demand, led by the UK’s immigrant Polish population. The film opened on a measley 32 screens yet still managed over £500K sales, which I think goes to prove the global nature of the film business. I missed it but it does sound like a film I would have enjoyed, as any brutal urban crime drama. It looks a bit generic but I just love how a grassroots operation can bring a supposedly ‘foreign’ film to these shores for a theatrical exhibition, so I think I’ll start with the original 2005 film which I’ve just loaded to the Lovefilm account;
Dog Eat Dog (2017) Teaser
What’s this, hot out of Cannes we have a) a new Paul Schrader movie that b) actually has received a wealth of positive buzz, unlike, say his last decade of efforts? Colour me excited;
Anything based on Eddie Bunkers novels will always clock into the Menagerie interest vault, so I’ll be instructing my narks on the street to keep their eyes peeled for a London release later in the year. Alongside the news that Scorsese will finally team up with De Niro, Pesci, Al Pacino (really? Blimey) and the gang for one final crime film and I’d judge this as a positive week…..
Minty’s Moviedrome Menagerie…..
Interesting stumble down memory lane this weekend, as I finally received numerous boxes of books, DVD’s, comics and assorted paraphernalia that I’ve had in storage for a near decade. So with a nod to the future and a glance to the past I’ve decided to institute a new activity, a Sunday night tribute to the sorely missed Moviedrome season that was a essential learning experience for any budding 1980’s cinephile. I’m not gonna be constructing new reviews around these re-watches – I don’t have the time nor inclination to commit to yet another strand of writing – but I might throw together some capsule reviews, dependent on my temperature. First up for tonight’s entertainment? A 1970’s urban minimalist classic;
EDIT – Ahhh, there are far more interactive and instructive links out there on MD such as this and this, oddly I always thought that I first discovered The Driver through this programming perfection but apparently not as it was never on the schedule. In any case Walter Hill’s best film is certainly within the spirit of such fantastic stuff…..
The Neon Demon (2016) Trailer
Well this looks lavish from a design and photography standpoint, and enigmatic on plot which is welcome. Having rewatched Refn’s Pusher trilogy again recently it is curious to see how this ‘cannibal horror movie set in the world of fashion’ might shape up since he’s moved into this middle phase of his career. No sight of Keanu though, unless I missed it;
In vaguely related news – Neon Demon is premiering there – this year’s Cannes line-up has just been issued and there are some exciting nuggets in the mix – finally a new Andrea Arnold, a fiction and non-fiction Jarmusch, another Jeff Nichols, one Park Chan-wook, a Mungiu, a Kore-eda and finally a Verhoeven are all on my watch-list. That’s just a brief scan but I’m sure there will be plenty to keep me amused…..but no real ‘killer’ new film announcement that has me exceptional excited I have to say….
Midnight Special (2016)
We just can’t escape John Carpenter’s instructive influence at the moment. That I’m complaining of course, JC is one of my favourite filmmakers of all time, so its been extremely rewarding to see a entire horde of small budget, genre savy-films emerge from the same birthing chamber, particularly in light of the incompetent remakes which have scourged the multiplexes over the past decade – The Fog? The Thing prequel? The Assault on Precinct 13 remake? Yuck. This brings us to the fine, ermine career of Jeff Nichols, for my money one of the more interesting American directors to emerge from the independent scene in the new millennium, now on his fourth feature of Southern scented stories with the eagerly awaited Midnight Special. Numerous critics have cited both the Carpenter and Spielbergian overtones which are easy to detect, but without the lack of cloying sentimentality when it comes to the latter which can tarnish his work, instead opting for the distillation of awe and wonder which made the likes of E.T. and Close Encounters so successful and memorable. Opening in a furtive motel we meet two stern men – Roy (the always brilliant Shannon) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton) who are sequestered with an eight-year-old boy named Alton (an eerie Jaeden Lieberher), whom we learn from news reports appears to have been kidnapped. With echoes of the Waco Branch Davidans the authorities raid the church led by Sam Shepherd, he is also hunting the fugitives and desires return the capture of the valuable child at all costs, grimly warning the FBI that they have no idea what they are dealing with. We soon learn that Roy is Alton’s birth father whom is desperately leading his son to the location of some psychically seered co-ordinates, linking up with Alton’s excommunicated birth mother (Kirsten Dunst) along the way. But who, or indeed what is Alton beneath that human carapace and what is the source of his mysterious, near apocalyptic powers? Well that would be telling wouldn’t’ it?……
Cell phones aside the film not only feels like a genre product of the 1980’s it could have been set in the 1980’s, such is the tempo and aspirations of Midnight Special from its sparse deployment of special effects to its emphasis on atmosphere and environment, so while it stands in the shadow of previous beloved artefacts it does struggle initially so define its own voice. I think a good point of departure (if you’ll excuse the plot driven pun) that enables us to unpack the film is to consider Nichol’s expressed working protocols, acting as sole screenwriter and director in true auteur fashion. He has explained that he writes on two ‘tracks,’ when slaving over a groaning MacBook, one for plot/genre and the other for behaviour/characterization. This enables him to take two aligned narrative cables and twist them into a stronger and more resilient coil, merging both streams into a movie which feels familiar but still aspires to surprise and delight. That’s a terrific approach which is instructive of his commitment to genre and style, a lesson which many of these independently sourced directors who are being absorbed into the studio system should take heed, we’ll see how Rian Johnson handles Episode IX but Colin Trevorrow certainly abandoned character in favor of spectacle soured SFX in the atrocious Jurassic World. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Nichols pick up a franchise nod having delivered another modest critical darling (Midnight Special only cost $20 million), and I for one would be amused to see his take on a Star Wars picture, some outcasts running through the solemn sandy badlands of Tattooine in pursuit of some ethereal, spiritual peace could fit in with that universe mechanics. He’s stated that his earlier triumph Take Shelter was inspired by his apprehension of responsibility, of getting married and starting a family, but the journey to Midnight Special was far more fraught. During pre-production he suffered a terrifying ordeal when his infant son was seriously ill, an experience of potential loss and abandonment which he has poured into his art like any worthy , without coming as to self-indulgent – again those genre trappings give the film one remove from a narcissistic bore. The film pulses with a genuine soul and desire to uncoil its subtexts within the confines of the genre infrastructure, although initially I liked it a lot I was a little disappointed for some shortcomings which I’ll get into shortly, but upon reflection some of those concerns have faded while other celestial moments have soared.
Oddly the film that Midnight Special immediately brought to mind wasn’t the obvious influence Starman which Nichols has cited as a major influence but another eighties cult classic – Near Dark. Both films are largely set at night, the reasoning in this that sunlight causes Alton to exhibit dangerous outbursts and symptoms of his mysterious pedigree, draping them both in a nebulous, smooth twilight suggesting the transitional permeability between two worlds. Both films prowl through the small towns and communities of Texas and Alabama, incubating rural authenticity in which the fantastical and uncanny takes place, and both films share a lyrical synth driven score – another Carpenter influence that the film proudly boasts on its sleeve. Nichols has selected a lens flare driven cinematography which could have J.J. Abrams reaching for his copyright attorney, but there is a method to the madness which becomes clear in the final act which holds a few surprises ups its sleeve – I really can’t elaborate on this for fears of the dreaded spoilers. Other recent interlopers to the Alien paddock like Super-8 and Tomorrowland seem to be pushing smaller scale SF into more positive modes, with the aliens (in both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial sense) as benevolent saviours rather than threats to be feared and fought, another link back to 1980’s staples like Cocoon and E.T. Again I’m dancing around spoilers here but the third act reveal is genuine, tear inducing ‘wow’ stuff for SF aficionados, restoring one’s faith in modest and appropriate deployment of SFX which serves the story rather than leaving the audience in a visual state of concussion.
However, there are frustrating problems which can’t be avoided. I didn’t particularly feel any emotional investment from the parents to Alton apart from one briefly touching scene, and Driver’s character feels woefully undeveloped in the first couple of acts which make his decisions in the final stretch disappointingly inauthentic, even if he’s playing the standard government good guy nested among a swarm of bureaucrats who want to weaponize or permanently eliminate a threat they can’t understand. The narrative slyly drops history and backstory through restrained and removed dialogue exchanges which is welcomed as storytelling to aimed at an adult audience, but other chains of cause and effect are nigh incomprehensible, with one scene where Driver cracks a crucial code is woefully illogical and confusing. Upon reflection Joel Egerton’s entire character is surplus to requirement, you could surgically remove him from the plot and you’d probably generate more warmth between the father and son doxology which propels the entire empathic engine of the film. The plot follows the usual race against time as Tyler grows more sickly, suffering from a photosynthesis aversion to our blazing sun, and there isn’t many surprises story-beat wise as the interesting context of the cult Alton’s history seems unexplored and expressed – those rumoured re-shoots ordered by a nervous Warner Brothers appear to hold water. Nevertheless Midnight Special excels in atmosphere which is Nichol’s forte, there’s a real sense of the world both physical and spiritual surrounding the fugitives with a slowly encroaching dread snapping at their heels, and any film so committed to such qualities is welcomed as antidote to the crash-bang carnage of the Hollywood proscenium. If they just fixed a few niggles this could have been a brilliant work rather than just a good one, but I suspect this is a movie that will grow and strengthen with repeated viewings, with a final act revelation which is pure cinematic celestial celebration. Midnight Special is a perfect companion piece to Nichol’s Take Shelter which for the moment remains a stronger picture, faith and prophecy hinting at entities beyond human comprehension, locked in the pure unencumbered love between father and son;
Assault On Precinct 13 (1976)
‘You got a smoke?‘ – As we approach our tenth birthday I knew it was time to finally broach a very serious milestone for the Menagerie, covering a sacred text that I have referenced and revered throughout our long and winding journey. This is becoming something of the year of the Carpenter with not one, not two but three JC events which demand my attention, and when I saw the screening schedule of this stimulating season knew I had to finally turn my attention to one of the unimpeachable foundations of my movie-love, a key text which had quite an influence on my evolving obsession with all things celluloid. Given my age of course I’d been beguiled by the likes of Indiana Jones, E.T. and Star Wars in my infantile appreciation, just like all the other members of my generation, but at some point those mainstream movies mutated into a love of John Carpenter movies, just as the idea of films having directors or some form of creative agent behind them was starting to coalesce in my perambulating mind. This was the golden age of the VHS format and I soon started to acquire a collection of those big bundles of tape and plastic, and I distinctly recall buying The Fog and Escape From New York for the princely sum of £5.99 each, a king’s ransom when your paper round income barely kept me in comic books and Michael Moorcock paperback’s from our local purveyor of all things geektastic. Somehow Assault On Precinct 13 had already infiltrated my mind as I can’t recall a period when it wasn’t in my all-time top five, it must have started with some late-night TV viewing, where that melee of exotic L.A. street gangs, a prowling electronica score and badass anti-heroes combined to show me what other genre birthed treasures lay beyond the mainstream Hollywood blockbuster template. I have been keeping an eye out for a London screening for the past fifteen years so when I learnt of its inclusion on the Prince Charles hosted season you can imagine my reaction, and although this screening was over a month ago I’ve kept this on the backburner as I wanted to synchronise such a milestone as the first piece written from my new home – just a little marker that heralds a new chapter of this quiet corner of the internet. So let’s begin at the beginning which is usually a logical choice, the lights dim, the curtains part and we’re back to 1976;
It’s an oft quoted observation but I love how films of this era took their time with their titles, they eased you into the picture through a slow environmental acclimatisation while discreetly signalling some of the semiotics of the experience to come through colour, font and graphic design choices, and of course that pulverising score which sets the seething tempo of the entire picture. In terms of plot the story is as finessed and sleek as the films compact run-time – 1970’s LA, and the cops have launched a violent crack-down on the various deadly street gangs that are boiling in a multi-racial cauldron of social malaise. When a particularly virulent capo guns down a young girl in cold blood – a scene which still causes the jaw to drop today – her bereaved father takes lethal vengeance, invoking the wrath of the street gangs as he flees to the supposed sanctuary of an adjacent police precinct. Staffed with a skeleton crew of officers headed by newly promoted First Lieutenant Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker) Precinct 13 is scheduled to decant to new premises, hence the isolated communications and resources the lawmen have at their disposal. Coincidently, a group of bus-bound convicts are diverted to the station when one of their group is taken ill, a rather unfortunate development as their arrival coincides with the gangs initial efforts to circle the chain of revenge in a natives versus civilisation scenario that’s not a million miles away from the template of a John Ford or Howard Hawks picture….
I’ll confess I was a little anxious about this screening, slightly concerned that a film I haven’t revisited for a few years wouldn’t stack up as so many films deteriorate with the changing times, shattering the foundations of Menagerie’s mecca like a drone strike on an orphanage. Does Assault highlight and ameliorate the great implacable mysteries of the human condition? No, not really. Does it speak to common truths across borders and ages, caressing the very contours of the soul through its aesthetic brilliance ? Probably not. It is however a tautly crafted, immensely entertaining genre picture with a motley crew of engaging and amusing characters, armed with a devastatingly influential electronica score which unlocked new realms of cinematic and aural obsession and appreciation. For me it is one of these guilty pleasures that will never fade in affection, an artefact, a text indelibly etched on the soul like that book your Dad recommend you read which subsequently inspired your career choices, like that album that formed the soundtrack of your wooing, romance and subsequent break-up of your first true love, a documents that you will carry with you until the day you die, a relic which embroiders the fabric of your life. In terms of context it is one of the key cult films of the 1970’s for a certain generation, appealing to the same breed of street smart urban horror fans who also gravitated to The Warriors, The Wanderers and Dawn Of The Dead, speared by the vicious vision of this strange, violent and colourful concept of America that seemed a million miles away in that pre-globalised adolescent era. I can’t make any claim or argue for its position beyond more than a finely honed urban thriller with calibrated through a genuine genre affection, but for me it still holds that indescribable quality, a sense of pungent nostalgia which I’ll admit can occasionally obscure a film’s latent shortcomings and weaknesses. Its about tribes and tribal affiliations so I’d offer a meta-reading, as when the likes of Laurent Garnier used to drop the soundtrack into his techno sets or the likes of Gasper Noe aligns a pornographically provocative scene in his recent film Love to that same slithering score you know you’re in an exclusive little gang, hostile to outsiders and committed to the bloody and change strewn end.
‘I got me a plan, it’s called save-ass, and here’s how it works – I jump out of the window, and I run like a bastard’ – In terms of the screening itself I assumed a digital experience, a prediction which was vindicated and to be expected. The anamorphic widescreen looked pixel-poised terrific and although I would have preferred an analogue 35mm screening I doubt there is a single 35mm print in the country or indeed Europe, although the French quite wisely always liked Carpenter and recognised his influences and inspirations as being sourced from a rich tradition of American genre gentrification. The Prince Charles always puts on a comfortable screening environment and ameliorates an appreciative crowd, it’s strange that I don’t make more of an effort to go to screenings there considering the competitive ticket price and amusing panoply of programming. My lore and knowledge wasn’t as wide as it now is when I first became enamoured with the film, but now it is blatantly obvious how Carpenter transplanted the Hawksian western to a ghetto glued Los Angeles for Assault, forming a rag-tag bunch of desperados, lawmen and support functionaries into a self-sustaining group whom have to bond, respect and trust each other to overcome their outsider alien foe, with just a suggestion of an equally footed romance between the main players to lace the danger with lightning strike of empathic energy. Carpenter’s use of space is his masterful metier, composing movement and threat in the frame and cutting action scenes to an expert choreography of information and trembling tempo, a claustrophobic master of the isolated siege movie – think Prince Of Darkness, The Thing, and Ghosts Of Mars – Ah, yes, OK, maybe don’t dwell on the last one too much. For the aficionado it’s also fun to link through the directors stock repertoire of supporting players, with Charles Cyphers, Nancy Loomis and Frank Doubleday going on to feature in other Carpenter crafts, that’s just one of those activities we geeks like to indulge in as some sort of pointless celluloid cerebral masturbation. Although Darwin Joston is my favourite – and more on him below – kudos also goes to Laurie Zimmer as the resourceful Leah, a pioneer Hawksian woman who gives as good as she gets, steadfastly fighting alongside the men instead of shrieking in terror when the carnage begins. She didn’t have much of a career and Stoker was best known for one of the latter Planet Of The Apes movies, this however being the age of ephemera guess what? Someone in 2003 only went and made a whole fucking documentary on Zimmer although I can’t find trace of it to buy or rent, and if you really want useless trivia then the little girl who gets clipped is apparently now one of ‘star’ members of the Housewife’s Of Beverley Hills ‘reality‘ show.
‘Life Just Seems To Pass Us By’ – The film seems to be pulled in the slipstream of so called facist works like Dirty Harry which took a similar black or white (if you’ll excuse the racial overtones) posture to the dregs of the criminal scum, the street gang members are projected as faceless cannon-fodder injuns, with no positioning of their social or economic realities to indicate why they might band together against the persecution of the authoritarian police state. In my view nor should there be as this isn’t that kind of picture, it’s a pure character driven action film which offers no political diatribe or satire that the libertarian streak of his later films would so confidently communicate – They Live and Escape From New York being the prime examples. We’re in no doubt that these silhouettes are mindless, almost insect herded murderers, with no quarter given nor asked for, a notion of a formless existential evil beyond our comprehension which is a nebulous world view that runs through the remainder of Carpenters horror pictures like the stygian river Styx flows through Hades. I love the frustrated character of Wells whom eagle-eyed viewers will recognise as Rocky’s sparring partner or perhaps as the Snowcat engineer in the longer domestic cut of The Shining. If you think that’s particularly cinephile obsessive then I’ll go one better, which brings us to the lamented figure of Austin Stoker. He delivers a pitch-perfect performance as the mysterious Napoleon Wilson, a turn I worried wouldn’t age as well as the rest of the picture, treading a fine line between stoic, enigmatic coolness and exploitation efficiency – he knows he’s in a fun little genre picture but treats the material with an appropriate modicum of respect. It’s a real shame that his early death guillotined a potential inclusion in the ‘oh that guy’ portfolio of interesting character actors, like John Cazale he seemed to have a potentially promising career cut woefully short. He appeared in two other films – a blink and you’ll miss it doctor in The Fog, and most cultishly he also made an incongruous appearance in Eraserhead– and that’s how you link early Lynch to latter Kubrick back to early Carpenter my learned friends, the master is now in session…..
‘I have my moments’ – Two years later Carpenter built on his modest film festival success by leveraging a few hundred thousand bucks out of international producers Irwin Yablans and Moustapha Akkad to finance his and his then girlfriend Debra Hill’s suburban horror tale about a babysitter terrorised by a indestructible bogeyman, and ushered in a whole new horror genre in the process. Halloween and The Thing are probably Carpenters masterpieces, the absolute apotheosis of their respective genres that have never been bettered within the structure of their symbols and semiotics, but for me it will always be that pulsing score, the silenced bark of the M16 armalite’s and the weary wise-cracking of Napoleon Wilson that occupies the apotheosis of this favoured auteur, as much as I love his entire 1974 – 1988 body of work. Naturally I’ve seen the remake and unsurprisingly dismissed it, it wasn’t a bad film as these projects go it was just kinda pointless really, it didn’t have the confidence or skill to do anything interesting or contemporary with the characters or setting as an update for 2005. So that’s that, another crucial foundation of the Menagerie finally gets its dues, and already the new releases I want to cover are stacking up in a holding position like some frenzied air-traffic control official’s work programme, let alone the launch of a major new season which begins in glorious 4K at the BFI. But we’re not done with Mr. Carpenter yet as we have another crucial centrepiece of the oeuvre to cross off with an extraordinarily exciting 70mm print of a 1980’s cult classic, so never forget that it’s all in the reflexes;
Jean-Pierre Melville Season – Un Flic (1971)
I don’t know about you but after six months of restless prowling through these crime sodden Parisian streets I’m exhausted, both spiritually and mentally as we take another walk on Jean-Pierre Melville’s nihilistic wild side. Nevertheless we have just one more score to settle, thus I thought it best to close this season appropriately enough with Melville’s last film which was released a mere year before his death in 1972. Un Flic opens with an atmospheric robbery at a rather implausibly remote coastal bank located in Saint-Jean-de-Monts, the solemn crash and burst of the sea spray providing an elemental expressionistic counterpoint to the criminal’s cool and professional robotic demeanours. The crew is led by Richard Crenna, a US actor making an unusual appearance in this France helmed picture, and he’s probably best known for his patronage of his comrade John in a certain Vietnam veteran franchise . After the robbery goes sideways and one of his fellow is mortally wounded the crew limps back to Paris, burying their ill-gotten gains and evading their collars being felt by the gendarmes led by Melville favourite Alain Delon in his third coolly dispassionate collaboration. New to the scene is Catherine Deneuve in feline femme fatale mode, oscillating between the affections of Delon and Crenna and seemingly playing the angles across both blurred sides of the law, as another train set heist promises to provide that final big score and enable the criminal crew to finally fade into underworld legend for good.
Truth be told it’s a relief to finally padlock this season as you’re probably as bored of reading the same quantifiers as I have in writing them- cold, implacable, minimalist, deadly. Un Flic is Melville’s style refined to its final keen intensity, a remorseless procedural narrative which follows the hunt for the criminal crew after they abandon one of their mortally injured comrades. I guess you can’t say he wasn’t ambitious in his final film, expanded his canvas by planning a second set-piece following the tense opening robbery, a mission involving numerous moving mechanisms as the criminals discreetly assault a moving train via helicopter assisted propulsion. Normally as a critic you raise above such derisive snorts as the SFX being poor due to a films pedigree and vintage, but the exceptionally poor model work and matte backgrounds are deeply distracting, reminiscent of the model work that Hitchcock deployed in some of his 1930’s pictures – you’d have thought the suspension of disbelief would have advanced in the intervening years. As you can discern from the photos the film has an icy cobalt chrome palette which would make James Cameron shiver in admiration, perusing the delicate graduations of the colour blue, reinforcing the icy pallor that runs through the cops, criminals and associated denizens, with barely any warm colour semiotics to counterbalance the overall aura of a remote and isolated annihilation.
“The only feelings mankind has ever inspired in policemen are those of indifference and derision…” is the motto of the film, provided in an opening title screed which is a technique that Melville frequently deployed to frame his films in terms of theme. Although the operative word as always with Melville is ‘mankind’ Catherine Deneuve blesses the feature with a much needed sense of sophistication and sultry champagne, her motives and machinations as deadly as her crimson blood lipstick. Un Flic is particularly sour and nihilistic even by Melville’s standards, the cops drained of all empathy as they ceaseless prowl down out their criminal prey, as we come to the end of the season its almost a blessed relief that Melville passed and could perhaps find some peace in the sweet sleep of eternity. Some of the flourishes are the result of a lack of countervailing force which is a common complaint of a directors twilight years, with no-one prepared or equipped to challenge creative decisions such is their venerable stature within the industry. Spending roughly ten minutes of screen time to show a washing his face and grooming after a rather absurd helicopter to moving rappel strains fidelity to realism and consequent audience patience. Even fans of a well planned and executed deception we are reminded that cinema is equipped with a grammar and syntax that is able to compress or expand time to present information within a context of pace and flow, and when you’re directorial decision are erring toward the realms of the tedious rather then tense the picture is starting to unravel with diagnostic danger. Un Flic is simply too self-indulgent, and quickly goes off the rails after the initial heist, and although it harbors many of Melville’s unique qualifying traits – the minimalism, the nihilism, the gallic masochism – thus closing his influential career with an appropriate synopsis and symbiosis. Now, finally, we can shift our gaze from the grim pastures of 20th century continental Europe to the elemental battlegrounds of feudal Japan, and bow in rapt awe gaze to sensei Kurosawa’s formidable oeuvre….
Elle (2016) Trailer
Have I posted this before? I’m so discombobulated at the moment I’m losing track of numerous threads. In any case I think the previous glimpse I had of this was a teaser and this is the full trailer, the latest film from brilliant Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven;
Considering this has one of my favourite actresses Isabelle Huppert in this combined with Verhoeven this is a must-see, I predict it gets pretty painful in the final act. In other news I was the BFI tonight which means I missed the Jeff Nichols Q&A and special preview of Midnight Special, which I’ve only just learned about from my Picturehouse feed. Grrrr….
Jean-Pierre Melville Season – Army Of Shadows (1969)
Right until the end of post-production Melville wrestled with the placement of the striking tableau of the Arc du triumph, isolated in long shot, with a long snaking line of Wehrmacht officers proudly goosesteeping their way to Hitler’s drumbeat of genocidal European conquest. It’s a striking image that opens Army Of Shadows, Melville’s third and final entry to his occupation trilogy of films, begun with Le Silence de la mer in 1949 and buttressed with Léon Morin, Prêtre in 1962. Shot in perpetual, gloomy rain this adaption of Joseph’s Kessell’s 1943 book is presented without mercy, without glamour or exciting derring-do, a somber recreation of the suicidal operations, furtive failures and cold victories of the resistance movement in occupied France, so let’s just say that Allo, Allo this is most definitely not. Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) is spirited away to a remote, decrepit prison camp, incarcerating a mosaic of insurgents in 1942 occupied France, forcing Franco loyalists, Trade Union agitators, communists and loyal French terrorists to rub shoulders as common criminals by the omnipotent, occupying Reich. Like Melville’s stern criminal constellation the setting is different but the game is essentially same, a sense of moral stricture in a cold netherworld, a nest of violence and nihilism which can quickly be silenced by a final bark of a luger or thrust of a bayonet, of trenchcoated men with their collars turned up against the elements traversing sparse, dispassionate environments, like wraiths hunted through some Sisyphean maze. Informers and infiltrators are even more deadly here as the stakes are more lethal than a simple spell in the joint, as the slightest digression from full and complete devotion to your cause will have you facing a squalid firing squad and a shallow ditch out in the wilderness, a relatively comfortable fate in comparison to the prolonged torture and mutilation of not only you but also your family, should you dare to resist your oppressor. All you need to do to sense just how serious and committed Melville was to telling this story as realistically and respectfully to his own experiences and those of his comrades is to compare and contrast with the contemporaries, the Second World War films of the late 1960’s. These were the preserve of boys-own adventure yarns like Hannibal Brooks, Where Eagles Dare, The Bridge At Remagen or The Guns Of Navarone, fun rainy bank holiday viewing to be sure but not exactly accurate musings on the cold mechanics of a ruthless life and death struggle for liberation under a remorseless and brutal occupying force, with Clint singlehandedly mowing down faceless swarms of gormless Wehrmacht redshirts while Oliver Reed made friends with an elephant.
The tempo and temperature of the film soon becomes clear, as Melville’s posture is set a diametric dimension away from the active mission statements of the war movie. Army of Shadows is grim, as cold and precarious as the knife edge lives lived by the warriors resisting the Gestapo ghouls, with torture and death lurking as a near certainty behind every mission, every dead letter drop, and every friendly and non-friendly interaction. As we have seen Melville is a keen minimalist and his craft is honed to perfection here, there is virtually no soundtrack so the soundscape is primarily a diagetic dirge, a tense echo chamber which informs the keen fly on the wall vérité of clandestine meetings and risky laden reconnaissance. Mostly studio bound the locations are sparse and simple in appearance, kept under Melville vice like grip in his private shooting boudoir, erecting a somewhat artificial framework to the drama but not distractingly so. The various theatres of operations does shift across nations and cities however to provoke the sense of a countrywide network, even if the attention remains on one cell of insurgents and their individual intertwined fates. What do two of the resistance members do when they find themselves with some precious R&R time? This is a brief respite between operations after their secret submarine sojourn to London to lobby for more weapons and logistics, so how do they set their mind against the existential terror of the nightly black-out of the pulverizing blitz? Well, they go to the cinema of course, and joke that when they’ve won the war they’ll be able to see all the films restricted by Goebbels wretched censorship control of the occupied territories. The structure of the film is a linked series of vignettes, task after task mapped to incident and incident, a slow chain of drama and threat which slowly builds a picture of resistance as a psychic entity, as a state of mind, the French body politic bent to liberation rather than a mere collection of sparsely effective agents, assassins and provocateurs. The minimalism extends to the terms of emotion, dialogue and performance, with the cells struggle amberfied in a diluted cold teal color palette, as bleak and unforgiving as the canvass of his more expressionistic crime films.
A spare, near dispassionate voiceover briefs us on the mechanics of the missions, a linking thread which The fidelity to the genuine activities and risks of the insurrection are fascinating, the film feels extremely realistic and insightful into how it really must have been, unvarnished with any false heroics and draped in the constant threat of discovery and betrayal, never knowing when the Gestapo could have got to colleagues or family members them and flipped them to save their own skins. The commentary of the French authorities colluding with the enemy was extremely controversial of course, but Melville presents as is facts which have since been accepted as documentary fact, gendarmes manning roadblocks and apprehension of so-called enemies of the state, the continuation of day-to day enforcement of legislation and criminal suppression which now speaks to Berlin instead of the Palais Bourbon. Army Of Shadows most memorable and disturbing scene concerns the killing of a former comrade who has been forced into collaboration, a Judas who circumstance dictates he must be made an example of in order to deter other offensive breaches of the resistance’s protective omertà. Melville stages this in a carefully controlled procession of shots, moving from tableau to close-up to make it clear that the perpetrators are not trained killers, maybe civil servants, or accountants, or businessmen before the war now plunged into literal life and death struggle, forcing them to shed blood in a rather clumsy and confused operation. It a rather pathetic and dingy execution that is quite difficult to watch, with zero in the way of moral judgement or dramatic posturing, just another moral pitfall which is the price of their brave and sustained struggle. In fact the violence throughout the film is staged for realism and uncomfortable consequence, an arbitrary, swift and remorseless fact of life, presented with an absolute minimum of detail to make the point, not expanded or celebrated for dramatic heft or excitement. This sword of Damocles shadows all the members of the resistance, as they seem to operate as an isolated solitary cell rather than a node in some countrywide network, adrift and fragile to interception and infiltration which saturates the film with a smothering sense of paranoia.
From the single thread the narrative flowers to encompass the experiences of an individual cell of fighters and their furtive day to day struggle, including a small but significant role for Simone Signoret of Le Diabolique fame. The episodic narrative pushes into some strange roads such as a tense caper when the team infiltrate a Gestapo facility in order to prevent a captured colleague betraying his connections under brutal and sustained torture. In another scene the quiet support and appreciation of the general populace is expressed when a fleeing warrior is given refuge and succour from the prowling eyes of the occupying ogres. These vignettes and asides slowly drain to an anguishing moral nexus, when one of the key members of the group is forced to collaborate in order to defend their family from a mortal threat of sustained torture, despite their child’s individual innocence – the sins of the mothers being laid to the daughter in this case. This is the final mortal quandary of the film, where comrades whom have risked their lives to save each other are trapped into making the most lethal of recriminations without hesitation, knowing that their former comrade would expect and deserves no less. At two hours and twenty minutes Army Of Shadows is a long, sustained experience which earns the attention, supported with a solid tranche of extras including a making-of documentary, a five minute behind the scenes featurette, a BFI newsreel of the Paris liberation with some graphic battle footage and a superior commentary from Professor Ginette Vincendeau, one of the world’s leading Melville scholars. It’s interesting that like Kubrick (and both only made 13 features during their long careers) Melville was something of a telephone addict, he would keep colleagues and potential collaborators on the line for hours and hours, bleeding them dry of information and ideas to feed his voracious intellectual appetite – I always ponder how those great minds would utilize todays communication media in order to sate those insatiable instincts. This is crucial Melville, one of the key films of his long and distinguished career, and this leaves us with just one final entry to close down this season before shifting our caméra-stylo to the land of the rising sun during the feudal sengoku period. But until then and our final foray into Melville’s muted universe Army Of Shadows is as cold and unforgiving a treatment on the moral and mortal cost of war as the cinema has had to offer, with resistance as much a state of mind as a physical, fragile reality;
Heat (1995) Anniversary
I thought I might provide a little criminal refreshment from this frantic week of anticipation of what seems certain to be the biggest film in motion picture history. Released twenty years ago on this very day Heat is one of my favourite film of all time, a close winner with other Michael Mann urban perfectionist poetics, just one of those pictures I can easily revisit once a year like The Thing, Goodfellas and The Shining and never get remotely bored. Sure enough its a product of its time, the whole cops and robbers, cat-and-mouse but a-ha aren’t they exactly like each other was about as original as moody urban serial killer pictures back in the late 20th century, but like Se7en someone had to do it first, and someone had to do it right. Here is editor William Goldenberg ACE talking about his sheer terror at suddently being involved with such a high-profile project;
I’m not quite sure how I managed this, but I appear to have three copies of the film, one on DVD (naturally) but then not one but two Blu-Ray releases, which I can’t even remember ordering let alone duplicating.The score was from the underrated Elliot Goldenthal, a fine composer whom is often overlooked in favour of your Elfmen, your Zimmer’s, your Burwell’s or your Howard Shore’s, his styling giving a sense of the epic urban space and character anthems from De Niro’s first visibility;
I almost went and saw it again at the cinema this year, at the beloved BFI of course, where I had originally caught a screening as part of a Mann season back in about 2005 or 2006 or so. This reminds me I should really finally pull a score on this. It was showing this year as part of the Pacino season but alas I didn’t get around to it, maybe some other time. I have to say that this sequence on the vast auditoria of NFT1 with the sound throbbing was quite electrifying;
I’m still not sure how he did but Mann manages to pack in so much material which you’d think would be extraneous to the central Vincent / Neil conflict – the former’s anxiety ridden stepdaughter (played by a young Natalie Portman), Val Kilmer’s spousal problems – and they don’t feel like padding or distractions. Instead they are just part of the tapestry of these LA lives, awarding the film with some dramatic vicissitude that amplifies the central cop / robber dichotomy. Here is some production context for you, Heck, I even managed to get through this without posting the infamous and allegedly inspirational shoot-out or the historic Diner scene – instead lets close with this montage of Mann which I’ve probably posted before, but withstands another scrutiny;
THE CINEMA OF MICHAEL MANN from Balistik on Vimeo.
Bridge Of Spies (2015)
What’s that, a new Spielberg movie you say? Has Christmas come early with this frosty Cold War chiller thriller? Well, judging by the general tone of the reviews my radar picked up on social media Bridge Of Spies is one of Steve’s more warmly received recent efforts, with the prospect of a Coen brothers polish on Matt Charman’s original treatment an essential asset for all competing agencies. Under threat of torture I have a secret list, a mental microfiche of those directors whose films I will go and see at the flicks as a matter of habit, the big-hitters whose impact on my movie mastery has made me the man I am today. It doesn’t matter who’s starring in them, it doesn’t matter what genre they operate in, it doesn’t even particularly matter what the film seems to be about, I just know that these are the guys (and yes, I admit it, they are almost all guys which I’m not proud of) whose work formulate an evolving and important body of work, whose achievements are fascinating to measure as their career develops, to judge how their style and themes mature as the years slip away. From that golden era of American film when Spielberg rose to prominence you can add in Scorsese, Schrader, Malick, Coppola and Lynch, although admittedly I tend to give Marty’s documentaries big screen berth as I’m not the worlds biggest Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan fan. More recently my periscope has been trained on Jeff Nichols, Sean Durkin, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola and Kelly Reichardt whom have arisen through independent waters, alongside established 1990’s Sundance castaways like Soderbergh, Jarmusch, Todd Haynes and Richard Linklater. Then there’s Mickey Mann, the Coen lads, Davy Fincher, Pauly T.Anderson and Chrissy Nolan, those thermonuclear assets whose style and deployments really butter my beans. A more recent recruit is Alfonso Cuarón who is one of the great modern craftsmen, and yeah, I guess I have a thing for Iñarritu, as it’s just occurred to me that I’ve seen and reviewed every one of English language pictures. I’ll always keep a detached and dismembered eye on genre stalwarts del Toro, Cronenberg and SF supernova Jimmy Cameron, alongside a general overview of the horror and supernatural genre to detect any promising talents. In asymmetric alignment there’s a cluster of the esoteric such as Peter Strickland, Jonathan Glazer and Nicholas Winding-Refn and from the foreign language legion there’s always Haneke & Herzog , Von Trier, Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook and Gaspar Noé, and finally our Japanese rearguard kamikaze’s Sion Sono, Takashi Mike and Kyoshi Kuroswa, although good luck tracking some of their films down even in cinema rich London. There’s plenty more whose work I follow with considered interest – Thomas Alfredson, Peter Jackson, Ang Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, Tarantino, Verhoeven, Edgar Wright, Wes Anderson and Sam Raimi, although I’m bound to have omitted a dozen, probably two dozen others but here we are. That was a rather circuitous route to Spielberg’s latest mission but I think we’ve shaken those goons off our tail, not to get on with real business of examining Bridge Of Spies which for me never quite reaches its initial promise.
You can loosely parse Spielberg’s work into the historical yarns, the franchise entries and the B movie genre epics which are adrenalized with a lacquer of CGI spectacle and wonder, Bridge Of Spies cleaves closer to the measured firmament of Munich or Saving Private Ryan, a considered and closely observed entertainment from a sure hand who recently breached his fifth decade of filmmaking. Reuniting with Hanks in their fourth collaboration as Spielberg’s Capraesque principled and decent ‘murican Tom plays James Donovan, a likeable and effective insurance lawyer who is saddled with the unenvious task of defending the treasonous Rudolph Abel, a spy portrayed with a stoic intensity by theatre actor Mark Rylance in a rare screen appearance. We first meet Abel in a deftly executed near wordless opening sequence which mutely expresses the mechanics of espionage, it’s 1957 and the Cold War is well and truly freezing over as communist witch hunts, pervasive paranoia & duck and cover are the parlance of the psyche. Donovan is charged with ensuring that Abel is given a fair and transparent trial as an exemplar of American justice and a beacon of obedience to liberty on the world stage, while behind closed doors the case is considered a foregone conclusion, much to the mild protestations of the constitutionally charged Donovan. Simultaneously the emphasis shifts to incorporate the US clandestine creeping, specifically the launch of their new state of the art U2 reconnaissance technology. When one of their assets is shot down over enemy territory and US serviceman seized by the Soviets both parties come to a hesitant head, as a possible prisoner exchange is mooted in the still scarred ruins of Berlin. Donovan as a private US citizen has a non-affiliated government mandate to negotiate the exchange, but as the divisive Berlin wall goes up other American citizens are caught in the chilly crossfire…
The primary problem with Bridge Of Spies is a misdirected emphasis. Spielberg seems more fascinated and attuned to the paraphernalia of his 1950’s childhood than he is in injecting a sense of paranoia or menace to the diplomatic divinations, so this is quite a light hearted and almost flippant film despite the neutron laced apocalyptic stakes. The Coens fingerprints are apparent in some recurring character gags and an almost buffoonish Communist stasi state, with certain characters verging on near cartoon parody. As such the film is breezy rather than bitter, a fine concept that mostly worked for light hearted fare such as Burn After Reading, but Spielberg seems uncertain of this tenor which veers from the humorous to the severe without quite defining a clear mission statement. The first half is primarily a courtroom drama without the grandstanding theatrics, apart from a few patriotically wrought scored speeches from Donovan which sees Spielberg at his most hectoring and saccharine. The second half defects into a more traditional, hyperborean Berlin thriller, all gloomy greys and sketetal industrial husks of the Nazi capital still decaying a mere decade since the conclusion of the war. But for all these misgivings I still enjoyed the film, Hanks as Donovan is always good company even if he muddles rather than strides through his mission to the inevitable and well choreographed finale. It’s a glossy piece of work crafted by consummate professionals, a film which maintains a mainline delivery vector that just never really soars from the launchpad. There are some vague nods to doubling and identity which are suggested through careful camera movements and composition, the start of some deeper motives and commentary, even if like some pathological lecturer Steve can’t resist battering us over the head with a redundant coda – normality is restored, equilibrium is regained, not quite the geopolitical reality by the time of the early 1960’s with Cuba, the Bay Of Pigs and Dallas lurking on the horizon.
Although Spielberg is treading water with Bridge Of Spies one of the joys of spying on a director is also appreciating his frequent collaborators,witnessing their careers and craft similarly evolve, and the bearded one is no exception. Although his obvious aural accomplice John Williams is MIA his cameraman Jausz Kamiński is on point, bathing the screen in lattices of cold steel and blown out backlighting, so at the very least there are some pretty moments to coo over. Similarly editor Michael Khan keeps a fairly linear plot parsed down to a sleek trajectory, with some amusing mood and match cuts that keep the story flow fluid and functional. As usual they all turn in highly professional, state of the art work in Bridge Of Spies, not experimenting but maintaining an even keel as the narrative patiently moves through murky and muddy waters. With the BFG next on Spielberg’s manifesto I can’t say I’m overly excited, I’d much rather he was meddling in genre fare with the long mooted Robopocalypse, although Ready Player One has been officially announced for 2017. t hope this this recent run of efficient yet modally average films – Lincoln, Warhorse and to a lesser degree Tintin are all a precursor to one final masterpiece, but his 21st century efforts all seem an increasingly distant paraphernalia of parsecs from the wonder warped and thermonuclear emotions he mustered in the likes of E.T., CE3K or even the first Jurassic Park back in 1993. If you’re content with a film which could comfortably pass a overcast November Sunday afternoon then you could do worse than Bridge Of Spies, but we’ll stay in the 1950’s for our next film which is one of the highlights of the year;
Spectre (2015)
I follow quite a few fellow film critics, bloggers and podcasters on a variety of social media. Broadly speaking we share the same politics as much as you can detect these things through such communication models, being supportive of equal rights for everyone, agitating for a woman’s right to choose her fertility options, in favour of gay marriage as an equalizing factor for a certain strata of the community, loathe the entire fabrication of austerity measures, all in all pretty much left of centre in most areas of social progress and civil evolution. It amuses me no end then that some of these individuals go absolutely berserk when ‘controversial’ ideas strike the movie community, such as perhaps the next actor to strap on a tuxedo and prefer their beverages being shaken and not stirred being of a darker skin tone than the last fifty years of representation. ‘But….but Bond is white‘ they passionately implore, with the idea of the franchise being helmed by Idris Elba or Colin Salmon allegedly representing some enormous affront to humanity, decency and in-universe character integrity. It’s ridiculous of course, as I think this immensely popular franchise could survive some small measure of experimentation, and in fact such developments could save the series from its slow, inevitable slide into irrelevance. Some of these ideas of Bond being a dinosaur and a relic of an earlier age are explored in the fourth film of Daniel Craig’s arc of Ian Fleming’s beloved misogynist psychopath, notions that are uncomfortably set against some of the series defining features – scheming super villains, travelogue globe trotting narratives, elegant sexy ladies and all socio-political problems being solved on the receiving end of a Walter PPK. Having precisely zero investment in this particular franchise on an emotional or historical level I do vaguely look forward to these films as movie events, as big, high-profile entries in one of cinemas most enduring franchises, and I was mildly interested to see what Mendes and Craig were going to go next after the spectacular success of Skyfall. The results for me were similar to the last picture, entertaining enough for a couple of hours but not secreting a great deal to take home and unpack, either intellectually or aesthetically.
It’s a shame that the opening sequence set against an evocative Day of the Dead festival in Mexico City is the strongest movement of the entire film, as when the expectations levels are set so high the remainder of the film is doomed to disappoint. Bond has gone rogue as all the heroes do in these films, instructed by a message from beyond the grave to hunt down the international ne’er-do-well Marco Sciarra, a nasty foreign type who is planning a series of terrorist bombings. Back in London HQ the new M (Ralph Fiennes) is preparing for a sinister new amalgamation of intelligence services and assets across the western hemisphere, with drones and surveillance assets being seen as the 21st century direction of travel by new Joint Intelligence chief C (Andrew Scott). The bad old days of wet-work and clandestine assassinations are deemed redundant in the modern global environment, but little do the authorities perceive that a secretive foe is marshalling its grip on the international narcotics, slave and terrorism markets, with a sepulchral figurehead whose evil ideology also bleeds into our heroes tragic childhood…..
As we all know the film has been eagerly awaited since the rights of the Spectre characters and concepts of Thunderball were acquired in November 2013, so if like me you have a passing knowledge of the Bond universe then there are no real surprises as to where the plot and character revelations finally formulate. Well, when I say plot I’m referring to a rather amorphous chain of A to B to C materializations which never really coalesces into any entertaining master-plan, as Spectre is not much more than a collection of interruptions and exotic locations set against the side plot of the intelligence co-ordination which also contains zero unguessable twists or revelations. Apart from the amorous opening (with a very comfortable long uninterrupted tracking shot that sees director Sam Mendes competing in the same arena as Cuarón and Iñárritu) and a particularly painful train tussle my pulse wasn’t exactly pounding, but Craig is as coldly functional as he has been in the other movies, comfortably sporting his arrogant tuxedo attire which he has carnivorously carved for himself. Ben Whishaw gets a bit more to do as the newly promoted superhacker Q (presumably a moniker for Querulous), Moneypenny is functional in the form of Naomie Harris, while Fiennes gets a bit more screen time as well. Personally I could have done with a lot more of Monica Bellucci though, she disappears after two scenes which is a shame, although the emphasis from an x chromosome perspective rests clearly with Léa Seydoux as the primary plot cypher whom leads Bond from one energetic entanglement to another.
For all these glaring faults I did kind of enjoy this movie, I was never bored even when enduring some of the patience sapping set-pieces, and I actively enjoyed the finale which I’m assuming is the first of this arc that peaks on the gloomy, rain-sodden streets of central London. It would have been nice to have more amusing quips and dialogue exchanges that deserved more attention, and I liked Seydoux’s character even if she starts off as a fairly strong agent before devolving to another damsel in distress trophy to be saved from the evil clutches of the nefarious, titular organisation. Speaking of which Christophe Waltz is proficient as always as the puppet master behind the scenes with an interesting link to our heroes childhood (is that in the books? If not that’s an interesting angle for Mendes to take the series), but it’s a shame he didn’t get more to do as the omnipotent scheming antagonist who has apparently been secretly torturing Bond for the past three movies. Perhaps Spectre’s saving grace is the lavish photography from the increasingly brilliant Hoyte van Hoytema who bathes the screen in high contrast black versus white exteriors, it can’t be easy stepping into Roger Deakin’s shoes but he acquits himself admirably. Nevertheless I still can’t for the life of me see how this movie cost an absurd $300 million, I guess all that commitment to practical effects and location work stacks up spectacularly plus the starry cast receiving generous upfront paycheques, and thankfully the product placement doesn’t sour the experience as much as the last few movies. Overall the series has thankfully moved on from the 1990’s doldrums of Die Another Day and other Brosnan bruisings, but still lags behind the modern techniques of the Mission Impossible or Bourne movies, as it tries to grapple with contemporary post Snowden queries on the ethics of modern surveillance and intelligence, alongside the franchise trappings of dispatching remorseless henchmen, seducing sexy ladies, conveniently contrived gadgets and remote super villain bases. You’ll have to forgive me for such an obvious affectation but Spectre left me stirred but not necessarily shaken;
Jack & James
Jesus, yes of course I have, what do you take me for? Some sort of amateur? Before I was inundated with ‘have you seen this?’ and enquiries as to my whereabouts from the respective authorities, of course I saw this back on Wednesday but I wanted to keep the momentum going with the LFF coverage. For the uninitiated here is some sort of insane menagerie fever dream, Hitchcock and Kubrick puréed into one delirious short;
Sicario (2015)
If you were wondering then Sicario is Latin American street slang for assassin, a gun for hire that the narco crime lords employ to execute the frequent enforcement of their complex matrix of allegiances and enemies, a helpful contextual primer that is communicated by an initial title card which opens Denis Villeneuve’s oppressive and unforgiving Mexican maelstrom. As someone who has been grimly fascinated with the horrific Mexican drugs war over the past decade and a recent purveyor of this shocking expose this movie bullseyed my buttons at a conceptual level, particularly when early screenings left commentators muttering of the film being the equivalent of Michael Mann at his professional best. Villeneuve has slowly amassed a strong reputation as a talent to watch after recent pictures Enemy and Prisoners, not to mention his Foreign Language Oscar nomination for 2010’s Incendies, with of course the controversially awaited Blade Runner sequel next in his firing line. Coincidently I re-watched Soderbergh’s Traffic a fortnight ago which nervously traverses similar territory, following the modern narcotics trade across the border as well as also starring the always dependable Benicio Del Toro. As a 2000 picture it already feels like a product of another pre 9/11 era, and evidently we have learnt and achieved precisely nothing in the intervening years with further trillions of dollars spent on the same prohibition policy, with thousands brutally murdered and the destabilization of the entire sovereign state resulting in more lucrative revenue returns year by year, ably supported by the unimpeachable corrupt money laundering machine. Traffic followed a portfolio of experiences on both sides of the law and through the baptism of pushers and users to explore the sulphurous reach and might of the modern drug trade. The sprawling approach is chiselled down to a rigorous tensile strength in Sicario by providing only one surrogate, F.B.I. agent Kate Macer (a bewildered Emily Blunt) who runs a kidnap-response squad that unearths a gruesome find in a Arizona suburb, with fatal consequences for some of her unsuspecting colleagues. The stage is set for a dangerous journey into another screen metaphorical heart of darkness, in this phenomenal politically charged & adrenalized thriller, a prime candidate for film of the year.
With the guilt of her comrades loss still ringing in her ears Macer is recruited to join a Mexican excursion, joining an intangible organisation which slots somewhere in the Venn diagram of the C.I.A., D.E.A., and local wet-work proficient weekend warriors. Her handler is Matt (Josh Brolin), a flip-flop sporting walking definition of the insouciant ideology, an operative who seems to regard the narco infrastructure as a wasp’s nest which it would be fun to aggravate, with a carefully attuned disregard for the lethal fallout that his activities might inflame. More enigmatic is the figure of Alejandro (a deadly del Toro) who is also attached to the anti-cartel operation, the quiet, stoic type with a worrying hand tremor who seems to harbour some secret interest in the slowly writhing and devious plan. The operation rests on a dangerous gamble, to draw senior Narco kingpin Manuel Díaz (Bernardo Saracino) out into the open by transporting his brother from the corrupt clutches of the Mexican authorities to US jurisdiction. Macer’s repeated queries as to why her in involvement is needed falls on increasingly deaf ears, until small coincidences and lethal situations begin to coalesce into an unscrupulous whole……
This is grim, uncompromising filmmaking that yearns to defibrillate the severe problems at the subject matters core, a numbing sense of uncontrollable atrocities and unstoppable corruption which the authorities are not only powerless to prevent but also tangentially complicit. Sicario has the confidence to take the time to weave its malodorous spell, investing the story with a palpable sense of slowly encroaching menace, and a haunting sense that all the players are merely rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic and are fully aware of the futility of their struggle. One of the key touchpoints is tension wrought through tensile strength, as shots are held absurdly long by todays contemporary standards, giving the viewers a sense of the physical geometry of the conflicts and threats, and a pregnant sense of apprehensive foreboding. This is a modern nation-state where the overnight appearance of dozens of mutilated corpses at busy transport nodal points is an unremarkable apparition, the social ripples of crimes and complicity straining to the pulse of Jóhann Jóhannsson ominous and sinewy score.
I’d have my critical membership card revoked if I didn’t allude to Roger Deakins crepuscular cinematography, which once again marks him as one of the finest half-dozen dozen if not the finest cameraman working today. It’s not just the magic hour vistas of the sun barely hurling its golden tendrils across a slowly ripening sky, it’s not the aerial vistas which shudder with an omnipotent understanding of parched, urban wasteland as a raging and moral hell on earth. The visual tapestry is also in the small details, the source lighting in the scene drawing our eyes to slowly crystallising narrative fulcrums and characters, and the swirling unseen forces and allegiances which glue the film together with a choking, clandestine intent. There is a sequence that oscillates through night vision google POV, to satellite imagery to isolated nocturnal figures moving stealthily through deadly territory, a landscape where we have crossed the line physically, morally and metaphorically, the psychology of the opponents illustrating the dictionary definition of madness – to repeat the same activity (prohibition in this case), to retrace the same mistakes and expect different results. There are also a few surprises in a plot which twists and turns in potentially frustrating ways, but when you’re that far down the rabbit hole only a deeper decent can possibly embrace the films unforgiving and unrelenting core.
There seems to be a group of my brethren that have been turned off by the film due its negative posture and total failure to offer any solutions, no light at the end of the tunnel of a decade of endemic numbing brutality, where the illicit material tsunami’s across the globe to the Western and developing elites in quantities and purity completely unaffected by law enforcements feeble thrashing. I say this to those people – grow the fuck up. It is not, nor has it ever been the purpose of narratives or art to offer any solutions, the only responsibility is to the story and its characters which Villeneuve acquaints admirably, although some of blunter musings and dramatic arcs might be a little contrived – with no pun intended. If you have even a passing knowledge of exactly the scale of the atrocities and events which have plagued Mexico for the past fifteen years then the only judgement is that perhaps the filmmakers weren’t tough enough, where instead they craft a gripping environment of perpetual anxiety and uncertainty which should have been more drenched in the entrails of innocent men, women and children caught in the poverty-stricken crossfire. Now if anyone wants to help me trace and apprehend Villeneuve’s first two features Polytechnique and Maelström then all help will be respectfully accepted, although the latter has a Region 1 DVD release it goes in collectors circles for over $200 a copy – that’s just criminal.……
The Visit (2015) & M. Night Shyamalan Q&A
How the mighty have fallen eh? This seems like an apt summation of some film-makers careers, those bright lights that blaze with a intense fury across the media landscape, a debut or sophomore film which for some reason strikes a chord with the public and the cultural temperature of the time. Those were my initial thoughts when I was invited to a preview screening of M. Night Shyamalan’s new film The Visit, a prospect rendering me slightly more interested in finally visiting the new screening facilities than I was in seeing the one-time wunderkid of suspense cinema in a post screening Q&A. Where once he sailed high as the critical and commercial darling of The Sixth Sense, stridently hailed in certain places as the new Spielberg his career has taken a icarus alike fall in the 21st century, with the unintentional hilarious The Happening, the cringe worthy Another Earth and unfortunately named The Last Airbender all failing to connect with audiences or critics alike. Somehow he still manages to leverage purse strings for production budgets, his modest yet being The Visit, a project which also appears to have sneaked onto the ‘found footage’ bandwagon with predictably tedious results. Does the sprawling landscape of suspense and mystery movies really need another verite violation? No, of course it doesn’t, but this isn’t the total disaster that a horrendous trailer and Shymalan’s fading reputation suggests…..
The spine-chilling terror hinges on what could be a terrifying prospect for some – a visit to see Grandma and Grandpa. Rebecca (Olivia De Jonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbold) are the two siblings of single mom Paula (Kathryn Hahn), the former a keen budding filmmaker who plans to make a documentary of the vacation with the now ubiquitous portable digital camera. Rebecca does have an ulterior plan, as her mom fell out with her parents causing her to leave home when she was young, all due to some secret infraction that has kept them asunder over the past fifteen years – so maybe a visual piece could prompt some reconciliation. Rebecca has some body image issues, while her brother suffers from a mild germ related OCD, two conditions that arose when their father left them a few years ago. Arriving at their home in wintry Pennsylvania initially the grandchildren warm to their sundered elders, keeping in touch with Paula through regular skype sessions. Alas though this is a Shyamalan picture so things are not always what they seem, as the grandparents behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and portentous, out all alone with them in their remote, winterlocked family domicile……
Tyler, the younger kid raps. He raps around three times in this film. It is embarrassing and I didn’t know where to look. IO have to say though that the audience I saw this with found these sequences adorable judging by the reaction, so maybe I’m just being a horrible old grouch. It may sound like damning with faint praise, but this film wasn’t as bad as anticipated, in fact it has a few well-constructed sequences, but these are few and far between in what I must label as something of a viewing slog. It has the feel of Shymalan getting something of his system, a mood piece, an experimental work shot in few dozens of days rather than a protracted, bloated, big studio behemoths he’s vomited into our laps recently, but whereas that verite immediacy can spark some genuine chills The Visit struggles to raise the hackles. The thumbscrews are tightened over the course of a week which is really far too long, but once the twist is revealed – oh c’mon, this is a Shyamalan film so of course you knew there’s a twist coming – the gears shift upward for a fairly tense final act, and by this point you’ve mostly forgotten about the tedious asides to the camera or the excuses to just drop the fucking thing and run for your life. I just didn’t once find this genuinely scary, other than the tedious jump scare / cattle prod incident there really isn’t enough to get your teeth into, even if the director has engineered some redemptive resolution for his characters absences which he programmes into every single one of his movies – a priest resurrecting his faith, a man coming to terms with his demise.
The Q&A was fairly entertaining, and having heard some rather disquieting things about the man over the years – that he was completely obsessed with himself and his genius, that he treats assistants and lackeys with the whole ‘do you know who I am?’ treatment – he seemed like a genuinely friendly and enthusiastic guy. Yes, he was a trifle pretentious at times (I know, I know, pot, kettle black right?) but fairly eloquent when he came to explaining his craft, asserting that everything comes down to character and they should drive the plot, master the narrative, rather than imprint cinematic tropes like twists and turns purely for the sake of sensationalism. timing. It was quite amusing to learn that he was offered the gig for Life Of Pi which he turned down, to the tune of $600 million at the domestic box office and the Academy Award as he good humouredly recalled, and fans of Unbreakable which has built its own cult following yes he would do a sequel but there isn’t any script. So not a bad evening and the cinema itself will get a better report another time (all the press screenings for the LFF are being held here post 7th October so I’ll probably test drive all the screens), if you’re bored then maybe give The Visit a, erm, visit, if you lower your expectations you might find the experience worthwhile. How’s that for a passive-aggressive recommendation?
El Clan (2015) Trailer
It’s slightly unusual to see a US studio backing such a limited appeal domestic project, but the notorious source material has propelled it as the most lucrative Argentinian domestic opening of recent memory. El Clan concerns a well-heeled Buenos Aires family who abducted people from their own neighborhood, demanding hefty ransoms, before executing their victims upon payment – ugly stuff to be sure. The twist of course is that this is based on a true story known to the population if you are of a certain age to recall the crimes, which occurred from 1982 to 1985;
After Wild Tales international success this seems like an ideal and organic continuation of possible breakthroughs, although given the saturated market I doubt that this film will get much more than potential festival exposure in our hemisphere. Still, I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled as the profile of Pablo Trapero rises, more on him and his superb work later in the year…..
Jean-Pierre Melville Season – Le Samouraï (1967)
Dust off your fedora, pull on your crumpled trench coat and fire up a gitane, it’s time to stalk the mean, crime ridden streets of Paris. Even though it wasn’t included on this boxed set which forms the spine of our new directors season it isn’t remotely feasible to take on Jean-Pierre Melville’s highly influential oeuvre without covering Le Samouraï, the 1967 brooding crime classic which is curiously difficult to source in the UK – I had to go and score a South Korean Blu-Ray import. Cited by filmmakers as diverse as Tarantino, Christopher McQuarrie, John Woo, Jim Jarmusch and the Coens (surely this where they got the chapeau motif for Millers Crossing?) as core inspirations Melville is the crime movie consigliere, the epitome of indomitable will and stoic staging, carving his own fiercely patrolled and sculpted underworld throughout a series of ruthless movies from the 1950’s to the 1970’s. A fierce soul Melville distinguished himself fighting the occupation during the war, giving rise to probably the best French war movie of all time Army Of Shadows that we will breach later. He’s always been something of an outcast, an idiosyncratic figure who lies somewhere between the cinephilia of the post-war nouvelle vague and the James Cagney and George Raft pictures of the 1930’s, but where his peers embraced the likes of Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks he clearly embraced American gangster flicks as a generic inspiration rather than worship specific directors, inflecting the iconography with his own continental conscience, carving his own identity independent of popular critical movements and theories. Like his country man Jacques Tati he was utterly obsessed with controlling and building his own cinematic universe (both men developed and owned their unique production studios), while the key thread that runs through Melville’s work are concepts of honour and the imperative of a moral code, whether among thieves or robbers, assassins or insurgents.
Melville’s Paris has the pallor of a slow rigour mortis grey corpse, a sour and lonely place, as transactions are exchanged wordlessly between underworld members for the acquisition of vehicles and firearms, as the rituals of the game are played through with a semiotic symbolism. The capital of romance instead is transformed into a ruthless realm where you walk into a room, clip your target with two bullets to the head without any last words or final pleas of clemency, before exiting into the night like some spectral trench coated angel of death. That epitome of 1960’s French chic Alain Delon stars as Jef Costello, the ruthless ronin of the title who takes on a deadly commission to execute a nightclub manager. During the stealthy and immaculately planned operation he is nevertheless witnessed by sultry musician Valérie (Cathy Rosier), the house pianist who for some undisclosed reason declines to identify Costello in a hastily police arranged line up of the usual suspects. The film then concerns itself with Costello’s efforts to cover his tracks and neutralise any threat, while also attempting to understand his saviours mystifying motivations. The direct synchronisation of the plot find its weight through a domination of bold angles, of clearly delineated verticals and horizontals, indicating a hermetically controlled and rigid realm where both sides of the law operate within concurrent confining structures. It is a cold and ascetic environment, swathed in battleship grey interiors and exhausted urban exteriors, an underworld of conformity which figures glide through with an almost automaton assembly – this is a world away from the Paris of Renoir, Jean Vigo or Marcel Carne. Unsurprisingly Melville’s aesthetics have been linked through to the philosophical musings of his countrymen Sartre and Camus, the random purposeless of existence leading logically to man erecting his own purpose and rationale, in this case a moral code and ideology independent of any higher power or guide other than to ‘thine ownself be true’.
Also austere is the use of score, the majority of the musical struts in the film are diagetic, the in universe sound generated within cafes or nightclubs. When Melville does break with these designs it is at crucial junctures in the drama, at key character moments when the independent score swells to frame the proceedings, indicating that Costello is wrestling with an internal crisis such as when he struggles to comprehend why the musician failed to identify him in the police line-up. Unusually for the period and crime movies in general women are more than mere trophies to be traded or won, in fact the fairer sex are key plot engines with their own agency, motives and goals, as equal to the men in their obedience to the strict rules and criminal conditioning of the streets. Unlike traditional film noir which vaguely casts its looming shadow over Melville’s work (in setting and situation, if not necessarily style and substance) there is very little sex or indication of sexual drives driving tormented souls to the brink of obsession and madness, if any coupling occurs it would seem to be a fleeting and mechanical exercise, another ritualistic going through the motions instead of being lost in a swirling torrent of desire. Instead the tempo of Le Samouraï isn’t that of the woozy, sleazy streets but a metronome procession, as one sequence alone has our lone wolf traversing a series of hallways and tunnels in Paris simply to walk to a meeting, taking a good few minutes to establish the milieu through a synthetic control of geography, space and movement, a field surgeon dissecting his patient with careful precision, before exploding in a burst of unsheathed violence.
This detached formalism also invokes Bresson as a clear influence, his monosyllabic mannequins also serving as opaque vessels that glide through these emotionally deadened interactions, and I think these acrobatics probably affected the art-house austerity of Michael Haneke and Bruno Dumont as well as genre gigolos Tarantino and Woo, with their emphasis on image and swagger. In that sense Melville emerges as something of a nodal point of cinema, a synthesis of early Hollywood Warner Brothers talkies, continental ‘chic’ formalism and a smattering of Kurosawa’s 1950’s samurai films, which post 1970 have imprinted upon ‘cool’ genre cinema within a pulsating, secret criminal underworld, visible all the way up to last years John Wick. There is not a single gesture, the flicker of any eye or speed of gait which isn’t significant in Melville’s universe, as the lack of any grand emotional discourse encourages the viewer to latch onto any small register as a significant event, a tiny hairline crack in the inscrutable façade of the career criminals and lawmen on their tail. Costello’s apartment has a single suggestion of a life beyond his job, a minor bird whose chirps suggest a small glimpse of humanity and a yearning for companionship. Of course this is revealed as another feint , the avian a canary in the coal mine, serving as a guard-dog in a brilliant plot machination which I will leave you to discover for yourselves. The film is also a fascinating social document of Paris in the 1960’s, of le metro, smoke choked cafes and the capitals numerous denizens, the swinging sixties this ain’t as the film has the mood of a sedative overdose rather than a sunshine kissed LSD labyrinth. In that sense its an interesting comrade to Boorman’s Point Blank which was released in the same year, both films sharing some common ground – a remorseless, granite hewn protagonist, remorseless stalking through an urban environment, shocking bursts of physical & emotional violence, a controlling moral codex – even if the criminal carapace takes on different hues on either side of the Atlantic.
Just from the random photos I’ve sourced you should get an idea of the washed out, pallid interiors, graveyard grey and slowly decaying, a truly cheerful start to this season and if memory serves this might be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Melville’s stripped down, hyperborean climate. I’ve seen all the other films in the boxed set but at indeterminate moments over the years, I’m almost 100% positive that the first time I saw Le Samouraï would have been during its 1990’s Moviedrome screening (ah yes, here we are) so I’m curious to see how they all fit together to construct an almost unique, carefully calibrated universe. I think I’ll try to keep the rest of this season faithful to chronology, meaning that next we will skip back to 1956 and Melville’s first crime film Bob Le Flambeur, which also served as a significant influence on Soderbergh’s first Oceans Eleven movie and was remade by Neil Jordan as The Good Thief back in 2002 – a rather underrated film as I recall. Le Samouraï scythes like its namesakes elite wakizashi weapon, razor-sharp, keen, elegantly balanced and manufactured for a singular, deadly purpose – to slay ones foes and retain ones honour, a grasp for purpose in a purposeless and implacable universe;
Minty's Menagerie 
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