The Week in Cinema: 17/06 -- 23/06

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --

George Harrison: Living in the Material World (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2011)

✭✭✭✭✭

Tenderness and wonder sit at the fore of Martin Scorsese 208-minute opus, a love letter to the unique career of the third and “quiet Beatle”, George Harrison. Over its enormous running time – one that does not depreciate from its quality, or perceptiveness – does Scorsese graph Harrison’s odyssey from small-town Liverpool to Beatlemania fame, before looking to his embrace of individualism, in the shape of Hindu-aligned spirituality and landscape gardening. Harrison’s songs (notably from All Things Must Pass) exhibit a similar strain of quiet discovery, at once separate from the Lennon/McCartney/Ringo collective and again hinting at, or defined by, such history. Of the entire film, the final segment – his cancer, acceptance of moving beyond himself, and bereaved reflections from friends and family – left the longest imprint on my mind. Dhani Harrison, his sole child, remembers being told to skip school by George, as well as him telling a policeman to “Fuck off”; Ringo narrates the final words spoken by George to him, offering support (“Want me to go with you?”) in his time of need; or even, with his second wife, Olivia Arias, musing on how, in death, George was a source of light. Such thoughts and memories tell of the many, personal relationships he formed over his life, existence as much completed by those who journey alongside as it is by the individual themselves. Affecting and quietly provocative, George Harrison: Living in the Material World is a perfect ode to the mind, beauty and workings of the late Beatle.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (dir. Terry Gilliam, 2018)

✭✭✭✩✩

Terry Gilliam finally lands the airborne, long-delayed Don Quixote project, as documented in Lost in La Mancha, in a highly-satisfying, if crumpled, shape. Jonathan Pryce, as the faux-Quixote character, is wonderful as the gleeful madman, partnered with Adam Driver’s movie-director figure, turned Sancho, who begins to share in the fantasy of the other. It is glorious filmmaking, a whirl of ingredients – cinema, theatre and animation brought together in a colourful blend – that, even if they don’t cohere as Gillian once envisaged, twenty-five years ago, still deliver a remarkable interpretation of Cervantes’ classic text. Electric, bizarre and phantasmagorical. 

The Week in Cinema: 10/06 -- 16/06

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --

Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942)

✭✭✭✭✭

‘But the others wait in Casablanca, and wait … and wait … and wait,’ reads the opening script to one of Hollywood’s greatest romances. It is possible that the story of Casablanca is unexceptional, or artless to a degree – simply continuing long-established stereotypes and cliché, as noted Umberto Eco – and yet, by cocooning itself within such tradition, its very essence (themes of love, sacrifice and war) are allowed to flourish and breathe in ways it could never have anticipated. I was not conscious of Casablanca having this sway over me when I first watched it, 5 years ago, or even again recently, its charm and allure rather a symptom of its ordinariness. Casablanca – an elegant, bustling port in Northern Africa – is a site of time past and time present, and maybe even of time imagined. It is the ‘grey area’ on the map, a purgatorial waiting room for expatriates, survivors and victims of war who dream of travelling to the United States, often limited by funds and their political or personal means. Time moves curiously in the city of Casablanca – that which is remembered one day appears to be forgotten the next, or scattered into the past – everybody waiting for some kind of relief to their predicament. Rick Blaine (smoothly played by Humphrey Bogart) is one such example, occupying an eponymous, upscale nightclub, (its glittering, neon placard reads: “Ricks Café Américain”) that seeks to nest refugees and those unstuck in time. It is a relocated idea of ‘America’, swollen with more-or-less faded, ghost-town figures. Early in the film, the past returns in the portrait figure of Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) – trailed by the melodic, bitter-sweet refrain of “As Time Goes By” – whose former, Parisian history with Rick is only now confronted. One emotional hurricane is caught by another, and we can only watch as their pain is discovered all over again, as if slowly encroaching into the spaces of Casablanca itself. Crowded with refuges and the lost, the two shine out as characters swept into an unspectacular, yet wonderful, tale of love and loss. Everyone is waiting for something better, without realising the perfection they once held.

Destroyer (dir. Karyn Kusama, 2018)

✭✭✭✭✩

Southern-gothic landscapes predominate across Karyn Kusama’s unusual LA noir, Destroyer, its spread of concrete neighbourhoods drenched in brilliant, all-exposing sunlight. Out of this bleached wasteland do we follow the career of hollow-necked LAPD cop Erin Bell – played with stolid restraint by Nicole Kidman – whose dark past emerges with the uncovering of a new body, attended by a dye-stained bank note. Images shimmer between the present investigation and a spectacular, botched job whilst undercover in a quasi-commune. Such failings and trauma, nonetheless, are sensed in the violence of the present, Kidman’s gaunt, raw features – as if stained and rubbed sore with grief – a visual contour of such bereavement. Kusama presents a fairly ordinary thriller with touches of magnificence, yet it does not cohere as well as it might expect. Destroyer is a meditative descent into the pains of another time. Evocative, if flawed.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2019)

✭✭✭✭✭

Rolling Thunder Revue is a wildly entertaining rove alongside a string of characters and scenes that defined Bob Dylan’s 1975-1976 tour across North America, a unique companion piece to Scorsese’s 2006 opus No Direction Home. Scorsese’s work continues in a trend of mockumentaries, covering themselves (much like Dylan) in their own mischievous face paint – F for Fake (Welles), A Hard Day’s Night (Lester) and Zelig (Allen), to name a few – employing fictionalised accounts alongside real, such as Martin Von Haselberg playing the imagined filmmaker Stefan Van Dorp, as well as Sharon Stone playing herself. Not unlike Dylan’s work itself, the documentary engages in a creative act of reshaping identity, drawing us into its world of fantasy and make-believe, before then spitting us back out, laughing. It is impossible not to surrender to the wonder and dazzling lights of this work, an imagination whose colour and music is a moment of history.

A Single Man (dir. Tom Ford, 2009)

✭✭✩✩✩

Fashion designer Tom Ford directs Colin Firth as the beautiful and damned protagonist in this Christopher Isherwood adaptation, a film whose well-polished, expensive allure steeps each scene with its own heady weightlessness. Set against the feverish tide of 1960s, anti-government feeling, Firth plays a day in the life of George Falconer, a well-groomed college professor whose bereavement over a former gay lover cannot be fixed to any form. Out of such grief does Falconer’s everyday survival appear more strained, more poignant in its conduct. Ford conducts a wonderful performance from this 1964 Isherwood text – building from, and out of, close-cut English mannerism that Firth has so comfortably slipped into over his career – peppering it with moments of delicacy and soft-heartedness. It is this delicacy that appears to distract Falconer’s central mission, however, an aesthetic attention to all that is beautiful and all that is gorgeous. A Single Man is drunk on such woozy, perfume-ad stylisation – you can all but laugh at certain set pieces – which, unlike his latest foray into cinema, Nocturnal Animals, does not serve the substance of its story so effectively.

Murder Mystery (dir. Kyle Newacheck, 2019)

✭✩✩✩✩

Another year, another Adam Sandler film to painfully digest – a further instalment in his mega-bucks, octaptych Netflix deal. Nick and Audrey Spitz (played by Sandler and Jennifer Anniston, respectively) fulfil their long-delayed dream of travelling to Europe only to find themselves invited by billionaire Charles Cavendish aboard a luxurious yacht, whereupon a plethora of suspicious characters, family and friends of, are entertained for the occasion. On the first night, the father of the family is mysteriously murdered – oh, what a shock – before sending the film into parodic, Agathie-Christie mode. It is weak and lazy storytelling, fitted together by a selection of stereotypes, puerile jokes, and the occasional Cluedo-style revelation that is laid bare. Oddly satisfying, if pulp trash, Murder Mystery is nevertheless as banal and charmless as anything delivered in Sandler’s career. (Indie works Punch-Drunk Love or The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) should not, by any means, restore faith in his ability.)

Diego Maradona (dir. Asif Kapadia, 2019)

✭✭✭✭✩

Asif Kapadia excels yet again with the conclusive feature to his documentary cycle – following the acclaimed Senna and Amy – another instalment ‘of a trilogy of child geniuses and fame, and the effect it can have’ (Guardian interview). Ambition runs through the blood of Diego Maradona, an Icarus-like myth of the Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona, a nobody who soared to unimaginable heights. “I learnt that there was Diego and Maradona,” recalls the player’s ex-fitness coach, Fernando Signorini, the timid boy and the legend he grew to be – one side of the coin slowly eclipsing the other. Maradona grows in stardom and public symbolism, the film opening with his transfer from Barcelona to the Italian club of Napoli, a team failing at the time, but illumined and enthused by the saviourism of his talent in the game. Football is a ‘beautiful toy’, comments Maradona, but it is also a lethal one. World cup success for Argentina – including the infamous “Hand of God” gesture against England, in the 1986 quarter final – inevitably pits his game against the nation of Italy, wherein, after being safely nested for several years, the world around him quickly unravels. From boy to God, and from God to bane of Italy, Maradona’s life is cleverly manoeuvred through reems of archive footage, shuttling between home footage, news clips, and glimpses caught (by accident, or not) by fans and followers. Such editing, heralded by Chris King and Kapadia, continues the approach from his prior documentaries, an exercise in ‘looking-glass self’ creation – the views, judgements and growth of the individual as seen through others, individual nature now assigned to its public perception. Diego Maradona is a thrilling look at the best and worst of glory, a life imploding under its own weight.

The Week in Cinema: 03/06 -- 09/06

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --

The Bleeding Edge (dir. Kirby Dick, 2018)

✭✭✩✩✩

Terrifying revelations about the US medical device industry – its abuse of regulation, corporate cover-up ploys and profit-driven strategy – encourage change in this attentive, expository documentary, if marred by its horror-show tactics. Should you trust your doctor? Or, looking more broadly, can you trust your health system? The Bleeding Edge wishes to confer doubt on such basic assurances, looking to five products on the US health market and their subsequent damage to the lives of patients – irrevocable, in some frightening instances. Dick looks to a somewhat neglected, uncinematic topic, and provides it with due spotlight and emphasis. Sporadically throughout, however, I felt myself swamped by the sheer volume of content presented, facts and figures whose relevance was almost dimmed by the need to excavate and relate information. Oddly, the film concludes with a blurred, quasi-hospital-bed staging of a patient being sedated; only we are the patient, the camera lens filled by an oxygen mask and the cooing words of a nurse: “Relax.” Its ending metaphor felt excessive, but the documentary is crucial viewing. 

The Cube (dir. Vincenzo Natali, 1997)

✭✭✭✩✩

Five strangers awake in a cube-shaped room, with no memory of how they got there or where to now go. It is a deceptively simple premise, somewhere between arthouse and mainstream. Early in the film, a phrase rings out: ‘I mean, nobody wants to see the big picture. Life’s too complicated.’ It is picked up by another voice, later: ‘You can’t see the big picture from in here, so don’t try. Keep your head down, keep it simple. Just look at what’s in front of you.’ It is whilst inside the structure that the ‘bigger picture’ of the cube is implicitly realised – it is simply a game, like life itself, that distils the essence of worldly life into a sequence of rooms (if you can imagine the world as box, you have it). It is whilst the group occupy the cube(s) – an industrialised, byzantine nexus of rooms, many of which hide deadly traps – that they learn to work together, a process that inevitably finds them learning more about each other. Sins are revealed, motives exposed. Slowly we learn of their lives outside, invariably characterised by plainness (‘I'm just a guy. I work in an office building, doing office building stuff’), ignorance (‘human stupidity’), negligence and quiet, joyless suffering. The Cubewould later spawn various sequels and prequels, embellishing the survivalist concept, whilst laying a blueprint for future horror franchises (think of Saw).Natali’s picture, in spite of such intelligence, straddles levity and seriousness to poor effect, the film blemished by horrendous acting, contrived dialogue, and peculiar moments of humour. Original, but flawed.

Hard Eight (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1996)

✭✭✭✭✭

Originally titled Sydney– short, finite and eponymous – the later title, Hard Eight, emerged as something far more uncertain of itself, its narrative as subject to chance as the dice roll in the game of craps where both dice aim to land on the number four. Written and directed by Sundance-alumni Paul Thomas Anderson, it is a picture that marks the bold first steps of one of Hollywood’s finest, and most alluring, working directors. Sydney, an elderly gambler in his 60s, finds a young man slumped outside a restaurant, John, who (for reasons not immediately apparent) he then takes under his wing and guides amongst the stools and conspiracies of the Las Vegas casino industry. Two years later, John begins a relationship with a cocktail waitress, Clementine – played by Gwyneth Paltrow, enthralling in every scene – whose private troubles play into his own troubles, further endangering their livelihood and future together. Uniquely, any sense of plot is not immediately available. Anderson begins with neat character studies – the wizened gambled, the troubled youth, the unfulfilled girl – inviting their paths to intersect, as if soaking into one another, before drawing back the curtain on the many intricacies of what is truly going on. Watching Anderson’s picture unfold reminded me of first listening to a composition of jazz: what we at first mistake to be loose, improvisational, is in fact the work of a highly-structured design. Effortless and compelling filmmaking.

Madeline’s Madeline (dir. Josephine Decker, 2018)

✭✭✭✭✩

“What you are experiencing is just a metaphor,” an unknown speaker announces at the beginning of the film – an allusion, perhaps, to Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive: ‘It’s all a tape. It is an illusion’ – the register between life and the dramatic complicated, uncertain. Two troubled lives cross, part and collide in the cinematic dance of mother and daughter in Madeline’s Madeline– dependent on whether you stress the ‘e’ or ‘i’, its phonetics prompt a duality of the same name. The experience of watching Josephine Decker’s latest feature is of being lost in a tormented consciousness, otherwise a wonderland maze of mental-health disorientation. Even if we are presented with a lot, we glimpse very little. One mind swallows the other, only to then find itself swallowed up. Grief is exchanged, forced between the hands of mother and daughter, before left to stagnate in other scenes. Decker’s soundscape crowds out its images: the sonic equivalent of a hand-held camera struggling to follow movement. It is not unsurprising that its editorial process resisted the completed form, its seduction, erotica and desperation requiring editor after editor, including the advice of Spike Jonze and Mike Mills. Rhapsodic, lyrical, with moments of theatrical craft, Madeline’s Madeline is one of the year’s best. Upsetting, affecting.

Booksmart (dir. Olivia Wilde, 2019)

✭✭✭✩✩

Eighth Grade, only adultified, slick, and favouring audience expectation over that of the subject matter itself. Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, (executively produced by maestro’s Will Ferrell and Adam McKay,) abounds with pre-College antics, reckless inanity and feminist strength, whilst grappling with the all-too-familiar movement between high school and university. Two best friends, Molly and Amy, compensate for their bookworm mentality – ‘we missed out. We didn't go to parties because we wanted to focus on school and get into good colleges’ – by joining, carpe diem, a party the night of graduation. Their plan stumbles from the onset, i.e. they find themselves unable to locate the address, and stumbles further as the night deepens. Quick humour is complimented by solid performances all-round, whilst its use of musical cue – not dissimilar to that of Eighth Grade – sees the smallest of moments given magnitude, style and ultimate coolness. Together with the aforementioned feature, and that of Ladybird, the ‘female coming-of-age’ genre is experiencing a unique resurgence, entirely unpretentious and contemporary. Seek out several viewings; if anything, the end-credit sequence of water-ballooned actors is worth paying for.

Out of Sight (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 1998)

✭✭✭✭✩

Intelligence and charismatic sensuality steam from Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, a Pulp Fiction-esque narrative of modern romance. George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez star as flushed lovers at opposite sides of the law – one a career bank robber, the other a U.S. Marshall – who, after sharing a car trunk during a getaway escape, find themselves unable to forget their memory of the other. Ingenuous editing traffics between various scenes and asynchronous timelines, basking in the freeze-frame technique in a stylish offhand: in one pause, so do we find ourselves smiling and/or revelling in the pleasure of the onscreen moment. Soderbergh, as with Sex, Lies and Videotapes, plays with the intersection of men and women to great effect, only here to a mainstream audience, delivering a kind of playground battle of the sexes. Auteur cinema.

The Week in Cinema: 27/05 -- 02/06

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --

Amores Perros “Love’s a Bitch” (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000)

✭✭✭✭✭

Alejandro Iñárritu arrived on the global stage with an incredible, debut feature, Amores Perros, a firework of world cinema, pulsing between a triptych of narratives hyperlinked by the impact of a car crash. It is a contemporary equivalent of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, or, perhaps, of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, only instead following the collateral of every character who is somehow affected by the events of the play. 21 Grams and Babel, later films from the director,also look to a similar narrative apparatus – the former, and my personal favourite, held together by a truck collision; whilst the other is bridged be a single gunshot – Iñárritu here laying the foundations for his cinematic language, one that is beautifully conceptualised even before his career found Hollywood heights with Birdman or The Revenant. A young man, training a high-class dog for street fighting, plans to run away with the wife of his abusive brother; a famous model is crippled after a crash and forced to watch her beauty fade; an anonymous, ageing hitman looks to recover his abandoned family. Each thread, in subtle ways, weaves between each other, illustrating the complexities and unities of the human condition. 

Holy Hell (dir. Will Allen, 2016)

✭✭✭✩✩

Will Allen – formerly of the Buddhafield cult (which he videotapes, ruthlessly and empathetically for 22 years) – concludes his remarkable feature by meeting with its former leader, Michel Rostand. It is a highly unsettling scene, almost reminiscent of the final confrontation of the documentary Catfish. One figure regards the other, now hesitant, afraid, burdened with their shared memory. Holy Hell is yet another example of modern, cult narrative – pastoral bliss converted, irrevocably, into manipulative abuse – its style adorned with Wicker Man-esque flourishes, grainy, pre-digital textures, as well as new footage of interviews with the surviving members. Uniquely, such acts of reminiscence shape what constitutes a love letter to the memory of the community itself – some kind of pleasure is found in being led, in giving to others, that Allen (a closeted, outcast homosexual in 1980s California) could not source in his life before. I wonder: is the film itself looking to recover those feelings? He does, nevertheless, survive the spell of his experiences, as do several others, and learns to recognise that the friendships he has gathered are in fact the true gift of his duration. It is not a particularly well-constructed documentary, constantly teetering on the indulgent, nor does it enlighten the cult of personality any further; it does, however, confer on its audience the timely responsibility of finding ways in which to accommodate those who lives are swept away by such communities. 

The Happy Prince (dir. Rupert Everett, 2018)

✭✭✭✩✩

The final, tragic days of Oscar Wilde are humbly reflected upon by the eye of Rupert Everett – someone who is clearly familiar with the immense material he retrieves from the depths (de profundis), often verbatim, often payment to the all-encompassing legacy of his work. Wilde is without grandness, now, vulnerable to burlesque self-mockery, alcoholism, the haunts of his two-year incarceration, and kept to the shadows in the wake of his own wildness. Everett is highly convincing in his performance and it is wonderful to watch such a transformation. Despite this meticulous artfulness, the film is irritatingly aware of its own conceit: Wilde communicates in epigraphs, poignant and witty, and the facts of his life are handed to us in digestible mouthfuls throughout. (I couldn’t help but feel the heavy, homogenising hand of the BBC looming over every scene.)