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Pafekuto Buru aka Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997)

Satoshi Kon’s idea of blurring the lines between fantasy and reality is realized almost fully already in his first feature.

Perfect Blue tells the story of Mima, a pop idol who walks away from her career to pursue her new dream of becoming an actress. If you don’t know what a Japanese idol is, it’s an interesting thing to know. It’s basically an entire genre of media personality that’s based on innocence, cuteness, and otherwise not doing much (except for singing and appearing on TV). For more information, please visit Wikipedia or some other source of information more trustworthy than this site.

Anyway, Mima wants a more grown-up image, but soon gets way more of it than she bargained for. There’s a pretty nasty film-within-film rape scene that really drives the message home. As she grows increasingly insecure about her new career choice, what appears to be a crazed stalker comes to the forefront of the story, a guy who not only follows all of her actions and appears to know even her secret thoughts but also creates a fake diary website for her, where said secret thoughts are re-told. Soon enough, murders start happening around Mima that terrify her - but she feels trapped inside a reality whose limits she increasingly cannot seem to grasp.

The truly great thing about Perfect Blue is how confidently Satoshi Kon uses the medium of anime to create a supremely unsettling feeling of a loss of separation between imagination and reality. I happens gradually, and once he movie has built up towards full-blown psychosis the scenes right before the resolution at the end are the real reason why you should absolutely watch the whole thing. Few filmmakers have been as successful at screwing with your brain’s understanding of waking life’s rigour as this one, and in Perfect Blue he shows this mastery of his to great effect. In fact, the resolution has left me disappointed, and I cannot help but wonder whether it was the constraint of the story or Satoshi Kon was just fucking with us. Perhaps it’s both.

Beyond this aspect, Perfect Blue is also a horror story about female life in 1990s Japanese society. What appears to be Mima’s souvereign choice quickly turns into loss of control - physical and subsequently mental, perhaps the most terrifying loss of control there is. There are other people more qualified to say something on this topic than I am, so I’ll leave it at that. 

Parallels between Perfect Blue and Hitchcock, Perfect Blue and Mulholland Drive are obvious but don’t entirely do the film justice. This movie really shines when it’s a genuine animation movie: it’s clear that it couldn’t have been comparable using film and real actors. Visually, PB may not always be quite there yet, but it more than makes up for not being a feast for the eyes by the treatment it gives its story. Watch it.

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The Time Machine (George Pal, 1960)

In this evergreen, Rod Taylor as H.G. Wells travels far into the future to discover a human society marked by racial divide and slavery, except that the slaves are white.

Disillusioned by his time and sick of humankind waging what seems like a neverending war with ever more refined technology on each other, H.G. (who’s an inventor preoccupied with time, a fact visually stressed by the fact that he has about 20 clocks standing around in his room) builds a time machine and takes off into the future. Since we’re talking 1900 here, there’s a few more wars that he’s yet to witness until eventually, the world as we know it is destroyed by nuclear conflict (and volcanoes). There’s a pretty sweet scene in which Rod Taylor just survives a nuclear blast without even being in a bunker. Only thing that happens to him is he’s thrown to the ground. This is rather typical of how the 1950s, which have just ended by the time this film is being made, imagined a nuclear holocaust to be. Remember the duck and cover films? They were a lot of fun.

Apparently, H.G. then rightfully decides that this is bullshit, and travels not just a few hundred but many thousand years into the future. I forget which year he eventually ends up in but I think it’s a six digit number. So the story is fairly optimistic when it comes to the survival chances of mankind.

Aside from mere survival, however, mankind’s fate isn’t much to write home about. First of all, everyone in the society of Eloi is white and blonde.

Second, none of the Eloi seems to be doing much with their lives. It’s some sort of fucked up version of modern-day society where to make matters even worse the white supremacists have won. Nobody reads any books or works on anything worthwhile. Our friend George is shocked by the fact they won’t even move a finger to save a fellow Eloi from drowning, but is about to learn the reason for such mental decay: in a twist that leaves much to analysis, it is uncovered that in the wake of the last war, humans split into the Eloi and the Morlocks, who opted to live under the Earth’s surface and subsequently turned the Eloi into slaves, breeding them “like cattle”. I think the two groups are actually referred to as races in the film, so it’s not like I’m interpreting too much into anything here.

Of course the Eloi have to pay with their lives for the food and clothing provided to them by the Morlocks. Bask in the sun and bathe in the streams my ass.

So on the one hand, there’s the whole topos of progress and civilizatory effort, discussed highly ambiguously: George escapes his time to flee the technologically increasingly sophisticated killing; he then marvels at the leaps forward technology has made by 1966; shortly thereafter, civilization as we know it is destroyed by that very technology; and the dystopian world he ends up in is made up of the nonviolent but mentally ruined Eloi, incapable even to make their own clothes, and the technologically more advanced but morally extremely corrupt Morlocks. George himself, of course, is an inventor and as such cannot take a decidedly luddite stance towards progress. He’s delighted at the sound of machines coming from under the earth when he first hears it, and speaks of the “thousands of years of building and rebuilding” that he deems lost on the future society that he finds. Nevertheless, it’s notable that he doesn’t find a single point in time that he is content with, and the only glimpse of hope seems to be his own personal agency by the end of the film.

On the other hand, there’s the far less explicit but nevertheless overt racial stuff going on, making the movie’s meaning yet more complex. I’m not even going to comment on that part because it’s so screwed up. It is remarkable, however, that the film also totally takes the subversive political potential of the novel right out of the story: in the book, the underground people are descendants of workers who had been banished from sunlight and successfully revolted somehere down the line. So the Eloi are the original exploiters after all, but we’re not told that, instead being left with the whole weird racism thing.

All of this aside, this is still a very interesting classic. Straddling well between entertainment and food for thought, it’s never boring, and if the story progresses at a somewhat strange pace - taking a lot of time to get to the bleak future that’s at the actual core of the movie then wrapping everything up rather briefly -, it strangely enough doesn’t ruin the experience. It also lends itself well to close reading for the reasons outlined above, which I guess is a good thing if you’re a film student. The love story is totally superfluous and annoying and there’s not much here for the lover of accurate science fiction since the explanations are entirely childish and ridiculous, but the film’s merits are elsewhere: watch it.

There is also a 2002 film version of the story, with Alan Young re-appearing in a cameo.

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Gomorra - La serie (Stefano Sollima/Claudio Cupellini/Francesca Comencini/Claudio Giovannesi, 2014-2016)

One of the reasons I haven’t been updating this blog was that I got busy watching this show, which took its toll on the time i had at my disposal to watch movies. So in a somewhat unorthodox move, I’ll write something about the show in toto, to be precise, about the two seasons made so far.

What Gomorra is is an unapologetic look at organized crime in Naples, Italy. The name is a pun, of course, since the oranized crime syndicate in Naples is called Camorra. We are invited to follow the lives and careers of Pietro Savastano, the local gang boss whose position is undisputed as of the beginning of our story; furthermore, his wife; his son; and his close associates, with the main focus lying on one Ciro di Marzio. Ciro is sociopathic as fuck, just like everyone else on the show, and always looks like a pissed-off dog who’s just been beaten up.

I don’t really want to give away any of the story - I don’t usually have a problem with that in film reviews, but with TV shows it’s a different cup of tea -, so I’ll try concentrating on the big picture instead.

First off, everything about this show is super fucking bleak. The makers really succeed at avoiding the creation of any relatable characters one might want to identify with, while at the same time keeping the show consistently interesting, at least throughout the first season - quite an impressive feat, performed in part by continually feeding the audience’s sympathy and subsequent disappointment at the lack of the characters’ moral integrity. This applies to absolutely everyone who’s portrayed, or, rather, anyone who isn’t killed off too quickly to become a disappointment.

Which is another thing that happens a lot here. Gomorra really doesn’t come off as giving too much of a shit about axing characters whose development the audience may be interested in, and people are killed left and right. One of the first things I heard about the show is that its protagonists die like flies and it wasn’t an exaggeration. So all of this should give you an idea of the extra mile Gomorra is prepared to go in the pursuit of the gritty realism that has generally been favored over a more classic form of drama ever since The Wire came out.

Unlike The Wire, Gomorra doesn’t show any particular interest in sociopolitical subtext. In other words, there is no overarching wider theme here, such as the way institutions function alike across the borders of the law - the entire focus is on the Camorra, and on, it seems, demystifying a good bit about the life of organized criminals in Italy.

Unfortunately, it is this all-or-nothing approach that ultimately ends up preventing this show from being either perfect or at least close to perfection. The no-bullshit perspective on the lives of Pietro, Ciro, Gennaro and their lackeys is fascinating - but one thing that helps this fascination along greatly is the picture perfect constellation of characters that we find at the very onset. Pietro the all-knowing, cold, brutal head of the organization, Ciro the ambitious youngster, ready to do just about anything to rise to the top, Gennaro the son, not yet hardened enough to take his place as Pietro’s successor: the way the story initially unfolds suggests that this show can’t do wrong, and this suggestion is reinforced throughout multiple twists in the first season.

However, the constraints put on the show by the realism begin to take their toll by the time the second season rolls around, in a sense that I suppose can be a good or a bad thing, depending ultimately on your judgement. As the fascinating pyramid of power crumbles and the mighty clan dissolves, becoming a rivalry between opposing groups and fractions (an aspect very much in line with how the actual Camorra operates), so the show inevitably begins to meander a little. It’s clear that the makers aren’t aiming for sympathy with the antagonists, but the grisly realism doesn’t quite manage to make up for the lack of narrative cohesion. Some of the episodes even stray far from the main narrative, becoming vignettes in themselves but without necessarily adding much to the overall picture, ending up as dissatisfying affairs. And Ciro just isn’t enough of an engaging character to entirely hold his own throughout two long seasons: by the end of the second one, as souvereign and well-executed as Gomorra undoubtedly is, I was also beginning to find it a bit tedious.

That being sad, it’s certainly an excellent show. Apparently, two more seasons are to be produced, and while I doubt there will be no further decline in quality, I’d definitely recommend watching at least the first one.

There is also a film which the show is a successor to, and which I haven’t yet watched.

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Passage to Marseille (Michael Curtiz, 1944)

Eventually, I’ll write about every single Bogart movie on here, which has to do with the fact that watching movies with Bogart is part of my routine to calm myself down at night. There’s hardly an actor better suited for the task, really.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s take a look at this wartime propaganda movie focusing on the French. Bogie and his troupe (featuring a highly charimatic Peter Lorre) are convicts who escape Devil’s Island, a penal colony in French Guiana, because they want to fight the nazis. Devil’s Island, in case you were unaware, is just off the South American coast so you can imagine getting to Europe in a wooden boat is quite a feat. Luckily, they’re picked up by a French freighter bound for home.

Aboard the freighter, among others, are Captain Freycinet (Claude Rains) and Major Duval (Sydney Greenstreet). Trivia fact: if you’re familiar with classic Hollywood of the 1940s at all, you will no doubt have noticed this movie has pretty much the same male part of the cast and director as Casablanca, which was released two years prior to Passage to Marseille. The female part of the cast is missing because the only woman in the movie is Bogart’s wife (Michèle Morgan) who stayed back in France and therefore barely even appears. Despite all that, though, the movie’s nothing like Casablanca at all, so that is about all the comparison I’m going to make.

Unsurprisingly, Greenstreet plays the nazi sympathizer. I think, though I’m not sure, that there might be a reference to either Maxime Weygand or Philippe Pétain somewhere in here. 

Greenstreet is being Greenstreet; Duval is certainly one of his more onedimensional characters. Far more interesting is Bogart’s role as Jean Matrac, who prior to his incarceration is a patriot, a journalist in opposition to his government’s appeasement politics, yet upon conviction loses much of his faith, becoming convinced that the France he once loved is now “dead”. Rather than being an act of pure patriotism, then, his escape is driven by his desire to reunite with his wife. France didn’t have the best standing in the USA of 1944, so this twist on the Matrac character is one thing; more strikingly still, however, he is at one point shown to commit a war crime when he executes the defenseless crew of a shot-down nazi plane.

This is most certainly not a given even when dealing with the Germans on the US screens in 1944, and is commented upon as a crime in the film. Bogart has rarely played infallible characters, but this dark episode lends at least the hint of an additional side to this otherwise rather straightforward propaganda piece. 

As the latter, Passage to Marseille is rather effective. It’s hard not to root for the Bogart-and-Lorre-led bunch’s unlikely endeavour. Naturally, it’s totally over the top - take the fact that once the convicts actually get to fly bombers, Matrac begins to communicate with his wife and son by regularly dropping off letters from his plane over their home in lieu of another means of communication -, but that’s just what any propaganda film that serves its purpose is, and serve its purpose the Passage does. 

Formally, the most interesting aspect of the movie is the use of flashbacks, which is something you’ll probably read about in any review dealing with it. At one point, you have as much as four levels of story-inside-a-story nesting, which I personally found interesting and enjoyable rather than confusing. Clearly, this was something of a formal experiment for Curtiz, and one he mastered gracefully: the narrative isn’t tough to follow at all, something of an achievement given its rather rich content.

The attempt to deal with the issue of suspension of disbelief re: making a movie dealing with a bunch of Frenchmen in Hollywood, on the other hand, is a freaking mess. Practically nobody in the movie is a Frenchman, and the device of speaking with a recognizably French accent is employed in a totally inconsistent fashion. While particularly the supporting characters will often speak with a heavy accent, Bogart doesn’t even try, and I couldn’t make out any French with Lorre, either. As much as I would have loved seeing Bogie speak like he was an immigrant from Bordeaux for just under two hours and as much as it would have made this movie a must-see for its camp value, it would have probably entirely ruined the film for what it actually is, so just throw everything that you know about French people overboard - a trick generally useful when dealing with any classic Hollywood movie portraying anything that’s not the United States.

Overall, Passage to Marseille is by no means a must see, but as a snapshot of its time and a document of the US’ attitude towards France near the end of the war, it’s certainly interesting and watchable. A special mention goes out to the action scenes which are competent and had me clutch my girlfriend’s hand. Watch if you’re interested in the era, want to see the Casablanca cast re-cast in a weaker film, or are a WWII buff.

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Zardoz (John Boorman, 1974)

In the mid-1970s, Sean Connery, deeply distressed by the fact a quarter of the movies he'd appeared in up until that point was in the role of James Bond, was seeking ways to diversify his portfolio. Bewilderingly but luckily, he chose to diversify it by starring in John Boorman's version of the Wizard of Oz as told through the eyes of an insane person.

Look at Sean Connery dressed up in 1970s porn clothes on the poster. I think it's really nice. Also, Boorman says in the commentary that “there are very few actors who could have worn this costume” and chuckles, amazingly for the person who actually made this movie. As a bonus, the costume’s not just a vain fashion choice but rather the uniform used by the Exterminators - a special class of humans ruled over by Zardoz, a deity that appears to its servants in the form of a giant flying stone head.

The Exterminators’ job is to kill off the surplus of Brutals in the Outlands. The Brutals are savages who populate the Outlands and apparently breed like rabbits. Life in the Outlands sucks.

Zed, Connery’s character, eventually climbs into the stone head and travels to the Vortex - a space sealed off hermetically from the Outlands and populated by the Eternals. At some point it turns out that some three hundred years ago, all hell broke loose on Earth, whereupon some scientists created a gated community where everyone is immortal, subsequently making everyone forget how the technology of immortality works lest they go back to dying. In doing so, the scientists either didn’t take into account or didn’t care about the fact that being alive forever in a small shielded community quickly becomes pretty fucking boring, which is something we can also observe in Western countries in the year 2016. 

This is the set-up that allows Boorman, in a totally delirious manner, to explore topics as diverse as sleep, sex, shared consciousness, aging, and death drive. Sex and death represent the two defining topics, since, firstly, the film is packed full with references to male genitalia, Sean Connery’s virility and sex in general. The thing is that sex, in the Vortex’ society, has become obsolete, even though everyone is dressed really skimpily. Therefore, the Eternals are really interested in Zed’s sexuality. There’s also a lot of gratuitious nudity.

Here’s a still of Sean Connery trying to have sex with an Apathetic. Apathetics are Eternals who are so bored with their advanced, sexless immortality they just decided to stop reacting to external stimuli altogether. This is not unlike the widespread ketamine addiction of today.

Here’s a leading scientist of the Vortex explicating the mystery of erection. Note the scientifically accurate inclusion of pubic hair in the otherwise schematic drawing.

After a while, Zed actually starts to ignite sparks of lust and sexual drive in the Vortex’ inhabitants, mainly because he is himself so manly and horny all the time. See how they both say “revenge” in this scene at this very moment? Any arthouse movie could be proud of this still, and it comes with an extra Sean Connery moustache. I really love this.

So sex is one main topic explored in the movie. Secondly and in part due to the severe lack of sexual urges I just described, the Eternals’ main issue is that they can’t die. Remember, their sadist scientist prededcessors made them forget the secret of immortality so they couldn’t ever destroy it. Which is where Zed comes in, him somehow being the Eternals’ only hope as the chosen one who may bring them Death.

Look, the problem with most of those who are puzzled and irritated by this movie is that they attempt to weigh its merits based on the notion that Zardoz is, primarily, a sci-fi movie. But just because it has a story forming its apparent framework that resembles whichever the fuck other sci-fi flicks you’ve seen doesn’t mean you’re watching it the right way. Who the hell cares if the story is told in a way that appears deliberately confusing? Look at it this way, that’s exactly what makes Zadoz great; it lends it its trippy quality (to say the least; I think delirium and free-association hits the nail of the head, frankly), giving scenes such as the one where the Apathetics drink Sean Connery’s sweat because it gives them life a free pass to haunt your drug-addled mind and dreams. Observe:

I won’t mention the closing scenes because you really have to see them for yourself. But if you don’t think that the scene in which the Renegades - that’s another class of humans, those condemned to spend eternity living out an old age as the only form of punishment that exists in the Vortex -, chase Zed to beat him is one that conjures and excites some sort of primal Urangst, I don’t know what to talk to you about.

Watch this movie. By the way: its tagline reads “Beyond 1984, Beyond 2014, Beyond Love, Beyond Death”, which I think describes the film surprisingly accurately. Trailer:

Bonus: here’s the magical immortality crystal talking to our friend Zed. Just admit you’re loving this already.

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All Through The Night (Vincent Sherman, 1941)

Bogart and a supporting crew of comedic stars fight a conspiracy of fifth columnist that they accidentally stumble upon in this enjoyable wartime thriller/comedy hybrid.

“Gloves” Donahue and his crew are a bunch of streetwise gambers who one fine day discover that one Mr. Miller, whose cheesecake Donahue is in love with, has been murdered. The trail that Donahue picks up because he’s Humphrey Bogart leads them to a club where Leda Hamilton (Kaaren Verne) works as a singer, along with a shady dude called Pepi (Peter Lorre), ostensibly her accompaniment but clearly having more of a say than you’d expect from a piano player. A second murder happens shortly thereafter, which the club co-owner tries to put on Gloves, and investigation into this second incident (which investigation is by now happening not because Gloves is Bogart but because he’s wanted by the police and needs to prove he’s innocent) uncovers an entire large-scale conspiracy by the nazis, complete with a portrait of Adolf Hitler on the wall of the secret HQ and a long list of sabotage acts. Naturally, our gambling friends take it upon them to neutralize this nazi scum.  

The cast in this movie is top notch. Bogart really shines in a quasicomedic role, as his ability to deliver slick-tongued lines is used to full potential here. Demarest, Gleason, McHugh, et al., who constitute his gang, all act a mix of clumsiness and street smarts, and while their deliveries are certainly dated in many respects, they’re endearing and highly enjoyable. Kaaren Verne is great as as an innocent refugee taken advantage of by the nazis, while the duo of Conrad Veidt (playing Ebbing, head of the nazi conspiracy) and Peter Lorre makes for a really nice pair of villains: the older one acting out of conviction, the younger one out of pure evil, with Lorre outshining Veidt, even. They cast a bunch of actual Germans in this movie, too, so if you’re German you’re going to enjoy some authentic dialogue, though in accord with the unwritten rules of suspense of disbelief most of the talking happens in English. Watch out for the scene where a second-tier nazi takes over the assembly, however - little has happened between 1941 and 2016 in terms of effectively depicting a German-speaking asshole with a penchant for discipline and order.

The story, while relatively complex, moves along with ease, which is helped greatly by the prominent comedic element. For today’s viewers, the dialogue is likely to be tough to follow because it happens at machine gun pace without ever taking so much as a breather. What All Through The Night mainly plays off of, though, is the juxtaposition of the extremely German fivers on the one hand, all about hierarchy and metaphysical principle and chain of command, and the chaotic but incredibly effective gang led by Bogart, on the other. Watch the classically comedic scene in which the aforementioned nazi assembly is stormed by an assortment of jovial Americans with bats to see what I mean. Though Gloves does say he’s “been a registered Democrat ever since he could vote” - a nod to screenwriters Spigelgass’ and Gilbert’s own political convictions, perhaps - him and his bunch really aren’t the greatest citizens, and this is the, for the times, inclusive message of the movie: even, and perhaps especially, if you’re a gambler, you’re still American through and through, and can easily discover your patriotism if confronted with the fifth column.  

The patriotism, as you might expect, goes hand in hand with heavy paranoia bordering on the pathological. According to the screenplay, the fifth column is everywhere - what Bogart stumbles upon here is a networks of “hundreds of them, in every city”. Don’t even talk to me about your teeny-weeny conspiracy theories after this as long as you don’t think a bunch of Hitler sympathizers with thick German accents are about to take over your country. Unless of course you’re from Germany in which event that’s actually the case. The paranoia is exquisitely underlined visually: the complex interplay of light and black shadow that the nazis’ secret HQ is marked by would make any noir filmmaker proud, and reaches over into the classically expressionist. 

All Through The Night is very much of the time, but that can be a good thing, too, of course, as it serves a double role as a highly interesting document and an enjoyable experience. 

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Until The Light Takes Us (Aaron Aites & Audrey Ewell, 2008)

With the cult status that the whole “second wave of Norwegian black metal” thing has, a documentary on the topic better bring something new to the table. Unfortunately, Until The Light Takes Us avoids doing that altogether.

Okay, maybe I’m spoiled by 2016 since blurry videos of early BM performances are now readily available for your education on YouTube, but even if we try to subtract that the whole affair still has an air of amateur hour about it. The movie feels totally disjointed and owing that somehow manages to not have a pace at all. I can’t believe this got a theatrical release. Central events that nowadays everyone knows about (and back in 2008 every black metal fan knew) are re-told in such a one-sided and confusing manner my girlfriend whom I was watching the film with had to ask me several times what the hell had happened, and I can’t say that I had a ready answer, so that makes us two confused viewers.

Predictably, lots of space is given to the murders and church arsons, but weirdly enough for a story which we can assume the interested parties being really, really interested in telling their own version of, Aites and Ewell don’t bother letting two or more sides speak, let alone introducing a narrator’s standpoint. In fact, most of the on-screen time is given to the talking head of our friend Varg Vikernes, who as we all know has a very idiosyncratic view of both the beginnings of black metal in Norway in particular and the entire world in general. The choice of casting Varg as the main narrator is disconcerting seeing as he is batshit insane, but not in an interesting way. On top of that, I’m not aware of anyone who has ever sat through one of his post-Filosofem albums, but that, after all, might be negligible because we’re talking about the past here. Nevertheless, all of this is symptomatic: I kind of get the impression the directors don’t really have an idea of what the hell they’re making a movie about, and that might explain the overall patchy choice of protagonists to actually appear in the documentary. There’s nobody from Mayhem, and anyone who isn’t Varg or Fenriz of Darkthrone doesn’t get a lot of opportunity to tell us anything of interest.

Varg being let to spread his message of Norwegian suprematism uncontested is one thing, but the entire structure is of the anecdotal kind, with nothing going anywhere most of the time. There’s some interesting footage of Satyricon’s Frost doing a solo performance in Milan, during which he destroys some artwork (presumably his own) and cuts himself, there are bits and pieces of interviews where the protagonists tell us about events that, without the proper context provided, lack any sort of relevance, there’s short of people walking through the snow and annoying bits about an artist doing a pretty boring exhibition dedicated to black metal. All of this is bad enough, but perhaps the greatest of the flaws is the fact that beyond giving us very little idea of how that time must have felt, this movie also fails to give any substantial idea of the actual music, a remarkable feat for a documentary focussing on a music genre and youth subculture. It goes so far in its guest for missing the mark as to make the outlandish choice of not actually including too much in terms of black metal in the soundtrack. If you’re a BM fan, this movie will annoy and bore you to death, and if you don’t know much about black metal, you’re probably better off reading Wikipedia and listening to the actual records, since Until The Light Takes Us will do nothing to bring the era to life for you. It does create a hint at a sense of nostalgia at the very end, but clumsily so, plus I suppose that’s the very least you can expect from a glance at a culture gone by. Avoid.

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Age of Consent (Michael Powell, 1969)

Here we have a 60s movie about an aging and dissatisfied artist whose genitals are still intact.

James Mason, whom I won’t bother calling his character name Bradley, is a painter who’s unhappy with his life in New York City. In search of inspiration, he returns to his homeland Australia, moves into a beachhouse on an island and meets Helen Mirren, who plays a teenager and whom he proceeds to paint in the nude. This gets his inspiration right back up to speed, but he still needs a while to figure out that they also have a romantic interest in each other. 

The Australian 60s were predictably even more fucked up than the American 60s. James Mason totally sugardaddies Helen Mirren in that her actual objective is to get the fuck off of this godforsaken island and become a hairdresser, which I guess is an okay goal and which she’s saving money for. Mason offers to pay her slowly, hour for hour of painting. All of this is a really thin veil of metaphor. Plus if he really wanted to help the poor girl, why not simply help her out when he clearly can afford a move to Australia and a beachhouse, all the while having no visible means of income? I had to assume his pictures sold fairly well, in which case he should just buy her a goddamn ticket. The pay he offers is ridiculous and an open-and-shut case of exploitation of a minor. It’s tough to develop any sympathy for Helen Mirren, though, because her character is plain annoying from start to finish. Exploitation, incidentally, is also what this movie to a degree is, since it visually cashes in on shots of Mirren in the nude quite a lot.

All of this notwithstanding, though, Age of Consent attempts to be a movie that breaks with the outdated pre-60s morals, as exemplified by the tagline “let yourself go... they do!” However, it does that so creepily you kind of wish for those pre-60s morals back. It doesn’t help that one of the user reviews on IMDB is titled “A sweet and likable middle-age fantasy”. The pre-60s morals, by the way, are represented by Helen Mirren’s character’s alcoholic grandmother, who senses teenage prostitution. Aside from the grandmother, nobody in this film appears to be doing any drugs or even drink, which is unusual for both Australia and 1969. The grandma is later conveniently killed in what has to be classified as a drunken accident, leaving room for Mason to concentrate fully on exploiting a poverty-stricken girl from an Aussie island.

Note how this movie is neither comedy nor drama but rather a piece on the times and mores, which I suppose makes it a somewhat interesting document. The island shots are okay, but if you’re looking for a feelgood movie, Age of Consent is probably going to creep you out instead. Watch if you’re interested in Australia, crude attempts at summarizing the sexual liberation of the 60s, or the midlife crisis.

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Conflict (Curtis Bernhardt, 1945)

This is an underrated noir with a Bogart/Greenstreet pairing, both of them doing what they do best.

Bogart plays Richard, an engineer unhappily married to his wife Kathryn, who is played by Rose Hobart. Right at the onset of the movie, Kathryn accuses Richard of being in love with her younger sister Evelyn (Alexis Smith), which he totally admits to. It's kind of nice how Kathryn's and Evelyn's names line up so perfectly, and there's probably some etymological wordplay going on here but I can't be bothered right now to research it. Richard talks about himself being in love with his wife's sibling matter-of-factly like it was details of bridge construction, which is psychologically interesting and tells us a lot about the type of guy he is. To top things off, it's the eve of Kathryn and Rick's marriage anniversary. A perfectly dysfunctional American family and an elegant triangle, and remember all of this is just the opening scene.

The triangle is supplemented by one Dr. Mark Hamilton (Greenstreet), who's a psychoanalyst. The movie plays off of this whole psychoanalyst - engineer juxtaposition a lot and uses it to help unfold the classic noir trope: that underneath a healthy, rational facade there are dark powers lurking that we cannot fathom. In a peripety true to the genre's form, Richard, upon following Dr. Hamilton's monologue at the anniversary, murders Kathryn in the hopes of marriyng Evelyn instead, but the plan doesn't quite pan out. The murder part goes over more or less well, but unsettling events seem to start happening right after. I don't want to give away any of the rest, because you really should watch this movie for yourself.

Conflict is an excellent genrepiece that doesn't rely on fancy adventures or extraneous plot devices. Instead, all of the focus here is on the love triangle that really only exists in Richard's head, and on the psychological torment that's commented on and framed by Hamilton, himself character and choir at once. This reduction to the basic elements is central to the movie's appeal, but instead of becoming schematic it manages to maintain interest throughout. The internal conflict is complex and develops in unexpected ways - take for instance Bogart’s character’s moment of revelation which could almost be confused for repentance, when he tells the young man in love with Evelyn to go ask for her hand again. The film is probably underseen because of its lack of bombast, but if you want to see how a poignant psychological thriller/drama was made in classic Hollywood, you should definitely watch it.

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Acción Mutante (Álex de la Iglesia, 1993)

This movie ranks pretty high on my fucked up movies list.

Our setting is the distant future. The world of the distant future isn't completely dissimilar to the world of the present day in that it's mostly ruled by good-looking people with money. Also, their idea of what constitutes good-looking is pretty close to what people thought about that in the 90s. Some things never change.

The good-looking people with money are routinely terrorized by a group that calls itself Acción Mutante, because it consists of rebellious mutants. Also, two of them are Siamese twins. They wreak all sorts of good old-fashioned havoc and eventually kidnap Patricia Orujo (Frédérique Feder), the daughter of a rich businessman, at her wedding for ransom. So far, all of this seems like pretty good and entertaining social satire, but none of that really matters because once the daughter is kidnapped, Ramón (Antonio Resines), the leader of the group, starts methodically killing off all of the other members in order to have the ransom money all to himself, and the movie takes a wholly different route.

Having failed to kill off Alex (Álex Angulo), the last of the group and one of the Siamese twins, Ramón crashes his spaceship on some trashy planet populated by inbred freaks (possibly Earth). He now needs to make his way to the handover point, followed closely by Alex who has fallen in love with Patricia, and to make matters worse, Patricia has apparently suffered brain damage from the collision and now thinks she's in love with Ramón, which Ramón blames on the Stockholm syndrome. You get the picture.

From here on out, we're treated to a further amazing assortment of illustrous characters. There's a lot going on in this movie. Ramón is completely drenched in blood throughout the second half, for which you have to cut him some slack since he’s running out of time. There's a great shoot-out, and generally the whole culmination is freaking hilarious (watch for the appearances of both daddy and fiancé, plus a TV reporter). Movies like these far too often try to score "fucked up" points by employing ultra-violence to no end, but thankfully, de la Iglesia knows better. It's seriously entertaining to watch from start to finish, the characters are for the most part surprisingly unannoying, and even asshole extraordinaire Ramón scores some sympathy points. Frédérique Feder is actually pretty good. Really, it's hard to find anything bad about any of this. Definitively recommend.

I can’t comment on the music and sound in the movie because I watched it with subtitles on and sound muted, my girlfriend being asleep at the time. But have a look at this poster. I usually don’t comment on posters, but this one is pretty damn good.

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Citizen Gangster (Nathan Morlando, 2011)

Here we have Morlando’s first feature, and Scott Speedman plays the historical figure of Edwin Alonzo Boyd. Edwin Boyd was a disillusioned WWII veteran who turned to serious crime. Sick of being poor and putting up with his father's nagging, Ed starts robbing banks while telling his wife he found an acting job, which I suppose in a way is true since he uses his bank robberies as a sort of stage for himself, makeup and all. Unrepentant upon getting caught and sent to jail, he forms an entire Boyd Gang, with which he breaks out and continues the robberies.

1940s people in contemporary mainstream cinema somehow always look a lot like their slick and groomed 2010s counterparts to me, just dressed up in costume. I'm not sure how justified I am in not buying it, but there's a certain something about all these movies - the totality of all the modern details both inside and in the picture - that makes the historical setting appear as only this much more than a pretty patina. Lazy postmodernism, I suppose you’d call it. The "modern classical" film music adds to the gloss, thus further destroying the realism. I can appreciate this type of soundtrack in other contexts, but not when we’re dealing with a grisly topic like the poswar period, and a guy who actually existed, to boot.

Citizen Gangster could have been much more than it ended up being, because Eddie Boyd is something of a hero in Canadian folk tradition, plus the theme of WWII vets being left alone by society is powerful enough to get a lot out of it. Unfortunately, although Morlando is quite a confident director (the story moves a bit slowly, but otherwise solidly), he tells the story in such generic terms you inadvertently start thinking you've seen it before, even though you haven't. Speedman's performance is fine, but it doesn't save the movie; we move from checkpoint to checkpoint with a predictability that turns the whole endeavour into something of an ordeal. Sure it's based on real events, but even casual students of history know how differently the same events can be retold. Morlando's Boyd lacks grit, dirt, life; his world is stylishly bleak, but that's all it is, separated from us by a fancy filter that doesn't let us see those little details that make a thing real. Boyd’s status as a folk hero, his psyche, the drama of his family crisis - all of this is hinted at, at times even shown, but lazily so, in a textbook-like manner, failing to grip. Watch only if you're really interested in the Boyd Gang, or you really love movies about bank robbers, but there are probably better resources for both out there.

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The Trip (Roger Corman, 1967)

LSDsploitation! With a screenplay written, suddenly, by Jack Nicholson. Peter Fonda is a film director who turns on, tunes in and drops out. The movie is completely ridiculous and features a creepy tripsitter, a lot of hippies, sex scenes lit by projectors showing psychedelic visuals, and no plot. It’s preceded by a funny disclaimer stating that the film would deal with the important and dangerous topic of this new drug, LSD; rest assured the following one hour and twenty minutes are one long advertisement for acid. Remarkably, most of the “trip images” don’t accurately display what an LSD trip is like at all (it’s like they didn’t even try), however Peter Fonda isn’t all that bad at putting on the typical facial expression and gestures of someone who’s tripping balls, leading me to believe Rogar Corman knew what he was making a film about. Watch if you have 1:20 to kill and really, really like acid and/or hippies.

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Jour de Fête (Jacques Tati, 1949)

Tati is remembered mostly for his Monsieur Hulot movies, but his first feature stands on its own and displays many of the traits of his humor, not shunning a bit of slapstick here and there but generally rather gentle, and able to employ elaborate choreography to create smiles. The movie is centered around the adventures of François (played by Tati himself, as you would expect), postman in an idyllic French small town. Everyone makes fun of François habitually, albeit in good spirit; when a fair comes to town and the fairfolk show a movie about the latest technological achievements of the US postal system (featuring delivery by helicopter and a training that involves jumping through fire on a motorcycle), François, who only has an old bike, becomes frustrated and decides to show everyone American standards. The moral of the story, of course, is that the world can wait.

I've been surprised a few times to find that people criticized Tati's movies for not being laugh-out-loud comedies. Creating laugh after laugh isn't necessarily their point; instead, their humor has an ambient glow that goes well with the director's obvious nostalgia for a simpler world that, in the time following the war, was quickly disintegrating forever. In these films, the sun always shines, and even death is distant, treated as just another vehicle to make a good-spirited joke, which marries them stragely to Soviet comedies of the 1970s. The cinematography, as usual with Tati, is perfect, particularly for a first film, and an interesting technical detail is that it was shot with two cameras, one using black and white film and another an untested color technology called Thomsoncolor. The color version has been restored and is available.

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Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)

Most of the slamming this movie has received came from people who haven't read Thomas Pynchon and therefore couldn't really understand what Anderson was trying to do here. Despite that, the movie isn't great.

Pynchon is one of those postmodern writers who only ostensibly write narrative fiction. In reality, his plots swirl, spin and sprawl, until they become their own thing, not racing toward any conclusion but instead building up a wider and wider network of references and clues. This goes for his larger works as well as books like Inherent Vice, that only count a few hundred pages; his main motif is conspiracy and alternative history, and he's one of those guys who instead of writing about a conspiracy give you the paranoid feeling of being in a conspiracy the workings of which you won't and can't ever understand; which is far more powerful.

However, this also means that trying to fit any of his works into a narrative frame by reducing them to it is a pointless endeavor, because the entire point of the work is automatically lost. You might as well try to retell Ulysses by giving an account of what happened to Bloom on Bloomsday. Accordingly, I've always thought that his books were impossible to turn into films, unless perhaps you rely on experimental devices heavily, and Anderson's effort didn't convince me otherwise.

At the start of the movie, we're introduced to Larry "Doc" Sportello, played (a bit stiffly, I thought) by Joaquin Phoenix, who is an aging hippie (it's 1970) and also a private investigator. In Pynchon's world, this is a totally normal thing, so don't worry. He meets his ex-girlfriend whom he is still in love with, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), who tells him that the wife and boyfriend of her current lover, wealthy and influential builder Michael Z. Wolfman (Eric Roberts), plan to deal with said lover in some way in order to, presumably, get at his money, but she's not sure about all that, anyway she, along with Wolfman, immediately disappears and Doc takes on the case. It's completely pointless to attempt to give a synopsis of anything that happens from here on out because it's more than you can fit in your head anyway. But here's where the frustrating part comes in: where Pynchon's opaque plots work in the medium of language to create a dark sense of paranoia through cross-references, clever hints and digressions, in narrative film, they become a series of barely interconnected episodes. The truth is that since Anderson is evidently setting out to tell a story in good ol' story-telling terms, and Pynchon's story evidently has a beginning and an end, the viewer is right in their frustration at the fact that the middle seems to fall apart into somewhat weird characters, somewhat weird settings, and somewhat weird episodes. This is especially true for a film that, at 2,5 hours, places higher than average demands on the viewer. The nostalgia for the dream of the 1960s, the suspicion that it has been replaced by something darker, which had always been lurking inside (cf. the title of the movie/book), the sense of witnessing a tipping point of recent history - all of this, which is found in the book, is lost in what ends up being an episodic film.  A bit of creativity with the medium would have done the film a ton of good. Watch only if you've read Inherent Vice and are curious.

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They Drive By Night (Raoul Walsh, 1940)

George Raft and Humphrey Bogart play brothers (convincingly so) who try to make it as independent truckers in the rough world of the American 40s. This movie doesn't really know what it wants to be. The entire first half of the movie seems like a portrayal of the hard life of truckers. I'm not 100% regarding just how realistic Raft and Bogart are as working-class American guys, but I like the angle. There's also a good dose of comedy thrown in the mix, which sometimes works. Then, Raft meets Ann Sheridan, who's a good all-American working gal, and Bogart loses an arm in a trucking accident because he fell asleep at the wheel while trying to make it in a dog-eat-dog society. So the arm was lost to 40s capitalism, but frustratingly this entire side to the story is never developed, aside from a scene in which Bogart voices his anger at having to rely on external help.

Meanwhile, Ida Lupino is thrown in the mix, who it turns out habitually stalks and one would have to say harasses George Raft, all the while being married to his boss (which boss Raft now has, because the whole losing the arm and the load thing has taught the brothers that making it as an independent duo is a lost cause in 1940s American society. Bogart doesn't have a boss because he sits at home unemployed). All of this makes the movie take a film noir-type u-turn, which seems weird because by now we're in midway, and I want to learn more about trucker life.

The boss is played by Alan Hale, who has a funny drunk scene before he's killed by his wife. From the murder scene, I learned two things: 1) automatic doors were newly around in 1940 and 2) recent technical innovations were used as plot devices back then already. This is pretty cool. As is common with film noir plots, Lupino then tries to hang the murder on Raft, but once again this is over pretty quickly. Raft comes out of the whole affair not only totally unscathed, but having barely noticed it, Lupino is comitted to an insane asylum and Raft (now married to Sheridan) henceforth presides over the company, with Bogart employed in an unspecified role. So the American Dream, in a way, does come true, lost limbs and murdered drunks notwithstanding.

I feel like this movie could have been great if the studio had decided to go with one of the two movies which somehow exist simultaneously here, and maybe cut the comedy out a bit. The cast is top notch, and the cinematography, while not all that, isn't terrible. But as it is, They Drive By Night remains an unfulfilling experience. Watch if you want to see Raft and Bogart as brothers, which really is the main attraction of this film.