Not Quite Hollywood (official trailer) has a limited run at the ICA as part of their Ozploitation season, then released on DVD with audio commentary from its director Mark Hartley. Quentin Tarantino, needless to say, is a huge fan of these films such as the horror Patrick (1978). Fuelled by tax legislation that allowed producers a 150% write-off, a lot of junk was also jangled out in this period. But equally (though many would disagree and do in Hartley’s balanced doco), there was some great ‘commercial’ filmmaking going on that would later inspire the teams behind Oz international successes like Saw and Wolf Creek. Richard Franklin’s Roadgames was also released last year on Optimum DVD.
And if you still haven’t had enough of these genres Optimum DVD have also just released Italian horror pic The Antichrist (1974). But anyone who finds this one offensive really should get out a bit more often. There’s actress Alida Valli no doubt paying her rent, composer Ennio Morriconi seizing the opportunity to experiment, and great cheeky (or is that cheesy) art direction from Liberto Bertacca. The rather flat lighting is very el cheapo (the toad’s blood looks straight out of a Dulux paint catalogue) not El Greco but there are some great scenes with levitating wardrobes, disembodied hands and are those EP records flying all around the room during the climatic exorcism? A very fun film for a Friday night in but scary Darrio Argento it aint.
[Addition: First look at Lars von Trier's new film Antchrist]
Or there’s Russ Meyer’s
Jennifer (daughter of David Lynch’s) film Surveillance is an interesting mix too. Some really fine filmmaking here boding well for her next one.
And Tom Tywker’s The International is, as you’d expect, fantastically made. Character development? Well no, but that’s not really what Tywker’s work has ever been about - moral issues are nonetheless always embedded within his commercial cinematic engines.
Not Quite Hollywood just opened this year’s Australian Film Festival at the Barbican that also includes Peter Weir’s 1974 classic The Cars that Ate Paris (Thurs 19 Mar) and the same evening a London screening of Tropfest - the largest short film festival in the world. For more ‘discerning’ punters, Three Blind Mice winner of last year’s FIPRESCI International Critic’s Award at The Times BFI London Film Festival is screening. Matthew Newton directed, wrote and acts in this tense low-budget film and wanted to avoid the cinematic “shorthand of most films...an anti-war film unashamedly about people rather than politics...with each character treating the film as their own story.” Films like this don’t emerge from Oz too often so well worth a gander.
The Femme Fatale BFI season
Last week’s high-school shootings in Germany raised again the question of violence in film and its effects. What frustrates more, is that after such incidents governments always try to convince us that they can instigate preventative legislation when in fact the fault lies more in society itself. Last year’s New Zealand film Out of the Blue showed a man out of control who should not have been allowed to be so. Was the fault psychiatric or sociological? The film never broached that thorny issue remaining a re-enactment. In London last year, a respected lawyer started shooting out the window of his posh Chelsea home before turning the gun on himself. And all along nobody wanted to admit or even discuss whether they (society) were part of this terrible process. The killers are condemned as being outside society. By the same token, and I’m thinking amongst many other examples of the police shooting of Menenzes on the London underground, authorities are rarely found to have made any wrong doing. It was systemic. The system not individuals were to blame, but the system though it can be found lacking, is never allowed to be seen as inherently flawed.
I’d like to know whether the German teenage gunman had been bullied, had been ridiculed by the text messages and emails from fellow pupils. That would not have constituted an excuse for his actions but such enquires might prove more fruitful in understanding society’s flaws and problems. The armies of governments are allowed to exist but private gun ownership is generally frowned upon by society’s liberals. The inherent contradictions of society march onwards.
The BFI’s re-release of the 1950 Gun Crazy (YouTube trailer) directed by Joseph H. Lewis is seen to be the epitome of B-film noir. Director Paul Schrader was a champion of the film in the 70s: “In no film has America mania for youth, action, sex and crime been so immediately portrayed. There are no excuses for the gun craziness – it is just crazy.” And it’s a film that, by accident or design, gets closer to the ‘heart of the matter’ than most others. Bart (John Dall) has loved guns ever since a juvenile offence but has no interest in killing. Laurie (Peggy Cummins) makes her living as an expert shot on the carnival circuit but for her the gun is a penis of revenge upon men. The two misfits become inextricably entwined: she senses dependable but strong femininity in him and he in turn is drawn to her masculinity. “You’re the only thing that is [real] Laurie, the rest is a nightmare,” says Bart.
Senses of Cinema article
and another
Jonah Goldberg’s book on Liberal Fascism:
The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Out on DVD is the satirical War, Inc. starring John Cusack (also writer and producer) as a suave government trouble-shooter in Tamerlane (a fictionalised corporate Iraq). It’s the only Hollywood film that you’ll ever hear the French writer (no I won’t say ‘any writer at all’ – that’s not quite fare) Céline mentioned but that’s as far as goes the cleverness or complexity of the film’s narrative. Journalists entering Tamerlane are jabbed with “implanted experience” but not the bolshy investigative Natalie Hegelgusen (Marisa Tomei, who’s worked for decades without much due recognition until The Wrestler) whose wiles inveigle her into ‘the empire’. And it’s a film that tries to tread the path of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and fails: an “absurdist comedy...with teeth” explains Cusack on the DVD interview extra. But it’s an honourable enjoyable dental malfunction (nice inventive casting turns from Ben Kingsley and Hilary Duff – don’t often hear those two mentioned in the same breath) that really needed the comic talents of Seth Rogan, Will Ferrell and his bawdy inmates to give the film some chutz.
Lionsgate also have out the DVD and Blu-ray of Oliver Stone’s W. (the George W. Bush biopic) including director’s commentary. As I wrote on the film’s release last year, we don’t really get a glimpse of why stalactites and stalagmites are different but Stone’s caves are nonetheless always worth exploring.
Clint Eastwood should get an acting award for stamina if nothing else from Gran Torino - he’s in almost every scene. The moral debate it raises about gun ownership will no doubt be seen by many as highly dubious. But Eastwood as always - past and present - counteracts that with hoisting and foisting an overriding message of human tolerance into the commercial cinema.
And if that opens the minds of ‘middle-America’ just a fraction that is quite an achievement. The enemy ‘within’.
Lakeview Terrace is out on Sony DVD March 30.
Il Divo (trailer), (official site) is Paolo Sorrentino's latest film about Giulio Andreotti, Italy's seven stint Prime Minister. Melancholy pervades most of Sorrentino's work and, as always too, the film has the magnificent look of a stage set. What is fascinating, though, is that Andreotti (Toni Servillo) is like a lame duck in a ballet of political scandals swirling around him rather than seen as a 'biopic'. There is neither action nor inaction, he is simply the sacrifice in this Rite of Spring; the minotaur trapped in his labyrinth forever condemned, the spectrum forever ripped open. As his other work reveals, Sorrentino’s interest always lies not in politics but with the inner man. We neither collude nor are angered: Sorrentino forces us to stare into an abyss. The abyss of a beautiful damned world.
Making Divo not easy for director (Variety)
BBC Radio 4’s Front Row (Mon 16 March)
The powerful anti-Mafia pic Gomorrah is out on Optimum DVD and packed on 2 discs with extra features.
Quiet Chaos also out on DVD.
Oxford Literary Festival: George Orwell's son speaks for the first time about his father
The forces of English power can be seen in The Duchess and Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day (both out on DVD) while The Young Victoria is out in cinemas. All are flawed in many ways but all worth seeing giving continued hope for a British film industry. No cutting edge here but some really great casting in all three films.
Van Dyck and Britain continues at Tate Britain.
The Independent review
And a wonderful film installation in the Tate’s Triennial Extramission 6 (Black Maria) by Lindsay Seers exploring how we project and formulate our own image from and into history.
Even after missing the first 10 minutes of In the City of Sylvia, the film’s voyeurism held my attention. Was that the filmmaking or human curiosity? Reminded me of Alain Tanner’s 1983 Dans la ville blanche (In the White City) with a man walking the streets of Lisbon sending home to Switzerland super-8 footage of his perambulations.
Çagan Irmak’s contemporary Turkish film Issiz adam (Alone) (literally deserted man) is familiar thwarted relationship fare (this is commercial [top grosser in Turkey] not film festival circuit fare) but has a riveting performance first-time actress Melis Birkan. And great to see a Turkish film playing in four multiplex London cinemas.
Gerhard Richter Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery explore in ‘blurred’ paint “the excess of unimportant information” - the seeming reality of photography long before (1962) such questions were asked (cf Susan Sontag's 1977 On Photography ) “I don’t think the painter need either see or know the sitter. A portrait must not express anything of the sitter’s ‘soul’ essence or character”, writes Richter.
Richter’s website
The almost improvised, instantaneous pictures in Constable Portraits make a great companion exhibition to Richter forcing one to ask ‘what is a portrait’?
In the fictitious Latin American country “a hell called El Dorado...stealing my youth” an idealist and anarchist poet near death, reflects on his struggles. Glauber Rocha’s 1967 B/W Brazilian Entranced Earth (trailer) now out on DVD feels like Kozintsev’s Russian Hamlet from a few years earlier (1964) – mobile soul-searching camera work, voice-over and all, “In this oblivion, horizons sealed by other poets”, “I vomit in the streets...I do the vain excuse of poetry.” And so on. Great depressing filmmaking. Slightly more uplifting (but only just) is Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Cuban Strawberry and Chocolate also out on
"To him, who still would gaze upon
The glory of the summer sun,
There comes, when that sun will from him part,
A sullen hopelessness of heart."
more tomorrow......
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