Three Films Make A Post: In this town a speeding ticket is a death sentence

Twin Murders: The Silence of the White City aka El silencio de la ciudad blanca (2019): This Netflix movie adaptation of a crime novel that’s apparently much better (which shouldn’t be terribly difficult to achieve) directed by Daniel Calparsoro feels like a greatest hits version of the serial killer thriller genre, and as with most greatest hits collections, there’s a lot of glitz but little substance on screen. Sure, the film does look great, but the script is a complete mess full of sub-plots that are picked up, dropped and forgotten for no apparent reason, motivations and character psychology that make little sense (and is usually neither explained nor demonstrated but just stated awkwardly). The film has the kind of overloaded stop and start pacing you often get when a book is cut down to what a screenwriter deems to be its highlights.
Otherwise, there’s only the usual overblown serial killer movie nonsense, full of grand declarations of intellectual depth that doesn’t actually exist, ridiculous murder rituals this film isn’t even clever enough to make as creepy as they should be, and taking place in a world where characters are probably even accompanied by Very Dramatic Music™ when they are on the loo.

Housewife (2017): I absolutely adored director Can Evrenol’s Baskin, but this, his second feature, is quite a step back, despite hitting some of my favourite horror and weird fic elements, namely a creepy cult, a protagonist who can’t quite understand if she’s dreaming or not, and creepy flesh masks. Evrenol seems to be trying to formally emulate the dream logic of Italian 80s horror, but for much of the film’s running time, he doesn’t hit the proper mood of a bizarre and unpleasant dream but more the randomness of actual dreams, which simply isn’t terribly interesting to watch. There are a couple or three effective scenes here to show that Baskin wasn’t an accident, but most of what we get is aimless meandering.

The film also suffers badly from the decision to have a cast of non-native English speakers speak English dialogue, adding a stilted and unnatural quality that may have been meant to add to the film’s unreal mood but in practice makes the already pretty awkward dialogue difficult to make out and puts another layer of distance between audience and characters when they badly need to feel as close to the audience as possible.


The California Kid (1974): Which leaves this post’s role of “The Good Film” to this unassuming 70s TV movie by Richard T. Heffron in which drag riding Martin Sheen takes revenge on Sheriff Vic Morrow who purposely drove his brother and others off a mountain road. It’s not a tight, Duel-style thrill ride but more interested in a  very 70s exploration of characters on the side-lines of life, while having some thoughts about the reasons why good people look away from bad acts, usually avoiding the melodrama that can come with the TV territory. Heffron’s direction is not spectacular but makes nice use of its California locations and knows how to provide space for a cast that also features a young Nick Nolte, Michelle Phillips and Stuart Margolin.

Three Films Make A Post: Something has put the fear of death in the living and sent the dead running for their lives

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2013): It seems somewhat obvious to compare Jean-Pierre Jeunet to Tim Burton: both directors have very distinctive styles, both have aesthetics deeply rooted in the grotesque and the strange. But unlike Burton on his bad days, Jeunet seems to be easily able to find the volume knob for the grotesque and the weird and fit it to the necessities of the narrative he’s telling. T.S. Spivet is a case in point, for it shows the director mellowing the grotesque into the whimsically strange while keeping his ability to create a world not really like our own that still feels perfectly logical and following its own rules and which is rooted in recognizable human feelings. So this is not just a film that’s great to look – and sometimes to gawk excitedly – at but also an example of that mythical “heart-warming” quality, a quality Jeunet – as is his wont – reaches without ever seeming to stretch for it, and that never feels in conflict with the film’s stranger elements but rather a part of them.

Christine (2016): Antonio Campos’s 70s period piece about a reporter for a local TV station who ends her own life in front of a running camera thanks to a toxic cocktail of clinical depression, rejection, male chauvinism, her frustration at the state of the world (which always looks even worse when you’re suffering from depression), stupidity, and the tragic inability of the people who do love her to actually enable her to seek help (not that this would have been easy at this point in time). You might say it is a bit of a downer, but it is also a film that stretches to let Christine be more than just a freak we gawk at and watch die inside and outside, that attempts to understand Christine not just as that thing we know as “a depressed woman” but as a living breathing person who is/was more than just a mentally ill woman with a sensationalist exploitable end. Rebecca Hall’s central performance is highly nuanced, insightful and utterly humane.

U Turn (1997): In comparison, Oliver Stone’s neo noir is not much of a film, even though it is one of the director’s best – and certainly least annoying – ones. Stone’s direction is expectedly showy and nervous, the characters are absurd caricatures utterly divorced from actual human beings or even what we usually accept in movies as human beings, and the plot is a series of tonally wildly wavering episodes about how horrible everything and everyone is. I’d call it a nihilistic film, but for that, I’d have to take Stone’s habitual posing seriously. As it stands, I’m more reminded of The Big Lebowski’s “Autobahn”.


The thing is, I also find the combination of the overblown direction, the great actors (and Jennifer Lopez) playing cardboard cut-outs as loudly as possible, the noir clichés and the badly digested philosophy highly entertaining, running on an energy that might be Stone’s typical screeching about how awesome and deep he is (which he isn’t) or just the result of a group of people having a wild time making a really silly film.