Detectorists (2014-2017;2022)

Friends Andy (Mackenzie Crook) and Lance (Toby Jones) are living in a small town in Essex. These gents have a proper Hobby (the capital letter is very much as it is treated in the series and their lives): they are detectorists, wandering fields with their metal detectors looking to unearth bits of the past that hopefully go beyond buttons and matchbox cars. Whenever they aren’t doing that, they are bumbling through their private lives. At the start of the series, Andy’s doing temp work to finance his archaeology degree and going through growing pains in the relationship with his long-term girlfriend Becky (Rachael Stirling). Those problems are mostly caused by him being a bit of a coward and the kind of dreamer who seldom does something about his dreams. At the same time Lance continues to pine after his horrible ex-wife (Lucy Benjamin). These things will change during the course of the series in a quiet tale of not just a male friendship but also late-blooming growing-up of the kind that doesn’t end up with anyone becoming something horrible like a banker, nor with giving up on childish things like being a detectorist. Also involved are the misadventures of the metal detecting club the two friends are members of, and the breath of buried history – even the Grail (the show’s just that British).

Mackenzie Crook, who not only acts but also writes and directs this wonderful BBC show whose until now final breath has been a pretty fantastic Christmas special in 2022, is apparently a detectorist in real life, which provides the show with a feeling of authenticity even when it goes through what sometimes can be rather standard comedy plots. There’s an idea of how to many people’s eyes rather silly hobbies – like being a detectorist, like going on endlessly about movies and TV on a blog – have the value of quiet, quotidian joy for the people involved in them, bringing with them moments of companionship and calm, as well as things to get unnecessarily but genuinely excited about. Crook generally portrays this and his characters’ foibles and weaknesses with a smile and sympathy, instead of the fist of judgement that’s so au fait these days. It’s not that he doesn’t understand or treat Andy’s and Lance’s failures and weaknesses as such, or seeks to excuse them, it just understands them as a part of how these people are, and not all that any given person is, and thus treats nearly everyone kindly. Generally, the series always seems to root for anyone to do better next time; they often do.

Tonally, Detectorists treats plots and beats that could absolutely make the basis for a minor soap opera with the unhurried patience of Andy and Lance walking a field before it is pub time. It never pretends the things that loom large and dramatically over anyone’s lives aren’t terrible, or painful, or wonderful, and being a comedy it is also never going to ignore them as an excuse for a joke, but it isn’t wont to dramatic gestures. Again, quietness and kindness are often at the centre of the show’s philosophy.

Below all this sits a meditation on a complicated idea of Englishness, informed not by bizarre things like bloodlines or skin colour but by the simple act of living and being in a certain place and relating to it, as well as a fascination with the small buried pieces of the past the protagonists look so patiently, sometimes bored, for. Repeatedly, the series includes bits and bobs of English folklore and culture, relates them to history as well as the present of the characters, never pressing too heavily for dramatic parallels (this simply isn’t that kind of show), but treating these things as the buried treasure and hidden connections they are for these characters. There’s a romantic longing here, not for reliving the past but for a way to be with the past, living one’s life with an acknowledgement of what’s come before. And, with the way Andy and Lance find the treasures of the past they do find, also a clear idea of the ironies of life.

That the series is also nearly always very funny indeed nearly feels like a bonus there.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

A pretty fantastic intro sequence introduces us to a CGI young Indy (Harrison Ford) doing his thing in 1944, Basil Shaw, a British archaeologist friend of Indy’s (house favourite Toby Jones), a Nazi scientist (Mads Mikkelsen), and the titular dial, or rather, one half of the dial. After an appropriate number of Nazis have been punched (poor Thomas Kretschmann), our hero waltzing from one bit of trouble to the next, we pop into the film’s main timeline in July/August 1969.

Indiana Jones is now a grumpy old man on the day of his retirement from a boring teaching job. Marion (Karen Allen) has left him in the course of grieving for their son (Shia LaBeouf is not appearing in this movie, thankfully, so his character can be more useful in death than he ever was in his fictional life) who died in Vietnam. The rest of his life really doesn’t look too sunny for our hero.

Then appears Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the daughter of the long deceased Shaw and Indy’s goddaughter. Helena tries to talk Indy into one last jaunt with the hat and the whip to help her find the second half of the Dial. Well, actually, it turns out she’s trying to steal the first half of the Dial from our hero to sell it - on the black market, no less. Also on the trail of both halves of the Dial as well as Helena is our old Nazi scientist acquaintance, now going by the name of Dr Schmidt. After being the architect of the US space program, he’s now planning on conquering time – for Nazidom.

What follows is the somewhat expected race around the world, during which Helena and Indy slowly grow closer to one another, Helena gets back into contact with that moral core she must have read so much about, and Indy reacquaints himself with his very special kind of luck. A good time is had by all, well except Nazis and innocent bystanders, but the former really asked for it, and are usually directly responsible for the demise of the latter.

I’m not sure which James Mangold Indiana Jones movie a lot of other people seem to have seen, but the one I watched turned out to be rather wonderful. Mangold and the horde of writers credited really seem to get the proper tone and style for the series again (ironically unlike the people involved in the fourth Indy movie, who must have forgotten when they made that one), so action sequences may be big and partially digital, but are keeping well in the spirit of the serials and old pulp adventure, where the heroes mostly win out by sheer courage and luck than the sort of competence later decades started insisting on heroes showing. Which actually makes a quite a contrast to the way superheroes not called the (Legendary) Starlord or Ant-Man typically operate, and really makes it difficult to confuse this style of action adventure with a superhero movie (unlike you’re a mainstream critic, therefore quite dense or just too mid-brow to care). Though, to be honest, one late, rather, ahem, implausible plot development in third act is certainly only thinkable because superhero movies exist. It’s also one perfectly fitting to a film that is as focussed on legacies and shadows of the past as this one is, so I’m not going to complain, particularly when it gifts us with the wonderful villain line of “Yesterday belongs to us, Doctor Jones!”.

In between a series of rather wonderful set pieces in just the right spirit of adventure and derring-do, and the kind of quietly confident and elegant filmmaking Mangold gets up to in this sort of stylistically very mainstream production, there are also a series of small and big scenes not just meant to propel our heroes (such as they are) from one place to the next, but also to comment on and mirror some of the elements of the older movies in the series. Waller-Bridge’s may at first look like a more modern by simply being more cynical version of Indy, but later developments suggest she’s just more honest about the worst parts of her character to herself than Indy is, and – in the sort of irony this particular film genuinely seems to enjoy – also less honest about the best parts of it, which makes for a nice reversal. Indy, for his part, is allowed to express all the frustrations and horrors of growing old and lonely, but, the film argues, that’s because he’s going out of his way to push away the people he means a lot to, and underplaying some of what makes him more than a graverobber to himself as much as Helena underplays her own better nature.

Which sets up one of the most traditional happy endings I’ve seen in quite some time. For once, the old hero is actually allowed to retire to the peaceful, happy life he deserves instead of dying heroically so that the younger generation must go on without him. to probably repeat that cycle again. That’s fitting to the genre Indy is working in as well, of course, because serials were eventually resolved through happy ends, instead of the old guard dying with their dreams burning down around them (hi, Star Wars).

I, for one, like to see a bit of hope in my movies from time to time.

The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

1830. A West Point cadet dies in what at first appears to be a suicide. Somebody breaking into the morgue the evening after to very literally steal the corpse’s heart does make the place’s leadership change their minds about that, though, and they call in a retired New Yorker policeman living in a cabin not too far away from the Academy. Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is a gifted investigator, but he’s not too happy to be drawn into his old profession again. He lost his wife and later his daughter some years ago, and would really rather prefer to drink himself into a stupor and wallow in his grief; he’s not too keen on West Point as an institution either, for reasons that will become clear later. However, he is also fascinated by the case and its macabre circumstances, something that will only increase once further murders happen. Landor acquires a kind of assistant among the cadets in form of one Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling). Poe is an outsider among his peers thanks to his combination of romantic weirdness and intelligence as well as his predilection for poetry and the weird. He also has a brilliant mind made to solve puzzles and ciphers, which will stand everyone involved in good stead, especially once things take a turn into the occult.

Going by what I’ve heard, Scott Cooper’s historical mystery with a touch of the Gothic seems to be a bit of a marmite movie, with any given critic either bored to tears or really fascinated by the film and its general mood. I’m part of the latter group, but then, the former seems to believe this in many ways very traditional mystery with an occult bent – and some more modern touches for the last act – to be a procedural. Everyone watches a different movie, apparently.

Be that as it may, I’m not usually terribly font of mysteries that enrol a random famous person from history as a detective; often, because little in these persons’ works or life suggest any interest in these matters (sorry, Oscar Wilde). Poe, on the other hand makes a lot of sense in a detective role, as the father of the modern detective story as well as through his public fascination with puzzles and hoaxes. Cooper, providing his own script from a novel by Louis Bayard makes great use of this, as well as of Poe’s macabre and grotesque and romantic (in the traditional sense of the word) side.

Melling is a great as Poe as well, finding mannerisms and language that makes him feel eccentric and emotionally overblown in many regards, but never drift into caricature. Rather, this Poe is a complete human being, and it makes perfect sense that this version of Poe and Landor begin hitting it off like a strange father/son duo. That Bale’s great doing the very standard “detective haunted by the past” bit should come as no surprise. In fact, he’s so good at it that later developments that could strain belief make perfect sense.

Add to this the film’s wintry mood of rural, US gothic, the various occult shenanigans, and Cooper’s calm, un-showy but often quietly intelligent direction, and a cast so full of great actors (there are Timothy Spall, Toby Jones, Lucy Boynton and Gillian Anderson, for example) it can throw away someone like Charlotte Gainsbourg on a minor role, and you’ve pretty much made a film so centred around various of my favourite interests, I’m bound to love it.

As a matter of fact, The Pale Blue Eye does quite a bit more as well. This is very much a movie about how the failure of all figures of authority and respect at just doing their damn jobs and treating their communities with respect and fairness destroys first single members of these communities (in ways that can be lethal, spiritual, or mental) and then the community as a community, without most of these men of authority ever even understanding what is truly happening; one might think because they do not want to see it, though the film isn’t really telling.

Apart from that, there’s also a much more personal story here, about grief, justice, and the things that might come after, but getting further into this would lead us into unnecessary spoiler territory.

In short: By Our Selves (2015)

Apart from a handful of exceptions, I’ve never gotten along with much experimental cinema. That’s not the films’ fault, I believe, but more one of those idiosyncratic and personal reactions to art, and I do tend to neither get these things nor develop a feeling for or from them.

So I was a bit surprised that this experimental (though not abstract) piece of filmmaking by Andrew Kotting (sometimes Kötting) did actually speak to me and held my interest throughout. But then, it is following the route John Clare – embodied by the great Toby Jones – took on his escape from an asylum in Essex to his home in Northamptonshire (for other non-Brits like me: that’s quite an expedition on foot, four days in Clare’s case) through what’s now predominantly industrialized agricultural fields and roads full of lorries, with the writer Iain Sinclair as a goat-masked guiding spirit or follower, and even one of the rare-ish appearances of Alan Moore. So it is very much operating in my cultural comfort zone of the discomforted. If it weren’t, I probably wouldn’t have the faintest idea what this thing is even about, but there’s nothing wrong with this sort of project not bringing its own handbook.

It’s an often strikingly shot film, suggesting parallels between Clare’s fractured mind and the human-caused fractures in the landscape we encounter. Though Kotting also still finds a place for the strange - even if it is now by necessity a wilful strangeness filtered through the intellect – even if it is by going through his own movie dressed as a straw bear. For some tastes, this will all be a bit too consciously eccentric in execution, something that’s certainly not helped by Kotting’s puckish sense of humour, but for me, the film works as a way of putting concepts and thoughts that aren’t always best helped by clarity, precision and earnestness into life.

Plus, I could watch Toby Jones doing anything for hours.

Three Films Make A Post: They called it God's Country... until all hell broke loose!

Morgan (2016): Luke Scott’s film starts as a very pretty to look at SF film about a woman (Kate Mara) sent to a research facility to find out what has gone wrong with the artificial life form (Anya Taylor-Joy) they have built there, promising some exploration of what it means to be human. Alas, halfway through, the whole thing turns into a very standard AI running amok flick that’s still pretty to look at and competently directed but suffers from the banality of this approach after the film has promised something slightly more interesting.

The film wastes a fantastic cast (also including Rose Leslie, Michelle Yeoh, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Giamatti, Toby Jones and more) by not giving them much to do with their underwritten characters and caps things with a so-called twist anyone in the market for SF films will have seen coming a mile away. It’s not a terrible film, mind you, but one that wastes so much potential it might as well be one.

Siren (2016): Speaking of banal, this spin-off of bro horror mainstay series VHS by Gregg Bishop is the kind of vaguely competent monster movie with a perfectly boring script (including about one somewhat interesting idea and of course not even doing something with it) that, while not being offensively bad, just isn’t worth the time invested into watching it. There are exactly one and a half relatively memorable scenes in here, the rest of this thing is the movie equivalent of a mediocre hamburger.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994): On the other hand, there’s worse things for a film than being a burger, as is amply demonstrated by Kim Henkel’s abominable fourth and final film in the original TCM series, a film that starts out as a particularly dumb slasher movie, becomes an annoying camp fest that makes a mild-mannered boy like me think very bad thoughts about its director/writer, and finishes on whatever the hell that ending even is supposed to be, seeing as it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with the film that supposedly led up to it. If that’s the sort of thing that rings your bell, there are early career lead roles by Renée Zellweger (who is much better than the film she’s in deserves) and Matthew McConaughey (camping it up in what I can only read as an attempt at self defence) before they were famous. Apparently, both actors (or “their people”) tried to suppress this thing in a move I find even worse than the actual film.

Otherwise, don’t blame me if you watch this, for there’s really no sane reason to inflict this much pain on yourself.

Some thoughts about Tale of Tales (2015)

Original title: Il racconto dei racconti

I’ve most often seen Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of three tales taken from the fairy tale collection of Giambattista Basile described as an attempt to get back to the roots of non-realist Italian art cinema, and while I certainly see more than just a bit of Fellini after his neo-realist phase in this the director that really comes to my mind here is Walerian Borowczyk. The way Garrone pictures sexuality, unhealthy obsessions and truly horrible things in here is generally not as explicit as Borowczyk could get, and certainly not quite as focussed on sexuality, yet his approach to his themes, as well as the way the film glides from the whimsical to the erotic to the outright horrifying seems quite in parallel to Borowczyk at the height of his powers to me.

I really admire how Garrone seems to zoom in on the weirdest parts of fairy tales presenting it all not with the gesture of somebody who is showing us something deeply grotesque but with the matter-of-factness of someone showing us the grotesque as the quotidian. There’s something incredibly beguiling about a film presenting a king (this one played by Toby Jones) secretly raising a flea in his bedroom as a pet until it’s about as big as a cow as if this sort of thing were just to be expected, not hindering anyone from reading this as a metaphor but certainly inviting us to just take the film at its word. It’s also quite typical for the film that it is exactly this tale that’ll turn out to have some of the more horrifying moments in a film that doesn’t shy away from truly horrifying things beside the poetic, and the sad and the joyful, suggesting that in this world (and every other, one imagines) comedy and tragedy grow from the same root.

The film never falls into the trap of being sumptuous for sumptuousness’s sake either – everything we see and hear has more than just one function, and the film doesn’t bother to explain itself (as neither do fairy tales, really), leaving it up to its audience to interpret intentions, choose one’s own understandings and inhabit the film in one way or the other.

In short: Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

I find two types of films the most difficult to write about. The first one are films so mediocre in all aspects they leave me with the feeling they don't exist as anything else than as artefacts created to fill otherwise empty spots in DVD stores or TV schedules; these movies aren't painful to not write about.

The second type, on the other hand, are films like Peter Strickland's utterly brilliant Berberian Sound Studio that leave me a little exhausted by their sheer aesthetic perfection. Here, the only way to write appropriately about a film is to describe every noise on the soundtrack, every edit, every movement on screen in the most meticulous detail possible. Proceeding thusly, one does of course only produce a long, tedious piece that could never even hope to explain or reproduce the aesthetic richness of the experience of actually watching the movie. So that's not a thing to do either.

Therefore, the only out left - apart from ignoring a film much too wonderful to ignore - for me is to pretend being a professional movie critic. That song goes a little something like this:  "Berberian Sound Studio - Brilliant acting, brilliant soundtrack, brilliant sound design, brilliant direction. 10 out of 10! Watch if you have even the slightest bit of love for Italian genre movies of the 70s, hauntology, films that don't slavishly adhere to the most simple narrative structures, intelligent weirdness, critique for genre tendencies that still loves the genre it critiques or just plain great cinema!"

Gosh, I sound just like Entertainment Weekly if they'd let people with actual taste write for them.

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