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BenjAii
Reviews
Lady in the Lake (2024)
Drama and story-telling for grown-ups.
Drama and story-telling for grown-ups.
I can see why some people don't like this. It's not conventional and simple story-telling. The two main characters, Cleo Johnson and Maddie Schwartz are deeply flawed people. Schwartz especially so, as she is quite unsympathetic and unlikeable. Johnson's story is that of a smart person who can't stop making bad choices. I find all this refreshing and relatable. It's so much more like real life. If you're bored with it, good for you - go back to your Marvel movies or 'Emily in Paris'.
I also get to play one of my favorite TV and movie games - spot the twist in advance. I know there's one or two big ones here, but by episode three they aren't revealed, so it's fun to try and guess. Maddie Schwartz was suspiciously quick in finding a murder victim in a very remote location; something tells me that will have a bearing on things.
Kudos also to Jennifer Mogbock in episode 1. Her character is forced to sing on stage while severely intoxicated and manages to turn it into something strange and beautiful. Actually 'strange and beautiful' sums up the best about this show when it's hitting its high notes.
Strange Angel (2018)
A show about a lesser explored side of LA & counter-culture Americana
It's a vanishingly rare occurrence for the occult to crop up in popular entertainment outside of the horror genre, but "Strange Angel" is that rare breed.
If you dial back a few decades from the birth of the 1960's counter-culture in California and look for the precursors of psychedelia, LSD & Hippies, you could trace some of its parentage to the bohemian experimentalists in "Strange Angel".
It's 1939 and as William Gibson would say, the future just isn't very evenly distributed yet. Jack Parsons can see the future is in space. That still sounds futuristic when Elon Musk talks about it in 2018 and like Musk, Parsons wants to do something to make it happen. What happens next is the true story of the man who helped spark that future and his unlikely tutelage under the teachings of Aleister Crowley.
One episode in and this is already looking good. I'm especially enjoying Rupert Friend's turn as a wild eyed mercurial next door neigbour, who initiates/baptises Jack into the Crowleian mysteries via a swimming pool.
I'll be curious to see how this show does. The real Parsons died at age 37 under mysterious circumstances, but certainly packed enough drama into his short life to fill out several seasons if it all works out for "Strange Angel".
Mildred Pierce (2011)
American Opera
I should start by saying, although I've never read the James M Cain novel, as a fan of classic golden era Hollywood films I love the original version of Mildred Pierce.
That didn't stop me enjoying Todd Hayne's new miniseries. It was fun to see the story retold and this is first class film-making for TV that easily outclasses a great deal of what gets pumped out for contemporary cinema. It's hard to say anything bad about the great cast and a beautifully photographed and realized recreation of 1930's Los Angeles.
Many reviewers seem to be posing the question Why? to a remake of this particular story. On one level there are obvious similarities to the Great Depression and the present times we live in coloured by an ongoing financial crisis. So is this a parable for our times ? Is there some deeper symbolic meaning to this storytelling that illuminates aspects of society ?
From what I've read of the novel, it seems this may have been James Cain's intention. Although Mildred Pierce is credited as his most ambitious work no one has ever mentioned it in the same breath as "great American novel". Is Mildred's vain pursuit of Veda's love and approval an allegory for ordinary folks pursuit of a chimerical and ultimately false credit card maxed "good life", that is ultimately a betrayal of who they really are and their true values Maybe?, maybe not.
It seems clear we are to think of Mildred as an tragic heroine on an operatic scale. Someone who's one blindness and weakness, her love for an ungrateful daughter, is her kismet and will be her ultimate downfall. But the story never really succeeds on this level and it's telling that it seems so well suited to it's styling as a Joan Crawford melodrama.
What's stopping it ? I think the problem is for this story to touch the greatness it's striving for this that its two central characters are never quite believable. Veda comes off as an almost cartoon or pantomime baddie. On the one hand we can understand (if not sympathize) with her disgust of lower middle class Glendale and aspirations for the finer things in life. But this never explains the level of hatred and sadism she displays towards her mother. Perhaps there is no explanation for this, the Italian teacher who so aptly sums her up is right, perhaps she's just an exceptional one off, a beautiful poisonous snake to be admired from afar, but never touched.
Even if we except this and take Veda's exceptional malevolence as believable the problem is that Mildred's character doesn't quite gel either. In almost every other area of her life we see Mildred as not only being clever, resourceful and capable but exceptionally so. The story of her entrepreneurial rise to success shows her dealing with people and situations with insight and astuteness. Yet this so completely deserts her when dealing with her daughter ?
Of course that's supposed to be the whole point of the story and in the tradition of capable heros with ruinous great flaws, something she can do nothing about. It's just that somehow here it never seems to quite work on the subconscious level these stories need to succeed at if they are to satisfyingly tap into the great archetypal themes they are aiming to communicate with.
So maybe Joan Crawford's version wins in the end, never the less HBO's mini-series is well worth a spin as a very superior soap opera told with cinematic flair.
Parasomnia (2008)
A conspiracy of good IMDb reviews
It's somewhat telling that most of the great reviews for the film on IMDb all come from people who have only reviewed one film in their entire IMDb career and yes you've guessed it, that film is "Parasomnia". I've often suspected suspiciously good reviews on IMDb for what turns out to be an anything but good films as underhand marketing , but it seems fairly transparent in this case.
That's not to say Parasomnia is terrible, but it stops well short of being the good or great film it had the potential to be.
On the plus side, it has a great baddie in Patrick Kilpatrick who does a brilliant job projecting menacing and evil, I could easily see him having what it takes to play a truly memorable baddie on a par with Hannibal Lecter. There are some beautiful visuals in the dream sequences, in fact if the film had decided to explore that terrain more it might have been something better. The actual concept of devious misuse of hypnosis is great too.
Although I understand suspension of disbelief is necessary for immersion in any good story, it's the mark of a good story that it succeeds in letting you do that. If you find yourself being annoyed at what you find illogical or just plain silly, then the story is losing you and that's what kept happening to me with this film. Other reviewers have mentioned this here and I don't want to get into spoiler territory, but I will say the setup at the ending was particularly ludicrous and disappointing, not too mention the varying mental age of a character that is only supposed to have experienced a few years of life.
All in all, there is the germ of a great idea here in diabolically misused hypnotism, but sadly this film fails to realise it into anything special.
Repulsion (1965)
The drowning struggles of a victim of childhood sexual abuse
I'll preface this review by saying straight away that it's for people who have seen the film, so spoilers galore ahead.
Before I even get to the actual film, a huge point of interest for me in how I feel about it, is the insight I have gained from it from reading reviews on this site. As correctly pointed out by some people here, most professional reviewers over the years seem to have missed the point of this film. Kudos in particular to carmenjonze-1 "What sane person could blame her ?"for hitting the nail on the head in what is really going on in this film.
This is in no way a film about Carole's sexual "repression", where that term implies some psychological malady with undertones of prudishness. It is very clearly implied that Carole was raped as a child, presumably by her father.
Given that knowledge, it's hard to label her hallucinations as "rape fantasies", they should be more correctly called repressed memories.
Easier still when armed with this knowledge to make sense of her disintegration. Every man she encounters has sexual designs on her and make them obvious, usually in a threatening and violent manner. Even the "nice" guy smashes the door down to the apartment to get access to her.
Almost every woman in the film is seen as complicit in going along with men's behaviour, merely differing by their degrees of success in having the ability to play them at their own game. None more so than her sister, recipient of an Italian holiday (still a relatively uncommon luxury in 1965), a months rent and even cab fare from her own apartment from her married boyfriend.
So while this is certainly a psychological thriller, it should more correctly be seen as a portrait of the disintegration of a sexually abused child forced to come face to face with sexuality as a young adult, where yet again sex is brutish, violent and ugly and she is powerless.
Finally the motif that stuck in my mind the most, as I couldn't make sense of it, was the infamous deceased rabbit, who is almost a character in this film, so often is it referred to. Particularly striking to me was that Carole was carrying around it's decaying head in her handbag.
My pet theory ? In addition to their long role as symbols of fertility, bunnies in their natural state represent playfulness fun and innocence. This was Carole's life before her sexual abuse and what her sexuality should have matured from. Now all is revolting decay and the stench of death, what Carole has inside her now. The head in the handbag; a macabre twist on the traditional lucky rabbits paw.
La question humaine (2007)
Let them eat cake
I'll start with what I liked about 'Heartbeat Detector'. It's poetical, discursive style is something I love in cinema when it's done well. I long for stories that break from the formulaic and say what they have to say while stretching the boundaries of cinematic story telling; 'Heartbeat Detector' is aiming for that. It's beautifully photographed too, it's washed out colours and florescent glare a study in disjointed alienation.
Oh, and there is some great acting going on too, but I'm going to have to get trite at this point, because I'm afraid it's all a wasted effort.
At heart this is a morality play, but it's lesson is a perversity, in that there is none at all. It's a meditation on the horrors on the Nazi death camps, that leads the protagonist to realise his role in firing employees in a downsizing European multi-national may equate to the culpability of Nazi functionaries involved in the slaughter of the death camps.
Many people will find this insulting, and it is, doubly so. Insulting to those who died in the Nazi death camps and insulting to victims whose deaths could be found comparable today.
A message to the film makers. Do you want to make a film about a man who slowly realises the banality of evil that lead to the death camps is still with us in the 21st century ? Perhaps ponder questions like why several million children in Africa die every year from diseases due to a lack of clean drinking water, while we in the West spend more than is needed to prevent this on the frivolity of bottled mineral water.
Instead how ironic under the banner of exploring awareness of social problems, the film makers show about as much social awareness as the aristocracy before the storming of the Bastille.
Låt den rätte komma in (2008)
A dark dark tale, masterfully told
So many people reviewing this film on IMDb seem to focus on the sweet friendship between it's 12 year old human and vampire leads. While this is a huge element of the film, this is a sweet story of childhood friendship in the same way 'The Godfather' is the story of a fathers concerns and worries for his kids; both true descriptions, its just that you would be missing the point if you came away from either film thinking that is what you had seen.
In truth, 'Let the right one in' is about as dark a film as you can get, and its a measure of its brilliant story telling that having seen it a week ago, its disturbing echoes have stayed with me and refuse to go away.
It's also one of those films best enjoyed without prior knowledge, but impossible to review properly without disclosing plot elements, so be warned - SPOILERS AHEAD.
As another comment here has said, it's the character Håkan that is the key to this story; for at the end of the film we are led to believe Oskar is stepping into his place. It is that fact, revealed in the final scene that gives the film its dark and nightmarish core; the blossoming friendship we have been witness to prior to this will offer no redemption to Oskar if this is path his relationship with Eli takes.
Håkan butchers boys not much older than Oskar as food for Eli. In this story, where the storytelling is of the highest order so many of its darkest whispers are just that, hinted and suggested at. Questions are alluded to that play on the mind, but are never answered. Why does Håkan pick these victims ? presumably they are Eli's preference. What does that say about Eli's interest in Oskar ? What is Eli's true nature ? She has been twelve "for a very long time", but we briefly glimpse her true physical age, in fact she is in late middle age; roughly the same age as Håkan. Her gift to Oskar in the films last moments; the brutal slaughter of his child tormentors. Entranced in her glamour, this makes Oskar happy, but how can this be happy or good ?
And then they go off happily into the sunset, Oskar presumably to be deadened to the soul destroyed husk of a person Håkan had become, butchering his fellow humans to provide Eli with food. You can see why I am puzzled when people think this film is sweet. In fact its conclusion is utterly chilling; Oskar has happily swapped the commonplace misery of childhood bullying for a fate that will truly be hell on earth and you know as he happily smiles in the films last shot that he doesn't have a clue.
None the less, it's superlative and a film I would heartily recommend. Like the greatest horror tales it succeeds by suggestion and playing on the imagination. It is also a truly great addition to the vampire cannon, a thing that can be said of very few variations on Bram Stokers brilliant original.
Little Erin Merryweather (2003)
Fresh and original for a first film
One of the great things about the internet having become a semi-official film distribution channel is it giving people the chance to view films they never otherwise would have had a chance to see, particularly first time film-makers and those trying to make a name for themselves.
Little Erin Merryweather would fall into that category for me. I have no idea how writer, director and actor in this piece David Morwick, feels about his film being available in the high quality divx format on the internet, but maybe he should be glad, as it will create an audience for his work it's unlikely he would have had any other way.
With the constraints of first time film making, especially lack of experience, it is always good to focus on the positives in reviewing these films. You will of course expect mistakes and it is a measure of the films success in how far the positives outweigh the negatives.
Little Erin Merryweather succeeds abundantly in scoring positives.
Already mentioned in its reviews here are its art work and photography, they're beautiful. Beautiful photography is always an asset to good story telling and in this case, along with the art work, ties in especially well with the theme of the fairy story within a story.
That theme itself is another plus for LEM. The genre is turned on its head by it's rewriting of Little Red Riding Hood and I like the idea that that was played with. Also clever was the fact that the film doesn't allow it's self to be neatly categorised into any one genre, and that too is a strength that lends originality.
All in all (and given that it had just turned midnight on Halloween!) I enjoyed watching LEM. However there always has to be negatives in criticising too! What puzzles me with LEM, given how much Mr Morwick got superbly right for a first film, is that it's actually quite silly things that let him down.
The policeman and his intervention was very, very unrealistic. I realise there were budget constraints, but if a serial killer has killed three people in three days, there will be more than one police officer involved, who will not just be sharing information with a college lecturer.
A small point maybe, but it made the last twenty minutes of the film seem more contrived and the eventual denouement a bit silly. I think he could have waited until further into the film before Erin's identity were revealed and that would have helped maintain tension for longer. If I had to sum up LEM's flaws, it would be that if explored just a bit more deeply, it's story would have had a great deal for nuance and subtlety to give up and that it would have elevated the film from excellent to something really special. Where Mr Morwick scores B+ here, you feel he definitely has the potential for A's.
Still, given its freshness and originality, I'm glad I spent the time with Little Erin Merryweather; it has a lot to recommend it.
Stardust (2007)
A gem of a film that get's it all just right
Stardust is a little charmer of a film. Yes, the story has been told a million times before to you since as early as you can remember. But it's how it's told that matters and Stardust does such a lot to get this right.
Great to look at visually, all the fairytale elements are wonderfully created with reference to everything from Shakespeare, classic European fairytale tradition, a brilliant airship very reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki and a fair smattering of Lord of the Rings.
The two leads are engaging and charming and I couldn't fault anyone's acting. I haven't read the books these are based on but there are enough fresh ideas in this magical universe to keep the storytelling engrossing.
Kudos all round, this film manages to get it just right on almost every area that counts. If you think you might like this film by all means go to see it, you almost definitely will.
Next (2007)
Entertainginly pedestrian, could have been so much better.
Oh Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood, why can't you invest just a little of the millions of dollars you obviously put into special effects, paying for Nicolas Cage and the rest into a decent story ? Next has a brilliant premise, which is what drew me to it in the first place (and some misleadingly good reviews on here !) but it's such a let down. Entertaining enough if all your simple brain demands is yet another guy on the run with FBI, must stop bad guys, explosions and chases type film to add to the identikit hundred or so you've probably seen already. But you'd expect a little bit more than utterly pedestrian with Mr Cage and Miss Moore at the helm. It doesn't deliver.
Things start out well enough, but then they always do with these types of films. We're introduced to Cage's character and how the rules of his future seeing world operate through an entertaining spin through Las Vegas. Then things start to go wrong.
SPOILERS AHEAD
So my first gripe; the terrorists. They're French. What ? . I mean, great break out of film stereotypes and don't make all terrorists Muslims. But I expect some credibility and backstory for the ludicrous notion that French terrorists want to blow up LA with a nuclear bomb. We're never told and it's never explained. What a load of rubbish, why not make them Canadian or from Iceland, makes about as much sense. You've got to lose bucket loads of respect for a film and the imaginary world it's trying to create for two hours with a plot hole this stupid.
But it's symptomatic of the lazy storytelling that is such a letdown in this film. The 'rules' of Cage's future seeing universe are explained to us and then conveniently broken whenever a deux et machina plot moment requires it at will. But at this point it's all gotten a bit silly and I've given up caring. Except maybe to wonder why Julianne Moore thinks it's worth wasting her time with this sort of stuff. Can't she get any better work? Oh and the 'twist' at the end. For a moment I thought they we're actually going to do something clever. No, it just gets sillier as yet again they arbitrarily break with the rules they've created. No French terrorists waiting this time, though there should be.
Yes, it's entertaining enough, if that's all you want but disappointing in so many areas.
It makes you wonder if Hollywood is such a dog eat dog world where only the most talented survive how it can turn out so many dogs of films like this. An internet forum of movie buffs could have rewritten this into something so much better.
Jimmy and Judy (2006)
Excellent for a first film - definitely worth watching
Jimmy & Judy overcomes it's limitations to be a film I'd definitely recommend even if intriguingly it points to greater things that it never achieves.
It's the first time I've seen a film filmed entirely from a first person point of view and I found this very striking. In many ways approaching film narrative through this device is very fitting for our age. We are surrounded as never before by video cameras, on phones, on CCTV etc and we spend more and more of our time viewing the end products of all of this on the internet. It stuck me watching me Jimmy & Judy just how rich the possibilities are here, developed further it could become a new genre of film. These possibilities aren't deeply explored here, but none the less where they are, it's surprising who naturally they seem to fit into the narrative. We see this as a story told about Jimmy, yet he's it's creator. People are frequently aware that they are speaking to camera, yet somehow we feel they are being filmed speaking to camera, as if there was another camera there filming this. It's a tribute to the skill of the directors that all of this works as smoothly as it does.
As other reviewers have pointed out another arresting feature of this film is the chemistry between to the two characters, fortuitously helped by the fact there was real off screen chemistry there as they actually ended up getting married in real life. Although I'd no idea watching at the time, this helps to keep their journey intriguing and watchable. Edward Furlong in particular gives it all with this character and as OTT as it can be it's all very watchable. I'd have to point out some great dark humor at the beginning to where Furlong's character films some scenes between Mommy & Daddy that really should have stayed secret very funny.
This is a great film and all the more impressive for being made on a budget of close to nothing in 15 days. However it's not without it's flaws. All things considered it would be nitpicking to go after anything small, but there are two things that stop it being in the ranks of real great film making for me.
The first is that cliché of clichés in American cinema, guns. I know Raymond Chandler said whenever he ran out of ideas when writing he always fell back on having a man walk into a room with a gun. Perhaps it takes a non-American from the outside looking in (I'm Irish) to see it but characters with guns has become utterly tedious in American cinema. It's been cinematic shorthand for drama and angst since the days of film noir and while it's been reinvented successfully over the decades, it's formulaic in the extreme. So hence Jimmy & Judy's Bonnie & Clyde style crime spree becomes a little, how can I say this, done so many times before. People using guns, dealing with guns, or having guns seem to be in about three quarters of American films. Boring, boring, boring can't you find some other way to talk about the human condition.
The second problem is their characters motivation for this angst driven spree. The film has a brilliant monologue near the end from William Sadler, a sort of white trash Declaration of Rights that speaks rivetingly of alienation, anger and despair. It seems to form a sort of denouement, the trouble is it's nothing to do with Jimmy or Judy who seem to have grown up in nice, well off, middle class homes. It's a shame having established this brilliant level of passion in Sadler's character, something similar couldn't be found for the leads, but apart from their love for each other it never is. By way of explanation we're offered their characters social ostracism in school but given their reaction to it, it doesn't come across as convincing. So as watchable as their journey, given its level of alienation and anger, it's never truly credible or believable.
Still that's not to gripe too much, as a debut this is excellent and well worth watching.
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
Interesting if ludicrous period piece
I'm surprised at the consistent reviews on IMDb this film gets that praise it as thoughtful, intelligent and underrated. Enjoyable it is, but it's far to ludicrous to be labeled thoughtful and intelligent. As for one of the great underrated films, eh no
. there's a good reason it's not remembered.
Any fantasy requires the willing suspension of disbelief. One of the main measure of success in any fantasy is whether it achieves this. As such what is being presented has to have just enough hooks into reality for us to be able to believe it. This is where Colossus falls down.
OK, I could suspended my disbelief enough to go along with Colossus's sudden development of super intelligent powers that computers today would struggle with despite being vastly more powerful than anything available in 1970. It's the action of the people around Colussus that are unbelievable, not only unbelievable but unbelievably stupid and as such the whole artifice comes tumbling down. For the premise on which Colossus is based to work, people have to be really, really stupid
A few examples ? Having built the super-computer that is now in charge of the whole US nuclear arsenal and which is built to be unable to be switched off. What do the Administration and all of the technical team do having just switched power over to it? Why the have a party and get drunk !! As you would.
But that's OK. Dr Forbin who built the machine is sober. Just as well, because on one else really knows anything about how it works. The Head of the CIA chuckles about how clueless he is about it, the Vice president & President chuckle about how clueless they are about Colossus. In fact having just handed over control of the US nuclear arsenal (apparently on the trust and say so of one person - Dr Forbin) they have a good old chuckle about not understanding it several times. Anybody wondered what might happen if Dr Forbin gets run over by a bus - you'd be screwed then !
Like some early version of SkyNet, Colossus becomes two hundred times more powerful within a short space of time, starts talking to it's Soviet opposite number and threatening to use nukes if anyone isn't doing exactly what they're told. But by this point I wasn't taking things too seriously. Dr Forbin can never manage to look all that concerned as his creation takes control of the world, and the dopey President he's dealing with makes George Bush look like Mensa material.
I'm a big sci-fi fan, and there is plenty to enjoy in this as a period piece. In fact I quite enjoyed it. But if I'm going to label sci-fi as intelligent and thoughtful, it really has to have a lot more going for it in the believability of the characters.
Threads (1984)
Genuinely horrifying
I've always said that no film can really scare you as an adult as films scared you when you were a kid. My benchmark for that being watching 'The Omen' on video when i was about 13, nothing has ever quite lived up to it in the effect it had on me.
Rewatching 'Threads' a while back makes me change my mind.
I remember first seeing it in Ireland on the BBC when I guess i was about 14. Even in Ireland, a neutral country, anxiety about nuclear war was a big thing when we were kids in the 80's.
'Threads' does really get to you, its very unsettling and disturbing. Unlike fictional horror films, 'Threads' is hugely different in one respect - it's real. This is what would happen, you can't distance yourself by saying it's make believe. There are still thousands of nuclear weapons armed and primed to be launched within minutes, 24 hours a day, everyday. Now we even have a country, the US, that says it's ready to use them, even if no one else does first.
Rewatching it, the dated production values don't detract from the film's power. It seems to bring the film even closer to the ordinary and the everyday. It's the film's ordinariness that makes it so viscerally disturbing - Hollywood special effects would at least have allowed you to distance yourself from it somewhat. In fact the film is more realistic for not having them. Someone else mentioned the scene of the woman in the shopping centre urinating where she stood out of pure terror as she sees the bomb go off a mile or two away from her - thats the scene that stayed with me the most too.
Its depressing to think in 2004 we are living in a world where politicians are again talking about 'winnable' wars using nuclear weapons. In many things in life you get a second chance if you make mistakes, I don't think nuclear weapons use will give us the luxury of finding out afterwards was it all worth it. Watch "Threads' and see if you think 'winnable' nuclear war is something you want to give yourself or your children.