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Get Carter (1971)
The best British film noir ever made
From the opening notes of the unforgettable theme music, and the first shots of London gangster Michael Caine on the train up north to attend his brother's funeral, sat reading Raymond Chandler's 'Farewell My Lovely', this stunning film immediately marks itself out as something a cut above all the other tawdry British thrillers of the 1970s. This is a hardboiled mystery the equal of any Philip Marlowe paperback, yet set in familiar, home-grown working class surroundings, that give it a unique feel amongst the rest of the genre, the same as "Brick" did, 30 years on.
Caine is amazing, just a juggernaut charging through the murky criminal underworld in search of his brother's killer, but both he and the film itself have moments of great poignancy and subtlety, which again mark it out as very different from almost every other British crime film from that time.
Network (1976)
"A Big, Fat, Big-T*tted Hit"
One of the greatest films of the 1970s: a brutal satire on television's quest for ratings and the spiritual need of the masses to find a leader who will speak for them. It probably seemed a little over-the-top and unnecessarily paranoid back in the day but now it just seems to describe our everyday reality, which is one of the reasons it has dated so well.
Faye Dunaway is perfect as the hollow-and-numb feminist career woman moving up the corporate ladder, and William Holden gives a warm and dignified performance as the news department head she is replacing, coming to terms with age and the increasingly heartless insanity of the world around him. But it's Peter Finch, as the news anchor Howard Beale - "The Mad Prophet Of The Airwaves" - who unforgettably steals the show and makes everyone watching him, then and now, run to their windows to shout "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!"
He died very shortly after, and was the only performer to ever receive a posthumous Oscar for Best Actor until Heath Ledger's in 2009.
Blazing Saddles (1974)
Authentic Frontier Gibberish For The Ages
There had never been anything like it before, and it's hard to think of anything like it since, but Blazing Saddles is the immortal and timeless spirit of comedy distilled and frozen forever and, along with "Airplane!", probably the funniest film of all time, with the highest number of classic scenes and laughs. It's also Mel Brooks' only truly great film, in which nearly every joke lands and destroys, but much of the script originated with Richard Pryor, and it would have been amazing to have seen him opposite Gene Wilder, as first intended, in the lead role that the studio ultimately gave to Cleavon Little.
Blazing Saddles is one of the only really well-known comedies that truly has no limits, and lays about every taboo with equal abandon, so I say it's fantastically-ferocious fearless fun, and no sidewinding, bushwhacking, hornswoggling cracker-croaker is going to ruin MY biscuit-cutter.
The Desert Bride (1928)
A Pleasant-Enough Mediocrity, Once Lost, Now Found
Very average film, chiefly of note for being considered lost for close to 90 years. Everything in it is decently done, but no character stands out, the romance is tepid and the fight at the end fails to excite. Glad it has been rediscovered, as the great majority of silent films from that time have been lost, and the BluRay print we now have is excellent, but the film itself is very much by-the-numbers.
That's about all there is to say about that, really. I can tell you right now I'm laid up in bed with a sore throat and wheezy cough and feel a little too weak to get out of bed and fix some food, but I'm perfectly willing to accept you didn't come here to hear that.
Straume (2024)
Catsaway
Impressive independent animation from Latvia, wordlessly telling the story of a bunch of animals working together to help each other survive after a cataclysmic flood.
The movement of the animals and depiction of the natural world is stunning and incredibly lifelike, although the animals look strangely blocky and unfinished up close, as if they ran out of funding to finish off adding details such as fur.
The selfless behaviour of some of the animals often seems too far-fetched to buy into, and seeing them competently steer a boat to harbour seems similarly hard-to-swallow. On top of that, the story seems a little too vague and unmoored from a followable narrative, meaning some of the environments they pass through look like little more than video game levels, dreamt up to look nice but not communicating anything meaningful about the wider world in which they are situated.
For all this, the immersive details and sheer FLOW of the film just about makes up for these shortcomings and carries one along in its wake, engrossed and entertained, to the end. Well worth a watch.
Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
The Emperor's New Clothes Part Deux
Watched the second "Joker" film, which for the most part I actually connected with more than the empty and overrated first, but there's a similar lack of story and it ends even more pointlessly. It doesn't GO anywhere: in this film, even more than the first, the Joker starts and ends a passive, weak, action-less nonentity, devoid of any talent or inspiration, carried along entirely in the wake of others, and hence has no connection to the Batman villain character in any way.
Folie à Deux could have redeemed itself if it had advanced the story from the first and unambiguously showed him transformed (by love?) into a supervillain of some kind by the end, surrounded by Harley Quinn and a gang of his imitators, but the very opposite occurs, so it's a waste of both characters and the chance to tell any kind of a story whatsoever.
The musical numbers add almost nothing and stop the flow of the film each time they appear. Plus, the whole thing's so needlessly drawn-out, the full experience feels like drowning in molasses.
All Hollywood does these days is insult and assassinate our heroes and villains of the past, and this is ultimately just another annoying and depressing degradation of a great icon and a squandering of the talents and attention of everyone involved.
The Substance (2024)
Cronenbergarella
An aging actress takes an experimental drug that creates a second, younger and more beautiful body, but the two struggle to co-exist.
This new film is a clever but shallow take on Cronenberg-esque body horror: it's flashy and colorful, but never scratches beneath the surface of any of the characters; the gore is repulsive rather than frightening and, in the final moments, rather silly and comical. On the other hand, it starts out very strong, is technically dazzling, and has a good performance from Demi Moore, so even with its catastrophically bad finale it still remains one of the more interesting movies this year.
Birth (2004)
Unsatisfying Ending but Fantastic Performances
10 years after her husband dies, a 10-year-old boy searches out a woman on the brink of remarriage and tells her he's her dead husband.
I rewatched this again many years on after hearing Wes Anderson recommend it for its music (which is very good). I really couldn't remember anything but the basic premise of the film, and that I wasn't impressed with how it ended, but then it's really quite a slight plot anyway; a little too drawn-out and talky, and it doesn't really resolve in a satisfying or believable-enough way. It pretty much fizzles out to nothing at the end, but the journey there is otherwise impeccable, and there's an amazing twist in the last third that I'd completely forgotten, that makes you see everything before it in a new light.
The acting is sublime, with every actor wringing the most out of the smallest line or gesture: Peter Stormare and Anne Heche are both fantastic but the best by far is the 10-year-old Cameron Bright, playing the possible reincarnation of bad-haircut Nicole Kidman's dead husband. He has a confidence and presence that seems so beyond his years, and it results in one of the best child performances in all of cinema.
The whole experience is creepy and unsettling, and there's a couple of uncomfortable scenes that border on the inappropriate because of the age of the boy. So it's a mixed bag all round: the bad bits are a disappointment, but the good bits are stunning.
6.9/10.
Kinds of Kindness (2024)
Lanthimos' Return To Form
The new film by Yorgos Lanthimos is a clear improvement over his last few flicks (The Killing of A Sacred Deer, The Favorite and the terrible Poor Things) but not quite as good as his best (Dogtooth and The Lobster).
Essentially, it's three separate stories with a linking arc (and one minor character), all played by the same cast in different roles, each centered around the terrible things people do to help or please someone else.
The cast is excellent in every part - the most recognizable of which are Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, but the less familiar Hong Chau and Mamoudou Athie are perfect and perfectly cast too.
Each story is weird and otherworldly and taking place outside of ordinary reality, but because of that has a compelling strangeness that keeps you hooked in a way similar to the best films of Davids Lynch and Cronenberg.
Kinds of Kindness is quirky and perhaps sporadically self-indulgent, so I can imagine some folks finding it absolutely maddening, but for me it's the the first Real Film I've seen in awhile and easily the best one I've seen all year so far.
7.7/10.
Faust: Eine deutsche Volkssage (1926)
A Spectacle Unlike Any Other
Watched this again for the first time in years, and it's even more of a masterpiece than I remember: easily the greatest version of the Faust myth on film, and one of the greatest leaps of imagination in all of cinema. Every shot is just about perfect and visually powerful in some way, and there are scenes, like the one in which Faust flies through the air with the devil all the way to Italy, that I really can't grasp the mechanics of. I know some miniatures must have been involved, but the way they are made to seem so real in such impossible surroundings is beyond me.
The incomparable Emil Jannings makes probably the best devil onscreen, the prototype for all that followed after, but, as with a number of other Murnau films, the rest of the cast are a little stagey and don't shine so bright. Still astonishing though, almost a hundred years on.
8.9/10.
Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats (2024)
Nice To Hang Out With But Definitely Lacking In Laughs
The new Joe Rogan stand-up special is nice and all, but almost never laugh-out-loud funny, and I'm wondering if it's simply because of the over-familiarity: Joe hosts the biggest podcast in the world about 9 hours a week, talking on every subject imaginable, so his millions of fans already KNOW his positions on every subject imaginable, and it's hard for anything he says here to feel like any kind of a surprise.
I think what would help for him going forward is to construct longer and more intricately-detailed set-pieces with lots of internal call-backs, honed down to polished jewels rather than just making a series of offhand humorous observations. This is what marks out his friends Bill Burr, Louis CK and Dave Chappelle as working on a higher level than the rest; by creating a transformative experience that an audience can enter and lose themselves in, being steered and guided along every step of a hazardous and uncertain journey, which distinguishes everything that happens in that space from ordinary speech.
Very glad to have Joe around, as he's a great force for good in the world but the bottom line is this was a little sloppy and needed more work. Plus, he should never, ever, ever wear a bright orange button-up shirt.
5½/10.
La femme de ma vie (1986)
I Fed "Average 1980s French Film" Into Chat GPT And This Is What It Came Up With
A very French, but much-too-slight tale of a classical violinist drunkard sobering up and joining Alcoholics Anonymous.
It's well done in most departments, but feels cold, abstract and distant from real life: the characters never worry about money or food or a place to live; they stay in lavish hotels and go sailing on yachts to dry out.
It's the kind of film that the French made in their sleep throughout the 1980s, and it's perfectly watchable; it just doesn't really add up to anything memorable or affecting. Jane Birkin does what she can but seems lost in a murky script, and the "love story" between her and the lead character is lifeless and unconvincing. The best acting comes from by Jean-Louis Trintignant, but none of his character's motivations or reactions are made any more clear than any of the others.
With Love and a Major Organ (2023)
Love Lies Bleeding
I really did not expect to like this at all going in, but the premise, of people opting to remove their hearts to deal with the pain of living in the cold, numb world we all know so well, very quickly grabbed me and drew me in. It's strange to me that it is summarized as taking place in "an alternate world", when we can see the numbness and inhuman insanity it depicts all around us every day.
The film ultimately feels a poor relation to great works on a similar theme, such as Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, Her, Cold Souls and The Lobster, and reminds me also of the films of Miranda July. It doesn't ever really approach those heights, mostly because it doesn't explore or sustain any of the ideas it introduces in any real depth, and so ends up more like a bunch of half-thought-out intuitions thrown at the wall and somehow forming a pretty decent -if familiar - Black Mirror episode. For all that, it's still a good film, made with good intentions, very well-acted by all, and a welcome change from the soul-crushing pap we are expected to consume every other second of the day.
6.9/10.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)
Peckinpah's Greatest Film
I don't think I'd ever seen this all the way through before, but I also think the version I tried to watch many years ago was the theatrical release that the studio took away from Sam Peckinpah and cut to ribbons, and I remember that being quite a mess, whereas the more modern cut flows a lot better and harmoniously.
The story never feels particularly authentic, and it deviates from the historical facts continuously. But that's okay, because really, it's simply the story of one friend betraying and killing another, and the painting of a time in American history in which death was commonplace and cheap.
As Billy The Kid, Kris Kristofferson looks and moves like a thin Jim Morrison, but James Coburn adds a lot more depth and shading to his character, displaying kindness and cruelty, conflict and regret over the carrying out of his duties.
I think it's easily Peckinpah's best film, and Bob Dylan's too, in his small, underwritten, but unforgettable role as Alias. It's a scruffy but satisfying watch, that belongs in the list of anyone's top 50 westerns.
Mockery (1927)
Exploitation, Gratitude, Sacrifice and Love
A downtrodden and slow-witted Russian peasant first saves the life of, and then fixates upon, a beautiful countess around the time of the Russian Revolution.
One of Lon Chaney's best films, yet little-seen or mentioned, probably because of him wearing so much less make-up than in his more celebrated roles like The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Phantom of The Opera. It doesn't address the politics or historical events of the revolution in any detail, dwelling as it does on personal power dynamics instead, but it's a thoroughly involving tale, mostly due to the detail of the two leads, Chaney and the delicately expressive Barbara Bedford.
It strikes me again how brutal and cruel some of the great creations of the silent era were, dealing in the dread realities of life the same way as the early blues songs, the ancient folk ballads and original fairy tales. A lot of these rough edges were sanded off to make a more palatable fantasy product for the masses as sound came in, but films like this, The Man Who Laughs, The Last Command and even Chaplin comedies like The Kid and City Lights have a gut-punching pathos in the face of ordinary human horror that it's hard to find anywhere today.
7.1/10.
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
the archetypal, genre-defining seventies conspiracy thriller
A low-level CIA researcher comes back from lunch one day to find his whole department murdered, and realizes that he is to be next.
I apparently saw at least some of this archetypal, genre-defining seventies conspiracy thriller many years back, but have no memories of it. I thought I would give it another try, and this time round found it to be a very well-made and continually gripping piece of entertainment, if a little far-fetched at times.
It's genuinely hard for me to tell these days whether the characters, writing and direction in some older films are really as good as they now seem, or whether only slightly-above-average films from the past seem better than they actually are because even Oscar-winning films today are so calamitously bad that they cannot manage even the simplest task of making likeable characters you care about go on an adventure that intrigues you and makes you want to find out what will happen.
Either way, this one does all it is supposed to, and Robert Redford plays his proto-Brad Pitt role with great star quality, and Max Von Sydow is splendid as one of the killers after him, breathing life into what could just be a generic bad guy, and making every line and action believable and memorable, the way every actor should.
7.3/10.
Little Murders (1971)
Little Murders, Every Day
Black comedy about an emotionally vacant New York photographer falling in love with an optimistic girl amidst the violence and madness of the city.
I tried watching this once, years ago, and it just didn't grab me at the time, so I moved along and filed it away in the back of my mind as one of those quirky-but-dated turn-of-the-seventies hippie-era things, like "Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?" or "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice".
I took another look at it today and found it to have a lot more depth and originality than I'd registered the first time round. It might be the most interesting and lifelike Elliot Gould performance, and this elevates the film to something more comparable to "The Graduate" or "Harold & Maude".
It's patchy, and often playfully amateurish, but there are some brilliant stretches, and a lot of the stuff about alienation, numbness and anxiety in the big city feels startlingly up-to-date and beautifully observed.
6.7/10.
The Visit (1964)
Hell Really Does Have No Fury
A now-fantastically-wealthy widow (Ingrid Bergman) returns to the impoverished town she was cast out of as a teenage girl to get revenge on the lover who got her pregnant and then abandoned her.
This unusual and little-seen revenge tale feels more like a nightmarish allegory in the same vein as High Noon, The Trial or High Plains Drifter than other English-language films of the time, with the whole town slowly turning against Anthony Quinn as the promise of riches eats away the morality and social fabric of his community.
A little far-fetched and heavy-handed, it doesn't entirely work but it's powerful and memorable all the same, and definitely worth a watch. Interesting to see Bergman as a villain for a change, and Quinn is particularly good as the everyman paying a terrible price for a youthful mistake.
6.8 / 10.
Knox Goes Away (2023)
Fitfully Forgettable
Decent-enough little movie from Michael Keaton about a hitman with a form of fast-acting dementia, trying to put his life in order before he shuffles off this mortal coil, as well as avoid the police looking for him for a botched murder.
Keaton is good, but the script is patchy and the rest of the parts are underwritten. The actress playing the lead detective on his trail is noticeably amateurish, with a limited range of expressions and emotions. There seems no rhyme or reason to the onset and bouts of the dementia: it barely affects Keaton's plans or hinders his interactions with others, except in the mildest ways, and so what the character is experiencing is not communicated at all believably, and the condition ends up just being a gimmicky and almost completely unexplored MacGuffin.
The film doesn't really have a lot more going for it than what anyone would come up with from the prompt "Breaking Bad meets Memento", but it's still worth a watch, if only the once.
The Last Warning (1928)
A Passable Mystery, But Peak Silent Cinema
This dazzling example of late silent cinema was available only in shoddy, awful looking prints for 80 years or more, until it was restored in 2016 and finally released on home video in 2019, and now for the most part looks fantastic. It was the final film made by the great Paul Leni, whose magnificent "The Man Who Laughs" is one of the absolutely essential silent works everyone needs to see at least once before they die.
The story of this one is a cross between The Cat And The Canary and The Phantom of The Opera, but not really as good as either: an actor is killed onstage and everyone in the cast and crew becomes a suspect; the theatre closes for years until the play is revived, and the killer plans to kill all over again. There's secret passageways and cobwebs galore, and a decent enough mystery, but it's got to be said the plot's a little messy and hard to follow at times.
It's in the visuals that The Last Warning really shines, with the camera in every scene swooping and zooming in on every action taking place, and great use of depth of field to draw one's eyes to things happening in the background: the camera is always doing something, always telling us something about the story and the characters, purely through visual means. This is the very peak of what silent cinema was reaching for at the end of the 1920s, just before the talkies came in the following year and largely destroyed that artform and the box of tricks it used for everyone but Alfred Hitchcock, at least until Citizen Kane came along. I always like to imagine what might have happened if sound had not been introduced for another 15 or twenty years; what visual magic and ways of imparting story through image might have been achieved.
In summation, then: not the most compelling or meaningful story but one full of energy, movement and endless inventiveness. A great delight for the eyes.
7½/10.
The Unknown (1927)
A Lost Masterpiece Still In Dire Need Of An Editor Today
This Tod Browning film has a legendary status that always baffled me in the past, because it was often referred to as some sort of half-lost classic, whereas the truncated and poor quality versions of the film I had been able to see before, while an obvious cult contender because of the bizarre premise (a criminal hiding in a circus pretends to have no arms, only to chop his real ones off in hopes of winning the neurotic woman he loves) often seemed just too silly to convince, at least as a whole. At no point does Lon Chaney ever convincingly look like an arm-less man, and the shots of him dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief obviously held by someone else's foot at times teeter much too close to comedy and so continually break the spell.
The new Criterion Blu-Ray restoration is visually far better than any that came before it, and about a quarter of an hour longer, too, but the desire to restore the film to as much of its original runtime as possible means they have included every scrap of negative they've been able to lay their hands on, and so practically every shot begins and ends with damaged or excess frames, making the whole thing feel like a glitchy, unfinished workprint. On top of this, all the title cards are on screen for more than twice as long as they need be, and a few of them are needlessly repetitive (all the "hands! Hands! I hate men's hands!" stuff) and overly-melodramatic. These two aspects alone affect the flow and forward motion of the film terribly.
In addition, the new score is generic and forgettable piano music, of the kind I strongly dislike: it would have been much better to have commissioned something like that which accompanies the other newly restored Browning film, 'The Mystic', with its thick, eerie atmosphere and precisely-added sound effects, or the John Cale score from 1999.
All these issues frustrated me so much when I watched it that I actually spent a couple of days making my own edit, fixing all the issues I listed above and a few more, and I can say that spending so much time poring over each frame has made my respect for the film and its maker go up enormously, and I now see the rich, deep and thoughtful work of art that lies within it. Chaney's performance is more impressive when pared back a little: trimming some of the continual over-the-top reaction shots makes one focus upon and treasure the smaller details he puts in.
There are some fantastic moments from Chaney - the point he realizes his self-mutilation was for nothing is the high point of the whole film, and one of the most powerful scenes in all cinema - but Joan Crawford is excellent too: clearly a star in the making, and more beautiful than she would ever be again. And repeated viewings made me really appreciate Norman Kerry, as the handsome circus strongman also devoted to Crawford: at first he seems simply light relief, but his subtle waves of hurt and longing and confusion provide the loving heart of the film. He plays a character so simple, physical and passionate that he simply cannot understand a woman with past trauma who shrinks from any man's touch. The scenes in which they eventually overcome this are deeply moving.
So that's my take on the pic: yes, a lost masterpiece, but still in dire need of a editor even today.
The Mystic (1925)
Spooks & Swindlers
This fantastic film I'd never even heard of until today, made by the creator of the immortal Freaks (1932) and Dracula (1931), Tod Browning. It's never even been released on any home video format before, but the recent blu-ray has been lovingly restored, and now, almost a hundred years later, looks the best it ever has, with one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard accompany a silent, care of the long-time David Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley, who adds a woozy, warped, disorientating atmosphere you can cut with a knife, along with painstakingly-added sound effects, all of which enhance the experience enormously. Every silent film should be accompanied in this way.
Like Freaks, Mystic is the story of carnival folk with a moral code of their own, this time a phony psychic act that travels from Hungary to New York to try get rich by fleecing the wealthy before falling foul of the law. It loses steam a little towards the end, but the early parts put me in mind of Nightmare Alley (1947) and Varieté (released the same year, 1925), and it's not far off being as good as them both, which is quite the complement. A splendid discovery.
7.5/10.
Niagara (1953)
Marilyn Could Be Better, But Otherwise An Enjoyable Hitchcock-Like Suspenser
I just watched this film for the first time a few days ago: all I really knew about it beforehand was it had Marilyn act more than she usually did. And she *does* act against type, being more of a femme fatale than the sexy comic relief, but she's not the best thing in the film at all, which doesn't play to her strengths.
It's mostly an above-average Hitchcock-like suspenser, too bright, colorful and linear to be film noir, but the last half hour especially is very good at using images to build tension, and there's some creative twists along the way. It would have benefited from a more firm and memorable final scene, but it's generally a compelling and enjoyable watch.
6.7/10.
American Gigolo (1980)
The First Eighties Movie
It had been many years since I saw this film, which I'd filed away in my memory as decent enough but rather shallow before. This time round, it seems a much more solidly-made work about loneliness in a cold, transactional world, with memorable characters and situations, for the most part very well-crafted and told, and of the films he directed, it might actually be Paul Schrader's best. It's certainly his most iconic.
The basic premise, of a male prostitute being wrongly charged with a murder, could easily have become silly, sordid or embarrassing, but Richard Gere, at his most impeccably beautiful, makes it all seem rather glamorous, although because of that the film lacks true feeling and realism, often resembling the cover of a fashion magazine more than anyone's lived experience.
Historically, it's of interest in that it straddles two eras perfectly: it's at once a paranoid, downbeat seventies thriller and an MTV music video. It really feels as though the 80s aesthetic begins here, and the Giorgio Moroder synthesizer soundtrack sounds like it could have accompanied 90% of all American films and TV shows made the next ten years. Without American Gigolo, it's very hard to imagine there ever being, say, a Miami Vice or Drive.
On the other hand, the ending feels disjointed and weak, concluding with a series of short and uninteresting scenes that briefly begin and then fade to black. I can't help but think this could have been handled much more compellingly, and it would have been nice if there had been some kind of a twist to the mystery of who was trying to destroy Gere's life. Instead, there's just a bunch of dull formalities and then a somewhat unrealistic happy ending. Which again, is very eighties, and another sign of the changing of the guard.
6.8/10.
You'll Never Find Me (2023)
A Weak Ending Lets Down An Otherwise Excellent Indie Horror
In the middle of a cold, dark, rainy night, a lonely man, living an isolated life in a trailer park, gives shelter to a woman who knocks at his door.
This new Australian horror gets an enormous amount of tension and atmosphere out of what is essentially a two-person story, set entirely in a mobile home. The camerawork is very high quality, wringing as much mood and texture out of the set's limited space as is possible, and the dialogue between the two leads is nuanced and constantly shifting, piquing one's attention and curiosity throughout. Brendan Rock, as the creepy man with the big, sad eyes, puts in a tremendous performance that will stay with you a long time.
The last third of the film is weaker, and more predictable, once the reveal happens, and it becomes kinda what you expected the film to be all along, which is a disappointment. And the final conclusion is not clear enough to satisfy the investment in the story: have we been watching some kind of purgatory all this time? Are these ghosts? Is any of this real?
If the filmmakers had come up with a great and unexpected ending, this could have been a cult film for the ages, but without a first-rate payoff, the best I can give it is a 6.66/10.