Rainer Werner Fassbinder directs Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann in this German drama about a seemingly bed-ridden fashion designer who tries to control her latest concubine. 

One of those nexus point movies that appears to tie-in with the themes and plots of everything you’ve watched lately. It is the anti-Carol in its presentation of an exploitative, sensitivity free relationship between a young girl and a regal older, richer lady. The power struggles, both sexual and emotional, between model and designer mirror Phantom Thread. And being only my second experience of Fassbinder, it is nice to see Hanna Schygulla play another variation on her beautiful hustler as in  The Marriage of Maria Braun, though this one is viewed less sympathetically and is far less complex a creation. Heartless in comparison, really. This is essentially a filmed play, though Fassbinder seems to delight in finding continually different, starkly obvious camera angles to film the drama, often entangling his actresses in unnatural poses for framing purposes. As a formal exercise it is visually impressive enough, but it is a cold, cynical tale, full of Brechtian distractions. I was also slightly misled by myself. I assumed Irm Hermann’s often in the background, often silent, always present “assistant” would turn out to be Petra’s estranged, often mentioned husband in drag. Some kinky subservient fallout from their disastrous marriage. Turns out I brought that weird little twist in entirely from my own subconscious. Disparaging the femininity of a fine actress. Whoops!

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Franck Khalfoun directs Elijah Wood, Nora Arnezeder and Genevieve Alexandra in this POV slasher remake. 

My TIVO box told me I was recording the 1980’s original but this proved surprisingly creepy and unsettling. There are discombobulating flashes of mannequin based surrealism. The excessive gore and T&A feel transgressive in these PG-13 horror remake wilderness years. Wood doesn’t make much of an impression as the baby face who looks back at us in the mirrors’ reflections but I guess the main point of the movie is to make us feel like the killer, and feel complicit in his shocking nastiness and perversions. You need a blank slate for that. Good ominous score and use of LA night shoot locations too.

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My Top 10 Slasher Movies

1. Psycho (1960)
2. Zodiac (2007)
3. Scream (1996)
4. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
5. The Fog (1980)

6. Scream 2 (1997)
7. Candyman (1992)
8. Deep Red (1975)
9. Peeping Tom (1960)
10. Tenebrae (1982)

 

 

 

John Badham directs Ally Sheedy, Steve Guttenberg and Tim Blaney in this children’s sci-fi comedy about a runaway military robot that becomes sentient and a dude.

The below score is based entirely on nostalgia… and the fact this has some neat rip-off moments from Spielberg… and is better than E.T. … and Ally Sheedy is really charming… and Steve Guttenberg doesn’t smirk right into the camera while Fisher Stevens is being a massively racist stereotype… and how convincing the robot FX work often is… and sometimes charmingly isn’t… and the design of Johnny 5 is utterly iconic.

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Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina direct Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal and Benjamin Bratt in this Pixar adventure following a young boy who finds himself on the wrong side of the spiritual plane during the Day of the Dead. 

The Pixar formula is growing stale and the platitudes and twists this builds up to are now utterly guessable. The slapstick dog and the colourful design work are distracting eye candy. Trad Disney aside, I don’t know why adults go to kids’ movies anymore. This is at least inarguably better, more wholesome, and slavishly crafted than the other shite trailered before it. Peter Rabbit as a lad on tour, gnomes farting in mankinis (remember those)… no wonder this perfectly alright distraction is being treated like a classic in comparison.

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder directs Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch and Ivan Desny in this West German drama about a war widow who uses her sexuality and guile to thrive in the new economic era despite some very melodramatic curve balls thrown her way. 

Like watching a highlights reel of a German soap opera, only directed with subversion for cinematic form and societal taboos. Fassbinder is a new director for me but he embraces chaos like Monty Python, celebrates nostalgic fashion and shock like David Lynch and churns out a ‘Woman’s Picture’ that would make Old Hollywood both proud and recoil in horror. He is ably assisted by Schygulla, turning in a compelling lead turn as a sexy go-getter, pragmatic and focussed.

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Todd Haynes directs Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett and Sarah Paulson in this 1950’s love story between a curious shopgirl and a glamorous upper class mother going through a difficult divorce. 

Elegantly seductive, this is a gorgeously detailed romance. Blanchett’s initially tragic trapped rarity is imbued with mystery. Mara has a less showy part as a proto-hipster, cute Tam O’Shanter and photography ambitions all present and correct, but through her searching, longing silences leaves a more lasting impression. Watching them go through their long, risky approach to consummating their obvious attraction for each other is heart breaking. Haynes visually essays a world of conformity and control, so that minor rebellions of affection or flirtation seem monumental. A child’s model railway is an apt early visual metaphor. Essentially a simple, colourful recreation of moving life… then we watch the nostalgic, stereotyped figures come to life, leave their loops and jump the tracks. Our final look at Carol is her left fashionably sitting in a cocktail party surrounded by other moneyed non-conformists. She is finally free of the heterosexual marriage she was enslaved in. Mara leaves her less salubrious apartment party to find Blanchett, after rejecting a subtle set-up with a more obviously “out” girl her own age. She isn’t going to be defined by the stereotypical 1950’s lesbian tribe anymore than Carol is pigeonholed by her gender. Their love transcends labels.

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Woody Allen directs himself, Mariel Hemingway and Diane Keaton in this love letter to New York following a writer choosing between his underage lover and his friend’s intellectually challenging mistress, between working on a well paid TV show or writing his novel. 

God! The second scene of this is painful to watch currently. Woody on a date with his seventeen year old lover, moaning that an ex-wife is profiting from spreading salacious gossip about him and bemoaning an American media happy to perform witch hunts over people’s private lives. He’s like a little Cassandra, a curly haired self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously biographical, the Mariel Hemingway plotline is problematic. She’s fantastic here by the way. And as much as she represents Woody’s unashamed desire to still sleep with teenagers… their relationship also represents safety, care and a lack of complications. Diane Keaton represents Woody’s reality as a forty something artist… the women he “should” date come with just as much baggage, neuroses, needs and history as he does. They are as flawed and as fickle as he is. It is either risk the difficulties of loving and losing a “real” woman or enjoy the simple yet unfulfilling benefits of sex and affection with someone pure, unjaded and unadulterated, by life. It is not the nubileness of his immature girlfriend that is the sole attraction, it is the fact he can impart in her his opinions, choose their movies and art exhibitions, knowing his taste and ideas will be absorbed rather than batted away or dismissed. Like the skyscrapers and diners and sidewalks so beautifully captured here in black and white by Gordon Willis, Hemingway’s Tracy is still naive enough to be romanticised. When Woody, in his opening narration, tries to create the perfect paragraph to summarise his love of his complex, ever evolving, harsh hometown he struggles. Returning to the eternal blank page is less daunting than committing to a life of potential rejection and the towering, long ago designed intricacy that adult partners hold.

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Elaine May directs Walter Matthau, herself and George Rose in this black comedy about a middle-aged trust fund kid who has overspent to ruin so sets his sights on wooing, marrying and murdering a gawky heiress. 

A relatively laughter-free comedy, more Ealing Studios than New Hollywood, that had an hour hacked out of its originally epic running time. While the cuts may make this less patience testing, it obviously lacks structure and pace, somehow the lead performances are still well preserved and very likeable. Both Matthau’s misanthrope and May’s naive botantist are well sketched creations who chafe amusingly off each other.

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Walter Hill directs Michael Beck, James Remar and Dorsey Wright in this fantasy gang actioner about a squad of rebel youths who have to fight their way back home to Coney Island over one crazy night. 

A movie I have nothing but uncritical, devoted mad love for. One of the first cult films I embraced as my very own as an almost teen. It was the poster on my wall at uni. The film I proudly shared with all my girlfriends knowing they’d love it. But that all makes it a very hard movie to write about. I guess what keeps me obsessed is the glimpses of all those crazy gangs. Their uniforms, their cultures, their turf. The shit your pants ominous Baseball Furies, the military unity of The Gramercy Riffs, the unlikely madness of The Mimes. I mean… imagine The Mimes starting some shit with you on the subway platform after midnight.

Hill dashes us through an alternative universe Big Apple. Rich in comic book detail, yet mostly left intriguingly unexplored. The scramble and fight sequences have a pulse raising, sweat inducing directness. If The Warriors are engaged then they rarely move on without losing a team member, no matter how hard they fight back… they are leaderless from the first act. This message is clear from the off, this night out in the city ain’t just “a trim hunt.” Anyone and everyone is at risk. There’s macho posturing… Remar as the pussy focussed hard man desperate to be in charge absolutely rocks, while Beck has his thousand yard stare down pat, a street tough gallantry wafts from him. The New York they get lost in is a rain soaked wasteland. Deserted apart from the hives of  antagonists. Edward Hopper was a visual influence. Figures lost in the shadowy gaps between dead buildings abound.

You get continuous portions of perfection. The messiah-like Cyrus’ rally is convincing stuff. Sign me up. I dig it. I DIG IT! Barry De Vorzon’s pulsating, synthy alarm of a score is a disco infused rattler. The party at The Lizzies makes frizzy haired girls dancing the most foreboding sight you’ve ever seen. The most unsettling moment though isn’t when cops hound the heroes on to the railways tracks or howling packs of skinheads chase them down in a prison van, it is a quiet interlude when the exhausted and filthy survivors share a dawn train carriage with some middle class kids out on a late night date. No one can make eye contact. The underworld strivers and the carefree prom night kids pass each other wordlessly. They can not comprehend the night each other has just had. Then we get David Patrick Kelly’s Misfit instigator and his threatening bottles. “Warriors… Come out to PLLLLAAAAAAYYYY-AAAAAIIII!” And here’s the thing, the second the sun rises and the quest is over and the 90 minutes of cult movie brilliance finishes up on a victorious freeze frame … I want to start it all again. Be bopping with The Warriors right back across all the five borough… “Be looking good Warriors. Real good.”

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Carl Reiner directs Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters and M. Emmet Walsh in this rags to riches to rags comedy about Navin, a naive white man “born a poor black child” making his way in the big bad world.

Zany is hard to do. This classic makes it seem deceptively easy. Like The Marx Brothers with A Day at the Races, Martin built his debut lead vehicle around wacky routines that had already earned their keep in live shows for over a decade. It makes for one of the most quotable, most intelligently daft movies ever made. A veritable Citizen Kane, in both plot and scope, of madcap. Steve Martin and Carl Reiner’s aim when translating his stand up gold was to have one killer gag per page. And it shows. Unlike Airplane which has a chuck enough shit against the wall attitude, The Jerk doesn’t always pummel you into laugh submission relentlessly. There’s time outs for sweet moments, bleak moments, moments that are tonally bewildering but no less captivating or amusing. Straight faced beachside ukulele serenades sit next to heartless disco vulgar excess. Bernadette Peters helps the off kilter tone. Vapid without being saccharine, wholesome while staying attractive… there’s something palpably unnerving about her Dear John exit, her unavoidable corruption by The Jerk’s outrageous fortune. It is powerful discordant notes like her performance that stop The Jerk from merely being a cash-in on Steve Martin’s cult popularity and raise it above most dumb spoofs. There’s seems to be real heart and risk in the choices made. Candide was an influence, giving us a film that invokes Voltaire but never feels sneeringly highbrow. Which is to say it is never in any way inaccessible to those just wanting fun. It is consistently a rollicking joke fest were Martin dances painfully out of rhythm, chases a runaway miniature railway and Shithead the dog steals many, many scenes. But to accuse The Jerk of being throwaway, its contemporary reputation, is shortsighted. It is a tight comedy with very little waste. Early doors set-ups are revisited for even better jokes entire acts later, in fact there’s a gleeful, ambitious narrative symmetry to the whole endeavour. And Martin as sweet, pig shit thick, greedy Navin is a delight… selling even the stupidest yucks with a breezy assuredness. It is his movie, virulent with his honed comedy persona, and that’s what makes it so unique. High status goof-off heaven.

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