Ben Young directs Emma Booth, Ashleigh Cummings and Stephen Curry in this based on a true story chiller about an Australian couple who kidnap, rape and kill schoolgirls in their suburban home.
Opens with a fantastic shot: our ordinary looking predators spying on a playground netball game, the shadow of a hand caressing and oppressing the teen’s unsuspecting body. Hounds of Love is full of neat visual moments but you realise after an onslaught of showy overused tics like slow-mo or cross cutting that there’s not much else to it. Young is so fascinated in making his warped pair of nasties’ incongruous existence among the everyday look artful that he neglects plotting and set pieces. You could say this is a child of Cinema Du Look first, a character study second and an entertainment distant third. As a thriller it is only fascinated by taking a leering look at the distress, paranoia and self pity of its killers and current victim. The sexual violence is implied rather than shown, you are never sure whether the wife (a standout Emma Booth) was once tied to that bed and is equally terrified of being disposed of… or is the worst of the monsters, jealously indulging her violent little man’s perversions? We take a long, hard, often painterly look at evil but for very few traditional thrills.
Chloé Zhao directs John Reddy, Jashaun St. John and Irene Bedard in this coming of age drama following two Native American siblings growing up on a modern reservation.
Unspectacular debut that roughly sketches Zhao’s continued strengths and interests in frontier communities, loner’s intimacy and diminishing freedoms. Not a bad insight but struggles to hold the attention at a feature length.
Michael Caton-Jones directs Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro and Ellen Barkin in this period adaptation of Tobias Wolff’s memoir of his bullying stepfather in the 1950s.
Time hop! If you can get past the jarring shock of DiCaprio looking simultaneously like a baby and somehow exactly as he does now as a middle aged man then there is a solid drama here. The acting is uniformly excellent, the period detail handsome but I don’t think it is unfair to say an answer song movie could probably be made about Dwight… the single father who tries to teach his rebellious stepson the values of responsibility, scouting and respect. Both child and petulant petty adult seem like particularly hard work to live with.
Steve Rash directs Patrick Dempsey, Amanda Peterson and Courtney Gains in this teen romantic comedy where a geek hires the head cheerleader as his girlfriend for the month in the hope of boosting his popularity.
The original title of this was Boy Rents Girl. They may have changed the tasteless name but they can’t change the yucky vibe. The pacing is off, with the charmless Dempsey becoming the near sole focus of the film in the second half. Very hard to care about his eventual rejection by the other obnoxious airheads… and the last minute reconciliation with Peterson’s hottie feels hollow and unearned.
David Lynch directs Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper in this psychosexual mystery where a college boy returns home to find a severed ear, a distressed chanteuse and whole lot of nightmare beyond his white picket fence.
That’s a font for a title credit. Sexy cursive. What’s under that lawn? Decay, turmoil, writhing. Mr Beaumont Snr. is fucked up in his neck brace. We’re In! Are we? We dawdle in wasteland and zoom into an ear. Whose rotten detached headspace are we entering? The hospital and hardware store scenes seem superfluous. I guess Jeffrey needs to take the place of his father and that needs to feel mundane, ugly and distasteful. Detective John Williams: the open cop. Enter the dame 1: hard to think of Laura Dern as the good girl now but she’s as pure as a glass of milk here. A real Nancy Drew / Hayley Mills. Kyle MacLachlan’s dorky chicken walk. How many bobbysoxers did teenage Lynch woo with that move? Date at The Slow Club. Enter the dame 2: Isabella Rossellini is off the chain brave in this. After getting her ‘goddess of the stage’ introduction she is stripped, abused, frantic, bruised, vulnerable, catatonic. You never know what this Dorothy Vallens is going to do next. It is an unhinged, gut driven piece of screen acting that deserves more recognition. Obviously your more bombastic nasty lunatics (Hopper, Stockwell) obscure what Rossellini achieves here but…
The dark side of town. Four honks unheard. Sneaking a peek! This sequence feels like it goes on forever. Caught! Dorothy gets to be in charge for a little while. “Baby wants to fuck Blue Velvet!” The scissors, the gas inhaler… what are we watching, Jeffrey Beaumont? Who is Frank? One of cinema’s most unfathomable but bleakly funny villains… well played Dennis. Jeffrey can’t resist going back. “Hit me!” Joyride with the neighbour. Beer brand disagreement – PBR is endorsed, I’m guessing no product placement payola changed hands on this one though. Off to Sauve Ben’s cathouse. Al from Quantum Leap lost on downers, covered in pancake slap, ready to gut punch you. A heartfelt reunion behind closed doors – non-sexualised Dorothy ain’t for our eyes. Candy Coloured Clown. Work Light Karaoke. “I’ll fuck anything that moves!” Teleporting jump cut. Skanky car roof dancing. “Don’t be a good neighbour to her. I’ll send you a love letter straight from my fucking heart!” If I ever made a movie, I wish I could replicate just a tenth of the unease and unpredictability Lynch conjures in this middle act.
Shell shocked Kyle MacLachlan sitting on a bed trying to process his yen for a beautiful but distressed woman being raped by a baby and a daddy… Is he to a Frank? Full of dark desires and posing as a “well dressed man”?… Or a little boy who saw his parents at it and is warped for life by the lusts it defined in him? “Who’s that? Is that your mother?” the jocks ask as they are about to kick our hero’s face in and a naked woman appears distraught and wailing. I’m sure David has his own deeper interpretations of all the mysteries and visual clues. He always does, the tight lipped genius. Poor Sandy’s heart is broken. Police raid. Back in the apartment where the nasty always happens… a set design dry run for The Black Lodge. You can see the rough sketch of Twin Peaks in pretty much every authorial choice here. This room is where your sexual desires become nightmarish reality. Dirty cop still buzzing up right, nothing but electrified muscles. Walkie talkie con job. Really fantastic small scale denouement, other thrillers take note… Lynch can do the genre basics too! Shitty robot bird. Not even the shape of a robin. But all that squirming turmoil is mastered in its beak. “It’s a strange world.”
Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro direct Dominique Pinon, Jean-Claude Dreyfus and Marie-Laure Dougnac in this post-apocalyptic romantic comedy where the quirky residents of a Parisian apartment building await the latest janitor to be murdered and served up as their weekly sustenance.
An eye-popping mash-up of Gilliam-esque excess and Chaplin inspired slapstick. It loses the plot by the end but that ensemble manages to be more ornate and garish than the impressive fantasy production design. Cannibalism, suicide and troglodytes abound but its pure heart is always reassuringly in the right place. A unique treat for visualists and vegetarians.
Peter Watkins directs Katherine Quittner, Carmen Argenziano and Gladys Golden in the mockumentary about the US government sanctioned torture and murder of dissidents in a desert assault course.
Don’t ever choose Punishment Park! Yet that’s the choice for the draft dodgers, folk singers, social activists, drop outs, pacifists and Black Panthers in Peter Watkins’ gruelling but unsensational vision of American fascism. It is a fantasy, an alternative US, 1971 in a different reality. It could be the start of the timeline we follow in Alan Moore’s Watchmen where Watergate had no effect, Vietnam was a “success” and Nixon enjoyed a perpetual presidency. But is this Land of the Free under the thrall of background fascism so much more different than how the conservative majority dealt with the youth who didn’t play ball, spoke out and fought back? Is it too strong of an embellishment after the National Guard opened fired on student campuses indiscriminately, the kangaroo courts of Bobby Seale and Abbie Hoffman, and those hippies forced into having their buzz cuts by thugs outside Disneyworld? Punishment Park explores, references and recreates all these true life injustices finessing them into a nightmarish escalation. We follow two groups: one almost voiceless and nameless enduring the desert. The other – the next batch being processed and trialed before given their options. The accused enter a tent, are given a pointless chance to defend their politics (the improvised testimonies are sensitive and compelling) to a jeering, uncaring panel. And then they are given that choice… a life sentence in a penitentiary or a two day challenge to complete a punishment park. A futile trek through an arid desert, pursued by cops who will violently detain you. If you somehow outrun them, survive, reach the flag (the America they are seen as rejecting) then you no longer have to serve the prison sentence. But the cops and soldiers aren’t dehydrated, have vehicles, weapons, shelter… of course they are going to catch you. And with your one chance at freedom cruelly snatched from you, of course you are going to resist or run… allowing the pigs carte blanche to deal with you violently. A cunt’s trick. A cruel con. But isn’t that the American Dream summed up? You can get there if you strive hard enough, only those protected by the state stand between you and your freedoms… Freedom is always tantalisingly out of reach. Makes The Hunger Games and Battle Royale seem like juvenile cartoons in its grim, didactic and queerly mundane persuasiveness. The movie ends with the few survivors being carted off to the prison sentence they strove to avoid, and the next batch leaving the last vestiges of society to face the same dehumanisation. The international documentary crew stands helpless, like us, they feel complicit.
John Waters directs Divine, David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce in this independent black comedy about a juvenile delinquent’s journey from single teen mother to the electric chair.
The first half is ribald and hilarious, the second half quite grim if you were to take it seriously. Don’t. Mink Stole steals the film as the bratty daughter. The highlight is probably a disfigured Divine vamping it along a busy pedestrian street and the real Baltimore people just blithely going about their day around her.
Eugène Lourié directs Paul Christian, Paula Raymond and Cecil Kellaway in this monster on the rampage movie.
We went to the Scottish Museum of Modern Art’s excellent Ray Harryhausen exhibition last weekend so it only seemed right we should watch one of of his special effects classics. A solid progenitor of Godzilla, this proves pretty standard sci-fi stuff until those final twenty minutes when a stop motion giant lizard is non-stop rollicking through New York. Lee Van Cleef pops up in the rollercoaster finale as the best sniper shot on the force.
Roger Donaldson directs Tom Cruise, Bryan Brown and Elisabeth Shue in this romance drama about a young bartender with a dream.
“When he pours, he reigns!” Like watching five years of a soap opera on fast forward, this never lays out why we should care about the dreams and desires of its wannabe yuppie himbo. The script just tragically assumes we share the hero’s juvenile values and dead eyed drive. It is so in love with Cruise’s pretty yet gormless bartender it never stops to consider how surreal the constant adulation reads to uncommitted eyes. The sad fact is a lot of the drink slinging and flair moves look nervous and cautious. Bryan Brown’s jaded guru flits in and out of the narrative… by the second act you wish we were following him and his hard earned bullshit rather than the callow youth. Hard to decipher what the entertainment value ever was here unless you are jonesing for Eighties cheese.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 