Rodman Flender directs Devon Sawa, Seth Green and Elden Henson in this horror comedy about a stoner who cuts off his demonically possessed killer hand and hangs out with the reanimated buddies he killed.
Absolute dreck, venal and compromised. Only a familiar pop punk soundtrack and a vapid but almost offensively voluptuous debut by Jessica Alba make this worthy of any note. I laughed at how dated, clunky and awkward this all was quite a few times, rarely am I slave to schadenfreude. Some good FX shots live incongruously within a lot of lacklustre ones.
Gareth Evans directs Dan Stevens, Martin Sheen and Lucy Boynton in this period folk horror mystery about a haunted older brother who infiltrates an island of cult worshippers who have kidnapped his sister.
Possibly the best film to spin out from the impressive cult wake left after The Wicker Man, easily far superior to the “official” remakes and sequels. While Evans doesn’t exploit his cast particularly well (the charismatic male leads bring more to the film in providence than it gives them to do) he makes sure we are never without an image that shocks or disgusts or fills us with dread. This and Private Life prove Netflix’s worth more than their recent obvious awards bait releases. The Coen Brothers and Alfonso Cuarón will always find a green light. Solid, rewatchable films like this are struggling for finance and distribution in the arthouses and multiplexes. The streaming giant has gifted us two of the best original films of the year within quick succession. One was mature and witty, the other gory and suspenseful. And I got to watch both in nothing but my underpants. Kudos.
Robert Zemeckis directs Michelle Pfeiffer, Harrison Ford and James Remar in this supernatural thriller where a housewife is distracted from her empty nest by the strange goings on of her new neighbours and the ghost trying to unveil a dark secret closer to home.
A slickly sheen shining exercise in stylish homage breathing in unashamed guffs of Hitchcock, Cluzout and an 1980’s blockbuster which I won’t mention aloud for fear of spoiling the best surprise. This was a side project, made in the downtime while filming Cast Away, when Robert Zemeckis got a few months off while Tom Hanks lost weight and grew dreads. It gave Zemeckis the chance to work with two major stars, Pfeiffer and Ford. Both of whom deliver career highlights here and their last respective hits of their peak periods. And the always cutting edge director does playfully exciting stuff with CGI and well designed sets in the elongated grand finale. The potboiler is equally fun in the first act when getting lost in a barrel of red herrings. But it does grow repetitive before the true peril emerges, long before. Something so simple really shouldn’t be exhausting for big swathes. As a one watch experience this glossy thriller justifies itself. You get a barrage of twists, cliffhangers and classy leads. Our Saturday night revisit 18 years later didn’t help its fond legacy much though.
Terrence Malick directs Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek and Warren Oates in this lovers on the run romance about a teenage girl who falls for a violent but friendly sociopath.
God, the sky looks grand in this. An expanse of blue and white that looks like hope and eternity. The folksy blanket under which sleeps an amoral classic, slight and meandering but undistracted from its own beauty. The movie is hazily dreamlike with a ragged ambling pace. Malick is still finding his voice here as a director and while it is confidently ethereal and bold in its blank humanity, it is also easily his most accessible work. You get the feeling the confident end product betrays an auteur finding his feet. There are burst action and seduction and play that feel there more for the audience than for their artistic or thematic noodling. Who is holding whose hand in this debut? It is hard to tell.
Natalie and I have been having an accidental ‘Sissy Spacek Season’ this month. Unintentional but she is a fascinating screen presence, both childlike yet utterly enigmatic. Her narration is playfully obtuse – you are never sure if she truly is as innocent as her naive narration posits, or if she is lying to herself… or us… or putting words into Kit Carruthers mouth… and if she is, are we hearing her defence of her complicity? Or that defence lawyer who is part of her happy ending? For a role that on first watch comes across cute yet detached, there are complexities therein. The question crops up again… Who is holding whose hand?
Let’s take Martin Sheen’s twitchy but charming Kit Carruthers. A boy who treats his crimes as an unavoidable adventure. He is interested in creating his own legend, building a monument for the site of his own arrest and handing out souvenirs to his pursuers. For him fame and infamy, atrocity and necessity are a blurred line he doesn’t understand. But he ends up caught and doomed, but Spacek’s Holly is lifted away in a helicopter, takes magical flight, to a new life. One has a future, the other survives only in gossip, a forgotten monster of the headlines. Badlands is scrappily formed, perfectly filmed fairy tale of freedom and adventure… the lovers on the run sub genre was born here. The superior True Romance steals liberally from it, just about every modern “Southern” film owes it deference.
Michael Apted directs Sissy Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones and Beverly D’Angelo in the musical biopic of Loretta Lynn.
The rags to riches form of this life story might go through what we now consider “the motions” but it does so with a lot of grit and charm. One benefit it has over its antecedents is we spend a long old time getting to know Loretta Webb, child bride born into sheltered poverty, before she even shows signs of becoming Loretta Lynn the country superstar. Her rise to fame almost feels like an accidental by-product of the chaotic but affectionate marriage she has with Tommy Lee Jones’ Mooney Doo. And though this romance takes in rough patches of infidelity, assaults, pill popping and bruised male ego, Apted is generous enough to tell the tragedy with a lack of terminal judgement, never making an easy monster of the ne’er do well lad. Their tumultuous relationship is told with such unvarnished frankness and warm humour you forgive him his transgressions because he is presented as just as fragile a human as our eponymous hero. Sissy Spacek is superb here, ably supported by a smaller but powerfully seductive turn by Beverly D’Angelo as Patsy Cline.
Lasse Hallström and Joe Johnston direct Mackenzie Foy, Keira Knightley and Jayden Fowora-Knight in this fantasy adventure about an inventive lass who enters the saccharine but declining world of her dead mother’s childhood imagination.
Better than its troubled production (the syrupy Hallström was replaced by the more FX minded but hacky Johnston midshoot) and slow box office suggest. It is a high fantasy adventure in the form of an Oz movie or Labyrinth but strained through the winsome visual palette of Disney’s current brand of winsome and fluttery live action !!!PRINCESS!!! remakes. Foy makes for a far less toothy and twiglike protagonist than her counterparts in Beauty and the Beast or Cinderella. The story, though beholden to playing homage to Marius Petipa’s ballet suite, allows for more deviation and “surprises”. I say surprises as if there are shocks… it is all thoroughly predictable but at least less constricted to a well worn tale as its stable mates often unsexily are. I want to talk about the villian, who puts in a brilliant pantomime worthy turn, but don’t want to ruin the twist for any 8 year olds reading this. There are bursts of visual invention; a swarm of mice forming a gigantic mouse king, a cracked exile queen living in a working puppet fortress shaped like herself, a laboratory of cogs and megascopes that brings toy armies to life. Enough of such bursts that I begrudgingly enjoyed this unwanted blockbuster for what it is, a childish lark, more than what it has become on the hit-centric studio’s account ledger: an expensive fail.
Julius Avery directs Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell and Mathilde Ollivier in this WWII sci-fi horror where US G.I.s take on Nazi zombie super soldiers.
By no means a perfect film. The plot idles in a village attic for far too long and there probably should be twice as many Nazi Zombies. Yet if this were released in 1992 and I watched it at 13 it would probably be a firm favourite. The action is impactful and chaotic, chunkily violent. The setting convincing and well realised. It leans into some of the hokey-er but effective tropes of your Grandad’s Black And White War flicks nicely. All four leads do attractive work, you want to see their next projects… especially Ollivier and Pilou Asbæk’s imposing enemy officer. Overlord offers slick, heroic thrills that never outstay their welcome. By the time a hip-hop mash-up of Mannish Boy blasts over the end credits you are left putting on your coat and walking out into the multiplex lobby with a broad, satisfied smile on your face.
Robert Wise directs Julie Harris, Claire Bloom and Richard Johnson in this ghost story classic where a fragile psychic joins a group to investigate a stately home with a dark past.
One of the finest horror films ever made, getting by on a classy mixture of hysteria and dread. The B-movie performances hide characters with disturbing depth. The walls and furnishings of the off kilter house maintains a constant fear. The booming, drafty sound design is perfect. The whole dreadful affair has the austere air of a curse set in stone. We know this house dooms its inhabitants. Wise has rattling good fun leading us to the inevitable tragedies and shocks.
Luca Guadagnino directs Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton and Mia Goth in this remake of Dario Argento’s witches coven hidden in a dance academy shocker.
Like the very best remakes, this uses the basic concept and pitch of an old standard as a jumping off point to make a very different experience. Sadly Suspiria 2.0 is an overlong and over cooked pudding, often grindingly pretentious. Guadagnino seems so keen to tie onto the basic plot, strands about the Baader-Meinhof Group, holocaust survival guilt, Cold War divisions, the conflict of new and old feminist narratives… that the body of the film (Witches / Dances) gets lost in a struggle of knots. The most frustrating thing is the 30 or so disparate minutes of pure horror are pretty strong. Repulsive dream sequence montages, supernatural injury gore, cursed modern dance thrash outs. Thom Yorke’s thrumming score and Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s colour limited cinematography are lush. It is easily the most erotic movie of the year… though Dakota Johnson probably shouldn’t be leading ensembles, as aesthetically pleasing as she looks (Mia Goth pretty much takes over as rush protagonist for swathes and it is a relief). As for Swinton, she is great for two of her three roles but once you twig who else she is playing it does lend the boring drama section of the narrative an air of Coming to America. Rubbery pranks and extraneous subplots about European 20th century psychological scars wallow hand in hand… in jarring longueurs that have nothing to do with Argento’s luridly damaging original.
Robert Redford directs Timothy Hutton, Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland in this Oscar winning drama about a teenager overcoming mental health issues that his grieving parents cannot understand.
The movie poster for this was a family portrait where each member is separated by their own gilt but cold frame. And that’s the movie entire, people who should love each other who cannot break out of their own boxes to adequately care for each other. The tensions and battles and rare moment of empathy that causes. It is an emotionally brutal film, for you care about Timothy Hutton’s guilt stricken, damaged son. His brother, the golden child, died a year ago and slowly you realise that his mother either blames him for the accident or resents him for surviving. Hutton performs a complex part with dignity, warmth and restraint. You genuinely feel his isolation and loneliness, want to give him a hug and the guidance he clearly lacks at home. Mary Tyler Moore is chilling as the matriarch who can turn on a dime from sunny and organised to wounding and resentful. Maybe the film is unfair to put all the psychological blame at her controlling door?Donald Sutherland adds another bereft father role to his back catalogue. A bumbling gregarious man who wants to be there for his son, reunite the child and his wife, but can only find blunt platitudes to say or accidentally inspire conflict he cannot fathom. Redford’s direction captures the strong performances well, lets them articulate the tension by allowing the actors get lost in moments where the world slips from them. The editing of Hutton’s school day for example is off pace, intentionally moving a little too fast so we share the overwhelming nature of this troubled kid trying to be normal. John Bailey’s cinematography captures the passing seasons well, the ominous beauty of an autumnal street, the unforgiving chill of a winter playground. Often it’s a film that looks like a yuppie in peril thriller rather than a sensitive drama about therapy. I appreaciate what a fine film Ordinary People is, but it isn’t really a film for me. It lacks the humour of the other upper class suburban dramas I do rewatch like The Ice Storm or Wonder Boys. And I don’t identify with this community finding “working class” stories that cover similar ground (Good Will Hunting, Manchester By the Sea) more effecting. That’s my personal prejudice though… if you come from money or class is no issue for you then you’ll no doubt rate this superbly crafted film far higher than me.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 