Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits this week. And only one film. I guess I’m just not trying anymore. Actually, I’ve been watching quite a few DVD extras this week, and they’ve proven rather more illuminating than the films themselves. Last year, I complained rather vociferously about Sky’s dreadful presentation of the Oscars ceremony, but this year I managed to evade whatever atrocity was served up by the good burghers of Sky Premiere by turning to the internet and watching the whole thing as a no doubt illegal stream courtesy of the great nerds of America who want to watch the Oscars on their computers and will sacrifice anything to make it so. And with only one slight dropout during the nominations for Best Actress, it was highly successful. And I got to see, or rather hear, lots of crappy American ads, so that was nice.

The ceremony itself was pretty good, long but the Oscars should always be long, and lots of the right people won, especially the Coen brothers and Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová and Diablo Cody. I think those ceremonies that share the wealth between several films are often better than those where one film sweeps the lot, although The Return of the King (2003) deserved everything it won. It was also nice to see that Transformers (2007) won nothing, and that Brad Bird thanked Jan Pinkava, the original sole director of Ratatouille (2007).

Blood for Dracula (1974)

Stefania Casini has a relatively small role in this film as one of Udo Kier’s intended “wirgins”, one of the four Italian daughters Dracula is attempting to marry in a “wirginal” state before handyman Joe Dallesandro can deflower them. It’s all to do with the blood, you see. As well as having her neck bitten (it may be a Paul Morrissey directed Dracula movie but it is still a Dracula movie), she also spends most of her time onscreen naked, but this was the 1970s remember and screen nudity had not yet been curtailed by the arrival of the internet. And she was slim, young and Italian. Casini also turned up two years later in 1900 (1976) as the epileptic who has a close encounter with the penises of both Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu at the same time. She appears in a brief bitchy role in Suspiria (1977) and meets a memorably bloody end in a room at the dance school which has been thoughtfully filled with a truckload of bailing wire. The Suspiria DVD has a 25th anniversary making of documentary in which Casini appears, and she is utterly captivating in this. She’s lively, sparky, full of fun, and comes across as a real character. It is no surprise that her later film career in Italy developed into both writing and directing for television and the cinema. A pleasing development for a woman who started her career on the cover of Playmen magazine in April 1973.

Three cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

World Trade Center (2006)

There’s a certain amount of reverence and respect accorded this film by American reviewers, whereas British reviewers have been keener to point out the film’s apparent shortcomings. There’s also a certain amount of surprise expressed by reviewers that this isn’t some crazy wacked-out conspiracy flick along the lines of the notoriously poor and ill-considered online documentary Loose Change. For someone like myself, who’s been following Stone’s films since the brilliant Salvador (1985), Stone overcomes the principal problem of inertia at the drama’s heart (two men pinned down under the rubble of the South Tower) through sheer filmmaking technique; 20 years ago, Stone used a similar methodology to bring Eric Bogosian’s one man show Talk Radio (1988) to the screen. And yes, Craig Armstrong’s music may be a touch too melancholy, the character of Dave Karnes seems a little too convenient, but, and it’s a big but, as the excellent documentaries on Disc 2 make all too clear, these events really happened, the reality was much worse than anything that could be depicted on film, and was it worth making this film just to give a taste of what it was like to be in the worst place in the world on September 11th 2001? Yes, it was. The highest compliment I can pay this film is that it is exactly as good as the Naudet Brothers’ 9/11 (2002).

No Country for Old Men (2007) *

I don’t personally think the Coen brothers have suffered a loss of form since O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). I even liked The Ladykillers (2004) because I thought it was about time we had a comedy with some proper swearing in it. There is no denying though that this entirely unironic return to the dark Western noir world of Blood Simple (1983) is on an entirely different level of filmmaking. There are immaculately constructed suspense sequences that rank with the best of Hitchcock. There is a thoroughly unnerving turn from Javier Bardem as a black-clad psychopath and a neat appearance as a working class Texan housewife by the Scottish Kelly Macdonald. There are probably going to be awards as well.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) *

This film combines three of my favourite cinemagoing tropes in one: the dark vision of Tim Burton, musicals, and excessive gore. There are any number of over the top throat slashings in this film, all perfectly executed, and all different from one another. The posters for Planet of the Apes (2001) promised that Tim Burton dark vision thing, and instead, in what must have been Conceptual Mistake #1 on that project, Burton elected to shoot the entire movie in bright sunlight with no darkness. Big mistake. No such chances have been taken here: Fleet Street looks like a suburb of hell, grime, filth and smoke are everywhere and the phrase sepulchral gloom comes irresistibly to mind. Add in a pitch perfect Londoner’s accent from Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter as the Goth Queen of the pie shops (a close relative of Fight Club’s (1999) Marla Singer) and some tremendous music and lyrics from Stephen Sondheim and you have an entire package of bloody excess well worth surrendering to.

Cloverfield (2007) *

I must clearly not be as tuned in as I thought I was, because all of the alleged internet buzz around this film passed me completely by. Existing really as a sharp reprimand to the dreadful American remake of Godzilla (1998), the creators of this film are quite clearly saying, no, you fools, THIS is how you make a monster movie. Although the conceit of continuous filming in the face of any number of imminent and certain deaths does stretch credulity a little, for the most part this is an unnerving success that very satisfactorily leaves an awful lot unexplained. And it’s about damn time there was a mainstream popcorn movie that let the audience have a chance to fill in some of the gaps for themselves.

Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)

Oh if only Tartan had released it in 3-D so Udo Kier could be dangling chunks of liver in your living room. Filmed in Italy at Cinecittà just before Blood for Dracula (1973), this is a film both inspired and uninspired, both grotesque and irritating. Udo Kier’s endless barking gets on your nerves early, and he’s got a lot of exclaiming still to do as Baron Frankenstein, obsessed as he is with creating a new master race, obsessed as he is with noses, obsessed as he is with molesting the internal organs of a female zombie (Dalila Di Lazzaro) while impotently humping her, having already had sex with his sexually voracious sister (Monique Van Vooren), which has produced two young children who will carry on his work after his death, his liver impaled on a ten foot pole and dangling in your living room, in 3-D, if Tartan had released it that way. And so on. And so on. The BBFC’s continued attempts to cut this film over the decades look particularly childish now the film’s available uncut. There was a continuing lack of appreciation of the film’s absurdist tone over a period of thirty years; the film’s gore isn’t pleasant, but it isn’t realistic either, and it’s successfully drowned out by all of the amateurish performances and intentionally bad dialogue.