Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits this week.

The Simpsons Movie (2007)

It ain’t what it used to be, but it’ll do.

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

In all of the fuss about Hong Kong action cinema in the 1990s with John Woo et al, and in the 2000s with Ang Lee et al, and how influential it’s been on modern cinema, and so on, and so forth, one film seems to have been unfairly forgotten. John Carpenter confirms on his great commentary track with Kurt Russell for this DVD that he was drawing direct from films like Zu Warriors of the Magic Mountain (1983). And away from the chop sockiness of it all, the film’s other big plus is Kurt Russell as Jack Burton, 80s action cinema’s most useless action hero, more liable to shoot his gun over his head, dislodge plaster from the ceiling, and knock himself out, than to engage the enemy in combat a la Sylvester Stallone as Rambo. Both of these elements mean the film plays more strongly today than it did 20 years ago when it died an undeserved death at the box office because Fox were unwilling to spend enough money on promotion to tell people the movie was out there.

Kissing Jessica Stein (2001)

Since Woody Allen had stopped making angsty, neurotic, romantic comedies about relationships in New York City by this time, two enterprising actresses keen to play in one decided to write their own, in which two angsty, neurotic women, sick to the back teeth with all of the useless men they’ve been dating/having meaningless sex with, decide they may as well check out what it’s like to play for the other team, if you know what I mean. Events follow a typically Allenesque path as the neuroses of one of the women comes to jeopardise the relationship just as surely as the neuroses of the characters in Allen’s films do. And being gay or just pretending to be gay or just trying it out(!) is no defence against it and may in fact be part of the problem. Somewhat inevitably, the question comes up: Are New Yorkers really so wrapped up in themselves, so self-conscious in their relationships, so obsessed with game playing and assuming roles, that they’re unable to relax into things and just go with it? Quite probably so.

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

And of course, the only movie ingredient better than lesbians is lesbian vampires. I think the first lesbian vampire movie was Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers (1970), and I think this film must have been a big hit all across Europe, because for the next decade, vampire cinema was dominated by lesbian vampires speaking every language in every country under the sun. These films range from the unwatchable Vampiros lesbos (1971) (proof that even naked lesbian vampires can provide no relief from a dull script and glacial pacing) to the entire career of French madman Jean Rollin to the low budget UK production Vampyres (1974) (which is engagingly nasty) to this, an art movie from Belgium that except for the slightest of generic horror movie references, might not even be a lesbian vampire movie at all. The cinematography recalls The Conformist (1970), the bleak end of season feel of Ostend and its cavernous unoccupied hotel looks forward to The Shining (1980), and there is something marvellously strange and perverse lurking in the shadows of this film. Two newlyweds meet some kind of countess and her female chauffeur, and strange attractions set them intertwining with each other.

Bitter Moon (1992)

And here is Roman Polanski’s remake of Daughters of Darkness. Well, not actually, but it has pretty much the same plot, as two couples are thrown together on a sea voyage and the various combinations work themselves out. All to a great mostly unreleased score from Vangelis. Hugh Grant is at the start of his ultimate embarrassed Englishman period, and whereas this got old very quickly in the endless series of poor romantic comedies he found himself locked into, here it provides welcome relief from the decadence of Peter Coyote’s doomed relationship with Emmanuelle Seigner (who is of course Polanski’s wife; Grant reports that they brought their marriage to the set – she would pretend Grant had used his tongue in kissing scenes with her just to wind Polanski up).