Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits this week.

Smokin’ Aces (2007)

Second films can be tricky, they can confirm the promise of the debut and hit one out of the park – a recent example would be Pulp Fiction (1994) – or they can lie there like a horrible mess bleeding to death, promising only that the filmmaker is going to have a really tough time making it to film number three – Lynne Ramsey’s Morvern Callar (2002) might be a good example here, except I really liked Morvern Callar; the problem is that almost nobody else did and her third film has yet to materialise. Joe Carnahan made a mini-splash with the excellent Narc (2002), a tough cop thriller like they used to make ‘em back in the 70s, released through Paramount at the personal instigation of Tom Cruise, which in turn led him to the director slot on Mission: Impossible III (2006) after David Fincher but before JJ Abrams. Creative differences reared their head and it’s taken Carnahan five years to make his second film. And… it isn’t that great. There is a ton, and I mean a ton, of plot and character exposition in the first half hour of the movie, the characters are basically a bunch of colourful lowlife scumbags (and that includes the FBI as well as the Mob guys), and while the violence has been expertly filmed, the movie’s rendered really rather meaningless in that none of it seems to matter, and Carnahan makes a fatal mistake in the plot denouement near the end where the plot’s MacGuffin is inadequately explained. Oops.

La Vie en Rose (2007)

Unlike a lot of recent biopics of musical performers, Olivier Dahan’s film takes a kaleidoscopic approch to Edith Piaf’s extraordinary life. Piaf suffered more heartbreak and disaster in any one year of her life than most of us would be unlucky enough to experience in our entire lifetimes. Accordingly, the film jumps around throughout the chronology of her life without paying attention to one of the deathly methods that can strangle a biopic at birth: introducing characters through clunky exposition along the lines of “Edith, here’s a lonely Frenchman in New York, he’s a boxer called Marcel Cerdan, you may remember he fought Jake LaMotta last year.” In this film, Piaf just meets Cerdan in a diner and we don’t necessarily know who he is. Whereas some may find this a minus, I found it very much a plus. We know how the other method of making a biopic works since we’ve seen it so many times, so why not try something different? If the film reminded me of anything, it reminded me of the films of Nicolas Roeg, and that is never a bad thing. Obviously, I bought the movie in the wake of Marion Cotillard’s Bafta and Oscar for Best Actress, and I have to say that the voters definitely got it right this year: Cotillard, who is yet another in the unending supply of beautiful French actresses, is fantastic in a role the quality of which she may never see again. And there’s the music; about halfway through I worked out where the film was heading at the end, and if you think about it a bit, you can work it out as well, but this didn’t spoil the film for me at all.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

Every bit as good as everybody said, and then funnier still. It’s not often that all of the deleted material could have been left in the film, but this film could have happily been 24 minutes longer. Except maybe sketch films should be short; the Pythons found that there would inevitably be a sag in the more sketchy of their films, and that there was almost nothing they could do about it. The only thing missing from the DVD is any information about how they did it, who was real and who wasn’t, and how the lawsuits are doing. The lack of behind the curtains material (and I can understand Baron Cohen’s reasons for not including any) is almost made up for by the sequence in the promotional reel that climaxes in a making the bed scene with Martha Stewart live on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno that is almost as good as the naked wrestling.

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.

Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *, and both of them were doozies. There may be some swearing at the expense of the noble film bookers of the cinema chains of the British Isles, who receive a firm telling-off for some There Will Be Blood related ineptitude.

Beowulf (2007) *

For the record, this was a screening of the film in 3D at the Imax in Birmingham. The majority of people reading this will never have read anything in Old English, never mind Beowulf, perhaps the most famous of ancient OE texts. Well, I have wrestled with Old English, but found the barrier of the language was getting in the way of any literary appreciation of the story, so I never took it any further than the first year of my three year English degree course. So that’s where Beowulf comes from, as filtered through the imaginations of writers Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, both perfect choices for the job as far as I’m concerned – I started reading The Sandman in single issues around the time of #15 and I have a lot of time for Avary, especially after The Rules of Attraction (2002). Made using the same elaborate motion capture process as The Polar Express (2004) and Monster House (2006), but now both more refined and more complicated (there are more dots on the actors in their blue suits, there are more mocap cameras, the space in which they can act is larger), the film looks incredible, more real than real, yet at the same time more fake than fake. The rationale for doing it this way is really quite simple: the story requires the characters to do things that real actors could not do, and to even attempt to get real actors close to what would be required in those scenes would be so expensive as to make the film unfilmable. Much better to fake it and know that you’re going to be not just fixing it but making the film in post production. There are also a ton of amusing 3D effects, more than a few of which are designed to dump a load of blood in your face, so thanks for that. And it has the best yet CGI dragon, better than the dragons in Reign of Fire (2002) – and they were pretty damn good dragons.

There Will Be Blood (2007) *

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2nd and 3rd films announced themselves with such authority after the low key start of his 1st that great things came to be expected of him, a situation he dealt with amusingly by engaging Adam Sandler to be in his 4th film, just to piss off film critics I expect. However, PTA’s problem was this: though lauded by critics, his films (with the possible exception of Boogie Nights (1997)) have not set the box office alight, and this, the 5th film, was as difficult to finance as all of the others have been. Thankfully, it was more than worth the effort. It more than reconfirms that Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the best actors on the planet and that his Robert De Niro in the 1970s attitude of taking gaps in between parts and waiting for the juicy stuff is absolutely the right one. I don’t have the words to describe how extraordinary his performance is, but I’m convinced there are a lot of actors out there who’ve watched this film who are a) realising that someone has raised the game for everybody else and b) filling in his name on their Oscar ballots. These days, the quality of film reviewing has declined so far that the word masterpiece is strewn about like so much confetti and attached to movies written by people who couldn’t even spell masterpiece without a spell checker. But that’s what this film is. A masterpiece. Go see it.

If you can find it that is, since the cunts who run cinema bookings in this country appear not to have booked enough prints of it to go around, when they’re perfectly content to book multiple copies of fucking shit like Rambo (2008) because it’s got that punch drunk old has been attached to it. Fuck you, cinema bookers, and the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. Ahem.

The Black Dahlia (2006)

Second viewings of films are funny things. It took me at least three screenings of The Matrix Reloaded (2003) before I realised that it was a good film after all, when I was able to have absorbed the plot and enough of the Architect’s dialogue to work out just what the film’s intentions were, or at least the intentions as they appeared to me. And once you know a film is good, you tend not to revise that opinion unless you see the film 20 years later and realise you were mistaken. That may happen with the two Matrix sequels, but at the moment I’m confident enough in their brilliance to assert that they can’t be released on Blu-Ray soon enough.

Now the first cinema screening of The Black Dahlia was unsatisfactory, and not because I was sat next to someone crunching popcorn or slurping a giant Coke or using their mobile. I’m a big James Ellroy fan, and have even briefly met the man twice. But there was an awful lot of plot in James Ellroy’s original and brilliant novel, and although screenwriter Josh Friedman did a man’s job of reducing the amount of plot for the film, there was still an awful lot of plot in Brian De Palma’s finished film to get past before you can start seeing whether or not the film works as a whole. Things that pop out, like Hilary Swank’s curious English accent, or the ages of the protagonists (some people thought Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson too young for their parts) tend to magnify in that situation.

So it is with some relief that I can report that these first screening impressions were mistaken. Once the plot complications have been sorted out in your head, the strengths of the performances and the camerawork and the production design and the costumes and the music and the direction start to come to the fore. Brian De Palma has made a decidedly old school film with a lot of longish takes and sweeping camerawork and not that much editing, as well as a couple of Untouchables (1987) style set pieces and some disconcerting switches in tone. The second screening of The Black Dahlia reveals that the film hangs together a lot better than it did first time around.

And that’s not always the case. The second screening can end with you asking yourself: so why did I buy this on DVD? It doesn’t work. Oh dear.

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *.

Juno (2007) *

One of the criticisms of this film I’ve come across is that all of the characters seem to speak their dialogue with the same voice, as if all of them have been written by the same person, which is in fact the case. What I find interesting is that I don’t recall this criticism  being directed at, say, Woody Allen, Kevin Smith or James Cameron, all of whom have a distinct authorial voice that comes across in their dialogue. Of course, they’re all men, and the screenwriter of Juno is Diablo Cody, who happens to be a woman. Interesting, eh? What’s most admirable about the film is that it takes its TV Movie of the Week subject matter (downscale underage pregnant teen acts as surrogate for upscale yuppies) and plays absolutely nothing for mawkish sentimentality and concentrates instead on utter realism and big laughs. What’s probably responsible for the film’s success is its positive attitude and unpatronising approach to and contempt for serious issues. In the same way that Richard Linklater was the perfect man to direct The School of Rock (2003) because he had no interest in making a kids movie, so Juno the film has no interest in melodrama and just wants to get on with life.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)

There is a disconnect between the relative plot coherence of the movie and its chaotic production schedule as detailed in an excellent hour long documentary on Disc 2 that is as good as the similar piece on The Phantom Menace (1999) DVD. They started the film without a finished script and could have ended up with a disaster like Alien 3 (1992). And somehow they didn’t.

The Fly (1986)

Dead Man’s Chest is awfully long and probably could have done with at least half an hour of running time trimming from it. In direct contrast, The Fly runs a very lean 96 minutes (or 92 on DVD here in PAL land) with every ounce of excessive fat having been carefully pruned away from it. Throughout the two and three quarter hour documentary on Disc 2, none of the extra footage and unused shots and deleted scenes and strange concepts look like they belong in the movie. The Fly is about as perfect as filmmaking gets, a film where no scene goes to waste, no line of dialogue is without its place or point, and where its haunting emotional wallop will stay with you forever. I’ve probably written this before, but Martin Scorsese, widely reckoned to be the greatest living North American film director, thinks David Cronenberg is a better director than he, Scorsese, will ever be. And The Fly may not even be Cronenberg’s best film, though it is the one time in his career when he had an unashamed popular success and a real opportunity to smuggle a lot of tough ideas into the mainstream.

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.

Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

The Golden Compass (2007) *

As I’m currently reading the His Dark Materials trilogy for the first time, it seemed like the right moment to nip to the cinema and catch New Line’s filmization of the first book in the sequence. I was deeply impressed. Who knew that Chris Weitz had a film like this in him after American Pie (1999) and About a Boy (2002)? Those two films were competent but only slightly surprising and certainly no standouts. No wonder Weitz walked off the project once, daunted by the technical challenges, but thank God (that’s a His Dark Materials in-joke by the way) he came back to finish what he started. The only blip in the continuation of the series is its dismal non-performance at the American box office. However, the film has done really well worldwide, and hopefully New Line will figure out some ingenious way to promote the film on DVD in the States and allow it to find its audience. Although it may look like a children’s film, it is so not, it’s about as deeply adult and disconcerting as fantasy films can get, and it knocks CS Lewis into a cocked hat, which is where he and the rest of his wretched Christian brethren belong.

Blade Runner (1982) *

For the record, this was the Final Cut version of the film, projected digitally. As magnificent as Blade Runner now looks on DVD (see previous post), this spanking new cleaned up digital version on a big screen with a decent sound system is simply overwhelming. Vangelis’ score has real presence, the special effects look better than CGI, and the subtlety of the performances and the great craft of the direction really come to the fore. The other thing, even though Golden Compass was coming to the end of its run, the cinema wasn’t crowded at all, but the Blade Runner screening was packed.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

So it takes Richard Linklater and Bob Sabiston’s proprietary rotoscoping software to bring Philip K Dick to the cinema really for the first time, reasonably undiluted and very out there. Maybe what a Philip K Dick adaptation needed was an approach as extreme as Dick’s own approach to science fiction, and it certainly gets it in spades here. Filmed in Austin, Texas, in the summer of 2004, it took 18 months to essentially reanimate the film frame by frame to deliver the final product. The blur suit, especially, would be a challenge even in CGI, but the approach here, halfway towards a comic book, works better than CGI would. A Scanner Darkly is an edgy, paranoid, very political film about drugs and the people who consume them and are consumed by them and the people who let people consume them for twisted purposes of their own.

Total Recall (1990)

The other kind of Philip K Dick adaptation is this beauty with its slam bang direction and driving Jerry Goldsmith score, which uses one or two ideas from We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and then has Arnold Schwarzenegger beat people up Dutch judo style, when he’s not shooting them in the head and delivering pithy quips, or using dead bodies as shields. By the way, the scene in the hotel room where the head of Rekall arrives to tell Arnold he’s living out a fantasy while suffering from a schizoid embolism is real; Arnold plants the “giveaway” sweat on the Rekall director’s head because he doesn’t want the fantasy to end; and the final fade to white, after Arnold has got the girl, killed the bad guys, and saved the entire planet, is a symbol of his ultimate lobotomy. And then he became Governor of California. Sorry, but can someone pinch me every time I read this or see this? Because it can’t be real, can it?

No cinema visits this week. Instead, I made the most of my Blade Runner box set Christmas present and watched the same movie five times in a row.

The Workprint (1982)

Disc 5 contains a 70mm version of Blade Runner that was used for test screenings before all of Vangelis’ score had been completed and before the voiceover panic had begun (even though the Workprint ends with a small piece of voiceover that was provided by one of the film’s screenwriters as opposed to the dreadful stuff long time Blade Runner fans have had to suffer through, which would appear to have been written by someone the producers met at a party). I don’t believe test screenings run by studios have ever made a good film better; what they have done is turned films that might have had a shot at artistic greatness into films that made a lot of money and were forgotten within a couple of years. Test screenings run by the filmmakers themselves would appear to be more successful; the Pythons were pretty systematic in conducting their own private tests so as to judge more effectively what worked and what didn’t in the comedy of their films. The results of the Blade Runner tests are well known: the imposition of the voiceover since the claim was that people didn’t know what was going on. Except that the voiceover is so bad that it doesn’t solve the  problem that didn’t exist in the first place. The intent with Blade Runner’s release 5 weeks after E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) was to mop up a lot of money with a big summer opening as a consequence of the budget overruns inevitable in a project of such scope and vision. Had Blade Runner been released at Christmas 1982, everything might have been very different. Memories of the production differ on the details. The memories that provide an emotional foundation for the replicants turn out to be elusive in the humans who made the film in deciding who made what decision or wrote what piece of dialogue.

The US Version (1982)

Science fiction writer William Gibson had only had a few short stories published in 1982 when he saw Blade Runner for the first time, but it would probably be fair to say that his breakthrough first novel Neuromancer (1984) existed in some form at that time. Gibson was initially distraught at what Ridley Scott had achieved. Right there on the screen was a vision of the future which William Gibson shared and had been writing about for a number of years on his own. There was the grime, the smoke, the rain, the decay, the mix of cultures, the artificial life debate, it was all there. However, at the end of the screening, Gibson realised that he had a card up his sleeve which hadn’t turned up anywhere in Blade Runner, and that card was cyberspace. So Gibson was able to see Neuromancer to publication and change science fiction forever, much to the horror of a number of science fiction purists around the world. Joanne Cassidy has a tattoo of a snake on her neck, a detail I have never noticed before, and I’ve seen Blade Runner more than any other film. What other details remain locked away in Blade Runner, lurking at the corners of the screen, impatient to be let out and revealed?

The International Version (1982)

It’s just slightly more violent than the original US release. The voiceover is really horrible and really indefensible. What’s offensive about it is pretty clear: all it does is tell us something we already know and can already see on the screen contained in the settings and the performances of the actors. It is one of the great redundancies of modern cinema, and feeds into my pet theory (which I may have picked up from someone else but never mind I’m going to pretend it’s mine) about the absence of that Vangelis soundtrack on Polydor that was never released in 1982 even though it’s promised in the end credits. Vangelis’ wonderfully ambiguous statement about this, that he “found himself unable to release the soundtrack” at the time is, I think, connected with the way in which the voiceover is used to bury some of the most beautiful parts of his score. This, and the endless messing about that went on, did, I think, contribute to the soundtrack’s absence in 1982. The visual effects have a stateliness and beauty that CGI has not as yet been able to achieve. This may have something to do with the pace of the film, which is slower than the fast cut bullshit being churned out at the moment, which serves only to deceive the mind and conceal the inadequacies of the filmmakers.

The Director’s Cut (1992)

In the wake of the 70mm screenings of the Workprint, Warner Bros realised they might have a money maker on their hands again, and commissioned a creation of a director’s cut at a time when Ridley Scott was embroiled in production on 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) and unable to give it his full attention. Elements could not be traced, all of the unicorn footage could not be found, but the voiceover could be removed as could the ridiculous happy ending and something resembling a director’s cut could be assembled. It was close but no cigar. The omission of the voiceover gave the film more space, and the introduction of the unicorn produced what I think may be the great MacGuffin of Blade Runner, the question of whether or not Deckard is a replicant. Ridley Scott is convinced he is, Paul M Sammon, on set journalist and author of Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, maintains that in the director’s cut Deckard is a replicant, Harrison Ford never played Deckard as a replicant, and Frank Darabont turns up in one of the supplements to maintain that if Deckard is a replicant, the film doesn’t really make any sense, and has in effect ceased to be true to itself. Blade Runner may be a film about a human who has lost touch with humanity, and can only be reintroduced to it by artificial beings who are more alive than he is, and who both save his life and offer to love him, when his other humans only see him as a killing machine without a soul.

The Final Cut (2007)

When I first got into DVD in 1999, Blade Runner in its Director’s Cut form had already been released in the UK, but I had already encountered internet forums and discussions with the people at Warner Home Video in the States where it became pretty apparent that the 20th anniversary of Blade Runner was only three years away and they were already working on a Special Edition DVD. Which didn’t appear in 2002. The legal issues that prevented this appear to stem from the circumstances of the original production back in 1982, where the budget overran, and Jerry Perenchio and Bud Yorkin became contractually entitled to more rights over the project than they would have done if Blade Runner had come in under budget, and hadn’t been the film of ambition and scope which it is. In the meantime, I wasn’t going to waste my money on a Blade Runner DVD that would be superceded by the coming Special Edition. So it has been, I have to say, a long fucking wait to own what is my favourite film on DVD. The Final Cut fixes a lot of what could not be fixed back in 1982, the wires on the spinners, Joanna Cassidy’s obvious stunt double, the “lip flap” in the snake merchant scene and so on. The scale of the film remains surprisingly intimate, a callback perhaps to an earlier version of the script where everything took place only in interiors. Ridley Scott’s desire to look outside the window and render that world using special effects led to some of my favourite scenes on film: I could watch forever the initial approach to police headquarters, the camera rotating over the building one way while the spinner rotates another. And if I’m really lucky, I might be able to see the Final Cut in a cinema next week. So yes, a little more Blade Runner to come.

No cinema visits this week.

The Man with Two Brains (1983)

If I have a soft spot for Woody Allen’s earlier, funnier work (and I do, hell, I think we all do), then I REALLY have a soft spot for Steve Martin’s earlier, funnier work. Steve Martin’s career started going downhill for me when he started taking not especially comedic parts in more mainstream movies than the low budget masterpieces he made alongside Carl Reiner. Parenthood (1989) pretty much marks the beginning of the end and Martin has only every now and then been willing to demonstrate the comedy chops that brought him respect in the first place. For every Bowfinger (1999), there’s been five pieces of execrable garbage like Sgt. Bilko (1996), the kind of unforgiveable mistake that makes one hope Martin isn’t a Buddhist since he’s going to be paying for that one on the old karmic wheel for all eternity if he is. Brains comes from the earlier, funnier period of Martin’s film career, and is, if anything, even funnier today than it was in 1983.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

As is this, which is a screening inspired by my current reading of Michael Palin’s Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years. One of the reasons the film works is the authenticity of the medieval background, although even here there are differences of opinion. For instance, every cast member and extra has had their teeth blackened and yellowed in tribute to the years before dentistry, but they were also the years before sugar, and there is evidence that a lot of people in this period had perfectly good teeth. Whatever, the medieval background feels right and is taken seriously by the filmmakers, and this allows them to take nothing else seriously at all. It’s interesting to note that John Cleese, despite his great comedy brain, felt that all this emphasis on shit and discomfort and knitted chainmail was getting in the way of the comedy, when in fact these were precisely the details that made the comedy work.

Titanic (1997)

So here we are ten years later and despite all the absolute works of genius that have been released in the interim, this wretched and despised hulk of schmaltz and bad screenwriting sits irritatingly atop the all time box office charts in the majority of countries around the world, sneering at all the Lord of the Ringses and Star Warses that have followed in its wake and been unable to top it for all around audience appeal. Has any recent film been so despised by men of a certain age, and male media people, and male posters on the internet? Here is a film that is sneered at, regarded with contempt and dismissed as an aberration, as if making a film that appealed to me and men like me not afraid to let the film in, young women, women in general and people over fifty all around the world were some kind of gross sin. As someone who saw Titanic FOUR TIMES in the cinema when it was released in the UK in 1998 and has loved it ever since, I am annoyed by this male hate. Titanic is not a film without flaws, nor is it a work of great art, but it spoke to people worldwide, and in the kind of cinema attendance numbers not seen since Gone with the Wind (1939). David M Lubin has written a rather excellent BFI Modern Classic on the film that does a much better job of defending the film than I have here, and he’s as aware of the film’s shortcomings as anyone is. For me, the film only really ups gears when the iceberg hits around 90 minutes in, and becomes the No.1 blockbuster in its second half that it certainly didn’t promise to be in the first, which is still mired in hokey irony, the Picasso incident, and too many references to the unsinkable ship that rather inevitably attracted the satirists of The Onion: World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg, Titanic Representation Of Man’s Hubris Sinks In North Atlantic and 1,500 Dead In Symbolic Tragedy. And yet as I cringe through Titanic’s opening, I’m reminded that Aliens (1986) works in exactly the same way, where, for almost an hour, an unbearably tense atmosphere of fear and suspense is worked up. Titanic takes the time it needs to establish the world it’s going to tear apart later.

No posts for three weeks and no cinema visits either. As is traditional in these parts, I’ve taken a Christmas break from watching films and have instead been reading books and watching DVD extras instead.

Boogie Nights (1997)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s sophomore film still astonishes with its virtuosity. I’ve yet to track down Legs McNeil’s harsh book about the realities of porn production in America in the 70s, but even in the John Holmes bio on the 2nd disc of Wonderland, there are hints that a very much rose-tinted view of the era is being presented here. Until the 1980s arrive, of course, and it all goes to hell in a handbasket. The clips of John Holmes talking to camera and defending porn are as hilarious as Mark Wahlberg’s deft impersonation of them (of course, Wahlberg had access to this material, as did Anderson, which allows them to recreate the “blocking the sex scenes” incident almost verbatim).

Wonderland (2003)

John Holmes was the kind of gleaming narcissist that actors of a certain type find immensely attractive, and Val Kilmer was absolutely the right choice to portray Holmes in this account of the Wonderland murders in which he may or may not have had a significant role. Since the travails of the porn industry had messed with his charismatic, dissembling, compulsively lying psyche, Holmes had a fresh story to tell about them to anyone who would listen. The truth was sacrificed, and no one has served any prison time for the murders. Wonderland is a tough good watch, and is successful on an artistic level rather than a financial one. The most startling moment comes with the introduction of Eric Bogosian as Eddie Nash, where it seems he has been styled after Alfred Molina’s Rahad Jackson in Boogie Nights. Or is it the other way around? Since Rahad Jackson is the fictional counterpart of Eddie Nash. The Region 1 DVD also includes the sobering half hour LAPD crime scene walkthrough video shot in 1981 with the bodies still in place, which may be more reality than any casual fan of the kitsch of 70s porn may want to face.

For Your Consideration (2006)

The take on this film is that it wasn’t quite as great as previous efforts from the team, and a little too “inside” for mainstream tastes. I don’t know, though, a lot of it seemed awfully funny to me on a first viewing, and I was certainly noticing enough bits that looked like they’d be even funnier next time through, the sure sign of a comedy for the ages rather than a comedy for right now.

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).