Calvary (John Michael McDonagh, 2014): Trying to be a Good Man

SHORT NOTES

Calvary is a brilliant, powerful film. I've seen some people complaining about there not being enough comedy in it. But this is not like The Guard at all, it's a serious and disturbing drama. I laughed a couple of times but they were black, black laughs. What got to me most was the whole atmosphere of disrespect for the priest played by Brendan Gleeson. He's such a decent man, but his parishioners seem to have nothing but contempt for him. The picture it paints of Ireland is an exaggeration for sure but I know plenty of Irish people who are a bit similar to the characters here, doing anything they can to prove they're not under the thumb of the church. And I don't think I've ever seen a film that made me feel so sorry for its leading man. To me it said something profoundly moving about trying to be good in a modern world where it's fashionable to sneer at goodness, and everyone is supposed to just be concerned with their own pleasure (and where the Catholic church as a whole is mocked and despised because of a small percentage of bad priests). I've noticed that the reviews of the film outside Ireland have been much stronger than those inside it. I wonder if people there are offended by the bleak picture it paints of their country. But to me that side of it is immaterial. I don't take it as representative. All I care about is that as DRAMA it's astonishing.

Jack Reacher (2012): The Joys of Generic Entertainment

The night before I saw Jack Reacher I watched Beyond the Hills, Christian Mungiu‘s follow up to the excellent 4 months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and I know as a serious movie-watcher I was supposed to like it more than the latest so-called trashy Tom Cruise flick, but to be honest I didn’t. Jack Reacher is the more enjoyable and satisfying movie. As with Bruce Willis, I think Cruise is an action star who often does good work; I even liked the much-maligned Knight and Day. This film is another example of that good work. It’s forgettable maybe, but as entertainment it delivers. 

In fact it starts with a horrifying multiple shooting of random people strolling on a riverbank and at first I was afraid it was going to be one of those nihilistic films that rub our faces in senseless violence. But it turned out to be more thoughtful than most thrillers about the consequences of violence. A man named Barr, who fought with Reacher (Cruise) in Iraq, seems to have committed these murders and Rosamund Pike plays defense attorney Helen Rodin, who wants to stop Barr from getting the death penalty. Reacher agrees to help her only on condition that she visits the victims’ families and there’s one well-played, very affecting scene where she interviews a deeply grieving father and his feelings unnerve her. 

Pike is the main female star of the film and hopefully this will be a role that brings her to the attention of a lot more people, because she has a refreshing, bright-eyed, open look about her that works well on screen. I didn’t know who she was until I looked her up online and found out she was a Londoner and was in another film I saw recently, Barney’s Version, where she’s the object of Paul Giametti's affection and you can quite understand why he’s crazy about her.

There are a few weaknesses and weird things about Jack Reacher. There’s one scene here where Cruise is attacked in a bathroom and it’s so absurd that it’s kind of jarring. The two guys doing the attacking get in each other’s way and end up hitting each other more than their target; we suddenly seem to be in a Keystone Cops movie. Another thing I found a bit off-putting was Werner Herzog’s performance as the main bad guy. He’s fine as long as he doesn’t speak; with his spooky eye and his missing fingers (he himself gnawed them off in a Siberian prison) he looks suitably menacing. But as soon as he opened his mouth all I could think of was the avuncular real-life Herzog. His voice is so distinctive, and so well-known from his documentaries and interviews, that I fear now he’d have to do something radically different with that voice to make audiences believe him as a fictional character. And there are some scenes in the movie that are generic and deflating: the way Reacher is introduced with shots from behind which pump him up as a mysterious figure, or the final battle, especially the fist-fight Reacher has with the man who really killed all those innocent people.

But at other times the writing is quite clever. A bar-fight with five guys at first seems like a too obvious set-up to show what a whiz Reacher is at hand-to-hand combat, but then it’s revealed it is actually a set-up - not by the film-makers, but by Reacher’s enemies. Apart from the motivations given to the bad guys - the stated reasons seem a bit weak considering all the mayhem they cause - the film is well-written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the writer of The Usual Suspects. It’s not quite as good as that film but it’s more than a respectable effort. The way the police put together all the clues that lead them to Barr is shown in a wonderfully economical way: it does in 2 minutes what most films would take 10 to do. The main plot about how Barr is framed for the riverside killings and how Reacher and Helen gradually figure out the truth, is well done. And there’s a nice final scene where she gets her DA dad (Richard Jenkins) to see that truth.

There’s an interesting, almost Oriental quietness to some of the confrontations between Reacher’s character and the bad guys. He is a bit of a Samurai. Not only does he play that movie cliché, the quiet man who does not seek violence but if pushed too far can more than handle himself, he keeps warning people that they’re not suited to the violent world he inhabits and should get out. He’s almost a peace advocate. You could say this was just a typical Hollywood ploy, with the film-makers wanting to have their cake and eat it, wanting to condemn violence but show it too, but it’s all in the way you do it, I guess, and I found it worked better here than in a film like Drive, which got far more praise as an ‘existential thriller’. 

There’s a decent car-chase in Jack Reacher involving a revved-up sports car that also reminded me of Drive and made me wonder again why that film got so much love from critics. Having seen his underwhelming Danish film Pusher I wasn’t as excited as many others seemed to be when Nicholas Winding Refn made his American debut (maybe they were excited because they’d only heard how good Pusher was supposed to be) and for me the film in general and the car chases in particular didn’t live up the hype. Salt with Angelina Jolie, for example, was a far better thriller that got far less love. And Jack Reacher is at least on a par with Drive. It's no masterpiece but some of the negative reviews it got were undeserved.

Deconstructing Harry (1997): A Calm Man Gets Angry

Woody Allen of course has made many films that pay homage to his favourite director, Ingmar Bergman. Interiors is like one of Bergman’s ultra-serious chamber pieces of the 70’s, Cries and Whispers or Face to Face. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy pays tribute to Smiles of A Summer Night, and so on. Deconstructing Harry has obvious similarities to Wild Strawberries: it’s centred on a road trip with a motley bunch of people accompanying an old man to receive an academic honour. The countryside they drive through could easily be Swedish countryside and at one point novelist Harry Block (Allen) even hunches over the steering wheel with a haggard look that may remind you of Victor Sjostrom in the earlier film.

Deconstructing Harry is a very autumnal movie - not only in its weather and temporal setting, but in its interior design and costuming: dark reds and oranges and browns and beiges. We start off with Judy Davis who, as she seems to have done in so many other Allen films, plays a woman coming apart at the seams, betrayed and badly used by his character. In the main narrative there’s a surprising sudden death from natural causes, a kidnapping of sorts and a resulting arrest, and Allen and Billy Crystal fighting over Elisabeth Shue. There’s a great scene where Kirstie Alley as Harry’s one-time psychiatrist wife discovers his infidelity: a patient arrives at that moment and she tries to treat him, but she can’t concentrate, so he sits alone on the couch and listens in fright as she keeps on going outside to scream obscenities at her contemptible husband. And there’s Hazelle Goodman’s striking Amazonian figure in pink hot pants clashing with the whitebread world of Harry’s sister (Eric Borgosian is that sister’s gnarly, ultra-orthodox Jewish husband) and the Ivy League college they end up at. Goodman plays Cookie, a prostitute Harry hires the night before the trip and who ends up along for the ride; she steals the show from the many other more well-known actors (who also include Mariel Hemingway, Amy Irving, Demi Moore and Robin Williams).

The main narrative is interspersed with vignettes from Harry’s books which focus on characters who are him in earlier life, or thinly disguised versions of him (played by Richard Benjamin, Tobey Maguire and Stanley Tucci). In one of them Maguire spends a night with an Oriental hooker who blows his mind, but he has to pay a hilariously heavy price for his ‘sin’ due to a case of mistaken identity. There’s a brilliant scene when Robin Williams starts suffering from being out of focus (and it’s funny when the same thing affects Harry himself later on) and another where a couple have furtive sex standing up in a parlour while having a conversation with a blind, oblivious old woman.

Things get mixed up and sometimes you may forget what’s reality, what’s from the books, and what’s pure fantasy. Eventually Block starts meeting some of the characters he’s created, conversing with them, learning from them. At one point Demi Moore, playing the novelised version of the Kirstie Alley character, takes Block to observe his sister and what she really says about him when he’s not there: the two of them stand in the same room but somehow they’re ‘invisible’, in the same way characters in Annie Hall (and Wild Strawberries) were. There is also a wonderful sequence when an old woman discovers a terrible and ridiculous secret about her husband of 30 years, plus a funny trip through hell (with great production design/art direction courtesy of Santo Loquasto and Tom Warren ) set to Benny Goodman’s ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’. And there's sharp humour throughout the film (Harry’s sister: “You have no values...your whole life...it's nihilism, it's cynicism, it's sarcasm and orgasm.”/ Harry: “You know in France I could run on that slogan and win.”)

This film sees Allen angrier than usual, and cruder too: there’s a lot of swearing in it. He seems like a misanthropic old man at the start, a nasty misogynistic old man even. Celebrity (1998), a companion piece to Deconstructing Harry, also had elements like this: scenes that seemed to express violent feelings towards women, which were only partially defused by humour. A while ago I wrote a review of Seven Psychopaths in which I said the film’s tone seemed ‘off’ because it did things like refer to women as ‘c**ts’, and Deconstructing Harry also does that once or twice. But to me I could accept it more here exactly because it wasn’t done casually, as a throwaway joke; it was pointing up how frustrated this old man has become with the world, that he has to use such violent language to express himself.

The film’s tone is a strange mixture. It’s intensely critical of Harry yet determined to explain and humanise him too. That creates a tension that keeps the audience on its toes. We’re constantly told: jeez, this guy is a terrible, terrible human being, he’s so selfish and unreliable, he cheats on every woman he’s with…but hey the world is such a fucked-up, unfair, crazy place and he’s doing his best, it’s not exactly easy for him either. (From another director we care less about, this line of reasoning wouldn’t work, but because it’s Woody, some of us at least are liable to sympathise). The film is close to the bone in suggesting similarities between Harry Block and Allen himself - or rather the reputation Allen had after the Soon Yi Previn scandal. And Harry's an angry character, but there's also real anger underlying the film, coming from the creator. I think it's anger at the way he was vilified in the press for that relationship with Soon-Yi. So he created this nasty womaniser partly in a huff, saying 'well you all think I'm a monster anyway, I may as well be one on screen'. And partly it's as if he's saying 'This is what a real misogynist looks like and do you really think that I'm the same? Are you really that dim?'

This was Allen’s best film since Hannah and Her Sisters and stands amongst his very best works ever, alongside Play It Again, Sam, Sleeper, Annie Hall, Match Point, and a few others. It’s spiky and full of energy. There are a lot of jump-cuts in some sections of the film, to give it a punchy feel: the director seems riled at the world. But Allen keeps hitting you with one great scene after another as if he were determined to make art replace anger. He succeeds wonderfully and makes most other films look drab by comparison. Deconstructing Harry works so well because after the sour opening scenes, the other parts of the film show us a great humanist, and suggest that Harry/Woody doesn’t want to be angry, is in fact trying to escape the anger life has foisted upon him. Famous for his self-obsessive characters, he is in fact too interested in telling stories about other people - this film has about ten great examples - to be really misanthropic or nasty. And after years of Allen being criticised for focusing on a rich white elite, the role Hazelle Goodman plays in the film is fascinating I think, a great riposte to those critics. Some may still complain because his one black character is a prostitute, but I think the honest sympathetic relationship Block has with her, and the matter-of-fact way he takes her into his white world, and the role she plays in humanising and calming him, more than make up for that. In the end all that matters is making connections and bringing people together.

For 88 screenshots from the film, click here

The Hit (1984): Gangsters and Sunshine

I hope anyone who liked Jonathan Glazer’s great 2001 film Sexy Beast has also seen Stephen Frears’ great 1984 film The Hit. In the former Ray Winstone plays a British gangster in hiding in Spain. The calm is shattered when Ben Kingsley, as a terrifying psychopath, arrives to bring him back to London against his will. Back in 1984, however, a very similar scenario had been played out. In Frears' film, Terence Stamp is the British gangster in hiding in Spain, and the calm is shattered when two menacing hoodlums (John Hurt and Tim Roth) arrive to kidnap him and take him to Paris to be executed. And probably The Hit was an influence on more people than just Jonathan Glazer. You can imagine Tarantino watching it and recognising that Tim Roth would be perfect for Reservoir Dogs, or Steven Soderbergh seeing it and picturing Terence Stamp as The Limey.

There’s a funny scene at the start of the film, set in the early 70’s, 10 years before the main action (Stamp’s kipper tie jumps out of the screen and the policemen guarding him are so gaudily dressed they’d give Cleopatra Jones a run for her money). In court, when Stamp is asked to rat out his former criminal compatriots, he seems so blasé and helpfully polite to the prosecutor, it’s almost like he’s been smoking something. Then the scene is topped off in truly surreal fashion when the criminals, lined up in the dock, do a very menacing version of ‘We’ll Meet Again’ as Stamp is led away.  

Apart from this scene, the film looks like it was all shot at the height of the Spanish summer, and the cinematography by John A. Alonzo and Mike Molloy captures the mood very well: it’s too hot, and the environment is always misty and dusty and exhausting. One minor quibble I had: Fernando Rey plays the head of the police-team tracking the kidnapping party across Spain, following their trail of destruction and dead bodies, and he and his men have probably no more than ten words to say in the entire film. We’re shown them turning up at the scene of every violent incident, questioning people in long-shot, pointing at things, gesturing, and we hear an incomprehensible mutter on the soundtrack. It gets a bit pantomimish after a while. It’s fair enough that we concentrate on the car with Stamp in it, and not get distracted by the police scenes, but surely they could have given Rey a few lines of dialogue? (It’s as if they were scared to include even one minute of subtitled screen-time). As it is, he’s like a silent figure in a shadow-play, and he must have wondered why they’d employed him, because someone much less experienced, and presumably cheaper, could have done the exact same thing.

It’s a film that relies heavily on its plot to keep us interested, and that plot is nicely unpredictable. (It was written by Peter Prince). Right from the start, when four young Spanish punks - rather than two British gangsters - burst into Stamp’s house to kidnap him, the film wrong-foots you. There are many moments when you think someone is safe, but then they’re not, or vice-versa. The scenes in the Madrid apartment with the Australian who shouldn’t be there are very tense and amongst the best in the film. Another gripping scene is late in the film at a gas station; it’s the first time we actually get to see a shooting, and it’s brutal and cold-blooded and throws you as a viewer. You realise that you’d almost begun to think of Hurt and Roth as good guys, and started to believe this could end happily for everyone. You have to admit you were wrong.

This was Tim Roth’s debut and it’s a great one. He’s got dyed blonde hair and he’s so much younger and nastier-looking than the guy we know now from things like Lie to Me, where he’s rather cuddly by comparison. Here he’s an authentically callow thug and the scene in the rural bar where he attacks four young locals for no reason is perhaps the clearest evidence of his moronic mentality. On the other hand - and this is to the film’s credit - he’s also kind of sympathetic, mainly because he has a soft spot for Laura Del Sol’s character, who’s a beautiful Spanish girl whom they kidnap and who ends up with Hurt’s gun pointed at her temples several times (Del Sol had become famous the year before in the lead role of Carlos Saura‘s film, Carmen).

There’s a lot of talk throughout the film about accepting death, always from the mouth of Stamp, who’s portrayed as a very serene and bookish fellow. I wouldn’t make any great claims for it as philosophy: it could have done with being a bit more bookish, and maybe he could have told us what a few great writers over the centuries have said about this subject. But he does come out with one nice line about the chemical processes of life and death being basically the same, so why do we get so worked up about the shift between the two? And it does give a nice feel to his character and the film, as both Hurt and Roth are mystified that he’s so unphased by it all, that he doesn’t run away when he has the chance. He even fixes their car for them when it breaks down. It gets on their nerves, because they want him to be scared. In the end he is scared, but it’s for strange reasons; it’s not so much his own murder he objects as the timing of it. Finally, the unpredictability of the characters in this film even gets to him.

La Strada (1954): Fellini’s Wife's Masterpiece

It’s above all Giulietta Masina’s performance that makes Federico Fellini’s 1954 work La Strada one of the greatest films ever made. The temperament of her character, Gelsomina, is beguilingly child-like. She’s constantly moving between extremes of sadness and happiness. Though she talks often, you notice also the many scenes where she seems to be in her own little silent movie, which is appropriate enough since there’s something very Chaplinesque about her. While other characters in the movie converse or go about their noisy business, she looks on with a beatific smile, like a proud mother to the whole world. At least that’s what she’d like to be. The tragedy of her situation is that the world doesn’t want her mothering. In fact it treats her more like an infant whom you can safely ignore.

And let’s not forget Anthony Quinn, because this is also his best film, and he also gives a magnificently honest, raw performance. He’s the strongman performer, with limited talents and a boorish nature, who hires Gelsomina and spends the film treating her badly. There’s a snowbound 15 or 20 minutes of the film near the end where he seems as pathetically sad and lonesome as his clapped-out old motorcycle mobile-home looks when set against the landscape. Richard Basehart, also good, has the third major role in the film, but he’s only there in a way to act as a catalyst to developments in the love-hate relationship between the other two.

If you’ve never seen La Strada before, you may find the music eerily reminiscent of something you know well. It’s very similar to the score of The Godfather, not in its actual tunes but in its instrumentation and feel. When Gelsomina plays a lovely mournful tune on a trumpet at a convent the echoes are particularly strong. But this is no co-incidence: the scores of both films were done by Nino Rota. The cinematography is by Otello Martelli and Carlo Carlini. It’s just wonderful in every way. You can see 88 screenshots from the film here. I especially like the shots filmed in the half-light of dawn or dusk.

La Strada is a road movie (the title means ‘The Road’) and the characters are constantly moving on, so the pacing of the film works well. We never stay long in one place and we never get bored. I also love the setting. It’s mostly rural, with a few scenes in Rome and the ‘flat scrubby countryside with occasional tower blocks’ look of Italy at that time seemed very different from that of any other country. There was something elemental and mythical to it. (Or maybe it was just the way the DPs shot it. I’m thinking of Fellini films but also some of Antonioni’s works from the 50’s and Pasolini’s Accattone. Even when I don’t like them much as movies, I appreciate their landscapes).

Masina (Fellini’s wife) was also the heart and soul of another one of his best films, Nights of Cabiria (1957), which had a slow beginning but a very powerful second half. It’s a shame that after that she didn’t appear in more of his films, only Juliet of the Spirits (1965) and Ginger and Fred (1986), neither of them anywhere near his best work. In the 50’s at least she seemed to be the soulful counterpoint that he needed. La Strada is certainly his greatest film (it’s his most heartfelt and human) and both it and Nights are superior to La Dolce Vita and 8½. Those movies initially impress because they have some spectacular individual scenes, but after you watch them a second or third time you realise the characters and stories are pretty thin.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012): Good Film, Poor Casting

For a slightly disappointing film, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has a lot of great moments. The film got rather mixed reviews but the action scenes, the special effects, and the conjuring of a magical atmosphere are as good as anything in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It falls down however on the casting and the characters (and occasionally the dialogue). A lot of people complained about the first 40 minutes of The Hobbit, in which we’re introduced to all the dwarves as they arrive at Bilbo Baggins’ house, much to his chagrin since they’re an unruly lot, uninvited by him. It’s true this sequence could have been cut by 10 minutes or so. But to me it wasn’t the main problem of the film.

That honour unfortunately goes to Richard Armitage, who plays Thorin, leader of the Dwarves. Surely I’m not the only one who kept on comparing him to Viggo Mortensen in the earlier films, and found him singularly lacking? With their long dark hair and beards, they’re physically very similar, and if Thorin was supposed to be a dwarf, he was a very tall-looking one. Plus they play the same role - leader of a pack on a mission. I doubt if Tolkien’s original book suggested that Thorin should be the exact same physical type as Aragorn (Mortensen’s character in the earlier films) so this was presumably a deliberate, clumsy attempt to remind audiences of The Lord of the Rings films. This seems even more likely because there’s also a character here who’s an archer and looks awfully reminiscent of Orlando Bloom’s earlier Legolas. These two choices are very misguided, and they would have been much better off picking actors who looked completely different, who could make a fresh impression on us without any unfortunate echoes.

With the archer, it’s not so important because this time he’s a very minor character. But with Thorin it is a major weakness because it’s his story in a way, his quest. He sometimes seems more central than even Bilbo (Martin Freeman). And his charisma level and the dialogue given to him are just not up to it. Apparently Armitage is a well-respected actor with a lot of stage and TV experience, but here he seems dull, and the testy relationship his character has with Bilbo never comes alive. That’s particularly annoying since it’s probably the main relationship in a film which is not exactly brim-full of great character inter-action. (James Nesbitt is one of the many dwarves whose characters are thinly drawn). And as for Martin Freeman himself, I thought he was quite good but could have been better; he still seems more of a TV actor than a cinema presence to me, and certainly Elijah Wood was more engaging as Frodo.

Of course we should also blame the writers (Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) for many of these faults, and for some clumsy dialogue. At one point a dwarf, unimpressed with the food offered to him by the elves, says ‘Have they got any chips?’. Thinking he must mean French Fries I said to myself: so these dwarves are British, are they? Or maybe he meant potato chips (what we Brits call ‘crisps’) and they’re American? In either case it takes you completely out of the magical world of the film to use such language. At another point, having finished one battle and about to start another, a character actually says ‘Out of the frying pan…’ and another completes it ‘into the fire’. That threw me for fully five minutes. I kept thinking: no, the screenwriters didn’t really just do that, did they?

On the plus side the scenes at Rivendale with Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee and Hugo Weaving are good, especially when Blanchett's character communicates telepathically with Gandalf (Ian McKellan). There’s a great early scene with some trolls, another interesting one mid-way through with some mountains that move, and the last hour of the film is action-packed and exciting. Occasionally they push believability too far: characters seem to fall for about half a mile and then get up with barely a scratch. But on the other hand Gollum appears in this final section too, and Andy Serkis’ wonderfully creepy voice-acting and body movements really bring the film alive. Probably he’s the actor we’ve all been waiting to ‘see’ most, and he doesn’t disappoint.

Seven Problems with Seven Psychopaths (2012)

First the good news: Martin McDonagh directed a very funny, very black comedy called Six Shooter in Ireland in 2004 and you can watch it on youtube. It stars Brendan Gleeson and won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. As for Seven Psychopaths, well....

1. The main cast is all big-name actors, and they’re all cool ‘guys’ guys’ in their 40’s or older: Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Colin Farrell, Tom Waits. The film needed some contrast. If some timid, 20-year old, relatively unknown actor had played the Farrell role, it would have helped a lot. Perhaps he could also have been an Indian, or a Mexican.
2. It’s not a bad film, but it’s all a lark. It reminded me for some reason of ‘romps’ like Hudson Hawk or Last Action Hero. It’s wittier than those films - the moment when Walken refuses to put his hands up when someone points a gun at him is a good example of that - but it’s just as inconsequential. Nothing in the story really matters. That’s a danger of course when you mix comedy and violence: they can cancel each other out. You don’t care about the deaths and the setbacks the way you do in a drama, and the jokes don’t seem so funny either.    
3. Sourness of tone is a problem in general. The language is not just expletive-filled as in so many other crime films. It seems nasty - as in the frequent references to women as ‘c**ts’ - and this sits badly with the film’s overall jokey tone. For me one moment in particular seemed ‘off’: the shooting of Sam Rockwell’s ‘girlfriend’. She seems to be introduced just so that she could be killed on a whim, for no apparent reason, and with no one caring. (Another female character is also killed but at least she’s mourned). There’s a meta-narrative aspect to the film because at times the characters discuss making a film called ‘Seven Psychopaths’ and Walken chides its writer (Farrell) for his disposable female characters. But stating explicitly that this is a weakness doesn’t excuse it. It just makes you think: ‘If you knew it was a problem, why didn’t you fix it?’ 
4. The story of the Vietnamese killer-monk felt tacked-on and pointless.
5. This is apparently a very old Martin McDonagh script. It shows. The influence of Tarantino weighs heavily on it: the Tarantino of the mid-90’s that is, not the Tarantino of today. At the start two gangsters trade witty repartee like Travolta and Jackson in Pulp Fiction and at the end we see a character who’s in fact dead now, just as we do with Travolta in Pulp. Didn’t anyone realise that it would have been a bad idea to be this derivative in 1997, let alone 2012? Even the poster for the film comes from the 90’s: a group of characters are lined up staring out at us, as in the iconic posters for Trainspotting and The Usual Suspects. 
6. They should have found a better MacGuffin than a stolen dog. It’s an especially small, cutesy, ‘lady’s dog’, so you never believe that hard man Woody Harrelson would really care for it so much. It just makes the whole film silly.
7. Most of the characters are too unrealistically impervious to engage us. Maybe because he was playing someone so stupid and unlikable, Sam Rockwell comes off worse. I usually like him but here his whiny shtick seemed really annoying. Harrelson, Farrell and Waits are OK, but could have been much better. They generally just provoke a feeling of indifference. They’ve done it all before in other, better films. Walken is the only one to come out of the film looking halfway decent, and there’s a reason for that: we care about him because he cares about someone else, his wife. So the lesson is obvious: give the characters someone or something that it will hurt them to lose.

Martin McDonagh’s first film In Bruges was excellent. Seven Psychopaths would seem to be that ‘difficult second work’ which didn’t pan out, despite initially sounding very promising. But as I said, it’s based on an old script so it’s not really a second film. There’s a clear reason it seems like a step backwards; it was written when McDonagh’s writing talent was less developed. Hopefully next time he’ll come up with something actually new.

La Grande Illusion (1937): Poetic Pacifism

The first time I saw this film I was in my early twenties and I couldn't see what all the fuss was about; I knew it was universally acclaimed as one of the two masterpieces that Jean Renoir directed in the 30's, and while I could see the attraction in the second of these two, Rules of the Game(1939), La Grande Illusion left me cold. While I still think Renoir's La Bete Humaine(1938) is a better film, and his Crime De Monsieur Lange (1936) is just as good, I can now see that La Grande Illusion is also worth watching.

The film starts when two French soldiers, the commoner Marechal (Jean Gabin) and the aristocrat Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), go up in a plane and get shot down and taken prisoner by the Germans. The first half plays out much like The Great Escape, except that this is World War One not Two, and all the soldiers in the German prison camp are French. But they likewise dig a tunnel out from under their barracks and there is even a sequence of the men dropping earth from inside their trousers and mixing it into the topsoil with their feet, which was presumably the inspiration for an identical sequence in The Great Escape.

The first half of La Grande Illusion is a bit slow depending on your patience for scenes of bored French soldiers sitting around talking about what they miss back home, the bars they frequented in the Champs Elyssees and the current fashions in women's hemlines in Paris. But I liked the scene where they get on stage and sing a French version of 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary', and then 'La Marseillaise'. Renoir shows the French defiant against their German captors, but as they do so half of them are wearing dresses: he seems to be having some fun at the whole concept of nationalism. And as Gary Cooper's iconic face was once used to represent the resilience of America manhood, Jean Gabin's features seemed to personify French strengths in the 1930's, and there are some beautiful shots of him. They are fine examples of what was special about the French poetic realist style of that decade, the soft impressionistic beauty that Renoir, Carne, Duvivier and a few other directors achieved.

If the first half served as the prototype for The Great Escape, the second half surely did likewise for The Colditz Story: a few of the men, including Marechal and Boeldieu, are moved further into Germany to an ancient castle that's being used as a prison. Much is made of class differences in the movie. Renoir was fascinated by how German and French aristocrats had things in common with each other which they didn't have with their fellow countrymen of lower status, bonds which even war couldn't break. Erich Von Stroheim, playing a rigid-necked Prussian officer in charge of the castle, apologises to Boeldieu when he shoots him; it grieves him greatly to have killed a fellow nobleman, despite the fact he comes from an unfriendly nation.

Gabin's character, Marechal, has earlier described Boeldieu as 'OK, but hoity toity' and says there's always a wall between them. Yet it's Boeldieu who causes the main diversion that allows Marechal and Rosenthal (the latter played by the wonderfully impish Marcel Dalio) to escape, and for this he pays with his life. The two free men then make their way through the German countryside, to a house overlooking a beautiful valley, and some of the vistas here are as beautiful as anything painted by Jean Renoir's father, Auguste. After sleeping in a barn, the two fugitives are found by the German woman who owns the farm it resides on, and she takes them in and feeds them. She tells them of her husband and brothers, all dead in the war, and soon Gabin is falling in love with her and getting Renoir's 'We are all one' message across by talking to the German cows, saying 'What do you care if you're fed by a Frenchman?', telling them 'You have the same good smell as the cows in France'.

Remembering that this film was made in 1937, it's notable how sympathetically the Germans are portrayed. The guards exhibit none of the brutality we expect from later films depicting the Germans of World War Two; they are all as gentle as the one 'Good Nazi' who befriends Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. It's almost as if Renoir was placating the Germans of the time and trying to make the Nazis understand pacifism and humanism the way he did. Of course if that was the case it now seems that it was he himself who was suffering from a ‘Grand Illusion’.

The Master (2012): A Partial Return to Form for Paul Thomas Anderson

This review contains a kind of plot spoiler

There’s one way in which The Master outshines everything else made by Paul Thomas Anderson. It’s the best-looking film he’s ever done. The cinematography by Mihai Mălaimare, Jr. is absolutely amazing, and there’s no doubt it deserves the Oscar. It’s often difficult to describe great cinematography. We can say it’s ‘beautiful’, ‘atmospheric’, ‘visually arresting’, and so on, but it’s probably best just to see for yourself (click here for 56 screenshots).

And there are some very good scenes in the film. For example, there’s the first processing session on the boat between Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and ‘the Master’, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Some of Dodd’s questions are wonderfully intrusive and he’s very insistent that his subject not blink as he answers; it’s intriguing to see if Freddie can do that, as he’s finally led into admitting he slept with his aunt. Another scene has a man at a party challenging the logic of Dodd’s beliefs, which results in a tense confrontation and a memorable concluding insult. And near the end when Freddie goes back to the house of the girl he once loved and finds that she’s long since married and moved away, it was poignant.

I really didn’t like There Will Be Blood (see review) mainly because I found the two central performances off-putting and that’s not the case here. Phoenix is particularly affecting in the scene just mentioned, but he’s excellent throughout the movie. His weird facial and bodily contortions engage the audience; you can’t help wondering what’s going on inside him. And Hoffman, and Amy Adams as the master’s wife, are also very good. (All the other characters in the movie are pretty minor, including the one played by Laura Dern). But I have to say that again I’m a bit mystified that a PTA film has gotten so much praise. In the Sight & Sound year-end poll for example, it was deemed best film of 2012. As I was watching it and really enjoying the look of it, I couldn’t help also thinking of the many ways the story could have been better. Here are a few of them:

The early scenes of the film are set in the Pacific during World War Two (you get the impression Anderson had been watching Malick’s The Thin Red Line) and though they’re nice to look at, we don’t learn much about Quell. Then he’s back in the US and before long we see him senselessly attacking one of his photographic subjects in his department-store job. It might have been better to first delve into his past and learn why he’s such a conflicted, confused character before we get such an outburst. It’s mentioned in the film that his father died drunk and his mother’s in a ‘looney bin’, but just mentioned, nothing more.

I also wanted more evidence of why people follow Dodd i.e. scenes of him saying wise or interesting things that could draw people in, or making speeches to his followers that were charismatic in some way. This aspect of The Master reminded me - in a bad way - of the role played by Eli (Paul Dano) in There Will Be Blood. Again Anderson is giving us a religious leader who doesn’t seem to have many leadership qualities. There are many, many scenes of ‘processing’ - usually strange ritualistic interviews - that I found it hard to care about because they seemed unconnected to any normal human interaction. Once again Anderson seems to be fascinated by a religious world that does nothing for me, and I suspect for many other viewers. And it seems strange that he should focus on this. Is it some form of penance for the outré sexuality of Boogie Nights?

On top of that, there are odd things in the film which seem underdeveloped. At a party, all the women- and only the women - are suddenly stark naked. Why? I’d be interested to find out what the director thought about this scene, since he doesn’t let on in the actual movie. At one point I thought the story was going to develop into an interesting conflict with the mainstream authorities because Dodd and Quill get arrested. But that turn of the plot is soon forgotten. And near the end the film moves to England. Is there enough justification for this shift? It seemed to me that not much happened there.

Most of all, I just felt that the film needed more conflict. Quill falls under the spell of the master, defends him, beats up people who go against him, but never fully fits into the ‘family’. And the master’s wife disapproves of his drinking, his free spirit. That’s about it. (That’s the plot spoiler: that unfortunately there are no plot twists to spoil in this movie). Near the end there’s an interesting conversation between the two men in which Dodd talks of their ‘future lives’ and is openly hostile to Freddie. But that tension between them comes too late. Before then they have many arguments but always in a father-son way, never with any real threat of a rift. I wish a real rift had developed between them earlier in the movie. As the old cliché goes, conflict forces characters to reveal their true selves, and that’s particularly needed here because Quell is not good at verbalizing and, despite Phoenix’ fine performance, we don’t get to know Freddie well enough.

The Observer review of The Master said “once we've established that Lancaster is a phoney and Freddie a fuck-up, the film seems not to know where to go next.” I have to say I agree. Despite that Sight & Sound poll, and far more than with There Will Be Blood, there seem to be quite a few critics this time breaking rank and daring to suggest PTA has gone astray. I don’t bring this up because I’m hoping for his ‘comeuppance’ or anything like that. I do it because he proved early on in his career that he had huge talent and I want him to rediscover that. In his last three films he’s forgotten the wonderful in-your-face brio of those earlier works and has attempted to be more stately and grandiose. To me he’s ‘matured’ in all the wrong directions. It’s like he wants to be David Lean now instead of Martin Scorsese, but he’s copying the David Lean of Ryan’s Daughter rather than the David Lean of Lawrence of Arabia. His films now are more refined, more respectable, but also more dull.

For what’s it’s worth, this is how I would rate all of his movies so far, with 4 stars the maximum and anything less than 3 stars not really worth watching.

Hard Eight ***½

Boogie Nights ****

Magnolia ****

Punch Drunk Love **½

There Will Be Blood **

The Master ***

Tarantino and Mozart

Quentin Tarantino and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart may not seem to have much in common, and let me assure lovers of high culture that I’m not going to claim that the American director is as important or influential as the famous Austrian composer. But I do think they are alike in one interesting respect: there is a huge disconnect between their personality and their work. Now I must admit that I’m basing my knowledge of Mozart’s character largely on the film Amadeus. I did once read a biography that confirmed he was actually a womaniser and a spendthrift, but that’s kind of beside the point: I’m not accusing Tarantino of such things. What I’m basing my thesis on is really just the moment in the movie when F.Murray Abraham as Salieri first encounters Tom Hulce as Mozart. He can’t believe that this childish, asinine, foul-mouthed boy (it’s right that he’s not played by a distinguished actor but by Hulce, previously known to most people only for National Lampoon’s Animal House) is the one who creates this beautiful music he’s heard. Salieri assumes God must be playing a practical joke on him.

Now once again I’m not saying that Tarantino is asinine or childish. But he is rather unprepossessing and gauche whenever you see him in interviews. He is usually a very bad actor (although his small role in Django Unchained, with what I think was an Australian accent, was his best so far, and I like the preposterous death he gives his character). And generally he doesn’t come across well in person. It’s not just that he hasn’t got the smoothness of an actor-director like George Clooney. He hasn’t even got the quiet dignity of your average low-key director who is comfortable only behind the camera. He talks a lot but he’s not a good talker; listen to his DVD commentaries and you’ll probably want to give up after 5 minutes. And sometimes he can be positively cringe-inducing. I once saw behind-the-scenes footage of him filming the famous John Travolta-Uma Thurman dance scene in Pulp Fiction and when he got up and started boogeying around - to show them how to do it! - it was like your most embarrassing great uncle making a fool of himself at a family party.

And yet his films are nearly always wonderful. Not just good, they’re usually way ahead of the competition. I didn’t think Django Unchained was one of his very best, yet still it has to be one of the year’s top 5 because his scenes and characters are so damn vivid. The movie is alive in a way so much other cinema isn’t. George Clooney, who has directed quite a few very good films, would kill to be able to direct the way Tarantino does. And for me only Michael Haneke challenges him for the accolade of most important director to have emerged since 1990. Like Haneke, Tarantino is also a great writer. The sophistication of the time-scheme in Pulp Fiction alone would qualify him for that designation. And one of the films he’s only written, True Romance, is an underrated gem. He's got a flair for using music in a startling and witty way. He casts brilliantly and gets amazing performances out of actors. His ability to build tension is unparalleled. Two amazing scenes in Inglorious Basterds are amongst the many in his work that testify to that: the opening scene in the farmhouse and the Michael Fassbender scene in German in the underground bar. And from Reservoir Dogs to Django, when Tarantino does violence, it’s just better than when any other director does it: more kinetic, more explosive, more shocking.

So that’s why I make the Mozart analogy, or at least the Amadeus analogy. Surely a few other directors in Hollywood have looked on with envy and asked: how can this doofus be such a cinematic genius?

The Exterminating Angel (1962): Rich and Poor Reversed

The Exterminating Angel is one of Bunuel’s most delicious pranks. A group of maybe 15 or 20 high-class people assemble in a mansion for a dinner-party. They get through the meal, but when it comes time to go home, they can’t seem to leave. And no-one knows why. The authorities outside know that the people inside are trapped and after several days are low on food and water, but for their part they can’t seem to enter. And they don’t know why either. We don’t get any sci-fi ‘force-field’ nonsense. It’s just a feeling people have. They walk as far as the thresholds and then give up, perplexed, and in a strange way saddened. Perhaps it’s because they realise that they’re not as free as they once thought.

I saw the film a long time ago and just appreciated it for the strangeness of the set-up, the comical aspects. It really makes you chuckle. I also recently saw Bunuel’s 1974 film The Phantom of Liberty and though that film is in a way more accessible (it’s in colour, it’s brighter and nicer to look at), it’s also too episodic - almost like a series of sketches. The Exterminating Angel is really the better film. It starts off with this one insane premise and just sits back and watches as chaos ensues.

And on recent re-viewing it occurred to me that Bunuel may also have smuggled a deeper point into The Exterminating Angel - about class and the way society works. It was made in Mexico, where earlier he had made one of the all-time classics about poverty: Los Olvidados (1950). And his 1933 film in Spain Land without Bread also suggests that this subject was close to his heart. Although throughout the film we’re focused on this group of rich people, really we should be thinking of them as representing poor people, anywhere anytime - the really poor ones who live in slums. Because if you do that nearly everything they do makes sense and does not seem so surreal.

Think about it. A few days after this strange ‘house arrest’ has started, this is the kind of world the guests are living in: people are constantly hot and uncomfortable and they’ve let standards of appearance and propriety drop. They’re lethargic and unable to think of solutions to their problems. They are vandalizing property so as to get water with which to live. There are dead bodies kept nearby making a stink. The room they’re trapped in looks like a garbage-heap, and when a group of lambs wanders in and are pounced on for food, the guests seem like wild animals. They then cook the meat and fill the room up with acrid smoke. People get superstitious and start believing in signs and performing strange rituals. They laugh for no reason, like mad people, and long for the children they’ve been forcibly separated from. They’ve lost all their magnanimity and are telling each other ‘You stink like a hyena’. They erupt into shows of anger over petty matters. They sabotage their own existence as well as that of the people around them. They are cruel to each other even when it doesn’t gain them anything, like the guy who throws away the pills vitally needed by one of his fellow guests. Generalised ennui and dissatisfaction with the world has taken over completely.

Isn’t that all a kind of picture of the worst that poverty can bring? By defamiliarising what is the reality of poverty for billions in underdeveloped countries, then and now, and cramming it all into one little over-crowded room, the film lets us consider that reality in a new way. We have to consider our own antipathy toward the poor. They - like the guests - don’t make for an attractive picture. We don’t want to be like them, and we don’t much want to hang around to help them either. At the start of the film we see the servants in the house making up lame excuses so as to get away as fast as possible. It’s all rather strange and they don’t seem to know themselves why they’re compelled to leave. Later they’re described as being like ‘rats abandoning a sinking ship’. But since in this film all roles are reversed, and the rich are playing the poor, these poor servants should be looked on as representing the rich in real life. Isn’t ‘abandoning a sinking ship’ what the rich - or the middle-class - do all the time if they find themselves living in or even just visiting a poor neighborhood? Don’t they scarper in the same way?

And finally couldn’t the whole set-up of the film be taken as a metaphor for the mental shackles the poor live with. There’s nothing physically stopping them leaving their slums, but for some reason they don’t, they stay where they are, snarling angrily at each other just like the guests in the movie. Bunuel of course was not much of a fan of the Catholic church, and the final few shots of the movie suggests that even if people do manage to throw off the shackles of poverty and get away to a better place, they’ll be one more mental prison to break out of: that of religion.

To see 53 Screenshots from the movie, click here

My Love for Italian Cinema/Why is Recent Italian Cinema So Bad?

Phony advertising at its worst

Years ago I made up a list of my top ten movies and when I finished it and examined it I was startled to find that it was dominated by Italians and Italian-Americans. The list included The Godfather, Part 11 and Apocalypse Now (Coppola of course), La Strada (Fellini), Mean Streets (Scorsese) plus Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's A Wonderful Life, two films directed by an American born in Sicily, Frank Capra. Six out of the ten films thus had an Italian element to them and the other four were Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Mike Nichols, a German-American), Fanny and Alexander (Bergman, Swedish) and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus (so the Czechs, in the form of Milos Forman, also did quite well).

Though my top ten might look a little different now - films like Heat and A One and A Two would be vying for a place in there - these ten films would still make my top 20 at least and they all still seem to me far superior to Citizen Kane and Vertigo, the two movies that excited so much comment and comparison when the latter overtook the former as No.1 in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll of best ever films. To me those two and other high-placing perennials of that list like La Règle Du Jeu, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Potemkin and The Searchers are all great, but they don’t quite have the raw power needed to make them personal favourites of mine.

The films that really do it for me, whether it is due to the input of Italians or not, all have a very strong emotional element to them. Now the term ‘emotional’ is of course a dirty word in film criticism because it’s often taken to be a sign of manipulative film-making, of a facile director pushing buttons to make those tear-ducts well up. Even for those of us who are not ashamed to say we cry at movies, this question of what is real emotion and what is falsely contrived can be a very vexed one, since individuals have such divergent reactions. Steven Spielberg sometimes gets accused of being manipulative and E.T. for example has always left me with completely dry eyes. On the other hand there are parts of Saving Private Ryan that get me every time. The tragic young deaths in movies such as Terms of Endearment, Titanic and Million Dollar Baby didn’t move me much, yet Tokyo Story really affected me, as did cartoons like Grave of the Fireflies and Toy Story 3.

When it comes to the films in that old top ten of mine, however, most of which did indeed make me cry, I consider them to be in a realm so elevated that if anyone mentioned the term ‘button-pushing’ in connection with them, I would think of that person as a completely obtuse horse’s ass. It’s not the way I experienced them at all, and they seem far more powerful, and far less saccharine, than such a term implies. Watching those films it felt to me like I experienced a higher reality, and I finally reacted with tears only because by that point I was in a state of wonder and awe. 

These films are properly ‘operatic’ (there’s that Italian connection again) in that they create mood upon mood upon mood until the cumulative effect is overwhelming. And while I’ve never had that experience whilst listening to an actual opera, I’m guessing it’s similar to the extreme emotion an opera-lover feels when he hears a very beautiful and dramatic aria. Apparently this is what happens sometimes and grown men do cry when they listen to Verdi et al in a public setting. I know this because I’ve seen it in movies - movies like The Untouchables, directed by Italian-American Brian De Palma. There it’s De Niro as Al Capone doing the weeping (while he’s simultaneously having Sean Connery’s cop character murdered) but no one said you have to be a saint to have these feelings…

So having said all that, it’s ironic that, after watching Nanni Moretti’s We Have A Pope recently, it struck me how bad Italian cinema has been for a long time. Even though most of that top 10 were Italian-American rather than strictly Italian, there’s no doubt that in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s there were many interesting directors in Italy. I’m not a fan of Pasolini or, generally, Antonioni, and I think Fellini was very uneven, but still there were brilliant films like Fellini's two best works, La Strada and Amarcord, plus Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1971). Since then, however, it seems like a wasteland. 

I quite liked Moretti as a director before this latest film: Dear Diary was a fun piece of fluff and The Son’s Room is the one really excellent Italian film I’ve seen from the last 30 years. Plus he’s a really likeable performer. But We Have A Pope was an embarrassing mess. Firstly, there’s not enough of him in it. It was sold on the ‘Pope meets psychiatrist’ angle, with Moretti as the latter, yet they have hardly any scenes together. Instead the Pope goes wandering around Rome incognito. He doesn’t really do or say anything of consequence. He meets a theatre troupe but that’s just an excuse to quote a lot of lines from Chekhov, as if the screenwriters despaired of their own words and thought this might save them. Meanwhile back at the Vatican all the cardinals have a volleyball tournament. It’s done in a really lame way, and the ending of the film is a total damp squib.

We Have A Pope got quite good reviews. But then so did Gomorrah and Il Divo and Le Quattro Volte. These three in fact got excellent reviews. Yet Gomorrah was over-rated, Il Divo was a bore and Le Quattro Volte was one of the most ludicrously unwatchable films ever made. Don’t Move was an Italian film from 2004 and that too was kind of dry and pointless. Then there was Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1997), widely regarded as the worst film to ever win a major Oscar. British cinema was famously scorned by Francois Truffaut, who said that the words ‘British’ and ‘cinema’ didn’t deserve to be in the same sentence together. But in recent decades it has had Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Michael Winterbottom and Danny Boyle amongst others, without even including the many Brits who make movies exclusively in the US, like Christopher Nolan and Ridley Scott. And France of course always has interesting things going on in its cinema. 

But the last really interesting Italian director was Bernardo Bertolucci, and he hasn’t made a good film since The Last Emperor (1987). His more recent films like Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers simply confirm the decline of Italian cinema. I may be being a little unfair because I only know the Italian films that win international renown and I have certainly seen more recent British movies - but when even the most acclaimed Italian movies are all bad, it seems to me there must be something going wrong. Is it that Italian writers and directors don’t try anymore because they think their country already has enough beautiful art? Is complacency the problem? Or has Berlusconi’s reign corrupted the cultural landscape? Are his TV stations to blame? What is it exactly? It seems very strange that a country with such a rich cinematic history is not doing a lot better.

Body Double (1984) and Brian De Palma's Obsessions

There are a number of things which are very interesting about Body Double, even though it’s ultimately an unsatisfying and silly film. The first half hour is a masterclass in how to draw viewers into a narrative whilst keeping them guessing. At first it seems to be about Jake (Craig Wasson) acting in a cheap vampire movie. Then it seems to be about how he recovers from finding his girlfriend in bed with another guy. Then it’s about him meeting a fellow actor, Sam, who provides him with a fabulous apartment to look after. It’s only then that we start to get to the real story - what Jake can see through the telescope from that apartment. Brian De Palma is of course famous for re-working Hitchcockian themes and plots in his films and here there’s no attempt to hide the strong influence of Rear Window; our main character witnesses a crime through his lens. What’s more, the film’s whole tone and structure is taken from Vertigo: in the first half, it focuses on a rather forlorn man trailing a beautiful woman around in a sunny Californian setting, without much dialogue but with plentiful bursts of rich orchestral music. In the second half, after her death, he becomes involved with another woman who - in a different way to Hitchcock’s film- was a kind of ‘double’ for the original woman.

I generally like De Palma’s films a lot, whether they’re explicitly Hitchcockian (Obsession, Dressed to Kill) or not (Carrie, Scarface). Even less popular films of his like Casualties of War, Raising Cain and Snake Eyes are very enjoyable. The Bonfire of the Vanities is not a great film, but hardly the disaster everyone says it is. And Mission to Mars, whose plot Prometheus recently stole lock, stock and barrel, is also underrated. But I must say I wasn’t much of a fan of his last three films - Femme Fatale, The Black Dahlia or Redacted - so he seems to be past his golden years. And his best films - Carlito’s Way, The Untouchables, Mission Impossible - are often his most uncharacteristic ones. The last two especially were big, commercial, star-studded projects and it might have been interesting if studios had put him in charge of more films like that. I also wish that younger action/thriller directors would learn from him; films like Knight and Day and Wanted and Red would have benefited from something similar to his mischievous wit.

Craig Wasson as the figure who is at the centre of Body Double at first seems a little bland, but he makes an impression after a while, as does Gregg Henry, who plays Sam. However - surprise, surprise - the women’s roles in this film are not very strong. The mystery woman of the first half, Gloria (Deborah Shelton) is a total blank even when Jake meets her and they start talking, and Melanie Griffith, who takes over in the second half of the film, is not much better. You mainly notice what a sexually explicit role this was for her. The character herself doesn’t amount to much.

The film is full of incidental pleasures. The music when Jake first starts spying on Gloria (‘Telescope’ by Pino Donaggio - you can find it on Youtube) is really quite beautiful. The apartment he’s in is the famous Chemosphere in the Hollywood Hills (though its striking interior here is no doubt a studio set). Another great setting is the multi-leveled beach house where part of his pursuit takes place. And there’s a good scene in a shopping mall (though when he spies on Gloria in a lingerie shop, and she just happens to leave the curtain to the changing room open a few inches, the element of teenage boy wish-fulfillment becomes a bit laughable).

There are many parts of the film which are deliberately artificial. When Jake is driving we often see him against a back-projected scene. And when he’s following the woman he sometimes gets ridiculously close to her without her noticing anything amiss. All this is fair enough because it’s the director playing with movie clichés (just as Tarantino does now). But there are other times when the artificiality is more of a problem. The premise on which the plot is built, the elaborate way Jake is set up to be a witness to a crime, is a bit hard to take. For this plot to work, every cop has to be blind and stupid. And part of the story rests on him becoming suspicious because he recognises the way two women dance as being identical. This to me seemed a bit bungled. All they had to do was to give each of them some little thing to do that was very distinctive, but in fact their moves are totally generic and I found it hard to work out why he was making the connection. Plus when Jake suddenly becomes a porn actor and films a scene with Holly Johnson from Frankie Goes to Hollywood singing ‘Relax’, it’s just bizarre and takes you completely out of the story.

Also the ending of the movie is very unsatisfying. After a perfunctory climactic face-off with the villain, the main storyline is left curiously unresolved as regards the relationship between Jake and the Melanie Griffith character. Then we cut away to something completely unconnected and the film shoves a pair of tits in our faces! It’s done in a way that’s so gratuitous and silly it reminded me of Airplane, when a bare-breasted woman runs in front of the camera for no reason. If the film had been a comedy I wouldn’t have minded, but it’s a preposterous ending to what at times is a very tense thriller. And there seems to be no reason at all why it’s the final shot of the movie.  

See 88 Screenshots from Body Double here

Nil by Mouth (1997): Time-Shift Ending

I’m not much of a fan of horror movies. I can become engaged in stories about real-life horrors, because they can resonate with me, but usually I don't get very worked up about poltergeists, zombies, Satanists etc. And to me few horror movies are as genuinely disturbing as, say, Harry Brown, a 2009 Michael Caine revenge thriller set in a nightmarish South London where people live in fear of going outside their own door because of the gangs of muggers and junkies in the street. It made London look as squalid as the worst parts of New York in the 70’s, and even nastier and more depressing. Most of the film seemed to be set at night, in a drizzle of rain that wasn’t even atmospheric, just annoying.

Now from my own experience of living in London for about 30 of my 45 years I do indeed think it can be a depressing place, though that’s more to do with things like the punishing cost of living, difficult workplaces, and thoughtless people. Most Londoners I’m sure have far more experience of having a metaphorical knife stuck in them by someone they know well than a real knife stuck in them by a stranger. Still, at night, there’s clearly a certain tension and surliness about people in the streets, and maybe I’ve never been mugged just because I’m a guy who’s 6 foot 2 and weighs over 200lbs. If you come to visit from New York or Paris or Amsterdam you might not notice it, because probably those cities have the same mood. But whenever I visit from Thailand I feel it; people are markedly more aggressive. And as the 2011 riots showed, there’s no shortage of real-life violent morons in the city. 

Nil by Mouth is one of the few films to deal realistically with the kind of Londoners for whom a ‘shopping riot’ like this is just a good piece of fun. These are people who spend half their life in the local pub, do a lot of drugs, live on welfare payments and scamming and thieving, and for whom a fist-fight is a regular occurrence. Harry Brown wasn’t a good film, it was just a downer without any purpose, but Nil by Mouth, and Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) are two stunning works about the rough, dangerous, foul-mouthed side of England’s capital that you watch with fascination despite the milieu because the acting and the story-telling are so vivid.

Gary Oldman directed this famously harrowing film, and dedicated it to his father. Ray (Ray Winstone) is the centre of the story, and Val (Kathy Burke) is his long-suffering wife. This time when I watched it I did feel sometimes that the extremes of Ray's behaviour could have been toned down to better effect, just because he’s nearly always brooding or cursing or threatening someone, he’s too obviously a monster, and I think the reality of this kind of person is more deceptive. Wife-beaters like him are usually fine, charming even, 90% of the time. That’s why the wives stay with them, after all; there’s a clearly observable ‘good side’ that they keep on vainly hoping will be their only side. Here Ray seemed to have no charms at all. And sometimes his rants go on too long and are too ‘big’ and shouty, for example in the scene where they go round to Val‘s mother’s house and start kicking in the door and a neighbour sticks his head out to offer a mild rebuke. (I think some inspiration for this type of outburst must have come from characters in Scorsese films like Mean Streets and Raging Bull, and it’s interesting that Winstone ended up working on The Departed). 

Another minor quibble I had is with the third most important character in the story, Val‘s younger brother, Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles). It’s an excellent performance but his character is a very unattractive, very pathetic junkie and it’s hard to spend a lot of time with him. I think they should have either had less of him in the movie or developed his story more; when he's not sticking a needle into his arm, the most exciting thing he does is hang out at the laundromat talking with his scummy friends.

Yet to put this in context; this is undoubtedly one of the most profound and most powerful films to come out of Britain in the last 20 years. And the final scene has certainly lost nothing; it’s still heart-breaking. An important theme in the movie is how people - especially abused/abusive people - repeat patterns of behaviour down through the generations. Ray has already talked of the dad he hated, who just sat around the house getting drunk and watching TV and occasionally walloping his mother, and he has no idea that he himself is exactly the same. Now at the very end we see Val going off to visit her father in prison and it makes sense. That, in a way, is why she’s with Ray: he’s the same kind of criminal personality that she grew up with.

And the strange thing is: this prison-visit happened a long, long time ago. One thing cinema can do better than any other medium is play with time. Pulp Fiction and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban are two good examples of how that can work. But neither of them contain anything quite as emotionally wrenching as this last scene of Nil by Mouth. After the main narrative has come to its sad conclusion, after we’ve watched nearly two hours of abuse and pain and violent anger within this one family, we’re suddenly transported back to an earlier era when everyone got on well together, everyone found it easy to laugh. Six or seven people are in the kitchen, talking across each other in a happy jumble, and though they’re casually using obscenities in front of a small child, it doesn’t seem to matter, because you’re just relieved to see them all in such a good mood, relaxed and friendly. Then it hits you that this ‘reality’ has long since been lost, and it’s unbearably sad.