Director: David Gregory
14 years ago in Ireland, Mrs Flynn gives birth to something that even the local priest doesn't think is one of God's creatures. He plans to kill it, as he has presumably killed others before it, but the Flynns want no more of it and they take him out instead. A golf club to the back of a priest's head and an axe to the front is a pretty solid way to make an impact at the beginning of a horror story, that's for sure. Back in the present, the Monahans, an American family, arrive to revisit their roots and bond as a family unit. It would appear that they're in serious need of bonding because they're a dysfunctional bunch, though dysfunctional in a very believable way.
Dr Jerry Monahan seems to be pretty stable, though not always prone to the best decisions in the world. There's no Mrs Monahan, though there's a Mrs Monahan to be, Annette Rothman, and she's the real reason for the bonding concept. Jerry wants everyone to get to know each other, away from the distractions of modern city life. He has two daughters, Jessica and Molly, and they really don't get on. Molly seems to be trying but she's not just fighting her loathing of her sister, she also has chemical imbalances. Jessica is a prize bitch, who did her bit to spoil the whole trip by fetching along some English guy that she met on the way. He's Robin, and he has plenty to say about how dumb the Americans are.
It doesn't take long before they start arguing and it doesn't take long before they get lost, after missing the last bus back to town. They're stuck in the countryside and all the people meet don't seem quite right. They look normal enough but there's something not quite right about any of them. They stand in the middle of fields as if waiting for something, they have a strange way of suggesting concern while implying some far more sinister and they refer to outsiders as seeds. And yet these are completely sane and normal people compared with the other folks in the neighbourhood that the Monahans are soon to discover.
This is a seriously good horror movie made by someone who would seem to know precisely what he's doing. David Gregory has no less than 91 directorial credits at IMDb, but only two appear to be feature films: the first, Scathed, back in 1994, and this one, due for release next year. All the rest are documentary shorts or featurettes, mostly on names associated with the exploitation genres. The subjects literally comprise a Who's Who of the exploitation industry and he's obviously picked up a few pointers here and there. This one plays out like Deliverance meets Death Line meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I'm reminded also of an eighties Guy N Smith horror novel called Cannibals, but that one was set in Scotland not Ireland.
Most notably Gregory manages to find that ever elusive balance point so he can provide a subtle film that contains scenes of extreme gore. That's not an easy task, in fact it's probably the most difficult task any horror director can set himself. I'm not saying that this one's perfect, because it isn't, but it comes a lot closer than anything else I can remember in a long while. He's aided by some very cool character designs, that are simple but massively effective, and a very good set of performances by actors who have either done nothing before this or close to nothing. This is an awesome independent film that I hope makes it to the big time.Director: David Gregory
14 years ago in Ireland, Mrs Flynn gives birth to something that even the local priest doesn't think is one of God's creatures. He plans to kill it, as he has presumably killed others before it, but the Flynns want no more of it and they take him out instead. A golf club to the back of a priest's head and an axe to the front is a pretty solid way to make an impact at the beginning of a horror story, that's for sure. Back in the present, the Monahans, an American family, arrive to revisit their roots and bond as a family unit. It would appear that they're in serious need of bonding because they're a dysfunctional bunch, though dysfunctional in a very believable way.
Dr Jerry Monahan seems to be pretty stable, though not always prone to the best decisions in the world. There's no Mrs Monahan, though there's a Mrs Monahan to be, Annette Rothman, and she's the real reason for the bonding concept. Jerry wants everyone to get to know each other, away from the distractions of modern city life. He has two daughters, Jessica and Molly, and they really don't get on. Molly seems to be trying but she's not just fighting her loathing of her sister, she also has chemical imbalances. Jessica is a prize bitch, who did her bit to spoil the whole trip by fetching along some English guy that she met on the way. He's Robin, and he has plenty to say about how dumb the Americans are.
It doesn't take long before they start arguing and it doesn't take long before they get lost, after missing the last bus back to town. They're stuck in the countryside and all the people meet don't seem quite right. They look normal enough but there's something not quite right about any of them. They stand in the middle of fields as if waiting for something, they have a strange way of suggesting concern while implying some far more sinister and they refer to outsiders as seeds. And yet these are completely sane and normal people compared with the other folks in the neighbourhood that the Monahans are soon to discover.
This is a seriously good horror movie made by someone who would seem to know precisely what he's doing. David Gregory has no less than 91 directorial credits at IMDb, but only two appear to be feature films: the first, Scathed, back in 1994, and this one, due for release next year. All the rest are documentary shorts or featurettes, mostly on names associated with the exploitation genres. The subjects literally comprise a Who's Who of the exploitation industry and he's obviously picked up a few pointers here and there. This one plays out like Deliverance meets Death Line meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I'm reminded also of an eighties Guy N Smith horror novel called Cannibals, but that one was set in Scotland not Ireland.
Most notably Gregory manages to find that ever elusive balance point so he can provide a subtle film that contains scenes of extreme gore. That's not an easy task, in fact it's probably the most difficult task any horror director can set himself. I'm not saying that this one's perfect, because it isn't, but it comes a lot closer than anything else I can remember in a long while. He's aided by some very cool character designs, that are simple but massively effective, and a very good set of performances by actors who have either done nothing before this or close to nothing. This is an awesome independent film that I hope makes it to the big time.
Thursday, 21 August 2008
Monday, 18 August 2008
Samaritan Girl (2004)
Jae-yeong and Yeo-jin are a couple of Korean schoolgirls who want to go to Europe, but they have a rather unique way of earning the money. Jae-young whores herself out and Yeo-jin acts as her pimp, organising the meetups and taking the money. While they're best friends, they're very different people. Jae-yeong enjoys what she does, she gets to know the men who pay her for sex and enjoys it all as much as they do. However Yeo-jin thinks that these clients are filthy men and really feels bad about being involved with them, even though she isn't the one sleeping with them.
While she doesn't really approve, she does understand why Jae-yeong is having sex with them. What she doesn't understand is why she would care about them. When she suggests going for a drink with one of them afterwards, she's horrified and berates her friend for even thinking about doing such a thing. Then Jae-yeong gets trapped inside a motel room when the cops raid it, and she jumps. She survives, though not for long but she was smiling when she jumped. Before she dies, she asks Yeo-jin to bring her one of her clients to see her.
She even dies with a smile on her face, a variance on that impish sort of smile that Audrey Tautou is so awesome at and Han Yeo-reum is good at it too. This was her debut on the big screen, her second being another Kim Ki-duk film, The Bow, which I saw last night. So Yeo-jin becomes even more confused than she was already and intrigued about who her friend was and what she did. So she takes on the same role in reverse, hunting down the same men to sleep with them and return their money. She's looking for understanding most of all, but maybe also to undo what has been done and to close the book on the affair, literally as the names and details of these men are in Jae-yeong's diary.
This isn't an easy part to play and it falls to Ji-min Kwak to do what she can with it. It's a big opportunity for her too, given that it was only her second film after Wishing Stairs, the third Whispering Corridors film, in which she was just another schoolgirl in the cast. There are so many things that could be driving her that it's hard to see which ones really are. She never finds the same smile that Jae-yeong found so naturally. What's more her dad, who is a cop, stumbles upon some of what's happening but doesn't understand and starts to react violently to those he sees as involved.
As always with Kim Ki-duk, I'm finding, there are a lot of questions here, that have to start with the obvious one: what's it all about? I think I understand the main track here, which is all about the transition to adulthood and I caught some dialogue with clever double meanings, but what was the dream sequence all about? Why didn't Yeo-jin's dad ever confront her about what he knew? Was there a subplot beginning about a serial killer of prostitutes that got written out? I was waiting for one character we meet early on to fit that role.
Maybe I'm just thinking too literally though. Kim Ki-duk's films are all about symbolism, so maybe I should be delving deeper into the religious parallels and what can be drawn from the title. While the film is Korean, the religious stories (and the title itself) all tie to Christianity. Is this about Yeo-jin finding a way to forgive Jae-yeong and the people she initially saw as filthy, after coming to an understanding of their respective motives? If so then it's also about her father finding a way to forgive both his daughter and those he saw as paedophiles, after also coming to an understanding of especially her motives. Still many questions though. Hopefully some college student will write a thesis on the symbolism of Kim Ki-duk and I'll see how close I get on each of his films...
While she doesn't really approve, she does understand why Jae-yeong is having sex with them. What she doesn't understand is why she would care about them. When she suggests going for a drink with one of them afterwards, she's horrified and berates her friend for even thinking about doing such a thing. Then Jae-yeong gets trapped inside a motel room when the cops raid it, and she jumps. She survives, though not for long but she was smiling when she jumped. Before she dies, she asks Yeo-jin to bring her one of her clients to see her.
She even dies with a smile on her face, a variance on that impish sort of smile that Audrey Tautou is so awesome at and Han Yeo-reum is good at it too. This was her debut on the big screen, her second being another Kim Ki-duk film, The Bow, which I saw last night. So Yeo-jin becomes even more confused than she was already and intrigued about who her friend was and what she did. So she takes on the same role in reverse, hunting down the same men to sleep with them and return their money. She's looking for understanding most of all, but maybe also to undo what has been done and to close the book on the affair, literally as the names and details of these men are in Jae-yeong's diary.
This isn't an easy part to play and it falls to Ji-min Kwak to do what she can with it. It's a big opportunity for her too, given that it was only her second film after Wishing Stairs, the third Whispering Corridors film, in which she was just another schoolgirl in the cast. There are so many things that could be driving her that it's hard to see which ones really are. She never finds the same smile that Jae-yeong found so naturally. What's more her dad, who is a cop, stumbles upon some of what's happening but doesn't understand and starts to react violently to those he sees as involved.
As always with Kim Ki-duk, I'm finding, there are a lot of questions here, that have to start with the obvious one: what's it all about? I think I understand the main track here, which is all about the transition to adulthood and I caught some dialogue with clever double meanings, but what was the dream sequence all about? Why didn't Yeo-jin's dad ever confront her about what he knew? Was there a subplot beginning about a serial killer of prostitutes that got written out? I was waiting for one character we meet early on to fit that role.
Maybe I'm just thinking too literally though. Kim Ki-duk's films are all about symbolism, so maybe I should be delving deeper into the religious parallels and what can be drawn from the title. While the film is Korean, the religious stories (and the title itself) all tie to Christianity. Is this about Yeo-jin finding a way to forgive Jae-yeong and the people she initially saw as filthy, after coming to an understanding of their respective motives? If so then it's also about her father finding a way to forgive both his daughter and those he saw as paedophiles, after also coming to an understanding of especially her motives. Still many questions though. Hopefully some college student will write a thesis on the symbolism of Kim Ki-duk and I'll see how close I get on each of his films...
Sunday, 17 August 2008
The Slender Thread (1965)
Sidney Poitier was 38 in 1965, which makes him just older than me, but in The Slender Thread he's playing a student in Seattle called Alan Newell. There doesn't seem to be much attempt to pretend that he's in his late teens so I hope that he's supposed to be a mature student. It really doesn't matter though as this isn't a school drama and Newell starts the film by cycling away from his college at the end of the day. What really matters is that he's also a volunteer at a crisis clinic and tonight he has to handle a call from a suicidal woman who claims that she's already taken an overdose of barbiturates.
She's Inga Dyson, she's played by Anne Bancroft and it's her story that provides our story, told in flashback as Newell gets her to talk about herself. This is partly to understand her reasons and partly to keep her on the line until a trace can be made on the line, and it's the heart of the film. What makes this most powerful is that Newell may mean well but he's no expert. He flounders around trying to find what will get Inga to open up to him, sometimes saying the right thing but sometimes the wrong thing, making a difference but making mistakes. And all the time, time is running out.
This is a tight little story, unique in that the two lead characters, who spend much of the film talking to each other, never appear together in person. There can't be too many instances like that in cinematic history, only films with DJs and switchboard operators and long distance romances. Anyway Poitier and Bancroft had an important meeting only a couple of years earlier when she presented him with the first Oscar given to a black man, for his performance in Lilies of the Field. The connection between them in this film is solid though, as hits home hard when the phone line between them drops. Suddenly we realise that we've been hanging on the phone with Inga Dyson just as Newell has.
It was written by Stirling Silliphant, as suggested by a presumably factual article in Life magazine by Shana Alexander. I'm guessing that the prominent sign on the wall in the crisis centre is a focus of the article: 'Every two minutes someone attempts suicide in the USA'. It's directed by Sydney Pollack, who hadn't yet won his two Oscars for Out of Africa because this was his first feature as a director. He had been making episodes of TV shows for a few years and obviously had ideas building up in his brain because there are a few scenes here that feel like a debut director doing it how it should be done. The lighting at the end of the disco scene is a great example and presages MTV by a good couple of decades.
There's able support from people like Telly Savalas and Steven Hill, but only two people really have substantial screen time and both Poitier and Bancroft are excellent. It's good to see Poitier in something other than a race drama: the fact that he's black has precisely nothing to do with his part here. Bancroft spends the entire film in various stages of fragility but never overdoes it. She also talks, especially early on, with a detached clarity that reminds me of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
HAL cropped up a little later as another obvious comparison when the phone company try to trace her call and the tech walks up and down the many huge banks of switches at the exchange. I've worked in phone company buildings that have more modern remnants of these things, which are now of course obsolete, and these rooms always give an impression of scale. I wonder if Kubrick had the same thought when he put together his film about scale only a few years later. And talking of obsolescence, it's fascinating to see how long it takes to trace the call. With modern technology, this film would be a short.
She's Inga Dyson, she's played by Anne Bancroft and it's her story that provides our story, told in flashback as Newell gets her to talk about herself. This is partly to understand her reasons and partly to keep her on the line until a trace can be made on the line, and it's the heart of the film. What makes this most powerful is that Newell may mean well but he's no expert. He flounders around trying to find what will get Inga to open up to him, sometimes saying the right thing but sometimes the wrong thing, making a difference but making mistakes. And all the time, time is running out.
This is a tight little story, unique in that the two lead characters, who spend much of the film talking to each other, never appear together in person. There can't be too many instances like that in cinematic history, only films with DJs and switchboard operators and long distance romances. Anyway Poitier and Bancroft had an important meeting only a couple of years earlier when she presented him with the first Oscar given to a black man, for his performance in Lilies of the Field. The connection between them in this film is solid though, as hits home hard when the phone line between them drops. Suddenly we realise that we've been hanging on the phone with Inga Dyson just as Newell has.
It was written by Stirling Silliphant, as suggested by a presumably factual article in Life magazine by Shana Alexander. I'm guessing that the prominent sign on the wall in the crisis centre is a focus of the article: 'Every two minutes someone attempts suicide in the USA'. It's directed by Sydney Pollack, who hadn't yet won his two Oscars for Out of Africa because this was his first feature as a director. He had been making episodes of TV shows for a few years and obviously had ideas building up in his brain because there are a few scenes here that feel like a debut director doing it how it should be done. The lighting at the end of the disco scene is a great example and presages MTV by a good couple of decades.
There's able support from people like Telly Savalas and Steven Hill, but only two people really have substantial screen time and both Poitier and Bancroft are excellent. It's good to see Poitier in something other than a race drama: the fact that he's black has precisely nothing to do with his part here. Bancroft spends the entire film in various stages of fragility but never overdoes it. She also talks, especially early on, with a detached clarity that reminds me of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
HAL cropped up a little later as another obvious comparison when the phone company try to trace her call and the tech walks up and down the many huge banks of switches at the exchange. I've worked in phone company buildings that have more modern remnants of these things, which are now of course obsolete, and these rooms always give an impression of scale. I wonder if Kubrick had the same thought when he put together his film about scale only a few years later. And talking of obsolescence, it's fascinating to see how long it takes to trace the call. With modern technology, this film would be a short.
The Bow (2005)
I've been getting seriously into Korean cinema lately. While I had almost no knowledge of it at all until recently, I had seen the odd thing in the past and the oldest of them was a Kim Ki-duk film, a monster movie from 1967 called Yonggary, Monster from the Deep. This film, along with a few others being marketed in the west by Tartan Video and shown on the Sundance channel as part of their Extreme Asia series, is also a Kim Ki-duk film. What I didn't realise until now is that these are two different Kim Ki-duks and they're not related. This one was only born in 1960, making him only seven when Yonggary came out. I wonder if seeing his name up there on the big screen was why he was drawn to the industry.
This more recent Kim Ki-duk has a penchant for more artistic films than monster movies and has gathered some notable acclaim for his work, not least for Samaritan Girl and Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring. While I have Samaritan Girl and Time on my DVR and The Coast Guard coming soon, this is only my second of his films after Bad Guy. That was hardly a conventional film and neither is this. Neither one of them are easy to read.
We're on a fishing boat out in the sea, far enough out so that land is not visible. Living on the boat are two people who have no names and who almost never speak. One is a 60 year old man and the other is a 16 year old girl, but she's not his granddaughter, she's his fiancee. Apparently he found her when she was six years old, though we're not told how, and they're supposed to marry on her 17th birthday. The inference is that she's never left the boat at all during those ten years, though she's met plenty of people, given that the old man brings them on board on paid fishing expeditions.
Initially life seems to be good, even blissful. They spend their time swinging off the side of the boat, practicing archery and playing a stringed instrument built out of the same bow used to shoot with. In the various interactions with the visiting fisherman, it's obvious that the old man is jealous of anyone who gets close to her but that she cares for him. He's also been building up her wedding accoutrements for some time and is getting more and more impatient for their wedding day, manipulating the time through use of a calendar.
Then, a young student gets thrown into the mix. He's a visiting fisherman, brought by his dad, and there's an immediate connection between him and the girl. While his jealousy continues, her looks to him change considerably. The student sees it as his duty to seek out her happiness, by taking her away from her kidnapper and seeking out the parents who are still looking for her. Now everything changes: the way the girl sees things and the way her keeper/protector/kidnapper treats her.
This was an intriguing film, hypnotically told and it makes very good use of the deliberately limited cast and locations. There's a lot of symbolism here, meanings not just laid out for all to see. We don't see land at any point in this film: just the boat the two leads live on and the smaller boat that the old man uses to ferry fisherman to and fro. To the young girl the boat and the water is her entire world. There's hardly any dialogue in the film, which tells its story through imagery and symbolism. While it sounds strange to say it, this is a very cinematic film. Too many films nowadays would work just as well if you turned the visuals off and experienced them like a radio play. This one is all about the visuals. None of the characters have names.
The most obvious symbolism ties to the bow of the title, which has many meanings: not least as weapon and as art. It protects both the old man and the young girl, but it also provides much of their entertainment. It also plays a major part in the dangerous fortunes that the old man tells for people: he fires arrows at the Buddhist painting on the side of the boat, in front of which the young girl is swinging, presumably the placement of the arrows providing the fortune. The soundtrack is almost entirely string based and there's a quote at the end that ties to a direction for life and could easily be seen as a mirror of the life of the two lead characters on the boat and how the change is both good and bad.
Like Bad Guy, it didn't knock me out but it did make me more and more interested in the work of this filmmaker, who wrote and directed here. It prompts a lot of questions and that's usually a good sign. One interpretation offered in the comments at IMDb by a poster called Horia sees the film as an metaphor for the quest for spiritual enlightenment. Everyone is a symbol: the old man is the ego, the girl the soul, the fisherman the thoughts, the bow consciousness and the young man enlightenment. I have no idea if this is what Kim Ki-duk intended but it does make sense. More questions...
This more recent Kim Ki-duk has a penchant for more artistic films than monster movies and has gathered some notable acclaim for his work, not least for Samaritan Girl and Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring. While I have Samaritan Girl and Time on my DVR and The Coast Guard coming soon, this is only my second of his films after Bad Guy. That was hardly a conventional film and neither is this. Neither one of them are easy to read.
We're on a fishing boat out in the sea, far enough out so that land is not visible. Living on the boat are two people who have no names and who almost never speak. One is a 60 year old man and the other is a 16 year old girl, but she's not his granddaughter, she's his fiancee. Apparently he found her when she was six years old, though we're not told how, and they're supposed to marry on her 17th birthday. The inference is that she's never left the boat at all during those ten years, though she's met plenty of people, given that the old man brings them on board on paid fishing expeditions.
Initially life seems to be good, even blissful. They spend their time swinging off the side of the boat, practicing archery and playing a stringed instrument built out of the same bow used to shoot with. In the various interactions with the visiting fisherman, it's obvious that the old man is jealous of anyone who gets close to her but that she cares for him. He's also been building up her wedding accoutrements for some time and is getting more and more impatient for their wedding day, manipulating the time through use of a calendar.
Then, a young student gets thrown into the mix. He's a visiting fisherman, brought by his dad, and there's an immediate connection between him and the girl. While his jealousy continues, her looks to him change considerably. The student sees it as his duty to seek out her happiness, by taking her away from her kidnapper and seeking out the parents who are still looking for her. Now everything changes: the way the girl sees things and the way her keeper/protector/kidnapper treats her.
This was an intriguing film, hypnotically told and it makes very good use of the deliberately limited cast and locations. There's a lot of symbolism here, meanings not just laid out for all to see. We don't see land at any point in this film: just the boat the two leads live on and the smaller boat that the old man uses to ferry fisherman to and fro. To the young girl the boat and the water is her entire world. There's hardly any dialogue in the film, which tells its story through imagery and symbolism. While it sounds strange to say it, this is a very cinematic film. Too many films nowadays would work just as well if you turned the visuals off and experienced them like a radio play. This one is all about the visuals. None of the characters have names.
The most obvious symbolism ties to the bow of the title, which has many meanings: not least as weapon and as art. It protects both the old man and the young girl, but it also provides much of their entertainment. It also plays a major part in the dangerous fortunes that the old man tells for people: he fires arrows at the Buddhist painting on the side of the boat, in front of which the young girl is swinging, presumably the placement of the arrows providing the fortune. The soundtrack is almost entirely string based and there's a quote at the end that ties to a direction for life and could easily be seen as a mirror of the life of the two lead characters on the boat and how the change is both good and bad.
Like Bad Guy, it didn't knock me out but it did make me more and more interested in the work of this filmmaker, who wrote and directed here. It prompts a lot of questions and that's usually a good sign. One interpretation offered in the comments at IMDb by a poster called Horia sees the film as an metaphor for the quest for spiritual enlightenment. Everyone is a symbol: the old man is the ego, the girl the soul, the fisherman the thoughts, the bow consciousness and the young man enlightenment. I have no idea if this is what Kim Ki-duk intended but it does make sense. More questions...
Saturday, 16 August 2008
Background to Danger (1943)
One year after Casablanca and two after The Maltese Falcon, Warner Brothers were keen to put Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre back together again. So in 1943 came Background to Danger. Even though this knock off of Casablanca completely failed to replicate the success of its two predecessors, the pairing was still so powerful that 1944 saw no less than three Lorre/Greenstreet pictures: Passage to Marseille, The Mask of Dimitrios and The Conspirators.
We're in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, which in 1942 is the most important neutral country in Europe. The Germans want to bring Turkey into the war and try at the beginning of the film with an assassination attempt on their own ambassador which they plan to blame on the Russians. They fail but there will always be another plan. After all they tried the assassination on what is known as the street of a thousand plots. As the name would suggest, what appears to be every foreigner in Ankara is a spy, an agent, a provocateur. They certainly make up almost all of our cast.
The lead actor is George Raft, because this film didn't have a budget big enough to cast Humphrey Bogart. Raft is an American agent called Joe Barton who's pretending to be an oil machinery salesman. Whatever his real intentions in Turkey, he gets caught up in intrigue before he even gets to Ankara. On the train in he shares a carriage with a young lady calling herself Ana Remzi. As she's being followed, she persuades Barton to carry into Ankara an envelope containing something important. Quite what it is is open to question but it's important and it's the macguffin around which everyone in our story revolves, and there's so much revolving that it's easy to get dizzy.
What's difficult is watching Raft without hearing Bogart. Raft turned down the part of Rick in Casablanca because he felt too important for such a B picture, but if you've ever wondered what it would have become in his hands, you should watch this. Raft is believably tough but he's pretty wooden, with none of the charisma that Bogie exuded without even trying. He sits in the middle of this film just like the macguffin as the rest of the cast act their parts out around him.
This woodenness is a real downfall especially when playing opposite Sydney Greenstreet, who acted mostly with his voice. Greenstreet sounds awesome here as a Nazi colonel masterminding the chaos, both in English and German, but he doesn't move much, which makes their biggest scene together not far off being a photograph with sound. Much better are the scenes with Lorre, who is a delight as a Russian agent called Zaleshoff. The biggest problem with the film is that there's too much Raft and not enough Lorre. I wonder what the film would have looked like had the Americans had swapped places with the Russians so Lorre could be the lead and Raft a supporting actor.
Other problems are that Brenda Marshall has very little to do as Lorre's sister (not that Lorre had enough to do himself), the car chase is sped up way too fast for the laws of physics to apply and there's nowhere enough ties built between the various characters. On the good side, there's so much intrigue and so little screen time (this is only an 80 minute movie) that there's hardly time to breathe, which is how such a story should be shown. It's notably flawed but definitely worth watching, especially for Greenstreet and Lorre, who are both excellent if not excellent together, as they rarely appear in the same scenes.
We're in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, which in 1942 is the most important neutral country in Europe. The Germans want to bring Turkey into the war and try at the beginning of the film with an assassination attempt on their own ambassador which they plan to blame on the Russians. They fail but there will always be another plan. After all they tried the assassination on what is known as the street of a thousand plots. As the name would suggest, what appears to be every foreigner in Ankara is a spy, an agent, a provocateur. They certainly make up almost all of our cast.
The lead actor is George Raft, because this film didn't have a budget big enough to cast Humphrey Bogart. Raft is an American agent called Joe Barton who's pretending to be an oil machinery salesman. Whatever his real intentions in Turkey, he gets caught up in intrigue before he even gets to Ankara. On the train in he shares a carriage with a young lady calling herself Ana Remzi. As she's being followed, she persuades Barton to carry into Ankara an envelope containing something important. Quite what it is is open to question but it's important and it's the macguffin around which everyone in our story revolves, and there's so much revolving that it's easy to get dizzy.
What's difficult is watching Raft without hearing Bogart. Raft turned down the part of Rick in Casablanca because he felt too important for such a B picture, but if you've ever wondered what it would have become in his hands, you should watch this. Raft is believably tough but he's pretty wooden, with none of the charisma that Bogie exuded without even trying. He sits in the middle of this film just like the macguffin as the rest of the cast act their parts out around him.
This woodenness is a real downfall especially when playing opposite Sydney Greenstreet, who acted mostly with his voice. Greenstreet sounds awesome here as a Nazi colonel masterminding the chaos, both in English and German, but he doesn't move much, which makes their biggest scene together not far off being a photograph with sound. Much better are the scenes with Lorre, who is a delight as a Russian agent called Zaleshoff. The biggest problem with the film is that there's too much Raft and not enough Lorre. I wonder what the film would have looked like had the Americans had swapped places with the Russians so Lorre could be the lead and Raft a supporting actor.
Other problems are that Brenda Marshall has very little to do as Lorre's sister (not that Lorre had enough to do himself), the car chase is sped up way too fast for the laws of physics to apply and there's nowhere enough ties built between the various characters. On the good side, there's so much intrigue and so little screen time (this is only an 80 minute movie) that there's hardly time to breathe, which is how such a story should be shown. It's notably flawed but definitely worth watching, especially for Greenstreet and Lorre, who are both excellent if not excellent together, as they rarely appear in the same scenes.
Thursday, 14 August 2008
Kontroll (2003)
We're in the Budapest underground system in this Hungarian film, and it's as intriguing a location for a movie as the Paris Metro and I'm pretty sure first time writer/director Nimród Antal has seen Subway. Quite a lot of the film is shot at night within the system after it's shut down and that really helps the otherworldly atmosphere generated. We never see the surface and it's not difficult to believe that some of the central characters never do either. Our lead, Bulcsú, even sleeps on an underground platform, though we get hints midway through the film that he had a very successful life on the surface at some point in the past that he's trying to escape from.
Our heroes are the ticket inspectors, the Kontroll of the title, who are far from the stereotypical On the Buses sort of inspectors. These are hard living loveable misfit types who look like hard living loveable misfit types. They dress like regular folks and only put on their armbands when they board a train and start checking tickets, which on the Budapest underground system is not the simple job you'd expect it to be.
It can't hurt that we follow what appears to be the runt crew of the litter, as they patrol the south line. Bulcsú seems to be the leader of the crew as he seems to be the leader of anything, not through choice but just by default. There's an air of mystery that hangs over him like a cloak. His crew is small: there's just five of them. There's the large and lumbering Muki, who is angry and narcoleptic; and the quiet, perpetually restrained Professor who nothing seems to faze. There's also Tibi, the new and pretty clueless guy, two weeks in to the job, and a fifth member whose name I perpetually seemed to miss.
They have a hell of a time of it. Just checking tickets on one train they run into no end of trouble customers: a paranoid schizophrenic, a large flamboyant and very fresh gay, a pimp with a couple of girls from his stable, an unmuzzled and loud dog, even a girl in a pear shaped bear suit. Some customers stutter, some have no voice at all. Some threaten with needles, some with words. Some have become legend, like a young punk called Bootsie, who the inspectors have been after for a long time but who continually seems to get through and past them. There's even a huge hooded guy who pushes people under trains.
The film runs through a lot of emotions. It seems strange to use words like 'rich' and 'sumptuous' when describing a dirty underground world where the lights keep flickering in and out of life, but those are the ones that spring to mind when describing the story. It's a ride, but it's not a ride where you check your brain at the gate and just experience; it's a ride that floods over you in fascinating waves, throwing little stories at you from every direction but so cleverly that they all form a coherent and fascinating whole.
It's a tough but tender film, surreal and symbolic but also firmly rooted in reality. Bulcsú and his crew go through a heck of a lot in what is just short of a couple of hours for us but still only a few days for them. Yet in that time, if I'm reading the subtext right, Bulcsú fights not just thugs and a rival crew run by the asskissing Gonzó, but his own inner demons, and finds romance too, in the form of the mysterious girl in the bear suit who is the daughter of a colourful train driver.
Bulcsú even plays Gonzó at a dangerous game called railing, in which they run along the track behind the last passenger train of the night, hopefully dodging the live rails and the various cables and conduits, while hopefully completing the run quick enough to not get wiped out by the Midnight Special following on behind without ever stopping at a station. It could easily be inferred that this entire film, Bulcsú's underground life, could be seen as a longer, less focused version of the same game. What a fascinating, quirky and delightful film, made by and with absolutely nobody I've heard of, though some of these people are cool enough to have double umlaut names.
Our heroes are the ticket inspectors, the Kontroll of the title, who are far from the stereotypical On the Buses sort of inspectors. These are hard living loveable misfit types who look like hard living loveable misfit types. They dress like regular folks and only put on their armbands when they board a train and start checking tickets, which on the Budapest underground system is not the simple job you'd expect it to be.
It can't hurt that we follow what appears to be the runt crew of the litter, as they patrol the south line. Bulcsú seems to be the leader of the crew as he seems to be the leader of anything, not through choice but just by default. There's an air of mystery that hangs over him like a cloak. His crew is small: there's just five of them. There's the large and lumbering Muki, who is angry and narcoleptic; and the quiet, perpetually restrained Professor who nothing seems to faze. There's also Tibi, the new and pretty clueless guy, two weeks in to the job, and a fifth member whose name I perpetually seemed to miss.
They have a hell of a time of it. Just checking tickets on one train they run into no end of trouble customers: a paranoid schizophrenic, a large flamboyant and very fresh gay, a pimp with a couple of girls from his stable, an unmuzzled and loud dog, even a girl in a pear shaped bear suit. Some customers stutter, some have no voice at all. Some threaten with needles, some with words. Some have become legend, like a young punk called Bootsie, who the inspectors have been after for a long time but who continually seems to get through and past them. There's even a huge hooded guy who pushes people under trains.
The film runs through a lot of emotions. It seems strange to use words like 'rich' and 'sumptuous' when describing a dirty underground world where the lights keep flickering in and out of life, but those are the ones that spring to mind when describing the story. It's a ride, but it's not a ride where you check your brain at the gate and just experience; it's a ride that floods over you in fascinating waves, throwing little stories at you from every direction but so cleverly that they all form a coherent and fascinating whole.
It's a tough but tender film, surreal and symbolic but also firmly rooted in reality. Bulcsú and his crew go through a heck of a lot in what is just short of a couple of hours for us but still only a few days for them. Yet in that time, if I'm reading the subtext right, Bulcsú fights not just thugs and a rival crew run by the asskissing Gonzó, but his own inner demons, and finds romance too, in the form of the mysterious girl in the bear suit who is the daughter of a colourful train driver.
Bulcsú even plays Gonzó at a dangerous game called railing, in which they run along the track behind the last passenger train of the night, hopefully dodging the live rails and the various cables and conduits, while hopefully completing the run quick enough to not get wiped out by the Midnight Special following on behind without ever stopping at a station. It could easily be inferred that this entire film, Bulcsú's underground life, could be seen as a longer, less focused version of the same game. What a fascinating, quirky and delightful film, made by and with absolutely nobody I've heard of, though some of these people are cool enough to have double umlaut names.
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)
Forget all those other names people throw out there as the greatest American director of all time: Martin Scorsese, John Ford, even Orson Welles. I'm starting to realise that the most consistent and versatile of them may just be Billy Wilder. He didn't make a huge amount of films, by most standards, just 27 of them as a director from 1934 to 1981, and this one makes two thirds of them for me. That's 18 films and all of them are great to some degree or other. In my rating scheme, I rated 11 of them as classics. I'm getting to the point where I'm already finding films of his that I'd never even heard of and enjoying the heck out of them. This one is a great example: it's a riot!
Orville Spooner lives in the small town of Climax, NV, and is played with complete relish by Ray Walston, everyone's favourite Martian. He's a piano teacher who gives lessons for a buck and a quarter an hour, but in his spare time he composes songs, to which Barney Millsap, the local gas station owner, writes the lyrics. Spooner is awesomely and hilariously paranoid, to the degree that he thinks that when he sends his songs off to the famous artists of the day, they just steal the stamps off the return envelopes. He's also convinced his wife is cheating on him (which she isn't), so much so that he even chases his fourteen year old student out of the house because he brought her flowers.
Orville and Barney are destined to get precisely nowhere, with songs like I Left My Heart in San Diego and Two Coins in the Fountain. Their latest is called I'm a Poached Egg. However suddenly their opportunity lands right in their lap when Las Vegas show legend Dino, on his way to a TV special in Hollywood, gets detoured through Climax and stops at Barney's gas station. Barney is good at grabbing opportunities so subtly sabotages Dino's car and puts him up in Orville's house so that Orville can play and thus sell their songs.
And from there this gets seriously twisted, but in a screwball comedy way. Dino is played by none other than Dean Martin, who obviously relished the chance to send up his own personality and reputation. He's basically playing himself, except a lot more so. This Dino is so addicted to the ladies that he falls in lust with Orville's wife just by seeing the shape of her dressmaker's dummy in the sewing room. Needless to say, paranoid Orville notices this and realises that to reach for the American Dream, he only has to throw his wife at Dino the nymphomaniac. What would you do for the American Dream? That's the question!
Orville won't give up his wife (especially as she's been crazy about Dino since she was sixteen) but, with prompting from Barney, he will give up a fake wife. So he upsets her enough to get her out of the house on their fifth wedding anniversary, then hires a waitress from a dive called the Belly Button (drop in and get lost) to pretend to be his wife so that he can throw her at Dino. It doesn't work out the way you'd expect but the way it does work out is even worse, at least from the perspective of the Catholic Legion of Decency, who were seriously upset about it. There's synchronicity in what happens and it's masterfully set up but wow.
There are lessons to be learned here and answers to be found to hard morality questions, but they aren't the answers you'd expect from a Hollywood movie made under the Production Code. What would you do to be rich and famous, to have a star sing one of your songs on air, to sell a million records, to appear on the Ed Sullivan show? Would you whore out your wife? If not, would you whore out someone else? Would you whore out yourself to make it yourself or to help someone else make it? And the biggest question of all is this: if the American Dream is so wholesome and above board, why are even asking all these other questions?
The stars of the show are Dean Martin and Kim Novak, though the real focus is on Ray Walston and both Felicia Farr and Cliff Osmond are perfect in their roles. Novak plays Polly the Pistol, the waitress from the Belly Button, and it's patently obvious that it was written for Marilyn Monroe. I'm guessing the last scenes were shot first because Novak is most reminiscent of Marilyn in them, but finds her own niche elsewhere in the movie. Walston's part was intended for Peter Sellers, who actually began filming but had to leave the production after suffering a heart attack. And as a Peter Sellers fan, I don't know how he could better what Walston gave us here. He does this sort of thing perfectly.
I didn't know Farr or Osmond, but I certainly do now. Felicia Farr made a string of movies in the fifties, mostly westerns, but tailed off in later years. This came four years after her previous film, Hell Bent for Leather and it would be another seven before her next film, Kotch. I saw her recently in the original 3:10 to Yuma and I've also seen her in The Venetian Affair with Boris Karloff, but it's here that I'll remember her most. She's probably best known though for being Mrs Jack Lemmon, which she was for almost 40 years until his death in 2001. He credited her with every good business decision in his life. Given that they married only two years before this film, questions must be asked!
Osmond appeared a few times for Billy Wilder. This was his second, after the previous year's Irma La Douce, and he'd follow it up with The Fortune Cookie and The Front Page. In between, he made things like She Devils in Chains and Invasion of the Bee Girls, proving that he didn't have Felicia Farr to make his business decisions for him. However they now sound like even more of a guilty pleasure than they would have been anyway. While he didn't write songs in real life, he did write and there's a film called The Penitent with his name on it as both writer and director which sounds intriguing. Given that this didn't happen until 1988, I wonder who he had to whore out to get that chance.
Incidentally, there are jokes everywhere, even in places I don't notice and need my wife to explain, such as with Zelda's parents. Mr Pettibone is played by Howard McNear, better known as Floyd the Barber from The Andy Griffith Show, the one who never shut up. Here he cant get a word in edgeways because his wife won't shut up. My favourite though has to be this line: 'The miserable liar! He was telling the truth!'
Orville Spooner lives in the small town of Climax, NV, and is played with complete relish by Ray Walston, everyone's favourite Martian. He's a piano teacher who gives lessons for a buck and a quarter an hour, but in his spare time he composes songs, to which Barney Millsap, the local gas station owner, writes the lyrics. Spooner is awesomely and hilariously paranoid, to the degree that he thinks that when he sends his songs off to the famous artists of the day, they just steal the stamps off the return envelopes. He's also convinced his wife is cheating on him (which she isn't), so much so that he even chases his fourteen year old student out of the house because he brought her flowers.
Orville and Barney are destined to get precisely nowhere, with songs like I Left My Heart in San Diego and Two Coins in the Fountain. Their latest is called I'm a Poached Egg. However suddenly their opportunity lands right in their lap when Las Vegas show legend Dino, on his way to a TV special in Hollywood, gets detoured through Climax and stops at Barney's gas station. Barney is good at grabbing opportunities so subtly sabotages Dino's car and puts him up in Orville's house so that Orville can play and thus sell their songs.
And from there this gets seriously twisted, but in a screwball comedy way. Dino is played by none other than Dean Martin, who obviously relished the chance to send up his own personality and reputation. He's basically playing himself, except a lot more so. This Dino is so addicted to the ladies that he falls in lust with Orville's wife just by seeing the shape of her dressmaker's dummy in the sewing room. Needless to say, paranoid Orville notices this and realises that to reach for the American Dream, he only has to throw his wife at Dino the nymphomaniac. What would you do for the American Dream? That's the question!
Orville won't give up his wife (especially as she's been crazy about Dino since she was sixteen) but, with prompting from Barney, he will give up a fake wife. So he upsets her enough to get her out of the house on their fifth wedding anniversary, then hires a waitress from a dive called the Belly Button (drop in and get lost) to pretend to be his wife so that he can throw her at Dino. It doesn't work out the way you'd expect but the way it does work out is even worse, at least from the perspective of the Catholic Legion of Decency, who were seriously upset about it. There's synchronicity in what happens and it's masterfully set up but wow.
There are lessons to be learned here and answers to be found to hard morality questions, but they aren't the answers you'd expect from a Hollywood movie made under the Production Code. What would you do to be rich and famous, to have a star sing one of your songs on air, to sell a million records, to appear on the Ed Sullivan show? Would you whore out your wife? If not, would you whore out someone else? Would you whore out yourself to make it yourself or to help someone else make it? And the biggest question of all is this: if the American Dream is so wholesome and above board, why are even asking all these other questions?
The stars of the show are Dean Martin and Kim Novak, though the real focus is on Ray Walston and both Felicia Farr and Cliff Osmond are perfect in their roles. Novak plays Polly the Pistol, the waitress from the Belly Button, and it's patently obvious that it was written for Marilyn Monroe. I'm guessing the last scenes were shot first because Novak is most reminiscent of Marilyn in them, but finds her own niche elsewhere in the movie. Walston's part was intended for Peter Sellers, who actually began filming but had to leave the production after suffering a heart attack. And as a Peter Sellers fan, I don't know how he could better what Walston gave us here. He does this sort of thing perfectly.
I didn't know Farr or Osmond, but I certainly do now. Felicia Farr made a string of movies in the fifties, mostly westerns, but tailed off in later years. This came four years after her previous film, Hell Bent for Leather and it would be another seven before her next film, Kotch. I saw her recently in the original 3:10 to Yuma and I've also seen her in The Venetian Affair with Boris Karloff, but it's here that I'll remember her most. She's probably best known though for being Mrs Jack Lemmon, which she was for almost 40 years until his death in 2001. He credited her with every good business decision in his life. Given that they married only two years before this film, questions must be asked!
Osmond appeared a few times for Billy Wilder. This was his second, after the previous year's Irma La Douce, and he'd follow it up with The Fortune Cookie and The Front Page. In between, he made things like She Devils in Chains and Invasion of the Bee Girls, proving that he didn't have Felicia Farr to make his business decisions for him. However they now sound like even more of a guilty pleasure than they would have been anyway. While he didn't write songs in real life, he did write and there's a film called The Penitent with his name on it as both writer and director which sounds intriguing. Given that this didn't happen until 1988, I wonder who he had to whore out to get that chance.
Incidentally, there are jokes everywhere, even in places I don't notice and need my wife to explain, such as with Zelda's parents. Mr Pettibone is played by Howard McNear, better known as Floyd the Barber from The Andy Griffith Show, the one who never shut up. Here he cant get a word in edgeways because his wife won't shut up. My favourite though has to be this line: 'The miserable liar! He was telling the truth!'
Picnic (1955)
William Holden plays a drifter who arrives in a small Kansas town called Salinson on Labor Day and shakes the whole place up. Mostly this takes place at the annual picnic of the title at Riverside Park but it starts off in the morning as he finds some work at Mrs Potts's house. Next door are no less than four ladies (and no man of the house), none of whom can fail to notice the stud next door working in the yard with no shirt on. Given that this is the midwest, it's all down home and countrified and none of these ladies are quite sure how to react to someone like this. He's Hal Carter and he wants to be someone in this world but he never stays anywhere long enough to get there, presumably quitting whenever someone sees through his facade.
This dissatisfaction with who they are is the theme here. Working up in age order there's Minnie who wants to be a grownup but doesn't want to stop being a child. She's the bright one of the family, already working through the college reading list, but all she can see is that her sister is more beautiful than her and so she gets the attention. That sister, Madge, has the opposite problem. She's certainly beautiful but she wants to be known for something other than her looks. Flo, their mother, wants to be young again but obviously can't be so she's trying to do it all over again through Madge.
Finally, there's Rosemary, a school teacher who rents a room from them. She keeps talking about men who want to marry her, but somehow she never got married. She doesn't think she can really be happy so she spends her time insulting and causing trouble for those who just might be. The other key player is Alan Benson, who had roomed with Carter in college, and whose dad owns a large grain operation. That's why Carter is here, so he can scrounge a job, but it won't come as much of a surprise to find that Madge is Alan's girl.
Throwing Hal Carter, and a little whiskey, into the mix in such a lively festival atmosphere is asking for trouble and everyone, including him, gets a good firm glance at who they really are. It's not that they've been lying to each other, it's that they've been lying to themselves and maybe not quite saying everything they feel. By the time morning comes everyone's had a solid dose of honesty and their respective worlds are different ones from the night before. Nothing will be the same again for any of them.
The script is a good one but it's the actors who bring it to life and they do a very good job indeed. Holden is decent, playing his role with broad strokes. He overacts a lot of scenes but then he's playing a character who's acting as much as Holden is. He's also too old for the role, something that he knew full well. He's completely overshadowed, as he often seemed to be, this time by two actresses. There's Kim Novak, looking a lot younger and softer as Madge than she did only three years later in Vertigo, and there's Rosalind Russell stealing every scene she's in as Rosemary. Apparently she would have been Oscar nominated but she declined the honour because it would have marked her as a supporting actress.
The rest of them don't disappoint either: Susan Strasberg as Millie, Cliff Robertson as Alan Benson, Betty Field as Flo. Better than these though to my mind were Verna Felton as Mrs Potts and Arthur O'Connell as Howard, Rosalind's 'man'. Felton was a Disney regular, playing elephants and queens, and she has a delicious and memorable voice. She has a very quiet part here, but she plays it very well indeed. O'Connell plays Howard like he's been hit by a truck but it's completely fitting: Rosemary dominates him completely, except when it comes down to it and Howard takes over for the few moments it matters.
This dissatisfaction with who they are is the theme here. Working up in age order there's Minnie who wants to be a grownup but doesn't want to stop being a child. She's the bright one of the family, already working through the college reading list, but all she can see is that her sister is more beautiful than her and so she gets the attention. That sister, Madge, has the opposite problem. She's certainly beautiful but she wants to be known for something other than her looks. Flo, their mother, wants to be young again but obviously can't be so she's trying to do it all over again through Madge.
Finally, there's Rosemary, a school teacher who rents a room from them. She keeps talking about men who want to marry her, but somehow she never got married. She doesn't think she can really be happy so she spends her time insulting and causing trouble for those who just might be. The other key player is Alan Benson, who had roomed with Carter in college, and whose dad owns a large grain operation. That's why Carter is here, so he can scrounge a job, but it won't come as much of a surprise to find that Madge is Alan's girl.
Throwing Hal Carter, and a little whiskey, into the mix in such a lively festival atmosphere is asking for trouble and everyone, including him, gets a good firm glance at who they really are. It's not that they've been lying to each other, it's that they've been lying to themselves and maybe not quite saying everything they feel. By the time morning comes everyone's had a solid dose of honesty and their respective worlds are different ones from the night before. Nothing will be the same again for any of them.
The script is a good one but it's the actors who bring it to life and they do a very good job indeed. Holden is decent, playing his role with broad strokes. He overacts a lot of scenes but then he's playing a character who's acting as much as Holden is. He's also too old for the role, something that he knew full well. He's completely overshadowed, as he often seemed to be, this time by two actresses. There's Kim Novak, looking a lot younger and softer as Madge than she did only three years later in Vertigo, and there's Rosalind Russell stealing every scene she's in as Rosemary. Apparently she would have been Oscar nominated but she declined the honour because it would have marked her as a supporting actress.
The rest of them don't disappoint either: Susan Strasberg as Millie, Cliff Robertson as Alan Benson, Betty Field as Flo. Better than these though to my mind were Verna Felton as Mrs Potts and Arthur O'Connell as Howard, Rosalind's 'man'. Felton was a Disney regular, playing elephants and queens, and she has a delicious and memorable voice. She has a very quiet part here, but she plays it very well indeed. O'Connell plays Howard like he's been hit by a truck but it's completely fitting: Rosemary dominates him completely, except when it comes down to it and Howard takes over for the few moments it matters.
Tuesday, 12 August 2008
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
After the intriguing but flawed cult movie The Cars That Ate Paris, Peter Weir made Picnic at Hanging Rock, quite possibly Australia's first big international hit. Often incorrectly regarded as a true story, it's really based on a 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay. The novel was originally approved by the author to be adapted onto film by a fourteen year old filmmaker called Tony Ingram, but once the film rights were officially bought, that version never got past about ten minutes of footage. It would be really interesting to see what a fourteen year old could do with material like this, but I guess we'll never know.
This version could easily be seen an excuse to watch young girls clad in white Victorian outfits string up each other's corsets and take off their stockings in soft focus for 115 minutes (cut down to 107 for the director's cut in a strange change from the usual trend). I'm sure there's a fetish that covers this sort of thing, but there's much more here than just fetish material. Like L'Avventura there's a mystery that is both the focus of everything in the film and completely meaningless in itself. What matters really isn't the disappearance of three schoolgirls and a teacher in rural Australia but the reactions that people take to that disappearance.
They're from Appleyard College, a private finishing school for young ladies, run by Rachel Roberts as Mrs Appleyard, looking a lot older and sterner in her black dress and large bun than she did in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. We're about as early in the twentieth century as you can get, being 1900 and it's St Valentine's Day, which prompts all the girls to create cards and dream of romance. After breakfast, all except one who has to stay behind and learn to recite poetry, travel by carriage to Hanging Rock, a volcanic formation only a million years old, in rural Victoria.
While they're supposed to stay in the picnic area and not actually go to the rock itself, four of them get permission from the French teacher supervising them to go and take measurements: Irma and Marion, dumpy and complaining Edith Horton and Miranda, a Botticelli angel, or so saith the French teacher. Needless to say they don't stop at the base, as they'd promised, they take off their shoes, climb higher and fall asleep in the sun. They appear to wake in some sort of trance state and disappear higher still, while one of them runs back to the camp in screaming hysterics. By the time she reaches the rest of the party she's lost her memory, later remembering only that as she descended from the rock, she saw a red cloud and Miss McCraw heading up without her skirt. Other than that, nobody knows anything.
There's a lot of atmosphere here, built in large part through isolation and a hypnotic soundtrack, full of drone and flute and soft sounds that retreat into the back of the brain to swim through. Nobody mentions this in the film but Hanging Rock appears to be some sort of mystical place. It wouldn't be surprising to find it to be a sacred place to the Aborigines or even tie into the Cthulhu mythos, which often talks of great cyclopean cities of stone rising out of the ground at bizarre angles. Some of the rocks even look like faces, great stone faces sleeping their way into mythology, making us wonder how the story would have turned out if this was a Norwegian fairy tale.
As I mentioned above, the story is really in the reactions. Mrs Appleyard sees the disappearance as something of an affront and is concerned more about the impact of the ongoing publicity to the enrollments at her school. Mlle de Poitiers, the French teacher, is deeply caring but unable to do much beyond. Miss Lumley, closest to the headmistress, is probably the best example of what such a school would turn out: prim, proper and utterly unprepared for reality.
The police investigate and search but to no avail. Only a young Englishman living nearby, who saw the girls go up the rock, has any success at all and that through dogged determination at the expense of his own health. Initially he appears to be guilty of something but he becomes the hero of the hour, finding Irma alive but weak high up on Hanging Rock. The girls themselves resent Irma for coming back without the others. Only Sarah, a young orphan girl stuck in a Dickensian subplot of class persecution, seems to have any key to the mystery but it isn't forthcoming.
And that's the point. We open with mystery and we end with mystery. The film isn't here to give us resolution, it's here to make us ask questions and it isn't crystal clear what the questions should be. That's why Picnic at Hanging Rock resonated and people are still talking about it over 30 years later. What it means depends on what the viewer brings to it and that makes it fascinating. It'll be interesting to see it again in a few years time and see how different it might seem. I bet it isn't like Mrs Appleyard's Bournemouth: blissfully unchanging.
This version could easily be seen an excuse to watch young girls clad in white Victorian outfits string up each other's corsets and take off their stockings in soft focus for 115 minutes (cut down to 107 for the director's cut in a strange change from the usual trend). I'm sure there's a fetish that covers this sort of thing, but there's much more here than just fetish material. Like L'Avventura there's a mystery that is both the focus of everything in the film and completely meaningless in itself. What matters really isn't the disappearance of three schoolgirls and a teacher in rural Australia but the reactions that people take to that disappearance.
They're from Appleyard College, a private finishing school for young ladies, run by Rachel Roberts as Mrs Appleyard, looking a lot older and sterner in her black dress and large bun than she did in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. We're about as early in the twentieth century as you can get, being 1900 and it's St Valentine's Day, which prompts all the girls to create cards and dream of romance. After breakfast, all except one who has to stay behind and learn to recite poetry, travel by carriage to Hanging Rock, a volcanic formation only a million years old, in rural Victoria.
While they're supposed to stay in the picnic area and not actually go to the rock itself, four of them get permission from the French teacher supervising them to go and take measurements: Irma and Marion, dumpy and complaining Edith Horton and Miranda, a Botticelli angel, or so saith the French teacher. Needless to say they don't stop at the base, as they'd promised, they take off their shoes, climb higher and fall asleep in the sun. They appear to wake in some sort of trance state and disappear higher still, while one of them runs back to the camp in screaming hysterics. By the time she reaches the rest of the party she's lost her memory, later remembering only that as she descended from the rock, she saw a red cloud and Miss McCraw heading up without her skirt. Other than that, nobody knows anything.
There's a lot of atmosphere here, built in large part through isolation and a hypnotic soundtrack, full of drone and flute and soft sounds that retreat into the back of the brain to swim through. Nobody mentions this in the film but Hanging Rock appears to be some sort of mystical place. It wouldn't be surprising to find it to be a sacred place to the Aborigines or even tie into the Cthulhu mythos, which often talks of great cyclopean cities of stone rising out of the ground at bizarre angles. Some of the rocks even look like faces, great stone faces sleeping their way into mythology, making us wonder how the story would have turned out if this was a Norwegian fairy tale.
As I mentioned above, the story is really in the reactions. Mrs Appleyard sees the disappearance as something of an affront and is concerned more about the impact of the ongoing publicity to the enrollments at her school. Mlle de Poitiers, the French teacher, is deeply caring but unable to do much beyond. Miss Lumley, closest to the headmistress, is probably the best example of what such a school would turn out: prim, proper and utterly unprepared for reality.
The police investigate and search but to no avail. Only a young Englishman living nearby, who saw the girls go up the rock, has any success at all and that through dogged determination at the expense of his own health. Initially he appears to be guilty of something but he becomes the hero of the hour, finding Irma alive but weak high up on Hanging Rock. The girls themselves resent Irma for coming back without the others. Only Sarah, a young orphan girl stuck in a Dickensian subplot of class persecution, seems to have any key to the mystery but it isn't forthcoming.
And that's the point. We open with mystery and we end with mystery. The film isn't here to give us resolution, it's here to make us ask questions and it isn't crystal clear what the questions should be. That's why Picnic at Hanging Rock resonated and people are still talking about it over 30 years later. What it means depends on what the viewer brings to it and that makes it fascinating. It'll be interesting to see it again in a few years time and see how different it might seem. I bet it isn't like Mrs Appleyard's Bournemouth: blissfully unchanging.
Cello (2005)
Hyeon-a Seong is the most striking lead I've seen in an Asian horror movie in some time. She's absolutely gorgeous, which is hardly surprising, but not in the standard way. She's older than the usual schoolgirl lead, less conventional in her looks and she dresses nicely but hardly flashily. Yet she seems so real, right down to the slight hunch and the mole on the bridge of her nose, unusually and refreshingly real. She can act too, subly so, and I'll be very interested to see her other films to see how versatile she is.
She's Hong Mi-ju, a part time cello teacher who seems to be doing very well for herself. She has a husband who's obviously making a decent living, judging from the size and quality of their house and its contents; she has a notable talent and the means to enjoy it and she has a family who obviously cares about her. However she's also got plenty of problems in her life. Her eldest daughter, Yoon-Jin, has some sort of developmental problems, while her youngest is merely precocious. Her sister-in-law, who lives with them, is distraught and Mi-Ju is being tormented by a student who holds a grudge for a bad grade she gave her.
She also has three deep scars in her wrist from a past that she's not telling about and she's having some bizarre hallucinations. These aren't just minor little nightmares either: they're dangerous hallucinations that are causing people to die and are putting her into serious danger. It all seems to tie to this mysterious past which is only gradually revealed. There's also a new housekeeper, who her husband has hired as a favour: she was struck dumb after drinking acid in a suicide attempt after losing her entire family in a car accident. How she ties into Mi-ju's past isn't particularly clear, but there are many twists to come. This is a tight plot, with nothing wasted, and there's a lot in there to pay attention to.
This Korean horror film plays less on the effects such movies tend to rely on, so is notably less horrific than its fellow genre entries, focusing instead more on the psychological aspects of Mi-Ju's story. Her character is vastly deep and it unfolds slowly and gradually in layers. Some of it is reasonably obvious, though it's played out very nicely indeed, while other strands are less expected and thrown at us with blistering effect. All this plays out to a delightful soundtrack, mostly played on the cello, as you can expect from the title. Even Yoon-Jin's amateur and dissonant attempts to play the cello are somehow pleasing to the ear and Hyeon-a Seong's melodious voice matches the cello material nicely. I was seriously impressed with this one: it isn't perfect, but it's a peach of a resonant shocker.
She's Hong Mi-ju, a part time cello teacher who seems to be doing very well for herself. She has a husband who's obviously making a decent living, judging from the size and quality of their house and its contents; she has a notable talent and the means to enjoy it and she has a family who obviously cares about her. However she's also got plenty of problems in her life. Her eldest daughter, Yoon-Jin, has some sort of developmental problems, while her youngest is merely precocious. Her sister-in-law, who lives with them, is distraught and Mi-Ju is being tormented by a student who holds a grudge for a bad grade she gave her.
She also has three deep scars in her wrist from a past that she's not telling about and she's having some bizarre hallucinations. These aren't just minor little nightmares either: they're dangerous hallucinations that are causing people to die and are putting her into serious danger. It all seems to tie to this mysterious past which is only gradually revealed. There's also a new housekeeper, who her husband has hired as a favour: she was struck dumb after drinking acid in a suicide attempt after losing her entire family in a car accident. How she ties into Mi-ju's past isn't particularly clear, but there are many twists to come. This is a tight plot, with nothing wasted, and there's a lot in there to pay attention to.
This Korean horror film plays less on the effects such movies tend to rely on, so is notably less horrific than its fellow genre entries, focusing instead more on the psychological aspects of Mi-Ju's story. Her character is vastly deep and it unfolds slowly and gradually in layers. Some of it is reasonably obvious, though it's played out very nicely indeed, while other strands are less expected and thrown at us with blistering effect. All this plays out to a delightful soundtrack, mostly played on the cello, as you can expect from the title. Even Yoon-Jin's amateur and dissonant attempts to play the cello are somehow pleasing to the ear and Hyeon-a Seong's melodious voice matches the cello material nicely. I was seriously impressed with this one: it isn't perfect, but it's a peach of a resonant shocker.
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