Month: October 2018

They Live

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

It’s by no means consistent, but when They Live is dirty it’s very dirty. John Carpenter is known for horror fare like Prince Of Darkness (1987), The Fog (1980) and Escape From New York (1981) – all three of which are also about to be rereleased in cinemas. They skilfully build atmosphere and tension to a climax to the accompaniment of creepy, rhythmic music co-composed by Carpenter himself. So admired are his scores that in recent years he’s been able to reinvent himself as a musician doing albums and tours.

The score in They Live plays a particularly important role building from a slow, repetitive blues riff. Blues was originally the musical vehicle African Americans used in order to express their woes in a country where white men were privileged masters and blacks decidedly second class citizens.

Carpenter doesn’t quite go as far as to have his main protagonist as a black person (his protagonist and sidekick are men not women). Instead, Carpenter builds a decidedly stratified social image of the US with haves, have-nots and a privileged financial elite using dirty tricks to maintain their position at the top of the heap.

The film was made towards the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term, the beginning of the whole neo-liberal era in which money was consistently channeled from the poor to the rich. In retrospect, it’s amazing Carpenter got away with as much as he did here – possibly because on the one hand this was a small, independent production rather than a big Studio one and on the other Carpenter was known for directing horror and sci-fi and since this fell within those categories no-one took it seriously.

A drifter Nada (pro-wrestling star Roddy Piper) is part of an underclass travelling the US in search of work. Arriving in a city and finding employment on a building site he meets Frank (Keith David) who directs him to a camp where people can find immediate food and shelter. Gilbert (Peter Jason), who runs the camp, periodically disappears into the Free Episcopal Church nearby and Nada follows him out of curiosity. He discovers that the church, where services are actually tape recordings played through a sound system, is a cover for a resistance organisation who interrupt broadcast television with messages about a small group keeping the rest of humanity in submission. The authorities worry about these people enough to raid the premises. Following one raid, Nada finds a box of sunglasses.

Wearing these sunglasses in the street proves a revelation. Suddenly the world is black and white. Billboards advertising consumer goods of holidays abroad are reduced to simple black print on a white background comprising capitalised slogans like “Obey” and “Marry and reproduce” – instructions to submit to the prevailing order. Street signs become “No independent thought”, “Consume” and “Do not question authority”. The advertising and mass media are pushing out subliminal messages designed to keep the population submissive. This has rarely been portrayed so effectively either in the movies or anywhere else.

More surprises still are to come from the glasses when they also reveal that not all humans are, in fact, human. Some appear an entirely different species whose heads look more like skulls with muscle attached. They are the ruling elite and they’re different from us – aliens, perhaps, or beings from another dimension. If ever you wanted to see an image of the financial elite behaving like a privileged race apart, look no further. The film is less concerned with what type of creature they might be and more with what they might be up to.

For the remainder of its running length, They Live veers off into action territory with a ridiculously long if highly entertaining back alley punch-up between Nada and Frank when the former tries to get the latter to put on the sunglasses… i.e. to see through his eyes. This is followed by a daring raid on the TV station broadcasting the signal that both makes the elite appear like ordinary people and brainwashes the audience. Like the hilarious sexual sight gag on which it closes, They Live’s second half is ultimately disposable although enjoyable enough while you’re watching it. And being a John Carpenter film, it has a driving score to move it along nicely.

The whole could do with a greater share of female characters (Meg Foster plays a TV executive as unmistakable third fiddle to the two men) and being a 1988 production there’s a complete lack of mobile phones which give a distinct period feel today. Even so, the sociopolitical images will stick with you, as powerful now as when Carpenter shot them, the rich and powerful making everybody else conform, the glasses providing the wherewithal to see through their deception and manipulation.

Neo-liberalism has been the dominant political model in the world in the 40 years since Thatcher and Reagan although there are definite signs that all that may be about to change (Sanders, Trump, Corbyn, Brexit). In the intervening years, They Live has had its finger on this particular pulse like no other movie this writer can think of – and has lost none of its power to shock and unsettle. To find it back on the big screen is an unexpected, dirty political treat. The other three reissued Carpenter movies are welcome too, but this particular one is really special.

They Live, alongside with Prince Of Darkness (1987), is out in the UK on Friday, October 26th. The Fog (1980) is to follow in time for Halloween on October 31st and then Escape From New York (1981) on November 22nd.

Watch the trailer for the 4K restorations here:

And here’s the They Live trailer from 1988, recut:

Our dirty questions to Alberto Sciamma

Posted on by victorfraga

The British-Spanish co-production I Love My Mum is about to premiere at the 38th Cambridge Film Festival, which starts this Thursday. The film narrates the story of a bickering British mother and son accidentally shipped off to Morocco on a ship container and having to find their way back home past Spaiin and France. Our reviewer Redmond Bacon described the film as “a picturesque comedy that doubles up as a grand tour of Western Europe”. Click here for our review of the film.

We took the opportunity to talk to the 57-year-old director from Barcelona, who is now on his sixth feature film, with a career spanning more than two decades. So we asked him about political undertones, nationalism, how it feels to be “from the outside” in Europe, and much more! All the images on this article are from the behind-the-scenes of I Love My Mum.

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Redmond Bacon – What was the core inspiration behind the film?

Alberto Sciamma – My own experience, I guess. I always feel like a fish out of water wherever I am. I have always been considered ‘from the outside’ both in Spain, where I was born, and in the UK, where I have lived for many years. That sense of being lost and trying to find a way back ‘home’ wherever that is… I guess that’s me.

RB – Olga and Ron’s journey is similar to that a refugee might take to the UK. Did you want to make any political comment here?

AS – I didn’t want to make a political comment, rather a social one. It’s always there as a background to Ron and Olga, but I wanted them to be blind to it, just as we tend to be. It’s there, we recognise it in occasions, and then go have breakfast…

I wanted to comment on the general attitude. Take the immigrant boat scene for example, in which Ron and Olga want to help rowing. They create chaos by trying to help. They are chucked out of the boat while screaming “sorry, sorry!’. For me, that sums up it all up.

RB – Is it correct to say that the film is also about Brits struggling to communicate in Europe?

AS – Instead of communicating, Ron and Olga just tend to ignore everything. Until a number of accidents moves them forth. They act instinctively, never questioning the world around them. But they never ever act out of badness, they don’t purposely ignore the world, they are just who they are, so there is no judgment.

I see Ron and Olga and both heroic and utterly flawed. Just like everyone else. Well, or at least me. They happen to be British, but they could as well be Spanish just like me…

RB – As the release date is the day after Brexit officially starts, is there another political message here too?

AS – The release date has not been fixed. But of course the discourse about Brexit underlines many situations in the film. The core of that discourse is not exclusive to Brexit, I believe that what is happening in Italy, Catalonia, France etc is at its roots the same bollocks; it’s a nationalist and populist discourse.

The movie looks at that from above and uses it in an absurd and occasionally surreal way, as a comedic pizza base.

RB – Did you look at any other road movies for inspiration?

AS – I’ve always loved Plane, Trains and Automobiles (John Hughes, 1987). But the inspiration wasn’t any other movie in particular, rather all the movies and experiences I’ve had: the good and the bad.

RB – The film has Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009) actress Kierston Wareing. Did you pick Wareing due to her performance in that film?

AS – Kierston is a force of nature, a fantastic instinctive actress. I loved her in It’s a Free World (Ken Loach, 2007). Seeing that movie nailed it for me.

RB – The acting is very naturalistic here, really allowing Wareing and Tom French to shine. How much improvisation did you allow?

AS – They got into their character very deeply, so that made working with them very easy. Tommy French is a natural, very talented and fast learner. He gets it. They were able to shape the script with the improvised style I was after.

The script was followed, and it was shaped by them.

Shooting the movie was nuts, in many occasions we were all improvising and adapting to the locations and never-ending changing situations we encountered. Morocco was particularly nuts, so the actors were responding to the craziness around them, Same with me Paolucci (our DOP) and the rest of the crew.

RB – You have mostly done horror and thrillers before. Why the change to comedy?

AS – I guess all my movies, specially the first one The Killer Tongue (1996) were or had comedy elements, or at least rather absurd stuff. I feel comfortable with comedy. I had previously written a few comedies, and I was desperate to direct one of them. I Love My Mum is that movie. My next movie is also a comedy and also a heist movie, entitled Five Idiots.

In fact, Ron and Olga were born as characters in the script of Five Idiots. I enjoyed so much writing them that I extracted them from that script and dropped them into a blank page… then started writing I Love My Mum. At the start of writing I only knew one thing about their story; they were gonna have an utterly stupid discussion that would put them in a rocket and send them to the moon. After that, the script grew its own body.

I Love My Mum

Posted on by victorfraga

This is a film that wastes no time getting started. Within the space of just 10 minutes, our central characters, mother Olga (Kierston Wareing) and son Ron (Tommy French) have an argument over stolen cheese, go for a shop at a petrol station and accidentally crash into an open shipping container bound for Morocco. Initially thinking they are in the afterlife, they find themselves stranded in a foreign land with no papers, no easy way to get back, and only each other for company.

It’s an action-first, character-second beginning that leaves us breathlessly catching up with the endlessly bickering odd-couple as they navigate their way back, humorously tackling everything from the refugee crisis to Britain’s relationship with Europe to the difficulties of truly connecting with your family.

Zipping nicely along from one wacky scenario to another, and coming in at a neat 86 minutes, this is a picaresque comedy that doubles up as a grand tour of Western Europe. While extremely broad in both its characterisation and comic chops, it’s grounded by the strong performances of Wareing and French, who locate the very real emotion of familial conflict to anchor this road movie on.

Why don’t they just fly straight back? Well it turns out that Ron isn’t actually a British citizen, and that his dad, long-thought dead, is actually a Frenchman – when Ron asks why they visited their “dad’s grave” every year, Olga replies that it was “good for your mental health”. In typical British fashion, the embassy cannot do much to help, leading the two of them to attempt the long way round. The early scenes, depicting paperless Brits stranded in a strange land, are the best in the movie, flipping refugee clichés on their head.

Not only does Ron end up getting a job as a taxi driver who doesn’t speak the native language, but they even attempt to cross over to Spain in a small and overcrowded dinghy. Done with too much heavy-handedness these types of scenes could be rather crass, but they gather their humour here by focusing entirely on the dim-witted Brits without resorting to North African stereotypes. Humanising the depictions that have been used to reduce them to statistics in the media, the king of thing is to make British people see themselves in the shoes of refugees or economic migrants.

Ammunition is reserved, however, for our European neighbours, Spain and France, who are seen respectively as sneaky drug traffickers and natural born philanderers. The essential misunderstanding between our heroes and their Spanish and French counterparts has overtones of Brexit negotiations, in which none of the countries can seemingly surmise what the other wants. While these later scenes meander at times, and rely on just a little too much flat sexual humour, they do get at the heart of why Britain and the rest of Europe seemingly can never properly get on.

Complemented by handsome photography of the Mediterranean Coastline and the Pyrenees, the rugged beauty of both Spain and France shows us what we are missing, making I Love My Mum’s 30 March 2019 release date (the day after the UK’s scheduled exit from the EU – that is, if it does ever come to fruition) rather apt indeed.

It premiered at the 38th Cambridge Film Festival in 2018, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas Friday, May 31st.

Bad Reputation

Posted on by victorfraga

Do you know what it feels like for a rock’n roll girl? Joan Jett started her career in the 1970s, when rock’n roll was virtually all male territory. The bad reputation associated with the movement was perceived as masculine and virile. Man’s business. Definitely not girly stuff. Even those who embraced femininity – David Bowie, Mark Bolan and other glam artists – happened to be male.

Joan Jett describes herself as a feminist, and she’s a founding member of the all-female American teenage rock band the Runaways. Bad Reputation follows Joan from her early days as she challenged the notion that “girls don’t play rock’n roll”, all the way to the present, as the 60-year-old artist collects awards and widespread recognition for a very distinctive career.

The early days where tough. She was spat on, her head cracked open and rib broken for being a female punk rocker. Misogynous criticism was heaped in every corner of the US and Europe where the rock band travelled. They only made it big for the wrong reasons: when they were arrested for disorderly conduct. Iggy Pop thinks that Joan and the Runaways weren’t entirely on their own “there were a lot of women who didn’t want to be like Joni Mitchell. They wanted to rock”. Despite the turbulent years (or perhaps because of it?), Joan is described as a “time-traveller”. She is now considered a woman ahead of her time, and thereby compared to David Bowie.

The documentary blends archive footage with talking heads interviews with Joan and various associates. Iggy Pop and a Debbie Harry with sunglasses permanently attached to her face talk about the significance of the Pennsylvania-born artist. The depravity of the LA’s colourful club scene in the 1970s, which is featured in the beginning of the movie, helped to create the Joan we know. Lisa Minelli’s Camp performance in Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) also had a massive influence on the female rocker, we also learn. At a defining moment of documentary, Joan explains why she shunned motherhood in favour of a “deviant” lifestyle, thereby defining the subversive essence of punk rock itself.

Other highlights of the movie include how Joan Jett survived the “bubblegum music” years, how the recording of I Love Rock’n Roll catapulted her into the mainstream, her relation to Bikini Kill and the Riot Grrrl Movement and much more. All in all, an enjoyable ride through the life of a woman who dodged labels and preconceptions both within and outside the rock world in favour of her individuality.

Bad Reputation is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, October 26th.

Miss Dali

Posted on by victorfraga

This is a film to be watched if you want a historical account of the painter’s life in the style of a cozy fireside chat. Much of this history is narrated by his sister Anna Maria Dali (Sian Philliips) to her old friend Maggie (Claire Bloom) over the course of one day. Maggie asks her old friend leading questions and Anna-Maria dutifully supplies us with the answers. Both Bloom and Phillips are exceptional actresses and give colour to a rather stern dialogue.

The events of Dali’s life are recounted to us as a memory, often in black-and-white flashbacks. He is played by Joan Carmona, who does a good job at portraying the painter’s eccentricities of manner. The younger Anna Maria is played with charm by Eulalia Ballart. As a young woman, Anna Maria often modelled for her famous brother. She was often required to pose for the painter looking delightful in front of an open window.

In the flashback scenes Dali’s family are often found (like the older women who narrate the story) to be reading letters from Dali about various events of his life, or leafing through a box of photographs and talking about past anecdotes. Older Anna-Maria tells us that Dali had fierce arguments with surrealists and communists while living in New York. Yet we never see these arguments.

Two thirds of the way through the film we are introduced to another two talking heads Captain Moore (Allan Corduner) and Joanne (Minnie Marx) and then later still by three other women speaking to older Anna-Maria. The presence of these narrators is never explained.

The cinematography (signed by Tito Arcas and Andalu Vila-San-Juan) is rather impressive. The Spanish village of Cadaques – one of Dali’s favourite retreats – is shown in all its splendid beauty. I’m just not entirely sure why the flashbacks suddenly turn to a colour palette partway through the film.

Overall, the film is a little too long at 168 minutes. The actors work very hard to bring the complex dialogue to life, but the narrative is stretched a little too thinly over such an extensive duration.

Miss Dali shows at the 38th Cambridge Film Festival, which takes place between October 25th and November 1st.

Cam

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Alice (Madeline Brewer) is in charge of her destiny, or so it seems. From a secret and self-contained, fluffy pink studio set up in her apartment, she promotes herself as her online persona Lola who hosts her own live online erotic shows where enthusiastic fans can encourage her to do specific things by sending her virtual currency. Her goal is to become number one on the site which hosts her and many thousands of other hopefuls, but she seems to have got stuck somewhere around the rank of 60th. What’s a camgirl to do in order to boost her ratings?

Clearly, spicing the sex up with a little violence is a winner, so when one of her admirers encourages her to use a knife, while others egg her on and other still try to talk her out of it, Lola cuts her throat online. Then, after what seems like an eternity, she raises her neck to show that it was a special effect, a trick which wasn’t real at all, a fake reality. But it did the job and boosted her rating several points. Once she’s offline, it soon becomes clear that the fan who egged her on was in fact a mate and that the whole thing was a setup by Alice.

Competition for the top spot is fierce, however, and in a subsequent session Alice sees her ratings suddenly plummet when a rival offers to strip if people will abandon Lola for her. Worse is to come when she finds herself locked out of her own site where someone is performing new shows as if they were her broadcasting live as Lola. Her account has been hacked and the site’s hapless tech support prove unable or unwilling to fix the problem.

Conceived and written by real life erotic cam performer Isa Mazzei, Cam possesses a striking understanding of both online sex work and the technical machinations of the internet. The portrait of the self-employed, small town girl using sex work as a career which she can control herself (at least until everything goes unexpectedly off the rails) is convincing as is a further subplot wherein she’s forces to deal with one of her fans in real life Tinker (Patch Darragh) when she runs into him in the local supermarket. And the plot line about being hacked and having to deal with a less than helpful tech support line will ring true to many internet users.

The conceit about a performer replacing the protagonist’s online persona with a clone she can’t control doesn’t quite make sense, with the only explanation a trashy and ill-thought out, generic horror plot device. Yet curiously, in terms of the insecurities of an artistic performer, the idea is spot-on and provided you can get past its narrative implausibility pays off in spades.

The film deftly juggles multiple elements: screens of activity within screens of activity, with internet chat pertinent to the plot going on at the same time elsewhere on the screen, all very impressive on a narrative and technical level. You might struggle with watching it on a small, low resolution screen but on a decent screen in a small cinema, it plays just fine.

Ultimately, this provides a glimpse into both a scarcely discussed commercial/erotic netherworld and the mind of one of its occupants/performers, with lots of smart observations about online communication to boot. A clever little movie, well worth 90-odd minutes of anyone’s time.

Cam played in the 62nd BFI London Film Festival, where this piece was originally written. A trailer was subsequently released on Friday, November 9th, one week ahead of its release on Netflix on Friday, November 16th. Watch that trailer below:

Sorry to bother you, BFI and Picturehouse!!!

Posted on by victorfraga

So London Film Festival closes out its 62nd edition tonight, having boasted a thrilling programme of festival favourites from the year alongside tiny films begging for eyeballs and distribution. Queues snake around Leicester Square for a preview of new films by Steve McQueen, The Coen Brothers, and Yorgos Lanthimos, while evening screenings attract huge crowds fighting for a glimpse of Timothee Chalamet in his latest Willy Wonka outfit. But yet again there is a sour note to proceedings, as the BFI’s relationship with Cineworld, and particularly its Picturehouse chain, grows ever tighter.

I’m sure you know Picturehouse is having an ongoing dispute with its workers over union recognition, the London living wage, ansod maternity, paternity, and sickness pay, all essential for staff on zero-hour contracts. Even a campaign has been launched. With other cinemas like Curzon and ICA both paying the living wage, it’s clearly manageable for Cineworld to do the same, since they have posted increasing profits year-on-year. There is no big strike this year, certainly nothing on the scale of last year’s Three Billboards inspired stunt. This article explains how difficult the law makes it for strikes to go ahead, and the legal threats that organisers have received over last year’s demonstrations. This may explain why there is so little visible action this year. Instead, workers have actively discouraged people from seeing films at Picturehouse, which is difficult when that’s knocking seven screens out of your schedule. But as your ticket is scanned and admission is granted into the Picturehouse walls, the painful undercurrent of exploitation can be felt.

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The shoemaker’s wife is always worst clad

Sorry To Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018; pictured just above) played a couple of times during the BFI London Film Festival Festival at Picturehouse, which might give you pause. You see, Boots Riley’s debut feature is a satire about unionisation. In it, LaKeith Stanfield plays Cash, a telemarketer who uses his ‘white voice’ (literally David Cross) to climb the corporate ladder, and while his stock rises, his low-level colleagues strike for better pay, with increasingly violent results. The film details individualist corruption, one that underwhelms in the final act in favour of a rousing fight against the system; more Mike Judge than Putney Swope. In satisfying its audience though, Sorry to Bother You ends up like an unfinished essay, perhaps because it would require more than 90 minutes for a fully coherent deconstruction of modern corporate capitalism.

But watching it at Picturehouse felt bogus. This is a film about individual vs collective responsibility, about sacrificing your own inflation in favour of making things slightly better for your community. And that part rang truest to the situation at BFI London Film Festival. I went, desperate to see one of the year’s most talked of movies. But it felt hollow. And I’m far from the only person who noticed this. Almost everyone is aware of the dispute, and yet, we are all happy to continue to support an establishment that hates its own workers. What’s interesting is that after last year nothing has changed. Because most people I speak to talk like they care and want to make a stand, but its apparent futility has caused the inverse effect: I gotta see these films, so why not just use the Picturehouse? And if you need a coffee while you’re in here, then why not?

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The heart of the capital

Desperate not to spend any money inside, but in need of caffeine, I found myself stalking Shaftesbury Avenue for somewhere that wouldn’t feel exploitative. McDons… be still my liberal heart. Starbucks… forget about it. But there’s a queue growing for the next movie, so God damn it, I’ll go without, I thought, before going to sit in the gigantic screen 1, and think about how everyone in here is a scab! But I at least, am aware of my hypocrisy, so I can enjoy Sorry To Bother You without self-immolation. Wrong.

Thing is, it’s easy for me to sit here and spill words about the situation, as many have done, but I’m still using the Picturehouse’s snap up chairs, willingly complicit in the entire system. You can understand my bind. This is my first LFF as an accredited press member (for which I had to pay £45, another pressure on the freelance journalist economy!) so it’s in my best professional interests to see as much and meet as many people as possible. Filmmaker receptions take place in Picturehouse, so guess where you need to go if you want to schmooze with the industry. Once you’ve decided to go to the Picturehouse, you’re locked in. You might as well be like Cash, selling slaves over the phone.

This might seem like fatuous complaining about The Way of Things. We like to think of film festivals as a Utopic escape from commercial interests, where ideas can be shared freely and the art is king. And of course this isn’t really the case, they’re all just one big conference/networking event where corporations can showcase the next year’s worth of product. But that product is usually overwhelming enough to make us forget (ignore?) the negative sides of it. But when it’s put so close to us, it’s hard to continue the fantasy. It’s like the Tessa Thompson character, Detroit, from Sorry to Bother You: a radical afro-futurist artist who chides Cash for giving in to the system. But when she wants to sell her work, she is revealed to also use a white voice. She both plays the game, and manages to seem outside of it.

It’s hard to make taking a stand matter, because there are 100 adept Twitter users waiting to swoop in and earn their accreditation by doing the PR work for the festival. The queues around the block must do half the work for Picturehouse, they’ve never seemed so alive (pictured above)! That’s the real economy here. A swathe of cultural capital: to have seen the big film before your non-film friends, or even better, to skip the big movie for a masterpiece first feature. But the films are so good. The swooning, muscular direction of Roma (Alfonso Cuaron, 2018), the romantic gazes of If Beale Street Could Talk‘ (Barry Jenkins, 2108; second picture above), the incredible, art-historical provocations of Make me Up (Rachel Mclean, 2018)… The quality of the films on show are the romantic notion that stops us from taking action. Is a rare chance to see Roma on the big screen before it disappears into the Netflix void as much of a defiant act as it feels, if the circumstances that enable that opportunity deprive others of obtaining economic agency?

Again and again, Cash is reminded to ‘STTS: stick to the script!’ That’s what the nebulous, Festival bubble wants us to do too. They want us to see Roma (pictured below) and If Beale Street Could Talk, films that already have a life outside of the festival. Like so many people I spoke to, you go in thinking you’re going to reject the Oscar fare, in favour of panning for the gold in the margins, but the buzz swallows you up and before you know it you’re sat down for The Sisters Brothers (Jacques Audiard, 2018) Complain all I want but my presence, and especially my acquiescence to this system speaks volumes.

Our individual’s guilt means nothing in the face of the festival’s BFI’s culpability by continuing to use Picturehouse as a key location. While the Leicester Square Odeon undergoes reconstruction, the red carpet premieres are all taking place at Empire (also owned by Cineworld) this year. So it’s clear that BFI doesn’t see it as their responsibility. And the fact that they pay the living wage themselves would appear to acquit them. This week, the BFI also announced ‘measuring class and socio-economic background in their funding and staffing’. Coinciding with their Working Class Heroes season, this is a great step forward, and the BFI should be praised for this commitment. But in the midst of this conversation, one worries that this shifts the focus away from Picturehouse.

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Who’s gonna say it out loud?

At the start of the festival, Charlie Lyne posted a great thread about boycotting the Picturehouse, and even pulled his own film from screening there. But he is in a certain position of influence as a popular young filmmaker/critic. He is one of the only filmmakers to have made such a stand. I couldn’t get Boots Riley or anyone from his team to comment on the situation, which is funny for such a vocal director, and a film of such radical ideology.

The Picturehouse can change their position, but it may take a stronger act of solidarity to do so. These films nourish us. But, if they don’t change us, then what does that nourishment mean? What exactly, does it feed? And if that means skipping a movie like Sorry to Bother You, and all the clout that comes with being a part of that conversation as it happens, then perhaps that is a price that is worth it for a cinema culture that’s worth keeping.

Malcolm is a little unwell

Posted on by victorfraga

Malcolm had seen the worst atrocities imaginable with his very own eyes. He had been to Sarajevo, Libya and other warring zones in order to document the conflict for the BBC and their avid viewers. Often, he did not even wear a bulletproof vest and worked entirely on his own. But none of the horrors he saw drove him to insanity. It was a yellow fever vaccine in 2011 in Greece, as he reported on the economic crash of the Hellenic nation, that sent into a downward spiral into psychosis.

Shortly after taking the jab manufactured by Sanofi Pasteur, Malcolm experienced intense fever. So intense it became life-threatening. Flu-like symptoms persisted. And he began to hallucinate. The fever eventually ceased, but by then Malcolm was entirely convinced that he was the messiah on a mission. The second coming had arrived, he proudly heralded the news. “I am Jesus”, he cried out. He communicated with “angels”, who happened to be old friends and war correspondents killed while on duty. As his religious fixation intensified, his Danish wife Trine Villeman his deliriousness with her camera.

The documentary, which was directed by Malcolm and Trine themselves, is narrated by Malcolm himself. The voice-over is solid stern, indicating that Malcolm has now fully overcome the psychotics episode. The tragic events marred the lives of the couple and their son Lucas, as Malcolm often relapse and financial problems forced the family to move to Copenhagen. The man who once braved the bloodied streets of Tripoli and Saravejo could hardly summon the courage to step outside their tiny flat somewhere in the suburbs of the Danish capital.

This is a movie about living with psychosis and overcoming it. Slowly, the anti-psychotic drugs began to work and the condition eventually subsided. Trine thought that the husband she once knew had “vanished” for good. But then he gradually returned to his old self. At one point, Trine was Malcolm’s nurse. Then she became his friend. One day, they even reclaimed their sex life. Malcolm has finally abandoned planet Malcolm and he’s now firmly living on planet Earth. They are now exuberant with joy, and keen to share their positive outcome with anyone who has ever experienced such an unexpected mental breakdown. They have even recovered their dog, and fully restated normality. They deserve credit for facing their own demons in retrospect.

The film also addresses the dangers of yellow fever vaccine. While Malcolm’s adverse reaction to the medication is extremely rare, it’s not an isolated case. They confronted the powerful manufacturer Sanofi Pasteur and the pharma industry to no avail. The company insists that there is no evidence that the jab called Malcolm’s psychosis. So far, no resolution has been achieved.

Malcolm is a Little Unwell premieres at the 38th Cambridge Film Festival, taking place between October 25th and November 1st.

Burning (Beoning)

Posted on by victorfraga

What do we burn for? Is the question at the heart of Lee Chang Dong’s latest, an extended masterpiece that meditates on the transience of identity, voyeurism, and a changing South Korea. But the Hitchcock of it all, might come as a surprise.

Yoo Ah-in plays Lee, an aspiring writer who begins a fling with a Shin (Jeon Jong-seo), a girl he once bullied in high school. He soon moves out of Seoul and back to his father’s farm, where propaganda alerts from Pyongyang echo from across the border. In a nation that, Dong suggests, increasingly revolves around city life, his family duty has him tethered to a liminal Korean zone.

When Shin returns from a trip to Africa to awaken her ‘Great Hunger’, it’s with a new man in town, and that’s where Dong lights a stick of dynamite that takes two hours to go off. Soon we realise that Lee’s obsession with Shin has become irrevocably linked with her new squeeze, Ben, a wealthy yuppie who espouses Übermensch philosophy and cooks pasta while listening to Jazz (this is based on a Murakami story, after all).

For a long time, Burning resides in Shadow of A Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) territory, as we contemplate Yuen’s guilt in a crime that may or may not have taken place. In fact, the “wrong man” theme is recurring in Hitchcock’s films.. Casting Steven Yeun (from the television series The Walking Dead) as a man who has seemingly rejected Eastern ideals in favour of a western-capitalist version of himself is a stroke of genius. The Korean-American actor gives a brilliant, balanced performance, playing him straight down the middle.

But then Burning veers into a detour that’s all Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), as Lee’s busted pick-up truck tails Ben’s sports car. It is one of the most breathtaking sequences of the year. When we think of the Hollywood directors that return again and again to Hitchcock, like De Palma or Verhoeven, they often take the technical bravado as a way of entering their characters’ psychology. Dong approaches that psychology straight on, through rigorous handheld camerawork that wouldn’t be out of place in more social realist dramas. But that’s how he sneaks this rising tension up on you.

Burning doesn’t just explore his characters’ desires, it manages to make them stand in for a search for a new Korean identity. Small elements, like the way each character holds a cigarette, or the interrogatory looks that the trio share, almost seem to provide an answer. But then its gone.

This use of symbols might prove problematic, particularly in regards to Shin, who’s character mostly serves to drive the men on either side of her to further extremes, without much of an arc of her own. But equally, this seems to be the point. As she dissolves from the plot, we realise that this tussle of masculinity is about no-one but the self. It’s a primal fight over ego, knotted in 21st century anxiety. And by the time Dong has finished fanning the flames, each element has a remarkable, haunting clarity.

Burning showed as part of the 62nd BFI London Film Festival and also the Cambridge Film Fest, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, February 1st. Available on VoD in June 2019.

Border (Gräns)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tina (Eva Melander) is a customs officer working at a Swedish port. She is very good at her job because she possesses the uncanny ability to detect when someone is trying to bring something they shouldn’t in to the country. Tina isn’t particularly good-looking – the unkind might call her ugly – and keeps herself pretty much to herself. She’s a misfit. Her woodlands home is a long drive from any town. She lives there in a cabin, which she herself owns, with Roland (Jörgen Thorsson) who breeds dogs for competitions. The couple get along but any sexual relationship seems to have pretty much stagnated. Her ageing, care home incarcerated “papa” (Sten Ljunggren), who she makes a point of visiting regularly, doesn’t like Roland much, believing the man to be taking advantage of his daughter’s essentially good nature.

Two people she is going to stop in two separate incidents as they come through the customs checkpoint at which she works are going to change her life.

The first is a well-heeled type in a hurry who seems irritated at having his bag searched. Sure enough, there’s nothing illegal in his bag. “Can I please go now,” he asks. Tina won’t let him, insisting he surrender his mobile. He’s not happy. She sniffs the mobile. Out comes the SIM. Before she or her colleague can stop him, he swallows the the tiny card. When they eventually get it out of him, it turns out to contain paedophile porn images. High-ranking police officer Agneta (Ann Petrén) has been after a particular paedophile ring for months, but can’t seem to get the evidence she needs to crack the case and make arrests. Tina’s abilities so impress Agneta that she enlists the former’s help on the case.

The second is a man with whom Tina feels an instant rapport. He would appear to be a loner and a lot like her in many other ways too. She later learns his name to be Vore (Eero Milonoff). When she first searches his bag, it turns out he’s carrying containers of live fishing bait. A bit odd, but nothing illegal. On a later occasion, however, convinced he’s concealing something, she has her colleague strip search the man. The colleague finds nothing – or rather, nothing actionable. It’s all a bit embarrassing. And a bit of a plot spoiler of which we won’t reveal the specifics here. As a relationship subsequently develops between Tina and Vore, she discovers things about him she hadn’t anticipated along with some unexpected truths about her own past and identity.

This is an extremely clever movie which starts off being about one thing – a Scandi-thriller about customs border officials and cops pursuing paedophile rings – but then switches so that it’s about something else entirely (whilst totally delivering the goods as a Scandi-thriller about customs border officials and cops pursuing paedophile rings). It then pulls a second switch on its unsuspecting audience. Which makes it a tough film to review because an accurate one-line description of the plot could ruin the whole experience for you. I guarantee that there will be reviews out there which will do exactly that and – worse – the film may enter into popular parlance as “that film about (but you’re not going to read exactly what it’s about here)”, so you’re advised to go and see the film as soon as you can knowing as little as possible about it. Before reading any other reviews. It has a UK distributor so should be released here in due course. (January 10th 2019 update: it’s out in the UK and Ireland on Friday, March 8th, 2019.)

To its credit, the international trailer below does an impressive job of truthfully representing the film without giving anything away (and, for that matter, so did the blurb about the film in the LFF programme). It says the film is a romance, which it is, showing lots of images of Tina and Vore. But it’s also so much more and the trailer drops hints as to some of that without actually giving anything away. One imagines director/co-writer Abbasi having fights with his producers to make sure the trailer didn’t contain certain elements or plot strands. There seem to be about 20 different producers, according to IMDb. Clearly those were fights worth fighting and winning. (Or perhaps everyone else involved didn’t have any different ideas as to how to sell the film – though somehow I doubt it.)

What we can safely say is that, aside from being an extremely clever script about one’s personal identity and place in the world, and about people who are, for one reason or another, different from the norm, this is a beautifully put together piece of work on a number of levels. For one thing, it takes a certain lack of ego on the part of an actor to play a character who looks a long way from Western notions of physical beauty and both leads Melander and Milonoff are to be congratulated for having the guts to take on these roles and play them under a ton of uncomplimentary makeup. And they both give superb performances. (Which is not to say that there aren’t also superb performances further down the cast too.) For another, the prosthetic makeup work itself is highly impressive.

There’s more to recommend the film: happily, the people who decided to make this Sweden’s contender for the Best Foreign Film thought so too. We at DMovies aren’t huge admirers of Oscar bait, but sometimes countries select films which we’re happy to get behind: this is one of those. So, make a note of the title, don’t read any further reviews or coverage of it and put Border on your must see list for when it comes out in the UK (it has no release date set at the time of writing). Dirtylicious? Absolutely!

Border plays in the 62nd BFI London Film Festival, where this piece was originally written, and also at the Cambridge Film Fest. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 8th, 2019. On Amazon Prime, DVD and Blu-ray on Monday, July 15th. Watch the excellent, spoiler-free film trailer below:

How Ally’s father is crucial to the success of his daughter

Posted on by victorfraga

Among other things,  A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper, 2018) is about a shifting musical landscape, starting with Jackson Maine (played by the director himself) playing sold-out rock concerts and ending with his protege Ally (Lady Gaga) singing pop songs about jeans on Saturday Night Live. In fact, the enduring myth of A Star is Born is the fact that the show-business is  always changing, and stars – in whatever form they may come will always be born. This is the third remake of the movie.

Overlooked in debates concerning A Star Is Born’s classic rock versus pop dynamic is how the movie actually frames this debate in a much larger historical context. This is we have Sam Elliott playing Maine’s much older brother, a failed singer himself that Maine looked up to and eventually superseded. And this is why on Ally’s side, and perhaps more crucial to the entire construction of the film, we have Lorenzo (Andrew Dice Clay), her father, a man who, in his own words, could’ve been as big as Frank Sinatra himself.

The word that has been bandied around a lot when it comes to this fourth version (of the classic American tale is “authenticity”. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Lady Gaga’s astonishing performance, which looks beyond the artifice of ‘Lady Gaga’ to the woman, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, underneath. As a result, the casting of fellow Italian-American Andrew Dice Clay was a masterstroke. He was even chosen over world-class actors such as Robert De Niro, John Travolta and John Turturro. While not as accomplished an actor, his less over-bearing presence allows him to really inhabit the role of her father, giving the film an uncommon depth for contemporary Hollywood drama. 

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There’s Something abou Ally

When Ally first returns home after her first wild night out with Jackson, her father is in the living room with his friends betting on horse races in Japan. Whether or not he is using traditional casino sites to play blackjack or simply gambling among friends, one gets the sense that this has become a regular routine. (If you fancy being like Lorenzo and playing blackjack and other casino games while in the queue to buy A Star Is Born tickets, check out this list of the best casino sites online now.) The room is full of cigarette smoke and there is plenty of alcohol to go around.

This is how Ally can tell immediately that Jackson is an alcoholic, and perhaps normalises his toxic behaviour from the start. Like nearly everything in the screenplay, characters continuously echo each other: not only has Jackson succeeded where her father didn’t, he is eventually the more destructive alcoholic. Through these brief shouting matches with Lorenzo, Ally’s relationship to men and to stardom is cleverly established, setting up a conflict that will only really be resolved in the movie’s final scenes.

Despite all of Lorenzo’s flaws, he loves his daughter dearly and wants her to have the success he never had. With a thick New York accent and seemingly only hanging out with other New Yorkers, despite living in LA, there is a hidden subtext that Lorenzo himself moved to LA in order to be a star. As a result, he imbues the film with a sense of wonderment; at what we mean by success and what we mean by genuine stardom. He creates the myth, repeatedly telling Ally that he heard many better singers back in the day than Frank Sinatra, but when Old Blue Eyes stepped on the stage, he had that ineffable thing that everybody else wanted. Stardom is something that you can’t pin down, you just have to see it for yourself.  And this is your opportunity to see it!

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Listen to the sound of a star

Even Ally’s musical choices continue this idea of classic songsters. It is no surprise that when Maine first lays eyes on Ally she is singing a rendition of La Vie En Rose, a song first recorded by Édith Piaf in 1947 and has been tacked by everyone from Tony Martin and Bing Crosby to Grace Jones and Donna Summer. First a classic show-tune, then a disco classic; in essence, the perfect song to play in a drag bar. It’s probably even a song that Lorenzo has performed, although probably in a quite different manner.

Then by the end of the film she pulls out all the stops to sing the original ballad “I’ll Never Love Again” – evoking shades of Whitney Houston in her barnstorming performance. In this moment, playing in a concert hall and decked out like a traditional crooner, she has truly become her father’s daughter. While rock and pop are definitely important, essential parts of the movie’s musical construction, this idea of timeless stars – whether its Frank Sinatra, Whitney Houston or Lady Gaga herself – ensures that that 2018’s A Star Is Born won’t date any time quickly.

Bradley Cooper isn’t aiming for any specific comment on the current moment here, instead creating a timeless vibe that feels like it could’ve been set any time in the past fifteen years. Lorenzo is crucial to this timeliness. Although at first appearing like comic relief, he is the movie’s beating heart, a link between the past and the present that shows that while musical genres are constantly shifting, the essential nature of stars remains the same.