Month: March 2019

Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story

Posted on by victorfraga

How does it feel to be trapped inside the body of a character of your own creation? This question has haunted many artists. Daniel-Day Lewis refused to leave the wheelchair after playing the protagonist of My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989). Heath Ledger locked himself up in his flat for a month after playing The Joker in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008). And Anthony Perkins required psychological support after failing to break character, having played Norman Bates in various films. Chris Sievey’s case, however, adds an entire new dimension to such tragic predicament. He was literally entrapped inside a huge expressionless papier mache head that he created himself for his character Frank Sidebottom.

This amusing doc investigates follows the English musician and comedian from his early days fronting the punk band The Freshies all the way to his death to cancer in 2010. The music group encountered moderate success. Sievey also experimented with pretty much any media that came his way: painting, drawing, video, etc. But it was the watermelon-sized headed Frank Sidebottom that catapulted him to fame, making Sievey a recognised cult artist.

Through a combination of never-seen-before footage (mostly from Chris’s own personal archives) and talking heads interviews with friends and family members, we learn that Frank Sidebottom began to consume Chris Sievey, and to take over. Unbeknownst to the majority of their fans, the two men in the film title – a real person and a character concocted by this person – were constantly battling against each other. A typical case of split personality. Chris grew increasingly frustrated that he could not showcase his other talents. He thrived on creativity. It was both ironic and paradoxical that one of his own creations would become his handicap. He gave up music. He became a tragic artist. His marriage failed and he hit the bottle. He alienated his three children (one of them recalls having to look after his very intoxicated father, at the age of just nine). His extroverted personality switched into reclusive mode.

Frank Sidebottom blended the nonsensical with self-deprecation. He took tourists on a tour of his native town of Timperley (near Manchester), a place with no real attractions. The pointlessness of the tour was the real selling point. He threw beer on his papier mache mouth (despite being unable to drink it). He made absurd songs about tax (“tax sucks”) and about becoming famous once he’s dead (upon finding out he had cancer).

Being Frank: the Chris Sievey Story is interesting enough for nostalgic fans, but it’s unlikely to convert any new admirers. A lot of people in the audience laughed throughout, but I didn’t find the character neither amusing nor moving. I just found Frank creepy and eerie. Plus, I wish the film had investigated his legacy in more detail. Who has he influenced? How did he change the world of comedy?

The documentary is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 29th, and then on VoD on Monday, April 1st,

Minding the Gap

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

If the concept of a film shot over 12 years will bring to mind the lackadaisical atmosphere of Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014), then don’t fear, Minding The Gap has far more purpose than the novelty of watching people grow up before you. Debut director Bing Liu is mining the life and adolescences of his best friends, to interrogate domestic abuse and notions of masculinity.

“I want to make a montage”, says 17-year-old Liu, setting off a trajectory that will find him drawing a cine-memoir from the footage he’s shot of his skater pals throughout his youth, and returning to his hometown of Rockford, Illinois to watch them become men. In telling their story, he helps his friends, family, and himself to come to terms with the abuse they have suffered and how close they might be coming to repeating that cycle. This would make for a depressing watch if they weren’t such entertaining subjects. The charismatic Zack is what would happen if Peter Fonda got really into NOFX, while the gangly Keire bottles his emotions up, but tries his hardest.

Liu is a pupil of Steve James, and you can see the great Chicagoan documentarian’s influence throughout Minding the Gap’s patience and controlled inquisitiveness. Liu is a visual director who uses suggestive cinematography to convey a year’s worth of information about his subject in a single shot, or a choice sound clip. Minding the Gap depicts the town of Rockford with the wholesomeness of community and the grit of what occurs behind closed doors.

The fluid camera understands the movement of the board – in a way that Jonah Hill’s Mid90s (2019) doesn’t even try to, Hill sees boarding as a lifestyle choice, not as a spiritual experience. Rather, the picking of choice moments will recall the superlative Hale County This Morning, This Evening (Ramelle Ross, 2018). If Ross is an outsider, then Liu sees his (smaller) cast from deep within, resulting in a film of focused poetry.

He also grants them the respect to tell their own stories, to give everyone a chance to speak. They recount their experiences in their own words, including Liu’s mother, who just wants him to forget the past and move on with his life. These words are often juxtaposed with Liu’s already entrenched eye. When he interviews his mother he strips back that level of filmmaking artifice by showing the full film crew preparing. Acknowledgement of the element of artificiality heightens the authenticity of the overall project.

It’s interesting that the fathers, the abusers, are, through time or whatever else, absent. But Liu can already see Zack turning into his old man, and so he becomes the central focus of the film as Liu tries to get through to him. In confronting this head on, Liu doesn’t shy away from the complexity of an abusive relationship; how dependant, even nostalgic it can be. No, Minding the Gap is an incredibly brave film, that might cause us all to examine our scars to see how we might become better.

Minding the Gap is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 22nd, and on VoD the following Monday.

A Clockwork Orange

Posted on by victorfraga

Violence in cinema has always been the source of endless debate. When depictions go past the fairly anodyne — such as a climactic shootout in an action movie — and into the realm of the genuinely provocative, such as the horrific world of Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) or Irreversible (Gaspar Noe, 2002), they can provide a genuine shock to the system, provoking outcry and even calls to be banned. Such was the fate of A Clockwork Orange, adapted from the novel by Anthony Burgess, in which its protagonist Alex DeLarge wreaks ultra-violent havoc upon London with his fellow “droogs” without a single care in the world.

Now enjoying the status of a classic movie, it was met with fury upon its release in 1971. The Catholic Church rated it Condemned, meaning the faithful were forbidden from seeing it. Roger Ebert called it “an ideological mess” and “a paranoid right-wing fantasy” which only exists to “celebrate the nastiness of its hero” while Pauline Kael called it “an abhorrent viewing experience.” It was even blamed for copycat violence, including the murder of an elderly man and a rape where the accused sang Singin’ in the Rain as “Singing in the Rape”. Kubrick himself withdrew the film from public ownership, making it difficult to see in his native UK until after his death in 1999.

Balancing obsessive production design, kooky frames and a generous wide-angle lens, Kubrick drops us into a world that feels both alien and still contemporary. The boys talk in a strange dialect known as Nadsat — a mixture of cockney slang and mispronounced Slavic words —and roam around raping girls and getting into fights. Crucially, the root of Alex’s problems are never explained, Kubrick initially treating it all as a lark. He is never meant to be a psychological character, instead a case study for Kubrick to show off his unique and abundantly self-satisfied style. Additionally, the soundtrack, courtesy of huge classical hits such as Beethoven’s Ode To Joy, Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie and Moog Synthesiser compositions by Wendy Carlos, gives it a sheen of the sublime, making Alex’s actions feel rather seductive.

If A Clockwork Orange only consisted of its first half, it could easily be dismissed as Kubrick depicting violence only for the mere sake of the thing in itself, pushing the limit of what can be seen on screen. Yet the second half takes us into deeper philosophical territory, with Alex, now a convicted felon, treated to a brutal bout of reprogramming. He is forced to watch horrific acts, including endless rape scenes and even clips of Nazi Germany, all scored to his favourite songs. Once he is let free into society, he shows no interest in violence or sex or even music, eventually becoming a similar victim to the violence he once released.

These two halves of the film, almost perfectly centring around the iconic cinema scene, are in direct contradistinction with each other, showing Kubrick’s fondness for bifurcating films between two distinct parts (most clearly seen in 1987’s Vietnam drama Full Metal Jacket). In its second half, A Clockwork Orange becomes a commentary upon violence in cinema itself — its meta quality stressed by those horrific film clips Alex is forced to endure — and how context can change the meaning of violent acts completely. The violence in the second half is nearly just as shocking and brutal as the first, only this time, we’ve finally identified — despite his numerous faults — with the former monster. He may be a terrible person, yet the way he is treated — unable to fight back due to his reprogramming — makes us pity him, like a once violent dog that’s been completely neutered and drugged into a shadow of its former self.

Of all Kubrick’s major films, A Clockwork Orange is easily his less subtle — with a broad (and perhaps simplistic) philosophical point about the horror of the state being worse than any one individual — but its more interesting for the ways he can so easily manipulate the audience’s sense of empathy. It seems he was only too aware of the easily-drawn message of Anthony Burgess’ original novel, Dostoyevskian in the way it starts with horror before moving towards a classic Christian message of redemption. Instead Kubrick famously lets Alex off, ending with a fantasy of him raping yet another naked woman, totally surrounded by adoring spectators in bizarre Edwardian gear. It’s as if to remind us of the artifice of his creation and cinema in general. Sandwiched between the sublime 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the beautiful Barry Lyndon (1975) – films that both end on more purposeful and enigmatic notes – it can feel like somewhat like a relative low-point. But the lessons it teaches us about violence in cinema seem to have come to the fore the last year, especially when it comes to the world of violent arthouse film.

Take Climax (Gaspar Noe, 2018) and The House That Jack Built (Lars Von Trier, 2018), both films made to provoke and push buttons by indulgent auteurs relentlessly plundering from their own filmography. Two similar yet crucially different scenes stand out for me. In the former a child is locked away and left to die, while in the latter the eponymous Jack shoots a child in the head and uses the body for taxidermy. Both feature a young and helpless child dying, yet I laughed at the former and nearly left the cinema in protest at the latter. Pitting the two cases side by side makes one reflect that its not the act itself that has any meaning. It is the way it’s presented — brutally funny in Gasper Noé’s case (presented off-screen) and unrelentingly awful from Lars von Trier (shown in all its horror)— that makes us view it in a particular way.

Likewise, I thought I was done with serial killer narratives after The House That Jack Built, but found Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove (2019) – a film some referred to upon its Berlinale premiere as a complete abomination – to be an utter delight, showing how complicated the relationship we have with violence can be. Watching A Clockwork Orange – a moral quagmire or a mess depending on how you look at it – once again reminds me that context is everything. Whether its style, personal feeling and experience or how much we are or aren’t shown, the way an act is presented or the way we look at an act can change its meaning entirely. Forty-eight years later, A Clockwork Orange still remains the ultimate case in point.

A Clockwork Orange is back in UK cinemas on Friday, April 5th, almost five decades after its original release, thanks to the BFI. Watch the film’s brand new trailer below:

The Crossing (Guo Chun Tian)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Sixteen-year-old Peipei (Huang Yao) lives in Shenzhen, but goes to school in neighbouring Hong Kong. She has to cross the China-Hong Kong border on a daily basis, waved through by border officials with better things to do than stop, question or search schoolgirls. She lives in a cramped apartment. Her father is rarely there because he works the night shift at a shipping yard, where she sometimes visits him. Her gambling mother often invites friends over to play Mahjong.

The family of Peipei’s best friend from school Jo (Carmen Soup) are clearly much better off judging by their huge, modern house in Hong Kong, which contains a large fish tank housing a dogfish (amongst other things). Jo has plans for her and Peipei to go to Japan and Peipei is trying to work out how to make some money to pay for the trip. She finds minimum wage work in a restaurant after school hours.

One day, Peipei stumbles upon what Jo’s boyfriend Hao (Sunny Sun) does for money: he and fellow gang members smuggle iPhones across the border. As someone who goes back and forth across that border every weekday, Peipei realises she’s in the perfect position to exploit this. Her face seems to fit with the gang and she starts to make money, chaperoned by both Hao and his older generation boss Sister Hua (Elena Kong).

As its title indicates, this is a film about crossing lines. Both literal and metaphorical ones. In much the same way that Peipei is constantly going back and forth over the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border, she must also cross and sometimes return over a number of moral and spiritual borders: child-adult, schoolgirl-worker, traveller-smuggler, unarmed-armed, innocent-criminal, platonic-romantic.

Director Bai signals the more troublesome of these crossings via the device of a freeze frame and a short bass guitar riff to indicate that a line has been traversed and her heroine can never be the same again. Peipei is caught between her own humble background and the desire to be part of Jo’s more affluent one, finding herself in a criminal underworld that acts as a potential thoroughfare to link these other two worlds.

The plot takes some satisfying detours along the way. When Peipei accidentally drops one iPhone of a larger shipment onto railway tracks she then has to find a way of getting its broken screen repaired before delivering the complete batch to her designated gang contact. Later, after taking exception to seeing Jo’s family dogfish in captivity, she releases it into the waters of the harbour.

While Hong Kong has a strong tradition of fast-paced, generally male-dominated gangland action movies, The Crossing delivers something very different – essentially a character study about innocence, transgression and personal corruption centred around a female protagonist. After Huang’s deceptively simple portrayal of Peipei and her carefree friendship with Jo has initially drawn the viewer in, the performances of Sun as Hao and those playing his fellow gang members exert a similar pull on both the audience and Peipei herself. Elena Kong is particularly good as the seemingly easygoing and friendly lady boss who when it comes to the crunch can be extremely hard and ruthless protecting her business interests.

In short, this is an impressive coming of age tale with all the trappings of a teenage crime drama wrapped up in a compelling, slow-burner of a character study. Well worth seeing.

The Crossing was out in UK cinemas in March, 2019. It also played in the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF), when this piece was originally written. It is streaming at the Chinese Cinema Season UK, taking place between February and May (2021)

The dirty movie that changed my life: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Posted on by victorfraga

I am now a strong and resolute woman in her forties, but back in 1997 I was barely 20 years of age. I was as vulnerable and gullible as one can be. I had married my first boyfriend James*, who turned out to be psychologically and financially abusive. He was basically a nasty control freak. We got married when I was just 19. Despite his manipulative behaviour, it never seemed like I would be able to find another love. He was also kind and loving at times, and that’s all that seemed to matter to me.

Yet somehow I summoned the courage to file a divorce. But that was just the beginning of the end. The battle got ugly, very ugly, but that’s all you need to know. It isn’t necessary to go into the details. Plus, shortly I submitted the paperwork, I found out I was two months pregnant. Had I made a mistake? Was this a sign that James was the right husband for me? Should I turn things around and make up with “the man of my life”? How could I go on without him and yet with his child inside my womb? The answers right now are as easy as apple pie now, but back then they weren’t as straightforward.

The final answer came one Sunday afternoon when I went to the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead. That’s before it was refurbished. It was a charming repertoire cinema where they showed all sorts of old movies. Double bills, triple bills, all for a fiver. Yes, there were mice running past. But so what? It was so cosy and homely. I was devastated when they shut it down the following year for a major make-over. Yet I was lucky enough to watch Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) shortly before it shut down for the works. It was the final sequence of the movie that gave me the strength to proceed with the divorce.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg isn’t a film about an abusive relationship. It tells the story of 16-year-old Geneviève (played by a dazzling Catherine Deneuve, in her breakthrough role) who runs a small umbrella boutique with her mother in the coastal town of Cherbourg (in Normandy). She falls in love with the handsome car mechanic Guy (Nino Castelnuevo). But Guy is drafted to serve in the Algerian War, and their future is uncertain. They pledge make a pledge of unconditional love before he departs, and Geneviève becomes pregnant. Reuniting with her lover seems to be the only way forward, until the final sequence of the film challenges the orthodox notions of eternal love.

Move the clock many years forward. Geneviève returns to Cherbourg with a young girl in the passenger seat of her car, who happens to be her child with Guy. She stops at a petrol station in order to fuel her vehicle, where she accidentally bumps into Guy, who happens to work there. They have a very short conversation inside the station store, while their daughter waits inside the car. Geneviève asks him whether he wants to see his daughter for the first time. He turns the offer down. Geneviève returns to the car and drives off. It all looks like doom and gloom. It’s impossible to get over unrequited love, particularly if there’s a child involved. The pain is insurmountable.

In a split second, however, the movie and my life changed. Literally in a split second: just watch the extract below, at 5:59. Moments after Geneviève drives off, Michel Legrand’s magnificent I Will Wait for You explodes into the speakers and Guy’s wife and child arrive. He embraces them. Happiness is to be found despite the unrequited love. Despite the baby. Incidentally, the iconic French composer Legrand passed away two months ago at the age of 85.

Geneviève’s story and mine are very different. In my case, my husband was mean to me. In her case, the circumstances (the war, the forced separation) were mean to her. What we both had in common is that we both loved our men profoundly and couldn’t see life beyond that. And that we had a baby. In both cases, life moved on and happiness prevailed. That baby is now 21 years of age and she’s expecting a baby herself. I couldn’t be happier!

* All names in this article have been changed, in accordance to the wishes of the writer.

Do you also have a story to tell about a movie that changed your life? We’d love to hear it! Just write to us at info@dirtymovies.org!

When identity politics backfire

Posted on by victorfraga

The Belgian film Girl tells the story of 16-year-old transsexual Lara, who dreams of becoming a ballerina and is undergoing a sex reassignment surgery. Our writer Tiago Di Mauro caught the film last year, when it premiered in Cannes. He gave it our maximum rating of five splats. The overwhelming majority of film critics were similarly impressed. The film hit UK cinemas last Friday. The reception wasn’t as enthusiastic.

Many people accused the filmmaker Lukhas Dhont and the main actor Victor Polster of opportunistic appropriation because they both are cis and the film protagonist is trans. You can see some of our readers’ comments here. The Curzon Blog also discussed such reactions (just click here). I believe that such criticism is wrong on many levels.

Firstly, the filmmaker used the very innovative concept of genderless casting for Girl. This means that he considered boys and girls alike for the main role. This is a very strong equality statement per se. Secondly, the film was based on the life of Nora Sencour, who was involved in the writing of the screenplay herself. And Nora was delighted with the outcome. She thought that both the director and the actor did her story real justice.

But even if no trans person was involved in the creative process, I would still defend Dhont’s right to make such a film.

At DMovies, we take representation very seriously. Equality is at the very heart of our core values, vision and mission. Until very recently, transface was a widespread issue in cinema. I denounced it myself in article written two years ago. The majority of trans roles used to go cis people. This has changed, and many trans films starring trans actors have been made since (this is just the tip of the iceberg). While we support representation, however, we do not believe that roles should be defined and limited by gender, colour of the skin and trans(sexuality). This is where the difference between representation and segmentation lies.

My argument also applies to film criticism. Just two months ago, a reader argued that I was not to be trusted to write a review of the superb Spanish Lesbian film Elisa and Marcela (Isabel Coixet, 2019; pictured above) because I am not a Lesbian. I wrote about the movue: “This is the real-life tale of two humans being who fell in love and took draconian measures in order in order to remain together, against all odds”. I also gave it the maximum rating available. This is by far the film that moved me most profoundly this year. Love is universal, and so cinema. If you beg to differ, you need to open up your heart.

If we applied the same exclusionary rationale to other areas, only blacks would make and review films about blacks, only women would make and review films about women, only men should make and review films about men, and so on? Let’s also get intersectional. Only black gays should make and review films about black gays. Sounds absurd? A reader two years ago indeed suggested that I wasn’t entitled to review Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2017; pictured below) because I am gay but not black. He questioned whether we have any black gay reviewers. In fact, we do have a gay black reviewer, but that’s not the point. It’s both impossible and undesirable to allocate all reviews according to both colour of the skin and sexuality combined. It’s healthy that people of different colours and sexualities have a say about Moonlight.

Identity politics have helped us to achieve more balanced representation for women, BAME and the LGBTQ+ community in many areas of the film industry. However, the extreme tactics described above can have precisely the opposite effect. They can make identity politics as divisive and prejudiced as nationalism. Representation does not equate to tribalisation. I do not want to see a world in which gender, race and (trans)sexuality are confined in an impenetrable bubble. I fear the day only gay men will make gay films, only women will make women’s films, only black lesbians will make black lesbian films, only Austrian trans people will make Austrian trans films, and so on!

That’s not called equality and tolerance. That’s called extreme sectarianism. That’s also dangerous and reactionary. It negates the universality of cinema and of human sensibility.

Breaking Habits

Posted on by victorfraga

Kate’s life wasn’t quite a walk in the park before she became a Sister. She gave her a corporate job “fulfilling fantasies of businessmen” as a telecoms consultant in favour of her husband and children. She wanted to live “the American dream”, she clarifies. Unbeknownst ho her, her husband was a bigamist married to his previous wife. And he was conning her. She was left without money to look after her children. She went on to live with her brother. But they fell out and he kicked his sister out. She was now penniless, homeless and hopeless.

Kate became very angry at what she perceived as “betrayals” within her family. She joined the Occupy movement. Then she decided to create her own family. She became a “self-declared self-empowered anarchist activist nun”. Other like-minded women quickly joined her and together they set up Sisters of the Valley in Kate’s native Merced County, California. Sisters of the Valley is a sisterhood. Its members lead a monastic life. Perhaps far more significantly, Sisters of the Valley is a business selling marijuana products. It generated more than US$1 million revenues in 2017.

Most Christian denominations offer healing and redemption through prayer, but these very unorthodox nuns beg to differ. They offer healing through CBD-products. CBD is a naturally occurring resin of cannabis. It does not have the psychoactive properties of its far less holy sister THC (the cannabinoid responsible for the marijuana “high”). CBD has medicinal properties associated with mitigating pain, anxiety, cognition and even cancer. The Sisters sell medicinal products, not recreational drugs.

Despite their very noble intentions, the Sisters encountered widespread resistance. Throughout this 82-minute documentary, we hear both sides of the story. A preacher and a sheriff insist that cannabis is dangerous, and that the nuns are little more than drug dealers in very cunning disguise. The sisters have to contend with a very powerful enemy: the Federal Government of the US. Particularly after Obama is gone. Trump empowers prosecutors in order to enforce trade prohibition of marijuana (amongst other drugs). This could spell the end of the Sisters of Valley? Not quite. A lobbyist helps them to gain all legal protections required. The Sisters are elated. The funky music score suggests that the filmmaker is on their side.

Breaking Habits is an auspicious documentary about a singular initiative combining religion, business and medicine. Strangely, the film has been marketed as a “nuns with guns” and a “gun-slinging nuns” flick. Because it rhymes. And because it sounds cool, at least to gun-loving Americans. Fortunately for us who see nothing cool in wielding a gun, weapons are only briefly featured in the movie. The nuns resort to guns for their own protection, in response to a violent robbery took place, but that’s not a prominent topic. The film does not seem to suggest that more guns is the solution to the gun problem in the US .

Breaking Habits is out in selected cinemas and also on digital HD from Friday, April 26th.

Birds of Passage (Pájaros de Verano)

Posted on by victorfraga

This family saga begins in Northern Colombia in the late 1960s, before the country became a prominent marijuana exporter. The Wayúu people are mostly untouched by modern civilisation. They speak their own language and engage in their indigenous traditions. Rapayet (José Acosta) courts his partner Zaida (Natalia Reyes) during an exuberant dancing ritual (one of the film’s most beautiful sequences). He’s then asked to pay a hefty dowry: 50 goats, 20 cows and a number of stone necklaces.

Rapayet finds a brand new approach to money-raising. That’s when the ancient culture begins to desintegrate. He sells marijuana to a young American hippie, who’s also campaigning against communism. Perhaps unwittingly, Rapayet wholeheartedly embraces the capitalistic ideal. He eventually learns Spanish and becomes a powerful drug lord, to the tribe’s matriarch’s dismay (a formidable woman called Ursula, played by Carmiña Martínez). The Wayúu traditions are quickly blended with drugs, heavy weaponry, vehicles and extensive violence. Rapayet becomes extremely rich and builds an impressive mansion in the middle of the desert fields. The building is a strange monument to wealth and tradition.

People are divided into three categories: the indigenous Wayúu, the alijunas (non-indigenous Spanish-speaking Colombians) and the gringos. Rapayet attempt to cling to his people’s traditions, but his alijuna associate Moises (Jhon Narváez) gradually defiles his native purity. Rapayet learns to kill, to negotiate with alijunas and gringos alike. Testosterone-fuelled greed spirals out of control and the threat of war between two Wayúu clans becomes a palpable danger. Very much à la Italian mafia (Scorsese’s 1972 The Godfather will probably spring to mind). The consequences of such war could be devastating. Rapayet wishes to prevent such armed conflict, but is the damage irreversible, is it now too late?

The director and crew behind the Oscar-nominated Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015) have created yet another cinematographically accomplished movie. The imagery is nothing short of breathtaking. The arid landscape provides a soothing backdrop to the fascinating indigenous rituals and also to the violent action. One of the final sequences has Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986) written all over it (I can’t tell you more without spoiling the ending for you). The film ends in the early 1980s

In a way, Birds of Passage is also a film about Colombia. About the country’s sudden obsession with drug trade. The Colombian economy boomed in the 1960s and 1970s after agriculture and farming were quickly replaced by marijuana plantations. But this wealth came at a price. Ancient traditions were polluted and perverted. Birds of Passage represents the twisted coming-of-age of a South American nation. Like a dysfunctional teenager who deep-dives into adulthood intoxicated with drugs.

Birds of Passage, however, does have a few problems. At 125 minutes, it does overstay its welcome. At times, the story becomes lethargic and laborious. Some of the acting is a little contrived. The film’s visual excellence is not on a par with the vaguely clunky storytelling devices.

Birds of Passage is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, May 17th.

Doozy

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

A brief and yet satisfying portrait of the US entertainment legend Paul Lynde, Richard Squires’ debut film Doozy takes multiple approaches to viewing its charismatic subject, from the conventional to the thrillingly experimental. As well as voicing a number of Hanna-Barbera characters and memorably recurring on the American television sitcom Bewitched, Lynde is probably best known as the centre square on the game show Hollywood Squares, as the deliverer of zinger after zinger.

Actual footage of Lynde is quite limited in Doozy, however, with Clovis, a cartoon likeness of the man reenacting anecdotes from his life over live action footage. It manages to summon the essence of the man with charm and an element of kooky mystery.

In taking a multiplicity of viewpoints, Squires doesn’t always get a handle on Lynde. One of his classmates is returned to again and again for commentary on her friend, her enthusiastic daughter cutting her off in order to give her own explanation. When we see a couple play the whole of American folk song I Wish I was in Dixie on guitars, as he cuts back and forth to shots of Lynde’s high school yearbook, it’s difficult to work out if the sense of Confederate nostalgia he’s created is ironic or otherwise. This uncertainty is part of what makes Lynde so compelling to return to; he symbolises something different to almost everyone.

A number of academics appear in Hollywood Squares to talk about aspects of the Lynde persona and impact. Squires focuses on their faces as they watch old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Some of their observations are insightful. While Mark Micale accuses Lynde of playing up to negative gay stereotypes, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen’s discusses the dubious concept of ‘pseudospeciation’ (the idea that social difference is motivated by cultural difference – Tribalism is scientific, how very pseud) leads to the conclusion that Lynde’s otherness is in his voice.

In fact, much of Doozy centres on the voice of Paul Lynde. And why wouldn’t it? Even as his TV roles are aired with increasing irregularity (although hour-long compilations of his Hollywood Squares appearances are readily available online), that shrill, expressive voice lingers in the cultural memory through impressions, references, and an influence that travels all the way down to the UCB comedy crowd. Doozy opens with clips of folks doing impressions of him, and Squires tries to link his voice to the essentially American by playing clips of it over footage of Chevrolets and suburban Americana.

In visual style, the cartoon sequences pastiche Hanna-Barbara, telling short anecdotes that aren’t so far out of the bounds of plausibility. If the voice acting was better (we have so many voice clips of the real guy that its easy to spot the fake), perhaps these scenes would feel better integrated, but they linger as asides rather than driving a thesis for Doozy. That said, sometimes it creates a nice effect, like seeing cartoon Clovis solicit a cartoon hunk and them tiptoe through seedy neon-soaked streets and into a hotel room, hiccuping while accompanied by an upbeat soundtrack, which progresses into something darker, tragic and hallucinatory. In moments like this, Doozy creates a heady late night vibe, as long as you don’t expect something truly illuminating about its legendary subject.

Doozy is playing in select UK screenings from April 23rd – just click here for more information.

Loro

Posted on by victorfraga

The film opens with a fluffy sheep looking into the camera. The sheep wanders off towards a summer house. The sheep enters the living room. The air conditioner adjusts the temperature for human beings, but it is too much for the sheep. The sheep falls down dead, legs splayed on the floor. Italy is the poor, old sheep, fluffy and rather stupid and subject to the wiles of nasty, scheming human beings.

This is the first of a series of striking images of a society gone rotten, obsessed by consumerism, gravitating always to centres of power, using sex and money to get what it wants. A dustbin lorry skids off the road in central Rome, flies through the air, crashes into the old Forum and throws its rubbish everywhere. The rubbish descends and suddenly turns into objects coming down on a frenetic pool side rave organised by Sergio Morra (Riccardo Scamarcio) to impress his most important guest. Silvio Berlusconi. But guess what? Berlusconi doesn’t bother to turn up.

In the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi (Toni Servillo), everyone is on the make. Sex, money, power, entertainment, parties are what get you somewhere and even if the main player doesn’t turn up, what does that matter? At least, you had fun. “The left doesn’t understand me,” Berlusconi says to his personal assistant. “Dottore, you give people what they thirst for.” Democracy is a marketing opportunity. This is the key to Berlusconi and populist politics.

Yet, despite all the power and money, it is all pointless and pathetic. Berlusconi sits on a bed and attempts to seduce a girl called Stella. She turns him down flat and says that his breath smells. It is just an old man’s breath like her grandfather’s. Berlusconi is just an old man and she couldn’t care less. His wife Veronica (Elena Sofia Ricci) is bored by him and loses herself in books and exotic holidays and eventually wants to divorce him. He claims that he has a “volcano” in his garden to amuse his guests but, in fact, it is just a toy volcano that lights up and makes silly noises.

This is a film made with verve and panache. The “sceneggiatura” (production or staging – the Italian word is so effective here) is magnificent in the best tradition of Italian cinema. Toni Servillo’s performance matches the pathetic yet cynical ruthlessness of the old scoundrel with precision. Feminists may wish to avoid this film. It parades and exploits the female body with no shame at. But remember: this is shamelessness is of the man it depicts, and the women themselves are as voracious and ambitious as he is. They know what their most effective asset is, and they flaunt it.

Loro was originally made in two parts for Italian cinemas in Loro 1 and Loro 2 released on different dates. The version available in British cinema is a distillation running for 150 minutes. Some may find this a bit long and the narrative might be a little difficult to fo,llow for those without a detailed knowledge of Italian politics. Nevertheless it is a feast for the eyes. Never have I sat in a cinema where a citizen of a country has exhibited such contempt for his government. They say there is an old Italian saying, “Piove – governo ladro!” – “It’s raining, that thieving government!” Well, it rains a lot in Britain and… do you admire the government?

Loro is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, April 19th. it’s a terrific kick in the balls to populist governments. It makes Michael Moore look like a pussy cat.

Under the Silver Lake

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

Bloated, hyped, panned, lionised. David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to the inventive Horror flick It Follows (2015) arrives in cinemas and on Mubi day-and-date this week. A year on from its decidedly mixed response at Cannes, the cluttered, uncompromising vision of Under the Silver Lake is destined to accrue a cult, midnight movie reputation.

Set in an uber-lush LA, full of foliage and animals and animal killers, after Andrew Garfield’s loser Sam gets caught watching Riley Keough through some binoculars and getting stoned together, they set a date to hook up tomorrow. But the next day, she’s nowhere to be found. Entire flat empty, leave no trace. This sends Garfield into a paranoid, spiralling quest through Los Angeles, where he uncovers a thousand conspiracies and points the finger at everyone but himself. The camerawork is lush, the music by Disasterpiece is great, intoxicating you on all that LA hedonism, with a bonerfied, libido deconstruction on the level of Thomas Pynchon, whose tone is captured better here than in literal adaptation, Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014).

Mitchell has built a city where nothing really leads anywhere but back up your own behind. Yes, it’s self-indulgent, but so is this quite hateful lead character played with adaptive skill by Andrew Garfield. The way he runs across the screen, flapping his stiff hands by his side, is hilarious. His sneer, hiding behind his shades, his dejection every time someone points out how bad he smells. It’s funny, Little Tramp material. And then Mitchell undercuts that sympathy by having Sam beat up a child.

As an audience identification figure, he sucks. And yet are we asked to align with Garfield again and again, and Mitchell is not always in control our understanding of exactly where we should be in opposition to him. That’s what lets the film down, but also what makes it interesting to figure out. His journey, for all of the film’s complicated, shaggy dog nonsense, doesn’t take Sam particularly far outside of his own social milieu. He’s is already peripherally connected to almost everyone he encounters, so much of his conspiracizing is just about a social group that he can’t really infiltrate. The failure of the male ego.

Mitchell has been compared, unfavourably, to David Lynch, for his employment of surrealism within the metier of the classic Hollywood. But his style doesn’t resemble Lynch as much as both directors build characters who are self-consciously situated within an intertextual world.

The mannered costumes, like LA is a perma-fancy dress party, brought to mind Rivette’s play acting in his fantasy films like Duelle (1976). Under the Silver Lake always seems on the verge of falling all the way into those fantastical elements. There’s nothing fantastical however about the way that all the women in Sam’s sphere, young aspiring starlets the lot of them, are being infantalised and sexually exploited by this world, forced to keep up those movie star smiles and behave placidly even around a broke dude who smells like skunk spray.

Indeed, charges of sexism against the films gaze on its female characters seem to be missing the point. Isn’t it clear to the point of bluntness about their objectification? Isn’t there a scene where Garfield and Grace use a drone to spy on a woman and then lose their boners when she begins to cry as she strips? Isn’t Garfields ineffectiveness as a person, in forming relationships, in developing as a person, punished by the film? Don’t the glimpses of conspiracy that are uncovered all revolve around the power that incredibly rich and powerful men hold over vulnerable people? Do viewers really need these things spoken aloud? The visual system of the film, from these plot beats down to the production and, of course, the fact that Garfield smells like a literal skunk for much of the run time, tell us the answers. Does a character need to placate the audience by appearing just verbally admonish him? Hang on, that happens too!

Perhaps Mitchell is throwing too much at the audience for a real coherence to be found. But its approach to mystery doesn’t lead you to expect every loose end to be closed off as much as to just savour the morsels it throws your way. You are forced to work through Sam’s bad decisions, the convoluted mystery, the novelistic digressions. Some of the places Under the Silver Lake reaches are perhaps too easy, as though Mitchell’s grasp of the galaxy-brain-society stuff he’s talking about is all surface level, like he himself is lost in the mire that is modern life. But you couldn’t have a film about self-indulgence that doesn’t swim in those waters itself, could you?

Under the Silver Lake is in selected cinemas on Friday, March 15th (2019). On Mubi in August 2020.