by ·Comments Off on Secret Friends (1991, Dennis Potter)

I don’t especially want to talk about Secret Friends. On one hand, it was interesting to compare to Potter’s book Ticket To Ride, which I just read, and the flashbacks and ambiguous dream sequences a la Alain Resnais’s Providence should be worth discussing, but on the other hand I’ve overdosed on Potter’s poisonous misanthropy and just want to move past this one for now.

Our hero on the train, looking like he is wearing a wig and false eyebrows:
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Alan Bates (Losey’s The Go-Between) is our guy, scheming against his wife Helen (Gina Bellman, title character in Blackeyes, later starred in the show Coupling) who doesn’t actually seem so bad. Riding the train to attempt to sell his obsessively detailed paintings of wildflowers, he has an identity crisis. Plenty of weirdness follows involving hotel prostitutes, affairs with neighbors, our contemptible protagonist’s painful upbringing, confused passers-by, and stuff that is happening which is not happening… which does not seem to be happening at all. Potter directed his own adaptation of his own novel.

Helen, spooked:
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Strangers on a train:
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by ·Comments Off on Brimstone and Treacle (1976, Barry Davis)

I’ve always wondered about this one. In my mind it represented all the non-musical Potter plays, the other half of his career, and so I had to coax myself into finally watching it for fear it’d damage my image of the great man. Liked it for sure, but don’t think I would’ve been hooked if this was the first one of his plays/adaptations I’d seen. Well-written, subversive, but dark as all hell… I am surprised this guy was allowed to work in television.

Over two decades before The Blair Witch Project:
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Michael Kitchen (Out of Africa, recurring role in recent James Bond flicks) is Martin, an evil young man who bumps into strangers on the street and tries to convince them that they know each other. Denholm Elliott (A Room with a View, Bad Timing, best known as a good guy in the Indiana Jones movies) almost falls for it then ditches him, but Martin stole Elliott’s wallet, takes it home and easily talks his way into the house with the wife Patricia Lawrence (in Potter’s Son of Man a few years earlier). Martin sees that their daughter Pattie is lying brain-damaged at home and fakes that he was an ex of hers who was turned down for marriage, offers to help care for her, acts ever so polite. Elliott is suspicious but doesn’t move fast enough, and Martin integrates himself. The wife might be gullible, but she’s also so weary from taking care of Pattie constantly and jumps at the chance to leave her in compassionate hands for a few hours each day. One night when Martin is about to rape Pattie for at least the second time, she wakes up screaming, aware of herself at last, and Martin flees, immediately starts looking for a new family.

Move mouse over image to see Michael Kitchen get over-excited:
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Barry Davis (who also directed Potter’s Schmoedipus the same year) keeps things lively on a miniscule budget. The not-at-all-naturalistic lighting effects (see first screenshot) are especially nice. From the initial street scene on, it stays remarkably intense, bizarre and horrifying. Martin has supernatural powers and hairy demon feet. He talks politics with the family, encourages their own worst impulses. Potter writes: “Deport them, that’s what I say. England for the English” into the mouth of the devil. Then of course there’s the home invasion aspect, the rape of a mentally damaged girl and the miracle ending. This was banned for eleven years (“brilliantly written and made, but nauseating”) – that’s why IMDB lists it as a 1987 release. The theatrical remake starring Sting was actually the first version released in the UK.

Denholm Elliott:
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My favorite line… having some brandy – “There’s fluoride in the water, so are you able to drink it neat, dear?”

by ·Comments Off on Powell & Pressburger double-feature #2

A rare valentine’s day treat for me when Katy suggested (not just “went along with” – suggested!) a Powell/Pressburger double-feature. Maybe she was jealous after reading up on the good times I had watching the previous double-feature by myself, or maybe it’s because I’ve been complaining for three years that we never finished watching The Red Shoes last time, or maybe she just likes me.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Movie wastes no time, with David Niven (his post-war return to film, previously in Wyler’s Wuthering Heights and Dodsworth) mid-plane-crash having a smooth, romantic radio conversation with a visibly upset Kim Hunter (of The Seventh Victim, later A Streetcar Named Desire), each photographed in close-up with washes of color behind them. He turns up on a heavenly beach, safely alive sans parachute, then finds his radio girl and they fall in love, the end.

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BUT WAIT, Niven was supposed to be dead, so a French-accented representative of heaven (Marius Goring of the Archers’ The Spy In Black) comes down to collect him. Niven argues that his situation has changed since he fell in love on his borrowed time and challenges the system to let him live. This is hardly precedented, but heaven agrees to give it a go. Niven consults with his new girl’s doctor friend Roger Livesey (star of I Know Where I’m Going!, and it’s nice to see him again) regarding which dead man Niven should employ as legal counsel in his heavenly trial versus the rabidly anti-British prosecuting attorney Raymond Massey (the soldier in the final scene of 49th Parallel). Movie has exquisite color, innovative production design and Roger Livesey, but it’s turning out to be another propagandistic (allied U.S./Britain need to get along) war story, and one with angels, no less. Angel movies are never good.

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BUT WAIT, new layers are added, as Niven is suspected by the doctor of having brain damage from his fall and is rushed into operation, so the whole heaven business might be in his mind. The doctor, trying to summon an ambulance on his motorcycle, dies in a crash and becomes Niven’s attorney in angel-court. Not particularly nationalist, no theologian, just a very smart and logical man who helps Niven get out of heavenly trouble while the brain surgeon is saving him on earth, leading to the inevitable happy ending.

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I ended up liking it an awful lot. Another movie, so soon after watching Magnificent Obsession, that hinges on the untimely death of a doctor. Niven’s painfully-British dead buddy, awaiting him in stark, black-and-white heaven, was played by Robert Coote (of The Ghost & Mrs. Muir and Welles’ Othello), all hanging out with the future Sister Ruth, Kathleen Byron. Somehow, even though I’ve seen his brother in a TV series 60 years later, I didn’t recognize Richard Attenborough.

–
The Red Shoes (1948)

Another glorious-looking film from the Archers and Technicolor pioneer Jack Cardiff. A student composer (hey, it’s a blond Marius Goring, the Frenchman from the last movie) whose work is being stolen by his teacher Austin Trevor (of Alexander Korda’s The Lion Has Wings) ends up on the same production as ballerina Moira Shearer under the tutelage of passionate and ruthless director Boris Lermontov (Ophuls fave Anton Walbrook, also in 49th Parallel). Composer and Dancer fall in love, but her true love is dancing. Torn between the two (she wouldn’t have to be torn if she could be married and dance, but it never works that way), a tragic finale! Wonderful sad conclusion with Lermontov announcing Shearer’s demise before the curtain, the play performed with only a spotlight where she should be. Echoes the end of The Golden Coach, another climactic love vs. art decision with a final curtain announcement.

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Of course the highlight is the Red Shoes performance, 15 minutes of ballet tricks enhanced with film tricks, one of the most thrilling cinematic montages in history. Besides that one acclaimed scene, movie mostly plays it straight, with believable characterization and classy (but not stifling oscar-classy) filmmaking, until the one bit of fiction crossover at the end, when the red shoes seem to cause Shearer to run from the play and throw herself in front of a train. Close-up on her face, horrified (recalling the finale of Black Narcissus), then a focus on the shoes during the whole run without showing her face again.

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Robert Helpmann, who was awesome in Tales of Hoffmann (and apparently made his own movie of Don Quixote in the 70’s) is awesome here as well, as the lead company dancer opposite Shearer. Movie won some oscars, including best music, but surprisingly the composer didn’t get much work except for other Powell/Pressburger films. Maybe he wasn’t looking for any.

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Katy liked the movies, but didn’t love them, and especially disliked the ending of Red Shoes. When asked what she would’ve preferred, she mysteriously replied “I like when we watch classic movies,” as if the Archers films seemed too contemporary.

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by ·Comments Off on Terence Davies double-feature

I’d like to watch more double-features by filmmakers with whom I’m not familiar… gives a better immediate sense of who they are than watching one movie, then a couple years later managing to catch another, and so on. I’ve already watched Terence Davies’s 2000 The House of Mirth but I completely don’t remember it. Must’ve been late at night on DVD or cable… the only evidence that I’ve seen it at all is my 8 rating on the IMDB, which I may have just clicked by accident one day while looking up Eleanor Bron movies. Anyway, since Of Time And The City isn’t out here, I grabbed his other two most acclaimed features Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992).

Both movies consist of beautifully shot sketches of memories. Distant Voices (the first half) was actually made as its own movie – about three siblings growing up under their father Pete Postlethwaite’s wrath. It was deemed too short to release, so the second part, Still Lives, was written and shot after – now father is dead from cancer and the kids are grown, moving out on their own and getting married. Episodes are shown in random-associative order, all superbly shot. Lots and lots of singing – movie is basically a musical… “takes a worried man to sing a worried song”… “in the bleak midwinter”… “there’s a man coming round taking names”… “when irish eyes are smiling”… tons more, all sung by the cast in bars, on the street or at home.

It was Pete Postlethwait’s breakout year – he was in two other reasonably big films. Davies in the DVD commentary: “It’s hard to believe that one man could’ve caused so much suffering and that all these years later I would make a film about it.”
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Mom, Tony, (dad), Eileen and Maisie
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Eileen (center) was in Aki Kaurismaki’s I Hired a Contract Killer. On left is a friend – loud, outspoken Mickey (good singer, too).
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Married life doesn’t always work out… old friend Jingles looks upset.
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Davies is annoyed that viewers thought the Christmas scenes gave sympathy to the father. He says his father deserves no sympathy. Seems from the commentary like everything actually happened in his life as we see it. Creative liberties are taken, of course… fewer siblings keeps things easier to follow, events and timelines are shuffled, but the movie is a mining of his real life. Reactions from family members to the film were mixed.
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Davies also has a wonderful voice on the commentary. I could listen to him all day. If he did EVERY dvd commentary, people might actually listen to the things. After watching the movie I assumed influence by Alain Resnais, but he says the structure is influenced mainly by T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
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Won a whole pile of awards, including at Cannes and Toronto, but lost the European Film Awards to Kieslowski and Wenders, oh well.
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The Long Day Closes is the same kind of thing, but in a shorter timespan and focusing on one kid (young Terence Davies, or “Bud”), his relationship with mother, home life, church and school. Still plenty of singing, though not as much as the other film, and now punctuated by audio clips from classic movies (the kid is happiest at the cinema). Subjective shots through his eyes, memory adding a dreamlike quality to certain scenes, rain and snow are so constant that sometimes they occur indoors.

Exquisite between-scene transitions… this is halfway through one of ’em.
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I’d say there’s less story here than in the other movie, more impressionistic. I don’t usually love nostalgic childhood reminiscence movies, but that’s because most aren’t as gorgeous as this one.

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By the time I got to the DVD commentary I’d already heard the one from DV,SL so I took it for granted that everything in Long Day Closes refers to a specific, sharply remembered incident in Davies’ real childhood. Liberties are taken, of course, like how the Christmas dinner table here seems to be out on the street.

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August 2012:
If there’s any film that should be watched on 35mm in theaters, it’s this one, and unbelievably, I got a chance. It was playing in Seattle, so Katy grudgingly agreed that we could go. Looked amazing. Nobody else in the theater but us. Katy mostly didn’t like it, dozed through the last 20 minutes, but responded to the audio clip from Tammy and the Bachelor.

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by ·1 Comment

There’s a traffic jam on the movie-blog because I couldn’t think of anything to say about Happy-Go-Lucky. I liked it though! Katy kinda liked it too. Happy teacher Sally Hawkins tries to infect everyone around her with happiness, meets a stone wall in her paranoid, misanthropic driving instructor. There’s also trouble with an unresponsive store clerk, a mentally disturbed homeless man, her picture-perfect pregnant sister, and a young school bully with abuse issues at home. Through the kid Sally meets a cute boy, a child counselor with whom she goes boating at the end.

I don’t remember Sally Hawkins from Vera Drake. I don’t remember driving instructor Eddie Marsan from any of his eight movies I’ve seen in the last five years, poor guy. I’ll look out for him playing John Houseman in Linklater’s new movie.

People who called this movie the flipside to Leigh’s Naked were right on (though Leigh himself doesn’t think so). It’s one of the few movies I’ve seen theatrically lately which I would gladly watch again right now.

D. Denby: “Leigh surrounds her with a realistic social world—workplace, family, students, a variety of grumpy and dissatisfied people. She greets them all with such frothy benevolence that you fear for her. Yet the movie, shot on sunshiny, light-filled days, feels joyous and loose-limbed, and the audience learns to relax and go with it.”

by ·Comments Off on Privilege (1967, Peter Watkins)

A very good movie, though it didn’t strike me as completely excellent – fascinating to see Watkins’ style applied to a fully fictional narrative. This movie’s complete obscurity and unavailability until two weeks ago on DVD really supports the director’s constant claims of marginalization. How can you continue your career when all your past work has been suppressed? It’s a glimpse at where PW’s career could have gone. Also interesting how all the reviews he quotes on the website attack the film’s shooting and editing style, calling it failed art, when I thought it was far more artfully put together than most movies of its time (although it’s not like I’ve seen BAFTA-winning A Man For All Seasons for comparison).

Paul Jones (former singer of top-ten UK band Manfred Mann) plays the top teen idol in Britain, Steve Shorter (sort of all four Beatles in one), who appeals to the youth with pain and rebellion, then is used by the government to promote peace and conformity. Sidetracks along the way for a love interest (who was supposed to be painting Steve’s portrait but that was dropped pretty quickly), TV commercials to push surplus apples, a Mr. Freedom reminiscent (not least of all for its effective cheapness, walls covered in tin-foil) “Steve-mart” superstore, and concert footage including the very nazi-rally-like concert finale (15 years before Pink Floyd’s The Wall). Sure Steve is a tool of the establishment, but he plays it too consciously, usually with an uncomfortable expression on his face (even in public).

Polish cinematographer Peter Suschitzky has had an awesome career, starting with The War Game, going through this and Gladiators, to Jacques Demy, to Ken Russell and Rocky Horror, to Empire Strikes Back and Krull, now shooting all David Cronenberg’s films since Dead Ringers (with time out for Mars Attacks). All great-looking films.

Watkins:

American novelist Norman Bognor and I adapted the script, which we retitled ‘Privilege’, to emphasize the significance of Steven Shorter as an allegory for the manner in which national states, working via religion, the mass media, sports, Popular Culture, etc., divert a potential political challenge by young people.

1970: the first ticker-tape parade in Britain’s history:
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Arty love interest Jean Shrimpton:
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Steve goes all Mike D. on this advertising billboard:
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Behind the scenes on the apple commercial:
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Set for the big rally:
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Steve drives the message home:
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Unlike the cop-out Boogie Nights reissue, this DVD includes the short bio-doc which was the inspiration for the film: Lonely Boy, about teen idol pop singer Paul Anka and his unreasonable screaming female fans. Lonely Boy was released in ’62, the same year he was second-billed (alphabetically, ha!) in The Longest Day with John Wayne, Robert Ryan and Sean Connery. Three years earlier Paul was in the MST3K classic Girls Town. The doc is good, made by two Oscar-nominated Canadians named Wolf and Roman, b/w in “verite” style, but there are voiceovers and lots of editing, so I’m not sure the label is appropriate. Anka is a cutie but his songs aren’t all that. He’s says to the camera that “it’s all about sex”, his manager admits to a nosejob, this was in ’62! Fun to watch them together, since Privilege steals a couple scenes wholesale from the doc.

Lonely Boy:
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by ·Comments Off on The Million Pound Note (1953, Ronald Neame)

A British comedy starring stiff, beefy American Gregory Peck (Robert Osbourne explained that American actors could reap tax benefits from working abroad a few months a year), based on a Mark Twain story, an early film work by the man who would become the Criterion-celebrated director of Hopscotch and other films I know nothing about.

Penniless Peck is given the titular note by two hyper-rich pranksters (IMDB says that in 2002 dollars, we’re talking about a hundred million bucks) who have a bet that he can/can’t live for a month solely on the appearance of wealth without ever cashing the check (or, presumably, getting a job). Peck hires a mute weightlifter to help him out, gets some suits and a swanky hotel, and falls for a young noblewoman (Jane Griffiths, of not much else). A few close calls and but Peck makes it through the month and presumably gets the job (worth somewhat less than a hundred million bucks) and the girl.

More jokes about not paying your tailor, twenty years after the Lubitsch movies. Not paying your tailor is hilarious to the British! A pretty good light movie. Katy and Jimmy enjoyed it more than Hamlet Goes Business.

by ·Comments Off on Elizabeth 2: The Golden Age (2007, Shekhar Kapur)

The latest bit of historical bio-pic entertainment from Kapur (dir. of Bandit Queen, ugh). And it’s not great. One huge weakness is the writing. The writer of the original was here joined (very unsurprisingly) by the writer of Gladiator, so we’ve got very fakey-Hollywood-period-pic dialogue. Katy says this movie defeats the ending of part one, which showed Elizabeth’s transformation into the powerful virgin queen, by having her act all girlish and weak and man-crazy over the (admittedly dreamy) Clive Owen. Owen plays Sir Walter Raleigh, and Abbie Cornish (Stop-Loss) is a lady of the court who ends up with Owen after being practically thrown towards him by the Queen who wants to vicariously experience love, but the queen flies into a rage when Raleigh and the court girl marry. Most of the movie is concerned with this love triangle, but Spain also forms their Armada and attempts to conquer England before being singlehandedly defeated by Clive Owen. We also get a miniature version of the Mary Queen of Scots story (first filmed in 1895, updated in ’71 with Vanessa Redgrave, soon to be updated again by Phillip Noyce & Scarlett Johansson), played here by the great Samantha Morton.

So yeah, we’ve got Clive Owen, but all he does is look dreamy and act cool, even during battle scenes. We’ve got generic loud symphonic music, some bad CG effects and some confusing storytelling. But there are also very good performances (Blanchett, Morton) and some plain-good ones (Geoffrey Rush, Spanish ambassador William Houston), awesome (oscar-winning) costumes, great set design, but nothing tying it all together. Katy didn’t like it either, so I’m free to complain all I like.

Apparently the same love-triangle story was previously filmed as 1955’s The Virgin Queen with Bette Davis and Joan Collins.

by ·1 Comment

“Human beings will always betray you. You can only trust the numbers.”

Well-chosen images (sometimes picked for more comic effect than illustration) keep the thing entertaining while it lectures us. Good use of stock footage and music (incl. Yo La Tengo’s “return to hot chicken” and “nowhere near”).

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PART 1

Post-Depression-and-WWII expansion of American gov’t in order to “control the economy and protect society from the dangerous self-interest at the heart of capitalism.”

Friedrich Von Hayek predicts tyranical outcome from gov’t planning and control of society, says everyone pursuing their own individual self-interest should lead to social order.

Intro of game theory and cold war strategy.

John Nash enhances Hayek’s theory, shows that “rational pursuit of self-interest” leads to a happy equilibrium, but after Nash was locked away to treat his schizophrenia, his coworkers tried to adapt his theories. Nash one of the few theorists and politicians who comes off looking kinda good at the end, saying that he was wrong and that his theories were mis-used.

RD Laing investigates schizophrenia, discovers a treatment (getting affected people the hell away from their horrible families) and a related scary fact, that sane people can be sent to an asylum and believed to be mad. Develops system to quantify personality disorders and remove subjectivity from diagnosis.

James Buchanan argues that politicians’ working for what they call “the public interest” is deceptive, greatly influences Margaret Thatcher. Sets up number-based productivity targets for health-care employees to “free” them based on Nash’s simplified vision of purely selfish individuals.

PART 2

John Major sets out to harness the individualism of public servants through liberating paradigm of the free market via performance targets.

Greenspan and Clinton’s economic advisor tell Clinton that his programs won’t work, needs to move to market-driven society and government.

“Freedom was redefined to mean nothing more than the ability of individuals to get whatever they wanted.”

When he talks about misinterpretations leading to this market-driven society, John Carpenter’s sinister “Halloween” theme kicks in… nice.

An anthropologist actually named Napoleon did a bizarre observational experiment which “proved” that game theory can be applied to the genetic level, that humans, like other animals, are self-interested machines.

“With the rise of this machine model of human beings a new idea of how to change society began to emerge, not through politics any longer but by adjusting how well the individual machines function” and into “a new form of order and control” in the form of imagined new mental disorders and treatments such as prozac. And the drugs turned them into simpler beings, closer to the machine model.

Meanwhile, performance targets weren’t working, corporate crime was huge, and class division was greatly increasing.

PART 3

Overview of how these simplified machine models of human behavior and other stupid theories led to increasingly bad policy decisions in England and the US, into an intro to Isaiah Berlin. I thought I kept notes during this one, even remember spelling out “Isaiah Berlin” but I can’t find them. So here’s wikipedia:

“Berlin is best known for his essay Two Concepts of Liberty, delivered in 1958 … at Oxford. He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents’ possible action. Greater “negative freedom” meant fewer restrictions on possible action. Berlin associated positive liberty with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one’s destiny. While Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, as a matter of history the positive concept of liberty has proven particularly susceptible to political abuse.”

Tony Blair tried at least, sending Berlin a letter asking for advice, but Berlin was on his death bed and never responded. Bunch of sadness ensues, and the movie’s ray of hope for humanity’s future only appears in the final sentences. I will have to watch this part again.

Overall a helluva terrific movie. I want to see it again and I want everyone everywhere to see it also. Katy even almost watched it with me.

Addendum JAN 2011:
Watched again with Katy and I was thrilled that she loved it also. We talked about how damned clever, well-researched and respectful of its audience it seems to be, and how all other documentaries seem lessened in its wake.