In Fabric

Dress To Kill

In Fabric
UK 2019 Directed Peter Strickland
UK cinema release print

In Fabric is the new film by Peter Strickland, a director whose previous two works, Berberian Sound Studio (reviewed here) and The Duke Of Burgundy (reviewed here), I totally failed to get on with. The former because it was misrepresented as using a giallo sensibility when it clearly didn’t (more a mixture of British exploitation filtered through Lynchian surrealism) and the latter because it managed to make completely tame the cinematic representation of a BDSM relationship (even given it was trying to channel films like Check To The Queen... which I reviewed here).

I’m very pleased to say, therefore, that I quite enjoyed In Fabric although, truth be told, it’s still a little tame around the edges in what the camera declines to accurately portray. This is, kind of, a horror film mixed with some light comedy and it’s a little bit like The Yellow Rolls Royce in that it’s a film about a specific object... in this case a kind of demonically cursed object channelling a spirit, in some ways... and what happens to it over the course of a number of owners. Alas, in this film we only focus on two of those owners... main protagonists played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Leo Bill in separate segments which are interconnected between the red dress of the title, the cursed object I mentioned earlier... and the department store/manufacturer of this specific dress where, at the very least, one can deduce that some of the fashion mannequins work in human form.

The film is vaguely surreal and quite sparklingly witty in places, with some nice performances from everyone involved with a special shout out to Steve Oram and Julian Barratt as a gay couple of bank managers who happen to be the boss of one of the main characters (and they were so good together in Aaaaaaaah! which I reviewed here that I was just pleased to see them together again). Captain Phasma herself, Gwendoline Christie also has some nice, sexually antagonistic moments on screen and Hayley Squires acquits herself well here and also shows a lovely comic side to her personality, such as when the somewhat weedy Leo Bill accidentally demonstrates his unknown ‘super-power’ in her presence.

The film is quite in your face and features much more of the ‘cut away to a visual montage’ moments than the director has manifested in one film before. Here, they usually take the form of either TV adverts for the shop which spawned the accursed dress or, quite often, flat print fashion advertising that give these sequences more of a ‘mood board’ element to them in the film rather than, I think, pretending to be anything that either forwards the plot of the piece (such as it is) or comments overtly on the nature of the narrative.

It’s also looking very 1970s, not just in terms of the period represented on screen (there’s a lot of equipment I remember from growing up through that time here) but also in terms of the style of the film-making and the way in which the shots are put together... which are very much Strickland but also very retro in feel and, I honestly don’t think that’s unusual for this director. The wonderful score by Cavern Of Anti-Matter which, alas, I can’t find on CD, is very much another element of the movie which highlights the pull back to the cinema of yesteryear and I was quite impressed by the audio soundscape of this film, to be sure (as I was by The Duke Of Burgundy score but, alas, that one couldn’t save the picture for me).

Once again, though, if you’re looking out for possible future signature devices from this director (like Ari Aster, I don’t think we’ve seen this guy’s masterpiece yet), it does kind of blend the subtle surrealism of a David Lynch movie still with the jolting, anti-immersive, almost tangental doses of surrealistic inventiveness reminiscent of someone like Jan Svankmajer.

In terms of story, though, it does make a lot more sense than something like, for instance, the director’s own Berberian Sound Studio. There’s no real impenetrable mystery at the heart of the movie which isn’t revealed in such a way that the audience can’t piece together a rough structural chain of cause and effect of the way in which the dress fulfils its purpose. In some ways, this does make the film somewhat predictable... I was kinda waiting for a sequence that showed two or three of the dead characters, from each section, revealing what their final fate would be... but, at the same time, Strickland leaves the ‘t’s uncrossed and the ‘i’s undotted so the audience is free to build on the rough narrative framework that is revealed in any way in which they please. Or at least, that’s the way it seems to me.

If anything, the film just doesn’t quite go far enough for me in terms of what’s depicted on screen. There are some violent moments, some of them bloody but... they never feel as impactful as they could be and that’s maybe because they are less surprising in the half nightmare, half candy factory world the director has managed to weave for us here. Similarly, the sexuality depicted on screen is all pretty much implied with nothing shown in camera as such and it kinda felt bereft of an edge to the ‘on screen shenanigans’ of various characters. So, I guess what I’m exploring here is why I felt the film was somewhat tame like his previous picture... so I should probably focus on something else, perhaps, such as the sparkling and flowery dialogue of the ‘people’ who work at the store or the absolute camp madness of the shop manager but, I don’t want to spoil all of the surprises 'in store' for you here.

In Fabric is... as I said... the first film I’ve actually liked by this director (or at least not hated) and so I’m happy to say that I can now look forward to his next one with a sense of excitement rather than what my expectations were when I dragged myself into central London to see this one. Films like this are, I should say, made for a big screen so if you want the full impact... especially in terms of the deliberately degraded stock effects he’s used in some sequences... then you really need to get yourself to a cinema to see this one. Not a film I would say would strike it big with horror fans but fans of comedy and things which are just a little, subtly unusual should get a kick out of this one.

Mindhorn

Mann Of Action

Mindhorn
UK 2016 Directed by Sean Foley
UK cinema release print.

When I first saw the trailer for Mindhorn some 6 to 8 weeks ago I looked at it and thought, yeah, looks like a film with a really strong comedy premise but the trailer really isn’t all that funny. Then, however, I remembered back to 1988, when I was almost dragged kicking and screaming to a film I didn’t want to go and see, Terry Gilliam’s remake The Adventures Of Baron Munchaussen, because the trailers had been so awful and offensive. That was the year I realised how misleading some trailers can be because Gilliam’s film, despite a much troubled shooting history, was an absolute instant classic. So I thought, yeah, Mindhorn... how bad can it be? After all, I’d sat through the truly terrible Johnny Depp movie Mordecai and lived to tell the tale (which I tell right here) and I was pretty sure that it couldn’t possibly be any worse than that.

In this prediction, at least, I was more or less right. It’s still not as bad as Mordecai.

Mindhorn is written by, and stars, Julian Barratt (who was so good in the absolutely brilliant Aaaaaaaah! which I reviewed here), playing fictional ‘career on the rocks’ actor Richard Thorncroft, who was best known for his cheesy, Isle of Mann based TV show in the 1980s called Mindhorn. In that show he portrayed the eyepatch wearing title character who had an advanced eyeball that could see into the truth of a person’s soul. However, cut to more or less modern times and a psychotic killer also based on the Isle of Mann, known only as The Kestrel and who thinks Mindhorn was a real person, will only negotiate if Mindhorn is brought in and so the police call in Thorncroft, who goes there with a mind to getting himself some much needed publicity for some kind of comeback or deal further along the road. However, all is not what it seems and there are bigger things afoot than the majority of the supporting characters are aware.

That’s pretty much all I’m giving away of the plot but the film takes Thorncroft through a minefield of ex-colleagues and co-workers from the show as he tries to figure out what really lurks behind the unusual request of The Kestrel and uncover something far more sinister lurking in the shadows. And it’s not without it’s entertainment value, to be sure.

The cast who, in addition to Julian Barratt, include the lovely Essie Davis, Jessica Barden (who was so good in Season Three of Penny Dreadful, reviewed here soon), Russell Tovey and even Steve Coogan are all pretty good. In fact, they’re more than good, they’re brilliant, especially when it comes to finding the little quirks and traits to their characters which tell a lot about them in a very short time. With a special heads up to Simon Farnaby as Thorncroft’s former stuntman who has since, in the fictional 'real life', stood in for him in every other way. Farnaby being the one who kind of steals the show with a couple of laughs here and there but, well that’s the problem with this movie right there...

Mindhorn is engaging, filled with some marvellous characters and is extremely clever. The plot sucks you in and I, for one, found myself really wanting to get involved in it more. I’m sure it must have looked really good on paper and I bet the script reads much better than it’s presented here because... and this is a crunch thing for me... it may be a cleverly concocted comedy but it’s just, really, not very funny. And there’s not much worse than a comedy which works on every possible level apart from the one creative element it needs to succeed as a comedy. In this way, Mindhorn reminded me more of last years spectacular but, ultimately, unfunny Ghostbusters reboot (which I reviewed here ). It’s exactly the same problem because Ghostbusters, too, had some great actresses in it with a lot of good chemistry who you really wanted to like... if only they had remembered to write some actual jokes in it.

And, like the aforementioned Ghostbusters reboot, this is pretty much the only thing which doesn’t work about the movie... but it’s such a crucial element that it causes the whole thing to fail. And it’s such a shame because its a very well observed movie which takes aspects of the human condition and kind of holds them up to the audience and says... look how ridiculous we are as a species. And I just loved things like the various Mindhorn merchandise and packaging such as the toxic truth powder and the different action figures. The music by Keefus Ciancia and David Holmes is appropriate to the images and captures the spirit of both Thorncroft as he is now and the kind of music being written for the fictional TV shows that were being spoofed. There’s a brilliant shout out to the varied and notorious drunken interviews given to Oliver Reed on various chat shows of the 1970s and 80s which was quite cool and there are even some memorable cameos from Kenneth Branagh and Simon Callow where they are playing themselves. But, yeah, you know... it’s just not funny.

And that’s about all I can really say about Mindhorn, at the moment. I rolled the dice on whether I should go and see this one and, unfortunately, the numbers didn’t come up lucky for me. If you are looking for a laugh out loud comedy then I think you might be looking in the wrong place when it comes to this one. That being said, if you are interested in some ingenious acting and are studying the way in which you can pull a character together in broad strokes and make things come alive for an audience then, you know, you might want to take a look at this one before it goes. Not my cuppa tea though, to be sure, so I wouldn’t be recommending it to anyone I know... alas.

Aaaaaaaah!

Pant-hoot Suite

Aaaaaaaah!
UK 2015 Directed by Steve Oram
Fright Fest Blu Ray Zone B

Pant-hoot - noun: A breathy hooting or honking call uttered by a chimpanzee, typically in a series rising in a screaming crescendo and tailing off with quieter calls; a series of such calls.
Oxford Living Dictionary.

If you’ve seen Steve Oram’s movie which he co-wrote and starred in with Alice Lowe... Ben Wheatley’s  Sightseers (reviewed here)... you’ll no doubt already know that this guy’s film projects are worth watching. Even so, this movie was not even on my radar until a friend of mine recommended this film to me (along with a few others which will make interesting review material) when I was touring the merchandise stalls at the Frightfest last August. Well... I say recommended it. What happened was we were looking at the stall where all the Fright Fest* branded films were and I pointed to this one with a dubious title and a strange cover of a gorilla unzipping from a human suit and asked him if he’d recommend it. He looked at me with a smile on his face and said he really loved Aaaaaaaah! but that he was reticent to recommend it because it’s extremely bizarre. I then went on to explain to him that this statement was, in fact, the best recommendation he could give me so I went for the extremely ‘value for money’ purchase of the blu ray version. I didn’t realise just how ‘value for money’ that was until I finally got around to watching it this gem.

Aaaaaaaah! is one of the most insanely entertaining, completely unique and mesmerising movie watching experiences you can have. It's even just a little mind blowing in some places but... you know... mind blowing in that good way. If you’re anything approaching a cinephile or even a casual watcher of movies (like myself) then you really need to be grabbing this one and seeing what all the fuss is about as soon as possible.

Oh, wait a minute. What fuss? There hasn’t been any notable fuss about this and on checking the internet, I can’t even buy this for any of my American friends because it’s never even been released over there. This is definitely a 'crime against filmanity' right there and some wily distributor needs to rectify this as soon as possible.

The only thing I can liken this film to, in my history of watching good movies, is the very first time I watched David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Aaaaaaaah! is one of the great moments of movie art of the 21st Century and it needs to be seen by anyone who is in love with cinema. Although, saying that, it’s got some pretty strong imagery at times and it’s not exactly ‘safe for work’... or for relatives, for that matter.

So what is the film actually about? Well, I’m not 100% sure that’s the right kind of question for this kind of movie experience although it does, when you think back on it, have a sort of story to tell. This is how the movie starts off...

Steve Oram and his friend trek into a forest. Oram gets out a photo of a bride, presumably now deceased by the expression on his face. He puts it on the floor and, rather than bury it, his mate starts pissing on it before Oram stops him. Oram then whips his own cock out and starts defecating on said photograph, while the tears of grief are still streaming from his eyes. His mate then cleans the head of his penis and Oram goes to have sex with a tree while the other squats and watches, before they go off to see what else is going on.

After not very long you will realise that all of the inhabitants of the movie, who are speaking in grunts and groans and using their bodyies to communicate just as much as their vocalisations, are in fact apes. That’s the premise here... everybody is a physically a human being living in a, mostly, human world, but they are all of the mindset of apes and so you get a thorough and blindingly funny, dissection of the way their small tribes (or family units in human terms) interact with each other.

They have their own TV show showing a cooking programme, hosted by a lady with her breasts on display as part of her outfit as she prepares to roast a hog and also, cover it in sugar (or perhaps salt but my guess is sugar). When two ladies go out to do a bit of clothes shoplifting, they are caught by the manager and his assistant which, obviously, means they have to be molested by said shopkeepers... before one of the girls does something a little more drastic to cut short the assistant’s pleasures.

There’s even a party scene with various apetastic social interactions on display such as a courting ritual for Oram and one of the girls and a teabagging moment (which will lead to a heck of a lot of trouble for some of the characters later in the film). The shindig is presumably thrown by the mother figure of the household, played brilliantly by once-upon-a-pop-star Toyah Wilcox. In fact, all the actors in this are absolutely brilliant. If you want to see some absolutely amazing, Oscar worthy acting then this movie is the absolute epitome of unbridled expression to achieve an end. And we see the soft but ferocious hidden sides of characters too, like the one I call Battenburg man (played by Julian Barratt), who carries his Battenburg cake with him as a precious object and even, in one instance, uses it as a makeshift brush to help paint the walls of his new family’s home.

But it’s not just the acting, of course.

The point is, how did Oram’s mind actually map this thing out in the first place? He’s said he was watching a video of two tribes of gorillas, one of whom was attacked by the other and about the death and rape in that moment and the reflection of it by the male apes of the attacking tribe afterwards. Well, I don’t know how Aaaaaaaah! was filmed but I am assuming that the majority of the cast and crew had to get pretty familiar with the rituals and habits of the various ape families to be able to turn in the enthusiastic performance they did here. Especially since the whole thing was apparently shot in two weeks.  I’m assuming that there was a fair amount of improvisation on the set too but, as I intimated earlier, there’s certainly a structural narrative in place. I’m also pleased to say that the final denouement of the movie is something I did not, for once,  see coming... so I’m really pleased about that. The point is, though, the story line does kinda work towards that ending in a few sections of the film but I was sufficiently misdirected to not figure out what the end pay off to that was (and I’m not 100% sure now I'd have been able to second guess it anyway). But I do know it didn’t let me down.

The camera work is fairly roaming and energetic in certain places, as you’d expect, but the edit makes it all work really well and not seem jarring to the eye at any point. It’s already jarring to the mind in some places, to be honest, and that’s not a bad thing. Usually I rely on the score to unify this kind of stuff and, about that...

The film soundtrack uses a lot of synthesised, zany sounds and beats and I wasn’t sure about this matching up with the tone of the movie until I realised that this simplistic approach may well appeal to the apes/people inhabiting the movie and then it all clicked into place for me. So when we see montages like Oram and his new lady friend, played insanely well by Lucy Honigman, going shopping while he is still carrying around the arm he tore out of another character in the film, the music provides a narrative about the absurd simplicity and intensity of the lives we are watching, even as it helps glue the edit together. I’m actually not sure, now, whether those particular scenes I just described actually have any music on them but... you get the idea. It’s a clever modus operandi for the film and it works a treat.

And there’s not a heck of a lot more I can add to this, to be honest. Is this a solid recommendation from me? Yes, of course it is. I think anyone who’s into film should pop this on in the format of their choice, possibly cover it in sugar and watch it until their eyeballs show signs of falling out. Easily one of the most original works I’ve seen in quite some time and I’ve already inflicted it on one set of friends with, I expect, more to follow (yeah... sales of Aaaaaaaah! are going to be going up a little sometime soon, I reckon). Not something for everyone, I would say but, even if you don’t actually like the movie, it’s definitely an experience and you should probably, at least, try it once.

*Although why this movie was branded up with Frightfest is anybody’s guess... since it’s totally not a horror movie.