Judy And Punch

A Stoning For Your Sins

Judy And Punch
2019 Australia Directed by Mirrah Foulkes
UK cinema release print.

Judy And Punch is one of those rare movies that look really interesting when you see the trailer and then, when you see the film itself, turns out to be exactly that... a real corker of a movie.

The film is not, as you may possibly be expecting, a true history of the story behind the much loved Punch & Judy shows still performed to this day... instead, it’s a fictional portrayal of two people who have invented the concept for this reality... a reality which really is as pleasingly tenuous, I would have to conclude by the conclusion of the story, as the little vignettes which play out in their puppet show.

Set in the 17h Century in a little village called Seaside (which, the inter-title explains, is nowhere near the sea), this stars the always incredible and talented Mia Wasikowska as Judy, puppeteer extraordinaire and her ‘domestic abuse prone’ husband and writer/puppeteer Punch, played by Damon Herriman (who recently played Charlie Manson in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood although, it has to be said, he’s far more effectively an unintentional villain as Mr. Punch). These two actors, more than ably supported by their co-stars, pretty much carry the film and it has to be said their performances here are astonishing. Wasikowska as the persevering wife and mother of Punch’s child who turns into a ‘not quite classic’ version of the female revenge figure by the end of the film is totally believable and this character is just the kind of role she thrives on. Herriman was surprisingly good as Punch, playing a drunk and short tempered, abusive man in a way which lets you understand where he is coming from in his pursuit of his basest instincts while still coming off as totally unsympathetic... and also he somehow manages to look and feel very much like the puppet he is named after too, with not a swazzle in sight.

The film opens strongly with a performance given by Judy and Punch of their puppet show which is followed the next day by a public stoning of three female victims in the village which everyone attends.... Mr. Punch is given the honour of casting the first stone. This immediately sets up the period with its echoes of witchcraft and the ruthless violence punctuating the times and, although the film is shot through with a very dark humour, the grimness of the situations throughout are very sobering and the bleakness tends to dispel the underlying comedy before it can take hold. This is not to say the film isn’t entertaining... it is and I couldn’t take my eyes from the screen but... expect to be in for a dark time with this one.

Writer/director Mirrah Foulkes, who is perhaps best known as an actress herself (appearing in things like The Crown), smartly plays with your expectations of the basic anchor points of a famous Punch and Judy tale, bringing in key elements like the dog, the sausages and, of course, their baby. However, she does manage to play with these expectations so that, although the tent poles of this popular entertainment show are met, they don’t necessarily come in the obvious manner. For instance... and I don’t think this is really a spoiler because it’s made implicit in the trailer... everyone pretty much knows that ‘something’ is going to happen to the baby, so Foulkes teases the audience with the threat of an open fire and toys with the elements she’s set up in, actually, much the same way a horror movie might set up a fake scare before bringing on the actual jump moment shortly after. When something does, indeed, happen to the baby it’s perhaps not that surprising but still... it’s an effective (perhaps even visually poetic) moment which leaves a lasting impression.

Okay.. so lets talk about the violence because I’m seeing people saying its a violent movie and... well it’s not actually violent at all... at least not in terms of what you actually see on screen. Asides from a long shot during the stoning near the start of the film, for instance, every act of violence as far as I could tell is kept just out of the view of the camera. Instead, this film uses a more the impressionistic version of violence which is, probably, much more potent in that your imagination fills in the blanks just at the moment where, say, a Dario Argento movie would not cut away (I’m thinking about a specific scene in Tenebrae now, reviewed here... but I’m not going to say what because I’m trying to make this review spoiler free). Instead, we are left with the camera looking closely at the aftermath of the violence in most cases, which is again very grim and shows exactly what has taken place. The method of justice that Judy metes out at the end of the movie, for example, is something which you can guess is coming but the aftermath of this moment is still quite disturbing and in no way blunts or cushions the moment for the audience. It has a nice little epilogue in terms of the birth of the traditional Punch & Judy show too. So, in some ways the film actually is quite violent but it’s less about what you actually see and more about how the examination of the crimes sit with you on a gut level... although I’m sure some people will believe they saw much more than they actually did in the film and, of course, that’s a great compliment to the director, cast and crew if they do.

Also, I have to say that the biggest crime committed in the film is that the absolutely jaw droppingly brilliant score from composer François Tétaz is not available to buy commercially. It’s so good and really helps elevate the visuals. When it first started, I actually thought it was Alexandre Desplat in full on Wes Anderson movie mode and was surprised when the end credits came up and found it’s Tétaz. This is meant truly in a complimentary way and, honestly, I wish they’d put a CD of this one out because it could very well be a contender for best score of the year. Quite dazzlingly brilliant on the ear throughout.

Okay, so that’s me done other than to mention that there are moments in this film, especially when Judy is ‘resurrected’ and joins up with a secret community of... well lets call them witches for the sake of this review but they’re absolutely not... where Foulkes uses the visual and acoustic syntax of a horror film to good effect. This film isn’t in any way a horror film, for sure but... she effectively mines elements of that genre to tell her tale and with some set design which feels pretty authentic, bolstered by an exceptionally fine cast and crew... well, I’d have to say that Judy And Punch gets a solid recommendation from me, especially for those readers who absolutely love the art of cinema and all that it’s about. Easily one of the year’s best and I would urge you to catch this one at your local venue while you can.

Piercing

Giallo Jukebox

Piercing
USA 2018 Directed by  Nicolas Pesce
Vertigo DVD Region 2

Okay, so let me start off by saying that, despite the title of this review, Piercing is not in any way, shape or form, a giallo. However, what it does do, like a fair few modern movies just lately since the resurgence of the giallo movie as a popular genre of home entertainment, is take certain aspects of the cinematic language of the genre to use on a film which, in this case, certainly isn’t an example of that particular form. This is often a successful choice with movies like Amer (reviewed here) and The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears (reviewed here) successfully mining certain aspects of this cinematic legacy to enrich the experience.

Now I didn’t realise that Piercing would be going down this route when I bought it. I was basically laying to rest a ghost because it clashed with something else I wanted to see at last year’s FrightFest and I was awaiting a local cinema release only to find it didn’t get any kind of general theatrical release over here at all... which is a shame because at least then I would have known not to bother with this DVD release (oh wait, I’m getting ahead of myself here, aren’t I?).

The other reason I wanted to see this is because it’s based on a novel by Ryû Murakami (no relation, as far as I can tell, to the other famous, literary Murakami) and I was curious because I’d read his book In The Miso Soup and also I kinda found interesting (though ultimately not great) another film I’d seen based on one of his books, Tokyo Decadence (reviewed by me here). So, yeah, this plus the promise of sexualised BDSM play invoked by the title and the film’s limited marketing combined with one of the lead protagonist’s/antagonist’s being played by Mia Wasikowska, who seems intent on picking very interesting roles and bringing something unusual to them, had me wanting to see this one.

So I popped this into the smart drive hooked up to my Mac (the one advantage of not being able to get an easily accessible Blu Ray release in the UK of this film) and the first thing that surprised me was the menu of this bare bones release. The main theme of one of my favourite Bruno Nicolai giallo scores, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, is used for both the menu and, bizarrely, various cues from this and other gialli and exploitation films are also used liberally throughout. So that’s one of the two main gialloistic elements used in this movie and I’ll get right back to the music shortly.

Preceding the opening logos we have one of those old style, distressed film stock “Feature Presentation” graphics to announce the film. This seems to have caught on with a few film-makers since Quentin Tarantino did something similar on Kill Bill. This is followed by all the company logos being on a distressed film stock and... it’s a pretty mixed message to be honest because as soon as the actual film starts, we are into pin sharp, high definition images in direct contrast to the style of those opening graphics. So I don’t know what’s going on there because the film is definitely not the kind of grindhouse experience you would expect from something introduced like that.

Now, I’m pretty sure the opening titles are a beautiful pan over what I suspect is a model of a big city skyline, with various scenes showing through the windows. And this is scored by what I believe to be Stelvio Cipriani’s score for What Have They Done To Your Daughters? Which got a big shout out on the soundtrack to the aforementioned Amer, too. That being said, although there is a long list of music credits at the rear end of the movie, I didn’t catch this one listed so... maybe I’m confused. Can anyone else confirm that this is definitely this soundtrack used in this and one other sequence on the movie... it definitely sounds like it to me. Back to the music again soon.

The film starts with Christopher Abbott as Reed, who is clearly a little psychotic as he obviously wants to kill his baby and nearly does that until the mother of his child interrupts him. He soon goes off to rent a hotel room and hire a prostitute, Jackie played by Mia Wasikowska, with the intention of murdering her and cutting up her body before putting it all in a bag for disposal. And when he is in the hotel room there’s a nice scene where we see him rehearsing the whole murder with certain sounds of what the murder should sound like... the slicing of flesh, the splashing of blood, the tying of the bag etc... thrown into the scene. Now, I didn’t have a shred of empathy with Reed’s character here, who seems to be the Walter Mitty of serial killers... neither with that of Wasikowska when you finally get a taste of her true character, but I have to say both actors did well with their roles and Reed comes off as a somewhat driven but reluctant psycho... which just made me dislike him even more to be honest but you can’t deny that Abbott does a good job here.

When Jackie arrives at Reed’s hotel room, to the strains of Goblin’s main them for Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (aka Deep Red), you assume nothing will go as planned because, why else show us a rehearsal scene showing what should happen? And, yes, it doesn’t and once Jackie goes to have a shower, when Reed goes in to see what’s taking her so long, you’ll get your first real surprise of the movie. I won’t ruin this for you but I will say that, after Reed has taken Jackie to the hospital and waits for her outside, he has a conversation with his wife on a phone about the murder. Except, you know she knows nothing about it in real life so the conversation is obviously in his head. Things like the ‘talking baby’ telling him that he knows what he has to do at the start of the movie are pretty much a dead giveaway about Reed’s mental state through all of this.  This kind of takes the punch out of pretty much anything else that happens after this point where Jackie takes Reed back to her ‘red room’ and starts to turn the tables on him... in really obvious, unsurprising ways, it has to be said.

Okay, you’re probably getting a sense that I didn’t really like this movie now and... well... I did and I didn’t. The stylistic mise en scène and framing of those old giallo movies, the second element that this film borrows from that particular strand of cinematic heritage, is beautiful. People are sectioned off in sometimes overly tidy and crisp shot designs and even a split screen sequence recalling the early ‘American gialli’ of Brian De Palma is in evidence and goes a long way towards making up for the film’s short falls. The colours are beautiful too and I love those old scores being used... especially for the end titles, a lot of which uses a truncated version of the main theme from Argento’s Tenebre and I assume the accompanying pan through those same models (I’m still convinced they are models) of the cityscape is an homage to Argento’s ‘moving camera over architecture’ moments from films like that. Even if it’s not... it works for me. Of course, the cynical amongst us (I’m waiting for a comment from one of my friends after he reads this review) would say that the director has just got a bunch of old giallo tunes and thrown it at the film in the usual needle-drop manner and... I’d have to say I wouldn’t disagree with that either.

Actually, one of the big stumbling blocks about using music like this is the game the audience is suddenly playing about ‘what film does that come from’ as they are watching. However, I don’t mind this aspect but I do believe that the director really makes a bad call in a couple of instances in this movie because, sometimes, music can also have strong emotional baggage attached to it and such is the case here, in a couple of scenes where he’s used Piero Piccioni’s wonderful score to Radley Metzger’s Camille 2000 (reviewed by me here) which immediately brings up the sympathies of young lovers, tragically doomed which... well I may be wrong but I don’t really think that’s the emotion he’s going for in the scenes where he uses one of Piccioni’s most poignant themes, to be honest. Still, he’s not the first contemporary director to needle drop excerpts from this score into his film but... I think it could have been done with a more appropriate deference to the on screen images here.

So, summing up then... this film has beautiful performances by the two leads, stylish camera work and shot design, wonderful stolen music and... those are its main pluses. Alas, I can only assume this is a pretty good adaptation of the novel because, as a film exploring the kind of subject area touched upon here, it completely disappoints and never really goes far enough. The fetishistic sexuality and violence are never really pushed into the kinds of extreme territory you would hope they would go into to give a more accurate and less whimsical approach to this kind of exploration and, ultimately, I don’t think I could completely recommend this one to people unless you are purely in it for the music and cinematography. Ultimately, despite the strength and vibrance of those elements, it still manages to be fairly bland and unambitious as a film and I really was expecting a little more from it than what we got here. Even with Mia Wasikowska's customary off-kilter take on her character, this film really didn’t feel edgy in any way and I felt that, as someone who quite enjoys the odd film exploring extreme sensations and situations, I probably wasn’t the more virginal, vanilla target audience that I suspect this one was designed for. So not my cup of tea despite the spot on stylistic sensibilities inherent in the film’s DNA, to be honest. Piercing could have done with some boundary pushing, I think.

Alice Through The Looking Glass 3D

Hatterstician

Alice Through The Looking Glass
2016 USA Directed by James Bobin
UK cinema release print.

Hmmm. Okay... I didn’t like the Tim Burton version of Alice In Wonderland much. I didn’t review it at the time (I think it just missed the birth of my blog by a whisker) but I did do a short review of Danny Elfman’s score when I was trying to write about music (which you can read here). The score was a triumphant masterpiece, as far as I was concerned. The movie, however, was overdone, emotionally inappropriate in the wrong places and just seemed to me like a Hollywood contrivance which the audience ‘better like, or else’... if you know what I mean. So why, you may ask, did I go and see this sequel?

Well, as much as I love most of the actresses and actors in these two movies, it wasn’t their presence that got me back into the cinema for this one. Neither was it the director... not Burton this time, although he did produce this one. No... the blame for me having to endure this slightly better but, in no way any good, sequel has to be placed fairly in the lap of the aforementioned Danny Elfman. He’s back to score this one and I really just wanted to see what he did with the musical follow through.

Now, I can’t remember if I ever read Lewis Carrol’s Alice In Wonderland sequel, Through The Looking Glass, as a kid but what I can tell you, and you can work this one out for yourselves just by watching the trailer, is that this one has almost nothing at all to do with the original source material. Other than the same characters are back and there is, actually, a looking glass that transports the movie’s title character back to Wonderland. If I further told you that this movie starts off with Alice in the real world performing large scale stunts with her ship and her crew to evade the chasing pirates... you might realise how far afield this is from what you might reasonably expect... although this opening sequence is quite strong, to be honest.

If I further told you that the main plot involved Mia Wasikowska’s Alice stealing a time travelling device from Time (played by Sacha Baron Cohen) and then using it to travel through the past in Wonderland to solve the mystery of the Mad Hatter’s missing, presumed dead, family and defeating and resolving the childhood issues of the Queen of Hearts... then you have certainly been fairly warned that this movie is not for anyone who is expecting a half decent adaptation of the original classic. However, I can’t place the blame for this entirely at the fault of the writer and director since, if memory serves, a lot of the core of the original novel was already sourced and twistedly used in Tim Burton’s prior movie... so I’m guessing there wasn’t really a lot left to play with, to be honest.

What I do know is that, as good as actors like Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway and Johnny Depp are... they really can’t do much to save this movie and its unfortunate inheritance by way of the last installment. Alas, Depp once more portrays the Hatter as an emotionally involved and sympathetic character... putting on meat where there was originally nothing but bone and continuing to do something completely different with a character that was probably not meant to be given any depth, anyway, to speak of. He plays an interesting character well, once again, but this really isn’t the Mad Hatter (I’d like to see him try his hand at The Joker in a Batman movie sometime, though).

The spectacle of the thing, however, is truly great and the special effects team, concept artists and everyone else involved should be congratulated on a really splendid vision making its way to the screen. Unfortunately, this only goes to prove that you can marvel at something but still feel empty because it’s not supported by an entertaining or especially well written story. It makes things bearable but that’s really no substitute for a tale that pulls you in tight, hugs you to its bosom and doesn’t let go until the final credits begin to roll. I feel bad about the cast and crew going to all that effort to pull this one off because, frankly, as splendid as it looks it really doesn’t do much to stir the blood... which is always a shame after everyone has obviously tried so hard to make it work.

The only real take home, again... and it is something I will literally ‘take home’ because I’ll order the CD... is Danny Elfman’s amazing score. Once again he weaves his brilliant Alice theme into the texture of the score and, once again, comes out with something both appropriate and pleasing to the ear in support of both the movie itself and, I strongly suspect, as a stand alone listen. Fans of the lyrics of the song, however, are forewarned that only one word, from what I could tell, of the lyrics makes its way into the score and then, only right at the end. I’m guessing you can probably work out which word that is already, though, if you’re a fan of the song. I won’t confirm that here.

At the end of the day, Alice Through The Looking Glass is a surrealistic ‘romp’ through time as our heroine strives to find the solution to the Hatter’s problem and also, as you would expect, gains strength from her adventures when she’s away from her fantasy realm. As far as I’m concerned, though, it really left me cold and in no mood to see any further additions to the story. Hopefully this one won’t become a franchise and the cast and crew can direct their obvious talents to something more interesting and captivating. Alas for Alice... this wasn’t it.

Crimson Peak

Redded Bliss

Crimson Peak
2015 USA
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Slight spoilers in this one 
in terms of the first half of the movie.

Well... this one surprised me by completely living up to my expectations of it... which were unrealistically high, it has to be said.

I first saw the trailer for Crimson Peak online, either at the end of 2014 or early 2015, if my memory is not playing tricks on me. I admire Guillermo del Toro as a director but find him a bit hit and miss when it comes to making movies which are able to entertain me. Films like Pan’s Labyrinth which, with its surrealistic fairytale leanings, should have been right up my street... left me a little cold, to be honest. Whereas stuff like the Hellboy movies (especially the second one) and Pacific Rim, to a certain extent  (reviewed by me here), are films I could happily repeat watch. However, even the films I find less than entertaining by him are always worth a look because they are usually so arresting at a visual level. Crimson Peak is no exception but, I’m happy to say, it’s also wildly entertaining and, frankly, a bit of a masterpiece of modern Gothic romance.

Now, I’m pretty sure I read a tweet by del Toro saying that the film is not a horror movie. Well, I guess it depends on your definition of horror. For me, anything with non-human monsters - be they off-planet, other-wordly or supernatural phenomena, falls firmly into the horror movie camp for me... and the presence of a handful of ghosts in this film certainly does the trick here. However, the horror details are really the icing on the cake of this delicious crimson confection... the movie is both more than that, and less than that, in equal parts... depending on your point of view.

More than that because they support what is basically a contemporary take on an old school gothic romance, a film firmly following a direct lineage of movie versions of such works as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca. Less, because the movie is more about the characters and their relation to their situation rather than a full on ghost movie... although this really isn’t to suggest the movie is anything less than scary in certain sections. What we have here is the style of those kinds of earlier literary works infused with a quite chilling rendition, due to del Toro’s very good taste at getting things to look and feel right, of the kind of modern incarnations of ghost horror movies such as Mama (reviewed here) and Dark Water.

The film follows a young lady called Edith Cushing, played by Mia Wasikowska, as she finds herself in an unlikely romantic entanglement with her former Only Lovers Left Alive (reviewed here) co-star Tom Hiddleston as Thomas Sharpe and his sinister sister Lucille Sharpe, played by Jessica Chastain. After the violent murder of her rich father by an unseen assailant, she and her money return with the Sharpes to live with them in England, to his ancestral home which... as Edith finds out far too late (certainly much later than anyone in the audience would expect, given that Tom starts talking to her father and his colleagues about red clay)... is known by the locals under the nickname Crimson Peak. This is a place she has been warned of, by her dead mother, and told to stay away from... so obviously there wouldn’t be a story here unless she ended up at this place at some point in the film’s running time. Her biggest concern... and the audiences... is to try and figure out just who or what is there that may mean her harm. Is it the ghosts of the violently deceased that plague her in the night or are either Tom or Jessica less transparent in their intentions than they are letting on?

Well, I’ll tell you now you probably won’t take too much time seeing through the various clues, highlighted in the cinematic equivalent of a giant marker pen on paper... but the mystery element in the story should keep some people happy and it’s not the story, anyway, which makes this film such compelling viewing. It’s del Toro’s deft touch and signature on the frames themselves which will have you riveted to see what beautiful set piece is coming next. There is high romance (a lit candle for a waltz scene), lurking terror (the entire environment Edith ends up in) and there’s also the terrifyingly rendered ghosts in the movie... I promise you, you would not want to meet one of these creations on a dark night. Above all though, there’s also a deep and lacerating sense of violence which boils up when, admittedly, you most suspect it but... honestly... with a certain visceral force that leaves you with a schism in your head as you try to marry up the contrast between rich, romantic gothic atmosphere and the viciousness and goriness of an expression of violence in which del Toro certainly doesn’t pull any punches.

It’s a terrible cliché for me to write in a review but the film truly is a rich, visual and, also, aural feast - the sound design is beautiful with whispers of dread and terror lurking in your ears as you follow the characters through the old house on Crimson Peak. This is, of course, exactly what I would expect of the director and his artistic sensibilities. He has apparently gone on record as saying that the design of the film was his attempt to recreate the look of Mario Bava. Now, as regular readers will know, I cite Bava’s influence in films a lot but I wouldn’t have necessarily highlighted that here unless prompted by the director’s own words. What I will say is that I was much more struck by the film’s resemblance, on some visual level, to the mid 1950s to late 1960s horror movies put out by England’s Hammer studios. The dense colours don’t quite seem to be as luminous as one might expect to encounter in the works of Bava, to my mind, and more like what you would see in a Christopher Lee Dracula movie, for instance (my review of the first Hammer Dracula can be found here). Indeed, the fact that Mia Wasikowska’s main protagonist is presumably named after one of Hammer’s best loved actors, Peter Cushing, presumably demonstrates that these films were also in the director’s mind when he was working on this film.

Either way, Hammer and Bava are not the only references for horror or, indeed, giallo fans to sink their teeth into. For example, the murder of Edith’s father is straight out of a Dario Argento giallo... in fact, I suspect it’s inspired by a murder scene in Profondo Rosso (aka Deep Red, reviewed by me here) but the director really manages to up the stakes and make the violence in this particular scene, among others, something you almost want to look away from. Which, frankly, is what violence should be... something you really want to look away from. The director uses the brutality of the violence to punctuate certain scenes, especially in the last reel, and really hits home that the characters populating the story, no matter how beautiful they all look in his perfect shot compositions and framed within his leisurely moving camera, are very much real people with a lot at risk. It helps add to the gravitas already conjured up by the three main leads and Charlie Hunnam’s character, who becomes more important toward the end. I’m happy to say that the ‘deus ex machina’ arc of Hunnam's character doesn’t necessarily follow the exact path the audience thinks it’s going to... and he's not very smart in some scenes, it has to be said.

Del Toro’s Crimson Peak is an absolutely beautiful film and it’s steeped in the gothic tradition of the literature of over a hundred years ago, filtered in a deliberately post-modern fashion through some of the best directors of colourful horror films of the past but, at no times, does it ever stop from being the unique and personal vision that you would expect from this Mexican master of cinema. Guillermo del Toro is one of the absolute key modern players of what is still the most popular art form of our time... the motion picture. Crimson Peak is, I will say again, a masterpiece and, from my view at this stage of his career, one of his key films.... certainly my favourite so far of all his works. Great beauty for fans of gothic romance and tales of ghostly spirits bearing warnings from the dead. Definitely one you should catch up with and see on a big screen. Such a beautiful film.

The Double

Doubloon

The Double
2013 UK
Directed by Richard Ayoade
Playing at UK cinemas now.

I know I’m probably going to come off as being really stupid when I say this but, for someone who hasn’t read the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel that inspired and informed this movie, The Double is quite frighteningly Kafkaesque.

Kafkaesque in the sense that it shows the little guy trapped in a world of corporate red tape and misunderstanding... a victim of the society that he lives in. To be fair, the original Dostoevsky novel apparently shares that common stance but, honestly, I invoke Kafka because it’s the only thing I personally have that I can compare to the experience of watching this quite brilliant, as it happens, movie version.

The film is vaguely surreal and, I have to admit, I was surprised when I found out the identity of the author of the original source. When I saw the trailer for this I was pretty sure that it was a modern reworking of Edgar Allan Poe’s  doppelgänger story William Wilson and, it turns out, that Poe’s own exploration of this theme predated Dostoevsky’s version by seven years. In fact, Thomas Mann compared the original 1846 novel unfavourably to Poe’s earlier endeavours on this proposition.

All of which means absolutely nothing here because, frankly, the movie is entertaining as hell.

It’s been promoted, perhaps lazily, as a comedy and, certainly, many of the cast play it as such. Jesse Eisenberg’s favourable take on the shlemiel type of character often found in early Woody Allen comedies is perfectly backed up by the often astonishing Mia Wasikowska and such inconceivable luminaries as Wallace Shawn, Noah Taylor and Paddy Considine. But for all of the laughs and moments of humour that this movie delivers by the bucketful... it’s also really, unbelievably depressing. Which I guess also fits with Dostoevsky’s modus operandi... unless Hal Hartley movies have been lying to me all these years.

It’s a movie which seems to have had very little publicity. I only first heard of it after I saw a trailer for it with Under The Skin a couple of weeks ago. Which is a shame really since, in addition to the wonderful performances which bring it to life, the film is a tour de force of brilliant set design, lighting, music (with some interesting needle-drop choices) and some really amazing sound design to it which brought to mind, nothing less than Alan Splet’s work on David Lynch’s Eraserhead. There are also some nice things going on in the editing which startled me at first, as the film will do things like cut between a mid shot of someone, then a long shot of something else, and then back to a close up of the original person which is kinda unsettling and jars you out of your comfort zone in certain places. Which is just excellent.

The film deals with a character who has his life invaded by a person who is an exact physical duplicate of himself and who is, for all intents and purposes, a much more extroverted and successful version. This double slowly and meticulously invades the main protagonist’s life by befriending him, then using him and ultimately usurping him and stealing the objects and goals of his desire until he becomes a bitter rival... this much you can get from just the trailer. It’s almost like he’s an evil version of Eisenberg’s character... like that episode of Star Trek, The Enemy Within, where Kirk gets split into two different versions of himself by the malfunctioning transporter. And it’s great that a film like this can be done now in a way that the illusion of having two Eisenbergs on screen is totally believable. I guess that we have David Cronenberg’s pioneering work on Dead Ringers to thank for that but it’s not the kind of movie where you’re always looking for the split in the screen like movies of yesteryear... although I’m aware that, to some of my younger readers at least, Cronenberg’s work on that movie probably does belong in the “yesteryear” category. But there’s definitely no seams showing here and, although the occasional “cheat shot” may be observed if your looking for it (the very first scene on a rickety, almost deserted train, for example... if I’m reading the meaning of that sequence correctly), the illusion is impressively maintained throughout the whole of the movie.

I mentioned earlier that the movie was somewhat Kafkaesque and there’s certainly a parallel with another great work of motion picture art that would share the same label, that of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. This film is almost as detailed in the environmental design like that one was and also similarly surreal in places. It also pulls off a trick that is common to both the Gilliam movie, Tim Burton’s two Batman movies and a whole range of 1930s and 1940s Universal Horror movies in that it is deliberately, or so it seems to me, shot out of period. There are significant props and design decisions from past, present and future references found in various guises throughout the film’s running time which all blend together to make trying to place this in a specific time zone absolutely impossible. Which is kinda cool and puts you in a self contained fantasy world right from the outset.

The films is quite dark (and I’m not talking about the lighting here) but it’s never dull and I found myself absolutely engrossed in the narrative twists and turns waiting to be discovered in this one. I think there’s a lot on offer here to entertain the visually jaded modern film-goer and I even think I’ll get around to revisiting this one again a couple more times in years to come. Whether I do that or not, though, I think this film is something which deserves to be seen and I wish that it could have had a greater marketing push levelled at it than I’ve seen so far. If you’re into cinema then you’ll probably be into the cleverness and bleak charm of this movie. It put me in a bit of a dark place... but that’s not always a bad thing. This one will haunt you a little, I think. Go check it out before it disappears.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Drink Tilda Blood Runs Cold

Only Lovers Left Alive
2013 UK/Germany/France/Cyprus/USA
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Up until a few years ago I thought the modern vampire movie was gone as a legitimate form of artistic expression and figured it was going to stay dead for a while. Zombies had taken over and not many people were really doing too much interesting with the genre, or at least that’s what I thought. Now I’ve seen four really great contemporary vampire films in the space of as many years and Only Lovers Left Alive is definitely one of the greats (the other three being Let The Right One In, reviewed here, We Are The Night, reviewed here, and Byzantium, reviewed here).

This time, master movie maker Jim Jarmusch takes his turn to play with vampires. That is to say, he’s using vampires to bring out one of the broader themes of his body of work and using that as a backdrop to, basically, have some fun with the possibilities inherent in the genre. This is not to say it isn’t a strong genre piece, it’s definitely a “Vampire movie” with an upper case V... but the way he uses the genetic make up and popular tropes of this type of experience very much requires a certain level of familiarity from the audience.

And in this artistic choice, of course, Jarmusch is not alone among film-makers.

I’ve noticed that a fair few writers and directors are taking the ingredients of the myth of the vampire, using the bits which they want and throwing the other rules out, making oblique mention of the parts of the myth that they have discarded for each film, assuming the audience already knows what those rules are... and thereby freeing themselves up to get on with “the story”. Which is an excellent way of doing things, no doubt, for an older audience... but young people who are perhaps less equipped to be familiar with the ritualistic elements of the vampire movie/novel may find themselves in danger of being left out of the loop if filmmakers keep using this tactic. Although I’m sure there’s an argument that, by the time one is old enough to see movies like this, the knowledge is already there. Which, I guess, certainly holds up for now with contemporary audiences... but future generations may not be so fortunate with the opportunity, and willingness, to watch the vast back catalogue of vampire films made over the last 100 years or so... but that’s an argument for another time.

Jarmusch starts this film with a startling array of rich imagery, beginning with some titles, in a quite clichéd font to match the legacy of the subject matter, superimposed over a slow circling backdrop of stars. This immediately puts the viewer under a little bit of tension and ready to enter a more hypnagogic realm as the titles have the illusion of veering off on their own if you lose your concentration or glance away from them to another part of the screen. It’s quite hypnotic. The motion is continued post-credits, as the starry background is replaced by a vinyl record rotating on a turntable and we are introduced to the two main vampires of the piece, Adam and Eve, played by Tom Hiddleton and Tilda Swinton respectively, in a series of shots which match the circling camera eye.

The swirling continues as they are intercut in their mutual slumber but, in different rooms and, once they get up and go about their business in two completely different places (Adam is sleeping in Detroit and Eve is sleeping in Tangiers) our perception of what we were just watching is completely overturned and we realise the dazzling camerawork and shifting distance of the main players from the lens is Jarmusch’s way of showing the mental connection between the vampires, even though they are separated by gazillions of miles, physically. Another series of shots of three of the main vampires drinking, which utilises a camera strapped to each actor I suspect, yields a similar sense of psychic camaraderie a little later into the running time of the film.

As Adam goes to get his blood supply from Dr. Watson (played by Jeffrey Wright) and gets some new guitars from his source, Ian (played by Anton Yelchin, the new Chekov in the Star Trek movies), Tilda Swinton’s Eve goes to see her vampire friend Marlow (yes, that Marlow, who wrote Faust and, in this version of celluloid reality, definitely wrote the entire output of William Shakespeare), as played by John Hurt, for her blood supply. The colours are really interesting as Jarmusch uses both fluid camerawork (and the occasional stint of handheld) to focus on what appear, at least to my eye, to be vibrant colours which have deliberately been toned down... so we get a kind of “filtered reality” feeling which is perhaps a visual rumination on the fact that, when you’re lived for as many centuries as the vampires characters in this film have, you get kind of jaded to things after a while.

The characters are set so you have Adam as a suicidal, Byronesque vampire archetype (something commented on quite blatantly by Eve during the course of the movie) who passes his time making great music which is never released and who gets a wooden bullet made so he can kill himself when necessary. And then you have the lightness and calm of the piece, his devoted wife who travels to Detroit to cheer him back up and act as the ying to his yang. The situations allow Jarmusch to comment and reflect upon the ideas made possible by the vampire myth in general, and since there are obviously only a few vampires here and there in this fantasy microcosm, it allows him to indulge on his kind of “last days of dying cultures rubbing together” theme, which he has dwelt on a few times, quite memorably in Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai. As he explores the possibilities of the genre, he gets to also invent some great responses to the nature of conversation between people who have been around this long and lived in this way... which is kinda the point I think.

A nice little idea, for instance, is the fact that the vampires tend to regard the general living human race as zombies and, when we look at our own culture’s current definition of all that means as defined by the slow, shuffling, brain dead legacy of the George A. Romero take on zombies from the 1960s and onwards, and then apply that conclusion to the supercharged senses of the vampires in this movie, that’s a pretty cool analogy to make. Cool being the thing here because, like a lot of Jarmusch movies, Only Lovers Left Alive is nothing if not extremely cool movie making.

It also gets allows Jarmusch an arena to get away with some cracking humour, which I think is where the bizarre accusations of pretension may have come from. The writing, if taken out of context, maybe does seem a little indulgent but, frankly, if you are decoding the scenes and the tone in which they are played, you’ll realise that a lot of the dialogue is high comedy. “You drank Ian!” for example, or my personal favourite moment, where I let out a large, inadvertent chuckle, as John Hurt pointed out that the old “zombie, Shakespeare” was a talentless hack.

However, a fourth vampire enters the picture, in the form of Mia Wasikowska playing Ava, and with her she leaves a wake of disruption which finds our main two protagonists fighting for their lives and, ultimately, reverting back to their behaviour from the 15th Century. Which is kind of an interesting angle for two characters such as these, who are lazing through life at their own pace and reflecting on the almost soporific nature of their existence.

I absolutely can’t reveal to you what happens by the end of the movie, but I will say that the pace is pleasant and leisurely, always fascinating, with stops to take in tranquil moments of beauty whenever those whims of fancy need to be indulged... all set to a fantastically simplistic, yet texturally rich, musical soundtrack which includes Jarmusch’s own band Sqürl in the mix too. And just when you think the pain of the reflection of the future survival of these vampires is about to take itself too seriously, it leads in to a final shot which is an absolutely delightful celebration of the vampire genre and which will, no doubt, please many people... just like it did me.

If you like Jim Jarmusch films in general then you’re not going to want to miss out on this genuine masterpiece. I’d place it up with my personal favourites of his ouevre like the aforementioned Ghost Dog and Down By Law (reviewed here). Similarly, if you like vampire cinema, he’s successfully made a film which both reflects on the genre rulebook while somehow still managing to keep it fresh and as alive as, it turns out, it always was. If you like works of art then, of course, you too will love this movie. If I’d had seen this movie last year, it may well have been my number one film, despite some strong opposition. My worst problem this year, however, is that it’s probably the best film I’ll see all year... and it’s only February.

Don’t miss out on this one, though, whatever you do. It’s one of those films that the cinema of reflection was invented for.

Stoker

Stoker, Ace

Stoker
UK/USA 2013
Directed by Chan-wook Park
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Very slight spoilers if anyone knows their movie history.

Right then. Here we have famous Korean auteur Chan-wook Park directing a film co-financed between the UK and the US and shooting it in English.

Okay... I can do that.

I should, right away though, point out that... out of this particular director’s body of work, the only movies I am familiar with by him are his loosely knitted “vengeance trilogy” and out of those three films, the only one I really enjoyed was Lady Vengeance.

That being said, Stoker is a pretty neat film and my only disappointment stems from the lack of twist or sting in the tail of this one... the whole thing being, I’m afraid, fairly cliché ridden and utterly predictable. However, that’s kinda missing the point with a movie like this and there are a fair few things which raise this past the level of the routine meandering of the story and lift it well into the boundary of “necessary viewing”... the most obvious being the very rich and neat visual imagery on show.

There’s just so much going for it in “the look” and the bright green, yellow and red colouration used in a lot of the shots combined with some very leisurely camera movement and an editing style which is used as metaphor to capture the mood and psychology of the characters when required, makes for a very seductive and addictive piece of film-making. Indeed, a lot of the movie plays without the necessity of character dialogue and the visual richness, not just of the overall mise-en-scene but also of the way shots are rubbed together to create intent and foreshadowing, makes for an almost perfect movie.

Except it isn’t perfect, by any means.

The film does tend to broadcast the overall arc of the film quite blatantly, so perhaps the “silent cinema” mode of some of the sequences were perhaps a little over the top. The movie comes from a lineage which quickly switches from Hitchcock’s Shadow Of A Doubt to a less polluted cinematic legacy which includes movies such as Badlands and Natural Born Killers. Indeed, it could well be considered a less obviously humorous version of Heathers than it could be a lot of other things. And the performances by all the central characters are just superb. Everybody is perfectly framed and delivering lines or going through various actions in a cinematic space which is uncluttered, painterly and gives the performances a lot of room to breathe.

And top marks to Park for coming up with such staggering compositions which still somehow manage to look effortless. One particular shot in the movie has the three main characters sitting down together for dinner and even though the distance between each of the characters is only what can be arranged around a fairly standard sized table, the breadth of depth the director manages to get in by having Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska share two separate planes (and therefore sizes) split up between the back of Matthew Goode’s head in the immediate foreground is absolutely astonishing as you see the three occupying completely different kinds of spaces within the same shot... it just blew me away. Ditto to a couple of other shots right at the end of the movie which were a quite beautiful mix of “blood and nature” which I would have thought almost unique... if I hadn’t already seen more or less the same shots done by Tarantino in Django Unchained (reviewed here) a few months prior to this (no, I don’t know who made their movie first... it’s probably all been done before anyway).

Clint Mansell’s score, too, is pretty good... as are some of the needle-drop choices in this movie. I don’t know if the amazingly sexualised piano duet was his invention or not, but it sounds amazingly like the music of Philip Glass (it’s not) and is making me want to rush out and grab the soundtrack CD as I write this.

My conclusion then, for this movie, is that it’s not as good as Lady Vengeance but certainly the next best of this director’s works... as far as I’ve seen, at any rate. Script, performances and visual poetry aside, the film is perhaps not going to blow you away in terms of originality unless you have not seen a lot of other movies in your lifetime. Ultimately, this isn’t quite the rich “visual feast” I had been lead to expect from this director... it is however, at the least, a very tasty “visual buffet with side salad” and certainly doesn’t deserve to be ignored at the cinema in favour of the loud and clunky Hollywood made movies which are currently on offer at UK cinemas. It’s a well made piece of art and you should take a look at it if you get a chance. Very much a recommendation and something which certainly has a lot to offer in terms of finding interesting ways to convey the inner psychology of the main protagonists and antagonists. Please see it before it goes.