Mifune - The Last Samurai

Mifune Valentine

Mifune - The Last Samurai
2016 Japan Directed by Steven Okazaki
Screening as part of the London
Film Festival - October 15th 2016

My first experience of watching Toshiro Mifune was when I was 12 years old, seeing him play Lord Toranaga in the 1980 TV series Shogun. It was a role which stuck in my mind for a long time but I had no idea who he was. When I discovered my favourite director, Akira Kurosawa, a few years later, I was absolutely entranced by both him and, of course, both his main acting collaborators, Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura. They soon became my new favourite performers and, after all these years, that pretty much stands. So when I saw that there would be a new documentary about the life of Mifune at this years London Film Festival called Mifune - The Last Samurai, I jumped at the chance to grab tickets and I’d have to say that, of the five movies I saw at this year’s LFF, this was probably the one I was most looking forward to.

Unfortunately, although it has a lot of good things about it, I’d have to say that it’s the one film in this years festival which disappointed me somewhat. Perhaps it’s my own expectations which brought me to this state of mind in that I was expecting a proper biography of the actor but, when I saw that the film is only 1 hour and 20 mins long, I should have possibly realised that there’s no way anybody could have done justice to the legend that was Mifune in such a short running time. I’m assuming that the curtailed running time was a contractual obligation and that this film is ultimately destined to be a DVD or Blu Ray extra... at least that’s my guess. Personally, I would have liked to have seen it expanded on by a couple more hours.

Now let me just start off by saying that it’s actually a pretty good movie and, to a certain extent, is a good primer for anyone unfamiliar with the actor and his work. That being said, it’s a bit of a puff piece in some ways and there seems to be some pretty glaring ommissions which could lead to a very slanted view of events in the actor’s life, if you don’t know anything about him. Certainly it rolls along at a fast pace and has some interviews with a lot of people still with us who worked with Kurosawa way back when. Not only still with us, it seems, but looking way younger than their years might suggest and one of the strengths of this documentary is that it’s primarily told by people who were a witness to the lives of the main players in this film and, mostly, not second hand stories.

So you have people like Haruo Nakajima, who acted for Kurosawa and who was sometimes the “man in the suit” in various Godzilla films (both Kuroswa and the Godzilla films came from the same stable, Toho Studios). Or Kurosawa’s long standing script supervisor Teruyo Nogami, who wrote a wonderful book a number of years ago about her experiences called Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa, which is well worth a read. There are also talking head interview excerpts from the likes of admirers such as Martin Scorcese and Steven Spielberg, not to mention Miffune’s son Shiro and Kurosawa’s son Hisao. Perhaps it’s the inclusion of so many people so close to the subject matter of the documentary that ensures it turns out as uninformative on certain periods of Mifune’s life as it seems to be in places... perhaps Japanese politeness won out over reportage of the facts. There is some pretty important stuff which is excluded here, I think.

I guess the clue is in the title but one of the main weaknesses of the movie is that it seems to focus, with the exclusion of almost all else, on Mifune’s period, samurai movies... which isn’t, by any means, all he did. It also, and I did find this strange, seems to dwell almost exclusively on Mifune’s time working with Kurosawa. Now Kurosawa is my favourite director, for sure, but both he and Mifune had a longish career away from each other too... so this seems to be a very strange way of producing a fair and unbiased documentary. While other films in Mifune’s CV are briefly mentioned, such as his international work on productions like Grand Prix, Hell In The Pacific, 1941 and the aforementioned Shogun, the main interest in this movie is absolutely on the artistic collaboration between the two and, though it’s a very important cinematic collaboration to rival other successful celluloid partnerships such as Scorcese & DeNiro or Hitchcock & Herrmann, one has to wonder if the film might have been better coming clean about what it really wanted to say and making it a movie specifically about that collaboration, rather than throwing the odd mention of other things into it too... after all, the running time is so short, there’s barely enough time to cover either of these subjects adequately.

As I said earlier, the film is also very spare with its facts and glosses over some important stuff. For instance, it mentions Mifune and Kurosawas last film together and says that they had nothing more to give to each other and decided to stop the collaboration... which makes everything sound nice and polite. However, for years I have been hearing the stories of how Kurosawa’s thirst for perfectionism extended to crazy extremes on Red Beard, with him trying to get authentic set dressing from the period of the movie for things like the insides of drawers which would never even be opened while the camera was rolling... presumably to properly immerse his crew in the right atmosphere. Consequently, with stuff like this, Red Beard’s shoot ended up taking two years... years in which Mifune, now with his own ‘struggling to be cash solvent’ production company, was not being able to work in films for that company and help keep the required revenue coming in. Tensions on the set of Red Beard must have been pretty fierce, I suspect.

It’s also said that Kurosawa saw the roles in other films that Mifune had been taking as inferior to the pictures he was making and he didn’t, for instance, have a good word to say about Mifune’s work on Shogun, amongst others. All of these things must have taken a toll on Mifune and Kurosawas relationship and it’s no wonder that, after Red Beard in 1965, they would never work together again, although I believe Mifune was still loyal to Kurosawa and spoke in his defence. After all, it was due to Kurosawa that he started off his career in acting.

Little things like these and the implication rather than straight forward presentation of Mifune’s role in the Second World War training Kamakazi pilots seem to paint a very one sided picture of the main subject of the documentary and I thought this was such a shame because, although the film is wonderful and it’s nice to see all these people turn up for it, it would have been better to have a more accurate portrayal of the man on film, I feel.

However, there are some nice things about it too. There are sections early on in the documentary which show excerpts from rare, silent chanbara movies and it was nice to see these and realise that, in many respects, they are not that different from ones still being made today.

The music in the film, composed by Jeffrey Wood, is quite minimal with a percussive quality which doesn't seem completely out of place when you pitch it against some of the classic Kurosawa movies excerpted, such as Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood and Yojimbo. It doesn’t intrude on the proceedings and lends it some appropriate support when required... so that's all good.

Also, although I somehow failed to realise this until I saw his name on the credits at the end, the voice-over narrative for the film is performed by Keanu Reeves. This seems entirely fitting as I can think of nobody better, at least in Western cinema, who can play a modern day incarnation of the wandering ronin (aka masterless samurai) with such style and confidence. Think, for example, of his stray dog of a character, John Wick (reviewed here), in the recent film of the same title... practically a living embodiment of certain parts of the mythos surrounding the honourable samurai.

And that's my take on this particular movie done. If you've never seen a Kurosawa movie or looked at anything with Toshiro Mifune in it then you should probably take a look at this film and then follow it up with Stuart Gailbraith's excellent book The Emporer and The Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. If you're already a fan of either then this is still a very interesting, if not nearly as informative, look at the two of them. However, as an extremely good friend of mine remarked, when I told her about the movie... "No story tells the whole story."

2016 London Film Festival @ NUTS4R2

Zoology (Zoologiya)
Women Who Kill
Mifune - The Last Samurai
Prevenge
Spaceship

Women Who Kill

Life's Kills

Women Who Kill
2016 USA Directed by Ingrid Jungermann
London Film Festival screening, October 15th 2016

Warning: Very light spoilers.

So the second of my movie choices for this year's London Film Festival was the black comedy Women Who Kill. Now the fact that it was a comedy must have somehow escaped me when I read the brief description of the movie in the LFF programme this year... otherwise I wouldn't have gone. I usually only respond well to comedies if they have Woody Allen or The Marx Brothers in them, truth be told. However, if the comedic tone was somehow underplayed a tad in the description, I'd have to say that was kind of a wrong move for fans of the genre because, frankly, not only is it a comedy... it's actually a very good one.

Describing it as a black comedy might be a little off though, it seems to me. Despite the tone of the scenes and the way the dialogue is delivered, it's actually quite a broad comedy and had the audience laughing out loud and almost rolling in the aisles. Not me, of course, because I rarely actually laugh or smile at comedy, but I was certainly enjoying and appreciating it as much as the next person.

The film focuses on Morgan, played by the writer and director of the movie, Ingrid Jungermann, who co-hosts a podcast she does with her ex, live-in girlfriend Jean, played by Ann Carr. The two women both research and host this podcast, Women Who Kill, which concentrates on some of their favourite female serial killers and goes into a lot of the detail which they’ve researched about their subject matter. In fact, they even go to various prisons to interview different serial killers for their show. The one they see in their latest edition is nicknamed, The Clipper, and played briefly, in two scenes, by Annette O' Toole. Everybody thinks that Morgan and Jean should get back together again properly but, at this moment in time, they are both kinda half resistant to the idea.

Enter Simone.

Played by Sheila Vand, the star vampire of the wonderful Iranian film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (which I reviewed here), this bright young thing comes from nowhere and enters the story, making a play for Morgan which the latter is more than ready to pursue. And so Morgan has a new relationship in her life with a woman who, she confesses, is a big fan of Morgan and Jean’s serial killer podcast. However, as the relationship plays out Morgan starts to feel a little more paranoid and vulnerable each day... refusing to ask her lover about her locked ‘mystery box’ until, when her suspicions get really aroused, she breaks into it one night and finds samples of different peoples fingernail clippings... which are labelled with the first names as the victims of... ‘The Clipper’. With a suspicious sudden death at the place where she and Simone work, Morgan is forced to ask herself if can this be The Clipper’s daughter and, if it is, is her life and the lives of her friends in danger?

Well you’ll have to go see to find out and I certainly urge you to. This has got a fantastic batch of actresses in the movie and the chemistry between them all is just wonderful. Jungermann’s script is tremendously funny and becomes a finely honed tool to extract laughter as the deadpan and somewhat understated delivery by Jungermann and Carr of some amazing one liners reach levels of high art in their performance.

Even situational comedy is great in this, such as the sudden unexpected announcement of the Sat Nav system in Morgan's car which is when you first realise that the main protagonists are going to interview someone in prison. Or a tremendous, actually somewhat suspenseful mini sequence where Morgan reaches for a weapon in the cutlery drawer of the kitchen when she believes Simone might be about to attempt to kill her... only to find later her hands had found a less than useful egg whisk for the situation. This is great stuff but the humour and extreme wit to be found in the, frankly, near perfect screenplay, also explores the tender and intricate sides of the central relationships, giving valuable insight into these characters and also a little look at the bigger picture in how these kinds of cutting observations apply to humanity’s collected experience. At least, that’s what I got from it.

There also seems to be a strong subtext dealing with the way a person’s interests and obsessions can also intrude into the smooth running of their life and how it can affect all of that person's relationships like the ripples from a stone being dropped into a body of water. Is Morgan bringing about her own problems and leading herself on in an example of self fulfilling prophecy or is there really much more to Simone than may at first meet the eye? The excellent but highly comical approach to the scoring tells us to disregard our own ideas about Simone but, is it leading us down the garden path, so to speak? And no, I don’t know who did the wonderfully light score to this movie, which seems somehow typical in terms of music for American independent movies, because the IMDB is no help here whatsoever, as it turns out.

What I will say is that the end of the movie is pretty bleak but not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. In some ways it reminded me of the original ending of Kevin Smith's Clerks. If you've ever seen that alternate ending you'll know it gets uncompromisingly dark in the films final minute. Women Who Kill also explores depressingly darker territory in the film's final minutes and, though I don't want to give anything away, I will say that the ending might haunt you unexpectedly after you've seen it and start forcing you to question your perceptions of what you have spent the last hour and a half of your time watching. You won't necessarily be able to find a consistent solution and I suspect the last few minutes might not sit well with some audiences, but it's a pretty interesting finish to the film and I find those kind of 'almost inconclusive' conclusions are often the best, at times.

So there you have it. If you're a fan of US indie cinema and you actually get the opportunity to see Women Who Kill on release sometime, definitely take a chance on it. The dialogue is scintillating and the static nature of some of the camera set ups goes hand in hand with the understated, but hilariously funny, performances... letting them breathe so they can worm their way into your imagination. A truly cool film, this one, and worth some of your time.

2016 London Film Festival @ NUTS4R2

Zoology (Zoologiya)
Women Who Kill
Mifune - The Last Samurai
Prevenge
Spaceship

Inferno (2016)

Inferno, Rest, Trains

Inferno (2016)
2016  USA/Japan/Turkey/Hungary
Directed by Ron Howard
UK cinema release print.

Not to be confused with the amazing Dario Argento movie of the same name, Inferno is the third of the big screen adaptations of Dan Brown’s popular Professor Robert Langdon series, this one being based on the fourth book... which is kinda strange but then the series started off with the second book, The Da Vinci Code and then made a sequel out of the first book, Angels And Demons (the movie of which I reviewed here). So why they’ve missed out The Lost Symbol I don’t know but I’m sure, if this series of movies continues to make as much money as the novels have done, they’ll get to it.

Like the first two movies, this one is once again directed by Ron Howard (who played Richie Cunningham in the TV show Happy Days back in the 1970s) and all I can say is, I still can’t figure out what his directorial signature is. Other than, for the most part, making some pretty entertaining and, usually, quite popular movies. My experience with the series thus far is... The Da Vinci Code was an okayish movie (and it had Audrey Tautou in it, so that helped) and Angels And Demons was an outstanding modern action thriller. This third one is incredibly entertaining too but, I think it also has some problems... just not quite enough to outweigh its sense of fun.

The movie, once again, stars the always watchable Tom Hanks as Professor Langdon (an actor I first saw in a TV movie called Mazes and Monsters and liked him in that so, you know, it’s good that he’s made a but of a name for himself now) and he is aided and abetted (character wise) by a very strong cast including Felicity Jones, who played Mrs. Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (read my review here) and who is about to become very famous heading up the release, in September, of Star Wars: Rogue One. The film also stars Sidse Babett Knudsen (who I last saw in The Duke Of Burgundy (reviewed here), Ben Foster, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, Ana Ularu and... oh yeah, they’re all amazing. You will believe in these characters and the unusual things they say and do for sure... you will have no problem suspending your disbelief here, that’s for sure. So that’s one of the huge plusses that the movie has.

The film starts off in the midst of an ongoing story and we're catapulted right into the heart of things as we have a completely discombobulated Professor Langdon suffering from hellish hallucinations based on a famous illustration of Dante’s Inferno from The Divine Comedy. The pace is, beyond anything the second movie threw at the audience, quite blistering. However, for the movie as a whole that’s a bit of a double edged sword because, although you won’t get bored here and the action will whizz by at a rate which will leave you wanting to catch your breath maybe just a little more than the director and editors allow that to happen here... you will also be as discombobulated as Professor Langdon from the outset of the film. Although things make more sense as the film speeds on, you will find yourself just wishing it will all calm down at some point.

That is to say... it’s a movie made up of mostly short sharp shots. The modus operandi here seems to be why listen to a line of expositional dialogue in a master shot when you can split it up into three totally different angles of a character when they are delivering a line. I guess it makes the dialogue more interesting but it's usually also punctuated, very quickly, by another dose of action/suspense as Hanks and Jones are hunted by pretty much every authority on the planet... as Professor Langdon tries to stop a virus which promises to unleash death on over half the world very quickly (people who are familiar with the story as it’s represented in the book, which I’ve not read myself, should be aware that this movie has a quite different ending to the original novel). As a consequence, however, it’s all very choppy and there are some points, even in scenes where nothing much is happening, where you just wish everything would slow down and go back to a single master shot at some point.

I’m guessing one of the other reasons the people who made this have decided to subject this movie to a ferociously intimidating piece of editing (although it's never dull) is because there is a so called twist about two thirds into the movie and they're maybe trying to distract you from it but, honestly, if you haven’t worked out what that twist will be within five minutes of the film's opening sequence starting you’ve not been paying attention because, honestly, Howard pretty much telegraphs this not so revealing reveal quite a lot throughout the movie. I was kinda disappointed, actually, when it happened because... well, who wasn’t expecting that? Obviously, I won’t give that twist away here but it’s exactly what most people, I suspect, are thinking throughout the movie and saying to themselves... “C’mon Professor Langdon, when’s the penny going to drop?”.

So there’s that.

However, like I said above, although there are a lot of problems with the story... or at least with the way the story is presented in this medium here, there are enough plus points to kinda outweigh it and still give you a good time at the movies.  And one of those plus points, of course, is Hans Zimmer’s amazing score.

I kinda liked Zimmer’s score to the first movie in the series but wasn’t completely crazy about it. His second score, though, to Angels And Demons, was simply a fantastic modern work and certain tracks from that are never off my iPod or CD player for very long. This third score is better than the first and certainly holds it’s own with the second... although I need to hear it as a stand alone performance before I can decide whether I like it better than the second or not. The music obviously uses Zimmer’s already established Robert Langdon theme but, also, it seems to use a lot of references to the action themes from Angels And Demons in some of its slower passages too... especially through the first third of the movie, which surprised me because that means I’ve now got absolutely no idea how the leitmotif works with this set of films. Why the heck was that in here? I haven’t got a clue but I do know a good soundtrack when I hear it and this one is pretty cool. As to be expected from the pacing on the movie, there’s a lot of action music and percussion so it should be quite a ‘rocking’ listen when I finally get the CD to this one. I’ve come to respect Zimmer a lot over the last decade or so, after initially dismissing him at the early stages of his career. He also knows how to rock a concert venue as you can read in my review of his London concert from earlier in the year here. 

All in all, although Inferno is quite predictable, a bit choppy and aggressively edited (not to mention quite noisy for a lot of the time), it’s also got some beautiful visuals (when you get time to focus on them), some great acting, an amazing score and, frankly, there are a lot worse big budget type popcorn movies you could be spending your cinema cash on at the moment. I’m not hearing a great critical reaction to it at the moment but I’m hoping that it will do enough at the box office so that Ron Howard and Tom Hanks will reunite for a fourth one (and preferably with Hans Zimmer in tow). Hopefully they’ll sink their teeth into The Lost Symbol next.

Alien 2 - On Earth

Come On Alien

Alien 2 - On Earth
(aka Alien 2 Sulla Terra)
Italy 1980 Directed by Ciro Ippolito 
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Yeah, this sort of has some mild spoilers but I don’t think you’ll mind them. It’s not that kind of movie.

Oh dearie me. Where do I even begin with a movie like Alien 2 - On Earth?

The Italians, along with a few other countries I could name, seem to have a reputation (and sometimes a knack) for jumping on the bandwagon when a film, or series of films, hits big. And then they capitalise on/exploit that craze for as long as they can while the money still comes in. When Argento repopularised the giallo format with his movie The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, for example, there were suddenly gazillions of gialli being made. When the Americans were using Italian studios to film their various biblical epics like the Charlton Heston version of Ben Hur, there was suddenly a slew of peplum (sword and sandals movies) again with heroes such as Hercules and Maciste heading the bills (I suspect the leftover sets and props would also have played a part). When Sergio Leone hit big with the first real Spaghetti Western, his remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, called A Fistful Of Dollars, there were suddenly hundreds, if not thousands, of similarly styled Italian Westerns being produced. They even bandwagoned their own bandwagons in some cases. For instance, when Sergio Corbucci had a hit with the Spaghetti Western Django, there were almost “too many to count” numbers of westerns made which had Django mentioned in the title of the movie, whether he appeared in the film or not (a trend which Tarantino played on a few years ago when he mentioned the famous character in the title of his movie but then, despite having Franco Nero in an unrelated cameo in the film, having a totally different character called Django as the main lead).

So yeah, in Italy, a really successful movie made sometime between, at least, the 1950s and the 1980s, was going to spur production on a large number of 'cinematic delights' cashing in on this film... quite often without any of the qualities that made the original template any good, actually being carried through into the next batch.

And that’s how it was when Ridley Scott’s A L I E N hit cinema screens back in 1979.

Young ‘uns these days possibly don’t realise just how big Scott’s A L I E N was when it came out. Star Wars was still very fresh in everyone’s mind and, despite a classic run of adult oriented science fiction films produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the post Star Wars consumer market was very excited to see an adult oriented, science fiction/horror movie once more. At 11 years of age, I was unable to see the film at the cinema on its first run due to its X certificate rating, but I remember being impressed that my mum and dad, for the first time I could ever remember in my life, went out to see the movie without me. But I had the big photonovel of the film and also, the far more violently expressed graphic novel, which also included scenes not seen in the movie until the much later ‘director’s cut’ and which, believe me, was way more gorily drawn than anything seen in the actual film.

So, the point is, A L I E N was pretty big and so, as far as the Italians were concerned, I guess, it was fair game for them to produce their very own sequel. Don’t forget that the film’s first official sequel, ALIENS, didn’t come out until 1986. So I don’t really blame the Italians for doing that. After all, the similarities between A L I E N and certain sections of Mario Bava’s Planet Of The Vampires were pretty obvious and so... I guess they felt they could just steal their stuff back.

Having watched this ‘sequel’ now, I have to say it’s one of the most unbelievably mind numbing and tedious movies I’ve ever seen... even for a dodgy, Italian, rip off exploitation movie. The film actually, in no way, shape or form other than in the title, mentions or refers to anything specifically in Ridley Scott’s A L I E N other than a few echoes which I’ll get into in a minute.

My first clue that I would have to take the film’s sequel status with more than an oversized pinch of salt was the fact that it’s set in the present day... or that is to say, contemporary to when it was filmed. As opposed to being set in the far future like the original A L I E N. If I was being kind, I’d say certain elements of content have been inspired by Scott’s film but, even so, there are other Italian exploitation films from around the same time nicking bits from A L I E N which are still bad but which have a flair for fun and are quite watchable. Luigi Cozzi’s Contamination (sometimes retitled Alien Contamination for some territories) springs to mind in this capacity as a fun, schlocky, so bad it’s good stab at something which maybe couldn’t have quite existed without films like A L I E N leading the way. However, Alien 2 - On Earth is not schlocky fun... it’s just interminably dull, to be fair.

The film has, presumably, hardly any budget and that would suggest why the film takes place solely in a TV studio (for one scene), a beach (for a couple of scenes), a bowling alley (for a few sequences including an over long finale) and, mostly, in a series of caves. Yes, it’s like a poor man’s The Descent we have here and instead of the crew of the Nostromo we have a bunch of people who like to explore caves and a writer/director who is trying to convince the audience that a bunch of 'cave scientists' can actually make a decent living poking around investigating rock forms. The background to this story is of a capsule returning from space with no astronauts aboard (I don’t think we actually ever see it) and a bunch of blue rocks turning up which, when one kid finds it, does something off camera and leaves her without a face. Of course, one of our 'Team Cave Explorers' protagonists finds one of these rocks next to the toilets at a gas station (there you go, I knew there was another location I was forgetting) and puts it in his ruck sack. The team then go underground for the majority of the rest of the movie, with everyone looking out for the character Thelma (played by Belinda Mayne) because she keeps having her telepathic flashes that something dark is going to happen.

The film is laughable right from the start due to an interesting but wildly inappropriate score by Oliver Onions (more well known to many as Guido and Maurizio De Angelis... who scored gazillions of Italian movies... including one of my favourites as a kid, Watch Out We’re Mad, reviewed here). However, despite some nice ‘spaced out’ synthesizer sounds running in the background, overlaying it on a free and easy guitar melody and with occasional vocals and, furthermore, bringing it in at completely inappropriate moments throughout the movie, does nothing to add to a sense of mystery or horror, believe me. It might make you laugh and also, perhaps, be quite listenable away from the movie but, in terms of supporting this story... it's completely out of it.

Aside from the dullness, there are also some great continuity errors too. When our heroine Thelma goes to the beach to meet her psychiatrist, he arrives on a boat and sits with her for a few minutes to establish for the audience that she has a darkness and a kind of sixth sense when something bad is happening (even from a ludicrous distance, which makes you wonder why she isn’t sensing every other bad thing going on in the world which isn’t pertinent to this hastily cobbled together plot), with the excuse of putting his boots on, which he waves at the camera. However, when the two go back to long shot after their talk, there are no boots or even spare shoes to be seen... they’ve just vanished completely. Good stuff.

Now, to be fair to the director, there are some nice moments of beautiful cinematography on show here... a scene where the little girl near the start of the movie finds the pulsating alien rock thing on the beach and she’s silhouetted against the sea by the light, comes to mind. However, moments like this are few and far between and, it has to be said, they can’t save this movie.

Now, the only things I could find on show that might be inspired by Scott’s A L I E N, apart from some gory scenes, is the atmosphere and costumes, As they go into the caves, they are full of stalactites and stalagmites and I can only think that maybe the film’s producers and designers were thinking that these natural formations might somehow pass for something that, if you half closed your eyes, might look like they came from the mind of H. R. Giger. That’s my best guess anyway. Coupled with the caving suits and the helmets with the lights on, I can only assume they were going for a similar look to the early, planet exploration scenes of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic. However, it has to be said that the scenes in the caves are among the dullest and unwatchable in the movie which... is a pity when you realise that at least 90% of the movie takes place in them.

The bizarre flying, almost unseen alien creature is badly handled but, to be fair, some of the goriness is imaginatively inspired. The life cycle of the alien in this film kinda means it jumps out of the rock and takes someones face off... until they are found with their face in tact somehow, which I suspect is due to a hasty script rewrite halfway through shooting when they realised that a faceless woman is not someone the rest of the cavers were going to bother about trying to administer medical aid to, after she is attacked. So in this movie we have a face ripper rather than a face hugger and it then somehow lives inside the host’s head before popping out of the front of their pulsating, rubbery face (pushing an eyeball or two out in the process) and attacking the next person. The next person attacked in this case is hooked to a rope at the edge of a precipice, for reasons really not worth bothering about going into here and, as he’s left dangling over the side of the edge above his companions, his head suddenly drops off for some bizarrely inexplicable reason.

And the majority of the rest of the movie is spent with the rest of the gang of spelunkers as they run around the caves trying to get out while being picked off one by one by a very dodgy special effect. There’s a brief moment of respite when one of the crew is taken over by the alien creature and Thelma tries to communicate telepathically... I know that’s what she’s trying because, for some strange reason, her eyes are glowing green when she’s doing this. It doesn’t do much, though, and when she and another survivor finally get out of the caves they find, just as you kinda know they would, the rest of the world abandoned... although there are no dead bodies around, to speak of. So, of course, they try and find out where everybody has gone by going back to their favourite bowling alley (because, why wouldn't you, I guess?) and it’s here that the climax of the movie is set because... of course an alien life form would be so interested in bowling. Must have been a very cheap location, I suppose.

Alien 2 - On Earth ends exactly as you think it might, scotching any chances of this being somehow even a prequel to A L I E N, rather than the advertised sequel. And, despite how fun it probably sounds, I can honestly say that it most certainly isn’t. The film’s only other noteworthy feature apart from the very occasionally nice cinematography is the inclusion of future giallo and horror director Michele Soavi in the cast... but he’s hardly a notable actor here so... well, he fits right in with all the others then. I’m really glad I saw this ‘lost gem’ finally and am grateful to 88 Films for releasing a restored Blu Ray of it but, even after recommending loads of terrible but fun Italian exploitation movies to people in my time, the only thing I can say about this one is, keep clear. It’s truly dreadful... just not in a good way.

The Feathered Serpent

Chan Clan Phooey

The Feathered Serpent
USA 1948 Directed by William Beaudine
Monogram/Warner Bros DVD Region 1

So here we have The Feathered Serpent, the penultimate of the six films where Roland Winters played Charlie Chan and, although it’s not an especially entertaining edition of the exploits of the world’s most famous Chinese American detective, it is one which is quite unique in the history of the series. It’s the only one of the original run of films which spanned nearly two decades and various companies to feature two of Charlie Chan’s sons in the same film, together. Namely Number Two son, played by Victor Sen Yung and, after a very long absence, Keye Luke as Number One Son.

Now Keye Luke was an artist who used to paint posters for various movies until he shot to fame in the original US run of Charlie Chan films opposite Warner Oland, my favourite Chan man, in the title role. I always remember him from watching the Charlie Chan films as a kid where he used to run in on a scene, usually thinking he’d solved the mystery and yelling something along the lines of “Gee, pop!” When Oland died unexpectedly, Luke had already shot some scenes for the next movie and these were transplanted, with new scenes added, when the Charlie Chan film was hastily rewritten and turned into one of the Mr. Moto films with Peter Lorre. The 1938 film Mr. Moto’s Gamble, to be precise, which I reviewed here. After the films were recast with Sydney Toler, Luke declined to continue in the series and so number two and three sons replaced him, on and off, for the majority of the Toler films. But, one decade later, Keye Luke was back in the series, opposite Roland Winters... regardless of the fact that he was slightly older than the man playing his father at this time (many years later, Luke would go on to voice Chan himself in the Charlie Chan cartoon show).

Now, with Mantan Moreland continuing in his role as the Chan family chauffer Birmingham Brown, you might think, with the three of them, that there are now way too many sidekicks for a Chan film to comfortably handle and, to tell the truth, you’d be right. How many 'on screen dummies' do you need to explain things to under the banner of audience exposition? I might be a little harsh on the idea, actually, because the writing on this one isn’t that great, even though it’s a remake of a former 1937 Western, The Riders of the Whistling Skull.

Roland Winters seems a little too laid back in this one, it seems to me and... I have to wonder what he thought of Keye Luke returning to the role. It’s a bit of a puzzler because I’m presuming they really went to town ageing Winters on this one in some subtle way because, as I indicated above, Keye Luke who is seen playing his offspring is, actually, five months his senior. Something only Hollywood could be bold and stupid enough to get away with.

This one isn’t so much a mystery story, since the villain behind the plot of this tale of a doomed archeological expedition reveals himself fairly early on in the proceedings. The set up is such that, with Chan and his team on vacation in Mexico, they find themselves suddenly embroiled in a plot when the man they rescue from the roadside turns out to be one of two missing scientists that another expedition are trying so hard to find. That means it’s up to Chan to help them find the scientist in question and also find the hidden Aztec lair full of buried treasure. So, yeah, the usual stuff but the execution of it here leaves a lot to be desired, I think.

There’s lots to groan about in this one, too. When the lights go out in a house at night and the first murder is committed under cover of darkness, it only takes the lighting of one single candle to suddenly plunge the set back into a fully lit shot set up. Oh dear.... still, Monogram were not known for being particularly brilliant film studios, that’s for sure. These Monogram films had a much smaller budget than the 20th Century Fox produced movies and, although some of the Monogram Chan films are excellent, the lack of production value really shows on this one.

Another groaner is when Chan and his sons, with Birmingham Brown tagging along, decide to join the expedition, Number One and Two sons immediately dress up in safari suits, along with obligatory pith helmets... this looks really silly. Actually, one of the great problems with this is the apparent lack of chemistry between Keye Luke and Victor Sen Yung. This would be Yung’s final Charlie Chan film... although he’d started back when Sydney Toler first took over from Warner Oland, with Benson Fong also playing number three son in the films where Yung wasn’t available. Now, I’m not sure if this lack of dynamic interaction between the two is a personality thing or whether it’s because they have just been given some terrible lines to work with here. What I do know for sure is that, once again, Mantan Moreland’s portrayal as comic relief Birmingham Brown is fantastic and he somehow manages to get the best lines, again, in this one. For example, when he wants to get out of a scary situation he says to one of them... “There’s somebody I’d like to see outside.” When he’s asked who, he answers “Me!”. Similarly, in another moment when he’s at a disagreement about staying where the trouble is, he reminds his boss... “Oh Mr. Chan, we’re on vacation. Why don’t we vacate?”

So yeah, Moreland and his quick fire dialogue really helps hold the movie together, for me, but ultimately, this one does fall kinda flat. There’s a nice mixture of moving camera and also static edits in and out of compositions but, at the end of the day, there’s just not enough going on here and it’s just not well written. Even the comedy moment which you can see coming a mile off, with Moreland sitting on a rock and accidentally activating the entrance to the hidden temple, is not milked the way it might once have been and it’s just a genuinely dull affair, for most of the short running time. The Feathered Serpent is not a Chan film I’d recommend anybody start on but, if you are a die hard fan of the series, the fact that he has two sons sharing the screen with him is certainly interesting. If you want to get excited about Charlie Chan, however, go back to the Warner Oland movies first, would be my advice.

Zoology (aka Zoologiya)

A Tall Tail

Zoology (aka Zoologiya)
2016 Russia/France/Germany
Directed by Ivan I. Tverdovskiy
London Film Festival screening, October 8th 2016

And so my 2016 London Film Festival adventures begin with Tverdovskiy’s low key but gently stunning movie Zoology. The film’s central concept intrigued me enough to add this to my ticket applications for this year’s festival... or bookings I guess, since they’ve all gone on-line and become computerised these days, which I hate.

The story, such as it is, tells of a frumpy, late/middle aged woman called Natasha, played by an amazing actress who doesn’t seem to have done much film work at all in her time, Natalya Pavlenkova. Not long after the film has started, we find that Natasha, who works in her local Zoo, has somehow grown a full fledged tail. Naturally, she is somewhat concerned about this and so goes to see her doctor, who then sends her to get an x-ray done. The man who takes her x-ray... and a second visit after the first one turns out to be blurry... is Pyetr, played by Dmitriy Groshev, who becomes Natasha’s romantic interest, despite what looks to be a fair age difference between the two of them and, of course, despite Natasha’s tail.

The film is a gentle study of Natasha as she begins, over the course of the movie, to embrace the idea of having her tail and we see her transformed into someone who starts to enjoy her life as her new appendage seems to see her blossom into the person she always had the potential to be. It’s a lovely little study of her coming to terms with her tail as the rumours and whispers about ‘the devil woman with the tail who can fix you with her eye and make you die with her stare’ become more abundant in her small community.

Perhaps part of the reason it’s so engaging, besides the absolutely incredible performances put in by the two central leads, is that the director seems to be using hand held camera for everything. There are a lot of shots which follow the actors around almost reactively, like a visual version of a film score 'Mickey Mousing'* the on screen actions... but even with the seemingly static shots in the movie, there’s still a lot of slight camera movement infecting the 'still' shots like a ‘slow shake’ and it’s very much the kind of methodology which some American TV shows, like Firefly or the Battlestar Galactica reboot, have been using recently to give a more ‘documentary-like’ feel to the proceedings. It’s kind of interesting, actually, because I noticed this happening pretty much all the time throughout the movie as I was watching it without being aware of who the director was and what his previous movie making exercises had been. However, at the screening, we were lucky to have lead actor Dmitriy Groshev on hand, with a translator, to talk a little about it and to answer any questions from the audience afterwards... some of which were quite awkward and, therefore, quite interesting. He explained that the director was actually a documentary director so that immediately made sense to me because he is obviously using that approach to make what seems to be (and the IMDB isn’t much help on this, it seems) only his second fictional feature length film.

It’s not a particularly unusual approach to making a movie, especially nowadays, but it does serve to give the film a kind of voyeuristic, fly-on-the-wall, kind of feel to the proceedings and, consequently, helps to legitimise what might be considered a fantastical story element by grounding it in a style which you might not associate with that kind of subject matter. Right away, you are sympathising with the main character because you forget that you are watching actors and are, instead, watching a slice of life, to a certain extent.

The film treats it's central theme less than seriously, most of the time, especially for a study dealing with the alienation of a person through a sudden physical transformation. It also doesn’t judge, like the local community and church, who condemn the phenomenon as the sign of some Religious demon, the existence of the appendage in question and, in fact, leaves the origin of the mystery of this new member unexplained... which is refreshing and, although this has been happening a little more lately in the odd American movie, is something which helps dispose of a lot of exposition and allow the writers and director more time to concentrate on just what it is they want to say about the phenomenon.

The comedic element of the movie, which includes a really fun scene where the lead actress is using her very flexible tail to masturbate in her bathtub, is very broad and the myth of Russian films being humourless and very bleak is pretty much busted throughout, most, of the running time here. I’m no stranger to Russian movies but at least two people had warned me, before I went to see this, that is was Russian and, therefore, bound to be a bit miserable. Imagine my surprise, then, when in the last few minutes of the movie, this actually turns out to be correct and we have a tragically dark but, also, beautifully executed ending which actually took me by surprise during the last minute or so of the film. I really don’t want to give away any spoilers here, especially since it was revealed at this screening that the movie will, in fact, be getting a UK release at some point in the future, but the ending of the movie both startled me in the unexpectedness of just where it leaves us while at the same time being absolutely brilliantly timed. The best thing I could liken it to would be certain types of music. When I was in my 20s and 30s I used to listen to a lot of music by contemporary minimalist composers and two of them, Michael Nyman and Philip Glass, would often end a piece quite abruptly but, simultaneously, at the exact natural point it should be ended. The result was a passage of music which finished before you realised it would (on first listen) but at the same time brought a sense of unconventional resolution to what you had just been listening to. The ending of this film is just like that... but on visual terms with the editing, which is always said to be an element of film which is similar to music anyway and, if you want to see that analogy demonstrated perfectly, then the ending of Zoology gives you that chance.

After the screening there were a fair few questions, one about the portrayal of female stereotypes, which I guess was kind of valid but which the actor admitted, presumably because he, like me, can’t see anything wrong with using stereotypes as short hand to get a message across... especially when these people do exist in real life. Another was very telling in that the lady who asked a question obviously saw the tail in the tale as a penis and some kind of misogynistic attitude towards women in the message of the film and, although there is that analogy made a couple of times to set up a couple of jokes, I think the question said more about the person asking it and the baggage she brought to the screening, rather than any inherent negative attitude to women... especially for a film which has such a strong, female character as the central role (and not some kind of male fantasy female, either). The lead actor pointed out that perhaps the lady was confusing somebody moving closer to maleness (which isn’t the case, anyway, I think) with somebody becoming just generally more alien and therefore not accepted but I can kind of see where the lady in the audience was coming from, even if I don’t agree with that subtext being present in the film, myself.

And there you have it. Zoology is a great little movie which has an intriguing premise and which plays it, mostly, for comedy with a lightness of touch which, perhaps, allows the bleak reality of the situation to come crashing down on the audience at the close of the film. One of the better films I’ve seen at the cinema this year and one I’d definitely recommend catching in screenings or on some kind of home video format if you get the chance. A movie which deserves a lot of recognition, I think.

*A term for film composition where the music catches and illustrates particular actions or dialogue highlights etc.


2016 London Film Festival @ NUTS4R2

Zoology (Zoologiya)
Women Who Kill
Mifune - The Last Samurai
Prevenge
Spaceship

The Girl On The Train

Carriage Return

The Girl On The Train
2016 USA Directed by Tate Taylor
UK cinema release print.

Oh dear. You know, I’ve been in a similar situation with a much anticipated movie based on a best selling novel before and I really should learn to trust my instincts more. I’ve only got myself to blame, I guess. I saw the trailer for The Girl On The Train a while ago and, frankly, it looked like a dull, Hollywoodland ‘almost-thriller’ that I could easily bypass as being an unremarkable film. And that’s what I should have done. Instead, just like my previous bad experience with Before I Go To Sleep (which I reviewed here), I bought into the idea that it was a much loved ‘modern classic’ of a novel... or at the very least a phenomenal best seller... and so I squashed my gut reaction and decided to give this one a go. Besides... it has a terrific lead actress and new score by Danny Elfman so... it seemed like the sensible thing to do.

So here I am now living with the fact that I’ve wasted my time on another clunker of a movie when I could, instead, have used that time for some genuine cinematic art... however, as I learned a long time ago, it’s necessary to see the really useless stuff to be able to harbour an appreciation for the good stuff too, so... I guess it wasn’t a completely wasted journey.

The Girl On The Train alleges to be a thriller and, although it kind of comes from an interesting structure in terms of the way it slowly reveals things in the past of the three main female protagonist’s lives in a non-linear fashion, it is still quite a dull movie. Now I don’t mind slow paced films... put me in front of a Russian movie where the highlight of the film is the quick condensation of heat from where a coffee mug had been left on a table and as long as it’s got great cinematography and intrigues me with the way the camera explores the situation, I’ll be fine (and you get an extra point if you can work out exactly which movie I was thinking about there). The pacing on The Girl On The Train is fairly slow but it’s not the problem here.

Neither is the story, to some extent, which looks at three women who find themselves fighting back against male antagonists that subtly, and less than subtly, brutalise them and make them question their beliefs. It’s got a positive message so that’s all good.

And the acting is really sound too, with Haley Bennett, Rebecca Ferguson doing a cracking job and with Emily Blunt playing the title character, really doing some good work here. Blunt has a tough time and is the main focus of the film, giving us an interesting study of a struggling alcoholic which is actually, almost cleverly but, you know, not quite that cleverly, used as a plot point later on in the movie. No problems with any of this and the construction is almost like a giallo in some moments... although it’s a pretty toothless giallo, to be sure. I did find myself wondering, about half way through the movie, what would have happened if they’d have given an old Italian director who used to crank out gialli back in the late 1960s or early 1970s the same kind of material to work with. I suspect it would be a lot less plodding than what we have here.

I don’t know for sure but I’m guessing the book is a lot more gripping than the film, where you can presumably be more in tune with the thoughts of the various characters. Unfortunately, although I totally believe in the ability of good cinema to portray, wordlessly, the inner struggle of the characters on screen in what I call the ‘cinema of reflection’... the director doesn’t really manage to catch that here, I would say.

Everything seems so obvious, to be honest, and I was waiting for some kind of twist to rear itself at the end of the movie to bite me on the backside for being so complacent during the rest of the time but, in all fairness, there is no twist ending. This is literally just a whodunnit kind of movie and, although there are a fair few suspects who might have been able to facilitate the film’s central crime, the killer is telegraphed somewhat early in the set up of the movie, it felt to me, and I was left with a movie going experience which, unfortunately, left me far from the edge of my seat.

Danny Elfman’s score is a bit low key too. It’s far from one of his big, splashy compositions he’s known for and this harkens back more to his scores for smaller movies like A Simple Plan, in some respects, although, certainly within the context of the movie, I found this less enjoyable. That being said, when Emily Blunt’s character starts piecing things together towards the end of the picture, the score’s rhythms and hues come more sharply into focus to heighten the sense of tension that the film is struggling so hard to achieve. I suspect the score is one of those compositions that work better away from the actual 'venue of the imagination' it was initially written for... so it might be worth a pick up on CD at some point.

And that's about all I’ve got to say about The Girl On The Train. Sorry about the short review but nothing else comes to mind. I’m sure the book must be better than this and, despite having a great cast who mostly do a bang up job, it’s not really doing much for me as a movie and I can’t say I’d recommend it myself. I won’t be making the return trip from the same carriage anytime soon.

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children

Play Miss P For Me

Miss Peregrine's Home
For Peculiar Children
2016 UK/Belgium/USA Directed by Tim Burton
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very light spoilers.

Although I’ve not read Ransom Rigg’s novel Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, the new adaptation once more continues my increasingly hit and miss (when once they were all hits) relationship with the cinema of Tim Burton. This is not one of my favourite films by him but, it has to be said, I did quite enjoy it in places although, in all honesty, there seems to be something a little less Burtonesque about the final product.

When I first saw the trailer for this film, and being unfamiliar with the book, I immediately thought it would be the kind of story telling that someone like Burton would want to be involved with, until I realised it was indeed directed by him. That being said, while the concept and tone of a film dealing with secret children with special powers who hide from their sinister and terrifying enemies by living in time loops where they never age through the years is, absolutely, something I would imagine this particular director would excel at (and to a certain extent, he kinda does), it doesn’t feel like the execution of the story is realised in a way which is consistent with other Burton projects in the past.

For instance, while the realisation of the children, their locales and the situations they find themselves in is full of imagination and peculiar whimsy, the look and feel of these elements seem to be just a little less wrought and twisted in the same way that the director usually pushes his visuals. Stylistically, it seems less controlled than usual but... perhaps that’s to be expected when the director himself has gone on record as saying that he did as much of this as practically and in camera as he could. It’s quite possible that this CGI element, removed somewhat from the equation (although there’s still loads of it, to be honest) is a contributory factor in my personal response to this piece of art. However, it is art and you are never going to get anything too naturalistic from Burton, you can be sure of that. On the other hand, in his early career, he still probably had a lot less to call on in terms of CGI effects than he’s used here... and those films always felt like they were coming from the same place.

Style aside, the film does still grab you from the very beginning and, although the follow through isn’t quite as good as the concept that’s being explored in the first half of the movie, it will intrigue most audiences I’m sure and, it has to be said, certainly give the viewing public an interesting ride.

My main reason for seeing this one was the casting of Eva Green, one of my favourite contemporary actresses, in the role of Miss Peregrine. Alas, she’s not in the film quite as much as you might expect, seeing that she is even mentioned in the title but... she’s in it enough and her absences from the screen at various times certainly contribute to the forward motion of the story as it unfolds. She is ably aided by a cast of children including Asa Butterfield and Ella Purnell as the two main male and female 'peculiar protagonists' and, it has to be said, the kids in this film really do a great job in this. They are all equally supported by a great cast including Samuel Jackson as the villain of the piece, Judi Dench (in what amounts to almost a cameo but she’s still pretty good here) and the always watchable Terence Stamp playing Asa Butterfield’s grandfather. I don’t want to give too much away about the temporal nature of certain passages of the plotting but Stamp is in it a little more than you might think he is going to be, after you get a little way in. This isn’t a throwaway cameo like he had in Star Wars Episode I - The Phantom Menace (reviewed here).

The acting is superb and the shot design, although less what I would expect from this director, is still quite beautful and it is, for the most part, fast paced enough to keep things going without losing the attention of the audience too much during certain sections. It’s inventive, has a moral heart for the people and the situations they find themselves in and, in a sequence which I knew must have been a labour of love for this director, has a scene which is pretty much a direct homage to Ray Harryhausen, as far as I’m concerned. There’s even what looks like an updated shot lift in one close up moment which had me thinking back to films like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason And The Argonauts. All I’m saying is... if you like watching Harryhausen’s s skeletons, you’re in for a treat here.

There are also a few little things which annoyed me about the film, too, it has to be said. Such as why would an English girl who has been living in Great Britain for so long and who makes her home in a time loop in 1943 refer to an Underground Train Station as a ‘subway’? Sounds a little like an American anachronism to me. If you’re going to set a movie in a specific time zone in the UK then at least research the differences in the language of the time.

Another interesting point for me is that of censorship. Don’t worry, I’m totally against any kind of censorship other than self-censorship after a certain age. However, I think that before the age of, say, ten, then a child’s parent or guardian should make decisions about what might affect that child in a negative manner. Now, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children is rated a 12A over here in the UK. Which means that children under the age of 12 must be accompanied by an adult and, as it happpens, when I went to the performance on Sunday morning, the majority of the audience seemed to be in the 7 year old range... plus accompanying parents. That being said, this film is absolutely filled with graphic images of eye injury... minus any blood so that, presumably, censorship can be gotten around and a less damaging rating can be bestowed upon it. Which I don’t really agree with because, graphic violence which is bloodless just teaches impressionable minds that violence has no consequence.

And were talking about a lot of eyeball stuff here folks. I mean, the plot is such that the villains of the piece harvest the eyeballs of children so they can eat them as a means to bring themselves back into something closer to themselves before they had their ‘terrible accident’ (which is shown for us in flashback). People’s eyes are removed, bowls of them are eaten and, in a particularly gruesome scene, eyeballs are squished out with tentacles. I can’t but think that, with all that stupid fuss over films like Zombi (aka Zombie Flesh Eaters) in the 1980s, this film might well have made the Video Nasty list (and you can read more about two documentaries dealing with that peculiarly British phenomenon here and here). So I’m somewhat bemused that young children, who are pretty robust (as was pointed out by someone close to me), are allowed to see something which is, in my opinion, far worse than anything found in that particular Lucio Fulci classic (which you can read my review of here).

The other thing about this movie which deserves a brief mention is the musical score by Michael Higham and Matthew Margeson. Anyone remotely familiar with the films of Tim Burton would be able to tell you that almost all of his scores are provided by Danny Elfman. I can only, in fact, think of three Burton films which didn’t have an Elfman score and, I can’t help but wonder why he didn’t score this one. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice enough score but it doesn’t hit the same kinds of rhythms and arrangements that Elfman might have provided and so I also wonder if this is one of the reasons why this seems less like ‘a Tim Burton movie’ to me. Director and composer relationships such as the infamously torn one between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann or the amazingly long held one by Steven Spielberg and John Williams can sometimes be a battle of egos, I suspect, but it also sometimes leads to the best work being created by either of the two artists involved and so I have to ponder, since the score for this one is less a pseudo-Elfman score than Howard Shore’s amazing contribution to Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, if this is a big contributing factor to the way I mentally received the film in this case.

Either way, it’s not something I can definitively say yes or no to so I’ll leave that thought there and just round up this review by saying that, although it’s not as Burtonesque, nor as consistently brilliant as I was hoping, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children is still a pretty entertaining ride and worth a look if you like the idea of the art of cinema showing you something you can’t, quite, see in anyone else’s movies. A definite good night out at the picture palace for most people, I suspect, and certainly worth catching at the cinema if you have nothing better to do one evening. And, despite my evenly tempered reaction to it... I do hope Burton adapts some of the other books in the series. I’d kind of like to see where this goes.

Swiss Army Man

Manny Decay

Swiss Army Man
2016 USA Directed by Daniels
UK cinema release print.

I got hooked into the idea of seeing Swiss Army Man right from the first time I saw the trailer a fair number of months ago on the internet. Unfortunately, not that many cinemas in London were showing it other than at silly times I couldn’t make it so, in the end, I took a shorter trek out to London Fields station and saw it at the Hackney Picture House which, I have to say, is a pretty nice cinema, despite the ticket prices. They also seem to be showing a load of movies my local Cineworld wouldn’t normally show so... think I’ll be going there a few more times a year now I know about it and how easy it is to get to.

I saw this film on a late Saturday morning performance and, even for a morning slot, this movie wasn’t exactly packed. In fact, there was only one other person in the screening I saw so I’m not sure what the box office returns on this one are going to look like.

Although the film at first appeared to be absolutely up my street, I did find the uncompromising vision of the two writer/directors,  Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert to be taking me just a little outside of my comfort zone at times... which is something I never thought I would ever hear myself saying about any movie which got a commercial release at the cinema. That being said, uncompromising vision is exactly what we need more of in today's bland and blasé cinematic world and so I can only applaud the cast and crew who worked on this.

The film centres on two main protagonists. One is Hank, played by Paul Dano, who starts the film stranded on a desert island and about to take his own life. However, just before he does the deed, he sees the corpse of Manny, the title character played by Daniel Radcliffe, washed up on the shore and, after a second false start at suicide, begins to bond with Manny when he uses the "is he really dead?" corpses prolifically natural gases to propel his body through water as he rides him like a speed boat. This gets him to land but still far away from civilisation and, after a while, Manny starts to manifest other super powers such as being a water dispenser for Hank and then, not so long after that, starts talking and recovering certain senses.

The film, then, becomes a road movie as the two try to find their way to civilisation. Of course, as Hank teaches the amnesiac, living dead corpse of Manny (who demonstrates many different uses and skills, just like a Swiss army knife, throughout the course of the picture) about the nature of life, the film becomes more about the examination of the road that brought Hank to the point where he was about to kill himself and looks at the way life in general impacts on people and leaves damage which not everyone sees is there.

It’s an inventive little story and filled with a lot of charm, that’s for sure. It gets very moving at times as the two discuss love and rejection and, ultimately, you wonder if the desert island at the start of the picture is not just a metaphor all along for Hank’s outlook on life and the place his mind has taken him to.

It’s also brilliantly shot with the directors finding some interesting framing and movement as the picture progresses... they’re also not afraid to focus your attention on something small and sometimes, that acts almost as a magnifying glass for the dialogue exchanges between Hank and Manny if you’re eyes are focused fixedly on one tiny part of the screen. One shot where a lot of forest is in close up, for example, blew me away as the two main protagonists are framed in the background through some trees and take up maybe just 5% of the screen. I don’t know how that shot will look to anyone watching on home video but at the cinema it was fantastic.

It goes without saying that a film which focuses primarily, for 99% of its running time, on just these two characters, needs actors who are really at the top of their craft and both Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe are more than up for the task... especially Radcliffe who has to be giving what is probably going to be the most unusual performance of his life... and any other actor’s, for that matter. I was already impressed by his performance in Victor Frankenstein (reviewed here) but what he does here is really amazing and, frankly, a brave move for any actor, not just somebody who is perhaps known to billions as the face of Harry Potter. There’s also a nice bit of supporting work from "my favourite actress who takes on cool horror and sci fi genre roles"... Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who plays the light at the end of the tunnel that keeps both characters going on their mission to return to civilisation as she becomes the not so healthy object of their collected desire. The last ten minutes or so also has cameos from composer Andy Hull, who provided the film's wonderful acappella score, and director Shane Carruth, who made two wonderful films called Primer and Upstream Colour (reviewed here).

It has to be said that, Swiss Army Man isn’t quite my cup of tea for personal reasons I won’t go into here but, having said that, you do have to admire the lack of explanation given about the title character and the single mindedness of the writers to craft their story their own way with what looks like little or no interference taken from the studios to be a more commercial product. I’m pretty sure a lot of audience members might be turned off by this movie in certain moments as it plays out and if I’d had seen this in a bigger collective audience than two people, I wouldn’t have been surprised if there would have been a number of walkouts like their were when it had its Sundance premier, from what I understand. But you know what? That’s okay. That’s what art is all about. This isn’t about number crunching pounds and dollars... this is about what all films should be about (and are in some ways but they are almost always severely compromised in this)... making something personal and creative which will make people think. As far as that’s concerned, this is a very successful film.

So... did I like Swiss Army Man. Well, yes and no. I think it’s a great film which I just didn’t happen to fully lock minds with but, obviously, I don’t see that as a failing of the film. I do know that it’s a film which does a very rare thing... shows you some stuff you are probably unlikely to have seen done on celluloid before (or even the horrible, modern day digital equivalent)... give you something new. As such, I think cinephiles around the world will probably dig this one a lot and, despite my own ambivalent reaction to it, I’d give it a hard recommend if you want to see something new which has been put together, no matter how vulgar in its wallowing in biological function, in as skillful a manner as you're likely to see. This is the kind of movie that cinema is all about... go see it.

Doc Savage - The Secret of Satan’s Spine

Bad Days With Black Rock

Doc Savage
The Secret of Satan’s Spine
by Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray)
Altus Press ISBN: 978-1618272164

So once again we have the amazing Will Murray taking on the mantle of the old Street and Smith pen name, Kenneth Robeson, to continue the good work of Doc Savage, long after original scribe Lester Dent’s death. I think it says a lot about Murray’s enthusiasm and attention to detail that this tome feels exactly like it’s been written in the period of Dent’s work when this particular story is set.

The Secret of Satan’s Spine is a Doc Savage adventure which takes place in the 1940s, during the Second World War. The back story of Doc Savage and the Amazing Five was that they met while serving in the First World War, although the full story was never divulged until many decades later when Philip Jose Farmer wrote a Doc ‘origin story’, Escape From Loki. Doc and what was left of his crew only managed to survive another four years in literary form after the Second World War before the pulp magazine in which the novels resided was cancelled. Obviously, over the years, and this has much to do with the Bantam reprints, the Doc stories have found a new lease of life and so, here we are with another of Murray’s incredibly well cobbled together tales... taken from an original Lester Dent idea which was rejected by the publishers at the time.

Something dark and strange happened to Doc Savage in the 1940s. He became much less reliant on the scientific gadgets that were always, until that point, a large part of his literary personae. The fashions of the time had presumably made it more popular for ‘science detectives’ to solve their problems with their brains (and possibly fists) rather than reach for, in Doc Savage’s case, a whole arsenal of curiously ‘ahead of their time’ gadgets which were, more often than not, easy to conceal on one’s person. Another strange thing which happened was that Doc’s five famous aides slowly found their roles diminishing until, by a certain point, Doc was only ever accompanied by the two who were, presumably, the most popular with the readers... Monk and Ham.

Something else which I seem to remember happening, although my memory may be playing tricks on me here and I’m unable to confirm this at present, is that Doc’s Crime College, where he operated on their brains to remove captured criminal’s memories of their past before teaching them how to become upstanding citizens, either slowly disappeared or may have just been consciously dropped by Doc at some point. By then, I suspect, Dent had maybe realised that the decision to change someone into a less criminal person without any choice in the matter, and in total secret, was a bit of a moral blind spot and so it was dropped, or at least pushed into the background significantly, during this time. It’s an interesting dilemma which various post-Dent comics and stories have used as a dramatic springboard in later years but I think it’s probably something Dent realised himself at some point. It’s definitely something Anthony Burgess must have figured out when he explored a less subtle variant of the same dilemma in A Clockwork Orange.

Anyway, all these little changes to the character means that, for me, the stories written and set in the 1940s, while still good, are not usually among my absolute favourite Doc Savage adventures.

Will Murray addresses these points and the style of the 1940s Doc head on and, in doing so, makes him much more readable and more interesting than I remembered him from being during that period. He talks about Doc consciously leaving his gadgets at home in order to not rely on them so much but... at the same time... it’s also true that for large chunks of the book, Doc is wearing what is the 1940s ‘science magic’ equivalent of Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility. So Murray kind of straddles a line between ‘to gadget or not to gadget’ and does it pretty convincingly, it has to be said, without really examining too closely why Doc would ever want to make life harder on himself and do such a thing in the first place.

The story starts off with Monk and Ham arguing, as usual, before Monk gets pulled into a scheme by being duped by a pretty face... a plot which will soon involve Doc and Ham too, as they take passage aboard a military ship to try and figure out just what kind of deadly commotion is about to erupt. However, that’s as far as it goes in terms of regulars of the series... it’s just Doc, Monk and Ham in this one and that would certainly fit in with the time period Murray has chosen to write about here. To counter that somewhat, he brings in a group of four friends who appeared together in one original Doc adventure by Dent and reunites them with what’s left of Doc and his crew... although they don’t do a whole lot over the course of the narrative, if truth be told.

As for that Crime College? Well, at one point near the end, Monk informs one of the captured criminals that he can look forward to a spell in Leavenworth, which is a far cry from Doc taking him back to a secret location and performing a special kind of acupuncture surgery on his brain. No explanation is given as to this passing comment by Monk and I’m guessing that people who are only aware of the 1930s Doc Savage adventures might raise and eyebrow over this line in the book. It does, I’m sure, make sense though.

The plot and pace in this one is not reminiscent of the globetrotting variety of adventures, even though a lot of the world, in terms of distance, is technically covered here. Unlike a lot of the Doc narratives, which can often be similar to a 1930s film serial in terms of people going here, there and everywhere, repeatedly, over a number of weeks... the structure of this one is fairly simple. We have a small part of the story at the start which is set in New York and a small part at the end on a small island which houses The Secret Of Satan’s Spine. Everything in between is set on the ship which has started its journey with a healthy number of disguised villains as well as the ultimate cure for all kinds of villainy everywhere... namely Doc, Monk and Ham.

The action isn’t choc-a-block and full-on in this one either, it has to be said. That doesn’t matter, though, because Murray has a way of grinding out his pulp prose in a fashion that moves the reader on at a fair lick without necessarily needing to constantly read about fist fights or other such matters... although there is still certainly enough action in here when called for... it’s just not one action set piece after another, which is not necessarily a bad thing and, especially I suspect, if you’re writing a specifically 1940s period Doc tale. Murray knows his stuff and he does his job well here.

I actually, despite the era of the Bronze Man’s adventures in which this fits, really enjoyed this one, after the initial set up was out of the way. The Secret Of Satan's Spine is a much better volume than Murray’s Doc book prior to this, The Sinister Shadow (reviewed here) and once I’d gotten over my disappointment at the 1940s setting, I really got into the swing of it. One slight criticism may be that the author seems less willing to spend time on a more believable pseudo-scientific explanation for some of the more fantastical things on display in this novel but I was happy to overlook this because of the sheer entertainment value that these inventions and archaeological artefacts bring to the story. Not nearly one of the best of Murray’s yarn spinners but certainly nowhere near the bottom end of the spectrum either. If you’re a Doc Savage fan then you should have no problem with this addition to your bronze library so... yeah... all in all, another big triumph for Will Murray writing as Kenneth Robeson. Looking forward to the next one.

The Magnificent Seven (2016)

Heaventh Seven

The Magnificent Seven (2016)
2016 USA Directed by Antoine Fuqua
UK cinema release print.

Okay... so Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai was one of the great masterpieces of cinema. No one, I think, would debate that (and retain any credibility, for sure). This film is kind of selling itself as a remake of the first of the more famous remakes of Kurosawa’s classic, The Magnificent Seven, directed by John Sturges in 1960. That film is also a bit of a classic, albeit a second hand one, and I know that a lot of the cast were so in love with Kuorsawa’s original that they were chomping at the bit to play the US equivalents of the original Seven Samurai, as far as some of them could be said to have counterparts in their remake.

People perhaps don’t remember that when the 1960 version of The Magnificent Seven was released in the US it immediately flopped but, did quite well in the United Kingdom and was therefore given another, much more phenomenally successful release in the US immediately following its UK success. At least, that’s the story I know (and it’s a very similar story with John Carpenter’s original Assault On Precinct 13, if memory serves me correctly). So yeah, that version became a perennial classic too and whatever you think of it in comparison to the far superior, original masterwork by Kurosawa, it’s still a lot more of a great movie than a much later remake, the Roger Corman produced Battle Beyond The Stars (which I have a bit of a soft spot for too, to be honest, and which is reviewed here). It also spawned three sequels... Return of the Seven, Guns of the Magnificent Seven and The Magnificent Seven Ride.

Now, the reason I mention all this is because I personally find remakes much more palatable if they’re reworked in a different milieu rather than do it in the same setting as one of the previous versions. So Kurosawa’s chanbara became a Western and then a Star Wars cash in space opera (I believe there was an Italian peplum version of the movie too). I think it speaks to Kurosawas ability to put together classic stories in that exactly the same thing happened to his chanbara Yojimbo when it was remade by, among others, Sergio Leone as a Western called A Fistful Of Dollars and again, starring Bruce Willis, in the 1930s depression era USA as Last Man Standing.

What surprises me about this new take on the original is that Antoine Fuqua and co have decided to remake the Western version of Kurosawas tale as... another Western. Ummm.... would rather had seen something else done with it but I guess, like the recent Ben Hur remake (which I reviewed here) I can’t be too vocal about reworking this kind of thing when some of the remakes are already classics in their own right.

Now, it has to be said that this new version of The Magnificent Seven isn’t really a remake at all. The characters have different names and, for the most part, don’t have too many counterparts from either the original Kurosawa version or the John Sturges version. Although, it has to be said that Chris Pratt is kind of playing a slightly less dashing version of Steve McQueen and Byung-hun Lee is kinda the greatests swordsman from the original, by way of James Coburn’s knife thrower in the first remake. However, all the character names are different and their relationships to each other are different too... although the Takashi Shimura/Yul Brinner role is obviously the one played by Denzel Washington here (although he doesn’t play it the same way) because he has an all black outfit and is the man who leads the others. Ethan Hawke’s character is a little closer in the spirit of the Sturges version because he has a back story relating to Denzel Washington’s character and he plays something like the Brad Dexter role in this one... except he also plays something like the Robert Vaughan role too so, you know, he’s essentially one of the few visible counterparts in the movie and it’s an amalgam of two of them.

The story is the same in spirit but... different too. This time, the villagers live in a small town and the threat to them comes not from Mexican Bandits but from fellow Americans who have taken over their town via the local gold mine. So I guess you can say the film takes certain elements from both Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven but does its own thing with them. It’s more a classic Western than it is a remake but, that being said, there are a fair few homages to the originals. I’ll get to the music in a minute but there are a few lines and paraphrases from the Sturges version such as Denzel Washington’s take on Yul Brinner's “I’ve never been offered everything before” (or words to that effect, itself an homage in tone to Takashi Shimura’s “I understand” when he realises the true cost of the farmers’ sacrifice in Seven Samurai). Actually, about the money the Seven are offered here... we are lead to believe it is pooled together by the locals in town but when the Seven arrive, it’s pretty obvious that the two people who hire Denzel and his crew have done so without the knowledge of the townsfolk. So there’s a bit of a weird... “How did they raise the money?” moment I had in the movie just about there. Now as it happens, and this demonstrates the way in which the basic characters have mutated into something completely different for this version, Denzel Washington’s Chisolm character has his own motivations for taking on the job (which you’ll find out right near the end) but as for the others... hmm. Maybe a bit of a story logic shortfall there, I reckon.

Another thing this movie has in common with the Sturges version is Steve McQueen’s joke about the guy who jumped out of the window of a tall building. Chris Pratt tells this joke in this version (although I wasn’t too sure about his delivery of this the first time, to be honest) and then the writers have a field day with it and it becomes sort of a running gag in this movie... which is a nice idea but, ultimately, felt overused and therefore undervalued because, you will hear it five or six times throughout the feature and it certainly wears out its welcome at some points.

The final battle is pretty entertaining though. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not got the sheer spectacle and excitement of Kurosawa’s epic ‘rain and mud’ finale but it is pretty much a more engaging and tense shootout than the 1960 John Sturges version... which is something I didn’t expect to be typing. So there’s that.

The tone of the movie is strange, though. Instead of being a classic American Western like the Sturges, we have a movie which takes elements from that legacy but also from the American Revisionist Westerns and, very much, the Italian Spaghetti Westerns too, it seems to me. It’s a very postmodernistic, eclectic version of a Western and although the visuals mostly manage to make this mish mash of Western styles work, it’s the musical juxtapositions which manage to help glue it altogether.

This was James Horner’s last score. That is to say... he’d written some of it from his visits to the set and it was delivered to the director after his death. The rest of the score is by a guy named Simon Franglen but, unless the two composers were both writing in completely different styles (which there seems to be in the movie) then it’s kind of hard to tell where one composer is taking the reigns as opposed to another. And it’s a diverse mix with the emphasis on 1970s revisionist style scoring, classic Americana (I’ll talk about that in a minute) and Spaghetti Western writing... especially the tense underscoring you get to the preamble to some of the gunfights in this. That being said, Horner’s danger motif is front and centre a few times in the movie and, yeah, if you know Horner (or even Prokofiev, for that matter) then it will probably pop you straight out of the action.

One thing which one or another, or possibly both, do in a couple of sequences (but my best guess is it’s Franglen in this case) is suddenly revert back to the Coplandesque style of Americana Western scoring that Elmer Bernstein used, to a certain extent, in the 1960 version. Now, Bernstein's classic score is not actually used in this movie at all other than a somewhat weaker orchestrated version at the end credits... which actually seem to play out visually more like the opening credits to Sergio Sollima’s iconic Western The Big Gundown (aka La Resa Dei Conti reviewed here) than a classic American Western, it has to be said. Bernsteins scoring isn’t used anywhere else in the movie apart from, at a couple of times, a very slight use of a simplified, four note version of one of the melody fragments, repeated here as a background rhythm. It’s actually far subtler than it possibly should be on a big, broad Western calling itself The Magnificent Seven, so I don’t know if that was an intentional reference or not... but mostly the composers don’t take their cue, so to speak, from the memorable Bernstein classic which is probably even more famous than the film it was written for (and reused in the sequels).

And I don’t have much more to say about this one, it seems. The cast are fantastic, especially Vincent D'Onofrio’s turn as Jack Horne but, mostly, the Seven don’t seem quite as charming as the 1960s lot, nor indeed their 1954 counterparts in Kurosawa’s amazing Seven Samurai. They are, however, more politically correct in their genetic make up, it seems to me. You have a dark skinned actor leading a group of men who include a Mexican, an Asian and a Comanche Indian in their number. Which is absolutely great, of course, and makes for an interesting movie but, at the same time, I have to ask myself the question... would you get that kind of ethnic mix working side by side in the Old West? I don’t know the answer to that, actually, because I’m not very well versed on history, especially American history, but I do wonder if it’s a valid criticism or not as to whether this kind of mix of stereotypes would have made a happy, effective team in the late 19th Century.

At the end of the day, however, I’d have to say that this version of The Magnificent Seven (if you want to think of it like that) is brilliantly played, well shot and is blisteringly entertaining. If you like Westerns and are not too worried about how it matches up to any of the previous versions, then you’re in for a treat because this is a pretty good one. An exciting time at the cinema and perhaps one to round up your friends for. I could easily see there being a sequel to this at some point although, like I said earlier, the ending is slightly different than you might be expecting if you go strictly for the ‘counterparts’ game in terms of surviving characters. A fun film though and one I might even watch again some day... so that can’t be bad.