Review of 2017: Part 3 – Movies

I’ve cut back a bit on film-watching in recent years, aiming for a slightly more balanced and healthy existence, but movies are still a huge part of my life. Here’s my top 10 of 2017, plus a few personal recollections of the year, and 13 older films I ‘discovered’ in 2017, and which you might like too.

Parts 1 (books) and 2 (gigs, shows and exhibitions) of the year in review are up on those links.

My 10 favourite films of 2017



It's been a great year at the cinema: I rarely see a new film as good as this year's #3, let alone two even better, and there are so many up-and-coming directors doing interesting work. This list is based on films which received a general release in the UK this year, so it includes some films from last year's London Film Festival. To read about some of the best movies coming up next year, including Guillermo del Toro's masterwork, The Shape of Water, you can go here.

Bubbling under (but still marvellous): Christine, The Beguiled, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), Tower, Call Me By Your Name.

***

10. Paddington 2



Director: Paul King
Cast: Ben Whishaw (voice), Hugh Grant, Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Brendan Glesson
They did right by Paddington again. The prison sequences are all kinds of lovely. Full(ish) review.

***

9. Battle of the Sexes



Director: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Cast: Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman, Bill Pullman
A hugely uplifting, entertaining movie, with a typically dynamic central performance from Emma Stone, who inhabits the character of Billie Jean King almost entirely, as the tennis legend breaks away from the sexist tennis establishment, confronts the fact she's a lesbian, and gears up for the eponymous match, opposite self-styled 'male chauvinist pig', the shy and retiring Bobby Riggs. Full review.

***

8. The Salesman



Director:Asghar Farhadi
Cast:Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti, Babak Karimi, Farid Sajadhosseini, Mina Sadati
An utterly compelling moral thriller from the writer-director of A Separation, Asghar Farhadi, about a couple (Shahab Hosseini and Taranah Alidoosti) whose marriage is thrown into turmoil by the hand of fate, as they prepare to appear together in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It contains a late shock so well-executed that it made the person next to me in the cinema do a little fart. Now that's movie-making. Full review.

***

7. Tickling Giants



Director: Sara Taksler
A wonderful documentary about 'the Egyptian Jon Stewart', Bassem Youssef, a heart surgeon who becomes a TV satirist and national hero following the Arab Spring. As the political climate festers and the military intervene, his potshots at authority start to divide the revolutionaries, leading to protests, boycotts and threats, but he and his staff remain unyielding – at least at first. After one of the writers says she doesn’t care about the outcry, a colleague asks if she’d care to provide a more diplomatic answer. “Yes,” she replies. “I don’t give a shit.” I expected Tickling Giants to be insightful and powerful, but not such fantastic fun as it is, and if you’re worried that Egyptian humour won’t translate across language and cultural barriers, you couldn’t be more wrong. Full review.

***

6. Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi



Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Daisy Ridley, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Kelly Marie Tran The first sequel that feels like a film on its own terms. It's also a tremendous antidote to gung-ho macho heroics, plays deliriously and drolly with our expectation of good-bad guys, and features the coolest new series vehicles since Return of the Jedi's speeders. I wrote this piece just after emerging, dazed and happy, from the cinema.

***

5. I Am Not Your Negro



Director:Raoul Peck
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson (narrator)
A profoundly powerful polemic that forces you to view the African-American experience through the piercing gaze of writer, thinker and activist James Baldwin, who speaks with authority, insightfulness and a broiling anger about the way his people have been exploited, abandoned and killed by their own country. It's a superb film in itself, and it also turned me onto Baldwin's writing, which has been one of this year's greatest joys, and changed the way I look at myself and the world. Full review.

***

4. Fences



Director: Denzel Washington
Cast: Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Jovan Adepo, Russell Hornsby, Mykelti Williamson
An astonishing drama, based on August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which tells an archetypally American story in the manner of Eugene O'Neill or Arthur Miller, but does so to elucidate the African-American experience, which as 13th so eloquently expressed, is the result of decisions that have never been in their hands. It's both extraordinarily original and utterly timeless, with a polemical power that comes along rarely, and two of the finest performances in years. Full review.

***

3. La La Land



Director: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend, Rosemarie DeWitt, Finn Wittrock, Jessica Rothe
The problem with contemporary musicals is the undercurrent that says: “Isn’t this wacky, we’re doing a musical!” It was musicals’ everyday nature, their centrality to the national psyche that made them so magical. Somehow Chazelle has made that live again. Full review.

***

2. Certain Women



Director:Kelly Reichardt
Cast: Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, James LeGros, Jared Harris
A film of unwavering, unflinching honesty and quiet poetry – from Williams’ piercing, scarcely likeable performance to that shot of a rogue truck tumbling off the road – a gift from a filmmaker at the very peak of her powers. Full review.

***

1. Moonlight



Director: Barry Jenkins
Cast: Trevante Rhodes, Ashton Sanders, Alex Hibbert, André Holland, Jharrel Jerome, Jaden Piner, Naomie Harris, Janelle Monáe, Mahershala Ali
An enveloping, once-in-a-lifetime film about the constancy, malleability and complexity of human nature, the pain and ecstasy of love, and the world's vicious but not quite unrelenting assault on the weak. Full review.

***

Five obsessions that defined my year in movies



Orson Welles
My intense infatuation with Awesome Orson flares up every three or four years. This time it was a first big screen viewing of The Magnificent Ambersons that set it off, sending me on a fast-paced journey through established classics (Kane, Touch of Evil, The Trial) and oddities both remarkable (The Immortal Story) and not (Journey Into Fear, Too Much Johnson). Though Ambersons will never be seen again in its proper state – having been cut by a third against Welles’ wishes before release, with the culled footage dumped in the sea – it also cast its spell on me more thoroughly and enduringly than ever before. I’m still thinking about it now, three weeks later, and I haven’t been able to look at any other film in the same way since. It’s the greatest thing he ever did and, even in its butchered form, one of the key works of screen art, with a look, a feel and an atmosphere – playfulness giving way to an exhausted, defeated malaise – that is like nothing else in cinema.



The big screen
More than half the films I saw this year were at the cinema, thanks to both the BFI’s magnificent programming and a newly rekindled love of the big screen experience. There’s still nothing quite like it, and it’s got me off my arse and out of the house and then back on my arse to catch films I love, that I have on DVD, but that I’ve never quite seen before. After experiencing countless movies ruined by dodgy prints or the Odeon’s laissez-faire attitude to keeping a projector in focus, I’d begun to see digital as a simple solution, especially after the great 4K job done on films like The Third Man. One of my favourite film writers, Ian Mantgani, took me to task a while ago for such naïvete, and he was right. Seeing Minnelli’s The Cobweb on film – the widescreen image tactile, its brash colour scheme turned a touch gaudy – or Ambersons with grain and flicker and the odd scratch, the soundtrack a little screechy now and then, but as it was shot and should be seen, is the ideal filmgoing experience, and one which perfectly polished pixels are never going to be quite able to match. Having said that, if the print is a hissy, fuzzy mess, don't take the piss by putting it on.



Titanic films
As I mentioned in passing in my books review, my friend Jess and I are watching all the films we can find about the Titanic. Our grand experiment is in its infancy, but we have managed Titanic (good), Titanic (great), A Night to Remember (excellent) and Raise the Titanic (absolute shit), and we’ve secured further titles for 2018 already. Next up: S.O.S. Titanic.



Lillian Gish
There haven't been quite the opportunities to further my Gish fandom that previous years have offered, but I've done my best. I tracked down three more of her films: The Greatest Question (a derivative but persuasive star vehicle), The Cobweb (a big, bold Minnelli soap with Gish in an unusually large supporting role), and The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (more a historical curio than A Good Film), and saw a watchable version of her 1928 classic, The Wind, for the first time. Anyway, we're very much in love, even though she died in 1993.



François Truffaut
I finished my voyage through the lesser-known works of François Truffaut, drawing the inescapable conclusion that this is one of those rare times the popular canon has it right: some of them were crap. Here's the full list of his 22 features, with plenty of reviews to go with it.

It's also important to mention at this point that IN OCTOBER I MET DANNY DEVITO.

***

13 'discoveries' of 2017

Perhaps because many of them were on at the BFI, this year's discoveries are perhaps a little less obscure than in previous years (a notable dearth of 1930s B-movies, sorry), especially if you're interested in seeing the established 'classics' of world cinema, but hopefully there'll be a couple that are new to you.



Chloe in the Afternoon (Éric Rohmer, 1972) – The last – and greatest – of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, with businessman Frédéric (Bernard Verley) torn between his marriage to quiet, repressed academic Hélène (Françoise Verley) and the sensual, erratic Chloe (Zouzou), who returns to Paris six years after driving his best friend to the point of despair. Shot in 1.37:1, reinterpreting Murnau’s Sunrise for the sixth time, and equipped with an unreliable, self-justifying narrator who’s obsessed with women, it feels like the summation of the series, and also its cleanest, clearest and most narratively inventive example: full of profound insights and observations wrapped in a light, sexy, playful exterior that simply doesn’t prepare you for what’s coming. Full review.

Cria cuervos (Carlos Saura, 1975) – A miraculous film, quite unlike anything else I’ve seen, that plays out on the face of its young heroine (Ana Torrent from Spirit of the Beehive) and exists in that strange place between memory, reality and fantasy, as scenes bleed one into the next, and Torrent recalls her authoritarian, adulterous father, conjures the gentle spirit of her neurotic mother (Geraldine Chaplin) and cautiously negotiates a new, lonelier life in the bosom of her strict aunt’s family. Full review.



Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960) – Jacques Becker's final film is a tough, meticulously detailed and incredibly suspenseful prison break movie, as four men awaiting trial acquire an apparently callow, privileged new cellmate (Mark Michel), while preparing their painstaking, painfully slow escape from the Big House. Cast mostly with non-professional actors (as opposed to unprofessional actors, like Marilyn Monroe) and based on an autobiographical novel by José Giovanni, it works as both a gripping thriller and a socialist allegory about class, co-operation and bourgeois hypocrisy. Full review. I saw Bertrand Tavernier talk about Becker, his great hero, at the BFI in September.

The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) – A pulsating, gripping, brilliantly-directed docu-drama about the Algerian revolution, which works as a history lesson, a thriller and a study of a handful of memorable characters on both sides of the battle, all augmented by Ennio Morricone's exceptional score. Full review.



Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989) – For all its rough edges (or perhaps because of them), Soderbergh’s debut still looks astounding. Full review.

Claire's Knee (Éric Rohmer, 1970) – The Rohmerest Rohmer film ever (hot French people talking unreliably about love and sex amid beauteous locales), with great acting, stunning Nestor Almendros photography and some of the finest examples of Rohmer defining his characters, their dynamics and his audience's perceptions through understated and apparently effortless composition. Laura > Claire, tho.



Babette's Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987) – A film full of painterly imagery, complex truths and quiet wisdom that echoes long after the curtain has fallen, and the virtuosic storytelling − hopping between time-frames, mood and media − takes the breath away. Full review.

Prick Up Your Ears (Stephen Frears, 1987) – Near-perfect biopic of gay '60s playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman), focusing on his volatile relationship with live-in lover, Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina), powered by a superb Alan Bennett script, and Oldman's best performance. 'Synthesisers by Hans Zimmer'! Full review.



Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) – We meet Chihiro just minutes after an emotional farewell to her old friends: she’s sitting in the backseat of her parents’ car, as they trail a moving van to their new home. The family stop to investigate what seems to be an abandoned theme park, and soon the parents have been turned into pigs, Chihiro’s life has been saved by a boy who it turns out is a dragon and also a god, and she’s been forced to find employment in a fully-functioning bathhouse populated by ghosts, assisted by a multi-armed man who lives by a furnace with his friends – sentient bits of soot – and under the cosh of giant-headed Thatcher-a-like Yubaba, whose beloved germaphobe baby is bigger than she is. That’s the first 20 minutes. Full review.

Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969) – So much for the tolerant left.



Le deuxième souffle (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969) – A violent, grimply poetic underworld epic from Jean-Pierre Melville, with Lino Ventura as a brutal train-robber – obsessed with his own personal conception of honour – who escapes from prison only to be drawn inexorably towards a heist plot. Relatively unknown within the Melville canon, it takes a little while to find its rhythm, but once it does it's stunning, with mesmerising set pieces and several superb supporting characters, including ironic, omniscient police inspector Paul Meurisse, and Denis Manuel as a short-tempered gypsy gunman.

All This, and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940) – An exceptionally classy melodrama, with Bette Davis giving one of her most extraordinary performances as a silhouette of a woman who enters the Duc de Praslin's tempestuous household in Paris of 1848 to act as the governess, falling in love with her master and becoming beloved of his children, before incurring the formidable wrath of his jealous, unstable wife. It's a beautifully balanced and restrained performance, with the star often saying one thing and playing three more, her heroine having to keep her emotions in check, know her place in society and her household, and juggle the conflicting responsibilities to her employers, her charges and herself. She's a character rarely permitted to speak honestly, but yet at every instant we know what she's thinking. Full review.



The Mouthpiece (Elliot Nugent and James Flood, 1932) – Few pre-Code films were ever as sweet and affecting as this one, in which William’s noble prosecutor reacts to tragedy by reinventing himself as an amoral shyster for the underworld (with a moustache, naturally), only to be changed back by the guileless southern office waif (Sidney Fox) he’s been trying to shag. It’s a little clumsy in places, and mistakes audacity for humour, but it’s saved by the performances. Full review.

***

Thanks for reading.

London Film Festival: Part 3 − Bassem Youssef, Certain Women and a dead Blackbird

"What was she like?"
"Beautiful..."

As good a description as any for Kelly Reichardt's mind. Four more films from this year's fest:

SUNDAY 9th (continued)



Film 10: The Fury of a Patient Man (Raúl Arévalo, 2016) at Picturehouse Central − A morally complex, hard-as-nails Spanish thriller from debuting director Raúl Arévalo about the relationship between a notably sexy mother (Ruth Díaz), her violent ex-con husband (Luis Callejo) and her quiet new boyfriend (Antonio de la Torre). It starts in mysterious, decontextualised fashion, then reveals its hand gradually, with particularly superb use of sharp implements and even better use of sound. (3)



Film 11: Una (Benedict Andrews, 2016) at Embankment Garden Cinema
European premiere

This belated opening up of the hit stage two-hander Blackbird makes for a flat, doggedly mediocre film, as the title character (Rooney Mara) turns up at the office of Ray (Ben Mendelsohn) to confront her past, but finds only slack writing and bad cinematography.

Mara's pretty good (if not at her dazzling best), but this functional, boringly-shot film is merely vague when it should be ominously, piercingly fascinating, recalling such drab, uninspiring homegrown melodramas as Match Point and Separate Lies.

I'd really like to see the play, which is apparently set in one room and packed with fractured, singularly rendered dialogue, but if that's true then this adaptation has incinerated its raison d'être, like those Shakespeare-for-kids books that keep the recycled plots but chuck out all of his words. (1.5)



Guests: An introduction from Andrews, Mendelsohn, Tara Fitzgerald (who plays Mara's mother), writer David Harrower and various crew. The main players returned for a post-film Q&A − I would have loved to see the movie they were describing.

***

WEDNESDAY 12th



Film 12: Tickling Giants (Sara Taksler, 2016) at Vue West End − A wonderful documentary about 'the Egyptian Jon Stewart', Bassem Youssef, a heart surgeon who becomes a TV satirist and national hero following the Arab Spring. As the political climate festers and the military intervene, his potshots at authority start to divide the revolutionaries, leading to protests, boycotts and threats, but he and his staff remain unyielding – at least at first. After one of the writers says she doesn’t care about the outcry, a colleague asks if she’d care to provide a more diplomatic answer. “Yes,” she replies. “I don’t give a shit.”

I expected Tickling Giants to be insightful and powerful, but not such fantastic fun as it is, and if you’re worried that Egyptian humour won’t translate across language and cultural barriers, you couldn’t be more wrong. Youssef is simply hilarious, beginning as a rather nervous Stewart clone, but quickly establishing himself as a ferociously funny and fearless comedian, with a fine line in irony, righteous anger and foul-mouthed rejoinders. This marvellously entertaining, inspiring and yet troubling film is liberally sprinkled with clips of the show (entitled ‘The Show’), fascinating behind-the-scenes footage (as the protests begin to take their toll) and animation designed by one of Youssef’s collaborators – which is distinctive if not as entertaining as what surrounds it.

It’s one of the highlights of the festival so far: an intimate portrait, state-of-the-nation address and uproarious comedy all in one. (3.5)

***

THURSDAY 13th



*VERY MINOR SPOILERS*
Film 13: Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016) at Hackney Picturehouse − Kelly Reichardt has such a unique way of looking at the world, at humanity, and this triptych of short stories is an instant classic: a rich, tactile, beautifully-edited film that's brilliantly low key in its performances, its humour and its sumptuous, washed-out, finely-grained cinematography.

We meet four great female characters across three stories, the final (and longest) of which is a simply stunning achievement. There's Laura Dern's patient lawyer dealing with an increasingly erratic client, hard-working but harsh mother Michelle Williams (shades of Dorothy McGuire in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) visiting a dementia patient with her husband (and employee), and then Native American stablehand Lily Gladstone happening upon knackered lawyer Kristen Stewart, and finding her life suddenly flooded with light and meaning.

Reichardt tells each story with simplicity, economy and endless empathy, while serving up – with a minimum of fuss – a feast for the eyes and ears: weathered snow crunching underfoot, a torrent of grain cascading into a barrel, and pioneers' sandstone lifted from the ruins of an old schoolhouse, and laid out in fudge-coloured chunks. There are no universal themes tying together the three Maile Meloy stories, nor a universal approach in their worldview – the first is fatalistic, the final one surprising and the middle chapter somewhere in-between – but each is deftly sketched, impeccably acted and comprised of handsome, static shots. The title seems to have a double meaning, articulating both the women's steadfast certainty and the barbs aimed at "certain women" who act in this bold, unapologetic way.

It’s a film of unwavering, unflinching honesty and quiet poetry – from Williams’ piercing, scarcely likeable performance to that shot of a rogue truck tumbling off the road – a gift from a filmmaker at the very peak of her powers. (4)

***

Thanks for reading. The fourth and final part will round up five films from the last weekend, including a fine foreign picture and a homegrown disaster, and I'll talk a little about the festival as a whole.

All the opening lines are taken from the festival trailer, every word of which is etched into my brain forever after seeing it 20 times!

Peter Boyle, All the President's Men 2, and Clara Bow talks! - Reviews #164

Joe (John G. Avildsen, 1970) - A bristling, unpredictable drama from Rocky director John G. Avildsen about the relationship between an advertising executive (Dennis Patrick) who's just beaten his daughter's drug dealer boyfriend to death, and the racist rent-a-gob (Peter Boyle) who admires him for it. In some ways it's a prototype Dirty Harry or Taxi Driver, though it's less bloodthirsty and more intriguing: a complex character piece, laced with pitch black comedy, that doubles as a state-of-the-nation treatise - as Falling Down would in the 1990s. I'm not sure if the film's politics are confused or just purposefully veiled, as it appears to oscillate between liberalism and fascism, but that moral muckiness rather plays in its favour, drawing us into an ugly, complex world with few easy answers; even if the ones Joe suggests are almost certainly wrong. Boyle disagreed: after hearing that audiences cheered the revenge sequences, he vowed never to make another film that glorified violence - if indeed this one does.

There are elements that seem cartoonish to a modern viewer - whether they were ever realistic, I'm not sure - but it is a fascinating film, a gripping evocation of a time in American life when the generation gap was at its greatest, a breeding ground for suspicion, outrage and contempt. America always seems to be at war with itself: in 1970 the enemies of the right were hippies, permissiveness and black benefit claimants, and it's all three that are making Joe mad. As the damaged furnace worker rising to boiling point, Boyle is absolutely sensational, even if, like Ron Burgundy, he has never heard of the phrase "When in Rome..." Incidentally, this was Susan Sarandon's first film. She's Patrick's daughter, a speed freak who ODs in a chemist after drawing all over her own face. (3.5)

***



Dick (Andrew Fleming, 1999) - From the title, I was expecting a biopic of Kelvin MacKenzie. Instead I got a passable teen comedy with a Watergate backdrop. Wouldn't it be funny if Richard Nixon ate cookies laced with weed? Not really, no. But that joke does have a clever pay-off, and the film comes equipped with some sharply satirical barbs, albeit 27 years too late. "Papier-mache is a hobby of mine," claims Nixon when his aides are caught shredding documents - actually one of his more credible lies of the period. Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst are ditzy 15-year-old friends who unwittingly stumble across the Watergate scandal, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Tricky Dicky, Henry Kissinger and those "radical, muckraking bastards", Woodward and Bernstein (Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch), who are easily the funniest thing about the film.

At its worst, it's shallow and silly - the sing-along with the Russians is a dreadfully weak concept, Devon Gummersall is wasted as a pothead, and the jokes about "loving Dick" get very tiresome very quickly - but it has an agreeably original premise, carried through with enough enthusiasm to sustain it for 90 minutes, and possesses a narrative that amusingly accounts for memorable details and enduring mysteries surrounding the scandal - including the blank 18-and-a-half-minutes on the Watergate tapes, which leads to a big laugh near the movie's close. Williams is very good as a naive, nervously-giggling nerd, and though Dunst sometimes fails to convince as her more confident friend - playing too broad, and too young for 15 - a supporting cast that includes Dan Hedaya, Saul Rubinek and Harry Shearer has fun bringing to life various infamous political figures of the early 1970s. The best thing about it, though, are those sequences riffing on All the President's Men: the sets are lovingly recreated, from the newspaper office to the garage where the investigative reporters meet Deep Throat, but now Woodward is an irritable, arrogant headline-hogger, and Bernstein is a needy, childish incompetent who keeps trying to steal his stories, and his notepad. It would be another 16 years after the film's release before Mark Felt, the FBI's former associate director, revealed that he was the pair's mysterious source, rather than two teenage girls, somewhat trashing the film's gimmick.

It's a bit too trivial and superficial, typified by a heap of annoying song choices (You're So Vain is a notably wonderful exception) and a bizarre disco coda - completely at odds with the rest of the film - in which Dunst and Williams lick lollies emblazoned with the legend "Dick" and stroke themselves, but it's still worth a look as a sporadically sharp fusion of teen comedy and political satire: two genres that are usually kept rather further apart. (The only other one that springs to mind is the exceptional Election, released four months earlier.) Just call it Romy and Michelle's All the President's Men.

***

CLARA BOW STUFF:

Films:



Call Her Savage (John Francis Dillon, 1932) - So... much... plot. Clara Bow's comeback, after her nervous breakdown in 1931, kicked off a two-picture deal with Fox. Depending on who you believe, her intention was to restore her battered reputation following a series of scandals and dud pictures, or to make as much money as possible before retiring for good. It may have been both.

After years of being shoved around by Paramount, who increasingly put her in inferior vehicles with nothing co-stars, her new contract at her new home gave her the final say on material, cast and director. What she chose first was this absurd Pre-Code melodrama - as Pre-Code as Pre-Code gets - which introduces her braless and furious, bullwhipping the hell out of "half-breed" Gilbert Roland in a sexually-charged frenzy. While the film can't maintain the breathless momentum of that classic, bizarre sequence, it does take in adultery, venereal disease, prostitution, paedophilia and attempted rape, as well as the first gay bar in cinematic history and more melodrama than you can crack a whip at.

And for anyone familiar with Bow's tragic life, the film is even odder than it may look at first glance. Her heroine makes a glib reference in a party scene to "a nervous breakdown", bursts into tears at the mention of mental illness - Bow's mother and two aunts were all institutionalised, as she had just been - and falls into destitution, the life of grinding poverty that would have been the actress's lot had she not won a magazine contest in 1921. She talks about mending her promiscuous ways and settling down - precisely the life that she had mapped out for herself at this juncture of her life - and is begged by her best friend (Bow's former fiancee, Roland) to try to sleep, recalling the insomnia that plagued the actress's life, after her mother attacked her in her sleep, aged 16.

As with so many of the star's films, this one also tried to head off or cash-in on scandals in her colourful private life, resulting in a perverse scene where her character frolics on the floor with a Great Dane. For those who need to brush up on their tabloid smears of the 1920s, it's a reference to an allegation that Bow frequently copulated with her dog - also a Great Dane - a claim that ultimately cost its author eight years in prison.

As a stand-alone film, rather than a historical curio, Call Her Savage is rather less compelling. Though it has superb moments, including a thrillingly-directed opening that sees a bunch of marauding Native Americans attack a wagon train, Bow's unforgettable entrance, and a slew of short sequences in which arguably cinema's finest silent actress gets to emote without those troublesome words, it's a haphazard movie that jumps from one rather unconvincing development to the next, buoyed only by its censor-hurdling tawdriness and Bow's charismatic performance. I'm not sure that, taken as a whole, her combustible character makes for a convincing human being: her fiery temper, fiery hair and plunging neckline seem to be the only constants across her various contrasting personas. But she does command the attention most of the time, and if she's hardly the force of nature that she was in silent films like It and Mantrap, she's still a fascinating performer.

Sadly, she isn't helped in her noble bid to defeat the dodgy material by a flat, uninteresting supporting cast. I bow to no man in my admiration for Willard Robertson, the lawyer-turned-actor who graces my favourite movie, Remember the Night, as a flamboyant defence attorney, and gave one of the coolest characterisations of all time in the comic Western, Along Came Jones. Here, asked to play an authoritarian father, he's just completely dull, an affliction that he shares with every one of his fellow cast members, aside from Bow. Even the smouldering Roland and the usually reliable Thelma Todd fail to spark much interest, perhaps because of the company they're keeping, but almost certainly because the script and story - while loaded with adult themes and moments of unspeakable tragedy - are so terrifically pedestrian in execution.

So, if you're after a '30s movie that still stands up well today, look elsewhere. But if you're a film historian, a Pre-Code buff or a Clara Bow fan, then this incredibly miserable movie - endlessly preoccupied with "the sins of the father" - is worth 85 sordid minutes of your valuable time. (2)



Hoop-La (Frank Lloyd, 1933) - Clara Bow gives one of the greatest performances I have ever seen in this, her final film, an otherwise standard carnival romance. Movies set around this seedy, colourful world were ten-a-penny in the '30s, from Borzage's dreadful Liliom (based on the same play as Carousel), to Tod Browning's Freaks and The Mind Reader, Ruth Chatterton in Lilly Turner, and a couple of films starring the extraordinary Lee Tracy: Carnival and Fixer Dugan. This adaptation of a popular Kenyon Nicholson play, filmed before in 1928 as The Barker and twice later by Tokyo Story director Yasujiro Ozu, tells the story of a sexually-savvy dancer (Bow) who agrees to seduce the carnival manager's callow son (Richard Cromwell) for a hundred bucks. Naturally, she falls in love with him, putting her at loggerheads with her boss - and the broad who stumped up the dough.

Bow, despite frequently sporting a risible hairdo that makes her look plump and 50, is absolute dynamite, shifting between playful sensuality, heartfelt emotion and coarse threats in the blink of an eye, taking what's little more than flax, and spinning it into pure gold. As usual, she's hilarious and sexy (despite the hairdo), but there's also that wonderful sincerity and vulnerability in this performance that lights up her very best work. In sound films like The Wild Party and Call Her Savage, she seemed to be succeeding in spite of the new-fangled need to vocalise her feelings. Here, she's finally at ease with the medium, producing a stunning, startling characterisation that leaps off the screen and proves that the talkies were hers for the taking, if only she'd had the temperament to go with her talent. Instead, she bowed out at the top of her game, leaving us with this: a dynamic starring role that dominates the movie to the point of parody and recalls the very best of her silent work, but, y'know, with talking too.

The rest of the cast is thrown into shadow by the brilliant Bow and her sparkly bikinis, but Cromwell - equally adept as a pure-hearted juvenile (Emma) or an appalling coward (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer) - makes for a likeable leading man, and I was extremely surprised by how good the often bland Preston Foster was as his father, navigating the rather overwrought material with considerable skill. Minna Gombell, who essentially played the same role throughout the '30s, is also well-cast as Bow's pal, a spoilt, selfish fellow dancer who wants her to win Cromwell, so she can get back to boffing his dad. When Clara's off-screen, Hoop-La looks like a conventional carnival flick, with a decent, nicely-detailed backdrop, but a slightly pat, cliched story. But when she's centre-stage, and she usually is, it's something else entirely: a mesmerising, affecting, often exhilarating ride, and a staggering swansong for one of the greatest actresses ever to grace the silver screen. (3.5)

Book:



Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild by David Stenn (1988/2000) - The definitive Bow book is a brilliantly-researched account of her desperately sad life, written with a fair amount of style, and only detracted from by a slight sensationalism and some excessive armchair psychology. The enduring impression is of a sad, haunted soul with a miraculous gift whose career - and life - were destroyed by rampaging inner demons fuelled by her heartbreaking upbringing. The manipulative, selfish Paramount executive B. P. Schulberg comes out of the book terribly, though not as badly as Bow's hateful father. Ironically, when MGM made a fun film loosely based on her life in 1933, Bombshell starring Jean Harlow and Lee Tracy, he was portrayed by popular character comic Frank Morgan as an affable bumbler. (3.5)

***



Louie Bluie (Terry Zwigoff, 1985) - This was the first film from Ghost World director - and blues buff - Terry Zwigoff, an odd little documentary about the leader of America's last black string band, Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong, a painter, pornography afficionado and tall-tale teller whose suspect anecdotes (usually directed at someone who has heard them before, such are the necessities of the medium) are alternated with exhilarating jamming sessions featuring many of his wizened, laid-back contemporaries. In striving for intimacy, the film suffers from a distinct lack of context - despite a nice effect which sees his stories accompanied by his evocative artworks - and though we hang out with Louie, playing cards, shooting the breeze and buying a poster of a dragon, we never really get a sense of the man beneath the bullshit. Still, while the audience is kept at arm's length, and Armstrong can unquestionably be a bit irritating, he remains an interesting character, and it's hard not to admire a man with such a cool signature, such a colourful lexicon, and acquaintances called things like Bumblebee Slim. The music, which is stunning throughout, climaxes with a beautiful version of Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams, performed on a Chicago street in front of 20 people and a sign about lampshades. (3)

***

Another from the Treasures V: The West box-set:



Womanhandled (Gregory La Cava, 1925) - A sporadically entertaining comedy about pampered New Yorker Richard Dix pretending he's a Western he-man to impress a woman he met in the park (Esther Ralston). He heads out to his uncle's lamentably modern ranch and then, when she decides to follow, tries to make it all seem a bit more "Western". The version on the Treasures V box-set is only 55 minutes long, as it's missing both the lost "cattle stampede" climax and a scene that the compilers cut out because they thought it wasn't very interesting (what the hell?!), but it has a few laughs - including a fun bit in which the ranch hands try to ride horses for the first time - and a couple of nice meta gags ("All the real cowboys have gone into the movies," laments Dix's uncle). It's all very reminiscent of Doug Fairbanks' 1917 film, Wild and Woolly - an embryonic version of those trick-the-visitor outings like Seducing Dr Lewis or Local Hero - but not as good. Dix's clean-cut appearance and sprightly manner may surprise those who only know him as a tired-looking '40s B-actor in films like the Whistler series and Val Lewton's The Ghost Ship, and he does a fair job with what he's given. Sadly the script, co-written by director Gregory La Cava, is rather hit and miss, with too much time given over to a destructive little kid who isn't very funny. Still, there was enough about Womanhandled for Variety to say of its director: "It is safe to predict he is going a long way in making the pictures of the future", and they weren't wrong. Within 12 years, La Cava would have made both My Man Godfrey and Stage Door, two of the defining achievements of '30s American cinema. (2)

***

Thanks for reading.

Cool Runnings, Audrey Tautou and one of the worst rom-coms ever made - Reviews #143

Here are the latest reviews. Comments are welcome below or on Twitter @rickburin.



A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004) – Jeunet’s follow-up to the incomparable Amélie is a transcendent romance, a complex mystery (with no shortage of whimsy) and a chilling evocation of the horror and futility of war, as Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) searches for her fiancé, one of five soldiers sentenced to death for desertion at Bingo Crépuscule three years earlier. It’s an extraordinarily successful melding of apparently incompatible moods and genres, full of vividly-drawn supporting characters (Marion Cotillard’s vengeful prostitute, Jodie Foster’s selfless wife) and featuring one of the only good trump-related gags in all of cinema (“Doggie fart, gladdens the heart”). It’s also beautifully shot, scored and acted – a treat for the eyes, ears and soul. (4)

***



Welcome to the Sticks (Dany Boon, 2008) – The most successful French film of all time – in terms of domestic box-office receipts – is a completely charming culture-clash comedy set in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the oft-maligned home of star, co-writer and director Dany Boon. Kad Merad is a post office manager in the south of France who tries to wangle a move to the Riviera, but instead winds up in “the Ch’tis”, a deceptively friendly part of the country marked by its uncomplicated lifestyle, smelly delicacies (smellicacies) and a litany of eccentric quirks of speech. It’s classic feelgood fare, with fun performances all round and some fantastic gags. (4)

***



The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, 2009) is like The Insider played for laughs, as chubby, moustachioed agri-business management nerd Matt Damon turns whistleblower on price-fixing for the FBI, though that's only the beginning of his hilarious, jaw-dropping – and true – story. Dealing in generalities, I tend to enjoy Soderbergh's "serious" films (like King of the Hill and Traffic) far more than his so-called "entertainments", (such as the Ocean's movies), which are often thin and superficial. Here, he eradicates that distinction, taking the bold decision to shoot this serious – though quirky, bizarre – material as a screwball comedy, incorporating a jaunty score and a brilliantly odd characterisation from Damon (complete with outlandish first-person narration), and it pays off superbly, creating an important but offbeat and wildly entertaining, even caper-ish, movie that deals deftly yet properly with heroism, hypocrisy and corporate greed. (3.5)

***



"Nuff people say, you know they can't believe: Jamaica, we have a bobsled team." Cool Runnings (Jon Turteltaub, 1993) – A very entertaining – though almost entirely fictionalised – comedy-drama about the Jamaican bobsled team that competed in the 1988 Winter Olympics. It’s at its best when being sincere, rather than opting for cartoonish characterisation and cheap sight gags, but it’s well-played throughout, and stuffed full of punch-the-air moments. (3)

***



Paris vu par... (Various, 1965) – This portmanteau portrait of Paris and its people is better than the more recent effort (Paris, je t’aime), though not nearly as airy or profound as Eric Rohmer’s trio of tales (Les rendez-vous de Paris), as six New Wave directors offer short stories set in the City of Light. The first three, from the lesser-known filmmakers, are all excellent: Jean Douchet’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés offers romantic twists and turns much in the manner now associated with Rohmer, Jean Rouch provides the ironic, eerie Gare du Nord, and Jean-Daniel Pollet’s Rue Saint-Denis serves up some light relief, as a worldly-wise prostitute runs rings around a nervous Buster-Keaton-a-like. Sadly the last three chapters (from the marquee names) aren’t as good: Rohmer’s thriller about a nervy clerk who may have killed someone is interesting but minor, while both Godard’s story of a capricious two-timer – which hangs on a wry pay-off – and Chabrol’s story of an unhappy boy with warring parents feel forced and uninspired. It’s still worth it on the whole, though, especially if you’re that way about Paris, as most people probably are. (3)

***



Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988) - Yuppie twat Tom Cruise finds out that his father's inheritance is going to the autistic brother he never knew he had (Dustin Hoffman), so he swipes his sibling from an institution and holds him for ransom – while taking him on a lengthy road trip. It's flabby (how much wordless footage of two men in a car do we really need?), the Las Vegas stop-off seems like wish-fulfilment, and it might have been more helpful to make a movie about an autistic person WITHOUT superpowers, but Hoffman is magnificent, Cruise isn't far behind and that "Rain Man" sequence in the bathroom remains wonderfully affecting. (3)

***



Me Without You (Sandra Goldbacher, 2001) - A familiar but unusually effective, unsentimental story of childhood soulmates – outgoing, confrontational Anna Friel and introspective, mousey Michelle Williams – falling in and out of friendship against the backdrop of '70s and '80s Britain. There are a few wrong notes (an early line about Belsen lands staggeringly wide of the mark), but the film feels admirably real in its emotional and dramatic messiness, there are a few nicely-realised directorial flourishes (particularly at the start of the 1989 section) and the important performances are good, from Friel, her screen brother Oliver Milburn and particularly Williams, offering an early masterclass in vivid and varied feeling. (3)

***



Julia Misbehaves (Jack Conway, 1948) – A pretty good change-of-pace for one of Hollywood’s favourite dramatic teams, as flirtatious showgirl Greer Garson heads back to ex-husband Walter Pidgeon’s house for the wedding of their daughter (Elizabeth Taylor). It starts a bit shakily, and there are some very iffy “English” accents on show, but it picks up momentum as it goes along, and Taylor is absolutely excellent in a key transitional role, whether sparking off Garson (in the film’s best scene) or suitor Peter Lawford. (2.5)

***



What’s Your Number? (Mark Mylod, 2011) – A vacuous annoyance (Anna Faris) enlists the help of a total idiot (Chris Evans) to help her track down her ex-boyfriends, so she can marry one of them and thus keep the total number of people she's had sex with to 19. I absolutely hated this. It’s just hideous from start to finish, with detestable characters, witless dialogue and a horrible way of looking at life and what it imagines to be love. Chris Pratt provides a couple of amusing moments and Aziz Ansari does a late voice cameo, but it’s a while since I felt so angry or disgusted at a movie. What’s my number? My number is (1). Now fuck off.

Take This Waltz, and Flint Lockwood revisited - Reviews #139

Lately, I've been really spoilt in my movie-watching - different to having my movie-watching spoilt, as has happened at times this year - and this new, indescribably tiny batch of films is no different. Take This Waltz is now my second favourite movie of 2012 (going by UK release dates), trailing just behind last week's Silver Linings Playbook, and the fun doesn't stop (or really start) there. It goes marginally further. So join me, as I take you on a journey to a TV with an accompanying DVD player.



*SPOILERS*
Take This Waltz (Sarah Polley, 2011) - Is happiness just about finding the right person? That's the question posed by Sarah Polley's fiercely intelligent new drama, a grown-up, adult film about a failing relationship, and the possibility of a new and better one, powered by a staggeringly brilliant performance from Michelle Williams. She's a wannabe writer, married to kind, gentle Seth Rogen, but experiencing an intense five-year itch which she thinks free-spirited artist Luke Kirby may be able to scratch – if she just can summon the courage to act. Beginning mysteriously, ending ambiguously and overflowing with symbolism, foreshadowing and existential angst, Polley's film is distinctive and bracingly original, with an unshakeable sense of conviction, an unflinching approach to storytelling and an unforgettable pay-off. It's a film with something to say and the talent to say it, armed with spellbinding imagery, an ambitious script and a sublime song score. And even its rom-com interludes feel new: the zingy badinage and mutual goofing twisted beyond all recognition by the torrent of emotions beneath the surface.

It isn't a flawless film. It's built on a rather feeble coincidence (the adultery interest lives right across the road), some of Polley's dialogue is too mannered, Kirby is never more than adequate (and he drives a rickshaw – what?), while Sarah Silverman's character exists only as a metaphor and rhetorical device. But films don't have to be flawless to be truly great. This is a movie that really moved me: philosophically invigorating, true to life and as painful as a knee to the nuts. Which other film has characters who are "afraid of being afraid"? Which romances tell you, "In the big picture, life has a gap in it, it just does. You don't go crazy trying to fill it"? Where else do characters re-connect so sweetly, only to fall away so completely? Rogen is great, building on the promise he showed in 50/50 and Freaks and Geeks' The Little Things, but no-one working today can keep pace with Williams. This is a wondrous film, and its beating heart is a perfect performance from the most exciting actor on the planet. (4)

This is an expanded version of a review that I wrote for MovieMail.

See also: Williams also had mo' marriages, mo' problems in Blue Valentine, one of my favourites of last year.

***



Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Phil Lord and Chris Miller, 2009)[/b]

Manny: "You are going to need a co-pilot."
Sam: "You are a pilot too?"
Manny: "Yes. I am also a particle physicist."
Sam: "Really?"
Manny: "No, that was a joke. I am also a comedian."

The best non-Pixar animation to come out of America last decade is just as delicious second time around: a barrage of brilliant jokes (and oversized foodstuffs), bouncing off an appealing romance and a touching father-son subplot, as inventor Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader) makes it rain food, unfortunately endangering the world. Its characters are superbly drawn, its action sequences are masterfully conceived and just about every gag is judged to perfection, several nailing the quiet absurdities of 21st century life in a way that few films master. It doesn't need non-sequiturs (the fall-back for any failing animation), because it's got something better: sensational comic timing and the most spectacular set of running gags I can remember. It's also admirably fearless - it isn't afraid to get soppy, or post-modern, or really and genuinely weird - but sharp and streamlined too. Everything serves the story. Even the bit where a monkey called Steve, who's wearing a thought-translator, pulls out the heart of a malevolent gummy bear and eats it. (4)

See also: For their next trick, Lord and Miller rebooted (i.e. gave a kick up the arse to) 21 Jump Street. Cloudy 2 has been confirmed for 2013. Boo, and indeed, yah.

Les enfants, Bob Peck and It Happened One Night 2 - Reviews #93

There's the usual heady blend of history, bad jokes and swearing in this latest set of reviews, which find me enjoying one of my favourite 10 movies at York's City Screen cinema, and then plonking myself down in front of the telly to watch some romcoms. And a bleak, seminal eco-thriller.



*MASSIVE SPOILERS*
CINEMA: Les enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné, 1945) –There are six or seven films so vast in their ambition, so surefooted in their execution, so utterly perfect in every way, that they just make you shiver and gasp and grin. Amongst this exalted group – Remember the Night, Colonel Blimp, Hoop Dreams, The Searchers, Ghost World and Diary for Timothy – stands Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert's Les enfants du paradis: the towering achievement of French cinema. Jean-Louis Barrault stars as Baptiste, the first great mime, who rises to fame at the Théâtre des Funambules but is tormented by his unflinching, draining love for flighty carnival-worker-cum-socialite Garance (Arletty). Even after he's married, he pines for her, while she hops from rakish thief Marcel Herrand to caddish actor Pierre Brasseur and aristocrat Louis Salou. Filmed during the Nazi Occupation of Paris, drawing on half-imagined events in 1830s Paris, and populated by a cast of stage titans, Resistance fighters and the odd collaborator (Arletty, I'm looking at you), it's a portrait of a vanished world, a hymn to the art of acting and an allegory about France – many try to tame or cage the worldly Garance (Arletty, ironically enough), but she is forever free, and none but the people (represented by the pure, Chaplin-esque mime Baptiste) can hold her heart. And all the while, a detestable, amoral shit of a clothes man – reviled by Baptiste – skulks around. That the film contains one of the great screen romances, we know. It's also clear on first viewing, no matter what size the screen, that in the performances of Arletty, Barrault and his quivering, obsessive wife (María Casares), it boasts three of the finest performances ever committed to celluloid. And its high spots are so far above just about anything else you'll ever see that it's faintly absurd: Baptiste sparing Garance from arrest with an impromptu mime, recreating the shattering of his heart as an audience looks on, transfixed, from "les paradis” (the "Gods” of the theatre), standing between his two lovers at the climax of the first half, or fighting against a tide of carnival-goers as an expressionless Garance leaves him again, and perhaps forever. But despite all that, seeing it on the big screen is something else entirely. Everything is magnified; we are placed in the front-row of the theatre, or else amidst its whooping, cheering audience. The atmosphere of the Boulevard du Crime leaps to vivid life – the exquisite staging of the sparingly-used external sequences pervading the whole – and Pierre Brasseur's irrepressible performance as the eternally irreverent ham Frederick is a delightful sideshow to the gutting central narrative. I think you can also see Arletty's nips in the tub, so strike one up for digital restoration. Carné's handling is breathtaking, Prevert's script is so clever, witty and worldly-wise it just makes me want to give up, and the timeless story seems to grow in strength and resonance with each passing year. The greatest. (4)

***



*SPOILERS*
The Baxter (Michael Showalter, 2005) – You know that guy who always gets left at the altar in movies? Yeah, the one who’s played by Ralph Bellamy. Well, this movie is about him – mostly. And with its time-shifting narrative, plethora of genuinely inventive, surprising gags and spectacular supporting cast, it’s a little gem. Showalter is decent in the lead, Justin Theroux makes an amusing nemesis and Michelle Williams is simply lovely as the girl our anti-hero should be dating – rather than tedious Elizabeth Banks – but it’s the bit-players that really make it, from Paul Rudd to Peter Dinklage, Joe Lo Truglio and Ken Marino. The two surprise gags at the death are sublime. (3.5)

***


Franchot Tone (left), doing his "one eye" thing.

Love on the Run (W.S. Van Dyke, 1936) – In 1934, MGM punished its hottest male star, Clark Gable, by loaning him out to ickle-wickle studio Columbia, for a screwball romance called It Happened One Night. The film, based on a script by Robert Riskin that had been sniffed at in earlier incarnations by anyone with half a brain, went on to be one of the biggest successes of its decade, scooping all five major Oscars – a feat unmatched until 1991. As you might imagine, MGM - America’s juggernaut of a dream factory - was a bit peeved, so it spent the next few years trying to recreate the success of that film, looking to capture lightning in a bottle the only way it knew how: by making movies that were quite a lot like It Happened One Night. This one is even billed in the trailer as “It happened... in 77 hours”, which makes it sound less, rather than more, romantic. It’s fun, though: another screwball comedy romance starring Gable, pitting him against Joan Crawford for the seventh time - she’s the tabloid fodder his scheming reporter just can’t do without. There’s a bit of intrigue in there too (though it’s rather incidental to proceedings) and Franchot Tone, Crawford’s then-husband, is cast as the third wheel and butt of Gable’s numerous practical jokes. Gable is fun as a kind of amoral, Lee Tracy-ish reporter – this ends up as something of a dry run for the tremendous Too Hot to Handle – and Tone is as appealing as ever in a role that Ralph Bellamy must surely have lobbied hard for, even if he does keep closing one of his eyes in an odd way that I think is supposed to suggest he's cross. Crawford is perhaps the Hollywood legend I have the least time for – she’s too abrasive to warm to but lacks Bette Davis’s raw power, and elsewhere features in the two worst dance numbers I have ever seen – but aside from a couple of strops, she’s at her most likeable here. The script is a little bit all-over-the-place, and it can’t sustain the film’s brilliant start, but with this level of star power, William Demarest as an irascible editor and Donald Meek doing a little dance in front of an imaginary dog, it’s got to be worth a look. (3)

***



I’ll Take Romance (Edward H. Griffith, 1937) – By-the-numbers comedy musical, with Melvyn Douglas romancing Australian opera star Grace Moore as he tries to get her to sing in Buenos Aires. The film has a few nice arias, a couple of standards and Douglas’ typically deft performance to recommend it, but the script isn’t up to much. (2.5)

***



TV: Edge of Darkness (1985) - Bob Peck's performance - as a tough, smirking, bereaved, hallucinating, hand-stroking, dildo-kissing cop investigating his daughter's murder - is perhaps the most exciting and revelatory I've seen since catching Jason Robards in A Thousand Clowns two or three years ago. And this resolutely adult eco-thriller just about matches it, even if the last two episodes aren't quite as a precise, pungent and flat-out phenomenal as the first four. The scene in which Peck and CIA man Joe Don Baker sing an uneasy barroom duet of Willie Nelson's 'Time of the Preacher' is fucking incredible. The score, co-written by Eric Clapton, is a masterpiece. Liked this a lot, lot, lot. (4)