Lockdown Viewing - April 13th to 19th

Bogus (Norman Jewison, 1996)

I was excited by the concept of Gérard Depardieu appearing out of the blue to be a child’s imaginary friend. I imagined all sorts of crazy antics – the film in my mind was entitled Drop Dead Ged – but Bogus seems bafflingly unwilling to explore any of the comic potential this film throws up. Depardieu’s Bogus is brought to life in an airplane toilet by the grief-stricken Albert (Haley Joel Osment), who is on his way to live with his late mother’s foster sister, whom he had never met. Harriet is played by Whoopi Goldberg, who wrings a few laughs out of her character’s puzzlement over this weird kid and his invisible friend suddenly living in her house, but the filmmakers seem content to have Bogus standing on the sidelines whispering words of wisdom to the boy instead of doing anything interesting or fun. He keeps telling Albert to be nicer to Harriet, to be patient with her, to give her a hug, etc. and all the life just drains out of the picture. There are a few fantasy sequences, like Bogus and Albert concocting an ice cream parlour out of thin air, but the attempts at spontaneous joviality feel even more forced than the hackneyed melodrama at the film’s heart. Bogus was written by Alvin Sargent and directed by Norman Jewison, and they push it for treacly sentimentality, losing their grip on the film completely when Harriet gains the ability to see Bogus and then – for some inexplicable reason – does an Astaire and Rogers-style dance number with him. Everything about Bogus feels, well, bogus, especially the final scene, in which Depardieu turns to the camera, ensuring us that he was off to perform more magical adventures for some unhappy souls elsewhere. Frankly, the actor looks like he’d rather be anywhere else.

The Family Jewels (Jerry Lewis, 1965) 

Your reaction to The Family Jewels will depend entirely on your reaction to Jerry Lewis. If you’re even slightly resistant to his charms, The Family Jewels will probably be close to unbearable, as he appears in seven different guises as a series of increasingly eccentric characters, but I love watching Lewis and I loved this picture. Six of the seven characters are uncles to an orphaned heiress (10 year-old Donna Butterworth), and she has to choose one of them as her legal guardian. There are echoes of Lewis’s other work in some of these creations. His clumsy photographer recalls The Nutty Professor, while his clown character recycles the one he played in 3-Ring Circus, although the darkness of this character also perhaps foreshadows The Day the Clown Cried. The Family Jewels’ plot is thin and largely irrelevant (there’s never any doubt that the kid will instead choose Willard, the family chauffer, also played by Lewis) but it does allow him to string together a series of extended skits as his various bizarre uncles each bring a different kind of chaos to the picture. An aged sea captain recalls a bomb disposal that is presented as a silent bit of slapstick; a pilot somehow conspires to get left on the runway as his plane takes off; a detective on the hunt of his kidnapped niece gets distracted by a pool hall and dazzles us with the trick shots Lewis learned from Minnesota Fats. There are also cherishable visual gags dotted throughout the film, like the way a whole row of books falls from a shelf in a perfect pattern when Lewis removes just one of them, or the deep groove he wears into the ground as he anxiously paces. Lewis’s timing and craftmanship on both sides of the camera is impeccable, and The Family Jewels frequently had me cackling on my sofa.

The Outrage (Martin Ritt, 1964)

With films like The Hustler, Sweet Bird of Youth and Hud already under his belt, Paul Newman was riding high as he approached the mid-1960s and surely had his pick of projects, so what on earth prompted him to sign on for The Outrage? I guess he was tight with Martin Ritt – this was their fifth picture together in six years – but he’s all wrong for the part of a Mexican bandit, both in the way he looks and the broad way he chooses to play the role, which verges on caricature. The Outrage is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, with Newman’s Carrasco on trial for the murder of a man (Laurence Harvey) and the rape of his wife (Claire Bloom). Watching Newman’s bandito face off against Bloom’s southern belle gets more tiresome with each flashback; Harvey spends most of these scenes gagged and tied to a tree, and he comes off best in comparison. I kept thinking that something about The Outrage felt strangely stiff and stagebound, and it was only afterwards that I discovered the screenplay was by Michael Kanin, who adapted Rashomon for the stage with his wife Fay in 1959. The Outrage does have its moments, but they tend to occur in the framing device rather than the flashbacks, which benefits from a terrific performance by Edward G. Robinson as a cheerfully cynical snake oil salesman who gets the film’s best lines: “Why, some of my best friends are corpses... they’re the only ones I can trust. Oh, sure, they stink a little but no more than a few alive ones that I know.” His turn is one of the film’s saving graces, with another being the vivid cinematography by the great James Wong Howe. His work is one of the few areas where Ritt’s film gives Kurosawa a run for his money.

Split Image (Ted Kotcheff, 1982)

Released within a few weeks of First Blood, the other 1982 collaboration between Brian Dennehy and Ted Kotcheff is an uneven but very compelling drama about a young man (Michael O’Keefe) who cuts ties with his family when he is drawn into a religious cult. Dennehy plays Danny’s father, a wealthy and flippant character suddenly rendered utterly powerless, and I thought we were being set up for a battle between him and cult leader Neil Kirklander (a malevolently grinning Peter Fonda) over the boy’s soul, but that’s not quite how it plays out. The wild card is Charles Pratt, an obsessive deprogrammer who hates Kirklander with a passion and has dedicated himself to bringing down his operation; I guess you could call him the film’s hero, except for the fact that he’s played by James Woods in one of the most hilariously scummy performances imaginable. “You know what I see college as? One big fuck farm” he tells a colleague as they wait for one of their targets to show, and he seems to take real glee in tormenting and the ex-cult kids as he beats Kirklander’s influence out of them. Woods invests Split Image with a prickly energy whenever he is on screen, but while this is a film with some great moments, it doesn’t quite come together into great film. O’Keefe’s journey from skeptical outsider to true believer feels a bit sketchy and underwritten, with the filmmakers relying too heavily on Fonda’s oily charisma to sell the cult rather than fleshing out its specifics. It’s perhaps easy to see why Split Image has slipped into obscurity, but there are some fine performances to discover here and the film is generally absorbing and unnerving, at least until the disappointingly pat ending.

We're No Angels (Neil Jordan, 1989)

We’re No Angels has a hell of a pedigree. David Mamet wrote the screenplay, Neil Jordan directed it, and it stars Robert De Niro and Sean Penn. Most people would walk into a movie boasting those names with high expectations, but fewer would expect to sit down and watch a wacky screwball caper. Something about We’re No Angels feels off from the start, and it never really finds its groove. The opening sequence in a grim 1930s prison is spectacularly staged, but the scale and darkness of the movie overwhelms the comedy. The idea of two cons disguising themselves as men of the cloth in order to escape the law is a comedy standard, but Mamet and Jordan seem more drawn to the tension and danger inherent in their repeatedly frustrated attempts to cross the border into Canada than they are in mining laughs. Penn and De Niro work hard to lift the movie, but only Penn occasionally succeeds, with an appealingly guileless performance that works particularly well when his character is forced to improvise a sermon on the spot, and he plays well with John C. Reilly, who has a funny recurring role as a young monk who is absolutely in awe of these visiting clerics, hanging on their every word as if God himself was speaking. De Niro, however, is a disaster. The role gives him so little to play he resorts to mugging like crazy, and there’s hardly a scene in the film that isn’t marred by him frantically pulling faces. Coming just a year after Midnight Run, it’s a painful lesson in what can happens when a serious actor actively tries to be funny instead of just playing the scene and letting the humour flow naturally.

Lockdown Viewing - April 6th to 12th

Big Trouble (John Cassavetes, 1986)

“I’m embarrassed to have my name on it, and even more embarrassed that people will think it’s my final film,” John Cassavetes said of Big Trouble, a salvage operation that he was parachuted into when writer-director Andrew Bergman left mid-production. It’s hard to know who is primarily responsible for the end result – Bergman, Cassavetes or the producers who reportedly meddled along the way – but it’s a film that doesn’t display much evident personality in its filmmaking, and has a schizophrenic quality in its storytelling. The first half is essentially a beat-by-beat parody of Double Indemnity, with Alan Arkin as the insurance man persuaded by a scheming femme fatale (Beverly D’Angelo) to get rid of her husband (Peter Falk) and split the payday. Once the deed has been done, however, the film spins off in a variety of directions, incorporating a faked death, a kidnapping, an attempted heist and an encounter with terrorists. A lot of Big Trouble doesn’t work or even make a great deal of sense, but no film starring Peter Falk and Alan Arkin is ever going to be a complete write-off, and this one is often very funny. The dynamic the two leads share is similar to the one at the heart of The In-Laws (also scripted by Bergman) and Arkin gets so much comic mileage out of simply trying to control the pitch of his voice as his anxiety overwhelms him or – in the film’s funniest moment – delivering a spit-take for the ages after tasting Falk’s sardine liqueur. Big Trouble may be regarded as an ignominious and anonymous end to a great director’s career, but if you judge it against the standards of the average Hollywood comedy rather than Cassavetes’ own work, it doesn’t look so bad. There is one interesting side note to this film’s troubled production: before shooting began Columbia Pictures had to seek permission from Universal to use the plot of Double Indemnity, and Universal agreed in exchange for the rights to a project that had been sitting on the shelf at Columbia. That film was Back to the Future, which had already become a monster hit by the time Big Trouble finally hobbled into cinemas.

The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo, 2003)

Given all the brouhaha that surrounded its release – the uproar at Cannes, the feud with Ebert, the fuss over a single scene – it’s strange to look at The Brown Bunny now and see how delicate, wistful and introspective it is. It's hardly a film that merited such a noisy introduction to the world. I don’t think it’s as strong a film as Gallo’s directorial debut Buffalo ’66, but I still like it a lot. The film feels of a piece with other minimalist films of that era, such as Gus Van Sant’s Gerry or Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms, while also harkening back to pictures like Zabriskie Point and Two Lane Blacktop, as Gallo drives across the United States and occasionally stops to have an awkward conversation with somebody. It’s clear that he’s a lonely individual haunted by something, and in search of some kind of reconciliation with Daisy (Chloë Sevigny), a woman from his past, but the nature of their relationship isn’t clarified until the very last scene, which is the only scene in the film anyone talks about. The meeting between Gallo and Sevigny is alternately uncomfortable, tender, angry and sad, and it acts as a culmination to everything that has come before it. Gallo has a gift for finding piercing and truthful moments in a scene that appears to be meandering, and he does that a number of times throughout The Brown Bunny, most notably in a wonderfully unexpected and intimate encounter with Cheryl Tiegs. The Brown Bunny’s 16mm images are evocative and atmospheric, and the film has an entrancing rhythm. I wonder if we’ll ever get to see another film from Vincent Gallo? I wonder if he’ll ever let us see his 2010 film Promises Written in Water? I dearly hope the answer to both of those questions is yes.

The First Men in the Moon (Nathan Juran, 1964)

Five years before Neil Armstrong walked on the lunar surface, this film imagined a United Nations mission successfully landing on the moon only to find that somebody had beaten them to it. The discovery of an old Union Jack flag and a note claiming the moon for Queen Victoria leads them to the aged Arnold Bedford (Edward Judd), who recounts the journey that he took to the moon way back in 1899. The First Men in the Moon is an adaptation of an H. G. Wells novel, and it’s very distinctly a film of two halves. The first half of the picture has a manic screwball energy, being dominated by Lionel Jeffries as Cavor, the eccentric scientist whose gravity-defying substance will lift their craft into space. Jeffries charges about the place causing explosions and shouting about geese, and while some of this is funny, it’s more often just loud and frenetic. It takes a surprisingly long time for Bedford, Cavor and Bedford’s fiancé Kate (Martha Hyer) to achieve lift-off, and it’s something of a relief when they do, but that relief eventually hardens into disappointment during the underwhelming moon-set section of the film, where Nathan Juran’s direction is too sluggish and workmanlike to generate any real sense of danger or excitement. This is a very handsome film to look at, though. John Blezard’s art direction is impressive, both inside the spacecraft and within the tunnels of the moon, but the real star of the movie is undoubtedly Ray Harryhausen. He creates some giant worm-like creatures for our heroes to evade, but I was particularly fond of the aliens’ x-ray machine, that reduced the captured Martha Hyer to an angrily gesticulating skeleton.

My First Film (Zia Anger, 2019)

One of the most depressing rituals that has grown familiar over the past two months has been the deletion of various eagerly-anticipated events from my diary, as the Coronavirus pandemic forced the closure of cinemas, theatres and art galleries. An early casualty of this was Zia Anger’s live presentation of My First Film at the ICA, which I was supposed to see at the end of March, but fortunately Anger has found a way to give people an approximation of that experience. She is presenting live online shows for around 60-75 people at a time, and being part of one of those audiences was a very special experience. The first film that Anger is referring to was called Always All Ways, Anne Marie, a feature she made in 2012 with friends and relatives on a crowdfunded budget of $22,000. Once completed, the film was rejected by every festival it was submitted to and was never seen by an audience. In My First Film, Anger shares bits and pieces of that film with us, presenting it on the left hand side of her desktop while typing her thoughts in a text box on the right hand side of the screen. Anger is honest and philosophical about both the film’s failings and her own, and there is something incredibly intimate about the spontaneous manner in which My First Film plays out, watching her thoughts appear on screen as she types them out, with her often going back to correct or revise them and sometimes responding to comments made by viewers as she goes. I admired her authenticity and imagination, and by the end of the film I was very moved by a shared experience that seemed to work as a cathartic and emotional experience for Anger too. I hope she can return to London to present My First Film live one day. If she does, I’ll be there.

The Rainmaker (Francis Ford Coppola, 1997)

The Rainmaker hits all the standard beats of a John Grisham thriller. An idealistic young lawyer is taking on a case that’s bigger than him. He appears in over his head against the high-powered legal team he’s up against, but after some canny legal wrangling, some shouts of "Objection!" and a few last-minute revelations of evidence, he wins the case and gets the girl. These films always adhere to a sturdy and familiar template, so what matters is how classy the filmmaking is and how many great character actors you can squeeze into the picture, and these are the factors that make The Rainmaker such a pleasure. This film may be among the most modest and anonymous of Coppola’s works, but his subtly intelligent direction elevates it. The way he frames certain figures, such as Mickey Rourke’s crooked lawyer and Dean Stockwell’s feckless judge, speaks volumes about their characters and the power dynamic inherent in those scenes. Rourke and Stockwell are just two of the wonderful roster of supporting players enlisted to prop up a committed but bland Matt Damon, whose romance with Claire Danes (trapped in a helpless abused wife subplot) is by far the worst thing in the picture. Jon Voight is the slick corporate lawyer who sold his soul years ago, Roy Scheider is the insurance company’s CEO, Mary Kay Place is the mother of a son who is slowly wasting away. Best of all is Danny DeVito as Damon’s opportunistic partner; constantly hustling and looking for an angle, he brings a vital bristling energy to the picture. The Rainmaker is a thoroughly engaging mainstream entertainment, but there’s also a real power in the way Coppola presents the dying young man (Johnny Whitworth) whose illness has instigated this case. Instead of just treating him as a plot point or a cheap emotional hook, Coppola recognises the tragedy of the situation, making us face these characters and their pain just as Voight and his cronies are forced to. "This is how the uninsured die," Damon says in his (Michael Sherr-scripted) voiceover. It’s an element of the film that still resonates more than two decades on.

Lockdown Viewing - March 30th to April 5th

Anna Karenina (Joe Wright 2012)

I felt an inexplicable urge to watch Joe Wright's Anna Karenina again recently. I'm not sure what I was expecting from it, as I hadn't really cared for it in 2012 and little of Wright's subsequent work had given me cause for reevaluation. It’s an enormously frustrating picture because I can admire much of what Wright is trying to do within the framework of his theatrical conceit, and there are times when he pulls off a virtuoso camera move or a complex piece of choreography that deserve applause. Ultimately, however, that’s all Anna Karenina amounts to. It’s a series of bold maneouvres and ambitious ideas that never coheres, and for a film determined to flow from one scene to the next – with scene transitions happening on the fly – it feels so disjointed. It was always likely to be a shallow and truncated adaptation, but Wright and Tom Stoppard never seem to have a grasp on the balance or pacing of the story, and both the primary and secondary narratives end up feeling underdeveloped. One of the key problems lies in the casting. The decision to cast Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Vronsky looks even more laughable now than it did then, and although she makes a fair stab at it, I think the title role was too much for Keira Knightley. The film’s real success stories lie in the supporting roles. Jude Law is marvelous as the dignified, wounded Karenin, and Alicia Vikander grabs her opportunity to light up the film every time she appears as Kitty. A star was obviously being born. I'd like to see her Anna Karenina some day.

Getting Straight (Richard Rush, 1970)

Getting Straight is talk, talk, talk. The characters in Richard Rush’s film are constantly arguing, debating, monologuing and cracking wise. It might have all become too cacophonous to bear if it wasn’t for two key factors. First of all, the protagonist Harry Bailey – a sardonic Vietnam vet returning to college to secure his master’s degree – is played by prime-form Elliott Gould, who keeps us engaged no matter how arrogant, pompous and misogynistic his character can be. The second factor that keeps us hooked into the picture is Rush’s incredibly vibrant direction. Working with Laszlo Kovacs, he finds imaginative ways to frame every scene through his blocking, his use of architecture and, above all, through some spectacular rack focus work. Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I saw so many focus pulls in a single film; there must be a dozen in some of these shots. Emerging from the burnout, disillusionment and fog of the end of the ‘60s, Getting Straight is a fascinating time capsule. I’m not sure if it all really works, and I found a lot of it unconvincing (especially Harry’s climactic explosion over The Great Gatsby) but it’s impossible to look away from this movie, and the ending has the same potent ‘burn it all down’ quality that characterises so many films of this era. Getting Straight made over $13 million and was the 21st highest-grossing film of 1970, which is a remarkable thing to consider from today's point of view.

Man Trouble (Bob Rafelson, 1992)

Hopes must have been sky-high for a film that reunited the director, screenwriter and star of Five Easy Pieces, but there’s no getting away from the fact that Man Trouble is a confounding mess. It’s not just the fact that it’s a bad movie, but it feels like three or four bad movies are happening at once. On one level the film is an attempt at an old-fashioned screwball romance, but stodgy pace and the lack of chemistry between Jack Nicholson and Ellen Barkin kill its chances of ever getting off the ground. Barkin appears to have been directed to flip into hysterics at the slightest provocation, while Nicholson operates on autopilot. To be fair, the actors might just have been confused by the way their character dynamics seem to transform from one scene to the next, with the film adopting a different style and tone every ten minutes. I know I was confused. There’s a subplot about a serial axe murderer that doesn’t go anywhere, and an equally baffling detour in which Barkin’s sister Beverly D'Angelo is kidnapped and held in a psychiatric hospital because some powerful men want a tell-all transcript she’s writing, or something. If that wasn’t enough, there’s also a running gag about a horny dog that keeps trying to shag people. Man Trouble has a cracking cast - Harry Dean Stanton, Michael McKean, Saul Rubinek and Veronica Cartwright all make appearances – but nobody seems entirely sure what their role is supposed to be. A bewildering misfire. 

Movie Crazy (Clyde Bruckman, 1932)

This was Harold Lloyd’s first foray into talking pictures, and despite some occasional stiffness, it’s generally a very smooth transition. The film pokes fun at our bespectacled hero’s inappropriateness as a big screen leading man. He is a dreamer hoping to break into pictures, who gets his opportunity when a mix-up over his headshot leads to him being invited to the studio for a screen test. Lloyd does have some fun with sound effects – notably in the way the audio speeds up as his various screen tests are run through – but Movie Crazy succeeds primarily because its best gags are inventive visual sequences that you could easily imagine him constructing in the silent era. He creates slapstick havoc when he stumbles into a production as soon as he arrives in Hollywood, and in the film’s comic highlight he accidentally wears a magician’s jacket to a party, looking increasingly bewildered as he pulls rabbits and doves from its hidden pockets. Movie Crazy offers an amusing dual role to Constance Cummings, who toys with Harold’s emotions as both an actress and the character she’s playing in a film; Harold isn’t aware that they’re the same woman, and he fears he’s cheating on one with the other. But what really distinguishes the film is the elegant style that Lloyd and director Clyde Bruckman (a frequent collaborator with both Lloyd and Buster Keaton) bring to the film. Rather than being constrained by the newfangled recording techniques, they keep the camera mobile, incorporating a series of impressive tracking shots, notably the one that builds up to the spectacular climactic fight on the deck of a ship.

Wife (Mikio Naruse, 1953)

The stark title could stand for a number of Mikio Naruse films, but in its opening scenes, Wife gives equal weight to the inner thoughts of both partners in a failing marriage. Mihoko (Mieko Takamine) and Toichi (Ken Uehara) have been married ten years and whatever spark their relationship once had has long faded. Neither party seems able to address this directly, however, and instead they both sit in silent resentment, stewing in their private emotions. The actors find small, telling details in their interactions that accentuate their mutual dissatisfaction, and when Toichi is driven into the arms of a co-worker she is young, cultured and modern – she represents a sharp contrast with his wife. Naruse surrounds the central couple with vividly sketched and equally poignant portraits of marital discord – one woman despairs of her unemployed and often drunk husband; another is devastated by her husband’s relationship with a prostitute – and he brilliantly weaves in and out of these narratives to create a tapestry of sadness, frustration and lost hopes. Wife is structured to open and close with scenes that echo each other, emphasising the hopeless situation that these characters find themselves in. Mihoko might have won the victory over her young rival, in a beautifully acted confrontation, but she has only condemned herself to many more years in a loveless union that won’t make anybody happy.