Silent Hill (2006)
Scene to scene, I vacillated between thinking this was either some kind of abstracted, demented genius - or total incoherent trash. And I'm honestly not sure where I landed by the film's end; the obvious place to settle is somewhere in the middle ... but even that feels like cheating somewhat. The video-game adaptation has become notable in being an unbroken succession of failures (ignoring TV & The Last of Us), and I think one of the pitfalls has often been the inescapable dissonance between an interactive narrative, often powered by reality-indifferent puzzle boxes - and cinema's fundamentally non-interactive format, formed from emotionality and thematic goals. So scripts sometimes fell over themselves trying to get distance from that "lesser" media, save for a few easter eggs and nods towards the games to placate the fans; with Silent Hill through, it kinda felt the filmmakers really wanted to embrace all those structural eccentricities and tropes of "video game logic" into the cinematic form - but nor am I convinced they actually pulled it off. Was my occasional confusion the point?
Assuming it was I suppose, the execution quite brazenly ran with this sensibility of foggy, dream logic and rarely compromised; the titular town a baffling nowhere place whose two modes were both eerie and disturbing in different ways, the palette of the games translated quite successfully. Both aesthetics were quite striking: the empty town transforming from ash-suffocated decrepitude into a nightmare form, one built entirely of rusty metal panels and barbed wire. It was and remains a fairly unique visual gimmick for a horror film; the latter, industrial variant of Silent Hill looking like Freddy Kruger's summer holiday destination. On the other hand, knowing some of the Silent Hill lore myself, certain iconography just didn't work within the context of this original story. The infamous "Pyramid Head" monster was the most obvious example here: in the original game he had a distinct, psychosexual purpose within the overall theme - yet here he was just a big 'aul monster, stomping around out of an obligation towards brand management. No explanation given for his presence, no hints towards a purpose relative to the town's secrets. Yet again though - was that the point?
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
One I had not managed to re watch since its release.
Its just great. Packed with a who's who of British Actors. John Hurt , Stephen Graham, Tom Hardy , Cumber batch and on and on.
It really grabs you by the scruff of the neck this film . the pacing is perfect , your tugged along at a nice clip and the story and investigation flow nicely in well a edited mixture of time line jumping. Very stylish too.
A Spy classic
high marks/ 10
The Last Emperor (1987)
Finally braved the 3h40m runtime to watch this epic saga of the last Emperor of China.
Appointed at the age of three just as the family had abdicated the throne, and China became a republic, the Emperor was allowed to remain in name and privilege but not allowed to leave the Forbidden city and influence the country anymore. The film follows him until his death and documents what is quite an extraordinary life.
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, it is a sumptuously shot, flawless in production. It feels like its been made by an Italian such is the artistic detail at every turn. Filmed towards the end of the golden age of film when epic movies were still made, and the skill and artistry of film was there to behold. We have lost so much of that if not all of it now because of Cgi. Crowds are not real anymore, extra's are generated images, the challenges of filmmaking are not what they were, and it takes massively away from the end product are our potential to emotionally connect. None of that here with something that must have taken forever to shoot and edit, but got its just rewards with 9 Oscars.
The Emperor is played by 3 different actors as he grows up, and is tutored in his teenage years by Peter O'Toole who commands your respect on the screen with an excellent performance, guiding the Emperor through the devious actions of the eunuch's he was surrounded by.
This is a fascinating history lesson to say the least, how Japan was a completely different animal than it is now and its endeavours for the total domination of East Asia and every country in it. Flooding china with opium, operating prison camps, massacring 100's of thousands of people. China on the other hand fractured, corrupt and weak. How things have changed in that 100 years since then.
The film carries the time well, and only starts to drag a little bit in the final act but it still holds the attention all the way. Highly recommended 9/10.
Funny been wondering about Patlabor, how that was; also looked gorgeous in that technologically exacting way. And the irony in all this is that this is all visual storytelling we're advocating .., something you'd think would be an automatic reflex for an animated movie. A medium that emphasises its visual palette shouldn't even needed exposition really.
To a certain extent I think that might be a bit of an issue with Oshii's approach to story in general. Case in point - I stuck on Patlabor: The Movie the other night (another one of his) as it's free to stream on ITV, and despite it being about big stompy robots and a plot that has a lot of overlap with GitS, I got bored and turned it off after 20 minutes.
That was partly because the ITV version only has a painful English dub - but also because after a solid cold-open/credit sequence scene, the film dumps so much leaden exposition (required to set up the story at the chosen start point) that you can almost hear the thud of impact. It's even acknowledged in the film by having the characters who are listening to the monologue shown to be dozing through it, which is a cute gag but not enough to pull it back.
I need to rewatch Avalon at some point as I recall enjoying it but suspect it probably has similar issues...
As Bestas (The Beasts)
A Spanish film that had great success at the Spanish version of the Oscars this year.
The plot is not unlike The Field. A French couple buy a farmhouse in rural Spain. However, the neighbours turn against them when an energy company offers to buy up the land and the French couple are one of the few who don't want to sell.
The film is very atmospheric. There's an intense and nasty undercurrent right from the first scene. It's a drama but some of the visuals give it a horror aesthetic. There are plenty of great performances and visually it's beautiful.
The pacing and structure are off, though. The film is two hours and twenty minutes long. It doesn't start at the beginning, the first few scenes let us know that a lot has already gone on. The second act is very long while the final one is pretty short.
I won't go into spoilers but a significant event happens an hour in but the character's initial reaction is glossed over and we see the story picking up a few months later and it actually takes a few minutes to verify what has happened.
I enjoyed it and would recommend it but it does drag.
Agreed. It descends into outright silliness in its attempts to go large. But for most of its running time, I was pretty entertained. But, as said, a lot of that hinges on Crowe's performance. It's certainly not a great movie by any standards and I wouldn't want anyone to go away thinking that it's a must see, but it is above average within its subgenre. A subgenre which, admittedly, consists of pretty poor fare over all.
I've seen 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose' and it's not bad either. It would probably hover around the same result as 'The Pope's Exorcist' for me. But, as I mentioned earlier, the best exorcism movie has already been made, so any subsequent film dealing with that subject is going to come a cropper. That movie, by the way, was based on a much better German film called 'Requiem', which is well worth seeking out. It's much less bombastic than either 'The Pope's Exorcist' or 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose' and in that respect it's more believable, for want of a better word.
I've seen Friedkin's documentary on Amorth and that's worth a watch too. Apparently the two became good friends in subsequent years.
6/10 is kind on The Popes Exorcist. It had some promise mainly because of Crowe, but descended into total madness, the last 15 minutes was difficult to watch just becoming a fantasy movie.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose was a far better one - these Exorcism films which I do like generally have to have a sense of realism for it to be scary at all and believable. The priest Amorth had a documentary done about him by William Friedkin, which admittedly is not very revealing but Amorth was a real guy doing Exorcisms for a living. So it going into comic book form for the final act is bizarre really.
Hoping Crowe is not going to go the way of Mel!
Aye it's a funny bird all right but the monologuing became a bit much after a time. I also found the Major's arc and development both hurried and slow at the same time - no real sense of who she was before all a sudden she's philosophising and making raah existential decisions. I only watched the sequel the once so am curious if GitS 2: Innocence doubled down on all this, or "solved" it.
Ghost in the Shell is a weird one, alright. Every time I watch Die Hard I discover all over again that its a 2 hour 20 min film, because its pacing is so finely tuned that I never feel the runtime. GitS is the opposite, and while it's not long enough to truly outstay its welcome, it is still jarring that it isn't really a conventional narrative arc so much as a short sequence of action scenes interspersed with some very philosophical conversations amongst the protagonists.
In some ways it is probably a more true cyberpunk adaptation for that, in that e.g. that feels more true to the feel of stories like Neuromancer, certainly by comparison to the higher-profile western cyberpunk adaptations.
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
A narrative set moments before the Singularity, in a world where humanity had already begun merging with its technology, all the while building up and over the relics of the old world. An important foot chase took us through an urban gully, far below the neon skyline & dotted with detritus from the 20th century - including a rusted tram half-sunk into the sodden earth. As reality itself becomes optional, institutions struggling to recapture the AI genie it let loose, this augmented human running through the analogue bric-a-brac seemed destined to join it, himself soon an antique with his notions of physical existence.
Undeniably gorgeous with its exacting aesthetic of cybernetic militarism, but the narrative was just insufferably baggy in spots - despite its slim runtime of 82 minutes. Maybe that speaks to a waning attention span on my part, but some of the monologuing bordered on impenetrable, even straying close to a pretension the likes of Hideo Kojima would elevate to self-parody; one critical piece of the entire plot was effectively hidden behind rambling exposition, with only a TL:DR from a 3rd character bringing any kind of clarity. Again though, maybe that's more a reflection of me than the movie.
Mind you. The profundity of this film's philosophising felt oddly quaint when stacked against what the Digital Frontier ultimately yielded in the years subsequent to this film's release. Even if, while I type, the concept of AI has resurfaced thanks to the morally dubious entertainment derived from ChatGPT et al, "the internet" as this untouched land of boundless horizons never quite transpired; instead mutating into a broad crystalisation and catalyst for our worse intellectual impulses. That's not to say it's a flaw of the film it couldn't accurately predict the future a few years from now, only that it clashes with what we got.
The Good Mothers (2023) This is a 6 part drama set in Calabria, a true story about the lives of the woman who are part of the N'Dranghetta families - the N'Dranghetta being the most powerful mafia group in the world, not that most people have ever heard of them.
Having spent some time down there years ago in the region, which is on the surface incredibly poor, run down and harsh - despite the group having a turnover of over €100 billion a year, this drama is especially chilling. The lives of the women there in what is supposed to be a modern country, is beyond repressive and a throwback to some era like the Middle Ages.
The series follows different women from different Calabrian families that are all interconnected and how they struggle with trying to leave or come back, and the pain it puts their children through who are not capable of understanding the true culture of their families and the brutality of it. The loneliness escaping brings, the living in fear in witness protection, and the horror of staying.
Its an outstanding drama, it captures Calabria like I've never seen before and an incredible insight to a world so murky its hard to believe it exists in Europe. Highly recommended.
'Knock at the Cabin'
M. Knight's adaptation of Paul Tremblay's book 'Cabin at the End of the World' is a case of nearly, but not quite. A story of a gay couple with a young girl who's holiday in a remote country cabin is cut short by a home invasion by four people claiming to have had visions of the end of the world which involves tsunami's, disease and planes falling from the sky, and that the only salvation will be a result of one of the gay men choosing to kill the other.
An interesting, if ludicrous, premise for sure. But Shyamalan does manage to wrench some tension out of the ridiculous story and even gets a decent performance or two from the cast. But it's all a bit too silly to really take in and become invested, so the audience ends up mostly marking time to see how things will play out. Also against the movie is the fact that it's all so tame and for the most part depicts a decidedly PG-13 version of the apocalypse, even if its real rating was an R in the US.
The ending, too, wraps up things just a bit too nicely and from reading a synopsis of the Tremblay book, the movie leaves out certain much need shocks and also does away with the novel's more downbeat denouement, which I think was a very bad move indeed.
As a final note the movie also contains a laughable scene in its final moments, which sees a diner packed with customers still being served by a waitress, while in the near distance there's plumes of smoke rising from several crashed aircraft.
All in all, might be worth a look if you really have nothing else to do with your time.
5/10
'The Pope's Exorcist'
Hopelessly derivative of William Friedkin's 1973 movie, Julius Avery's 2023 effort is destined to be endlessly compared with that superior product, which is a bit of a shame because Avery's slice of religious hokum isn't all that bad in and of itself. While it's true to say that 'The Pope's Exorcist' could never live up to the standards set by 'The Exorcist', there's still a lot to like. Standout amongst the good parts is a charming, if a bit hammy, performance by Russell Crowe as Father Gabrielle Amorth, the exorcist at the heart of the yarn. Crowe has taken the role by the horns and has just gone with it and infuses the character with one or two quirks that keep him, and the movie, watchable. There's decent support, too, from Daniel Zovatto as his young accidental second in the exorcism, and Alex Essoe, the mother of the possessed. It was also kinda nice to see Franco Nero turn up as an unnamed Pope, even if it's clearly not supposed to be Pope John Paul II, the Pope in place during the 1980's, the period in which the movie is set.
The problem, though, with Avery's movie is that it all gets out of hand in the way that Friedkin's never did. Whereas 'The Exorcist' remained contained in a reality of sorts, its central possession being excused of course, 'The Pope's Exorcist' feels is needs to go "bigger" and therefore becomes absurd in the final act. It's not that things become terrible, it's just that all the subtlety gets destroyed, which is a problem a lot of these exorcism movies face. The supernatural elements become so overblown and outrageous that the audience no longer feels anything in the face of lurid CGI madness and people being thrown around like rag dolls, but still managing to survive bone crushing abuse. Plus there's subplot of sorts that claims some sort of conspiratorial shenanigans going on within the church regarding the inquisition that never really comes off and at times makes the movie feel like a Dan Brown story.
'The Pope's Exorcist' is certainly not the worst of its type in this particular subgenre and, in fact, is quite entertaining in parts. But its main issue is that the best exorcism movie is 'The Exorcist' and it probably always will be. As an aside, the real Father Amorth believed that Friedkin's film was the closest to a "real" exorcism that a movie has ever come.
6/10
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
This was a surprisingly claustrophobic and oppressive feature, where the camera rarely drifted further than centimetres from actors' faces - especially Jodie Foster's. All of it keeping the viewer in a state of constant discomfort - echoing the characters' own; the zenith being the various moments Dr. Lecter would stare down the camera at us, outwardly charming but his eyes full of menacing hunger. All that visual closeness put me in mind of the difference between subtext and text: how it can be a narrow band easily shredded by an inferior writer or director intent on hammering us over the head. An eagerness towards "discourse" that would jettison nuance or sometimes, a basic respect for an audience's intelligence. Instead, Jonathan Demme used the tools of cinema to push us right up to Clarice Starling's face, to feel that resting sense of unease as she navigated a male-dominated world. Her personal space obliterated, so that the viewer could share that same prickling sense of repulsion as Clarice; the world watching and judging before she even opened her mouth. No need for clumsy dialogue, or two-dimensional caricatures (though Dr. Chilton came perilously close), just good filmmaking. For sure it remained a masterful thriller, one unmatched even across the subsequent years of a zeitgeist increasingly obsessed with serial killers - but the craft of execution also remained peerless. Every year, the Oscars reinforce their redundancy with inane Best Picture wins - but when they got it right, you watch a film like this and say to yourself, "Yeah, I get why that won".
Of course, there was also the matter of its most famous performance: one whose impact could have been diluted through mimicry and parody; but watching this again reminded that the reason Anthony Hopkins' work became such a mainstay of pop-culture in the first place was because of his Luciferian turn as Hannibal Lecter. His performance and the camera's proximity to everyone's face ensured audiences would remember Lecter - whether they wanted to or not. Returns to the character saw Hopkins' method slip into ham, but first time of asking he nailed the part; a killer full of ineffable, undeniable charm all the way up to - and perhaps, including - the moment he ate your face.
As to the lasting reputation with regards to Buffalo Bill? Uhhh. I'm not remotely the best person to comment, but it was noteworthy how ...intentional and deliberate Demme's film tried to put distance between Bill and Transsexuality. As if he knew the potential harm all those fictional insinuations could seed given the subject matter. All in all, it was a broadly considerate move given this particular era was one where mainstream humour still punched down, transsexuality often portrayed as something grotesquely humourous or shamefully deceitful. Putting explicit dialogue where the audience was told Bill was definitively not a transexual, while utterly clumsy, felt like emotional damage control. That's not to say the portrayal of the character wasn't without issue, but that degree of empathy from the production was still laudable.
The next day and I swear, I still don't know what the point of this was. maybe that was because the film tried to shove about 20 bajillion plot points into the runtime; if the show took liberties with medieval travel times, this film managed to increase the stupidity with FTL travel between Northumbria and Wessex. A bunch of characters got killed off screen, presumably cos the actors wouldn't come back - including a pretty critical one really - while the way the script ignored stuff like Ühtred's own daughter was weird.
Might go and check this out later.
Can't say I'm a fan of the Evil Dead "franchise" though. But I did like the 2013 remake. Although I think this has nothing to do with it IIRC.
Thanks. You just saved me 2 hours.
A coffee in Berlin , if you like small European films, this hits the target, stars Tom Schilling
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1954701/
The Last Kingdom: 7 Kings Must Die
Something of a guilty pleasure of a show; never especially nuanced or complex but was often very much a "rollicking" adventure show at its height. Kinda petered out in its original run of 5 seasons. Given the show wrapped up quite neatly I was a bit sceptical this Netflix film had a point.
It didn't, and was an exercise in total redundancy: a feature-length coda never needed after the main show reached relative finality; all executed with pacing accelerated to the point of incoherence. This smelt of a script for a potential Season 6, compressed into a 2 hour "movie" that barely let its characters breath (the ones it remembered even existed - hi Stiorra!). And in a world where everyone was caked with mud and their name aggressively archaic, it made the experience bewildering at times.
Watched Evil Dead Rise.
Fairly solid film, well made, well paced and good fun, with some great nods to the original. I also enjoyed Lee Cronin's Hole in the Ground.
Certainly very violent but didn't quite capture the grisliness, horror and dread of the 2013 version, but there's plenty to disgust and repel in the effects.
Definitely worth a watch for fans of Evil Dead and/or the 2013 remake. It's a very good effort.
The Nightingale, written and directed by Jennifer Kent, is a pretty brutal, bloody, western-ish, revenge, Aussie film. Worth watching, but very tough going.
I'll add to the above and say that 'The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith' is another Aussie film that vies for top spot.
A few Australian films that stood out for me but didn't see mentioned
Mystery road and Goldstone. A kind of western duet revolving around an aboriginal Detective : Jay. Goldstone is my favorite of the two and one of my favorite films but I'm fairly alone in this as it was never as well regarded as Mystery road. The shootouts in these films are brilliant.
The rover is one that Ill not forget fast. Very violent. Stars guy Pearce and Pattinson its an A24.
Samson And Delilah. Modern day Drama about a young aboriginal couple grinding by on the edges of Australian society. brilliant. Australian Society does not come off very well in it.
Sweet Country; Court Drama about an aboriginal man who kills a white man in self defence based on true story.
The Proposition: pretty gritty western that stood out amongst some schlock
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2022)
Contained possibly the worst CGI human face since The Rock from The Mummy Returns.
I went into this with a genuine desire to ignore the anti-hype, but this was an abysmal case of Confirmation Bias for anyone with an axe to grind about the MCU. Ugly, incoherent, unfunny and just plain tedious to watch; the FX were truly shockingly inept and flat. Ant-Man himself was thrown under the bus; his knockabout small-scale adventures of Super Science heists and family drama sacrificed, all so Jonathan Majors could ham up the runtime with the MCU's latest cod-English accent - coupled with an aggressive reminder these films simply exist to advertise the next one.
Green Room (2015)
Gnarly and nasty, but never excessive. If comedy's foundation is built upon timing - perhaps the best horror does too. Not like laughter and screaming aren't often interchangeable responses after all. Point being, this film was an able example of when and how one might use "gore" as a cinematic tool: not through sheer amount; or a desire to push the viewer's face into the viscera; but as punctuation, a sudden moment of extreme carnage quickly whipped away before the camera could leer, or the brain could process what it saw. That's not to say there isn't a place for OTT blood n' guts - step forward Evil Dead 2 - but it's only when something's done well, you can understand when it's done ... well, done by Eli Roth.
That's not to say this was a film dominated by violence mind you. Broadly, it was a stripped-down and economical "under siege" story with a unique and authentic isolated setting, its villains depressingly believable. While our heroes were a group utterly out of their depth, already on the fringe of society before they found themselves trapped with Nazis 20 miles from the Middle of Nowhere. Not a group of experts, military or otherwise, but a bunch of scared musicians. This genre of film can be prone to stumble when previously sober characters would grab the Idiot Ball and make a rash decision - just to create some loud noise and action. So the Movie Can Happen. Here, the panic of the ill-prepared never gave way to total foolishness; instead, the actions of the protagonists felt roughly parallel to how I'd react, if I'm honest. Then when the tables finally turned after sequences of excruciating viciousness, the catharsis felt twice as earned. Not like one needs a narrative excuse for a robust response to Nazism - but it helped tie up the sense of victims becoming the hunters.
The largest promotional angle at the time of release was Patrick Stewart playing the Big Bad - and I'm really stuck on this one. By all accounts, his was a menacing and understated performance; constantly matter-of-fact that in of itself was chilling, never indulging in theatrics or overplaying the part of the head Nazi as he plotted carnage like it was any other day. All that said, this was still Patrick Stewart and all the cultural goodwill and gravity he has amassed was often impossible to separate. That he barely even tried for an accent also didn't help. It was a great performance for sure, but also proved the man has become larger than his profession.
The Aviator (2004)
Stopping short to call the portrayal of Howard Hughes sensitive or nuanced, there was a degree of respectful sympathy towards his infamous OCD and neurosis that ... surprised upon a rewatch. A tonal choice where the audience was invited to feel appalled: but not by the extremity of the Hughes' debilitating "insanity", but by his rivals' attempts to weaponise it against him; the affliction never actually outwardly mentioned by others, but always used to get one over the mogul at critical junctures. The exploitation on the part of the men within the narrative, not those outside creating the fiction. This was a two-hander mind you because if Scorsese brought that choice behind the lens, DiCaprio's performance in front of them avoided anything hammy or overblown. Ultimately selling what amounted to a funny paradox to this ageing Lefty: that a walking, successful manifestation of Randian Ideals might be an underdog in the face of corporate greed?
Mind you, while Scorsese has the uncanny knack to make even a 3 hour runtime fizz by like it was just 90, the actual flying sequences have aged like milk and really wrenched me out of the yarn. Sure, by all accounts nobody watches Scorsese films for their FX but given the film had multiple, sometimes important set-pieces set within a cockpit, it was always deeply distracting just how fake and computer-generated those moments looked. Bad FX aren't a dealbreaker or anything - the recent Dungeons & Dragons film has awful CGI but never got in the way - only that here it seemed like the ... I dunno, lazier choice? The counterpoint being a crash, important to the story and Hughes' downward slide, rendered as a moment of frightening chaos through physical props and stunts - almost making up for the bad CGI everywhere else.
Snowtown and Chopper are two other Aussie films I enjoyed, ain't seen them in about 20 years though so not sure if they will stand up to the test of time. Must give them a rewatch along with some of these recommendations.
Never heard of this will have to give it a watch. And as pointed out Shine is another fantastic movie, definitely up there. The Flight of the Bumblebee scene in the cafe is one of the best scenes in film history.
Tell him he's dreamin'
Strictly Ballroom is obviously the best Aussie film.
Sorry if off topic but I just finished a great tv show from Australia - Mr. Inbetween. Great 25 minute episodes about a 'fixer'. Fury Road would be my top Oz film, Lion from a few years back was decent too.
Animal kingdom is a fantastic Aussie movie and definitely in the conversation for one of the best
also obviously loved Shine, Muriel and Priscilla queen of the desert
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