1,001 Films: "La Jetée/The Pier" (1961)

Chris Marker's photo-roman - later the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys - sets out, in a series of still photographs punctuated by the odd sign of life, a post-apocalyptic landscape in which experiments are carried out on human survivors to recreate the world through memory; our hero has to travel back to the past, where he begins to work through a relationship with a young woman he remembers, then ahead to the future, in a bid to save what remains of mankind. It's technically dazzling, with exceptional sound editing: its snippets of narration, like the images, fade in and out after the manner of half-recalled phrases. Peel back some of the (very 60s) modish pretension, and within a span of twenty-nine minutes, it appears to tell the story of every love affair in history, including yours and mine.

La Jetée is available on DVD in a twin-pack with Marker's Sans Soleil through Optimum Hone Entertainment.

From the archive: "The Killing Fields"

As is his wont, Oliver Stone was to blow the conscience-movie out of the water in 1986 with Salvador - wherein those investigating American foreign policy's latest atrocities were a comedy double-act straight out of a Hunter Thompson novel - but he'd never have been able to do that without The Killing Fields being the film it was two years beforehand. This was the true story of how, with the Vietnam conflict spreading into surrounding areas like an especially pervasive cancer, New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) and his interpreter Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor) came to tour Cambodia, witnessing one act of neo-colonial cowardice after another, and staying behind even after the Khmer Rouge took to the streets and senior American officials fled the scene.

As an account of a country submitting to internal chaos, Roland Joffe's film is by necessity a little shapeless, but - written by Withnail's Bruce Robinson - it's finally human, four-square and upstanding in the best David Puttnam tradition, to the point where it can only ever really end with Lennon's "Imagine". The one big surprise is that it should so evidently play as a love story between its two male characters, complete with tearful parting in the rain, a second half in which Schanberg is haunted by his erstwhile partner's absence, and a (genuinely emotional) final-reel reconciliation.

Waterston's liberal nice-guy persona is both challenged and set in stone here - he's interestingly tetchy, and at least a little self-absorbed to begin with, as though Schanberg's beard was both irritating and insulating him; the thesp equivalent of a one-hit wonder - though he'll live on in Simpsons lore as the actor whose Academy Award Homer Simpson attempted to pass off as his own - Ngor offers his own baleful perspective on events, rather than merely translating everything into English for the benefit of the white man and his white audience. 

I suspect an entirely American-backed production would have stuck to Schanberg's viewpoint come what may, but in fact Pran's second-half expose of the Khmer's Orwellian project (forcing its citizens to un-remember pre-Revolutionary Cambodia) perhaps results in The Killing Fields becoming a better 1984 film about Nineteen Eighty-Four than Nineteen Eighty-Four itself. Yet twenty-five years on, the real question here - and it's a question that points to the way the cinema might be heading - is this: how did Joffe go from the abhorrence of suffering displayed here to the torture-porn of Captivity? Is that what the modern American cinema does, turn people into sadists? Or are these but two sides of the same coin: that the Joffe of Captivity was already present here, and that where once he lingered over boneyards and dismemberment to make a point, now he does so to make a buck?

(July 2008)

The Killing Fields screens on BBC1 tonight at 12.20am.

1,001 Films: "Black Sunday" a.k.a. "The Mask of Satan" a.k.a. "Revenge of the Vampire" (1960)

Italian horror director Mario Bava was his own cinematographer, and as such he had as much to do with the look of the 1960s horror film as anyone. Black Sunday, his Gogol-inspired tale of witchcraft in deepest, darkest Russia, takes the crypts, horse-drawn carriages and exposed brickwork of Hammer's period films and makes them newly elegant and spooky: it's not too great a stylistic leap from here to Romero's striking deployment of monochrome in the first Living Dead movie, or indeed onto the vivid, visceral flourishes of Bava's compatriot Dario Argento.

In a prologue, a prince and his witch lover are burnt at the stake after having a mask of torture nailed to their faces; two centuries on, they've returned to stalk the residents of the town where they were put to death, and where - in an especially poetic touch - the witch's doppelganger (Barbara Steele, in a career-making dual role) now resides. The sets - while still seeming very much like sets - at least seem like atmospheric sets, not so very far removed from the Universal horror movies of the 1930s in their pools of light and fog, yet Bava doesn't shy away from more graphic shocks.

Blood drips into maggot-filled eye sockets; there's a spectacular disinterment; and the make-up stretches from punctured skin to gaping ribcages. Even as it held rather ploddingly dear to timeless folk myths, the chopped liver and potatoes of the modern horror movie were being set firmly in place. While the English dub currently available proves a little flat and imprecise in places, the sound throughout is never less than supremely evocative: with its network of secret corridors running behind the action, it remains one of the all-time great creaking door movies, and I'm pretty sure you can hear every last one of those nails piercing the heroine's flesh.

Black Sunday is currently available on DVD through Arrow Video.

From the archive: "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, director Rebecca Miller's adaptation of her own novel, casts Robin Wright-Penn as "flexible enigma" Pippa, fortysomething wife of a much-lauded, much-married author two decades her senior (Alan Arkin), with whom she's moved to a small retirement community and settled into a routine of docile domesticity. Drifting off in her head, she begins to reassess how she got here - sparking a splurge of flashbacks - and where her future might lie; somewhere en route, she catches the eye of her 35-year-old neighbour Chris (Keanu Reeves, at his most Keanu-ish), a perennial underachiever who even the mother he's just moved back in with describes as "half-baked".

Though she positions Pippa centre stage throughout, Miller doesn't probe too deeply into the psyche of a woman who's settled for normalcy and taken to caring for an old man as an offset for the wayward instances of her youth: it's deemed enough (and funny enough) that she should be shown to be literally sleepwalking through life. What's left works as bright, chatty, eminently photogenic entertainment, with a number of better-than-average performances on its side. Arkin is given more to work with than his now stock, Oscar-certified role of cranky uncle, and makes touching (where others might well have made creepy) a run of scenes in which he has to woo a sensitive, attuned Blake Lively as the teenage Pippa. Accompanying boyfriends may have their reluctance ground down by a scene in which Lively is dolled up in pigtails by lesbian photographer Julianne Moore, and Wright-Penn - perhaps because of the excess of biographical info we're given about Pippa, perhaps because Miller allows her to smile and laugh and work out a happy ending for herself - is more present, more alive than she's been on screen at any time since The Princess Bride.

(July 2009)

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee premieres on BBC2 tonight at 12.05am. 

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of February 22-24, 2013:

1 (2) Wreck-It Ralph (PG) ***
2 (1) A Good Day to Die Hard (12A)
3 (new) Mama (15) **
4 (4) Les Misérables (12A) *
5 (6) I Give It A Year (15)
6 (new) Cloud Atlas (15) **** 
7 (3) This is 40 (15) ***
8 (new) Song for Marion (PG) ***
9 (7) Django Unchained (18) **
10 (5) Beautiful Creatures (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:
1. Arbitrage
2. Hi-So
3. Cloud Atlas
4. The Road: A Story of Life and Death
5. Madame de...

 
Top Ten DVD rentals:

1 (1) The Bourne Legacy (12)
2 (2) Ted (15) ***
3 (4) Looper (15) ****
4 (3) The Dark Knight Rises (12) ***
5 (10) Total Recall (12) **
6 (5) The Perks of Being a Wallflower (12) **
7 (8) Lawless (18) **
8 (7) Ice Age 4: Continental Drift (U)
9 (6) The Sweeney (15) *
10 (re) The Five-Year Engagement (15) **

 (source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:

1. Frankenweenie

2. McCullin

3. Skyfall

4. Ruby Sparks

5. The House I Live In

      

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Vera Cruz [above] (Saturday, five, 3.30pm)

2. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Sunday, five, 3.30pm)

3. The Killing Fields (Tuesday, BBC1, 12.20am)

4. I've Loved You So Long (Friday, BBC2, 11.50pm)

5. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (Saturday, BBC2, 12.05am)

 

 

"Hi-So" (The Guardian 01/03/13)

Hi-So (uncertificated) 102 mins ****

Aditya Assarat is the Thai writer-director who caught eyes back in 2007 with his quietly stirring debut Wonderful Town, about an architect dispatched to a region flattened by the Asian tsunami. His third feature – its title short for “high society” – returns to similar terrain, watching discreetly as a drifting actor (Ananda Everingham) splits with his model girlfriend (Cerise Leang) while filming in a desolated coastal resort. Assarat shares Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ability to conjure delicate moods and memories, but his interests reside in the concrete, rather than spiritual: the semi-demolished apartment block the actor retreats to becomes a particular source of fascination. It’s almost gallery-like in its resistance to urgent narrative drives – anyone who finds Sofia Coppola movies wispy should stay clear – yet if life, as they say, moves on, then here’s a film truly attuned to its underlying rhythms: an oddly cleansing, even affirming experience. 

Hi-So opens in selected cinemas from today.

"Broken City" (Metro 01/03/13)

Broken City (15) 109 mins **

Every now and again, someone has the bright idea of getting two of Hollywood’s buffest tough guys to lock antlers, and the results are usually a dull thunk. Here, it’s Mark Wahlberg and Russell Crowe, dropped into a flatfooted latter-day conspiracy with – as references to “Sing-Sing” and “shamuses” make apparent – aspirations/pretensions towards being a 1930s gumshoe movie. Instead of Bogart, we have Wahlberg as Jimmy Taggart, an ex-NYPD cop turned private detective; Crowe’s the hardline Mayor who, on the eve of re-election, recruits Taggart to tail his apparently faithless wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones).

The scorecard will show that Wahlberg, doing extreme brow-furrowing, outpoints his flabby, coasting co-star, but Allen Hughes’ film keeps finding ways to make everybody look silly. Marky Mark’s drunk scene, intended to reveal his character’s inner turmoil, isn’t quite as laughable as Rusty Russ’s style choices (hair by Donald Trump, tan by Jordan), yet it’s funnier than the old-school misogyny implying that Zeta-Jones has been sleeping with everyone in sight.

Hughes’ early ‘hood classics (Menace II Society, Dead Presidents) gained their considerable force from keeping close to the streets. Here, given access to swanky penthouses and flashy helicopter shots, he delivers on the jaw-clenching and bone-crunching, but struggles to make key plot details ring true. The sketchy view of the independent film scene Wahlberg’s actress squeeze is involved in suggests Hughes has badly lost touch with his roots – and who’d vote for Russell Crowe as Mayor of New York?

Broken City is in cinemas nationwide.