From the archive: "Victim"

Although it's hardly Bruce LaBruce, Victim was considered shocking back in 1961 for its treatment of (the then-illegal matter of) homosexuality; today, it looks both groundbreaking and fascinatingly awkward, obliging its audience to insinuate and extrapolate that which the film's network of well-spoken gays can only hint at. Dirk Bogarde is the high-flying lawyer whose wings are clipped when his past - and, more specifically, ties to a dead (rent?) boy - embroils him in a plot to blackmail London's queer community. Shot mostly on location by Basil Dearden (The Blue Lamp), this has the gritty, noirish feel of late 50s British urban cinema, but also a strain of drawing-room debate in which Bogarde's "outsider", assuming the role of detective, adopts a more aggressive and antagonistic line of questioning than your average copper, provoked by the social mores of the time. The script - by Janet Green and John McCormick - can feel a little too hung up on notions of "normal" and "abnormal" (Bogarde's wife Sylvia Syms runs a clinic for delinquents) for it to entirely convince nowadays, but you keep spying flickers of all those issues later queer cinema would find itself working through: a strain of virulent self-hatred that Bogarde pushes to the max ("Nature played me a dirty trick") and a genuinely edgy, uncomfortable response to women. Syms has a slightly more complex characterisation than one might expect, but the turncoat's a bitter harridan with a neurotic disgust of pretty much everyone, especially the sad, lonely men classed as criminals at the centre of the piece. 

(April 2000)

Victim returns to selected cinemas this Friday.

1,001 Films: "The Muppet Movie" (1979)

Muppets assemble. The Muppet Movie constitutes one of the most purely fun and touching origin stories the movies have ever given us, and you can get a feel for the essential Kermit-esque sweetness of Jim Henson and collaborators from the juxtaposition of the first reel's rowdy framebreaking business - the chaos that attends a screening of a film we ourselves are about to see - with the entirely unmediated sweetness of a song like "The Rainbow Connection": there's a loyal and true heart beating behind these frantically reconfiguring jazz hands. As Kermie heads from his swamp home to Hollywood - driven less by the prospect of becoming rich and famous than by a desire to "make millions happy", as he and Henson surely have over the years - he turns not just one into many, but the fragile hopes and dreams expressed in that opening number into tangible big-screen reality.

It's hard not to see the carnival that follows as Henson's attempt, through writers Jack Burns and Jerry Juhl and director James Frawley, to dramatise his own struggles for artistic independence: the malevolent interventions of fast-food maven Doc Hopper (Charles Durning), obsessed with getting his mitts on Kermit's legs, are recognisably those of a system keen to eat unwary creatives up. Other elements have worn a little less well. That writing can feel as episodic as latter-day kids' films; the novelty of its celebrity cameos has lessened over time as its human faces have faded or died off; and Paul Williams' songs aren't as consistently hummable as they were in the later The Muppet Christmas Carol. The freewheeling irreverence of some of its pageantry does, however, make it very much a Muppet movie for the decade of Nashville (Elliott Gould is on hand, to seal the comparison), while the full-body Muppets - Kermit on bicycle, Gonzo pulled away by balloons - remain somehow indefinably funny.

The Muppet Movie is available on DVD through Disney.

1,001 Films: "The Jerk" (1979)

Remember when Steve Martin movies were properly funny, rather than withering tests of endurance; when he appeared to be fully engaged with the business of making grown-ups laugh, rather than simply trying to steal off with nine-year-olds' pocket money in order to fund his private art collection? The comedian's later movies would take the American dream several times more seriously than anyone but the least discerning of pre-teens could tolerate. The Jerk, on the other hand, holds up as Candide rewritten by the staff of MAD magazine, charting the rise and fall (and rise again) of Navin Johnson, "born a poor black child" after his actual parents abandon him on the front porch of a Mississippi shack. The quintessential American naif, Johnson becomes a millionaire after he invents a device that makes it easier to remove one's spectacles, but is destined to be brought low by his own director - this being Carl Reiner, cast in the once-in-a-lifetime role of "Carl Reiner The Celebrity".

Despite trace evidence of a tattiness that suggests a film rushed into production to exploit the popularity of its hot-potato star, it's less sketchy than you might remember, operating chiefly on the same zingy, how-did-we-get-here? logic that subsequently underpinned many of the best Simpsons episodes. A typically inspired stretch starts with Navin's delight at being included in the phone book ("I'm somebody!"), builds with the arrival of mad sniper M. Emmet Walsh, and concludes with Navin being pursued by the latter into a fairground where he will be deflowered by a trick motorcyclist. Throughout, Martin tempers his wild-and-crazy-guy stage persona - which could well have grown wearisome over the longer haul - with an optimism and sweetness (strumming a banjo along a beach to woo cosmetologist Bernadette Peters) which seems doubly touching in the face of a world perpetually indifferent to the fortunes of a Navin Johnson. Forrest Gump would later play similar material straight, without much in the way of satire or absurdity; The Jerk manages all that, plus elements of tragedy and social comment, and as fondly remembered Seventies studio comedies go, it's far sharper in the points it raises about race and privilege in America than the altogether scattershot Blazing Saddles. The bonus is that it's frequently hilarious: "Hey mister, don't call that dog Lifesaver. Call him... Shithead."

The Jerk is available on DVD through Universal Pictures.

The leftovers: "It Comes at Night"

With studio eyes locked almost exclusively on the flag-waving, stock-boosting business of superhero movies, it behoves us to look into the shadows for that original work being carried out under cover of darkness. In Split, Get Out and now It Comes at Night, Universal - a studio without a superhero franchise (the Fast & Furiouses don't count) but with links to the restless, inventive Blumhouse production shingle - have provided multiplex audiences with three of the year's best rollercoaster nights out, creating a mini-cycle notable for its lack of concessions to genre norms and market demands, and for its willingness to strike out into contentious, provocative territory. In each of these cases, you get a strong sense of creatives being left alone to make exactly the film they first intended to make - which is why Split plays around twenty minutes too long, and Get Out got to push the buttons it did. Peril manifests itself on both sides of the camera: just about the only certainty within these very differently pitched works is that the Avengers won't be coming along to save anybody's skin.

It Comes at Night, for its part, is the handiwork of one Trey Edward Shults, the writer-director who first served notice of his talents with 2015's Krisha, a rough-edged indie endeavour (barely released in the UK) that recruited members of the filmmaker's own family to enact a bristling Thanksgiving reunion. His follow-up dramatises another family get together - an event with its own suffocating tensions - albeit this time somewhere close to the end of the world. Paul (Joel Edgerton), Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and their teenage son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) inhabit a (never commented upon) mixed-race household that might be held up as a liberal ideal were it not for their circumstances, which prove greatly more redolent of the Michigan militia: the family's shack in the woods has been heavily fortified in the wake of an unspecified, America-wide toxic incident that has left survivors recycling their water and wearing gas masks whenever they venture beyond locked doors. (The suffocation, in other words, has become literal.) One night, this stasis is interrupted by an outsider, Will (Christopher Abbott), who claims to be seeking help for his own wife and child. Paul at first regards this younger man as yet another threat to his homestead; though, given that he himself is observed shooting two men dead without thinking on a recce to retrieve the new arrival's loved ones (wife Riley Keough, son Griffin Robert Faulkner), we're led to consider just who poses the greater risk to anybody's continued existence.

In doing so, It Comes at Night shapes up as another of those apocalyptic fictions that strives to pass comment on national character. Just as Shaun of the Dead proposed popping to the pub as the most apposite response to any societal breakdown, and the recent Aussie drama These Final Hours saw its doomed characters fire up the barbie ahead of an obliterating meteor strike, so there seems something emblematic here about Paul's decision to bring out the big guns and enter so readily into lockdown. What's notable, however, is how often Shults defaults to the perspective of Travis, the teenager growing up unsexed in a home apparently designed to at some point become a tomb. There is a battle for the future of America going on around this small patch of land: it's like a red state that has succumbed to a flurry of more progressive activity. Certainly, Abbott's Will and Keough's Kim - gentle, optimistic, cupcake-craving sensualists whose lovemaking keeps their hosts awake at night - form a marked contrast to the terse Paul and the cowed Sarah; there's an unlikely echo of the recent Brexit-themed Wife Swap in the way Shults forces different personalities into the same small, pressurised space. While these two physically symmetrical families first form an easy bond, their constituent members glad for the renewed company, from an ideological viewpoint, they remain diametrically opposed; it's not long before those underlying differences become apparent, and everything badly unravels.

Though dramatically persuasive, that unravelling proves a gradual process, and I suspect those expecting the usual quiet-quiet-loud mechanics will at the very least be thrown - as evidenced by the steady stream of teenagers who began exiting the public screening I attended from the halfway mark, either expecting a few more bumps in the night or seeking less oppressive forms of entertainment. (In essence, Shults has taken Krisha's fraught interpersonal dynamics and shifted them sideways into a notionally more commercial realm.) The film remains as tightly, hermetically sealed as the house itself, purged of the release valves of humour or those easy wind-up jolts that serve to let an audience off the hook in mainstream horror movies; it may be one of those films less impressive for what it is - which is, after all, a modestly budgeted single-location calling card - than for what it steadfastly refuses to become. At any rate, it gains an additional dimension from the performances of quietly simmering intensity Shults fosters: Edgerton, now established as one of the movies' very best readers of genre scripts (Warrior, The Gift), has a late close-up that registers as among the deftest acting we'll likely witness inside a Cineworld all summer. With performers like these, a director doesn't need much in the way of money, flashy helicopter shots or city-trashing VFX; they also ensure the monsters in It Comes at Night walk, talk and act just like us, and there is something more legitimately chilling about that than there would be in a half-dozen Conjurings, Annabelles and Paranormal Activitys.

It Comes at Night is now playing in cinemas nationwide.  

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office 
for the weekend of July 7-9, 2017:

1 (new) Spider-Man: Homecoming (12A) **
2 (1) Despicable Me 3 (U)
3 (2) Baby Driver (15) **
4 (3) Transformers: The Last Knight (12A)
5 (5) Wonder Woman (12A) ***
6 (4) All Eyez On Me (15)
7 (new) It Comes at Night (15) ***
8 (6) The House (15)
9 (new) Mom (15)
10 (7) Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge (12A) **

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five: 
1. David Lynch: The Art Life
2. The Tree of Wooden Clogs
3. The Beguiled
4. War for the Planet of the Apes
5. It Comes at Night


Top Ten DVD rentals: 

1 (4) Passengers (12) **
2 (1) T2: Trainspotting (18) **
3 (2) Hacksaw Ridge (15) ****
4 (5) Lion (12) ***
5 (new) Assassin's Creed (15)
6 (9) La La Land (12) ***
7 (new) Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (15)
8 (re) Moonlight (15) ****
9 (7) Underworld: Blood Wars (15)
10 (new) Why Him? (15)

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five: 
1. Neruda
2. Heal the Living
3. Certain Women
4. The Levelling
5. Beauty and the Beast


Top five films on terrestrial TV:
1. Die Hard with a Vengeance [above] (Saturday, BBC1, 10.10pm)
2. Forbidden Planet (Saturday, BBC2, 1.15pm)
3. Young Adult (Friday, C4, 1.20am)
4. Legally Blonde (Friday, five, 7.55pm)
5. Inception (Saturday, ITV1, 9.45pm)

1,001 Films: "The Tin Drum/Die Blechtrommel" (1979)

A deeply, richly strange adaptation of Günter Grass's allegorical novel, Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum observes the gathering Nazi storm through the eyes of Oskar Matzerath (David Bennent), a young boy of uncertain parentage from the hotly disputed port of Danzig, who - on his third birthday - vows never to grow another inch. As the army moves in, Oskar continues to express a desire to return to his mother's womb, thus escaping an increasingly cruel world; his stubbornness manifests in a bloodcurdling, glass-smashing shriek deployed whenever anybody threatens to take his beloved tin drum away from him. The symbolism is laid on thick, and it might be an idea to keep a historian close to hand: for the "bread and circuses" of Hitlerian rhetoric, an actual big top springs up, inhabited by tumbling midgets who naturally empathise with Oskar's condition, but can later be seen lining up in SS uniform, while there's an obvious parallel between the toy Oskar pounds away on and the military beat to which his country is seen to dance.

After that, you're on your own, though - with its cavalcade of dwarfs and tin soldiers, and Schlöndorff's clever use of the colour red - it may equally be possible to read these events as the darkest of fairytales, a Grimm fable from (in 1979, still recent) German history. Bennent, an old head on young shoulders, is very carefully directed through one of the most disconcerting performances in all cinema, asked to act not his age (which is to say, not cute, as so many child actors are) but years and decades older than he actually was, which gives a real creepy charge to those scenes wherein the actor - playing the teenage Oskar, still in a childlike body - has his libido awakened by the young woman who comes to work in the family shop. The sight of Bennent nursing his "son" - the result of Oskar's soursweet sex games with sherbet - would be disturbing enough in itself to power a film on the Nazi era, but Schlöndorff keeps coming up with arresting setpieces that both illustrate and dramatise the sickness and stunted growth that plagued German society of the time.

The Tin Drum is available on DVD and Blu-Ray through Arrow Academy.

Monkey magic: "War for the Planet of the Apes"

The three recent Planet of the Apes prequels - an admirable mini-cycle initiated by the Brit Rupert Wyatt with 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes and sustained by Cloverfield's Statue of Liberty toppler Matt Reeves through 2014's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to this week's War for the Planet of the Apes - have come to describe a gradual shift in the balance of power between man and monkey. Rise unfolded around a recognisable latter-day San Francisco, a location possessed of human interest enough to generate an unusually substantial subplot charting John Lithgow's retreat into the furthest reaches of Alzheimer's. Dawn, pressing onwards into a world run newly ragged by the aftereffects of an apocalyptic "simian flu" outbreak, was founded on the uneasy tension between the epidemic's survivors and newly emboldened apes with radically different visions for the future: one path through the jungle led towards peaceful co-existence, the other to a bloody assertion of tribal dominance. 

That fork in the road is now long behind us. War, drawing us deeper into the wilds and further away still from the civilisation of that first prequel, opens with a platoon of soldiers (whose helmets bear chalked-on slogans like "Endangered Species" and "Bedtime for Bonzo") fighting a doomed rearguard mission against a supremely well-organised, Vietcong-like troop of primate insurgents led by the returning rebel leader Caesar (mocap master Andy Serkis). If this defeat doesn't quite signal game over for the old humanoid order, it's soon clear we are likely watching its final, desperate throes; that we're not far from where Charlton Heston first entered this story some fifty years ago now becomes apparent back at monkey basecamp, where there's a walk-on - perhaps better: scamper-on - part for a cheeky young tyke named Cornelius.

Although a few, generally ill-fated human interlopers show their faces, we will spend practically the entire two-hour, twenty-minute duration of War embedded among the ape community, witnessing revisionist history unfolding from a distinctly simian point of view: it's possible that upwards of 90% of the key players passing across these frames are to all intents and purposes virtual creations, the evolutionary endpoints of a series that began in broadly analogue territory (remember James Franco, in his labcoat?) and has since passed decisively into the realms of the digital. For some while here, there is wonder - or as close to wonder as modern multiplex cinema can bring us to the wonders of nature itself. 

Motion capture has demonstrably developed in leaps and bounds even in just the five years since Wyatt's film, transporting its programmers and their eventual audience far beyond the jagged troughs and peaks of uncanny valley: these apes not only have intensely expressive extremities (snouts, fur, whiskers; faces that go quiet with thought and come alive again with rage), they've also been configured in such a way as to suggest vividly shifting interior states. It gives the series one especially striking new addition in Bad Ape (Steve Zahn), an oldtimer - bearing a marked resemblance to a simian Robert Duvall - liberated from a zoo to go a touch doolally in isolation; it also allows Reeves to set up and develop an unexpectedly tender relationship between kindly orangutan Maurice (Karin Konoval) and the mute foundling Caesar's band pick up on their travels - a sentimental touch, converted into a strength by careful handling.

The wizardry matters - some might say it's essential to War's cause - because (as in the recent run of Alien prequels) we're getting one of those in transit plots, conceived chiefly to shift interested parties from one point in an established universe to another we will already broadly have been aware of (monkey supremacy; the advent of Chuck). Throughout the film's equally diverting and meandering first half, you can feel Reeves and co-writer Mark Bomback riding alongside their apes on horseback, rather looking for the one good purpose or battle that might nudge this timeline on; it helps that the effects team have handed them characters that demand to be marvelled at at length, because those characters really aren't headed anywhere fast. (There is an urge to shout: just knock that Statue over already.)

Eventually, there is an endpoint: a concentration camp-cum-slave plantation cut off from the world beyond by a vast mountain range and presided over by War's one overtly recognisable humanoid - Woody Harrelson as the bulletheaded Colonel. Here is a rogue martinet lording over a private army of grunting, screeching followers; the blurring of distinctions between man and ape is presumably wholly deliberate. Although this less-than-gilded cage provides a welcome narrowing of focus, and brings the alpha-versus-alpha conflict that has been simmering throughout this cycle to a head, the film gets a little bogged down on this spot, waiting for the epochal eruption of hostilities that will spell the end of the world as you and I know it; a monkey prison break, complete with coordinated poop-slinging, provides a welcome pebbledash of humour, but everyone's basically prowling the perimeters until such time as Caesar and the Colonel stop snarling at one another and go directly for the jugular.

In this evolutionary process, then, there have been gains and losses. You can cheer how the 21st century Apes movies have improved upon their occasionally clunky predecessors, in terms of their dramatic and visual sophistication; then again, you might lament how what (even on Wyatt's watch) were brisk, thematically limber B-movies have, under the Reeves regime, swollen into sombrely attenuated post-Nolan statements on man's inhumanity to his fellow species. (Incidentally, Nolan's latest Dunkirk runs to a mere 106 minutes: even he may have had enough of this trend.) War consistently delivers on the spectacle front: the finale involves both a petrochemical explosion and an avalanche, fire and ice, Reeves allowing his VFX wonks - previously caught up in the digital equivalent of grooming their characters for gnats - a belated opportunity to cut loose. Yet the second of these seat-shakers is a wow that serves no narrative purpose; like the Apocalypse Now reference graffitied on the tunnel wall beneath the Kurtzian Harrelson's bolthole, it's more overstatement, whereas at its best the film - and this franchise - has communicated multitudes with small gestures and tiny, insinuating shifts in perspective. No monkeying around.

War for the Planet of the Apes is now playing in cinemas nationwide.