My top ten streaming picks (for the week ending April 17, 2020):
1. And Then We Danced (15) **** (Curzon, BFI)
2. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (12A) **** (via Amazon Prime)
3. Who You Think I Am (15) *** (Curzon)
4. The Grand Bizarre (uncertificated) *** (MUBI UK)
5. The Perfect Candidate (PG) *** (Curzon, BFI)
6. Vivarium (15) *** (Curzon, BFI)
7. Dogs Don't Wear Pants (18) *** (Curzon, BFI)
8. Fire Will Come (12A) *** (Curzon)
9. The Elephant Man (PG) *** (BFI)
10. Bacurau (18) *** (MUBI, Curzon)
DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten:
1 (2) Jumanji: The Next Level (12)
2 (1) Frozen II (U) **
3 (new) Sonic the Hedgehog (PG)
4 (3) Knives Out (12) ***
5 (10) Trolls (U)
6 (4) Bloodshot (12)
7 (5) Le Mans '66 (12) ***
8 (12) Spider-Man: Far from Home (12) ***
9 (new) Just Mercy (12) **
10 (11) Charlie's Angels (12) **
(source: officialcharts.com)
My top five:
1. For Sama
2. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
3. Long Day's Journey into Night
4. Why Don't You Just Die!
5. Blue Story
Top five films on terrestrial television:
1. The Conversation [above] (Saturday, BBC2, 11pm)
2. Grease (Sunday, C4, 5.50pm)
3. Crank (Saturday, ITV, 10.30pm)
4. The Damned United (Saturday, BBC1, 11.45pm)
5. Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (Friday, BBC1, 11.45pm)
The title of Reiner Holzemer's documentary Martin Margiela: In His Own Words prompts two immediate questions: who is Martin Margiela, and what will we gain from heeding his words? To address the first of these, even habitués of the fashion world from which Margiela emerged would be hard-pressed to pick the Belgian out of a line-up. Unlike Jean-Paul Gaultier, the ebullient, camera-ready Frenchman who employed him as an assistant and mentored him through the haute couture scene of the 1980s, Margiela has successfully fostered a near-complete anonymity, refusing to do press and stitching blank labels into his garments where the logo would normally go; even the models he sent down the catwalk in his 1990s heyday tended to have their hair combed forwards to obscure their faces, or cloth sacks over their heads. (We can but wonder how many of them made it down the runway and back without coming a terrible cropper.) Holzemer's film, then, holds the promise of revelation, of seeing Margiela unmasked; that it never quite delivers on it - allowing its subject to remain off-camera for the most part, heard but seen only in the form of hands flipping through sketchpads and other archive materials - is down to a directorial approach that falls somewhere between awestruck and timidly incurious. We simply never get a good look at anything other than the work, eyecatching though that often is.
The film is at its most comfortable discussing the designer's methods; as a Margiela primer, it'll just about do. What's clear is that Margiela inherited from Gaultier a certain air du punk comparable with Vivienne Westwood's simultaneous endeavours in the UK: he staged major shows on wasteland and in underground car parks, sending his models out in reconstituted tea towels or the plastic wrapping in which his creations arrived from the workshop. Holzemer is good on the effects of his subject's refusal to engage with celebrity. Firstly, we learn, it kept the spotlight on the clothes; secondly, as the New York Times critic Cathy Horyn admits, the absence of someone painstakingly explaining their creative choices obliged journos to work a little harder to contextualise Margiela's output. The film is basically a chance for the now happily retired designer to offer, in one sitting, all those justifications designers typically have to come up with after each collection. As such, though browsable in the manner of the high-end made-for-TV profile it is, it proves far less iconoclastic than its subject. Holzemer's boldest choice is an unusually rocky score by famous Belgians dEUS; arguably he adds a dash more texture to his pristine, serene digital imagery by cutting in grainy Super-8 footage shot at Margiela's oddly chaotic shows, but that would seem less a choice than a narrative obligation. His editorial, unmistakably, takes this man without a face at something like face value: the third-party interviewees (employees, journalists, ex-models) are fans who smilingly side with Margiela's gripes about the modern fashion industry. A straightahead career celebration, it throws up striking creations - dresses made out of bags and balloons give the lie to Gaultier's claim Margiela was "too serious" for fashion - and leaves you admiring the designer's commitment to the invisibility bit, but non-fashionistas may find Holzemer answers the first of those initial questions rather better than he does the second.
Martin Margiela: In His Own Words is available to stream via Curzon Home Cinema.
The twisty men-in-a-warehouse movie was wisely put into storage the minute Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs became a phenomenon: it was important, amid the indie boom of the 1990s, to work your own territory, land upon new ideas, and avoid the plagiarism lawsuits you didn't have the money to fight. Well, time has passed, and now the Texan writer-director Henry Dunham returns to the scene of the crime with The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, a terse, stylish B-movie throwback centred on a group of militiamen closing ranks after reports one of their number has opened fire at a cop funeral. Nobody as yet knows the shooter's identity, save that he may well be hiding among them; as the sirens grow louder, a decision is taken to smoke out the guilty party with an eye to turning him in, thereby preserving the group's collective behind, and we get to watch variably grizzled character actors stepping up to snipe at one another with loaded words. Chris Mulkey is the hard-nosed leader, very much the Harvey Keitel of this bunch; James Badge Dale the intense ex-cop Mulkey appoints to conduct this inhouse investigation; meek Brian Geraghty his brother, who might seem safe, were he not presenting as an Elisha Cook Jr.-like fall guy; and Patrick Fischler (now eternally remembered as the dude freaked out by the bins behind the diner in Mulholland Dr.) is a teacher with a quietly chilling knowledge of automatic weaponry.
The percentage of David Lynch alumni in this cast is, it turns out, no coincidence. What Dunham has absorbed from US cinema's foremost backwoodsman extends to an unnerving ambient sound mix and a wider sense of the malevolence lurking in remote, tree-shaded spaces - though Dunham maintains that the evil that pervades these spaces isn't supernatural but entirely manmade. As a group, his characters possess even less camaraderie than Tarantino's Dogs, who at least had the diner scene that opens their film to look back on fondly; all that unites these loners is that they've been cut off from polite society, and we're hardly reassured by the easy access they have to heavy-duty artillery. The pivotal exchange comes between Badge Dale and Mulkey on the subject of the hapless Geraghty: an agonised "He's my brother!", followed by a bloodcurdling "So?". Quietly, scene-by-scene, Standoff builds into a fully realised vision of American desolation: Dunham isolates his characters in big, abandoned industrial spaces, while setting us to wait for the worst to happen. There'd be no mistaking this for anything other than an endgame, whether for capitalism, blue-collar brotherhood, or the no less threadbare notion of white supremacy: the film's still a little off-radar, but if Dunham makes good on the considerable promise he displays here, you could see it sneaking into some future retrospective called Cinema in the Time of Trump or similar. Emotionally (and visually, with its considered Edward Hopper lighting) it falls on the cool side, and it's almost unavoidably masculine, which might put some off. Yet its stilled assurance struck me as mightily impressive: in a VOD market awash with hokey horror fodder turned in by chancers with no greater ambition than to be the next James Wan, how intriguing and encouraging to see a young filmmaker looking in the direction of early Kubrick or Sam Fuller instead.
The Standoff at Sparrow Creek is now available to rent via Amazon Prime.
The Japanese maverick Sion Sono came out of the decade just gone rather less forcefully than he went into it, but then it was always going to be hard to top the almighty primal howl of Himizu, his berserker masterpiece of 2011. Preceded by the logos of studios Shochiku and Universal, Sono's 2015 film Tag is the kind of genre piece our auteurs sometimes have a go at so as to fund more personal projects down the line, occasionally bringing a fresh idea or two into play with them. It has a very workable set-up - broadly Quantum Leap meets The Butterfly Effect - and a notoriously wicked opening, as a coachload of daytripping schoolgirls are met head on by a bracing gust of wind that literally blows right through them, leaving the bookish, dreamy Mitsuko (the Vienna-born Reina Trindl, not unlike an Asiatic Carey Mulligan with her naturally downturned features) as the sole survivor. Our girl embarks upon a fresh start, only to find there are forces at play in her universe that she cannot outrun; the viewer, meanwhile, is set to ghoulish chuckling, and the realisation Sono has spent whatever downtime a relentlessly prolific tyro has boning up on string theory.
Tag retains that fondness for full-throttle exploitation Sono displayed in his breakthrough works Love Exposure and Cold Fish: one oft-documented side effect of that killer breeze is how it blows up the schoolgirls' skirts, as if they were in The Benny Hill Show circa 1983 (call it G-string theory), and we also get possibly the most OTT kill scenes ever to have snuck into a 15-rated movie. Equally, though, some of Sono's choices - like the extended overhead shots of Mitsuko and truant friends running wild in the country - are bold and rewarding enough not to scream "trashy, dashed-off B-movie". The intensity Sono brings to what are in effect linking or expository sequences suggest he connected with some aspect of Yusuke Yamada's novel - quite possibly its heroine's ability to disrupt the norm. We're just settling into each new reality Mitsuko runs into when something major comes out of leftfield to change the game; basically, the movie is an excuse for Sono to enter various formal settings (a maths class, a wedding ceremony, a marathon) which he then takes great delight in trashing. Anyone hoping he might match Himizu's agonised sincerity might as well look elsewhere, because the goal is to elicit a WTAF every twenty minutes, but Tag unarguably achieves that, while confirming Sono as one of the few directors at large who seem incapable of making a dull movie - even when he's reporting to the studio suits.
Tag is available to stream via Amazon Prime.
Back in the glory days of the video shop, I'll Take Your Dead would have made a perfectly decent rental on one of those weekends when the bigger titles were all out: a taut, well-sustained Canadian horror-thriller, centred on the person of a professional "cleaner", the widowed owner of a snowily remote farm paid to make the bodies racked up in gang activity disappear, no questions asked. William (Aidan Devine) retains some scruples, nevertheless: he enforces a strict no-kids rule, in part because he has a 12-year-old daughter of his own (Ava Preston), with whom he hopes to move to sunny El Paso and a better life. By the end of the first act, however, he also has a problem, in the form of a body that wasn't nearly as lifeless as his clients thought. The title suggests some jokey, tongue-in-cheek romp, yet while the film's not without its flickers of black comedy, writer Jayme Laforest and director Chad Archibald mostly play this situation (dead) straight. For much of its duration, indeed, it's practically a stageplay: a three-hander between dad, daughter and Jackie (Jess Salgueiro), the young woman who wakes up on William's chopping board to challenge his routine and become a confidante to the girl. It could do with a dash more directorial oomph in the run-up to the finale, in which the criminal element returns to this doorstep to settle accounts and William - in an echo of Straw Dogs - has to defend those he loves with assistance from unexpected sources, but it's nudged along, and finally into unexpectedly emotional territory, by very creditable performances from Devine and Preston.
I'll Take Your Dead is available to rent via Amazon Prime.
My top ten streaming picks (for the week ending April 10, 2020):
1. And Then We Danced (15) **** (Curzon, BFI)
2. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (12A) **** (via Amazon Prime)
3 (new) Who You Think I Am (15) *** (Curzon)
4 (new) The Grand Bizarre (uncertificated) *** (MUBI UK)
5. The Perfect Candidate (PG) *** (Curzon, BFI)
6. Vivarium (15) *** (Curzon, BFI)
7. Dogs Don't Wear Pants (18) *** (Curzon, BFI)
8. Fire Will Come (12A) *** (Curzon)
9. The Elephant Man (PG) *** (BFI)
10. Bacurau (18) *** (MUBI)
DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten:
1 (1) Frozen II (U) **
2 (new) Jumanji: The Next Level (12)
3 (3) Knives Out (12) ***
4 (4) Bloodshot (12)
5 (2) Le Mans '66 (12) ***
6 (9) Downton Abbey: the Movie (PG)
7 (11) Rocketman (15) ***
8 (6) Joker (15) **
9 (new) Frozen/Frozen II Double Pack (U) **
10 (32) Trolls (U)
(source: officialcharts.com)
My top five:
1. For Sama
2. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
3. Long Day's Journey into Night
4. Blue Story
5. Knives Out
Top five films on terrestrial television:
1. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory [above] (Easter Sunday, ITV, 2.35pm)
2. The Ten Commandments (Easter Sunday, five, 1.40pm)
3. Pretty Woman (Easter Sunday, five, 10pm)
4. Loveless (Easter Sunday, C4, 12.55am)
5. Clouds of Sils Maria (Saturday, BBC2, 11pm)
One quirk of the current shutdown is that critics have been professionally obliged to consider fewer titles, but a far greater range of material than they might once have done: with those middlebrow dramas that make up the arthouse's bread-and-butter suddenly out of the picture, the contrast between, say, Trolls World Tour (streaming from tomorrow) and the week's more marginal releases appears newly stark. (The weekly roster may have been thinned out, but it's fallen unexpectedly in line with the French release schedules, which never lack for artful odds and sods.) Last week, MUBI UK showcased Nona..., a Chilean hybrid that wasn't at all this viewer's cup of tea, but which self-isolating cinephiles may have been tempted to take a punt on; this week, the platform is highlighting Jodie Mack's The Grand Bizarre, which - at just an hour long - wouldn't have come within touching distance of a theatrical release and the coverage that comes with that. As its punning title indicates, the business of this zappy pop-art curio is material itself: it bombards the viewer with highly colourful fragments and offcuts of fabric, sourced here, there and everywhere, and deftly stitched (by Mack herself, in what is very much a one-woman show) into a jittery audiovisual tapestry that variously recalls the animations of Len Lye, Godfrey Reggio's stoner-classic Koyaanisqatsi, and the projections at every other illegal rave of the early 1990s.
Plastic globes bouncing across the frame and passing inserts of shipping containers might suggest Mack is keen to press a few sociopolitical observations upon us: that similar patterns recur in the East and the West, possibly, or that these fabrics have been sewn with such evident skill it's a pity their makers are paid peanuts. The film also invites approach, however, as a molten blast of eye-popping stimuli, setting radically diverse shades, textures and animated ribbontails loose to an eccentric score (repetitious beats, esoteric, Art of Noise-like samples) which is itself of a piece with Mack's manic, mix-and-match editing. There's an extent to which the film seems to be recreating the experience of those flickbooks that allow the reader to dress and redress various characters, albeit at a speed that reflects the hyperaccelerated rate at which the planet now turns. Every image poses a question: how does this look? And now? And now? For a while, I wondered whether the appeal might wear off, even at an hour's duration. But no: Mack finds new juxtapositions, new horizons, taking her samples on a train, then a ship, generally alighting at some novel way of illustrating those points where the material world and the world of materials intersect. The closing stretch is a hypnotic flicker, topped by one of the year's most unexpected - therefore funniest - punchlines. (Some of these fabrics must have been... dusty.) Unlike Nona - which required contextualising information its maker wasn't prepared to give - The Grand Bizarre clearly hails from the experimental cinema's accessible and playful wing: you could even set it before housebound children, who are likely to be mesmerised by its colours and shapes, and - if you're not careful in its immediate aftermath - running amok with scissors, hacking great swatches out of the contents of your wardrobe.
The Grand Bizarre is now streaming on MUBI UK.
