Change Your Image
phantlers
Reviews
As Above, So Below (2014)
Risible rubbish
An hour and a half I'll never get back. Starts off with the heroine reciting her c.v. into camera for a supposed documentary in the making and continues in this shaky hand-held phony-reality mode throughout, increasingly annoyingly.
For much (too much) of the film the viewer is subjected to meaningless, blurred imagery of the type one gets when walking down the street with one's phone video camera running. IOW, utterly meaningless and very, very cheap, nasty and lazy. Found footage my arse, found where, in the dustbin out behind a high street photo shop?
The female lead, one Perdita Weeks (who sounds like a pound-shop Connie Nielsen in Gladiator - RP as shorthand for super-intelligent, highly educated, morally impeccable - d'uh) is unconvincing from the get-go and the whole film 'turns' on her (a supposed world authority on archaeology, alchemy and several related academic disciplines) discovering The Philosopher's Stone and then trousering said artifact from a never-before discovered corner of Paris's catacombs. Just like that, and as indeed you do - if you are Charles Peace and not David Attenborough.
It ends very disappointingly with three of the main characters surviving their underground ordeal after an escape that is as unlikely as it is obviously the only way to wrap up this abomination. By that time one might well have lost any empathy with any of them and damn the producers for not killing them all and leaving the mystery intact.
It sets out to be Indiana Jones but ends up an extended episode of Scooby Doo does The Crystal Maze. A really, really dull episode.
Shame (2011)
A Quiet Classic
I enjoyed the extended commentary in the form of printed word placement on screen from advertisements, street signs, graffiti or newspaper headlines, wherein lies some humour and irony. Similarly, the epiphany towards the end when Brandon realises the truth of what Sissy has said about the value of their relationship and its importance for each of them. For me, this is the shame of the title, his realisation of how he may have betrayed the essential values (and people, including himself) in his life for the superficial or the artifice, as represented by placing sex before love. There's a nagging thought that the title may also echo a reference to an imagined incestuous act that never occurs but which may well have been anticipated by an audience teased by the trailer and synopsis, perhaps another joke by the director.
There is much allegory here, in what is a deeply layered tale - something about the superficiality of thrill-seeking and the worthlessness of placing the immediate satisfaction brought by feeding an insatiable craving over nurturing a relationship that may become more lasting and worthwhile.
I'm not convinced Brandon has a 'sex addiction' per se, as is widely supposed, so much as a compulsion to seek out the immediate thrill of an orgasm, something closer to an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder than an 'addiction'.
Sure, I may have over-thought this a little and perhaps this belongs in a discussion rather than a review but that's how the film - and its superbly atmospheric soundtrack - moved me.
Young Adam (2003)
A Very Scottish Film
Just a few words of recommendation. This is masterfully understated and as others have already said, all about the performances, the script, the scenery, the way of life. It is very much a Scots film that meets with the 'Scottish Screen' proud tradition of quality writing, acting, direction, photography and tacit social commentary. This is almost documentary in its feel, raising questions of morality with the cold detachment of the post-mortem room.
The film is not relentlessly dark. There are moments of playfulness and some very bleak Scots humour. Overall, it is a good performance by Ewan McGregor but which is only made possible by some very strong supporting work by Peter Mullan, Tilda Swinton and Emily Mortimer.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009)
No Satisfaction
Perhaps this film defines me as an average movie-goer but it was my third trip to an art-house cinema (Cineclub de Tavira, Portugal) in a week and by far the least satisfying, and I am usually a fan of both David Lynch and Werner Herzog. I cannot recall a film with so many unsympathetic characters since W. C. Fields's heyday, and at least in his pictures they were played that way for laughs.
Herzog draws some good performances out of a talented cast but the story, such as it is, hardly extends beyond a ten to fifteen minute short, in fact the trailer that was shown the week before the screening contained all of the film's most significant action.
The most disappointing element of all was that the S.W.A.T. team does not shoot the lead character to pieces in the last scene. By then I might even have been ready to turn their weapons on myself.
Nothing Personal (2009)
An Ode To Solitude
I watched this alone, in a foreign cinema far from home and found it highly resonant. It is a love story, and one of some sort of healing of the senses.
There are some exquisitely observed scenes, the sensuousness of her running the seaweed through her hands (several times) and their connectedness with nature form a counterpoint to their individual alienation and personal sorrow, their unrevealed grief. That and the scene in which she demonstrates an extraordinary culinary talent reveal a refinement that he shows us from the outset with his solitary decorum.
The gradual acceptance of their feelings for one another is well constructed although like at least one other commentator I felt the use of some fractured chronology was ambiguous and unsatisfactorily edited.
There is the eventual, inevitable tragedy, punctuated with some (mostly wry) comedy along the way but some sense of uncertainty at the end. Whatever else it may be, it features two very moving performances that are deserving of any awards the film receives.
Khlebnyy den (1998)
A Modern Classic
Sergei Dvortsevoy's technique of leaving a sometimes apparently unattended camera running is most effective in the shop scenes where the villagers enact a darkly comic ritual of banter and barter.
There is a rich vein of comedy and tragedy running through the film that is characteristically Russian. Even the lingering shots of the goats munching are charged with a sense of absurd philosophy. They set the scene for the pace of life in the village and the importance of the bread, it's all they have to do, just like the goats, eat and pass the time of day with one another, just as the goats do when one unexpectedly rears up to greet another through an open window.
The piece is punctuated with moments like that and it is a moving portrait of a dying way of life in a stunningly beautiful but decrepit setting.
Kate & Leopold (2001)
Leopold and who?
I watched this on TV and was appalled at how unsympathetic Ryan's character is, she is a utterly dreadful woman that in whom it's hard to believe a 19th century throwback might find any redeeming quality. Once you get over that gaping plot flaw the time travel is easy.
There are some charming moments though, mainly derived from the basic conceit and Jackman's performance, and the photography is good overall.
The best feature is probably the subtext that good manners are important whatever age we live in. Like the touching moment when we don't see Ryan make her 'leap of faith', we also don't quite see how, when or why this realisation hits her - the character she plays is cynical and graceless, quite how she manages such a profound personality polarity reversal is beyond 21st century science.
The Sorcerers (1967)
Early Brit para-psychological crime thriller.
This is a long way from 'Performance', even further than Lisson Grove (St. John's Wood) is from Powis Square (Notting Hill).
Watching on BBC2 in 2008 one immediately supposes that the motive for th elderly couple will be to experience something erotic but it is very British, and very 1960's that the only seduction is that of the Professor's initially benign wife into avarice and violence. The film is misogynistic and of course sensational but the subtext that subversion of free will - and there are clear parallels and references to hallucinogens and other 'recreational' drugs - leads to suggestibility and is close to inviting mind control.
The denouement is comical as the Police Inspector ushers the two protagonists back to the patrol car - superbly driven in the chase scene, its lumbering spin off the road is memorable - and instructs the driver to chauffeur them home. Case closed.