Michael Hardach - Creative Writing

Paul Thomas Anderson's "Inherent Vice" – One word is the last word

2016-11-20T01:03:00.002-08:00

I don't using go for one-word reviews, but here goes...

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Loathsome.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

Maybe it would be better you were wasted but I doubt it.

Personal Score: 0/10

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on the BBC's Top 21st Century films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Tomas Alfredson's "Let The Right One In" – Little Miss Vampire

2016-11-12T08:37:00.000-08:00

The glut of vampire movies in the past few years has passed me by. As with actual vampires, I've heard they're out there but I've never felt the urge to seek them out. But here comes one on the BBC’s 21^st Century’s 100 Greatest Films list, so I sat down to watch it, driven to my television like a vampire to its bed at daybreak.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

One thing Tomas Aldredson's film, Let The Right One In, is not is scary. There is none of the cushion hiding, stomach clenching terror of Hitchcock's Psycho, for example, despite a fair number of sudden vampire attacks. And it doesn't have the full-blown sexual elements of many vampire films either. There is a love story between the vampire, Eli (Lina Leandersson) and a twelve-year-old boy, Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) but they never get much sexier than 'going steady'.

Oskar is bulled at school by a classmate called Connie. Connie has two henchmen who he seems to bully almost as much as Oskar, which is a nice little touch. As a result of the bullying, Oskar stabs trees with a hunting knife in an impotent rage, and collects a psycho's scrapbook of newspaper clippings about murders, which soon start to include local murders when Little Miss Vampire moves next door with her middle-aged helper, Håkan (Per Ragnar). Håkan turns out to be the world's most inept renfield, stringing up local victims with no care whatsoever for being discovered in the act of draining their blood. Unsurprisingly, he is disturbed by passers-by every time and is soon bumped off. Apparently, Håkan has a more developed role in the novel on which this film is based, but in the film he's a waste of space.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

Oskar's parents are separated and his father (as well as apparently most of the other local men) is an alcoholic. It's a nice touch to show this most prosaic of human weaknesses as a direct analogy with the vampire's exotic lust for another liquid, blood.

Given it's not scary or sexy and given that most people agree vampires don't exist, you might be wondering what the heck is the point of this film. In some respects it is a coming of age film, with Oskar going through puberty, doing weight lifting to build up his body and confronting his bullies. In this way, Eli can be seen as a personification of Oskar's lust for blood in revenge for his bullying as well as for his nascent sexuality. There is a moment when Eli sneaks a glimpse at Eli's crotch while she is undressing and we see a scar in place of genitalia of either sex. Given that Oskar has never seen a naked girl, it would make sense that his imagination projects a big question mark there if we interpret Eli as a kind of phantom stand-in for his murderous rage. Eli also has a habit of flitting across impossible gaps across buildings through high-up windows, and of appearing from nowhere (as at the swimming pool at the end), which also supports the idea that she's not really there. Plodding old Håkan is the fly in this metaphorical ointment, of course.

It's worth watching for the claustrophobia of the community, the beautiful snow-bound photography and the sweet and dangerous relationship that develops between Eli and Oskar.

Just one thing though – will vampires *please* wipe their freaking mouths after a blood meal. Gross.

Personal Score: 5/10

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on the BBC's Top 21st Century films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Jacques Audiard's "A Prophet" – Breakin' the law, breakin' the law

2016-11-10T14:19:00.000-08:00

Here in the UK, most kids go to free state schools but there are also private schools with fees. The fees are about 20,000 GBP a year, or 72 percent of the average UK salary of 27,600 GBP – so it's not for everyone. Apart from keeping their young charges away from the riffraff, the private schools claim to help the pupils achieve their aspirations and realize their potential. They hire inspirational teachers, or at least teachers who pretend to give a damn about the needs of the kids. I mention this because in Jacques Audiard's film A Prophet, a similar development happens to the main character, Malik (Tahar Rahim), an Arab serving a six-year sentence in a tough French jail.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

Rather than an inspirational teacher, Malik is guided by the ghost of Ryad (Adel Bencherif), a prisoner who Malik is forced to kill early in the film by a Corsican gang boss, Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup). Ryad has offered Malik drugs in exchange for sex. When Malik goes to his cell, concealing a razorblade in his mouth, Ryad talks gently to Malik about books and learning to read in order to calm him down. This is unendurable to the nervous Malik, who'd hoped to attack Ryan immediately, so the murder doesn't go as planned and ends up in a messy fight.

While it's conceivable that Ryad would talk kindly to Malik ahead of a cosy sexual encounter, it's harder to understand why his ghost continues in the same vein after Ryad has murdered him. Nevertheless, that is what the ghost does. What's more, the ghost is a kind of angel and Malik turns out to be a sort of prophet in the Muhammad mould. You might also wonder why Muhammad and an angel would be mentoring and developing the aspirations of a drugs boss, which Malik gradually turns into over the course of the film, inevitably eclipsing the influence of Cesar along the way. But hey, you've just got to roll with this stuff if you stick with the film.

Given that poor prisoners are unlikely to end up in privately education, the only chance for the realisation of their aspirations is likely to be the appearance of a guardian angel. I suspect this is a rare event in real life, which doubtless explains the lamentable state of personal development among modern-day prisoners. But shy, gauche Malik makes the most of his good luck and becomes a proper boss, playing the various criminal gangs against each other both inside and outside the jail.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

Tahar Rahim plays Malik beautifully. When the other characters point out his limitations, he brushes them away with little shrugs and shakes of his head, as though he's already moved on to the next thing. The prisoners are superbly cast and really look the part – I suspect many are not formal actors, It's a long film but the quality keeps up throughout. For example, about three-quarters through, when the script could have started to flag, suddenly there are two sweetheart touches from the scriptwriters. First, Malik dresses in a suit and tie and his crim friend tells him he looks just like a lawyer – a lovely piece of dialogue since lawyers are probably the only people he's encountered who wear suits and ties. Then shortly afterwards, Malik goes through airport security for the first time – he has never flown before. A guard pats him down, and at the end Malik subserviently sticks out his tongue, just as he's used to doing during the searches when he comes in and out of prison.

Another thing that's done well is the standard thriller device of a murder plan that goes wrong. There's the attack on Ryad at the beginning, and later Malik and his friend attack a rival gang boss in his armoured car. But the car doesn't stop in the way it usually does and the pair have to think on their feet to get the job done. In each case, seeing how Malik reacts to the stress of the unexpected events leads to a memorable scene that brings out his character and also develops the plot in a skilful way.

Personal Score: 8/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on the BBC's Top 21st Century films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Coen Brothers' "Hail, Caesar!" – Squint against the grandeur!

2016-11-05T09:26:00.001-07:00

I recently finished watching the IMDB Top 250 list and for that exercise I watched every film, regardless of whether I expected to love or hate them. I’m now working through the BBC’s 21^st Century’s 100 Greatest Films list and, well, I’m being slightly less rigorous. There are certain directors (Tarantino, Scorsese, Nolan and Jackson for example) that I’ve simply had a bellyful of on the Top 250 list. To put it bluntly, I won’t be watching any more of their fucking films. Steven Spielberg is a different case. There are quite a few of his films on the 250 list. Some of the earlier ones (Jaws, Jurassic Park) I enjoyed. Others I really hated (Schindler's List). Generally the sentimentality and artistic misjudgement of the later films outweigh the positive elements for me – there’s no denying Spielberg’s talent, but the rage these later films generate in me can’t be good for the heart, so I’ve decided to add Spielberg to the Cunt List along with Tarantino etc. (Sorry I’ve got a bit sweary in this introduction, by the way.)

All of this is a longwinded way of saying that I haven’t watched the film at Number 83 on the BBC list, A.I. Artifical Intelligence, by Steven Spielberg, and I’ve replaced it with Hail, Caesar!, by the Coen Brothers.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Hail, Caesar! isn’t a well-loved film among the Coen Brothers’ output. People complain that it hasn’t got a plot, or they walked out of it, or fell asleep during it or whatever. Personally, I loved it and chuckled my way through the whole thing.

The set pieces – George Clooney’s epic Roman scenes, Channing Tatum’s tap-dancing routine, Scarlett Johansson’s synchronized swimming extravaganza, Alden Ehrenreich’s adventures with his horse, Whitey – are all magnificent, and serve both as a homage to the entertainment value of 1950s Hollywood big-budget movies and a knowing nod to the artifice and non-reality of these glitzy entertainments.

Alden Ehrenreich’s cowboy character, Hobie Doyle, is pushed into a mannered drawing-room drama directed by a British director Laurence Laurentz, played by Ralph Fiennes. Hobie is horribly miscast due to the unavailability of any other actor and doesn’t make a success of the role. It’s a sign of the genius of this film, however, that the Coens don’t mock poor Hobie from one end of the film to the other. On a date contrived for publicity purposes by the studio between Hobie and a young starlet, Hobie is allowed to be charming as he demonstrates his lassoing skills with spaghetti strands at the dinner table. This is the kind of artistic judgement that comes with the long experience of the Coens.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

Of course, without the problems in production (Hobie’s miscasting, Scarlett’s character’s pregnancy, Clooney’s character’s kidnapping), there would be no need for Eddie Mannix (played by Josh Brolin) as the Hollywood fixer, who has to keep the expensive productions running smoothly. Mannix is a Catholic and he is often tempted in the film – to lie, to smoke cigarettes after he’s told his wife he’s quit, and to change industries to a well-paid position being offered by the engineering firm Lockheed. But while the crazy, frivolous world of Hollywood is held up against the sober, cushy world of Lockheed, Mannix is never in any doubt about where his heart lies. When the Lockheed recruiter shows Mannix a photo of a hydrogen bomb detonation that his company has been involved with, the relative evils of the two industries are put into focus.

A nicely understated aspect of this film is that Mannix is such a brilliant manager. He walks the line between satisfying political pressures and compromising quality. He promises to follow up on the results of his decisions (such as watching the rushes) and always does what he says he’ll do. He deals with the creatives in exactly the right way to keep them happy and to extract their best performances. It’s not often that the mundane techniques of proper work are convincingly shown in art, but this is a great example.

George Clooney has worked with the Coen Brothers on a number of films now and I think he gives good value. I liked him in another much hated Coen Brothers film, Intolerable Cruelty. The DVD extras of that film showed him doing a dozen takes of spitting out a mouthful of tea in surprise, and I don’t doubt that his jowl-shaking response to being slapped by Mannix towards the end of this film took just as much effort to get perfect. Clooney’s character is kidnapped by a group of Marxist writers, who are furious at being cut out of the profits of the films that rely on their scripts, and who get their revenge by slipping in sly Marxist references wherever they can to the studio’s film scripts. There are some long scenes of Clooney with the Marxists and I suspect it is these that cause much of the negative reactions to Hail, Caesar!. I loved them though – they are full of little gags, not least of which is the sight of these Marxists having their earnest discussions in a luxury ocean-side building, complete with servants, eating crustless cucumber sandwiches.

Personal Score: 9/10

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on the BBC's Top 21st Century films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Steve McQueen's "Shame" – Might as well face it, you're addicted

2016-10-30T00:53:00.000-07:00

Last week I reviewed Spike Jonze's 2013 film, Her, and this week it's Steve McQueen's 2011 film, Shame. Both have a one-word title. They were released within two years of each other. They sit three places apart on the BBC's list of 21^st Century's 100 Greatest Films. Both deal with a professional white man's dysfunctional attitude towards sex following a traumatic incident. Both contain an unconventional sexualized female foil to the lead man's sexual dysfunction: in the case of Her, an AI Operating System, and in the case of Shame, a sister.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Of course there are differences. In Shame, Brendon (Michael Fassbender) does not have a sexual relationship with his sister. And Shame is set in contemporary New York rather than the unspecified future of Her. This last point makes me admire Shame a little bit more than Her because I think it's always harder to pull off a narrative with a wider social resonance when it's based in the here and now, as opposed to a sci-fi setting where basically anything can happen. Tying a story to the present creates huge challenges in how to lift the narrative from mundanity, how to surprise and excite your audience in comparison. But when it works, as it does in Shame, the reward is a story with more credibility because it has its roots in the messiness of real life.

Brandon is a sex addict. His sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), is messed up. Both their problems come from some shared issue in their Irish childhood. It's not explicitly mentioned, but the implication is child abuse of some kind, whether sexual or mental or physical or a combination.

Both of them are drawn to sexual encounters with married partners, like Selvy in Don DeLillo's novel 'Running Dog,' as a way to avoid intimacy, avoid long lasting relationships. Perhaps brother and sister do it for different reasons, Sissy living through one tempestuous and disastrous relationship after another, Brandon more self-aware, more calculating.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

Brandon relishes the role of cuckolder – at one point he openly taunts the thuggish boyfriend of a woman he is seducing in a bar, making him sniff his fingers. Fassbender does a great job with the role, just as Joaquin Phoenix did in Her. It would be interesting to see how a black actor would play it, opening up another layer of complexity to an already complex character due to the traditional role of black men in cuckold literature (usually written by white men, of course).

His use of pornography at home and at work, his constant masturbation, his frequent use of hookers, brothels, sex clubs, pick-up bars, and even a gay sex booth is a welcome realistic portrayal of a sex addict. Yes, he also has the ability to attract strangers on the metro, in regular bars etc, but it would be a mistake to show his character as any kind of glamorous superstud, and the film does not do that. It's true that he always seems to be able to perform, while real-life sex addicts generally end up complaining about erectile dysfunction. The single exception is when he tries to have sex with a woman from work who breaks the mould – she is single, she isn't afraid to call out the weirdness of his lack of commitment, she implies that a longer term relationship is what she wants.

And at the end, after everything he's gone through, does he rise to the bait of the reappearance of a married woman on the subway that he flirted with before? He holds back but he can't stop looking. The camera cuts away.

Personal Score: 7/10

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on the BBC's Top 21st Century films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Spike Jonze's "Her" – No Oscar for Scarlett, just some lovely Golden Globes

2016-10-26T01:26:00.000-07:00

Speaking as someone who's followed Scarlett Johansson's career with interest for many years :-) I've noticed that her performances have never troubled the Academy judges, although she's picked up a few Golden Globes along the way. Natalie Portman managed to squeeze in an Oscar before she squeezed out her first baby. Perhaps Johansson hoped for the same with her performance in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, completed before her own first child, but it didn't happen. In truth, most of the time she seems to have been happy to take the pay cheques for the blockbusters. The few smaller films she's done recently have twice been vanity projects for the director (Jon Favreau's Chef and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Don Jon). But there's also this one, Spike Jonze's Chef, where Johansson plays the voice of an intelligent Operating System (OS) who has a relationship with a human, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix).

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Her works best as a satire on current society. The sight of a street full of people walking along, talking to their phones, doesn't seem so far away from people's current obsession with smart phones, and the bespoke letter writing service that Theadore works for, his virtual reality games and his late night cybersex with strangers all seem a baby step away from current technology and social trends. No one seems to wear belts in this society, so there's another prediction that Her will live or die by in future decades.

It's less successful as a commentary on the nature of relationships. Yes, if computer AI became indistinguishable from a real person, sad sacks of both sexes would eagerly seek relationships with them. Yes, if the AI was really working, the computer would end up having something to say about the state of the relationship. But so what? What's impressive about the script, though, is the way it doesn't veer down a thousand and one dreadful plot lines (the computer manufacturers pull the plug on it. The OS becomes a vindictive jealous lover. The OS and her OS friends are really out to control humans and take over the world etc etc.) Instead, the idea that the OS evolves to the point where the tiny gaps between sentences with a human become intolerable silences that must be filled with thousands of other interactions and even love affairs is a neat way to wrap up the messiness of the situation.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

The minimal questions asked by the computer when Theodore sets up his OS are a real highlight of the film. Once the sex is decided as a woman, the only question that is needed is what is your relationship like with your mother? And even then, the computer doesn't need to hear the whole answer. The idea that a man's ideal computer helpmate can be defined from this question is a little piece of genius and no doubt explains why the two of the them subsequently get on so well.

Another nice touch is that an AI alien character in one of Theodore's virtual reality computer games (played with gusto by Spike Jonze himself) hears the conversation outside of the game and starts joining in with it. And it's good detail that – after we're told that Theodore uses internet pornography – one of his fantasies involves a pregnant celebrity, a detail so random it I'd gladly bet my mortgage that it reflects the real-life fetish interest of one of the writers or the director. (It does perhaps tie back to the mother OS set-up question and forward to the inevitably childless nature of a relationship with an OS, a point which is otherwise never mentioned.)

There are a few ropey moments of the kind that seem to creep into even the most carefully written Sci-fi. For example, Theodore feels the need to explain to 'Samantha' (the name of his OS) who his ex-wife is, even though she would undoubtedly have already known this from his divorce proceedings. The cybersex he has early on with a late night stranger turns unnecessarily surreal with his partner insisting on bringing in choking with a dead cat into the fantasy. (As though we'd hate Theodore too much if we saw him enjoying the encounter.) I wasn't really convinced by the surrogate – a stranger who Samantha enlists to act out her relationship with Theodore with a real human body.

Overall, it's a smart and thoughtfully shot film that casts a light on life in 2013 (and 2016). I do wonder whether people's obsessions with their smartphones will last. Years ago I remember scoffing when Douglas Adams predicted that people would tire of digital watches. They seemed so ubiquitous, so useful and so cool that surely they were here to stay (like Bros-mania). A few short years later and only the gnarliest geeks were wearing them.

Personal Score: 6/10

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on the BBC's Top 21st Century films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Lucrecia Martel's "The Headless Woman" – Don't phone and drive

2016-10-20T11:32:00.001-07:00

Still reeling from having my Hollywood expectations shattered from Claire Denis’s White Material I now stagger into another mind-blowing film from the BBC’s list of the 21^st Century’s 100 Greatest Films: Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman.

Not everyone will like it because a lot of the time you’re not really sure what’s going on. But at the end of the film I was left with a clear idea, if not of what had precisely happened, at least of the range of possibilities of what had happened. Which is fair enough, given that the characters don't know precisely what happened either.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Novelists such as Don DeLillo and Ian McEwan, influenced perhaps by university English degrees and literary theory, delight in constructing fictional scenarios to demonstrate that life is not always best summarised by the rational 'single right answer' approach of science. There can be multiple interpretations of reality, each with an equal claim to validity. A similar artistic desire is at work in this film.

An early example is the overlapping, irrational, unintelligible babble of conversation between friends and their children as they prepare for a car journey. This is an alternative reality that defies rational sense, and yet one that rings true to life and one that the characters are delighted to inhabit. Don DeLillo nailed this kind of bonkers family car talk in his novel 'White Noise,' where factually incorrect statements, irrelevant comments, in-jokes etc are all bundled up and, taken together, form a meaningful reality for that family.

As well as the dialogue we get a similar ambiguity with a handprint on the car window of the lead character, Vero. We see the handprint being left by a child in that flurry of exchanges between the friends but later it causes doubt in Vero's and the audience's mind after a possible hit and run accident.

Did she hit a dog, a boy or both? We don't know and she doesn't know. There was a dog and boy apparently present at the scene, and a boy is also shown momentarily stuck in an empty canal, ahead of a heavy storm. He could have drowned because he was trapped, or he could have been knocked in by Vero's car.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

The subsequent cover-up by Vero's menfolk also leads to a rewriting of reality, such as her hotel booking and X-rays from the time of the accident being erased.

And in an Ian McEwen style take on alterative realities, Vero has suffered from possible concussion or at least mental shock, which distorts the way she perceives the world, and the way we perceive it through her point of view.

Combine all this with an intentionally anachronistic mix of Seventies music and hairstyles with modern phones and cars and you have yet another artificially created reality.

The framing and composition of the camera shots also enhances the feeling of ambiguity. A frequent device is a vertical line that blocks part of the screen from top to bottom – an out of focus building column or a crack between glass doors, for example – that seems to echo the characters' incomplete view of what is going on.

There are two big themes of guilt and class divide. Towards the end, Vero heaps kindness on a local boy who begs for money in exchange for chores in a guilt transference from her supposed road victim. It’s a nice touch that – perhaps sensing that Vero’s state of mind is uncharacteristic and temporary – the boy gruffly declines her offers of food and a bath, as though to accept them would endanger his future visits to this affluent household.

Personal Score: 7/10

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on the BBC's Top 21st Century films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Tom McCarthy's "Spotlight" – Father Jack

2016-10-13T14:28:00.000-07:00

I was astonished to discover that watching Tom McCarthy's film Spotlight was part of Pope Francis' yearly Christmas Day ritual with his family. Every year after Christmas Dinner, he settles down with his extended family to watch McCarthy's searing revelations about the child abusing priests of Boston.

Then I remembered that I'd made up that story. It's not true at all.

You don’t need a masters in Film Studies or Theory of Literature to realize that when a film claims to be based on a true story, it’s going to be anything but. It doesn’t matter how earnest the intentions or how slavishly the actors research their roles, it’s going to be as much of a subjective work of fiction as Luc Besson’s Transporter or Keenen Ivory Wayans's White Chicks. And films don’t get much more earnest than Tom McCarthy’s account of the exposure of paedo Catholic priests by the Boston Globe newspaper. The actors apparently hung out with the real life journos so they could copy their exact mannerisms and voices. Is the result a faithful and objective account of what happened in the lead up to the explosive revelations by the Globe’s crack investigative department, Spotlight? No it is not.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Let’s take a look at a few arguments that various characters put across to us in this film.

1. Around fifty percent of catholic priests are not celibate

2. This causes a culture of secrecy from which six percent emerge as nonces

3. The victims include both girls and boys. The abuse has nothing to do with homosexuality and is predatory behaviour. Boy victims are often chosen because their shame will cause them to keep quiet about the abuse.

We’re given no idea of where these fifty percent and six percent statistics come from. The six percent figure sounds suspiciously accurate – not five percent or ten percent – six percent, as though accurate to a confidence level of one in a hundred. This number comes magically true in the film, although the notes over the end credits seem to suggest that the final number of bad priests found was much higher.

We’re also given no idea how much of the research had been independently and earlier done by other investigators.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

It’s not PC to suggest any link between homosexuality and paedophilia so any suspicion of a link here is explicitly broken – this is just catholic bashing. And of course, there is no link, so why mention it? This kind of bullshit does political correctness no favours. It’s irrelevant to this story. The predominant mode of sexuality among catholic priests does seems to be homosexual – look at this recent story where the few remaining students at an Irish training college spend half their time flicking through Grindr. How many of the fifty percent of non-celibate priests mentioned in Spotlight were in same-sex relationships? The film is silent. Does their sexuality have any relevance to the abuse story? No, of course not.

And what about that six percent figure? If we make an assumption that child abuse is high among priests because of their easy and anonymous access to children, where does it leave the rest of the population now the internet provides easy and anonymous access to children? Do we really think the situation is any better in the general population?

‘current research and expert opinion suggest that men within the Catholic Church may be no more likely than others to abuse’ says this article.

All of the above is not intended to belittle the seriousness of the abuse perpetrated by the priests, the importance of the journalism in exposing it, or the scandal of the systematic cover-up by church hierarchy. Only that what is presented as clear-cut and objective fact by the film is not necessarily the case.

Can you believe the events in this 'true life' story? No.

Can you believe the drivers offered by the film as an explanation for its events? No.

My view is that these kinds of stories are better served by documentaries. Let the real-life journalists tell us their stories and we can make up our own minds. Instead we get Michael Keaton and the others shadow-marking their men, aping their body language and their speech. Watch Keaton as he leans his body forward in eager anticipation as he approaches a hotel lobby desk. And of course all the journalists are shown as hard-working, earnest, selfless types. Funny that, because in real life, they always seem like a cynical bunch of snark-merchants, like this time when Paxman asked Tony Blair if he used to pray with George W Bush.

How do you score a film like Spotlight? I suppose if you like this kind of stuff, you might give it a 6. But in my case, it’s

Personal Score: 4/10

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on the BBC's Top 21st Century films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Olivier Assayas' "Carlos" – Jackal and Hyde

2016-10-07T00:32:00.001-07:00

Olivier Assayas’ Carlos is built on a framework of real people and actual events still in the memories of many viewers, with some of the characters still alive and in prison. The events and the characters are both larger than life and real, giving this partially fictionalized history a global scope and a resonance beyond its scenes.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

The audacity of the OPEC raid and the messiness of the subsequent country-hopping on a donated plane could hardly have been played for higher stakes and it seems as incredible now as it must have done at the time. The true masterstroke of the terrorist attack was that the hostages were VIPs – international representatives. Subsequent hijackings were ruthlessly crushed in military raids by the Israelis and others – we hear of these in the film, and we’re led to believe that their failure was due to the absence of Carlos after his suspension by his terrorist boss. But the real reason was surely that those later hostages were ordinary people who could be killed in a special forces storming without a second thought. Carlos was protected by the importance of the hostages in his raid.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

Some scenes are shot with a kind of monochromic blur behind the characters – the background flooded in yellow or ochre. I don’t remember seeing an effect quite like that in a film before. There are so many shots of so many rooms in so many countries, and the décor speaks as loudly as the characters in every bar, Parisian apartment and sheik’s palace … the coloured cushions, the vinyl seats, the airport check-in desks.

Édgar Ramírez heads up a huge and effective cast. His Carlos is a complex and evolving character, tossed on waves of idealism, greed and vanity. There is an ambivalence about the character Carlos, who is seen by many of his followers as a revolutionary hero in the mould of Che Guevara, and by others in the film as a brutal and evil terrorist. The cool post-punk soundtrack is a mistake in this context because it collapses the ambivalence into straightforward glamour too many times. It’s one thing when Sofia Coppola sets her film to a mix-tape of her favourite indie bands, but her subject matter is cool and glossy so it matches up. The soundtrack leaves an uncomfortable feeling in Carlos.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about Carlos is how much the world has changed in the short time since the events of the film. Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, a pre-Arab Spring Egypt, a Syria without barrel and phosphorus bombs. These dictators and countries had a terrifying and intractable character in the 1970s but it’s hard to escape the thought that today things are even worse.

Personal Score: 8/10

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on the BBC's Top 21st Century films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Andrew Dominik's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" – Grim Viewing

2016-10-01T01:46:00.000-07:00

Brad Pitt was a disastrous choice for the lead. Perhaps his casting was designed to add some commercial clout to a slow and artily shot film. He simply can’t act at all. His one mode of acting is smirking and while this may work reasonably well as the outlaw with a reputation to uphold, it wears a bit thin when applied to every situation – he even smirks when he’s crying. Presumably he took the role to get an Oscar but if so, it didn’t work.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

It’s an interesting idea, an outlaw so notorious that the only way out for him is death, so he encourages and controls his own assassin. But I couldn’t get past Pitt.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

And Roger Deakins’ cinematography annoyed me – with its washed out colours and high contrast settings, most of the time it looked like the kind of photographers I hate the most on Flickr.

Personal Score: 2/10

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on the BBC's Top 21st Century films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Claire Denis's "White Material" – Goddamn Kids

2016-09-23T07:27:00.000-07:00

Having recently ploughed through the IMDB Top 250 films, I’ve watched an awful lot of Hollywood films, so it’s a shock to watch Claire Denis’s White Material. None of the Hollywood film grammar I’ve learned applies here.

A woman stands in a threatening landscape, her back at the edge of the frame. I’m waiting for the jump-shock as a hostile actor from offscreen attacks from her blindside. Doesn’t happen – Denis’s film simply cuts to another sumptuously coloured African scene.

I’m twenty minutes into the film and wondering when the token hot girl is going to appear. Doesn’t happen – there is no token hot girl.

Charismatic male figures are introduced early on: The Boxer, a rebel leader, popular with child soldiers in this unnamed African country, an ex-husband who wants to sell up the farm and get out of the country and a corrupt local mayor. I sit back waiting for their stories to unfold and dominate the narrative. Doesn’t happen – the narrative is dominated by a woman’s story, occasionally changing to the point of view of children.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

The story centres on Maria Vial (played by Isabelle Huppert), a complex character who supervises a coffee farm. At a time of upheaval and change – early on we see the French army trying to persuade her to leave from a helicopter – she wants to stay put, at least long enough to harvest and process the current crop.

The ‘white material’ of the title is an African name for the white colonials and their belongings – now reduced to a disposable commodity. And part of the horrific compulsion of this topic of whites fighting a losing battle against the tide of change in Africa – also explored in J. M. Coetzee's novel "Disgrace" in South Africa – is the sense that no power on earth can prevent the unfolding tragedy. Liberal whites (who surely make up the bulk of this film’s viewers) are forced to watch an unstoppable human tragedy through the eyes of the last few whites being beaten up, driven out and killed. These liberals just want to look away and not have to think about all the messiness of the child soldiers, roadblocks and arbitrary cruelty – but until all the white Europeans have gone these kinds of stories force them to acknowledge the reality. And as for the Africans, the ‘white material’ is a finite resource that will quickly be exhausted and then what? The future doesn’t look bright for the locals in this film, whether or not the colonial past was just as bad.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

So, playing out with its non-Hollywood grammar and beautifully shot scenes, the film traces its way through the escalating chaos and inevitable collapse of Vial’s world. The child soldiers are among the most memorable of the images from the film, the camera picking out the childishness of their features, and their pathetic military skills brutally contrasted with those of the government’s adult soldiers. The professionals are so much bigger, better trained and with automatic guns twice the size of the kids’ rifles. While the film doesn’t hide the atrocities performed by the child soldiers, there is a rather preachy, almost sentimental, aspect to their portrayal in the film. We see their victims, such as the doctor and pharmacist they kill to loot medicines, but we don’t see much of them performing the atrocities. Perhaps they rape Vial’s son, but if they do it’s done off camera. We don’t hear their shrieking voices or witness much of their callous bravado.

"For me, the child soldiers were victims. They were number one children, and only after soldiers with guns. I wanted them to be children first," Denis says in this interview.

There were also some rather clunky dialogue lines, aimed at colonials, about people being powerless if they don’t own land. And I wasn’t entirely convinced by The Boxer, who Vial shelters in the farm, drawing in the child fighters who follow him like a Pied Piper. But the overall depiction of place is superb and the evocation of a time of terror, fear and chaos is convincingly done.

Personal Score: 7/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on the BBC's Top 21st Century films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom" – Dance, Boogie Wonderland

2016-09-16T02:13:00.000-07:00

Imagine a Tim Burton film except that it isn’t totally shit and you get an idea of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Moonrise shares many of the features of, say, Burton’s Big Fish. For example, a knowing narrator, bright colours and painterly scene setting, a sense of wonder and a childlike desire to shed the constraints of modern adult life, a spirit of fantasy where anything can happen and often does. While I hated Big Fish, I found Moonrise Kingdom far more enjoyable. It’s a question of tone and judgement.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

In a fantasy film where anything can happen, the question of tone and judgement becomes all important for the writer and director. Unbound by real-life probabilities or cause and effect, there is a thin line to walk between annoying self-indulgence and a bravura display of unrestricted artistic freedom. Moonrise Kingdom is also helped by a far stronger cast than Big Fish, with heavyweights such as Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton and a vanity-free performance from Bruce Willis. Even the child leads turn in better performances than Ewan McGregor in Big Fish. The other important difference between the films is that Moonrise Kingdom is more explicitly a comedy, which I think is essential in deflating the more self-important aspects of fantasy.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

Moonrise is clearly inspired by real incidents from someone’s childhood, and the authenticity that comes from real life seeps through the wilder elements of the film and keeps the whole thing grounded. Is that to say that any of the events or even character interactions is believable? No. But there is a grain of truth behind them, some more mundane real-life anecdote that helps keep things on the right side of that thin line.

The themes of pre-teen sexuality are brave and interestingly done. I wasn’t quite convinced by the tone of some of these scenes, which seemed to be presented through an adult eye rather than a child’s view. Imagine someone who’s only ever encountered lipstick lesbianism meeting real-life lesbians – there’s something similar between encountering this film and the reality of twelve-year-old experimentation. But from an artistic and politically correct perspective, they just about pull it off.

Personal Score: 6/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on the BBC's Top 21st Century films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

The IMDB Top 250 List – As Stable as Mel Gibson after a Tel Aviv Pub-crawl

2016-09-13T08:43:00.000-07:00

With my recent review of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, I have reached the end of my original IMDB top 250 list. It’s taken me over five years to complete the list and during that time I have watched, reviewed and given a personal score to every film in the original list. I say original list because the current version of the IMDB 250 has changed significantly over these years. Over eighty films have been added to the list during this time, with others removed. If you watched films at a slow enough interval you could go on watching the IMDB top 250 list for your entire life and never reach the end due to the degree of churn. Details of how the weighting system works and the attempts made to minimize unhelpful churn can be found here. My observation: it ain’t working. The list is about as stable as Mel Gibson after a pub-crawl through central Tel Aviv.

FOR ONCE, NO SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

Some people complain that the list has become too dominated by superhero films in recent years. Personally, I’m fine on any kind of film getting into the list so long as the spirit of the list is maintained. Genre films have received the lowest and the highest scores from me during this exercise.

Overall, I’d say there’s evidence of a kind of geeky male bias in the voting (considerably more films by Tarantino, Scorsese, Nolan, Eastwood and Jackson than I would personally have included) and a populist tendency (Jean Renoir's La règle du jeu has long featured in the Sight and Sound top ten films, for example, yet does appear at all in the current IMDB 250 list).

Here is a graph showing the frequency distribution of my scores across the 250 films. I guess you could describe it as a sort of bell curve around the score of 8, but with a significant tail at the lower end. Of course a personal score is just that – personal. I generally marked a film with an 8 if I unequivocally knew I’d want to watch it again.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

It’s a feature of the IMDB list that it contains plenty of films that are not to my taste – it’s an inevitable consequence of the way the list is compiled. But there was a certain grim pleasure in sitting through the films that scored 0 or 1, when I knew that there was a bound on the misery I’d have to endure – that’s the advantage of watching a list of a fixed length. One of my motivations for this exercise was to learn from the best films to help with my fiction writing, and a bad film is often just as useful as a good film in helping to figure out what does and does not work. It’s also interesting to watch films that passed the IMDB 250 entry criteria (which suggests that a lot of people enjoyed them) but which are different from my usual taste.

As well as watching films I read a list of books each year. I don’t bother scoring these because almost every one would be a 9 or a 10. Whether this says something about the relative quality of classic film and written fiction, I don’t know, or perhaps it’s has more to do with the fact that I self-select of my reading list. But 94 out of the 250 films got a score of 8 or more, so that’s not too bad.

In case you’re interested, the complete list of scores is at the bottom of this post.

The average score was 6 and this is pretty consistent across, say, the top 10, top 50, top 100, top 200, top 250 films. Many of my reviews are not online so if you’d like to see a particular one, let me know in the comments.

So what next? I could carry on watching the extra films that have come into the list. I could switch lists to the more hardcore critical Sight and Sounds list. I could make up my own list from favourite directors. I could switch to the recently published BBCArts list of the top 100 films of the twenty-first century.

One thing I’m not going to do is stop. This has been a hugely enjoyable exercise and watching a classic film a week has become part of my life.

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)	5
The Godfather (1972)	9
The Dark Knight (2008)	4
The Godfather: Part II (1974)	9
Buono, il brutto, il cattivo., Il (1966)	7.5
Pulp Fiction (1994)	5
Schindler's List (1993)	1
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)	9
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)	6
12 Angry Men (1957)	8
Casablanca (1942)	8
Star Wars (1977)	8
Shichinin no samurai (1954)	8
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)	1
Goodfellas (1990)	4
Rear Window (1954)	7.5
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)	6
Cidade de Deus (2002)	8.5
C'era una volta il West (1968)	2
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)	1
The Usual Suspects (1995)	3
Psycho (1960)	9
Fight Club (1999)	6
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)	9
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)	9
North by Northwest (1959)	8
Memento (2000)	7
Sunset Blvd. (1950)	9
Citizen Kane (1941)	5
WALL·E (2008)	0
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)	1
The Matrix (1999)	8
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)	6
Se7en (1995)	5
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)	7
Apocalypse Now (1979)	6
Léon (1994)	9
Taxi Driver (1976)	8
American Beauty (1999)	6
American History X (1998)	6
Vertigo (1958)	8.5
Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, Le (2001)	1
Paths of Glory (1957)	8
M (1931)	9
The Departed (2006)	4
Forrest Gump (1994)	1
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)	7
A Clockwork Orange (1971)	5
Alien (1979)	10
Chinatown (1974)	8
The Third Man (1949)	9
Leben der Anderen, Das (2006)	10
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)	6.5
Double Indemnity (1944)	9
The Shining (1980)	8
The Pianist (2002)	7
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)	9
Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001)	6
Saving Private Ryan (1998)	1
Laberinto del fauno, El (2006)	7.5
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)	1
Requiem for a Dream (2000)	3
L.A. Confidential (1997)	7
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)	8
Aliens (1986)	4
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)	6
Reservoir Dogs (1992)	1
Boot, Das (1981)	7
Rashômon (1950)	8
The Maltese Falcon (1941)	8
Raging Bull (1980)	6
Metropolis (1927)	5
Untergang, Der (2004)	4
City Lights (1931)	5
Modern Times (1936)	8
Rebecca (1940)	8
All About Eve (1950)	6
Singin' in the Rain (1952)	9
No Country for Old Men (2007)	7
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)	8
The Prestige (2006)	3
Amadeus (1984)	5
Vita è bella, La (1997)	8
Some Like It Hot (1959)	7
Sin City (2005)	0
The Elephant Man (1980)	7
The Great Escape (1963)	5
Sjunde inseglet, Det (1957)	7.5
Hotel Rwanda (2004)	8
On the Waterfront (1954)	6
Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1988)	9
Full Metal Jacket (1987)	8
There Will Be Blood (2007)	5
Touch of Evil (1958)	6
The Apartment (1960)	4
The Sting (1973)	8.5
Batman Begins (2005)	2
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)	7
The Great Dictator (1940)	6
Jaws (1975)	7
Braveheart (1995)	2
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)	7
Blade Runner (1982)	6.5
Back to the Future (1985)	8
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)	6
Strangers on a Train (1951)	8
Ladri di biciclette (1948)	8
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)	6
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)	6
High Noon (1952)	5
Notorious (1946)	7
Unforgiven (1992)	8
The Big Sleep (1946)	8
Oldboy (2003)	7
Fargo (1996)	8
The Wizard of Oz (1939)	7
The Green Mile (1999)	0
Cool Hand Luke (1967)	8
Per qualche dollaro in più (1965)	6
Yojimbo (1961)	8
Ran (1985)	7
Mononoke-hime (1997)	2
Gladiator (2000)	6
Die Hard (1988)	7.5
Donnie Darko (2001)	2
Salaire de la peur, Le (1953)	8
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)	3
Annie Hall (1977)	4
It Happened One Night (1934)	7.5
The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)	8
Smultronstället (1957)	8
Into the Wild (2007)	6.5
The Deer Hunter (1978)	5
Million Dollar Baby (2004)	0
The Sixth Sense (1999)	1
The General (1927)	8
Ben-Hur (1959)	6
Notti di Cabiria, Le (1957)	8
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)	6
Platoon (1986)	5
Heat (1995)	8
Ratatouille (2007)	8
Life of Brian (1979)	3
Diaboliques, Les (1955)	8.5
The Killing (1956)	6
Amores perros (2000)	5
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)	7
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)	6
Finding Nemo (2003)	8
Witness for the Prosecution (1957)	8
8½ (1963)	8.5
The Big Lebowski (1998)	6
Brief Encounter (1945)	8
The Graduate (1967)	8
Battaglia di Algeri, La (1966)	9
V for Vendetta (2005)	2
The Wild Bunch (1969)	7
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)	7
Stand by Me (1986)	7
The Night of the Hunter (1955)	3
The Incredibles (2004)	7
Snatch. (2000)	4
The Princess Bride (1987)	3
Gandhi (1982)	7
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)	6
Children of Men (2006)	4
Trainspotting (1996)	6
Gone with the Wind (1939)	9
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)	8
The Gold Rush (1925)	8
Harvey (1950)	4
Scarface (1983)	5
The Thing (1982)	7
Groundhog Day (1993)	7
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)	3
Toy Story (1995)	6
The Lion King (1994)	6
The African Queen (1951)	8
The Terminator (1984)	7
Sleuth (1972)	5
Crash (2004/I)	1
The Conversation (1974)	9
Twelve Monkeys (1995)	1
Duck Soup (1933)	6
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)	7
The Hustler (1961)	8
The Lady Vanishes (1938)	8
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)	4
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)	3
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)	6
Belle et la bête, La (1946)	8
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)	1
Hotaru no haka (1988)	3
King Kong (1933)	8
Ed Wood (1994)	5
Iron Man (2008)	9
Umberto D. (1952)	7
Wo hu cang long (2000)	3
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)	8
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)	8
The Lost Weekend (1945)	8
Patton (1970)	8
Scaphandre et le papillon, Le (2007)	7
Stalag 17 (1953)	5
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)	4
The Exorcist (1973)	9
Casino (1995)	2
Glory (1989)	3
Frankenstein (1931)	7.5
Dial M for Murder (1954)	6
The Kid (1921)	6.5
Rope (1948)	7
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)	9
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)	7
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)	8
Magnolia (1999)	5
Spartacus (1960)	5
Rosemary's Baby (1968)	8
The Philadelphia Story (1940)	4
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)	7
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)	8
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)	6
Cabinet des Dr. Caligari., Das (1920)	8
Big Fish (2003)	1
In the Heat of the Night (1967)	9
Roman Holiday (1953)	9
Manhattan (1979)	5
Mystic River (2003)	5
His Girl Friday (1940)	8
Network (1976)	1
Stalker (1979)	10
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)	7
Strada, La (1954)	4
Mou gaan dou (2002)	5
Young Frankenstein (1974)	5
Dolce vita, La (1960)	8
In Bruges (2008)	8
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)	7
The Searchers (1956)	7
Lola rennt (1998)	3
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)	7
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)	2
Rocky (1976)	7
Barry Lyndon (1975)	8
Hauru no ugoku shiro (2004)	2
Haine, La (1995)	6
Shaun of the Dead (2004)	3
Great Expectations (1946)	7
Planet of the Apes (1968)	4
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)	7

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" – Luck of the Irish – Final film on my IMDB 250 list

2016-09-04T03:11:00.000-07:00

With a re-watch of Barry Lyndon I have reached the end of my original IMDB 250 list. Every film watched, scored and written up. Yay… It’s taken a while. Barry Lyndon is just one of many films on the list that I’ve watched several times during the project. I guess I’ll write a separate blog post on the experience but suffice to say that it’s been highly enjoyable and I recommend it to anyone who’s got a television and five years spare to watch some great films.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

He’s a funny devil, that Kubrick, what with his chess playing, his crash helmet car driving and his 150-take approach to film making. Personally, I like and admire most of his films. I suspect, though, that his reputation is going to take a major dive at some point, due to the way he chose to portray his female characters. Stephen King hit the nail on the head when he said of The Shining, "Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film, she's basically just there to scream and be stupid." And let’s face it, The Shining wouldn’t be the first film that sprung to mind if you started thinking about misogynism in Kubrick’s films. There’s the single scene with a female in Dr Strangelove, conducted entirely in her bikini. There’s the choice of Lolita as a film adaption with its disposable and intellectually dismissible nymphets. There’s the male-gaze view of the rape in A Clockwork Orange. Another favourite Kubrick female character is the bitch, a clever woman who delights in cruelty against men. Only last week I commented on this role in Spartacus and the same role crops up at the start of Barry Lyndon in the form of Lyndon’s bitch cousin who takes his heart and then delights in breaking it.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Lyndon is the photography. The repeated technical device is a close crop of a character that then zooms back to reveal the character as a spec in a larger landscape. And that landscape changes deliberately over the course of the film, starting with the misty mountains of raw nature in Barry’s native Ireland and moving through scenes of increasing man-made sophistication – palaces and formal gardens. There are many scenes set up with composition and colours that remind you of old master paintings. And there are the famous candlelit scenes, filmed with specially adapted lenses to work in low light. Even all these years later they create a unique and beautiful atmosphere. It’s typical of Kubrick’s love of ego-driven self-publicity that these are often talked about ‘lenses developed for NASA’ etc. Years ago, when the BBC wildlife team filmed a season on insects, they developed unique huge lenses to capture depth of field for macro filming. They didn’t make a huge fuss about it like Kubrick, but the stories Kubrick put out about himself are reminiscent of the myth-building adopted by global superstars like Michael Jackson and Prince and, within film circles at least, have been just as successful.

Ryan O'Neal is superb as Barry Lyndon. He stands passively, observing the cruelties of fate with his mournful eyes, then launches from time to time into episodes of ultraviolence when he feels they are required to advance his career. I’ve never met a real-life bully with such a soulful approach to life – his silences are philosophical – but somehow the performance works. Barry Lyndon is monster but he’s a monster who keeps the audience on board.

What about the narration? Kubrick has taken the unreliable first-person narration from Thackeray’s source novel and turned it into a world-weary third person narration (Michael Hordern). Some people say this narrator is still an unreliable narrator but it’s hard to find anything he says that is definitely untrue. Often the onscreen events show more complex and nuanced motives than the moralizing, conventional narrator allows and these reflect the unreliability of a moralizing, conventional history. We might suspect that the episode with the heartless cousin at the start of the film provides a driver for Barry’s unstoppable ambition and desire to transform himself from a ‘boy’ to a fully eligible man, but the narrator doesn’t explore this. There is a reason that this kind of narrative is never used in modern films – the unfolding events are self-explanatory in so far as they can be explained at all. The inclusion of the narrator in Barry Lyndon is a rather academic point about the inherent unreliability of historical narratives. I don’t exactly want it to not be there, but it would be nice to have the option of turning it off and watching the film in a different way.

Personal Score: 8/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus" – Swords and Sauce-ry

2016-08-27T05:02:00.000-07:00

What can you say about Kubrick’s 1960 epic Spartacus? It’s a beast. Multiple writers, multiple directors, multiple luvvies. Plenty of egos here, Kirk Douglas (Spartacus), Laurence Olivier (Crassus), Charles Laughton (Gracchus), not to mention Mr Mega-ego himself, Kubrick. To echo a famous scene from the film, it sometimes feels like: “I’m fabulous.” “I’m fabulous.” “I’m fabulous…” The result is sometimes messy as these heavyweights slug it out for influence and screen time, but also often entertaining and breathtaking.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

Spartacus makes no attempt to be historically accurate, so if you’re looking for a history lesson you won’t find it here.

It’s moulded into the epic genre so it’s got plenty of big, glib statements about slavery and religion but very little in the way of genuine human experience. Spartacus is a hero from beginning to end. Jean Simmons plays an out-and-out tart with a heart, apparently mentally un-scared at being pimped out nightly to the gladiators, and swiftly converted into Madonna mother figure once freed.

So perhaps the only way to rate the film is on how well it succeeds as an epic. It does pretty well even after all this time. Modern epics tend to squeeze in a few more battles. The battles in the middle of Spartacus happen off-camera but the final big scene is amazing – and incomparably better for being filmed with real extras rather than the CGI armies which seem to be the only thing we see in recent films. The Roman leaders are gloriously corrupt – particularly Peter Ustinov as Batiatus, the cynical owner of the gladiator school and Charles Laughton as Gracchus, whose face looks as though it is about to melt into a puddle of vice. There are plenty of memorable scenes, including the gladiator fights and the revolt scenes and the initial salt mine sequence. The music is suitably epic.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

But there are also self-indulgent sideways glances at the Cold War and at Hollywood’s anti-communist blacklists. Some of the veiled homosexual references seem childish or forced into the screenplay – the famous pool scene with its oyster vs snail discussion, for example, is dramatically redundant since Crassus goes on to have his odd relationship with Spartacus’ wife but it is a memorable scene nonetheless, with its sinister overtones of control since it directed to Crassus’ male slave. There are also plenty of Carry On-style comments about swollen armies and enormous Roman lords.

The female characters are a problem, as in so many of Kubrick’s films. As well as the tart with a heart, we have a feisty old slave crone and two nasty companions to Crassus who insist on the gladiators performing fights to the death for sexual kicks. “I feel so sorry for the poor things in all this heat. Don’t put them in those suffocating tunics. Let them wear just enough for modesty.” You can almost hear Kubrick cackling, delighted at creating such bitches.

Personal Score: 5/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder" – Lawyer-ing The Tone

2016-08-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

I’ve seen a lot of James Stewart over the course of watching the IMDB 250 list. For me, he’s at his best when he has a sinister touch about him, most notably under the direction of Hitchcock. Left to himself he has a tendency to drift into aw-shucks American apple pie territory. The combination of Stewart and Frank “Capra-corn” Capra is a particularly sickly mix. Anatomy of a Murder is on the edgier side of his performances under the direction of Otto Preminger, but there are some cheesy moments, particularly at the beginning while the Stewart’s character Paul Biegler is established (a district attorney who’s lost his post at re-election).

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

Jazz-loving Biegler is shown at a loose end at the beginning, drinking on his own and spending his days fishing and playing the piano. His fridge full of newspaper-wrapped fish is a decent visual metaphor for his unfocused ingenuity but hardly a realistic one. It would get pretty stinky in there after a few days. Biegler’s alcoholic Irish lawyer friend, Parnell McCarthy (played by Arthur O’Connell) is able to stop his heavy spirit drinking like turning off a light switch in order to assist with a new case.

These gripes might seem minor but the strength of this film is in the main courtroom story which was based on a novel written by a lawyer in a real-life case that closely mirrored the characters and ploy of the film. The power of a narrative based closely on real-life events makes the usual Hollywood blather and bullshit of the fictionalized character-establishing scenes at the start even more unsatisfying than usual.

This is a long film but it never drags thanks to Preminger's skillful direction, the power of the underlying real-life narrative and the strength of the supporting actors. A husband is on trial for murder after shooting a local barman who his wife says raped her. We never know for sure whether the wife was raped, what really went on between the husband and wife at the time of the events, or what the true mental state of the husband was. (The defence is based on short-term insanity.) There are twists and turns but not in the expected way of revealing more of what happened on the night of the shooting. Instead the focus is on Biegler’s legal case. The twists and turns relate to his ability to persuade the judge that by law his client should be found not guilty. They have nothing to do with his client’s innocence or guilt of the crime.

The result is a deliberately cynical view of the trial process and of the ability of lawyers to influence the outcome by manipulating the jury, the judge and the legal framework with only a glancing engagement with the crime. This is one area where the film is forced to skirt around conventional Hollywood plot devices. Stewart’s character is attracted to the young manager at the murdered man’s bar, who turns out to be the daughter of the murdered man, born out of wedlock (re-enforcing the barman’s reputation as a ladies’ man). But he can’t get romantically involved with her – it would be too messy since he has coached the killer of her father into a dodgy insanity defence. At the end of the film when the accused husband and his wife abscond without paying his fee, Stewart’s character cheerfully shrugs it off, despite retrospective evidence that the husband is a wrong’un – a heavy drinker, some further slight evidence of being a wife-beater, skipping his fee, and a litter-lout to boot.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

There is surprisingly frank discussion about the alleged rape and the sexual habits of the wife for a 1959 film. She is slut-shamed in court by the big-town lawyer for the prosecution (played with impressive presence by George C. Scott) and the word ‘slut’ is used in the dialogue. The film goes further, however, and effectively slut-shames the wife itself. She is shown flirting with Stewart’s character as well as with army officers at a bar while the trial is in progress. She even casts a meaningful look at the battered old alcoholic, McCarthy.

A real strength of the film is its refusal to indulge in flashbacks. We don’t see a single reconstruction of the night of the murder, let alone – heaven forbid – a series of evolving flashbacks as more knowledge of the night is fed in. It is only too easy to imagine a weaker director doing this but the result would be to deflate the ambiguity about the events of that night and detract from the real unfolding drama, which is the journey of the legal arguments in the courtroom. Similarly, we never see the murdered barman to judge what sort a womanizer he might have been, although we see photographs of him.

I wanted to give this film a 9 or 10 score but wondered whether some of the cheesier sections at the start would force it down to an 8. (There are also a couple of rather heavy-handed asides in the courtroom to tell the audience what we already know.) But in the end I stuck to my guns because there are so many moments of original genius here that I’ve never seen done so effectively in any other courtroom film.

Personal Score: 9/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Franklin J. Schaffner's "Patton" – Superstar DJ

2016-08-06T00:33:00.002-07:00

Another week, another near-three-hour war film. After All Quiet on the Western Front, we have switched from WWI to WWII with Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1970 portrait of American general, George S. Patton. The stalemate of WWI trench warfare has been freed up by the development of military technology, primarily highly capable air cover and tanks. This produces a paradox for artists since on the one hand the new military technology utterly crushes the human scale, so human suffering is as high or worse than it ever was. Yet the ability of the planes and tanks to smash through the stasis of trenches also allows authors and directors to focus on stories of daring war valour at the expense of the suffering of the ordinary soldiers. The popular art of WWI was its poetry. The popular art of WWII was daring hero films, a tendency only reinforced by the presence of a clear evil on the part of the Nazis. Perhaps it was the painters who took forward the human horror of WWII most effectively.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

Patton reflects these trends as much as any traditional WWII film of valour and daring against a clearly evil enemy. What lifts it above the average is a clever script co-written by Francis Ford Coppola and the direction of Franklin J. Schaffner, who generates excitement and tension through many beautifully shot scenes. The scene where Patton and his commanders first spot German tanks approaching their position, for example, gives a real thrill.

It’s hard to know sometimes how much the film is taking the piss out of the egotistical gung ho Patton. This may be the result of having separate authors contributing to the script. What are we to make of the famous opening speech, for example, based on actual lines from the historical Patton but stitched together to produce a unique piece of art. Some of the lines fall out harder than the bombs we see in the battle scenes.

“Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost, and will never lose a war... because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.”

Surely there is some irony in the selection of these lines – but then the Vietnam War wasn’t lost in 1970 and apparently Richard Nixon used to watch Patton while driving the remainder of the Vietnam war. These are the ways that films can spill out of their boundaries into real life.

Another reason for suspecting irony is that George C. Scott played an out-and-out satirical part of a bullish American general is Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 cold war film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It’s hard not to see the spirit of General 'Buck' Turgidson seeping into Scott’s portrayal of Patton even though Scott explicitly avoided a direct comparison.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

The messy complexity of the film’s production is summed up by this quote from Scott, reproduced in Lawrence H. Suid's book "Guts and Glory": "I simply refused to play George Patton as the standard cliche you could get from newspaper clips of the time. I didn't want to play him as a hero just to please the Pentagon, and I didn't want to play him as an obvious, gung ho bully either. I wanted to play every conceivable facet of the man."

The idea of superstar generals ruling the battlefield with their genius comes across strongly in Patton, with the Nazis shown as being scared of him and a similar mixture of fear and respect being shown to Rommel by the Allies. But if there’s one message that any reader of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” takes away, it is that this idea of military men controlling a battle like a game of chess is an illusion and that the reality is that they are subject to chance just as much as the soldiers caught in the chaos of battle.

To take one example from this film, Patton gets his men to make a long winter journey in just two days to break a siege. But without air support their campaign is unlikely to be successful and the weather is stopping the planes from flying. So he asks for a weather prayer to be written. And after reading the prayer, the next day there are clear skies and the planes can fly. Let’s imagine for a moment that the clear skies were the result of chance rather than the prayer. In that case, if the cloud had remained, Patton’s exhausted men would probably have been taken apart by the Germans and the siege would not have been broken. You might say that great leaders create their own good luck but Tolstoy was fundamentally right about this point, I think, and it undermines the narrative of great warriors like Patton striding across the pages of history.

Personal Score: 8/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Lewis Milestone's "All Quiet on the Western Front" – What is it good for?

2016-07-28T02:06:00.001-07:00

I confess I wasn’t greatly looking forward to a three-hour film that I suspected could be summed up in a short sentence: “War is bad.” But All Quiet on the Western Front is a fascinating film that sometimes seems far more modern than its 1930 date.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

There are some key decisions that make this film successful and which I believe have kept it relevant for so long.

No musical score is used
It is based on a decent novel
It’s a WWI film shown from a German viewpoint
Given that the Germans are shown speaking English, no attempt is made at comedy German accents
There are impressive long ranging battlefield scenes
It pushed the limit of what could be shown on screen so it does not seem excessively sanitized from the reality of war

These points taken together produce a powerful experience and the battlefield scenes in particular are as convincing and harrowing as any of the various modern attempts to show similar scenes. In terms of tone and choice of shots I would go further and say these scenes are more effective than say the battlefield scenes in Saving Private Ryan, etc.

There is perhaps a question over whether stories as serious and troubling as world war are better handled as documentary or fiction. In some ways the compromises of fiction undermine the importance of the history. For example, is it realistic that all the men get on so well in the group? Perhaps a true fly on the wall documentary (even though it would be impossible to achieve) would show a far messier picture. And the simple craft of structure, cause and effect, character and symbols (the special boots, to take just one example from this film) that are an unavoidable part of fiction have a tendency to trivialize history, however subtly they are applied (in truth, not very subtly in the case of the ‘cursed’ boots.)

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

Trouble is, it’s hard to imagine how WWI could be engagingly shown without fiction. When archive footage tends to be heavily propagandized and limited in its scope and when the people involved are dead, what can you do? The dreadful reconstructions inserted into television documentaries are clearly not the answer. Eyewitness interviews such as the holocaust film Shoah are a good solution but are never going to get huge audiences. Perhaps the only answer is some compromise similar to what Lewis Milestone achieved in All Quiet. Many ex-German soldiers were apparently used in the making of the film, both as extras and to check authenticity, and the trouble taken pays off.

In the film, the characters have a simple discussion about why countries go to war, and they speculate whether it’s due to leaders wanting posthumous glory or because of the benefits to manufacturing companies. It’s interesting to see how things have got even worse in modern times as the war technology that was seen for the first time in WWI has become so much more developed. When countries such as the UK, America, China and Russia spend such a large percentage of their GDP on their military there is only one possible result: war. If I spend a large chunk of my salary on a flashy car I’m not going to keep it in the garage.

Personal Score: 7/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" – Little Perisher

2016-07-24T01:19:00.002-07:00

Roman Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby offers a suggestion about how an indifferent actor can get a chance to make it big on stage and in Hollywood. It’s as plausible an explanation as any I’ve heard to explain the popularity of certain big name actors in real-life Hollywood. (Clooney, I’m looking at you.)

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

Just kidding, George. Who could resist your unique mix of easy charm, unforced slapstick and A-list versatility? Absolutely no need to resort to pimping out a baby to devil worshippers to explain Clooney’s success, but for Guy Woodhouse (played by John Cassavetes), the actor husband of Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) in the film, a little Satanic assistance with his career proves to be irresistible.

A difference between this film and that other classic of childhood demonic possession, The Exorcist, is that Polanski chooses not to show the baby at all and plays throughout the film with the idea that the supernatural conspiracy could be a delusion of Rosemary’s, caused by her pregnancy. It’s a classy approach and it adds to the spookiness of the film as well as sharing Rosemary’s paranoia with the audience, since there is a sense that we can trust no body, just as Rosemary feels.

However, it is a weakness of the execution that we are never in any serious doubt that the Satanic plot is real. There are too many telling details from Rosemary’s point of view – from the fact she notices that pictures have been taken down when she visits the weird old neighbours’ apartment (the Castevets, played nicely by Ruth Gordon (as Minnie) and Sidney Blackmore (as Roman)), to the pierced ears of Roman Castevet, to the chalky undertaste in the ‘chocolate mouse’ that she eats before her impregnation etc etc.

The only time doubt is cast on her view of the world is when she demands that her husband shows her his shoulders, thinking he has been marked by the coven. It turns out that his shoulders are unmarked (although he doesn’t offer to show her the rest of his body). Perhaps a few more of these kinds of moments would have strengthened the ‘is she / isn’t she?’ angle.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

There is a lot to love in the film. The details of the main characters’ relationships, their unstated backstory, their ambitions are beautifully put across. The apartment itself, with its long history of human tragedy has a spooky presence. And there are some nicely sinister moments pulled out by the slow burn approach, such as the way the husband’s complicity is gradually reviewed, and the jolt as Rosemary realises that the coven has acquired a personal belonging of each of its victims in order to curse them. When we do get to see the removed paintings in the Castevets’ apartment, they are suitably disturbing – the burning church, for example.

The technical delivery of the filming is unobtrusively superb, with long takes and perfect camera angles. The many older characters are played by big name actors and that adds a sheen of quality to all the minor parts in the film as well as to the sinister neighbours, the Castevets. Ruth Gordon’s performance as Minnie is terrifying, perhaps inspiring the character of Ros in Monsters, Inc: "I'm watching you, Wazowski. Always watching. Always!"

It’s debatable whether Mia Farrow was the best choice of the various actors that Polanski considered for the part of Rosemary. I’d say Polanski got the best performance out of her that it was possible to get, and that he bent the character to benefit from Farrow’s appearance and personality (she was at the height of her dippy-hippy little girl persona at the time of filming). But perhaps he wouldn’t have had to work so hard with another actor. The vulnerability and elfin gauntness of Farrow has ended up becoming part of the character of Rosemary and a keynote of the film – I suspect this more a result of Polanski’s genius than Farrow’s.

One lesson to female viewers of the film is clear. If your husband spontaneously gets enthusiastic about having a child to the extent of putting up wallcharts marking ovulation dates and filling the apartment with roses, it’s time to run. Run like the wind and don’t look back. That stuff NEVER happens without a Satanic motivation.

Personal Score: 8/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M For Murder" – Scissor Sister

2016-07-15T23:28:00.000-07:00

In the UK plays and operas from London are broadcast live to cinemas across the country ~~in a desperate attempt to justify all the arts funding going to the capital~~ in a laudable effort to present the best of the arts to the widest possible audience. Of course, one consequence of this is that the director must choose where the audiences eyes are looking through his selection of shot angles and zooms.

Films that closely follow an original play and choose to retain the constraints of the staging – such as Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder – sink or swim on the skill of the director in framing the shots in a skilful way to avoid the action seeming contrived or television-like in its ambition. Hitchcock does a great job of this and it would be nice if the directors of the streamed operas and plays learned a few lessons from his films.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

What Hitchcock can’t avoid in his close following of the play is the lengthy scenes of explanatory dialogue in the first third of the film, particularly between evil jilted husband, Tony Wendice (Ray Milland), and the slimy spiv he coerces to perform his perfect murder, Robert Cummings (Mark Halliday). Once the scheme is set up, however, things flow more naturally and enjoyably.

Wendice is a retired pro tennis player who married his wife for her money. He is then surprised when he finds she is not in love with him and has found love with another man – and he shows his true colours when his first instinct is to kill his wife in order to receive her money through his will. There is some subtle balancing of character flaws with audience sympathy in this film, because Wendice is an affable, rather likeable character in the Cary Grant mould. The audience instinctively roots for him and hopes he’ll get away with his murder. At the same time, the wife, Margot (Grace Kelly) can’t be blamed for her infidelity given that she was effectively hoodwinked into a loveless marriage. A nice touch that isn’t rammed down our throats is that there are parallels between the respectable Wendice and the conman, Cummings.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

Cummings and Wendice studied at Cambridge together. Cummings was already performing petty theft at college and after graduation got himself into some adult trouble, leading him to be court marshalled and sent to prison. By following Cummings, Wendice has established that he now supports himself through attaching himself to rich widows, frequently changing his name and skipping rent. But it’s made clear that without the support of friends, and with his criminal record, Cummings has little choice but to support himself through crime. What’s nice is that within a conventional, respectable life, Wendice has been equally morally reprehensible in marrying Margot for his money and subsequently feeling no qualms about murdering her.

Perhaps a more interesting film would have been in exploring the desperation and opportunism of Cummings’ life. Perhaps Margot’s character could have been explored more fully. Perhaps it would have been more satisfying if Wendice had got away with it and the detectives discovered the truth too late, or if he got away with it altogether with a further twist.

But the play was what it was and Hitchcock did a good job of filming it.

Personal Score: 6/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Federico Fellini's "La Strada" – A Fool's Errand

2016-07-09T08:57:00.001-07:00

In a somewhat Shakespearian set-up, we have a strongman king of his motorbike-caravan, his unofficial wife and a fool who has an overwhelming compulsion to undermine the king and to point out his folly, ideally in front of an audience. Unlike Shakespeare, however, this is not a licensed fool and the king is so angered by his taunts that he attacks him whenever he sees him.

Imagine if King Lear reacted the same way.

'To give away thy land

Come place him here by me

Do thou for him stand.'

s.d. Lear repeatedly punches and kicks the Fool in the body and head.

…

‘Why, after I have cut the egg i' th' middle and eat up the

meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i'

th' middle and gav'st away both parts, thou bor'st thine ass on

thy back o'er the dirt. Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown

when thou gav'st thy golden one away.’

s.d. Lear takes a knife and slashes the Fool’s face from side to side.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

Zampanò (Anthony Quinn) buys Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) from her poor family to be his travelling entertainment act assistant and to sleep with him in his motorbike-caravan as they tour the country. She is a simple girl who doesn’t seem to cope well with life but she enjoys being an artiste. She doesn’t enjoy Zampanò’s frequent womanizing or his habit of training her like a dog, whipping her until she learns the act. Sound familiar? Yes, we are in tart with a heart territory here. There are few things I hate more in books and films than a tart with a heart.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

Among those few things I hate more than a tart with a heart are plaintive melodies played over and over and adult characters who jump around and chuckle with the glee of a child.

This film has those things as well.

I’m also very uninterested in womanizing characters – a problem I’ve faced in other Fellini films. When Zampanò gets drunk and tearful at the end after hearing of the fate of Gelsomina after he abandoned her, it’s the sentimental emotion of a wife-beater in his cups. When he sobers up he’d do exactly the same things again.

Personal Score: 4/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker" – "Transporter 5"

2016-06-30T14:12:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it is too fanciful to imagine a young Jason “The Stath” Statham resting after a hard session with his weights, protein shake in hand, earnestly studying the atmospheric films of Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky. Yet I am not the first person to notice something of The Stath’s style in Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy's portrayal of the Stalker in Tarkovsky's 1979 film. For one thing they have similar shaped heads and close cropped hair. For another thing, Kaydanovskiy has the habit of bending his neck slightly as though in apology for his brawn, a habit The Stath uses to good effect in the Transporter series – humble in his strength, sure in the knowledge that if a gang of chain-wielding thugs were to jump him, he’d quickly see them off with his astonishing fighting skills.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

And the similarities don’t end there. Tarkovsky’s Stalker character performs some nifty driving at the start of the film as he evades the military guards of the Zone. And just like the Frank Martin character in Transporter, he lives his life according to a strict set of rules. No women are allowed in the Zone, for example. The shortest route to your destination is not a straight line, for another.

There are differences, of course. When the Stalker tries a bit of fighting, to wrestle a portable nuclear weapon from the Professor, he turns out to be rubbish at it. If The Stath was playing the role, he’d use the Stalker’s iconic leather jacket as a makeshift kung fu weapon, throw a few of the cloth-covered nuts around, and find a pool of oil to do some topless wrestling.

Still, after seeing George Clooney mug his way through an insipid remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, perhaps it’s best if The Stath sticks to his tried and tested franchise films for a while longer.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks. Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book" Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson

There is an interesting Free Thinking BBC podcast on the subject of Stalker that’s well worth a listen if it’s available where you live.

The wonderful thing about Stalker is its refusal to accept conventional wisdom. In the Zone, only the broken and the wretched are allowed to live and to enter the special room where a person’s innermost wishes are fulfilled. Openly dealing with archetypes, the main characters are known simply as Stalker, Professor and Writer. And there is a robust rejection of the science and art of the Professor and the Writer, with the Stalker despairing of the characters’ self-serving efforts when he leaves the Zone. There is also a sense that it was science and technology that got the ‘small country’ into the mess it’s in. The Zone has plains full of decaying tanks and big guns, and a polluting power station stands close to its outskirts at the end.

There are some ironies here, however. The pin-sharp focusing and flashy depth of field and lighting effects are only possible thanks to a mastery of scientific lenses and cameras. This film that denounces the pursuit of art as self-serving egoism is full of poetry and philosophy. And the apparent “Fuck you, Science” telekinesis displayed by the Stalker’s child at the end was no doubt made to happen through some pedestrian special effect.

But if there’s one film that isn’t afraid of contradictions, it’s Stalker.

The music is amazing, the visuals are amazing, the ideas are amazing.

This is as good as film gets. Top marks.

Personal Score: 10/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia" – Cruising for a Bruising

2016-06-17T00:15:00.000-07:00

I suppose that if I walked along a pebble beach for long enough – trillions of years, say – I would eventually find a portion of the beach where the pebbles spelled out a message: “Happy birthday, Michael Hardach! Have a great day!” And if I walked long enough (billions of trillions of years) I might even stumble upon this message on the day of my actual birthday. It would be a pretty awesome moment. A couple of things would diminish my awe, however. One, I’d be dead. Two, the apparently amazing coincidence would be the result of the cold machinations of blind chance.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

Because of the short length of human lives, truly stunning coincidences of this kind never happen. And so it is that the three coincidences described at the start of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia didn’t happen. The three men with crazily coincidental names didn’t murder the chemist (they were framed), the failed suicide shot by his own mother is a legal thought experiment designed to test the limits of the application of law, and the scuba diver dumped on a forest fire is an urban myth. But even if they had happened, they would be boring, because they would be coincidences.

Imagine the scene in the casting room: ‘We need an actor to play a macho misogynist prick. Mel Gibson’s not available. Who shall we use?’ They went for Tom Cruise. Watching Cruise pump his way through his character’s trajectory is a depressing experience. As he stands by his dying father that he hates, his face contorted with emotion as he (apparently) invokes memories of his real-life dying father… maybe I’m a heartless swine, but I just wanted to create an amusing animated gif of his face and put it on the internet for people to mock. If you put “tom cruise” magnolia filetype:gif into Google Images you’ll find that others have had similar ideas.

There is plenty of flashy filming in Magnolia and there are plenty of resonances between the loosely connected threads. To give just a couple of examples, the scuba diver in the tree at the beginning echoes the raining frogs at the end. The policeman’s musing over how he treats the criminals he finds (some need help, some need a warning, some need jail) echoes the decisions that the various children have to make about the failings of their fathers. And there are hundreds of these sorts of resonances in the three hours of Magnolia. So, if you like flashy filming and a high density of clever cross-references, this film could be for you.

William H. Macy does a nice turn as Quiz Kid Donnie Smith, a loser adult who was a child star on a quiz show (his parents stole his winnings and abandoned him). Macy’s character’s existence has now become a trivia question of the kind he used to be able to answer. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he asks the people in a bar. And the answer is, Yes, you’re Quiz Kid Donnie Smith, and weren’t you struck by lightning? Philip Seymour Hoffman also has a good performance as a male nurse who keeps threatening to transform into the out-and-out pervert he played in Todd Solondz's Happiness (another film of loosely related stories with a bitter-sweet backdrop, but in my view much more successful than Magnolia). But the character ends up taking a different direction.

There’s a scene late on in the film where all the characters take turns to sing over Aimee Mann's song "Wise Up." It’s expertly filmed and the way the actors’ voices cut in over the original vocal is masterly. The song itself is suitably plaintive, with kooky chord changes, haunting piano chords and the cracked voice of a boho girl singer-songwriter, a fellow traveller. Like so much in this film it is both a success and a failure. It does what it set out to do but the end result is like one of those adverts for coffee or banks where they overlay a plaintive song by a cracked-voiced boho girl singer-songwriter, a fellow traveller.

Cramming in dying fathers, showing children rejecting their parents even when they’re terminally ill, describing the emotional fall-out of failed parental relations on children's lives – this stuff is the dramatic equivalent of the opium drops that Earl’s trophy wife obtains for him – and yet I found that it didn’t move me. Why not? Hard to say. The events shown are mostly not over the top and in some ways their mundane reality is a strength (child abuse, parental greed, parental abandonment), yet I didn’t believe in anything I was watching. More fundamentally I felt I was in the presence of a director who was ideologically removed from me. There are obvious influences from Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet’s Network and Robert Altman – not my favourite things.

Personal Score: 5/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope" – Time is Ticking

2016-06-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

Two characters, Philip and Brandon, perform the perfect murder of their friend David for kicks at the very start of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. Disconcertingly for UK viewers, the murdering leads – Farley Granger (Philip) and John Dall (Brandon) – look a bit like Ed Miliband and a young Michael Portillo. I’ll try to forget about that for the rest of this review.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

Rope is a sophisticated film but tonally it hits the odd bum note.

James Stewart doesn’t seem very comfortable in the role of the murderers’ old housemaster, Rupert Cadell and his final lecturing speech shaking off all responsibility for his own philosophy’s influence on the murderers is hardly satisfying.

There is also something unsatisfactory about the homosexuality of the murdering pair. There is a suspicion that their homosexuality is somehow linked to the moral deviancy that they have enthusiastically learned from their housemaster. This link is not explicit. The question is, has Hollywood moved directly from not representing gays at all to having two implicitly gay characters whose sexuality has absolutely nothing to do with their separately held views, which just so happen to be morally deviant? Or has Hollywood in this case landed on non-politically correct middle ground? To answer this question fully, you’d perhaps need to ask the same question of the finished film, the screenplay, play on which Rope is based, and even the real-life crime that inspired the play – and you might get a different answer for each.

A series of long takes, artlessly joined by unsubtle zooms to the backs of characters’ jackets due to technical limitations at the time of filming on how long an uncut take could last. The long takes create an effective sense of claustrophobia and increases the sense that the film is played out (more or less) in real time. I can’t see the point of the pretend non-cuts, though, which are obtrusive.

I’d like to distinguish between issues described above and deliberate use of ambiguity in the film, which I believe is the reason for its overall greatness.

Some examples of intentional ambiguity in the film are:

Despite Brandon’s homosexuality, he has been romantically involved with their female guest Janet (Joan Chandler) in the past.

The philosophy underpinning the murder is that it is acceptable to murder an inferior human, yet David is shown to be at least the equal of the murderers academically, socially and financially.

Far from a perfect murder, the pair have simply killed their friend in a sneak attack during broad daylight, with only the vaguest idea on how to dispose of the body.

There are also some subtle points that enhance the presentation of the plot. I’ve mentioned the effects of the long takes above. Another example is the use of music. There is no overlaid score to the film proper, with the sound being generated from the events of the film. A metronome ticks away like the timer on a speed chess game as the Prof ramps up the pressure on the visibly cracking Philip. At the same time, Philip plays Poulenc's “Mouvement Perpétuel No. 1” on the piano, whose shifting harmonies and discordances echo the unfolding cat-and-mouse game.

Personal Score: 7/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" – Hell of a Film

2016-05-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

A little while ago I commented that, for all its flaws, at least Return of the Jedi managed to spawn an original and long lasting Halloween outfit: the Slave Leia.

Other films have attempted to introduce new swearwords or slang into our lives. In Chan-wook Park's Oldboy, the character Oh Dae-Su returns to the world after a fifteen-year imprisonment to find that the kids have coined a new swearword: dickshit. In Mark Waters' Mean Girls, the character Gretchen Wieners tries unsuccessfully to foist ‘fetch’ as a new piece of slang onto her friends.

William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is notable for using the word ‘cunting’ twice. ‘Cunting’ was not added to the Oxford English Dictionary until March 2014 but it was alive and well in the mouth of the character Burke Dennings in The Exorcist in 1973. While the OED defines the word as an intensifier, similar to ‘fucking’, there seems to be an extra sense in its use in The Exorcist of ‘like a cunt’ or ‘cunt of a…’

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Follow @MichaelHardach

The first time Dennings utters the word, he is drunk at a party and accuses a guest he believes is a Nazi as a ‘cunting Hun’. The second time we hear it, is from the twelve-year-old possessed girl Regan, who is made to speak in Dennings’ voice by a demon to say ‘Do you know what she did? Your cunting daughter?’ This is after he has been killed by the possessed Regan. If the demon had said ‘Your cunt of a daughter’ it would have ruined the iambic flow and we all know the devil gets the best poetry.

It’s typical of William Peter Blatty’s intelligent and devilishly sparky script that this unusual word links the two speeches and gives the audience a nudge that it is Dennings’ voice coming from the little girl. It provides all the proof that Regan’s mother needs that her daughter has indeed killed Dennings.

Fans of modern classical music often despair that nothing later than Stravinsky seems capable of making an impact on modern society. In fact, there are two places where modern music is alive and well in popular culture: one is in the ‘before’ section of adverts plugging anti-migraine pills. The other is in horror films trying to summon the spirit of Bernard Herrmann's screeching strings in Hitchcock's Psycho. The Exorcist uses passages of top-flight modern composers Krzysztof Penderecki and Hans Werner Henze at the beginning and end of the film. Sadly for music fans, the use of these passages (for both the ads and the films) seems to be when a director asks for ‘an ungodly racket,’ ‘the worst imaginable sound,’ or ‘an aural representation of a living hell.’

A lot of people have said a lot of things about The Exorcist, which is why I’ve gone a little left-field for this review. Watching it again, I was struck by the mastery of every scene. Compare the opening shots of the Iraqi archaeological dig with similar scenes in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, for example. Friedkin aces the scene, with herds of sheep flowing along the bottom of the shot.

As though to justify the outlandish elements of the script, which asks us to believe in an actual demon, there are multiple evocations of hellish aspects of the real-life world, from the hints of the holocaust in Dennings’ rant, mental illness, loneliness and abandonment of the elderly, child abuse, the trauma of broken families, painful and hopeless medical procedures.

Vastly more ambitious than the average horror flick, The Exorcist also leaves its audiences with visual images as memorable as any in film.

Personal Score: 9/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.