Tag Archives: Colour

31Mar / 2024

Journey Into Prehistory (Cesta do pravěku)

1955, dir. Karel Zeman

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

There’s a song by the Norwegian band synth-pop band a-ha on their debut album, Hunting High and Low, called “Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale.” Karel Zeman’s remarkable second feature film, Journey Into Prehistory (US title: Journey to the Beginning of Time) is that phrase fleshed out in colour.

It uses the framework of a group of pre-teen and teen boys thirsty for knowledge and adventures as a vehicle to achieve Zeman’s own boyhood dreams, combining 2D and 3D models, animation, and live-action into a seamless Sci-fi fantasy film. While slow-moving by today’s standards, it is a perfect illustration of the kind of imaginative escapades you would have found in books and serialized magazine stories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

For those not familiar with Zeman’s work, his films are some of the most effective combinations of live-action and animation ever done to that point — until a fan of his, Terry Gilliam, began his own filmmaking career. While I haven’t seen many Zeman films, the other two I have seen — the amazing 1962 Baron Munchausen and the jaw-droppingly incredible 1958 Invention for Destruction — are just mind-blowing masterpieces of imagination. Zeman combines his own filmic skills with whimsical tales and brings great stories into the visual world of movies.

The boys encounter their first prehistoric creature — a curious wooly mammoth.

In the film, the boys learn about the prehistoric creature the trilobite by examining the fossil of one. The youngest, Jirka (Vladimir Bejval), is disappointed that there are no living triobites left, so the older boys propose taking a trip back in time to find one — like you do — and take a boat up river into a cave that allows them to pass through it, and into progressively earlier eras of earth’s development as the continue upstream.

The oldest boy Petr (Josef Lukáš) narrates most of the film and does most of the rowing and planning, while the second-oldest Toník (Petr Herrmann) keeps a logbook. Jenda (Zdeněk Husták) and Jirka, the younger boys, help out as they can, with Jirka in particular running off to explore too eagerly, which causes the occasional misadventure.

Jirka (left) is a bit of a jerk-a sometimes, deliberately ignoring safety warnings to explore.

They indeed pass through the four main periods of prehistory (as defined in 1955) — from the Ice Age, to the Tertiary, the Mezozoic and the Paleozoic, and all the way back to Silurian age.

This film is more sparse on the effects compared to Zeman’s later ones, but importantly when special effects appear, they are as realistic as it was possible to make them. Some effects used puppetry, some used a very smooth form of stop-motion, but clever use of shot-matching allowed the actors to travel with beautiful backgrounds and “living” prehistoric creatures very smoothly integrated and fluidly animated.

Along their journey, they encounter and learn about progressively older examples of prehistoric creatures. Interestingly (at least to me), the film makes no attempt to get the boys back to their own time, even after tragedy befalls their original vessel. I don’t want to say more about the plot to avoid spoilers, but the film is both blatantly educational but also filled with moments of danger, suspense, and the single-minded energy of the young to sate their curiosity.

The Czech version runs 93 minutes, and while the pacing makes it sometimes hard to stay on board with the slowly-unfolding story, the promise of another effects sequence soon will hold most viewers, and also curiosity about how the story will be resolved.

A life-size Stegasaurus model was built for this sequence.

A US version was created later, using a new intro and outro where the boys (replaced by US actors shot only from the back of their heads in the opening and end sequences) imagine the whole adventure while visiting the Museum of Natural History, and stretches credibility pretty hard. The recut US version runs only 84 minutes, dropping some exposition to get to the effects more quickly.

The story is a mash-up of Jules Verne’s 1912 novel The Lost World and a Russian novel called Plutonia from 1915, both obviously influences on Zeman (he would go on to a brilliant and straight-up later film combining several Verne stories named after the primary story its based on, the novel Facing the Flag).

For many years, the existing prints of Journey Into Prehistory were of such low quality that the film almost passed into unseen obscurity, following its initial worldwide success. Thankfully, the film has since been digitally restored and repaired, so we can see it the way Zeman intended.

A friendly creature from long before the dinosaurs

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01Jan / 2024

Tom of Finland (2017)

(dir. Dome Karukoski)
⭐️⭐️⭐️
52-week challenge, film 52

When looking this film up and reading the description, I was led to believe that this would be a documentary of the artist Touko Laaksonen (portrayed by the similar-looking Pekka Strang), better known in the gay community (at least previous generations thereof) as “Tom of Finland.” Disappointingly, it isn’t … but it is a biographical drama of the man, which gives us a lot of background information on his adult years both in finding inspiration for his art, and his rise to fame-slash-notoriety.

The film itself was made in Finland, which really marks an acceptance of the artist the country shunned for decades. Learning more about this time as a Finnish soldier in World War II is worthwhile, and about his remaining family (we only see Touko from about the age 23-onwards) — his sister Kaija (Jessica Grabowski), with whom he lives. As the film begins, Touko has returned from the war with some mental scars, but also an obsession … men, especially men in leather or more traditional kinds of uniform.

He makes his living by day as a commercial artist for an ad agency, but begins frequenting parks after dark where other gay men meet for anonymous sex. One amusing scene where he first meets Veli (Lauri Tilkanen).

Their sex is interrupted by police, but instead of running, Touko composes himself and walks casually through the park — running into the police and asking them what’s going on, thus allying any suspicion that he might be one of the homosexuals. There aren’t many laughs in this film, but there are few more to be had in the final third.

Kaija doesn’t accept Touko’s homosexuality, and is mostly unaware of his predilection for explicit fetish erotic drawings. They are both talented artists, so Touko takes to hiding his “gay” portfolio in the attic. As so many gay men in the 1940s to 80s did, he skated a very fine line between looking for love (or something a bit quicker) and avoiding the police and society’s rejection.

The film shows Touko getting older, getting beaten by straight men he mistook for gay, and the other realities of life for gay men in a sexually-repressive society. He finally does meet up with Veli again (ironically when Veli begins dating Kaija), and the trio pal around for a while until Veli finally ends up with Touko, which forces Kaija to accept the situation.

The final third of the film, where Touko’s drawings begin to been seen in the US and bring his pen name great fame, is where the viewer feels things are finally coming together for Touko. He is flown to LA and sees the fetish scene he has created among the gay men there, and is hailed as a hero.

Finally getting up the courage to publish his own book of his work, he runs into a roadblock … nobody in Finland will publish him. In one of the most amusing scenes in the film, Touko and Veli finally locate a religious Jewish printer who is willing to take on the work, but is too small a shop to print and bind 10,000-plus copies. An ingenious solution ensues, and “Tom’s” lasting fame is ensured.

Now in a stable relationship and his own place back in Finland, and celebrated as a gay icon in the US and elsewhere, “Tom” has found his place in the world at last … until Veli gets sick (of throat cancer), and other gay men are being stricken with what become known as AIDS. Touko feels partially responsible for this “gay” disease, but is quickly dissuaded as the epidemic grows.

The last scene in the film is an elderly Touko, having lost Veli some years before, appearing at a fetish convention as the guest of honour, walking on stage to an army of Leatherman. As he gazes across this army of men his works inspired, his opening words are “Hello, boys …”

As with the man himself, the film’s first half is very straightforward and mostly strait-laced, at least as much as a biographical drama of a gay man can be. As with Touko’s art finding its audience, the film finally starts to loosen up and celebrate its subject in the final third, and while the first half can seem stilted and slow at times, the last act makes the journey all worth it.

Author’s note: Well, I did it. An average of one movie every week for a year, with a few days to spare, even — documented with what I hope readers will find as informative and helpful reviews. The point of this exercise was to select a bunch of films randomly, some I’d seen before but most I hadn’t, and appraise or re-appraise them to help others decide if they wanted to delve into a particular film, as well as encourage readers to take a chance on some films they wouldn’t normally make the effort to see. If you look over the whole set, I found a bunch of new gems over the course of the year.

What’s great about movies is the way they can bring you into worlds outside your own, especially in a visual way that books cannot fully compete with. Like travel, film broadens the mind, and sometimes profoundly changes some aspect of your own worldview — or just takes you out of your own reality for a couple of hours, which can be good for your own mental and emotional health.

I’ll continue to post the occasional movie review here, but for 2024 I’ve decided to take up a new reviewing challenge — I’ll be sharing with you my discoveries, delights, and disappointments (if any) once a month over a given box set of music CDs — sometimes a career compendium, sometimes a greatly-expanded album, sometimes just a curated collection of music related to a given theme. The CD format is said to be commercially dying, ironically giving way to its predecessor, vinyl — which, as you may have guessed, I find a very odd consumer choice.

Hopefully we’ll see you over at Bargain Boxset Bin Bonanza — a new page coming soon to this same website — in the near future, and we much appreciate those of you who have visited to read the film reviews.

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24Dec / 2023

Tank Girl (1995, dir. Rachel Talalay)

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
52-week film challenge, film 49

This review has to come with three disclaimers:

  1. I have never read the “Tank Girl” comic (though it looks like something I’d enjoy). I am reviewing the film strictly as a movie.
  2. I have met and chatted with the director, Rachael Talalay, about her career, US-Canadian immigration issues, and more recently I was present in Chicago for the debut of her latest bit of TV work (for Doctor Who, as it happens), but this doesn’t influence the review too much.
  3. I am aware that the film was, in parts, heavily re-edited by the studio.

With that out of the way, let’s dive in.

Hoo boy, has Tank Girl ever aged well. On its original release, it didn’t do well financially, though it later earned cult status on the strength of its strong “feminist futurism” and humour. It is almost, but not quite, a mirror-universe version of 1984’s The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eighth Dimension, only with far fewer goatees and more mutants, who eventually form an alliance to take down the mad big bad (Malcolm McDowell, in this case).

Like the earlier film, it has a definite aesthetic that reflects the decade in which it was made, is funny but not meant as a parody, and does some excellent world-building that pays homage to its influences. In the case of Tank Girl, the world of 2033 looks increasingly likely to come to pass — only instead of a comet directly hitting earth causing the climate to change, we just have man-made climate change. I can see this “future” from my house, so to speak.

A hasty voiceover from yet-to-be Tank Girl herself (Lori Petty) sets up the story: since the comet hit (presumably with enough force to push the earth closer to the sun), it hasn’t rained in 11 years, and the world has mostly turned to desert. The (male) elites have taken control of the enormous reservoirs of water underneath the sands in the only livable area left (the former Australia), thus controlling nearly all of the remaining population.

Director Talalay with star Lori Petty.

Some Mad-Maxian-type rebels live “free” in the outback in a commune, relying on finding and tapping into parts of the reservoir to survive. Although the head of the monopolistic Water & Power Corporation, Kesslee (McDowell), is trying to find and destroy these water pirates, the rebels fear another enemy much more: The Rippers, who are kind of armored super-soldiers operating from a secret base.

Buck is quickly established as a sarcastic rebel even before the commune is attacked.

The Rippers attack both W&P and occasionally the rebels under cover of darkness. Insert your own analogy to the aboriginal native populations of various countries (and of course capitalism) right here.

W&P discover the last well the commune has tapped, and attack the commune (which is decorated like every 90s teen’s dream) with corporation troops, killing many of the rebels. The body count includes Rebecca Buck’s (Petty) boyfriend Richard (Brian Wimmer) and, after a brave fight, capturing Buck and a young girl from the commune named Sam (Stacy Linn Ramsower).

Sam (L) and Rebecca

In a classic trope, Kesslee is fascinated by Buck’s spunk and sarcasm — and instead of just killing her, instead enslaves her. When she continues to rebel, he subjects her to various tortures.

Buck meets a fellow prisoner, who Buck nicknames Jet Girl (Naomi Watts) because she is being used as a jet mechanic by the cruel (read: rape-minded) troops. Jet Girl urges Buck not to fight back, but Buck is having none of it — and saves Jet Girl from a stalker trooper by pretending to be Jet Girl’s jealous girlfriend.

Kesslee decides to use the rebellious Buck to lure the Rippers out into the open, but the plan backfires, and Kesslee is gravely injured. Buck gets a tank (and is now Tank Girl), Jet Girl steals a jet, and they seek shelter and spend time modifying their weapons and plotting to break W&P’s control of the world’s water.

Their success prompts Kesslee to use the little girl Sam as both a hostage and bait, and puts the child in serious danger at one point — I don’t want to say more than that, but Iggy Pop is involved, and not in a good way. The Girls (Tank, Jet, and the little-seen Sub) get wind of this, and redouble their efforts.

Iggy Pop as a (thankfully unsuccessful) pedophile.

The ladies form an alliance with the Rippers, who we discover are mutated men (and the occasional dog that was first mutated into a man) who have been fused with kangaroo DNA (because Australia!) into a funny-looking mercenary force originally created by W&P before being largely wiped out for rebelling. Kesslee hopes their united force will attack so that his army can crush them all, but things don’t quite go according to plan.

That’s Ice-T on the left there, as T-Saint — one of the smarter and more poetic Rippers.

The film might possibly err a little too much on the comic side, but the look and set pieces are aesthetically pleasing throughout. As mentioned, looking at this almost 30 years after its initial release, it seems prescient and less unrealistic than it probably did in 1995. Indeed, “Kesslee” rhymes with “Nestle,” and if you don’t think that evil corporation isn’t trying to buy up as much of the fresh water supply as it can, you might want to read up on that topic.

In the meantime, the rise of women as role models, heroes, rebels, and the leads of non-drama films over the last three decades makes Tank Girl ever more relevant as the years go by. When it was first released, some critics and most audiences didn’t quite “get it,” but the tween/teen girls who got to see it took it into their hearts, and built a cult following around it.

The film turns out to have had enormous staying power as an influence, both outside and inside Hollywood. Although the film flopped in its theatrical run, it did okay with critics — and I think it has since garnered enough respect that a Blu-ray release beyond just the US would be justified.

The “Girls” together — (L-R) Jet, Tank, and Sub

If said Blu-ray could also include a ”restored” version that undid the watering-down cuts and edits the studio insisted on (among many other things, reducing Jet Girl and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Sub Girl’s roles, not to mention changing the ending), I think it could even be a hit on the revival circuit as well. As Ms. Talalay has gone on to a strong career in TV and film since then, I look forward to asking her about the “Kesslee” name, and the possibility of a “Director’s Cut,“ when next our paths cross.

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17Dec / 2023

Lynch/Oz (2022, dir. Alexandre O. Philippe)


⭐️⭐️½
52-week film challenge, film 48

The short version: this film-school set of academic essays read aloud with visual accompaniment, which collectively try waaaaaay too hard to connect everything David Lynch has done to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is overlong and misguided.

That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of references and visual cues in Lynch’s work that parallel TWoO; of course there are.

He’s obviously influenced by it, and there’s plenty of examples, either spoken in his films or visual/story metaphors. In answer to one essayist’s question at a Q&A somewhere, Lynch himself says that not a day goes by that he doesn’t think about that film.

Glinda the Good Witch literally makes an appearance in Wild at Heart, FFS.

The problem (one of several) with the central premise behind this is that most artists Lynch’s age or younger can easily be demonstrated to have been influenced by The Wizard of Oz: it was a unique film that embraced Technicolour in a new way, giving new life to L. Frank Baum’s first Oz book (he went on to write another 13 in the Oz series). The film version’s characters, dialogue, and songs have all entered the public consciousness in a huge and enduring way, thanks to the film’s yearly repeats on television and its extravagant, nearly-timeless tale of poverty, fantasy, and the power of friendship and imagination.

Even if you accept that Oz was a major influence on Lynch’s films — and there’s plenty of evidence that it was, in places — the documentary goes on to point out that it was also a significant influence in dozens and dozens of other films that have nothing to do with Lynch at all, thereby diluting Lynch/Oz’s central premise. This adds significant time to the already-thin but interesting premise, with the documentary running a very long-seeming hour and 49 minutes, when it could have been a really tight and more interesting hour.

Lynch/Oz is divided into six chapters, following what director Philippe probably thought was a Lynchian oddball introduction by odd-looking Jason Stoval (as Sid Pink) that falls very flat, as does the reprise at the end of the doc.

Another element that might have helped make this tribute less dull would have been to actually see the six essayists who read their written analyses of Oz’s influence on Lynch. Instead, we get clips from many other movies that also in some way reference The Wizard of Oz, seeming undermining the point of this particular doc — Oz is a very influential picture across all of the last 80 years, we get it.

Amy Nicholson has one of the weakest premises in her section, titled “Wind.” Yes, she talks about the use of strong winds to be transformative agents in both The Wizard of Oz and Lynch movies, of which there are but a handful of examples. Rodney Ascher’s “Membranes,” which posits the dividers between “reality” and the things beyond that (often illustrated with curtains in Lynch’s work, akin to Toto pulling back the curtain to reveal that the Wizard is not who he seems), is much more successful. It’s a very, very, obvious point, but well-explored.

Lynch’s films frequently deal with a character discovering a larger — and more sinister — world than the one they live in, which sparks a journey of discovery.

The third essay is the one that is the most completely worth watching: fellow filmmaker John Waters, who has a delightful personality and distinctive speaking voice that radiates joy, talks about how he and Lynch are of similar age, and so of course are in some ways influenced by the same films they saw as kids — not to mention that, like Lynch, he developed a fixation on the undersides of façades. Waters shares an anecdote of meeting Lynch, talks about their shared influences, and similar — but very distinct — desire to poke around underneath the fantasies we all try so hard to fit into our realities: it’s by far the best of the essays.

That’s not to say Karyn Kusama’s pondering on “Multitudes” in her exploration isn’t good also, but it marks a return to the more dry and academic style of analysis that has dominated this documentary until Waters brought some fun in with him. Thankfully, this is followed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s humourous ruminations on the frequent reference to a never-seen “Judy” in Lynch’s TV and film work, which brings in an excuse to explore the influence of Judy Garland’s own life on Lynch — a genuine and, once you see it, obvious musical influence that their essay makes clearer.

I did appreciate the documentary pointing out some examples of red heels (and even clicking them) in Lynch’s work.

This leaves David Lowery to bring up the rear with his essay on the theme of digging — a pretty weak link, and a curious choice for the finale of the documentary. He pokes around at the rather obvious point that Lynch’s characters often try to either bury things they don’t like, or have such things dug up (metaphorically or literally).

As a Lynch fan, I was hoping I’d get more out of this documentary than I did, though I do appreciate both some of the essays and examples they gave to support their point, and of course the archival footage of Lynch interviews, which are sprinkled throughout. Lynch doesn’t talk that much about his own work, so these nuggets are rare and Lynch’s obtuse way of answering questions about his work are mischievous and amusing.

If they’d drop the pretentious opening/closing, the seemingly-endless references to non-Lynch films that have obvious Oz references, and maybe the weakest of the essays (either “Wind” or “Dig”), you’d have a smart, shorter documentary with some real insight. It’s too bad director Philippe didn’t do that, because what he ended up with is a documentary that will have you squirming in your seat — for all the wrong reasons.

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12Dec / 2023

Godzilla Minus One (ゴジラ-1.0) (2023)

directed by Takashi Yamazaki
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
52-week film challenge, film 47

This remake of the first Godzilla film from 1954 (my review of that one is here) is a really clever reimagining that turns the perspective around: the focus here is on the human beings affected by the monster, rather than the monster itself. It makes brilliant sense in that the original really showed off the effects, but the new one looks at this phenomenon from a completely different angle.

I certainly did not expect a Godzilla movie to be this emotional, nor did I expect it to be entirely in Japanese with English subtitles in North American cinemas (nice touch). I find it fascinating that 37 films in — with multiple “reboots” from both Toho and Legendary Pictures — they found something new to say about kaiju generally, and yet also reiterate the original’s analogy to nuclear war.

Furthermore, I was completely gobsmacked when I discovered that the budget for this shot-in-the-arm epic was a mere $15 million — there are some films that exist where the catering bill for the shoot was around that amount!

I have, of course, seen quite a number of Godzilla movies over the years, though I largely haven’t seen the post-2000 comeback films. Growing up, Godzilla movies were fun and cheesy, and you (or at least I) never paid a moment’s attention to who was in those (model) ships, tanks, and buildings the monster trashed like the cheap paper maché they were. I also watched TV shows inspired by those movies, including “Ultraman,” a particular favourite.

Godzilla looks so “smol” in the 1954 original. Inflation, I guess, whatcha gonna do?

The genius of writer, director, and visual effects chief Takashi Yamazaki is in putting the emotions and the people up front in this version, with the title character itself getting a fair amount of screen time, but only very rarely being the focus. He even explains both why Godzilla keeps coming back, and why he’s so gigantic and “Hulk-like” compared to his first appearance.

That said, the vast majority of the time spent here is on the humans, specifically telling the story of Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot near the end of World War II — when the outcome was no longer in doubt — who chickens out, and feigns engine trouble and lands on Odo Island. That night, Godzilla emerges and attacks the base. Shikishima gets into the plane, but cannot muster up the courage to shoot at the dinosaur-sized monster.

He survives to find only one other survivor, Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), who blames Shikishima for the deaths of the other men. A year later (1946), he returns home and learns that his parents were also killed by Allied bombers. He meets a woman named Noriko (Minami Hamabe) who is taking care of an orphaned baby named Akiko (Sae Nagatani) that she has rescued.

As he is suffering from survivor’s guilt, he takes care of Noriko and Akiko, forming a sort of family. Although all three clearly care for each other, it is not made explicitly clear if Shikishima and Noriko actually became romantic partners.

Meanwhile, Godzilla gains his gigantic size and atomic powers via the US military’s nuclear testing in Bikini Atoll. The enlarged and super-powered monster attacks the ships, and then heads towards Japan.

By mid-1947, Shikishima has had some success in a dangerous but well-paying job, aboard a ship clearing mines left by the US around Japan. Authorities, which have been tracking Godzilla’s slow approach to Japan, order the minesweeper try and delay Godzilla’s approach so that more powerful ships can get there.

Cleverly, the shipmates use a mine and manage to release one that explodes in Godzilla’s mouth — which does some actual damage — but the creature can seemingly regenerate from injuries. A heavy cruiser arrives just in time, but is destroyed when Godzilla shows off its new power of atomic breath.

Of course, Shikishima is re-traumatized by the return of Godzilla, now enomous and unstoppable. Godzilla eventually reaches Japan, and attacks the city of Ginza. After tanks engage Godzilla, it again employs its atomic breath, destroying the city and seemingly killing Noriko after she saves Shikishima. He is yet again re-traumatized by this loss.

Since neither the US nor Russia will help because of tensions between the two, the Japanese government essentially gives up and does nothing. One of the minesweeper’s crew, Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), assembles a team and comes up with a plan to destroy Godzilla, using a small group of former Navy veterans — including Shikishima — and some disused Navy carriers to carry out the plan.

Unbeknowst to the others, Shikishima has finally been pushed too far, and plots his own revenge on Godzilla, that will presumably cost him his life. He makes arrangements for the care of Akiko with neighbour Sumiko (Sakura Ando), and pretends to cooperate with Nodi’s plan.

And like a good neighbour, Sumiko is there …

That sets up Act 3, and I don’t want to go into the plot any further because the movie is still playing in cinemas as I write this, except to say that some good twists ensue as the group bravely takes on Godzilla and Shikishima seeks revenge and redemption.

I, at least, was surprised by the finale as well as the final scene. I was also utterly delighted by some surprise callbacks to the original film.

Noriko sees Godzilla for the first time, shortly before she is swept away.

I was downright shocked by how engaged I was with the emphasis on the people affected by these events, and how right this alternative approach felt, viewing it from my cinema seat in a world where Godzilla is a stuffed toy with a very long history (and, as mentioned, an ongoing successful franchise for Toho).

70 years on from the original film, the monster itself can still elicit nostalgia and appreciation, but going back to its roots from a very fresh angle has given Godzilla Minus One something new: emotional connections with its audience beyond a general fandom. I’m not sure if this approach would work repeatedly, but it has certainly injected some fresh blood (sorry) into a franchise that had become cliché.

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22Nov / 2023

Withnail and I (1987, dir. Bruce Robinson)

⭐️⭐️⭐️½

52-week film challenge, film 43

We’re up to Doctor Who #8 on our filmic celebration of “Doctor Who”’s 60th anniversary. For those who aren’t fans of the TV show, Paul portrayed the 8th Doctor in a TV-movie in 1996, which technically I could have reviewed — I most definitely have thoughts on it — but I thought I’d get back to “proper” movies, and this is the one he’s best known for.

It’s an intriguing and wryly funny film written and directed by Bruce Robinson, based loosely on Robinson’s own life in Camden Town in the late 1960s. It centers around two currently-unemployed actors (Richard Grant as Withnail, and McGann as “I”, who is named “Marwood” in the script but is based on Robinson himself).

As we meet them, they are busy cross-feeding each other’s worst traits: Withnail is prone to abusing drink and drugs, Marwood is prone to bouts of paranoia. They live in a filthy flat and wait for the phone to ring, living off unemployment compensation and indulging their vices.

On a particularly going-spare sort of day, Marwood convinces Withnail to call up his eccentric Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths) and ask for the use of Monty’s country cottage in Penrith in the Lake District for a recuperative getaway. Let’s just say things don’t go quite as planned for Withnail, Marwood, or Monty.

The film has gained a cult reputation for its realistic look at the late 60s from a particular angle, and also because of a gay subplot that never really gets fully resolved (by design). It’s a very black comedy, but there are some very serious moments as well.

Grant’s flamboyantly seething performance as Withnail is meant to be the star of the film, but McGann’s Marwood is a good foil, alternating between hopeful optimism and dark paranoia, the latter of which gets encouraged by various incidents. Both men seem unprepared for coping with the real world, let alone rural England, and each is dependent on the other to try.

Our “heroes” arrive at last at the “cottage.”

The film effectively shows the two leads in rapid descent in Act One, but Act Two is where the movie picks up steam, as the pair leave the flat, encounter the rural locals, and don’t get on too well with them. Luckily, Monty arrives by surprise (a great excuse for Marwood’s paranoia to fall into a near-breakdown), but his presence brings both relief (he brought supplies!) and tension (he had a reason for coming) that fuels the third act.

Without giving too much away, there’s a comedic return to London and then some good fortune comes Marwood’s way — an acting job in Manchester — and thus the team has to split up. What becomes of the alcoholic Withnail is left open, but it doesn’t look like it will be anything good.

The boys’ idea of “fishing”

This is a movie that could only be made based on true-life adventures of the writer-director, because no scriptwriter would have planned for this level of emotional complexity — or, for that matter, this much colloquial English and plot-moving voiceovers — in a mainstream film. Indeed, a lot of the time the story seems like it would have made a good play, given how dialog-driven it is.*

*and as I was writing this review, I discovered that it has indeed finally been turned into a play which will premiere in Birmingham in May of 2024. Called it!

All of the main characters are based on real-life people, with “Withnail” being based on a friend and housemate of Robinson’s who was indeed alcoholic. “Uncle Monty” is based loosely on Franco Zeffirelli, with whom Robinson worked as Benvolio in the 1968 film Romeo and Juliet.

A very English movie.

The film turns really dark late in the second act, and then (thankfully) lightens up and brings back the comedy. When the the lads make it back home, they find their drug dealer (Ralph Brown) and friend (who is called “Presuming Ed,” played by Eddie Tagoe) squatting in their flat, waiting for them to return.

Producer Paul Heller was able to raise some of the money needed for the film, but turned to Handmade Films (George Harrison’s company) to secure the rest of the funding. Richard Starkey (Ringo) gets a special thanks in the credits, but with no explanation as to why.

Presuming Ed (right) is worth the wait.

This film, once viewed, certainly stays with you, as there really is nothing much like it. I am still thinking about McGann’s superb performance in a long scene where Marwood must talk his way out of a challenging situation, and spins a tale that might well be more true in some ways more than he actually realizes himself.

It’s a film you will remember, fondly or not, since the truth of it rings through — even though Robinson compressed events from across two or three years into two of three weeks in the screenplay. It truly could only have been made in England.

Disrupting a tea room. Very funny stuff.

Maybe another reason this film is so memorable, apart from its honesty, is that it can easily be seen as the first slacker “buddy movie,” a lifestyle that would come into mainstream consciousness in the 90s with films like Trainspotting and TV shows like “The Young Ones,” and which plenty of young people here in the impoverished 2020s can still relate to. It has certainly influenced a number of films, such as Pineapple Express, to name but one example.

If you like your comedy to be as black as your soul, you’ve found your new favourite movie. As a time capsule of a certain time, place, lifestyle, and one man’s memories and adventures, it’s a unique film. That both would go on to worldwide fame along very different paths makes you realise how incredibly well-cast Withnail and I is, too. Take a chance, try something out of your usual. Oh, and for the love of all that’s holy do not drink lighter fluid, no matter how desperate you become.

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13Nov / 2023

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

(1973, dir. Gordon Hessler)
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
52-week film challenge, film 41

The quick summary: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is as good as Sinbad movies with Ray Harryhausen effects get. This one has everything: a great actor for the title role (John Phillip Law), an intriguing and well-played villain (Tom Baker), a beautiful love interest (Caroline Munro), some comic moments alongside the race to victory, and a great selection of original Harryhausen monsters to complement a well-constructed fantasy adventure tale.

This was the second of the Columbia Sinbad movies, a revival of sorts following the first one, 1958’s The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. While it would really be nice to someday get a mainstream Sinbad movie where the lead was played by an actual Muslim from the actual region in which these stories are set, John Phillip Law charismatically embodies the qualities of the heroic wayfarer, unlike his successor (my review of Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger is here).

As mentioned there, for the month of November I’m reviewing movies that feature actors who also played the title role in the TV show “Doctor Who.” While Tom Baker may have one of the longer filmographies of that select group of actors, there are only a handful of films where he had such a large role, and this one is a personal favourite.

What’s great about this film is that, while it is a little slower-paced that modern films in terms of setting up the story location, major characters, and conflict, it is well-directed and tightly edited to to ensure that every scene in the film has a purpose that serves the overall story — the main failing of Eye of the Tiger, in my view.

In this tale, we find Sinbad just doing nothing in particular at sea, when along comes a strange flying creature with a shiny bauble. One of his men injures the creature via bow and arrow, causing it to drop the shiny item — a strange piece of jewelry that looks like some kind of puzzle part. Sinbad decides to wear it as a necklace, despite warnings from his crew.

That night, he was strange dreams, including a disguised but ominous man calling his name, and a sequence involving a dancing girl with a tattoo of an eye on the palm of her hand. A storm comes out of nowhere to knock the ship off course, taking them to the land of Marabia, where Sinbad encounters the ominous man, who turns out to be the evil magician Koura (Baker).

Koura demands the puzzle piece back, but Sinbad escapes with it into the city, where he meets the Grand Vizier (Douglas Wilmer), who wears a golden headdress/facemask to hide his disfigured face (from an earlier attempt by Koura to take over Marabia). The Vizier has a matching piece of the jewelry, but there is a missing third that, when matched with the other two, forms a map to the Fountain of Destiny, on the lost continent of Lemuria.

(L-R) Sinbad, Haroun, and the Grand Vizier

Those who can bring the three pieces back to the Fountain will receive youth, a “shield of darkness” (invisibility), and “a crown of untold riches.” Sinbad agrees to help the Vizier find the third piece, but unbeknownst to them, another of Koura’s flying homoculuses has seen and heard their conversation, and related it magically to Koura’s castle. They discover and kill the homoculous, but the race to Lemuria is now on.

Koura with one of his homoculus spies.

Koura is no ordinary magician; he is steeped in the black arts, and calls upon the forces of darkness for his magic — and each time he does so, the darkness takes some of his life force, visibly aging him in small or significant ways, depending upon what Koura calls for.

The aging begins, and gets worse Koura grows more desperate

In a later scene, Koura is desperate to avoid crashing on some rocks that Sinbad knows how to navigate around, and casts a spell to bring the figurehead of Sinbad’s ship to life, so it can steal the map and bring it to Koura. This is, as you might expect, a big “ask” of magic, and when the (terrific) sequence is over, his assistant Achmed (Takis Emmanuel) is shocked to see that Koura is much visibly older.

The chase continues through a series of interesting set-pieces, and the third bit of the jeweled map does at first fall into the right hands — following a magnificent bit of Harryhausen work as Kourna animates a statue of the six-armed god Kali to win over the natives, with the statue fighting Sinbad’s main crew simultaneously — but Koura steals it and takes the completed ornament to the Fountain, where he appears to win the day (going so far as to receive the youth that was promised, which restores him from the very old man he has had to become to try and stop Sinbad).

Koura also receives the shield of darkness, which prevents Sinbad’s attempt to steal the completed ornament back, but Koura makes the fatal mistake of hiding inside the fountain, where his shadow can be seen, and is then killed by Sinbad before he can claim the third prize. Sinbad thus wins the crown of many riches, but chooses to give it instead to the Vizier, where it restores his face and melts away his mask, making him the new Sultan. Now free to marry Caroline Munro’s Margiana, Sinbad and his friends sail off for Marabia.

The Vizier’s true face is restored by the Crown of Untold Riches

As I mentioned in my review of Eye of the Tiger, that film could be edited way down to reduce the padding and come out a much more exciting 90- to 110-minute film. Golden Voyage proves this theory by being much tighter and faster-paced, and clocking in at … 105 minutes.

Once you accept the (excellent) stop-motion effects work, the movie just carries you along on its quest with a rich set of characters, obstacles, and — let’s face it — cleavage (courtesy of Ms. Munro). It’s also worth noting the film’s b-plot — a merchant who enslaves Margiana begs Sinbad to take his drunken, useless son on the voyage to make a man of him, in exchange for Margiana and 400 gold coins.

Initially operating strictly as comic relief, the son Haroun (Kurt Christian, who would go on to play one of the villains in Eye of the Tiger) does complete his story. By the end of the film, he is a keen sailor who loves the thrill of adventure.

Even by today’s standards, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is still an enjoyable Saturday afternoon adventure, anchored by Law’s credibility in the Sinbad role, the judicious use of comic moments to move the story along, and in particular Baker’s strong performance as Koura (so much so that it led “Doctor Who” producer Barry Letts to cast him for the title character in early 1974).

Baker delivers both on the evil the part requires, and his own powerful charisma to rivet attention on Koura without ever stealing the spotlight away from the story. Yet, he still gives us a markedly different performance here than he would bring to the more heroic Doctor, where he created the first truly “alien” incarnation that remains one of the all-time favourite takes on the character. It’s a pity he didn’t get the chance to do more movies, but at least in one of them he got to play Rasputin — yet another definitive interpretation, in my view.

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11Nov / 2023

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977)

(dir. Sam Wanamaker)

⭐️⭐️⭐️
52-week film challenge, film 40

Continuing with our theme this month celebrating the 60th anniversary of “Doctor Who,” we continue to spotlight films that feature actors who played The Doctor over the years for November. This time, it’s the last Harryhausen Sinbad movie, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, featuring one of my absolute favourite Doctors, Patrick Troughton, in a major role.

It’s a pity this is probably the weakest of the three Columbia Sinbad movies, but it had a surprising amount of bad luck behind it. Patrick Wayne (son of John) is a handsome enough Sinbad, but … no charisma. He definitely puts in the work on the buckling of the swashes and such, but he never comes off as the lead of the film, or even as the hero of the story. Even Sam Wanamaker couldn’t pull a convincing performance out of him.

Another issue with this particular entry in the Sinbad series was that they literally gave animator Ray Harryhausen too much to do, resulting in a mix of excellent work and some clearly rushed and less-well-done effects. As a result, the story really drags, and has difficulty building any tension.

But the killer problem is that, as luck would have it, the film opened just three months after the truly revolutionary (and by comparison, breakneck-paced) first Star Wars movie, that instantly made Harryhausen’s mostly-great work look very dated by comparison.

Fans of Harryhausen’s incredible stop-motion work get a feast with this picture, and point to some of the creatures as among his best work — and they’re right, so if you want to see those you kinda have to suffer through the non-animated slog. The best of these effects are really enjoyable, but there are perhaps too many sequences of them for one movie, and the ghouls we see early on seem very lazy —- since they strongly resemble repurposed skeleton soldiers from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

No, they’re not quite the same, but too close to the Skeleton Warriors of the previous movie for comfort.

The storyline reads well on paper: Prince Kassim is about to be crowned Caliph of the kingdom of Charak, but his evil stepmother, the witch Zenobia (Margaret Whiting), places a curse on him that turns him into a prehistoric baboon. If the curse cannot be lifted within seven (full) moons, Zenobia’s son Rafi (Kurt Christian) will become Caliph.

Sinbad enters the picture by sailing into town to seek the hand of Princess Farah (Jane Seymour), but the town is under lockdown. Farah eventually finds Sinbad, and tells him of Kassim’s curse and that Kassim must be made whole and assume the Caliph before she can marry Sinbad.

Prince Kassim sees exactly what he looks like under the curse, to his horror.

The pair set sail to find the Greek alchemist Melanthius (Troughton), who may be able to help. Zenobia and Rafi, worried that they could succeed in undoing her curse, set off in pursuit using a ship powered by a giant “Minodon,” a Bull-Man creature made of metal, brought to life by Zenobia. The Minodon can do the rowing of six men from a single master oar (an uncredited Peter Mayhew, ironically also playing Chewbacca in the competing Star Wars), so they don’t need a crew.

Our heroes eventually do find Melanthius, who can’t help them, but knows of a temple in the faraway land of Hyperborea that will be able to undo the curse, if they can get there quickly. If they can’t, Kassim will remain an ape forever, so Melanthius and his lovely daughter Dione (Taryn Power) accompany the group to help in the quest.

Farah and others pass the time by playing chess with Kassim, which is beautifully done.

Zenobia, who transformed herself into a seagull to go spy on the group (a really bad effect that’s really noticeable in a movie with mostly strong effects), sees enough of the map they have to navigate her own path there, but some of her potion was spilled when the crew discovered her in seagull form, so when she transforms back, she still has one foot as a seagull — a nice touch (and callback to Koura’s price to pay for his own sorcery, but that’s from another Sinbad movie).

Anyway, it’s a loooonnnngggg journey to get to this mythical land, that keeps getting interrupted by stop-motion creatures (mostly quite good) and some disappointing traveling mattes that don’t quite work. Both ships finally make it to the Arctic, eventually find alternate ways into the somehow-temperate lost city, which provides the opportunity for a brief nude scene of the girls swimming — until they discover a giant troglodyte.

Well, hello there!

Finally, the two opposing crews have their big fight scene that also involve stop-motion creatures inside the temple of the lost civilization. One guess who wins (and who doesn’t end up as an ape permanently, as we were constantly warned would happen if they didn’t hurry things along), but it’s pretty well-done — and of course they make their escape just as the temple and city destroy themselves, and all ends up well for our heroes and very badly for the villains.

Kassim-ape is by far the most consistently excellent effect, almost at times convincing you that in some shots an actual ape was used. The now-friendly troglodyte and friends’ battle against Zenobia-in-smilodon-form in the climax is another standout sequence, though it’s never made fully clear why this creature threatens and then later helps our heroes, other than a weird “friendship” with Kassim-ape, maybe.

You could cut this film down, shorthand more of the interminable “here’s Sinbad’s boat … and here’s Zenobia’s boat” travel sequences, tighten the plot machinations, and have a really pretty good, exciting adventure movie that runs maybe 80-90 minutes instead of the poor pace of its actual 1h53m. It’s a pity they didn’t do that, because there’s some excellent work scattered among the overrunning parts.

I may be biased, but Troughton as Melanthius is far and away the best actor in the film, apart from the stop-motion ape which is kind of mesmerizing. I should add that the two women, Seymour and Power, do a very effective job in their stereotypical love-interest roles even if poor Jane is romancing up against a flat wall named Patrick Wayne sometimes. At least Kassim, once restored to human form, also finds a mate in Dione.

It’s a pity the Columbia Sinbad franchise finished on such an uneven note, both because of the flaws of the film and because it was mistimed to a fluke revolution in sci-fi special effects by Star Wars and Close Encounters at the box office that same summer. The earlier two Sinbad films are much better examples of the adventure genre, with the pinnacle of Harryhausen’s Sinbad work shown off in the second one, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad — which just so happens to have Fourth Doctor Tom Baker in a major role …

The Minodon (Peter Mayhew) does all the henchman work and gets no thanks whatsoever.

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05Nov / 2023

Will Any Gentleman …? (1953)

Dir. Michael Anderson

⭐️⭐️½

52-week film challenge, film 39

I hadn’t actually intended originally for last month’s reviews to have a theme of horror movies for October, but after the first one I just opted to keep it going. There’s really not enough Thanksgiving movies to make a theme out of that (and Thanksgiving’s not necessarily in November, Americans), but this year marks my all-time favourite TV show “Doctor Who”’s 60th anniversary, so I’ve hit upon the idea of reviewing films that have actors who played The Doctor in them, and we’ll start with a twofer: Jon Pertwee (in a big part) and William Hartnell (in a minor part) in a film adaptation of the stage farce Will Any Gentleman …?.

The problem with film adaptations of stage plays that are farces is that the energy doesn’t translate well, and of course now this 1953 film is so dated that it’s almost 100 percent laughter-free. There’s a lot of “stagey” overacting, though Pertwee and Hartnell are not among the guilty parties, and neither is lead star George Cole.

The underlying story is a simple one: mild-mannered bank clerk Henry Sterling (Cole) is trying to repay a small debt his brother Charley (Pertwee) owes the owner of a music hall. He gets roped into attending the show, gets pushed up on stage where “The Great Mendoza” (Alan Badel) hypnotizes him to remove his inhibitions. Things go a bit wrong and the show is closed before Mendoza can un-hypnotize anyone, leaving Sterling and another man with mixed personalities.

Sterling randomly alternates between his normal self and his wild playboy persona, to the consternation of most of the people in his life and the amusement of a few (including his maid). Brother Charley slowly works out what has happened and retrieves Mendoza to undo the hypnotism, but not before many shenanigans and misunderstandings have happened, almost resulting in Sterling’s marriage collapsing and being arrested for stealing money from his bank.

The other man hypnotized by Mendoza and not brought out of it turns out to be an undertaker who is hypnotized to laugh at nearly everything — one of the few genuine funny surprises in the film.

If you had seen the stage play in the early 50s, I’m sure you would have laughed a lot — farces work much better in theatre because the energy of the cast brings the audience along with them. The film version also plays things mostly very broadly, with may characters being cartoonish in nature, apart from the aforementioned future Doctors and Cole, who does an expert job switching personas.

If you’d seen the film in the 1950s being aware of the stage version, you’d probably find this one funny as well. But this type of campy, stagey comedy is tricky to get right on film, and while there are a few movies of this sort that still retain their “suspension of disbelief,” qualities this one just seems like most of the cast are trying waaaay too hard, and the comedy fizzles.

“Manic” Sterling has plans for his maid, who is more than willing as her life is otherwise dull and lonely.

At this point, the only people who would seek out Will Any Gentleman …? are likely “Doctor Who” fans who want to see what Pertwee (33 at the time) and Hartnell (45) looked like when they were much younger (though people in the 1950s all seem to look “old” all the time to me), and of course fans of George Cole, who is the best part of this movie.

Pertwee plays the rogueish brother just right, and his colourful personality keeps his performance in line with the film but not exaggerated, while Hartnell as the only truly serious part in the movie (as a police detective) just reminds me that every film I’ve seen him in, he gives each of his characters something distinct from the others — in this he is a perfect foil for Pertwee and Cole, gruff but never crossing into exaggeration.

Three of my favourite British actors in a single picture.

It’s a pity that this doesn’t quite work, but it doesn’t — in part because of changing social morés around sexism, which is really the centerpiece of this one. It is of its time and reflects its stage origins, which bodes mostly badly for modern viewers.

Almost the entire cast, L to R: Sterling’s wife, mother-in-law, frantic bank manager, brother, Detective Inspector, hypnotist, (can’t remember the half-seen fellow), and overly dotty doctor. Missing: the maid.

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14Oct / 2023

Phantom of the Paradise (1974, dir. Brian de Palma)

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

52-week film challenge, film 35

This review is dedicated to Don Smith, a recently-deceased podcaster on one of my favourite podcasts (Watchers of the Fourth Dimension), who loved this movie.

The early 70s covered a lot of cultural ground, but one of the weirder cul-de-sacs was the emergence of the Rock Opera, in which pop composers attempted to Do Something Meaningful by combining multiple rock songs into a (sometimes semi-) cohenent plot line. The form began in either 1968 (with S.F. Sorrow by The Pretty Things) or 1969 (The Who’s Tommy), depending on who you ask.

It hit big first with Jesus Christ Superstar in ‘70, Bowie’s album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars in 72, and the original stage production of The Rocky Horror Show in ’73. Movies of some of these efforts followed on, peaking in the mid–70s: Jesus Christ Superstar in late ‘73, Phantom of the Paradise in ‘74, and arguably the most successful examples, The Rocky Horror Picture Show in ‘74 and The Who’s Tommy in ‘75.

Of these films, all but one was a well-polished and long-running stage musical, and it was Phantom of the Paradise. In my view, it is less successful as a rock opera because of this — but on the other hand it borrows liberally from two great sources: the 1909 novel and 1925 classic film The Phantom of the Opera and Lon Chaney’s memorable performance, and of course Faust.

Brian De Palma’s second commercial film, seen now, will remind people of Rocky Horror in some ways — over-the-top camp, rollickin’ rock music, and the eccentric camerawork. It’s an amusing movie, particularly as a parody of Faust (and for pre-Muppets Paul Williams) but the humour is probably boosted if you are already enjoying some recreational substances, as people surely did at the time this came out. There’s no doubt in my mind that De Palma saw Rocky Horror on stage, and spotted the future filmic potential, though I’d love to verify that.

Winslow, soon to become the Phantom, and Phoenix.

The plot, basically: a singer-songwriter named Winslow Leach (William Finley) creates a cantata based on Faust, and this gets heard by a rich record producer named Swan (Paul Williams). Swan thinks the cantata will be perfect for the opening of his new concert hall, and has his henchman Arnold Philbin (George Memmoli) steal it.

Leach, expecting to hear back from Swan, makes repeated attempts to get back in touch but keeps getting thrown out. On one of these visits, he hears Phoenix (Jessica Harper) singing a portion of his work and falls in love.

This time, Leach is framed for drug possession, is sent to prison for life, and has his teeth forcibly replaced with a steel set. A few months later, he hears that Swan’s band The Juicy Fruits have covered part of his music, goes berserk and escapes prison, breaks into Swan’s record-pressing plant as is severely disfigured when he falls into one of the record-pressing machines.

Yes, various tricks are used to keep Paul Williams’ actual (lack of) height obscured.

Seeking revenge, he breaks into the Paradise club itself, hiding in the costume department and finding a stylish silver owl mask and cape to complete his transformation into the Phantom (these bird metaphors are already laid on kind of thick). He hears the Beach Bums (formerly the Juicy Fruits) rehearsing a reworked version of his music and nearly kills them all, which attracts Swan’s attention.

Swan tracks Leach down and proposes a deal: finish the cantata and record it in a custom built recording studio. Swan gives Leach a voice box to (kind of) replace his destroyed vocal cords, promises that Phoenix will be the lead, and makes him sign a contract in blood.

The Phantom and Swan are the original frenemies.

Leach completes the cantata at the point of exhaustion, allowing Swan to steal it and replace Phoenix as the lead with (I’m not kidding) a glam rock prima donna named Beef (Gerrit Graham). Swan orders the studio sealed up with bricks.

Leach recovers, and in a fit of adrenaline smashes his way out of the bricked-up exit, makes his way to the Paradise, and confronts Beef in his shower, threatening him not to perform the lead.

If this image looks a bit familiar, you might be a film buff.

Beef agrees, but is forced by Swan and Philbin to return and perform for the rehearsal. Leach’s Phantom is in the rafters, and when he see this repeated betrayal he sends a neon lightning bolt down, which fries Beef.

Beef.

Philbin, understanding that the Phantom is behind this, promotes Phoenix to do the next song, and — surprise! — everyone loves her, including Swan. Swan promptly begins seducing Phoenix, and the Phantom tries briefly to warn her, but she is panicked and doesn’t recognize Leach.

Later, the Phantom spies on Swan and Phoenix as they prepare to make love. He tries to kill himself out of despondence, but Swan appears on the roof to tell Leach he cannot die until Swan dies because of their contract. So Leach attempts to kill Swan, but Swan points out that “I’m under contract too,” explicitly revealing he made a pact with the devil 20 years earlier to stay eternally young.

Swan announces to the press that he and Phoenix will marry during the finale of his production of Faust. Leach realizes that Swan plans to have Phoenix assassinated as the wedding concludes, as she has also signed a blood contract with him. He goes to Swan’s vault, destroying the tapes and Swan’s filmed and blood-signed contracts, then hastens to prevent the assassination during the wedding.

Because of this, Swan is starting to deteriorate, and dons a mask for the wedding. The Phantom, arriving just in time, swings onto the stage, removes Swan’s mask, and stabs the now-vulnerable Swan again. As a result, they both are now dying, but the now-saved Phoenix finally sees who the Phantom is, and stays with him as he dies.

So yeah, pretty convoluted, with a little “Picture of Dorian Gray” thrown in for good measure. It’s very well-shot in most places, with a bright colour palette and some fish-eye shots and other moments that remind me of A Clockwork Orange.

The Juicy Fruits (the best-sounding incarnation of this band)

Williams wrote all the music, and performs as the Phantom’s singing voice, and it should be mentioned that the staging of the actual in-film Faust is a glorious tribute to The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, with the Juicy Fruits/Beach Bums now performing as goth-y Greek chorus The Undead. I should mention that Williams’ songs are not at all bad, but as catchy as they are (at times), they never hit the level of “memorable” the way the aformentioned started-as-a-stage-musical songs do.

As a horror/comedy/drama, it kind of works, but it’s a stew with too many ingredients in my view. Luckily, the film improves as it goes on, and the ending is really very satisfying.

The Juicy Fruits become the Beach Bums …

I can see why some people love this film, as it is as bombastic, in-your-face and over-the-top as a rock musical perhaps should be. If it had been polished and honed as a stage show first, I have little doubt that I’d love it like that as well. By the way — why hasn’t this film gotten a proper stage treatment yet?

Rocky Horror, which came out a year later, is frankly a better example of a sex/drugs/rock musical on film on every level. That said, Phantom of the Paradise has its charms, and remains an upstanding denizen of the “midnight movie” genre.

The Beach Bums become Kiss (actually, The Undead)!

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10Sep / 2023

The Raven (1963, dir. Roger Corman)

⭐️⭐️½
52-week film challenge, film 31

From the 50s and into the early 60s, Roger Corman was churning out hit-or-miss exploitation films and grind house movies. In 1960, having established a reliable reputation, he opted to do something a little different — making House of Usher based on the book by Edgar Allan Poe. The screenplay was written by Richard Matheson, art direction by Daniel Haller, and the film starred Vincent Price.

It was a critical and commercial hit, and thus the same team made another Poe-based film in 1961, The Pit and the Pendulum, and again it was a hit. In all, Corman made eight movies based on the works of Poe, with only one of them (The Premature Burial, made for a different production company) not starring Vincent Price, but rather Ray Milland.

When making Tales of Terror in 1962, the tale “The Black Cat” inspired Corman and his team to make a movie out of Poe’s famous poem, “The Raven.” In a signature move, he re-used the sets created for The Raven in his next film, The Terror (which was not part of the Poe Cycle, as the Poe-based films became known collectively). Once again, Matheson provided a script, Haller the art direction, and Vincent Price the lead — though this time, Corman brought in Boris Karloff as one of the villains, with Peter Lorre as a rival to both.

Because the segment “The Black Cat” in Tales was comedic in nature, Matheson and Corman opted to make “The Raven” a comedy as well. Although there are amusing moments throughout the film, the comedy largely falls flat because, in my view, Corman was, at least at this point, not competent at comedic timing.

Price plays Dr Erasmus Craven, a wizard and expert at “gesture magic,” who has rejected the Brotherhood of Magicians in preference to leading a quiet, nearly solitary life. His only company is his daughter Estelle (Olive Sturgess), and a coachman he employs. One evening, a raven raps at the window, Craven lets him in, and discovers the raven can talk — and is in fact another wizard, the pugnacious (and, as it turns out, alcoholic) Dr Bedlo (Lorre). With Bedlo’s nagging, Craven crafts a potion to restore him to human form, having been transformed in the first place by Dr Scarabus (Karloff), another wizard of gesture magic and other skills.

The trained raven in this film is *amazing*.

Bedlo recruits a reluctant Craven to return to Scarabus’ castle (the exterior itself reused from House of Usher, and very visibly composited into this film) to help him finish the duel. Craven’s coachman is taken over by Scarabus from afar and attacks the party, but recovers after a protracted axe-attack scene. Instead, Bedlo enlists his son Rexford (Jack Nicholson) to be the coachman, but as the journey begins Rexford is also controlled by Scarabus and nearly drives the coach off the cliffs. He recovers in time to bring the carriage to Scarabus’ castle.

Scarabus greets his guests as a perfect gentlemen, trying to undo his reputation and greeting Craven as a long-lost colleague. Bedlo, who has been rude, aggressive, and belligerent throughout the picture, demands that the duel resume, and sets about demonstrating his style of artifact-based magic, calling up a storm. Scarabus secretly gestures to intensify the storm, eventually directing a lightning bolt to strike Bedlo, destroying him.

Literally the only “magical” thing Dr Bedlow is seen to do in the entire movie.

The shocked party adjourn for the evening, being offered hospitality by Scarabus until the storm passes. Rexford, who saw what Scarabus did to bring about Bedlo’s destruction, hides in Estelle’s room, but they quickly find themselves prisoner when the door is magically locked. Rexford uses a window and the castles ledges to make his way over to Craven’s room, convincing him that Scarabus is not the charming and gentle man he seems to be.

On the way to confront Scarabus, Rexford discovers his father still alive, unharmed, and hiding. Bedlo confesses the entire plot thus far was staged to bring Craven to Scarabus so that the latter could duel against his closest rival, Craven. Meanwhile, Craven discovers that his “dead” wife Lenore (Hazel Court), for whom he has been grieving for two years, is in fact not dead, but feigned death to become Scarabus’ mistress.

Utterly not-dead Lenore (Hazel Court).

Thus, the duel is on, with the two wizards seated in fancy chairs, attacking each other magically in turn. This is by far the best part of the picture, with various practical as well as optical effects (but not really much in the way of imagination) used effectively. Bedlo, who has now decided to become a raven again, redeems his treachery by aiding Craven, leaving his son Rexford to woo the fair Estelle, and despite Scarabus’s castle and magic being destroyed as a result, even he and Lenore survive (for no good reason). All’s well that ends well.

This movie isn’t terrible, but it is … not good. Lorre’s character is just plain obnoxious, and apparently the actor ad-libbed himself a few extra lines throughout the film, leading to he and “son” Jack Nicholson not getting along, and rubbing the ailing Karloff the wrong way as well. Karloff and Price are excellent, with Price in particular showing off his effortless style and charm, which is why he’s the star of nearly all of these Poe films.

Although there are some occasional moments that might bring a smile, mostly from Lorre’s rude outbursts, there is not one single laugh to be found in this “comedy” at all, and I’m putting that on Corman’s very flat and hands-off direction. The plot is convoluted and contrived, and its pretty shocking to think that Richard Matheson had anything to do with it, but as with Corman, movie comedy just didn’t seem to be his strong suit at this point.

I often found myself watching the sets (which make the film look at lot more expensive than it was) as much as the actors, though some of the dead-body effects (for Craven’s father in particular, but also for the fake dead “Lenore”) were quite effective. Sturgess and Nicholson are merely perfunctory in their roles, while Hazel Court chews the scenery whenever she gets the chance.

Once the scene shifts to Scarabus’ castle, the film becomes more watchable, particularly the duel, but it doesn’t overcome the “failed attempt at camp humour” vibe of the overall film. The other Corman Poe films, such as Masque of the Red Death, are much better and still recommended, despite being very much of their filmmaking era.

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09Sep / 2023

Barbie (2023, dir. Greta Gerwig)

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

52-week film challenge, film 30

Barbie is a fun (and much funnier than I expected) movie that takes some time to make some serious points that are top-of-mind for many people these days. What’s amazing about this film is that it also finds time to address the men in the audience, given that woman are pretty obviously its main focus.

I can certainly see why some repressed critics have brainlessly labeled the film as “too woke,” but given its box office, their silence about the consequences of being woke, i.e. going broke, is pretty deafening.

The last thing in the world I would have expected from a movie about Barbie was a really rather deep dive into both modern society and mental health. I’m hopeful that this film won’t age well over the coming decades, because that would mean we’ve made some evolutionary progress as humans. Sadly, I suspect it will be standard viewing for many years to come, and not for lack of trying.

Barbie is roughly divided into three acts: setting up the status quo in Barbie-land, disrupting that status quo via a visit to the “real world,” and finally a Busby Berkeley entertainment extravaganza about putting it all back together, only with some important lessons learned.

As a Ken … I mean, man … I’m probably not very qualified to talk about the second and third acts too much, since they are so obviously and squarely aimed at both full-grown women as well as girls. But of course, as a man, I will do so anyway.

From my perspective, a few elements of the “awakening” parts of the film are laid on a little thick, but always with some good humour behind them. But of course I would think that, since the Kens are (correctly) lacking much in the way of depth, and blunder through the stuff that should have provided them with more enlightenment about themselves.

Despite this, I did manage to grok that some of the points made needed to be hammered home hard, and not for my benefit — rather, for the benefit of women of nearly any age. While society has certainly made some progress over recent decades, this movie shows that there is still a long and multi-vehicle sparkly process before us.

So, like the film itself, let’s switch back to the more fun parts for a bit. I really enjoyed the Barbie nostalgia and the self-effacing discontinued Barbies, Kens, and pal dolls that pop up routinely in the film. The set designs and Barbie/Ken variety in Barbieland are note-perfect, and it was especially fun (for me) seeing future “Doctor Who” star Ncuti Gatwa as one of the secondary rank of Kens behind Ryan Gosling — Gatwa didn’t get much in the way of lines, but he got a surprising amount of screen time and made for a great other-Ken.

Repeated references to Midge and Allan (and yes, Skipper and even Growing Up Skipper, among others) really added to the humour, the accessories and their cameos, and the significant role Mattel itself plays in the film (even making fun of its own paucity of female CEOs and board members) surprised and delighted me. I found it very interesting that the Mattel board ends up ultimately doing the right thing in the film, but for all the wrong reasons.

Allan’s movie hair is parted on the “wrong” side compared to the actual doll, but at least his wardrobe is straight out of the box.

After a lengthy introduction to Barbie World and how static it is, Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) begins to have dark thoughts and other little breakdowns because of a mental link to the (former) little girl who played with her in the real world. She starts to perceive Barbieland as an artifice, and after a consultation with Weird Barbie (scene-stealing Kate McKinnon), she journeys into the real world to find her former playmate and fix what’s wrong.

Only things don’t go according to plan: for starters, lovestruck Ken sneaks into the car and accompanies her on her journey, immediately discovering (and falling in love with) the patriarchal society that allows for only token advances by women every now and again. It turns out Ken has a surprising number of issues for a guy with no penis.

Barbie eventually finds a sullen, self-aware tween girl named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) who’s mad at basically everything in her world, and her struggling single mother Gloria (America Ferrara), who as it turns out is the former little girl who owned Stereotypical Barbie. After the usual disbelief at the circumstances, they resolve to return to Barbieland to put things right — but Mattel’s board has gotten wind of Barbie’s return, so a Screwball Chase™ is required, giving Ken (armed with books about patriarchy and men’s history) time to get back to Barbieland first.

When Barbie, Sasha, and Gloria finally arrive in Barbieland, it has been renamed “Kendom,” and the Kens are in charge, and strangely fixated on brewskis and horses. The Barbies have all been brainwashed into being Stepford Wives, essentially (and yes, I’m old enough that I consider this movie something of a remake of it).

Our heroes are at first dismayed by this, but again thanks to Yoda (sorry, I mean Weird Barbie), they work out a plan to disrupt the patriarchy from within. But will things just go back to being what they were before, as the Mattel board (who have followed along) want? That’s what sets up the third act.

The Mattel board of directors, horrified to learn that Barbie is present in the real world, give chase on Venice Beach in California — the nexus point between our world and Barbieland.

Without giving the whole thing away, following the ensuing hi-jinks and reset and a lot of feminine self-enlightenment as the Barbies are de-programmed (and the Kens, in a way), everyone gets at least some of what they want. Ken breaks his dependency on Barbie’s approval, Barbie (the main one, that is) becomes a “real” woman, and the Mattel board get some hot new and more-relevant variations to sell.

It’s not a perfect happy ending, and the Kens are left a bit adrift (and still in a matriarchal society, but somewhat more balanced this time), but both the other Barbies and the Kens become more self-aware, and realise the Big Lesson that happiness can only come from within, not from other people, and that means becoming a whole person.

And then the closing credits finally bring out a version of the insipid hit “I’m a Barbie Girl” song, along with a hit parade of actual WTF Mattel alternate dolls and accessories, including a pooping dog and innumerable outfits that were actually sold across the long history of Barbie. I should mention that Rhea Perlman of all people pops up in the film in small but a very important role, and it was super-nice to see her.

Ths scene is from the beginning of the movie, and this was all it took for me to know I’d enjoy myself. No spoilers, but this one’s for the film buffs.

If you’re going to make a “super-woke” film about female empowerment in a patriarchal society, this is how you do it: with a lot of cleverness and laughs and bright colours and goofy characters. You might even learn something … even if you’re a Ken.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy a Weird Barbie, and a Ncuti Gatwa Ken.

Inspired by the film, someone built an actual Barbie Dreamhouse on the California coast, and turned it into an AirBnB.

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