Let the Right One In (2008) – What happens if you fall for a vampire…
What happens if you fall in love with a vampire? Released the same year as the first installment of the Twilight saga, Tomas Alfredson’s low-key adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel attempts to answer the same question. While the conclusion reached may be more frightening, the central romance is certainly more touching.
Set in a humdrum Stockholm suburb in the early Eighties, Let the Right One In tells the story of Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a lonely twelve year old boy who lives in a small apartment with his single mother. Oskar is a bright kid with no friends, and is bullied at school. He hasn’t told anyone about it, and at night he fantasizes about taking revenge, and making the bullies squeal like pigs with his pocket knife.
One night he meets Eli (Lina Leandersson), a scruffy girl of around the same age who recently moved into the apartment next door to Oskar. Eli is also lonely; she lives with her “father” Hakan (Per Ragnar) and also has no friends. She appears poor – she has a funny smell and walks barefoot in the snow.
Eli is a vampire. Hakan, a combination of pedophile lover, father figure, guardian, and familiar, dutifully attains blood for her by waylaying locals, stringing them up, and bleeding them into a container.
When Hakan is disturbed by passersby in his latest attempt to gather blood, Eli goes hungry. Unable to control herself, she shanghais local drunk Jocke on his way home from the pub, and feeds.
As Oskar and Eli’s friendship develops, Hakan’s attempts to cover up her true nature and provide blood become more desperate. After another disastrous attempt to tap blood, Eli ends up on her own, and her interest in Oskar intensifies.
Oskar and Eli’s relationship feels very natural, aided by the open, unguarded performances of Hedebrant and Leandersson. Although Eli initially tells Oskar they can’t be friends, they are drawn together anyway through their isolation. The friendship and burgeoning prepubescent romance can be taken at face value, although Eli’s motives remain ambiguous.
Does she want Oskar as a boyfriend, or does she see him as a replacement for Hakan? Does she encourage him to stand up his tormentors because she cares for him, or does she want to stoke the violent tendencies in him?
The answer is likely a combination of these things. What happens if you fall in love with a vampire? Let the Right One In‘s answer is infinitely more sobering – and makes more sense – than the Twilight saga.
In Twilight, Bella falls in love and marries into a beautiful, affluent, civilized, intelligent, family of vampires. They are benevolent toward humans and tactfully do their blood sucking off screen.
Bella loves Edward so much she begs him to turn her into a vampire, unperturbed by the ramifications – becoming undead, living forever, never sleeping again, and having to suck blood from living flesh to survive.
It probably helps Bella’s decision that Stephanie Meyer found all the actual vampire stuff rather distasteful, and sanitized it to the point of ludicrousness.
In Let the Right One In, the answer in more complex, but also more mundane and frightening. At one point, Oskar asks Eli how old she is. She answers the same age as him “…But I’ve been twelve for a very long time.”
Which begs the question, how old was Hakan when Eli picked him up? If you want to know what happens when you fall in love with a vampire, Hakan’s last few days is your likely answer.
You end up moving from town to town to evade capture and protect your undead loved one. No friends, no family, you live in anonymous apartments which aren’t your home, and kill locals to provide blood. You are lonely and devoted, you grow physically older than your vampire lover, and become their parent and their servant. And, when things finally go bad, you become an emergency ration pack.
Will this be Oskar’s fate? The final moments suggest this, but as with many things in this beautiful film, the answer is left open to interpretation.
Let the Right One In is also happy to embrace vampire lore. Unlike Twilight, the vampires in this film have a more traditional reaction to sunlight. As hugely successful as the Twilight Saga is, someone at the studio should have had the courage to stand up to Meyer and tell her her vision of what happens to vampires in sunlight sucked. It is perhaps the most belief-buggeringly dreadful moment of flaccid revisionism in movie, or indeed fiction, history.
The title alludes to a lesser known clause of the vampire myth – vampires cannot cross a threshold without first being invited.
Almost all Alfredson’s are the right ones. The film is gorgeous, luminously lensing the dreary suburb as a magic kingdom. The initial view of Oskar, reflected in his bedroom window looking out over the courtyard below, brought to mind Rapunzel – Oskar trapped in his tower, waiting for someone to come along and rescue him.
Every shot is carefully framed to provide an isolated, snowy backdrop from Oskar and Eli’s unnatural romance. Alfredson’s depiction of Oskar’s lonely childhood reminds me of Spike Jonze’s interpretation of Where the Wild Things Are.
A few moments of child nudity – a naked cuddle, and Oskar catching a glimpse of Eli changing – might raise an eyebrow in UK or US cinema, but are handled as matter-of-factly as the violence. There is blood in Let the Right One In, but it is handled in a frank, understated manner – about as titillating as watching someone eating a steak.
Let the Right One In works as a horror romance, as a haunting coming-of-age tale, and would work almost as well without the vampire aspect. The central relationship between these two lost children is touching, and will stay with you for a long time afterwards, even if the conclusions you draw may not necessarily be happy ones.
Do I Not Like That (1994) & Mike Bassett: England Manager (2001) – The Impossible Job…
Football caught me at an impressionable age – I was twelve when England lost on penalties to Germany at Italia ’90. Before the tournament, I’d never kicked a ball or even thought about football. I was into Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and writing – football existed on a different wavelength to me.
The moment that caught me forever was not the shootout defeat, or Paul Gascoigne’s famous tears, or arch-goalhanger Gary Lineker’s two nerveless penalties against Cameroon in the quarters. It was David Platt’s late, late hooked volley in the last minute against mighty Belgium that sold me on the nerve-shredding wonders of football.
I’d never watched football, I’d never been abroad before, and those glowing images coming out of Turin on that fateful night against Germany looked so romantic, with a soundtrack of Pavarotti, that they looked like signals from a distant planet.
What followed was twenty two years of failure, and now as England fans steel themselves for their two-yearly dose of humiliation and heartache, it’s easy to think back to another penalty shootout defeat to Germany at Euro ’96.
The country was bouncing throughout the first tournament on home turf since their only victory in a major competition since 1966. The official anthem was Three Lions, a song that tapped into the average England fan’s combination of longing and disenchantment.
“Football’s coming home.” we all chanted, while the lyrics swung between cynicism and optimism – “Everyone seems to know the score, they’ve seen it all before” to “Thirty years of hurt, never stopped me dreaming.”
Another sixteen years of hurt has stopped all but the most blue-sky England fan dreaming of glory. Euro 2012 is upon us, new manager Roy Hodgson has picked his 23 man squad, and the nation braces itself.
My twenty two years of hurt has witnessed a tragi-comic litany of penalty shootout heartbreak, dubious disallowed goals, red-carded star players, unfortunate injuries and the tabloid pillorying of every manager brave/stupid enough to take on what has become “The Impossible Job”.
Off the field, England’s failure can be attributed to many things, including – an imperialistic arrogance – “We gave football to the world…”; an unfounded sense of entitlement fluffed up by heroic defeats in ’90 & ’96: a deep-seated conservatism in tactics; a Lilliputan governing body out of touch with the modern game; an antiquated coaching system; and millionaire footballers psyched out by the pressure of pulling on an England shirt.
That’s before you even start talking about the media, which Do I Not Like That & Mike Bassett: England Manager investigate in intimate detail.
Do I Not Like That is a very good fly-on-the-wall documentary following the final months of Graham Taylor’s doomed USA ’94 qualification campaign. Subsequent managerial appointments have in many ways been more disastrous, but no era pricks the England fan’s sense of gallows humour more than Taylor’s ill-fated era.
The punchline came in the match against San Marino. England needed a favour elsewhere to qualify after a disastrous set of results; to stand a chance anyway, they needed to run up a cricket score against the part timers. And so proceeded to concede the fastest goal in World Cup history, 8.3 seconds.
Taylor was ruthlessly hounded by the press, and it is easy to dismiss him as a combination of Alan Partridge and Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army. His unusual grammatical choices made him an easy target – “Do I Not Like That” and the lesser used “Can We Not Knock It?” gives him more catchphrases than the average gameshow host.
After an undistinguished playing career, Taylor earned astonishing success at unfashionable Watford. For several years, the club punched way above their weight, achieving some remarkably goal-heavy results against more affluent sides.
Watford also reached the FA Cup Final in 1984, a 2-0 defeat against Everton, which featured chairman Elton John weeping in a cowboy hat. If he’d chosen to write a gushy lament about his football club before he turned his attention to Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana, he could have called it Pissing in the Wind.
Taylor was aided by two useless assistant managers, loveable makeweight Lawrie McMenemy, last seen doing anything worthwhile in football during the Eighties, and brainless yes man Phil Neal.
At the time, I was stung to tears by England’s failure to qualify that I lapped up the tabloid’s cruel lampooning of Taylor. The Sun‘s long running hate campaign began with Taylor’s face super imposed onto a picture of a turnip – the headline after England’s defeat to Sweden in Euro ’92 ran – “Swedes 2 Turnips 1″.
Nowadays, I love hearing Graham Taylor commentating on football. Deeply unfashionable, but Taylor is an honest, fair, knowledgeable football man, still in love with the game despite the misery heaped upon him during his time as England manager. Every now and then, a story crops up of how Taylor will delay an interview to finish his conversation with a young footie fan – a gentleman.
It’s easy to laugh at Taylor in full body language sync with Phil Neal in Do I Not Like That, but there’s less obvious highlights. Taylor’s firm but dignified handling of the media during press conferences; Taylor politely telling a fourth official that their “boss” just lost him his job; and a truly touching, fatherly motivational speech to his players in the dugout which comes to nothing.
Mike Bassett: England Manager is an averagely amusing comedy that casts it’s net far too far and wide in an attempt to draw some laughs. It covers the rise to prominence of an old school football manager thrust into the England job, his incompetent qualifying campaign for a World Cup in Brazil, and their improbable journey to a semi final defeat against the hosts.
In the process, there are some jokes so obvious a twelve-year-old football fan might have scripted; on the subject of Bassett’s father, Bassett’s response is: “He was like a father figure to me.” and some clubfooted satire that mostly blazes over the bar.
In a messy, disorganized script, everything is a target. An opening news bulletin trumpets “If you didn’t know Mike Bassett won the Mr Clutch Trophy for Norwich at Wembley on Saturday, then you just couldn’t have been in East Anglia.”
Other jokes include a disinterested FA – Bassett’s boss repeatedly suggests sliding any suggestions under the door – “Here’s one from Ron Greenwood…” [England Manager 1977-1982], to the burgeoning Sky Sports box of tricks – an elaborate computer graphic measures how far a missed penalty kick travels beyond the goal.
Despite the film’s scattergun approach, Taylor’s regime is the most obvious point of reference – Bassett and Taylor were both journeymen players who made their name managing unfashionable, provincial teams. Bassett is more old fashioned than Taylor – his habit of jotting his team selection on the back of a cigarette packet leads to the inadvertent international call ups for two lower division players, Benson & Hedges.
Bassett has a simple-minded, sycophantic yes-man assistant, David Dodds (Bradley Allen), a direct nod to Taylor’s sidekick Phil Neal. He is constantly attacked by the press and knowledgeable fans for trying to shoehorn his motley crew of players into the prosaic 4-4-2 formation, and some of the headlines echo the tabloid’s punishment of Taylor – “Brussels 2 Sprouts 1″
Bassett also has an inspirational speech in him – after a boozy bartop dance ends in disaster, the embattled Manager faces a furious press gang, sharpening their knives, and launches into a moving recital of Rudyard Kipling’s “If”.
In the lead role, Ricky Tomlinson puts in an earnest, heartfelt performance – it’s a shame that he wasn’t given a less flippant screenplay to work with.
Released in 2001, some scenes ricochet nicely off our view of the modern game. A repeated criticism of the inflexible 4-4-2 is even more pertinent now than it was then. The stereotyped England Captain Gary Wackett, probably based on hard-tackling Stuart “Psycho” Pearce at the time, brings to mind current shameless thug John Terry.
Others are more nostalgic – Bassett’s idiot savant is Kevin Tonkinson, aka “Tonka”, clearly based on Gazza, England’s most gifted player for a couple of generations – mesmerizing on the pitch, but with an unfortunate penchant for tears, booze, fake boobs and silly jokes.
A wobbly satellite link between the studio in England and Bassett incongruously sipping a pina colada on Copacabana beach simply wouldn’t happen these days, but entertainingly recalls the day when a picture beamed from the other side of the world was unpredictable and exotic.
Neither film is the best ever made about football – that accolade must surely go to the Zimbalist’s electrifying The Two Escobars – but will make a perfect double bill for an England fan working themselves up for the opening game of Euro 2012. Or for any philanthropists with an interest in bumbling, institutionalized failure.
Or you could make it a hat-trick and lighten the mood afterwards with 2010′s more straightforward doc covering England’s glorious defeat in Italy – One Night in Turin. Come on, England!
A Time To Kill (1996) – Morally Dubious Manipulation from Schumacher & Co…
There are plenty of things that wind me up about A Time to Kill, and the first is that title.
Not because it’s pretty meaningless, but because it makes it sound like a second rate Bond movie, rather than a lusty courtroom melodrama set in the Deep South. So fans of the John Grisham novel approaching the film for the first time will be pleased to hear hotshot lawyer Jack Brigance is played by Matthew McConaughey and not by Roger Moore. (Although in my parallel universe-cinema, that casting choice sounds oddly intriguing…)
Joel Schumacher’s adaptation takes a racially charged potboiler and turns it into two and a half hours of sexy, gripping, salaciously enjoyable entertainment.
The movie opens with the brutal beating and rape of a ten year old black girl by two drunken rednecks. The grieving father, Carl Lee Hailey (Samuel L Jackson), infuriated that the rapists might go free, takes the law into his own hands and guns the two men down on the courtroom steps.
Hailey hires up-and-coming lawyer Jack Brigance to defend him in his seemingly unwinnable case. Up against racial prejudice and the ruthless, ambitious DA Rufus Buckley (Kevin Spacey), Brigance’s job isn’t made any easier by lack of funds or staff, or the newly-formed chapter of the KKK planting bombs under his house or burning crosses in his front garden.
Brigance is aided by seedy divorce lawyer, Harry Rex Vonner (Oliver Platt); a perky and brilliant law student, Ellen Roark (Sandra Bullock); and his drunken, disbarred mentor, Lucien Wilbanks (Donald Sutherland).
A Time to Kill is like a Who’s Who of people who were big in the Nineties. Spacey hot off the back of Seven and The Usual Suspects; Jackson huge after Pulp Fiction; Bullock still a big box office draw after Speed and While You Were Sleeping.
Further down the cast list, you’ve got Oliver Platt honing his rotund, garrulous, slightly shady sidekick act as Harry, and Brenda Fricker, still trying to make good Stateside after her Oscar for My Left Foot. Fricker is the only casting blunder, horribly miscast as Brigance’s devoted, fierce legal secretary. Donald’s boy Kiefer sneers his way through an underwritten role as one of the rapist’s equally racist brother.
Supporting roles are filled out with a sturdy crew of character actors; Chris Cooper stands out as a Deputy who loses a leg after Carl Lee accidentally shoots him while blowing away the redneck creeps. Charles S Dutton plays the sheriff; M Emmet Walsh as the defence’s critical witness; Ashley Judd as Brigance’s wife; Patrick McGoohan as the judge; Kurtwood Smith (the baddie from Robocop) as the KKK Grand Dragon – even if you’re not paying attention to the story, it’s entertaining enough to see all the famous faces popping up.
Amid this Nineties star-studded cast, Matthew McConaughey holds the screen well. A natural matinee idol, he convinces with his swagger and his innate sense of dignity, although he perhaps gets carried away with the emoting in the final courtroom scenes. Bullock got top billing, but it’s McConaughey’s movie.
Schumacher lavishes his cast with his usual attention, although it is notable that among the vast gallery of characters, there are only a few roles of any note for black actors. Carl Lee’s family are left in the background – as Ebert puts it; “Maybe…the movie is interested in white people as characters and black people as atmosphere.”
Schumacher’s Deep South is filled with attractive, privileged white people sensually covered in sweat looking like they want to hump each other, while during working hours trying to defend a double murder case. I’ve never been to the Deep South and I don’t know what race relations when the film was made, but it feels a little anachronistic – like a 90′s remake of the 60′s.
It is also easy to suspect that it’s a fantasy Deep South, created by white people and populated mainly by white actors, with all the racially charged stuff thrown in for titillation of liberal audiences.
Watching A Time To Kill again made me feel uneasy. I still enjoyed it as much as I did the first time, but felt far more manipulated. This is a big, handsome, sultry popcorn courtroom thriller, yet opens with the rape of a child.
I’m not saying all courtroom thrillers need to be harrowing and sombre, but the glossy entertainment that follows the initial heinous crime seemed inappropriate. It felt as if the crime was chosen specifically to goad audiences into a way of thinking.
Taking a step back, A Time To Kill swims in morally murky waters. The nature of the crime and how it is portrayed instinctively pushes us to react – “they deserved to die”.
The film assumes it is talking to liberally minded people, and uses the frightening specter of the KKK to ramp up the indignation. Even the racist rednecks in the movie seem to recognize this as a plot device – “There ain’t been no Klan around here for years.”
Not that racist child rapists deserve any sympathy, of course, but these are the worst kind of racist child rapists. They are filthy, drunken, knife-wielding, pickup truck-driving, confederate flag-waving scumbags with mullet hair cuts. Just to make sure the audience don’t take the wrong side.
I don’t want this to sound like I think the racists deserve more of a fair shout. I just objected to the movie coshing me over the head, bundling me in the boot of a car and driving me to conclusions I would have made anyway.
To make things more uncertain, Carl Lee tells Brigance of his intentions to shoot them – and then pleas not guilty of murder because of insanity. He guns down the rapist before they enter the courtroom, just to make sure they don’t get let off.
Throughout the case, the all white jury seem to be in favour of upholding the law and sending Carl Lee to his death, but after Brigance’s summation, it is not revealed how the Jury suddenly switch to a not guilty verdict.
This is all very slippery and manipulative, and leads to an interesting game of cut-and-paste. What if the original crime wasn’t so horrific in most people’s eyes – what if the rednecks had just killed the girl drunk driving? Would they deserve Carl Lee’s vigilante justice then, and would Carl Lee’s shaky plea of insanity swing the jury? What if the jury were black, and weren’t swayed by Brigance’s histrionics, and decided to be objective and uphold the law?
There’s lots of conundrums you can play with after watching A Time To Kill, and reading back, this doesn’t seem like a terribly positive review. However you take your courtroom dramas and whatever your politics, you should still be thoroughly entertained by this film, and will have plenty to chew on afterward if you want to get into it.
The Tree of Life (2011) – Malick’s Meaning of the Universe…
If you liked all the dreamy tree-gazing poetry that broke up the fighting in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, here’s another two hours of it for you. Malick’s latest certainly won’t be for everyone, as it tells a family drama without traditional methods such as plot or dialogue, and takes in the creation of the Universe for good measure.
Malick likes to take his time making a movie, and “The Tree of Life” is only his fifth feature in thirty-eight years. That means it takes Malick almost as long to make a film as it does for the audience to watch it. If you are not familiar with the Director’s work, you are best advised to approach this film as if sitting down to watch an orchestra perform a symphony.Dialogue and story are of secondary importance to images. The film opens with snapshots of a grieving family, although it is not clear who has died, or what the circumstances were. These glimpses are like fragments of memory, which we assume belong to a middle aged architect, played by Sean Penn. As it turns out, the circumstances of his younger brother’s death will remain a mystery, but that isn’t important when played out against the canvas of God’s universe.
Most of the film’s oblique dialogue comes in the form of a whispered voice over, like the interior monologues of the soldiers in Thin Red Line. These thoughts are often in the form of a prayer, or questions directed at God – “Where are You?” – or the deceased brother, or perhaps both at the same time.Some reviewers have compared the film to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but goes one better – while Kubrick’s adaption of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel only covered Mankind’s evolution, The Tree of Life encompasses the whole of history, from the Big Bang, right through to the hereafter.
However, while Kubrick’s eye was cold and meticulous, Malick is reverent to all things that make human life bearable. While his view of childhood is nostalgic, it is not rose-tinted, and treasures those moments where the love of God/Universe is present in the touch of a loved one or the wind through the trees.
The early scenes of the Universe’s creation are done with enigmatic cloudscapes and mysterious shapes, leaving it to the viewer to decide exactly what they’re looking at. The sequence is as awe-inspiring and absorbing as Bowman’s trip through the stargate in 2001.The film eventually settles down into something resembling conventional narrative as it follows the O’Brien family from the birth of their eldest through to when they leave their neighborhood years later. Mr O’Brien (Brad Pitt) is eventually faced with a dilemma at work – either lose his job, or take a position in another part of the country.
Although this is Malick’s movie, this is a big performance from Brad Pitt. It’s a shock to see him at first – with a buzz cut, bunched jaw muscles, horn rimmed spectacles, cheap starched short sleeve white shirt and a skinny black tie, he’s left his uber-cool personae of Tyler Durden behind. He looks more like Michael Douglas’s psychotic poster boy for white collar anonymity, D-FENS from Falling Down.Pitt, now pushing fifty, may see this as his breakout role. No longer is he the laconic or reactionary understudy to an older, wiser actor (Ocean’s Eleven, Seven). He is the older actor now, and it is startling, brutal and elevating to see him suddenly in that light.
With the absence of a normal script, he manages to portray a devoted, God-fearing father in a series of abstract snapshots, which due to their regularity, give the flick-book appearance of a series of stills coalescing into a narrative.He’s a devoted father, but also a strict disciplinarian, as is demonstrated during numerous dinner table stand offs between Mr O’Brien and his offspring. He loves his wife, but the kaleidoscopic memories whirling across the screen show the tension put on them by the pressures of life.
There are scenes of Mr O’Brien insisting his children finish sentences directed at him with “Sir”. There are also scenes showing him gambling, and flirting with a waitress in a diner, without suggesting in a melodramatic way that he’s either a ruinous gambler or a nefarious womanizer.
For all his downfalls and tense moments when Mr O’Brien’s disciplinarian tendencies threaten to boil over into violence towards his wife and kids, he’s not portrayed as a bad father. He just simply wants his boys to grow up into God-Fearing men like himself, and wants to give them the benefits of the upbringing he had.His wife, Mrs O’Brien, is a mainly speechless part, played with warmth and charity by Jessica Chastain. She illuminates the screen as the infinitely more benevolent parent. It is suspected she may be idolized in hindsight by the grown up Jack.
Hunter McCracken has a breakthrough role here as the young Jack. As a boy he worships his dad, but as he approaches adolescence and becomes more aware of his individuality, starts running with a bad crowd and begins to resent, and eventually hate, his strict father.It’s hard to think of another film recently, apart from 2009′s Fish Tank, which so successfully celebrates and commiserates those ties that bind, the painful love/hate relationship with our families.
Without the trite dialogue, routine situations and deathbed melodrama usually served up in a family tragedy, The Tree of Life speaks clearly about the beauties, both cherished and dreadful, of our loved ones.
In our cynical, know-it-all age, it takes a brave man to give us a vision like The Tree of Life. – someone who is not afraid to say all God is in the Universe, and all the Universe is within us. We will see our loved ones, because we are all part of the same thing.
That omnipotence is in the Big Bang, the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, a breath of breeze billowing curtains on a hot summer’s afternoon, and the love that carries us through to the ever after. Thank the Universe we have Terrence Malick.
Tropic Thunder (2008) – Get Some…Again!
Tropic Thunder starts off in your face, and spends the next two hours blaring and honking, tooting and parping, like the world’s biggest, most expensive, attention seeking one man band. The man with the cymbals and the washboard is Ben Stiller, and he plays his assorted instruments as loudly and enthusiastically as possible. Tropic Thunder is never less than entertaining.
The jokes are obvious, the music choices are cliched, and the satire is broad, but Tropic Thunder also possesses a manic energy, powered by three monstrous comic performances. Robert Downey Jr picked up the plaudits and the nominations, but Tom Cruise’s demented turn as a brimstone-spitting movie mogul is just as memorable.
Stiller deserves credit for starting off offensive and having the courage to stick with it, and mounting a Hollywood satire with a Hollywood blockbuster budget. Satires about the movie making industry are ten a penny, but few come with a $90 million price tag.
Tropic Thunder follows the disastrous adaptation of an acclaimed memoir by a Vietnam Vet, “Four Leaf” Tayback (Nick Nolte), who lost his hands saving his comrades in battle.
The bloated production is stuffed with assorted Hollywood types. There is the over-the-hill action star, Tugg Speedman (Stiller), sniffing out another hit after his creaking franchise, Scorcher, left audiences cold, and his ill-advised stab at credibility, Simple Jack, is regarded as the worst film ever made.
Also onboard and striving for credibility is Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a drug addicted bad boy famous for a string of fart-based comedies; and rapper Alpa Chino (Brandon T Jackson), fresh from a lucrative endorsement of “Booty Sweat” energy drink and trying to go legit in the movies.
Contrasting sharply with Speedman and the others is Kirk Lazarus, five time Academy Award winner, an actor so method he undergoes surgery to darken his skin to portray African American Sgt. Lincoln Osiris. So method, in fact, he stays in character all the time and doesn’t emerge until after he’s done the commentary on the DVD.
The warring egos cause trouble on the location shoot, and rookie director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) is unable to control his cast. The chaos on set causes the cameras to miss a $4 million explosion, attracting the attention of the movie media, reporting the production as over budget and a month over schedule after only five days.
Studio Boss Les Grossman (Tom Cruise) is furious, and threatens to pull the plug unless Cockburn can control his stars. Cockburn follows Four Leaf’s suggestion, dropping the prima donnas in the middle of the jungle and rigging cameras along their route, and use pyrotechnics to elicit a realistic performance.
Things don’t go quite to plan – the crew attract the attention of a local gang of druglords, who mistake the heavily armed Americans as the DEA. Soon Speedman and crew find themselves in very real danger…
The idea of pampered actors finding themselves in peril without realizing it isn’t exactly original – Three Amigos! and Galaxy Quest – and Tropic Thunder, seemingly conscious of this, takes a little while to get rolling. Stiller seems to try covering up the unoriginality with a lot of shouting, noise and swearing.
Once the gang finally realize they’re in trouble the film finds the right gear. The cast warm to their characters and Tropic Thunder actually becomes an effective action movie in its own right, as Lazarus and the remaining actors break into the cartel’s base to rescue the others.
The satire is broad, but packs a mighty punch. The film attracted the wrath of disability advocacy groups in the States, objecting to the repeated use of the word “Retard”. In one of the film’s most memorable moments of dialogue, Lazarus explains to Speedman the fatal mistake he made in Simple Jack, of going “Full Retard”.
If anything, the disability advocacy groups should celebrate Tropic Thunder & Simple Jack for naming and shaming high profile actors who use disability as a surefire shot at another trophy in their cabinet. The joke is not on people with disabilities, it is on high profile public figures who use people’s disabilities as an easy win. Dustin Hoffman, Peter Sellers and Tom Hanks are all name checked, but poor old Sean Penn – “…2001, I Am Sam…went full retard, went home empty handed…”
Eyebrows were inevitably raised about Downey Jr’s character going “Blackface”, but once again, the joke is not on black people. The joke is on a character so shameless and so wrapped up in “Method” methodology he believes that he can be Black by being black.
Downey Jr’s jive talking Lazarus/Osiris is the film’s outstanding performance, as layered as it is. What is happening in Lazarus’ head? He is so in character, he doesn’t back down from racial stereotypes even when called by the real African-American on set.
Downey Jr is almost trumped by Tom Cruise’s grotesque cameo as Les Grossmann. Demonic studio bosses have been done many times before, but you have to think back to Michael Lerner in Barton Fink to find one this fickle, ferocious and slimy. Who knew Tom Cruise had a sense of humour?
Stiller, who has made a career of portraying angry little men with huge egos, is more likeable here than he has been for quite a few years now, and generously lets Downey Jr grab all the plaudits with the flashier role. Stiller puts in some good work here though, and draws considerable sympathy. And of course, there’s his deliberately excruciating moments as Simple Jack.
Of the cast’s big names, Jack Black is the most disappointing. His Portnoy is a jarringly one note, mean-spirited performance, as the meaty wild child spends the whole movie screaming and shouting through cold turkey in the jungle.
Nick Nolte is predictably gruff and grizzled as Four Leaf, the vietnam vet whose experience of the war may not have been as grueling as he described in his book. In a neat cameo, Matthew McConaughey is convincingly slick as Speedman’s shallow, materialistic but ultimately loyal agent, Rick Peck.
The film has the look and feel of a glossy Hollywood blockbuster, although some of the music choices are rather familiar. This may be a deliberate choice – if movies have taught us anything, it’s that guys riding in helicopters loved listening to the Rolling Stones & Buffalo Springfield while machine-gunning “gooks”.
Tropic Thunder is worth catching on the small screen for some tasty comic performances and some juicy, controversy-baiting dialogue. Sure to develop a separate cult following away from the big screen.
Robocop: If you can, buy it for a dollar. (I’d pay up to $10)
Paul Verhoven’s deliriously brutal satire Robocop was unfairly written off as a Terminator cash in, although it has very little in common with Cameron’s relentless sci-fi hit. Notionally fitting the Sci-Fi genre, it is more like an old western, where a stranger rides into a bad-ass town and cleans things up…the hard way.
Detroit, sometime in the near future – the city is plagued by crime. The beleaguered police force is fighting a losing battle against the ruthless villains controlling vast swathes of the city. We meet officer Murphy (Weller) on his first day in the precinct – he is partnered with a sassy, butt-kicking Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen), who is immediately drawn to the calm, slightly arrogant new boy. Top on their agenda is notorious cop killer Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith), a snide and vicious ganglord who is running riot in the city with his cackling band of hoodlums.
Meanwhile, over at the sinister multinational corporation OCP (Omni Consumer Products), they’ve just won a contract to run the police force. In order to do so, two rival executives are pitching high-firepower alternatives to fragile human law enforcers. Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) unveils his crude and fatally flawed ED209, a walking gunship with a ferocious growl, in a boardroom bloodbath that is one of the movie’s standout scenes. ED’s malfunction is both frightening and hilarious.
The murderous debacle opens the door for Robert Morton’s (Miguel Ferrer’s) brainchild, the “Robocop” programme, which is lower key than the military-style ED209, and will feature a law enforcer that is half human, half machine. All he needs is a volunteer…
Hot on the heels of Boddicker and his gang, Murphy and Lewis chase the crew to an abandoned factory, and unwisely decide to continue without back up. Our two heroes are separated, and Murphy is soon caught, tortured, and blown to bits. Morton now has his candidate.
Murphy is resurrected as a gleaming knight in shining armor, and it’s not long before he’s cleaning up the streets in old Detroit. However, the techies haven’t wiped Murphy’s memory properly, and he goes renegade, looking for clues to who he once was. Robo is also back on the trail of Boddicker, who happens to have a connection with vindictive exec Dick Jones…
Robocop is extremely violent, and scenes such as Murphy’s demise are visceral enough to hit hard 25 years on. However, the violence is undercut by Verhoven’s energetic direction, a sly and subversive sense of humor, satirical swipes at Reagan era 80′s America, and tremendous performances from actors making the most out of 2-D roles.
Standout is Weller as Murphy/Robocop. He has only a few scenes with his full face showing, and fewer still as a living human being. Weller maximizes on his strange, ethereal features and calm delivery, His few early scenes with Lewis establish their instant bond and get the viewer rooting for him.
Once transformed into Robocop, his performance is threefold. He showcases some truly remarkable mime work as he creates Robo’s way of moving, with determined striding arms and jerky head movements. Notice how his head turns first, then the body follows. Most people who try doing the robot – apart from Peter Crouch – just look ridiculous, but Weller pulls it off brilliantly.
Then there is his monotone voice, which can be very funny. Listen to his cadence when he advises “Come with me or there may be…trouble.”. Later, the monotone becomes sad and melancholic once he discovers his former life, and realizes he can never go back.
Thirdly, is how much of an emotional performance Weller creates considering his face is covered from the nose up for the majority of the movie. He manages to convey recognition, disbelief, confusion, anger, and sadness with just a few minor twitches of the lips. Weller gives the movie it’s emotional punch that makes it a more rewarding film than Terminator or other genre pics of the era.
Nancy Allen makes the most of her brief scenes with Murphy; Kurtwood Smith makes a deliciously sleazy villain; Ferrer and Cox enjoy themselves as the warring, greedy executives, undermining each other for the big buck.
Verhoven enjoys himself thoroughly, handling the B-movie material wonderfully, investing it with some satirical bite – the TV Adverts are delightful, particularly the “Nuke Em!” board game.
Some of the shoot ‘em up sequences are rather generic, as when Robocop storms a cocaine lab. We are also treated to some wonderful moments - Murphy’s gut-wrenching last few seconds; a POV sequence intercut with flashbacks as Murphy lays dying on a operating room table; Robocop’s visit to his old house, where flashbacks vanish as he walks through them.
Everyone has their favorite Robocop moments and quotes. Give it another visit if you haven’t seen it for a few years, because there is sure to be some detail you’ve forgotten.If you haven’t seen Robocop before, then you’re in for a treat – forget its dated look and give it a bash.
Exit Through the Gift Shop: Everyone’s An Artist Nowadays…
Here’s a curious piece for you. A documentary about street art, supposedly directed by ultra-anonymous and ultra-famous graffiti artist Banksy; it starts as a Banksy doc by an obsessive frenchman Thierry Guetta; but turns into a documentary about Guetta by Banksy, using Guetta’s own footage.
Confused? You won’t be. You may have your own opinions on Banksy, good or bad, but it’s hard to deny that the man has made an extremely assured and thoughtful film debut with Exit Through the Gift Shop.
I went into this documentary expecting a straightforward and self-aggrandising film about Banksy. Banksy is ubiquitous these days, and I’ve always had a strong ambiguity towards his work.
On one hand, I’m suspicious of his arch sloganeering and his occasional pandering to trendy political views, which can encompass anything in the scope of Banksy’s anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anarchy with a very small “a” worldview.
But then – there are moments when I can’t help but delight at some of his images, and I prefer his less overtly political stencils, and prefer the ones where he uses the environment around him to make a visual pun. I liked the maid lifting up the wall to sweep dust underneath like a curtain; or the double yellow lines that veer off the road, across the pavement and up a wall to form a flower.
So, a Banksy film. After a nice opening montage of graffiti artists doing their thing, we are introduced to “Banksy” – a guy with his face hidden in the shadow of his hoody, and a digitally altered voice. Banksy, with some degree of modesty, claims the man the film eventually turns out to be about is more interesting than him…
Thierry Guetta is a French immigrant living in LA with his wife and kids, where he makes a comfortable living running a vintage second hand clothes store.
Thierry seems an amiable, friendly type, and instantly seems comical, with his gigantic sideburns, tubby frame and silly little hat. But there is something blank about his eyes, and we soon learn Thierry has an obsession. He films his whole life with his camcorder, and stores the tapes in a haphazard collection which he never labels, let alone watches.
Thierry’s life takes a new course when he visits family in France and finds out his cousin is the street artist Invader, who’s shtick is placing mosaic aliens from the ancient Space Invaders video game in locations around the world.
He accompanies his cousin as he goes about his nocturnal work, and is later introduced to Shepard Fairey, another street artist famous for his mock-totalitarian Obey campaign, featuring wrestler Andre the Giant, and the Hope poster for Obama.
Fairey is a little puzzled by Thierry’s enthusiasm and relentless filming, but finds the Frenchman a willing assistant and lookout as he goes about his work on the city’s walls and rooftops. Thierry also films a number of other street artists, and announces his intention to make a documentary about Street Art. But he is missing one famous British street artist in particular…Banksy.
The two eventually meet, and the film gets stranger from there, as Thierry first completes his documentary, and then becomes a street artist himself.
By the end, the big question is – what is art? Banksy and Shepard Fairey are bitter about their contribution in Thierry’s eventual success as “Mr Brainwash”. They’ve devoted years honing their craft while Thierry just flung a load of cash at a Warhol-like studio. But does that make Mr Brainwash’s “art” any less legitimate than Fairey’s or Banksy’s?
The latter in particular has been provoking the “But is it art?” question for years. Banksy says at one point: “Warhol took cultural icons and repeated them until they became meaningless, but in an iconic way. Thierry made them really meaningless.”
True, there is a complete witlessness to Mr Brainwash’s images compared to Banksy, but both wouldn’t exist without Warhol. For anyone to “get” pop art, they need to have some awareness of the culture around them, and their appreciation of the painting or image is informed by what they already know about the world around them.
Take for example Banksy’s image of a policeman searching Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz”, reaching for her picnic hamper. The look on Judy Garland’s face is suitably worried about what he might find.
The initial juxtaposition of riot helmeted copper with an innocent young girl from an old family movie is humorous enough; but then we also know of Judy Garland’s unfortunate trouble with drugs throughout her life, which hints at what the policeman might be looking for.
Banksy, if his work isn’t art, then at least it’s great pop art, and falls into the same category as Chuck Jones and Terry Gilliam.
Like some of Jones’ more experimental and post-modern Looney Tunes, Banksy is aware his audience is aware of the “frame” or “canvas” he’s using, which allows him to turn the meaningless (derelict buildings, shabby, peeling walls) into something meaningful.
And, like Gilliam’s surreal, free association animations in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. there is a kind of nostalgic, retro conformity to the images Banksy uses for his stencils.
Exit Through the Gift Shop features some fine footage of street artists at work, often by dangerously climbing out of windows and over rooftops, and avoiding the police as they go.
It also turns into a very interesting character study of Thierry Guetta. Here’s a man who films his whole life, but never watches it back. He has a normal looking wife and kids, so he can’t be that crazy, but it’s clear his obsessions run deep.
By the time he gambles everything he has on staging an elaborate LA exhibition, he has learned all the techniques of street art, and can produce copious amounts of images without actually having any talent or feel for the medium.
In some ways, he reminds me of Raymond Babbitt, Dustin Hoffman’s autistic character in Rain Man – who can recite Abbott & Costello’s Who’s on First? routine perfectly, but without realizing it’s actually supposed to be funny.
And the final irony of Exit Through the Gift Shop is people show up and pay tens of thousands of dollars for Mr Brainwash’s crass, stream-of-consciousness artwork. It seems these days all you have to do is tell people they’re looking at art for them to believe it.
Twilight: Why Did The Vampire Cross the Road?
You think vampires are evil? I had a girl like Twilight‘s Bella work with me once. Her attitude stank so bad I gave her a special job to do. I had a huge pile of old papers that needed shredding, and told her that the information was so sensitive, she needed to go through every page and black out every line with a marker first. It took her four days.
I’ve been building up to actually watching Twilight for so long now, just so I could form my own opinion, and I end up starting with that non-movie related anecdote. I guess I was just groping around to find a way to describe how much Kristen Stewart’s character irritated me.
The first act of Twilight plays like a less fun version of The Lost Boys, as morose teen Bella Swan moves from her hometown Phoenix to stay with her divorced dad in Forks, WA. a town so quiet, small and ordinary it looks like David Lynch’s worst nightmare.
The ungrateful sourpuss is quickly befriended by her new classmates, but her attention is grabbed by the mysterious Cullen clan, who swan around the school in a stately manner and keep themselves to their ultra-cool selves.
Bella is quick to spot hollow-cheeked hunk Edward (Robert Pattinson), although his reaction to her on first meeting in Biology class is unfortunate. When he catches a waft of her scent, he looks like he’s about to lose his lunch.
Through a series of quavering, awkward conversations, the glum pair get the hots for each other. When Edward miraculously saves Bella from being flattened by an out of control van in the parking lot, she realizes he might not be quite what he seems…
Bella and Edward fall heavy for each other, but there is a problem – namely, Edward’s a vampire. Bella’s not too fussed, though, even when he explains her scent is like curry to a pisshead for a vampire.
Questions inevitably arise; Edward wants to give her a good old sucking, and Bella clears wants to be sucked. What about sex? Edward doesn’t eat regular food, or sleep, so does he get a boner? Or does that only happen when two people are both vampires?
Or once they’re both blood-suckers, do they just waft around aesthetically together, gazing longingly at each other for eternity in a daze of deliciously fatalistic ennui? Or do they just take turns ravishing each other, sucking one another dry? I hope the rest of the Twilight Saga will answer these questions…
Other characters include Jacob (Taylor Lautner), a native American wolfboy (it’s only alluded to in this episode, but it’s hard to avoid the trailers). The Native Americans wear durable materials, check shirts and jeans, and drive pickup trucks; the genteel Vampires nonchalantly flaunt the affluence of presumably Old World ancestors. They also have lots of fast cars in the garage, although vampires need cars as much as Jaws needed a speedboat.
I enjoyed Twilight. I deliberately disengaged the movie snob and let myself go with it. I was disappointed to see what they’ve done with classic motifs of vampire lore – the vampires don’t live in the cloudiest, wettest part of the US by mistake. But it’s not to prevent them bursting into flame, it’s to stop them twinkling like a Snoop Dogg tie pin. What trauma!
They are also clearly visible in mirrors, which explains how they manage to keep perfectly groomed.
I resisted making any judgement about Twilight until seeing it, although based on the trailers, I did suggest it looked like a bit of a cheapo rush job. The trailers mainly feature two sullen teens moping around in the woods, or else running away from bad CGI in the woods. Of course, the woods, along with abandoned warehouses, are often a surefire location clue to a cheap production.
However, I thought the locations in Twilight were very atmospheric; plenty of moping in the woods, granted, but also stunning coastal scenery, lakes and glowering storm clouds.
Despite my initial desire to give Bella a sadistically large pile of mind-numbing paperwork to do, Stewart is relatively effective in the role, somehow suggesting a free spirit wanting to escape her awkward, morose exterior.
The real one to watch is Pattinson, of course. I’d never seen the guy in anything other than a Twilight trailer, so I was eager to see what the fuss was about. My initial reaction was he looked like an ultra-lifelike creation by Jim Henson’s Shop, with the bloodless line of an unsmiling mouth, a jutting nose and stern eyebrows. But, when he smiles…yes, girls, OK I get it.
Some might say the Muppets are more expressive, but I get the feeling there’s a good actor in Pattinson waiting for better material. Twilight is ultra-safe, sanitized and focus-grouped to appeal to the widest possible audience without offending anyone, and the script is hardly giving him the chance to cut loose.
There’s a couple of good lines – I enjoyed him talking about sucking on animals being like regular carnivores eating tofu. Most of the dialogue is made up of ultra-sincere swooners aimed at lovelorn teenagers -
Edward: “That’s what you dream about? Being a monster?”
Bella: “I dream about being with you forever.”
or
Edward: “I don’t have the strength to stay away from you anymore.”
Bella: “Then don’t”
There is a disappointing lack of vampire action in Twilight, however, and I think anyone who by some miracle doesn’t know anything about it would be best approaching it as a straightforward teen romance rather than a vampire film.
If I was a teenage boy looking for a few scares and a good old vampire monster mash, I’d come away very bored indeed.
Despite all my criticisms, I got pretty engrossed. I found a stand off between the good vampires and bad vampires surprisingly tense, and I found the thing quite romantic. Bring on New Moon!
PS: Punchlines to the title joke gratefully requested…
The Departed: Scorsese Returns to the Mean Streets, but Gimme Shelter from Jack!
The Departed opens as all Martin Scorsese movies will open, when you die and watch them on that big silver screen in the sky.
The Rolling Stones are on the soundtrack, Scorsese is back on the mean streets with his steadicam, waltzing around his characters in soda shops and chop shops, while the infernal Irish mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) dispenses his hard-won philosophy to the audience.
There’s been a notable backlash against Goodfellas recently. However, for sheer headrush of eclectic soundtrack, awesome performances, audacious editing and persuasive directing, it takes a lot of beating as cinema as sensation, as an experience.
And The Departed starts with something similar – a young lad seduced by the larger-than-life characters of his neighborhood’s underworld, and the drama that will unfold from his relationship with these criminals.Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) meets Costello at an early age – clearly daunted by this dangerous man as he collects his protection money from a soda shop owner. He still pays a visit on the big man’s suggestions, and is taken into the family. Next thing, we see Sullivan as a fully grown Matt Damon, a police officer working towards promotion in the Special Investigations Unit.
At this point, we only suspect Sullivan is on Costello’s pay roll, and is actually working for the crime boss as a mole. Meanwhile, Billy Costigan’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) superiors in the Police force have another role in mind, being a young man from a poor background, whose family has a history of crime. Because of his family’s criminal ties, Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) considers him a perfect undercover police officer – a few months in jail to make it look good, and nobody’s going to ask any questions.
The rest of the film follows the two men – unknown to each other – as they gradually infiltrate their respective organizations. Both are intimately familiar with Costello, one trying to protect him, the other trying to gather enough evidence to send him down.Fans of the original Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs won’t need telling, as the storyline is fairly faithful to the original.
Some eyebrows were raised about Scorsese’s decision to remake such an esteemed Asian classic, but those people seemed to forget the director has done remakes previously. His Cape Fear fleshed out the respected original potboiler, adding many extra layers of sexuality, infidelity and ambiguity to the sweaty plotline.
In The Departed, Scorsese remains faithful to the original while also building in his own nuances – influence of religion being one of them – and fleshing out his characters in a tough Boston environment.
His grip on the material is as tight as it’s ever been; there’s a lot of information being presented in this movie, and Scorsese is able to keep it simple, often with just a few choice cuts to show us all we need to know.
Double cross stories can be confusing at the best of times, and it’s testament to Scorsese’s mastery of the medium that you’re never puzzled about who’s doing what, when or where, and what their motivation is.
Scorsese is also assisted by a fantastic cast – Nicholson, Damon, DiCaprio, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Ray Winston – all making the most (in one case, too much) of their allotted time on screen.
Like Manchester United’s Sir Alex Ferguson, Scorsese knows how to change with the times, and build his team with the best of what’s available. He also knows how to build a team around his star player. For years, Scorsese’s “Captain” was De Niro, who was central to everything he did – Mean Streets, Raging Bull, King of Comedy, etc. There were many other great actors in those movies, but it was De Niro at the center holding it all together.
When that collaboration tailed off in the Nineties, presumably because De Niro became a parody of himself, Scorsese found himself a new Captain – Leonardo DiCaprio.
DiCaprio, building on his early promise of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and Romeo and Juliet, survived the early heartthrob image and matured into one of today’s best actors. DiCaprio, I think, is one of the most naturally gifted actors – at first, you think, “Oh look! It’s Leonardo”, but then his onscreen presence is so effortless that you forget his acting; once that happens, he just draws you into the character.
Scorsese has collaborated with DiCaprio on a number of occasions now, and his Billy Costigan in The Departedis another fine performance, and he anchors the film. With his lanky frame and dark rimmed eyes, you can feel the pressure Costigan is under as he tries to do his job and stay alive at the same time.
Matt Damon as Sullivan is also very good – but then Matt Damon usually is. Damon, once again, uses his boyish good looks to his advantage, and, like he did in The Talented Mr Ripley, uses them as a disguise for a dark amoral soul. There’s something queasy watching Damon in these roles where he uses his brilliant smile and easy-going charm to manipulate the people him.
Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin and Ray Winston make the most of relatively small roles, but standout in supporting cast is Mark Wahlberg’s Staff Sergeant Dingham, an uptight and offensive senior policeman with a rather unfortunate way of dealing with people.
I’ve always had trouble accepting Wahlberg as an actor, with his plain, unremarkable face and strangely effeminate, lispy voice.Here he plays nicely against type as the aggressive, foul mouthed Dingham, who grabs up most of the film’s laughs and also turns out to the the story’s retributive force.
Then about halfway through the movie, he suddenly turns into The Joker. Here’s Jack playing with a severed hand, and here he is pulling silly faces and funny accents, and look! Jack’s waving a rubber cock around! The performance goes from a controlled portrayal of a dangerous, larger-than-life character, to a larger-than-life, dangerously uncontrolled performance.
Dangerous, because in such a gripping, assured effort from Scorsese, surrounded by excellent performances, the big exploding charisma in the center of it that is “Jack!” unbalances the whole thing, and makes it distractingly comic when the tension should be really biting.
So – imagine. Scorsese’s got his new team Captain DiCaprio playing his socks off in the middle of the director’s long awaited return to the mean streets. Imagine if it was his old team captain De Niro in the Costello role? That could have been something….
Black Narcissus: Nuns in Heat – in Glorious Technicolour!
You know what I’d like for Christmas? Not in a real sense – I’m happy with cash this year, and if you want to contribute, drop me a line & I’ll give you my PO Box details. I mean in a “things from movies that haven’t been invented yet” kind of sense.
I’d like one of those 3D virtual reality sunbed things from Minority Report, and use it to watch old Powell & Pressburger extravanganzas.
I”d stick on Black Narcissus and stand around in an ancient pleasure palace, looking dashing while two hot nuns lust after me, trying to keep my trousers on. Then I’d come out with a ravishing technicolor tan.
If you haven’t seen Black Narcissus before, I suppose that introduction might make it sound more appealing than the standard blurb – a band of Anglican nuns are dispatched to an outpost deep in the Himalayas to set up a school and hospital for the natives.
The woman in charge is Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), a stern and ambitious Sister Superior. She wants the post, although her Mother Superior has doubts about her ability. The location for this new convent is an old palace, which many years before used to house a harem. More recently, some monks also attempted to convert it to a monastery, perched far above the village and forest on a sheer cliff face.
The sisters’ contact in the area is a British agent, Mr Dean (David Farrar), a dishy and irreverent presence. He singles out Sister Clodagh with his suggestive, innuendo-laden comments, and his arrogance and lack of respect soon gets her hot under the habit.
The old palace, with it’s erotic paintings and peculiar atmosphere, soon has a queer effect on the nuns. This is most evident in Clodagh, and the poorly Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), who develops a fierce attraction to the brash Mr Dean.
It soon turns out that Clodagh isn’t as cold and pious as she first seems, and perhaps it’s the mountain air, but her mind starts to wander during prayer. She also secretly starts to feel a bit giddy about the British agent.
Meanwhile, the natives aren’t too keen on visiting the nuns for either their education or their welfare – it is revealed the local General is paying the villagers to visit.
Dean also lumbers them with a local piece of jailbait, Kanchi (Jean Simmons) hoping the nun’s influence will be beneficial to her, and to stop her mooning around his house making eyes at him.
All this comes to a crescendo when Sister Ruth, who turns out to be mentally frail as well as physically, throws herself at Mr Dean. She is disgraced, and begins a descent into murderous insanity…
Black Narcissus is one of a hat trick of technicolor masterpieces by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, along with A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes. All three are elevated by Jack Cardiff’s sumptuous cinematography, and curiously for films almost universally regarded as masterpieces, all three are far from perfect.
A Matter of Life and Death (1946), a fantastical and warm-hearted romance about a young WWII pilot who bails out of his craft without a parachute and survives, only to be summoned to heaven on the basis of a celestial clerical error, is virtually flawless until the final courtroom scene. Then it bizarrely degenerates into a Brits vs Yanks sermon.
The Red Shoes , the tale of a talented ballerina who is destined to suffer the same fate as the character she portrays, is rather stiff and old fashioned until it’s stunning ballet sequence. Then everything is forgotten and it becomes the best thing you’ve ever seen.
Black Narcissus suffers from some rather muddled characterization, and it’s not always clear who’s who or what their motives are. Clodagh and Ruth are difficult to tell apart on first viewing, because both actresses are facially quite similar when smothered by a habit.
However, Black Narcissus hangs together better as a narrative, because it’s not as top- or bottom-heavy as the other two. It’s also an easier watch for modern audiences; although it is variously described as an adventure, romance, or a melodrama, the thing it resembles most in structure is a horror movie.
There’s the old haunted house on the hill, although it’s never explicitly made clear whether Mopu is actually haunted, or whether it’s one of those places people bring their own ghosts.
There is the story of the monks, whose previous attempt to inhabit the palace ended in failure. This is a classic touch of foreshadowing most familiar to fans of horror films.
Think of the story of Grady, the axe murdering former caretaker of the Overlook in The Shining; the derelict spaceship full of eggs in Alien; or the Norwegian base in The Thing. Bad things have happened in this place, so chances are, bad things are going to happen again…
Sister Ruth’s final, desperate, unhinged pursuit of Dean and Sister Clodagh resemble something out of a 80′s or 90′s psycho-thriller, and the final reel is full of suspense as murderous Ruth stalks her unwitting love rival.
Also adding to the tension is the tangible erotic charge, which is largely thanks to Jack Cardiff’s sublime cinematography, particularly the use of color and shade.
When we first see Clodagh, it is in close up. A pale white face in a ghostly white habit, harsh eyes and tight white lips. Our first blast of color is on our first visit to the palace – a room filled with empty gilded cages, and a first glimpse of the General, resplendent in silks, preening himself by a mirror in a bright blue room.
Later, as passions grow wilder, red come into play – most startlingly on previously white lips – and as the film builds to its conclusion, the nuns’ habits seem stained with the color.
A subplot involving Kanchi falling romantically for a young prince doesn’t really add much, apart from more eroticism. On Kanchi’s first time alone in the palace, she is seen dancing sensually by herself; she spends most of her time crawling around on hands and knees trying to get the prince’s attention. And in one unfortunate moment, she appears to be moving in to give him a blowjob.
This can’t have been by accident, given how meticulous and gifted these filmmakers were. They had oral sex back in 1947, so they must have realized it looked like she was going to nosh him off in that scene.
Aside from a few duff moments, Black Narcissus is thoroughly absorbing and at times transcendent, mainly due to the miraculous work of Cardiff and the production team. Some images from Black Narcissus are indelibly imprinted on my mind – most notably Sister Clodagh’s walk across the windswept courtyard to ring out the noon bell on the cliff’s edge for the first time.
It’s an old cliche, but they truly don’t make films like this any more. The atmosphere of lush exoticism is thick in every frame, and the ingenious model work and matte paintings create a hyper-real setting for the drama.
And because they don’t make them like this anymore, you deserve to watch it on the biggest screen possible. Perhaps invite some close friends round and have a naked Black Narcissus party.
Or instead, until they finally invent Minority Report-style 3D virtual reality sunbeds, perhaps you could petition your nearest IMAX cinema to give you a private screening of this classic? That would be the perfect way to see it…
