Listomania! My Favourite Films of 2015

If 2014 was all about the eyes, then 2015 was all about the ears. The sounds and the groove and the feet. “After a long day of Turing test, you gotta unwind…”

...Oscar Isaac and Sonoya Mizuno in perfect sync to Oliver Cheatham’s Get Down Saturday Night under blood red lights - an infernal disco - Domhnall Gleeson looking on in a state of bewildered horror as Isaac gives that unzipped all-in-one tracksuit a proper workout. My favourite ninety seconds of cinema in 2015…

...Miles Teller frantically calculating whether or not he’s pushing or dragging to the syncopated beat-down of J.K. Simmons' slaps to the face. Jazz as military manoeuvre, percussion as punishment, blood on the drumsticks. Just my tempo…

...The sheer unalloyed joie de vivre as we pull into the final act of Magic Mike XXL, idyllically rendered in the warm glow of the Kings of Tampa preparing to put on One Last Show, a montage to the sound of Heatwave’s triumphant The Groove Line...

And so here’s my Cream of the 2015 Crop, and I don’t have to preface it with tedious preamble about the inherent subjectivity of personal favourites do I? Great! And, obviously, I haven’t seen Everything, because that would be madness. I do have a life, you know? One last thing: These are in No Particular Order. OK, that’s it. Let’s do it!

Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu)

I saw this on January 1st and wondered if anything could possibly top it over the next 364 days. Turns out that wasn’t so difficult after all...Whilst no film is for everybody, I didn’t forsee that there would be such a hostile backlash from people who really didn’t like it. I’m with Mark Twain on this: “It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse-races.”

Whiplash (Damien Chazelle)

Big Hero 6 (Don Hall and Chris Williams)

Fistbump! Yes, I prefer Big Hero 6 to the universally adored Inside Out. No, don’t fucking argue with me about it.

John Wick (David Leitch and Chad Stahelski)

Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bai ri yan huo) (Yi'nan Diao)

Ingredients: Retribution, vengeance, death by ice skate, fireworks, neon, dismemberment and a dance number. Marinate in blood, booze and snow. Et voilà: Superior Chinese Noir.

Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs)

The Glass Slipper. The Groove Line. The Last Ride. Magic Mike XXL hits all the right (up)beats. Dayum.

Slow West (John Maclean)

Bone Tomahawk (S. Craig Zahler) - which I already wrote about a bit here

Victoria (Sebastian Schipper) - another one I’ve written a little bit about before, here

Yes, that makes a total of nine. No, I couldn’t settle on a definitive ten. So, here’s an “Any one of these could be number ten” Close But No Cigar list:

Enemy (Denis Villeneuve)
Ex Machina (Alex Garland)
Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Mad Max Fury Road (George Miller)
Mr. Holmes (Bill Condon)
Sicario (Denis Villeneuve)
The Gift (Joel Edgerton)
The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Trumbo (Jay Roach)

Bonus Hate: Kingsman: The Secret Service (Matthew Vaughn)

I wrote around 1,000 words on the good and the bad of Kingsman: The Secret Service, mostly concentrating on the incredibly dubious gender politics on screen (it ain't called QueensWoman, after all...) but it was exhausting and it wasn't really helping to quell my rage. So here's the lone surviving closing sentence: "Like the shiny platters of greasy fast food that megalomaniac villain Richmond Valentine favours, Kingsman: The Secret Service is vaguely enjoyable to a point, but once you’ve swallowed the whole thing, you just end up feeling queasy and wishing that you hadn’t bothered."

And I’m out. Peace!

"Leave your worries behind
'Cause rain, shine, won't mind
We're ridin' on the Groove Line tonight"

The 59th BFI London Film Festival 2015: Part Two

The first part of my London Film Festival wrap-up is here. Six down, six to go...

The Witch
“Think on thy sins!”. Subtitled “A New-England Folktale”, set in the 1630s and in the fine tradition of Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, A Field in England and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, with dialogue culled from real diaries and court records of the era, Robert Eggers’ The Witch did something to me in a cinema that has never happened before. Now, I like to think that I’m a hardened horror buff, but this one really burrowed under my skin in a way that I wasn’t expecting. With a devastating sustained control of mood and tone, The Witch was so deeply and oppressively unsettling throughout that my fight-or-flight response kicked in and I almost wanted to get up and leave. I kept feeling that I needed to escape. The discordant sounds, the prowling, unflinching gaze of the camera...The Witch is chilly, bleak, hugely impressive, incredibly effective and I’m pretty sure that I never want to watch it again.

Cemetery of Splendour
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s melancholy, hypnotic film doesn’t lend itself easily to a pithy, ultimately reductive synopsis. Not strictly magical realism, yet delicately touched with fabulism, Cemetery of Splendour primarily focuses on a makeshift rural hospital ward of soldiers struck down with an intermittent sleeping sickness, fighting in their collective dreams of the past. Layers of reality are piled on top of one another, and spirits wander between each realm without fanfare. Lights and colours shift subtly, and time and space, past and present, life and death, gods, mortals and spirits are revealed to be useless definitions and meaningless constructs. An understated, beautiful waking dream of a film.

The End of the Tour begins in 2008 with the breaking news of the “pleasantly unpleasant” David Foster Wallace’s suicide, before spiraling backwards to David Lipsky’s recollections of the five days he spent interviewing him in 1996, first at Wallace’s home in Bloomington, Illinois and then on the final date of a book tour in Minneapolis. I should note that I’m not overly familiar with Wallace's written work, so I didn’t come to the film with any pro- or anti- opinions about the man or his writings - but I don’t think that matters very much. Whilst I don’t think the film is as revealing or profound as it thinks it is, what it does do very well is examine the spiky, combative and competitive relationship between an interviewer and his subject. Jason Segel plays Wallace as a TV addicted, shambling bear of a man - guarded and somewhat socially awkward but always quick with a quip or a well-turned phrase. It’s fun to just watch the two men shooting the shit with digressions on everything from Alanis Morissette to just how amazing Die Hard is, the simmering, ambiguous undercurrent behind every exchange never far from the surface. Do “brothers of the lung” Wallace and Lipsky genuinely like each other? Or is this just a professional transaction, using each other for their own ends? The End of the Tour also gently prods at insecurity and imposter syndrome, isolation, loneliness, ego (and id), with fine performances from both leads (although it isn’t hard to tell that Jesse Eisenberg probably isn’t a real smoker…). That said, my favourite sequence in the film remains the one where Wallace sits rapt in awe at a screening of John Woo’s Broken Arrow.

A Tale of Three Cities
Check that Dickens allusion in the title - it’s no coincidence. Starting in 1951 before returning to the 30s and 40s to tell the wartime romance of Jackie Chan’s parents - his father a former spy; his mother a former opium smuggler, A Tale of Three Cities is an intimate epic preoccupied with time. The film opens with the carnage resulting from an exploding clocktower, and from there it moves through good and bad times; right and wrong times; victims of the time(s) and a loss of time with loved ones. Soldiers on covert maneuvers are unable to synchronise their watches...because they don’t have them. A car explodes in a shower of black-market watches. It’s a moving love story that looks at immigration and displacement and the toll they take on separated lovers and, whilst the film has one too many subplots that detracts from our central star-crossed couple, this is a thrilling, touching, quietly powerful melodrama.

Victoria
Some Victoria statistics for you. Duration: 134 minutes. Shot in one continuous take. The film is the third and final (and reportedly, the only successful) take. Based on a twelve page script. Shot over 22 locations. And, cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen gets the first credit over the end titles, as he should. Taking place between 4.30 and 7am in the Kreuzberg and Mitte neighbourhoods of Berlin, Victoria shows us the hour before a heist and the hour after the heist, with the bank job itself taking place just off-screen in between. There’s an incredible piano rendition of Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz, there are car chases and running gun battles, and then, as the dark angel at the heart of it all, there’s Laia Costa as Victoria. A compelling, extraordinary presence, the camera never leaves her, no matter where it goes, in this euphoric, exhilarating sunrise flit through the streets of Berlin, and it never feels like merely a formal experiment with a single uninterrupted take (in stark contrast to the pyrotechnic artificiality of similar in Birdman). Astonishing.

Office
Adapted from Sylvia Chang’s stage production Design for Living, Johnnie To gets his Verfremdungseffekt on with this ambitious 3D musical comic satire on the 2008 financial crisis. Harnessing every trick in the Brechtian Alienation Playbook, To conjures with space and artifice utilising his remarkable multi-level set, from the Huge Clocks (because, of course, Time Is Money) to the way the frame is divided and the characters are separated into distinct areas of the screen, to the symbolic elevators denoting status via movement, this is a bravura piece of work showing a side of To rarely seen.

The 59th BFI London Film Festival 2015: Part One

Better late than never. The 59th BFI London Film Festival wrapped up on 18th October and so I thought I better slap some virtual ink down before those big screen moments were lost in time, like tears...in...rain. Time to write…

I watched a total of twelve films at this year’s festival, so I’m splitting this free-wheeling canter through my dirty dozen into two separate posts. I’m only thinking of you and your limited attention span and your precious, precious eyes. Let’s get on with it before I waste more of your time than the interminable ad-and-trailer slurry you have to suffer through at your local shitplex. Here we go:

Mountains May Depart
Opening night at the BFI Southbank and the festival kicked off in fine style with Zhangke Jia’s time-tossed tale of love, loss, globalisation, dumplings and the unalloyed joy of dancing to the Pet Shop Boys’ Go West. As the film progresses and widens its perspective, Jia utilises form to great effect - from the tightly-packed, dense 1:33:1 frame of 1999 to the wide open, spare 2:39:1 frame of 2025, where lone characters wander, adrift and isolated. As technology connects us more and more, are we actually further away from everyone? Or is it that the further we travel, the closer we are to where we started out? Over the course of the 131 minute running time, Jia covers a lot of ground: temporally, emotionally, geographically and thematically, touching deftly and sometimes almost imperceptibly on ideas of alienation, memory, identity, language, communication, belonging, family, freedom, infrastructure and the ebb and flow that exists between all of them, but if I had to take away one abiding thought from the film (and the film is fluid enough that there are many, many different ways to read it) it’s this: Everybody leaves...but you’ll be OK. Astonishingly good stuff.

Trumbo
“We both have the right to be wrong”. The most important thing to know upfront about Trumbo is that it is funny. Very funny. I laughed a lot and smiled consistently, and that’s not what I expected at all from a film about the insidious effect of McCarthyism’s toxic scaremongering on America, the Hollywood Ten and, in particular, Dalton Trumbo. And yet Trumbo uncoils with simmering fury in all the right places without ceasing to be thoroughly entertaining at the same time.

Other Really Positive Things About Trumbo: It’s not a hagiography. For all of Dalton Trumbo’s righteous ideals, the movie doesn’t go easy on him and shows him with all his contradictions and intransigence laid bare (and not just in the bath). Also: this is very much a Writer’s Film (and kudos for making screenwriter John McNamara’s name so prominent over the end credits) - not so much because it documents a writer’s life, but because it captures so well what it means to live with one - hat-tip here to sterling supporting turns from Diane Lane and Elle Fanning as Trumbo’s wife Cleo and daughter Niki, who are just the cream on the top of a very strong ensemble cast, in particular Louis C.K., and Michael Stuhlbarg’s take on Edward G. Robinson

He Named Me Malala
Crucially, Davis Guggenheim’s documentary is not called I Am Malala, after Malala Yousafzai’s memoir. The “he” denotes a significant shift in emphasis, and Malala’s relationship with her father (and her father Ziauddin Yousafzai himself) is the core of the story covered here. Unfortunately, it’s an ultimately frustrating film. Malala is a fascinating person who leads a fascinating life, and yet this is an awfully pedestrian glimpse into it. The filmmaking just isn’t compelling or illuminating enough. It’s a disparate melange of elements that don’t quite cohere, with an over-reliance on (admittedly impressive) stylised animated sequences, archival footage of Pakistan and Malala’s notable public appearances, and scrappy handheld footage of the Yousafzai family’s daily life in Birmingham. The documentary is at its best when it reminds us that, for all her accomplishments, Malala is still just a young girl - studying for her GCSEs, slightly nervous around her classmates, teasing her little brothers and looking up handsome celebrities on Google Image Search.

Grandma plays like a distaff Nebraska, with Lily Tomlin’s terrific central performance as the dyspeptic Elle Reid proving what I’ve been saying for years - foul-mouthed short-tempered bastards can be lovely people too. Grandma passes the Bechdel Test early and often - there are only four male speaking parts in the whole film, and each one fills a distinct role: a mechanic (functional tool); a secretary (subservient peon); an ex-boyfriend (slacker, loser asshole); and Sam Elliott’s judgmental manipulator - and all four of them are, one way or another, totally pwned by one of the three female leads. Shout out to what amounts to the fourth lead character - the 1955 Dodge Royal car (that Lily Tomlin herself owns, having bought it in 1975 for $1,500).

A Bigger Splash
About halfway through A Bigger Splash, I thought: “Hold on a second...this is just a rip-off of La Piscine!”. I didn’t realise until the end credits that this was entirely intentional. It’s a thin line between remake and rip-off…

As much fun as it is to see Ralph Fiennes dancing to the Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue (and that is a lot of fun), A Bigger Splash is a little bit too On The Nose for my tastes: You see this guy Harry (Fiennes) he’s a STONE thrown into the tranquil POOL of their lives with a SPLASH which results in RIPPLES. See what they did there? And then there are the SNAKES (both literal and figurative)...

There’s a clunky point about the relationship between the idle rich and refugees late in the film that doesn’t really work either, but the film succeeds in the moments when it embraces ambiguity with miscommunication, ellipses, language barriers and lies. Tilda Swinton is glorious (that’s a general statement, obviously, and doesn’t just apply to this film) with an expressive, almost entirely mute performance, surrounded as she is on all sides by the noise of others and her own legacy of the noise she made as a rockstar.

Bone Tomahawk
At the post screening Q&A, director S. Craig Zahler cited a slew of influences on his grisly, horror-inflected Western: Takeshi Kitano, John Cassavetes, Wong Kar Wai, Larry Clark and Lars von Trier. Interestingly, I didn’t detect traces of any of them in there. Instead, I picked up strong notes of Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (in particular, the banter between Kurt Russell and Richard Jenkins echoing the grouchy camaraderie between John Wayne and Walter Brennan) and Lucio Fulci’s Four of the Apocalypse, (tellingly, one of the songs on the soundtrack is entitled Four Doomed Men Ride Out) via John Carpenter’s own riff on Rio Bravo: Assault on Precinct 13 (particularly in the first act) as well as Predator. For all the grit and splatter, this is an incredibly strong character piece hidden within the folds of an H. Rider Haggard “lost race” tale, with magnificent turns from Russell, Jenkins, Matthew Fox and Patrick Wilson. Exhilarating, visceral and one of my favourite films of the year so far.

That’s all for now. Part Two of my LFF round-up will appear as soon as I get around to actually writing it.

Shark Still Looks Fake

There's something very familiar about all this.

As of 7.28pm PDT today, the entirety of the Back to the Future series will take place in the past.

Back, forward, past, present, future...now seems as good a time as any to drift into reveries of my own timeline and personal relationship with those films in a piece I wrote a couple of years back: My Density Has Brought Me To You.

I'll leave the last word to the indefatigable Dr. Emmett Brown...

Pig Tales

I don't really want to comment specifically on the allegations made by Lord Ashcroft that have been splurged with so much truffle-snuffling glee all over the place directly from the front page of today's Daily Mail. (Whenever I type the words Daily Mail, please imagine that I'm making a dismissive spitting sound directly afterwards...)

But I do want to point out that, if you've ever read Hunter S. Thompson's Fear & Loathing: On The Campaign Trail ’72, this isn't anything remotely new.

…(I)n both the Ohio and Nebraska primaries, back to back, McGovern was confronted for the first time with the politics of the rabbit-punch and the groin shot, and in both states he found himself dangerously vulnerable to this kind of thing.  Dirty politics confused him.  He was not ready for it….

This is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics.  Every hack in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even been elevated to the level of political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas.  The race was close and Johnson was getting worried.  Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.

“Christ, we can’t get a way calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested.  “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”

“I know,” Johnson replied.  “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

The tl;dr version for the benefit of David Cameron et al: Buy the ticket, take the ride...

Wes Craven 1939 - 2015

“The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.”

"I believe the cinema is one of our principal forms of art. It is an incredibly powerful way to tell uplifting stories that can move people to cry with joy and inspire them to reach for the stars."

"Horror films don't create fear. They release it."

"I like to address the fears of my culture. I believe it's good to face the enemy, for the enemy is fear."

"If whoever makes my gravestone has a sense of humor, it should say, ‘The man who gave you Freddy Krueger.’ But my change would be for it to say, 'Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.’ Every time our culture falls asleep, we get into a lot of trouble."

Words to Follow

Just finished reading David Shafer's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Loved it. The prose just sings.

Sometimes, if you read the right passage in the right book at the right time, it can floor you.

Like this heartfelt declaration of devotion that kind of comes out of nowhere, and yet feels inevitable at the same time:

"I would like to one day live with you in Rome and bathe our child in an iron tub. Actually, any kind of tub, really. With you, I would always try my hardest - God loves a trier, they say. And I wouldn't lie or hide. I want to feed you and fuck you and ask you what's up and walk with you through whatever searing desert, down any choked street, into what joy and trouble might be ours."

Wow, that's Fantastic.

I was probably softened up for that by the reference to T.S. Eliot that just precedes it:

"For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." -- T.S. Eliot, East Coker (1940)

AKA gives this one two thumbs way up. Read it before HBO turns it into a half-hour comedy series.

Midriff

The last day of June. Almost, but not quite, the midpoint of the year. It's currently 24°C in ol' London town, the subterranean sweatbox of the London Underground is already ripe with the pungent fragrance of all manner of commingled body odours, and I've been awake since 4.30am with the sun just commencing its ascent. All around, people looking half dead, walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head.

Spent most of June on the down-low, so I'm just breaking cover now with this Proof of Life blogpost. Hello!

So, June...

June meant Father's Day (and homemade cinnamon choc-chip Pac-Man cookies!)...

...and mooching around the second-hand book-stalls on the Riverside front of the BFI Southbank. One find in particular made my day ...

...and Johnnie To was at BAFTA for an on-stage Q&A. (You can find a full transcript here).

It's a great life if you don't weaken. Worth remembering that as we start to dip below the navel of 2015.

We Dug Coal Together

I think the Justified finale might be my favourite series finale of all time. For many reasons, but there’s one particular scene I want to take a closer look at here.

(We interrupt this bIogpost to insert the necessary SPOILER WARNING. For the most part, I've avoided plot spoilers here but, by necessity, I’m diving into one specific scene in considerable detail. So, consider this your final warning, hombres y mujeres…)

The final episode of Justified was called The Promise, and it delivered on that promise. Since it aired a month ago, my thoughts keep returning to one specific moment over all others, and I think I probably need to write those thoughts out of my head. Not only did the last episode resolve the stories of all of our characters in various bittersweet and satisfying ways, it also served as a fine, fitting farewell to it’s spiritual godfather Elmore Leonard. The episode is littered with Easter eggs tipping a stetson in Leonard’s direction, and my undisputed favourite is the one that pays tribute to one particular sliver of Leonard lore.

It’s the moment when Raylan is clearing out his desk as he prepares to leave the U.S. Marshals office for the last time, as his long-suffering colleague, laconic sharp-shooter Tim Gutterson, looks on.

Raylan picks up a battered old copy of George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle and riffles through the dog-eared pages fondly.

Tim: “You read that a bunch, or you buy it used?”
Raylan: “If I say I've read it ten times, I’m low.”

The Friends of Eddie Coyle had long been cited by Leonard as the book that inspired him to stop writing westerns and to try his hand at crime fiction. It was a book that changed his life.

In 2000, Leonard wrote: “What I learned from George Higgins was to relax, not be so rigid in trying to make the prose sound like writing, to be more aware of the rhythms of coarse speech and the use of obscenities. Most of all … hook the reader right away.”

Leonard had also said of Higgins: "He saw himself as the Charles Dickens of crime in Boston instead of a crime writer. He just understood the human condition and he understood it most vividly in the language and actions among low lives.”

Raylan closes the book and gives it to Tim. As with so much of Leonard, it’s an understated, almost disposable gesture freighted with unspoken emotion. It’s heartfelt, but neither Raylan or Tim act like it means much of anything at all. It's just a beat-up old paperback, right?

As Raylan walks out of the office forever, in the background, (quite literally behind his back) Tim is approached by office irritant Nelson.

Nelson: You gonna read that book, Tim? 
Tim: No, Nelson, I’m gonna eat it. 
Nelson: I read fast. Have it back to you tomorrow. 
Tim: Keep talking, I’m gonna throw this stapler at you.

The tagline on the movie poster for the Peter Yates adaption of The Friends of Eddie Coyle could equally apply to Justified if you substitute the word "Eddie" for "Raylan": “It’s a grubby, violent, dangerous world. But it’s the only world they know. And they’re the only friends Eddie has.”

Happy trails, Justified. I raise my shot glass of fine Kentucky bourbon in your direction. Take it easy.

The Way of Der Samurai

On April 9th, Peccadillo Pictures and The Duke Mitchell Film Club hosted the DVD launch of FrightFest hit Der Samurai with an evening of dance moves and decapitations at London’s Prince Charles Cinema with director Till Kleinert in attendance.

(Here’s the pitch for Der Samurai: A transvestite with a samurai sword carves a bloody swathe through a provincial German town, and the only person who can stop him is Jakob, a young police officer struggling to get to grips with his sexuality.)

The Duke’s own Evrim Ersoy introduced Kleinert, who cued up his film with a selection of clips that weren't so much inspirations as they were touchstones along the path that brought him to Der Samurai.

First up was an excerpt from the balletic, ballistic roaring rampage of revenge John Wick. Specifically, the moment early on when Russian mob boss Michael Nyqvist is explaining to his reckless son exactly why he fucked up by crossing "that fucking nobody" just before all manner of bloody retribution is unleashed..."They call him Baba Yaga"...

Kleinert pointed out why this scene, intended to show exactly why John Wick is so dangerous, doesn’t play so well in certain parts of the world, where Baba Yaga conjures up a very different, unintended set of memories and associations. I confess that I was unaware of these connotations, until I saw this:

Afterwards, I decided to cure my ignorance with a bit of judicious Googling. From the Wikipedia page for Baba Yaga - "In Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga is a supernatural being (or one of a trio of sisters of the same name) who appears as a deformed and/or ferocious-looking woman. Baba Yaga flies around in a mortar, wields a pestle, and dwells deep in the forest in a hut usually described as standing on chicken legs (or sometimes a single chicken leg)."

Crucially, in relation to Der Samurai, there is a tradition that Baba Yaga is occasionally played by a man in drag….

Next up: the incongruous trailer mash-up of the visuals from The Sword and the Dragon cut to the audio track of 300: Rise of an Empire. The first Soviet movie filmed in CinemaScope (and also known in it’s UK cut as The Epic Hero and the Beast), Kleinert showed the trailer to give a flavour of the film’s visuals, as the mash-up stripped away the tone and made it sound like something completely different...

Kleinert then introduced the trailer for his first cinema disappointment - the film he went to see that, for the first time ever, made him think “No...that’s not good enough” - Super Mario Bros.

The significance of Super Mario Bros. to Kleinert was two-fold. Firstly, his dissatisfaction with the film marked the development of his nascent critical faculties. On top of that, he regards the film as an early example of a trend that has now become all-too commonplace - the grim ‘n’ gritty "Nolanisation" of children's characters.

I was fortunate (if that’s the right word) to see a 35mm print of Super Mario Bros. at the Prince Charles as part of their Good Bad Movie Club strand in 2013, and at the time I wrote the following capsule review:

At one point in Super Mario Bros., Dennis Hopper says: "Do you know what I love about mud? It's clean and it's dirty at the same time". Which serves as quite a neat metaphor for the dichotomy at the heart of the film. It looks like a lot of money was spent on it...and yet it looks dirt-cheap, bargain basement and slapdash at the same time. It's fantastically ill-conceived on almost every level, but you can still see little flashes of the idiosyncratic worldview that Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel brought to their creation Max Headroom. And on an objective basis, this is a terrible movie, but I'd be lying if I said that I didn't find it terrifically entertaining.

(If you are remotely interested in the deeply troubled gestation and birth of Super Mario Bros., you should definitely take a look at Karina Longworth’s article at Grantland on “unearthing a major disaster to learn the lessons held within”.)

From a disappointment to a success - the trailer for John Woo’s Face/Off:

The great thing about the trailer is that the first minute is footage shot specifically for it. The great thing about Face/Off (and the thing that takes us back to Der Samurai) is that it takes an absurd premise and plays it straight - and it works. Kleinert maintains that it is still one of his favourite action movies. (Interestingly - there’s another unspoken resonance here with Der Samurai, in the mirroring of the two leads).

One of Kleinert’s favourite things in movies is dancing. Specifically, people dancing alone. Dancing as self-expression, that moment when a character sloughs off self-conscious awkwardness and let’s it all go. This was illustrated by two clips featuring Denis Lavant. The first one has Lavant dancing to David Bowie's Modern Love in Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang

The other one features Lavant dancing to Corona's Rhythm of the Night at the very end of Claire Denis' Beau Travail:

It’s worth noting that there was a distinct lack of horror in the influences presented. Warning: I can remedy that, but this next bit constitutes a pretty big SPOILER for the end of the movie. If you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading…..now!

Kleinert’s original ending for Der Samurai had the Samurai gunned down by police, but he felt that it was unsatisfying and didn't quite work. He solved the problem by borrowing from Eric Red and Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher, in which the resolution comes down to a final confrontation between just the two leads: Jakob faces the Samurai alone. Killing him means that, on some level, they both attain their goals and reach a final, mutual understanding. (An ending that also put me in mind of Jeremy Lovering’s In Fear).

I found all of this preamble and background fascinating and it only served to enhance the experience of watching the film itself, which turned out to be a stylish, smart, distinctive, gore-flecked blast. Two blood-encrusted thumbs up!

Fantastic

It was a Saturday evening ten years ago today. I plopped my six-month old daughter in my lap in front of the television, all because once upon a time there used to be this thing that I loved. I loved it a lot. And it was there throughout my childhood until one day it wasn't any more. As I grew older, I forgot about it a little bit. Until I forgot about it a lot.

I heard the odd rumbling every now and then that it was coming back. To be honest, I wasn't even that excited. It had tried to come back before.

Yet there I was, sitting there, my gurgling, squirming progeny cradled in the crook of my arms. I leaned in towards my daughter’s ear and I said: “This is Doctor Who. You’re gonna love it.”

The music started. That music. That strange, ethereal, swooping music. And that little blue box from years gone by was suddenly back - swirling and hurtling into a cascading blue vortex. In so many ways, it all came rushing back.

"I'm the Doctor, by the way, what's your name?"
"Rose."
"Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!"

People sometimes like to say that the hairs stand up on the back of their neck, but they don’t mean it most of the time. Not really. It’s just evocative shorthand.

You know what? The hairs did stand up on the back of my neck.

From a dispassionate, purely objective, critical point of view, it wasn't perfect. It was slightly clunky and ramshackle in the endearing way that it always had been. Thing is: I’m not a dispassionate person. To me, it was perfection.

I was right, by the way, she did grow up to love it. Keep running, Doctor.

UPDATE: When I wrote the above, I hadn't yet read the below. Great minds and all that...