HOPE (Na Hong-jin, 2026)

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There are so few foreign films shown in Birmingham that I grab every opportunity. That was my only reason to see HOPE (Na Hong-jin, 2026), even though I didn’t know the director or cast, and in spite of the film being over 2h30 long. I found it a bit prosaic at first. A chief of police (Hwang Jung-min) is sent on a call in a village near the Demilitarised Zone by North Korea.  A cow has been mangled. What has such large claws? Could it be a tiger? No, it turns out to aliens.

The first makes its appearance almost forty minutes into the film, and from then it’s non-stop action, shootings from cars, horses, in the town and in the forest. The aliens can leap into trees so they can literally chase the earthlings from any direction. It all had me on the edge of my seat and was exciting to watch. I loved the design and look of the monsters, which are sometimes CGI’d and sometimes  old-fashioned puppets. The film has a retro feel made contemporary with the crudity of its humour and with the speed and inventiveness of its action; a key type of shot is where the camera follows a speeding car or horse which ends up turning in one direction as the camera goes in the opposite one, creating a feeling of frenzied distance.

An hour into the film, during a frantic car chase, the police chief notices that the alien is crying, and that shifts the narrative. Why is he crying? It turns out there are more of them — we’ll eventually see six – and that a hick would-be militia-man has killed what looks to be a child.  Is that the reason for the tears and the franticness that has led to the destruction of the village and the killing of people?

At this moment the aliens become individuals too rather than concepts, the chases and shootings take on a different tone – they’re now killing people not things, and when Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender appear near the end as the aliens, who can speak to each other, and who’s speech is sub-titled for us, the film changes direction completely, ready to take us on another journey, which presumably is the sequel. I was a bit iffy at first, the set-up made worse by the rotten projection at Cineworld, with half the sub-titles being off-screen and the image lacking in necessary luminescence, but the film won me over by the end and I now hope there is a sequel.

I see that some critics have been using the term gonzo in relation to the film, which I frankly don’t get. Some of the humour is crude, the chase scenes are inventive, the special effects are sometimes basic but always effective…but there’s nothing gonzo about it in at least my understanding of the term. Ostensibly, South Korea’s most expensive production.

José Arroyo

 

PINK ULYSSES (Eric de Kuyper, 1990)

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How could I have missed PINK ULYSSES (Eric de Kuyper, 1990)? A clear descendent of PINK NARCISSUS (James Bidgood, 1971) , a contrast, and perhaps to some, antidote  to Christopher Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY, it’s queer desire, palpitating and in heat, wrought from a collage of found, perhaps nicked  is the better word, materials from a previous history of culture where traces of it could be made manifest: opera, Zarah Leander, Athletic Guild Model Films, the films of Sergei Eisenstein, the music of Igor Stravinsky, silent epics with Greece or Rome as a setting. It’s tied together through film tableaus of various episodes including Penelope waiting for Ulysses but somewhat longing for her son, Telemachus, who in turns longs for the return of his father with a desire that is not without a sexual component. A reverie of longing, fevered dreams, struggles with desire. Queering of classics couldn’t have found a better expression or example. It would make a wonderful double bill with PINK NARCISSUS. Nolan’s ODYSSEY is too long to be double-billed with anything.

José Arroyo

A note on As You Like It (RSC Stratford-upon-Avon) Monday 5th of October

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I’d given up on seeing Jonathan Groff in the all-male production of AS YOU LIKE IT at Stratford as I thought it was sold out. But a friend recommended it, saying there were tickets, and there were. But there won’t be for long. It’s great. Funny and moving. The Forest of Arden a place where dwellers appear to sing Welsh folk songs in a way that touches something deep in one’s heart and brings out a profundity of feeling: beauty, pain, longing, hope, all bound up in four-part harmonies.
Jonathan Groff plays Rosalind as a human being rather than as a ‘woman’. Aside from putting on a dress at the very beginning I couldn’t detect any difference in his playing of gender when he was passing as male or female, the playing is all of the sentiment and in the situation, and unlike Sigourney Weaver in THE TEMPEST a few years ago, he’s learned to bring out the most of that gorgeous language Shakespeare has gifted them with. Groff’s kept his American accent but learned how to speak the verse. Fisayo Akinade takes a slightly different take as Celia – also playing the character but sometimes as streetwise black girl who knows her friend’s faults all to well and is not afraid to ‘read’ her. It’s a show that valorises feeling, but it’s also a comedy and the production is not afraid of camp. There’s a wonderful moment amidst all the coupling shenanigans were one of the characters in full drag bursts into Raye’s ‘Where is My Husband’? – ‘I want a ring, a diamond ring’
In the Scorsese documentary on Fran Lebowitz from a few years ago, Lebowitz talks of how part of the reason Ballet was so great in the New York City of the Seventies was because the audience was so knowledgeable of what they were seeing and so demanding: they set the standard. AIDS made a large part of its audience disappear and with it, she argues, went much of the knowledge and the standards. The RSC’s audience is still with us, more mixed, greatly knowledgeable and just as demanding. I attended the discussion session before the play with director Daniel Evans and there was a whole 15 minute discussion of the significance of the name Ganymede. At the end of the play, after the Epilogue, there was one of those heartfelt, automatic and electric standing ovations that makes one feel thrilled and grateful to have been in the room: a sexy, funny, joyful and innovative production, worth taking the last train home from Stratford.
José Arroyo

MUYBRIDGE by Guy Delisle (

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Just a few words to praise Guy Delisle’s brilliant graphic novel MUYBRIDGE. It’s beautifully told, surprising, suspenseful, entertaining; and I learned so much about early photography and time-motion studies, how a sewing machine inspired the threading of celluloid, Louis Lumière work on emulsions (he used potato starch), Reynaud and his projections, Leland Stanford who founded the university that bears his name, praxinoscopes, kinetoscopes, zootroopes, zoopraxiscopes, etc. This also has the melodramatic elements one associates with the art of the period: robber barons, fortunes made and lost, inventions stolen, immigration and even murder (Muybridge was tried for killing his young wife’s lover). All of this is beautifully illustrated and not only with the wonderful drawings, but also with photographs, many of the most famous ones by Muybridge, reproductions of paintings, colour is brought in expressively; there’s a biographical element in that Muybridge’s work is still the basis for animation studies and that’s how the author first learned about the subject; and Guy Delisle even offers us graphic footnotes in a graphic novel. It’s marvellous. The book also makes excellent arguments on crediting Muybridge with the foundation of cinema through his time/motion photography but also for the basis of animation, Claymation in particular, more modern techniques such as the bullet time we see in THE MATRIX and much more. I can’t wait for my young nephews to get a bit older to gift them this and I can also imagine teachers of the subject using some of the images/captions for teaching: it makes the obscure Greek designations to some of the devices so easily legible. In other words, a marvellous book.

José Arroyo

Alice Friedman’s QUEER MODERNS: MAX EWING’S JAZZ AGE NEW YORK

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One of the finds at Pulp bookshop in Montreal on my last visit was Alice Friedman’s QUEER MODERNS: MAX EWING’S JAZZ AGE NEW YORK. Max Ewing (1903-34) was a writer/photographer/ man-about-town from Pioneer, Ohio who moved to New York City in 1923, was mentored by Carl Van Vechten, to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance to, got to know everyone in that intersection of black/white/queer/arts/bohemia/Paris/New York/ Harlem, and photographed and wrote about them privately. He committed suicide, just past the age of thirty, at the height of the Depression after the death of his ailing parents when he was forced back to Ohio and couldn’t find a way out., another example of structural queer extinction, dying young but leaving a legacy. Van Vechten bequeathed Ewing’s papers as part of his own donation to Yale University in 1941, creating the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection for the study of African American History. Now Alice T. Friedman has woven these treasures of the archive into our knowledge of queer desire and circles of the period, solidifying and expanding them. We see Tom Sansone, the bodybuilder, The Ritter Brothers, George Platt-Lynes, Lincoln Kirstein  and their circles, Aline McMahon, Florence Mills, Paul Robeson. It’s a more inclusive weaving, now incorporating so many members of the Harlem Renaissance, with queer desire and sexuality now central in the nudes, collages, poses of queer desire, male and female, that thrived in the particular era. The pictures are quite extraordinary. The book is also a lovely complement to @Will Straw’s great NIGHTS IN FAIRYLAND: GOSSIP, BLACKMAIL AND THE MANY LIVES OF BROADWAY BREVITIES.

José Arroyo

TWENTY THOUSAND STREETS UNDER THE SKY.

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It was a sadness to see the Southwark Playhouse half-empty for Simon Reade’s adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s TWENTY THOUSAND STREETS UNDER THE SKY. Hamilton wrote the books on which GASLIGHT, ROPE and HANOVER SQUARE are based. This work is set in 1929, in the aftermath of the General Strike and the Crash and follows six people who meet in a pub. It’s an empty set with a few pieces of furniture that get moved around and it’s the story of sexual obsession and manipulation. The play begins with a wonderful film noir image of a young man on a train, his faces grilled over by shadows, who ends up working in a pub. The young lass who works there and has dreams of working as a nanny for a family in India has a crush on him; he however falls in love with a young prostitute who was manipulated into the life by her best friend and a cruel married adventurer who runs over a cyclist. On the surface a bit cliché-ish, it’s certainly very middle-brow but also very good: one really gets a sense of a the social structures of the time, of the reasons for the limited options the characters have, for why they feel and act as they do. The actors are really superbly relaxed, evoking palpable heat and unfulfilled desire in a very intimate setting. It flows beautifully as well, scene merging into scene with a change of a stocking or a chair, all marvellously directed by Matthew Llife. A choreographed flow of feeling in a period setting. Yanexi Enriquez and Jordan Scowen stand out even amidst this wonderful cast. It deserves a bigger audience than it’s getting:
José Arroyo

A Note on the Roaring Twenties (RAoul Walsh, 1939)

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Aside from one of the greatest endings in all film history, two things stood out in my latest viewing of THE ROARING TWENTIES (Raoul Walsh, 1939), in a gorgeous 4K Digital Restoration at the BFI. One was thematic: when Cagney, Bogart et all return from fighting WWI, they’re pretty much sneered at, lose their jobs, treated as chumps. And this made me wonder if, except for WWII, this has ever been thus in the US’s treatment of its war vets: lots of sanctimonious ‘thank you for your service’ on the surface but ‘enjoy the streets sucker’ in reality. The other was the poetry and intensity of the montage created by Don Siegel to evoke the effects of the Wall Street Crash, the melting skyscrapers particularly impactful. It’s gorgeous. I loved the intensity of feeling without the sentimentality that is such a marker of Raoul Walsh (and of 1930s cinema in general) and is personified here by Gladys George as Panama Smith, street gutter glitter, rueful, down to earth; there’s something in the performing of all the supporting cast, everyone seemingly conscious that they’re in showbiz and have to entertain, so they all attempt and succeed in being believable as the characters they play, but adding little twirls, an inflection, a move of the eyes, vocal and physical embroidery with which to delight the audience. And of course, at the centre of it all Cagney, immense throughout, displacing air, crackling with life, bringing humanity into the darkened theatre, long after everyone involved in this movie, one of the all-time great gangster films, has died. A terrific experience, made more poignant by realising that it explicitly sets out at the beginning to construct a work of memory of one period (Mark Hellinger’s opening narration), the film itself operating as a marker of another, and all its many generation of viewers carrying yet at least one other within them.

José Arroyo

A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (SERGIO LEONE, 1964)

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I left my nephew and his kids and braved a thunderstorm to see A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (Sergio Leone, 1964) at the Cinema Moderne last night. It was a sold-out screening. I was put on a waiting list but did manage to get in, probably thanks to the rain. Everyone applauded at the end. I liked it very much. But I don’t understand its current status as one of the great masterpieces of the cinema. Influential, without question. Historically significant, of course; amongst other things, it made Clint Eastwood a star, and one can definitely understand why watching it. But Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO (1961), which borrowed its structure from American Westerns and of which this is a remake, is funnier, deeper, more complex and with characters that  convey something about people, ways of life, structures of feeling. Watching A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS is a somewhat dislocating experience, the dubbed language, the Spanish landscape standing in for the West but so different from it, everything a trope, a witty take on a cliché, a referent to something else. It’s all fun with surfaces, an evocation of a certain kind of mid-sixties cool, and épater de older generation aimed at the younger one: the shooting at the kid at the beginning, the close-ups of an extremely handsome Eastwood doing his poses. It might be seen as an early postmodern film. I loved the music, the shot of the horse galloping and the poetic raising of the dust, the intriguing compositions and uses of perspective and point of view. I do think Leone is an extraordinary visual filmmaker. And this is a very fun film; but to praise it as anything more seems to me a lack of discernment. This was particularly brought to mind through the presence of Margarita Lozano, who plays Consuelo Baxter, and who was also played the maid in VIRIDIANA, and thinking of both films in relation to art. Perhaps I should re-read Christopher Frayling and figure out exactly what I’m missing, if anything

José Arroyo

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (George Cukor, 1940)

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Magical experience watching THE PHILDALPHIA STORY in the 4K restoration with Chris and my sister amidst a goof size audience at the Cinema Moderne yesterday. Everybody laughed in all the right places, loudly at all the scenes I remember from childhood viewings (Virginia Wiedler, particularly wearing a huge diamond collar – a copy of Marie Antonoinette’s famous mammoth one —  dancing ballet, speaking French and singing ‘Lydia, oh Lydia, the lady with the Tattoo’) and pointed out laughs to me I hadn’t noticed viewing the film alone subsequently. I remember having a conversation with VF Perkins where he told me why he didn’t like it though I now can’t remember the specifics – was it the beginning? The characterisation of the husband to be? Yesterday, I loved it all. It’s got Hepburn, at her most beautiful, and filmed uber glamorously, Joe Ruttenburg puts eye-lights in her face, her lips glisten, her hair  — by Sidney Guilaroff –seems to float in little curls above her head; she’s at her most chic too, dressed by Adrian. James Stewart won the Oscar for it that year, and he is simply great – and what a year HE had (THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, THE MORTAL STORM, NOT TIME FOR COMEDY). Cary Grant still has that chubbyness around the face that made him so attractive. The goal was to revitalise Hepburn’s stardom, which it did, magnificently; how it did so – by ‘taming’ her, bringing her down to earth, humanising her – is something that so many of her later films would continue to do, not always this well or humanely. In the RADIO DAYS, Woodly Allen has a marvellous scene where an aunt takes a child to see a movie at Radio City Music Hall to convey the thrill and magic the movies then represented. There they watch the drunk scene with Hepburn and Stewart in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY and nothing personifies the sexiness, romance, beauty and glamour of the movies better. A farce, a screwball, a commentary on Hepburn herself, celebrity, the rich, the gutter press – I’ve been reading Will Straw’s NIGHTS IN FAIRYLAND about the Broadway gossip celebrity press, which connects beautifully to the blackmail plot in the film. Delightful.

José Arroyo

Pressure (Anthony Maras, 2026)

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The biggest surprise at my screening of PRESSURE (Anthony Maras, 2026) at Cineworld was the elderly woman in a wheelchair vaping huge clouds of smoke and a smell I initially thought was some kind of bubble gummy perfume. I was too stunned to think much of it other than admire her brass.

As to the film itself, about the impact meteorological predictions had on the scheduling of D-Day, the vast stakes in that decision, and the pressure that in turn placed on those making it, I liked it very much. It’s all rich browns and golds, with a nostalgic dimension, including singing of hymns at chapel, iconic images of England – the rolling hills, the stately homes, the variable weather – and, as a finale ,whether the protagonists’ wife lives and whether the child was safely born which could have been overegging but isn’t. But for the scene of the D-Day landing, it’s mainly filmed in medium-length shots and close-ups, an intimate focus on a great historical event. The main thrusts invites a comparison to current events – unlike the orange one’s thoughtless and impetuous war on Iran – this is measured, debated, down to the last detail, even to what is predictable about the weather. It’s a film that valorises facts, data, knowledge, method, argument, debate, discipline; and in which the loss of life is integral to the decision making. The film doesn’t make a direct comparison to current events but the juxtaposition inevitably arises.

The acting is admirable: Andrew Scott reliably excellent and nuanced – the sound he makes at the hospital near the end is so expressive and moving. Brendan Fraser surprised as Eisenhower; he is so physically unlike the pictures of the eventual President, but ends up utterly convincing; Kerry Condon is believable as Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s no-nonsense, unflappable but sympathetic private secretary (and lover); and I adored Damian Lewis as ‘heigh-ho old chap’ bullyish Montgomery; it’s a turn but excellently done.

I enjoyed it much more than I thought and was surprised to be so moved.

Jose Arroyo

One Night Only (Will Gluck, 2026)

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It’s interesting what the worlds of romantic comedy tell us. In the great Doris Day/ Rock Hudson hits of the late 50’s/ early 60s, we were shown a rich, sophisticated, vibrantly coloured world with clear rules and very rigid gender roles that the characters themselves struggled to live up to. In PILLOW TALK (Michael Gordon, 1959), Doris was a successful career woman who wore chic clothes, the latest hair-dos, and was uber-careful about sex, which some derided, but really who wouldn’t be in those pre-pill, illegal abortion days, when a pregnancy could sink one’s career and ruin one’s life? Rock was the lothario who pretended to be a gay mama’s boy to ease the conquest, embodying all the contradictions and giving life and voice to that which was taboo. Tony Randall did almost the opposite, signifying gay no matter how many marriages and divorces the plot assigned to his character.
ONE NIGHT ONLY (Will Gluck, 2026) presents a world, also using New York as setting but in the near future, 2035, where sex for unmarried people is prohibited except for one night only, and even then, they can only have sex with a condom. The government has developed this bar code which people have tattooed on their wrist and instantly communicates any infringement to the authorities. So how to turn this dystopian premise into a light romantic comedy? The film focuses on the frenzy of that night, the different ways people take advantage of it, the desperation for condoms…while our protagonists, Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro, really want something deeper. It’s a film with a great central premise, not fully or well explored (think of the kind of comedy Italians might have made of people trying to evade this rule the rest of the year). There’s a tension between the film’s attempts at being titillating, which it doesn’t really succeed at, and the fundamental prudishness, which persists in spite of the premise. The film highlights the authoritarianism of the culture but one which the leads take for granted and accept. What is meant to be a light sexy romantic comedy ends up with a gleeful acceptance of the status quo, a culture so fascistic it tries and succeeds in regulating sexual expression..
It’s a very misjudged film, by Will Gluck, the director of ANYONE BUT YOU, (Sidney Sweeney and Glen Powell are used for some good jokes). Turner and Barbaro are sexy and witty, well-handling even the physical comedy. I was also very pleased to see Molly Ringwald as Turner’s mom; and LeVar Burton as her boyfriend. Pity about the rest

THE DOG STARS (Ridley Scott, 2026)

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Reviews of THE DOG STARS were so muted that I was surprised I liked it as much as I did and now suspect it will be one of those Ridley Scott films (like, recently, THE COUNSELOR and THE LAST DUEL) that will be re-evaluated upwards in years to come. I liked the depiction of nature, which remains beautiful, whilst all humans have built is ugly and deteriorating. This is a world almost eradicated by a virus and now dog-eat-dog survivalist. The film is about overcoming the sadness that overhangs everything and finding love (romantic as well as communal) and hope. The pace feels slow (though is that just because of our current doom scrolling from ten sec clip to ten sec clip?). There are some fantastical moments – gothic meets the surreal – with Allison Janney ruling an airport outpost and I loved the John Fordish prelude to the film’s end. The cast is starry indeed, Jacob Elordi and Margaret Qualley lovely together; Josh Brolin at his most appealing; Guy Pearce brilliant at playing someone almost ordinary. I liked the film’s valuing of skills and knowledge and really loved the combination of apocalyptic circumstances not without nature and beauty, overhanging sadness, and a finding of more than a glimmer of love and hope as those circumstances unfold. I was very glad to see it.

 

José Arroyo

Bitter Christmas/ Amarga Navidad (Pedro Almodóvar, 2026)

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BITTER CHRISTMAS is about an aging director who’s having trouble finding an original idea, keeps cannibalising his old work, can’t let go of the death of his mother, and it turns out the movie you’ve just watched is the movie he’s been writing. We’ve seen it all before, though with a less self-referential acknowledgement much less inquiry. The complex structure veering from fiction to non-fiction is what he used in BAD EDUCATION and PAIN AND GLORY; the narrative ease with which he moves through time and media is still a wonder; women searching in the night for drugs that will alleviate their pain we’ve seen in WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS, WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, and even THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET. We’ve seen the black Fomentera beach in BROKEN EMBRACES; the artistic pottery and works of art as backdrop in all of his movies. He’s upscaled to cleaner lines and fancier kitchens but you can still get interior decorating tips from Almodóvar movies, though now you need a much bigger budget. Even sonically the film repeats themes you’ve heard before in his older movies. Chavela returns from the grave to make the characters and us cry again, more layer but not too different a deployment than Caetano Veloso  in TALK TO HER. Handsome men swimming, cars driving on darkened Christmas streets like in LIVE FLESH; cars coloured Valentino red like in almost all his movies; even all the bit part players that have featured in his films since the 80s – and his brother—here pose for a group picture with Rossy de Palma. Filmmakers obsessed with films about filmmaking can be tiring for audiences and I do look at what seems an embourgeoisification with sadness, though I’ll grant that his recent films don’t neglect history, the social and the political and a filmmaker can’t do everything at once. This is about autofiction, mythmaking, self-iconisation, and it’s best viewed through an auteurist lens. Through that lens, it can be very fascinating. Watching it, my mind kept flickering through the various associations, where you’d seen what before, and I was quite unmoved by what I was seeing, admiring the narrative facility of chucking out characters, doing impossible scenes; critical of a loss of sex and desire in the way the strip-tease scene was filmed. Unusually for an Almodóvar film, it stimulated my brain more than my emotions.

José Arroyo

A CHORUS LINE AT THE PUTNEY ART THEATRE & PRIDE AT THE NATIONAL

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We saw two musicals yesterday, both wonderful experiences. The matinee was an am dram production of A CHORUS LINE at the Putney Arts Theatre. I saw the last professional production at the Palladium, and it seemed too much of its time, slick and fake. This was brilliant, most of the actors were almost good: some could sing, not all could dance, and then not at too high a level. But there was something about the yearning, the desire, the need to perform that was true and endearing, funny and moving. An hour before the show, the guy who played the director did ‘castings’, which people, including members of the audience could sign up for beforehand and which segue-wayed very smoothly into the start of the show. The ‘One Singular Expression’ number brought cheers, as it always does, even though the execution lacked the unity and precision of movement that is normally thought essential and by the end the audience was at its feet.

 

The other musical we saw was the adaptation of PRIDE (Matthew Warchus, 2014), at the National’s Dorfman theatre, which also brought the audience to its feet, this time with tears in their eyes, like the film did. The film starts with images from the culture of the period, protests, Thatcher, Madonna, the Miner’s strike, to a Jimmy Sommerville soundtrack. Is any musician ore associated with the queer politics of the time? The show, about the need for community, solidarity and collaboration in the force of oppression is funny, moving, still defiant. It really works. The second act opening curtain, a real corker of a number, fantastically camp and like the best camp with a real zinging critique at its heart. The problem, which funnily was not much of one, is the score, which didn’t seem good enough. But is it really not up to par or is it just unfamiliar to us? And how could the quality of the music not matter much in a musical? I’m not sure. I didn’t think much of the music but it was good enough to be effective, act as a vehicle for the melodrama and the humour of the piece: it’s a good enough conduit without being dazzling in itself. Whatever, the play worked, and I was one of those teary eyed and on my feet by the end, though I admit being particularly sensitive to the period – my youth – and the material. The production is such a hit it’s transferring to THE BRIDGE  this Autumn.

José Arroyo

Electra/ Persona by Benedict Andrews after Sophocles and Ingmar Bergman

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In PERSONA (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) , an actress has a nervous breakdown while performing ELECTRA and stops speaking. The basic conceit in Benedict Andrews’ play is to combine the two; the first part starts off as a performance of Electra where each night Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss toss a coin in front of the audience as to who performs Electra and who Clytemnestra. The choice made, they take a moment to put on some make-up, step into the role, and onto the stage where the performance starts. A tour de force, played out on a simple set that looks like the steps to a temple, and in which aspects of the tragedy play out.
Cameras come out on in the second half, first pointed at the audience, then mainly in Elizabeth Vollander’s hands until her madness transfers onto Alma the nurse. We get more than a few winks to Bergman in this scenes, live-filmed onstage, in black and white, and where at one moment Hoss and Blanchett recreate the famous profile shot. Actors, acting, performance, mothering, mother-daughters, are all part of the material that the play is working through, and I found it a thrill.
I’m ambivalent about Blanchett recognising her as a great actress but to me on film only truly effective when she plays outsize characters: queens, stars, fairies. Onstage it’s different because somehow the theatricality charges the air around her. Onstage, she ‘displaces air’ as someone said of Cagney, so that the theatricality itself becomes a conduit to the recognisable and human. That nervous, energy, that electricity generated, is something I associate with the greatest film actors (Cagney, Davis, Garland, later Fonda and Jack Nicholson have that quality). Blanchett has it onstage. Nina Hoss was also wonderful (first as Electra, then as the catatonic actress, Elizabeth Vollander), without being quite so commanding, except in the filmed parts, where she was masterful with minimalist expression, making full use of those close-ups. I found their performance a tour de force and a thrill to witness. There are two other actors but they appear briefly.
The play itself I’m unsure of, and I’m not a fan of the live filming, though it worked better here than in many other instances I’ve seen. Our waiter at the BFI restaurant was chatting to us before the show and told us the whole technical thing had been a disaster earlier but was now under control, and indeed it was. They also eliminated the intermission so it’s two hours straight through, which I think definitely concentrated its power. I enjoyed it very much and it felt a privilege to see those two great actresses working together on such challenging material so close-up (we could see the streaks of powder on Blanchett’s face).
José Arroyo

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 482 – Coyote vs. Acme

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In 2023, Warner Bros. announced the completion of Coyote vs. Acme, a family film in which Looney Tunes‘ Wile E. Coyote, still desperately and valiantly chasing the Road Runner, sues the Acme Corporation for selling defective products. They also announced that the film would not be released, preferring to claim a tax loss of some $30 million against it. Those who’d seen the film described how good it was and that it deserved a release, and there was opposition to its cancellation both publicly and within the industry. In response, Warner Bros. decided to shop it out to other distributors, with Ketchup Entertainment eventually buying and releasing it. Now that we’ve finally seen it, the question remains: was Coyote vs. Acme worth rescuing?

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

DODES’KA-DEN (Akira Kurosawa, 1970).

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DODES’KA-DEN (Akira Kurosawa, 1970). The title is onomatopoeia, the equivalent in English of ‘clackety-clack.’  It begins with a young boy and his mother. She prays as he gets ready to ‘go to work’. The boy has a whole fantasy life. He’s obsessed with trams and imagines himself as a tram inspector. This fantasy life of imagination bookends the film; DODES’KA-DEN ends with the boy returning  home from ‘work’ and a sweeping shot of all the childish drawings of trams that line his home.

Opening Tram:

End Tram

In between, we get a series of vignettes of people living in extreme poverty in a shanty-town outside of Tokyo: A married woman who has children by numerous men but whose husband treats as his own, loving them all. Two couples, colour-coded in red and yellow so you can tell them apart as the drunken men end up sleeping with each others’ wives. A homeless man and his son who dream of building beautiful places but who are forced to beg for food that is often tainted. A woman who returns to her husband after cheating on him but finds he doesn’t forgive. A young girl raed by her uncle while her aunt is seriously ill in hospital. All these stories and more are tied together by women gossiping at a well, a kind of Greek chorus on the action, commenting, distancing, unifying.

The film treads the same ground as THE LOWER DEPTHS but in a contemporary setting. It highlights the extent to which Kurosawa is drawn to this milieu, evident in so many of his films from DRUNKEN ANGEL to RED BEARD. It’s got very beautiful and precise use of colour, though the palette and imagery seems very of its time, a portent of what Kurosawa will achieve later in KAGEMUSHA AND RAN, though the later work now seems timeless. There’s a melding of almost kabuki like imagery with gritty realism and brightly coloured highly stylised fantasy sequences (the homeless man imagining what he’d build) that don’t quite tie in together. The acting is for the most part excellent but off, too-much, in some key characters (the ‘businessman’ with the facial tics and the leg-spasms; the woman at the top of the visual pyramid at the well’.) And though this is the exception, it destroys the delicacy of tone of the whole and makes one realise how much work goes into getting those things precisely right. RED BEARD took two years to make; this was finished in 27 days, and it shows.

 

Dodes’ka-den was Kurosawa’s first film in five years. Wiki tells me it was his first without Toshiro Mifune since IKIRU in 1952, and his first without composer Masaru Sato since SEVEN SAMURAI in 1954. It was also his first colour film, shot on 35mm in classic 1.37 ratio; and the first time working with Takai Saito as cinematographer, with whom he’d go on to do such extraordinary work with colour and cinematography in KAGEMUSHA and RAN.  It’s an experiment with newish technologies (first time I notice use of the zoom in his work, quite extensive here). It was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film but was such  critical and commercial failure at home that it led Kurosawa to attempt suicide. To me now, it seems a flawed but essential

José Arroyo

RED BEARD (Akira Kurosawa, 1965)

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Kurosawa saw RED BEARD (1965) as a turning point in his filmmaking, acknowledging that his subsequent films would be different. The film shows no traces of all the experiments with sound, editing, portable cameras or narration that younger filmmakers from all over the world were engaging with at the time. It’s classic, humanist cinema in the best sense. Structurally it’s almost Dr. Kildare -ish: a young doctor (Yuzo Kayama) learns wisdom from a gruff wiser one (Toshiro Mifune) who gently guides him through whatever ethical or medical problems present themselves. A comparison to MARCUS WELBY MD  would also not be inappropriate, given the episodic structure of the Kurosawa film. But these are only surface comparisons.

The episodes in RED BEARD are much grittier, harsher: A young mad woman tells stories of sexual abuse as she kills men with her hairpin (Is this where Almodóvar got his opening for MATADOR?) The second story is of a woman who rejected her husband for his younger clerk and married off their daughter to him so she could continue her relationship with him. When the clerk asked his now wife to ask her father for money after he’d stolen his wife and his daughter, she stabbed him. The third story starts with a body found after a mudslide. A man reveals it’s his wife and tells of an impossible love – she’d been bonded for ten years to another — that led her to commit suicide. We see also a young girl captured into sexual slavery at the age of 12; of a young boy who causes his whole family to attempt suicide after he’s caught stealing food. ‘ Poverty’s a political problem they say. But what has politics ever done for the poor?’ asks Red Beard.

The story is the young Doctor’s. He’s been educated in Western medicine and expected to work for the Shogun but circumstances and politics force him into this clinic for the poor, who he initially sees as smelly and inhuman. The change and journey are his. Red Beard’s guidance and his own experience lead him to understand fragility, empathy, compassion, kindness. In his marvellous review of the film, David Denby said that it should be required viewing for all doctors.

RED BEARD is 185 minutes with an intermission half-way through at 1h47. It took two-years to make and would be Kurosawa’s final collaboration with Mifune. The film is set in the 19th century and it views a bit like the equivalent of reading a 19th-century novel, with sweep, detail, and a moral centre. It has a touch of soap which makes the viewing compulsive but cut through with the style of telling and the grit of the tales themselves. The mise-en-scene is as precise, economical and evocative as good writing. And it’s a film that is always conscious of the viewer: Mifune’s fight scene outside the brothel being the most blatant example. It’s a film that can seem old-fashioned but which I prefer to call classic. I loved it.

Images

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 481 – Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

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Horror is surely the most deconstructed genre in film, the slasher the most deconstructed subgenre therein, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma may be the most deconstructy of all such cinematic deconstructions. It tells the story of a young, queer, indie filmmaker hired to resurrect a problematic slasher series of yesteryear, the Camp Miasma films, which feature a box-headed villain who periodically emerges from a lake to murder teens who are drinking too much and forcing themselves on each other. Attempting to decide what she wants her reboot to be, she revisits the first film and meets its reclusive star, the enigmatic look in whose eye, in that first film, she’s desperate to understand.

Mike gets on with Teenage Sex and Death; José does not. What José finds cutesy and aimless, Mike sees originality and charm in. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun is keen to have their cake and eat it, building in criticism of Gen Z-esque reevaluations of old media by modern standards while engaging in them all the same. This is a film loaded with irony – but its love of its subject matter is obvious.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

It’s easy to argue that Teenage Sex and Death is at odds with itself when its former final girl (a delightfully drawling, glamorous Gillian Anderson) encourages the visiting filmmaker to cast off her intellectual pretensions and simply enjoy the “flesh and fluids”, but it’s a film that has plenty of room for ambiguity and blurring of the lines between points of view, and reality, media and fantasy. To some, the ambiguities will be approached as a problem to solve – just what is reality and what isn’t, at the end of the day? – but for Mike, they’re Schoenbrun’s way of following Anderson’s advice.

It’s not a perfect film and there will be those to whom it fails to speak at all (one of them is on this podcast), but Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is at the very least interesting, and an eager addition to the groaning shelves of self-referential horror media.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Kagemusha (Akira Kurosawa, 1980)

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Kagemusha (1985)

 

The legends around this are many. Even after Kurosawa won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film for DESU UZALA (the film he’d made in 1975 in the Soviet Union) he could not get financing for KAGEMUSHA, and went five years without working. Depressed, suicidal and scratching a living from whisky commercials, he spent most of his time doing paintings of what his film would look like, over two hundred of them, very beautiful, highly detailed, and had his people take them along with the script – as a kind of visual storyboard — when shopping the film around the studios, though as Kurosawa is quick to mention, movies are MOVING pictures. The film eventually got made only with the help of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, then riding high on their 70s blockbusters, who helped obtain foreign distribution guarantees. The film also began as a troubled shoot with Shintaro Katsu, of ZATOICHI fame, who was set to play the lead, fired on the first day for wanting to film Kurosawa directing on set, and replaced with Tatsuya Nakadai, who had played the handsome gun-slinging villain in YOJIMBO (1961) and would go on to play the King Lear figure in RAN (1986)

The Criterion disk has magnificent extras; a making of, two films on the paintings themselves, a commentary by Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince and much else. My favourite bit was hearing Coppola and Lucas talk about the importance of Kurosawa, arguing that for his generation, great cinema was Bergman, Fellini and Kurosawa, with Coppola demonstrating how Kurosawa’s filming of violence can be traced from Ford and then through Kurosawa to Peckinpah, BONNIE AND CLYDE,  and his own work. Lucas talks of how Kurosawa had influenced STAR WARS and the work of others of his generation like Spielberg and Milius. Coppola and Lucas were both present at the shoot of KAGEMUSHA.

 

Images in Motion:

The story itself revolves around a drunken thief who is hired as a double for Takeda Shingen, one of a set of warlords fighting for supremacy in the 16th century, with Nakadai playing both roles. Shingen dies one evening whilst getting too close to a castle to listen to some flute-playing and his last wishes are that this be kept secret for three years whilst his generals stay put in their main castle, defend their clan, and let the others fight amongst themselves. The double fools everyone except his grandson, whose comments are dismissed as those of a child and later learns to love the man he eventually will think of as his grandfather; and finally, the warlord’s horse, who ejects him. The horse’s actions are taken as ultimate proof whereas the words of men, much less children had always been treated with suspicion. The film’s last third are motivated by the son, who has daddy issues due to being bypassed as heir by the father in favour of his own son; and who does the opposite of what his father had commanded, moving ‘the castle’ to the battle instead of keeping put, and thus ensures the downfall of the Takeda clan.

Framing, Compositions, Colour, Detail within Design:

It’s a film about identity, power and strategy, loyalty and ambition, and father-son relations. The only women one sees are the warlord’s mistresses, and not for very long. Watching the film and not well-versed in the history, I was sometimes a bit lost about the various warring factions. And yet some of the images are so astonishingly beautiful that I literally gaped AND gasped. The compositions are extraordinary from the simple ones of three figures at the beginning, to what he does with moving armies later on in the film. The use of colour has to be some of the most dazzling I’ve ever seen in cinema, sophisticated, minimalist (there’s often one or two colours that dominate), balanced. Even the kimonos the warlords wear are magnificent prints in gorgeous silks —  there’s something one can extrapolate here about the accumulation of carefully chosen detail which together expresses a balanced simplicity — that might be amplified onto the film. And then there are the battles themselves, particularly the last one with the slaying of the horses, thrilling and tragic, with the slow motion emphasizing the beauty of the destruction, the sublimity of the tragedy unfolding. It’s a gorgeous film and one can only appreciate the beauty of the restoration by comparing it to the dank, dark, pedestrian tones in the unrestored clips  utilised in the various extras. It was the release of this film that brought Kurosawa to my consciousness though I did not see it upon first release, probably put off by its three-hour length. I now aim to see it again.

 

Swift as the Wind. Quiet as a Forest. Fierce as Fire. Immoveable as a Mountain.  All that is must perish and the flow of the river is ceaseless.

Compare images above to unrestored version below:

José Arroyo