Monthly Archives: September 2025

A NOTE ON DOG DAY AFTERNOON

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I woke this morning still thinking about DOG DAY AFTERNOON. A man who has loved no other woman more than his wife, who loves his two children, and his mother, yet who robs a bank so that –to use the film’s own language — his other wife, a man named Leon, a man he’s loved like no man has ever loved another, can have a sex-change operation, is constantly crushed by all the obligations he feels towards those he loves ‘I’m dying here!’…and fails. That is the premise of the film, a courageous one. That man, Sonny (AlPacino) is not only the protagonist of the film, but its hero. The film’s achievement is to get the audience to empathise with that man, which it succeeded in doing then — the film was a big hit – and it still works today. It’s a New York film. To much of America, probably a story that could only take place in New York. But I see New York itself as a protagonist in the film. The helicopter shots that begin it, the buildings, the people, the talk, the attitude, the energy, the humour, the grit. There are actors that I still can’t name but recognise from TV as New York actors (Carol Kane, in a small early role, is one I can). The performances of John Cazale and Chris Sarandon are justly praised. But I’d forgotten that Charles Durning, James Broderick, and Lance Hernriksen are also in the cast and excellent. Lumet is justly celebrated for his work with actors and each of the kidnapped secretaries is rendered an individuals, often with bits of business. But here Lumet also uses a mobile camera to bring energy and urgency to the heist. He uses the inside and outside symbolically, bringing in the crowds as commentary on America and the media. People remember ‘Attica’ and the gay rights moment. I at least had forgotten the can-throwing and the bile directed at Sonny. It’s a truly great film, and Pacino as the man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, doing wrong so that he can do right by everyone is tender, sweet, brave, angry, violent, caring, funny and ultimately very moving. The whole gamut. One of the greatest performances in American film history and a truly great film.

José Arroyo

A note on Claudia Cardinale

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I mourn the death of Claudia Cardinale. I’ve seen a lot of her lesser-known work this year (LA RAGAZZA DI BUBE/ THE GIRL WITH THE SUITCASE, IL GIORNO DELLA CIVETTA/ THE DAY OF THE OWL, IL PREFETTO DI FERRO/ I AM THE LAW) and only learned to love her more. She was one of those rare performers whose smile lit up a screen and sparked some kind of opening or expansion in the hearts of spectators (Goldie Hawn, Audrey Hepburn, and Julia Roberts are others). Like Carmen Sevilla, who was dubbed ‘The Girlfriend of Spain’ Cardinale was publicised as ‘The girlfriend of Italy’, which I found interesting because they’re both very beautiful, and very sexy but in a non-threatening way (think of Ava Garden or Linda Fiorentino as opposites.); they both radiate positivity instead of danger. Like with Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, the other Italian superstars of her era, she could move from playing rural peasants to aristocrats with ease. She was a great actress, with a calm demeanour and a liveliness behind the eyes that audiences worldwide found easy to identify with. I learned from the Spanish obituaries that LES PÉTROLEUSES/ THE LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING (Christian Jacques, 1972), a gunslinging Western in which she starred with Brigitte Bardot, a contemporary whose evocation of freedom had been an inspiration, played for years in Spain, an enormous hit, and was advertised as ‘BB contra CC’. A great star and a great actress whose filmography is a legacy that extends beyond the obvious works from Fellini, Visconti, Monicelli, Leone, Herzog, etc: it’s interesting to see the different works obits from diff countries highlight, depending on what traces they left on those particular cultures.

José Arroyo

A thought on Kip Nolan’s Mulholland Meat

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I couldn’t afford the vintage pulp novels that I wanted but saw that there were new equivalents in the same vein, so I tried one: MULHOLLAND MEAT. It’s about a young sexually abused boy who leaves home and is picked up at the bus station by an agent based on Henry Wilson (Tab Hunter, Rock Hudson, Troy Donahue), also the subject of Michael McKeever’s play, THE CODE, currently on in London. It’s the evening of the premiere of THE ROBE in 1953 and by the end of the year the young man will find love and become a star, but not before having to put out to all kinds of creeps, famous and not, up and down Mulholland Drive. It’s badly written soft-core porn with Golden Age Hollywood lore as context. It’s heavily based on Scotty Bowers’ FULL SERVICE: MY ADVENTURES IN HOLLYWOOD AND THE SECRET SEX LIVES OF THE STARS (which was also the case with Ryan Murphy’s HOLLYWOOD TV series). What bothered me most was seeing all the internet gossip being offered up as fact, so representative of this age of digital disinformation. And worst of all to me was the representation of Katharine Hepburn as a sexually rapacious lesbian. And I began to ask why did it bother me? Is it some form of internalised homophobia? After all it’s quite likely that Hepburn did have some same-sex experiences, particularly with her close friend Laura Harding. We’ll never know. What we do have is concrete evidence of marriage and several important affairs with men, heavily documented in all kinds of ways including testimony from all her friends. But be that as it may, I suppose what upset me is that what I suspect drives the re-iteration of this account of her nicked from Scotty Bowers is misogyny, an attempt to reduce one of the great figures of 20th century cinema, all that she meant to people then and now, all that she accomplished and created, to a nasty stereotype: closety, repressed but rapacious, something gay men of today could look down on sneer at, knowingly (but knowing nothing). And this goes for the rest of the real life figures mentioned in the book (Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, Richard Burton etc). And perhaps all of this may be more excusable in a pulp novel than in London play or a tony Netflix mini-series. Perhaps.

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 456 – Together

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Commitment is scary. It’s especially scary when you drink water from a cursed puddle that wants to make a hybrid of you and your partner. Together tells the story of a couple moving to a new home during a questionable period in their relationship: she has a new job and is responsible for the move away; he’s emotionally distant since the death of his parents and relies on her for transportation and financial security. They love each other, but will they last?

First-time director Michael Shanks demonstrates a good instinct for tone, effectively combining comedy and horror – that Alison Brie and Dave Franco (married in real life) are both experienced comic actors helps the film draw out the absurdity of the events it depicts. What quibbles we might have with details of its supernatural basis are easily ignored because its focus always remains on the central couple. It doesn’t matter that some specific detail might not be explained to our satisfaction: the question is always, how do the couple respond to their predicament? Together never loses sight of what’s most important, and that makes it one of the best horrors – maybe one of the best films full stop – that we’ve seen in a while.

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.

 

 

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 454 – Weapons

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One of the most hotly-anticipated horror films in recent memory, Weapons begins with seventeen third-grade children in a Pennsylvania town mysteriously waking up at 2:17am one Wednesday and running from their homes into the darkness. The shocking, unexplained disappearance and imagery of an empty classroom alone suggest an allegory of school shootings, and we ask what else can be read into the film, and discuss the depth with which it handles its themes. We have our issues with Weapons but enjoy it very much all the same, and find a lot to like. It’s probably just a little overpraised.

Two weeks later, with the film still on his mind, Mike opens up further discussion and proposes that maybe there’s more to it than he gave it credit for – or that you have to be American to properly get it.

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.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 453 – The Shrouds

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A psychosexual thriller that’s neither psychosexual nor thrilling enough, The Shrouds is a disappointment. There’s great promise to businessman Vincent Cassel’s invention of a technologically advanced shroud that creates a 3D model of the decaying body it houses, when we’re shown the lust with which he observes his deceased wife’s corpse. The film is peppered with recurrent imagery of her disfigured body, and its importance to Cassel’s character is constantly reinforced, but the film is too talky, its imagery too bland, and its plot too convoluted to make the most of it. A shame.

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.

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 452 – The Ballad of Wallis Island

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Mike loves Tim Key. This much has been true for some time, and he’s thrilled to discover that the comic poet’s unique approach to wordplay and social interactions finds a natural place on the cinema screen, in the character of an eccentric lottery winner who lures his favourite folk duo, long since broken-up, to the lonely island on which he lives for a private gig. Tom Basden’s singer-songwriter finds the forced reunion an unwelcome intrusion from his past, and so begins a comedy about grief, loss, loneliness, and rice.

The plot is easily predicted, the visual nous close to absent, but it has a good heart and, in Key, an irresistably energetic, unusual central performance. It filled the Mockingbird with laughter and left us all feeling warm and cuddly and sad and happy. The Ballad of Wallis Island is a charming film, well worth watching.

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.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 455 – Eddington

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Most film and TV has quietly agreed to pretend that the Covid pandemic never happened. Perhaps it’s too awkward to discuss it. Perhaps it’ll date your work. Writer-director Ari Aster doesn’t share these worries, telling a story about the days of lockdowns, mask mandates and conspiracy theories – days of particular hostility and division in the USA, in which individual freedom does constant battle with the greater good.

Eddington is an ambitious attempt at the state-of-the-nation film: a darkly comic thriller with wild tonal shifts, a mass of interwoven themes, uneven pacing, and an eventual climb out of reality into absurdity. José finds much to dislike, particularly its dismissive attitude towards the young people it depicts supporting the Black Lives Matter movement; Mike is surprised at how much he likes it, given how let down he felt by Hereditary. Eddington is certainly a mixed bag, but we’re glad to have seen it.

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.

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 451 – Friendship

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We talk adult male friendships, stress and surreality in our discussion of Friendship, in which oddball everyman Tim Robinson finds himself enamoured with effortlessly cool new neighbour Paul Rudd, but lacks any of the social nous to naturally bond with him. The film gets huge laughs from meaningful subject matter, a far cry from our experience with The Naked Gun. Its tone is idiosyncratic and its observations on human nature ring true in their exaggerated way, and Robinson is a fascinating and hilarious presence on the cinema screen. Friendship won’t be for everyone, but we highly recommend it.

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.