I had a very long journey yesterday – a train trip from Prague to Vienna was but a small part albeit a highlight — perfect for reading a short Simenon novel. This one’s set on a Sunday in a small pension in the South of France. It begins on glorious day, as a couple is waking up. Simenon describes the bodies, the breaths, the density of the air, the smells of the people, the colours of the view. It’s a very sensuous setting for a murder. The man on the bed is Émile, the chef; the woman, Berthe, his wife, who he feels has trapped him; she is the owner of the pension and, he fears, of him. The rumblings upstairs are from Ada, the maid and Émile’s mistress. Murder is the bid for freedom and a new life. The whole novel is an account of the events of the day leading up to the murder -when? How? -with flashbacks explaining the why. Every detail seems common sense yet they all add up to a damming and very entertaining picture of amorality. A risotto, the chef’s speciality, takes pride of place in a startling finale that overturns much of what the reader has thought so far, risottos included. Thanks to Richard for the gift of the book.
Listen to our podcasts on the previous two films in the series, Jigsaw and Spiral.
Mike’s favourite horror series, which fizzled out in 2010 after seven annual instalments, has been resurrected in fits and starts over the past few years, and if future sequels can maintain the quality of storytelling of Saw X, we want to see more of them. José still doesn’t understand the appeal of the gore and torture, but accepts that it’s part of the landscape here; what neither of us expects is such an involving and interesting first act.
The serialised story that became so hard to follow during the 2000s is here eschewed in favour of a relatively self-contained episode of Jigsaw’s life – the convolutions that followed his death way back in Saw III are nowhere to be seen here. We’re in pure prequel mode, following him on a trip to Mexico to receive an experimental miracle cure for his terminal cancer, during which the film confidently takes time to build surprising and effective hope for him – everybody likes Jigsaw, the adorable little sadist, after all. The savage redemption that he sets out to offer later on is given weight by this stage-setting, and in the light of how ugly these films can be, it’s a rather refreshing and bold bit of storytelling.
We discuss the racial composition of the group of victims and the varying viciousness of the games they’re forced to play, and just how hard they are to beat – disproportionate gruesomeness is this series’ stock-in-trade, but is only three minutes to sacrifice a body part really fair? Mike praises the lighting, which proves images need not be hard to see to be dark. And we discuss the series’ history, the differences between Saw X and its predecessors, and single out Tobin Bell, the man holding everything together. He got lucky in 2004 to find that his almost background role would quickly make him an iconic cinematic villain; the filmmakers got lucky that the bit-part player they’d hired to lie on the floor for two hours turned out to have the ability and presence to lead a billion-dollar franchise.
Mike’s always thrilled to see a new Saw film, and the fact that this one’s good is merely icing on the cake – but most remarkably, José has found one he needs no nudging or persuasion to recommend!
Kenneth Branagh continues to direct himself as Hercule Poirot in his ongoing project to make Agatha Christie’s classic whodunnits all about him. A Haunting in Venice has less focus on the process and nuances of investigation than its predecessors, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile – and those already felt the need to punctuate the procedural with action, lest the audience get bored – but shows just as much interest in Poirot’s story, at the expense of the suspects’ and victims’. It’s safe to say that these adaptations are not what they could, or should, be.
Branagh enthusiastically uses dramatic angles and camera movement; wonderful to see but for the fact that he does so with little motivation, failing to create with them the effects and mood that he could. The casting disappoints José, who looks to these sorts of films for the stars of yesteryear who fill the ensemble, bringing their histories and personas to their portrayals of the snooty dowagers, nervous accountants and so on; here, no such stars are present. A few current names pepper the cast list, but most of the players that this whodunnit hosts form a who’s who of “who’s that?”
We’re already into diminishing returns with Branagh’s Poirot series, the films increasingly missing the point of their genre – how can the audience play along with the mystery and marvel at the intricacy of its solution when we’re rushed past the details in favour of hearing about the detective’s inner life yet again? Mike found an element of that to like back in Murder on the Orient Express, but even a heart as large and generous as his can find no room for it any more. It’s simply not good enough.
You can also hear our discussion of 2018’s The Nun, and our podcast on The Exorcist, part of our exploration of the oeuvre of William Friedkin.
For our 400th episode we indulge in a pair of horror sequels, both heavy on faith, possession, and Christianity. One is part of a modern universe of interconnected stories, characters, and demons, the other represents the reignition of a series whose sequels have been produced intermittently for fifty years without receiving anything like the acclaim of the film that spawned them. The Nun II is the eighth film in the ten-year-old Conjuring Universe; The Exorcist: Believer is only the sixth Exorcist film in half a century. Truly, they don’t make them like they used to.
Neither film in this double bill is very good in totality, but The Nun II contains imaginative and effective set pieces and visual ideas, while The Exorcist: Believer is content to discard a reasonably interesting first act in favour of useless and charmless reference to, and pathetic reenactment of, William Friedkin’s 1973 original. We discuss what we think the films are about, wittingly or otherwise – horror is commonly understood to often allegorise and express the ills and worries of the societies that produce them, and we consider the ways in which these films might be doing so. And there’s much to compare and contrast between them, including their characters’ attitudes to the supernatural; the ways in which religion, be it Catholicism specifically or Christianity more generally, plays into their stories and atmospheres; and the kinds of imagery through which they attempt to instil fear in their audiences. And we take time to criticise many, many examples of the weakness of the storytelling in Believer.
The Nun II, like its 2018 predecessor, is not very good, but it is fun. The Exorcist: Believer is neither good nor fun. Happy 400th episode!
We heartily disagree on The Creator, a sci-fi film directed and co-written by Gareth Edwards, who made his name with Monsters in 2010, which he made largely by himself for half a million dollars, and quickly graduated to tentpole cinema with Godzilla and Rogue One. José had a wonderful time, finding it marvellous to look at and emotionally effective, though leaving room to criticise cinema’s continued insistence that John David Washington is a star. Mike finds it dull, brim-full of clichés, and even a little ugly at times, although Edwards’ sense of how to convey scale, already shown off in his monster movies, remains intact here.
Also featured: ChatGPT and how AI will kill us all.
The Old Oak, possibly Ken Loach’s final film, is his least challenging for some time, and that’s perhaps why it’s an easier watch than normal. A northern English town sees the arrival of several Syrian families made refugees by the Assad regime; TJ, the owner of the local pub, begins a friendship with Yara, a daughter of one family. The film draws a connection between the displaced Syrians and British former mining communities, both of which groups have had their ways of life taken from them, and sees communal dining as a means to embrace other peoples and practise solidarity. We find it easy to see its cogs turning, and simplistic in its attitudes and characters, but although The Old Oak shows its share of misery and loss, it also conveys a hopeful feeling at times. An interesting film that will generate conversation, and worth seeing.
One of the great concert films, if not the greatest, receives a 4K restoration four decades after its release, and comes to our local IMAX Digital screen. Talking Heads were huge at the time that 1984’s Stop Making Sense was released, and José loved their music, but something about the film didn’t appeal to him, and he never saw it. Though Mike is familiar with the band, he only knows a couple of Talking Heads songs and didn’t expect to ever get around to seeing the film, so what a way to experience it.
The restoration is beautiful and the huge IMAX screen shows it off spectacularly. We discuss the ability of celluloid to capture rich, textured imagery that digital acquisition formats have never matched; David Byrne’s captivating presence, handsomeness, and exuberant movement; the film’s cinematic style and what puts it above other concert films; the racial composition of the band, both the core members and additional musicians, and what it may or may not reflect about American culture of the time; and more.
We’re absolutely sold on Stop Making Sense‘s greatness, and, even forty years on from its release and the height of the band’s popularity, immediately grasp why it’s still held in such high esteem. See it at the cinema.
A taxidermist is married to a wife who constantly nags, feigns illness and tells neighbours he’s is abusing her whenever he doesn’t do what she wants. What do you think will happen? EL ESQUELETO DE LA SEÑORA MORALES/ THE SKELETON OF MRS MORALES (Rogelio A. Gonzalez. Mexico, 1960) was voted 19th in a list of the top 100 films in the history of Mexican cinema and currently on MUBI as part of the ‘Spectacle Every Day: The Many Seasons of Mexican Cinema’. Based on a short story by Arthur Machen, ‘The Islington Mystery, the film stars Arturo de Córdova, Amparo Rivelles and Elda Peralta and is written by Luis Alcoriza, who that year also wrote Buñuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL’. In the podcast we discuss all of this plus the film’s visuals, pacing, tone, whether it’s macabre rather than Surrealist, whether it’s misogynist …and more. Our favourite in the series thus far. Rogelio A. González is a director we’d never heard of. This film makes us want to see more of his work.
Another fascinating film showing on MUBI; part of the ‘Spectacle Every Day: The Many Seasons of Mexican Cinema’ program; a lurid and very entertaining melodrama; interesting to compare with its contemporary Hollywood variant but perhaps best seen as an example of Spanish speaking transnational cinema. The director Tulio Demicheli is from Argentina, Jorge Mistral is Spanish, Miroslava originates in Czechoslovakia, from a Jewish family displaced by WWII. The film itself is a Mexican/Cuban co-production, in which, as we can see from the poster, the location shooting is a major attraction: ‘The exteriors for this movie were filmed in Santiago de Cuba, the beautiful Capital of Oriente.’ It’s a movie that condenses, symbolises and allegorises class oppression under patriarchy, interspersing the drama with some melo in the guise of very suggestive musical/ dance sequences.’ All this and much more is discussed in the podcast below:
A ‘pre-Code’ film set in Havana, probably so lots of drinking could take place during Prohibition, and based on the Frankie and Johnny song about a prostitute who falls in love with a sailor and kills her pimp(see below). The roving camera in HER MAN challenges many of the pre-conceptions of cinema at the beginning of the sound period. Costs of the Havana footage were split with W. S. Van Dyke’s CUBAN LOVE SONG, with Havana street-scenes of the period remaining a major attraction. In the podcast we discuss the mobile camera, the subject-matter in relation to the Code, how music is mainly restricted to the diegetic, the opening titles, the connection of the comic gags to Garnett’s training with Hal Roach, and the performances of Phillips Holmes, Helen Twelvetrees and Marjorie Rambeau. Many thanks to the Film Foundation for once more offering an opportunity to see such a great restoration.
A novel that is also work of criticism, BRIAN feels very English to me, kitchen-sinky even – loneliness and alienation enveloped in cold and damp; and whereas the French might have abstracted the material into some heroic philosophical struggle, here the attempt at connection and meaning are almost pointillist, every precise dot adding up to a larger picture; there’s something endearingly Barbara Pym about BRIAN. The story is simple: a middle-aged man who works as a clerk for Camden Council, alone and scared of connection, finds meaning and community in attending the BFI screenings at the South Bank, becomes a film buff, a member of a group, a specialist in Japanese cinema, and a person who goes from controlling every aspect of his life so as to minimise the strange and unknown to someone who dares offer someone else a gift. A beautifully written paean to film-buffery and cinephilia.
Denzel Washington returns for the third and final instalment of the Equalizer trilogy, in which former government assassin Robert McCall devotes his time and skills to avenging for the little guy. This time, he finds himself in Mediterranean Europe, embroiled in a fight to protect a coastal town from terrorisation by the Camorra, the Mafia of southern Italy.
The Equalizer 3 shares the contemplative tone and pervasive sense of loss of its predecessors. Here, there’s a focus on physical infirmity and vulnerability, a gunshot McCall receives early on forcing a long recuperation, slow, careful approaches to walking down stairs, and the use of a cane. Action erupts quickly and violently, emphasised by director Antoine Fuqua’s camera and editing – McCall is wounded, but maintains his ruthlessness and murderous efficiency.
We compare the action and Washington to Rambo: Last Blood and its star, Sylvester Stallone, which took a similarly staccato approach to its action, clearly informed by Stallone’s age and inability to move as gracefully as he used to – this film is doing something similar, but less thuggishly, if no less violently. We question the ease with which moral decisions are made in this world, in which right and wrong are easily distinguished and the involvement of a vigilante is sold as an obvious necessity and benefit; the film’s look, which fails to show off its spectacular location; and some of its writing and contrivances, particularly concerning Dakota Fanning’s character, a CIA analyst contacted by Robert, and the Camorra. And we discuss McCall as a neurodivergent superhero.
The Equalizer 3 is a flawed film with a fair bit of dumbness to overlook, but it is easy to do so when the portrait it paints of local life and close community is so absorbing and inviting, and its star has such presence, warmth, and intelligence. It’s an easy film to recommend, bearing in mind that it’s a work of vigilante fantasy. After all, if Batman’s allowed to take the law into his own hands when the institutions around him fail, why shouldn’t Denzel be? At least he doesn’t pretend not to kill people.
José enjoys the examination of contemporary relationships in Ira Sachs’ Passages, a Paris-set romantic drama in which a marriage is disrupted when one partner begins an affair with a friend. Mike thinks that the characters’ problems aren’t real problems and that if the unfaithful partner just grew up then everything would be fine.
Two sisters, one a prostitute and one a bourgeois housewife, meet accidentally after many years. Turns out the pimp of one is trying to con the other out of her money. Marriage ends up offering no security and the bourgeois also ends up on the street, like her sister. A female perspective on sex and marriage evoking a great mistrust of the social construction of romantic love. Truly radical for its time, in the way that it so clearly positions marriage as equivalent to prostitution, and makes husbands equivalents to pimps. The third film directed by Matilde Landeta, who had to fight the director’s guild in order to be allowed to direct at all, and who would not direct another film after this one for another forty years. A film to see. Currently screening under the rubric of Spectacle Every Day: The Many Seasons of Mexican Cinema, on MUBI. With Miroslava, Ernesto Alonso and Elda Peralta.
I was eager to catch this before it left theatres and glad I made the effort (and an effort it was). The only Mexican-American superhero I know of. The film is extremely ambitious, with considerations of class, capitalism, imperialism and ethnicity completely woven into a narrative that is immersed in the US’s Hispanic cultures. References abound from Macario to Calle 13’s Atrevete. It’s very enjoyable and well done if also a bit obvious and overly sentimental about family.
THE BEAST MUST DIE (1952) is another fabulous rescue mission from Flicker Alley and The Film Noir Foundation. An adaptation of a detective novel by Cecil Day Lewis – Daniel’s father – under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, the fourth novel in the Strangeways series. The beast is a rich industrialist who beats his wife, abuses his stepchild, and is openly having an affair with his business partner’s wife. He must die because one drunken evening driving with his sister-in-law, a famous actress, he killed a child in a hit and run, and the father, a writer of mystery novels is now out to get him. The film begins as the beast, tellingly named Rattery, imbibes some poison. But who did it? Flashback structure upended by biblical quotations from Ecclesiastes, suspects gathered in a stately home, a novelist and film star as protagonist, a journal as clue, expressionist lighting and fabulous nightmare montages: a superb film. In one of the extras to the DVD, one of Viñoly Barreto’s sons speaks on how Argentina doesn’t have a national cinematheque or archive; how much of its film heritage has already been lost and even more is in danger. A crime. The novel has also been adapted by Chabrol (Que la bête meure, 1969) and there’s been a recent TV series based on it with Jared Harris as The Beast of the title.
We podcast on our second Shadi Abdel Salam film, the beautiful Film Foundation restoration of The Eloquent Peasant. The film is a parable, a moral lesson. A peasant is robbed of his cargo by a rich man. Is justice for the powerless possible or are the rich protected by too many vested interests? As relevant a question now as it was in Ancient Times. The podcast may be listened to here:
We have done two previous podcasts on Shadi Abdel Salam’s Al Momia: The Night of Counting the Stars, which the film foundation screened in conjunction with The Eloquent Peasant.
This is our eighth podcast on Arturo Ripstein films. Increased exposure has only increased our appreciation; and Deep Crimson seems the best of the films we’ve seen. Based on a true story that was then made into a film by Leonard Kastle in 1970 — The Honeymoon Killers — Deep Crimson has a very particular tone, black and funny, encased in the structures of feelings of 1940s popular romances, and edging them towards the savage and brutal as the film unfurls. It’s an extraordinary work. Why it’s so funny and so disturbing is the subject of the podcast.
BUSHMAN (David Schickele, 1971) is a real discovery, already the subject of much excitement when shown at Ritrovato in Bologna, and now made available to us through Cinema Re-Discovered this coming weekend, where it is being screened Sunday 30th of July at 18.30. Set in 1968, in the context of the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, with the Nigerian Civil War in its second year, the film centres around the experiences of Gabriel (Paul Eyam Nzie Opokam), a Nigerian graduate student also teaching at San Francisco State College, the cross-cultural experiences he’s afforded, and the different types of racism he encounters. In the accompanying podcast, we discuss the film’s beauty, its politics, how it fluidly seems to condense so many of the burning issues in Black American cinema in the following four decades, and the important shifts in register near the film’s end. A really great film, so far little known, in a superb restoration by Milestone Films, that’s bound to encourage much discussion, as indeed it did with us.
After a few months off, during which Mike has forgotten how to record podcasts – sorry about the audio early on – we’re back for Barbenheimer weekend. Never mind your Infinity Wars, this is the crossover they said would never happen, and the clash of tone between joy-of-pink Barbie and sin-of-man Oppenheimer, coincidentally released during the same weekend, has unexpectedly and charmingly reignited the public’s interest in going to the pictures. The question isn’t, “which one will you see?”, it’s, “which one will you see first?”
And we picked Barbie. Our screening was packed with young girls typically unaddressed by the biggest releases, and this film does a great job of correcting that. José describes its treatment of patriarchy as a fact as one of the most radical things he’s seen, and it’s a sign of where we are culturally that it can be, and that every joke and piece of commentary the film builds upon it is implicitly understood by an audience the film treats as intelligent.
Yes, Barbie‘s a toy advert. Yes, you’re always aware that every joke at the expense of Mattel and Barbie’s cultural footprint has the company’s stamp of approval. Yes, Mike brings up Jean Baudrillard. (He’s such a Ken at times.) But it’s also witty, ironic, self-knowing, and really good fun.
