Three Films Make A Post: Two bad people are about to meet two worse people.

Some Kind of Hate (2015): Whereas I thought that director Adam Egypt Mortimer’s follow-up film Daniel Isn’t Real (perhaps later more about that one on a later date) was a brilliant horror film about mental illness and the idea of “normality”, this, Mortimer’s first feature really doesn’t work at all. This one’s about the trauma of bullying and an undead girl taking vengeance on bullies and taking things rather too far. Apart from obvious structural problems like terrible pacing and way too much repetition, what this one suffers under most is a certain heart on its sleeve quality that suggests filmmakers a bit too close to the theme they want to talk about and therefor unable to step away from it enough to turn it into functioning art. A couple of the kills are pretty cleverly staged and imagined, at least, but it’s clear throughout that the film has much greater ambitions than being a slash fest it simply can’t fulfil.

Meek’s Cutoff (2010): Kelly Reichardt’s revisionist (post-revisionist?) Western on the other hand seems to be able to fulfil all of its ambitions easily, but then the comparison between a debut horror movie by a young guy just starting out and an experienced director like Reichardt at the top of her game is completely unfair of me, probably to both films. Anyway, Reichardt’s ambitions here are many: at once to show a naturalistic, detail-focussed tale of settlers on the Oregon trail but also to sip from the mythic well that has been built over the bones of such settlers; talking about America today by talking about its past; facing the complexities of societal misogyny and racism head-on. She’s doing all that in a film shot with some of the starker values of post 2000s US indie cinema – the very digital camerawork, the realistic sound (though leave it to Reichardt to make it a highly constructed realistic sound clearly designed), the paucity of a classical dramatic plot, the slow pacing. Which shouldn’t work terribly well at all, but in practice, the whole film has a nearly magical quality of slowly growing intensity and will eventually feel at once naturalistic and utterly not of this world.

The Ladykillers (1955): And now for something completely different, a classic British black comedy about criminals and old ladies by Alexander Mackendrick (made for Ealing Studios who had a bit of form for this sort of thing) that’s about as subversive about society, to be precise about how a classist society reads social cues and roles and the way this twists even the people who think themselves clever enough to use this for their own profit, as can be.


It’s classically stylish British comedy cinema of this type, with actors like Alec Guiness, Katie Johnson, Cecil Parker, a young Peter Sellers, or Herbert Lom treating their roles with an arch humour that never can quite disguise the actual humanity behind characters that aren’t treated terribly compassionately by the film they are in.