Three Films Make A Post: Evil has a new vessel…

Haunting of the Queen Mary (2023): From time to time, Gary Shore’s and Rebecca Harris’s tourist attraction based horror film gets up to a scene or two of effective, surrealist horror. More often then not, alas, this is one of those movies that confuses “surrealist” with “random”, so there are interminable scenes of the filmmakers just throwing random stuff at characters and audience.

Little of that stuff sticks or lands anywhere interesting, while the film drags through an interminable two hours of non-plot. Good actors like Alice Eve and Joel Fry stand around, do things with little relevance or connection, some dude who doesn’t look like him and isn’t too great of a dancer plays Fred Astaire (did I mention this thing is random?), and little of any actual consequence, impact or meaning happens.

The Red Monks aka I frati rossi (1988): Not really less confused but decidedly more concise is this Italian TV movie (“Presented by Lucio Fulci”) directed by Gianni Martucci. Its tale of sordidness and a bit of murder plays out before an early 40s background it can’t afford to actually portray (again comparable to Queen Mary) but really doesn’t seem to care about anyway. What the film does care about is to put a kind of cheapskate greatest hits of Italian Gothic horror and giallo tropes on screen, mix them up with the help of a surprisingly clever protagonist shift in the final act, and let its audience wallow nostalgically in the TV sleaze.

This will only work for viewers who are really into the beautiful ages of Italian genre cinema and its byways, but for those like us, it is a surprisingly fun little movie.

The Spiral Staircase (1975): This version of the Ethel Lina White thriller drags the somewhat venerable book into the age of the 70s British potboiler thriller. It isn’t exactly art, but Peter Collinson was pretty great at this sort of thing, rushing its protagonist (Jacqueline Bisset) through her private gauntlet of betrayal and mad men with verve and the joyful nastiness of the British thriller of that era.

From time to time, the film teeters on the brink of actual feminism, but whenever it does, Collinson appears to get distracted by needing to do something cheap and schlocky instead. I’m neither damning nor complaining here, for as much as I would have liked the whole affair to just be a little bit more clever than it ends up being, I never could – and certainly still won’t – resist a bit of good schlock. Plus, say what you will about the director, Collinson was pretty great at improbably, schlocky suspense sequences.

Short Film Friday: Hare

In short: Scream (1981)

A rather diverse group of rafters makes a stop in their wet adventures to overnight in an old ghost town. They probably should have stopped somewhere else, for an invisible force starts killing off party members, and sabotages the boats, leaving them stranded in the mountain desert ghost town with barely two brain cells to rub together between them. Two motocross dudes who’ll drive through aren’t going to be much help either, though biking types look rather fetching draped dead over a horse, it’ll turn out.

Byron Quisenberry’s early slasher is really nothing to write home about. Though the ghost town isn’t a bad backdrop, there’s only so much these filmmakers can make out of it, and in practice, “ghost town”, means “two bare rooms and a store front”.

Under different circumstances, the characters would be supposed to make up for the affair’s general lack of suspense, but they tend to the grating. And not the good kind of grating, either, but the sort of boring stiffness that’ll lull you to sleep instead of making you watch in astonishment.

From time to time, Quisenberry hits on a moody scene or two. A couple of the murders are certainly effective and a bit clever, and there’s a lovely sequence where house favourite Woody Strode, dressed in black, rides into town to provide pipe smoke and exposition about what’s going on in town in a dramatically misplaced but pretty fun scene. Not that there’s any reason for the characters or us to know, mind you, it really has no bearing on the plot at all, but then, if you could get Woody Strode for a scene, you’d probably find something for him to do.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

A pretty fantastic intro sequence introduces us to a CGI young Indy (Harrison Ford) doing his thing in 1944, Basil Shaw, a British archaeologist friend of Indy’s (house favourite Toby Jones), a Nazi scientist (Mads Mikkelsen), and the titular dial, or rather, one half of the dial. After an appropriate number of Nazis have been punched (poor Thomas Kretschmann), our hero waltzing from one bit of trouble to the next, we pop into the film’s main timeline in July/August 1969.

Indiana Jones is now a grumpy old man on the day of his retirement from a boring teaching job. Marion (Karen Allen) has left him in the course of grieving for their son (Shia LaBeouf is not appearing in this movie, thankfully, so his character can be more useful in death than he ever was in his fictional life) who died in Vietnam. The rest of his life really doesn’t look too sunny for our hero.

Then appears Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the daughter of the long deceased Shaw and Indy’s goddaughter. Helena tries to talk Indy into one last jaunt with the hat and the whip to help her find the second half of the Dial. Well, actually, it turns out she’s trying to steal the first half of the Dial from our hero to sell it - on the black market, no less. Also on the trail of both halves of the Dial as well as Helena is our old Nazi scientist acquaintance, now going by the name of Dr Schmidt. After being the architect of the US space program, he’s now planning on conquering time – for Nazidom.

What follows is the somewhat expected race around the world, during which Helena and Indy slowly grow closer to one another, Helena gets back into contact with that moral core she must have read so much about, and Indy reacquaints himself with his very special kind of luck. A good time is had by all, well except Nazis and innocent bystanders, but the former really asked for it, and are usually directly responsible for the demise of the latter.

I’m not sure which James Mangold Indiana Jones movie a lot of other people seem to have seen, but the one I watched turned out to be rather wonderful. Mangold and the horde of writers credited really seem to get the proper tone and style for the series again (ironically unlike the people involved in the fourth Indy movie, who must have forgotten when they made that one), so action sequences may be big and partially digital, but are keeping well in the spirit of the serials and old pulp adventure, where the heroes mostly win out by sheer courage and luck than the sort of competence later decades started insisting on heroes showing. Which actually makes a quite a contrast to the way superheroes not called the (Legendary) Starlord or Ant-Man typically operate, and really makes it difficult to confuse this style of action adventure with a superhero movie (unlike you’re a mainstream critic, therefore quite dense or just too mid-brow to care). Though, to be honest, one late, rather, ahem, implausible plot development in third act is certainly only thinkable because superhero movies exist. It’s also one perfectly fitting to a film that is as focussed on legacies and shadows of the past as this one is, so I’m not going to complain, particularly when it gifts us with the wonderful villain line of “Yesterday belongs to us, Doctor Jones!”.

In between a series of rather wonderful set pieces in just the right spirit of adventure and derring-do, and the kind of quietly confident and elegant filmmaking Mangold gets up to in this sort of stylistically very mainstream production, there are also a series of small and big scenes not just meant to propel our heroes (such as they are) from one place to the next, but also to comment on and mirror some of the elements of the older movies in the series. Waller-Bridge’s may at first look like a more modern by simply being more cynical version of Indy, but later developments suggest she’s just more honest about the worst parts of her character to herself than Indy is, and – in the sort of irony this particular film genuinely seems to enjoy – also less honest about the best parts of it, which makes for a nice reversal. Indy, for his part, is allowed to express all the frustrations and horrors of growing old and lonely, but, the film argues, that’s because he’s going out of his way to push away the people he means a lot to, and underplaying some of what makes him more than a graverobber to himself as much as Helena underplays her own better nature.

Which sets up one of the most traditional happy endings I’ve seen in quite some time. For once, the old hero is actually allowed to retire to the peaceful, happy life he deserves instead of dying heroically so that the younger generation must go on without him. to probably repeat that cycle again. That’s fitting to the genre Indy is working in as well, of course, because serials were eventually resolved through happy ends, instead of the old guard dying with their dreams burning down around them (hi, Star Wars).

I, for one, like to see a bit of hope in my movies from time to time.

In short: Sympathy for the Devil (2023)

A man we’ll only ever really know as The Driver (Joel Kinnaman) is just on his way to the hospital where his wife is in heavy labour. He’s rather nervous, for a first birth some years ago did go sadly. Unexpectedly, the Driver is carjacked by a guy we’ll just call The Passenger (Nicolas Cage). The Passenger is a bit of a ranting, raving maniac, supposedly only threatening the Driver with death and violence to get a ride from him, but it quickly becomes clear that he hasn’t chosen his victim randomly. The Passenger seems to test and prod the Driver, searching for certain reactions whose nature will become clear during the course of the movie.

Eventually, during a climactic scene in a diner, all else will become clear as well.

How much you’ll like, or even just tolerate, Yuval Adler’s Sympathy for the Devil will very much depend on your love or tolerance for Nicolas Cage in his all-out mode, when neck muscles tense, eyes bug, and expressions become barely human contortions, while dialogue spews and spits forth as by a man possessed by something nasty. Me, I could watch doing Cage this sort of thing for hours. Over the years, Cage’s very particular sense for being larger than life has grown to mean a lot to me, and he’s delivering that in spades here.

He’s not doing it pointlessly or without purpose, though, and one of Sympathy’s specific joys for me is to watch his interplay with Kinnaman’s demonstrative normalcy, what it suggests about the characters and what it actually means once the plot has run its course. I really can’t overstate how important Kinnaman’s performance here is, his ability to not get drowned out by what Cage does, despite having to use an acting approach that’s the exact opposite for the film to make sense.

Adler’s direction is also very strong indeed, not just because I’m a sucker for prettily shot neon night ride movies (though I am), but because he actually copes with Cage’s performance and makes use of it for the film, emphasising or decreasing the loudness of Cage in the appropriate moments. Not an easy task, I would assume. He’s also rather great at creating a classic suspense scene. when needed. The diner climax is as good as this sort of thing gets, edited to a perfect rhythm and breathless in its sense of threat, violence, and its feel of transgression.

So, for anyone who doesn’t actively hate Cage (and really, are you sure you’re at the right place here?), this might turn out to be a fantastic thriller.

Music Monday: With the Middle Edition

Black Invitation (1969)

Original title: 黑帖

China, the outskirts of the Martial World, where a gang of mediocre bullies is a major threat. After four years of wandering, major servant’s son Nian Zhu (Pai Ying) returns to the community he left for reasons of broken hearts and personal dignity. He doesn’t appear to come back with anything more than the shirt he left in on his back and a somewhat ratty looking umbrella. In truth, Nian Zhu has learned rather awesome kung fu, but has taken his master’s lessons about not using violence to heart so deeply, he’ll go out of his way to hide his abilities. That’ll cost a lot of people, obviously.

But really, how much kung fu does a man need to reconnect with his father (Kao Ming) and the lady love (Han Hsiang-Chin) who waited for him – and who is the adoptive daughter of his father’s patrician boss?

Turns out quite a bit of kung fu, for our protagonist’s old home is under threat from a group of bandits living and working in the nearby hills. Said bandits have been terrorizing the local communities for some time now. Their modus operandi is to send out the titular “black invitations” with their money and rich people’s daughters and mistresses wish list, and come down hard on anyone resisting. Apart from the kind of kung fu that’d get them kicked off the movie early in many another kung fu film, the bad guys also utilize the least subtle spy available, traitorous, not the least bit suspicious Wan Ren-Mei (Wan Chung-Shan).

Somehow, it will take a whole movie to take these guys down, with a couple of kidnappings and the usual scenes of the non-violent hero getting tortured before that blissful state of ass-kicking can be achieved.

In some regards, Chou Hsu-Chiang’s Taiwanese martial arts movie Black Invitation feels as if it were a predecessor to the thoughtful mid-period style of the great King Hu. It is at least much more concerned with philosophical concerns and the personal drama of Nian Zhu’s past and relationships than with pulling the audience from one fight to the next. In the early stages of the film, this works rather well, partially because Pai Ying very capably embodies the emotional weight of a world-weary homecoming through every expression and movement. There’s an effective sense of melancholia running through the early parts of the film, of lives not lived to their best, and certainly not their fullest, of youthful idealism getting ground down by a world that simply doesn’t care.

The more the film needs to integrate its more traditional wuxia plot, the less interesting it becomes. Not because there’s anything wrong with integrating the emotional-philosophical with the martial arts tropes, but because the film’s martial arts elements never really convince. The villains are less than impressive, so much so they never feel like the threat everybody around treats them as.

Worse, the martial arts scenes have a couple or three fun ideas, but their execution is much below what you can expect from a Taiwanese film of this era. It is difficult to say if the choreography (apparently by Pai Ying himself) is the problem, for Chou cuts away from all moments of impact and stages every single action scene in a way that hides forms, postures, and movement, as if this were an early 80s low budget martial arts movie made in the US.

This is particularly frustrating because the first one and a half acts are fine indeed, the melodrama perhaps a little stiff but the film’s approach to its protagonist’s plight genuinely moving; the rest of Black Invitation however, leaves much to be desired.

In short: Thief (1971)

Neal Wilkinson (Richard Crenna) is a professional burglar. Two convictions and prison sentences behind him, the next time he’s caught he’d be up for a mandatory ten year sentence (because US laws make no sense). Neal also has a son somewhere he genuinely wants to regain custody of, and a new, increasingly serious girlfriend in Jean (Angie Dickinson), who knows nothing of his past. So he has every reason to keep on the straight and narrow; he’s even serious enough to have hired a lawyer (Cameron Mitchell) to help him there.

But right now, Neal really isn’t quite as straight as he pretends to be. He’s still clearly enhancing his income through opportunistic acts of thievery, and he’s lying through his nose to his probation officer (Michael Lerner). To make matters even more dicey, the thief also has a gambling problem, and he’s stupid enough to pay his gambling debts to civilians with cheques he knows will bounce and end his parole. To keep that particular wolf from the door, Neal is all too willing to go on a rather more risky crime spree than is his usual style.

As directed by TV movie specialist William A. Graham, this crime drama is an unassuming little film. Its protagonist’s troubles are life-shattering for him but not terribly dramatic in form or execution.

This will make Thief a bore to some, but I’d argue its small scale and its air of the quotidian are the film’s strengths. While this always stays a – well, if unspectacularly, directed – TV movie and can’t go as far in certain directions as contemporary theatrical films would have, there’s a groundedness and a sense of somewhat sad, small-scale reality to the film that works very well for it. Not every genre film needs to be big and spectacular.

Thief also recommends itself through a very 70s style downer ending with a side dish of dramatic irony. One could find it unpleasantly moralizing – thieves weren’t allowed to prosper by the era’s TV rules, after all, but Graham throws his ending at the audience so quickly and off-handedly, it feels organic and surprisingly true to the rest of the film.

Short Film Friday: The Bells

In short: Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

This time around, aging super spy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team of little buddies (Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames) who are actually allowed to do something in this outing are fighting two enemies: first, a CIA director (Alex Baldwin) who shuts down the IMF with the reasoning that they cause more harm than they prevent. Which, given the fact that the villains in three of the other four Mission Impossible movies were rogue or traitorous IMF agents, has the ring of truth to it.

Enemy number two is a sort of anti-IMF made up of a world-wide network of disgruntled spies disgusted with keeping up the status quo following the leadership of the reptilian Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). As all Mission Impossible villains, Lane is a bit obsessed with Ethan, of course.

Seemingly playing both sides – like a proper spy – is the mysterious Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson).

In an ideal world, this fifth Mission Impossible movie would of course hinge on the fact that its villains are absolutely right – the IMF is a bunch of idiots causing problems it then solves with grand gestures and considerable loss of life, and the status quo it is bound to uphold and its methods to do this are morally unsupportable. This being a modern blockbuster and Tom Cruise vehicle instead, Baldwin’s character is a well-meaning fool, and Lane is a movie villain.

This isn’t something I actually condemn Christopher McQuarrie’s film for, but it is something so remarkably obvious, I couldn’t help but comment on it. Coming to the film the filmmakers actually made, this is a marked improvement on the horrors of the fourth Mission Impossible, featuring interesting villains actually allowed and able to make an impression on the audience – Harris is just great – a twisty plot line that might not hold up to too much logical scrutiny but is very fun when you’re just willing to go with it, and some genuinely great action and suspense set pieces. The opera sequence alone would be worth the price of admission as a piece of high drama suspense filmmaking, but the rest of the set pieces is just as fun, well directed and exciting as it.

Coming to our the “state of the Cruise” segment, I can gladly report that the close-up hogging isn’t painfully egregious anymore, and that the movie actually has quite a few scenes for other actors to shine in during which Cruise doesn’t even make an appearance. A personal appearance, I should say, for everyone here has a curious habit of throwing in a sentence or three about how awesome/sexy/breathtakingly dangerous Ethan Hunt is, even if that’s not a pertinent question at all right then. Vanity’s an interesting thing.

Witness in the City (1959)

Original title: Un témoin dans la ville

Pierre Verdier (Jacques Berthier) throws his lover Jeanne (Françoise Brion) out of a train. Everybody in the justice system is pretty clear that he murdered her, but there’s simply no proof to actually convict him, so he walks. Verdier isn’t really scot free, though, for when he triumphantly at his home, Jeanne’s husband Ancelin (Lino Ventura) awaits, and Ancelin has plans to shorten Verdier’s life considerably.

Ancelin isn’t just going to murder Verdier, though, he’s also hellbent on getting away with it in one of those perfect murder constructions that never work out in the end. He does manage to kill Verdier as he has planned, at least, but when a cab driver sees him coming out of the house, and Ancelin realizes this, there are greater lengths he needs to go to if he wants to stay free. And if that means committing another murder or two, what of it?

There’s rather a lot to like about this noirish thriller by Édouard Molinaro with a script by Boileau and Narcejac (of Les Diaboliques fame, among many others) and diverse hands. The first impression is one of a film of considerable economy: Jeanne dies in the first scene, Verdier gets off in the next, and is dead before twenty minutes are through. There’s really no fat on the film’s first act whatsoever yet it never feels as if were leaving out anything of actual import or necessity to its plot.

The rest of the film never stays quite this tight, but it still introduces characters and situations with just the right amount of detail, never staying anywhere or with anyone for longer than it needs to, building tension through a relentless forward momentum, Which is a particularly wonderful effect when one keeps in mind that there’s not actually all that much happening here plot-wise beyond an increasingly panicked Ancelin trying to correct mistakes and only making his problem larger again and again. The portrayal of this is just so tight and focussed a viewer can’t help but be drawn in.

The film also recommends itself by taking place in wonderfully shot often empty city streets at night, streets that are only populated by night people – all kinds of workers, be it in sex or transportation, mostly. This lends Witness an effective sense of place, a certain desolation, but one that is, in the end, also broken and humanized by the comradery of the night people once they realize a threat is there. The climax plays out as a minor homage to Lang’s M, though it never reaches, never aims for, really, that film’s particular kind of darkness. France in the late 50s isn’t, after all, the Weimar Republic shortly before the end.

Another fascinating element is the treatment of Ancelin, its actual protagonist, how it slowly shifts the audience’s sympathies away from him once we realize how far he is willing to go to get off as free as Verdier thought he did. A man killing the murderer of his wife, we can understand, perhaps even sympathize with, but Ancelin’s ruthless willingness when it comes to destroying whoever gets in his way is quite another thing; which may be a point the film is attempting to make towards the problems with vigilantism. Ventura’s portrayal of a man whose mask of calm and collectedness is increasingly slipping is brilliant in any case.

In short: Coogan’s Bluff (1968)

Happy to get rid of him for a couple of days, his boss sends Arizona Deputy Sheriff Coogan (Clint Eastwood) off to that strange and peculiar city known as New York, to transport an escaped fugitive the New Yorker’s somehow managed to catch back to Arizona.

Alas, things become difficult for Coogan from the start. Not only do the primitive city people he is confronted with ignore the fine difference between Arizona and Texas – certainly Coogan’s cowboy hat and boots don’t help there – they also take their dear time with actually putting the escapee into Coogan’s hand. It’s some liberal nonsense about illness at work. Yes, it is unfortunately that kind of movie.

Of course, once Coogan has acquired his man, he finds himself bashed over the head by some of the dirty hippie associates of the guy, and loses his gun to them. His masculinity stays intact, though, I’ll have you know. So our protagonist makes his way through New York looking for his man, while sneering at everyone disapprovingly and trying to fuck every woman he meets.

This Don Siegel joint shows Siegel and Eastwood at their most unpleasant: reactionary – the hippie disco scene must be seen to be believed –, quietly racist, and misogynist. There is a line of this sort of thing running through both men’s bodies of work, of course, but usually, there’s some human insight, some interest in people or violence or how people and violence go together and what that does to them, or even just an exciting plot to either make up for these failings or put them into a more human perspective, often even break them.

Here, there’s nothing of the sort. Coogan’s Bluff has no plot to speak of and consists exclusively of its protagonist wandering around New York sneering at people and things, from time to time exploding into violence on those weaker than him, and pressuring women into sex. Worst, the film never seems to think him anything but a hero, instead of the not terribly competent asshole he is.

But then, Coogan’s an Asshole would not make for the greatest movie title.

Music Monday: Sand Sculpture Tombstone Edition

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Warning: contains dolphin-related spoilers!

This write-up is based on the clearly superior Japanese cut of the movie. Why is it superior? Because it features more of Takeshi Kitano and Dolph Lundgren and its third act vaguely makes sense, if you squint.

The close cyberpunk future of 1995+whatever. Okay, it’s 2021, but really and of course, it’s 1995’s 2021. Johnny (Keanu Reeves) works as a data courier, which is to say, he has replaced the part of his long term memory used for his childhood memories with sensational 80GB of data so he can literally carry data around in his head. He’s even upgrading to humungous 160GB right at the start of the movie, so take that, SanDisk!

Alas, the super secret and extra dangerous data his middle-man Ralfi (Udo Kier) has lined up for him that is supposed to pay for getting Johnny's childhood memories back, is much larger than that, which leads to dangerous side effects the longer the data is in Johnny’s head. In two days or so, his head will – figuratively or actually, we don’t know – explode.

That’s not even the biggest of Johnny’s problems. The data is hardly in his head when a team of Yakuza doing the dirty work for an evil pharma corporation ambush him and his clients. Johnny barely manages to escape – he’s luckier there than his clients are – but only has one third of the codes needed to encrypt the data – the only way to get it out of his head.

Hunted by the Yakuza, – we regularly pop in with their boss Takahashi (Takeshi Kitano) who is going through the early stages of grief for the loss of his child – and the corp, and betrayed by Ralfi, our hero’s quest for getting rid of the data is supported by street samurai/bodyguard Jane (Dina Meyer) and the anti-corporate resistance whose leader isn’t actually Ice-T like we might at first think but a damn dolphin. Also involved are a crazy, evil, cybernetic street preacher (Dolph Lundgren dressed up as post-apocalyptic Moses), and barely coherent, yet awesome, monologues during which Johnny wrestles with his conscience as well as the importance of room service.

Some movies don’t age gracefully; others, like Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic get better – well, immensely more entertaining – once they’ve got a couple of decades behind them. Today, it is easy to enjoy this as an intensely 90s movie, whereas during the 90s, it was exactly its extreme 90s-ness that made it practically unwatchable.

Today, when we have reached a state of practical corporate ownership (he said, using a Google site to post this on) that just doesn’t look as sexy and absurd as the one portrayed in the movie, the film’s bad future seems incredibly attractive. It is, after all full of hot people dressed up like extras from an Italian post-apocalyptic movie, contains a cyberspace that looks like a digital psychedelic light show instead of being the place where crazy people shout at each other for all eternity, and has 160GB of RAM in its head (and very little else).

I respect the hell out of Johnny Mnemonic as a bizarre high-ish budget cyberpunk as pulp movie as well: the brazen absurdity of its awesome, nonsensical production design, the straight-up nuttiness and glorious dumbness of its action set pieces, William Gibson’s deep if you’ve imbibed enough, otherwise nonsensical  philosophical monologues poor Reeves has to get through, the willingness to go with silly, “cool” ideas instead of aiming for boring depth – it’s all good in a “how did they manage to get a budget for this” way, and great as popular cinema no populace in its right mind actually watches gets.

To really draw in an audience of me, the film features a wish list of cult movie favourites in roles large and small: Keanu is at that point in his career when he has learned enough basic acting skills to get through scenes without falling over his own feet and shows the awesome ability to keep a straight face even when he shares a scene with Moses Lundgren and a dolphin, or when Henry Rollins rants into his face. He’s also young enough to be agile and fast in action sequences without too much help from the editing room. I very much suspect his back hurts less, as well. Then we get Kitano (who has something of a plausible character arc in the Japanese cut) being Kitano, Kier as ready for anything as he ever was, Dolph looking as if he really enjoys himself, Ice-T doing his usual shtick for non-cop roles, Meyer aiming for intense and dangerous but often only hitting cute, Barbara Sukowa as an AI (don’t ask)… It’s pretty fantastic.

In other words, this one really is in dire need of a reassessment from the larger cult movie audience, because it is a wonderfully entertaining piece of bizarro nonsense that’s also a time capsule of an in hindsight simpler, quieter, and certainly more hopeful even in its dystopias time.

In short: Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)

After an IMF team breaks perfect super spy god person Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) out of a Russian prison – we’ll only learn why he’s in there much later, and it’s not worth the wait – our hero and his minions are tasked to…Oh, why bother, to get another doodad that does stuff from yet another world-destroying terrorist without any actual agenda (this time it’s Michael Nyqvist). Eventually, the protagonists are framed for blowing up parts of the Kremlin and the IMF shut down. The Evil Guy does of course also obsess about Hunt like every other MI antagonist, so it’s the usual duel between big egos, one of whom just happens to belong to a producer.

If all of this sounds a bit tired and tiresome, that’s because Ghost Protocol actually is how critics who loathe blockbuster cinema on moral principle pretend all of them are. Lacking any kind of creative personality – animation director turned live action director Brad Bird might as well be fence post turned director Woody T. Keepout –, any will to put some effort into a script, and featuring a cast so underused, they, too, could be replaced by random objects. Things happen on screen, but they’re just random nonsense meant to set up action set pieces that are as silly as those in a late period Fast & Furious movie, but completely lack the sense of big dumb fun which makes that other series so enjoyable. Plot twists sure happen, but they’re awful, make little sense, and simply do nothing.

Cruise is still his biggest fan, but that’s because he clearly hasn’t suffered through these particular two hours.

Short Film Friday: A Short Story (2022)

In short: I, the Jury (1982)

Sleazy private dick – I choose the latter word for a reason – Mike Hammer (Armand Assante) has to take a break from sleeping with the wives of clients he’s supposed to spy on because their husbands fear they’re cheating on them, and his bizarre full-body relationship with his secretary Velda (Laurene Landon). An old Vietnam buddy of his is murdered, and nobody, not even his favourite cop Detective Chambers (Paul Sorvino) seems too bothered with doing anything about it.

Hammer’s investigation soon points him towards the sex clinic of Dr Charlotte Bennett (Barbara Carrera), and the product (Judson Scott) of a government conspiracy meant to build mind-controlled killers. Though I’m not quite sure why you wouldn’t just grab an actual serial killer if you want a serial killer, instead of laboriously creating a facsimile of one. In any case, once Hammer understands who his enemies are, he’s going to murder the heck out of them.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the hard-boiled novels of raving right-wing fantasist Mickey Spillane and his murderous, misogynist prick of a hero Mike Hammer, so don’t ask me how this measures up as an adaptation. It does take considerable liberties with the plot of the novel it is based on, but then, you wouldn’t expect a Larry Cohen script to go for evil commies and Italians and whoever else Spillane didn’t like that week.

Initially, Cohen was apparently meant to direct this as well, but was replaced by bland TV hand Richard T. Heffron. That poor man then had to make sense of a Cohen script the guy wrote for himself to direct, clearly leaving much room for improvisation nobody involved in the Heffron version really knew what to do with.

This leads to a movie with a particularly weird tone: sleazy and grimy, but in a way completely divorced from any sense of reality. It’s not an ironic approach to being exploitative so much as a strange fever dream idea of what exploitation might be, with some of the more absurd bits of sex and violence you’ll see in a movie featuring actual actors. Often, it is difficult to parse if certain elements of the film are meant to be terrible jokes or supposed to be taken seriously, which increases the highly peculiar vibe of the whole affair.

Most of the actors seem perfectly baffled as well. But then, what would you think about Hammer’s fish tank obsession in Assante’s position that sees him talking with a client while holding a dead fish in one hand in the very first scene? The big sex clinic orgy that would put off even the most easily aroused? Whatever is supposed to go on in the climax? Only Barbara Carrera seems unruffled, but then, she’s just doing her usual femme fatale bit; if the femme fatale – and the sex scenes – are a bit weirder than usual clearly doesn’t matter to her. Whereas this viewer rather enjoyed stumbling from one improbable scene to the next.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has retired from the field agent life, and now teaches the next generation of IMF superspies. He does this for love, for between the last film and now, he has not just apparently dropped a certain thief, never to be mentioned by the movie, but is also now very happily engaged to nurse Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who does know nothing of espionage or his true job.

Because that’s always the way, Ethan is drawn back into field service for a rescue operation of one Lindsey Farris (Keri Russell), his former favourite spy pupil who has gotten herself into a spot of bother. Somehow some quiet observations has resulted in her getting kidnapped by the insane international arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Ethan and his team – this time around Ving Rhames and Maggie Q with a bit of hometown help from Simon Pegg – manage to extract Lindsey, but she dies from an explosive capsule implanted in her head. Ethan’s out for revenge now, and while he’s at it, he might as well also grab a dangerous biological agent in Davian’s possession.

Davian’s not a man to be thwarted or threatened, however, and what’s a better move to make than threaten a superspy’s loved one? Further complications, including yet another traitor in the IMF, do of course ensue.

In Cruise years, we have now reached the point where he had acquired most of the needed acting tools for the kind of star he probably always wanted to be, and has allowed directors to tune down the frequency of shots of him grinning smugly for no good reason. Because we haven’t yet reached the 2010s, trying to come over like more of a human being – if an utterly perfect one who is good at everything, inhumanely hot, and so on, and so forth – is apparently of interest, too. Doing this by giving him a fiancée in one of those jobs Hollywood people would probably describe as “grounded” and “human”, and then threatening her is probably the least original way to go about that, apart from teaming him up with a monkey or a little child, but damn me if J.J. Abrams doesn’t do this efficiently as well as effectively. In part, the trick works as well as it does because Michelle Monaghan is really, really, good at projecting humanity back at unlikable male stars that isn’t actually coming from them, convincing us that something must actually be perfectly alright and decent with those guys. It’s a curious ability, but it works.

At least, this is the only one of the Mission Impossible movies that actually manages to make me root for Ethan instead of just watching the crazy plot contortions and absurd plans, explosions and shoot-outs he’s getting into while raising eyebrows at his boring perfection. So, while humanization by threatened significant other may be a primitive move, it does at least work.

Also livelier than in the movies before is the villain. On paper, Seymour Hoffman doesn’t actually have that much more to do than his predecessors, yet his precise performance and the greater pull of the plot sell him not just as an actual threat but also as a great counterpoint to Hunt, again making a protagonist who isn’t generally likeable more so by contrast.

The action set pieces make as little sense as we’ve grown used to from the series, but make up for that by a general sense of awesomeness and Abrams’s typical ability to shoot loud and obnoxiously conceived scenes as if they were sensible and natural. That he’s actually good with the spy bits of the superspy formula is another point in Mission Impossible III’s favour, leaving this a fine way to while away a few others.

In short: Babylon (2022)

One of the very first shots in Damien Chazelle’s is of an elephant endlessly projectile crapping into (and over, and around, and probably under) the camera, so you really can’t blame the movie for not being honest about itself, and not just about its preoccupation with bodily fluids.

Supposedly, this follows the travails of three characters – played by Diego Calva, Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt – through the decadent early years of Hollywood and portrays the way anarchy turned into just another business In theory it also says some stuff about the perniciousness of institutional racism. In practice, this is either filmic diarrhoea or a director incessantly masturbating into your eyes.

I am generally perfectly fine with showy direction, and have rather a lot of favourite directors who follow the rule of style as substance, but there’s a difference between focussing on style and showing off so much, a film’s sheer excess becomes so huge, it actually starts to feel lifeless through it, something Chazelle achieves here in a series of never-ending, over-edited, over-scored, over-planned, and over-staged sequences. There’s really not a single second of this damn thing that leaves room for any idea or performance to breathe. It’s all just shouting, blaring, stupid edits, and the least interesting idea of decadence and excess spat into endless, never-ending, really never, never ending scenes of a length you usually only find in backyard horror movies. Makers of those of course have the excuse of not having directed a pretty great Academy Award winning musical, among other things. This thing just makes Michael Bay look restrained.

Given its three hour (though it rather feels like three days) length, it’s pretty astonishing how little Babylon actually has to say about its characters or early Hollywood. All of its self-referentiality never rises about the quality of mediocre in-jokes, so much so that I now find some of my criticism towards Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood rather crude, for Tarantino’s film has life and interest in its characters as human beings, and fulfils ambitions beyond shouting in your face for three hours.

Babylon has Brad Pitt sleepwalking, Calva making googly eyes at Robbie, and Robbie doing Harley Quinn with a different haircut while around them, an intensely loud amount of nothing screeches. At least, someone has finally found the perfect dictionary example for “overdirected”.

Music Monday: Returner Edition

In short: Searching for Sugar Man (2012)

At the beginning of the 70s, Sixto Rodriguez made two good to great folk rock albums, only to disappear from the public stage (well, there was a late 70s/early 80s comeback in Australia, but the film at hand doesn’t mention it and probably genuinely doesn’t know about that part of the story). Unbeknownst to anyone in the US – certainly the artist – Rodriguez’ output became something of a key cultural artefact for the white anti-Apartheid counterculture in South Africa, with some of his songs being veritable black market hits.

Following the end of Apartheid – which also brought with it official versions of the records Rodriguez apparently saw as little money off as from the bootlegs because the record industry sucks – and a lot of pretty unbelievable rumours about Rodriguez’ death – “best” of them the one about him committing suicide on stage in front of an audience unappreciative of his music – some of the man’s South African fans start to dig into the case of their lost idol. Eventually, they not just find out where he lived – Detroit, which comes as little surprise given the Motown connection of his records – but also that he’s actually still alive (or was, as Rodriguez unfortunately died just this August). Which leads to a triumphant tour in South Africa.

There’s something special about Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man that doesn’t lie in its effectively used but still pretty standard music documentary format. Probably, this special quality has a lot to do with how it resonates with the Romantic in many a music lover, the way it portrays how music taken out of its original context can take on different, important, (personal) world-changing qualities in a different part of the world. There’s something at once hopeful and strange about this, art resonating in different ways as planned that are still sympathetic to its source.

It is doubly nice that this is one of the handful of films and stories about rediscovering a lost musician that end happily, even quietly triumphantly, with the artist not just being alive but also happy, not having recorded further music but having had what feels like a full and interesting life, and was still living it when this was shot.

Three Films Make A Post: Those which change. Those which never change. And those that don't want to change.

Shin Kamen Raider (2023): Hideaki Anno’s version of good old Kamen Raider is the most bonkers entry into what we’ll probably just call the Shin Trilogy around here (even though New Trilogy isn’t exactly specific or sexy). It condenses a whole fifty episode plus season of the first Kamen Rider series into an updated thing of crazy beauty, taking place in a world populated with weirdoes only able to speak in a very Japanese version of High Pop Philosophizing, transforming weirdly.

The production design manages to evoke the cheapness of the early Kamen Rider without falling into the trap of pure nostalgia, and Anno’s direction pays homage, deconstructs and wallows in the hallmarks of early tokusatsu TV, all the while condensing what Anno clearly loves about the genre into a two hour package. It’s absolutely brilliant in its earnest weirdness, but also so specific to early Kamen Rider mirrored in the now I’m hard pressed to imagine an audience outside of core nerds and otaku. Which isn’t a bad thing for me, of course.

Older Gods (2023): Tubi originals don’t exactly have a high betting average, but David A. Roberts’ cosmic horror movie about a man’s encounter with the cult that killed his friend is rather an exception to the rule. It’s certainly a very indie and very cheap movie, but also one that uses that as an opening to do things - in tone, rhythm and style - nobody’d throw a couple million dollars at you to put into a film. The whole affair feels personal and individual, at times perhaps a bit too earnest in tone for contemporary tastes (not for mine, mind you), features some genuinely creepy cosmicist imagery and does its best to add some idea of redemption and freedom to a philosophical outlook on horror that's generally not made for these feelings.

I’m not quite sure Older Gods is completely successful at convincing me of its redemptive moments, but I certainly found myself respecting it rather a lot for trying.

Sky Pirates aka Dakota Harris (1986): Trying certainly isn’t something Colin Eggleston’s dire Indiana Jones rip-off with John Hargreaves as its Indy stand-in does. In fact, I have seldom seen a film that seems quite so disinterested in even trying to make a basically Italian rip-off league of “borrowings” from other movies interesting or fun in any way, shape or form. A film with this wild a plot of adventure, adventure fantasy and pulp tropes and ideas really couldn’t or shouldn’t be what Sky Pirates manages quite effortlessly to be: boring as heck.

Short Film Friday: The Repeater

In short: Sweeney 2 (1978)

Flying Squad coppers Regan (John Thaw) and Carter (Dennis Waterman) have to cope with a number of cases that are as brutal as they are peculiar. A series of particularly murderous bank robberies committed by well-armed men rocks London. There’s something more peculiar to the deeds than just their often needless brutality: for some reason, the gangsters like to leave their getaway drivers – and only them - for dead, and only ever take sums of about sixty thousand pounds with them, even when there’s more money to grab.

Eventually, clues will lead our policemen out of their natural habitat to the continent. But don’t worry, this is not a movie about evil criminal foreigners.

For my tastes, Sweeney 2, the second and final movie spin-off of the the popular and somewhat important ITV police show, this time directed by Tom Clegg, is a marked improvement over the already highly entertaining first one. The film keeps to the grubby and grainy 70s aesthetics of the first one, but has a rather more engaging plot, as well as rather more interesting side characters. Regan and Carter encounter all kinds of peculiar customers during their investigation, like a semi-nude model with a Nazi fetish – or a fetish for Nazis? – and other semi-probable weirdoes, and have rather more interesting times with them than in the first movie as well.

While the violence stays as pleasantly brutal and effective as in the first one, this sequel seems rather more interested in the effects this violence has on its protagonists, so there are scenes of hardened coppers Regan and Carter spattered with blood, going into shock. Which not only makes enjoying the violence on display rather more precarious for a viewer, but also makes the macho types we are supposed to root for more human and sympathetic.

Also rather interesting is how much the film portrays dramatic versions of working class cultures: the cops and the robbers are both very visibly from the same kinds of social stratum with comparable social mores and energies – at least up to a point, for these policeman certainly wouldn’t go around complaining about England having run its course (which is code for exactly what you think it is code for), emigrate, and then only ever return home for a bit of murder and mayhem, for there’s being working class and then there’s being a murderous shit, a fine point this film understands in all of its subtlety.

Meg 2: The Trench (2023)

Some years after the first Meg. Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), still a total badass (because he’s played by Jason Statham), is now working for Jiuming Zhang (Jing Wu, also a total badass, but more on that in a second), the brother of the last film’s tragic (cough) shark victims. Apart from being a badass underwater explorer, Jonas is also a bit of an eco warrior now and takes good care of his daughter Meiying (Sophia Cai). Because this is a very Chinese co-produced movie, Jiuming is just as great at everything he does as Jonas, so if a Gary Stu double team isn’t part of your movie dreams, you’d probably best hide now.

Their combined perfection will come in handy when an exploration of the trench where the megalodons come from goes badly awry, and the team has to fight their way back to the surface not just through megalodons but also a couple of other critters. And yes, of course, Meiying smuggled herself on the expedition, do you even need to ask? Also involved are a traitor in our heroes’ midst, an evil American corporation of evil (in contrast to the angelic Chinese one the good guys are working for, of course) who hires the least competent mercenaries on the market – probably to save a buck – and eventually a place known as Fun Island. Which is more fun with added monsters.

Given that even the directors of Marvel blockbusters are allowed to put some stylistic marks on their films, you’d think that Meg 2 would leave some space for the things its director Ben Wheatley is known for and good at. No such luck here, alas – there’s really not a single shot in the movie that would suggest Wheatley, or really anyone with a personality behind the camera.

If one can cope with that, and treats The Meg 2 as the cartoonish shark action movie with way too much unfunny humour it is meant to be, there is a lot of fun to be had here. While the script is a mix of painfully unsubtle Chinese propagandist subtext, more clichés than you can throw a landshark at, plotting that’s as far from being dramatically effective as can be, and further dragged down into absurdity by having to include not just the usual one but two specimen of men who are always right and can do anything, it is difficult to fault a film that’s so hell-bent on shoving in whatever its writers think is fun. So there’s the expected megalodons, but also a horde of other critters, underwater action, a few second of claustrophobia, thriller-type traitors, a third act that just jumps to a completely different place as well as into a different shark movie sub-genre – whatever shark movie you’d like to watch, there are couple of scenes of it in here. None of which combined makes much sense as a story, or works as a proper narrative, but is very enjoyable as a series of colourful, noisy flashes in front of one’s face. If this makes a viewer feel like a cat following a laser pointer, well, there are worse fates in life.

In short: Sealed Video 27-30 (2017)

I’m not going too deeply into details about every single of these Japanese POV anthology movies from the producers of the “Honto ni Atta. Noroi no Video.” series. That latter series seems to be one – if not the – pioneer in this peculiarly Japanese found footage sub-genre of about hour-long anthologies of supposedly true videos.

All of them are clearly done dirt cheap and feature stories that are predominantly inspired by/taken from urban legends, Japanese folklore and 2Chan. Aesthetically, Sealed Video, like most of the other series of these types I’ve managed to see some episodes of, loves the blurred faces and street signs, the point of views assembled from security cameras, supposed home video, and so on, and so forth, which – at least to my eyes – often actually does work to provide even the silliest tale with a certain frisson of reality gone wrong.

Sealed Video’s director Ryujin Onizuka is as efficient and competent as most of the filmmakers working this particular field seem to be, milking dubious ideas, mediocre acting and often bad special effects to tell tales that are seldom not at least a little interesting. In fact, nearly every hour-long anthology of the series I’ve seen has at least one actually pretty good tale in it, one where aesthetics, ideas, and directorial effort create a simple creepy tale.

Compared with the other series of the style I know, Sealed Video features a bit more involvement by the fictional production crew in the stories. They don’t generally become proper occult detectives (alas!), but there are tales where they do attempt to break instead of just show a curse. The series never goes as far as to provide them with much characterisation, but a somewhat more proactive team does make for a nice difference compared to other series.

From time to time, a tale recommends itself by being properly bonkers as well. One, for example, explains the tengu the witnesses encounter in a mountain forest as the descendants of persecuted Western Christians, who apparently have learned how to fly and drink blood while doing the backwoods lifestyle for a few centuries. Which, we are told, is much more horrifying and threatening than actual yokai would be.

How could one resist a proposition as this?

Music Monday: Just Like Baron Frankenstein Said Edition

Mission: Impossible II (2000)

Rogue IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) and his team of rogues steal the lab-made disease “Chimera” a crazy Russian scientist made for an Australian pharma company. Given what happened in the first movie, the IMF seems to have a bit of a problem with rogue agents committing supervillainy.

Fortunately, still tiny, not quite as shouty anymore, super agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, smugly grinning like a loon for the whole first act for reasons only known to himself; the movie even makes it part of its villain’s motivation instead of telling Tom to cut it out) is put on the case. Before really starting on the mission, he is supposed to recruit sexy jewel thief Nyah Hall (the artist now known as Thandiwe Newton). The recruitment is more like a short courtship dance, and before you can doubt anyone’s professionalism, they have already copulated and fallen for each other deeply (at least for this movie). Which gets a bit awkward when Ethan’s boss (an Anthony Hopkins cameo) explains that Nyah is a former girlfriend of Ambrose’s and supposed to help them via good old sexspionage instead of thievery.

That makes Hunt so grumpy, he’s going to stop grinning for the rest of the movie, so good job there, Anthony Hopkins. But needs must, so sexspionage it is. This being a Mission: Impossible movie, a heist and various action scenes are of course going to follow.

This being a John Woo movie, a misplaced pigeon, as well.

Four years after the first MI movie, Cruise has settled into his star persona, which leaves us with less strained attempts at acting and a leading man who is quite a bit more assured in front of the camera, but also one who really insists on showing off in as many scenes as possible, and can demand to get more close-ups than, say, the rather more talented and close-up worthy Newton. There’s also at least one pointless vanity scene showing Cruise rock-climbing early on, which, combined with the antiseptic vibe of the “romance” between him and Newton’s Nyah, makes the first act a bit of a slog.

There’s little interest in team work as a core value of the franchise here anymore, either, so that the thing can turn into even more of the Cruise show.

Scott isn’t great shakes as a villain either, and never feels like the properly oversized threat towards all that is right and good in the world he needs to be to work against Cruise’s plot-armoured Hunt.

To be fair to MIII, there are a quite a few great action sequences in here, but then, great action sequences are only half of what made Woo one of the greatest action directors of all time. The other half is pairing the action with an operatic sense of melodrama, blood with tears. You can see where the film wants to deliver this all-important connection, but with a weak Scott and a Newton that’s never allowed as much space as Cruise, there’s really nobody for the film to connect Cruise with properly, so the melodrama feels hollow and never satisfies emotionally .

Three Films Make A Post: Don't meddle with the devil.

Saturday Morning Mystery aka Saturday Morning Massacre (2012): This low budget horror comedy by Spencer Parsons posits an edgy version of the Scooby Doo cast with filed-off numbers visiting a supposedly haunted house that does end in a bit of a massacre for them.

This isn’t really my kind of humour: “just imagine the gang having sex while on LSD”, “let’s kill the dog!” just doesn’t do much for me as jokes go, particularly since the movie doesn’t do terribly much with the set-up. To be fair, the gory bits are nicely realized and staged.

Moonfall (2022): This Amazonbuster mixes Roland Emmerich’s main interests as a director: big dumb fun science fiction, big dumb unfun disaster movies, and not giving talented actors much to do. Well, I’m unfair about the third point, for the lead is played by Patrick Wilson, who is just his usual voidal self and is probably not playing below his possibilities there.

Whenever the film stays in the big dumb SF area – with a bit of idiot conspiracy theories and a cameo by Donald Sutherland – and makes a drinking game out of the word “megastructure”, it is actually a lot of brainless fun. Alas, whenever the disaster movie parts turn up, particularly in the otherwise wonderfully bonkers second half of the film, it’s the usual drag of Emmerich disaster types going through the Emmerich disaster movie motions. Though the film gets bonus points for squeezing a completely out of leftfield Fast and Furious CG car chase in.

Sweeney! (1977): Sweeney was a very popular ITV series that turned up the amount of sex and the violence allowed for a British TV show of the time. It was popular enough for two movie spin-offs which dial up the sex a bit and the violence even a lot more when compared with what the producers could just get away with on the TV. This first one, directed by David Wickes, does a version of the Profumo affair – a bit of an evergreen in the UK – but with rather a lot more murders to hush the affair up, and even more loathing for the political class than you’d expect going in.

Everybody is ugly, brutish and not terribly clever, London looks ugly, grimy and unpleasant, and our hero (John Thaw) eventually wins the day with an act of astonishing amorality. So, even if you’re like me and have seen not a single episode of the series, this is probably going to be a whole lot of fun as a nasty little bit of 70s crime/conspiracy cinema.

Short Film Friday: The Open Doors