In Elysian Fields.

I have almost nothing to say about Elysium. It came and it went and I’ve not thought about it much since, which is a shame because it has a visionary director, a strong cast, big money, superior effects and an interesting premise. So what went wrong? Well, it sets itself up as a film about class war and then does nothing with it. The rich will abandon us, the poor will get poorer, life will get cheaper. Yeah, and? The film doesn’t really know. It pats itself on the back for having pointed inequality out and then gets on with the business of showing people in robot suits hitting each other….because we haven’t had enough films like that recently. We’re supposed to care about Matt Damon’s character because he had a childhood sweetheart who now has a sick child, he’s a nice guy in the ghetto, a hard worker who talks back to robots. There’s a villain called Kruger who’s a kind of Terminator throwback. He has an impenetrable South African accent, almost as impenetrable as Jodie Foster’s performance. What film did she think she was making? She has the worst lines in the film, pushes buttons and walks down corridors in a power suit. She should be doing better work than this. Everything stays at a very simplistic level except the violence which is taken to excess and that in the end is the problem; too much reliance on brawn rather than brains.

Goodbye Ted Post.

Ted Post is not a name you see often in the index of film books. He’s not a director people know or one that critics talk about. He doesn’t have a cult following or devoted fan base. His passing yesterday will be acknowledged and then forgotten. He did however make not one, but four of my all-time favourite films from the seventies. His moment in the sun may have been brief and the rest of his career may have been unremarkable but I thank him and raise a toast to this weird and wonderful quartet.

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes (1970)

A sequel as good as the original film. Some would say better.



The Baby (1973)

Bizarre, camp and shocking. One of the strangest exploitation films ever made.



The Harrad Experiment  (1973)

"Exploring ourselves through others" or,  sex on campus. Controversial at the time. A time capsule hoot now.



Magnum Force (1973)

A sequel that turns up the heat on Dirty Harry. Iconic.

Q: When is a tree not a tree? A: When it's 'The House At The End Of TheStreet'.

It sounds like a horror movie and it looks like a horror movie, but It plays out like an episode of ‘Dawson’s Creek’ or ‘The O.C.’ and ends as a fumbled Psycho variant with a dubious message. It wastes the talents of Jennifer Lawrence and Elisabeth Shue and annoyed the hell out of me with it’s morality: basically, you should listen to your mum, even if she is drunk, because she’s right - the boy next door is no good for you and all those prejudices of the ‘normal’ townsfolk are well founded. There’s a point where mother and daughter look at a tree and Jennifer asks - “What do you see?” Mother says “A tree.” And that in a nutshell is what this movie is saying. Your viewpoint should be shallow and you will be safe. Don’t go looking for beauty, depth or a human face in the tree as Jennifer does. Don’t try to understand other people. Call a tree a tree, call a weirdo a weirdo, an outsider an outsider and join in with the mob of would-be rapists, bullys and selfish parents because the mob was right all along. It’s okay to ostracise people because they’re from troubled backgrounds, don’t fit in and lower the house prices in your area. You should follow the house rules and you should not transgress.

Jennifer scrambles around like a slasher-movie final girl at the end (actually she looks like Bruce Willis in her bloodied white vest) but it’s mum and mum’s point of view that dispatches the threat. The actual mechanics of how this all happens is clumsy to say the least. I’m still not sure how mom survived a stabbing at the end. Presumably her alcohol levels and bigotry provided her with plenty of padding.

The Conjuring Trick

The Conjuring is getting some great word of mouth and the cinema was packed when i went to see it but I thought it was a disappointing, tepid affair. It’s ‘based on a true story’ and set in the early seventies and so immediately puts you in mind of The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror. It’s a trick that seems to have fooled lots of people into thinking this is a modern classic with some authenticity and class. I was hoping the settings and fashions would invoke the feel of something like ‘The Stone Tape’ or The Legend of Hell House but actually everything just looks muddy and beige and dull. It’s more in tune with made-for-tv horrors and rolls through a repetitive set of cliches: there’s the creepy doll that turns it’s head towards us, the creepy music box, the creepy face in the mirror etc, etc etc. It’s fine if you like mild jolts but not unnerving at all. In fact, that’s the problem,  it’s a very conservative horror in every sense - comforting in it’s tired set of thrills and then just a soapbox for Christian right propaganda.  Once we get into the final act we discover that demonic possession means you become a bad mother for a while and therefore basically a conduit for evil. Only the church, the law and family love can restore order. Oh, and the persecuted women of Salem really were satanists, so there. Maybe it’s just me, but I just don’t find the possession/exorcism type of film to be all that scary and if anything they’re a little bit funny. Nothing more than hide and clap parlour games.

Hi Ho Silver Lining

There’s a point halfway through The Lone Ranger where Johnny Depp kicks a dead horse; that’s pretty much what I thought this film was going to be like. The trailers looked terrible and critics were lining up to savage it before it was even released. The truth is that this is actually this year’s John Carter, i.e.. a film that has been killed by word of mouth, bad reviews and bad marketing but is actually one of the most entertaining films of the year.  It somehow manages to be a revisionist western, a Disney film that has the balls to remind you of the genocide of the native American Indian and a family film that unashamedly entertains. It tips its hat to every decent western you can think of without ever getting buried under the weight of knowing homage. It’s as playful as Sergio Leone and has two train sequences as inventive as Buster Keaton. It delivers the spectacular scenery of John Ford and is as attempts the same pathos as Dances with Wolves and Little Big Man. It plays with the notion of heroes and myth but still has you rooting for the good guys. The villain is believably psycho and you feel the impact of bullets as much as you would in Peckinpah or Walter Hill feature. It even references El Topo. Really, what more do you want? Cowboys vs Aliens, Maverick, The Wild Wild West? Get out of here. It’s not perfect by any means; it is blighted by the same things as most modern blockbusters - too long, dodgy politics, clunky framing narrative and Helena Bonham Carter but it delivers more thrills than any amount of big robots/zombies/superheroes hitting each other.

Goodbye Karen Black

In the eighties TV only seemed to show films from the decade before and they nearly always starred Karen Black. She was just one of those faces you knew growing up, so it was sad to wake up today to the news of her death. She worked with some great people - Hitchcock, Coppola, Altman and starred opposite Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Kris Kristofferson and the like. She was in some American classics - “Easy Rider’, ‘Five Easy Pieces’, ‘Nashville’ and some straight to video crap but never stopped working. To most she will be remembered as the brave stewardess who flies the jumbo jet to safety in ‘Airport ‘75’. To me she will be best remembered for ‘Burnt Offerings’ a haunted house horror that scared the life out of me at an impressionable age.

The Heat Is On ( A Low Thermostat Setting)

This action comedy lady-cop-buddy movie plays out exactly like you think it’s going to. It’s above average, but only just. The surprise is that it is Sandra Bullock who is the weak link here. She basically just takes her stock Miss Congeniality character out of the wardrobe and gives it another airing. It doesn’t quite work in the context of this film which requires her to be a lot tougher and less klutzy than she plays it. Melissa McCarthy’s insane detective needs a stronger foil who won’t stand for her shit. It would have given the relationship a definite edge and genuine tension but Bullock’s FBI agent seems to acquiesce too easily even though there are script reasons for her doing so.

Take a second here to consider the career of Sandra Bullock. She first came to attention with ‘Speed’ which was some twenty years ago. An A-list female star who has had a consistent run of hits and is still a bankable draw after all those years is something very rare in Hollywood. I like her but she gives a lukewarm performance for this one. It’s also disconcerting that she is becoming a doppleganger for Andrew Eldritch from The Sisters of Mercy.