TOP TEN FILMS
1. Howl's Moving Castle (Miyazaki, 2004)
2. Ocean's 8 (Ross, 2018)
3. Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2001)
4. My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki, 1988)
5. Moana (Clements, Musker, 2016)
6. Spider-Man: Far From Home (Watts, 2019)
7. Ponyo (Miyazaki, 2008)
8. Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)
9. The Truman Show (Weir, 1998)
10. Tomorrowland (Bird, 2015)
TOP TEN BOOKS
1. The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken
2. Divergent by Veronica Roth
3. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
4. To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han
5. One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus
6. More Than This by Patrick Ness
7. 5 Feet Apart by Rachael Lippincott
8. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
9. Ingo by Helen Dunmore
10. After the Fire by Will Hill
Previously on Barnflakes
Top ten Studio Ghibli films
My daughter's top ten films, aged 13
My daughter's top ten books, aged 12½
My daughter's top ten films (aged 12)
My daughter's top ten films (aged 11)
My daughter's top ten films (aged 10)
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Sunday, June 14, 2020
Tuesday, June 09, 2020
Alternative Call Me By Your Name poster
Look at other alternative posters – usually called 'fan art', which makes it sound so teenager – here. (Whilst browsing, I hadn't realised its acroymn, CMBYN, was a thing, and half-read it at first as a cross between CORBYN, former Labour leader, and CMYK, the four colours – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black – used in printing. Go figure.)
The soundtrack proved immensely popular, which is odd considering how eclectic it sounds – it ranges from modern classical to awful 80s Europop, and helped hugely by a few Sufjan Stevens classics – yet perhaps that's part of its attraction. The vinyl releases in particular, including, naturally, a limited edition peach-scented version, sold out immediately. Then there's a limited edition blue vinyl, a transparent red and even a regular boring black vinyl.
Previously on Barnflakes
I'mpeach
Poster for The Last Movie
The Morris Dance Murders Movie
See You Next Tuesday & Wednesday
Sunday, June 07, 2020
I've never seen The Wolf of Wall Street
I used to work with a guy called Joe who said he had never seen Star Wars (and, presumably, neither its sequels and prequels), which he mentioned about once a week (like me saying I have no TV), and it became a thing (almost a cliché). The thing with a thing is, it becomes consuming, and you have to keep it up. He could never see Star Wars, ever. He couldn’t see it once and say, I didn’t watch Star Wars for the first 35 years of my life, then I watched it. I mean, that’s not bad actually, not watching it for 35 years, but not as good as being able to say you’d never watched it.
It would be like being an alcoholic falling off the wagon: I didn't touch a drink for 35 years, then I did, and got raging drunk – Joe's equivalent would be binging on all nine Star Wars films one Saturday night. And, like an alcoholic, the temptation is always there – in the supermarket, the off licence. In Joe's case, Star Wars, on TV, online, in the supermarket, the charity shop. I know how Joe feels: Wolf of Wall Street is free to watch on Prime*, so it’s right there. I could watch it and not even tell anyone I’ve seen it.
It was a boast, implying he had no time for such things, that he had better taste, a kind of moral high ground — he's better than you or me; though he wasn’t, he was as mainstream as anyone else. It came across as a bit pretentious: he could almost be saying I haven’t seen Star Wars but I have seen Werckmeister Harmonies, but I doubt he'd ever watched any foreign films. I actually felt sorry for him, and there was a slight tinge of sadness in his voice, as if he was deprived, as if it was inevitable he had never seen Star Wars and never would.
I've Never Seen Star Wars is apparently also a comedy talk show on Radio 4 and a TV programme. The concept came from creator Bill Dare, who had never seen Star Wars. The format of the show is to have guests try out new experiences, such as actor Nigel Havers watching The Simpsons, getting a tattoo, eating a MacDonald's and listening to The Smith Hatful of Hollow – you know, stuff the rest of the planet does on a daily basis.
The Guardian also have a regular film column, The classic film I've never seen.... (insert classic film from Chinatown to The Shawshank Redemption).
It may not be a classic but I have never seen The Wolf of Wall Street but also, I haven't liked any Scorsese film since Goodfellas in 1990, and haven't seen a lot of them. Now, I tell people I haven't seen Wolf of Wall Street and they're like, Why Not? And I have to say I really don’t approve of hedonism or money or late-period Scorsese, and perhaps sound more pretentious than Joe. No one ever asked Joe why he'd never seen Star Wars. It was just greeted with quiet awe. Or indifference.
Most Scorsese post-Goodfellas, from Casino onwards and continuing with Cape Fear, Bringing out the Dead, Shutter Island and The Irishman, amongst others, feel like insincere Scorsese parodies of himself. It happens to us all, with age. Robert de Niro has done a similar thing with his latter acting career.
I thought I’d always love Scorsese films; it was Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The King of Comedy which got me into cinema. But unlike, say, football, where a fan will follow their team through thick and thin, I feel no such loyalty to Marty when he makes such clunkers as Hugo.
Killers of the Flower Moon, the new Scorsese flick currently in production, a crime film starring DiCaprio and De Niro (or DeCapriNiro – they should be a coffee, right?), does not, unsurprisingly, excite me at all.
*I avoided The Wolf of Wall Street one more night recently by watching Happy as Lazzaro on Amazon Prime, an extraordinary Italian film from 2019. What starts off as an Italian neo-realist film in the style of Tree of Wooden Clogs turns into a time-travelling slice of magical realism, with hints of The Village.
It would be like being an alcoholic falling off the wagon: I didn't touch a drink for 35 years, then I did, and got raging drunk – Joe's equivalent would be binging on all nine Star Wars films one Saturday night. And, like an alcoholic, the temptation is always there – in the supermarket, the off licence. In Joe's case, Star Wars, on TV, online, in the supermarket, the charity shop. I know how Joe feels: Wolf of Wall Street is free to watch on Prime*, so it’s right there. I could watch it and not even tell anyone I’ve seen it.
It was a boast, implying he had no time for such things, that he had better taste, a kind of moral high ground — he's better than you or me; though he wasn’t, he was as mainstream as anyone else. It came across as a bit pretentious: he could almost be saying I haven’t seen Star Wars but I have seen Werckmeister Harmonies, but I doubt he'd ever watched any foreign films. I actually felt sorry for him, and there was a slight tinge of sadness in his voice, as if he was deprived, as if it was inevitable he had never seen Star Wars and never would.
I've Never Seen Star Wars is apparently also a comedy talk show on Radio 4 and a TV programme. The concept came from creator Bill Dare, who had never seen Star Wars. The format of the show is to have guests try out new experiences, such as actor Nigel Havers watching The Simpsons, getting a tattoo, eating a MacDonald's and listening to The Smith Hatful of Hollow – you know, stuff the rest of the planet does on a daily basis.
The Guardian also have a regular film column, The classic film I've never seen.... (insert classic film from Chinatown to The Shawshank Redemption).
It may not be a classic but I have never seen The Wolf of Wall Street but also, I haven't liked any Scorsese film since Goodfellas in 1990, and haven't seen a lot of them. Now, I tell people I haven't seen Wolf of Wall Street and they're like, Why Not? And I have to say I really don’t approve of hedonism or money or late-period Scorsese, and perhaps sound more pretentious than Joe. No one ever asked Joe why he'd never seen Star Wars. It was just greeted with quiet awe. Or indifference.
Most Scorsese post-Goodfellas, from Casino onwards and continuing with Cape Fear, Bringing out the Dead, Shutter Island and The Irishman, amongst others, feel like insincere Scorsese parodies of himself. It happens to us all, with age. Robert de Niro has done a similar thing with his latter acting career.
I thought I’d always love Scorsese films; it was Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The King of Comedy which got me into cinema. But unlike, say, football, where a fan will follow their team through thick and thin, I feel no such loyalty to Marty when he makes such clunkers as Hugo.
Killers of the Flower Moon, the new Scorsese flick currently in production, a crime film starring DiCaprio and De Niro (or DeCapriNiro – they should be a coffee, right?), does not, unsurprisingly, excite me at all.
*I avoided The Wolf of Wall Street one more night recently by watching Happy as Lazzaro on Amazon Prime, an extraordinary Italian film from 2019. What starts off as an Italian neo-realist film in the style of Tree of Wooden Clogs turns into a time-travelling slice of magical realism, with hints of The Village.
Monday, June 01, 2020
Top ten songs about films
Film: The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957)
"Anybody seen a knight pass this way?
I saw him playing chess with Death, yesterday"
2. Song: Debaser by The Pixies
Film: Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel/Dali, 1929)
"Got me a movie
I want you to know
Slicing up eyeballs
I want you to know"
3. Song: Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen*
Film: Badlands (Malick, 1973)
"I saw her standin' on her front lawn just twirlin' her baton
Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died"
4. Song: 2HB by Roxy Music
Film: Casablanca (Curtiz, 1943)
"Oh I was moved by your screen dream
Celluloid pictures of living
Your death could not kill our love for you
Take two people, romantic
Smoky nightclub situation
Your cigarette traces a ladder
Here's looking at you kid"
5. Song: Brownsville Girl by Bob Dylan**
Film: The Gunfighter (King, 1950)
"Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding 'cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck
He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself
The townspeople wanted to crush that kid down and string him up by the neck"
6. Song: E=MC2 by Big Audio Dynamite
Films: Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, the Man Who Fell to Earth and Insignificance, all directed by Nic Roeg.
"Man dies first reel, people ask, "What's the deal?
This ain't how it's supposed to be; Don't like no Aborigine" [Walkabout]
"Took a trip in Powis Square, pop star dyed his hair" [Performance]"Met a dwarf that was no good, dressed like little Red Riding Hood
Bad habit taking life, her calling card a six-inch knife" [Don't Look Now]
"Space guy fell from the sky, scratched my head and wondered why" [The Man Who Fell to Earth]
"The King of brains, Queen of the sack; executives have heart attack
It's assault course celluloid the money makers would avoid
Sometimes notions get reversed – centre of the universe" [Insignificance]
7. Song: Like Dylan in the Movies by Belle and Sebastian
Film: Dont Look Back (Pennebaker, 1967)
"Don't look back
Like Dylan in the Movies"
8. Song: Lyla by Coco Rosie
Film: Lilya 4-ever (Moodysson, 2002)
"It reminded me
Of a movie I just saw
About a little girl
From Yugoslavia
She got sent away
They made her prostitute
She ate McDonald's all day
And never had a chance to play
Lyla"
From Yugoslavia
She got sent away
They made her prostitute
She ate McDonald's all day
And never had a chance to play
Lyla"
9. Song: The Union Forever by The White Stripes
"Sure I'm C.F.K.
But you gotta love me
The cost no man can say
But you gotta love me"
The cost no man can say
But you gotta love me"
10. Song: Breakfast At Tiffany’s by Deep Blue Something
And I said "What about Breakfast at Tiffany's?"
She said, "I think I remember that film
And as I recall, I think we both kinda liked it."
*Springsteen also wrote a song called Badlands which has nothing to do with the classic Malick flick of the same name.
**Film references and dialogue litter the songs of Bob Dylan, most frequently on his 1985 effort, Empire Burlesque. One keen Bobcat has found references to 61 films in Dylan songs..
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Top ten British seaside films
1. Brighton Rock (Boulting, 1948) BRIGHTON
2. The Damned (Losey, 1962) WEYMOUTH
3. Bait (Jenkins, 2019) CHARLESTOWN
4. Quadrophenia (Roddam, 1979) BRIGHTON
5. The Birthday Party (Friedkin, 1968) WORTHING
6. Wish You Were Here (Leland, 1987) BRIGHTON, WORTHING & BOGNOR REGIS
7. Archipelago (Hogg, 2010) ISLES OF SCILLY
8. Last Resort (Pawlikowski, 2000) MARGATE
9. London to Brighton (Williams, 2006) BRIGHTON
10. Bhaji on the Beach (Chadha, 1993) BLACKPOOL
Elsewhere on the web
Films on the Strange British Coastline at Celluloid Wicker Man
Previously on Barnflakes
Fisherman's Friends vs Bait
Art of the seaside
Thursday, May 07, 2020
Worst five all-female films
1. Ocean's 8 (Ross, 2018)
2. Ghostbusters (Feig, 2016)
3. Hustlers (Scafaria, 2019)
4. Charlie's Angels (Banks, 2019)
5. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (McG, 2013)
How many women make an 'all-female film'? 3? 8? What makes an all-female film? A lack of men? Women behaving like men? Women behaving worse than men? Women getting one over on men? All of the above?
What's interesting – and I realise I'm now perpetuating this – is how many articles there are highlighting the failure of these all-female films (not Hustlers, mind, which inexplicably got 4 stars in the Guardian – we (one of whom is a woman) found it unwatchable; I mean, not just that it was boring and had no plot or characters; no, rather that this is what a feminist film apparently is: women getting their own back on men. And buying lots of expensive handbags.), but any recent film consisting of a female reboot – Ghostbusters in particular bore the brunt – is automatically going to be accused of cashing in on the #metoo movement rather than being a genuine celebration of womankind.
Of course there are lots of excellent, genuine films featuring strong, female characters who are not just out-doing men: look at virtually the whole Studio Ghibli output, most Ingmar Bergman films, the recent Little Women adaptation, The Duke of Burgundy, 3 Women (inspired by Bergman's Persona, and a dream), Bridesmaids, and the French 8 Women and Girlhood are a few that spring to mind.
Previously on Barnflakes
My daughter's top ten films, aged 13
Sunday, April 19, 2020
Recent random cinematic top tens
For your lockdown viewing pleasure.
TOP TEN FILMS ABOUT CULTS
1. Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968)
2. Kill List (Wheatley, 2011)
3. The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973)
4. Race with the Devil (Starrett, 1975)
5. Martha Marcy May Marlene (Durkin, 2011)
6. Midsommar (Aster, 2019)
7. Mandy (Cosmatos, 2018)
8. The Endless (Benson & Moorhead, 2017)
9. Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)
10. Holy Smoke! (Campion, 1999)
(NB: Quentin Tarantino chose to rewrite the history of the Manson Family in last year's Once Upon A Time... in Hollywood.)
TOP TEN BLACK & WHITE CULT FILMS
It doesn’t have to be low-budget, weird, sleazy and violent, but it helps.
1. Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977)
2. Carnival of Souls (Harvey, 1962)
3. Freaks (Browning, 1932)
4. Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel, 1929)
5. The Honeymoon Killers (Kastle, 1970)
6. Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
7. Onibaba (Shindo, 1964)
8. Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968)
9. Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! (Meyer, 1965)
10. Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1978)
TOP TEN RABBITS IN FILMS
1. Watership Down (Rosen, 1978)
2. Harvey (Koster, 1950)
3. Donnie Darko (Kelly, 2001)
4. Fatal Attraction (Lyne, 1987)
5. Alice (Švankmajer, 1988)
6. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Box & Park, 2005)
7. Us (Peele, 2019)
8. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Zemeckis, 1988)
9. Inland Empire (Lynch, 2006)
10. Night of the Lepus (Claxton, 1972)
TOP TEN FRENCH THRILLERS
1. Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959)
2. Le Boucher (Chabrol. 1970)
3. Les Diaboliques (Cluzot, 1955)
4. Le Samouraï (Melville, 1967)
5. L'Appartement (Mimouni, 1996)
6. The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Audiard, 2005)
7. Tell No One (Canet, 2006)
8. A Prophet (Audiard, 2009)
9. Cache (Haneke, 2005)
10. La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995)
TOP TEN FILMS FEATURING DEER HUNTING
A little while ago, it felt like every other film we watched started with a deer hunt, usually as an ironic metaphor for the movie to come: the hunter will soon become the hunted.
1. Bambi (Hand, 1942)
2. The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978)
3. The Hunt (Vinterberg, 2012)
4. Hanna (Wright, 2011)
5. Captain Fantastic (Ross, 2016)
6. The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012)
7. Prisoners (Villeneuve, 2013)
8. Straw Dogs (Lurie, 2011)
9. Last of the Mohicans (Mann, 1992)
10. Big Game (Helander, 2015)
(NB: Yorgos Lanthimos' excellent Killing of a Sacred Deer does not feature any deer at all; come to think of it, his 2015 film The Lobster contains no lobsters.)
TOP TEN WOMEN IN WESTERNS
1. Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954)
2. Julie Christie in McCabe and Mrs Miller (Altman 1971)
3. Millie Perkins in The Shooting (Hellman, 1966)
4. Shirley MacLaine in Two Mules for Sister Sara (Siegel, 1970)
5. Natalie Wood in The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
6. Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon A Time in the West
(Leone, 1968)
7. Jane Russell in The Outlaw (Hughes, 1943)
8. Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (Marshall, 1939)
9. Jane Fonda in Cat Ballou (Silverstein, 1965)
10. Doris Day in Calamity Jane (Butler, 1953)
TOP TEN FILMS ABOUT CULTS
1. Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968)
2. Kill List (Wheatley, 2011)
3. The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973)
4. Race with the Devil (Starrett, 1975)
5. Martha Marcy May Marlene (Durkin, 2011)
6. Midsommar (Aster, 2019)
7. Mandy (Cosmatos, 2018)
8. The Endless (Benson & Moorhead, 2017)
9. Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)
10. Holy Smoke! (Campion, 1999)
(NB: Quentin Tarantino chose to rewrite the history of the Manson Family in last year's Once Upon A Time... in Hollywood.)
TOP TEN BLACK & WHITE CULT FILMS
It doesn’t have to be low-budget, weird, sleazy and violent, but it helps.
1. Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977)
2. Carnival of Souls (Harvey, 1962)
3. Freaks (Browning, 1932)
4. Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel, 1929)
5. The Honeymoon Killers (Kastle, 1970)
6. Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
7. Onibaba (Shindo, 1964)
8. Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968)
9. Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! (Meyer, 1965)
10. Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1978)
TOP TEN RABBITS IN FILMS
1. Watership Down (Rosen, 1978)
2. Harvey (Koster, 1950)
3. Donnie Darko (Kelly, 2001)
4. Fatal Attraction (Lyne, 1987)
5. Alice (Švankmajer, 1988)
6. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Box & Park, 2005)
7. Us (Peele, 2019)
8. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Zemeckis, 1988)
9. Inland Empire (Lynch, 2006)
10. Night of the Lepus (Claxton, 1972)
TOP TEN FRENCH THRILLERS
1. Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959)
2. Le Boucher (Chabrol. 1970)
3. Les Diaboliques (Cluzot, 1955)
4. Le Samouraï (Melville, 1967)
5. L'Appartement (Mimouni, 1996)
6. The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Audiard, 2005)
7. Tell No One (Canet, 2006)
8. A Prophet (Audiard, 2009)
9. Cache (Haneke, 2005)
10. La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995)
TOP TEN FILMS FEATURING DEER HUNTING
A little while ago, it felt like every other film we watched started with a deer hunt, usually as an ironic metaphor for the movie to come: the hunter will soon become the hunted.
1. Bambi (Hand, 1942)
2. The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978)
3. The Hunt (Vinterberg, 2012)
4. Hanna (Wright, 2011)
5. Captain Fantastic (Ross, 2016)
6. The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012)
7. Prisoners (Villeneuve, 2013)
8. Straw Dogs (Lurie, 2011)
9. Last of the Mohicans (Mann, 1992)
10. Big Game (Helander, 2015)
(NB: Yorgos Lanthimos' excellent Killing of a Sacred Deer does not feature any deer at all; come to think of it, his 2015 film The Lobster contains no lobsters.)
TOP TEN WOMEN IN WESTERNS
1. Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954)
2. Julie Christie in McCabe and Mrs Miller (Altman 1971)
3. Millie Perkins in The Shooting (Hellman, 1966)
4. Shirley MacLaine in Two Mules for Sister Sara (Siegel, 1970)
5. Natalie Wood in The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
6. Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon A Time in the West
(Leone, 1968)
7. Jane Russell in The Outlaw (Hughes, 1943)
8. Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (Marshall, 1939)
9. Jane Fonda in Cat Ballou (Silverstein, 1965)
10. Doris Day in Calamity Jane (Butler, 1953)
Alternative cinematic streams
If, like me, you don’t have or like Netflix, Amazon Prime or Disney+ (though I occasionally watch them), there are still plenty of places online to watch great – or at least interesting – free films.
Danish film director Nicolas Winding Refn scored a hit with Drive, which I always rename Drivel, but then he made Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, which were even worse. Anyway – Refn is a collector of obscure old black and white exploitation films. He started restoring them, initially as a hobby, but since 2018 Refn has put them online to watch for free, on his byNWR.com website.
It's a lovely website and I applaud the intention and execution: divided into volumes with such titles as Smell of Female and You Ain't No Punk, You Punk, with accompanying essays and photos, it's a lovingly curated project of forgotten cult films. My only problem with it is some of the films themselves. Now, I don't mind low-budgets and amateur acting but some of the films are just plain bad. Nevertheless, the director's favourites are certainly not without merit. The most famous film in the collection is undoubtedly Night Tide, a bona fide cult classic, starring a young Dennis Hopper as a sailor who falls in love with a mermaid.
Spring Night, Summer Night, shot in 1969, feels like a Walker Evans or Robert Frank photo come to life. Set in a small town fallen on hard times in rural Ohio, it tells the scandalous story of a young woman who has an affair with her half brother and becomes pregnant. Lyrical and poignant, the film comes across as a slice of Italian neorealism of a bygone era. There is a great, extended scene early in the film of a Friday night in the crowded local bar that feels like a documentary. Sadly, the film was re-edited soon after its initial release and re-released as an exploitation flick. Refn, and others passionate about the film, lovingly restored the film and it's one of the best on the website.
All you need is a library card to access and watch thousands of free films through Kanopy, a streaming service provided by your public library or university. From foreign arthouse films like L’Avventura and Wadjda, to great documentaries including The Act of Killing, Kanopy has a fine selection of challenging films. The only caveat is that no more than six films a month can be viewed.
Open Culture, ‘the best free cultural & educational media on the web’, is a blog with links to a huge amount of free culture, including free courses and audio books. It also includes 1150 films, from Hitchcock to Vertov. UbuWeb is ‘All avant-garde. All the time.’ It features art, magazines, music, sound, writing and a huge section of film and video, featuring hundreds by and about artists, from Laurie Anderson to Orson Welles. The Internet archive has millions of free books, music and films, including silents, shorts and home movies.
If you haven’t already, now is the perfect time to get free trials. Aside from the obvious big streamers, it’s worth looking at less well known providers. Criterion Collection DVDs have an online channel with over 1,000 classic and contemporary films. Annoyingly, the channel and 14-day free trial seems to be only available in the States. The BFI Player has a library of free regional archive films, a rental section for recent films plus a subscription service for classic films, which is £4.99 a month, with a 14-day free trial (though if you access the BFI Player through their Amazon Prime Channel, you get a free 30-day trial). MUBI has everything from ‘cult classics to modern masterpieces’ and has a 7 days free trial, after which it’s £9.99 a month.
Of course YouTube has billions of free films. Most recently, I’ve enjoyed films from the Cult Classics channel, including Larry Cohen's God Told Me To (starring Tony Lo Bianco, also seen in the classic cult film the Honeymoon Killers), Carnival of Souls and Ride in the Whirlwind, to name just a few from the collection of sci-fi, film noir and westerns.
I forget that most people probably own Smart TVs (I still famously/pretentiously don't own any kind of TV), but if you don't, there's the BBC iPlayer, ITV and Channel 4, including Film4, online too.
Previously on Barnflakes
Top 30 films on Amazon Prime right now
Lifetime subscription
Danish film director Nicolas Winding Refn scored a hit with Drive, which I always rename Drivel, but then he made Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, which were even worse. Anyway – Refn is a collector of obscure old black and white exploitation films. He started restoring them, initially as a hobby, but since 2018 Refn has put them online to watch for free, on his byNWR.com website.
It's a lovely website and I applaud the intention and execution: divided into volumes with such titles as Smell of Female and You Ain't No Punk, You Punk, with accompanying essays and photos, it's a lovingly curated project of forgotten cult films. My only problem with it is some of the films themselves. Now, I don't mind low-budgets and amateur acting but some of the films are just plain bad. Nevertheless, the director's favourites are certainly not without merit. The most famous film in the collection is undoubtedly Night Tide, a bona fide cult classic, starring a young Dennis Hopper as a sailor who falls in love with a mermaid.
Spring Night, Summer Night, shot in 1969, feels like a Walker Evans or Robert Frank photo come to life. Set in a small town fallen on hard times in rural Ohio, it tells the scandalous story of a young woman who has an affair with her half brother and becomes pregnant. Lyrical and poignant, the film comes across as a slice of Italian neorealism of a bygone era. There is a great, extended scene early in the film of a Friday night in the crowded local bar that feels like a documentary. Sadly, the film was re-edited soon after its initial release and re-released as an exploitation flick. Refn, and others passionate about the film, lovingly restored the film and it's one of the best on the website.
All you need is a library card to access and watch thousands of free films through Kanopy, a streaming service provided by your public library or university. From foreign arthouse films like L’Avventura and Wadjda, to great documentaries including The Act of Killing, Kanopy has a fine selection of challenging films. The only caveat is that no more than six films a month can be viewed.
Open Culture, ‘the best free cultural & educational media on the web’, is a blog with links to a huge amount of free culture, including free courses and audio books. It also includes 1150 films, from Hitchcock to Vertov. UbuWeb is ‘All avant-garde. All the time.’ It features art, magazines, music, sound, writing and a huge section of film and video, featuring hundreds by and about artists, from Laurie Anderson to Orson Welles. The Internet archive has millions of free books, music and films, including silents, shorts and home movies.
If you haven’t already, now is the perfect time to get free trials. Aside from the obvious big streamers, it’s worth looking at less well known providers. Criterion Collection DVDs have an online channel with over 1,000 classic and contemporary films. Annoyingly, the channel and 14-day free trial seems to be only available in the States. The BFI Player has a library of free regional archive films, a rental section for recent films plus a subscription service for classic films, which is £4.99 a month, with a 14-day free trial (though if you access the BFI Player through their Amazon Prime Channel, you get a free 30-day trial). MUBI has everything from ‘cult classics to modern masterpieces’ and has a 7 days free trial, after which it’s £9.99 a month.
Of course YouTube has billions of free films. Most recently, I’ve enjoyed films from the Cult Classics channel, including Larry Cohen's God Told Me To (starring Tony Lo Bianco, also seen in the classic cult film the Honeymoon Killers), Carnival of Souls and Ride in the Whirlwind, to name just a few from the collection of sci-fi, film noir and westerns.
I forget that most people probably own Smart TVs (I still famously/pretentiously don't own any kind of TV), but if you don't, there's the BBC iPlayer, ITV and Channel 4, including Film4, online too.
Previously on Barnflakes
Top 30 films on Amazon Prime right now
Lifetime subscription
Monday, March 23, 2020
Top 30 films on Amazon Prime right now
At first glance, the films free to watch on Amazon Prime (UK) seem severely limited (a fact I’ve probably moaned about previously). Bizarrely, the worst films on Prime are the highest-rated (Letters to Juliet, Saw V, The Book of Eli). However, it doesn’t take long to find something decent (though I’ve wasted hours over the years trawling through their lists of films, to the extent that it's bedtime by the time I still haven't found one, so I just go to bed). Anyway, catch them whilst you can – another annoying thing about this streaming lark is films come and go frequently with no warning.
1. 8½ (Fellini, 1963)
Other Fellini films also available: La Dolce Vita,
Juliet and the Spirits, I Vitelloni
2. Repulsion (Polanski, 1965)
Other Polanski also available: Cul de Sac, The Tenant,
Knife in the Water
3. Under the Skin (Glazer, 2014)
4. Toni Erdmann (Ade, 2017)
5. The King of Comedy (Scorsese, 1983)
6. LA Confidential (Hanson, 1997)
7. Brazil (Gilliam, 1985)
8. The Man With The Golden Arm (Preminger, 1956)
9. Once Upon A Time in America (Leone, 1984)
10. The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock, 1938)
Other Hitchcock films also available: The 39 Steps,
The Man Who Knew Too Much, Jamaica Inn, Stage Fright,
Secret Agent, To Catch a Thief
11. Carol (Haynes, 2015)
12. Killing of a Sacred Deer (Lanthimos, 2017)
13. The Squid and the Whale (Baumbach, 2005)
14. Suspiria (Argento, 1977)
Other Argento films also available: Phenomena, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Opera, plus the much maligned but pretty good Suspiria remake from 2018
15. November (Sarnet, 2017)
This black and white Estonian film is stunningly beautiful, profoundly weird and often hilarious, conjuring, as it does, the obscure symbolism of Parajanov, the animation of Svankmajer and early Borowczyk, and characters straight out of a Grunewald painting. It evokes that cold (it's usually snowing), poverty-stricken but magical feeling of 1960s medieval-set films by Tarkovksy and Frantisek Vlacil, in a pagan, supernatural tale of doomed young love.
16. The Gospel According to St Matthew (Pasolini, 1965)
Other Pasolini films also available: Accattone, The Anger
17. Cold War (Pawlikowski, 2018)
Another sumptuous recent black and white film about doomed love.
18. Midsommar (Aster, 2019)
19. Cube (Natali, 1998)
20. The Dead Zone (Cronenberg, 1983)
Other Cronenberg films also available: A History of Violence
21. 12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2014)
22. Room (Abrahamson, 2016)
23. Charade (Donen, 1963)
24. Green Book (Farrelly, 2019)
25. Four Lions (Morris. 2010)
26. Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky, 2000)
Other Aronofsky films also available: The Fountain, Pi
27. This is 40 (Apatow, 2013)
28. Booksmart (Wilde, 2019)
29. Blinded by the Light (Chadha, 2019)
Guardian journalist Sarfraz Manzoor's memoirs, Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock N’ Roll, form the basis of Blinded by the Light, starring Viveik Kalra as Javed, a Bruce Springsteen-obsessed teenager growing up in 1980s Luton. If it seems unlikely that a Pakistani teenager in 1980s Luton would find much in common with Bruce Springsteen, then it's then equally unlikely that I would find much in common with a Pakistani teenager in 1980s Luton... except we studied English Literature A Level in the same year (Hardy's The Return of the Native is mentioned) and got into Bruce Springsteen at the same time, and for the same reasons (however, perhaps more important than the Springsteen influence is that of his English teacher, who encourages his writing and submits it to competitions for him), so the film struck a chord with me. Period details are depressingly spot on – mainly, the Arndale Centre and Job Centre. Unfortunately, the poster depicts Javed looking like a camp Kevin Rowland from the Come on Eileen video instead of a macho Springsteen.
30. Fisherman's Friends (Foggin, 2019)
These mawkish musical films are turning up everywhere (see Blinded by the Light, Yesterday, Military Wives) – this one's also rubbish but I've seen it three times.
Previously on Barnflakes
Fisherman's Friends vs Bait
A Study in Scarlett
The films of Dario Argento
Notes on Charters and Caldicott
The films of Sergei Parajanov
The films of Walerian Borowczyk
1. 8½ (Fellini, 1963)
Other Fellini films also available: La Dolce Vita,
Juliet and the Spirits, I Vitelloni
2. Repulsion (Polanski, 1965)
Other Polanski also available: Cul de Sac, The Tenant,
Knife in the Water
3. Under the Skin (Glazer, 2014)
4. Toni Erdmann (Ade, 2017)
5. The King of Comedy (Scorsese, 1983)
6. LA Confidential (Hanson, 1997)
7. Brazil (Gilliam, 1985)
8. The Man With The Golden Arm (Preminger, 1956)
9. Once Upon A Time in America (Leone, 1984)
10. The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock, 1938)
Other Hitchcock films also available: The 39 Steps,
The Man Who Knew Too Much, Jamaica Inn, Stage Fright,
Secret Agent, To Catch a Thief
11. Carol (Haynes, 2015)
12. Killing of a Sacred Deer (Lanthimos, 2017)
13. The Squid and the Whale (Baumbach, 2005)
14. Suspiria (Argento, 1977)
Other Argento films also available: Phenomena, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Opera, plus the much maligned but pretty good Suspiria remake from 2018
15. November (Sarnet, 2017)
This black and white Estonian film is stunningly beautiful, profoundly weird and often hilarious, conjuring, as it does, the obscure symbolism of Parajanov, the animation of Svankmajer and early Borowczyk, and characters straight out of a Grunewald painting. It evokes that cold (it's usually snowing), poverty-stricken but magical feeling of 1960s medieval-set films by Tarkovksy and Frantisek Vlacil, in a pagan, supernatural tale of doomed young love.
16. The Gospel According to St Matthew (Pasolini, 1965)
Other Pasolini films also available: Accattone, The Anger
17. Cold War (Pawlikowski, 2018)
Another sumptuous recent black and white film about doomed love.
18. Midsommar (Aster, 2019)
19. Cube (Natali, 1998)
20. The Dead Zone (Cronenberg, 1983)
Other Cronenberg films also available: A History of Violence
21. 12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2014)
22. Room (Abrahamson, 2016)
23. Charade (Donen, 1963)
24. Green Book (Farrelly, 2019)
25. Four Lions (Morris. 2010)
26. Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky, 2000)
Other Aronofsky films also available: The Fountain, Pi
27. This is 40 (Apatow, 2013)
28. Booksmart (Wilde, 2019)
29. Blinded by the Light (Chadha, 2019)
Guardian journalist Sarfraz Manzoor's memoirs, Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock N’ Roll, form the basis of Blinded by the Light, starring Viveik Kalra as Javed, a Bruce Springsteen-obsessed teenager growing up in 1980s Luton. If it seems unlikely that a Pakistani teenager in 1980s Luton would find much in common with Bruce Springsteen, then it's then equally unlikely that I would find much in common with a Pakistani teenager in 1980s Luton... except we studied English Literature A Level in the same year (Hardy's The Return of the Native is mentioned) and got into Bruce Springsteen at the same time, and for the same reasons (however, perhaps more important than the Springsteen influence is that of his English teacher, who encourages his writing and submits it to competitions for him), so the film struck a chord with me. Period details are depressingly spot on – mainly, the Arndale Centre and Job Centre. Unfortunately, the poster depicts Javed looking like a camp Kevin Rowland from the Come on Eileen video instead of a macho Springsteen.
30. Fisherman's Friends (Foggin, 2019)
These mawkish musical films are turning up everywhere (see Blinded by the Light, Yesterday, Military Wives) – this one's also rubbish but I've seen it three times.
Previously on Barnflakes
Fisherman's Friends vs Bait
A Study in Scarlett
The films of Dario Argento
Notes on Charters and Caldicott
The films of Sergei Parajanov
The films of Walerian Borowczyk
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
Lifetime subscription
Time to read: depends how fast you are at reading.
Main thrust of argument: I hate Netflix and Spotify because they both completely devalue films, TV and music, making it all a never-ending stream of shit. After not very long it all becomes an absolutely meaningless waste of time.
Forgive me for sounding like a broken record but, to recap: first we bought records, then 8-track, then cassettes, then CDs, then MiniDisc, then remastered box sets with bonus and live tracks, then mp3s. Now some of us buy records (actually, the facts are slightly misleading, even though vinyl seems to be everywhere, in the UK, 23m people still buy CDs compared to 4.3m purchasing their tautological vinyl records – streaming accounts for about 114m albums) which will probably be a completely pointless limited edition on red, blue or green coloured vinyl. But most of us now stream the music from Spotify or Apple. So it’s possible to have bought the same album on up to about a dozen different formats, only to end up not owning it but only subscribing or renting it.
We do this with films and TV too, And computer software. Nothing is ours anymore. If it was once ours – on LP, Betamax, VHS, cassette, CD or DVD – we probably gave it to a charity shop years ago or, if young enough, have never, ever bought any removeable media. With other streaming services, such as Disney+, Apple TV, HBO Max and BritBox (literally can’t think of anything worse in the whole world), entering the arena, Netflix will lose some of its most popular programmes and films (as the likes of Disney and HBO take back their content from the steaming giant), and we may find ourselves having to join half a dozen streaming services to watch what we used to watch just on Netflix. It may be that soon we will all be trudging round the charity shops buying back our DVDs and CDs.
Naturally, I don’t pay for any streaming services. I disagree with everything about them. However, I have just finished my free three month Spotify trial (three months is ages! Yes, long enough for them to figure you won’t be able to live without it. Ha, I dropped them like hot potatoes). Saying that, it was a good experience.
How else could I go from King Krule to Prefab Sprout to Grouper to Roxy Music to John Zorn to Mazzy Star to Circa Waves to The Avalanches to Michael O'Shea to CAN to Julia Holter to Bardo Pond to Against All Logic to SQURL to Michelle Gurevich to Janet Jackson to Destroyer to David Thomas Broughton to XTC to Tame Impala to Meredith Monk to Billie Eilish to Gang of Four to Nico to The Fall. And that’s just in a day. There is no way I would have the physical space, let alone be able to afford, the amount of music I listened to if I were buying it on CD or LP. Basically I listened to hundreds of albums I couldn’t have done otherwise.
The main difference between Spotify and Netflix, of course, is Spotify has just about every song and album you can think of, and Netflix has about eight films you want to watch (Amazon Prime has even less – any film you actually want to watch will never be on Prime; you'll have to pay an extra £4.99 to rent it for the evening; possibly £10 to 'own' it on Amazon's cloud), and even that's going to decrease, and a trillion shitty series which all start with the kiss of death: A Netflix Original.
A million times better than Netflix or Amazon Prime was LoveFilm (RIP), also a subscription service, but one where DVDs were sent in the post. I know, what an antiquated thought in these streaming days, but, and to me it’s a huge but, they had just about every film available on DVD (yes, that means foreign films too). As the Guardian said at the time, when Amazon bought the company, then closed it in 2017 (I know, right, not as long ago as you thought), LoveFilm – the hint is in its name, really; Netflix may as well be called NetWatchAnyOldShitFlix – they catered "for people with specific tastes, who are into Korean horror or screwball comedies from the 1930s and 40s, for people who will carefully write down the names of films when they read a good review, or whose first response to a film they loved is to watch everything else that director ever did". I still, after all these years, think streaming is for morons (the highest-rated movies on Amazon Prime are mostly two-star reviews in The Guardian). It’s the difference between having a nice meal in a restaurant or stuffing your face with junk food. It's the difference between quality and quantity.
(The use of the humble letterbox hasn't entirely vanished. If sending letters and cards – or DVDs (though not video games, apparently – a colleague tells me video game rental services are popular) – by post is pretty obsolete, the internet has a thousand other subscription services to shove through your door, from vegetable and beauty boxes to toilet paper and coffee.)
I still don't trust algorithms – or rather, I wish they were better. I've mentioned before how you buy a one-off holiday, then all you get for the next month is online ads for holidays to the place you've just been. The whole if you liked that, you'll love this thing, is a dreadful bore, leading to us all watching or listening to very similar TV and music (the internet in general is said to narrow tastes, from politics to porn). Netflix and Spotify end up serving a non-stop stream of similar material. Music becomes part of the background. When you get to the end of an album, it doesn’t stop, it just continues playing similar music it thinks you’ll like (to be fair, you can probably turn this off in preferences). With Netflix, the programmes which are popular have more seasons made which are identical to the first one (locations and a few characters may change).
I like my films and music to consist of making some effort. Going to the cinema (Parasite was great!). Reading about an album, ordering the record and waiting for it to arrive in the post, or going to a record shop. Unwrapping it, holding it, reading the sleeve notes. Maybe even listening to it (I'm not even joking when I say that – like a sucker, pun intended, I ordered the limited edition, transparent vinyl – red had sold out – version of the soundtrack to the classic lesbian vampire film, Daughters of Darkness. It is gorgeous, and I have no chance of playing it in the near future – my record player is in storage).
Previously on Barnflakes
Top ten Studio Ghibli films
Incidental sounds from Netflix's Power
Random Netflix review: Stranger Things 3
Revenge of the VHS tape
Amazon Prime / Netflix mash-ups
Random Netflix TV reviews
Main thrust of argument: I hate Netflix and Spotify because they both completely devalue films, TV and music, making it all a never-ending stream of shit. After not very long it all becomes an absolutely meaningless waste of time.
Forgive me for sounding like a broken record but, to recap: first we bought records, then 8-track, then cassettes, then CDs, then MiniDisc, then remastered box sets with bonus and live tracks, then mp3s. Now some of us buy records (actually, the facts are slightly misleading, even though vinyl seems to be everywhere, in the UK, 23m people still buy CDs compared to 4.3m purchasing their tautological vinyl records – streaming accounts for about 114m albums) which will probably be a completely pointless limited edition on red, blue or green coloured vinyl. But most of us now stream the music from Spotify or Apple. So it’s possible to have bought the same album on up to about a dozen different formats, only to end up not owning it but only subscribing or renting it.
We do this with films and TV too, And computer software. Nothing is ours anymore. If it was once ours – on LP, Betamax, VHS, cassette, CD or DVD – we probably gave it to a charity shop years ago or, if young enough, have never, ever bought any removeable media. With other streaming services, such as Disney+, Apple TV, HBO Max and BritBox (literally can’t think of anything worse in the whole world), entering the arena, Netflix will lose some of its most popular programmes and films (as the likes of Disney and HBO take back their content from the steaming giant), and we may find ourselves having to join half a dozen streaming services to watch what we used to watch just on Netflix. It may be that soon we will all be trudging round the charity shops buying back our DVDs and CDs.
Naturally, I don’t pay for any streaming services. I disagree with everything about them. However, I have just finished my free three month Spotify trial (three months is ages! Yes, long enough for them to figure you won’t be able to live without it. Ha, I dropped them like hot potatoes). Saying that, it was a good experience.
How else could I go from King Krule to Prefab Sprout to Grouper to Roxy Music to John Zorn to Mazzy Star to Circa Waves to The Avalanches to Michael O'Shea to CAN to Julia Holter to Bardo Pond to Against All Logic to SQURL to Michelle Gurevich to Janet Jackson to Destroyer to David Thomas Broughton to XTC to Tame Impala to Meredith Monk to Billie Eilish to Gang of Four to Nico to The Fall. And that’s just in a day. There is no way I would have the physical space, let alone be able to afford, the amount of music I listened to if I were buying it on CD or LP. Basically I listened to hundreds of albums I couldn’t have done otherwise.
The main difference between Spotify and Netflix, of course, is Spotify has just about every song and album you can think of, and Netflix has about eight films you want to watch (Amazon Prime has even less – any film you actually want to watch will never be on Prime; you'll have to pay an extra £4.99 to rent it for the evening; possibly £10 to 'own' it on Amazon's cloud), and even that's going to decrease, and a trillion shitty series which all start with the kiss of death: A Netflix Original.
A million times better than Netflix or Amazon Prime was LoveFilm (RIP), also a subscription service, but one where DVDs were sent in the post. I know, what an antiquated thought in these streaming days, but, and to me it’s a huge but, they had just about every film available on DVD (yes, that means foreign films too). As the Guardian said at the time, when Amazon bought the company, then closed it in 2017 (I know, right, not as long ago as you thought), LoveFilm – the hint is in its name, really; Netflix may as well be called NetWatchAnyOldShitFlix – they catered "for people with specific tastes, who are into Korean horror or screwball comedies from the 1930s and 40s, for people who will carefully write down the names of films when they read a good review, or whose first response to a film they loved is to watch everything else that director ever did". I still, after all these years, think streaming is for morons (the highest-rated movies on Amazon Prime are mostly two-star reviews in The Guardian). It’s the difference between having a nice meal in a restaurant or stuffing your face with junk food. It's the difference between quality and quantity.
(The use of the humble letterbox hasn't entirely vanished. If sending letters and cards – or DVDs (though not video games, apparently – a colleague tells me video game rental services are popular) – by post is pretty obsolete, the internet has a thousand other subscription services to shove through your door, from vegetable and beauty boxes to toilet paper and coffee.)
I still don't trust algorithms – or rather, I wish they were better. I've mentioned before how you buy a one-off holiday, then all you get for the next month is online ads for holidays to the place you've just been. The whole if you liked that, you'll love this thing, is a dreadful bore, leading to us all watching or listening to very similar TV and music (the internet in general is said to narrow tastes, from politics to porn). Netflix and Spotify end up serving a non-stop stream of similar material. Music becomes part of the background. When you get to the end of an album, it doesn’t stop, it just continues playing similar music it thinks you’ll like (to be fair, you can probably turn this off in preferences). With Netflix, the programmes which are popular have more seasons made which are identical to the first one (locations and a few characters may change).
I like my films and music to consist of making some effort. Going to the cinema (Parasite was great!). Reading about an album, ordering the record and waiting for it to arrive in the post, or going to a record shop. Unwrapping it, holding it, reading the sleeve notes. Maybe even listening to it (I'm not even joking when I say that – like a sucker, pun intended, I ordered the limited edition, transparent vinyl – red had sold out – version of the soundtrack to the classic lesbian vampire film, Daughters of Darkness. It is gorgeous, and I have no chance of playing it in the near future – my record player is in storage).
Previously on Barnflakes
Top ten Studio Ghibli films
Incidental sounds from Netflix's Power
Random Netflix review: Stranger Things 3
Revenge of the VHS tape
Amazon Prime / Netflix mash-ups
Random Netflix TV reviews
Saturday, February 01, 2020
Top ten Studio Ghibli films
10. Porco Rosso (1992)
9. Arrietty (2010)
8. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
7. Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
6. Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
5. Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986)
4. Ponyo (2008)
3. My Neighbour Totoro (1988)
2. Spirited Away (2001)
1. Princess Mononoke (1997)
Friday, December 20, 2019
Fisherman's Friends vs Bait
Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019)
Also: Tin (Bill Scott, 2015)
You wait years for a film about bloody Londoners ruining Cornish fishing villages then two come along within months of each other. Fisherman's Friends and Bait are two sides of the same coin, portraying the effect of tourism and second home owners in Cornwall, one of the poorest parts of Europe, in very different ways.
Fisherman's Friends is partly based on the real life sea shanty group of the same name, based in Port Issac, a fishing village in North Cornwall. Pretty sentimental, it follows the familiar trope of British films of its ilk, from The Full Monty to Brassed Off without those films' originality, humour or warmth. Nevertheless, it has its moments, as it follows cocky London A&R music scout Danny (Daniel Mays), to Cornwall with some colleagues (one of who is the smarmy Henry – all the Londoner's are smarmy – played by Christian Brassington, no stranger to Cornwall, having played the hypocritical and hideous Reverend Osborne 'Ossie' Whitworth in Poldark. Brassington has also played similar roles in his depictions of both Boris Johnson and Tony Blair) for a stag do. They stumble across a performance by the Fisherman's Friends, a group of male fishermen/coastguards who, in between catching fish and saving stupid tourists' lives, sing sea shanties on the sea shore. As a wind up, Danny's boss tells him he has to sign the boy band – and drive off, leaving him high and dry.
At first, Danny is just staying on in the hope of shagging a fisherman's daughter, in the form of Alwyn (Tuppence Middleton), before he succumbs to the authenticity of the Fisherman's Friends and the charms of the fishing village. Anyway, despite the wind up, Danny signs the band and gets the record contract. And the girl. Oh, and buys the local pub.
Despite occasional digs at Londoner's and second home owners, and as you might be surmising by now, a film supposedly about a sea shanty band and Cornwall is actually more about Danny, a London 'tosser' (Alwyn's daughter's words), and his journey to finding fulfilment (that's because the Cornish have already found theirs, quipped H).
This fact was mentioned, actually, when we heard director Mark Jenkin give a talk after a screening of his film Bait, called "one of the defining British films of the decade" by the Guardian. Stylistically, it is world's apart from Fisherman's Friends (filmed with all the imagination of a BBC drama), shot as it was on 16mm black and white film on a Bolex camera (which I used at film school in the 1990s, already obsolete then – it's a loud, hand-cranked camera and can only shoot a few minutes of film at a time, but it is durable – on one film shoot the camera fell in a river; when we pulled it out it was absolutely fine). Jenkin's decision to film this way, as well as to hand develop the film and record all the dialogue post-production certainly helps give the film its unique look (and goes some way to explaining the lavish praise heaped upon it from the likes of the BFI – well, they funded it – and the Guardian).
The slight plot revolves around fisherman Martin Ward (Edward Rowe, a.k.a. the Kernow King and general Cornish Renaissance Man), eking out a living as a fisherman and struggling to save money for a fishing boat, whilst his brother makes money hiring out their late father's fishing boat to tourists wanting to party. To add insult to injury, they've sold the family's harbourside house to poncy Londoner's who use it as a second home. The seeds are sown for seething resentment, and the film is an intense experience, with its high contrast black and white expressionist cinematography, extreme close-ups and contemptuous glances between the social classes.
The film isn't perfect – characters are slightly cardboard cut-out and it's a little simplistic – but there's no denying it's a stunningly original work, and a breath of fresh air compared to the usual Cornish fare of Poldark and Doc Martin.
Fisherman''s Friends and Bait make an obvious double bill but how about Bait and The Lighthouse, with Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe playing 19th century lighthouse keepers in Robert Egger's black and white psychological horror, released in the UK next month.
---------------
The film Tin also deserves a mention. Released in 2015, it was filmed in as equally
The film was originally a play performed by Miracle Theatre (based on a novel about bank swindling in Cornwall), and filming was shot entirely using green screen in the evenings after the play's performance over several years, with the backgrounds added later, giving the film a odd and distinctive feel. The film features Jenny Agutter, who ironically (considering the other two films) owns houses in London and Cornwall.
Previously on Barnflakes
Top 30 of the year
Encrusted
Random film review: Straw Dogs
The lost art of the double bill
Double bill me
Tuesday, December 10, 2019
How to compile a Robert Pattinson top ten films without mentioning Twilight or Harry Potter
10. Water for Elephants (Francis Lawrence, 2011)
9. Damsel (Zellner brothers, 2018)
8. The Rover (David Michôd, 2014)
7. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012)
6. The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2016)
5. The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)
4. Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, 2014)
3. The Childhood of a Leader (Brady Corbet, 2015)
2. High Life (Claire Denis, 2018)
1. Good Time (Safdie brothers, 2017)
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, Exeter
Bill Douglas (1984-1991) was a Scottish filmmaker no one has heard of, but his autobiographical trilogy of films made in the 1970s are extraordinary and harrowing – and like Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy, filled with enough poetry and beauty to make the poverty bearable.
The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum contains the moving image memorabilia collected by Douglas and his friend Peter Jewell. It is one of the largest collections in Europe, consisting of about 50,000 items collected over 30 years, a vast cinematic array from a Lumiere cinematographe to a Marilyn Monroe soap dish. The museum also consists of Douglas's papers and is a place for research and study. A little gem well worth seeking out if you've got an hour or two to wait at Exeter St David's (about a ten minute walk from the train station).
www.bdcmuseum.org.uk
Previously on Barnflakes
Top ten museums/galleries
H is for Horrific
My childhood just flew by
Top ten greatest film trilogies
Friday, July 19, 2019
Random Netflix review: Stranger Things 3
There was much excited anticipation for the new season of Stranger Things. But the only question on my lips was not what new characters or plot developments would emerge but what pop cultural references would be pillaged from the 1980s. Well, it's two years since the last season, and the kids have progressed to John Hughes movies and shopping malls. We are in 1985, year of The Breakfast Club and Back to the Future; the guys have discovered girls and the girls have discovered shopping.
With three separate plots running parallel with the inevitability that they will all join together in the end, it's a rather predictable and soulless if fun series (a sort of paint it by numbers; compare it, if you want, with the third season of Twin Peaks, which took the viewer places they had no idea they wanted to go, building from the first two seasons and creating something wonderfully original), again wallowing in 1980s blockbusters and bad music (the first series had far better tunes).
However, what's even more shocking than the tacky '80s music or fashions is the strong anti-commie stance and the pro-capitalist message of its numerous product placements – Coke, Burger King, Gap, Adidas and Casio are just a handful of brands seen so repeatedly in the show that it comes across just like in The Truman Show, where products are awkwardly woven into the storyline. But whereas The Truman Show uses product placement for satirical means, there is no such irony or comment on society (or movies) in Stranger Things. It really does want you to Enjoy Coke, It's The Real Thing. As more than one website has quipped, it's now Sponsored Things.
Netflix insist they receive no money for product placements, though these free placements have been valued at $15 million. The Duffer brothers have also said the products are there as part of the narrative, but more than once the products actually interfere with the narrative flow.
Cinematically, again the Duffer brothers wear their references on their sleeves – no, make that their foreheads. Alongside Back to the Future and The Breakfast Club, other films mentioned or referenced range from Dawn of the Dead, Red Dawn and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to The Terminator, The Evil Dead, Christine, Rambo, The Thing, Alien and The Karate Kid. There's even a scene where one of the characters, Robin, names three old, black and white films as her favourites in an interview for a job in a video shop (Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, Carné's Children of Paradise – I’ve literally never heard it by that title and didn’t know what the hell it was until I realised it was Les Enfants du Paradis – and Wilder's The Apartment. All extremely unlikely, but hey, if any films mentioned in the series – all of which are more rewarding than Stranger Things – actually get watched by viewers, then it's a success).
To be fair, it's impossible to be original nowadays, though some do it with more...erm, originality. Horror director Jordan Peele* also wears his pop culture references tattooed on his forehead, citing such influences as The Shining, The Goonies, The Lost Boys and Hitchcock for his latest film, Us. I also saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Lady from Shanghai and Big, and noticed it was handy for actress Elisabeth Moss to go seamlessly from acting in The Handmaid's Tale to Us without having to change her red costume. Nevertheless, what comes across is an original, thoughtful and terrifying journey into the night (I've mentioned this before with the horror film It Follows, which transcends its John Carpenter-influenced origins).
But most stuff, especially if it comes out of Netflix, tends to be derivative. I saw I Am Your Mother recently, a Netflix sci-fi film, and virtually every scene reminded me of other, better, films (it's a curse having watched so much cinema): 2001: A Space Odyssey, Moon, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Retreat, Ex Machina, Aliens and Jurassic Park were just the obvious ones. Likewise, Spanish road movie 4L is Little Miss Sunshine meets Road Trip. Extinction is a bad and cliché-ridden District 9. The Perfect Date is sub-John Hughes garbage. You get the idea.
Earlier in the year Netflix were accused of plagiarising A Quiet Place, the hugely successful horror film, with their own version, The Silence. The plots are virtually identical – except A Quiet Place is good, and The Silence is terrible.
Netflix used to get accused a lot of showing 'mockbusters', low-budget films with similar titles or stories to proper blockbusters. They were usually made by film company The Asylum, who produce films such as Triassic World (based on: Jurassic World) and Tomb Invader (based on: Tomb Raider). Anyway, nothing wrong with a rip-off B-movie. All I have a problem with is every Netflix release calling itself A Netflix Original. Surely this should be A Netflix Unoriginal.
– 2.5 / 5
*It feels like Peele can do no wrong, but I have mixed feelings about his upcoming remake of Bernard Rose's classic horror Candyman. It reminds me slightly of the Italian director, Luca Guadagnino, who, after directing A Bigger Splash and Call Me By My Name, seemed like he could also do no wrong, until he remade the classic horror film Susperia (I was actually one of the few who enjoyed it as an interpretation rather than a remake – he tones down the original's colour palette and gives it some depth).
Previously on Barnflakes:
Random Netflix TV reviews
With three separate plots running parallel with the inevitability that they will all join together in the end, it's a rather predictable and soulless if fun series (a sort of paint it by numbers; compare it, if you want, with the third season of Twin Peaks, which took the viewer places they had no idea they wanted to go, building from the first two seasons and creating something wonderfully original), again wallowing in 1980s blockbusters and bad music (the first series had far better tunes).
However, what's even more shocking than the tacky '80s music or fashions is the strong anti-commie stance and the pro-capitalist message of its numerous product placements – Coke, Burger King, Gap, Adidas and Casio are just a handful of brands seen so repeatedly in the show that it comes across just like in The Truman Show, where products are awkwardly woven into the storyline. But whereas The Truman Show uses product placement for satirical means, there is no such irony or comment on society (or movies) in Stranger Things. It really does want you to Enjoy Coke, It's The Real Thing. As more than one website has quipped, it's now Sponsored Things.
Netflix insist they receive no money for product placements, though these free placements have been valued at $15 million. The Duffer brothers have also said the products are there as part of the narrative, but more than once the products actually interfere with the narrative flow.
Cinematically, again the Duffer brothers wear their references on their sleeves – no, make that their foreheads. Alongside Back to the Future and The Breakfast Club, other films mentioned or referenced range from Dawn of the Dead, Red Dawn and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to The Terminator, The Evil Dead, Christine, Rambo, The Thing, Alien and The Karate Kid. There's even a scene where one of the characters, Robin, names three old, black and white films as her favourites in an interview for a job in a video shop (Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, Carné's Children of Paradise – I’ve literally never heard it by that title and didn’t know what the hell it was until I realised it was Les Enfants du Paradis – and Wilder's The Apartment. All extremely unlikely, but hey, if any films mentioned in the series – all of which are more rewarding than Stranger Things – actually get watched by viewers, then it's a success).
To be fair, it's impossible to be original nowadays, though some do it with more...erm, originality. Horror director Jordan Peele* also wears his pop culture references tattooed on his forehead, citing such influences as The Shining, The Goonies, The Lost Boys and Hitchcock for his latest film, Us. I also saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Lady from Shanghai and Big, and noticed it was handy for actress Elisabeth Moss to go seamlessly from acting in The Handmaid's Tale to Us without having to change her red costume. Nevertheless, what comes across is an original, thoughtful and terrifying journey into the night (I've mentioned this before with the horror film It Follows, which transcends its John Carpenter-influenced origins).
But most stuff, especially if it comes out of Netflix, tends to be derivative. I saw I Am Your Mother recently, a Netflix sci-fi film, and virtually every scene reminded me of other, better, films (it's a curse having watched so much cinema): 2001: A Space Odyssey, Moon, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Retreat, Ex Machina, Aliens and Jurassic Park were just the obvious ones. Likewise, Spanish road movie 4L is Little Miss Sunshine meets Road Trip. Extinction is a bad and cliché-ridden District 9. The Perfect Date is sub-John Hughes garbage. You get the idea.
Earlier in the year Netflix were accused of plagiarising A Quiet Place, the hugely successful horror film, with their own version, The Silence. The plots are virtually identical – except A Quiet Place is good, and The Silence is terrible.
Netflix used to get accused a lot of showing 'mockbusters', low-budget films with similar titles or stories to proper blockbusters. They were usually made by film company The Asylum, who produce films such as Triassic World (based on: Jurassic World) and Tomb Invader (based on: Tomb Raider). Anyway, nothing wrong with a rip-off B-movie. All I have a problem with is every Netflix release calling itself A Netflix Original. Surely this should be A Netflix Unoriginal.
– 2.5 / 5
*It feels like Peele can do no wrong, but I have mixed feelings about his upcoming remake of Bernard Rose's classic horror Candyman. It reminds me slightly of the Italian director, Luca Guadagnino, who, after directing A Bigger Splash and Call Me By My Name, seemed like he could also do no wrong, until he remade the classic horror film Susperia (I was actually one of the few who enjoyed it as an interpretation rather than a remake – he tones down the original's colour palette and gives it some depth).
Previously on Barnflakes:
Random Netflix TV reviews
Sunday, June 16, 2019
My daughter's top ten films, aged 13
1. Ocean's 8* (Gary Ross**, 2018)
2. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki & Kirk Wise, 2003)
3. The Hunger Games (Gary Ross**, 2012)
4. A Dog's Purpose (Lasse Hallström***, 2017)
5. Howl's Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2005)
6. Jurassic World (Colin Trevorrow, 2015)
7. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence, 2013)
8. My Neighbour Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)
9. Instant Family (Sean Anders, 2018)
10. Ponyo (Hayao Miyazaki, 2010)
**Mr Ross, now in his sixties, is hopefully best well known for directing the brilliant Pleasantville. And writing Big.
***Surprising he wasn't asked to direct Mamma Mia – Hallström directed most of ABBA's videos in the 1970s and 1980s as well as ABBA: the Movie in 1977. He's made a few decent films – My Life As A Dog (1985), What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) and Chocolat (2000) among them but sentimentality was always his weakness.
Anyway, I'm glad she still loves Studio Ghibli films (numbers 2, 5, 8 and 10), I think they're brilliant too.
Previously on Barnflakes:
My daughter's top ten films (aged 12)
My daughter's top ten films (aged 11)
My daughter's top ten films (aged 10)
2. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki & Kirk Wise, 2003)
3. The Hunger Games (Gary Ross**, 2012)
4. A Dog's Purpose (Lasse Hallström***, 2017)
5. Howl's Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2005)
6. Jurassic World (Colin Trevorrow, 2015)
7. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence, 2013)
8. My Neighbour Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)
9. Instant Family (Sean Anders, 2018)
10. Ponyo (Hayao Miyazaki, 2010)
*Hmm, Ocean's 8 was going to be in a list I never posted for Worst 10 films of 2018. It would have looked like this:
1. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
2. Ocean's 8
3. Black Panther
4. Bohemian Rhapsody
5. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Two forms of punctuation in a three word title can only be bad)
6. Avengers: Infinity War (I agree with director László Nemes (Son of Saul and Sunset) about superhero movies)
7. Pacific Rim: Uprising
8. You Were Never Really Here (As much as I admire Lyne Ramsey, this didn't work for me)
9. Fifty Shades Freed
10. The Darkest Minds**Mr Ross, now in his sixties, is hopefully best well known for directing the brilliant Pleasantville. And writing Big.
***Surprising he wasn't asked to direct Mamma Mia – Hallström directed most of ABBA's videos in the 1970s and 1980s as well as ABBA: the Movie in 1977. He's made a few decent films – My Life As A Dog (1985), What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) and Chocolat (2000) among them but sentimentality was always his weakness.
Anyway, I'm glad she still loves Studio Ghibli films (numbers 2, 5, 8 and 10), I think they're brilliant too.
Previously on Barnflakes:
My daughter's top ten films (aged 12)
My daughter's top ten films (aged 11)
My daughter's top ten films (aged 10)
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Top ten Keanu Reeves films
2. My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant, 1991)
3. The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999)
4. Speed (de Bont, 1994)
5. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (Herek, 1989)
6. A Scanner Darkly (Linklater, 2006)
7. River's Edge (Hunter, 1986)
8. Thumbsucker (Mills, 2005)
9. Dangerous Liasons (Frears, 1988)
10. Parenthood (Howard, 1989)
We recently had trouble watching the whole of Siberia, a 2018 Netflix film starring a wooden Reeves as a dodgy diamond trader ("Fatally, the script requires Reeves to do some serious acting", quipped the Guardian). You'd think after thirty years of doing the same job, he'd get the hang of it by now.
On paper, Reeves seems more interesting than he is on screen: born in Beirut with a mother from Essex and a Hawaiian father, Reeves is actually Canadian. I read once he didn't own anything and lived out of hotels. His wife gave birth to a stillborn baby in 1999 then died just over a year later in a car accident. It's thought he's Buddhist (though he's not). Then there was that sad meme which went viral a few years ago. No one's entirely sure if he's deep or dumb or both, but everyone likes him. Adam Driver looks like a long lost cousin of Keanu's – but at least he can act.
I’m torn about writing top tens for actors – do you rate the film or the performance or a combination of both? I'm going for both. Hence I'm leaving out the "critical approved" John Wick films, The Devil's Advocate, Constantine and the two other Matrix films – all of which are terrible. Recently he seems to be doing a Liam Neeson and typecasting himself as an action hero in his later years (Neeson was 56 when he did the first Taken movie; Reeves is in his mid-50s now.)
To misquote a line about Orson Welles and Citizen Kane: Point Break is the best action film ever, and it's not even Bigelow's best (that would be Near Dark, surely?).
Thursday, November 22, 2018
Random film review: Circle of Light
Dir: Anthony Roland | Sound: Elsa Stansfield and Delia Derbyshire | UK | 1972 | 32mins.
From the director's website, where you can also rent and watch Circle of Light: “This film without words is composed of Pamela Bone’s unique photographic transparencies. Her talent has been said to ‘push photography beyond its own limits, liberating it to the status of an entirely creative art form’. Inspired by nature, and being more responsive to feeling than to thought, Miss Bone has sought to express the mystery and beauty of the inner vision through photographic means alone: landscape has the quality of a dream; children on the sea-shore have a sense of their own enchantment, trees are foreboding and strange when night moves in their arms. It took Miss Bone twenty years to find the right technique and so overcome the limitations that photography would impose."
Delia Derbyshire, who died in obscurity of renal failure in 2001, has become something of a cult figure in early electronic music. Her pioneering work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop spawned the Dr Who theme. Since her death there have been plays, dramas and exhibitions about her life and work (her posthumous recognition reminds me somewhat of Alan Turing, mathematician and computer scientist, who remained unknown for many years due to his homosexuality; in Derbyshire's case it was partly due to being a woman in a male-dominated industry).
Trunk Records released the soundtrack to Circle of Light on vinyl in 2016. Consisting of natural sounds combined with the odd Dr Who-esque drone, it works best with Bone's mysterious and sometimes beautiful images of nature, parts of which come across as a slower version of Stan Brakhage's Mothlight.
3/5
Previously on Barnflakes:
The Putney Shed Synth
Monday, November 19, 2018
Random film review: Mandy
"He’s the only actor since Marlon Brando that’s actually done anything new with the art of acting; he’s successfully taken us away from an obsession with naturalism into a kind of presentation style of acting that I imagine was popular with the old troubadours."
—Ethan Hawke on Nicholas Cage, 2013
"I think Nicolas Cage is one of the few people in the history of acting that has really changed [the form]. I mean, he’s a true original—one of the greatest actors ever."
—Ethan Hawke, still obsessed with Nicholas Cage, September 2018
"All I care about is the transformation."
—Nicholas Cage on his acting, October 2018
No actor divides opinion more than Nicholas Cage. Even though he's always had a cult following, for many years he was a bit of a joke; you weren't even sure if fans were laughing with him or at him. This is despite winning an Oscar in 1995 for Leaving Las Vegas and working with directors such as David Lynch (Wild at Heart; the filmmaker calls Cage 'the jazz musician of American acting'), Martin Scorsese (Bringing out the Dead), Werner Herzog (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans) and Francis Coppola (yes, his uncle). But for every great film, there's a dozen turkeys—the man's still a workaholic in his mid-50s, though mainly to pay off his debts, it seems.
I'm still not sure he can actually act, but he certainly has a manic presence; and as someone in The Guardian wrote recently, they'd rather watch Cage's worst performance than any film with, say, the bland Ryan Gosling. I'm inclined to agree.
Nevertheless, whilst Cage is powerless to control the numerous 'Cage rage' memes or the reddit forum onetruegod (with 117,000 members), he doesn't exactly help himself when he describes his acting techniques as 'Nouveau Shamanic', 'German Expressionist' and 'Western Kabuki', none of which anyone knows what he's talking about. Most people just call him crazy.
*******
A cult film used to take years to germinate. Not anymore—Mandy comes ready packaged as a cult classic. Charles Manson meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre via Alejandro Jodorowsky and Dario Argento in this lurid, hallucinogenic doom metal psychedelic horror sci-fi revenge LSD trip of a movie. The first half has Nic Cage at his most laid back, playing Red, a lumberjack, living a peaceful, bucolic existence in a cabin in the woods with his girlfriend Mandy. (Sorry to be a party pooper but I would have enjoyed the entire movie if it was just the two of them pottering around, talking planets, watching movies and reading sci-fi novels...) Alas, of course, the tranquil bliss doesn't last.
A hippie cult—with help from a demonic biker gang, the least scary of the bunch looking like Pinhead from Hellrasier—invade his home, murder his girlfriend. And Cage, naturally, goes crazy. And (spoiler alert) kills them all in variously imaginative ways. That's it. But what distinguishes the film, aside from its King Crimson opening song and the doom metal soundtrack from the Icelandic musician Jóhann Jóhannsson (who died earlier this year, aged 48), is the extraordinary visuals, the set pieces—and Cage's crazed performance.
(If I say it’s Netflix's Stranger Things but for grown-ups, what I mean is: it has similar fonts, it’s set in the 1980s, mostly in a forest, it’s scary... yet where Stranger Things was a rehash of Spielberg et al, Mandy is a true original, even if its second half is somewhat predictable; a lusher version of Hobo with a Shotgun or a grindhouse movie. I also noticed shades of British filmmakers Ben Wheatley (in particular Kill List) and Peter Strickland, with their nods to vintage Euro-horror.)
4/5
Previously on Barnflakes:
Top ten Nicholas Cage films
(I was listening to Jóhann Jóhannsson's album Englaborn whilst I was writing this. Such a sad piece of music—and it suddenly dawned on me: films, reddit (I still don’t know what it is), the internet in general, TV, consumerism, most poeple’s pointless office jobs… all this stuff we do to waste our time and energy… and meanwhile, you know, climate change, 60% of wildlife wiped out since 1970, huge divides between rich and poor, all happening before our eyes. I guess we choose to ignore it most of the time...)
Sunday, November 18, 2018
Notes on John Dahl, film director
Like most (if they’d even heard of him), I’d forgotten all about John Dahl – until I saw his name come up recently as director of a few episodes of Amazon Prime’s Outlander series. Could it possibly be the same John Dahl who directed a a string of superb but criminally underrated neo-noirs in the 1990s then seemed to vanish without trace? Yup, the one and only.
The original film noir (a term coined by French film critics retrospectively) was a certain type of thriller made post-war and up until the mid-50s, tapping into America’s pessimism and cynicism. Defined by expressionist lighting and shadows, starring laconic anti-heroes and fabulous femme fatales, with convoluted plots worthy of Shakespeare, some of the best include Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep and Kiss Me Deadly.
In the 60s and 70s film noir came out from the shadows and into the L.A. sunshine with Polanski’s Chinatown and Altman’s The Long Goodbye, two of the best films of the 70s; Penn’s Night Moves, however, as the title suggests, kept things in the dark.
Like John Dahl, Alan J Pakula directed a trilogy of classics in the 1970s: Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men all contain elements of noir, fuelled by political paranoia and corruption in the States during the period. (Pakula died in noirish fashion, aged 70, when a metal pipe smashed through the window of his car and into his head in Melville, an affluent New York suburb. French director Jean-Pierre Melville was a master of the laconic noir; his masterpiece is Le Samouraï.)
Since the 1980s there's been a smattering of classic neo-noirs including Cutters Way, One False Move, Blood Simple, Fargo, LA Confidential, Brick and Mulholland Drive.
John Dahl's first three films – Kill Me Again (1989), Red Rock West (1993) and The Last Seduction (1994) – all inhabit noirish worlds, full of duplicity and desire, and smouldering femme fatales. Kill Me Again stars Val Kilmer as a private eye hired by Joanne Whalley, escaping abusive boyfriend Michael Madsen, to fake her death. Red Rock West contains perhaps Nicholas Cage's least manic performance – well, he's up against Dennis Hopper for a start. Cage plays an out of work drifter who gets mistaken for a hitman, and goes along with it to make $5000. Things start to get complicated when the real hitman – Dennis Hopper – turns up.
The Last Seduction is the best of the three, with Linda Fiorentino as the most socipathic femme fatale ever to grace the screen, running rings around husband Bill Pullman and lover Peter Berg. Still slightly shocking is the scene where she sizes up if the guy in the bar (Berg) who hits on her is really 'hung like a horse', and the sheer fact that she's pure evil throughout, and gets away with it. As Roger Ebert says, 'This woman is bad from beginning to end, she never reforms, she never compromises, and the movie doesn't tack on one of those contrived conclusions where the morals squad comes in and tidies up'.
Dahl returned to the world of noir with 1998's Rounders, starring Matt Damon as a high-stakes poker player. Joy Ride (which spawned two inferior sequels), his 2001 thriller with a noirish, B-movie feel, is a tense, roller coaster of a movie, with two brothers travelling across the States to pick up a girlfriend. En route, one of the brothers, playing around with his CB radio, teases a truck driver who turns out to be a psycho killer. Imagine Spielberg's Duel, with teeth.
Most of Dahl's films received critical acclaim – there's even been a book written about his first three – but fared badly at the box office (I think it's because they all had awful posters), picking up fairly well on video later. His first three are nelgected classics: tense and steamy, with sizzling dialogue, lashings of black humour, an atmospheric sense of place, fine performances and labyrinthine plots. Everything a film noir should be.
The original film noir (a term coined by French film critics retrospectively) was a certain type of thriller made post-war and up until the mid-50s, tapping into America’s pessimism and cynicism. Defined by expressionist lighting and shadows, starring laconic anti-heroes and fabulous femme fatales, with convoluted plots worthy of Shakespeare, some of the best include Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep and Kiss Me Deadly.
In the 60s and 70s film noir came out from the shadows and into the L.A. sunshine with Polanski’s Chinatown and Altman’s The Long Goodbye, two of the best films of the 70s; Penn’s Night Moves, however, as the title suggests, kept things in the dark.
Like John Dahl, Alan J Pakula directed a trilogy of classics in the 1970s: Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men all contain elements of noir, fuelled by political paranoia and corruption in the States during the period. (Pakula died in noirish fashion, aged 70, when a metal pipe smashed through the window of his car and into his head in Melville, an affluent New York suburb. French director Jean-Pierre Melville was a master of the laconic noir; his masterpiece is Le Samouraï.)
Since the 1980s there's been a smattering of classic neo-noirs including Cutters Way, One False Move, Blood Simple, Fargo, LA Confidential, Brick and Mulholland Drive.
John Dahl's first three films – Kill Me Again (1989), Red Rock West (1993) and The Last Seduction (1994) – all inhabit noirish worlds, full of duplicity and desire, and smouldering femme fatales. Kill Me Again stars Val Kilmer as a private eye hired by Joanne Whalley, escaping abusive boyfriend Michael Madsen, to fake her death. Red Rock West contains perhaps Nicholas Cage's least manic performance – well, he's up against Dennis Hopper for a start. Cage plays an out of work drifter who gets mistaken for a hitman, and goes along with it to make $5000. Things start to get complicated when the real hitman – Dennis Hopper – turns up.
The Last Seduction is the best of the three, with Linda Fiorentino as the most socipathic femme fatale ever to grace the screen, running rings around husband Bill Pullman and lover Peter Berg. Still slightly shocking is the scene where she sizes up if the guy in the bar (Berg) who hits on her is really 'hung like a horse', and the sheer fact that she's pure evil throughout, and gets away with it. As Roger Ebert says, 'This woman is bad from beginning to end, she never reforms, she never compromises, and the movie doesn't tack on one of those contrived conclusions where the morals squad comes in and tidies up'.
Dahl returned to the world of noir with 1998's Rounders, starring Matt Damon as a high-stakes poker player. Joy Ride (which spawned two inferior sequels), his 2001 thriller with a noirish, B-movie feel, is a tense, roller coaster of a movie, with two brothers travelling across the States to pick up a girlfriend. En route, one of the brothers, playing around with his CB radio, teases a truck driver who turns out to be a psycho killer. Imagine Spielberg's Duel, with teeth.
Most of Dahl's films received critical acclaim – there's even been a book written about his first three – but fared badly at the box office (I think it's because they all had awful posters), picking up fairly well on video later. His first three are nelgected classics: tense and steamy, with sizzling dialogue, lashings of black humour, an atmospheric sense of place, fine performances and labyrinthine plots. Everything a film noir should be.
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