Boogie Nights

OK, so not quite an Oscar winner but a respectable three nominations which is not bad for a film whose subject matter includes sex, drugs and the rise and fall the West Coast porn industry of the 1970s.

It opens with a naive young man called Eddie (played by Mark Wahlburg) who is discovered by Burt Reynolds’ sleazy movie mogul Jack Horner washing dishes in the back room of a nightclub. He is swiftly inducted into the world of pornographic movies and the associated hedonistic LA lifestyle of drugs and pool parties. He adopts the soubriquet of Dirk Diggler and builds his reputation mainly based on the prodigious size of his penis.

The film veers between humour at the expense of the shoddily made porno films with badly acted, wafer thin plots and tediously mechanical sex, watched by slack jawed men, and the grim consequences of drug overdoses and the degrading nature of the work.

As the hedonistic 70s give way to the greed is good 80s with the switch to cheap home video, Dirk’s career inevitably starts to wane as he is edged out by younger performers and finds that his, ahem, performance has been severely affected by the drugs he has taken. An ill advised attempt at a career as a singer goes nowhere and things take a dark turn with more drugs and violence.

Will our hero get a happy ending? (fnarr, fnarr)

As a whole, the film captures the sleazy seventies with a great soundtrack and attention to detail in the fashions and home decor.

Weapons

Another Oscar winner for Saturday night and definitely one worth watching without too many spoilers if possible. The premise is that one night at 2:17 in the morning, 17 young children from the same elementary school class got out of their beds, went downstairs and left their houses, running off into the night. The next day we see an empty classroom with just their teacher Justine, and Alex, the only child not affected.

The opening section of the film is told from Justine’s perspective as angry parents demand answers and point the finger at her. She locks herself away with a bottle of vodka to escape the anonymous threatening phone calls and wakes up to find her car vandalised with the word WITCH daubed in red paint on the side. Is she really the nice, young liberal teacher that she seems?

The film then proceeds to show events from the different perspectives of people involved- a grieving father, a local cop, the head teacher of the school, a homeless person and finally the child Alex, as the truth is slowly unveiled. 

This is a horror film built around a mystery that keeps you guessing until the final act, with the Rashomon style structure working well, with overlapping timelines and viewpoints. There are a couple of jump scares but the film doesn’t rely on them to build tension and the conclusion is a satisfyingly gruesome one. There is some humour too (can we say Naruto running here), that undercuts the horror just enough so that the atmosphere isn't completely grim - without getting into spoiler territory the premise is one that could easily have gone to some very dark places.

The Big Sleep

I’m currently reading this for the book club and spotted that this was available for streaming, so I picked it for Saturday night viewing.

It’s a classic tale of hard boiled detectives, blackmail, betrayal, vice and murder from 1946 starring Humphrey Bogart as private eye Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Mrs Rutledge, the object of both his investigation and affections.

Plotwise Marlowe is employed by the elderly Colonel Sternwood to investigate a letter from a rare book dealer called Geiger asking for money to cover gambling debts supposedly incurred by his younger daughter, the flirtatious and unpredictable Carmen. After accepting the job, Marlowe also encounters Sternwood’s elder daughter, the married but separated Mrs Rutledge who seems keen to know what her father is up to.

Marlowe soon discovers that Geiger’s bookshop is not quite what it seems and tracks him to his house in the Hollywood hills. As he keeps watch, a shot rings out and he breaks in to discover a drugged Carmen in a compromising position, a very dead Geiger and a secret camera with the film missing. Shenanigans ensue.

From this point, things get steadily more confusing and complicated with multiple murders and murky mysteries, explained with a hefty amount of dialogue and people pointing guns at each other. At some points I wished for a detective’s notebook or a murder board with pictures and bits of red string to keep track of who was double crossing who.

The sparky scenes with Bogart and Bacall keep things moving though with some unexpectedly funny bits of business thrown in to lighten the tone. Bogart was 25 years senior to Bacall, but that didn’t stop him from carrying on a very public affair with her whilst divorcing his third wife. The pair married in 1945 and were reportedly happy together until Bogart’s death some 12 years later.

Sinners

Another Oscar winning movie as the Saturday night pick, and this was a good one. As with superhero stories it’s difficult to find a new twist on the vampire genre, but Ryan Coogler manages this on several levels.

The movie is set in 1932 Mississippi and stars Michael B Jordan as a pair of identical twin brothers returning to their home state from a sojourn in Chicago dressed in sharp suits, with a truck load of illicit booze that they have heisted by playing off the Italian and Irish mobs against each other. The first third of the movie sees them reconnecting with old friends, lovers and acquaintances as they put together a crew to run a juke joint for black workers so the can sell the booze at a tidy profit. They first buy an old sawmill from a fat, racist landowner (clearly in the Klan) and in turn recruit their cousin Sammie, a gifted guitarist, and a veteran bluesman called Delta Slim to provide the evening’s entertainment.

The day is spent joyously as the juke joint is spruced up, food prepared and Sammie plays his guitar with joy. As the sun goes down, the scene changes to a remote farmhouse where a badly burnt and beaten white man pleads for sanctuary from a couple of suspicious farmers. He claims to be on the run from a posse of Choctaw hunters but as soon as he is allowed into the house his true vampiric nature is revealed.

Meanwhile the juke joint is now jumping as Sammie’s guitar conjures the spirits of the past and future in an astonishing scene, as the ever-growing crowd of vampires gather outside attracted by the prospect of music and fresh blood. The music is great in this, being a mix of authentic era appropriate blues mixed with a modern score.

The story pretty much follows the established rules of vampire lore - they must be invited into a place, they are repelled by garlic and only a stake to the heart or sunlight will kill them. However what makes this movie stand out is the way that is tackles straight on the institutional racism of the Deep South and the contrast with the world of the vampires. After a satisfyingly bloody final act, there are two codas that lift the movie to the next level, especially a final scene starring the legendary musician Buddy Guy that initially plays like a mid credits bonus scene but is actually a brilliant conclusion to the story, leaving you wanting to know more. I really want to know more about the Choctaw hunters!

Great stuff and a worthy winner.

Superman

Superman is the archetype for comic book superheroes. He has been brought to life in film and tv many times, but do we really need another version? This recent incarnation wisely skips the origin story and assumes a reasonable level of knowledge of the character and associated cast, starting the story in media res with Superman crashing to the ground, beaten and bloody after his first defeat in a fight. He is rescued by Krypto the Superdog which immediately sets the tone - this is not another grim dark take on the character, rather this one is the big Boy Scout with his pants on over his tights.

The plot of this film revolves around Superman becoming involved in geopolitics by stopping a war between rival nations somewhere on the other side of the world, purely to save lives. That the invading nation is a US ally and has been well supplied with arms by Lex Luthor is the thing that is going to get him into trouble.On top of this we have a supporting cast of all the usual suspects of a Superman story - Lois Line, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, as well as Green Lantern, Mister Terrific and Hawkgirl as members of the "Justice Gang". 

Cue much mayhem with monsters to fight and evil schemes to thwart, played with a light touch and a satisfying number of twists to the story. Some parts don't entirely work - some of the cgi effects feel a little bit floaty and lightweight in places, and the subplot with Lex Luthor's social media influencer girlfriend and a somewhat unlikeable version of Jimmy Olsen is a bit reductive. 

On the whole, it's an enjoyable film for a bit of light hearted fun and a James Gunn's take is pleasant change from the previous brooding and dark version of the character from Zack Snyder. 

One Battle After Another

I went into this film not knowing a great deal about it, other than it was this year's Oscar winner. It opens with an audacious raid by a rag tag left wing revolutionary group on an immigration camp on the Mexican border to free prisoners being held there. Whilst Pat (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is seemingly in charge of little more than letting off some celebratory fireworks his partner, the marvellously named Perfida Beverley Hills (Teyanna Taylor) sexually humiliates the camp commandant Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). 

After an attempted bombing, Perfida is intercepted by Lockjaw who it seems has a fetishistic obsession with her and blackmails her into meeting for sex. She winds up pregnant, but this doesn't seem to quench her revolutionary fervour (one striking shot shows her heavily pregnant and joyfully firing an automatic rifle), and after giving birth to a daughter she returns to the fight and is finally arrested during a bank raid. 

Cut to 16 years later. Pat is now living off grid under an alias as Bob with daughter Willa (played by Chase Infiniti). Lockjaw has been invited to join a secretive White Supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers Club so determines to hunt down Willa to hide any evidence that he might once have had an interracial relationship. Hijinks and ultra violence ensue.

I'm still not sure quite what to make of this film. There are obvious parallels with the current situation with right wing racist paramilitaries hunting down immigrants and carrying out summary executions of undesirables. However, the revolutionaries seem to be more rooted in the radical chic of the 1970s than contemporary movements like Antifa. The film was adapted from the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon which was set between the late 60s and 1984, which might explain this though.

There is an uneasy tension between the truly vile politics of the Christmas Adventurers and almost farcical/slapstick humour as acid casualty Pat tries and fails to remember his identifying passcodes, worries about charging his phone, and then falls off a roof to be tasered by the police whilst on the run. 

The film is also on the long side at over two and half hours, cramming an awful lot of stuff in there with some great action sequences and car chases that feel almost grafted in from a classic 70s style thriller. The score by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead is also worthy of note and underpins the action nicely.

Not what I was expecting, but worth a watch.

Incendies

I went into this not knowing what to expect, other than it was a French-Canadian film directed by Denis Villeneuve. The film opens with a disturbing scene of young boys having their heads shaved and apparently being inducted into being child soldiers in an unnamed middle-eastern country, before switching to an office in Canada where a notary is reading the will of the recently deceased Nawan Mawal, an unassuming immigrant from the Middle East who had worked as his secretary for 18 years, to her twin 20-something children Jeanne and Simon.

The will contains some unusual provisions - she is to be buried simply, naked and face down, without prayers or headstone until a promise is fulfilled. The notary then hands two letters to the children - one to be delivered to their father, who they thought was dead, and the other to a brother who they had not previously been aware of. Simon reacts with bemused anger but Jeanne resolves to travel to the Levant to track down her brother and uncover the mysteries of Nawan's life.

The story is told through a mix of flashbacks and contemporary scenes, as the truth is slowly uncovered, showing Nawan caught up in the midst of a brutal civil war between Nationalist Christian militias and Muslim rebels in a country that is strongly implied to be the Lebanon. Key events are drawn from that bloody and protracted conflict, with the central character of Nawan being based on a real person called Souha Bechara.

The conclusion of the film is a grim one, perhaps with one twist too many, but it certainly had the intended effect of showing what life in the Middle East is like during the endless wars that have cursed the region. Definitely worth a watch.

Paul McCartney : Man on the Run

If you've been part of the biggest band in the world for ten years, what do you do when that comes to an end? We know how John Lennon coped with it but in Paul McCartney's case, he first recorded a deeply personal solo album on basic home recording equipment in his spare room before disappearing to a remote Scottish farmhouse with his new wife Linda. The album was something of a disappointment to bemused fans, but it wasn't long before he felt the urge to get back to work and spread his musical wings again.

This documentary covers the period from the breakup of the Beatles to the slow winding down of McCartney's band Wings in 1980, using some rare footage and giving insights into Paul and Linda's life together. There's a lot to enjoy here, with music from the various evolutions of Wings as they went from doing surprise gigs in student unions, to recording an album in a ramshackle studio in Lagos, to playing Madison Square Gardens amidst fevered rumours of a Beatles reunion.

I remember some of the cruel jokes about Linda only being in Wings because she was married to Paul, but it's clear from this that she worked extremely hard to make music as well as running a farm and being a mum to their four children. It was also good to learn that after the pain of the Beatles split that Paul and John finally rekindled their friendship in private, although they were robbed of the chance to make music together again.

The Worst Person in the World

 A Norwegian romantic comedy drama is probably not the genre that I would gravitate towards, but this critically acclaimed film from Joachim Trier did pull me in bit by bit. 

The story revolves around Julie, a young woman approaching her 30th birthday and unsure of what direction she wants her life to take. She starts by switching from her medical degree to psychology before deciding that what she really wants to be is a freelance photographer (and maybe a writer). She starts a relationship with Axsel, a comic artist who is fifteen years older than her and keen to start a family, an idea which fills her with horror (especially after spending a weekend with Axel's happily settled friends with children). 

While walking home from a publishing event, she gatecrashes a wedding and meets a barista called Elvind with whom she feels a connection. She starts daydreaming about him before breaking off her relationship with Axsel to be with Elvind instead. During this time she also examines her relationship with her divorced parents, seeing a pattern of broken or unhappy marriages through the years, and also has a psychedelic experience that confronts her fears of becoming a parent and aging.

I would hesitate to call this a comedy and it's not really romantic either, but it does capture something of the uncertainty that is part of moving from your twenties to your thirties when life suddenly seems all too real. 

Nebraska Live

 A coda to last week's viewing of Deliver Me From Nowhere was this live performance of Nebraska, filmed simply in Black and White with an equally stark musical arrangement that captures the original spirit of those bedroom recordings from over 40 years previously. Bruce's voice has aged, not surprisingly, but it feels like he has grown into some of these songs with the added depth adding emotion to classics like Nebraska, Mansion on the Hill and Highway Patrolman. These could well become the versions of the songs that I turn to first now.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

In 1981, Bruce Springsteen was on a roll. After the release of the critically acclaimed and chart topping album The River and a sellout tour to large crowds, everyone (not least the record company) was eagerly anticipating the next big hit from the Boss.

However, there was a darkness on the edge of Bruce's metaphorical town. The tour had been physically and emotionally gruelling, and the long studio sessions for the previous album had eaten through all but $20,000 of his savings. He rented a house by a lake in the small town of Colts Neck and bought a simple four track cassette recorder, turning one of the unused bedrooms in the otherwise empty house into a home studio with the aid of his engineer Mike Batlan. 

The plan was to work on demo recordings in advance of the studio sessions with the band but things took a darker turn. Bruce was evidently rattling around in the house on his own when he caught the movie Badlands on the TV. This led him to research the Starkweather spree killings that inspired the film, which he turned into a grim first person narrative murder ballad called Nebraska. 

Other songs started to flow - tales of working class struggles and troubled people, evidently inspired by memories of his relationship with his damaged and abusive father (shown in black and white flashbacks). At one point he also starts listening to the song Frankie Teardrop by the band Suicide, which Mike Batlan advises him not to listen to on repeat. 

Around this time he starts a tentative relationship with a young single mother called Faye that he meets after a gig at a local bar where he has been blowing off steam playing with old Jersey friends. This is a composite character created for the film, but it shows his difficulty in committing to any sort of lasting relationship at this time in his life.

As his mental health spirals and the recording sessions with the band are struggling (a stellar recording of Born in the USA being the one high point), he insists on putting out the lo-fi home recordings out as an album, warts and all. Fortunately his manager and producer Jon Landau saw where he was coming from and backed him in the face of record company scepticism to release the album Nebraska with zero fanfare (although having a sure fire hit in the bag probably helped).

That's pretty much the film, but it's a worthwhile watch mainly for the performances of Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen and Stephen Graham as his father, and the music which sees White recreating the feeling of those haunting recordings on Nebraska as well as the punch the air live performances in a couple of scenes. 

Her

A rewatch for this 2013 film, about a man falling in love with his artificially intelligent operating system. The protagonist is a man called Theodore Twombly, making a living by writing heartfelt personalised letters on behalf of other people (beautifullyhandwrittenletters.com) and living on his own whilst going through a painful divorce. He installs a new operating system on his computer (that quaintly comes on a disc with an instruction leaflet) that promises to revolutionise his life by adapting and learning from him. After answering some personal questions and selecting the female voice, he finds himself in conversation with his new companion as she sorts through his old emails and organises his contacts.

He starts to form an attachment to Samantha (as the AI decides to call herself), which quickly grows into romance and even sexual feelings. I remember a great deal of scepticism at the time (and also expressed by some of the other characters) that someone would possibly have a meaningful relationship with an AI, but evidently many people are now doing exactly that. 

Perhaps the most science fictional element is that his conversation is picked up perfectly by his wireless earbuds (did we have those in 2013?) without the usual palaver of "Alexa, switch the light on" "I'm sorry, I couldn't find a device or group called light". Director Spike Jonze also completely missed the obvious conclusion that the only reason a software company would release an AI operating system is so that they could hoover up as much personal data as possible to send targeted ads and political propaganda to the user as they can.

The Outfit

In this film, Mark Rylance plays an English cutter running a high class tailor shop in Chicago of the 1950s. He treats all of his gentlemen customers with respect and discretion, especially the sharp suited mobsters who use the back of his shop as a drop box for messages. He takes a fatherly concern when his young receptionist Mable appears to be showing an interest in Richie, the son of the local Irish mob boss Roy Boyle. Mable denies that there is anything serious going on, sharing her dreams of travelling the world one day but having to be satisfied with her snow globes of Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower.

One fateful snowy night, Richie is dragged into the shop accompanied by the ambitious Boyle Capo Francis. The pair are on the run from the both the cops and the rival LaFontaine gang, and Richie has been badly shot and is in need of sewing up. Francis is also carrying a briefcase with a tape from a hidden FBI bug that he believes will prove the identity of a rat in the organisation.

From that point, the drama plays out with some satisfying twists with the tape as the maguffin. There are some tense (and sometimes bloody) scenes with Mark Rylance on top form as the voice of calm reason attempting to placate the hot headed men in power, echoing his best known role as Cromwell in Wolf Hall.  The use of a single set and the claustrophobic air make this feel a little like a stage play, but that suits the nature of this story. 

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

 I seem to have watched or read a lot of things with parallel universes recently, but this film is easily the most the bonkers. It starts simply enough with a middle aged launderette owner called Evelyn trying to sort out her tax return while dealing with her cantankerous elderly father, a rebellious teenage daughter and a husband who she finds out is planning to ask for a divorce. At the tax office she is contacted by a representative from a parallel Earth who is the Alpha version of her husband who explains that as the greatest failure of all the parallel Evelyns she alone can save the multiverse by jumping into her parallel selves and absorbing their skills and talents. 

The first jump she makes is into a universe where she became a world famous kung fu movie star and returns with superhuman combat skills, leading to some fantastic fight scenes through the tax office building. Each jump and twist gets steadily wilder as the multiverse (and Evelyn's mind) becomes increasingly splintered. There are some genuinely laugh out loud and jaw dropping moments before the satisfying conclusion. Excellent fun.

The Princess Bride

I revisited this in preparation for a book club discussion of the original novel by William Goldman. Yes, it's cheesy. Yes, it's made on a shoestring with cheap sets and cobbled together costumes. Yes, it definitely fails the Bechdel test. It's still fun though, mainly for one of the most satisfying fencing scenes in movie history and a whole lot of quotable lines.

David Bowie : The Final Act

A retrospective look at Bowie's career focusing mainly on the period from the poorly received Tin Machine project through to his headline show at Glastonbury in 2000, his health problems and withdrawal from public life and his final album released just before his death in 2016. I've never understood the vitriolic response to Tin Machine, which deeply hurt Bowie according to accounts given in this documentary. He hadn't been happy with some of his 80s albums, feeling they were playing safe for a global audience rather than what he really wanted to do which was just be a guy in a band for a bit, so that's what he did and it felt like he had fun doing it.