The Cutprice Guignol

The Ninth Year: The Haunting of Swill House

Category: Movie Marathon

September 17, 2013

Movie Marathon #11: The Dark Knight

Well, it’s come to this: another thoughtless rehashing of the final role of the hugely lamented Heath Ledger. Appearing here in what is essentially the definitive representation of The Joker (save for maybe Mark Hamill’s work on Batman: The Animated Series), Ledger did himself spectacularly proud with his swan song. A deranged, unhinged, terrifying performance in which Heath inhabits the role of this psychotic villain, it rightly garnered an Oscar win and gallons of critical praise, acting as a tragic marker for just how far this exceptional actor could have gone.

But. I watched the second installment in the Nolan’s trilogy recently, and it struck me how questionable the film is a whole. I’m not one of those Christian Bale haters who seem to loath the very talented actor on principal; I think he makes a grand old Batman, as well as being a swoonsomely suave Bruce Wayne. And he brings a bit of subtle humour to the role, a hint of tongue in cheek wit that elevates this Batman tenfold. Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Aaron Eckhart also do solidly well, prancing around in the B-stories of the movie’s outskirts with glee (even though they talk almost entirely in exposition). I also developed a powerful crush on Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon in this segment, but that’s neither here nor there.

But this film is always going to be overshadowed the fact that it features the final, almost portentous performance from one of the best actors I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching. A powerhouse, hypnotic role that almost feels unfair in how good it is; it’s not right that we lost Heath Ledger as he was cresting the wave of what promised to be a fantastic career. This film, however entertaining and absorbing it might be, will forever stand as a morbid momento of what might have been.

Also, do you think Heath ever brought up the fact he filmed a gay sex scene with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s brother? I sincerely, truly hope so. For Heath’s sake.

Leave a comment
September 16, 2013

Movie Marathon #10: Brazil

My earliest memory of Brazil-indeed, of any film, come to think of it-was growing up with a huge Brazil poster dangling above the stairs next to my room. I loved the wierd imagery; a great winged figure rising from a set of drawers in some existential office block, framed with the neon pink script declaring the movie’s title. It’s one of my dad’s favourite movies, and one that I received on the understanding I would watch it immediately the day I turned fifteen. It’s one of those wierd films that I was aware of in intimate detail before I’d even seen a snippet of it; so often a disappointment, but not in the case of this dystopian Gilliam masterpiece.

Brazil is one of the few films whose appeal I’ll admit is limited; it’s a deliberately wierd, passionately contrived, extremely dark sci-fi comedy set in an unnamed period of time that draws heavily from Orwell’s 1984 for themes and imagery. I know how awful that makes it sound, but none of that ever takes over Gilliam’s bonkers imagery and cunningly crafted story. Like Wes Anderson, I usually think Terry Gilliam’s makes interesting movies as opposed to perfect ones; somehow, he drew together the perfect cast-including an utterly fantastic Michael Palin as a professional torturer-and one of the most brilliantly depressing/life-affirming endings I’ve ever seen.

Much has to be said for the sheer creativity poured into Brazil; it would make no sense to spew it all up here, but when you do watch the film (and you will), the devil’s in the details. It’s like being squirted by a joke flower on the lapel of the Thought Police. I also developed a huge crush on Johnathan Pryce over the course of the film, portraying a beaten-down office drone who becomes a superhero in his dreams. Ridiculous? Almost as much as Jim Broadbent playing a questionable plastic surgeon. But fuck it: this is a film that defined my experience as an avid audience member because it was so unaplogetically ridiculous on every level. But that didn’t stop it being one of the most resonant, touching and consistently entertaining movies in existence. All hail Gilliam, except when he’s making yer Imaginarium shite.

Leave a comment
September 14, 2013

Movie Marathon #8: The Mummy

Now, I believe there to be a real dearth in the world of family horror films. You know what I mean-the type that terrify the kids into silence while the grown-ups can drink wine and enjoy the general rollick and fun of a good story. Babysitting movies, essentially.

The Mummy is a perfect example of that; fun, light, exciting, entertaining and properly scary in places. I saw it when I was twelve and incredibly impressionable, and I was shit-scared by it. It didn’t help that my father spent the rest of that evening chanting “Ih-mo-thep..” whenever I was in a room by myself, but frankly that’s just good parenting. I needed toughening up.

It’s also a wonderful throwback to the Hammer Horror films of the sixties; all glamorous women, handsome heroes and bumbling sidekicks. It’s difficult to balance homage with making a solid film of your own, but here it works; there’s just enough tongue placed firmly in cheek for the movie to pull it’s own style out of film history. It’s also greatly blessed by a cast who look like they’re having the best time ever, especially the eccentric English collector played by a gurning, goggling, gaping John Hannah. And Rachel Weisz as the sexiest librarian known to mankind. Which certainly helps.

It’s properly scary, too; from the opening scene of live mummification to the slowly-regenerating ancient killer mummy running around Egypt waging war with a wannabe Liam Neeson on a horse, it doesn’t skimp on getting in some really traumatic scenes for the kids. And therein lies it’s allure-when you’re a kid, you secretly hunt out the scary stuff, the stuff you shouldn’t really be watching. I still think that one of the reasons I have such a passion for horror movies is that feeling of crawling into the comforting womb of Something You Shouldn’t Be Doing, and The Mummy balances the fun adventure story with the nasty, violent horror side with panache. It’s a brilliant way for kids to get into the scary side of cinema without staying up late and ending up wide-eyed with terror-fueled insomnia after over-indulging on some blood-soaked frames of film. And anything that gets kids into horror is something I love. Saves me the bother.

Leave a comment
September 14, 2013

Movie Marathon #9: The Bling Ring

The Bling Ring marks Sofia Coppola’s fifth venture into feature film territory, her first since the 2010 drama Somewhere. Starring Emma Watson, Katie Chang and Taissa Farmiga as members of the titular crime gang, the film draws from the true story of a privileged group of teenagers in California who routinely burgled celebrities to collect trophies and trinkets from their homes-victims included Paris Hilton and Orlando Bloom, with some scenes shot inside Hilton’s own residence.

The film is filled with Coppola’s trademark ennui-the beautiful cinematography is chock-full of long, languid shots, and that very specific sense of disaffection and mild, middle-class dissatisfaction. Coppola’s ability to capture the frustration and discontent of beautiful young women-as she displayed in her first feature, The Virgin Suicides, and later in Lost in Translation-is brought to the forefront in a very different way in The Bling Ring, with a bunch of pretty young things and their social restlessness captured to a tee. One of Coppola’s key skills is her ability to remove herself from the action, acting only as a passive observer to the increasingly mad events taking place around her-she refuses at any point to become involved in the world of the girls or their high-profile victims. Instead, she focuses on what has driven these privileged young women, on the cusp of adulthood, to steal pointless knick-knacks from their idols; less a physical or psychological need to burgle, but rather for the pseudo-fame that came from the news coverage and social interest in the case.

Kudos has to go to the actresses who inhabit the challenging roles with ease. Finding young actresses who can convincingly portray, well, anything, really, is a challenge, but Coppola hit the jackpot with the lead five. Emma Watson, in the process of throwing of the shackles of her rise to fame through Harry Potter, rightly received buckets of critical praise for her performance as the leader of the group.

However, perhaps too much emphasis was put on her character at the expense of any sort of reasonable characterisation of the other four girls, as they begin to meld together with little defining characteristics. That said, this is a film about teenagers occupying the height of vapidity; the blank stares, mundane dialogue and overwhelming sense of senselessness, though sometimes seeming put in place just to emphasise how crushingly shallow these women are, are required to truly put across how crushingly shallow these women really, truly, and utterly are.

Leave a comment
September 13, 2013

Movie Marathon #7: Talk to Her

Pedro Almodovar makes patchy, patchy films. Volver? Genius. Atame!? Pish. The Skin I Live In? Visionary. Bad Education? Bleh. And so on. Pretty much, when he’s on, he’s on with fireworks blowing out his arse and steam coming out of his ears, and when he’s off he makes soap operas with actresses who should be doing far better things.

Luckily for me, Talk to Her is an excellent movie; flawed, yes, but driven by two excellent central performances. Tracking the relationship between the male nurse of a coma patient and the boyfriend of another patient in the same hospital, it takes on a variety of typically huge themes; sexuality, love, rape, obession, men climbing up inside giant metaphorical vaginas-your usual Almodovarian affair. But what sets it apart, at least for me, is the quiter nature of the film- although it features some ridiculous sequences and powerful scenes, it eschews his usual shrieky stlye of direction to create a mournful, very modern tragedy.

The real kudos must go to Javier Camara for his performance as Beningo, the male nurse who looks after a young female dancer stricken into a coma. He’s an awful man, in so many ways, but he’s also an innocent; there’s only a small part of him that is aware what he’s doing is inherently wrong, and he is consistently misled by emotions only he truly believes he has. He’s ambiguos and interesting, and that’s more than can be said for most of Almodovar’s straight-down-the-line creation.

The developing relationship with the gorgeous Dario Grandinetti, who winds up meeting Beningo after his girlfriend, a bullfighter, winds up in a coma after a fight turns nasty, is also beautifully handled. Grandinetti’s Marco is reiticient and as weak as Beningo in his own ways, but gradually comes round to feel sympathy and to even care for the horribly misguided nurse. It’s an odd Almodovar film in that it doesn’t focus on the women in the story-for most of the film, the key female players are in comas- but rather on the way that, even when they are not physically or mentally present, these strong, ambitious women have an untold influence over both these men’s lives.

Christ, that was pretentious.

Leave a comment
September 12, 2013

Movie Marathon #6: District 9

Recently, I went to see Elysium. Unfortunatley, I can’t review it here as I already did so for one of the sites that pays me to write for them here, so I’ll have to bloody well satisfy myself with Neil Blomkamp’s electric debut, Distric 9.

Now, I LOVE sci-fi movies; I love movies in general, granted, but boy-oh-boy-oh I love me some sci-fi. From the momen my dad handed me my first book of Philip K. Dick short stories to the first time I saw Alien, I’ve been fascinated by how people view the future. As I got older, I became a little disenchated with the super high-tech, glossy version of days to come, and found myself leaning more toward a Bladerunner-style grottiness; I loved writers and directors who created their future as a kind of nasty, dirty, unpleasant world of shuderring awfulness. But that’s because I’m wierd.

I thought I’d seen every variation there was to be seen on this idea. That’s why it took me so damn long to get around to District 9; an unknwon actor, a big action move, some aliens, the future’s shite, etc. Yeah, yeah. But, one day (the very day my brother left for university, bizarrely, though this is neither here nor there), I was slouching around the house with nothing to do and decided to watch it.

And it’s brilliant. Truly, mandly, wonderfully brilliant. First off, you’ve got that intriguing premise- when aliens DO get to us, we bung them in a ghetto in Johnanesburg and try to keep them off our streets and give them derogatory nicknames (yeah, so, Blomkamp hadn’t quite got his head around the idea of “subtext” yet). Then throw in the documentary format of following Wikus- a propely stunning big-time debut from Sharlto Copley (whose name I didn’t know for so long I began to refer to him as “Wikus” in my head)- a government offical, as he begins the process of moving the “prawns” to a larger, safer commune far and away from any human contact. It’s a sympathetic film; warm, intelligent, with smatterings of humour throughout that show Blomkamp doesn’t quite take himself too seriously. It’s emotional without being cloying; exciting without going overboard, and creative without trying to smack us in the face with a big stick that says “LOOK HOW FUCKING TALENTED I AM! DICKS!”.

Copley is the real human heart of the film (excuse the pun-ishment), an innocent, slightly dim guy who ends up working against the Collusus of the media manipulation of the events surrounding his exploits, while simulateneously fighting for his life and his right to carry on living the way he was used to. It’s a great role for a kind-of debut; almost Shakesperean in it’s tragedy, while also maintaining some of Wikus’ humanity and flawed, naive nature. Copley rips it to shreds. Pun not intended but enjoyed.

1 Comment
September 11, 2013

Movie Marathon #5: Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Black Pearl

I’m a big Johnny Depp apologist. I love him in a few films- Sleepy Hollow, Ed Wood-like him in a couple more-Sweeney Todd, Edward Sisscorhands-and hate him in more than I could comfortably count on all my appendages. Dark Shadows, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Finding Neverland, and so on. And it doesn’t help that he manages to come across as a washed-up reject from the world of Bohemia, with interviews like painting him as the worst kind of unnecessarily adored, pointedly laid-back bastard. Which I’m sure is at least something of a collective misinterpretation.

But I will stand by his rightfully Oscar-nominated performance as Captain Jack Sparrow in the glorious adventure romp, Curse of the Black Pearl. It truly transcends simple prancing around on-screen-within that first, glorious introduction of Jack pitifully attempting to salvage a sinking ship, you’ve forgotten that you’re watching an actor trying to convince you of his validity-and bear in mind that actor is Johnny In-Depp-titude (look, I fucking tried)-and you’re drawn in by the charismatic piraate who redefines the word “swagger”.

Luckily, the film manages not to rely on Depp’s staggeringly good (literally and metaphorically) performance. Director Gore Verbinski weaves together a thrilling family adventure romp that nails the pacing (a tricky one for a child and adult orientated movie), relating a complicated and lengty ploy without ever dropping pace. Add to that some cracking action sequences-the budget was blown in the right place- and you’ve already created a movie I’d be happy to sit through. He even manages to coax some perfectly passable performances from wooden-as-a-stick eye-candy Kiera Knightely and Orlando Bloom as the star-crossed lovers at the story’s heart.

Verbinski is spoiled for choice with his supporting cast-the gleefully dastardly Geoffrey Rush, a rare American silver-screen appearence for Mackenzie Crook, the luscious Zoe Saldana and the criminally underused Johnathan Pryce (whose masterpiece Brazil I’ll be investigating at some point). But he doesn’t neglect them; rather weaving them into this gorgeous world of pirate zombies, boat chases and acursed gold. A beautiful, unreserved bit of entertainment from the Oscar-winning director of The Lone Ranger. If that sentence doesn’t cause reality to combust.

Leave a comment
September 10, 2013

Movie Marathon #4: Withnail & I

How many of you, after watching Withnail & I for the first time, decided to model your life on Withnail? Started swaggering around in a big coat, drinking questionable substances and quoting Shakespeare in the park? Hands up. Right, fuck you all. You’re the reason I can never love this film as much as I should. Because it created scores of establishment-bending wankers trying to emulate Richard E. Grant playing one of the most interminably terrible cunts in silver-screen history.

And it is a brilliant film; dawdling around with pseudo-philosophical bullshit, reveling in the beauty of the English countryside, and constantly spouting eminently quotable lines. Very little happens to shake the earth, and that’s the beauty of the piece; Paul Mcgann’s guileless but neurotically endearing actor brings a wide-eyed innocence to the otherwise very black-hearted little movie. Richard Griffiths (may he rest in peace) is simply fantastic as Uncle Monty, one of the most watching-through-your-fingers lecherous poshos I’ve ever clapped eyes on. And the film is utterly British, in general-with coffee shops, pubs, Shakespeare and the muddy countryside, it smacks of a knowing but ultimately affectionate pat on the head to all the awesome and awful corners of British culture.

But yet. The constant imitation of Withnail is a testament to the sheer comedic force Grant brings to the role; he’s briliant. Shamelessly cowardly, pathetic, dependent, arrogant and pretentious, he represents the one of most toe-curlingly unbearable characters even created, and he delivers every line with a tongue-rolling aplomb that’s simply irrepeatable.

IRREPEATABLE. Get it? Withnail is a vile, vile man; deeply entertaining for a two-hour on-screen dalliance, but no-one you’d really want to have around for any lengthy period of time. He’s a child with delusions of adulthood; a grimly awful man who you’d simply tire of in the real world. So, to everyone who’s toying with that extra-long coat and furniture polish: chin-chin, motherfuckers. Chin-chin.

Leave a comment
September 9, 2013

Movie Marathon #3: A Nightmare on Elm Street

I like classic horror movies. I like movies starring Johnny Depp before he only played one character. I like Robert Englund running around with a spiky glove of death terrorizing sexy youths while they sleep.

No, I’m not suddenly going to turn around and admit to hating another seminal film-I love Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s absolutely, utterly, wonderfully absurd; one of the first movies to employ properly hilarious and creative methods of violent death, in the form of the supernatural kiddie fiddler Freddie Krueger.

The first of the Big Three of Horror I’ll be reviewing over the next thirty days (Halloween, Friday the 13th and Elm Street), Wes Craven’s creepy little horror comes up it around a bit, threw in a pointlessly alcoholic mother, some soft-core sex scenes, and tried to work out what they couagainst one major barrier; the film itself is pretty awful. Now, shut up and let me explain; Wes Craven is a cracking director, and his skill at shooting a gorgeous, claustrophobic chiller is evident even in this, which was one of his earliest movies. But Christ.

It’s clear from the complete lack of skilled actors that the budget went on making this a gory, scary slasher; the idea behind it is fantastic, and the film pretty much relies on the strength of the concept and Englund’s cackle (“DON’T RUN IN THE HELL-WAYS!”). The rest of the acting is pretty shockingly terrible; I know time makes fools of us all, but Elm Street looks beyond dated; it looks like someone took dated, then bashed it wround a bit, threw in an alcoholic mother, some soft-core sex scenes and then worked out what would stick to the wall with a litre of pigs blood. The writing revels in the limitations of the youthful, glassy-eyed leads, and Wes never forgets what he’s trying to do: create a new, violent, scary but ultimately entertaining movie. He’s working from his weird, pretty unmarketable idea in a genre that wasn’t really respected at the time-the peripheries, such as acting, script, characterization, etc, weren’t as important or fun as drowning Johnny Depp in a backwards waterfall of blood. All hail Wes.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Spectacle: 7
Acting: 5
Script: 6
Entertainment Value: 9
Influence: 9

Leave a comment
September 7, 2013

Movie Marathon #1: Muppet Treasure Island

It was only this week that I watched Muppet Treasure Island for the eighth time this year. There’s something deeply comforting about that movie; I don’t know if it’s Tim Curry, a bear with a man living in his thumb, or Billy Connolly exclaiming “RUM TILL I FLOAT!”, but there’s something distinctly adult about this kid’s movie.

It’s peppered with meta nods to a more mature audience; clever little asides that stop the whole thing turning into a kiddie-centric retelling of a classic novel. More importantly, though, it’s fucking entertaining; I watched the show with my good buddie , and we could both unashamedly chant along with at least three quarters of the dialogue and every single one of the songs. I have no idea how anything that I know that comprehensively and with that level of constancy could still entertain me, but it does. Maybe it’s because I have a relationship with Muppet Treasure Island that outweighs most of my major romantic couplings, but there’s something warm and fuzzy about crawling back into that womb of childish glee at seeing Kermit in a funny coat. It’s also heartwarming to see how these big-name stars always just avoid the trap of being out-acted by a puppet, while maintaining a ridiculous amount of chemistry and camaraderie with these mechanical teddies voiced by Frank Oz

I will stand by my belief that anyone who doesn’t know the words to at least one song from Muppet Treasure Island is inherently not worth knowing; anyone who can’t understand the appeal of a movie which is guileless and cheekily self-aware in equal measure, a movie which truly immortalized some lesser-known pirate book from, like, forever ago, and a movie with some of the coolest action scenes in history. Do it. Do it now. Preferably while drunk.

Muppet Treasure Island

Spectacle: 8
Script: 10
Entertainment Value: 10
Acting: 9
Influence: 7

Leave a comment