Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

I got shot with my own gun. Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton) is a lonely private detective who doesn’t let Tourette’s syndrome stand in the way of his job. Gifted with a few clues and an obsessive mind, Lionel sets out to solve the murder of Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) his mentor and only friend while they’re out on a job. Scouring the jazz clubs and slums of Brooklyn and Harlem, Essrog soon uncovers a web of secrets while contending with thugs, corruption and the most dangerous man in the city, Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin) famed for building parks but in reality lining the pockets of his fellow investors in building corporations. Meanwhile Lionel finds that the half-caste daughter Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatah-Raw) who campaigns against housing discrimination may be connected with him. And the man supplying him with information on Randolph (Willem Dafoe) is not quite who he claims to be … Everybody looks like everybody to me.  Star and director Edward Norton loved Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel and determined to adapt it when it was published but this bears virtually no connection with its source material, setting it forty years earlier and fusing a variation on the plot of Chinatown with Robert Caro’s 1974 biography of Robert Moses.  It takes its sweet time to bed in and Norton’s character’s tics are immensely irritating even offputting. Once it settles into being a private eye flick it’s a better fit with the tone and the tropes work well – surveillance, shady operators, mistaken identity, chases, beatings and – just like Jake Gittes – going to a public meeting and then looking up files in City Hall. The issue of race and miscegenation replaces the incest plot but it’s all about power. Baldwin is at his best declaiming and he has some good lines here:  Do you have the first inkling how power works? The plot really kicks in when Norton works out who Dafoe really is. Norton asserts his own peculiar charms as the disabled guy whose problem ironically makes people think he’s dumb and uses that to his advantage. Either that or a sugar shaker. Wonderfully shot by Dick Pope, this is a tad long but ultimately a rather intriguing throwback noir melodrama with straightforward political commentary about slum clearance, ghettoising and corruption. This is not a programme for slum removal. This is a programme for negro removal

The Last Picture Show (1971)

Everything is flat and empty here. There’s nothing to do. In 1951 Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges) are high-school seniors and friends in Anarene, North Texas. Duane is dating Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd), who Sonny considers the prettiest girl in town. Sonny breaks up with his girlfriend Charlene Duggs. Over the Christmas holiday Sonny begins an affair with lonely Ruth Popper (Cloris Leachman) the depressed wife of high-school “Coach” Popper (Bill Thurman) who is secretly gay. At the Christmas dance Jacy is invited by Lester Marlow (Randy Quaid) to a naked indoor pool party at the home of Bobby Sheen (Gary Brockette) a wealthy young man who seems a better romantic prospect than Duane. Bobby tells Jacy that he isn’t interested in virgins and to come back after she’s had sex. Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson) bans the boys from his cafe, pool hall and cinema when they mistreat their retarded friend Billy (Sam Bottoms) taking him to a prostitute who beats him for making a mess. Sam dies while the boys are on a road trip to Mexico and leaves his property to different people, including Sonny. Jacy invites Duane for sex in a motel and eventually breaks up with him by phone, eventually losing her viriginity on a pool table to her mother’s lover Abilene (Clu Gulager). Sonny fights with Duane over Jacy  and Duane leaves town to work on the rigs out of town. Jacy sets her sight on Sonny and they elope to her parents’ fury. The war in Korea provides an escape route for Duane but there’s one last picture show on before the cinema closes down forever … Nothing’s ever the way it’s supposed to be at all. They say the third time’s the charm and so it was for neophyte director Peter Bogdanovich in this adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel about kids growing up in small town North Texas which he co-wrote with the author as well as wife Polly Platt, who was the production designer and collaborator with Bogdanovich on all his films. (Then he fell in love with his young leading lady Shepherd, but that’s another story). The film was shot in black and white following advice from Orson Welles, Bogdanovich’s house guest at the time (and the best book on Welles derives from this era of their wide-ranging conversations, This Is Orson Welles, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum).  The cinematography rendered by Robert Surtees is simply exquisite, the attention to detail extraordinary but this is no nostalgic trip down memory lane. The universally pitch-perfect performances exist in this very specific texture as a kind of miracle, duly rewarding Johnson and Leachman at the Academy Awards. But Ellen Burstyn as Jacy’s mom Lois has some of the best lines and delivers them with power. She and Shepherd have one amazing scene together. This is a coming of age movie but it’s also about ageing and loneliness and deception and disappointment and it’s the acknowledging of the sliding scale of desperation where the emotions hit gold. And there are juxtapositions which still manage to shock – like when Sonny looks out the window to see one horse mount another while a great romantic poem is being read in class. The realisation that Sam’s great love was Lois and vice versa. The callous way sexual manipulation is used as a casual transaction for the bored. There were controversies over scenes of sex and nudity which didn’t make it into the initial release but those parts were restored in 1992 by Bogdanovich so that the full potential of the story could be contextualised. A poignant Fordian masterpiece now firmly imprinted as an American classic.  You couldn’t believe how this country’s changed

Hurry Sundown (1966)

I’m home. I’m really home.  In 1946, bigoted, draft-dodging, gold-digging Henry Warren (Michael Caine) and his heiress, land-owning wife Julie Ann (Jane Fonda) are determined to sell their land in rural Georgia to owners of a northern canning plant but the deal rests on selling two adjoining plots as well, one owned by Henry’s cousin, returning veteran Rad McDowell (John Philip Law) and his wife Lou (Faye Dunaway, in her film debut); the other by black farmer Reeve Scott (Robert Hooks) whose prematurely aged and sick mother Rose (Beah Richards) had been Julie’s wet nurse. Neither farmer is interested in selling his land, and they form a dangerous and controversial black and white partnership to strengthen their legal claim to their land, which infuriates Henry. When Rose suddenly dies following a failed intervention by Julie, which she doesn’t admit occurred, Henry tries to persuade his wife to charge Reeve with illegal ownership of his property.  Local black teacher Vivian Thurlow (Diahann Carroll) searches the town’s records and uncovers proof that Reeve legally registered the deed to his land. Julie, upset with Henry’s treatment of their mentally challenged six year old son Colie (John Mark), decides to leave him and drops her suit against Reeve. With the help of Ku Klux Klansmen, Henry dynamites the levee above the farms, and tragedy ensues … Certain things are better left to experts. An overripe postwar melodrama that has Message Movie written all over its overacted over-obvious narrative, this was adapted by Thomas C. Ryan and Horton Foote from the 1965 novel by K.B. Gilden (husband and wife writing team Bert and Katya Gilden). Despite the lurid presentation in hotter than thou temperatures with the sun burning up the screen beautifully for cinematographers Loyal Griggs and Milton Krasner it seems undernourished, mainly because the characters are working through some Freudian issues about parenting and it’s told in broad strokes with some performances (like Burgess Meredith as Judge Purcell) bordering on caricature; the presence of Madeleine Sherwood (from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) as his wife reminds us of that other (superior) Deep South saga of family, sex, mendacity, greed and perversity. Henry’s son is retarded and Rad’s eldest son Charles (Steve Sanders) betrays his father, loyal to his cousin instead – there are no good outcomes for men here. The full-on language and sex scenes, complemented by Caine playing the devil’s horn to get his wife in the mood, don’t entirely achieve the effect a more subtle approach might have yielded for a social issue film. It was shot amid huge hostility in Louisiana due to the race theme. (Locally-born critic Rex Reed appears uncredited as a farmer).  Dunaway had to sue director Otto Preminger a huge amount of money to get out of her five-film contract because the two were wholly out of tune with each other. Law does very well here however and he and Fonda would appear together a couple of years later in the notorious Barbarella for her husband Roger Vadim. Do you think the twentieth century will stand still just because you want to hang on to a few little acres?

Mask (1985)

I look weird but I’m real normal. Azusa, California. It’s 1978. Roy ‘Rocky’ Dennis (Eric Stoltz) is an intelligent, outgoing and humorous teenager who suffers from a disfiguring facial deformity called “lionitis” and has now outlived his life expectancy:  he’s always being told he’s got 6 to 8 months. He’s happy go lucky and indulges his passion for baseball card collecting. His single mother Florence ‘Rusty’ Dennis (Cher) struggles to fight for his acceptance in the mainstream public school system, where he proves himself to be a highly accomplished student at junior high and wins friends by tutoring them. Though Rocky endures ridicule and awkwardness for his appearance, and the classmate he’s sweet on has a boyfriend, he dreams of travelling to Europe with his best friend Ben (Lawrence Monoson). He finds love and respect from his mother’s biker gang family the Turks and particularly likes Gar (Sam Elliott) who eventually reconciles with Rusty and moves in, frequently acting as peacemaker between mother and son. He even experiences his first love when he is persuaded to volunteer at a summer camp for blind kids where he meets Diana (Laura Dern) but then her parents try to keep them separated and Ben lets him down when he says he’s got to move to Chicago ... I want to go to every place I ever read about. Absurdly moving, this wonderfully sympathetic evocation of real-life Rocky Dennis and his mom benefits immensely from being simply told, allowing the characters and the performances to do the heavy lifting. Stoltz has such a tough role but carries it with dignity and aplomb; while Cher is a revelation as the mom whose tough love and wild lifestyle add up to a complex emotional picture. Beautifully written by Anna Hamilton Phelan and sensitively directed by Peter Bogdanovich, this is a life-affirming story of real courage and love. When something bad happens to you you’ve gotta remember the good things that happened to you

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992)

You never, ever let an attractive woman take a power position in your home. Claire Bartel (Annabella Sciorra) is happily married to lab tech Michael (Matt McCoy) with a little daughter Emma (Madeline Zima) and when she attends a new obstetrician Victor Mott (John de Lancie) she feels she has been molested during what should have been a routine check-up. Michael encourages her to report Mott to the state medical board and other women follow suit.  Mott commits suicide by shooting himself before a legal hearing can take place and his pregnant widow (Rebecca De Mornay) loses her baby, has an emergency hysterectomy and is broke because her husband’s suicide voids an insurance payout needed for his victims and their fabulous modernist home is put up for sale. She presents herself to the Bartels as nanny ‘Peyton Flanders’ and endears herself to Emma; makes Michael’s married ex, realtor Marlene Craven (Julianne Moore) warn Claire about the danger of having a good looking nanny; and is witnessed by disabled handyman Solomon (Ernie Hudson) breastfeeding newborn baby Joey.  Peyton then reports Solomon falsely for sexually assaulting Emma, ensuring his exit from their home. She arranges an accident to happen to Claire in the greenhouse but when she realises Marlene is on to her, she changes her victim … He wasn’t examining me. It was like he was getting off on it. What if I accused him and I was wrong? How amazing to hear these words come out of Sciorra’s mouth 28 years after this was released and two months after her testimony about what happened to her at the hands of studio head Harvey Weinstein, who derailed her career. This nuttily addictive home invasion/yuppies in peril thriller from writer Amanda Silver (granddaughter of screenwriter Sidney Buchman) ticks so many boxes for female viewers it positively tingles – capturing women’s vulnerability on so many levels: tapping into fears about ob-gyn appointments, pregnancy, a husband’s wandering eye, younger prettier women and the systematic way in which one apparently benign interloper can utterly undo a family’s stability with her insidious attractiveness and manipulative charms. The scene when De Mornay nurses Sciorra’s child is … startling. This is my family! A deeply pleasurable exploitation thriller raised to the level of zeitgeist comment by virtue of taut writing, brilliantly stylish directing by Curtis Hanson and a pair of well managed, contrasting performances by the leading ladies who make this property porno utterly compelling. De Mornay’s unravelling is perfectly, incrementally established. And it’s a treat to see this good early performance by Moore, even if she’s the least believable smoker in screen history; while sweet and resourceful little Zima grew up to be the lethally Lolita-esque teenage sexpot in TV’s Californication. This ferociously slick fun is probably the reason most women wouldn’t have a nanny within a yard of their homes if it could possibly be avoided. Don’t f*** with me retard! My version of the story will be better than yours

 

A Christmas Carol (1938)

Keep Christmas in your own way and let me keep it in mine. On Christmas Eve, Ebenezer Scrooge (Reginald Owen) is visited by the spirit of his former partner, Jacob Marley (Leo G. Carroll). The deceased partner was as mean and miserly as Scrooge is now and he warns him to change his ways or face the consequences in the afterlife… Humbug, I tell you. Humbug! Charles Dickens’ sentimental novella gets a fine adaptation by Hugo Butler and a delicate, sprightly production by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and director Edwin Marin. Everything is beautifully staged and nicely played by a very apposite cast. There is a deal of magic with the ghosts (Lionel Brabham, Ann Rutherford and D’Arcy Corrigan) and some excellent scene-setting and romance between Fred (Barry MacKay) and Bess (Lynne Carver). The atmosphere is well sustained and it’s a very enjoyable rendition that tugs at the heartstrings even if the 1951 British adaptation is a personal favourite. The countdown begins… It’s the only time when human beings open their hearts freely

The Return of Count Yorga (1971)

Aka The Abominable Count Yorga. The most fragile emotion ever known has entered my life. Those brutal supernatural Santa Ana winds revive Count Yorga (Robert Quarry) and faithful manservant Brudah (Edward Walsh) and they follow little boy Tommy (Philip Frame) to his San Francisco orphanage home where Cynthia Nelson (Mariette Hartley) is helping run a costume party fundraiser. Lonely Yorga bites one of the guests Mitzi (Jesse Welles) and then becomes infatuated with Cynthia, whose family his female vampires feed upon, bringing the object of his affection to his ramshackle lair intending to make her his bride against the advice of his in-house witch. Cynthia’s mute maid Jennifer (Yvonne Wilder) and her fiance David (Roger Perry) become suspicious about her whereabouts…  Where are your fangs?/ Where are your  manners? The title (and the poster) say it all, really. That debonair bloodsucker sticks his hand up from the grassy knoll and enters the vicinity of entirely vulnerable people, tongue subtly planted in cheek even while his teeth are in their necks. It’s fun again, with the Count losing out in the Best Costume stakes in the opening party scenes to a pretend vampire. This is of course just another story of an arranged marriage with an army of vampiress enforcers with teased hair and tacky dresses enhancing their startling impact. Hartley is lovely, Quarry is lovelorn and the entire shebang looks and moves smoothly with writer/director Bob Kelljan at the helm (the screenplay is also credited to Yvonne Wilder) in a decent sequel concluding in the mandatory twisted ending to a tragic romance which openly pays tribute to Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers.  Perry is also back from the dead but in a different role and it’s good to see a young Craig T. Nelson as one of the sceptical investigating police officers. Wouldn’t it be nice to think that vampires do exist?

Steel Country (2018)

Aka A Dark Place. With a dead kid there’s almost always abuse first. In smalltown rural Pennsylvania garbage truck driver Donny Devlin (Andrew Scott) becomes obsessed with the death of local boy Tyler Ziegler when the police don’t want to investigate how he is found in a river and he is buried without an autopsy. Donny takes it upon himself to investigate, irritating his initially sympathetic co-worker Donna (Bronagh Waugh), getting an admission of suspicion of abuse from Mrs Ziegler (Kate Forbes), confronting a local police officer Max Himmler (Griff Furst), tackling the sheriff (Michael Rose), the paediatrician Dr Pomorowski (Andrew Masset) whose office has taken a lot of calls from Tyler’s mom and finally suspecting the boy’s father Jerry (Jason Davies). His own disordered personality almost puts him in the frame, until he digs up Tyler’s corpse and brings it to a coroner to prove his suspicions … Nothing ever happens around here. Brendan Higgins’ screenplay is equal parts character study and mystery. The noises in Donny’s head and his frankly unusual disposition are never truly explained, the grounds for his obsession left untapped other than a presumed autistic problem hence a rather narrow field of enquiry. The circumstances of how he conceived his beloved 11-year old daughter Wendy (Christa Beth Campbell) with Linda (Denise Gough) are rather seedy;  his living situation with his disabled mother (Sandra Ellis Lafferty) kindly depicted. Marcel Zyskind’s cinematography peers into the American darklands but other than corruption, the kind of easy institutional conspiracy that seems ten-a-penny in child abuse cases and the interesting positing of a paediatrician as a paedophile (one is reminded of a case in the UK when subliterate vigilantes targetted a doctor’s office, presumably believing that child abusers advertise their predilections on their doors), it doesn’t really ring the narrative cause-effect that is required. However it is tonally interesting and Scott delivers a committed if distracting performance in this ironically titled story where industry has long departed leaving predators free to exploit their working class targets. The ending is jaw-dropping – just not necessarily in a good way. Directed by Simon Fellows. What are you trying to do? You trying to give your shitty life some meaning?

The Predator (2018)

Did you not see the new Predator? It’s evolving. The universe’s most lethal hunters are stronger, smarter and deadlier than ever before, having genetically upgraded themselves with DNA from other species. Only a ragtag crew of ex-Marines (Keegan-Michael Key, Trevante Rhodes, Alfie Allen,Thomas Jane, Augusto Aguilera) led by renegade Army Ranger sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook), whose autistic son (Jacob Tremblay) with estranged wife Emily (Yvonne Strahovski) accidentally triggers the Predator’s (Brian A. Prince) return to Earth, can stop the end of mankind.  With the help of kick-ass evolutionary biologist Casey Brackett (Olivia Munn) they launch an all-out attempt to tackle this new hybrid alien but also have to deal with treacherous Government agent Will Treager (Sterling K. Brown), director of The Stargazer Project ... Fuck me in the face with an aardvark. Part Four in the franchise and not just a sequel but a remake/reboot of the first one (1987) which was a rite of passage in the Eighties, one of the era’s defining films and auteur Shane Black was in it (in the supporting role of Rick Hawkins). And he brings to it his typical brand of smarts – witty dialogue, generic tropes souped up and remade faster and shinier while the Predator hunts and he himself is hunted. As we know from his other movies, Black likes kids and here he’s a bullied savant (upgraded with the very current condition of autism); instead of Christmas we have Halloween (bringing to mind E.T.); and the motley crew of mentally ill soldiers remind us of The Dirty Dozen except they’re not as nasty although that won’t save them. Beneath the message – re-design human DNA at your peril, appreciate the accidental genius Nature occasionally creates – it’s fast-moving, funny and most unusually for an actioner these days comes in at a trim 95 minutes. Bliss, of sorts.  Written by Fred Dekker & Black, from characters created by Jim Thomas and John Thomas. Nice reverse psychology. I can do that, too. Don’t go fuck yourself

Anything (2017)

You don’t want to live in Hollywood. Struggling to cope with the death of his wife and following his own suicide attempt, Mississippi widower Early Landry (John Carroll Lynch) moves to Los Angeles to be near his sister Laurette (Maura Tierney) who works in development at Sony and lives in Brentwood with her wheelchair bound husband Larry (Bradley Wayne James)  and teenage son Jack (Tanner Buchanan). A stranger in the city, Early endures the dinner party from hell when a widow (Bonnie McNeil) says she can’t stop thinking about her dead husband. His life is changed forever when he gets a place of his own in Hollywood and grows close to his transgender prostitute neighbour Freda (Matt Bomer) and experiences a different kind of love in a ramshackle building where everyone’s got their own problems … When I first got here I had a pulse. That and a desire to die. Practically an essay in kindness and intersectionality, this very contemporary mood piece has its origins in a 2007 stage play written and directed by Timothy McNeil who does the main duties here. With beautiful impressionistic handheld cinematography by James Laxton (who works a lot with Barry Jenkins) we see downtown LA as Early gets to experience it:  shopping at Ralph’s, eating at Canters, hiking in the hills, stopping at the burger stand. These interludes and montages disguise the fact that most of the action takes place in Early’s new home. His interactions with his neighbours including songwriter Brianna (Margot Bingham) and her junkie boyfriend David (Michah Hauptman) are blunted with alcohol and he finally sees in these marginal people echoes of his own life and its limitations following a happy 26 year-long marriage.  Lynch is nothing if not an unconventional romantic lead – as Brianna says, like Andy Griffith’s sadder brother.  He imbues this supposedly simple man with incredible complexity and warmth. (Let us not forget Lynch is a fine director too, having helmed Harry Dean Stanton’s last film, Lucky). The abortive attempt to introduce Freda at a dinner party with Laurette and family is grindingly difficult and ends in tears:  rather fantastically, everyone behaves just as you’d expect but the writing is so good and lacking in crude stereotypes you’d expect elsewhere. This is all about pain and lack of empathy. Bomer is superb as the beautiful prostitute who cannot believe her feelings for this tightie Southern whitey and she endures the horrors of detoxing when Early decides they’ve got to quit their respective demons.  She’s a mess of feelings and conflicts with all sorts of arresting ideas and lines and a desire to change her life, it’s just that this relationship was definitely not on her agenda. It’s a sweet romantic drama with rough corners about acceptance and making the best of what and who you’ve got. In this small scale but rewarding film we are reminded that love and friendship find a way, no matter what we do to get in the way. In spite of all your love letters and your stars you really fucking hate me