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?

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There Was a Little Boy (1993) (TVM)

Hey! She doesn’t want me! Fifteen years after their baby boy was stolen from their apartment, English teacher Julie (Cybill Shepherd) is expecting her second child with wealthy husband Gregg (John Heard). He has never given up on finding Robbie, she accepts his guilt despite it happening on her watch while she was taking a bath. She is teaching in a downtown high school and finds herself forced to deal with a difficult transfer student Jesse (Scott Bairstow) who appears functionally illiterate but is actually gifted and they form an uneasy connection. His own mother Esperanza (Elaine Kagan) is on welfare and ill with a lung condition and they get by with his thieving from the store. When Julie tries to sell off  Robbie’s baby cot, Gregg objects and finds in the base a necklace with a religious medal attached which doesn’t belong to either of them and which they trace to a local Catholic priest who is now gaga and cannot positively identify the owner. However Jesse’s own actions lead Julie in the right direction to find her long-lost son …  I am your worst nightmare:  a politically incorrect teacher who dares to flunk your ass. Adapted by Wesley Bishop from the novel by Claire R. Jacobs, this operates somewhere between Teacher in the Hood and Maternal Melo, The action scenes are well handled, the irony of Jesse’s identity well flagged (it’s not really the point), the trade-off in guilt between husband and wife completely believable, the acting good, and it’s directed by the admirable Mimi Leder who of course proceeded to make those terrific actioners Deep Impact and The Peacemaker before the wheels came off her cinema career for a long time after Pay It Forward. She returned to the fray late last year with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex. Hurray for that. And if that doesn’t suffice, how about all those early 90s chintzy couches. I lost a son and a husband. I won’t let that happen again

Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

Aka The Fantastic Puppet People/War of the Puppet People/Six Inches Tall/ I Was a Teenage Doll. Living in the moment is the most important thing. Inexperienced secretary Sally Reynolds (June Kenney) is grateful to her seemingly kind new boss, eccentric expert doll maker, Mr. Franz (John Hoyt), when he introduces her to a dapper young St Louis salesman Bob (John Agar). Little does she know that Franz is really a mad scientist who fights off loneliness with a machine that shrinks people to one sixth of their size forcing them to serve as his living dolls. But when he shrinks Bob after her predecessor Janet (Jean Moorehead) has disappeared, Sally then becomes his victim and she and Bob refuse to be his playthings, eventually escaping into a dangerous world that towers over them... Nobody can hear little people like us! The Amazing Colossal Man is playing at the drive-in and there’s something so eerie about Mr Franz’s amazing lifelike dolls it would drive a girl crazy with suspicion. George Worthing Yates developed producer/director Bert I. Gordon’s story into a fully fleshed screenplay, inspired by The Incredible Shrinking Man, no concept being beyond the ken of AIP in those exploitation-hungry days. The aforementioned Colossal was Gordon’s own work, hence the generous clip. Kenney (Teen-Age Doll) is terrific as ever as the innocent but the film is best when Hoyt rationally explains his daft plans; and when Sally and Ben are introduced to their fellow captives – US marine Mac (Scott Peters), teenager Stan (Scott Miller), aspiring pop singer Laurie (Marlene Willis) and a broad called Georgia Lane (Laurie Queen of Outer Space Mitchell), who bathes in a pot of instant coffee granules. From the misleading title to the paucity of effects, this is cheap as chips but deadly serious. This guy takes friendship seriously so he does old puppetmaster (Michael Mack) from the old country a favour that leads to the gang’s escape attempt during a very unnerving theatrical debut. That’s the director’s daughter Susan as the irritating little girl who gives the game away to LAPD Sergeant Patterson (Jack Kosslyn). Don’t leave me! I’ll be alone

Lucky (2017)

The one thing worse than awkward silence is small talk. Every day in the desert town of Piru, California, 90-year old Lucky (Harry Dean Stanton) does 21 reps of his 5 yoga exercises, drinks some milk, shouts Cunts! at the botanic garden that barred him for smoking and enters a diner owned by Joe (Barry Shabaka Henley) where he has a large milky coffee and does the crossword. Then he buys some smokes in Bibi’s (Bertila Damas) shop on his way back home, where he settles down to his TV quiz shows before heading to Elaine’s (Beth Grant), the local bar, where he chews the fat with a group of friends:  Howard (David Lynch) gets depressed about President Roosevelt, who, it transpires, is his tortoise,who outlasted Howard’s two wives and who’s disappeared; Paulie (James Darren) misses his late wife and Lucky reckons he is fortunate never to have married. Lucky falls over when he’s home alone (he’s always home alone) and winds up in hospital where the doctor Christian Kneedley (Ed Begley Jr) tells him he’s a medical wonder. The diner waitress Loretta (Yvonne Huff) calls to his house and they watch Liberace on TV and smoke grass and Lucky insinuates that he is homosexual and asks Loretta not to talk about it. At Elaine’s Howard is treated ingratiatingly by a lawyer Bobby Lawrence (Ron Livingston) he hired for end of life bequests who Lucky thinks is gaming his friend. Back at the diner he chats with Fred (Tom Skerritt) a tourist and fellow WW2 veteran and they share stories about the Philippines. At the birthday party of Bibi’s son, Lucky sings in Spanish and that evening finds his friends once again … All I can think is it’s a combination of genetic good luck and you’re one tough son of a bitch. Harry Dean Stanton was always old, or so it seemed. The first time we see Lucky outside it’s a conscious re-staging of that famous low angle medium close up from Paris, Texas. But now he’s thirty-five years older and it’s a different hat and he’s not on the move any longer, save for those few exercises on the floor of his house, and the furthest he walks is shuffling down the street of his small town for his unvarying daily routine. He’s an atheist looking at death and trying to figure out what matters. Every scene is detailed and deals with an aspect of philosophy, a preparedness for the next phase, set in motion by the definition of realism which Lucky finds in a dictionary when doing the crossword. It’s funny and humane and brought to life by effervescent performances from a range of actors you never dreamed of putting together, but here they are. Written by Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja, this feels very elegiac but never depressing, more of a coming to terms with the inevitable, featuring some comic interludes which never intrude on the tone of the deep felt emotionality. Lynch has an extraordinary monologue about his tortoise that ends with the line: There are some thing in this universe that are bigger than all of us and that tortoise is one of them.  It’s a wonderfully humble moment and it crystallises the film’s central idea as well as reminding us what a lucky charm Stanton was for Lynch’s career. Those sunlit desert scenes are beautifully shot by Tim Suhrstedt while the songs are mostly by Elvis Kuehn but you’ll get a lump in your throat when you hear Johnny Cash singing Will Oldham’s I See a Darkness. Directed by veteran actor John Carroll Lynch, it ends on a shot of Lucky walking into the desert, sort of like President Roosevelt (the tortoise). A perfect conclusion to an incomparable career, this was the cherishable Stanton’s final film and he’s the leading man at last. I always thought that what we all agreed was what we were looking at

Under the Cherry Moon (1986)

The more you drink, the better I sound. Gigolo cousins Christopher Tracy (Prince) and  Tricky (Jerome Benton) swindle wealthy French women as they pursue musical careers on the Riviera. The situation gets complicated when Christopher falls in love with heiress Mary Sharon (Kristin Scott Thomas) after planning to swindle her when he finds out that she inherits a $50 million trust fund on her 21st birthday. Mary’s shipping magnate father Isaac (Steven Berkoff) disapproves of the romance and proves a difficult adversary. Meanwhile, Christopher rivals Tricky for Mary’s affections…  I want a girl who’s smart, a girl who can teach me things. I hate stupid women. You know why? You marry a stupid girl, you have stupid kids. You don’t believe me? Follow a stupid kid home and see if somebody stupid don’t answer the door. Nutty, silly, completely nonsensical and entertaining in ways that somehow seem very Eighties – it could only be the work of that great musical genius, Prince. With highly demonstrative acting that is straight out of the silent era, a debut by Scott Thomas, a nod to the Beatles’ movies in the casting of Victor Spinetti, and a raft of extraordinary music, this notoriously earned a hoard of Golden Raspberries while being labelled a Vanity Project but is all about romance and the kind of class zaniness directly attributable to Thirties screwball. Analysing performance in such a deliberately OTT eye-rolling production is beside the point. It’s all about pastiche and homage and is as fluffy and adorable as a kitten with daft dialogue and a game cast whose collective tongue is firmly in cheek. Originally Mary Lambert was set to direct but Prince took over those duties, crediting her as creative consultant.  Written by Becky Johnston; with classic songs by Prince and the Revolution and orchestration by Clare Fischer. Total fun.  I do nothing professionally, I do everything for fun

Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)

This doll had almost been loved to death. You know, love inflicts the most terrible injuries on my small patients. When American single mother Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) reports her small daughter as missing after she dropped her at nursery school when she arrives in London, Scotland Yard Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) investigates and begins to wonder if the child isn’t a figment of the woman’s imagination. Her relationship with her journalist brother Steven (Keir Dullea) also raises questions … Ever heard him read poetry? It’s like a Welsh parson gargling with molasses. Adapted for producer/director Otto Preminger from Evelyn Piper’s (domestic suspense pioneer Merriam Modell who also wrote The Nanny) New York-set novel by husband and wife team John and Penelope Mortimer after unsuccessful attempts by Ira Levin  and Dalton Trumbo, this fits into the director’s psychological noir films where the escalating of suspense is less interesting than the sheer strangeness of people’s lives. From the intricate editing and soundtrack alternating between Paul Glass’ score and rock songs by The Zombies (including one that comments on the action) to the title sequence by Saul Bass, this is a beautiful interrogation of the space between what is real and unreal. Sumptuous looking, it’s a film that simply glides on the surfaces of a society that has not yet erupted into sexual freedom and that knowledge feeds into the solution of the mystery which is altered from the source novel. There is an astounding supporting cast including Clive Revill, Noël Coward (as Ann’s landlord who’s into S&M memorabilia), Lucie Mannheim, Martita Hunt, Finlay Currie and Megs Jenkins.  Olivier has top billing but it’s all about the brother and sister and both the young actors do very well. During production Lynley and Dullea discovered not only that they had in common an Irish heritage but they even shared living relatives in Ireland which makes sense when you look at them, echoing the implication of incest in the story. Lynley claimed that Dullea bore the brunt of Preminger’s legendary bullying. Noël Coward (No autographs please but you may touch my garment) didn’t think much of Dullea as an actor either. He apparently walked up to him on the set one day and whispered, “Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow.” Dullea had the last laugh – Stanley Kubrick offered him the lead in 2001: A Space Odyssey after seeing this.  He didn’t even have to audition. I have some more African heads in my apartment. Small, pickled ones. Do drop in anytime you care to meet some unsuccessful politicians

The Deadly Affair (1966)

I’m a socialist capitalist.  MI6 agent Charles Dobbs (James Mason) is shocked to discover that a Foreign Office official Samuel Fennan (Robert Flemyng) whom he knew has committed suicide following their meeting in a park after which Dobbs cleared him of charges that he was a Communist spy despite his past activities at Oxford as a student. Suspicious circumstances soon point to the death being a murder, and Dobbs investigates further, contacting the victim’s wife, Elsa Fennan (Simone Signoret), a Jewish survivor of a concentration camp. At home his Swedish wife Ann (Harriet Andersson) is carrying on another affair under his nose and this time he doesn’t want to know who it is because when he asked before about her arrangement with his work colleague  it wasn’t to his advantage. One afternoon he arrives to find Ann has a visitor: Dieter Frey (Maximilian Schell), whom he trained years ago and who is now selling chocolate for a firm in Zurich. Ann admits she’s sleeping with him. Despite pressures from senior officials to leave the case, Dobbs continues, hiring veteran cop Inspector Mendel (Harry Andrews) to dig deeper. But Dobbs is being followed and winds up being injured while Mendel is querying a lowlife garage proprietor Adam Scarr (Roy Kinnear) in a pub and now Dobbs is keen to land his prey which involves a trip to the theatre …  I’ve never held your appetites against you. The unaddicted shouldn’t blame the addicted. Adapted by Paul Dehn from John le Carré’s Call for the Dead, the character of Dobbs is actually George Smiley, altered for rights reasons. Sidney Lumet produced and directed this downbeat English-set thriller which is dedicated to procedure, detail and an incredible conflation of the personal and political told across two marriages, unwittingly linked.  Mason is remarkably affecting as Dobbs/Smiley. When his wife confesses the identity of her current lover the ever tolerant Dobbs says he loved him too so he understands completely. There’s a reservoir of hurt in that admission. When you see what he can do with a broken hand to the same man when the chips are down you understand the character’s power and drive. And also the anguish. Ann screams at him, How can you be so aggressive about your job and so gentle about me? Just who is he?!  This truly is the flipside to Mason’s Vandamm. It’s quite bizarre seeing Andersson as his feckless promiscuous wife, living up to everyone’s belief about Swedes, never mind Bergman heroines. Flemyng had played the director of MI5 in the previous year’s spy spoof The Spy With the Cold Nose and had a decent role as Rushington in The Quiller Memorandum the year before that.  Signoret is hard to watch – a solidified pudding of historical damage. There are recognisable backdrops shot by the gifted Freddie Young – not just the West End where the penultimate setpiece takes place at the Aldwych Theatre but in the bus trips and the docks and the ‘burbs and dull interiors barely enlivened by two-bar electric fires.  There’s a line about a clearly epicene MI5 boss Morton (Max Adrian, who is fabulously OTT) that lands rather too sharply nowadays if you get it: Marlene Dietrich but there’s fantastically good byplay between Dobbs and Mendel particularly when the latter refuses to stoop to an assumptioin and nods off whenever Dobbs talks hypothetically. Strangely enough, this casting is a link with Mason because Adrian had a role in The Third Man TV series which Mason had turned down and he also had a role in Alfred Hitchcock Presents the same year Mason worked with the director on North By Northwest. You could say there’s a twist ending – as it transpires, and like a lot of le Carré, the entire plot is a twist and it’s unbelievably satisfying.  Lumet and Mason work so well together – the director knew just what Mason could give to this role as they had done three TV plays together in the US. Whatever you gave to him he would take it, assimilate it and then make it his own, Lumet said of the star who was in the ascendant again with this and Georgy Girl – whose breakout star Lynn Redgrave features here, as does her brother Corin.  The final scenes from Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company production of Edward II starring David Warner are a great record of the theatre scene of the time not to mention excruciating to watch (the rectal insertion of a red hot poker:  do keep up) and an utterly drab variation on a Hitchcock thriller’s choreography yet yielding an equally desperate conclusion in the cheap seats. The amusingly intrusive bossa nova score is by Quincy Jones and the mournful theme song by Astrud Gilberto is utilised to cheeky effect in a scene between Mason and Andersson. This is Sixties spycraft at its finest.  It’s not a woman’s play

 

 

A Woman in Berlin (2008)

Aka  Anonyma – Eine Frau in Berlin/The Downfall of Berlin. Find a single wolf to keep away the pack.  In April 1945 the Soviet Union’s Red Army arrives in Berlin defeating the last German defence. Its soldiers rape women of any age as they occupy the city. After being gang raped by a number of Soviet soldiers, the film’s anonymous woman, German journalist Anonyma (Nina Hoss), petitions the battalion’s commanding officer, for an alliance and protection to control the terms of her rape. From now on I will decide who gets me After initially rejecting her, married Ukrainian Lieutenant Andrei Rybkin (Eugeny Sidikhin) is seduced by the beautiful battered German woman. She manifests a cool, practical approach to her life, part of an informal community that develops among survivors in her apartment building. The officer subsequently protects, feeds and parties with her and her neighbours. Other women also take particular officers or soldiers for protection against being raped by soldiers at large which works until their husbands return. Rybkin comes under suspicion and is reassigned, who knows where …  My name doesn’t matter. The book by Anonymous (Marta Hillers) wasn’t published until 1959 and even then the account of the mass rapes (2 million plus) by the Russians was hard to bear so this adaptation has a twofold problem:  not turning it into an exploitation fest; and not being so melodramatic as to remove the nature of the horror and the pragmatic decision that women took to try to survive.  On that front at least it’s a success, a clear-eyed depiction of how life was. Watching rape used as a weapon in the rubble-strewn ruins of Berlin in revenge for what the Germans did in Russia is an unedifying experience. We step over the corpses of women to get a jar of jam. Hoss is superb as the worldly woman who has travelled and lived abroad yet also been a committed Nazi who is forced to use the only means she has to keep alive – a complex portrait of ambiguity proving she’s one of the best actors around. There are moments of humorous irony – her neighbour the widow has it away for a bit of salami, as she wryly observes. Hillers died in 2001 after which the book was republished and she was identified. She didn’t live to see this, which is a great pity. It’s a tough and grim story, brilliantly constructed and performed. Adapted by Catharina Schuchmann and director Max Färberböck. War and dying used to be men’s business. That’s all over

The Godfather Part III (1990)

Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in. As Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) ages and has a place of respect in society having divested himself of his casinos, he finds that being the head of the Corleone crime family isn’t getting any easier. He wants out of the Mafia and buys his way into the Vatican Bank but NYC mob kingpin Altobello (Eli Wallach) isn’t eager to let one of the most powerful and wealthy families go legit. Making matters even worse is Michael’s nephew, Vincent (Andy Garcia) the illegitimate son of Sonny. Not only does Vincent want out from under smalltime mobster Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna) who’s now got the Corleones’ New York business, he wants a piece of the Corleone family’s criminal empire, as well as Michael’s teenage daughter, Mary (Sofia Coppola) who’s crushing on him. Ex-wife Kay (Diane Keaton) appeals to Michael to allow their son Anthony (Franc D’Ambrosio) quit law school to pursue a career as an opera singer.  A trip to Sicily looms as all the threads of the Corleone family start to be pieced together after a massacre in Atlantic City and scores need to be settled … Why did they fear me so much and love you so much? Francis Ford Coppola revisits the scene of arguably his greatest triumph, The Godfather Saga, with writer Mario Puzo and yet he viewed it as a separate entity to that two-headed masterpiece. Perhaps it’s a riff on the material or a tribute act. The transition is tricky with a brusque crewcut Pacino boasting a different boo-ya voice at the beginning when the Catholic Church honours him following a $100 million donation; and the symbolism writ large in the concluding sequence, a performance of Cavalleria Rusticana in which the weakness of our own central Christ figure is punished with the greatest violence – the death of close family.  This story then mutates from a pastiche of its previous triumphs to a a pastiche of an opera. Michael is doing penance for the death of Fredo, his dumb older brother who betrayed the family. He is physically weak from diabetes and the accompanying stroke;  his efforts to go totally legitimate have angered his Mafia rivals from whose ties he cannot fully break and they want in on the deal with the Vatican;  his brother Sonny’s bastard son Vincent is nipping at his heels while sleeping with his own daughter; he is still in love with a remarried Kay, whom he finally introduces to Sicily;  he is in bed with God’s own gangsters. It’s a sweeping canvas which gradually reveals itself even if the setup is awkward:  we open on the windows at the Lake Tahoe house and see they are decorated with inlaid spider webs:  we soon see that sister Connie (Talia Shire) is the wicked crone behind the throne in her widow’s weeds, her flightiness long behind her. Like Wallach, her performance is cut from the finest prosciutto as she encourages Vincent in his ruthless ride to the top of the crime world. Mantegna isn’t a lot better as Joey Zasa. Wrapped into real life events at the Vatican in the late 70s/early 80s which gives Donal Donnelly, Raf Vallone and Helmut Berger some fine supporting roles, with an almost wordless John Savage as Tom Hagen’s priest son, this has the ring of truth but not the class of classicism even with that marvellous cast reunited, something of a miracle in itself:  it feels like the gang’s almost all here. I cheered when I saw Richard Bright back as Al Neri! So sue me! And good grief Enzo the Baker is back too! Duvall is replaced by George Hamilton as consigliere, not Coppola’s doing, but because he wasn’t going to be paid a decent salary. What were they thinking?! Even Martin Scorsese’s mother shows up! That’s Little Italy for ya! There are some witty exchanges amid the setpieces when everything beds in and the tragedy is set to violently unwind. The death of Sofia Coppola was the price she had to pay for being her father’s daughter, non e vero? Finance is the gun, politics is the trigger.

 

 

 

Christiane F. (1981)

Aka Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo. You’ll never forget her … In mid-1970s Berlin, an aimless teenager (Natja Brunkhorst) who lives with her single mother and sister in a social housing project falls in with a drug dealer Detlef (Thomas Haustein) after meeting at a nightclub where her hero David Bowie is performing. Soon her addiction leads her to hanging out with other junkies at Bahnhof Zoo subway station and then to a life on the streets… I only did it because I wanted to know how you feel. Adapted from tape recordings with the real-life junkie whose story it tells, this has cult written all over it. From the Berlin setting, the drugs, Bowie and the excruciating portrait of a beautiful child lost to sex and heroin and, well, rock ‘n’ roll, it’s tough stuff. Working from a screenplay by Herman Weigel and director Uli Edel adapting Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck’s non-fiction book, Edel directs with verve and a realistic grit. This is not an attractive experience despite the superficial elements of cool – its low budget, graphic sex scenes and shooting style place it in the exploitation realm while the classic score by Bowie (Station to Station, Boys Keep Swinging and unofficial theme song Heroes are the most famous tracks) and the great Jürgen Knieper give it a real kick. The cast are mostly non-professionals and the beautiful Brunkhorst is the only one who proceeded to an acting career. However watching dead-eyed kids having underage sex, shooting up and overdosing ain’t pretty and this squalid depiction of Berlin in the 70s is miserable – no wonder it cleaned up. A film that truly shocked upon release, it’s dedicated to Atze, Axel and Babsi, all portrayed here and all dead from heroin ODs.  A grim Euro-classic with a cameo performance by Bowie actually recorded in NYC.  I can’t get hooked if I just use a little, only once in a while. I can control my using