The Life of David Gale (2003)

Rape. Murder. Death Row. Very intelligent guy. David Gale Kevin Spacey) is a former philosophy professor on death row in Texas. With only a few days until his execution, his lawyer negotiates a half-million dollar fee to tell his story to Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet), a journalist from a major news network. She has a reputation of keeping secrets and protecting her sources and has herself served a jail term for just such an infringement in defence of someone producing kiddie porn. With four days before his presumed execution Bitsey arrives at his prison and his lawyer Braxton Belyeu (Leon Rippy) diverts her intern Zack Slemmons (Gabriel Mann) and Gale tells her his story in a series of flashbacks: In 1994, Gale is a successful public intellectual and the head of the philosophy department at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an active member of DeathWatch, an advocacy group campaigning against capital punishment. At a graduation party, he encounters Berlin (Rhona Mitra) a graduate student who has been expelled from the school that afternoon and who earlier asked him to up her grades in exchange for sex. When Gale gets drunk, she seduces him and they have rough sex. She then falsely accuses Gale of rape. The next day, he loses a televised debate with the Governor of Texas when he is unable to name any innocent people executed during the governor’s term. Gale is arrested, but the charge is dropped when Berlin disappears. However, his marriage, career and reputation are all destroyed, his home is sold and he struggles with alcoholism after his wife Sharon (Elizabeth Gast) takes their little son Jamie (Noah Truesdale) with her to Spain and disallows contact. Constance Harraway (Laura Linney) a fellow DeathWatch activist is a close friend of Gale who consoles him after his life falls apart. However, Harraway is discovered raped and murdered, suffocated by a plastic bag taped over her head. An autopsy reveals Gale’s semen in her body and that she had been forced to swallow the key to the handcuffs, a torture technique known as the secure top method which Gale previously wrote about in a journal article. The physical evidence at the crime scene points to Gale, who is convicted of rape and murder and is sentenced to death. Now Bloom investigates the case in between her visits with Gale. Gale maintains his innocence, claiming he and Harraway had consensual sex the night before her murder. Bitsey comes to believe that the apparent evidence against Gale does not add up. She is tailed several times in her car by Dusty Wright (Matt Craven) an alleged one-time lover and colleague of Harraway, whom she suspects was the real killer and who has been trailing Bitsey and Zack. Wright slips evidence to Bloom that suggests Gale has been framed, implying that the actual murderer videotaped the crime. Bitsey pursues this lead until she finds a videotape revealing that Harraway, who was suffering from terminal leukaemia had committed an elaborate suicide made to look like murder. Wright is seen on the videotape, acting as her accomplice, implying that they framed Gale as part of a plan to discredit the death penalty by conspiring to execute an innocent person and in its aftermath ultimately releasing evidence of the actual circumstances. Once Bitsey and Zack find this evidence, only hours remain until Gale’s scheduled execution and they enlist Nico the Goth Girl (Melissa McCarthy) who now resides at Constance’s old home to restage her death … Name one innocent man that Texas has executed during my tenure. Urgency is inscribed from the first frame when Bitsey is running down a country road. After a series of flashbacks and contemporary interview scenes we rejoin that particular scene at 114 minutes in and the finale unspools. The screenplay by Charles Randolph resulted in a uniquely polarising critical reception for what transpired to be the late and lamented Alan Parker’s final production. Hate’s no fun if you keep it to her she just wanted to help other people avoid it. It’s a cunningly contrived drama, giving Gale a fully established private life and then turning his choices in a very different direction on the basis of one bad decision at a party with a sexpot which throws his life into disarray. You’re not here to save me, you’re here to save my son’s memory of his father. In this race against time narrative, the plot construction necessarily revolves Bitsey chasing her tail a little – we are to some degree in Silence of the Lambs territory when she talks to David in prison so that the ultimate manipulation of this conscientious journalist makes more sense in retrospect. Part of the dramatic problem is Winslet’s performance – it doesn’t ring entirely true: yes, she’s been carefully selected for the job of ‘saving’ David Gale on the basis of her fearsome reputation for journalistic ethics but somehow she doesn’t seem entirely serious in her profession as it’s presented here. Winslet overacts somewhat particularly in the more emotive setups. Where this should perhaps have engaged more with the idea of the role of journalists in promoting a point of view and the machinery of the news industry in shifting or controlling social perspective on crime and the death penalty becomes a more personalised tale about the lengths activists go to in order to make meaningful change – and in the State of Texas, which has a very high annual body count when it comes to Death Row. The final twist is probably a move too far in a film which thrives on every kind of sensation, good and bad. It is however very interesting on several levels, including performance. Ironically, in view of the criticism, this was allegedly inspired by a true story. Co-produced by Parker and Nicolas Cage. Let’s not throw a pity party and sit around reading Kafka

The Invisible Man (2020)

He needs you because you don’t need him. Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) is trapped in an abusive relationship with wealthy optics engineer Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen).  When she escapes from his home her sister Emily (Harriet Dyer) helps her hide out with good friend San Francisco Police Detective James Lanier (Aldis Hodge) and his teenage daughter Sydney (Storm Reid). Two weeks later it appears Adrian has committed suicide but Cecilia feels she’s being watched. Her interview for an architectural firm is ruined when she arrives without her portfolio and she collapses after being drugged with Diazepam. Then she stages a reconciliation meal with her sister after confusion over an email sent from her account without her knowledge and Emily has her throat cut in front of her and Cecilia is arrested and placed in a secure unit. Adrian’s lawyer brother Tom (Michael Dorman) tells her she needs to have the baby she’s been told she’s having after Adrian replaced her contraceptive drugs and if she does she’ll live with him again and not go to prison. When the police refuse to believe her story, she decides to take matters into her own hands and fight back … He’s not out there. I promise. An ingenious reworking of the original H.G. Wells novel, hitting the contemporary staging posts of coercive control, gaslighting, stalking and surveillance, with technology taking top billing in a classic story of female paranoia. The morbid mood is brilliantly sustained by dint of point of view camera, simple composition and use of space; the tension is cunningly heightened as the tropes of horror and thrillers are ticked one by one. Moss gives a tour de force performance in a film that features her in every scene. The best horror film since It Follows and that’s saying something.What a good idea it was to move away from the idea of Universal’s concept of the Dark Universe in favour of standalone stories. Quite brilliant. Written and directed by Leigh Whannell. This is what he does and he’s doing it again

The Comfort of Strangers (1990)

My father was a very big man. And he wore a black moustache. When he grew older and it grew grey, he coloured it with a pencil. The kind women use. Mascara. English couple Mary (Natasha Richardson) and Colin (Rupert Everett) are taking a return holiday in Venice in an attempt to repair their relationship. They are befriended by suave Robert (Christopher Walken), a British-Italian bar proprietor, unaware that he has been stalking and photographing them. When he brings them to his palazzo apartment and introduces them to his wife Caroline (Helen Mirren) they become enmeshed in a game of psychological and erotic roleplay and wind up experiencing a terrifying drama of decadence in which nothing and nobody is as they appear … I mean that you’d do absolutely anything for the other person, and you’d let them do absolutely anything to you. Anything. Adapted by Harold Pinter from the 1981 Ian McEwan novella, this picturesque exploration of perverse relationships practically wallows in morbidity. Teetering on the verge of horror and luridness at all times, this never tips into typical genre expectations, always erring on the side of suggestiveness, surprise and eerieness. Until a swift end is brought to proceedings. The irony replete in the story is all in the title and in creepy Walken who declares, They want to destroy everything that’s good between men and women. It’s expertly directed by Paul Schrader with densely beautiful cinematography by Dante Spinotti, permitting the full strangeness of the city to express the moistly malevolent mystery, sinister and lustrous, terrifying and thrilling, all at once, inhabited by just the right performers in wondrous sets by Gianni Quaranta. Some people don’t like the ending. As in life, etc. Although if you’ve read Thomas Mann or seen Don’t Look Now you’ll have a justifiably familiar feeling of foreboding. A sensual nightmare of innocents abroad. I knew that fantasy was passing into reality. Have you ever experienced that? It’s like stepping into a mirror

Road to Perdition (2002)

Where would this town be without Mr John Rooney? In 1931 Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) is a hitman and enforcer for Irish-American mob boss John Rooney (Paul Newman) in the Rock Island area. His son Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin) hides in the car one night after the wake for one of Rooney’s henchmen and sees his Connor Rooney (Daniel Craig) administer a shot in the head to the dead man’s brother Finn (Ciarán Hinds) who talked too much at the event; while he understands for the first time what his father does for a living when he witnesses the bloodshed. Rooney sends Connor to kill Michael and the boy but Connor instead kills his wife Annie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and other son Peter (Liam Aiken) in cold blood and Michael goes on the run with Michael Jr in an attempt to gain revenge for his family’s murder. He finds that he has no friends and no protection and is advised by Mafia man Frank Nitti (Stanley Tucci) to give up. He reckons without a freelance corpse photographer Maguire (Jude Law) following him and thinks that by uncovering Connor’s theft that Rooney will accept him as the son he never had … A man of honour always pays his debts and keeps his word. I like this far better now that years have passed, Newman is gone and what I originally thought of as directorial heavy-handedness is more readily recognisable as a comfort with the excessive expressionistic qualities of the source material. Hanks’ doughy face with its deep-set eyes seems peculiarly unsuited for this kind of role but paradoxically lends the performance an unexpected quality. His six-week road trip with his son gives him an opportunity to impart lessons and learn about the boy for the first time. He makes us know that Michael Jr is not to follow him into this deadly business. His scenes with Newman are marvellous – a kind of trading off in acting styles, one legend passing on lessons to the next, borne out in the storytelling. What Michael doesn’t know is that blood means more than sympathy, no matter the horrors involved in being part of the Rooney family. Of course Connor would betray his father;  and of course his father knows. It’s a hard thing to watch Michael learn the truth. Loyalty sucks. This is a gallery of masculine roles – Craig as the ever-smiling psychotic son, Law as the rotten-toothed shooter masquerading as the photographer of death – a correlative of the film’s own morbidity; Hoechlin as the boy learning at his father’s elbow as the guns go off. Hinds impresses in those early scenes, quietly seething then mouthing off at his brother’s wake, a crime which will  not go unpunished. Dylan Baker’s accountant Alexander Rance has a decidedly old-fashioned homosexual taint of prissiness. This is a linear story of fathers and sons, cause and effect, crime, punishment and revenge in an Oedipal setting dictated by the rules of inevitability that can be traced to Greek tragedy. There are no surprises but the pleasures of the production design by Dennis Gassner, the cinematography by Conrad Hall (who earned a posthumous Academy Award) and the performances make this worth a re-viewing. Screenplay by David Self from the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner. Natural law. Sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers

Wings of Desire (1987)

Aka  Der Himmel Über Berlin / The Heaven Over Berlin / The Sky Over Berlin. Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? Isn’t life under the sun just a dream? Isn’t what I see, hear, and smell just the mirage of a world before the world? Two angels, kindred spirits Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander), glide through the streets of Berlin, observing the bustling population, providing invisible rays of hope to the distressed but never interacting with them. They are only visible to children and other people who like them. When Damiel falls in love with wistful lonely trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin) whose circus has closed due to financial problems, he tires of his surveillance job and longs to experience life in the physical world. With words of wisdom from actor Peter Falk (playing himself) performing in a WW2 thriller whose cast and crew the angels are observing – he believes it might be possible for him to take human form and enter history ... We are now the times. Not only the whole town – the whole world is taking part in our decision. We two are now more than us two. We incarnate something. We’re representing the people now. And the whole place is full of those who are dreaming the same dream. We are deciding everyone’s game. I am ready. Now it’s your turn. You hold the game in your hand. This beautiful benign allegory of the divided city of Berlin is of course clear to anyone familiar with the practices of the Stasi, who deployed one half of the East German population to spy on the other half:  when the Wall came down and the files were opened families and friendships were torn asunder. However a few years before that occurred, director Wim Wenders plugs into the nightmare of watching and being watched and makes it into a surreal dream in this romantic fantasy. I can’t see you but I know you’re here. It’s verging on noir with its portrait of a place riven by war and totalitarian rule, its acknowledging of the Holocaust and the overview of the Wall snaking through a post-war world. You can’t get lost. You always end up at the Wall.  A poetic film that’s so much of its time yet its yearning humanity is palpable, its message one of eternal hope. Shot in stunning monochrome by Henri Alekan, brought out of retirement and for whom the circus is named. I’m taking the plunge. Written by Peter Handke, for all the fallen angels on the outside looking in. Co-written by Wenders with additions by Richard Reitinger, loosely inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems. An exquisite city symphony that insists on the disrupting of image making, bearing witness, choosing life. With Curt Bois as Homer and Crime and the City Solution and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform.  Must I give up now? If I do give up, then mankind will lose its storyteller. And if mankind once loses its storyteller, then it will lose its childhood

Happy 60th Birthday Psycho (1960) 16th June 2020!

The film that changed everything premiered on this day at the DeMille Theater in New York City sixty years ago. From its mordant premise to its stunning performances and exquisite mise-en-scène, the cod Freudianism and the cutting – culminating in the shower scene, that masterpiece of montage, this is Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest achievement. Happy birthday to Psycho!

Manhunter (1986)

You want the scent? Smell yourself! Former FBI Agent Will Graham (William Petersen) is called out of early retirement by his boss Jack Crawford (Denis Farina) to catch a serial killer.  The media have dubbed him The Tooth Fairy (Tom Noonan) because he kills random families in their homes. Will is a profiler whose speciality is psychic empathy, getting inside the minds of his prey. The horror of the murders takes its toll on him. He asks for the help of his imprisoned arch-nemesis, Dr Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox) who gets to him like nobody else and nearly murdered him years earlier yet has insights into the methodology of the killer that could unlock the case… He butchers whole families to pursue trivial fantasies. As an adult, someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks. The mindbending antics of Thomas Harris’ narcissistic creation Lecktor were first espied here but it’s really Will Graham’s story and what a surprise casting choice the introspective pigeon-toed Petersen seemed.  He carries this oppressively chilling thriller where he is the masochist to his targets’ sadistic mechanisms. The dispassionate style, the modernist interiors, the internal machinations of the protagonist’s obsessive inner voice while he inhabits the minds of his relentlessly morbid prey, lend this a hypnotic mood. As the action increases in intensity the colours and style of cinematographer Dante Spinotti become cooler and more distancing. The diegetic score by bands including Shriekback and The Reds is an immersive trip into the nightmarish vision. An extraordinary spin on terror that is as far from the camp baroque theatrics of The Silence of the Lambs as it is possible to imagine, this masterpiece has yet to be equalled in the genre and feels like a worm has infected your brain and is burrowing through it, out of your control, colouring your dreams, imprinting you with a thought pattern that may never depart. A dazzling exercise in perspective and perception, this is a stunning work of art. Adapted from Red Dragon by director Michael Mann. Does this kind of understanding make you uncomfortable?

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Why don’t you lie down and let me look at it. When a British and a Soviet nuclear submarine disappear off the radar, MI6’s top agent James Bond (Roger Moore) is ordered to find out what has happened. He escapes an ambush by Soviet agents in Austria and goes to Egypt where he might acquire an advanced surveillance system. He meets Major Anya Amasova ie Agent XXX (Barbara Bach) whose lover he unwittingly killed in Austria. They are rivals to recover microfilm and are obliged to deal with hitman Jaws (Richard Kiel) as they travel across the country. Forced to work together by their respective bosses, they identify the person responsible for the thefts as the shipping tycoon and scientist Karl Stromberg (Curt Jurgens) who is consumed with the idea of developing an underwater civilisation …. There is beauty. There is ugliness. And there is death! Christopher Wood and Richard Maibaum’s screenplay may take the title from Ian Fleming’s tenth book in the series but little else. With a son et lumiére show at Giza, a shark tank in the villain’s lair, an MI6 office shared with the Russians inside a pyramid, an astonishing hit man in the form of giant Kiel with his mouth full of metal teeth, a fun relationship between Bond and his Russian opposite number, the wonder was it was made at all, beset as it was by rights issues and production troubles. This includes the replacing of Blofeld as arch nemesis – hence the inventing of Karl Stromberg, a nuke-obsessed Nemo tribute act. Getting a director was another issue, with Lewis Gilbert ultimately taking on the project, returning to the fray ten years after You Only Live Twice, whose plot it mimics somewhat. Gilbert’s influence on the form the film took was profound, notably on Moore’s characterisation in Wood’s draft of the screenplay, which was a return to the humour and tone of the original books, despite the legal issues preventing much of the actual story material being used (and you’ll be hard pressed to see Fleming in the credits). Apparently former Bond scribe Tom Mankiewicz was also brought in for uncredited rewrites on the final draft. Like Connery before him and Craig more recently, Roger Moore’s third foray into MI6 territory would be the most successful with the public, keeping his end up for England. Then there’s the showstopping title sequence with the greatest ski jump ever filmed (performed by Richard Sylvester) with a Union Jack parachute payoff; plus a barnstorming theme song performed by Carly Simon, with lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager and composed by Marvin Hamlisch (and the first title song not to be named for the film) who does a minor pastiching of the Lawrence of Arabia theme, making this a home run among Bond freaks. Brit flick fans will get a kick out of seeing Caroline Munro (dubbed, as Stromberg’s sidekick Naomi), the director’s brother-in-law Sydney Tafler (as a Russian ship’s captain) and Hammer Horror vet Valerie Leon (as a hotel receptionist). And that’s without even mentioning the awesome production design by Ken Adam, the Lotus Esprit that turns into a submarine and a Jaws vs Jaws swimoff! A perfect blend of action, thrills, sex, great gadgets, sly wit, astonishing stunts, explosions and pithy banter. It’s lavish, but I call it Bond. James Bond. How does that grab you?

Shadows and Fog (1991)

I was just pointing out to these lovely ladies the metaphors of perversion. Europe, between the wars. Kleinman (Woody Allen), a cowardly bookkeeper, is woken in the night by a mob of vigilantes and assigned the task of finding a strangler on the loose in the fog-shrouded town where the circus is visiting. Meanwhile, after a lover’s quarrel with her clown boyfriend (John Malkovich) after seeing him flirt with trapeze artist Marie (Madonna), sword-swallower Irmy (Mia Farrow) escapes into the city, eventually joining up with Kleinman for support as they make their way through the ominous streets and foggy back alleys. Kleinman meets up with a mortician (Donald Pleasance) who’s dissecting the murderer’s victims; while Irmy encounters a prostitute (Lily Tomlin) who offers her a place to stay at the brothel where she works and wealthy student Jack (John Cusack) chooses to sleep with her rather than the professionals present.  She enjoys it and wants to donate the money to charity. When certain circumstantial evidence points towards Kleinman, he must prove his innocence as the police take interest and vigilantes assemble … There isn’t a whore in the world that’s worth $700. The first screening may have had the studio suits immobilised and looking like they’d been paralysed with curare, as Woody Allen recalls in his memoir, and this adaptation of his play Death is an admittedly uneasy mix. It’s part German Expressionist serial killer flick, circus picture, sex comedy, cowardly nebbish tale and social melodrama – but it’s still funny as hell when it hits the right notes, even though some of the cast (David Ogden Stiers, Kurtwood Smith) apparently think they’re in a different film altogether. But who doesn’t love Donald Pleasence as the mortician about to get his? And what about Kathy Baker, Lily Tomlin (especially Lily Tomlin) and Jodie Foster as chilled-out smart alecky prostitutes (even if they aren’t given proper names)? There’s a myriad of funny moments and lines with Allen giving most of them to himself but Farrow gets some of them, including, I always think you can tell a lot about an audience by how they respond to a good sword swallower. And howzabaout the great Kenneth Mars as a drunken magician? I once plucked a rabbit from between the bosoms of the Queen of Denmark. Small rabbit. Small bosoms. A hoot, in fits and starts, and so much more fun than its reputation suggests. Miraculous production design by Santo Loquasto, building an entire set at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, NYC and shot by Carlo Di Palma. It’s drenched in an atmosphere equally mysterious and amusing with a sort of sinister undertaste, alluding to Lang, Pabst, Murnau but also Hitchcock because we don’t really care about the strangler McGuffin a whit. He’s played by Michael Kirby. See? Told you. Soundtrack by Kurt Weill – well who else could it possibly have been? Written, directed by and starring Woody Allen as the Kafkaesque Little Man. I can’t make a leap of faith necessary to believe in my OWN existence

Dorian Gray (1970)

Aka The Secret of Dorian Gray/Il dio chiamato Dorian/Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray. One day when even you’ve become an old and hideous puppet this will still be young. London student Dorian Gray (Helmut Berger) is the subject of a portrait by society painter Basil Hallward (Richard Todd) whose clients hedonistic aristos Lord Henry Wotton (Herbert Lom) and his wife Gwendolyn (Margaret Lee) take a fancy to him. Meanwhile he has fallen in love with aspiring actress Sybil Vane (Marie Liljedahl) as she rehearses Romeo and Juliet. She makes him think about someone other than himself for a change. As Basil completes his portrait Dorian finds himself obsessed with his painted image and swears that he will trade his soul to remain young. His relationship with Sybil grows complicated and argumentative and she is killed when she is knocked down by a car. Dorian is heavily influenced by Henry who has him sleep with Gwendolyn and Dorian then becomes immersed in society as a kind of gigolo who makes other people famous, be they men or women. However as the portrait begins to reveal his age and escalating depravity he hides it away from sight where it changes appearance and becomes ugly and Dorian ends up killing Basil when he says he’s not responsible for the alterations.  Dorian is conscious of the peril of his situation, particularly when Henry introduces him to Sybil’s double, a woman married to a scientist embarking on research into rejuvenation … Everything is yours. Take it. Enjoy it. The most beautiful man of this or any time stars in a European co-production of the greatest work of literature by the greatest Irish author and it’s updated to the flashy, groovesome Seventies. What bliss is this?! With equal parts tragic romance and fetishistic kink it easily falls into the category of trash yet the moral at the centre – the idea that youth is beautiful in itself, not just for what it can obtain – gives it a lingering value. The god-like Berger is perfectly cast as the impossibly erotic creature who transitions from youthful selfishness to graceless decadence, and his sleazy polymorphous journey through the fashionable world of swinging London is both quaintly dated and oddly touching, principally because of the relationship with Liljedahl (best known for her soft-core films in her home country of Sweden) and Berger’s consistent performance, beset by narcissistic fascination, bewildered by loss. It is precisely because this plugs into the truly pornographic ideas behind the 1890s textual aesthetics that it seems oddly perfect as an adaptation despite the occasional surprise – a bit of S&M in a stables, plus it’s not every day you see Lom approach a beautiful young man to have his wicked way with him. The screenplay is credited to giallo director Massimo Dallamano, Renato Romano, Marcello Coscia and Günter Ebert, from  Oscar Wilde’s indelible novel. The contemporary score is composed by Peppino De Luca and Carlo Pes. Produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff and Harry Alan Towers for American International Pictures. You only have a few years to live really fully