Three Films Make A Post: He was a world-class criminal and a working-class hero.

The General (1998): This gangster movie by the great John Boorman about Irish burglar, robber (etc) and perhaps part-time national anti-hero Martin Cahill (portrayed by Brendan Gleeson with perfect nuance even when the character he portrays would deny possessing any of that) was all the rage with critics when it came out, and really doesn’t seem to be part of any conversation anymore. It’s definitely a John Boorman movie in its willingness to be peculiar: at times, it feels more like a very strange comedy than your typical biopic. It portrays its protagonist with as much sarcasm as it does reverence (though there’s some of that, also), understanding the very specific working class charm of the man as well as the fact that he also was a scumbag. Boorman is never willing to make any total statements about his subject, instead treating Cahill as the sort of complicated and contradictory person we all are, denying the audience the easy way of seeing him as a hero or as a villain, therefor denying the kind of easy judgement that sees everyone as either all-virtuous or all-bad that’s all the rage at this political moment in time.

Confessions of a Police Captain aka Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica (1971): If you go into this Damiano Damiani joint hoping for more typical hard-hitting Italian 70s cop movie fare, you’ll probably be a little disappointed, for as is so often the case with the director, he’s really only interested in providing as much of the exploitative stuff as he needs to let his social criticism go down easier with an audience. That approach is not always to my taste because it does tend to suggest a pretty patronising view on Damiani’s audience, but in this film, the director avoids most of the spirited monologing he loves so well and instead makes his points via the conflict between a bitter police captain (Martin Balsam) and an idealistic young D.A. (Franco Nero, cleverly and effectively cast against type), who want the same things but completely disagree on how to achieve them, arguing against political and societal corruption by showing what it does to individuals and their view of the world.

It’s a very effective film at this, and even better for the fact that this is one of the Damiani films where the director seems to have put as much heart and energy into the more generic crime elements as he has into the political side of the film, letting one enhance the other quite wonderfully.

Jaca Pocong (2018): A nurse (Acha Septriasa) is tasked to travel to a lonely country home to change an IV and make an injection, but quickly finds herself roped into a wake. Of course, there’s spooky stuff happening. And some of said spooky stuff in Hadrah Daeng Ratu’s Indonesian horror film is rather effective; the spookery is also rather generic in its nature, with only the not quite as worn out last act twist providing a hint of half-originality to the proceedings. It’s not a bad film before that, mind you, just one that seems so satisfied with standards shocks and suspense moments, it never gets too exciting.

On the other hand, it is crafted carefully enough that it also never becomes boring, so there’s that.

In short: Midnight Show (2016)

Warning: structural spoilers ahoy!

A small, third-string cinema in late 90s Jakarta. Projectionist Juna (Gandhi Fernando) and ticket seller Naya (Acha Septriasa), their boss, and the worst security guard ever are a bit of a personnel overkill for the midnight showing of an elsewhere rather successful horror film “based on a true story” about a small boy murdering his whole family. There are, after all, only four paying customers.

As it will turn out, one of these customers is of a rather murderous persuasion. He may even be the little boy from the film all grown up and out of prison partaking in a bit of practical film criticism that overlooks the truth every moviegoer knows: films based on a true story are never actually true.

For the first two thirds of its running time, impressively named director Ginanti Rona Tembang Sari’s Indonesian slasher variant Midnight Show seems to be a pretty straightforward affair, a well-done thriller that comes down on the fun side of films about masked maniacs slaughtering a handful of people. However, for its third act it isn’t only going the plot twist route but also turning up the impact of the violence, changing from a more film-like bloodiness to something that feels more real and even a bit disquieting. In spirit, this turns out to be not so much like a late 90s slasher, the pinnacle of the slasher as a film genre ignoring any possibility of having an emotional impact on its audience, but rather the sort of bleak affair I tend to connect with the 70s. In fact, as the film’s killer turns out to be a bit of a too active film critic, so does Midnight Show turn into a bit of a critique of the merely fun slasher, getting nasty about the business of killing people for our entertainment because that is indeed a bit of a nasty thing.


That doesn’t mean Sari’s film isn’t an effective slasher. In fact, its somewhat lighter first acts are very well done thriller fare, the director clearly having a knack for the classic low budget business of portraying simply yet deftly drawn characters fighting off a violent menace in an enclosed space. There are some very cleverly staged sequences early on, some subtly stylish flourishes to the framing that build tension even when there’s no outright action happening, and a general sense that you’re in the hands of a director who is very much in control of his material and what he wants out of it. That he then escalates to something harsher and a bit more complicated than Midnight Show at first appears to be is obviously only improving on something that’s already been a very a good film.