Three Films Make A Post: The Pressure is Rising, The Adrenaline is Rushing, The Clock is Ticking

Run Lola Run aka Lola Rennt (1998): As a German born in the second half of the 70s, I really should have been all about Tom Tykwer’s hyperactive little action movie with an alternative timeline twist at the time. In actuality, I’ve watched it for the first time this week, and find myself half impressed by how much mileage Tykwer gets out of all the hallmarks of 90s cinema that usually make films ugly, if not just unwatchable.

Here, as is in some of the films of Dominik Graf, all of the stylistic excesses of a time of filmmaking turn into an actual style that feels like the only correct way to tell this particular story; or really, the style is the story here. Which does lead to my major problem with the film: its main characters may be really good at running, but are also spectacularly shitty people we are somehow supposed to care about because they are in love. Or something?

It’s not a deal breaker – I’ve cheered on even worse people in other movies after all – but also not exactly something to endear a movie to me.

The Last Sacrifice (2024): Speaking of not endearing, there’s this thing, a film that takes a Wikipedia-look level at an actual crime, uses bits and pieces of horror cinema that never really fit the voiceover talking at us to portray it, and suggests an influence of said crime on folk horror it never takes any effort to actually substantiate. It also tries to connect it to the cultural development of the UK without ever showing much of a grasp of that development beyond the most superficial talking points.

Like most true crime documentaries, and especially those with a horror bent, it’s shoddy, thoughtless and always more than a little offensive.

fuji_jukai.mov (2016): For quite some time, Katsumi Sakashita’s POV horror movie where footage of a film crew interviewing people of what we usually call Aokigahara forest in the West – and the film mostly calls jukai – is intercut with that supposedly shot by a girl going into the forest to commit suicide, accompanied by two other girls she met on the web who just want to watch, had been more of a rumour than an actual film outside of Japan.

It is a fine, low budget example of its form that sometimes shows its constraints in the performances and some unideal set design. Its emphasis on very human horrors and a central twist reminded me more than a little of the wonderful Banned from Broadcast series (more about them on a later date), but it certainly is on a level of accomplishment where that comparison is a compliment instead of to a film’s detriment.

Chain Reactions (2024)

This documentary by Alexandre O. Philippe treats Tobe Hooper’s seminal – and burned not only into my mind – Texas Chainsaw Massacre through the lens of five different admirers, presented in consecutive interviews during which Philippe provides comparison and enhancement of ideas via visual commentary. It is actually pretty revelatory to see the very yellowed print of TCM notable film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas saw of it in its first Australian presentation in comparison to today’s much cleaner versions. This is then used as an excellent jumping off point into a fantastic discourse on the colour yellow in Australian horror (visually proven by the proper number of very yellow looking outback horror snippets). It is just as fascinating to hear Takshi Miike talk about the film’s personal impact on his work as a director, which is notedly different from what film school jargon spouting Karyn Kusama, coming from a very different time and place, finds in the very same scenes Miike talks about.

In fact, it is one of the most interesting aspects of Philippe’s documentary that the film often repeats scenes from Hooper’s film when a different person speaks about them, demonstrating very nicely indeed that everyone can see a very different film while watching the same one.

As the kind of viewer I am, I’m particularly happy how much emphasis Chain Reactions puts on exploring TCM through some very individual and personal lenses, finding insight less in academic analysis, as in the way Patton Oswalt, Miike, Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King and Kusama relate to the film as part of their lives and personal/emotional/intellectual development. There’s multitudes here, and while most viewers will find one or two approaches they won’t vibe with – I find Kusama’s approach that ignores any visceral impact this very visceral film has in favour of jargon-heavy academicisms pretty grating, for example – all of them are treated with equal respect and emphasis, and resonate with one another as well as with the film these five (plus one in form of the director) talk about so eloquently.

Three Films Make A Post: Well, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night Edition

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025): Scott Cooper’s Springsteen biopic focussed on the making of “Nebraska” (certainly one of my favourite albums of all time) is a deeply frustrating experience. At its best, this is a calm, meticulous and thoughtful portrayal of the creative process, and about trying to go forward when something in one’s past always holds one back.

At its worst – all too often – this just dumps the greatest hits of biopic clichés onto that better movie, the kind of bullshit neither life nor art deserve and that runs against the attempts at truthfulness of the film’s good third. It doesn’t exactly help that the the film’s ideas about psychology tend to the reductive or even the outright stupid, and that Cooper also likes to do things like show Springsteen looking up at a mansion on a hill and then cut to him writing “Mansion on the Hill”, as if the writer/director were either an idiot or assumed his audience to be.

It Was Just An Accident aka Yek tasadof-e sadeh (2025): Whereas this is Jafar Panahi channelling quite a bit of his own suffering under the Iranian regime into a movie that is never going for the simple and the easy and transfiguring what must be a lot of actual pain into a film of astonishing compassion with even those the director would have every right to see as beyond having any right to be treated with it.

Also included are moments of righteous anger turned righteous art, complex characterisation of characters a film like Cooper’s above would have treated as walking, talking tropes, genuinely riveting discussions of the morals of vengeance and mercy, and emotions genuine yet still filtered through the thoughtful complexity of these discussions. There’s also a dry sense of dark humour running particularly through the middle act that’s often actually delightful.

Here We Come A-Wassailing (1977): Coming to something rather different, this short-ish BBC documentary directed by great British folk rock musician Ashley Hutchings (whose Albion Band also scores the film) looks at various local yuletide/midwinter/Christmas traditions in different villages on the British Isles. It’s an often fascinating document of rites that by the time this was shot were curiously disconnected to the actual life of those people still holding to them. What must have been deeply meaningful at one point to the communities involved here looks like a nice lark to get up to while getting very, very drunk – to be lost in the next decades, and then in parts revived again through new generations stumbling onto the traditions and filling them with hopefully new meanings.

In any case, it’s fantastic just to be able to see some of this stuff, to speculate on the meanings these traditions might have had, and to watch people enjoy doing pretty damn strange things that would puzzle anyone living farther away than three villages over.

Three Films Make A Post: Ghoulish Delights

Halloweenville (2011): Gary P. Cohen, of Video Violence fame, and one Paul Kaye, document the intense Halloween shenanigans in Lambertville, New Jersey, which turns into a giant, tacky and lovely piece of Halloween kitsch for a week a year. Embedded in cheesy commentary and the cheapest default editing tricks the directors’ editing suite can provide, are interviews with various local Halloween enthusiasts and many a verité (or awkwardly framed, if you prefer) scene of the place’s insane Halloween festivities. It’s enough to make any ghoul cry tears of joy.

While this is certainly not done artfully, there’s so much genuine enthusiasm here, presented fully in the cheesy version of the spirit of the season, it’s impossible not to love this.

The Raven (1963): This adaptation of Poe’s poem as a comedy has never been a particular favourite of mine among the films of Corman’s Poe cycle. On this recent rewatch, I actually fell in love with the film. Price, Lorre and Karloff mugging it up in this tale of duelling wizards, Hazel Court doing a femme fatale bit, and young Jack Nicholson looking confused in front of Daniel Haller’s gorgeous gothic sets, filmed by Corman with the élan they deserve – what’s not to love?

Particularly when I’ve actually grown old enough to find the general silliness rather diverting, find myself actually laughing at jokes I’ve shrugged at a decade ago, and enjoy how much Corman and company make fun of a style they themselves put a lot of effort into creating.

Plus, the climactic sorcerous duel is one of the prime moments of pure, silly, imagination in cinema.

The House of Usher (1989): Speaking of Poe adaptations that don’t exactly keep to the text, Alan Birkinshaw’s bit of late 80s cheese is pretty fun if you accept it as what it is and what it isn’t – there’s certainly joy to be had in Donald Pleasence running around with a drill hand pretending not to be mad, Oliver Reed being dastardly while chewing scenery, some tasteful mutilation and decapitation, a rat eating a guy’s penis, and come curiously fine set design that goes for some sort of modernist gothic. All of this doesn’t make terribly much sense, but certainly looks pretty great.

Three Films Make A Post: Elvis Has Left the Building

Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (2015): It wouldn’t have been difficult to tell this specific tale as an utter freakshow. It is, after all, the of story a horse breeder with musical ambition and a voice naturally a lot like that of Elvis Presley who got roped into the role of “Orion” – a masked singer heavily insinuated to be Elvis returned shortly after his death, somewhat bigger, buffer, and younger, and built to make Sun Records (the Nashville version, so no bad thoughts about Sam Phillips necessary) a whole lot of money, at least for a time.

Director Jeanie Finlay doesn’t at all, but instead creates a sympathetic portrayal of a guy who had a dream he finds fulfilled in a way that’s making him painfully unhappy, and the curious cultural impact of Elvis on the more peculiar parts of American culture. It’s a lovely thing, and that most pleasant of surprises – a documentary about a curiosity that turns out to be a film about people.

Bored Hatamoto: Island of No Return (1960): In this outing of the jidai geki pulp detective series, the Bored Hatamoto (as always embodied quite wonderfully by Utaemon Ichikawa) makes his way to the shadowed streets and the foreigners’ quarter of Nagasaki, where he finds a lot of moody filmmaking by Yasushi Sasaki, who makes much of the sets, those exotic foreigners (like the same two red-headed Western guys wandering through the background of many a scene, or the Japanese guys in blackface wearing turbans), yet another plan to dispose of the shogun (this time via the drug trade), musical numbers, running sword battles and my very favourite trope in this sort of movie – the Japanese actors very badly pretending to be dastardly (sigh) Chinese who turn out to indeed be meant to be Japanese villains pretending to be Japanese.

This is particularly rollicking good fun, with everyone involved in top form. There’s really something to be said for industrialized studio filmmaking, at least when it comes to Toei films from this era (and the next two).

Crimson Bat, the Blind Swordswoman (1969): Apparently, every studio in Japan wanted a slice of the blind swordsperson cake after the success of the Zatoichi films. Shochiku gave us this comparatively short-lived – four entries are next to nothing for a Japanese movie series – entry in the canon, following the adventures of blind swordswoman Oichi (Yoko Matsuyama), in this first film directed by veteran director Sadatsugu Matsuda.

The film’s pacing suffers a bit from too much flashback backstory, but whenever the pretty delightful Yoko Matsuyama stops crying (about her run-away mum, having been blinded by lightning, and years later a murdered gramps) and goes to business with her red sword cane, Matsuda does direct like a young man instead of one right at the end of his career, with some pretty fancy choreography, excellent bad guys (among them eternal villain Bin Amatsu as a gent named “Devil” Denzo), and frame compositions to die (be killed by blind swordswoman?) for.

Three Films Make A Post: Romance is dead.

Culloden (1964): Once upon on a time at the BBC, someone like Peter Watkins actually got commissioned/allowed to make a film about the Battle of Culloden in the form of a fake verité documentary with a gigantic angry, anti-colonialist, anti-classist streak that was really not par for the course for its place and time. Or any place or time, truly.

From time to time, there’s a certain awkwardness to the proceedings, mostly in those scenes when Watkins can’t or won’t hide the artificiality of the fighting, or when the amateur actors so beloved of certain arthouse filmmakers can’t quite manage to hit the right notes (because they’re not actors). The film’s loathing for those that send others to their deaths without even a twitch of their consciences make this, alas, painfully timeless a film.

Ghosts of East Anglia (2008): This documentary about the ghosts and ghouls of East Anglia by Andrew Gray is mostly an excuse to present various bits of archive footage taken from TV presentations of many decades past. Thus, this is a fascinating treasure trove of “true” supernatural stuff. If you’re as interested in ghost stories of this type and the way they exist in the cultural mainstream as I am, all of this – tales of black shuck, haunted manors and haunted council flats - is highly fascinating and fun; if you’re not, it’s archive footage with a bit of a dramatic presentation around it.

Heart Eyes (2025): A couple hating killer murders only on Valentine’s Day. Not yet a couple Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding) will have to get through their romantic comedy under duress, the occasional spurt of blood, and rather a lot of dead bodies. Meet cutes don’t usually work this way.

You really can’t blame Josh Ruben’s romantic horror comedy for not going all out with both of its genres. The film’s total commitment to its shtick is absolutely admirable, even more so since Ruben’s direction often very cleverly shifts between the stylistic coding of romantic comedy and horror.

As many a high concept movie, this is a bit slight, but then, most holiday based slashers as well as most romantic comedies are, and we don’t necessarily love them less for it.

The God of Ramen (2013)

Aging Kazuo Yamagishi is the owner and chef of the tiny ramen shop Taishoken. He’s also the vaunted titular God of Ramen, who provides giant portions of the dish so loved, people are standing in line for actual hours to get a seat in a shop only able to serve sixteen guests at a time.

This documentary’s director Takashi Innami follows him verité style over the course of several years, at first clearly fascinated by the phenomenon of this apparently ramen of mythical quality and the huge lines it provokes. But things become somewhat revelatory the more time director, film and audience spend with Yamagishi, surrounded by apprentices he teaches with graciousness and kindness, yet who can’t actually lay a hand on the noodle. There’s as much sadness as there is beauty to Yamagishi’s fixation on ramen as the be all and end all of his life, and something terrible about his willingness to ignore his dangerously bad health just so he can make another bowl of noodle soup.

It becomes clear that much of this has to do with the death of Yamagishi’s wife fifteen years ago, that left behind a grief the chef has avoided working through by focussing on his art.

There’s nothing cruel or lowering about the way the documentary treats Yamagishi. Instead, a sense of compassion and kindness runs through here, a willingness to meet Yamagishi on the level he wants to be met. Which mirrors the many small moments of kindness and compassion Yamagishi shows towards others throughout the film, clearly parts of his character he didn’t bury under grief and cooking. Being truthful about a person yet still respecting their dignity is not an easy ask of a documentary (or of a human being), but Innami is and does in a delicate manner that’s neither cowardly nor manipulative towards his subject.

In fact, if there’s a feeling the documentary seems to have towards its subject, it is the wish for him to be happier in a way that fits him, to make choices he can be happy of, and to be kind to himself. Which it generally does without getting kitschy or high-handed, even though the film’s only true flaw, a terrible score, would really rather like it to.

Fortunately, a very Japanese mixture of respect and kindness prevails throughout The God of Ramen, so much so I found myself deeply moved by a film that’s supposedly about a ramen making sensation.

Three Films Make A Post: "This is the story of the world's secret that only she and I know."

Weathering with You aka Tenki no ko (2019): This is certainly one of Makoto Shinkai’s lesser films. There’s always a fine line between being emotional and being emotionally manipulative when you like to go for heightened emotional stakes like Shinkai’s anime tend to do, and here, he’s sometimes stepping over that line into obvious attempts at pushing audience buttons. Particularly the last act is simply too melodramatic, so much so its emotional loudness hinders the emotional impact it could possess if it were only holding back a little.

That doesn’t mean this is a bad film. There are certainly quite a few moments of great beauty here, as well as some insight into the teenage psyche – it’s just that the film as a whole doesn’t come together as well as those Shinkai movies that surround it, a great director sometimes being his own worst enemy.

Hell Hole (2024): Whereas this shot in Serbia body horror monster comedy by the Adams Family (minus Zelda Adams) is a downright disappointment. Gone is nearly all of the personality of the family’s other films, the idiosyncratic yet/and awesome decisions to use the weirder approach whenever possible. Instead, we get what once would have been a middling SyFy Original, full of obvious jokes, lots of feet-dragging disguised as dialogue sequences, and very little else beyond the basic competence filmmakers in the lowest budget end acquire over time when they don’t give up.

I wouldn’t be complaining if this were actually a good traditional body horror monster movie with a bit of bite to it. Alas, it feels as if the filmmakers were just ticking boxes on a list of monster movie tropes.

Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters (2019): At times, Gilles Penso and Alexandre Poncet’s documentary about the great special effects artist Phil Tippett (whose creations certainly made my childhood as much more interesting as Ray Harryhausen’s did for Tippett) also feels a bit like the directors are ticking boxes on how to structure a biography-driven documentary. But then, you get to the next bit of interview with Tippett or one of his peers, and you are struck by the sheer single-minded love these people have for Tippett and the art of hand-made special effects, and can’t help but mirror that feeling right back at them.

The film never manages to acquire an actual thesis about Tippett or his world. Thus, it never turns into the kind of documentary you’d recommend even to people who aren’t terribly interested in their subjects. There is, however, quite a bit to say for the film’s willingness to let Tippett and his peers simply speak about their lives and times, and work.

Three Films Make A Post: Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they can't see you.

Horror in the High Desert 3: Firewatch (2024): I still find Durch Marich’s Horror in the High Desert movies some of the most likeable projects in American (the Japanese side operates on a whole different level) POV horror low budget cinema. But with film number three, I – not a viewer typically needy for explanations – do find myself growing rather impatient with the film’s unwillingness to even show or say so much you’d need an explanation for it. In film number three, there’s great set-up work in the first act, much flabby nothing in the middle and a climax that has two or three shots but delivers so little it’s difficult to truly think of it as a climax, and not just a stopping point for the inevitable fourth movie, in which again little of import will happen (not happen – you know what I mean).

Beautiful Noise (2014): Eric Green’s music documentary is billed as an “in-depth exploration” of the roots of the genre the film goes out of its way not to call shoegaze, but in truth, it is a painfully  superficial and surface-level exploration of it. Instead of focussing on a handful of bands as a core for style and sound, this tries to squeeze a dozen or more of them into ninety minutes, chasing through soundbites and interview bits and pieces that could be revelatory in the proper context without ever arriving at anything like an argument or a point. There were bands, they were making music, their sound was sort of revolutionary and very influential, and that’s all we truly are allowed to learn through this approach.

Then there’s a terrible reliance on interviews with “famous fans”: Billy Corgan is rambling, on drugs, wearing the worst hat, and has no clue (as expected), Wayne Coyne appears comparatively sober (gasp!) and has little insight to add, and only The Cure’s Robert Smith appears to provide any musical insight.

Mayhem! aka Farang (2023): Despite the excitable English market title, this (mostly) Thailand set French action movie by Xavier Gens with the excellent Nassim Lyes as a man with a past finding his new-found family peace disturbed by old grudges is a rather slow affair for the first hour or so of its runtime. What’s there of action early on seems rather perfunctory, and the too-slow build-up of all the expected clichés of this sort of affair make the first two thirds a bit of a slog to get through, though certainly a professionally shot one.

Once the action comes, it certainly is gritty, bloody, and competently staged, yet I found myself watching it from a certain remove, too much of it having been spent on building up the expected early on, and a just as expected “plot twist” later.

I also have to say that I’m a bit tired of action movies killing off the female lead to motivate their male heroes to violence. At least when it’s done in as mechanical a fashion as it is done here.

Three Films Make A Post: Beneath the city streets lie government secrets. File #7 is missing… Pray they don't find it.

The Most Terrible Time in My Life (1993) aka Waga jinsei saiaku no toki: This first movie in Kaizo Hayashi’s Maiku Hama trilogy is a very film school film nerd type of project. It is full of allusions to and plays with tropes and approaches from other movies – mostly from noir, the hard-boiled school and the nouvelle vague.

As it often happens with this approach, the film appears stuffed full of things, or really, overstuffed, leaving little room for a personality that isn’t made exclusively made from other movies. As it also often happens, many of the scenes here are fantastic when looked at on their own, they just don’t add up to much of a whole.

Where You’re Meant to Be (2016): Paul Fegan’s documentary concerns the attempt of Arab Strap’s voice Aidan Moffat of doing a small town tour with his versions of traditional Scottish ballad and folk material. An early encounter with very traditional Scottish ballad singer Sheila Stewart – her rules of folk singing are so purist, most other folk singers wouldn’t cut it – sees her criticizing the project rather vigorously. Her criticism clearly hurts and rankles Moffat in ways he never quite expresses on camera. An off-camera monologue ruminates about Moffat’s doubts, while the film follows him through backrooms, rehearsals and meetings with various somewhat ballad connected people.

This is more an interesting documentary than a successful one, mostly because it seems to be quite able to find out what it actually is about. It attempts to use the Stewart/Moffat divide as a narrative frame, but there’s really not enough substance to it to carry the whole film. Other encounters feel rather random and not always terribly interesting, something that isn’t helped by Moffat’s tendency to throw himself into the pose of a smirking ironicist, which in my experience only is a way to get people to talk when they’re drunk and don’t notice their interlocutor thinks he’s above them. In any case, it’s not a pose I find terribly interesting to watch.

Hidden City (1987): A young woman (Cassie Stuart) drags an at first unwilling statistician (Charles Dance) into the search for a classified film that leads into the lower echelons of espionage, bad commercial art, and all the interesting things barely buried under London’s surface, secrets the people meant to keep them secret have mostly forgotten themselves.

In mood and style Stephen Poliakoff’s movie fluctuates between comedy, a light and very British 80s version of the 70s US conspiracy thriller, and a psychogeographical essay turned movie. This is very much a film about a boring life getting in touch with the weird undercurrents that have always run just a tiny bit below the surface and starting to get in tune with them, shifting his view of the world; the thriller elements are really only there to hang this shift in personal perspective on.

F for Fake (1973)

Hired to take over/make use of the bare bones of a documentary made by François Reichenbach about art forger and general high living faker Elmyr de Hory and his biographer and semi-professional liar Clifford Irving, Orson Welles starts having a bit of fun, turning the material into a meditation on art and reality, the nature of forgery, the flim-flam elements of his own particular talents, and takes an opportunity to show off his late life partner Oja Kodar  – in a very unreconstructed kind of way you really wouldn’t encounter anymore these days, very much for better and for worse.

Also involved are thoughtful moments of Orson – in his role as one of the great and wonderful hams of the screen - hamming it up considerably when the opportunity for a monologue arises (or whenever he simply fancies doing one), some moments of “high art” theatre, and a dirty story about great painter made particularly funny via a combination of “look how hot my girlfriend is!” and Michel Legrand’s score going full softcore soundtrack on us.

All of this is very Orson Welles in many aspects. Welles treats the project as yet another opportunity to show off his – considerable – intelligence and his – hardly in need of an adjective - talents – real and imagined. On paper, this should be a rather unpleasant watch – Orson holding forth to his friends with a glass of wine or three, Orson showing magic tricks, Orson talking up his girlfriend, Orson wearing his favourite hat, and so on, and so forth. In practice, like most of the man’s weirder projects, there’s a genuine charm to film and man. Sure, he’s full of himself, but he also appears to approach his audience as people who are on his own level (up in the stratosphere, at least), whom he invites to think about a couple of things, to have various very diverse kinds of fun with him, to listen to interesting people tell even more interesting lies and truths, and to present us with a last run-through of what Orson Welles was all about.

Only the very disagreeable would disagree with this approach, and only the much too serious would not be caught up in Welles’s charm. I for one don’t want to be any of these things, at least this evening.

Three Films Make A Post: A new depth of fear

Gods of the Deep (2023): British low budget one man movie making army Charlie Steeds returns to the Lovecraftian well, including a pretty fantastic God of the Deep/homemade Cthulhu effect.

Otherwise, this is at first dominated by the joys of cheap underwater sci fi sets that sometimes reminded me pleasantly of Juan Piquer Simón’s own cardboard underwater horror/sf affair The Rift, to then turn into a mix of cheap weird psychedelia with terrible action movie dialogue and some dollops from Aliens.

It’s all very 80s Italian in its approach to, ahem, creative borrowing, which, depending on one’s taste, is either a damning indictment of the film, or, if you’re me, a gateway to the kind of fun they don’t usually make this way anymore.

London Overground (2016): John Rogers’s documentary finds that most London of writers, Iain Sinclair, retracing the steps he took for his book of the same title, with the involvement of some of the usual suspects. Like a lot of later Sinclair, this is a mix of insightful observations on London and the changes in her, an old man ranting at clouds while walking, and a portrait of a man finding poetry in the sort of thing most people would just walk on by and ignore.

Thus are some of the typical problems of Sinclair’s work on display. Predominantly, the inability to separate the critique of the capitalist horrors inflicted on a place from one’s own nostalgia for the ideal version of the place that only ever existed in one’s mind – or in this case the books one wrote, which can lead to the impression that Sinclair is against any change whatsoever (which I don’t believe he actually is).

However, there’s much to think about and look at here that would be lost without Sinclair or this film.

Top Line (1988): A writer (Franco Nero) procrastinating and sleeping around in Colombia is put on the trail of a great conspiracy that hides the trail of alien influences on earth. Various forces – like a sadistic Nazi played by George Kennedy of all people – try to hinder or murder him. Among those forces is a wonderfully blatant – and pretty good looking, effects wise – Terminator rip-off, for we are back in the arms of the actual Italian rip-off machine in all its confused oddness. Here, James Cameron meets the UFO conspiracy and traces of the 80s jungle adventure movie, Nero goes shirtless a lot, and little happens that makes much sense.

On the plus side, little happens that makes much sense that isn’t also pretty awesome or entertaining. From time to time, director Nello Rossati even manages an actually suspenseful scene – the preposterous but great sequence of Kennedy hunting Nero through a cactus field comes to mind. If not that, he at least comes up with something memorably goofy. Why wasn’t the Arnie Terminator smashed by an angry bull?

Short Film Friday: The Shrew Ash

https://freetubeapp.io/

In short: The Pigeon Tunnel (2023)

Great documentary filmmaker Errol Morris interviews the re-inventor of spy fiction John le Carré, shortly before the writer’s death. It is a series of deep conversations during which Carré goes into some very private facets of his personality and life but also shows himself – rather expectedly when you’ve read a little about the man’s background – a great raconteur, looking back at his life with a distance towards those things he hates or loves about himself or what happened in his life. He still loathes Kim Philby, though, but also sees him as a mirror of his own failings of character and personality. Of course, the author would argue, he doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as a core personality.

Consequently, much of what le Carré talks about with Morris circles around the flexibility of personality and truth, of autobiographical truth and untruth, speaks of masks and betrayals, and of how to take elements of reality and shape them into narratives. All of this clearly resonates with Morris’s own work as a filmmaker, his questions about truth, truthfulness and artificiality. It is clear Morris is little interested in le Carré’s biography as a simple, linear progression of facts but rather tries to talk with the writer about how one can attempt to be truthful about a subject, say oneself, even when it is impossible to be absolutely, abstractly truthful. Critical distance is not a concept that makes sense here, and if you go into the film expecting something more to contemporary tastes, interested in judging le Carré on his autobiography, you’ll probably go away disappointed. But then, that’s hardly what one should expect from Morris.

To my eyes, The Pigeon Tunnel is a fascinating, and often very entertaining, film that doesn’t quite try to hide its philosophical questions behind le Carré’s abilities as a storyteller, and that also happens to express rather a lot of ideas about human nature and the world I tend to share. At least on some days.

In short: Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (2020)

Julien Temple’s documentary about the late, great Shane MacGowan uses a kind of collage method to not speak about the man and his work but let him speak for himself. So the film uses archival footage and often appropriately bizarre animation to illustrate the life and times of MacGowan as he tells them through various interviews from different stages of his life, some of which conducted by and with friends with an physically barely there man. The only outside perspective given is from some interviews with members of his family, editorializing doesn’t really happen. Given MacGowan’s tendency to extreme drunken debauchery, I wouldn’t exactly believe anything he’s saying, which doesn’t mean the film isn’t a true portrayal of his life and mind – it’s simply not one I’d believe as a portrayal of all the facts of his life and mind. But the facts aren’t really the point when you’re trying the portrait the core of a human being.

Given the nature of the man and his music, the film is a mix of nostalgia, aggression and sudden outbursts of poetry. It’s also clearly not on board with romanticizing hard living as a necessity for art – there’s an unflinching aspect to its look at MacGowan’s increasing physical and mental decline that leaves no room for that. Pleasantly, this unflinching view is paired with a complete lack of hypocritical moral superiority – talent wasting away and life fading is not treated with judgment here, but sadness for what’s gone and love for what’s still there. Which does turn this into a bit of a heartbreaker for those of us to whom MacGowan’s music means a lot, but that’s only right and proper.

In short: Skinwalker Ranch (2018)

Most people interested in Fortean phenomena in one way or the other will have heard of the “Skinwalker Ranch”, a property in Utah located in what appears to be located in a hotbed of all manner of strange activity from Navajo-style skin-walkers to poltergeists over UFOs through cattle mutilation – if it’s High Strangeness, people seem to experience it there. If you’ve never heard of the place, have a Wikipedia page.

The place is also known for various attempts to gather data about the occurring phenomena in a scientific manner. Of course, if you believe the people involved – some of which you’ll encounter in Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell’s documentary – the phenomena seemed to purposefully (and rather conveniently, one can’t help but feel) avoid camera lenses and all attempts to measure and understand them, as is such phenomena’s wont.

The documentary itself is a thing of two halves. Large parts of it consist of often very interesting and atmospheric material from a never finished documentary by George Knapp about the place and the surrounding phenomena. These parts are actually wonderful filmmaking, including some rather suggestive material, and while they don’t exactly convince me of the theories of the parties involved, they do certainly convince me that a lot of people have indeed experienced very strange things in the area.

Unfortunately, Knapp’s material, that seems more in the spirit of the better Fortean documentaries of the 70s, is intercut with amateurishly shot footage of the Utah desert in “suggestive” camera angles with Corbell rambling on and on about nothing through a cheap microphone, a couple of interviews that go nowhere at great length, some conspiracy bullshit, and a sit-in on the ranch with its new owner who wants to hide his identity while pontificating about having “a large empire of business interests”, and showing off his watch. Well, and a random cameo by crap pop star Robbie Williams, who, we learn, believes. If you’d cut these scenes out, the whole affair would be 90 minutes of modern folkloric bliss, as it stands, you gotta work for the good stuff here.

In short: Searching for Sugar Man (2012)

At the beginning of the 70s, Sixto Rodriguez made two good to great folk rock albums, only to disappear from the public stage (well, there was a late 70s/early 80s comeback in Australia, but the film at hand doesn’t mention it and probably genuinely doesn’t know about that part of the story). Unbeknownst to anyone in the US – certainly the artist – Rodriguez’ output became something of a key cultural artefact for the white anti-Apartheid counterculture in South Africa, with some of his songs being veritable black market hits.

Following the end of Apartheid – which also brought with it official versions of the records Rodriguez apparently saw as little money off as from the bootlegs because the record industry sucks – and a lot of pretty unbelievable rumours about Rodriguez’ death – “best” of them the one about him committing suicide on stage in front of an audience unappreciative of his music – some of the man’s South African fans start to dig into the case of their lost idol. Eventually, they not just find out where he lived – Detroit, which comes as little surprise given the Motown connection of his records – but also that he’s actually still alive (or was, as Rodriguez unfortunately died just this August). Which leads to a triumphant tour in South Africa.

There’s something special about Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man that doesn’t lie in its effectively used but still pretty standard music documentary format. Probably, this special quality has a lot to do with how it resonates with the Romantic in many a music lover, the way it portrays how music taken out of its original context can take on different, important, (personal) world-changing qualities in a different part of the world. There’s something at once hopeful and strange about this, art resonating in different ways as planned that are still sympathetic to its source.

It is doubly nice that this is one of the handful of films and stories about rediscovering a lost musician that end happily, even quietly triumphantly, with the artist not just being alive but also happy, not having recorded further music but having had what feels like a full and interesting life, and was still living it when this was shot.

Three Films Make A Post: It's never too late to start.

Living (2022): There’s so much that could have gone wrong with shifting Oliver Hermanus’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to 1950s London, but the resulting movie carves out its own, individual identity instead of being the original movie, but worse and set in the West. Kazuo Ishiguro’s script for the tale of a man confronted with the diagnosis of his looming death and what this does to him is delicate, intelligent and easily portrays the difficult bits of the human heart, so that a story that in the wrong hands could be just a piece of kitsch becomes deeply felt, thought and moving. Hermanus directs with quiet intelligence, a presence that’s never showy, and the ability to support his actors.

The cast, led by a typically wonderful Bill Nighy doesn’t exactly need the support, great as the ensemble does, but the film isn’t exactly getting worse by them and their director being on the same page.

Sri Asih (2022): Only the second film of the Indonesian Bumilangit Cinematic (superhero) Universe, and we’re already getting not only a female led (Pevita Pearce as the titular heroine) entry, but one directed by a woman – Upi Avianto – to boot. For my tastes, this is a better paced movie than Gundala is, a little slicker in presentation and choreography, and a lot of fun like this sort of big budget superhero thing is supposed to be, particularly – as with its predecessor - in the way it allows itself to be local as well as universal.

Hergé: In the Shadow of Tintin aka Hergé à l’ombre de Tintin (2016): Apparently, there are different cuts of Hugues Nancy’s documentary about the great pioneer of the Bande dessinée, Hergé. I have only been able to see the shorter, fifty-two minute cut. I suspect most of my problems with the film would be resolved by the thirty minutes longer version, for this version’s main problem seems to be its neck-breaking pace, racing through its subject’s life and work with so little breathing room, it can only touch on anything – his unpleasant early politics, the war years, his emotional struggle with being the Tintin drawing machine, the development of his style and so on – without ever finding the time to actually say anything deep about it, despite featuring an impressive number of experts as well as rare and valuable archive material from Hergé’s estate.

I’m not quite so sure the film’s tendency to hyperbole – there’s a lot of talk about “genius”, whatever that means, little talk about any comics work influencing Hergé and things like that – is going to be better in the longer version, but it running around like the White Rabbit really is its main problem in the short cut.

In short: Driver 23 (1999) & The Atlas Moth (2001)

Rolf Belgum’s verité style twin documentaries concern one Dan Cleveland, a metal guitarist and delivery driver who deeply believes he’s meant for greater things in life. Cleveland has troubles with mental illness and an obsessive personality, bad medication and general unhappiness, all of which he tries to get through with a mix of delusions of grandeur, intense determination, and a habit of inventing strange contraptions where others would take a walk to the next hardware store.

Both films follow their subject without much commentary, yet the first one, when seen alone, can leave one rather uncomfortable. At times, we get too good a look at parts of Dan’s personality strangers shouldn’t be or needn’t be prone to and there are a few moments when the documentary seems out to present him as an object of mockery more than one of sympathy. It’s not that I didn’t laugh, it’s that I really felt bad for laughing at a guy who clearly is subject to forces out of his control even more than most of us are, and whose main sin is that he’s difficult, weird and a dreamer.

The second documentary avoids this pitfall completely, following Dan through harder times but really very clearly wanting him to achieve some of his dreams. On the way there (spoiler, I guess, so sorry), we get more insight into Dan and his peers, and an honest look at that part of middle age where you look at your life and realize that none of your dreams and hopes have come to pass, and you have left other, more realistic chances, pass you by for these unfulfilled dreams.

In short: Where Are You, João Gilberto (2018)

Documentary filmmaker Georges Gachot follows the traces of German writer Marc Fischer’s book “Hobalala” in an attempt to finish what Fischer started: find and hopefully meet the great Brazilian musician João Gilberto. For the last decades of his life, Gilberto spent an eccentric and reclusive life, apparently living in hotel rooms and avoiding personal contact with anyone as much as possible, for unknown reasons.

On the trail of Fischer on the trail of Gilberto, Gachot meets various other key figures of Brazilian music history, encounters saudade as well as more European coded versions of sadness, loneliness and nostalgia, and ends up in front of a closed hotel room door listening to Gilberto singing behind it.

Obviously, this is quite different from your typical music documentary, particularly since Gachot often seems to go out of his way to avoid naming, dating or categorizing – if you want to learn about Brazilian music history, you’re wrong here. Instead, this is a film all about the feelings Gilberto’s music evokes in Gachot, Fischer and others, the feelings Fischer evoked writing about the absence of Gilberto as an actual person to be communicated with, as well as the sad beauty of music, not of its historical context.

This approach stands the film in good stead, as does Gachot’s ability to relate to everyone he interviews on a personal and specific level that feels grounded in a genuine appreciation for people with their foibles and eccentricities, as much as a love for Gilberto’s work and Fischer’s book.

That Gachot is also clearly one of those “poetic truth” documentarians makes me a little sceptical about the factual truthfulness of the hotel room door ending, but it’s so perfect an emotional capstone (even more so when you keep in mind that Gilberto himself would die in 2019, never making the big stage comeback and the albums produced by sensitive young fans he so richly deserved), factual truthfulness isn’t the point.