Three Films Make A Post: The past has a mind of its own

Documenting the Witch Path (2017): I have a higher tolerance for POV horror bullshit than most people, but I’ve seldom encountered a 65 minute movie that felt quite as long as this Swedish one. There’s amateur filmmaking – which is perfectly okay in my book – and then there is a film that exclusively consists of circular dialogue sequences during which characters tell each other about the phone call they and we just fucking heard, dudes reading lore at the camera, and awkwardly edited nothing. Camera angles are apparently chosen at random, and nothing is happening, at all.

Heck, there’s not even a single actually effective shot once the characters finally kinda-sorta begin following the titular Witch Path.

Kshudhita Pashan aka The Hungry Stones (1960): The first half of this poetically shot Bangla language movie by Tapan Sinha based on a story by Rabindranath Tagore is a kind of ghost story you can encounter in many countries, at least in its larger outline. A young tax inspector is sent to a country town to set various things in order. He is quartered in a large, empty palace the locals won’t stay in at night, and has various encounters with a female ghost. At first, these encounters are dream-like and frightening – shot in beautifully realized shadows, but soon enough, a doomed romance starts between the living and the dead. Before we come to the doomed part, the film turns out to be a tale of reincarnation, and so the backstory between these two lovers is revealed in an extended flashback. Which I found somewhat weaker than the film’s first half, though still shot and staged with great care and a sense of true visual poetry. As a tale of doomed supernatural love and mild spookiness, this a lovely thing, made even more so by its wonderful locations.

Mother aka Maza (2014): This only directorial work by great (and in Japan beloved in his public persona) horror and humour mangaka Kazuo Umezu aka Umezz is a somewhat uneven film in acting and direction but there’s quite a bit to be said for any movie that turns parts of the manga career of its director into a horror tale including dark family secrets and the evil ghost of his own mother. It’s certainly not your typical biopic.

As a director, Umezu isn’t as great as when he’s working in manga. The film’s timing is often a little off in a way that suggests difficulties to adapt to the needs of a different form of storytelling, and while there are some fine, creepy sequences, some of the horror here is surprisingly bland.

But hey, there aren’t too many movies in which an actor portraying the actual filmmaker gets into physical altercations with the ghosts of their mothers, so I can’t say this isn’t interesting.

Flora and Son (2023)

Flora (Eve Hewson), a mostly single Mom in Dublin – the father Kev (Paul Reid) is around but is clearly useless in most regards – can’t really connect with her teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan). She’s not quite grown-up as fully as you’d expect of a proper movie mom, after all, and is rather more abrasive than Hollywood rules allow for being a good mother.

On a wine-driven lark, Flora signs up for online guitar lessons from Los Angeles never-quite-made-it musician Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Not unexpectedly, they do fall in long-distance love, but, this being a John Carney movie, the romantic aspect isn’t everything, so Flora discovers certain aspects about herself through the power of music and their connection that will in turn help her connect with Max.

So yes, this is pretty much a typical John Carney film in its use of romance movie tropes it doesn’t quite subvert but also clearly isn’t feeling slavishly beholden to, where the lovers not getting together in a romantic embrace isn’t actually a sad ending, and where re-connecting a family isn’t part of some kind of conservative impulse to put things back in order, but an example of human connection.

Human connection that in Carney’s films is typically enabled and enhanced through the power of music, or really, the power of songs – in a way where genre and approach matter less than the nearly spiritual way making music together as an act of creativity can connect people in unexpected ways.

This nearly never glides off into the realms of kitsch because Carney also knows that songs do not magically solve every problem, that problems may indeed not be solvable, and isn’t afraid to leave room for characters to grow or screw up after the movie is finished. His sometimes a little abrasive but never cruel sense of humour certainly helps keep things honest as well.

Which makes Flora and Son, like all of Carney’s musically minded movies, the kind of film to watch when you want to feel all little better about humanity without feeling like you’re being lied to - a perfect thing, really.

The Gorge (2025)

Two highly skilled and emotionally messed up sharpshooters (Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller) from what a couple of months ago were still the big international enemy blocks are stationed on opposite sides of a mysterious gorge of unknown location that’s covered with mines and auto-firing guns.

They are there to watch out for some kind of threat climbing up from the gorge. Communication between the two sides is forbidden – but apart from a dangerous abyss, there’s nobody around to police these rules.

So obviously, the two fall in love pretty much on first sight (who could blame them?) and end up learning quite a bit more about the place than the powers that be like. Also, they will shoot a lot of monsters and cause a more than sufficiently large explosions.

The Gorge is contrived, The Gorge is more than just a little silly, yet I found myself highly entertained by Scott Derrickson’s mix of horror, action and romance. It’s the sort of film that will always prefer a cool idea to a serious one, but it does so with the sense of joy and excitement, and the hidden glee at hiding away some cleverness you could find in the best films of Corman’s New World cinema phase.

Thus, this feels like the product of filmmakers enjoying themselves with the Apple money they somehow managed to get for making their high budget low budget movie, doing their best to get their audience to loosen up enough to enjoy themselves, as well. That’s how it worked out for me, at least.

Plus, Joy (whom I’d watch in anything, anyhow) and Teller have a pleasant degree of chemistry, there are some fun monster designs, sometimes great art direction, and the action is staged with verve as well as the expected professionalism. What’s not to like?

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 Fall Guy (2024)

Having broken his back during an accident, Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), stuntman to the insufferable star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), does recover bodily, but finds himself in lowest of spirits. During his recovery he has driven away his girlfriend, budding director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), and has decided to park cars for a living instead of jumping canyons in them.

However, Ryder’s manager and producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham) lures Colt back to stunt work by the simple expediency of telling him Jody asked for him to work on her directorial debut Metal Storm, a SF epic about the power of love, violence and cheesy speeches, that does, alas, seem to lack Jared Syn. What the film also lacks is Tom Ryder, for he has gone missing – possible on a drug bender – which wouldn’t be atypical for the guy. Gail wants Colt to find him before anyone else notices he is gone (most people on set don’t). All the while, Jody is rather nonplussed to find her ex-boyfriend suddenly working on her movie – she certainly didn’t ask for that.

Soon, Colt will need all of his considerable stunt person superpowers to survive his surprisingly dangerous search for Ryder; in between being drugged, getting run over by cars, and so on, there’s also a bit of a possibility to restart the relationship with Jody he so efficiently sabotaged after his accident on a more equal footing.

Saying I went into David Leitch’s The Fall Guy with low expectations would be selling them rather high, even though I loved Leitch’s Bullet Train. The combination of modern high budget action comedy, a needless revival of a mildly beloved old IP (shudder), and Ryan Gosling (whose general unwillingness to express emotions via facial expression or body language simply isn’t my idea of acting except in very specific circumstances) did not promise a good time.

But here’s the thing: Gosling emotes! Well, that’s one of several things, as a matter of fact. Instead of the completely empty pap I expected, this is a lovely cross between two genres that only very seldom meet – the romantic comedy and the action comedy, and one where both genres are equally important to the film.

That Leitch does absurd action very well is no surprise; his expert sense of romantic timing very much is. But then, Drew Pearce’s script goes out of its way not to reproduce the way relationships are usually treated in action movies, nor does he fall into the trap of many a male-centric romcom where the protagonist’s girlfriend-keeping character change feels self-serving and dishonest. Colt Seavers isn’t just working out his bullshit, he’s also genuine about his feelings and going through that whole parallel action comedy plot at the same time; Blunt’s Jody is never just a prize but has some actual agency, as well as dreams and hopes that belong to her. Blunt’s also as fun in the Romcom stuff as she is in the more action oriented bits of the film. In fact, the way romcom and action comedy collide and change one another’s clichés is one of the most surprising elements here – much of the film can be read as meta commentary on the differences and parallels of genres that are typically female and male-coded, and suggests some things they might learn from each other.

The absurd action for its part is as expected: fun, fast, often very clever with the stupid jokes and very much centred on actual stunt work instead of CG, as is only right and proper when it comes to a film about a stuntman. The film’s also genuinely well plotted, with a central mystery that works and an eventual solution to our heroes’ problems that very consciously uses movie magic to come to a proper movie solution.

Because that’s what The Fall Guy is as well: a paean to genre films, the absurd things we are willing to love, the clichés we embrace and those we embrace while laughing about them, the things we want to believe in movies, the special moment when something preposterous and artificial touches one’s heart just as if it were the real thing, only better.

Circle of Danger (1951)

Some years after the end of World War II. Having made enough money in the underwater salvaging business to afford it, Clay Douglas (Ray Milland) travels to the UK to figure out the truth of the mysterious circumstances that resulted in the death of his brother during the war. All Clay really knows is that his brother died on a joint commando raid with British forces, but he has a curious feeling that there’s more to the death than “just” the vagaries of war.

Now Clay has the funds to travel around Great Britain from Wales to Scotland to meet up with the survivors of the raid who also happened to survive the war. His doubts grow with the reticence the men show to speak of what happened to his brother; this certainly makes his investigation rather difficult.

Because a man needs a hobby, Clay has an early meet-cute with americanophile Elspeth Graham (Patricia Roc) who is as obviously smitten with him as he is with her. Turns out investigating a mystery and romancing a woman at the same time is something of a juggling act Clay isn’t terribly well cut out for.

Going by the bare plot description I did expect Circle of Danger to be a – perhaps Hitchockian, perhaps early 50s paranoid – thriller somewhat in the vein of perpetual house favourite Ministry of Fear (a film that of course also features Milland). In actuality, this is a very leisurely mystery that spends as much if not more time on Elspeth’s and Clay’s romance as it does on a very minorly realized mystery. Quite a bit of the film looks and feels a bit like a tourist board ad as well, with Milland strolling through very different parts of the UK in the studio and some beautifully shot locations director Jacques Tourneur shows from their prettiest sides.

I don’t know the – usually great – Tourneur as a director of fare this light, but once I accepted that nothing about this affair is going to be tight, exciting, or tense, and clearly isn’t meant to be any of those things, I did start to enjoy myself with it.

After all, Milland is still in his charming leading man phase, and as always a joy to behold going through these particular motions, the romance is improbable enough to work, and Tourneur shoots even the least exciting criminal investigation with great style. As an added bonus, the suddenly very tight five minutes during the climax feature an incredible use of wide empty spaces for a suspense scene.

In short: City Beneath the Sea (1953)

Two salvage divers – straight arrow Brad Carlton (Robert Ryan) and his friend and partner, the morally more flexible Tony Bartlett (Anthony Quinn) – travel to Jamaica for a rather delicate operation. They are tasked to salvage one million dollars in gold bouillon from a sunken ship. At first, they find nothing at the coordinates provided them by the local contact (Karel Stepanek) of their employer.

Instead of going home again, both men decide to stay on Jamaica and romance some ladies in that horrifying 50s style you don’t have to be particularly woke to raise all available eyebrows at. Brad takes time getting to know boat captain Terry McBride (Mala Powers), while Tony sets his eyes on a night club singer working under the nom de plume of Venita (Suzan Ball). Eventually, their dithering and many a scene of “romance” will lead our protagonists on the trail of the gold again. Turns out, that local contact is involved in a rather huge insurance fraud.

But what, one might ask, about the titular “City Beneath the Sea”? Well, our heroes use the awkward looking ruin to locate the gold, that’s all.

It is not only the title of Budd Boetticher’s City Beneath the Sea that emphasises the wrong things – unfortunately, what is sold as an adventure movie in the classic style really isn’t much of that. The search for the gold takes a back seat for most of the movie. Instead we have to endure Ryan’s and Quinn’s characters acting like traditional male chauvinists for what feels like hours, some unfunny comedy, a musical number and other distractions in a film that seems to have no interest at all in its purported plot. Which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the distractions were actually interesting and fun, or would make use of Boetticher’s considerable talent for complex characterisation and explorations of human relationships. Alas, even with the considerable charm of Ryan and Quinn, the distractions never feel like anything but dithering, or desperate attempts at getting the film to feature length. From time to time there’s an interesting detail – like the way Tony very emphatically greets the black Dijon (house favourite Woody Strode) as a peer after having been introduced to him as their contact’s “boy” – but this is not a film where those details add up to very much, as much as I’d like them to.

Even the adventure scenes that are in the movie aren’t terribly great – the focus on slow, slow, oh so very slow diving sequences doesn’t play to Boetticher’s strengths as a director at all, what with it mostly showing our heroes bobbing up and down in their – now old-timey – diving gear.

All of which leaves City Beneath the Sea as a film only of minor interest even for Boetticher (or Ryan, or Quinn, etc) completists.

Three Films Make A Post: The girl you've been waiting for

The Unheard (2023): Other people’s mileage apparently varies considerably, but I had a lot of fun with Jeffrey A. Brown’s thriller about the auditory haunting of a deaf girl (Lachlan Watson) during and after an experimental procedure to regain her hearing. The whole “person encountering ghosts while regaining a formerly lost sense” thing is of course less than original, but the script by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen is tight, Brown’s direction solid, and Watson’s performance effective and likeable, so I didn’t mind this lack of originality in the least.

Whipsaw (1935): This melodramatic crime romance by Sam Wood about an undercover cop (Spencer Tracy) and a thief (Myrna Loy) he is attempting to pump for information about her colleagues in crime going on the road together is a surprisingly fun little thing, living off the considerable chemistry between Tracy and Loy – not something I would have expected going in, though Loy apparently had the ability to spark off everyone if she wanted to – and a sense of melodrama that never becomes too sappy or kitschy. There’s what feels like genuine heart to the story, so much so that, even under the conservative hammer of the Hays code, the cop seems to learn as much from the thief as she from him. That the film manages to contrive a way to not punish Loy’s character for past misdeeds and points at a happy end is an additional pleasant surprise.

Battle in Outer Space aka Uchu daisenso (1957): Leave it to the great Ishiro Honda (and of course writer Shinichi Sekizawa) to make a film about a space war between Earth and a superior alien force that have made their base on the moon to not go for the jingoist vein but emphasise the importance of international togetherness. It’s till rather refreshing; and a bit uncomfortable in that it makes a space war movie feel somewhat utopian.

If that alone doesn’t float your boat, you also get some wonderful miniature work from Eiji Tsuburaya and company, an ever wonderful Ifukube score, goofy yet awesome science, and even a bit of the old “mind-controlled by the alien menace!” paranoia. Though most of the latter could have been avoided if the powers that be had put any effort at all into guarding their heroic astronauts from alien abduction. But what can you do?

Three Films Make A Post: Winning was just the beginning.

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021): If the first Escape Room didn’t feel random and contrived enough to you, Adam Robitel’s sequel has you covered. The characters are even thinner than in the first movie – and what good is a diverse cast when none of the diverse characters is even the least bit interesting? – the plot is non-existent, and the film’s attempt at a big reveal in the final act is so stupid, it’s laughable.

The escape rooms themselves manage to be at once implausible, random and just ever so faintly stupid, showing as much imagination as the rest of the film, which is to say, none. That its idea of excitement mostly seems to consist of random editing tics and screeching actresses is only par for the course for this one.

Ek Tha Tiger aka Once There Was a Tiger (2012): Despite not being much of a fan of its lead couple Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif as far as I know their bodies of work, I had quite a bit of fun with this Bollywood spy romance by Kabir Khan. The film puts heavy emphasis on the romance, so much so, the handful of action sequences and the rest of the spy business sometimes feel as if they’ve slipped in from another movie. Since the action is still good fun, and the romance actually works pretty well, that’s not really a problem, though – one does not venture into an early 2010s Bollywood hit expecting the same ideas about tonal consistency you’d find in Hollywood at the same time, and blaming a film for not following rules it doesn’t actually set out to follow seems pointless, and a bit boring, like complaining about the lack of veggies in your ice cream.

Plus, there’s something deeply likeable about a Hindi movie that uses the enmity between India and Pakistan without ever becoming jingoistic (because love beats politics, here, obviously), and whose romance actually affords its female lead some agency.

Street View aka Reikai no tobira Street View (2011): A curious figure in street view seems connected to the disappearance of our protagonist’s sister. A lot of only mildly changed beats from old Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hideo Nakata movies follow. Alas, director Soichiro Koga doesn’t really manage to turn his cobbled together bits of great movies into a decent one of its own.

From time to time, there’s a scene or a moment here that manages to create something of a frisson, a suggestion of something truly ghastly lurking on the other side of one’s monitor, but more often than not, this looks and feels like a cheap rip-off of much better things, without the thought that could have turned it into something special, or even just interesting.

In short: Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge (2007)

Original title: Negatibu happî chênsô ejji

One night, disenchanted teen Yosuke (Hayato Ichihara) stumbles upon the rather surprising event of a beautiful teen girl we’ll soon enough learn is called Eri (Megumi Seki) fighting a pretty obvious metaphor for grief, depression and loneliness in form of a large, hooded guy wielding a chainsaw who appears to drop down from the moon. Yosuke is instantly smitten and fascinated by Eri, and starts to accompany her on her nightly fights against Chainsaw Guy as her awkward, tea-fetching, sidekick.

Of course, they get closer to each other, what with them both being movie teens in a dangerous situation suffering from alienation and grief – Yosuke for a “courageous” buddy who got himself killed doing idiot teenage things, Eri for the whole of her family, though Yosuke will take ages to figure that one out.

When it comes to teen coming-of-age movies/romances with obvious central metaphors, you could do much worse than Takuji Kitamura’s Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge. In its tropes and ideas, it is a very standard post-2005 Japanese treatment of its material, somewhat lacking in originality or depth, and clearly built for a teen audience more than for an old fart like me.

While it is a little direct for me, and Yosuke’s idealization of his suicidal dead friend does get annoying rather quickly if you’ve have seen kids from your own childhood die exactly the kind of stupid death that guy did, there’s nothing wrong at all with the movie. Seki and Hayato are as cute as their audience needs them to be and happen to be perfectly capable actors, the script flows nicely, and Kitamura’s direction is generally competent, sometimes even a little stylish.

I think the story Negative Happy etc tells would have had more emotional impact told from Eri’s perspective rather than Yosuke’s – her story’s simply more interesting than his – but it’s still something I would probably have eaten up at the right age, and can still respect for what it is now.

In short: In Your Eyes (2014)

I’m not completely happy with Brin Hill’s Fantastika Romance based on a script by Joss Whedon, perhaps because I expect a bit more than this film’s finale based on artificial outside threats that really doesn’t fit the calm tone of the rest of the narrative very well.

There’s also the sad presence of one of these generic indie rock soundtracks too many indie romances suffer from, you know the kind, where every song is just as characterless as any given piece of truly bad charts pop. Which would be less of a problem if the film didn’t push the music on its audience quite as hard as this one does at times.

On the positive side, and despite the music, the film’s first two thirds are often quite lovely, with many a scene that’s clever and emotionally honest, and fine acting by Zoe Kazan and Michael Stahl-David. But even here, the film’s missing something, be it whimsy, be it depth, that would turn it from something comfortably watchable into something a bit more emotionally involving. I’m not so much looking for nihilist philosophical monologues here (though I’d certainly be game for that), as for any sign the film actually has a philosophy, or emotional politics, beyond what the genres it belongs to ask of it. It looks like the comparative glut of more or less quirky indie romances with fantasy plot base that went on when this was made has resulted in heightened expectations from me for these films to go beyond well-made button pushing and highly competent filling of expectations. I suspect if this had been made a decade earlier, and I would have seen it then, I would not have the same complaints about In Your Eyes.

In short: Sleepless in Seattle (1993) & You’ve Got Mail (1998)

These probably aren’t the sort of film anyone expects to find around here, but when it comes to writer/directors who continued the tradition of the romances of the studio era in Hollywood without just being retro, Nora Ephron at her best – and she certainly was in these two films - probably was the best too, dropping as many nods and smiles in the direction of other films as Quentin Tarantino. Of course, because being a woman in Hollywood still sucks, and the film genres Ephron was involved in usually don’t even get the cult credits of the sort of film I’m usually talking about here, only a handful of critics ever cared. Not that this blogger is an exception, mind you, for I’ve been turning up my nose at most romantic comedies for quite a few years, as well. Chalk this up as another thing about which I have been wrong.

What makes these two films special is not just Ephron’s ability to construct a romantic comedy that never is too sappy while still tugging on a viewer’s heart strings. Rather, Ephron here gives us a complete package full of perfectly timed sequences, dialogue that’s clever and sharp and flows so naturally you never stop and think that nobody talks this cleverly in real life, and direction that is much more imaginative in its approach than it lets on. Add to that an excellent cast (remember Tom Hanks when he wasn’t completely in thrall to the illusion he’s a great dramatic actor or, Cthulhu help us, a director, and when Meg Ryan wasn’t kicked to the curb side with Hollywood’s obsession not with youth but with people over forty looking like thin pressed sausages?), the director’s excellent taste in the use of music, and I don’t see how I couldn’t like these films.

Sure, I disagree with Ephron’s idea of romantic love, and certainly can’t help but raise my eyebrows at the absence of non-rich people in these films, but then, I also don’t believe in ghosts yet still enjoy a good ghost story told by fussy old upper-class academics.

Three Films Make A Post: It's not important where we are going. I just want you to drive.

Drive All Night (2021): Night-time cab rides (or new-fangled ride share rides, aka cab rides with worse paid, less insured drivers) with more or less mysterious passengers are still a nice set-up for movies in quite a few genres, though not one always used as well as you’d wish. Peter Hsieh’s film featuring Yutaka Takeuchi as the cabbie and Lexy Hammonds as the mysterious passenger doesn’t quite hit every note right for me. There’s sometimes too vague a quality surrounding this mix of noir tropes, Lynch-inspired weirdness, and hallucinations even for my ambiguity positive taste. However, Hsieh clearly understands the beauty of night rides, so there are quite a few good scenes of people in cars. This is not me damning with faint praise.

Cracked (2022): This piece of Thai horror directed by first time filmmaker Surapong Ploensang is rather too generic in its building of scares and shocks to ever quite work for me, particularly since the film seems actually afraid of getting deeper into its less generic aspects. So, not surprisingly, its characters never do much of emotional or intellectual interest either despite their trauma load. Plus, there’s some really bad possessed child acting in here in an era where I suspect that playing possessed is one of the first things they teach kids on the child actor clone farm.

On the positive side, like with a lot of ultra-generic horror, this is still a perfectly decent way to while away ninety minutes or so. Just don’t expect any emotional impact, or really anything you’ll remember about the film a week after you’ve seen it.

The Awful Truth (1937): One of the reasons why screwball comedies often land in these clean-out posts is not that I don’t love them (I really, really do), but it’s that this kind of comedy is particularly difficult to write about, unless you want to get into historical and sociological analysis, which seems to run counter to the actual experience of watching these films. Because watching Leo McCarey’s movie does not really see me thinking about its representation of male-female relationships, nor how its portrayal of marriage sheds light on the mores of its time. Rather, it distracts me from these more worthy proceeds by making me laugh, repeatedly and heartily.

Three Films Make A Post: It's a cold, cruel world - but Jackson can hack it!

Fresh (2022): I’m not as excited about Mimi Cave’s variation on common horror tropes as quite a few other viewers seem to be, mostly because adding a bit of gloss to keep a more mainstream audience watching something usually done sordid doesn’t seem to be much of an achievement to me, and does not for a terribly interesting movie make to these eyes. I also found the film’s feminism very superficial and pretty bland, not really adding further insight to anyone’s view of the world nor doing much I haven’t seen before to the tropes of its sub-genre. It’s certainly well-filmed and well-acted (with Daisy Edgar-Jones giving a likeable turn, and Sebastian Stan giving the oversize crazy performance every filmography needs) on a technical level, but it’s also twenty to thirty minutes too long. Particularly the never-ending (and not in a good way) climax is a problem here.

Unmasked Part 25 (1988): Anders Palm’s very low budget slasher comedy romance from several decades earlier is rather more creative with the tropes of its sub-genre, providing many a moment of handmade gore as an additional attraction, thinking through and against the basics of the slashers genre, skewering bodies as well as poetry-quoting self-serious sad sack men, and actually building a world for his slasher (Gregory Cox) to inhabit. The jokes here are trying to hit on every level, from making fun of genre tropes – be they horror or romantic comedy – to peculiar sex jokes to plain deadpan weirdness, and as is par for the course for the shotgun approach, not all of them hit. But there are so many of them, you’re already laughing or shaking your head at the next one.

Bride of the Nile aka Arouss el Nil (1963): Practically everything I’ve seen of classic Egyptian movies like this romantic fantasy comedy by Fatin Abdulwahhab fits very much in style and taste to classic Hollywood formulas, and it’s very easy to imagine a US version of this tale of a grave-disturbing engineer (Abdel Moneim Ibrahim) first being haunted by and then falling in love with the spirit of the last bride of the Nile (Lobna Abdel Aziz) without many changes to the script or the filmmaking. We don’t actually need a US version, happily, for the film at hand is really all you could want from the kind of whimsical, fantastical romance this material promises, with many a superimposed image of Lobna Abdel Aziz waving her hands so that some telekinesis can happen, the expected assortment of musical numbers and pretty great costumes, and a general sense of fancy that never seems to get tired or old.

Three Films Make A Post: They said he couldn’t cut it – they were right!

Cosmic Dawn (2022): There are exactly three things Jefferson Moneo’s very mysterious cult plus aliens movie has going for it: cheap but clever production design, a bright yet strange, sometimes even psychedelic, use of colour, and a perfectly decent central performance by Camille Rowe. Alas, the rest of the film is terrible: the pacing is drawn out and slow for no reason apart from keeping things “mysterious” and “ambiguous” (both of which they aren’t, if you’ve ever read about actual cults or have seen movies about fake ones), the dialogue tends to the inadvertently comical, the rest of the acting is so broad one might think this is supposed to be a comedy (it apparently isn’t?), and all the script’s structure of shifting between different time periods does is draw out things even more. Sometimes, narrative devices that are good for TV or can be used productively by really great screenwriters aren’t what more pedestrian talents should use, apparently.

And since there are at least a handful of movies about UFO cults that are actually good (decent would be enough in this case), I don’t see why anyone should waste their time with this one.

Ghosts of the Ozarks (2021): While it isn’t without its problems either, I’m rather more fond of this Weird, somewhat philosophical, Western-ish film by Matt Glass and Jordan Wayne Long. Sure, its script does have some unnecessary lengths too, but it also has something to say, saying it via a fantastical narrative because that’s simply a great way to talk about complicated things without getting distracted. That Ghosts does this in ways which are sometimes a bit cheesy, perhaps even silly, will be a problem to some viewers, but does feel so personally and individual to me in this case, it actually becomes one of the film’s strengths.

The direction is a bit awkward sometimes, but mostly in the way films straining against their budgets can get. The acting is generally good to great – with leads Thomas Hobson, Tara Perry (who also co-wrote) and Phil Morris doing fine work. And it’s always nice to see Angela Bettis, and David Arquette being weird.

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (2021): As if we were trapped in one, we are living in the age of the time loop movie again. Like certain characters in many entries of the genre, I’m perfectly fine with it, at least as long the time loop movies are as good as the current batch. Quality-wise, this teen romance version by Ian Samuels (with a script by Lev Grossman in a very uncynical incarnation) is certainly keeping with modern sub-genre standards, hitting all the mandatory beats of the time loop film and the teen romance, but giving all of them a neat, even mildly subversive twist of their own. Kathryn Newton and Kyle Allen make for very likeable leads indeed, too. Newton should have a nice career in front of her even when she’s not playing characters possessed by Vince Vaughn, it seems.

Apart from making a film that’s charming as all get out, the filmmakers also succeed in giving it one of those “positive emotional messages” without letting it get schmaltzy; instead the emotional beats feel genuine and deserved. Perhaps a bit too optimistic about the non-crappy nature of the universe, but them’s the breaks.

Three Films Make A Post: The time has come to tell the tale.

A Classic Horror Story (2021): This Netflix horror film by Roberto De Feo and Paolo Strippoli starring Matilda Lutz (last seen here in the mind-blowing rape revenge film Revenge) does have quite a bit of fun with the whole meta horror genre shifting business, though never so much it seems more interested in patting itself on the back instead of being an actual horror movie. Consequently, the various set pieces are inventive in their nods to horror of the past but creative enough on their own to also feel organically threatening and creepy. The genre shifting is a fun enough game to play, though I do have to admit I was more than a little disappointed the whole affair decided on one of my least favourite sub-genres as its ending point. But then, it’s me, not the movie.

Ghibah (2021): I have a history of not getting along with Indonesian horror comedy very well (the language barrier certainly doesn’t help), so colour me very surprised about how much enjoyed this somewhat religious (again, not something I love in my horror) horror comedy by Monty Tiwa about an ifrit punishing a group of college kids committing the sins of gossiping and defamation (which is apparently worse than murder) quite a bit. There’s a charming wryness to the film’s comedy that even continues during its most moralizing moments, rather suggesting your mildly disappointed teacher rather than a fire and brimstone preacher (imam?), turning the comedy curiously companionable. At the same time, the horror set pieces are sometimes surprisingly vicious, confronting characters and audience with pretty traumatic images and nearly never playing the horror itself for laughs; which is why the laughs work so well and vice versa.

His Motorbike, Her Island (1986) aka Kare no ootobai, kanojo no shima: On paper, this is your typical mid-80s Kadokawa production made with a young audience and box office results foremost in mind, a romantic coming of age tale between a young and pleasantly awkward Riki Takeuchi (so young even his hair hasn’t quite reached its future epic form) and the motorcycle-loving Kiwako Harada. While it’s script is very much written to market, it’s not stupidly so, knowing quite a bit about the workings of the late teenage heart, fear of commitment and early fear of loss, just presenting it in a light and non-brooding way.

And that’s before director Nobuhiko Obayashi comes in, who, as is his wont, stylizes every single element of the film to hell and back again, intensifying, ironicizing, breaking and putting back together again, often in the same scene. Sometimes, this approach bogs Obayashi’s films down in irony and pop aestheticism, but when it works like here (not to speak of a masterpiece like Hausu), cheese turns into something more fraught, dangerous, exciting and strange, themes, plots and surface aesthetics going on a merry dance with one another that becomes riveting and singular.

Three Films Make A Post: A tale of the strange and perverse.

G@me (2003): Supposed to be a twisty crime thriller with some satirical elements, Satoshi Isaka’s adaptation of a novel by Keigo Higashino (that may very well be much better) is exactly the sort of thing that gives twist-based movies a bad name: as is oh so typical the plot twists manage to be completely obvious to anyone who has seen a couple of movies yet also make a mockery out of the characters’ behaviour the audience has witnessed throughout. It doesn’t help that we spend our time with two characters (as played by Naohito Fujiki and Yukie Nakama’s respective hair-dos) who are at once deeply unlikeable and terribly boring, nor that their attempts at faking a kidnapping really rather belong in a Coen Brothers comedy, but are played completely straight here.

Some of this is certainly meant as a critique of early 00’s Japanese capitalism, but the bland writing, the one note characters and Isaka’s slick yet uninteresting direction bury that lede rather effectively.

My Girlfriend is a Serial Killer aka Love and Murder of Sheep and Wolf aka Hitsuji to Okami no Koi to Satsujin (2019): Also not as successful as I’d like it to be is this manga adaptation by Kayoko Asakura, about a hikikomori (Yosuke Sugino) who falls in love with the neighbour (Haruka Fukuhara) he has started spying on through a hole in the connecting wall between their apartments, and continues to do so even when she turns out to be serial killer. This one suffers from the weird decision to underplay how perverse its set up actually is and go from there. Instead it plays things off as if this were a pretty traditional romantic comedy, just with more bursts of blood and violence as central problems to the relationship. Even the random murder of strangers is played without any weight, not just by the characters but by the film as a whole.

It’s a much better movie than this post’s first entry, mind you: it is entertaining throughout, it just never gets anywhere interesting or too unpleasant (which we might blame the manga for?) with a set-up absolutely built to.

The Night Digger aka The Road Builder (1971): This British movie by Alastair Reid, apparently adapted from a Joy Cowley novel by Roald Dahl to get post-stroke work for his wife, the excellent Patricia Neal, on the other hand, does know a bit about the perverse, and willingly admits to it. When the film is not a bit of a broad satire of the manners of the country bourgeoisie, this is an in turns sharp and ambiguous movie about loneliness, horrible families, and the way the worst kind of love can worm itself into one’s heart if one has been beaten around by life enough. It’s also a thriller with a nasty streak that still manages to feature little to no on-screen violence, a sleazy bit of exploitation that seems to beam its nastiest implications into your brain instead of showing it, and a heart-breaking character study for Neal.

It’s pretty fantastic in often very unexpected ways, is what I’m saying.

Three Films Make A Post: You will believe …

Haunted (1995): Why this plushy attempt by veteran director (every single piece I’ve ever read about this movie seems to call him that, and it’s certainly true) Lewis Gilbert at adapting one of those later James Herbert novel where the writer – artistically rather successfully – attempted to escape his pulp instincts is pretty well regarded is beyond me. The script snails its way to a big twist the book handles and seems to understand much better, dialogue and plotting are otherwise completely forgettable, and a theoretically decent cast does little to improve things by being typically wooden (Kate Beckinsale), atypically panto (Aidan Quinn), or nearly not in the movie (John Gielgud). Lewis shows little understanding on how to film the haunting scenes, overlighting every scene (nights are basically as bright as days in this haunted house), and doing not a lick of mood building beyond the mood of a postcard. Intelligent use of shadow or colour simply doesn’t happen; instead, the score by Debbie Wiseman swells, because the filmmakers think the film’s material is best treated as a romance. Which it might be, if the script actually constructed one.

The Devil’s Hand (1961): I had quite a bit more fun with this early 60s indie horror movie about a guy seduced into becoming a member in the cult of “Gambu, the great spirit of Evil”. As directed by one William J. Hole Jr. it feels a lot like the adaptation of a Seabury Quinn story sans Jules de Grandin that never made it into “Weird Tales”. Consequently, it does contain rather a lot of weird ideas about non-western cultures – the cult’s lair is kitted out with bits and bobs from all kinds of non-Anglo cultures that have sod all to do with one another – but then, it does mostly seem to consist out of white people from LA, so that’s a somewhat ironic (and certainly inadvertent) fit. The acting’s very stiff, as is the dialogue, but the film goes as far with the masochist elements implicit in the tale of a man falling for a femme fatale as it could get away with at the time, doesn’t drag its feet, and is genuinely engaging as a piece of pulpy horror. From time to time, Hole even catches on a truly weird idea or two, which is more than you can say for a lot of movies.

Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet aka Adéla jeste nevecerela (1978): Speaking of weird, this farce by Oldřich Lipský is a perfect example of the peculiar Czech sort of slapstick, deeply silly in a way that always feels somewhat subversive. Apart from that, it also functions as a loving homage to the more lively kind of silent cinema (and certainly silent cinema serials), Jules Verne (including what today reads as proto-steampunk elements), and whatever else the filmmakers find enjoyable, from Czech beer to dime novels (the hero is, after all, Nick Carter). The visual effects are at least in part designed and realized by the great Jan Svankmajer, so there’s quite a bit to gawk at between overcranked action sequences, silly romance, and bizarre revenge plots surrounding a giant man-eating plant who only dines when called with the sweet sounds of a Mozart lullaby not actually written by Mozart.

The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

Retired British officer Rudolf Rassendyll (Ronald Colman) is visiting one of those curious fictional Balkan countries that pop up so often in Hollywood, the pulps, and comics for a fishing trip. As a matter of fact, the country in Anthony Hope’s novel this is based on, called Ruritania there and not named in the film, is often seen as the earliest example of the made up Eastern-ish European country in popular culture.

In any case, a peaceful fishing trip it’s not going to be for the man, for he just happens to look exactly like the very soon to be crowned king of the country, also called Rudolf, and Rudolf the king is in a spot of bother no true Englishman of Rudolf the Brit’s type is going to let him hang in. Being a notorious carouser and alcoholic gadfly, the king isn’t well loved by his subjects, leaving the door wide open for his perpetually coldly angry and pretty evil brother “Black” Michael (Raymond Massey). Really, simply drugging Rudolf on the night before his coronation should do the trick, providing Michael with an opening to declare himself regent, marry Rudolf’s betrothed Princess Flavia (Madeleine Carroll), and probably rename the country into Latveria.

As it happens, said drugging is taking place right when Rudolf the Brit is present, palling around with the king after a chance encounter. Because nobody would believe the truth, the king’s oldest and most-suffering retainer, Colonel Zapt (C. Aubrey Smith) comes up with a plan: why not let his king’s virtual twin go through the coronation to thwart Michael’s plans, without anyone knowing any better?

This is of course only the beginning of a series of intrigues, romantic interludes and curious adventures for our Rudolf.

The Prisoner of Zenda is, in its nature and type, a kissing cousin – or really rather a making out heavily in the backyard cousin – of the swashbuckler, really only missing that particular genre descriptor in my eyes because its moments of physical derring-do are nearly completely relegated to the final act. It’s a very fine final act, though.

And really, this is me doing genre nit-picking and not me complaining about the actual film, for the adventure and romance movie we get here is indeed one of the great achievements of classic Hollywood. Not only because it puts quite a few of the British actors working in Hollywood at the time into one movie – for what is more continental European than guys from Oxbridge to American eyes, apart from lederhosen – but because it really does wonders with them.

This is one of those films that don’t just feature a perfectly cast hero in Ronald Colman, who does the wit, the romance and the physical demands of the role more than just justice. Nearly everyone else on screen is more than just fit to type, enhancing the traditionally flat characters in a film like this through mild ironies, charisma, and a hand for the telling details of body language and intonation. Even Raymond Massey’s Michael is only not considered one of the great screen villains because he’s overshadowed by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.’s Rudolf von Hentzau, the most fun to watch bastard imaginable, whom I left out of the plot synopsis as well the roles played by Mary Astor and David Niven because synopsising the film’s finely wrought net of dramatic interpersonal relations and improbable intrigue would have to go into novel, or at least movie, length.

Apparently, this was a bit of a difficult production, director John Cromwell having some kind of beef or the other with about half of the main cast – which sounds ridiculous going by what we see of them on screen – so that some scenes may or may not have been shot by someone else. George Cukor was supposedly shooting whatever, as well as, and more probably to my eyes, W.S. Van Dyke doing work on the fencing scene in the climax. Whoever told DP James Wong Howe in any given scene what to do (or was wise enough to let him get on with his business) did a bang-up job in any case, creating one of the best fairy-tale Europes of the American subconscious, built out of sumptuous, beautiful and exotic scenes gliding into another elegantly, everything culminating in a finale that visually seems to take place in the direct neighbourhood of Universal’s backlot Europe of shadows and expressionist castles.

It’s as perfect as anything you’ll see.

In short: Rendezvous (1935)

1917. Former newshound William Gordon (William Powell), freshly commissioned as a Lieutenant in the US Army is rather keen on getting to the front. On his last day before getting on the proverbial train, he meet-cutes rich gal Joel Carter (Rosalind Russell). Both are smitten instantly, and when Gordon tells her he once wrote a book about cryptography under a pseudonym, and is now trying to avoid the military finding out so they won’t commission him to a desk job at home – he just finds the thought to be slaughtered in the trenches irresistible I suppose – Joel tells on him to her papa, who just happens to be the Assistant Secretary of War.

There’s some friendly bickering between the couple still to come, but mostly, William will soon be disabused of his idea of a desk job being not dangerous enough. For a German spy ring has involved itself in the US cryptography business, having gotten rather close to striking a dangerous blow. Of course, the Germans are perfectly willing to commit rather a lot of murders to make their plans work. It’s easy enough, too, what with the Ministry of Defense apparently having so little security that a spy can simply waltz in and assassinate a scientist there.

For the first twenty minutes or so of its running time, William K. Howard’s Rendezvous seems to start a slightly more sober wartime variation on The Thin Man, which had after all been a considerable success of the kind no Hollywood studio wouldn’t want to repeat or copy by putting Powell together with a different actress but going for a mix of proto-screwball humour, romance, and espionage. Powell and Russell have a good bit of chemistry between them, so things start out pretty charming indeed.

However, once Powell’s character is set up as code breaker, the spy potboiler business takes over nearly completely, and Joel is relegated to a minor character. Powell – still charming and entertaining to watch as always – has to walk through a rather stiff and melodramatic spy plot nearly alone, romance taking a back seat to the business of espionage and war, even though Howard as a director seems to be really rather better at the romance and the comedy.

The longer the film follows the espionage plot, the less sense it makes, the spies’ plans only nearly succeeding because everyone working for the US government not played by Powell is painfully dense.


Thanks to Powell, it’s not exactly a chore to get through the final two thirds of the film, but it’s not a joy either. The bait and switch of promising a very different film from the one we get isn’t exactly making one happier with the affair either.