IF YOU ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU'VE ALWAYS DONE

Talking about Predestination without confidently, fearlessly giving away plot points that shouldn't be given away is enormously hard. The best thing would be to go in totally cold, not even knowing what short story it's based on (having read the story - it is not at all obscure, though calling it "well-known" might be a stretch - I was unfortunately able to get ahead of the movie pretty early on when I recognised it, which was kind of disappointing), so if you trust me, please go find it; it's crawling across the U.S. right now, and also can be found VOD. If you only trust me a little, how about this to sweeten the pot: no matter what you end up thinking about it, it's worth seeing because in it, you will find Sarah Snook giving an immaculate, wholly-formed Star Is Born performance of the first order. Gimmickry, raging sentiment, immensely subtleties of facial expression and gesture, showy vocal work; whatever you thinking Great Acting is, she's got some of it for you. The role won the Australian Academy Award for Best Actress against some weighty contenders, and boy, it's not the half of what she deserved.

So I'll assume you either have seen the movie, or don't care (but no worries, I'll keep spoilers firmly limited to the first third). Predestination is, to begin with, a film by Australian filmmaking brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, whose last film, 2009's "what if?" vampire story Daybreakers, felt like a peerless example of a once-in-a-lifetime concept that simply didn't have enough done with it in the execution. No such hedging applies to Predestination, which has an equally hearty concept, but sees it through to its conclusion in a way the previous film didn't. That's partially because it's an adaptation of Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies-", one of those mid-century science fiction short stories that seems to exist primarily so that the author could show all his steps in solving a problem and disingenuously calling it a narrative; all the Spierigs had to do was minutely copy the story and just like that, full-realised narrative. And that is, in fact, mostly what they've done, even when it leaves their movie snagged on ideas that work as asides in a short story and feel like conspicuous dropped threads in a movie. The biggest change is to add a bit of a "stop the terrorist" thriller spine that extends the plot far enough beyond the "taa-daa, I've revealed everything" gesture that it feels like an actual story with actual stakes and themes. Which makes it, whatever else it is, one of the too-rare movies to have thoroughly improved upon its source material in the act of adaptation.

The plot, meanwhile, is designed with a few confusing fake-outs along the way (it opens with the kind of in medias res scenes that annoyingly telegraphs that we'll see bits of it again later, and then it will make sense; a gimmick that I have long grown tired of), but in its basic for, it goes like this: a man (Ethan Hawke, the lead in Daybreakers), who has just received a new face after being badly burned, has for uncertain reasons set himself up as a bartender in New York in the early 1970s. One night, another man comes in, and after some fencing that could be seen as basic bartender chitchat but feels like goading, this second man offers to tell the most amazing story that the bartender has ever heard, betting a fresh bottle of booze that it will knock his ass off. And then begins his story, of the time when he was a young woman named Jane (Snook), who grew up an orphan with a distinct sense of being Not Like Other Girls; at a certain point, to make ends meet while traveling into space, she attempts to get a job as one of the space-courtesans serving the astronauts growing lonely and horny on year-long missions (it's details like these where scrupulous fidelity trips up the movie a bit). This doesn't pan out, she gets involved with a man who leaves her pregnant, and the birth results in a shocking discovery: Jane is of biologically indeterminate gender, and to save her life after this turns out to have made giving birth a near-fatal ordeal, the doctors have elected to turn her into a man.

It's right about then that it all clicked for me: not that Jane was the man in the bar (that's made clear so early that it's unfair to call it a twist), but that Snook had been playing him all along. Prior to that, the odd vocal cadences and carriage that went into the performance seemed just like part of the pile-up of mysteries that Predestination was indulging in during its opening act; it literally didn't occur to me that it was a woman playing a man until the slow progression of make-up joining the two end points (the film boasts some stellare make-up effects) made it impossible to miss. Snook is that good at playing the chameleon, figuring how the personality of a depressed man in 1970 is different from a brittle, whip-smart woman in the early 1960s, and exploring those registers so fully that it seems like she's playing two entirely different characters; and yet, the evolution between the two of them feels totally natural and correct.

And that's just at the level of the central gimmick: at all points in her performance of both iterations of Jane/John, Snook's carefulness in letting the right emotions slip out at the right time is so flawless in such a sustained way that even if this was the most sedate, genre-free kind of story, her performance would be hardly any less exemplary. There's nothing about any moment she's onscreen that isn't mesmerising; even Hawke seems dumbfounded, happily handing her each and every scene they share together - and it goes into some place where they share some really weird scenes together - without compromising his own rather nuanced and tricky performance, but also without showboating.

The two leads are so faultless in their performances, and Snook is so commanding in every scene, whether as a worn-out man or a fierce woman, that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that Predestination isn't actually a character study at heart; it's a carefully laid-out exercise in narrative mechanics, which asks multiple times, to varying degrees of explicitness, "are our actions the result of choice, or are they (wait for it) predestined? And if a certain choice is immoral, does the fact that it is predestined obviate our need to resist making it?" A bit dry and theoretical, sure; this does have its roots in '50s literary sci-fi, and dry theory never found a genre and a period that suited it better.

And, indeed, the dryness of it does tend to diminish the film's impact as more than a precisely-described puzzle with really urgent thematic questions that are more fun to think about then they are to apply to one's own life. The Spierigs do yeoman's work keeping the film's narrative clear and visually connected to itself, and the confidence of the filmmaking helps to keep things purring along any time the more logically-inclined viewers might start to feel the need to tug at the film's central impossibility. But it's very arid, in a lot of ways: impeccable but sterile, and only the fact that Snook and Hawke are in there, insisting on the warm, sloppy humanity of their characters allows Predestination to feel like a relatable story and not just an extraordinarily well-framed exercise.

But then, this is a movie, and movies do have actors, and maybe that was the point all along: take Heinlein's clinical chilliness, and make it into a rich human story by throwing some rich humans at it. I'm not sure it's quite enough to make Predestination an actual great piece of cinema, but it's absolutely enough to make it terrifically compelling viewing: a film with ideas and feelings that are inseparable from each other is nothing to discard lightly, even when it feels like it might be, at some level, a giant put-on.

8/10

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THE 2014 LIVE-ACTION OSCAR SHORTS

Oscar season means many things to many people, but one of the best is that, thanks to the folks at Shorts HD, it's the only time all year that most of us have even the smallest opportunity to see short films on the big screen And that is something I look forward to every year with enormous enthusiasm. So without further ado, allow me to dive right into the matter of the five films nominated for Best Live-Action Short, and now screening here and there throughout the country, in advance of a VOD run sometime soon.

"But Tim," you are undoubtedly about to ask (irrespective of the fact that I do not live in your computer & cannot hear you), "you're such an animation buff. Why aren't you reviewing the animated shorts?" Well, don't forget, while I'm merely a lusty, amateur animation buff over here, I'm actually a professional animation buff over at the Film Experience. And that's where you can find my thoughts on the other slate.

Aya (Oded Binnun and Mihal Brezis, Israel / France)

If I have it right, this is the current frontrunner to win in the eyes of most pundits. And I won't claim that I feel unmixedly good about that - it's one of the weaker films of a generally strong slate. That's less because of anything specific it does wrong, and more because it's simply not very focused or thoughtful about how it wants to tell its story: at 40 minutes, it's not only the longest of the nominees, it's also brushing against the Academy's definition of "short film" rather recklessly. Nor are all 40 of those minutes used to equally good effect. There's a lot of time spent on conversations that are a bit more indulgent than they frankly need to be.

The titular Aya (Sarah Adler) is waiting to pick someone up at the airport when she's mistaken by a Danish scholar named Overby (Ulrich Thomsen) as his driver; she refuses to correct him until miles into their drive to Jerusalem, at which point he doesn't seem to care much. The film eventually reveals itself as a parable of dissatisfied people seeking new connections, but it relies an awful lot on a kind-of twist ending to make most of that clear, which leaves a lot of scenes of talking about nothing in particular, all set in the front seat of a car. There's goodness and insight within the film, though it needs to be ferreted out of the bloat, and the characters who always feel a bit more like screenwriting conceits than psychologies. 6/10

* * *

Boogaloo and Graham (Michael Lennox and Ronan Blaney, UK)

Can't have the Oscars without darling children getting into light scrapes while something serious burbles on unseen in the background. "Something serious", in this case, is the Troubles; the 1970s Belfast-set film manages to wedge in a late scene involving a political prisoner and the violence of the region that is all the more garish for how much the film otherwise has not the smallest interest in the political or social ramifications of its setting. And boy, was I ever ready to go harsh on it.

But then, as darling children movies go, Boogaloo and Graham - named for the pet chickens given to a pair of young brothers (Riley Hamilton and Aaron Lynch) by their father (Martin McCann) in a fit of poor judgment - has the benefit of actual darlings, with just enough snarky spike in their personalities that it's not just the cloying sitcom nonsense it so readily could have been. Its insights into human behavior are trite, and the punchline at the end - if that's the word for something so calm and subdued and philosophically Irish - suggests that the film doesn't really know what it's trying to be about, either. But as a snapshot of a quirky family, it has its pleasures, even if it is undoubtedly the weakest thing here. 6/10

* * *

Butter Lamp (Hu Wei and Julien Féret, France / China)

Okay, we're starting to get to the really good stuff. Once again, we have here a film that doesn't announce its meaning until the final moments of the final shot, but in this case, it's a much more effective strategy, allowing the film to build up a sense of mystery along with its rather effective charm. We find a rarely-seen, but constantly chatting photographer (Genden Punstock) positioning groups and individuals from a Tibetan village in front of his portable backdrops (the film camera adopts the perspective of his still camera throughout: nothing but static frames with people staring into the lens, and it gains a weird energy as a result as it goes along), creating touristy snapshots of these people in towns, at religious sites, standing atop the Great Wall of China, and at Hong Kong Disneyland.

The latter two examples specifically foreshadow the film's ideas about the forcible homogenization of the Tibetan people into whatever the Chinese government says they have to be, but the bulk of that work is done by the modestly ominous suggestions of the final shot, which lands with a thud in the silent space left by the chatting and laughter of the rest of the film. For it is awfully funny, looking with its unforced observational candor at people being uncontainable messes no matter how badly the photographer tries to choreograph them. In truth, the whole thing is a bit concepty and editorially heavy-handed in the last moments, but the implicit humanism of the whole thing is so affecting that I can't really complain. 8/10

* * *

Parvaneh (Talkhon Hamzavi and Stefan Eichenberger, Switzerland)

I have a suspicion that I should find this to be corny bullshit, and yet somehow, it really works. Teenager Parvaneh (Nissa Kashani) is an Afghan refugee living in Switzerland, and she needs to send some money back home. The trip to Zurich to find a place to wire the money is daunting, but it's the easy part - Parvaneh's papers and age mean that she can do no such thing, which means she must hunt around for a kind stranger. The only one she finds is a slightly older punk, Emely (Cheryl Graf), who agrees to help for a small fee, but the store is closed by the time the girls get back there. On the spot, Emely proposes that Parvaneh should pal around with her and they can go back in the morning. In the meantime, it's a night of music, clubs, flirting with boys, and finding out that the two have a lot in common.

Clichés don't come any mustier, but the Euro-realist style and incredibly laid-back naturalistic acting on display help enormously to make Parvaneh seem more insightful and raw than it sounds. There's no sweetie-pie fun going on; the whole time, Parvaneh seems slightly dazed and alarmed at the speed and danger of life in the urban West, compared to her safe, rural enclave of fellow refugees, and though the connection she makes with Emely is clearly important and unprecedented, the film doesn't pretend to have solved The Immigrant Problem. Bless it for that.

Anyway, the acting is sharp, Kashani especially, and while the style is a bit Dardennes-light, director Hamzavi wields it with canny discipline for when it can heighten the narrative vs. when it can serve to accentuate the moments in between narrative. I would never want to see this as a feature, but it's a pretty thoughtful 25 minutes. 8/10

* * *

The Phone Call (Mat Kirkby and James Lucas, UK)

The other frontrunner, and I rather think the best of the five (though Parvaneh comes close). It's a sterling example of something that could never work so well except as a snug, 20-minute short: set up a single situation, play it out, get the hell out of there. Heather (Sally Hawkins) works at a virtually empty crisis call center, and she picks up early one shift to hear a very sad man identifying himself as Stan (Jim Broadbent, never seen). At first trying simply to cheer Stan up, Heather teases out after a few minutes that he's just taken a lethal dose of pills, having wanted to kill himself ever since his wife died. And he's not calling for help, but simply to have company while he drifts off into death.

It's an acting showcase: director Kikby rather sensibly understands that a film which consists of almost nothing other than a phone conversation in which we never see one of the two participants needs to have an immovable rock on the visible end of the line. The Phone Call would wither and die without having somebody that Kirkby could point his camera at for minutes, confident that whatever is happening on her face is bound to be interesting, and Hawkins is that somebody. She has to build a character using hardly any backstory, and then communicate a desire to be sympathetic, a steely determination to save Stan from himself, and flustered panic that she is by no means equipped to deal with this situation, and she does all of this so well that it doesn't even register as acting; the film gets to skip right ahead to the part where it asks us to consider what it would be like to be Heather, tossed into this horrible situation; but also to be Stan, that sad and empty. It's a lovely portrait of mental states in turmoil, concise and streamlined and driven enough that the lack of flash doesn't register till it's all over. 8/10

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IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU'RE...

The Costnerssaince just isn't going well, is it?

For the latest from our boy Kevin Costner, we turn to Black or White, a drama about race relations in America whose suffocating earnestness is almost enough of a liability to distract one from the film's clear-eyed assessment of the tenuous state of racial harmony in a world that is not our own, populated by individuals who very well may not be human. The film's lack of commitment to a reality that overlaps with ours in more than the most incidental details is clear long before it even raises the under-articulated questions promised with its title: right about the time that it introduces us to the bedroom of a person that it claims to be a seven-year-old girlchild, despite the set decorators' obstinate insistence that she is actually a pod person raised on Pier 1 Imports catalogs. It has been a long time since I saw a set in a nominally realistic drama that was so blatantly, offensively a set and not a room that somebody might have chosen to design that way because it reflects their personality. Unless the seven-year-olds these days like to kit out their bedrooms with the kind of blankly inspirational wall-mounted plaques that vacantly demand us to "BELIEVE" in a classy gold font on black.

But I digress. Black or White's inauthentic spaces housing inauthentic people are hilarious, but the real crime of the film is its utter impossibility as a parable of racism. It's a film whose central narrative hook - the white maternal grandfather, Elliot (Costner), and African-American paternal grandmother, Rowena (Octavia Spencer), of mixed-race first grader Eloise (Jillian Estell) duel over custody after the sudden death of Elliot's wife Carol (Jennifer Ehle, wasted on a wordless part stretched across few than ten individual shots) - could kickstart Lord knows how many different variations, but writer-director Mike Binder is too certain of the very specific points he wants to arrive at, and he stops at no melodramatic contrivance in order to make certain that the narrative arcs within millimeters of where he has preordained it to go. The result is an increasingly tattered lacework of unnecessary developments and complications that reek of little notecards pinned to a cork board in the writer's office. Elliot has to be an alcoholic, of course, because the film needs to avoid stacking the deck too hard against Rowena's son Reggie (André Holland), Eloise's dad, whom it has already decreed must be a (semi-)recovering crack addict. And he has to be a crack addict, because how else would the film be able to maintain ambiguity about whether Elliot is truly concerned for Eloise's well-being, or if he's just a bigot?

Many, many ways, of course, but some of them would require Black or White to be more thoughtful and reflective and less declamatory and clearly flagged at every level for who is being Reasonable, who is being Stubborn, and who is being Awful, Just Awful. We are told that the best kind of dramatic storytelling sets the characters in motion, and then follows them wherever they will go, building a narrative out of their psychology and behavior. This is surely not what happens in Black or White, which has already decided what kind of decisions all of its characters are going to make, and then constructs them to fit that space. At its best - which isn't much - this approach allows Spencer to give the film's only three-dimensional performance as a woman of stiletto-like insight and dogged self-assurance and willpower, but one who'll tie herself in knots to justify the actions of her absent, dissolute son. At its worst, it leaves us with a vacant hole in the place where Eloise should be, a plot device and lazy symbol from the beginning to the grotesque freeze-frame that the movie elects to end on.

The writing shows itself so openly, and the filmmaking and acting so limply facilitate it (it is overlit and prone to cutting to close-ups as a means of depressingly literal punctuation), and the whole thing is so patently artificial as a result (but not in the good way), that it hardly seems sporting to attack the film's idea of race. Honestly, it hardly seems possible to do so, since even by the rules of its universe-that-is-not-ours, it's hard to say what Black and White actually thinks about racism in 21st Century America. The climax, which finds Elliot given an angry, raspy speech in a courtroom - of course this is one of those "third act courtroom scene" movies, it would just have to be - muddies any of the points the film had previously been making to the point of irrelevance. Black people and white people are different? Aren't? It's all actually about poverty? I don't know what the hell we're meant to take away from any of it, and given how painstakingly the film has been jerry-rigged to make sure that it arrives at exactly that point, it's especially frustrating for the whole thing to collapse into urgent but vague statements along the lines of "Racism! Man, fuck it! And you know what fuck else? Fuck alcoholism, while you're at it". All I can tell is that shaming black drug addicts for being drug addicts but not for being black is, apparently, the film's secret weapon for creating the beatific state where we can all find some kind of way to admit to our own faults and get along.

So the whole thing is confused, shoddily-built, blandly assembled, and acted with a surface-deep emphasis on shouting, snarling, and flaring one's nostrils for effect. Worse films on delicate subjects have been, and will continue to be made, but right now, this is the one we get to deal with. Tuneless and messy, Black and White is not the film America deserves, and it is also not the film America needs. But we got it anyway.

4/10

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FEBRUARY 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

A January with some halfway decent surprises lying behind us, it's time now to plow into the real depths of the winter dumping season: after a few years where there was one surprising hit toe be found in February, 2015 looks to have nothing of the sort. A hit, yes - a big, enormous, Top 10 of the Year sort of hit - but one that looks terrible. We might always be surprised, of course, but I'm not counting on it, so let's just get this over quickly


6.2.2015

But now, having said all of that, I am going to proudly declare that I'm totally excited for Jupiter Ascending, and I don't give a shit what anybody has to say. After Cloud Atlas, a movie I just keep loving more despite/because of its faults when I re-watch it, I will follow the Wachowskis to whatever place they have it in their mind to go. Will Jupiter Ascending be bafflingly dumb? Probably. Maybe. Will it be splendid to look at? I expect so. Will it be totally its own thing and a complete outlier in the 2015 popcorn movie biosphere? Undoubtedly, and that's what matters to me most of all.

Elsewhere in very visibly-delayed effects-driven fantasies, we find Seventh Son, which manages to combine the powers of Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, and Olivia Williams into the creation of what is, by all available evidence, boring crap. Though it's exciting to think that Moore and Eddie Redmayne might both end up winning Oscars after having played the main villains in two enormous, high-profile flops that opened just 16 days earlier. Oscar joke writers: do something with this, now that I have called it to your attention.

And then we have the animation hybrid The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge out of Water, which I'd surely have any kind of opinion toward if I had any level of connection to the SpongeBob SquarePants media franchise.


13.2.2015

So here's the deal: I am indecently excited for the thought pieces to come out surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey, from all directions. It will be the great talking point of 2015. But I could not possibly be less excited to drag myself out to see the actual movie, outside of what appears to be some sleek, handsome Seamus McGarvey cinematography. I've failed multiple times to get more than a few pages into the infamous bestselling novel it's based on, which is written at a sub-literate level, and my understanding is that the whole thing is really just porn dressed up with a feeble narrative copying the main points from Twilight. And I don't mean to say "just porn" in a dismissive way; it frankly makes the whole thing seem more respectable than assuming all those middle-aged women are actually enjoying the horrible, horrible prose and what I am assured is horrible, horrible character psychology.

But it leaves us with the ungainly fact that a movie is being adapted out of a porno while not, itself, being very pornographic (R-rated in the sexophobic United States, with apparently only around 20 minutes of sex, and a confirmation that there'll be no onscreen penis). Which suggests that the horrible horribleness is all that's going to be left. And director Sam Taylor-Johnson's only other feature, Nowhere Boy, was a fucking dog.

As counter-programming, nobly muscling its way to the teenage boys confused why a major blockbuster release doesn't care about them at all, we have Kingsman: The Secret Service, a Matthew Vaughn film that sure as hell looks like a Matthew Vaughn film, and there are some people for whom that is a good thing. But some people ain't me.


20.2.2015

Now this feels like a February weekend. Disney is gamely releasing a warm and fuzzy "crusty old white dude intervenes for the better in the lives of underprivileged minorities" sports drama, McFarland, USA, and the white dude is even played by Kevin Costner. There's some hideously generic high school clique movie, with the "ooh, look at me, I'm raising all kinds of questions!" title of The DUFF, and then there's Hot Tub Time Machine 2, which has all the feeling of a project that got greenlit and financed at a particularly drunk party, and by the time everybody came to their senses, they were into it for too much financial and legal liability to safely back out.


27.2.2015

And then, blessedly, things finally sputter to a close. We've got Focus, starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie as con artists who perhaps have romantic comedy sparks between them - or perhaps that is part of the con! - and is giving me something not entirely unlike Duplicity vibes, so maybe it's got something worth looking forward to, hiding in its DNA? Anyway, there was a time when Smith made enjoyable movies for halfway intelligent adults, and I'm kind of getting that vibe, too.

The Lazarus Effect, for its own part, has an excitingly junky trailer surrounding a lazy, retread concept, with a much too classy cast for it, including Olivia Wilde as this movie's version of the Frankenstein monster. Hopefully cheesy enough to be fun, possibly actually good and just mis-marketed, but either way, it's the first horror movie in some while I've actually caught myself looking forward to.

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B-FEST 2015

Different cinephiles will have different measures by which they can tell that one movie year "officially" gives way to the next, but for me, the answer is always clear enough: the year starts with B-Fest, the glorious 24-hour celebration of awful movies, sleep deprivation, and the sweat of 200 moviegoers crammed into uncomfortable seats on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

The 2015 incarnation of the fest - the 33rd overall, and my 14th - was an awfully strong one, the latest in a pretty sterling run of years that started in 2012. It felt, overall, a bit lower key than most years in terms of audience participation, and it lacked the benefit of a truly spectacular bad movie that gave everybody a lot to bite into (a bad movie that was just bad, though, now that was very much present). On a personal level, it was particularly nice to have a B-Fest that was mostly made up of new titles to me - only three out of 13 total were films I'd seen, and those three were all exemplary B-Fest candidates - after 2014 had been so over-familiar.

Indeed, it was all so terrific that I could barely stand to go to sleep, and ended up staying awake for all but about an hour and 45 minutes of the 24-hour whole - the best I've done in a great many years. And with that, no further ado: I give you my 2015 B-Fest Diary

Friday, 23 January, 6:00 PM
The kick-off was a '50s sci-fi film, my favorite way for B-Fests to ramp up (it was, in fact, the only such film and one of just two black and white movies, ignoring the inked-in Plan 9 from Outer Space). Now, the film in question, Creature with the Atom Brain, didn't prove to be an exceptionally memorable example of the form: with Edward L. Cahn directing a Curt Siodmak script, it's too slickly competent to have been excitingly terrible, while the basic premise - a gangster and a Nazi refugee creating radio-control zombies - is daffy without being particularly outré.

It's short enough that it's not a slog, though, and its unexpected mix of the expected kind of B-movie with a very different sort of B-level crime picture gives it more interest than anything else I've said. Basically, it's a police procedural about stopping zombies, when zombies were much less interesting than they are now. A worthy little noodle all around for the fan of the form, not the sort of thing that I'd say you must go out and see, but absolutely worth stopping for if it ever crosses your path.

7:15 PM
Time for a little Charles & Albert Band, with Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. I had high expectations for this one when I found out it was playing (I stayed blind on the schedule until about 30 minutes before we started), and I am sorry to say it didn't quite live up to them. Combining a Star Wars knock-off with a Road Warrior knock off is, at any rate, a noble impulse for a craven producer, and the unrepentant '80s-ness of this film is pure delight, as is the tawdriness of its 3-D effects (it was one of the earlier independent productions during the '80s 3-D boom). It's certainly bad enough for B-Fest, with its discohesive screenplay and cheap mutants in the wasteland make-up, and the charming presence of Richard Moll in the cast (he is, by far, the best actor involved), and the clumsily staged action, and the sequel hook that didn't work. But there are many fake Mad Maxes, and some of them are vastly more entertaining and not just confusing and incoherent.

8:45 PM
I have only two real problems with this year's B-Fest, and one of them is that the films tended to clump by decade. Here, we arrive at Frogs, the first of multiple '70s films right in a row. And I'm not dissing those films - it was also, maybe, the best sustained run of movies of the event, and certainly the point where things flipped decisively from "these movies are letting me down" to "these movies are amazing". Frogs, in particular, might have had the best energy from the audience all night, owing mainly to the inevitability of how we'd all scream in terror at every shot of frogs, but also to the way it inaugurated a surprisingly durable theme of barely-sublimated homoeroticism in many of the films to follow. Also, I am happy to say, I got my first solid riff of the night out, with "Cry havoc, and let slip the frogs of war!".

I shall modestly suggest that those who want to know my deeper thoughts on the film can find them in my full review from 2012.

10:25 PM
We now join the magical world of 1970s made for television thrillers, with 1974's Killdozer. A movie that boldly elects to join the world of Duel rip-offs by possessing a bulldozer with an evil alien spirit.

It's ridiculous as hell, as director Jerry London finds ways to frame the bulldozer leering over hills and stalking around corners like it's not tens of tons of loud metal. The writing, meanwhile, divides its five-man team (six, really, but one dies pretty much right off the bat) into the hoariest clichés available in '74, turning them loose on a Pacific island to run around, state things which make no sense and are not germane, and then die in unbelievably easily-avoidable death traps. All leading up to a fencing match between the killdozer and a human-operated crane. It's breezy nonsense that doesn't take itself seriously but also doesn't look down on its own scenario, and it's watchably goofy in the absolute best ways. It's very nearly my pick for the surprise success of the fest; it made it almost all the way to the end. Fingers crossed that this means that a '70s TV movie will become a permanent, or at least reoccurring, part of the schedule in years to come.

There then followed the usual traditions: the short Wizard of Speed and Time, followed by the midnight screening of Plan 9. As is also traditional, I left to sleep, but I didn't really succeed in grabbing more than 10 minutes.

Saturday, 24 January, 1:35 AM
The blaxploitation slot was filled by the not-really-blaxploitation Black Mama, White Mama, one of the women in prison films made by American International Pictures in the Philippines. It's not the best, but it might very well be the boldest: a grindhouse re-do of The Defiant Ones, in which Lee (Pam Grier, the black mama) and Karen (Margaret Markov, the white mama) escape from the lesbianic clutches of an abusive prison, and flee, handcuffed to each other, across a nameless island, where Karen wants to reunite with her revolutionary cell, while Lee wants to find the fisherman who's going to help her leave the country. Only they want to go to completely opposite sides of the island. Meanwhile, the cops, the revolutionaries, and the gangsters hired by Lee's old pimp, are all giving them chase.

Not a surprise - it's been on my radar for years - but this was probably my favorite movie of the whole event. Eddie Romero's directing perfectly splits the middle between tacky exploitation and actually thrilling suspense well, and the story (co-written by Jonathan Demme, no less) is one of the most inventive, thought-through, and complex in the genre's spotty history. In truth, Grier isn't at her best in this situation, which is a pity (Grier being the best thing about every film you see her in is one of those truths you get accustomed to), but the pace, the snarky comedy - much of it centered around a giddily camped-up Sid Haig - and the relatively sharp political commentary, for AIP trash like this, all make it a real blast. Glad I finally got to catch up with it.

3:10 AM
A brief respite from the '70s with the first South Korean giant monster movie, Yongary, Monster from the Deep, of 1967. It's a fairly transparent attempt to do a Godzilla movie with plot elements and a tone borrowed from Gamera, and an effects budget somewhere in the middle, and director Kim Ki-duk (a different one) handles the whole circus well enough, though like most daikaiju eiga, the opening act, when we still don't officially know what's going on, drags on a bit. What salvages it is the cheesy optimism of the Yongary effects, with a store-bought blowtorch almost visibly protruding out of its mouth to make its fire breath, and its simple, derivative design looking forlorn enough to be appealing. But it's a bog-standard giant monster film, and I hard forgotten, during my year of daikaiju eiga, how grating it is to have to watch them dubbed (the Korean original of Yongary is believed lost).

4:40 AM
Back to the '70s we go, with the Roger Corman-produced Avalanche. I was prepared to sleep during this one, but it ended up being too unexpectedly magnetic: Corman's attempt to a snowbound version of The Towering Inferno with a fraction of the effects and cast budget is certainly peculiar, far more than should be possible for something so hopelessly derivative of the already-waning '70s disaster craze. Rock Hudson, Robert Forster, Jeannette Nolan, and a zonked-out Mia Farrow headline, and the melodrama is surprisingly crude and sleazy for a routine trek through the typical "arrogant developer, no heed for the natural world, romantic triangles" formula, with some startlingly cruel-minded deaths. Did sleep deprivation make this one seem better than it deserved? Undoubtedly, but I think it's clearly worth a look as an overreaching oddity, if nothing else.

6:20 AM
But it did mean that I had to pay the piper. I stayed up for enough of Cloak & Dagger, the first '80s film of Saturday, to determine that Dabney Coleman notwithstanding, a kiddie-flick adventure and James Bond-lite shenanigans was not what I was up for. This turned out to be a terrible mistake, apparently, for as I got fitful, restless sleep, one of my friends had a great time with it, and the audience was clearly enthusiastic and ready to go after most of them had taken the last three films off.

8:15 AM
I finally gave up on my failure to sleep slightly before the halfway point of Andy Hardy's Private Secretary, the 10th of 16 Andy Hardy films, and, with a release date of 1941, by far the oldest film at B-Fest. As I could tell within seconds of re-entering the auditorium, the audience was ecstatic to be watching this one, and I would begrudge nobody their pleasure.

For my part, I would have given anything for it to not be there. Or for me to have been able to sleep. I've seen enough of the Andy Hardy films to know that I absolutely hate them (and since I mostly hate Mickey Rooney, that's hardly a surprise), but not in the "this is so irredeemably bad" way. It's basically the '40s equivalent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe: a formula-driven franchise that made huge money for one of the biggest spenders of any studio, for years on end. It hardly makes any sense at all for it to be at a thing like B-Fest, and the fact that I'm much too familiar with the formulas at play made it impossible for me to view it as any kind of novelty and have any fun with it at all, despite the gasping from laughter going on around me. It felt more like homework, honestly. Though I respect that habitués of '40s studio comedies do not make up a key component of the B-Fest audience, and I am in a unique place to have watched that film, in that context, and not enjoyed myself.

There followed a breakfast break.

10:35 AM
After breakfast, we caught up with Can't Stop the Music, the last of the infamous disco musicals of 1980 to show up at B-Fest, following The Apple in 2005, and Xanadu in 2008. It's the best of the three, owing to having by far the best music, sort of the best acting (mostly thanks to Valerie Perrine), and the only even slightly sane narrative of the bunch - it's a heavily fictional biopic of the Village People set years too late, but it lacks supernatural elements of any kind, and is thus incomparably more realistic than the other two combined.

This, sadly, does means that it's the least-suited to the environment of B-Fest, where derangement goes over better than intentional camp, and screaming ineptitude goes over better than clumsily-handled mediocrity. So the riffing was a bit muted, and the energy of the room quieted down more than it should at that time of day. I mean, it's hilarious and bad, but it's not that hilarious. I enjoyed it fine, but I enjoyed it more the other time I saw it.

There followed a lunch break.

1:30 PM
And then there followed, ten minutes behind schedule (the only time we got off the entire day), Albert Pyun's ghastly 1988 Alien from L.A., starring Kathy Ireland as a bespectacled geek with a helium-pitched voice, as the daughter of an archaeologist who goes into a bizarre subterranean world to find him. It's frightening close, in tone, plot, and visual style, to the five-years-younger Super Mario Bros., only even worse. For Pyun is a rare and daunting non-talent, even by the standards of weak filmmakers with no budget.

I tried to sleep through this one, and couldn't really; the upshot, I guess, is that I got to see nearly all of the year's clear-cut worst film. Shrill and dumb comedy (like casting Ireland as a gawky, squeaky nerd, which I think is meant to be funny, but is just nauseating, every time she opens her mouth), a story that makes absolutely no sense on any level, and ugly cinematography hiding impoverished sets, all add up to a really hard sit, and I think it would have made sense on a number of levels to swap this one with Cloak & Dagger - it would retain the clumped-up '80s-ness of it, but this would be a perfect last film of the generally agreed-upon sleep hours, and kiddie junk is a better fit for the after-lunch hour.

Anyway, it's a hell of a thing to experience, so I won't tell anybody not to, though I'd hate to be the reason anyone sought it out.

3:00 PM
The '80s conclude with Miami Connection, which I have now seen three times and adored more with each visit. It's an action musical written by and starring and directed by non-native speakers of English - it was the brainchild of taekwondo marketing guru Y.K. Kim, who stars as the lead - and by their own admission hadn't seen but a handful of movies prior to making it. And it plays like somebody who had heard of all the trends of shitty '80s independent genre films was trying to combine them into a '50s-style message picture. Basic version: a rock group of orphaned college students who also study taekwondo and live together is forced to fight a collection of angry rockers, drug dealers, and motorcycle-riding ninjas. Lyrics include "Bikers by day, ninjas by night" (they are, in fact, ninjas by day as well), and "Against the ninja, we will fight to battle the sin", followed by the back-up singers chanting "Tae-kwon, tae-kwon! Tae-kwon, tae-kwon, tae-kwon-DO!", while clapping out of time.

You must hunt it down, if you haven't already seen it. It was on Netflix for a spell, but no longer; Amazon streams it for a small cost, and it's a bargain at twice the price

4:30 PM
The end of the festival was also the film that took me by surprise the most: Viva Knievel! starring legendary stunt biker Evel Knievel as himself and a miserable, bored Gene Kelly as his sidekick and mechanic, in a story about foiling a drug smuggling plot that involves murdering Knievel and hiding the dope in his corpse. It's one of the last places to see pre-comedy Leslie Nielsen at his most villainous - this is, in fact, not a comedy, which I suppose I probably need to specific - and the second film at B-Fest with Dabney Coleman, which was also a nice surprise.

The film is endlessly fucking weird, in the best possible late-'70s way, when blending action, farce, and thriller just sort of happened (see also: Smokey and the Bandit, from the same year). I'm forced to admit that it's probably terrible, but it's terrible to a high level of confidence and competence, and Knievel has the stuff even as an aging stuntman, even if he has nothing resembling the stuff as an actor. I enjoyed it almost despite myself as a time capsule of a bizarre moment in pop culture that was wedged into a totally unacceptable generic framework; for all that the ingredients are individually sort of routine, the whole effect is like absolutely nothing else, and I thoroughly recommend it.

Also, I got off the best riff in my history as a B-Fest attendee: when the characters mistook a dead man dressed in Knievel's clothes for Knievel himself, and a few minutes of weird complications ensued, I breathlessly declared that they had chosen the lesser of two Evels.

On that note, I shall cut myself off. Next year can't come soon enough!

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: OPEN UP AND LET THE DEVIL IN

In the 2010s, one of the most interesting new directorial voices anywhere in the English-speaking world has been that of Great Britain’s Ben Wheatley. Without having produced any clear-cut unambiguous masterpieces in in the handful of features and short contribution to the horror anthology The ABCs of Death (one of the lonely few segments of that film that’s worth any damn at all - it is, in fact, my favorite) that make up his career since 2009, Wheatley has eked out a position as an extremely satisfying manipulator of genres and tones, finding pawky humor in the grotesque and maddeningly tense horror in the mundane and suburban. It’s a little premature to claim that I’d be willing to follow him anywhere, but I haven’t been let down yet.

So with all that in mind, it’s a little bit disappointing that the first of Wheatley’s films to put in an appearance on this blog, A Field in England, finds the director producing his first movie that I haven’t loved on the spot. Not because he seems to relaxed whatever internal pressure led to the creation of his first three, enormously idiosyncratic movies - the film, his fourth feature,his fourth, is arguably his most ambitious yet, artistically and narratively. If nothing else, the attempt to mount a period movie set during the Civil War (the 17th Century one in England, not the 19th Century one in America) with only six actors and costumes that look like the most talented mom in middle school put them together for the spring play - and to succeed so fully in that attempt that after the opening scene finishes instructing us how to watch the movie, there’s never another moment when it feels inauthentic or fake - would earn so many moxie points that it would be hard to entirely dislike the film.

The simple beginning to an obtuse, psychologically-driven narrative finds bullying military man Commander Trower (Julian Barratt) relying on an apprentice alchemist and diviner named Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) to find a missing outlaw. During battle, which he watches from the fringes (and if it feels like this is an excuse for us to hear the fighting without seeing it, sure, but it works at establishing the film’s off-kilter tone right at the start), Whitehead is able to escape, meeting up with a pair of deserters, Jacob (Peter Ferdinando) and Friend (Richard Glover), and a freeman, Cutler (Ryan Pope), all leaving the field of battle; their attempt to find an ale house a little way back into the country leads them quickly astray, and right into the path of O’Neil (Michael Smiley), an Irish thief, and the exact same outlaw Whitehead had been assigned to hunt down. O’Neil has a much more intriguing possibility than ale and whores; he claims to know of a treasure hidden in a nearby field, and he’s not going to give up the chance to have a trained diviner help him find it.

It would be simple and clean to suggest that the film takes its turn when the group eats a stew made of wild mushrooms that prove to be hallucinogenic, and it’s certainly at this point that the film most fully reveals itself as a psychological drama with overtones of cosmic, religious terror. But that would be selling the opening act short. At all points, A Field in England delights in presenting the viewer with a world sufficiently disorienting, between the weird emptiness of its setting, the stylised mix of modernism and olde-tymey dialogue in Amy Jump’s script (Wheatley’s regular writer and thus the co-author of his distinctive, odd tones), and the metallic cinematography by Laurie Rose, in a full range of soft greys that never quite commit to full white and only rarely to black. The film looks and sounds like a dream in a rather more direct sense than most “this is a dream” films usually do: the images stubbornly refuse to link up properly even though there’s no obvious discontinuity in the cutting, and objects and concepts suddenly appear in the story as though they were already there and we were supposed to have noticed them before. It looks, and sounds, deeply uncanny, long before the magic mushrooms enter the picture.

The film's general direction, with its generally increasing pileup of suggestions that the field is a version of Hell or at least Purgatory, and the equivalence of O'Neil with the actual devil (first as a joke, increasingly not), rather neatly marries two kinds of content: that is, having unexpectedly chosen to dive into the 1640s, Wheatley and Jump proceed to tell a story with moral concerns that feel period-appropriate, and even with a certain period-correct lack of polish and convincing illusion. If 17th Century Englishmen had access to digital cameras, but nothing else of contemporary technology, A Field in England has the distinct feel of something they might have made, and that's exceptionally cool. Also, this is what helps the film to hang together as much as it does, for as long as it does. For in honesty, while all of the individual parts work terrifically, from the nervous, rough performances to the cinematography to everything, the unified whole feels vaguely aimless and less than totally satisfying. The impression one gets - I got, at least - is that Wheatley and dompany didn't really have a feature's worth of different ideas, and so A Field in England ends up being a somewhat drawn-out affair that is punctuated, whenever it starts to flag really badly, with one of its more aggressively outré gestures.

I won't quite go so far as to say it's boring or pointless, though those words do rear their heads. What A Field in England does offer, by the bucketload, is a pervasive sense of unease, an almost physical sense of things being entirely and perversely not right with the film, as you're watching it. The combination of costume drama, religious allegory, and psychological horror that largely go to making up the movie matches with that unease beautifully, and the increasing fragmentation of the narrative into events that barely make sense on their own and don't seem to flow naturally from what went before proves to be a well-motivated and totally effective choice, and not just aimless messiness. It works as an experience, whatever else it does. But it's the first Wheatley film which I left feeling no clear sense of why - of what that experience was meant to do besides unsettle me mightily. It succeeded, and that's no little thing, but compared to the suggestive themes and social insight of the director and writer's previous work, I'm a little bit annoyed that it's the only thing.

7/10

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GRIN AND BEAR IT

The word that primarily suggests itself in respect to Paddington, roughly muscling out all other possibilities, is "charming". A word which could certainly be employed with a certain level of condescension, sure, but not really in this case. For it is an earned charm, in Paddington; the screenplay by director Paul King, from a story he and Hamish McColl adapted from Michael Bond's series of children's books, reeks with lighthearted affection for its characters, its settings, and its gentle depiction of a colorful, warmhearted England that never was. Even in it hardest-edged details - a crisply sardonic sense of humor with a healthy level of family-friendly misery, and an unremittingly cruel villain - the film never moves very far into darkness. Unpleasant things happen, yes, and they are played for laughs; but the only reason those laughs work, in this form, is because we're never persuaded that the unpleasantness is actually going to stick, or that anything genuinely bad might ever really happen to the characters.

The film takes its first cues from Pixar's Up, setting its stage with an old newsreel of a British explorer, Montgomery Clyde (Tim Downie), leading the first-ever expedition to Darkest Peru (the best example I can give of where the film's sense of humor lies is to point out the unblinking way that no character ever, ever refers to the country as just "Peru", anywhere in the film). Here he finds an unknown species of hyper-intelligent bear, able to form human speech and use tools, and he's so impressed that he leaves them totally unmolested, along with an invitation to find him in London if they ever wish to cross the Atlantic. Many years later, those same bears, Lucy (voiced by Imelda Staunton) and Pastuzo (Michael Gambon) are raising their orphaned nephew (Ben Whishaw), enjoying peace, tranquility, and an endless supply of homemade marmalade. After a terrible storm destroys their home, the young bear finds it necessary to make his way in the world, hopping a boat to England, where he encounter the Brown family, who name him "Paddington" after the station where he's found. Two very basic plots play out after this: Mr. Brown (Hugh Bonneville), a risk analyst, is horrified at the thought of having a bear in the house, but Mrs. Brown (Sally Hawkins) is too kind and caring to throw Paddington out, and the bear's gentle, bumbling ways eventually bring a new kind of life to the stilted Brown household, with children Judy (Madeleine Harris) and Jonathan (Samuel Joslin), and housekeeper Mrs. Bird (Julie Walters), quickly coming over to Mrs. Brown's side, while her husband behaves obstinately British. That whole thing, the one that's been done several dozen times.

The other plot centers on deranged museum taxidermist Millicent (Nicole Kidman) learning of Paddington and setting her sights on taking the bear down to be the prize of her career, with the help of the crusty, unpleasant Mr. Curry (Peter Capaldi), the Browns' neighbor. Which in the abstract isn't terribly fresh either, though the taxidermy angle is appealingly morbid.

What makes Paddington lovely, then, surely isn't its creativity, unpredictability, or its insight into human behavior. It's simply that this ancient, well-worn form is done with such a light touch, enlivened by the absolutely terrific cast - Jim Broadbent is somewhere in there, too - assembled by producer David Heyman in a fine impression of his decade-long work making sure that every actor born in the British Isles found work somewhere in the Harry Potter octology. The role of a stuffy, overly-protective dad doesn't strain Bonneville any more than playing a warm-hearted soul with a steel spine exerts Hawkins, or the wise, tart-tongued housekeeper finds Walters rummaging around in the deepest recesses of her bag of acting tricks. But then, Paddington isn't an acting showcase: it's a sweet, low-impact script that needs a lot of rich but non-fussy performances to keep things steady and free from too much syrup on the one side, or insincerity on the other. And that's exactly what everybody provides, from the enthusiastically amazed Whishaw on down (all apologies to Colin Firth, but it's an obvious good that he ended up dropping out of the role).

The only exception is Kidman, whose performance actually does stand out as a bit of a virtuoso turn; it's a basic hammy bad guy performance, but it offers one of the rare chances for that actor to have any real apparent fun, biting into her part and gnawing on it, while the cinematography and costumes and hairstyling all pitch in to make her look as porcelain an bleached-out and harsh as possible. It's especially gratifying to see Kidman well-used as the merciless villain in a literary adaptation for children, seven years after The Golden Compass so frustratingly refused to capitalise on her visual presence, and what she's up to here makes her one of the finest kids' movie villains of recent years.

That's one of the obvious hooks the film has for an adult viewer (assuming that "it has a gentle, forgiving, and amiable soul" isn't a hook, which sadly, I imagine to be the case); another is that the film is rather snugly made and handsome to look at. Particularly the production design by Gary Williamson, which has the richly stuffed texture of a Wes Anderson film, only scaled back to a more cozily domestic sphere (the Brown house is imagined as a literal doll house at times, and the intricate detailing of every room plays that up well). One location calls to mind the elaborate, dazzling interiors of the Harry Potter films without feeling out of place or breaking things; the rest of the movie presents a comfortable and clean London, recalling the obviously set-bound Mary Poppins both in its stagey artifice and its appropriate softness.

Paddington's unending niceness is its best and defining characteristic, though it's not without some meat on its bones: without arguing so hard that it knocks things out of balance, it serves as a durable parable about how England is strengthened by diversity and immigration (which doesn't quite extend to offering nonwhite faces actual parts to play, but it's hard to imagine which role would specifically benefit from such a choice). And there's also that wry, snappish sense of humor to pull things back from being so soft and cushy that the whole thing is insubstantial. The whole package is simple and not very showy (the CGI Paddington is hardly a cutting-edge piece of effects work and animation, though it gets the job done), but the whole thing is satisfying enough that if it turned out to hang around as a minor classic of contemporary children's filmmaking, I'd not be bothered by that in the slightest.

7/10

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