SNOW-COVERED BEACH PARTIES: EVEN THE BEGINNERS WILL BE HAVING FUN

In the waning days of the mid-'60s surf fad, and the short-lived but intense burst of beach party movies that tagged eagerly along, the brains at American International Pictures came up with many new ways to prolong the life of that cash cow which they had largely invented, each more weird and strange than the last: beach movies plus sci-fi, plus Bondian spy thrillers, plus ghost stories, plus racing thrillers. Not the first, not the last, and not the weirdest - though by Christ, it is very weird indeed - was the beach movie plus winter, introduced in the functionally-named Ski Party. Which, in a fit of puckishness, was released in June of 1965.

This was AIP's sole experiment in this direction, though it was apparently some kind of hit, because a couple of knock-off beach/ski hybrids were made by AIP's competitors. I will confess that this turn of events surprises me somewhat, because Ski Party is sort of bad. The entire genre of beach movies was sort of bad, of course, but the best ones compensated for it with a bouncy energy and who-the-fuck-cares creativity that made them imaginative pop culture curios anyway. Ski Party bounces about as well as a lead tennis ball, and instead of who-the-fuck-cares, the overriding tone is closer to we-don't-fucking-care. It's a flat-footed farce whose gestures in the direction of imaginative absurdity are too bland and mean-spirited to land as comedy. The best example is the film's routine habit of breaking the third wall, with co-leads Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman frequently addressing the camera to acknowledge that they understand the conventions of the genre as much as the audience does. Instead of being bracing and punchy, the feeling is more of exasperation - a sort of "God almighty, can you believe how relentlessly shitty the things we're saying and doing are? Really, can you? Do you know how many of these damned things we've made in the last two years?" Particularly with Hickman giving such a uniformly sour, petulant performance at every turn.

It's tempting to blame the creative team: the best AIP beach movies were all directed and mostly co-written by William Asher, typically with Leo Townsend sharing script duties, and AIP honchos Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson on-hand as producers. Ski Party keeps Arkoff and Nicholson removed to executive producer status, replaced in their immediate duties by Gene Corman, Roger's less interesting and successful younger brother. Directing was handed off to Alan Rafkin, a sitcom director making the first of a small number of features (he was still active on TV until shortly before his death, into his 70s), and the screenplay was by Robert Kaufman, also a sitcom veteran making his first movie, though he'd stick around the movies quite a bit more successfully. The point being though, is that there was a smallness to the creative background of these men, and Ski Party does not find them pushing very hard to broaden their aesthetic. The outline of their creative poverty is hinted at if we observe that Ski Party is in large part a shticky retread of the then 6-year-old Some Like It Hot, but the true scope of their hackery is only revealed by learning that they have the clanging balls to reference Some Like It Hot by name in their dialogue.

The scenario is straightforward and reductive as all hell, and even by the standards of a subgenre whose whole entire purpose was to put girls in bikinis and guys in board shorts, its gender politics are stuffy and ancient. Todd Armstrong (Avalon) and Craig Gamble (Hickman) are best buddies at a Southern California college, and they are utterly baffled by women. Their latest attempted conquests, Linda (Deborah Whalley) and Barbara (Yvonne Craig) have only pity and certainly no romantic ardor for them, and they can't understand how preening blond alpha-male Freddie (Aron Kincaid) can possibly score with so many women, so they study him. And in studying him, they decide that the key is more co-ed sports (?), which is why they crash a ski trip during break. Their inability to ski helps them out not at all, but the only ski instruction available is for women. I pray you can see where this is going.

Todd, as "Jane", gets plenty of cues from the girls on how to attract American boys (their disguises are meant to be British exchange students, though neither Avalon nor Hickman attempts even the slightest accent behind their screechy falsettos), while Craig's "Nora" immediately attracts Freddie, who feels for "her" an intensity of passion he's never felt for anyone. Perhaps to compensate for this dimly interesting hint of homoeroticism, Ski Party retrenches into what might be the earliest overt gay panic humor I've ever witnessed. Which still isn't half as galling as the nonstop repetition of "Women! Like some kind of crazy-ass space aliens, am I right?" jokes that make up the middle third of the movie, reminding one with a dismal pang of how much better these movies are when Annette Funicello is around to provide some sardonic wit and wisdom as the romantic leading lady (she pops up in a cameo as a professor, right at the start, in a rare acknowledgement by AIP that their stable of teen idols were quite long in the tooth).

Rafkin's direction effectively smothers whatever comedy survives Avalon and Hickman's surprisingly crummy baner, and all that's left is the most left-field absurdity to give the movie any punch, like a yodeling polar bear that wanders through from time to time, or a literal ex-Nazi ski instructor recalling the Battle of Stalingrad. The film is hastily and sloppily assembled: scenes jam into each other like bumper cars, and the two big celebrity musical cameos - Lesley Gore singing the two-year-old "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows", and James Brown with the much newer "I Got You (I Feel Good)" - are plagued by awful sound mixing and terrible lip-synching. There is a certain joyless expediency to virtually everything onscreen save for Bobbi Shaw's dippy Swedish sexpot ski instructor; a stock cartoon character to be sure, but Shaw was good at it, and it's the only self-assured performance in the film. Which speaks volumes about where the film's energy level is set. It's by no means as dreadfully awful as something like the perfunctory How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, but it's just no damned fun, and with this much smutty, manic content executed in a way that strips it of its fun, the film ends up a shrill slog.

Reviews in this series
Beach Party (Asher, 1963)
Muscle Beach Party (Asher, 1964)
Bikini Beach (Asher, 1964)
Pajama Party (Weis, 1964)
Beach Blanket Bingo (Asher, 1965)
Ski Party (Rafkin, 1965)
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (Asher, 1965)
The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (Weis, 1966)

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - TWO KONGS DON'T MAKE A RIGHT

Everything about King Kong Escapes is inexplicable. It's... no, let's wait a second. Look at that poster there. I mean, really look at it. Bask in it. It is only descriptive of the things actually to be found in the movie it's advertising, as giddily pulpy and inane as those longs would appear to be. It is rare to find any piece of movie advertising that tacky and also that honest.

The film isn't in any visible way related to Toho's King Kong vs. Godzilla, released five years earlier, and even less to RKO's King Kong from 1933. It is, however, a feature-length spinoff of a mid-'60s King King TV cartoon series produced by Rankin/Bass but animated by Toei, making it the first American TV show with to have its animation farmed out to Asia. This cross-Pacific collaboration having worked out so well, Rankin/Bass then took the natural step, for a given definition of "natural", of having the world's most prominent creators of giant monster movies take the lead on their King Kong feature. I do not know this means that King Kong Escapes is therefore best thought of as a Japanese movie made with a lot of American money to help offset RKO's steep licensing fees, or an American movie made in Japan to keep production costs down, and therefore whether the 96-minute English dub or the 104-minute Japanese original is the more "official"; since it was released in Japan in 1967, almost a full year before it hit the States, I don't feel particularly bad about sticking to the longer version for this review.

Despite this being a literal live-action cartoon, it got the A-list treatment (perhaps Toho felt, even now, that Kong was a more "important" monster than Godzilla), in contrast to the shot-on-the-cheap Godzilla pictures released on either side of it: Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (itself an aborted Kong vehicle) and Son of Godzilla. In contrast to those ratty little cash-grabs, King Kong Escapes has all of the great masters of Toho's daikaiju eiga gathered in one place: director Honda Ishirō, producer Tanaka Tomoyuki, composer Ifukube Akira, and effects director Tsuburaya Eija, taking a more active leading role than he was on the contemporaneous Godzilla films; it is the last film where those four men would work together in those capacities (sort of - Tsuburaya received a largely honorary credit for 1968's Destroy All Monsters). And they were joined by the less-storied but still hugely important cinematographer Koizumi Hajime (making his very last Toho picture), screenwriter Kimura Takeshi, and stuntman/actor Nakajima Haruo, making this a much more polished and professional set than the Godzilla films were enjoying at the time.

And yet, the results are almost identical. King Kong Escapes hinges on a loopy world domination plot by Bondian supervillains that feels much more like something Fukuda Jun and Sekizawa Shinichi would dream up than anything Honda would put his name to. And it's an unabashed kids' movie, much more so even than the wretched "Toddler Godzilla" antics in Son of Godzilla, befitting its origins. There are very few obvious benefits to its appropriation of a more well-heeled crew: Ifukube's music, which is nowhere near his best, is far better suited to the matter of giant monsters than Sato Masaru's pop-music indulgences, and Koizumi's camerawork is typically great at creating a sustained atmosphere and encouraging a suspension of disbelief.

But where it counts, King Kong Escapes is just as flighty and ludicrous as any Toho's "for the kiddies" daikaiju films, even with Honda's humorless direction keeping it from feeling as trivial. It's even worse, in some cases: Tsuburaya's Kong suit is easily the worst he thing he ever designed, and a strong contender for the title of Toho's all-time worst-looking kaiju. Perhaps this is a factor of its need to somewhat mimic a cartoon character: one of the very worst things about Kong his his face, weirdly expressive in a horribly unpleasant way, and prone to exactly the kind of mugging one expects from a broadly-made kids' show. That's where the problems begin, though, not where they end: there's also the matter of the inexplicable body shape (there are shots where Kong looks like the hunchback of Notre Dame), the ratty fur, and the use of two suits, one with much shorter arms than the other for action sequences, that result in some eye-watering continuity lapses.

The other monsters in the movie are all at least somewhat better. There's a dismayingly inert sea serpent, but a giant dinosaur (subsequently named Gorosaurus) and the robotic Mechani-Kong are at least moderately charming; Gorosaurus looks somewhat like a kangaroo rat wearing a lizard's skin, but that's the worst you can say about it. Which is actually pretty bad. But for all the ridiculous hokiness of the concept, I like the design of Mechani-Kong quite a lot, and Sekida Yu's performance of the machine is, honestly, rather more nuanced and thoughtful than Nakajima's spastic Kong.

As for the plot that ties all of this together, it's... There's a reason I've been putting it off, y'see, which is that the story of King Kong Escapes is fucking nuts. I am given to understand that the scene structure of the American version is a little bit more streamlined, but in any case it involves a plot by the craven "foreign agent" Madame Piranha (Hama Mie) and the villainous Doctor Who (Amamoto Hideo), and even in the Japanese language version, that is audibly his name. In everybody's defense, the legendary BBC show wasn't a big deal outside of Great Britain yet, and possibly not even within it. I am not sure. The doctor and the madame are busy hunting in the Arctic for a vein of Element X, the key substance in building a world-destroying nuclear weapon, and the Mechani-Kong was built for this purpose; but the radiation is so powerful that it fries the robot, and Doctor Who theorises that only the real King Kong is strong enough to withstand the Element X mines. Meanwhile, the crew of the UN research vessel Explorer - Americans Carl Nelson (Rhodes Reason) and Susan Watson (Linda Miller) and Japanese Nomura Jiro (Takarada Akira) - are stranded on a South Pacific island, where they encounter that same Kong, who instantly takes a liking to Susan. Thus the even Doctor determines that if he is to control the giant gorilla, he needs to kidnap her and her colleagues.

That is the excessively cleaned-up version of a plot that includes elements of political thriller, spy adventure, monster movie, and South Seas adventure, and takes its sweet damn time about it: I don't know about the American cut, but the Japanese version is achingly slow to get started, with its plotlines coalescing very slowly over the course of the first 50 minutes or so. Though, in the film's defense, the human plot and the kaiju action - inevitably, King Kong escapes (get it?) from Doctor Who's clutches, and he and Mechani-Kong end up having a fight in Tokyo that is almost good enough to make up for how awful the Kong suit is - are unusually tightly-bound in this case.

Even so, the human plot still isn't all that interesting, with the three members of the Explorer crew filling the role of so many B-movie science-heroes of the 1960s, and Reason being an intensely boring stock type on top of it (the square-jawed All American with perfect hair and no personality). It only comes to life when the villains are around: both Hama and Amamoto are deliciously campy, particularly the latter, who understands precisely what character he's playing (a sniveling bad guy written for easily-bored kids), and lands at exactly the right place of scenery-chomping hamminess to make that delightfully fun, not just garish.

Not much of the film is fun at that level, though: Honda was a poor choice of director for the material, and he mostly recedes from it, leaving a film that's neither here nor there in terms of pacing and tone. It's not really all that entertaining until Kong and his robot clone arrive in Japan, and that's at the end of a lot of unnecessarily complicated plot shenanigans. It's weird and random without being particularly memorable, and it's very difficult to feel even a little bit sad that Toho never bothered trying to get Kong back after this picture.

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WHEN THE DAY IS GREY AND ORDINARY, MARY MAKES THE SUN SHINE BRIGHT

There's a very real danger of applying a most peculiar kind of grading curve to Saving Mr. Banks. It's a movie produced by Walt Disney Pictures, with Walt Disney as an actual character, and it presents him as more of a human being with good and bad characteristics than a plaster saint? He's seen stubbing out a cigarette? He says "damn"? WHAT A BRAVE AND UNPRECEDENTED MOTION PICTURE THIS BE.

So, step #1: avoid that kind of thinking. Saving Mr. Banks is charming and surprisingly non-saccharine; but it's still the Disney monolith protecting its own. A "brand deposit", in the creepily Orwellian phrase that has been going around lately, after Disney decided against all logic that it would be fine for one of their executives to use it in a public forum. The whole plot is still dedicated to a climax that represents the triumph of Disneyan whimsy and sweetness over pain and sorrow, and which is exactly contrary to the established facts of real life. But, yes, it does allow Friendliest Living American Tom Hanks to portray his Friendliest Dead American Walt Disney with considerably more bite and nuance that any sane person would ever have expected. Here is a Walt who is charismatic and charming, and perfectly willing to use those qualities to get his way in a business meeting; a Walt who hands out pre-signed autograph cards at Disneyland without even noticing the possibility that someone might find this tacky or unctuous. Here is a Walt who can't entirely keep his expansive smile plastered on as he starts to get entirely pissed-off when he doesn't get his way, exactly how he wants it.

All that being said, it's not Walt's movie; he might not even be its second most prominent figure, in fact. This is, every inch, a movie belonging to P.L. Travers (played gorgeously by Emma Thompson in her first big leading role in a generation), the Australian-born author of the über-British Mary Poppins books that Disney eventually adapted into his 1964 masterpiece Mary Poppins. The film largely documents the process by which Disney managed to cajole Travers into selling him the film rights to her characters after 20 years of wheedling, succeeding only because the author had reached a point of financial desperation and was finally ready to let the glad-handling creator of frothy, bubble-headed cartoons convince her that he was going to make a film she wouldn't entirely hate.

Spoiler alert: she did entirely hate Disney's Mary Poppins, in real life. But as much as Saving Mr. Banks is willing to humanise its iconic co-star, it will not do the same for the entire edifice of Disney Magic™. And so Travers must end up loving the live-action/cartoon hybrid musical (despite her burned-in hatred for both cartoons and musicals), because, in this incarnation of her life story, it is the key to healing all of her deep-set emotional traumas, centered around her Australian childhood as simple Helen "Ginty" Goff (Annie Rose Buckley), daughter of the lovingly unstable alcoholic bank manager Travers Goff (Colin Farrell).

The huge, slab-like problem with Saving Mr. Banks is not, in the end, that it tells appalling, self-serving lies about its real-life subject; movies have been making fiction of reality for decades, and the story that the movie tells is more satisfyingly dramatic than the story that actually happened. It is not that the film ends up being a commercial for the transformative power of Disney, either: mostly, it's a commercial for the idea that Mary Poppins is a goddamn wonderful movie, and since this is merely accurate, I have no problem with it. The problem is that Saving Mr. Banks, as first written by Kelly Marcel with latter contributions by Sue Smith, began life as a straight-up biopic of Travers that only drifted into its current form once Disney got involved and cleared the way for both likeness rights and, even more crucially, music rights (Thomas Newman's score uses themes from the earlier film to great effect, and the narrative is built of phases centered on "Spoonful of Sugar", "Let's Go Fly a Kite", and "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank", with a sweet but spurious cameo for "Feed the Birds").  But enough of the biopic material remains that a huge chunk of the movie - certainly more than a quarter of the overall running time, maybe as much as a third - is spent in Travers's 1906 childhood in Australia, a place where momentum goes to die, slaughtered at the feet of Farrell's twee leprechaun of an Aussie banker.

The 1961 material is aces: directed with maximum bland hand-holding and redundancy by John Lee Hancock, for whom this still manages to be a major career peak (aye, it somehow manages to trump both The Alamo AND The Blind Side), though mostly because of everybody and everything that isn't him. The script is a friendly but largely accurate look inside the story-building process, with Bradley Whitford as producer Don DaGradi and B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman as songwriting brothers Robert and Richard Sherman playing the part of Virgil to Travers's descent into the Burbank inferno (along with Paul Giamatti as a friendly chauffeur, barely more than a cameo), and being completely great at it. The sweaty desperation of trying to get the very brittle and angry Englishwoman to respond with positive emotion to anything they have in mind for the project is funny and accessible without being sitcom-style broad, and all three actors are in pitch-perfect form, Novak especially. And it should come as no surprise, given how fully the film has been built around her, that Thompson is wonderful, easily the best element of the whole affair. The role probably did not offer her very many challenges, but still could hardly have been executed better than this: her default glacial expression of lifeless superiority is modulated in all sorts of beautiful little ways - her struggle not to enjoy herself as the Shermans present "Let's Go Fly a Kite" is a particular highlight - and her priggish line readings are reliably the most hilarious part of a movie that ends up being much more of a comedy than it presents itself.

Of course, the sparring between her and Hanks is the main event, and it's awfully good too, though to be honest, I prefer the scenes with the Shermans and DaGradi; they feel more alive and honest, and not so pre-ordained. Hanks is very good, even so - more at playing a character in a movie than in portraying anyone who resembles Walt Disney to a closer approximation than "white guys with mustaches" - and there's plenty of impressive character material to be had in his battle of wills with Thompson, between a depressed woman pretending to be unreachably proud and a stubborn businessman pretending to be the source of all happiness in the world.

But then there's that goddamn Australia material, sucking the joy right out of the movie, by rendering it schematic and bland in the most prototypical biopic manner. I don't mind Travers having personal demons that influence her reluctance to sell Mary Poppins to Disney; that might very well have been the fact, anyway. I mind that the movie slows itself to such an oozing crawl to show us these demons in such overwhelming detail, and that it leaves a punchy, deeply entertaining movie about the sausage-making process of developing a script at Disney in the '60s as such a wretched paint-by-numbers things. I really mind how much screentime is devoted to Farrell's awful, shticky performance (and I consider myself a Farrell partisan most of the time). Just about the only thing I don't mind is the John Schwartzman cinematography, for his customary Rockwellian softness and golden-hued nostalgia fits what the film is trying to do with the Australia scenes - and with the California scenes, when it comes down to it. Outside of that, the only worthwhile thing done with the flashbacks is a scene of daddy Goff getting drunk at a fair surreally chanting the lyrics to the Disney film's song "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank", intercut with the Shermans' first performance of it for Travers; it is the only cinematically complex thing happening anywhere in the film.

Basically, we have here a giddily enjoyable confection undone by its anxiety for a Something to be About. Give Travers a big weepy monologue about her drunk dad that explains all of her brittleness, and the story functions, at a mechanical level, exactly the same way (also, Thompson gets more to be awesome). As it stands the filmmakers wanted to make a standard biopic, for whatever reason, and that's exactly what they have on their hands. Far more of the film works than doesn't - and even more works for the dyed-in-the-wool Mary Poppins fan, who can pick up on the impressive number of Easter eggs littered throughout the script and the mise en scène, but the po-faced "daddy issues" focus of the narrative is tedious drudgery, and it's never very far away. It shouldn't be this much work to enjoy something this bouncy and fluffy.

6/10

-but a very strong 6/10. Or perhaps 7/10, but a very weak 7/10. I wonder if I shall never fully resolve this question in my mind.

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RIO BY THE SEA-O

Another Thursday, another Film Experience review of a foreign animated film. This week, it is the Brazilian Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury, about which I feel extremely mixed admiration.

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MEN OF STEEL

I like to think it went this way: during the filming of Out of the Furnace, a bored Forest Whitaker and Christian Bale were goofing around on set, keeping themselves awake as actors do. And Whitaker decided to break out his impression of Bale's over-the-top gravelly Batman voice while they were goofing around. Unfortunately this ended up being filmed and was an otherwise perfect take, and Whitaker was thus forced to use the voice throughout the rest of the shoot, for continuity purposes. I mean, there has to be some reason that a pro like Whitaker would allow himself to get mired so down deep in such an obviously terrible choice as that accent.

The good news is that neither Whitaker nor his staggering voice are all that important to Out of the Furnace, which is instead a movie about two brothers struggling to get by in an America That Stopped Caring. And the capitals, I promise, are entirely justified by the film's gravely declamatory presentation of post-industrial rural Pennsylvania as a decaying No Man's Land of the skeletons of proud factories and proud industry towns, reduced to hardscrabble populations of desperate people. Not since The Deer Hunter has a movie been so forthright in its desire to use steel mills to represent absolutely everything imaginable besides steel mills.

Aw, I'm giving Out of the Furnace a harder time than it deserves. It is, in fact, a largely successful version of the thing it wants to be, and it even manages to justify some of its biggest ambitions, thanks largely to the skillful location photography of Masanobu Takayanagi, whose insistently unromantic camera leaves poverty looking grubby and sad and not at all picturesque; to Dickon Hinchliffe's frequently redundant but effectively sparse and weary folk-orchestrated score; and to Bale and Casey Affleck as brothers Russell and Rodney Baze, the pair of them capturing something lived-in and essential about the kind of guys who would grow up in such an environment as the tapped-out community where they live and work. Even that's not as complete and deep and perfect as their fraternal push-pull relationship, relaxed with each other, anticipating each other's actions and words, bantering in a lazy manner that exactly nails the notion that these two men are family, despite the complete lack of any visual evidence that they share genes.

In keeping with its Stated Themes, this is a story of bad things happening to largely decent people. When we meet those Baze boys, Russell is a steelworker with a swell gal, Lena (Zoe Saldana), Rodney is on a break between tours in Iraq (it's 2008, and people were still getting dragged back into combat against their will over and over again), and neither one of them has much of a sense of where life is going, but the day-to-day seems to be taking care of itself just fine. Except that in Rodney's case, he's in for a lot of money to the patient but not infinitely saintlike John Petty (Willem Dafoe), a local business owner and gambling fixer. Russell takes care of this situation as best he can, but there comes at this point a car crash, an elevated blood alcohol level, and a dead mother and child. Thus does Russell end up in jail for several years.

Everything's shitty when he gets out: Lena has hooked up with police chief Barnes (Whitaker), the brothers' dad is dead of cancer, and Rodney is working up a transparently dumb scheme to make enough money to wipe out all his debts by throwing his lot in with the back country psychopath Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson, buoyantly unhinged; I am undecided if this is a good thing or an outrageously terrible one). When the easily-angered druglord takes offense to Rodney and John's activities, he disappears them in the Appalachian woods, and an untethered, soul-despairing Russell tries to reassemble his world the only way that makes sense: hunting Harlan down, finding his brother, and getting revenge.

On the whole, Out of the Furnace is much too dour and fatalistic to be the simple revenge thriller that it seems to set its mind on being, which is absolutely to its benefit: the straightforward version of the story would be unpleasantly fixated on redemptive violence as the cornerstone of masculinity. And it's not entirely free of that (the film's last 45 seconds are befuddling and terrible), but Bale's performance, certainly, goes a long way to muddy the most simplistic possible reading of the scenario. Still, the film gets rougher and more generic as it goes along, and the first half is altogether better, not just because it lacks the po-faced amorality, but because the Bale-Affleck chemistry is the best thing the film has going for it, and when Affleck vanishes from the film, he takes away not just its human spark (which is, anyway, likely intentional), but a lot of what makes it interesting to watch.

This is, after all, a film by director and co-writer (with Brad Ingelsby) Scott Cooper, only his second feature. His first, 2009's Crazy Heart, was another rural American character study, but one that pointedly avoided the Big Questions that lace throughout Out of the Furnace, possessing not a trace of pointed symbolism; and while this makes it a bit less vivid and rich, than the director's sophomore work, it also keeps it from being so bogged down by its own weight. Cooper's great at watching people living life, and that is the primary mode of the better half of Out of the Furnace, and the whole thing noticeably sags when it is called upon to become a genre film.

Sagging, mind you, is very much what Out of the Furnace is about, and I will not pretend that the two portions of the plot are not very much of a piece; it has a clear dividing line, but the tone and style are exactly the same throughout, and it builds its themes and ideas throughout its entire 116-minute running time. It has a focused momentum that carries it through even the stiffest passages of plot (including a long red herring of a road trip), and the sense of place that is the film's best asset after Bale remains firmly intact (as does Bale's performance, for that matter). It ends up being less persuasive and probing than it feels like the opening scenario and setting could have facilitated, but that setting is rich enough to carry over a somewhat contrived storyline or two.

7/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: SOUND AND FURY

Writer-director Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio works, I am tempted to say, in spite of itself; it works "for all the wrong reasons" might do just as well. They key is that it works. The film is smart as hell, for one thing. It has been carefully worked out just so, with a final third that significantly up-ends what we think we've been watching in a way that at first blush seems random and ridiculous, but gels rather neatly, if you let it percolate and bear in mind what genre this belongs to. Which is a genre that the film itself seems to have invented, for it's basically a combination of the British psychological thriller of the 1960s and the Italian post-giallo paranormal horror film of the 1970s. And one of these things is much more eager to play "fuck you" games with the audience's desire for logic, but both tend to be what we might call subjectivity-based genres, and in the case of Berberian Sound Studio, the subjective viewpoint we're adopting is that of a man losing the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction; the final third of the movie might be read as the ultimate expression of his subconscious preoccupations throughout the first two-thirds, or it might be understood as the real reality which has been hiding all along, in the fashion of Mulholland Dr. Either way, it is the expression of the mind of a man who has lost his tether.

The man in question is a nervous, ultra-British fellow named Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a sound designer for motion pictures who has just been hired by Italian producer Francesco Coraggio (Cosimo Fusco) to provide the effects and mix for Il vortice equestre, a horror movie whose plot details, barely dribbled out, make it sound powerfully like Suspiria (the film doesn't come right out and say "this is the 1970s", but that seems to be a fair assumption to make). Gilderoy is not a good traveler or even an especially functional adult - he lives with his mother, we're able to discover if we're keeping an eye on the letters held up to the camera but never read, a nifty trick that invites an unusual degree of interaction between viewer and movie. And the situation he's arrived in would make even a seasoned adventurer long for the comforts of home: one of the two lead actresses is a breathy, talentless bimbo, the director, Giancarlo Santini (Antonio Mancini) is a self-adoring auteurist whose vision for the movie is implicitly at direct odds with Coraggio's, and the very unfriendly company secretary, Elena (Tonia Sotiropoulou) is stonewalling his attempts to get reimbursed for his travel expenses, effectively stranding him in this hostile environment. And, of course, he doesn't speak more than rudimentary traveler's Italian, which isn't just a personal liability, but a professional one as well.

The film's most captivating strength and its Achilles's heel are one and the same, but let me not reveal it just yet. First, let's take a look at what this is, for Berberian Sound Studio is a film of many layers and metanarratives. To begin with, there's the matter of Il vortice equestre - The Equestrian Vortex, misunderstood as a film about horses by the country-loving Gilderoy - of which we see not a single frame, except for the opening credits; and these occur at precisely the point that you'd expect to see Berberian Sound Studio's own credits (and with as little connection to the diegesis: nobody is watching them, that we can tell, except for us). It's obvious enough that we're being invited to conflate the movie and the movie-within-the-movie. And since the bulk of the first hour consists of watching Gilderoy provide sound effects to unseen horrors that are verbally described, or detailed on his grand flow chart, what we get to do a lot of is listen to Il vortice equestre. In fact, solely through audio cues, we end up learning a lot more about what happens in Santini's film than in Strickland's, at the level of "plot".

To a great extent, Berberian Sound Studio is an experiment of sorts, exploring how much meaning we, the outermost level of audience, can extract from nothing but sound, augmented by watching the expressions of people watching the thing we're hearing (Gilderoy, to nobody's surprise in the audience and everybody's in the movie, has a weak stomach for gory horror). It's not exactly a film "about sound", but it's a film about how we piece together meaning in cinema.At all points, we're watching Berberian Sound Studio but also interpreting Il vortice equestre, until the the final third comes along, collides the two films in irresolvable ways, and having then done its job of demonstrating how little value there is in looking for "meaning in cinema" anyway, destroys itself as viscerally as any film this side of Persona.

So that's the captivating part. The problem - and maybe the fact that I'm calling it a problem reveals personal bias, but I don't think so - is that it's sluggishly intellectual, operating entirely at the level of thinking and not at the level of feeling. But, in keeping with the phantasmagoric Italian films it's both paying tribute to and parodying (the film is bleakly funny at times, far funnier than I'd have ever predicted), much of what "happens" at the film is so subjective and impressionistic that it can only be understood at the level of feeling: having yoked its perspective firmly to Gilderoy's, the film can thus break itself down as a means of dramatising his own loosening grip on reality. So we have a film that at one and the same time can only be understood as a detached, highly intellectualised experience that isn't a tiny bit scary, and a film that's only satisfying if we give in and just experience the thing as a disorienting ride through fragmenting psychology. Either way, that leaves a lot of nonsensical bullshit lying around, and it's really not possible, that I can tell, to resolve the film's disparate parts in any kind of coherent way. The result is a dazzling mess full of terrific visuals (the repeated use of a blood-red "SILENZIO" sign is the best horror movie image of the year), entrancingly confounding audio, and a lot of random tedium interspersed in between. I'm tempted to call it required viewing, doubly so for fans of Italian horror, but certainly not because it is objectively great, or even because it is, for the most part, very good. But the parts can be awfully good, and the whole is different - not more, just different - than the sum of its parts.

7/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: WORSE THINGS HAPPEN AT SEA

For the English-speaking critic, the comparison between 2012 Danish prize-winner A Hijacking and 2013 American prize-courting Captain Phillips is as easy to make as it is spurious and unenlightening. The one is a psychological drama about the unfeelingness of corporations and hostage negotiations, the other is a politically-minded high-energy action film, and similarities of scenario aside, there's absolutely no reason to compare them. So I shall hereafter not do so.

A Hijacking is the sophomore effort and first broadly-available film by director Tobias Lindholm, who's a bit better-established as a screenwriter; he co-wrote Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt, and appears to have picked up a few stylistic tricks in doing so. For if there's any easy, reductive way to describe A Hijacking in generic terms, it would be as "a Scandinavian realist thriller". It's not quite as ascetic in its realism as the most Dogmetic of Vinterberg's movies, but still palpably free of Hollywoodised gloss and polish, to the degree where it's hard to say that it really qualifies as a "thriller" at all, except that nothing else seems to work. The film concerns the Rozen, a Danish cargo ship attacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia; it divides its attention between two protagonists, one onboard, one back in Denmark. The man on the boat is Mikkel Hartmann (Pilou Asbæk), the ship's cook, who we first meet shortly before the attack looking haggard and worn and eager to get the hell back home. The man back at the corporate offices is Peter Ludvigsen (Søren Malling), an executive selected to be the company's primary negotiator, speaking with the pirate ambasador Omar (Abdihakin Asgar) over a crappy phone connection and over fax. With hideousness slowness - the number of days that the film proposes for the total length of the hijacking is stupefying - Ludvigsen and Omar hash out a deal, as the hostages grow increasingly frayed and dead-eyed.

If I had to come up with an adjective for this, I'd go with "sinewy". There is precious little wasted in A Hijacking, a film about one agonising process stretched out by corporate deliberations on both sides (the Somali pirates take on the aura of an unseen bureaucracy), with virtually every line and narrative beat focused only on how that process plays out. It's not a movie that wastes time on melodrama (Mikkel's family is pulled in for the most pragmatic of narrative reasons, but never for any kind of weepy "the family waits" moments), nor on broad concepts of How the World Works and how this story Reveals Truths of That World. Perhaps, arguably, there is something of greater social import in its implicit themes of corporate coldness versus human passion: the central conflict of the Denmark-bound plotline is between Peter's heavily rational approach to crisis management as a professional being coached by a hostage negotiation expert (Gary Skjoldmose Porter), and his increasing frustration at being impotent to actually do anything as days turn into weeks and eventually months. Malling is deliriously good in these scenes, capturing all the tightly-coiled tension of his character's situation such that you can almost watch him shaking from nervous energy at points.

And of course, there's another conflict as well, between the men in Denmark and the men in the boat, who grow increasingly ragged and weathered as the story crawls on, eventually forming a kind of comradship with their captors that has less to do with Stockholm Syndrome and more with a sense of "fuck it, we're miles at sea, might as well do things to pass the time". I will confess to finding the hostage half of the movie not as compelling, largely because there's no character as sharply and originally defined as Peter (Mikkel is a good Everyman, but not a particularly groundbreaking figure - not to compare it to Captain Phillips like I said only a jackwad would do, but he's not as compelling a "captive human under stress" figure as that movie's titular character), but it's still pleasingly straightforward and free of trumped-up action: it is the most realistic, unforced part of a most realist motion picture. In fact, all of the acutely "tense" moments in this laconic thriller take place in the offices: wondering why the phones went dead, trying to decode a cryptic fax, wondering if somebody just got shot on the boat. It's kind of astonishing how much tension Lindholm is able to scrape out of everyday officework being applied to a life-or-death situation. Even the simple trick in the audio, in which the speakerphone that Peter uses to talk with Omar introduces an echo so that everything Peter says is repeated and muffled, adds considerably to the feeling of ominous frustration.

I presume that there exists a viewer for whom all of this low-key, realist genre work would come across as boring rather than excitingly unconventional and fresh, but I think most of us would agree that the film's ability to keep the stakes so high and potent even in the face of the bureaucratic shuffling that drives the story. Lindholm isn't quite able to sell the chronology as well as the film might need: other than the use of title cards, nothing actually makes this seem like it couldn't be two or three weeks as easily as anything longer. And that saps the film of some of the ravaging hopelessness that might have given the scenes on the boat a little more impact.

Still, whatever is or isn't great and whatever is or isn't nail-biting and exciting to people who need more or less obvious thrills from their thrillers, this much is undeniably true: the last several minutes are dynamite. After a film that has been so good at contrasting bureaucratic wrangling with human suffering the last few story beats in A Hijacking are strictly about the human fallout from traumatic experiences, and it's like being punched in the gut for several minutes running. In the absolute best way, of course. The film isn't perfect, but anything that could earn that climax is getting a whole lot of things right, and pridely ekes out its place as an entirely essential viewing experience.

8/10

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