Is it 2010 again?

The ghost of Christmas returns one more time. Just before Christmas I was in an HMV store -a rarity these days-  and I noticed a sale section with a twofer for Peter Hyams’ Outland (1981) and 2010 (1984) on Blu-ray. I had Outland on a DVD many years ago, never bought 2010. I’d been ruminating over these Blu-ray editions (HMV exclusives here in the UK) for years but finally decided to give them a shot. Maybe it was the Christmas songs playing instore and all that tinsel everywhere clouding my judgement. Watched Outland a few weeks back, finally caught up with 2010 last night.

Outland looked pretty respectable on Blu-Ray, seemed a genuine improvement over that old DVD. The film isn’t great -its basically a tired old rehash of the Western High Noon with lots of scientific inaccuracies thrown in while ripping-off Ridley Scott’s Alien production design (so much so you could almost be forgiven for thinking it an unofficial prequel), but for all that its an easy watch. There’s rather something cosy about that grungy  ‘look’ that Ridley Scott launched in sci-fi films. The film also has some nostalgia factor for me as the first time I watched it was in a re-release double bill with Blade Runner in 1983 (both films are Warner/The Ladd Company flicks).

2010 on Blu-ray unfortunately doesn’t look that hot at all (it looks too ‘hot’ if anything, very warm and hazy the way many films did back then), which is doubly surprising as it was both newer than Outland and benefitted from a bigger budget. You’d think that latter point might be reflected in the image quality, but it isn’t.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the Blu-ray (itself over a decade old at this point) was even from a DVD-era master, but saying that I’m not entirely sure the film would benefit greatly from a new 2K or 4K restoration.  Many of the film’s opticals are messy (a prologue faux-computer text crawl on the screen, reprising what happened in 2001,is very unsteady) and the live-action photography is very hazy, filtered, indistinct. Its rather a shame as the visual effects from the last days of EEG (Doug Trumbull’s old outfit after he’d moved on, I believe)  are on the whole of very high-quality but done few favours by the optical printing, with optical masks clearly evident in many shots of miniatures superimposed over star fields and planetary backgrounds. One could (possibly should) expect them to clean-up much better than this given a restoration, as EEG shots were in 65mm to ensure less degradation (just look at the quality of Blade Runner’s effects, shot by EEG just a few years prior). Maybe I’ll have to dig out my old Cinefex, see what that 2010 article had to say.

All that being said,  would it even really deserve a 2K or 4K restoration? As always the biggest obstacle for 2010 to climb is the simple question, ‘why?” as it was a redundant film even back then, and only more redundant now. Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey remains a genuine classic film, quite unique in many ways even all this time later, an example of art and craft in the analogue era that stands apart. Its perhaps a trite observation in some ways, but throughout 2010 video screens are 4:3 CRT televisions with piped video and they always look horrible (and inaccurate) compared to 2001‘s flat screens that were front-projected. The result of work and dedication that the makers of 2010 couldn’t be bothered to match, it seems. Moreover, the plot of 2010 seeks to explain everything that shouldn’t have been explained with regards 2001‘s many mysteries and does so in a depressingly mundane manner.  Watching 2001, you have to pretend that 2010 never happened (not too difficult- bit like watching Alien and pretending that Prometheus and its ten-foot bald guy in a Space Jockey suit never happened).

It just dawned upon me though, when 2010 finally ended, that the film is forty years old this year. Forty years! That’s the equivalent of young me in 1984 watching 2010 and comparing it to films released back in 1944, before even Destination Moon, The Day the Earth Stood Still etc., so its possibly not fair of me to complain or suggest that it looks dated. But 2001 still looks largely timeless, so maybe that’s the point. I suppose I would cut the film more slack if not for the Kubrick/2001 angle; Kubrick’s film is like genre hallowed ground.

Curious thing, I can vividly remember travelling on the bus back from town with my mate Andy having just seen 2010 in our old ABC Cinema, utterly appalled at what we’d struggled through . We really didn’t enjoy it and were in a bit of an embarrassed funk, as we’d had to choose between 2010 and David Lynch’s  Dune, unable to afford to watch both. We felt like we’d messed up. We’d catch up with Dune on VHS a few months later and realise that maybe we hadn’t, but anyway, I remember that nervous embarrassment on our ride home. The 2010 score music by David Shire, an electronic score that probably caught his attention being a Vangelis fan, struck a chord (sic) with Andy, as he bought the vinyl soundtrack album; that cover was a thing of beauty, always loved that movie poster- deserved a better movie.  It was a good time for movie posters, mind, as I recall also being quite smitten by the Dune posters back then, too (the poster of the moons over the desert, NOT the one of Kyle MacLachlan and Sean Young standing with an armada of spaceships behind them like some action flick).  But forty years ago. My God.

The Abyss: (No, not THAT one…)

The Abyss (aka Avgrunden), 2023, Dir. Richard Holm, 113 mins, Netflix

No, that particular James Cameron will have to wait another month or so for the 4K UHD to arrive from distant shores. This unfortunate disaster of a disaster film saw fit to use the title… well, I’m not sure why, exactly. Certainly doesn’t ‘fit’ as a title as well as it did Cameron’s film; there’s a big hole in this film (other than the many plot-holes, ha ha) but nobody ever descends into it, there’s never a character plunging into ‘the abyss’ to save someone, which I foolishly expected.

Not that I expected much, in all honesty, but even then such mild expectations were ill-founded; this film quickly stumbles into the usual disaster-movie tropes that Irwin Allen had such success with back in the 1970s, and if you’ve seen any of his films, then you’ve seen everything attempted here, but done better, no matter how cheesy some of those Allen films were.

Frigga (Tuva Nuvotny, who featured in Alex Garland’s Annihilation, apparently, although I can’t place her)  is the security manager at the Kiirunavaara mine which is forcing the town above it to be moved house by house due to subsidence and tremors caused by the mining (incredible as that might sound, that part is based on a true story).  As usual with films of late, Frigga’s family life is dysfunctional, separated from her husband, with their two teenage children caught in-between, Frigga’s new boyfriend, Firefighter Dabir (Kardo Razazzi) arrives in town on the very day that disaster strikes, antagonising Frigga’s estranged husband Tage (Peter Franzén) who is still in love with Frigga and hopes they can have some reconciliation. It is also son Simon’s birthday, but he’s gone missing as the tremors intensify and the holes start opening up around and under the town, and worse, daughter Mika (Felicia Maxime) is having tensions with her girlfriend Aila. So we have lots of bitching and tears and shouting that has nothing to do with the ground opening up around them or people getting crushed under giant rocks.

Nuvotny is very good (I must say, she has incredible eyes) doing a lot with very little help from the script, frankly, but I suppose that could be said for most of the cast. Its a really badly written film, constructed almost entirely from disaster-movie tropes that pile one upon the other.

My biggest gripe is maybe from something lost in translation, because I could have sworn we saw Simon exit a drunken student party and fall into a chasm that opens up underneath him at the start of the film, only for him to turn up waiting for rescue in a collapsing school at the end. It was one of those wtf moments that left me unsure whether I missed something, like maybe there were a few pages of the script never got filmed or I totally missed the point of that prologue (the lad we thought was Simon wasn’t Simon?). I don’t know, maybe a rewatch might fix that criticism if I missed something obvious but I can’t be bothered, life is far too short. Its just that I spent a film thinking I was watching people frantically searching for Simon in entirely the wrong place, me assuming he was in a hole outside the town (the titular ‘Abyss’ that I expected Frigga to go into to save him), when he was actually playing a Call of Duty LAN party in school?

True Detective Season 4: frozen mystery thaws to a mucky puddle

True Detective Season Four (2024), Dir. Issa López, Six Episodes, HD

Okay, on one level, I enjoyed this latest (and long-awaited) season of True Detective… always a fan of Jodie Foster, I enjoyed the setting, and the tantalising initial mystery, but as it progressed, it felt less like True Detective (writer/showrunner Nic Pizzolatto’s show for HBO) and more something else just appropriating its name (now a HBO show by Issa López). Just like so many other reboots/remakes of late: grab attention by using a popular IP and then use the opportunity to do something often wildly inappropriate or inferior to the original. I do think that to some extent it works; I liked the central conceit that the first season was hot, sweaty, male, whereas this season is decidedly cold, dark and female, what showrunner/writer/director López describes as a “dark mirror” of the first season, but its gradually let down by bad creative decisions and some poor writing. The journey isn’t the thing here; the characters, the emotional drama etc feel so typical of what we see now that its getting formulaic, almost token liberalism (not a bad thing if its a natural part of the narrative, but horrible if forced), and the destination of the story finally proves to be such a let-down it scuppers the whole thing.

I stuck with it, felt a bit of a fool afterwards. It ultimately felt a lot like other shows/films that I’ve watched over the past decade or so.  Disappointingly  familiar to J.J. Abrams stuff… its all tease and mystery box with no satisfying pay-off at the end. These are creatives who come up with an intriguing premise – in this case, an Arctic science research station is found abandoned, and later its scientists discovered out in the ice, naked and frozen to death with faces contorted in pain and terror- but are just not up to the task of following it through with a satisfying rationale. In the specific case of this show, López endlessly drops suggestions of ghosts and supernatural forces, only to conclude with a painfully mundane solution completely from out of leftfield that not only stretches believability but essentially leaves one feeling like being taken for a mug.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the severed human tongue (a homage to Blue Velvet‘s ear or a lazy rip-off?). When the station is found to be deserted and the police investigate, one of them discovers a severed human tongue on the floor under a desk. This is a narrative device to link the scientists disappearance to the unsolved brutal murder of an indigenous girl from the nearby town several years before, who was discovered stabbed to death and missing her tongue. The tongue is tested and confirmed to belong to the murdered girl, and the show spends the next five episodes solving the mystery of the link between the two events. But it never, ever explains how that tongue ended up in the abandoned station. We find out who disposed of her body and severed the tongue (ostensibly a warning to locals regards keeping quiet etc) but not why the tongue was frozen, hidden away for years and then brought out to link the two cases (which, one must remember, was not to any advantage of the person who disposed of the body or severed the tongue in the first place). I’m of the understanding that López has dismissed that as mystery for the audience to make up their own minds about, which strikes me as a lazy cop-out having written her way into a corner she couldn’t get out of- sadly typical of how the final episode pans out generally.

As noted, all this made me feel like I was being taken for a mug. Not a good feeling when you’ve given more than six hours of your time to sit down and watch something.  HBO have signed López to make a fifth season. Well, fool me once and all that… nice way of HBO to inadvertently destroy a franchise, you’d think.

Devil Girl From Mars: cup of tea, anyone?

Devil Girl From Mars (1954), Dir. David MacDonald, 77 mins, Talking Pictures TV

A pretty wild ride, this- I can perhaps best sum it up as it being a weird British hybrid of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959).  Criswell never predicted this one. A caped leather-clad, dominatrix-like female alien intending to land in London takes a wrong turn and winds up arriving outside a remote Inn in the Scottish Highlands in the dead of Winter. Intending to abduct virile men to serve as breeding stock back on Mars, she finds slim pickings here while her flying saucer repairs itself.

Mark my words, its even dafter than it sounds, written like an hysterical soap-opera (complete with an escaped convict in some romantic tryst with the barmaid, a frustrated fashion model, an aged professor, an American reporter and a really annoying little kid) , with actors keenly spouting risible dialogue “It amuses me to watch your puny efforts!” and sporting a non-existent budget (Martian Devil-girl Nyah is accompanied by a robot that looks exactly like a  giant walking refrigerator). Its enlivened by what may or not be a deliberate attempt to turn it into a comedy (“while we’re still alive, we may as well have a cup of tea,” decides the old lady who runs the Inn when threatened with the complete destruction of Earth).

I won’t pretend to suggest this is one of those ‘so bad its good’ films, its probably not really bad enough to be that (its certainly more professional-looking/well-made than Plan 9 for instance) but it does have some charm. Mind, its almost unnerving to see Nyah (Patricia Laffan) and realise her kinky outfit is a stunningly close precursor to that of Darth Vader. Laffan’s performance, her voice dripping with contempt of puny Earthlings, is the clear highlight of the show – there’s something endearing about her chewing up the scenery the way she does in THAT outfit. What’s not to admire, seeing an actress looking THAT ridiculous in such a dire film acting with such earnest conviction, as if she’s reciting Shakespeare? How utterly British!

Short enough that it doesn’t quite outstay its welcome, this oddity of a movie possibly has to be seen to be believed. I watched it on Talking Pictures TV, but its also recently been released on Blu-ray with a commentary track and some other features. I don’t know what’s more crazy – the film itself or the fact its released on Blu-ray when so many other films still aren’t. Its a strange world.

So you’re on a desert island…?

A few nights back, I watched The Prisoner of Second Avenue again; its one of those films that I find endlessly rewatchable. Every year I give it a rewatch, sometimes more often than that. Sure, there’s better films but not so many as you’d think that I can sit through again and again and enjoy like I do.  There’s just so much to enjoy- the fine performances of Lemmon and Bancroft, the witty, poignant screenplay, the wonderful New York locations, the lovely music score… its some fine cinematic jewel.

Its funny; released in 1975 its likely largely forgotten these days (to be fair, it IS close on 50 years old now) and is rarely if ever shown on television, or on streaming. Films so easily disappear. Which again makes me wonder why some channel like the BBC doesn’t run a regular themed movie night like in the good old days, for instance a season of noir or sure, Jack Lemmon films or science fiction classics.  Or something like Moviedrome; anybody here in the UK remember that? Why does some BBC chief think that there’s no longer a need for something like Moviedrome on a Saturday night, or even a midweek afternoon? Television networks fill schedules with endless gameshows and even repeat them endlessly in daytime slots, I’d have thought ‘old’ movies would be an easy and fairly inexpensive way to fill all that time they have to fill.

I’ve written about the The Prisoner of Second Avenue here before.  Watching it again, it made me think about the films we can hold so dear, that aren’t necessarily those films which get referred to as ‘the classics.’ I think its the films we make connections with, usually emotionally, certainly films which mean something to us. It led me to thinking about Desert Island Discs, the radio show in which each guest is asked to chose eight music recordings that they would want with them if they were a castaway on some remote desert island. As each piece is played the interviewer asks why they chose it, and what it means to them, and usually the conversation touches on their life etc. Its a great format.

Naturally, this set me thinking along those lines, I began to wonder which films I have on disc that I couldn’t live without- the films I would dearly want with me on some desert island or, to offer a more modern equivalent,  were I isolated on some Arctic research station or the ISS. Say, ten films? Ten of my favourite films…

Its trickier than you’d think. I’ve been looking at all the films on my shelves and its a tough one. Some of them are blindingly obvious to anyone whose familiar with this blog – Blade Runner, Alien… but it does get tricky awfully quickly. Its not a question of what I’d consider the ten best films that sit in my collection, but more the films that mean the most to me that I couldn’t live without, and that I can watch time and time again and still get pleasure from. To put it another way, if I had to ‘lose’ all my disc collection and just keep ten titles, which would they be?

I haven’t got a list yet. I just keep playing a mental game in my head, and when I’m standing by those shelves my eyes run through those spines this conundrum starts to wind me up somewhat- it really is trickier than one might think.  Maybe I’ll run a few posts here later on when I narrow it down, but I was wondering what readers here might think, which films you might choose, had you to make the same choice.

4K, Crom!

Had a blast of a time last weekend, watching Arrow’s 4K disc of Conan: The Barbarian (1982), which I’d had to import from their American store for reasons which are pretty similar to why I’ve had to do the same for next month’s 4K release of James Cameron’s The Abyss. Its almost funny how the more things (i.e. formats etc) change, the more they stay the same- it almost feels like its getting a lot like the early DVD days of importing discs, of late. Which is all sorts of weird, frankly.

Its funny though how much I thoroughly enjoyed Conan. There’s a reason why I so revere those genre films from 1982 and that period in general, but in Conan: The Barbarian‘s case, there’s some irony attached to it. Back when it originally came out, I didn’t care for the film very much at all- it was only re-watching it on VHS rental that I began to succumb to its charms.

Back in 1982, I was aghast at how little  sword and sorcery the film seemed to have, compared to what I was expecting having read the Robert E Howard stories and reading Marvel’s Savage Sword of Conan b&w magazine since the mid-Seventies. But these days, it works to the films advantage tremendously. Indeed its almost surprising now just how restrained the film is with regards its fantasy aspects.  There ARE fantasy aspects, certainly (the Witch, the giant snake, Thulsa Doom’s transformation, the sprits that come for Conan when he is mortally wounded ) but there is something rather  understated about them, almost matter-of-fact. Much of this is simply because the film consciously veers away from optical effects as much as it can- a budgetary thing at the time, for sure, but it helps not date the film with stop-motion or blue-screen issues (the use of miniatures in-camera was Old School back when the film was made but works splendidly)  I certainly appreciated the craftmanship in the costumes, the sets etc- it looks marvellous, and so tangible and believable and of course the film sounds fantastic, that magnificent Basil Poledouris reminding one of just how awful most film scoring is these days.

I was watching the scenes where Conan reaches the Mountain of Power and walks amongst the followers of Thulsa Doom; “look at all those people!” I marvelled seeing the several hundred extras around him and off in the distance. It was curiously refreshing, the sheer scale of that sequence, with all those extras and that huge set physically built on the side of the mountain.  These days it would either be a distant shot with lots of CGI crowds or some sweeping virtual camera move with the same, neither of which would have seemed as natural or realistic, spectacular as it may have been (I detest those sweeping virtual camera shots, they are in everything now and I hate them, so distracting).

Thanks to the Panasonic remote hack I was able to watch the bonus features disc; much of this is legacy material familiar from previous home video releases, but there’s several new interviews which are splendid fun (Jack Taylor is such a charming gent) and the disc producers also managed to license footage from a ‘concert performance of the score conducted by Basil Poledouris months before his death, with  accompanying tribute featurettes. This material was from a R1 DVD release seperate from the film that I believe went OOP long ago so its great to finally have it, being such a fan of the score as I am.

The whole package (currently a limited edition, standard in the offing soon enough, no doubt) is handsomely presented in a chip-board box with a substantial booklet, poster and lobby cards- basically this is the definitive Conan on home video. Such a  shame it can’t be released outside of America (mostly rights issues, as its a Fox/now-Disney title Internationally) and there’s censor problems with the UK in particular which would probably force me to import anyway. Yeah, the more things change…

The Hitcher: The stupid reason why I never watched this movie until now

The Hitcher (1986), Dir. Robert Harmon, 97 mins, DVD

One of the pleasures of watching 1980s films is the sense of nostalgia; part of the appeal of watching films like Trouble in Mind, Predator, Robocop, Lifeforce, The Abyss etc. is not just how good I think they are, but from my memories of first watching them, and during the years after. Film buffs tend to bookmark our lives by them. I remember seeing Robocop at the cinema, then on on VHS, then the unrated version on the imported R1 Criterion DVD, later on Blu-ray…. there’s all sorts of memories that arise from re-watching it. Inevitably it blurs any impartiality, its easy to forgive a film its faults when its a matter of re-experiencing favourite moments within the film or real-life memories relating to it. Sometimes I think all I can do is group all those 1980s films together, seen through the rose-tented lens of nostalgia, and forget ever being impartial. They are the films I grew up with, they informed who I am.

But what about a 1980s film that you’ve never seen? Hmm; such is the case with today’s offering; Robert Harmon’s cult favourite The Hitcher from 1986.  That’s right, I’d never seen it before. Yeah, The Hitcher. Never seen it. I know; this rather sounds like a feature in Ripleys Believe it or Not! But sometimes film’s escape me. I haven’t seen Barbie yet, either.

Why I never saw it, how I never saw it…. well, its been so many years now, but I have a suspicion, ironically enough, that it was because it stars Rutger Hauer. One would think, since he starred in my favourite all-time movie, Blade Runner, that I would then be intrigued to see him in everything he subsequently did. But I didn’t. Maybe it was because I’d seen Flesh+Blood on VHS rental, a film that Hauer had starred in earlier in that post-Blade Runner spell (curiously, Flesh+Blood also featured Jennifer Jason Leigh, who also features in The Hitcher (casting can be such a small world)).

I can’t put my finger on it, but I confess I had this odd feeling watching Flesh+Blood, it seemed  almost disturbing, watching Hauer in something else other than Blade Runner back then- to me, he WAS Roy Batty, and it was a classic, film-stealing performance, and is it a little crazy to suggest that seeing echoes of Batty in other roles somehow diluted that Blade Runner performance? It was no longer unique, it was Hauer being Hauer, using his own mannerisms and ticks to inform the character he was playing, as if Roy Batty was just another part, and Blade Runner just another movie. Heresy! Well, I was young, and I had Blade Runner on some crazy cinematic pedestal. The young can be forgiven for being a little nuts -ahem- eccentric, or, well, stupid.

I would have freaked out, though, had I indeed watched The Hitcher back then, because his John Ryder, the titular character in that film, is massively channelling Roy Batty. Hauer can’t help it, he’s digging into that same well of life-experience in portraying a strangely charismatic bad guy.  These days it just puts a smile on my face, but back then I might have been annoyed at proof that maybe his Blade Runner role  wasn’t as unique a turn as I thought it was.

But wasn’t Hauer a magnificent actor though? He had such a screen presence, and intensity, part roguish charmer, part dangerous villain- indeed, he was probably just too intense an actor to play your nominal lead hero, which is why he was always cast the way he was.  There’s something that is almost intimidating about him. I think he deserved better films though; he seldom got the parts he merited. Too many straight-to-video b-movies or relegated to supporting roles when he should have been the lead. Still so hard to believe he’s gone. Watching how good, how bloody brilliant, he is in The Hitcher is a sad reminder of how much he is missed and how great he should have been.

Actors don’t always get the careers that they deserve. Some very average actors get lauded far more than they deserve. The film industry just works that way; quality doesn’t always rise to the top.  Shouldn’t’ be too surprising, some of the best films never get made, languishing in pre-production hell.

But is The Hitcher as good a film as its cult reputation would suggest, watching it in the cold light of a rainy day in 2024? Well, there’s the rub; its not that great a movie. Back in 1986, it probably seemed to be.  There’s too many wtf moments, stretches of disbelief; Hauer’s  John Ryder becomes almost a supernatural presence, a less believable antagonist, as it goes on, which diminishes the film. I think maybe folks were more forgiving back in 1986 when the film likely seemed rather fresh and new, but the idea that while Jim is in the shower Ryder can not only deduce what hotel room they are in, he can surreptitiously break in, steal poor Nash away and chain her up to a big rig in that trailer park without anyone noticing is just crazy, wall-breaking stuff. Can’t help but pull you out of the movie in disbelief. Back in 1986, it was probably so much easier to get seduced by it, to go along with it.

But I can understand the film’s cult status. You can forgive a film a lot when you are in love with it, as so many fans of it are. I’ve read that the boutique label Second Sight have been working on a 4K release for a considerable time now (decent film elements seem to have been an issue) and there’s been great excitement about that. Well, I doubt I’m keen enough about the film to ever be interested in a 4K release, but its surely a good thing that any new release of The Hitcher will allow Hauer’s great performance to get the attention it deserves, and bring new audiences to it. I doubt many will have waited as long I, though.

American Underdog: Ain’t life great?

American Underdog (2021), Dir. Andrew Ervin & Jon Erwin, 112 mins, Netflix

Aha, this is more like it- a genuinely inspirational, life-affirming movie with a truly emphatic hero. This is the remarkable true story of NFL MVP and Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner, who went from stocking shelves at a supermarket to becoming an American Football star. Played by a beefed-up Zachary Levi (a physical transformation from his Chuck days maybe a result of that Shazam! movie?) its one of those only-in-America, American Dream stories about someone who through hard work and dedication against the odds somehow manages to triumph. Indeed, its so improbable that if it weren’t true (and they cut to real-life footage towards the end as if to say, ‘no, really, this REALLY happened!’) you’d probably bail out halfway through the movie in disbelief.

Its such a powerful story, the film cannot fail: indeed I think its one of the very best feel-good films I have ever seen and its a fine sports film too- its really impressive how they stage the on-field NFL scenes. I’m sure there’s all sorts of effects/CGI trickery going on but its very convincing. Nice to see CGI done well that doesn’t draw attention to itself, leaving the attention instead to the story and the emotional moment.

So yeah, I really enjoyed this, a great palette-cleanser after some of the darker films I have been watching lately. It is unabashedly old-fashioned (one could almost imagine this as a 1950s/1960s movie) and possibly struggles to shake the TV-movie matinee feeling that, I’m sure, will give this film long legs for Sunday afternoon TV showings for years to come. But that’s really damning it with faint praise, because for a feel-good movie, there’s few better examples out there. It just is what it is. Oh, and its great to Dennis Quaid and Adam Baldwin (yay! Another Chuck regular!) again.

Nyad: cold and wet, not warm and fuzzy

Nyad (2023), Dir. Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, 121 mins, Netflix

Well, my first attempt to break from the Peeping Tom/Killers of the Flower Moon/I, the Executioner run of frankly disturbing/depressing examinations of the very worst of the human spirit, with a life-affirming real-life drama to inspire and warm the cockles of me poor old heart.  The story of how 64-year-old Diana Nyad managed her life goal of swimming the 110-mile ocean crossing between Havana, Cuba to Key West, Florida is frankly  beyond remarkable, its one of those stories that has to be real or you just wouldn’t believe it.  Its a triumph of the human spirit, a dare-the-impossible tale. Its the kind of rousing tale that should leave you warm and fuzzy and thinking anything is possible if you just try hard enough. Its the American Dream in a nutshell.

Yeah, that same American Dream that was trampled all over in Killers of the Flower Moon a few nights back. Over to you, Nyad.

But Nyad has a problem, and the problem is Nyad. Diana Nyad is just so plain bloody annoying, one of those incredibly single-minded, relentlessly driven characters spouting endless self-promotion with egos so invulnerable, who are just so irritating to be anywhere near that I’d want to run, not walk, to the nearest exit. Maybe it is just me, but I couldn’t root for her at all. All I was doing was just sympathising for the poor buggers who were caught up in her dream and had to make endless sacrifices to facilitate it. Those poor buggers caught up in the wake of her ambition, who had to form a loyal safety team to accompany her on her dangerous attempts to succeed. They were the real heroes to me, not Nyad.

I suppose I should congratulate the film on just being so honest that it shows Diana Nyad in such a bad light, there must have been so many temptations to just soften the edges, make her more warm and fuzzy and adorable, you know?  Well, I say bad light, I’m sure some viewers just thought her wonderful throughout, as I say, it may be just me who found her just so bloody unbearable. In any case, hats off to Annette Benning for a fantastic performance that immediately ditches any soft-focus trickery or make-up magic, she really lets the real-world horrors of salt-water and sunburn ravage her pretty looks and she always looks real, rather than an ageless film star (personally it is SO refreshing, I mean, imagine Nicole Kidman starring in this?).

I suppose the thing is, the whole enterprise felt as much an exercise in madness, that could have easily ended in tragedy, instead of what is intended to be an inspirational tale of triumph against the odds. I also found it a little weird how they treated Nyad’s history of suffering child abuse by a swimming coach early in her life, a traumatic episode that presumably was the source of the fire that made her so driven in everything she did in her life. I assume that’s why they referred to it in flashbacks that drop every so often during the film, but it did seem a little off to me. Was this some mechanism by which they thought they could engender audience sympathy and empathy from the audience for this infuriatingly annoying woman?

Oh well. An impressive story,  Not so sure its the life-affirming happy pill I was hoping for though.

I, the Executioner: do bad girls deserve THIS?

I, the Executioner (1968), Dir. Tai Kato, 91 mins, Blu-ray

I sense that as far as this blog goes, 2024 may prove to be a Radiance-dominated year, as other boutique labels divert to films which don’t particularly appeal to me – such as Indicator becoming so obsessed by Jean Rollin films or Mexican horrors (well, I had a good run of Hammer and Film Noir boxsets so can’t complain).

Anyway, here we are, another week, another Radiance release- this time Tai Kato’s neo-noir serial killer film I, the Executioner. As its title likely suggests, this is not a film for the mild-mannered or easily offended, and it is most definitely misogynistic. They certainly don’t make them like this anymore, but thank goodness boutique labels can release them on Blu-Ray…

A woman is stripped and beaten until she writes onto a notepad the names and locations of four other women, whereupon she is then raped, viciously stabbed and finally bludgeoned to death.  So begins a series of murders that upon Police investigation seem to be linked to the suicide of a young man  who jumped off the roof of the same building where the first murder occurred.

Considering how genuinely nasty the subject matter of this film is, it is quite beautifully filmed (in stark black and white, intensifying its highly-stylised, noir feel). There is something quite unnerving about the unusual composition in the framing of most shots -very often the camera is positioned at extremely low angles, looking upwards or from an obstructed viewpoint. Apparently, this was a preference of Kato in his films, here giving I, the Executioner a somewhat experimental look that imbues it with a docu-drama feel that is at odds with the fantastic, exploitive (sexploitive?) subject matter of the narrative. Kato also has a tendency to put the camera right into the action with very extreme close-ups, powerfully heightening the intensity of certain moments.

But its much more than an exploitation b-movie; well, of course it IS an exploitation movie but its more sophisticated than that, preferring to tone down, as it progresses, the graphic violence seen in the beginning of the film in favour of using its narrative to consider then-pressing  topics of sexuality, promiscuousness, pornography and a moral decline of urban Japan. It even manages to subvert something like a gangrape (usually a crime perpetuated by males) into one shockingly actioned by women at a hen-party driven into a frenzy from watching pornography. Evidently the hedonistic liberalism of the swinging sixties was a rather troubling subject in Japan at the close of that decade, some of the resulting changes deemed alarming for society and reflected in films such as this. In this respect, it presumably predates Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, a film notorious for its sexual violence and rather more well-known than this film was.

Watching a film set in Japan often feels like watching some science fiction set on another planet, I suppose this is accentuated when its something made decades ago (I wonder if contemporary Japanese viewers would watch this film with the same nostalgic curiosity that I do when watching, say, a film like Saturday Night, Sunday Morning?).  This film is evidently influenced by Western culture, particularly 1940s/1950s American film noir, albeit this film tackles its subject more graphically than any of those American noir could- so its this weird hybrid, I guess. But in any case, Japanese culture is so very different to Western culture, its endlessly fascinating  exploring it in something like this.

This film is not an easy watch and it feels a little strange to declare it entertaining, given its subject matter, but I thought it was excellent and I’m sure I’ll watch it again several times.  The craft behind it is clearly evident and its much more than just a sleazy b-picture. My only criticism of this Radiance release (incredibly, the Obi-strip assures me it is the first release of this film on Blu-ray anywhere in the world) is that I wish the film had a commentary track. I think a film as bold and odd as this proves to be deserves, even needs, one. I guess Radiance didn’t deem it worthy of the effort/expense, more’s the pity.

How odd though, how these things work out, watching this film so soon after Peeping Tom, and both films sharing the same serial-killer, sexual undertones etc of Hitchcock’s Psycho. I need to turn towards more life-affirming stuff, pronto…