Rebel Moon Part Two: Not terrible. Its worse.

Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver (2024), Dir. Zack Snyder, 122 mins, Netflix

This was so bad. The bar was set pretty low after suffering through Rebel Moon Part One, but all the same, it still managed to disappoint.  The scary thing is, I really don’t think Zack Snyder can see it. He’s so out of touch with film-making reality, lost in his Snyder-verse of what makes a decent film, that he just cannot see it. There’s something genuinely tragic about that. This is a guy with considerable visual talent, but my goodness his flaws are like a gaping maw, swallowing his career up.

I liked his Dawn of the Dead remake more than I expected, and 300 was a pretty decent stab at converting a Frank Miller graphic novel to film, and I will always defend his Watchmen (even if Alan Moore won’t)  as one of those unfilmable projects that somehow worked out. But after that, its been a long slow slope of style over substance finally crashing into the rank cesspool that is the Rebel Moon project. It’s not like we couldn’t see its coming- Sucker Punch, Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League… they were all films with isolated moments of visual brilliance, moments of Pure Cinema, increasingly dragged down by abysmal plotting, cardboard characterisation and risible dialogue, steadily becoming more and more banal almost to the point of sheer lunacy. There is something increasingly juvenile, perhaps bordering on infantile, in how narrative functions in these films which curiously corresponds with his vociferous fanbase of teen nerds who refuse to grow up.

Nobody can really match him for his visual flair in transferring the energy of comicbook panels to the silver screen, so vividly managed in 300 that it has shaped -and limited- his career ever since. His slo-mo is the equivalent of Tarantino’s penchant for littering his own films with bad language, its become shorthand for his directorial method (but at least Tarantino can write, for all his own faults, his films at least make sense). But comics are dumb, (largely) made for kids- or at least kids who would later grow up and start reading proper books. There is a reason why, back in the 1970s, there was huge disbelief and media attention when the Salkind’s bet a fortune on making a big-budget, serious motion picture based on that old Superman comicbook. Comics were for kids, films were for adults. At least, that’s how it used to be. Has it gone full circle now, are the comics for the adults and the films for the kids?

Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver is so stupid, so badly written, that even the world’s finest actors couldn’t save its dialogue or plot- and this film’s actors are NOT the world’s finest actors. They are clearly not helped by Snyder’s direction, either, which I suspect primarily involved stand here, pose like this and frown, and repeat, etc. Even the action is boring and badly staged, and that’s usually Snyder’s prime selling point- here the endlessly repetitive slo-mo doesn’t intensify anything, instead it constantly veers into parody.  This film could be given a laugh track and it would probably work as some sit-com piss-take of Star Wars. I was watching it appalled at just how lazily it telegraphs everything, how badly it is paced and edited and how it is riddled with plot holes like the craters on the moon.

Basically, its a lesson in how not to make a movie, but more importantly, maybe its the film that wakes up Netflix and other streamers to how Hollywood creatives are taking them for a ride. Quality should mean something, it shouldn’t just be content for content’s sake, and the creatives should be taken to task for taking the piss like this. If this film crashed and burned at the box-office with huge noise and attention, instead of just disappearing on a streamer, it would likely derail Snyder’s career. Instead I guess he’ll just carry on as usual, and we’ll get more of the same.

Napoleon: Bland and bonkers

Napoleon (2023), Dir. Ridley Scott,  158 mins, Apple TV

Its inevitable that one compares Napoleon to Ridley Scott’s first film, The Duellists from 1977, because it shares the same period setting. It’s fascinating, really- The Duellists is a beautiful film that feels like an artefact of some other era,  a grim, subdued arthouse film with a gorgeous, hypnotic score by Howard Blake soaring over one of the moodiest, most beautiful closing shots in cinema history. Napoleon, meanwhile, is utterly bonkers.

The Duellists is like some delicate painting executed in minute detail with absolute care using the smallest of brushes, while Napoleon is slapped on its canvas with big sweeping brush strokes in wild abandon. I’m not suggesting the latter is the wrong approach but it does seem symptomatic of Scott’s output of late, cranking out films as if in a race against time. His speed shooting films no matter their complexity or scale is amazing, the very definition of efficiency on-set, it would seem. Doesn’t necessarily translate into accomplished films, though. Its curious to me that the characters in Napoleon feel very modern, whereas in The Duellists the characters all seem of their age, of the Napoleonic period, a little strange, a little alien.

I watched Napoleon once and I’m pretty fine with that, but I occasionally return to The Duellists and I’m always bewitched by its strangeness, there’s something just so interesting about it, its pace, lighting, how it sounds. I wouldn’t suggest it was any more historically accurate- some of the casting is frankly bizarre. But there’s something about The Duellists which calls me back for more viewings, and it remains one of my favourite Ridley Scott films.

Napoleon seems rather disposable in comparison. Maybe a directors cut would improve it- Scott did talk at length about a longer cut which was expected to surface on Apple TV eventually, but that’s all gone quiet of late. Its perhaps foolish to imagine a directors cut would ‘fix’ the film in the way that his Kingdom of Heaven was improved by its own directors cut, but you never know…

nobody needed CGI back in 1977….

True Lies 4K: The ugly truth

James Cameron’s True Lies finally comes to home video in a 4K presentation- but that may not be the truth, it may be a lie. Depends on what 4K means, really… true lies indeed.

There doesn’t seem to be much love out there for True Lies these days (and will probably be even less after this release). The film seems to be widely considered something of a misfire for Schwarzenegger  and Cameron, although I always enjoyed it. I remember watching it back in 1994 knowing nothing about it, and instead of it being the straight action flick that I expected, it turned out to be something of a hoot. To be fair, nuclear-wielding terrorists seem to be an odd subject for a comedy but that’s essentially the b-plot, the main story being one of a spy’s marital strife when his lies catch up with him. The film isn’t perfect- Schwarzenegger seems rather out of his depth (imagine Bill Paxton playing that part instead!) and Cameron’s heart doesn’t really seem to be in it (it was a project brought to him by Schwarzenegger rather than something he instigated himself), but there’s an awful lot of good in the film- especially Jamie Lee Curtis who steals the show from everyone.

But this is another of those Cameron films – like The Abyss, in particular- that has a troubled history on home video beyond the DVD era, in that it hasn’t had one. This is a film that was never released on Blu-ray and looked increasingly unlikely of ever getting a 4K release. Even now, the lack of enthusiasm for the film from the Studio and Cameron seems to have resulted in a lacklustre/disastrous transfer, subjected to all sorts of nefarious A.I. shenanigans by Park Road Post, a New Zealand-based outfit using HAL 9000 by the look of it. The same A.I. tinkering has been inflicted upon Aliens and The Abyss, but for some reason True Lies has fared the worst.

What I suspect -and I may be wide of the mark, its only a suspicion- is that for all the talk of a new 4K scan of the original negative, I think this 4K master is based on a 2K scan done years ago when a Blu-ray release was mooted (and presumably stalled by Cameron, as was The Abyss). My suspicions are based on the fact that The Abyss looks so much better than this, and does seem to have had a new recent 4K scan – if that were also true of True Lies, it would seem reasonable to presume that the result would look very similar if not even better (much of The Abyss being pretty dark, True Lies shot often in bright sunlight). Instead, True Lies looks suspiciously like Park Road Post has up-rezzed a 2K scan to 4K, adding artificial detail and digital artefacts like edges,  and scrubbing out most of any film grain. If they DIDN’T, then something went wrong somewhere. Sometimes the film looks fine, even frustratingly good, while at others it looks almost as ugly as a DVD would.

The Abyss on 4K, while clearly looking processed, nonetheless looks very good indeed – but there’s something wrong with True Lies. Its not an unwatchable disaster by any means but if this thing has indeed had a new 4K scan then there’s something very wrong with that camera negative. I often thought while watching the film that maybe some of the shots had focus problems (happens more often in films than you’d think) and that the A.I. algorithms that Park Road Post are using just couldn’t fathom out how to fix it.  There’s an early shot when the credits are onscreen -text being an optical addition that can cause degradation anyway in the pre-digital days- when a driver pulls up to the security gate and his face looks so out of focus his features drop into smeary DVD territory, its pretty amazing and not something I think I’ve seen on a 4K disc before.  What I would like to know is, why would Cameron put up with that, why would he find that acceptable when he’s been delaying HD releases of these films for years.

I guess we’ll never know. The irony is that some effort has clearly been made for this release- there is a great new 43-minute featurette looking back on True Lies with many of the participants who are still around (its an older film than we’d like to admit when looking in the mirror),  chipping in with interesting observations and anecdotes. There’s many new releases and studio catalogue titles that don’t get features like this anymore, and I really enjoyed it. Its not exactly worth the price of the 4K disc but is a certain consolation.

At least I can watch True Lies though- my old DVD was from the R1-import days, I hadn’t seen the film in maybe fifteen to twenty years, possibly longer, so I had a great time with the film itself. Its been great being able to watch this and The Abyss again; films just aren’t the same as they used to be, these days, albeit I appreciate pink-tinted glasses of nostalgia may have a hand here.

Does anyone think we’ve missed the point of this release? That its some kind of grindhouse edition, approximating the look of my old fleapit ABC cinema in town during the 1980s? Don’t know why Cameron would aim for that, but… strange world.

The Abyss 4K: or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the 4K

I received my 4K copy of The Abyss a few weeks back. With all the noise regards James Cameron enlisting AI to produce the new 4K masters for his films Aliens, The Abyss and True Lies, I was rather  trepidatious watching it; after all, this was one of my favourite films, certainly my favourite James Cameron film, and having waited so many years for a release of this film on home video…

A little history might help here, because for some of us this is a very special title. The Abyss was released back in 1989, and got home video releases as one might expect, originally on VHS and laserdisc (the former in 4.3 pan and scan, and later in widescreen) and then on non-anamorphic DVD, in early 2000. At the time, the DVD was  pretty much cutting-edge, with the two versions of the film (theatrical and Special Edition) via seamless branching and a massive amount of extras on a second disc. But times move on, and left that DVD far behind, with changing screen technology (we were mostly all watching CRTs back then) and advancing disc formats (Blu-ray and later even that being superseded by 4K), and during all that time, for The Abyss…nothing, nada. My multi-region DVD player with its transformer the size of a brick was consigned to the garage, and I only ever played that 2000 DVD on a cheap player very rarely, if ever, as it looked increasingly horrible as my screens improved- I can only imagine the horror of trying to watch it on a 55″ OLED.

So anyway, I watched the film on this shiny new 4K disc that we aren’t allowed to buy in the UK (that’s another story…) and was immediately relieved to see that The Abyss looks pretty good for a 1989 movie. Actually, it looks maybe TOO good for a 1989 picture- there’s a slightly ‘uncanny valley’ look to the film, like its a modern film shot on digital. Its lost some of the rough, grainy look that the film used to have (albeit a lot of that is likely my recollections of it on VHS). Its a little strange at first but I soon got accustomed to it. Detail and definition is very high- in some respects, this is possibly the best the film has ever looked (but then again, I can well recall the horrible colour-blooming of the reds in the Montana sequence at the beginning of the film and the murky blues of the sub exteriors in the VHS days, so my perspective may differ from many). I thought that on the whole the film looks pretty great on the 4K disc. There’s been some marked colour-timing changes, moving away from the deep blues that dominated the film before… its more of a steely-blue tone veering towards teal but not dominated by it. I know some people are less enthused by the films treatment than I, but I think its pretty strong indeed and am very pleased with it I still have a pinch-me moment when I see the film on my shelf- I mean, this is The Abyss, after all these years.

And the film still holds up. Its always been one of my favourite films, since I saw it in 1989. Its not perfect, but I just like the premise (if you’re going to borrow, borrow from the best- in this case The Day the Earth Stood Still and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and how brilliantly its been executed (the underwater sets and filming is just extraordinary, especially today when films so often shoot dry for wet). I thoroughly enjoyed watching the film again, indeed so carried along with it that I stopped being distracted by how it looked just so different to how I remembered, and just enjoyed the film.  The acting (the film has a fantastic three leads) is a joy, the music is fine, the art direction brilliant. The miniature effects work looks as amazing as ever, hardly aged at all (maybe better than some of that CGI in Titanic even?).

Still cringe at some of that dialogue though (never Cameron’s strong point).

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?

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…

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.

Killers of the Flower Moon: the banality of Evil

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), Dir. Martin Scorsese, 206 mins, Apple TV 4K UHD

I hate true stories such as this. I find them so depressing. I’m not suggesting they shouldn’t be told- this story of corruption, betrayal and greed, the hypocrisy and lie that is the heart of the American Dream, absolutely needs to be told, but all the same, sometimes they can be too much for me, to be honest. Maybe I’m getting too sensitive in middle age. In youth you rage at ‘the machine’ but in later years you grow weary of the inevitability of it.  Bad enough some of the stuff we see on the news every day of late, without being reminded of the stupidity and calculated depravity of the human soul when watching a film.  Is there a cumulative effect on mental health with all of this, I wonder? This is such a powerful film, but with everything else going on, maybe its too much.

Just after the end of World War One, oil is discovered under Osage Nation land in  Oklahoma, starting that ugliest of Twentieth Century sights; an Oil Boom. The Native American Osage are suddenly among the richest people in the world,  attracting the attention, jealously and ire of oil workers, criminals, con-artists, capitalists and businessmen.  War veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leo DiCaprio) returns home to join his brother Byron and his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro). Hale is wealthy and well-respected community leader of the town, and a trusted friend of the Osage. However its all part of a calculated scheme to strip the Osage of their wealth for himself, literally the unsuspected Enemy Within. Hale advises his rather dim nephew Burkhart to woo and marry Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a beautiful but sickly native woman whose family is immensely rich. Burkhart becomes entwined in Hales’ devious scheme to kill Mollie’s siblings and their heirs, so that Mollie inherits all the family wealth and upon Mollie’s death, Burkhart, and ultimately his Uncle. So follows a grisly tale of betrayal and murder involving criminals, murderers, corrupt cops and doctors that thoroughly undermines any trust in the integrity of the human spirit. The spoken line “Can you find the wolves in this picture?”  is perhaps the central text of this entire film.

But dear God its depressing. I think Killers of the Flower Moon is possibly Scorsese’s best film since The Departed (way back in 2006, wow time flies). Its a strong and deeply effecting film. I’ll confess I found the running time (close to three and a half hours) rather intimidating, if only the matter of finding the time to actually sit down and watch it in one sitting, but once you’ve started the film, you know you’re in the hands of a master film-maker and it grips your attention throughout, never letting go . Its clearly a testament to the excellent pacing that the film never feels that long or starts to drag. I think that’s a testament to not only Scorsese’s direction but the script by Eric Roth (and Scorsese) and the editing by regular collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker. Its a masterclass of film-making technique.

The performances are all excellent. I gave up on De Niro years ago, he phones-in so many half-hearted, clearly-for-the-money performances in those detestable comedies he does, but on rare occasions (usually when reunited with Scorsese, funnily enough) he reminds me of why he was so exciting years ago.  Lily Gladstone is no doubt  a sure-win for the Best Actress award, she’s pretty amazing as Mollie- and on that Academy subject, I think its rather alarming that DiCaprio hasn’t got a nomination for his work here. I think its a much trickier role than some might think- there’s a certain complexity in the writing to get away with such, well, banality of Evil. Burkhart is so dim-witted, every time someone suggests something to him, you can see it go in, drift around in there and then he just immediately accepts it as gospel, so to speak. On the one hand, its rather infuriating seeing him get played so easily, but at the same time its realistic, assuming how uneducated many people were back then (and are now, sadly) He’s the dumbest sonofabitch you’ll ever see. The fact he genuinely loves Mollie but is willing to slowly murder her and betray her, and even their children, just beggars belief, frankly, so its a comment on his performance and that writing that we do believe it.

The score, by the late Robbie Robertson, sounded so much like Ry Cooder I was almost convinced it was Cooder- it fits the film like a glove albeit its use and placement is rather sparse.  Indeed, the art direction, costume design, cinematography, is all first-rate. I find little at all to find fault with regards this film.

So this is a genuinely great film, so much more satisfying than Oppenheimer, for instance, a similarly long and ‘important’ picture: I suppose its commendable that we still get films like this, rare as they are. Curiously Oppenheimer seems to have  caught the cultural zeitgeist rather more than Scorsese’s film so while I think Killers of the Flower Moon is superior, it seems that its Nolan’s film that is destined to with the Oscar for Best Picture this year.  Its unfortunately telling of how the film industry is going though, that this has, following a cinema engagement, gone straight to Apple TV, missing a disc release completely, whereas Oppenheimer seems to have sold very high numbers on home video formats (again, an indication of how popular that film seems to be with the public). Hopefully someone will get a stab at a 4K disc release of Killers of the Flower Moon in a year or so with the substantive extras/analysis that the film deserves.

Peeping Tom: Through a camera lens, darkly…

Peeping Tom (1960), Dir. Michael Powell, 101 mins, 4K UHD

These days, whenever you see groups of people, especially at events like concerts or meetings, you are liable to see several people holding their phones up in the air, recording what is going on. I am endlessly bemused seeing people apparently unable to experience an event without doing so through the lens of their phone, as if their own eyes are not enough, or their own memory untrustworthy. Indeed, it seems that someone coming upon a crime or accident taking place is more likely to take out their phone and film it, rather than actively attempt to stop and help. Has the combination of lifetimes watching films and handy technology resulted in a world of voyeurs, recording and disseminating  experience rather than actually getting involved? Life has become a movie, sometimes to be shared online, edited to two-minute clips, as if something only happened if it had a camera witness.  We are incidental actors in real-life films we never see, subjects of CCTV lens we seldom even notice.

I’m certain that Michael Powell could never have imagined, in his wildest of nightmares, the world in which we live today. It is a world that eminently deserves a film like Peeping Tom.

Mark Lewis (Carl Böhm), works as a focus puller in a British film studio that makes light, mainstream comedies. He uses his technical expertise with cameras and photography for an illicit side-line job shooting pornographic stills of women, sold under the counter of a corner newspaper shop. Mark is an awkward character around people, something of a social outsider, lonely and repressed, watching from the Outside, looking in- he spies on his downstairs lodger through her front window, watches couples kissing,  He is also a serial killer, using his camera to film his victims (all women) just as they die- Mark is fascinated by fear, particularly that of those about to die and their faces in their final moments. To intensify their fear, he attaches a mirror to his camera so that as he kills the women they see their own faces as they die, witnessing their own death, Mark replaying the footage over and over in his loft-space studio, as if trying to discern some meaning in their contorted terror in dying . 

This, in a British studio film released in 1960?

Its an astonishing, deeply disturbing piece of cinema. Having only seen the film once, I cannot possibly suggest that I have got even the slightest grip on what this film fully means, or what its rich visual palette (every shot is some grisly work of art) subconsciously represents in each carefully composed frame. It is clear that this is a film that prefigures all the serial killer/slasher films that would follow (released a few months prior to Hitchcock’s Psycho, even),  a film that ridicules much of the mainstream studio establishment of the time, a film fascinated by the act of watching, of the male gaze, of the power of the image.  I have the feeling that I have only dipped my toes in this film’s pool of meaning. Its just too deep to take in one one viewing.

Director Michael Powell could have had no idea just how prescient his film Peeping Tom would become, decades later. Terribly reviled and vilified by critics at the time – so much so it largely ended Powell’s career- the film was pulled from release within its first week, as if in apology for the temerity of its horrors,  and only reappraised and lauded decades later. Maybe this film is increasingly coming of age in a world that has not just slowly caught up with it, but lately now perhaps living beyond it, a fresh deepening horror on our side of the screen. Powell could never have imagined the Internet, its instant access of millions, perhaps billions, of different screens, the subjects of countless cameras, staring darkly on porn, tragedy, war, atrocity. Mark would be fascinated by all of it, searching for the meaning in the fear in all of it.