Operation 101010: post-match analysis

Last night, at 11.02pm, I blogged the last of the Operation 101010 reviews, concluding the project on 10.10.10. The mission was accomplished; the gimmicky end date achieved. For the record, the individual categories and complete list of titles is as follows:

Clint Eastwood movies
1. Coogan’s Bluff
2. The Beguiled
3. Play Misty for Me
4. High Plains Drifter
5. The Eiger Sanction
6. Escape from Alcatraz
7. Heartbreak Ridge
8. Dirty Harry
9. The Enforcer
10. The Outlaw Josey Wales

Werner Herzog movies
1. Little Dieter Needs to Fly
2. Wings of Hope
3. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans
4. The Wild Blue Yonder
5. The White Diamond
6. Even Dwarfs Started Small
7. Heart of Glass
8. Stroszek
9. The Flying Doctors of South Africa
10. Rescue Dawn

Anime
1. My Neighbour Totoro
2. Sky Blue
3. Ponyo
4. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
5. Appleseed Ex Machina
6. Grave of the Fireflies
7. The Place Promised in Our Early Days
8. Millennium Actress
9. Resident Evil: Degeneration
10. Kiki’s Delivery Service

Gialli
1. All the Colours of the Dark
2. Blood Stained Shadow
3. The Black Belly of the Tarantula
4. Baba Yaga
5. Forbidden Photos of a Woman Above Suspicion
6. Short Night of Glass Dolls
7. Opera
8. The Stendahl Syndrome
9. Four Flies on Grey Velvet
10. Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes

Documentaries
1. The Aristocrats
2. An Inconvenient Truth
3. Anvil: The Story of Anvil
4. Iron Maiden: Flight 666
5. Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer
6. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
7. Religulous
8. My Kid Could Paint That
9. Fuck
10. The Cove

Eurovisions
1. Amarcord (Italy)
2. Winter Light (Sweden)
3. All About My Mother (Spain)
4. Amelie (France)
5. Funny Games (Austria)
6. A Serbian Film (Serbia)
7. The Double Life of Veronique (Poland)
8. Dead Snow (Norway)
9. North Face (Germany)
10. Cold Fever (Iceland)

Comedies
1. Intolerable Cruelty
2. Kissing Jessica Stein
3. In the Loop
4. Kick-Ass
5. Zombieland
6. South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut
7. Monty Python’s Life of Brian
8. Superbad
9. It Happened One Night
10. Some Like it Hot

Biopics
1. Sylvia
2. Monster
3. The Aviator
4. The Edge of Love
5. Ludwig
6. Wilde
7. The Doors
8. Immortal Beloved
9. The Gambler
10. Ed Wood

Impulse buys
1. Rise: Blood Hunter
2. Stoned
3. The Oxford Murders
4. Priceless
5. S. Darko
6. Frost/Nixon
7. Show Me Love (a.k.a. Fucking Amal)
8. Together
9. Lilja 4-Ever
10. A Hole in My Heart

Films with numbers in the title
1. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
2. 49th Parallel
3. Million Dollar Baby
4. The 39 Steps
5. Eight Legged Freaks
6. 30 Days of Night
7. 800 Bullets
8. The Ninth Configuration
9. 10 Things I Hate About You
10. Seven

Out of 100 films, 47 were movies I watched for the first time prior to reviewing. Of these, 11 were absolute gems: ‘The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans’, ‘Ponyo’, ‘Millennium Actress’, ‘Short Night of Glass Dolls’, ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’, ‘North Face’, ‘In the Loop’, ‘Kick-Ass’, ‘Frost/Nixon’, ‘Show Me Love’, ‘Together’ and ‘800 Bullets’.

‘The Aristocrats’ and ‘Fuck’ were magnificently sweary. Whilst not exactly fun to watch, ‘Grave of the Fireflies’, the two Aileen Wuornos documentaries, ‘A Serbian Film’, ‘Lilja 4-Ever’ and ‘A Hole in My Heart’ made for provocative and rewarding viewing.

In particular, the Lukas Moodysson films were a real discovery.

Of the 53 movies I had seen before, it kind of goes without saying that they were all worthwhile enough to revisit and write about. ‘Little Dieter Needs to Fly’, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, ‘Amarcord’, ‘Amelie’, ‘Some Like it Hot’ and ‘Ed Wood’ were all immediate choices from the Personal Faves list.

On the whole, Operation 101010 has provided me with 10 months of generally satisfying movie-watching. There were ten films I was ambivalent about or indifferent to: ‘Coogan’s Bluff’, ‘Sky Blue’, ‘Baba Yaga’ (which I’m prepared to forgive for its outright weirdness and the sight of Ely Galleani in bondage gear), ‘Religulous’, ‘Funny Games’, ‘Dead Snow’, ‘Stoned’, ‘The Oxford Murders’, ‘Priceless’ and ‘S. Darko’ (which, like ‘Baba Yaga’ is almost redeemed because of its general fucked-up-ness). And only three that I outright disliked: ‘Rise: Blood Hunter’, ‘The Edge of Love’ and ‘30 Days of Night’.

An acceptable result, then, but not a challenge I’m in a hurry to repeat. If anyone postulates Operation 111111 for next year (which would entail 121 films across 11 different genres or categories), I’ll be opting out.

In the meantime, I’m taking a couple of days off (I’m feeling all blogged out at the moment), during which I’ll make a point of catching up with, and commenting on, all the blogs I’ve neglected while I’ve been aiming for the Operation 101010 finish post. The Agitation of the Mind will then return to a more realistic and less cluttered schedule (seriously, the ‘Rescue Dawn’ review yesterday took me to a total of 23 posts in 10 days!) as I count down to Hallowe’en with a batch of horror movies.

Rescue Dawn

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 100 of 100

Okay, maybe this is a bit of a cheat – I’ve already reviewed ‘Rescue Dawn’ on The Agitation of the Mind; back in November 2007, during the blog’s first month of existence – but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed the right film to end the Operation 101010 project on.

The first title I reviewed for Operation 101010, on 20 January 2010, was Werner Herzog’s astounding documentary ‘Little Dieter Needs to Fly’. ‘Rescue Dawn’ is his feature film exposition of the same story. The same narrative perameters apply: German-American Dieter Dengler is driven to become a pilot. He enlists, trains and is sent to Vietnam. He is shot down over Laos, captured, endures inhumane conditions and eventually escapes.

My original piece on ‘Rescue Dawn’ was a mere 240 words, by far the shortest review I’ve posted on the blog. When I wrote it, I felt that Tim’s review on Antagony & Ecstasy said all that needed to be said; his article certainly reflected my feelings on the film. I concluded: “There’s much to admire … And yet … this is Herzog in the jungle. This should be ‘Aguirre’ with planes, ‘Fitzcarraldo’ goes ’Nam. What it is, ultimately, is a dichotomy. It’s simultaneously one of the best things I’ve seen in a multiplex this year and arguably the most ordinary thing in Herzog’s filmography.”

So now, rounding out a bizarre triple-bill that started with ‘Some Like it Hot’ and ‘Seven’, I find myself concluding today’s movie marathon with my first viewing of ‘Rescue Dawn’ since November 2007. And I still maintain that it’s an exceptionally well-made film, with a sterling performance from Christian Bale as Dengler (who starved himself to the kind of skeletal frame he exhibited in ‘The Machinist’) and an excellent supporting turn from Steve Zahn (as Duane, Dengler’s closest friend in captivity). To see Zahn – who usually does smug, wiseass, or smug wiseass – delve into a hitherto unexplored capacity as an actor is a revelatory. Jeremy Davies gives his usual wild-eyed, flapping hands, strangulated syntax Jeremy Davies performance, but I find him less annoying in ‘Rescue Dawn’ than most of his other films.

Peter Zeitlinger’s cinematography, while never quite reaching the mystic/poetic visuals of ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’ or ‘Fitzcarraldo’, is never less than evocative. Herzog’s script is focused and direct: ten minutes in, Dengler’s plane is down; less than twenty minutes in, he’s captured; by the half hour mark he’s at a PoW camp and starting to think about escaping. Herzog captures the banal, routines and unpredictable outbursts of violence from the guards that characterize life in the prison camp. He charts the physical depletion of the captives and their desperation in eating grubs and suffering dysentery. He has an ear for their camaraderie and banter, too, but without descending into cliché or jingoism.

(Parenthetically, the ending – which I did find hopelessly jingoistic first time round – I have since learned is depicted pretty much as it happened. So fair dues.)

The escape comes about two thirds of the way into the movie, two groups of prisoners striking out in different directions. The rest of the film follows Dengler and Duane as they trek arduously through the jungle, trying to evade Laotian troops while attracting the attention of the occasional US helicopter or search plane.

‘Rescue Dawn’ is, by turns, exciting, grueling, suspenseful and (finally) cathartic. From most contemporary directors, this would be top-of-their-game stuff – possibly a masterpiece. From Herzog, it’s curiously pedestrian, but it proves that (a) even cinema’s premier maverick can turn in a conventional, mainstream work and (b) Herzog should always be a freakin’ maverick.

Seven

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 99 of 100

When ‘Seven’ (and I’m not using that ‘Se7en’ spelling, by the way; it only works when you render it in capitals: ‘SE7EN’) was released in 1995, I saw it without reading a single review or having any comprehension of what it was about. It was a Sunday afternoon, I fancied going to the cinema, ‘Seven’ was on and Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman were in it. Good enough for me. I bought a ticket, took my seat and twiddled my fingers through a bunch of asinine adverts and trailers. The film started. The first scene had a sombre, lonely-looking Detective Somerset (Freeman) leaving his prissily neat apartment to go to work. Cut to a murder scene, Somerset asking a humane and well-meaning question only to meet with a contemptuous response from a colleague. Then he’s back in his apartment, throwing a flick knife at a dart board.

I start getting the impression that this isn’t exactly going to be a run-of-the-mill cop thriller.

Somerset, on his last week on the job prior to retirement, meets his new partner/replacement Detective Mills (Pitt). Their relationship gets off to a fractious start. A headfuck opening credits sequence razors across the screen.

Okay, I think to myself, what the fuck’s going on here?

I spend the next hour and a half alternately revisiting that thought and marvelling at how cleverly the film is being constructed. The literary allusions, crucial to the narrative and yet unforced. The darkly satirical tailoring of the seven deadly sins to a contemporary aesthetic. The murder of the lawyer: genius. Occasional bits of cerebral humour (Somerset pointing Mills in the direction of Dante and Chaucer; Mills sending a patrolman out to by Clarkes notes not the actual texts). Occasional bits of wry humour (Somerset good-naturedly berating the security staff at a library for playing cards all night instead of availing themselves of “all these books, a world of knowledge”). A couple of beautifully judged character scenes between Somerset, Mills and Mills’s fragile wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow). The deepening of Somerset’s character from slightly snobbish grouch to mentor. The deepening of Mills’s from verbose hothead to man of compromised ideals.

I slowly come to realise how tight Fincher’s control over his material is; how acute his directorial decisions. How starved of natural light every scene is. ‘Seven’: a film of almost continual rain. A film of trash-strewn alleyways, dour tenement blocks, shadowy corridors, dark rooms, glum offices. A film where the sky is barely glimpsed.

Until that last gut-churning half hour. During which I sit in my seat, decidedly uncomfortable as Mills and Somerset ride out into the desert, their prisoner taunting them with intimations of something. Uneasy at not having any inkling, this late in the game, of exactly where the filmmakers are going with this. Squirming as that van comes careening through the desert, kicking up clouds of dust. Agitated, fingers digging into the armrests, as the package is delivered.

I sit in my seat until the end credits have finished. ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’. Then I walk unsteadily out of the Showcase, emerge blinking into the light, and wander across the car park looking for my car. Feeling like the film had come out of nowhere and struck me repeatedly around the head with a concrete block. Feeling that I’d seen something that had crept into my subconscious and wouldn’t be leaving in a hurry. Something I was convinced was a masterpiece and equally convinced I’d reapproach only at significant intervals.

Fifteen years down the line, I watched it this afternoon. Only my fourth viewing. It had pretty much the same impact, but this time left me with a consideration I’d not entertained before: for all that Mills is rash, impulsive and volatile, it’s the calm, methodical and intellectual Somerset who’s the true foil to John Doe. The other side of the coin. The tick of a metronome as opposed to the voice of a higher power.

PERSONAL FAVES: Some Like it Hot

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: comedies / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 98 of 100

Perpetually penniless jazz musicians Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) find themselves out of work when a two-bit job playing at a speakeasy owner by Chicago mob boss Spatz Colombo (George Raft) goes south after a police raid. Spatz has an inkling that the nark who squealed to the coppers is “Toothpick” Charlie (George E. Stone) and arranges for him to be rubbed out in a St Valentine’s Day style hit. Which brings us to Joe and Jerry’s second piece of bad luck: being right at the scene when the shooting goes down.

Spatz has an aversion to witnesses who are still alive, so Joe and Jerry go on the lam. In disguise. A women’s orchestra is leaving town for a three-week gig in Miami. A quick make-over and Joe and Jerry become Josephine and Geraldine (only Jerry doesn’t like the name Geraldine so he re-reinvents himself as Daphne) and the scene is set for Billy Wilder’s funniest and most sparkling comedy.

On the train to Miami, sharing a sleeping car with several dozen women, Jerry/Daphne is in heaven, delightedly reminiscing about a recurring dream he had as a kid of being locked overnight in a bakery, the place filled with all kinds of goodies. Joe/Josephine curtly informs him there’ll be no such calorific intake here: “You’re a girl, remember.” Jerry/Daphne takes a disconsolate look at the ocean of female pulchritude before him and forlornly murmurs, “I’m a girl, I’m a girl, I wish I was dead.” No-one could do harassed like Jack Lemmon, and he’s at his comedic best here.

Not that Joe/Josephine leads by example, however. Chief among the panoply of pulchritude is ditzy blonde singer and ukulele player Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), who catches the eye of both of them. During a girlie heart-to-heart, Sugar tells Josephine that she’s joined the women’s orchestra after a string of bad relationships, all with tenor saxophonists who are impecunious, charming, inveterate liars and good for nothing but borrowing money off her that they never pay back. Since this is a pretty good description of Joe himself, he eagerly prompts Sugar for the particulars of her perfect man – millionaire, bespectacled, sensitive, gentle, own private yacht – and once the band are ensconced at their Miami hotel, he sets about passing himself off as a myopic, sensitive, gentle, yacht-owning millionaire. Problem is, apart from the specs and the blazer (both appropriated from the orchestra manager), he’s demonstrably lacking the other accoutrements.

Fortunately, yacht-owning millionaire Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown) – who is neither bespectacled nor sensitive – is also in town and takes a swift interest in Daphne. An interest that Joe/Josephine persuades him to play along with, the better to gain access to his yacht. Then the Friends of Italian Opera show up for their convention (that only one of them seems to know that ‘Rigoletto’ is an opera and not some wiseguy should tip you off that they aren’t actually a bunch of Verdi fans) and, as Jerry/Daphne puts it, “the omelette just hit the fan”.

‘Some Like it Hot’ starts off as a gangster movie – with a properly kick-ass car chase and shoot out – then becomes a romantic comedy of mistaken identities (so wittily structured and nuanced that it’s pretty much cinema’s answer to Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ but with colloquialisms and tommy guns), before wrapping things up back in gangster movie guise. Wilder’s genius is that he plays the gangster shenanigans more or less straight (there are plenty of funny moments during these scenes, but they’re done totally deadpan) and the romantic comedy a little broader. The effect is something like a Frank Capra feelgood movie bookended by ‘The Roaring Twenties’.

From the script to the direction to the performances, the film is flawless. Everyone’s ideally cast: Lemmon’s a hoot as the increasingly flustered bass player, Curtis goes from camp as Josephine to faux­ Cary Grant smooth as the phoney millionaire (the way he passes himself off as hier to the Shell Oil company is priceless), Marilyn Monroe – notwithstanding the Curtis likened playing their elegantly staged love scene as akin to “kissing Hitler” – is at her most likeable, George Raft does gangster like he means it (hanging out with some of America’s most notorious hoods probably helped) and Brown gets the best last line a comedy has ever been graced with.

‘Some Like it Hot’ isn’t just a classic of its kind. It’s perfection.



(i.m. Tony Curtis, 3 June 1925 – 29 September 2010)

Kiki's Delivery Service

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: anime / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 97 of 100

How often have you seen a poster – usually for a children’s film, usually animated – which trumpets the movie as “magical”? How often has the epithet really only applied because magic (such as the ability, say, to fly) is the theme of said film? It’s one of those lazy descriptions that makes the ad man’s job so cynically easy.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Hayao Miyazaki’s warm, lovable and wholly life affirming animated classic ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’, a film which not only proves itself that rarest of beasts – a work ostensibly for children (and, moreover, ostensibly for 13 year old girls) which genuinely is magical – but roots its sense of the magical firmly in the practicalities and responsibilities of everyday life.

Miyazaki’s work has always tended towards a strong feminist sensibility and here Kiki, a 13 year old witch-in-training who is obliged to spend a year away from home in the furtherance of her special powers, is cut from the same cloth as Sen in ‘Spirited Away’ and Satsuki in ‘My Neighbour Totoro’. All, for different reasons, find themselves far from home and move towards maturity through the necessity of a strong work ethic and the acceptance of their responsibility to others. The genius of Miyazaki is that none of this is forced down with sugar-coated insistence as would be the case in many a Hollywood production, but incorporated seamlessly into the narrative.

The other tenets of Miyazaki’s filmography are environmentalism and the love of flight. ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ just misses out on being the exemplar of Miyazaki’s ongoing themes and concerns by having very little in the way of an environmental subtext (claiming a scene involving a migratory group of wild geese as such would be pushing it a bit!); however, it rivals even ‘Porco Rosso’ in its big-hearted love of all things avionic.

Whereas the porcine hero of that derring-do action extravaganza pilots a seaplane, Kiki follows the time-honoured tradition of witches everywhere and reaches for the sky on a broomstick. It’s once she’s left home for her year away that she realizes she doesn’t really have a magical specialty beyond her (admittedly rather erratic) broomstick riding skills. After a misadventure that sees Kiki and her talking cat Gigi (the coolest and most laconic talking cat in cinema) stowing away on a goods train hobo-stylee, they arrive at a coastal town and try to fit in. The locals, though, are mainly sceptical.

Eventually, Kiki meets sympathetic bakery owner Osono who takes her in and gives her a job. Kiki, for whom self-deprecation is something of a tendency, considers the ability to fly the basic minimum for a witch-in-training and is kicking herself that she seems to have no other talents. Osono, however, recognizes that she has stumbled on an excellent and very motivated delivery girl. Kiki takes to the role with relish and quickly becomes self-sufficient.

That synopsis pretty much sums up the narrative developments of the first hour, and even though Miyazaki throws in a subplot about Kiki’s hesitant romance with teenage aviation fan Tombo which sets up a rescue mission involving a doomed dirigible for the edge-of-the-seat denouement, there’s not much in the way of plot. Instead, Miyazaki weaves a beautifully imagined series of vignettes detailing Kiki’s newfound friendship with an artist, her doubts and crises of confidence as she convinces herself she’ll always be an outsider, and her mixed feelings about Tombo (juxtaposed in witty fashion with Gigi’s feline romance with a neighbourhood cat), the latter exacerbated by an encroaching sense of homesickness.

With only the last reel plot development of Kiki’s sudden loss of powers providing any degree of conflict or drama (will she regain her capacity to fly in order to rescue Tombo when a freak accident afflicts the dirigible?), the film unfolds quite leisurely through its earlier stages. For the most part, the humour is light-hearted and good-natured (particularly an extended scene in which Gigi, doubling as a stuffed toy, is aided in his escape from a potential new owner by his supposed natural enemy, a dog) and Kiki’s adventures entertainingly episodic.

The final sequence goes for something deeper but without sacrificing the feelgood aesthetic that permeates the entire film. ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ is one of Studio Ghibli’s most purely enjoyable productions. It’s about growing up, gaining independence, and finding friendship and love. It’s about doubt, experience and determination. It’s as light as a soufflé and as deep as the human heart. It contains everything I love about Studio Ghibli.

Operation 101010: the final push

The objective: complete Operation 101010 on 10.10.10 (ie. tomorrow).

The obstacles: housework, new Peter F Hamilton novel, new Iain M Banks novel, pubs are open.

Mission status: 5 movies, 2 days, 1 blogger, several litres of coffee.

Fuck it, let's go ...

Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: gialli / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 95 of 100

Made two years after ‘Deep Red’, Lucio Fulci’s ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ – the last of a decade’s worth of great gialli including ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ and ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’ – has definite parallels with Dario Argento’s classic. Both centre on a protagonist who initially misinterprets a crucial detail glimpsed at the scene of a violent crime. Both follow the blundering amateur sleuthing of the protagonist only for them to realise, far too late in the game, the extent of their involvement in…

But that would be telling.

If you haven’t seen either of these films (and I hadn’t seen ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ until yesterday; kudos to the gentleman who made it available to me), make a point of doing so. They’re stone cold classics.

Before we go any further, a note on the title. In its original Italian, it’s ‘Sette Note in Nero’ (literally, ‘Seven Notes in Black’. It’s also been released as ‘Seven Black Notes’ and – most popularly – ‘The Psychic’. It was under this American release title that I watched the film and ordinarily that would be the title I’d have reviewed it under. But I’ll be damned if ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’, ticking two of the three traditional giallo boxes (animal, colour and number), isn’t one of the most awesome fucking titles in a genre renowned for awesome fucking titles. Also, ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ (and there’s no way in hell I’m opting for some ‘MttToSBN’ acronym for the rest of this review; I’m enjoying typing it way too much) yields up a darker meaning as the end credits roll and you’re left to ponder a supremely ambiguous closing shot.

But again, that would be telling.

The movie starts in England as a distraught woman drives to a clifftop, parks her car and walks to the edge. A credit tells us it’s 11.45am. The scene cuts to Florence, Italy, and a young girl who’s one of a party of schoolchildren on a trip suddenly stops dead, a look of horror on her face. A credit tells us it’s 11.45am. A series of shocking cuts (well, maybe not that shocking, since the body that smashes into the cliffs in loving close-up is plainly a mannequin) juxtapose the young woman’s suicide with the girl screaming “Mother!” (IMDb list these incredibly specific references to the time as a “goof”, citing the fact that “continental Europe is one hour ahead of the British Isles time zone in which the time in Florence should read 12.45”.)

I wonder if whoever wrote that even bothered to watch the film to the end. That was the first thing that nagged at me, because I was sure Fulci had done it for a reason. And even then I was completely taken aback when he pulled the rug from under me round about the halfway mark and everything that I had taken in one context – and which had fit together perfectly – suddenly took on a whole different meaning.

The opening scene is Fulci’s answer to Marc Daly’s slow, confused walk along the corridor to Helga Ullman’s apartment in ‘Deep Red’. It’s there if you know what you’re looking for, and it’s so brazenly stated on a second viewing, that the sheer chutzpah of it is magnificent. Note to IMDb: it’s not a goof. It’s quite deliberate. It’s layered with meaning.

Events then move forward eighteen years and that selfsame little girl – all grown up and very elegant with it – is revealed as American designer Virginia Ducci (Jennifer O’Neill), recently married to suave Italian businessman Francesco Ducci (Gianni Garko). Bidding hubby farewell as he jets off to the States to close a deal, Virginia installs herself at an old farmhouse that’s been in his family for years, intending to renovate the property. En route, she has a vision: a room decorated in hellish red; an ornate mirror, broken; a reproduction of a Vermeer with something written on it; a hollowed out section of a wall; an ornament tipped over to reveal something hidden beneath; a man’s face emerging from the shadows; a discarded magazine with an attractive model on the cover; a cigarette with distinctive yellow paper smouldering in an ashtray; someone with a limp slowly approaching; bricks and mortar, a cavity being walled off, a corpse hidden. A strange, almost childlike tune floats through her mind during the vision.

Virginia reaches the farmhouse, starts pulling dust covers off furnishings and recognises the mirror from her vision. She hammers away at a section of wall (psychic visions; childlike musical cues; protagonist alone in creepy house; walled up area containing corpse – all ‘Deep Red’ touchstones). Next thing, the authorities are involved and Francesco, returning from America, is taken into custody pending a satisfactory explanation as to the presence of a skeleton in a home that’s been in his family for generations. Then the lab boys confirm said skeleton as the final remains of a model with whom Francisco once had a relationship. All of a sudden things are looking bad for our boy. Virginia reluctantly joins forces with Francesco’s hoity-toity sister Ida (Evelyn Stewart) and tries to prove his innocence.

For the next forty minutes or so, Virginia sifts red herrings (hmmm, a certain someone smokes a certain brand of cigarettes), identifies clues, and – with the help of her therapist Dr Fattori (Marc Porel) and his Nancy Drew-like secretary Bruna (Jenny Tamburi) – establishes a watertight mass of evidence that prove Francesco couldn’t possibly be the killer. Just one problem: the only thing that correlates all of the evidence is a vision. Which, as Francesco’s lawyer helpfully points out, is pretty frickin’ useless in a court of law.

Then Dr Fattori picks up on a crucial but overlooked detail and the entire picture changes …

I’ve rammed home the ‘Deep Red’ connotations to such a degree that I may have misrepresented ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ as being derivative. Like IMDb’s misunderstood “goof” at the start, Fulci is actually using the audience’s assumptions very very cleverly. He evokes ‘Deep Red’ so well – right down to some Goblin-like motifs on the soundtrack – that it’s easy to take Virginia as a replacement/stand-in for Helga and assume that when she …

But that, once more, would be telling.

‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ is brilliantly conceived and executed, beautifully shot (it’s a damn shame that most people remember Fulci primarily for the gore and not how inspired a visual stylist he was) and ends on such a viciously unresolved and debate-in-it-the-pub-for-hours-afterwards note (and I use the word “note” very specifically) that it makes the last shot of ‘Inception’ look like an act of closure.

There are two moments that don’t quite add up (one along the lines of “but if X and Y are still at Location 1 it must mean that only a couple of minutes have passed so how come Z is already at Location 2 and spouting reams of expositional dialogue to certain secondary characters?”; the other involving the from-nowhere availability of building materials and an unfeasibly fast clean-up operation), and he overuses the technique of zooming into Virginia’s eyes every time she uncovers a clue that prompts a flashback to her vision of the crime to the point at which it’s become a cliché after just half an hour, but why carp? For one thing, Jennifer O’Neill has the kind of opalescent eyes that close-up was invented for; and for another, Fulci manipulates imagery, timelines and audience perception with such legerdemain that ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ proves a headfuck so satisfying that you’ll be sparking up a post-coital cigarette and hoping you can do it again soon.

The Flying Doctors of East Africa

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 9 of 10 / Overall: 94 of 100

Made in 1969, the year after his feature-length debut ‘Signs of Life’, the 45-minute documentary ‘The Flying Doctors of East Africa’ is – even by Herzog’s admission – an impersonal project:

“I was asked to make it by colleagues of the doctors themselves, and though I do like the final result, it is a film that is not particularly close to my heart. In fact I do not even call it a film, it is much more a Bericht, a report.” (Quoted in Herzog on Herzog, ed. Paul Cronin.)

Indeed – to be a little more blunt – it often feels like on of those clunky public information films you’d expect to see lampooned on ‘The Simpsons’ (“I’m Troy McClure, you might remember me from such films as …”). The film documents in po-faced style the work of the Flying Doctors service established in Tanzania by the English surgeon Michael Wood, staffed mainly by volunteers and maintained almost entirely by charitable contributions.

The vital importance of being able to ferry medical staff by air in two hours to remote villages it would take a day to get to by jeep is established quickly, and there’s no doubt that Wood and his team are heroes in the efforts they make and the painfully limited resources they have to cope with.

On the minus side, the interview footage is often stilted. It’s evident that even the otherwise entirely capable and confident Wood is ill at ease in front of the camera. The most wooden interviewee is a nurse who vocalises, word by hesitant word, the difficulty of communication with the natives (in the unreconstructed style of the times, she cringingly refers to them as “these people”).

The outcome of communication problems is, however, serious. A young boy, nil by mouth prior to major surgery, is secretly fed by his parents who mistakenly believe that they are fortifying him. Complications under anaesthetic result in his death. Herzog immediately identifies the key issue as cultural differences:

“The most interesting scenes stemmed from my interest in vision and perception. One of the doctors in the film talks about showing a poster of a fly to the villagers. They would say, ‘We don’t have that problem, our flies aren’t that large’, a response that really fascinated me. We decided to take some of the posters … to a coffee plantation to experiment. One was of a man, one of a huge human eye, another a hut, another a bowl and the fifth – which was hung upside down – of some people and animals. We asked people which poster was upside down and which was of an eye. Nearly half could not tell which was upside down and two-thirds did not recognise the eye … For the locals these five objects apparently just looked like abstract compositions of colours. It was clear there brains were processing images in a different way.” (Quoted in Herzog on Herzog.)

Was this the moment when Herzog’s own doors of perception stood open. “Processing images in a different way.” Is there any better mission statement, over forty years after he made this little seen and seemingly minor work, for what Herzog has tireless striven to achieve in his cinema?

The Gambler

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: biopics / In category: 9 of 10 / Overall: 93 of 100

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky – best known for ‘Notes From Underground’, ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ and ‘Shopaholic in St Petersburg’ (okay, I was lying about that last one) – was an epileptic, a gambler and a man prone to making rash decisions. One of these cold-light-of-day/oh-fuck-what-have-I-done moments came when, desperate for funds (he’d had a losing streak at the roulette tables), Dostoyevsky signed a contract with the publisher Stellovsky for a three-volume collected edition of his works to date. A sneakily inserted clause which committed him to producing a full-length new work, forfeiture of which would entitle Stellovsky to copyright on all of Dostoyevsky’s works without having to pay him a single rouble.

For all of his contractual chicanery, Stellovsky gave Dostoyevsky the not unreasonable deadline of more than 18 months to deliver this new manuscript. The erratic genius found himself busy working on ‘Crime and Punishment’, an undertaking that occupied far more time than anticipated. He was still only halfway through it when he realized that his deadline with Stellovsky was just four months away. He begged Stellovsky for an extension and even offered to buy himself out of the clause, but the publisher was having none of it.

Finally, with the deadline just a month away and realising he was so deep in the shit he was looking at it from underneath, Dostoyevsky engaged the services of a young stenographer named Anna Snitkina (who he later married) and dictated ‘The Gambler’ to her, completing the manuscript in less than four weeks. Denied such minor luxuries of the novelist’s art as actually having the time to think up a plot or invest in fleshing out an entirely invented cast of characters, Dostoyevsky drew from his ruinous personal experience of the casinos and wrote his most nakedly autobiographical work.

Which brings us to Karoly Makk’s 1997 film which – and how meta is this? – functions as both biopic and adaptation. Yeah: take that, Charlie Kaufman!

Michael Gambon plays Dostoyevsky and does so with the proper gravitas. The film opens as the deadline approaches and Stellovsky (Tom Jansen) is pushing for the new manuscript. Enter Anna (a wonderfully sympathetic Jodhi May) and work on the novel begins. Makk counterpoints the beginnings of Dostoyevsky and Anna’s relationship with dramatizations from the work in progress as compulsive gambler Alexei (Dominic West) arrives in Baden-Baden and his (very literally) win-some-lose-some lifestyle is contrasted with that of a grande dame (Luise Rainer), a fallen society woman, Polina (Polly Walker), with whom he is hopelessly smitten, and an aristocratic General (John Wood) whose financial woes mirror Alexei’s but whose social status guarantees that he is treated differently.

Dostoyevksy’s swiftly composed novel, for all that it delves into the addicted and self-destructive psyche of the gambler, is basically a melodrama and the relevant sections of Makk’s film reflect this. What surprises is that the melodrama is interspersed so effectively, and in such an unforced manner, with the biographical element. The cast is offbeat – Angeline Ball from ‘The Commitments’ playing a scene opposite Luise Rainer?!?!? – but somehow they gel.

An occasional lapse into contemporary affections – Alexei punching the air and hissing “Yesssss!” when he wins big is horribly anachronistic – annoys but on the whole ‘The Gambler’ is never less than intriguing and has much to recommend it.

Immortal Beloved

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: biopics / In category: 8 of 10 / Overall: 92 of 100

It’s said that Beethoven died during a storm. Accordingly, Bernard Rose’s ‘Immortal Beloved’ starts with a rumble of thunder. The maestro struggles to rise from his death bed; reaches his hand almost imploringly towards the camera; the immediately recognisable opening motif of the Fifth Symphony fills the soundtrack; he slumps back, dead.

Yes, it’s that kind of biopic.

Bernard Rose had established himself with the brilliantly creepy ‘Paperhouse’ and the superlative urban horror ‘Candyman’, two of the genre’s best examples from the latter half of the 80s. (We’ll gloss over ‘Chicago Joe and the Showgirl’, the oddity he directed in between them.) ‘Immortal Beloved’ seemed like a strange follow-up to ‘Candyman’. Rose’s subsequent film – a static adaptation of Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’, sunk by the absolute dearth of chemistry between stars Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean – suggested that he was trying to re-invent himself as a “respectable” filmmaker. Subsequent projects ‘Ivansxtc’ and ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ have remained in the Russian literary adaptations camp (drawing, respectively, from source material by Dostoyevsky and – again – Tolstoy).

Rose seems to have a genuine and responsive passion for high art, and there’s no doubt that he manages to communicate its continued relevance to contemporary times (‘Ivansxtc’ cannily updates ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ to Hollywood). With ‘Immortal Beloved’, he makes a profound and sometimes successful attempt to fuse the passionate intensity of Beethoven’s music with the emotional traumas of the composer’s life at the time the various pieces were composed. Thus a truly gutsy performance of the Kreutzer Sonata (yup, Tolstoy took the title of his novella from a Beethoven composition) accompanies a rain-lashed sequence in which a carriage is stuck in mud preventing Beethoven from keeping a romantic assignation. And the marriage of music and imagery that Rose pulls off during the climactic performance of the Ninth Symphony as Beethoven experiences a flashback to a pivotal moment in his childhood is utterly inspired and worthy of comparison to Powell and Pressburger at their finest.

It’s a shame, then, with so much to commend it (the music, mostly conducted by Sir Georg Solti, is generally full-blooded and played with sturm und drang immediacy) – and with one of the great Gary Oldman performances in the lead role – that ‘Immortal Beloved’ is so badly flawed. Mostly, it’s the kind of stuff that bedevils most biopics: the cliché of the opening scene (the Fifth is one of my favourite pieces by Beethoven, but the way it’s used here is just fucking awful); the episodic structure; the thuddingly unsubtle exposition; Rose’s determinism to ram in a few bars of every famous Beethoven composition to the point that the film sometimes seems like a full-length music video for a Greatest Hits album.

But the biggest flaw is the one that truly sinks it. Rather than simply tell the story of Beethoven’s life, Rose opts to use a ‘Citizen Kane’ style structure, with every episode presented as a flashback. Thus Beethoven becomes the subject of the film rather than its protagonist. The central character, probing Beethoven’s papers and interviewing those who knew him, is his secretary Anton Schindler (Jeroen Krabbé). Schindler discovers an unsent letter by Beethoven address to his “immortal beloved” and tries to identify who the mystery woman is.

Anton Schindler was the first person to write a biography of Beethoven. It has largely been disproved as hagiography, not least in Schindler’s attempts to pass himself off as a close friend and confidant of Beethoven. The truth is that Beethoven had fired Schindler sometime earlier. Worse, Schindler was able to gain access to Beethoven’s papers very shortly after his death and is said to have destroyed certain documents which would have contradicted his version of things.

The effect is to deploy the best available talent (Oldman is magnificent and Krabbé much better than the hamfisted role he’s saddled with) in telling the story of arguably the most important classical composer and base the whole thing on the least reliable material.

Stroszek

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 8 of 10 / Overall: 91 of 100

‘Stroszek’ is inarguably the most emotionally shattering work Werner Herzog has ever put his name to. It has, infamously, become known as the film Joy Division singer Ian Curtis watched just before he hanged himself. An extreme reaction (although it should be noted that Curtis did himself no favours by listening to Iggy Pop’s Dostoyevsky-inspired slice of miserablism ‘The Idiot’ straight after watching it), but I guess there’s something in that evil soulless fucker of dancing chicken at the end that’s capable of destroying rationalism and convincing you that there is nothing left but the bleak emptiness of despair.

So what compelled Herzog to create this hour and three quarters of bleakness? Some run in with the American studio system that caused him to render that country’s cultural heritage as an act of artistic suicide? Some failure of his own creative vision from which he reeled in self-critical agony? Some personal tragedy so deep and heartbreaking that he was driven to paint ‘Stroszek’ in the harshest and darkest shades of black?

Er, no. He made it to say sorry to Bruno S. for not casting him in ‘Woyzeck’.

For those not in the know, Bruno S. was the idiot savant street musician whom Herzog cast in the title role in ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’ (a film whose German title ‘Jeder Fur Sich und Gott gegen Alle’ – ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All’ – I much prefer). During production, Herzog told Bruno S. that he wanted to make a film of Georg Buchner’s unfinished play ‘Woyzeck’ and would cast him as the lead. Herzog shot ‘Woyzeck’ back to back with his loose but inspired Bram Stoker adaptation ‘Nosferatu – Der Phantom das Nacht’, using the same crew, and quickly realised that ‘Nosferatu’ star Klaus Kinski was better suited to play Woyzeck.

By way of apology, Herzog knocked out the script for ‘Stroszek’ (the similarity of the protagonist’s name to Woyzeck surely no coincidence) in a couple of weeks, and shooting the second half of the movie guerrilla style in America without a permit. But then again, this is Werner Herzog we’re talking about and small matters like getting permission to film have never stopped him. This is only one of many reasons I fucking bloody love the guy so much.

‘Stroszek’ casts Bruno S. as the eponymous man-child, turned loose after two and a half years in prison (the nature of his crimes is never disclosed, but alcohol is categorically blamed for his behaviour). His first act as a free man is to go into a pub and order a beer. Can’t knock him; I’d have done the same myself. It’s while he’s knocking back said beer, however, that he becomes reacquainted with his old girlfriend Eva (Eva Mattes), now turning tricks for a couple of thuggish pimps in some of the most horrible fashions ever to disgrace the 1970s.

Scraping out a meagre living singing in courtyards, Stroszek’s life takes a turn for the once when pimp-boy’s violent behaviour towards Eva quickly transfers itself to Stroszek. Then Stroszek’s elderly neighbour Herr Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz) offers a way out that seems to good to be true: a new life living and working in America with his nephew.

Too good to be true? You can say that again! Stroszek, Scheitz and Eva find themselves in Railway Flats, Wisconsin, a town so bleak and run down it makes Beirut look like the Riviera. Scheitz’s nephew, Clayton (Clayton Szalpinski), runs a dingy garage and is such a poster boy for personal hygiene and sophisticated demeanour that he removes a broken tooth with a pair of pliers and swills his bleeding gums with a can of beer. He has a face like the back end of a pick-up truck and sniggers about the possibility of shagging Eva. Yup, this guy is so déclassé that Cletus from ‘The Simpsons’ looks like Alistair Cooke in comparison.

Stroszek and Eva take out a loan to buy a mobile home, but soon fall behind with the payments. An unctuous type from the bank threatens repossession. Eva starts turning tricks again. Stroszek falls into despair. Things come to a bad end after Stroszek and Scheitz’s attempts at making easy money from a life of crime fail spectacularly. And, brother, do I ever mean spectacularly! If Bonnie and Clyde’s watchword was “we rob banks”, Stroszek and his OAP wingman demonstrate how not to do it by striking when the bank’s closed and robbing the barber’s shop next door for $32 instead. The concept of a getaway doesn’t seem to occur to them.

Granted, Herzog milks moments like these for absurdist humour (likewise a narratively redundant but bitingly funny scene about two feuding farmers and the no-man’s-land strip of dirt that separates their properties), but there’s no humour whatsoever in the denouement, which takes place at a deserted funfair. Stroszek rides a chairlift to nowhere and the dancing chicken keeps on dancing. Herzog has spoken of the idiocy of chickens. The chicken in ‘Stroszek’ goes beyond idiocy. Its meaningless gyrations go beyond a black joke at the expense of Stroszek himself; it stands as a metaphor for cultural emptiness; an epitaph for the clichéd myth of the American dream – something that probably never existed in the first place.

Resident Evil: Degeneration

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: anime / In category: 9 of 10 / Overall: 90 of 100

Does ‘Resident Evil: Degeneration’ count as an anime? I don’t know, but I’m on the home stretch of Operation 101010 and I figure ‘Degeneration’ ticks three boxes worthy of inclusion: it’s a Japanese production, it’s animated (albeit from motion capture) and it’s a fuckload better than the Paul W.S. Anderson live-action instalments in the franchise.

Full disclosure: I’m not a gamer and my only exposure to ‘Resident Evil’ has been the aforementioned affronts to the filmmaker’s art. The first movie was just about serviceable and at least had a convincing action heroine in Milla Jovovich. The second had a couple of halfway decent set-pieces but offered little other justification for its existence. The third was a patchwork quilt of borrowings from other (better) movies, enlivened only by the addition to the cast of Ali Larter as Claire Redfield.

It’s Claire Redfield, rather than Jovivich’s Alice, who is the central character in ‘Degeneration’. The story picks up seven years on from the Racoon City outbreak, finally contained after the military nuked the place, and Claire has just arrived at Harvardville airport. There, she notices the presence of political protestor Curtis Miller, a campaigner demanding the government release the truth about Racoon City, but thinks no more of it. Then an airliner crashes into the main airport building, a horde of zombies spill out of it and chaos ensues.

Claire finds herself holed up with corpulent Senator Ron Davies, a man who knows more about this new outbreak than he’s letting on. Their escape from the airport – a tense and excitingly staged sequence that occupies most of the first third of the movie – is enabled by Claire’s fellow Racoon City survivor Leon S. Kennedy and SWAT team member Angela Miller … who happens to be Curtis’s younger sister. And with Curtis the number one suspect and a deadline engendered by terrorist threats fast approaching, these mismatched allies are forced to work together as it soon becomes apparent that no-one else is to be trusted.

With a plot that plays like a throwaway episode of ‘The X Files’ pumped full of steroids and populated by zombies, more action per square inch than the whole of Anderson’s offerings put together and a script that values exposition and pacing above quality of dialogue, ‘Resident Evil: Degeneration’ is formulaic but value-for-money entertainment. The animation is variable, the characters generally well rendered facially but often awkward in their body movements, whereas vehicles, hardware, buildings, backgrounds, gore and explosions are vivid in their detail. The vocal cast sleepwalk their way through line readings, however. Unsurprisingly, I guess, given how clunky the script is.

Still, if you a fan of zombies, military/political/pharmaceutical conspiracies (here represented by WilPharma, the new corporate bad guy in town after the downfall of the Umbrella Corporation), snivelling Machiavellian types in suits getting what’s coming to them, and kick-ass chicks with guns doling out zombie-killing, conspiracy-exposing justice, then ‘Resident Evil: Degeneration’ has guilty pleasure written all over it.

Cold Fever

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Eurovisions (Iceland) / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 89 of 100

Hirata (Masatoshi Nagase) is holding down a soulless corporate job in Tokyo, wasting his evenings watching trashy TV in his shoebox apartment and counting down the days till his golfing holiday in Hawaii. Then his grandfather reminds him of his filial obligation to conduct a ritual of remembrance at the place of this parents’ death.

His parents died in Iceland.

On arrival, he is immediately shepherded onto a coach which takes him, not to Reykjavik as per his itinerary, but to a spa called the Blue Lagoon. It’s the first – and certainly least surreal – of a series of misadventures which take Hirata across Iceland to the remote riverside spot where his parents met their untimely end. His trip from the Blue Lagoon to Reykjavik is made courtesy of a taxi driver who makes a detour to participate in a farmyard nativity, and a lift in a Scania truck whose payload appears to be a male voice choir.

On his first night in Reykjavik, Hirata meets a woman who tells him they have a strong psychic connection and proceeds to sell him her car, insisting that it has the right “aura” for a cross-country trip. Personally, I’ve never driven a Citroen DS so I can’t speak for its karmic qualities, but our first glimpse of it doesn’t bode well.

Against his better judgement, Hirata buys the car and sets out on an epic drive armed with a map he can barely read while the Citroen’s radio malfunctions almost immediately, sticking on the most annoying radio station in Iceland. Freezing from the cold, acutely conscious of the language barrier (Iceland’s almost nationwide second language is English, of which Hirata speaks only a little), his journey is variously helped and hindered by Laura (Laura Hughes), an English woman who “collects” funerals; Jack (Fisher Stevens) and Jill (Lili Taylor), a bickering American couple who use sock puppets to talk to each other when their rows reach a certain point; a strange Icelandic girl who may be a ghost and who can scream at a banshee-like pitch capable of shattering ice caps; a hotel full of Icelandic cowboys participating in a ram competition (yes, that’s right: a competition to determine who has the best male sheep); and Siggi (Gísli Halldórsson), a hard-drinking pragmatist who helps Hirata to complete his journey, the final stages undertaken by horse and an on-foot crossing of a distinctly unsafe bridge.

Made a few years before ‘The Straight Story’, Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s quirky road movie has a similar good-natured quirkiness to David Lynch’s odyssey-by-tractor masterpiece. Hirata is a sanguine and likeable hero (even his occasional badly-aimed kick at the recalcitrant Citroen is comedic rather than petulant). He’s an affable everyman, an innocent abroad, a stranger in a strange land. And Fridriksson’s Iceland is definitely strange. There’s also a hint of Jim Jarmusch, probably in the influence of Jim Stark, producer of several Jarmusch movies, who co-wrote the screenplay.

Ari Kristinsson’s cinematography is a marvel, capturing the stark natural beauty of Iceland, an aesthetic Fridriksson reinforces by having the opening Tokyo scenes shot in 1:33 ratio in fairly tight and clustered compositions, then expanding the screen to 2:35 as Hirata’s flight descends over Iceland and the vast landscape which will define his journey stretches out in snowy solitude beneath him. It’s a breathtaking moment, brilliantly executed, and the film becomes stranger and visually more beautiful as it progresses.

The final sequence, Siggi’s selfless assistance bringing Hirata to the river, is profound, low-key and sensitively done. It’s the point at which ‘Cold Fever’ becomes more than just another entertainingly quirky indie film, and achieves something spiritual and meaningful.