Tag Archives: Culture

Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema

#179 – Mr Kill Man

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(2011, US, 106 min) Dir Jay White. Cast Michael Keaton, Justin Long, Elizabeth Shue.

A pre-Birdman rejuvenation Keaton starred in this, Mr Kill Man, in another role that riffs on his vigilante past. Mild mannered office drone Hamilton Brody is knocked on the head during what he believes to be an attempted robbery (but was, in fact, an attempt to save him from a worse fate from a falling brick) and when he wakes up in hospital he finds himself reborn as a Death Wish style vigilante, the self-styled Mr Kill Man. So, once he’s tricked the hospital staff into believing that he’s fine, he begins patrolling the night, looking for crimes to stop and wrongs to right. The only problem with this is that he doesn’t have a gun like he thinks he does – no, he’s actually facing down hardened criminals armed with nothing more than a scowl, a trench coat and a banana held like a revolver. It’s up to Brody’s wife and son (Shue and Long) following in the family car to stop him from getting hurt and protect him from the attentions of the law. A fun little film with a great central trio all perfectly shot in a sea of drenched neons, Dutch tilts and darkened alleys.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Imaginary US Cinema, Thriller

#178 – Great Storm, The

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(2011, US, 109 min) Dir Jack Burch. Cast Michael Shannon, Paul Dano, Jena Malone, Benicio del Toro.

Michael Shannon is the explosives expert in a cell of eco-terrorists who is known only as Banger and when a planned raid on a dam is foiled by the police he suddenly becomes their leader. The media attention surrounding the arrest divides the group and drives them underground but somehow, where the police can’t find Banger, Benicio del Toro’s mysterious unnamed South American does. He is representing a Brazillian rubber company, he says, the name of which Banger wouldn’t know if he was told it. Del Toro has a proposition – the vast rubber plantations in South East Asia have caused untold ecological damage and will cause much more without the diseases that kept the plant in check in it’s native South America. Perhaps Banger and his crew would smuggle in some of the offending Microcyclus ulei and aid the decimation of this environmental disaster? “Why would we help you?” asks Banger. “I think you’d do a deal with the devil to get what you want,” is the reply. And he’s right – Banger contacts Alvin and Sasha, the only other members of the cell remaining, who now have to get to Laos and begin their new mission, never realising the dangers that lie ahead. A tense yet low key thriller.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Horror, Imaginary Japanese Cinema

#177 – Dr. X

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(2000, Jap, 91 min) Dir Hiroya Hino. Cast Yukie Inoue, Mitsuo Ibaraki, Kon Ito.

Based on the Japanese urban legend of the masked doctor. In case you haven’t heard of it, it goes like this – you’re on your own and you fall maybe and hurt yourself and from a nearby side street or even from out of the bushes appears this man in a long white coat and a surgical mask offering to help. If this ever happens to you get up and run as fast as you can no matter how badly you’re hurt – the legend goes that if this mysterious helpful passerby were to lift up his mask you wouldn’t return to tell people what you saw. So how has this slim premise become another film in the J-Horror canon? Nanako is at home one day waiting for her son Rikiya to get home from school but he never arrives. Asking about she hears from one of his classmates that he saw Rikiya fall and a tall man in a white coat and face mask appear to help him. The young boy won’t tell her any more. Later, when the old man Hiroyuki turns up at her doorstep to tell her about his own son who went missing thirty years before and shows her the drawing of the masked man, at that point Nanako’s desperate search is on. An eerie urban nightmare in a rare display of restraint from director Hino (Dark Tentacles, the uncomfortable Gynaecologist series).

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Drama, Imaginary US Cinema

#176 – Hurtin’

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(1990, US, 80 min) Dir Bryce Tasco. Cast Jeff Bridges, Dennis Quaid, Paul Haltmann.

Directed by Bryce Tasco from his own play, the little-seen Hurtin’ follows the last days of an Elvis-alike superstar as he roams his mansion, clearly at the end of his mental and physical tether. He’s visited by his drug dealer Amos (Quaid) and his hot-shot manager Phil (Haltmann) who has taken over from his recently deceased long-term one but, for the majority of the film, is alone and talking either to the pictures on the walls or to the TV or to phantoms that we can’t see. Apparently starring Bridges and Quaid as favours to Tasco – a friend to both – and filmed in the Beverly Hills mansion of a third unnamed friend (rumoured to be none other than Jack Nicolson), Hurtin’ has been virtually unseen by any kind of audience since it was made as while the main character is never named as Elvis Presley, his estate evidently felt the likeness to be sufficiently close for litigation and the producers agreed. It’s a slight film either way though it’s attempt to bring depth to a death that has been mostly regarded as little more than a joke is laudable.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Black and White, Comedy, Imaginary French Cinema

#175 – Taisez-vous! (Shut Your Face!)

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(1950, Fr, 61 min, b/w) Dir Albert. Cast Albert, Romy Pice, Oscar de la Vana, Jacques Jacques.

The first full length feature from future French film luminary Albert, of Le Roi du Canard and Monsieur B dans l’Univers fame. As such Taisez-vous! is an altogether more small-scale an enterprise, set entirely within one room in a library though since said room is the vast glass and iron reading room in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris the smallness of the scale is entirely relative. Albert plays a novice librarian on his first day on the job, desperate to not let a single noise disrupt the silence but inevitably mere shushing soon isn’t enough and before long he’s bursting bubbles of gum before they pop, making everyone remove their shoes (if by force if necessary) and trying to baffle the sound of books being set down with a well aimed catapult and a pile of small cushions. It all gets out of hand, of course, culminating in the bookshelves toppling like dominoes and Albert diving madly to bodily interrupt their crashing end. The whole enterprise rests on Albert and his performance and as such the film is a success – his whole body is a wonder of physical comedy and his facial expressions alone are worth the price of admission.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Detective, Drama, Imaginary British Cinema, Imaginary US Cinema, Thriller

#174 – Black Book, The

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(1985, US/GB, 106 min) Dir James G Marshall. Cast Gabriel Byrne, Theresa Russell, Ian Holm, Billie Whitelaw, Phil Daniels, Alexi Sayle.

Alexander Kasin (Byrne) is a rising star in the KGB tasked with tracking down the author of the so-called Black Book of the title, dozens of copies of which have been disseminated across the Soviet Union via the producers of handmade publications known as samizdat. The file on said book is very thin – no copy has yet been found by the authorities though numerous references have been logged from intercepted mail, bugged telephones and the confessions of criminals. “There are not many copies in circulation,” he superior tells him, “But so far as we can tell the contents of this book are so volatile none can be tolerated.” So Kasin begins his investigation in the usual places – checking in with his informers, known black market operators and the samizdat slinging intelligentsia – but not only draws a blank but meets a kind of frightened resistance totally uncommon to him in his usual course of work. As he digs ever deeper and finds himself on a trail that leads to the obscurer ends of his homeland it occurs to him that he’s not on the trail of something new, but of a cancer as old as his country with a dark purpose at its heart. A classy, creepy detective film full of unplumbed darkness. An US/GB co-production directed by a Canadian, populated almost entirely with British actors and fantastically shot by veteran Irish DOP Brendan Bradley in snow bound Finland, The Black Book was made on the back of Gorky Park’s success but was sadly unable to replicate it. Not to be confused with Verhoeven’s Black Book nor indeed the Dylan Moran sitcom Black Books.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Documentary, Imaginary British Cinema, Imaginary Canadian Cinema

#173 – Palm

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(2012, Can/GB, 76 min) Dir Alice Werkherser.

Alice Werkherser’s follow up to Engineer Species is a very different beast to the earlier work which followed the traditional interview/narrative form of documentary and is very alike Peter Mettler’s Petropolis in execution. The main difference between the two films is that Mettler’s film, being an aerial record of the devastation wrought by industry on the Alberta tar sands, has visuals that are dramatic, terrifying and even beautiful if isolated from their context. Werkherser’s film is similar in many ways in that it is also about a great environmental devastation but one whose visual effect on the land is not as immediately shocking. Through a combination of helicopter and drone photography she has recorded the vast scale of the palm oil plantations that have irrevocably changed the once lush rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo in Indonesia (the world’s largest producer) into unending rows of farmed palm trees, straight line after straight line from one end of the film to the other, each area tagged at the bottom of the screen before rolling on for uninterrupted chunks of time in it’s bland, terrifying uniformity. He soundtrack is given over to a variety of people affected by this, from the purchaser of a multinational company (unnamed) who imports the oil about the surprising amount of products it is used in, to an indigenous person displaced by the plantations, to a representative from International Animal Rescue on the terrible effect on the local wildlife and environment, to a farm worker who relies on the plantations to feed his family and who was unemployed prior to that. A piece of vertiginous perspective.

Comedy, Imaginary British Cinema

#172 – Daniel, the Fart Catcher

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(1998, GB, 93 min) Dir Alastair Hirst. Cast David Thewlis, Clive Owen, Jane Horrocks, Kevin McKidd, Ewan Bremner.

Period comedy. Apparently a fart catcher was the derogatory term for a footman or valet in the 18th and 19th century and, in this, David Thewlis is Daniel, the fart catcher for the bastardly Lord Everdice (Owen). Everdice, having lost his family’s fortunes on the baccarat tables of Europe, now desires to wed Lady Balthirst (Horrocks), the only child of the fantastically wealthy Balthirst family who remains unwed due to the fact that she’s a kleptomaniac with Tourette’s. Daniel, on the other hand, has been taken in the employ of Balthirst père to make sure this doesn’t happen and must now try his damnedest to sabotage his masters amorous advances without raising suspicion. Further complicating matters are Brush and Wash (McKidd and Bremner, reunited from Trainspotting) who, in the service of Balthirst mère who just wants her daughter wed no matter the cost, are trying valiantly (if ineptly) to sabotage Daniel’s sabotagings. To the film’s advantage it’s directed by Alastair Hirst, costume drama veteran of 1985’s Buried Hearts and the 1992 TV adaptation of J. Langdon Beetleman’s Staedtler Quartet so the form of the film is very much in keeping with the genre being mocked. The film’s disadvantages are chiefly two – one is that it’s directed by Alastair Hirst, who may have directed a good few costume dramas but hasn’t directed a comedy, and the other is that one is constantly reminded in the watching of the film of how much better Blackadder would have handled the same material.

Documentary, Imaginary Spanish Cinema, Imaginary US Cinema

#171 – Camino de Santiago

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(2003, US/Sp, 104 min) Dir Emmanuel Pascal, Andrea Filipe.

The first in Pascal and Filipe’s four years in the making Walks Trilogy. The directing duos films are the very paragon of simplicity, following a process or – in the case of their Walks Trilogy – journeys. In Access Road they follow the construction of a mining road in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and with Camino de Santiago they turn their cool lens on the route and the walkers of the famous European pilgrimage. It’s simple – the film begins in Roncevaux and ends in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela recording the landscape along the way. To some it’s the very definition of cinematic wallpaper but to others the way they record the changing of the landscapes, the relationship of the people within it and the places where the modern world runs up against a path that has remained unchanged in hundreds of years all tells a story that no words could adequately convey. As you can tell I’m a fully paid up member of the latter camp. Still a stunning film on the small screen it plays all the better in the cinema. Pascal and Filipe followed this up with The Inca Trail and Shikoku Pilgrimage, both as stunning as this.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Animation, Black and White, Imaginary German Cinema, Silent

#170 – Golden Padlock, The

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(1931, Ger, 61 min, b/w) Dir Hans Thomas Mann.

Hans Thomas Mann (not to be confused with regular old Thomas Mann, sans Hans) was an early pioneer in German cinema. In the early days he ran a one man operation, producing his own ‘lantern shows’ (rudimentary animation, mostly) with which he would then tour the country to show with his daughter Pini as assistant. In his autobiography, The Picture Man, he revealed that his tours took him up mountains, down valleys and across half of Europe to bring cinema to the country folk who would not have witnessed such a thing otherwise. This golden era for Mann ended, rather inevitably, when the First World War broke out. Like many during those long hard years he lost much, not least his beloved daughter. The interwar period found Mann struggling for work but he found himself a patron in Lupu Speyer, star director of Zwei Brüste (and, more famously, 1927’s megabudget flop Götz von Berlichingen) who had first been introduced to cinema as a boy by Mann’s travelling show. Speyer, having clout in spades at this time, wrangled Mann the budget for his debut film with an actual budget and what would turn out to be his final film – The Golden Padlock. The fairy tale story of a young girl lost in a vast forest primeval and the titular object that keeps shut the door leading to her home in the subterranean land of fairy. It’s totally animated in a style similar to Lotte Reiniger (whose career was taking off about the same time) with the padlock hand painted in a fashion that shimmers off the screen. A soundtrack silent save for the sound of a distant flute only adds to the etherial strangeness. A labour of love obviously made in honour of his lost daughter the process as a whole took almost ten years, during which time Speyer’s career had peaked and nosedived back into obscurity and Mann had emigrated to England where the film was finished. It’s been seen very few times since then but the BFI have a fantastically well preserved copy in their vaults which they wheel out on occasion – if you get the opportunity run, don’t walk, to see it.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms