A month at the movies #29: Army of Darkness

The future apocalypse ending might be the original one, but the s-mart showdown is still my all-time favourite last scene.

I remain convinced that every film ever made would be better if it ended with ‘Hail to the king, baby’.

A month at the movies #28: Singing in the Rain

There is a revisionist take on Signing In the Rain that could be made these days, where poor Lina Lamont is a star trying to make it in the world of the talking movies, only to be crushed by the cruelty of the masses laughing at her distinctive New York voice, (which really doesn’t sound that bad to modern ears – at least her tones have got a lot more personality than the smooth, dulcet tones of everybody else).

From Lana’s perspective, the main characters in the film are conceited little shits, undermining her life’s work with cheerful sneers and dancing feet.

You could make a movie about that these days, but it would still pale in comparison to the original, because holy cow, these kids could move.

Gene Kelly is one of the great movie dancers of the 20th century, and he and Donald O’Connor throw themselves across the screen with joyful abandon, making it all look so effortless as they glide over chairs and shuffle their feet sideways. Debbie Reynolds keeps up with the boys with great enthusiasm, holding her own in the most energetic scenes. Sixty-six years on, and the movie is still alive with their shenanigans.

I made the mistake of watching La La Land not long after this, and the new guys were pretty smooth, but they didn’t have that raw, powerful and uninhibited energy of their predecessors. Chances are, nobody else ever will.

A month at the movies #27: Raw

My favourite film of last year was almost certainly Raw, the heart-warming tale of cannibalism at a French veterinary school.

I just really like any film that properly commits to its premise, and doesn’t wimp out when that goes to strange and graphic places. Raw takes a fairly ridiculous idea – a young vegetarian develops a sudden taste for human flesh in her first year away from home – and goes all the fucking way with it, no matter how unpleasant or baffling it gets.

The scene that starts off with the world’s clumsiest Brazilian wax, halfway through the film, and just gets more and more ridiculous and crazy, is so good and so unexpected and goes to places few other film would touch. When so many screenwriters are stuck in the predictability of the bullshit three-act structure, it’s so nice to have a movie that is so unpredictable, and so rewarding.

It’s a cold, grey film that still throbs with spilled blood, and repression breaks out into animal-level murder. It’s not a movie I can see myself watching over and over again, because it is genuinely disturbing at times. But in the sea of blandness that is modern cinema, anything that can get any kind of a reaction – even if it is just nausea – is something to be treasured. 

A month at the movies #26: Metropolis

Fritz Lang’s masterpiece has come out in several different versions since it was released nearly a century ago, and I’ve seen three of them, but my heart always belongs to the one I first saw - the one with the pop/synth soundtrack from Giorgio Moroder that came out in the 1980s.

It splashes colour across the screen and cuts up classic scenes, but it’s also got Freddie Mercury, and hits that sweet spot in where an unmistakable masterpiece bashes up against something corny and dopey, and I’m always down for that shit.

A month at the movies #25: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

While he may have finally bagged an Oscar by putting on a fat suit and lumbering around the screen as a grumpy historical figure, Gary Oldman's finest performance in recent years was undoubtedly his George Smiley in 2011's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 

He's so quietly brittle, while still super-sharp. Well-composed at all times and unflappable in moments of stress, with just a hint of the human being inside creeping out in moments of tiny weakness. He's a puppet master who takes no real delight in pulling the strings, he just wants to get the job done.

Still, as good as Oldman is, Alec Guinness' Smiley in Tinker Tailor and Smiley's People in the 70s and 80s is even better - more bumbling and avuncular, but it's all an act, using it to trap his unsuspecting prey who walk right into his schemes.

And there is a moment at the end of Smiley's People that is just devastating, where Smiley has defeated his ultimate enemy, but used the target's love for his daughter to trap him, and in order to do it, Smiley has shut away his own love and affections, and his victory is so stale and it's all there on Guiness' face as he quietly melts down in his moment of triumph.

The moral of this story is - if you really need an actor to sell a 'what have I done?' moment, there was never a finer actor in history than Alec Guinness. But Gary Oldman will do for now.

A month at the movies #24: Annihilation

Haven't seen it.

I do want to check it out, because if you're going to rip off anything, I'll take somebody who is trying to do Andrei Tarkovsky, instead of Michael Bay. But I doubt I'll be doing it anytime soon, and that's entirely because it only got a release through Netflix in this part of the world. The internet is our house is rubbish for reasons no technician has ever been explain to me, and watching anything that is streaming is sheer folly because I'll spend most of the time waiting for it to buffer.

But I'm also just really annoyed that this is the only way to see it here, because it was one of the few films coming out this year that I genuinely wanted to see in the cinema. It looks intense and stylish and all I want to do is see that in a dark room on the biggest screen in town. Not my TV.

When people talk about the experience of going to the cinema these days, it's usually told through the medium of moaning. Rude patrons who won't turn their bloody phones off, projection equipment that is sub-standard, and staff who plainly don't give a shit about any of it.

But I still fucking love going to the cinema. Getting out of the damn house, hearing booming sound systems echoing around a large auditorium, enveloping in the darkness and lack of distractions and the way it forces you to pay some damn attention to what's happening on the big screen. I can feel things about a movie in the theatre that never come up at home, I can have a reaction to the story that is more heartfelt than anything I feel on the couch.

Unfortunately, it feels like going to the cinema doesn't love me back, because there is fuck-all on the list of coming attractions that inspires me to get off that fucking couch. It's all cynical kids' movies, endlessly bland blockbusters and a surprising amount about middle-class and middle aged French people fucking. Anything that looks too intense - the best goddamn thing to see on the big screen - is relegated right out of the theatre.

There were some parts of the world where I could have seen Annihilation in the theatre, but this isn't one of them, and that's one less reason to bother going to the cinema. Maybe I'll catch it on some plane sometime.

A month at the movies #23: Suspiria

Every time I watch a Dario Argento movie, something awful happens to me. The last time I saw Suspiria, it was at a film festival with Goblin performing live, and I nearly died the next night, and somewhere there I convinced myself those fucking evil witches had actually cursed me...

It doesn't stop me watching his films, because they're all amazing, even the terrible modern efforts. I'm just more prepared for the bad shit afterwards.

A month at the movies #22: The January Man

I try to find the best in shitty movies, desperate to some redeeming feature and anxious that I haven't just wasted two hours of my fucking life on another dumb horror or stone-face comedy. Even the most odious film can have a line, or a shot, or a plot twist that clicks. It doesn't always make up for the time I've wasted on the bloody thing, but I'll take anything worthwhile. This world is a vast, gaping void of existential dread, I've got to try and fill it with something.

It means I can put up with the unbearable schmaltz of Fincher's Benjamin Button film, because the way it captures the tiny amount of time the characters have when they are finally the same age is fucking stunning; and I can ignore the tedious political maneuvering of Zemeckis' Contact, because the 10 minutes of build-up before Jodie Foster steps out into the universe is extraordinary.

And it means I can get through something as bone-crushingly average as The January Man from 1989. It looks like a failed TV pilot with a strong cast it does nothing with, and has no real style or visual wit. It's got a dumbass serial killer plot that hinges on the murderer following a pattern that can be cracked like a code, which it ignores for plenty of scenes of the main character cooking weird food and chatting up his sister-in-law.

But I still watched the whole thing. It's still starring Kevin Kline, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Susan Sarandon, who are all always good value, and has Alan Rickman floating through the movie as an artist neighbour, clearing there for the Hollywood money, but unable to stop himself from being the most watchable and charming character in the film.

And it's got this dopey climax, where Kline's detective finally catches up with the killer, and they have this long, protracted and clumsy fight down a flight of stairs. It's pretty ridiculous, but has just the right amount of irony, and after years of overkill in every action film, it's pleasantly low key.

It didn't really make up for the time I spent on this movie. But at least I got something out of it. I'll take it.

A month at the movies #21: Logan

The last Wolverine film (until the next one) takes place in a brutal and uncaring near-future, and shows just how brutal it can be in the first few minutes, when Logan pops the claws and starts stabbing some poor bastards in the head when they shoot him and try to steal his ride.

It's impressively nasty, but that leaves the movie with nowhere else to go when it comes to violent action, and every scene that follows features the same kind of action, over and over. Eventually, it all ends with Logan running through a forest, shrugging off gunshots and stabbing some poor fuckers in the face, which is what he has been doing in these X-films for a long time.

Even with the addition of a nasty doppelganger, there is no escalation and no anticipation. It all becomes a bit of a slog.

Action films need to be properly paced - you can't just blow your wad at the start. You need to build things up, and you need to have some kind of pay-off. If it's all the same tone, it's a boring-ass song.

Even films with some phenomenal individual action scenes can become blase -  John Wick 2 has all sorts of crazy fighting and gunplay going on, but nothing really matches the opening scene and its car-fu craziness. Fatigue sets in somewhere around the time Mr Wick is fucking about in the tunnels under Rome, and it never really recovers.

The action choreography in Logan isn't anything like the balls-out efforts of John Wick, and doesn't have much idea of what to do with the claws, once they're out.

Weirdly, one of the main source materials for the Logan script - Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's Old Man Logan comic - does actually have some great pacing going on. While it's as typically nasty and weightless as most of Millar's comics (and I say that as somebody who loves Millar's work), one of the main points of that comic is that Logan won't use his claws, no matter how much he is beaten down. But when he is pushed too far, the claws come out in a gloriously over-the-top two-page sound effect, and the story goes into a higher gear for its gratuitous climax, in a way the movie never does.

The Logan of the recent film doesn't have anything like that kind of release, it's just face-stabbing from the start. While the film-makers could argue that the emotional stakes of the ending add to the intensity, it's nothing worth going feral over.