Matty

The first roughly forth minutes (up to Time After Time) of O Lucky Malcolm! are an excellent personal profile because space is given predominantly to McDowell himself, thanks to whose innate acting talent even well-known stories from filming (the inception of the dance scene in A Clockwork Orange) are made fresh again. The documentary then jumps forward some twenty years and much more space is suddenly given to long clips from (relatively bad) films and McDowell’s loved ones and collaborators. Though it’s pleasing that not everyone praises the actor to the heavens – they don’t conceal the fact that he isn’t easy to work with – but none of them is able to come up with any more valuable revelations. The film becomes more serious only later, toward the end, when McDowell exhibits obviously greater interest in recalling his empathy for the character of Evilenko. Unfortunately, the quality of the documentary is uneven, which is surprising for a film by Harlan, director of an excellent portrait of Stanley Kubrick, but McDowell remains as entertainingly ironic with respect to the world of show business as he is toward himself. 70%

The North vs. South of exploitation films. Whereas more conventional attempts to break through the dominant ideology use the storytelling conventions of classic narrative films, Jacopetti and Prosperi do whatever they please with the language of film. By constantly violating unwritten genre conventions, they make it impossible to watch Goodbye Uncle Tom as either a documentary or a fictional film. The characters speak to the camera, which is not merely a passive witness, but one of the perpetrators of the oppression of the black population. The concept of the “white” camera capitalising on the humiliation of black people is brought to its ultimate conclusion with the moment when the camera(man) lies down in bed with a black female slave. The intermingling of authentic documentary shots with fictional scenes masterfully directed in keeping with various exploitation subgenres (sex-, blax-, slave-) creates solid parallels between the blacks’ prior oppression and their contemporary fight for their rights (in the climactic sequence, a parallel montage is skilfully used to create the impression that past and present events are identical). On the one hand, the film thus makes the suffering of slaves a compelling epic spectacle but, on the other hand, it shows the white man in a negative light, calls black brothers to arms and, with alienating effects, prevents us from becoming “immersed” in the film. The ambiguity is notable with respect to the possible use of cinema for political messaging, as exploitation itself serves as a means of both strengthening (the camera in the hands of the white man) and weakening the power of the white majority (showing the legitimacy of resistance). I definitely recommend watching Goodbye Uncle Tom as more than just study material for Django Unchained. (The rating relates to the uncensored Italian version). 80%

A film about the holocaust of everyday life, forgetting rituals, the non-transferability of historical experience, the fear of growing up, American fetishes (guns, cars, big buildings) and ordinary gestures of extraordinary significance. Sorrentino has expanded his thematic scope, though he has again chosen a single person, a single special being, to be his witness to the state of contemporary society. More than before, this time he doesn’t merely alternate between lullingly static and sharply dynamic shots, but also switches between micro- and macro-perspectives. The guilt of the man who contributed to two suicides is less; the guilt of the man who systematically humiliated defenceless prisoners for years is greater. As Cheyenne slowly grows up and moves on from minor mischievousness (supermarket sabotage) to more responsible actions, his view of reality and the mood of the film change. Scenes are composed as brief sketches, but thanks to their placement in the context of the narrative, they don’t come across as gratuitous – some of them are more chilling than comical (the supremely bizarre moment with the obese fan and the guy passing by, whose moustache makes him look like Hitler). The atmosphere of This Must Be the Place cannot be described with a single adjective; you have to experience it. The changing perspectives, polished visual style, internal dynamics and unforced humour – all co-directed by Sean Penn together with Sorrentino. Penn’s zombie walk sets the pace of the film, which is simultaneously slow and (thanks to the camerawork) constantly in motion. At the same time, we have to figure out the internal movement, in the protagonist’s mind, from the gradually added information. Occasional echoes of Cheyenne’s wild rocker years find accomplices in sudden camera approaches. Like the film itself, the protagonist defies clear categorisation. He doesn’t fit in anywhere; even he doesn’t really know who he is. As in every Oedipal drama, he can know himself only through his father and, in this case, he can know his father only by understanding the Holocaust…and is it even possible to understand the Holocaust? His uncategorisable appearance excludes him from the world of superficial scanning of reality while also conferring on him the special privilege of a harmless know-nothing with whom anyone is willing to engage in dialogue. In the course of his journey, however, he begins to realise that even though looking at the world from behind the mask of a child is comfortable, it is also extremely irresponsible and evokes a feeling of being incomplete. A feeling that “something isn’t right here”. It isn’t and probably never will be, because the search never really ends, but thanks to that, This Must Be the Place is one of the most captivatingly strange films of recent years. 90%

SPOILERS AHEAD. My second viewing of Django Unchained clarified some seeming structural faults (the triple ending, the ineffectiveness of the romantic storyline), but it still seemed to me that the film has fundamental problems with pacing and cohesion: the continuously changing tone is quite gratuitous, some shots and scenes stick out of the film (the double cameo by Zoe Bell as a woman watching the approaching Django and Schultz from a window and as a gang member). It doesn’t matter that the characters do a lot of talking about things for which a single shot would have sufficed – Tarantino has always been stronger at interior dialogue than narrative images, so we can understand the landscape here as serving a purely decorative purpose. What’s problematic, however, is that some of the dialogue-heavy scenes don’t push the narrative along, nor do they offer any other value added such as slowly built-up tension (which was a major component of Inglourious Basterds). The strangely edited KKK digression after the Brittle brothers are captured (the inserted flashback seems somewhat confusing at first) is nothing more than filler. One storyline concludes, but the next (Hildi) hasn’t yet been opened. The narrative stands still for several minutes. Schultz’s subsequent familiarisation of Django with the rules of the market mechanism initiates the transformation of the slave into a master, which culminates with a radical change of wardrobe. Together with the education in capitalism, however, there is the rather unnecessary (in terms of the narrative, not the viewing experience) training of Django to be the fastest gunslinger in the American south. Despite that, the multi-layered transformation of the protagonist ranks among the best instances of character development in Tarantino’s entire filmography. From the beginning, we are prepared for Django to take over responsibility from his master, toward whom he first behaves like a little boy, eager to learn what has become of his German princess. However, he gradually exhibits more and more independence, though the roles he has to play, which definitely do not suit him, prevent him from fully expressing himself (his microworld has to be subordinated to Schultz’s, with which he later comes into conflict, powerfully for the first time in the scene with the dogs). With all the more bombast in the blaxploitation-style climax, he can take on the position of head moral authority, throw off all masks (and the saddle from his horse) and, as a completely free hard-ass black motherfucker, shoot about two dozen white devils (and one assimilated black man who reveres his master more than his own mother and undergoes a similar shift in meaning in relation to his master as Django does). Finally, Django explicitly sets out to do what Tarantino does behind the camera – break down stereotypes. Most of the characters that the German former dentist and the freed slave encounter correspond to a certain archetype from American mythology or from exploitation cinema (mammy, the Southern belle, the villain obsessed with eugenics). Unfortunately, Hildi is no exception; for Tarantino, she is an unusually one-dimensional female character who is mostly allowed only to cry, scream and be rescued. Django Unchained is an incredibly stylish affair, excellent in many of its constituent parts (soundtrack, actors, punchlines) and bold in its refusal to respect the conventions of westerns (though Italian directors had much earlier violated some of them, e.g. shooting a horse and using white American cowboys as villains), but as a whole, the film is not entirely cohesive. In terms of making an impression, however, it is almost perfect with respect to the intensity of viewing pleasure and I will watch some of its scenes many more times.

After the overwrought yet empty Dark Shadows, Frankenweenie is an endearingly humble film in which Burton refers to his previous work without stealing from it. The opening scene with the film within a film and the very condensed telling of the following minutes prepares us for the “rewriting” nature of Frankenweenie, which shows what was previously filmed in much more amateurish conditions, only on a larger scale. The film captures Burton’s own transformation from a strange child into a widely beloved filmmaker. Several children embark on the same experiment, but only Victor’s intentions are pure and he ends up being the only one to find support among the adults. As with Burton’s other protagonists, what’s important is not that he becomes part of the group, but that the group accepts his eccentricity, and Burton is overwhelmingly successful in depicting this. I suspect that he made Frankenweenie mainly for his own pleasure and that of his most faithful fans. Black-and-white, morbid, anti-Disney (the cutest animal is a bloodthirsty cat-vampire), with an intentionally predictable story. The familiar plot framework is used in the manner of an atmospheric museum of classic horror films recalling not only celebrated monster movies, but also Burton’s earlier works. If you don’t relish visual quotes from horror movies, you will be entertained by Frankenweenie, depending particularly on how much you are able and willing to appreciate its self-referential and auto-biographical qualities, which take the film out of the realm of light entertainment that the whole family will go to the cinema for on a Sunday afternoon without prior preparation. In the context of contemporary major-studio animated films, Frankenweenie is just as much an outsider as Burton’s obstinate protagonists. Commercially suicidal, but very likable. 75%

As a film of indeterminate genre, Dollhouse appears on the surface to be a criticism of the empty lives of today’s young people, who outwardly do not acknowledge having any values. What lies beneath that veneer, however, is an almost Haneke-esque sadistic game played with viewer expectations. The initial situation, where a group of idiots break into a luxury villa, and the way the “innocent” scenes are interspersed with hints of something very unpleasant (close-ups of a drill, a hammer, bruises on a back), lead us to see Dollhouse as a teen horror movie in which there will be a lot of dying (and rightly so). The dialogue, through which the characters seemingly comment on the rules of films like this, necessitates the search for an alternative, less predictable key. I believe, however, that the chosen solution negates all of the assumptions that any given erudite viewer will make while watching. It isn’t shocking for the sake of being shocking. The drastic change in the direction that the film takes (or doesn’t take) enables the director to end the film with a much more imaginative point than that found in a traditional horror movie: at the end, everyone – with the possible exception of the final girl – dies. In the climax, the plot is basically turned upside down, which corresponds to the heroine’s mental state and her and her peers’ disjointed perception of reality. Like Haneke’s psychological studies of contemporary society, Dollhouse is rather exhausting for viewers. However, it will require even more effort to stop thinking about it than it did to watch it. 75%

A rape revenge comedy into which Alexander Hemala oozed from somewhere on the bottom, along with paedophile sex and black magic (“you put a hex on the city!”). A dud that’s just as blatantly idiotic and atrociously tasteless as the films from the early years of Normalisation, but with food-porn delicacies such as Magnusek heating up sausages and Magnusek eating a cream puff. It’s enough to make a nutritionist choke on their organic granola. 20%

Has emancipation finally broken into animated films? Merida is probably the first female Disney protagonist whose satisfaction in life is not bound to a prince or some other male character. That seems to be the film’s aim at the beginning, when the girl’s headstrong nature is manifested mainly through “male” behaviour. In her predetermined role as an obedient girl, she is unable to fulfil her desire for freedom, expressed through boisterous horse riding. The feminine clothes that she wears, including the wimple under which she must hide her fiery red hair, which hinder her in archery, clearly stifle her true nature. The absence of a female role model contributes to her masculinisation. She is surrounded only by stereotypical images of femininity (the good-hearted maid, the strait-laced mother) whose role in the girl’s transformation is surprisingly more important in the end than the role of the male suitors, who are (literally) only MacGuffins. Merida perhaps identifies more with her father, who was permanently cursed in the past, when he (in)famously fought a bear, but he is not a major inspiration for her. Instead, her mother becomes her inspiration. The true role of women in the patriarchy – women are the prey; men are the hunters – fittingly becomes apparent only after her metamorphosis. Merida and her mother can change this situation only by joining forces. As in many maternal melodramas, the central conflict arises from the daughter’s disrespect for her mother, but its resolution is mostly successful in avoiding melodramatic clichés. The emblematic scene in which Merida is forced to combine who she should be with who she wants to be (repairing the tapestry while on horseback) to save one of her parents is rather mature, and not only for an animated movie. The joy of the mature approach to the female character is diminished by the infantilism of the narrative. It wasn’t previously customary for Pixar to constantly shift focus to attractions at the expense of character development and deepening of the plot. Almost everything important is addressed in the action (or directly by means of the action). The smooth continuity of the chain of action scenes with emphasis on there always being something to look at and something to be entertaining does not leave any room or time for more enduring emotions. In a certain way, the ground-breaking view of what had previously been solely male territory from the female perspective is thus mainly quick entertainment whose true value is buried under heaps of action and comical clowning around. 75%

When he didn’t have a tommy gun at hand, James Cagney used his mouth to fire off words at a machine-gun rate. As a producer with an explosive disposition and the smile of an innocent, he fires in all directions during the first hour without a break. Because his battlefield is a film made before the introduction of the Production Code and his partner is the in no way bashful Joan Blondell (see her promotional photos from the given period), the sensual innuendos in the scenes with screwball editing are like bacteria in a petri dish. Though it’s categorised somewhere among musicals and was clearly inspired by stage musicals – including the transitions between scenes, which are reminiscent of a curtain opening, including Cagney addressing his stable as if he’s speaking to the audience – Footlight Parade offers up the real performance during the last forty minutes, specifically at the moment when the waiting for the transformation of the working relationship into a personal relationship burns itself out in the narrative. (But everything happens in such a hurry that there is no time to think about it anyway.) Anyone expecting spectacular musical numbers cannot be disappointed by the Berkeley-esque footwork. The lyrics of the songs are not nearly as important as the choreography, eliciting well-deserved superlatives from our speechless mouths even during a barroom brawl. Though it breaks down into two films, the second of which is three separate numbers, this all-talkie show-business comedy is consistently entertaining and makes what was at the time of its creation a valuable, albeit ultimately false, statement: sound films are not a threat to your business. 75%

A struggle between romanticism and rationalism (with respect to the visuals, the filmmakers clearly favour the former) in a setting like that of a gothic horror movie. I don’t doubt that the book still contains valid ideas and can emotionally drain the reader, but this adaptation offers only a highly unsatisfying sampling. Other than trying to help us find our bearings in complex family relationships, which are a bit incestuous and probably slightly necrophilic, the film offers no justification for the double jump into the past or the fact that someone is telling the whole story. The female protagonist’s limitless suffering belongs in melodrama, but it doesn’t fulfil its purpose here. It doesn’t elicit sympathy for Cathy, who sometimes behaves like a toxic bitch toward her loved ones, or for any other female character, as none of them is boldly depicted. It’s even more difficult to figure out Heathcliff, who is depicted as a vile psychopath who isn’t attracted to Cathy by pure feelings but by insane love (and he doesn’t behave nicely toward anyone else). Just try to enjoy a melodrama with mostly unlikable characters who hurt each other and the people who try to help them. Perhaps if I had read the book, I would have seen their actions in a different light, but having only seen this film, all I took away from it was a lot of negative emotions and the memory of vivid landscape shots that would have looked good as illustrations in a book by Byron, for example.