For those who are familiar with the great work Brian De Palma did throughout the 1970's and 80's, his bright, energetic glam-rock opera Phantom of the Paradise may seem like something of an oddity. It's a spin on The Phantom of the Opera, with elements of Faust and The Picture of Dorian Gray, told within the context of the music business, who De Palma and scorer/star Paul Williams obviously hold some level of disdain for. While this may differ tonally and perhaps thematically to De Palma's more popular works, Phantom embodies the mixture of flair and homage that De Palma perfected, which many label him a rip-off merchant for (though I strongly disagree).
Sad-sack composer Winslow (William Finley) is overheard playing his Faustian opera by the powerful and mysterious music producer Swan (Williams). Swan is on the cusp of opening his new theatre The Paradise, and feels Winslow's music is perfect for his vision of nostalgia and kitsch. Winslow offers his work to Swan, but is never called or paid for his contribution. Seeking answers, he arrives at Swan Records to see an endless line of women, including Phoenix (Jessica Harper), auditioning to be a backing singer and singing his songs. He is thrown out, framed for drug possession and sentenced to life in prison. But Winslow escapes and, after being mutilated by a record press, seeks vengeance on Swan.
For all it's visual pizazz, where Phantom lacks is within the casting. Finley, who had worked with De Palma the year before in Sisters and who sadly died in 2012, struggles to make his character empathetic. Williams, while certainly looking the part, lacks the presence to convince that he would be able to wield such a control on his underlings. Harper, while cute as a button, lacks the charisma to really justify Wimslow's obsession over her. The only actor to really impress is Gerrit Graham as glam-rock God Beef, who behind the scenes is a fussy little queen. Beef is no doubt Paul Williams' stab at all those self-important diva's he unavoidably came into contact with during his time as a musician.
But with a bright and bouncy film such as this, the acting plays second fiddle to the visuals and the music. While the music may not be catchy in the same way as Phantom's close relation The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), in context they contemplate De Palma's camera. All of De Palma's visual ticks are there - crane shots, long takes, split-screen - and it even throws in a homage to Psycho (1960), only with a plunger. It makes for quite an exhausting experience, but you only really need to hold your breath and dive in, and it's really quite easy to fall in love with it. It was unfairly panned by critics and ignored by movie-goers on it's release, but with De Palma's early films getting positive re-evaluation with various Blu-Ray releases, Phantom is finally getting the praise it deserves.
I wanted to get through this entire review without mentioning Trainspotting (1996). But Danny Boyle's British classic was so brimming with dark energy and so tapped in to the Zeitgeist of the 1990's that comparisons are unavoidable when faced with a movie adaptation of an Irvine Welsh novel. The problem with the adaptations that followed Trainspotting -The Acid House (1998) and Ecstasy (2011) - were that they were so caught up in recapturing the spirit and iconic imagery of Trainspotting, that they failed to find a tone of their own, and as a result, were very bad films indeed. Thankfully, with the adaptation of Welsh's most difficult novel, Filth, director Jon S. Baird has found of a verve of his own, and has entrusted much of the film's success to lead star James McAvoy, who is uniformly excellent.
Repulsive bipolar Edinburgh Detective Sergeant Bruce Robinson (McAvoy) spends his time drinking, snorting, shagging and bullying his way through life. When he's not being the despicable racist, homophobic and misogynistic bully that he is, he indulges in what he calls 'the games' - a collection of sociopathic manipulations he projects onto his colleagues and rivals for the upcoming promotion to Detective Inspector. His best friend is soft-spoken doormat Bladesey (Eddie Marsan), a wealthy fellow Freemason who is married to Bunty (Shirley Henderson), a bored housewife who Bruce regularly makes prank phone calls to in the voice of Frank Sidebottom.
There isn't much defining plot to the film, and instead simply follows Bruce on his various self-destructive exploits, such as having rough sex with the wife of a work colleague, forcing an under-age girl to perform oral sex on him or stealing a suspect's inhaler only to repeatedly blow cigarette smoke in his face as a form of effective interrogation. The movie begins with the murder of a Japanese student by a gang of punks led by Gorman (Martin Compston), and Bruce is assigned to the case by his boss Toal (John Sessions). It gives the film a story to build around, but it features very little, and instead we are forced to witness the complete mental deterioration of a truly disturbed, utterly depraved, yet - thanks to McAvoy - highly charismatic man.
If you're easily offended, then this isn't the film for you. Shockingly, the film tones down Bruce's character from Welsh's book, knowing that without a narrator, Bruce could have been so off-putting that he could be beyond audience redemption. So, with McAvoy giving absolutely everything to the role, his bullying and manipulations, regardless of how evil and cruel they are, are hilarious. Knowing his work partner Ray Lennox (Jamie Bell) has a tiny penis, he suggests everyone in the office photocopy their penis and have the girls match the genitalia to the face. The camera pans from penis to self-satisfied face, only to pass Lennox, his face in his hands.
But Filth certainly has its share of dark moments too. As more about Bruce is revealed throughout the film, the clearer his mental illness becomes. Only rookie Amanda Drummond (Imogen Poots) can really see through his outlandish antics, and with her being a woman and all, that drives Bruce even crazier. In the novel, Bruce has a tapeworm growing inside of him that narrates a lot of the book, revealing to the reader more about Bruce's history, but for the film this has been changed to some hallucinatory episodes with his doctor Rossi (Jim Broadbent). These moments didn't work for me, as they seemed forced and trying to recapture some of the 'cold turkey' stylings of Trainspotting, as well are interrupting the manic pace.
While the ending (which is also different from the book) may be a little too much for some people to take, it is certainly consistent with the fast-paced, twisted energy of the movie's first half. It is tragic, amusing and pathetic, much like Bruce himself. Filth is daring cinema, especially for a dark British movie that doesn't revolve around football hooliganism or Danny Dyer. It doesn't try to be forcefully iconic or deliberately provocative, instead relying on and trusting Welsh's twisted and socially aware text. It also has a fine cast to boot, lining up one of the finest displays of British (mainly Scottish) talent in recent memory. It's far too dark a film to grab the attention of the Academy, but McAvoy, an actor I had never really taken to, deserves every award under the sun for his unflinching performance, and Filth deserves to be talked about without a single reference to Trainspotting.
Released a surprising seven years after James Whale's fantastic and commercially successful The Invisible Man (1933), this sequel faces the problem of creating a story worth telling, without recycling the events and themes that ran through the original and H.G. Wells' novel of the same name. Pleasingly, Returns is an exciting little horror film, that boasts the same fantastic (and Oscar nominated) special effects as the first, as well as offering Vincent Price in one of his very first horror roles.
Falsely imprisoned for the murder of his brother, Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe (Price), the owner of a mining corporation, awaits the death sentence. As his execution looms close, Radcliffe suddenly disappears from his cell, baffling the guards who are placed under suspicion. Knowing Radcliffe to be innocent, Dr. Frank Griffin (John Sutton), the brother of Claude Rains' original Invisible Man, has injected him with the invisibility drug so Radcliffe may conduct his own investigation into the murder. But with Scotland Yard detective Sampson (Cecil Kellaway) suspecting Griffin and the drug slowly turning him mad, Radcliffe faces a race against time to find the culprit and cure himself of the effects of the drug.
This is one of those old-fashioned horror films that adhere to all the genre clichés and never really surprises you, but the cast and execution of the film is wholly charming. The plot keeps things interesting, as the sympathetic innocent man is slowly driven to madness that is beyond his control. Price, although only appearing for less than a minute, had yet to hone his acting craft, but manages to carry the film using only that voice which is now so embedded in horror culture. It's not a patch on Whale's masterful original, but The Invisible Man Returns is a worthy sequel, remaining thoroughly entertaining throughout, kick-starting one of many lucrative franchises for Universal Studios.
Upon Ghost in the Shell's release in 1995, the Western world was still largely unfamiliar with manga, but had already had its head turned by Katsuhiro Ohtomo's Akira (1988). Blending philosophical musings with blistering action, Ghost in the Shell captured the imagination of it's new audience, helping kick-start the Japanophilia that runs so blatantly through most modern Western cartoons and lines the bookcases of many a teenager. While it certainly has its flaws, this was the first time that casual Western audiences who were new to manga had seen a cartoon be as meditative as is explosive. And for those that didn't catch it, no doubt they would have watched The Matrix (1999) four years later, a film that arguably 'borrows' a lot more from Ghost in the Shell that it lets on.
In the future, technology has become so far advanced that all aspects of life are interconnected through an electronic network. Major Motoko Kusanagi (Atsuko Tanaka), a soldier working for government agency Section 9, is a cyborg, and is able to access this network through plugs in the back of her head. She and her team are assigned to catch an elusive 'ghost-hacker' known as the Puppet Master (Iemasa Kayumi), an intelligent entity created by the government, who they lost control of when it became self-aware. When the Puppet Master surfaces in the mangled body of an artificial human shell, Kusanagi faces a crisis of identity.
Disappointingly, the film begins with gratuitous nudity, showing off the fine female form (with giant breasts, of course) of Major Kusanagi just before she takes a plunge off a building to nail some bad guys. Manga caters heavily for its audience, be it sexually-frustrated, highly-stressed businessmen or horny teenagers who have no doubt been bombarded with images of giggling, short-skirted school girls throughout their young life. Thankfully, these moments are brief, and prove to be not much more than a mild distraction from the stunning animation on show. Things are grim in the future, but they're certainly beautiful to look at.
The sexism aside, Kusanagi is an interesting character. When a man realises his wife and daughter are nothing more than an implanted memory, he fails to comprehend it. Kusanagi, with her mixture of organic and mechanical body parts and uploaded memories, struggled to define what it is to be human. Her hunt for the Puppet Master, who is seemingly a new kind of being, becomes a hunt for identity. Is it enough to be aware of what and who you are? The philosophy, although provocative, is heavy-handed. Conversations about humanity between Kusanagi and her second-in-command Bateau (Akio Otsuka) are delivered with a monotony worthy of a whiny emo teen, and I found the film's first half quite a head-scratcher. But things thankfully do become clearer, and the film is still, almost twenty years later, one of the best examples of the genre.
Headhunters is one in a long line of recent sophisticated Scandinavian noirs, offering a more thoughtful alternative to some of Hollywood's more mainstream thrillers. Based on the novel Hodejegerne by Jo Nesbo, Headhunters is high on the chase but low on plot, which is sad given the network of corporate sleaze that seems so high on possibilities during the film's opening scenes. It's set-pieces are streaked with wickedness and black comedy, but as they go on and on, and its lead character is dunking himself in human waste to escape an angry dog or surviving a fifty-foot drop off a cliff, it pushes its plausibility to, well, implausible levels.
Aksel Hennie plays Roger Brown, a smug, vertically-challenged corporate headhunter that moonlights as an art thief to fund the lavish lifestyle he believes his supermodel wife (Synnove Macody Lund) wants. He is approached by former military tracker Clas Greve (Games of Thrones' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who wants to be chosen by Brown to be the new CEO of Pathfinder, a technologies company. Hennie discovers that Greve has an ultra-rare Rubens painting, and steals it, only to find his wife's mobile phone in Greve's home. After stalling on the job offer, Brown finds himself being hunted by Greve and betrayed by those he believed cared about him.
With his preening demeanour and pale eyes, director Morten Tyldum is asking a lot for the audience to be rooting for Roger Brown's survival. Clas Greve is the one-dimensional bad guy - sneering, chiselled, glowing with self-satisfaction - but there were times I found myself cheering him on. Tyldum wisely portrays Brown's suffering with a tongue locked in cheek, and the situation he finds himself in are suitably amusing, even when they are particularly gruesome. But when his redemption finally comes, it's in favour of an extended collection of set-pieces and little resembling plot, glossing over what could have been a smart corporate thriller.
The next time I criticise an action movie for being brainless, only to be met by the response of "well, it is an action movie!", I'll refer them to Runaway Train, a breathless, thoroughly exciting action movie that manages to portray two fully three-dimensional characters amidst underlying sociological messages about imprisonment and reform. Developed from an un-filmed Akira Kurosawa script by Djordje Milicevic, Paul Zindel, and former hardened inmate Eddie Bunker, Runaway Train proves that action movies can do a hell of a lot more than blow shit up and offer amusing one-liners.
Notorious convict Manny (Jon Voight) is released from three years in confinement by hateful warden Ranken (John P. Ryan) not just because of media pressure, but in the hope that he will try and escape so Barstow may kill him. After he is attacked and wounded, Manny makes the quick decision to escape his Alaskan confines, and does so with the help of the young and rather dumb Buck (Eric Roberts). They board a train, but unbeknown to them the engineer on board has died from a heart attack and the train is heading at high speed towards various obstacles. Ground-staff are alerted to the situation and quickly set about clearing the tracks, but Ranken has soon joined them with revenge in mind.
Many Hollywood movies offer moments of spectacular visual effects and sound design that should be applauded, but normally these scenes don't tend to generate any excitement in me. Runaway Train offers similar scenes, but there's two key aspects that make the film work so well. The first is emotional investment. As despicable as these characters often are, Manny and Buck are real, helped considerably by the career-best performances of Voight and Roberts. The former, in an empowering speech that may just be the best work he's ever done, informs Buck of the futility of their situation. They may just rule the world if they could hold down a job, but they can't, they're criminals, and cannot escape their societal role.
The appearance of Rebecca De Mornay's character Sara, a young engineer still aboard and who is unable to stop the train, highlights this. Manny and Buck squabble and fight for the first time in front of her, showing that when put into a situation where the laws of society come into play, they reject it and turn into animals. These exchanges occur between some nail-biting scenes, which brings me onto the next aspect that makes the film work so well - real action. There's no wide-shots of gigantic explosions, just two battered men clawing and slipping their way along the snow-drenched train. In one scene, after a daring attempt to jump carriages, Manny's wind and cold-battered face craws towards the camera, ragged bandages hang off his bloodied hand, and his crooked, brown teeth are bared. The camera is so intrusive that you really feel every move he makes, to the point where I felt exhausted.
Though it does occasionally slip in prison movie cliche, this is perhaps one of the most underrated films ever made. It was recognised at the Oscars with nominations for Voight, Roberts and for Best Editing, but it doesn't seem to have left the legacy it certainly deserves. I wouldn't exactly call the film obscure, but your average film-goer probably won't have heard of it, especially when compared to, say, Die Hard (1988). This is riveting stuff, tightly directed by Russian Andrei Konchalovsky (who went on to make the crappy Tango & Cash (1989)), and the film leaves you with a beautiful and slightly eerie final image that could say more than words could have.
In one of his first feature film appearances, former wrestler Roddy Piper plays Sam Hell, a highly fertile man in a post-apocalyptic world that has rendered most of its adult population infertile due to a devastating nuclear war. This being the late 1980's, and with Hell Comes To Frogtown being unashamedly B-movie ridiculousness, every long-legged female character wants to jump his bones, and do so wearing not very much at all. It is misogynistic, very, very silly (which I'm sure one would assume from the title) and Piper won't be receiving any Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Academy, but it is occasionally a lot of fun, and features one of most memorable titles in the B-movie canon.
With male population numbers heavily reduced due to nuclear war, women now rule the Earth. After a group of warrior-nurses led by the bespectacled Spangle (Sandahl Bergman) capture nomad Sam Hell, they see their chance to do their part in helping re-populate the Earth due to Sam's high fertility rate. But when a group of fertile women are captured by a gang of rapey amphibian mutants who have been affected by the radiation, Sam is employed as a mercenary along with the tough-but-sexy Centinella (Cec Verrell) to enter a place known as 'Frogtown' in order to steal them back.
Somehow, Hell Comes To Frogtown has managed to spawn three sequels, the latest being made in 2002. The years have made the film a cult favourite, and admittedly, for all it's many flaws and amateur direction, the idea of women piecing together the remnants of civilisation is quite an intriguing one. Of course, the plot isn't really why you would watch a film involving rubber-suited monsters and scantily-clad women, and ultimately, Frogtown suffers from long moments of tedium that plague low-budget films of its ilk. But there are still moments to enjoy in the 90 minutes of endless gun-fights and goofy Roddy Piper quotes, namely in Piper's obvious amusement at the film he is starring in. Best enjoyed with beer in hand.
Before he was whisked off to Hollywood where his talent seemed to stagnate and eventually fade into obscurity, John Woo conquered the world of action cinema with bullet-ridden delights such as A Better Tomorrow (1986) and The Killer (1989). His Hollywood career would consist of sub-standard genre movies such as the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target (1993) and blockbuster pap like Mission: Impossible II (2000). But he had one more balletic, hyper-kinetic Eastern thriller left in him before he left Hong Kong, and with Hard Boiled, he not only topped his previous films, but made one of the finest action movies in history; a non-stop orgy of explosions, slow-motion, and homoerotic undertones of brotherhood and honour.
After accidentally killing an undercover police officer in a bloody shoot-out, loose-canon cop Tequila (Chow Yun-Fat) vows to get revenge on the gangsters involved. Meanwhile, Triad boss Uncle Hoi (Hoi-Shan Kwan) has unwittingly employed undercover cop Alan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) as a hitman, using him to bump off a gang member who has been secretly working for rival boss Johnny Wong (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang). Impressed with Alan's skills, Wong tries to recruit him, causing him to turn on his former employer in an effort to move up in the criminal underworld. Learning of Alan's undercover role, Tequila seeks him out so that they may take down Wong together. But the shooting of a police informant leads the two cops to the hospital, where Wong keeps his secret stash of weaponry.
The film ticks off the genre cliché's at a rapid rate, even playing it dead serious in the quiet moments between the carnage. But all the wailing saxophone music and loose-fitting shirts that were so prevalent in the 1990's make the film even more likeable, and a nice little time capsule for an era that seems not so far gone yet is shockingly over 20 years ago. It would be silly to dwell on the simplistic story, as it only really plays the role of McGuffin so that John Woo may deliver two hours of ludicrous, heart-pounding action-porn. The extended climax is a barrage of slow-motion gun-fire, leading to a shockingly high body count, but Woo squeezes everything he can out of the hospital setting, naturally leaving it in ruins. It's a exhausting and cheesy two hours, featuring some of the best action scenes ever filmed, yet it soberly reminds you of what could have been if Woo had resisted the glamour of Hollywood and stayed in Hong Kong.
Sad-sack composer Winslow (William Finley) is overheard playing his Faustian opera by the powerful and mysterious music producer Swan (Williams). Swan is on the cusp of opening his new theatre The Paradise, and feels Winslow's music is perfect for his vision of nostalgia and kitsch. Winslow offers his work to Swan, but is never called or paid for his contribution. Seeking answers, he arrives at Swan Records to see an endless line of women, including Phoenix (Jessica Harper), auditioning to be a backing singer and singing his songs. He is thrown out, framed for drug possession and sentenced to life in prison. But Winslow escapes and, after being mutilated by a record press, seeks vengeance on Swan.
